built on a beautiful spot shaped out and shaded by the hand of instinct.
There they stood dotting the landscape by the cooling shade of palms,
yams, orange and other trees of luxuriant tropic foliage. In the cleared
spaces by those huts squatted the tribes of powerful mothers and men,
all of them dressed in no clothes excepting their hair, which sprouted
upwards on the top of their heads and shone in the sunlight. As I
emerged from the forest trees into full view the tiny children stopped
from their gambolling, stared at me for a moment and then all raced off
towards the village homesteads as though for dear life. They ran so fast
that I could only see their legs twinkling in the sun-gleam. Then uprose
the wild mothers and stalwart forest men, and between their bare legs,
with little wistful demon-like faces, those frightened children peeped
at me as I walked across the scrub and waved my hand, smiling as I
approached them.
I found them a very hospitable people; they gave me food and drink and I
well repaid those wild mothers for their kind thoughtfulness as I
stroked the small frizzing heads of their babes and raced the little
naked beggars, boys and girls, across the track and gave the winners
buttons for prizes. “Moora, moora,” they shouted as I gave the last
button away, and then I held on to myself tightly as they scrambled
around me and tried to steal the buttons off my clothes! “No, no,” I
shouted to one persevering little imp, and his mother, seeing my
annoyance, picked up a large plank and struck him over the head with a
terrible crash! By Jove, I was astonished when she did that, but the
poor little devil simply looked a bit crestfallen, looked up to me for
sympathy, instead of his mother, and I rubbed the top of his head and
made him happy. I found out afterwards that the top of their heads is
the safest place to hit, the South Sea Island skull being very thick
indeed.
I don’t know how those natives lived or what employment they followed. I
suppose some of them worked at copra gathering or some other work which
was useful to the white traders; anyway they all looked fat and well and
their native villages like little bits of paradise compared with
European cities. Away further in the interior were living (so I heard)
tribes that still encouraged the cannibalistic tendency. I suppose they
were still under the influence of the older men and women who had
memories in their heads of the olden days when they dined off their
enemies and discovered the good points of old rivals at the festive
board. I never went off into the interior to see if it was so; my past
experience was quite sufficient for me and I did not intend to take any
more risks.
Before I leave that native village I must tell you of their idol
worship. Before sunset I went back to the beach, and loitering about got
in with some sailors, and together that night we went over the hills and
down into the village and strolled among the natives, and going behind
one of the larger huts there stood before us monstrous effigies with
hideous faces and eyes bulging out like unburst soap-bubbles, and before
them on little mats knelt the elder native men bowing and chanting
prayers at the top of their voices, throwing their long arms up over
their heads all the time. They were earnest enough in those fetish
rites, and as we stood there, white-faced men of the Western world,
watching, they took not the slightest notice of us, so deeply were they
engrossed in their pleadings to those dirty wooden deaf idols. Of course
I could not understand a word they were saying, but the note of the
chant had grief in it and sounded to me like “Winga-wonga, wonga-winga,”
repeated over and over again to a minor cadence that fell and rose as
their bodies and arms moved up and down.
My comrades and I were somehow impressed by that strange sight of
religious old-world grief which sounded the same note and showed the
same earnestness as the creed expression of the modern civilised world.
The missionaries were, and are, of course, dead against the idol
worship, and so as time goes on and the methods of Christianity get hold
of the people the idols rot away or are touched up and hidden in the
secret depths of the forest, safe from the destroying hands of those who
have gone over to the new creed. Often the wanderer among the primeval
woods will come across the relics of those gods standing in some
secluded gully under the shade of banyan-trees and rotting tropic
trunks, covered with wild vines, vividly coloured with gorgeous flowers,
still upright, with perhaps one eye missing and the face thus
obliterated by decaying rot made more hideous than ever. Yet some
indefinable awe still clings to them as they stand there deserted by the
poor heathen children who once appealed to them with their whole hearts,
sorrowing over “the giant agony of the world,” now long dead in their
forest graves.
I have told you all this because I once saw it, just as I have attempted
to describe it to you, and as I stood gazing, quite alone, I looked up
over the rotting, eyeless head and saw a branch with about twenty human
skulls hanging in a row. The tropic rains had washed them quite white
and as they swayed and clinked one against the other as the wind swept
mournfully through the trees I became nervous and made off from the spot
as quickly as I could. I am very fond of music, but the funereal notes
of those tinkling skulls did not appeal to me and make me brave.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XI
Back in Samoa—My Friend the Missionary—Musings
NEXT day we sailed away, and being lucky with a fair wind blowing
steadily behind us we soon arrived back safely at the Samoan Islands. It
was a long trip and I was jolly glad to see my berth ashore again as I
did not get much sleep at sea—room being scarce I had slept on deck the
whole time, and I had to sleep in the sloop scupper as she lay over with
so great a list. Everything was just about the same, and very quiet. The
_Lubeck_ had been in and left again for Sydney. Hornecastle had a heavy
drinking bout. There were several American sailors hanging round who had
been left stranded by the wrecks of the man-o’-war ships that were blown
ashore. I once more felt a longing to get away to the civilised world.
Our comrade the poet got a job on a schooner and went away, and I was
sorry to see him go. I still had my violin and started practising again
in the evenings and often went into my old friend the shell-seller’s big
den on the beach and yarned to him in “pigeon-English,” and it was there
that I met Mrs Stevenson. I was playing the violin and she took a great
interest in me. She was a real Bohemian and invited me to her home at
once, but I was young and nervous, and at that time I was getting pretty
shabby too—my blue serge suit had almost turned yellow through fading
under the tropic sun—so I pretended to have an important job on that
very night and got out of that invitation. I played several melodies at
her request and I well remember playing “Alice, where art thou?” to her,
to which she sang the refrain quietly as I played. She was
attractive-looking and looked as though she had spent her life exploring
the tropics. At first I thought she was some passenger just arrived on
one of the boats till she introduced herself and told me her name.
[Illustration: NATIVE COAST VILLAGE NEAR APIA, SAMOA]
There were a good many whites about at that time and also a lot of
buildings going up for them, and for a time I had a job looking after
the natives who did all the hard graft, but had to be kept watch over by
the whites. I do not think a brown man has ever been known to work
industriously in the South Seas when no one was looking, unless, of
course, he was doing something completely on his own account. I got to
know many of the Americans, English and Germans who were there at that
time, some staying only a day or two before going off to the Marquesan
group, Fijis, etc. Some I think were missionaries, others were
travellers sight-seeing. One of the missionaries I got to know well and
he struck me as a very decent fellow, had a fine sense of humour, was
devoid of hypocrisy, and though earnest enough in his mission he could
see quite vividly the light and dark shades of the whole of the
Christianising schemes. We often smoked and yarned together, and though
I was much younger than he, he seemed to prefer my companionship to the
society of the men of his own profession. I taught him to play tunes on
the violin by ear, and a very good ear he had too, as well as a refined
taste for melodies with something in them, and if he ever reads my
autobiography he is sure to remember me.
A “Man-o’-War” ship called in at Samoa about that time. When the crew
got ashore that night it sounded like civilised Europe and home again. I
must say that the Samoan ladies are nearly as bad over sailormen as the
English middle-class girls are, and the jolly Jack Tars had a fine time
of it roaming about the beach, on terra-firma again after so long a sea
voyage. They bolted off in all directions, visiting the native huts
along the shore, most of them in the hands of a cute-looking native
guide who knew all the ropes and also all those Samoan ladies who were
mostly addicted to easy virtue. These men guides work on commission, and
some of them claim half of the proceeds as the foreign ships arrive, and
so they do very well, and you can well imagine that Berlin, London,
Paris and New York to-day are well represented in the South Seas as far
as the different stock of the world’s sailormen is concerned. There they
are out there to-day (the half-castes I mean), while the fathers,
pensioned-off sailors in the civilised cities of the world, are bringing
up legitimate families, respectable young men and women who do not dream
of their half sisters and brothers toiling on the plantations lashed by
the overseers’ whip in the far-away Pacific, and many a cosy vicarage
retreat of Puritan England, standing like the very emblem of sedateness
and purity by the village roadside, is the ancestral hall of some savage
South Sea man or woman with eyes that gaze longingly seaward from their
native Isle, knowing not why. And so the world jogs along and I suppose
all for the best.
It was about this time that I am speaking of that Mataafa and Laupepa
were enjoying their resumed power over the Island. Laupepa had been
exiled by the German Government, and had at last been allowed to return.
There had been a good deal of fighting going on among the German and
American sailors, and Samoans, but all seemed pretty quiet in my time. A
terrible hurricane had struck the Islands, lifted the warships up on
tremendous waves and tossed them ashore as though they were canoes. Many
lives were lost, and the storm did more damage in a couple of hours than
all the warships and threatening natives.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XII
Tramping the South Sea Bush—Native Homes, Scandal and Jealousy—Samoan
Children—Samoan Girls attired in European Cast-off Clothes—Another
South Sea Chief
I THINK that you might like to hear something of the suburban life in
the South Sea Islands, of the native villages inland, and so I will now
tell you of my strolls and visits to Marano’s hut and his wife
“Taloffora.” One morning quite alone I set out to go inland to the
village of Safata. It was a lovely morning; I walked along under the
tamanu-trees that skirted the borders of the forest where thousands of
screaming parakeets passed over by the seashore, disturbing the tropical
silence as they wheeled away.
Before starting on the main track I made my way down to the beach to
have a swim in the cool waters and refresh myself. I was then several
miles from Upolu, and as I crept from the forest and gazed shoreward,
where by the palms shone a lagoon, I suddenly surprised a covey of
native girls who were all having their morning bath. Some were still in
the water and others on the shore; all of them, of course, perfectly
nude. I shall never forget how some of them ran up the shore to get
their “ridis” while others modestly bent themselves in the shallow
waters, their heads and chins just poking out, watching their
opportunity to bolt up the shore. This they did one after the other,
their brown legs splashing out as they raced to the palm-trees, each
plucking a big leaf to hold in front of her for modesty’s sake. There
they stood in a huddled group just as God’s first thought had moulded
them, the jungle grass brushing to their knees, in their hair the lovely
wild red flowers plucked from the plants around them, their rows of
pearly teeth gleaming as they smiled.
I tramped enviously onward. I was very happy that day. Somehow the scent
of the sea-winds stirring the forest flowers intoxicated my brain as I
trudged along and I felt as though I and those forest trees had been
friends for ages. There is nothing under the heavens like a South Sea
forest to make the atmosphere of true poetry, to lift you out of and
above your fleshy self, and as I tramped along I sang to myself through
sheer delirium of happiness.
Before the sun had climbed over the western hills I arrived at “Safata”
and old Marmona’s wife came from her hut door with her big mouth open so
wide with welcome and astonishment that I saw the brown roof and her
three back teeth. “Marmona!” she shouted with delight as she called for
her husband, “White man’s,” “Siva,” and across the track from behind the
scattered shed-like huts of the village that stood beneath the palms and
South Sea bamboo-trees came running Marmona, my old friend, whom I had
got acquainted with in Apia. He was delighted to see that I had my
fiddle with me and though he was getting old he clapped his hands and
started chanting and did a double shuffle round me as the native girls
came running across the clearings to see the white man. Round me they
stood gazing into my face in regiments, their thick dark hair smothered
in grass; some wore hibiscus flowers stuck behind their pretty brown
ears, others a palm leaf twisted hat-shape to fit their curly heads,
others were perfectly naked excepting for a tiny strip of tappa-cloth
tied round the thighs into a bow at the back and in front a large
blushing hibiscus blossom.
It was a sweltering hot afternoon and by their huts sat the Samoan
parents watching their “Fainetoa” (little children) play. Some of them
were very old, dark, hairless-headed grandfathers and grandmothers, and
they all sat cross-legged, each on a little mat. Marmona led me up to a
group of them and introduced me with pride, very much the same as an
English draper would introduce an earl who suddenly claimed his
friendship, to his tradesmen acquaintances, for I was a white man, and
moreover my violin-playing made me something of a god in his eyes. I
fully appreciated his great impression of me, saluted the village folk
in lordly style and smacked Marmona familiarly on the back afterwards,
and he nearly fainted with sheer pride and delight as the awestruck
village _élite_ followed us across the cleared patch towards his hut,
where his wife Taloffora was busily laying the cloth on the ground for
dinner. Her back stuck high up as she stooped and stirred the hot baked
fish food and plantains, all got ready especially for me, and I sat
there cross-legged on the special visiting mat and thoroughly enjoyed
that meal. As I was sitting munching away, thinking how peaceful
everything was in that native village, I suddenly heard a loud jabbering
in a hut close by. It was a jealous neighbour of Mr and Mrs Marmona’s;
they had long since been at loggerheads with my friend and his family,
and now to see me there dining with them had riled them till their
jealousy knew no bounds, and to make things worse old Madam Taloffora
kept talking loudly to me in her own language as she walked round me
filling my platter up with more hot fish. I could not understand all
that she was saying, but I guessed she was having “one off” her jealous
neighbour. Crash! came a coco-nut from the enemy’s hut and caught my
hostess a terrible whack on that back part which the South Sea Islanders
often reveal when they stoop. With a yell she placed her skinny fingers
on the insulted part, and then the outraged husband came rushing under
the palms towards her and gazed up into her face. She jabbered
hysterically and the old fellow’s brown-skinned face shrunk into a map
of scheming wrinkles that denoted intense concentration on the way for
the best and speediest revenge! For the brown man is much the same as
the white man—he believes all his wife tells him, never dreaming that
she is possibly the cause of the whole trouble. Often the tribes of
those wild lands meet in bloodthirsty warfare, kings are dethroned,
queens murdered and unmentionable cruelties occur through no greater
cause than that a woman was spitefully jealous of another woman’s tappa
waist sash!
I knew old Marmona’s wife well, and in truth I could have sworn that she
had scandalised the irate owner of the hand that had shied the coco-nut;
anyway the deed was done, and I was at my wit’s end to know what to do
to avert disaster. As quickly as possible I appealed to the old chap and
by many signs and deftly used Samoan words I let him see that the best
way to have revenge was not to imitate the injury, but to let me smile
on and treat him and his wife with lordly respect. He was a clever old
fellow and quickly fathomed the depths of my meaning, and I was so
delighted to see how things were going that when he fetched the hut oil
pot out in his hand, which the South Sea Islanders always keep ready for
bruises, I myself held it as that wretched old scandalous wife stooped
and he applied the lotion with his tender hand, and across the track,
under the palms through a small hut door, gleamed the envious jealous
eyes of the woman who had thrown the coco-nut. Had I not appeased the
murderous wrath of my host and hostess they would have attacked that hut
and the friends of each would have taken sides and a pitched battle
commenced, which would in all probability have ended in the taking of my
life. Evidently the jealous neighbour thought she had been sufficiently
revenged, for with the cessation of Mrs Marmona’s groans the feud
ceased.
Samoans are not given to vendetta vindictiveness, and mortal enemies by
day are often great friends by night; and so it was in this case, for
that night, as I played the fiddle, the enemy crept from her camp,
sneaked through the circles of native girls and boys who sat all around
delighted as they watched me, and fell into the arms of my hostess, each
wailing loudly as I played away. Two grim-looking aged chiefs of many
past battles chanted some old idol song as their friends sat round with
frizzly heads and merry eyes listening to the awful noise. They sang in
any key but the one I was trying to accompany them in, but it did not
matter—they were all happy enough and so were the audience as they
listened and smoked at their ease, tired after working on the yam
plantations or on the buildings that were being erected for German
Government officials far away by the beach.
In the huts hard by I heard the poor brown kiddies being spanked as they
were put to bed screaming with disappointment that they must sleep while
the chiefs sang and the funny white man scraped the spirit wood with the
magic long thin finger, for that was the way those natives described my
violin and bow.
I shall never forget the strangeness of those times in those primeval
forests and native villages. As the moon sailed overhead that night
after the concert had ceased I carefully hid my violin in my hostess’s
hut and took a stroll around under the shadow of the palms. Among the
yellow bamboos I saw the native girls in the arms of the Samoan youths,
their eyes shining in the moonlight, while the innocent old mothers and
fathers squatting cross-legged by their huts smoked peacefully away,
thinking those very lovers were fast asleep in the next hut bedroom.
[Illustration: LOW-CASTE NATIVE GIRL]
As I strolled by with Marmona by my side they each saluted us with the
exclamation of “Talafa!” and “Good white mans.” In the branched moonlit
forest by the narrow pathways that lead from house to house, I saw dark
figures pass; they were the natives passing and repassing along the
silent forest tracks as they hurried each to his home in the woods or
other distant villages. Many of them had stayed late in the village
where I was staying, and suddenly remembering the domestic
establishment, their lonely hut in the forest afar and the waiting wife,
they one by one went off running at full speed, and often in those
lonely South Sea hills you could hear yells and excited jabberings as
the wretched wife screamed and the semi-savage husband endeavoured to
explain the why and wherefore of his lateness. Indeed the traveller in
the South Seas invariably is astonished by the sameness of the native
and the European character. As men say, “civilisation is only skin
deep,” and very often so is the difference between the white and brown
man. I particularly noticed the manners of those who had better clothes
on than their neighbours. They would walk along with a trader’s cast-off
long-tailed shirt flapping behind them and gaze with a scorn-like glance
upon their brown brothers who wore only a native “ridi,” and the native
girls nearly burst with pride and vanity as they creep from their hut
attired in a red sash only, a banana-leaf hat and white flower behind
their ear, and others with a yellow pair of high-heeled shoes on and a
white woman’s cast-off night-shirt. The traders call in at the villages
and bring all kinds of cast-off European clothing, which they exchange
with the natives for copra, yarns and many other things, and so you
often are surprised by suddenly meeting a native creeping from the
forest wearing some lady’s under-garments, or a pretty Samoan girl
attired in a sailor’s cast-off pants, cut off close to the thighs and
buttoning under her pretty curved chin!
The women struck me as being very industrious. They sit for hours and
hours singing and making cloth stuff out of leaves and bark which they
keep hammering and weaving. By their side lies the stupendous bamboo
stick which every now and again they swiftly lift up and strike their
children over the heads with—as they keep pestering them with questions
and mischief the whole time that they are working, the bamboo rod gives
forth a hollow sound on the tiny native skull, and seems to have no
effect beyond checking the infantile activity for a few minutes, after
which the mothers, without ceasing the song which is always flowing from
their lips, lift the bamboo and strike once again. Out of the forest
into the village often come the quick-footed youths and maidens with
small baskets full of jumping fish which they have been catching down on
the shore side in the lagoons and in the sea, and as they go along the
tiny baby urchins run from under their mothers’ legs, steal the fish
through cracks in the basket and eat them “all alive O.”
Round some of the hut dens sit the old stagers of other days, stalwart
old men, brown as mahogany, their naked limbs striped with tattoo marks
and scarred with spear wounds. Squatting under the shade of the palms
they tell the younger men of ancient battles and of the old idols and
the wonderful things those idols foretold and how it all came to pass.
Those old warriors still believed in the old heathen gods, and when they
were dubious about anything crept away into the forest depths and
consulted some monstrous armless wooden image, rotting away in secrecy,
staring with a big boss eye as it had stared for years through the
shadows of the forest, till the superstitious chief crept behind the
ancient tree trunks up to it and fell on his knees, lifted his hands and
chanted the prayers of his heart to its wooden outstretched ears.