seeming to take no further thought. The old women of the family
returned to their ordinary occupations, and no longer lay banded in
places where Sina might pass. It would have mattered nothing if they
had, for the little Pig-face stuck to her house like a barnacle to a
rock; and except on Sundays, when she went to church between Patsy and
Ta’a, we never saw the least hair of her head. But Java knew of means
more potent than knives for the undoing of a worthless person, and
she sought out Malesa, the old wizard of Aleipata, to whom one went
ordinarily for love-philters and medicines. For a dollar he gave Java
a curse on a sheet of paper, and told her to nail it to the church
door on the following Sunday. This she did, to the great indignation
of Nehemiah and the elders, though to no purpose so far as concerned
the little Pig-face, who happened that day and all the Sundays after to
keep away from church, like a heathen in the Black Islands. For what
worth is a curse if thy enemy reads it not, nor goest even near the
door on which it is placed? Is it not like firing a bullet in the air,
hurting nothing?
“So Java returned again to Malesa the wizard, and, for lack of better
gifts, she carried with her the sewing-machine she had possessed before
her marriage. But the old man said he must have more, and spoke like
one delirious, of a hundred dollars and a boat; and when she cried out,
he laid his skinny hand on her shoulder and looked a long time into
her eyes, and then turned the wheel of the sewing-machine to show that
it was broken. But Java’s heart was stronger than a man’s and full of
hatred; so instead of shrinking back, as most women would have done,
she told him boldly to name some other price, thinking, perhaps, to
give a finger, as Fetuao had done when her husband was perishing with
the measles.
“‘Thy long, curly hair,’ said Tingelau, slowly, ‘and I will make of it
a head-dress for my son.’
“‘I will give thee that and more, also,’ said Java, with the tears in
her eyes, for there was to her nothing so beautiful as her hair.
“Then, behold, a strange thing happened, for as she knelt before the
wizard and undid the knot of her hair, letting it tumble over her bosom
like a cascade, the old man touched it not with the scissors in his
hand, no, not even cutting so much as a single hair.
“‘Java,’ he said, ‘thou art too beautiful to mar. Some other girl must
provide a head-dress for my son, and thou shalt return perfect as thou
camest; though I shall retain the sewing-machine for my pains, and
from time to time, without fail, thou shalt give me a silver dollar
until five be reached. And for this small, insignificant reward I shall
prepare thee a curse the like of which no wizard ever made before--a
curse which beside the other shall be as a man to a child, so that the
whole world shall tremble and the dead turn in their graves.’
“Accordingly, in three days my sister returned to Aleipata, where old
Malesa, faithful to his word, handed her the curse he had been so
assiduously preparing. Ah, Siosi, the reading of it was enough to make
one’s blood run cold, and palsy the hand that held the written sheet.
The little Pig-face was cursed outside and inside, in this world and
the next world, part by part, so that nothing was forgotten, even to
the lobes of her ears and the joints of her toes. There was nothing
of her but what was to be scorched with fire, torn away with pincers,
scratched, pierced, and destroyed with pointed sticks; lo, she would
scream for death while the sharks fought for her dismembering flesh and
squid sucked out her eyes, no one being at hand to give her the least
assistance. Java smiled as she read the curse aloud, and took counsel
with Tu, the brave and handsome, who had agreed to nail it to Patsy’s
door.
“It was black night when Tu made the attempt, holding the paper in his
mouth like a dog as he climbed the scratching wall of wire. At every
moment Java and I expected to hear the explosion of a gun or some
sudden sound of awakening from within the devil-house; yet nothing
reached our ears but the beating of our own anxious hearts. After a
long while we heard Tu whispering in the darkness beside us, and our
first thought was that he had failed. But we were wrong, for Tu had
succeeded in every way, and that with the utmost secrecy and skill.
Then we went and lay behind a big bush about a hundred fathoms inland
of the house, so that we might see with advantage what was to happen in
the morning; and Java and I petted Tu, and talked to him sweetly, for
he had a brave heart, and his handsome body was everywhere torn with
the points of wire.
“_Panga!_ Siosi, never was a dawn so slow to come as the one we then
waited for, nor any so bitter and chill. Our teeth clicked in our
heads, and though we lay closer together than a babe to its nursing
mother, or soldiers to one another in the bush, we nearly died with
the cold, like people in the White Country. When at last the sun rose
in a haze like that of blood and smoke commingled, we felt, indeed,
that the curse was already at work; for the air turned sultry beyond
all believing, so that we breathed suffocatingly, and endured the
taste of matches in our throats and mouths. Tu said prayers--very
good prayers and long, which he had learned in the missionary college
before he had been expelled; all of them about the beauty of holiness
and well-doing. But Java attended to none of these things, nor seemed
to care whether we ourselves lived or died, for her eyes were ever on
Patsy’s house.
“Patsy himself was the first to come out, leaving the door open behind
him, so that the curse was unluckily hidden from his view. He had clubs
in his hands, which he twirled in the air as his manner was every
morning for the strengthening of his arms. After a few movements he
called out to the little Pig-face, saying, ‘Sina, Sina,’ like that.
‘Come out to thy work, thou idle one.’ Thereupon she too appeared,
rubbing her eyes, and in her hands were two clubs like those of
Patsy’s. But instead of leaving open the door, as her partner had done,
she closed it with a push of her hand, and lo, the curse shone white
upon it like a splash of lime on a dark cloth. At the sight of it she
shrieked to Patsy, and together, side by side, they read what was there
written, clinging to each other with fainting hearts.
“When Patsy had read it to an end, he uttered a great, mocking laugh,
and struck the paper with his club, so that the whole house shook, and
old Ta’a came tumbling out like a scared rat. Then he laughed again
until the whole bay reëchoed round, and every time he laughed his
voice grew more shrill and screaming, like that of a woman in a fit.
But there was no laughter at all in the little Pig-face, who went and
lay down in the sand, hiding her eyes with her hands. And old Ta’a,
the thief, the evil-hearted, the out-islander, she tore down the curse
with derisive shoutings, and danced on it a shameful dance which is
prohibited by the church. But for all that, we could see that she and
Patsy were greatly discountenanced, as well they might have been; for
who could read such a curse without trembling, or regard with calm
the smoky air now thick with the smell of matches? As for the little
Pig-face, she was helped inside the house like a drowning person from
the sea, for her legs would no longer carry her, and she could not
breathe for very terror. The clubs were left untouched where they had
fallen; and when Patsy and Ta’a had carried Sina into the devil-house
they shut the door and locked themselves within.
“I don’t know how long it was after this that we lay still spying from
our _ti’a_, but it seemed to me like the space of many hours. For my
part, I should have gladly returned home, for I was gnawed with hunger,
and stiff with the cold night watching; so also was Tu, who spoke
piteously of his love for Java, and how it might be the means, through
this lawless dabbling with the unseen world, of cutting him off in his
prime. But so rock-like was Java’s heart, so fierce the flame of her
revenge, that she had no compassion for this beautiful young man, nor a
single word for the comfort of his spirit. With her burning eyes fixed
on Patsy’s house, she lay motionless on the ground like a dead person,
her only thought to see the curse accomplished.
“Suddenly we were startled by a peal of thunder; low at first, and then
tumultuously rising, which, with repeated explosions like those of
cannon, seemed to shake the island to its bottommost roots. We jumped
to our feet, clinging wildly to one another, while the earth shook
under us like the sea, and the skies above were rent with a thousand
burstings. Even as we stood there, swaying and horror-stricken, I felt
Java’s fingers tighten on my arm and heard her voice in my ear, crying,
‘Look, look!’ And behold! what did I see but Patsy’s house rising in
the air and darting seaward at the tail of the great rope, which,
hand over fist, the devil was now pulling in from hell. The rope was
covered with long, green sea-grass, and all manner of curious shells,
which sparkled and twisted in the sun; and it went thus in jumps, like
the crackling of a mighty whip; and with every jerk the house skimmed
forward like a boatswain-bird, showing us at a broken window the faces
of the accursed, who with frenzied movements climbed the one above the
other, striving to escape like a tangle of worms in a pot, each one
pushing away the other, until at last the water closed over them all.
And from that day to this, Siosi, nothing has ever been seen of Ta’a,
nor of Sina, nor of the devil’s white man.”
THE PHANTOM CITY
THE PHANTOM CITY
“God has sent you to the right place here,” said Father Studby,
solemnly, to the lay brother. “Life in Lauli’i flows in the same
channel, day by day, year by year, so that we wonder to grow old and
are surprised to see our changing faces in the glass. When we think,
it is of the goodness of God; when we fear, it is for the sick or for
the machinations of the Evil One. Our little bay is a monastery, remote
from all the passions and fevers of mankind; and the people we live
among are pleasant children, naïve, gay, and pious.”
“You must not consider me a sick man,” said Brother Michael, with
his dark smile. “I am worn out with teaching, and the hot bustle of
Nukualofa. The doctor said I needed rest, that I needed peace and fresh
air, and the bishop has sent me here to get them.”
“In Nukualofa,” said the old priest, who entertained a partisan’s
contempt for the neighbouring island, “in Nukualofa they do not know
the meaning of those words. They exist in a frenzy of excitement,
amid the intrigues of three conflicting nationalities; one’s ear is
dinned with rumours; and one wearies with the very names of consuls and
captains. One cannot take a walk without beholding a fresh proclamation
on a cocoanut-tree, or turn round without offending some preposterous
regulation. The natives wear trousers and drink whisky; they model
themselves on the dissolute whites set over them, and degenerate as
rapidly as their masters.”
“I never could see what people found to like in the natives,” said the
lay brother. “I dare say they are good enough in their way, and fill a
necessary place in the world, but to me they are greasy and offensive.”
“Ah, but you have never seen the true Samoan,” exclaimed the priest.
“Here it is so different from Nukualofa. Here our people are better
born; here they are self-respecting, honest, and kind; here you will
see at once an astonishing contrast to those you have left.”
Once launched on his favourite topic, the superiority of Lauli’i to
all the villages of the group, the old missionary knew not when to
stop, and his interminable tongue ran on in an unceasing harangue. The
new-comer listened with a sort of detachment, as he might have done
to some strange parrot screaming in a zoo, assenting by perfunctory
nods to that long tale of Samoan virtue, religion, and generosity. His
black eyes ranged about the room and through the open window at its
back, where, within a distance of a dozen yards, a little church half
barred the vista of peaks and forest. Still talking, Father Studby led
him away to see it, this scene of his professional life which had been
raised, stone upon stone, by his own assiduous hands. The lay brother
was shown the altar, with its artless decoration of tissue-paper
flowers; the pulpit inlaid with pearl-shell; the sacramental vessels
in their wrappings of tapa-cloth. The father seated himself at a crazy
harmonium, which was planted on the sandy floor like some derelict cast
up by the sea, and ran his fingers over the yellow keys. He played,
after a manner, with considerable skill and vivacity, his preference
being for the sentimental ballads of his youth, and the dance-music
which had then been in fashion. It was strange to hear these old
waltzes, so long dead and forgotten, coming to life again in that
darkened chapel and from the hands of such a player. The lay brother
leaned against an open window, from which there was a wonderful view
of wooded mountains half screened in mist, and sighed moodily as he
gazed about him. Under the spell of those swaying measures, his heart
returned to the Australian plains where he had been born, and he felt
himself, indeed, an exile.
On leaving the church, the father took him on a little tour of the
garden: showed him the cemented oven where the bread was baked, the
roofed-in spring, the hives, the cow, the imported cock, everything, in
fact, down to the grindstone and the rusty scythe.
Michael followed as in duty bound; asked the proper questions; showed
everywhere a becoming interest; endured it all with propriety. He
asked his host many questions, some of them the inspiration of mere
politeness, such as the best food for chickens, and the precautions to
be taken in handling bees; others, in which he seemed more genuinely
concerned, as to the nature of the inland country and its resources.
He was surprised to hear that the island had only once been crossed
by whites; he was impatient of the priest’s statement that it did not
greatly matter, as the natives suffered in social consideration by
living too far from the sea, and were, besides, better off for the fish
it afforded and the easy means of communication.
“There are other things in Samoa besides Samoans,” exclaimed Brother
Michael, with a disdain that he could but ill conceal. “Here is an
island scarcely forty miles wide, which apparently has only once
been crossed in the memory of living man. Why, the thing stirs the
imagination; it makes the blood tingle in one’s veins; it makes one
speculate on a thousand possibilities. In those secluded depths there
may be the ruins of ancient cities; mouldering tombs covered with
hieroglyphs; perhaps even another race still surviving in those inner
valleys! There may be whole forests of sandalwood, beds of fine coal,
deposits of rich ores. Who knows, but there may be gold!”
Father Studby crossed himself.
“God forbid,” he said.
“You must remember,” he went on, “that every village has some
knowledge of the land behind it, and if you could combine what they
know you would find that the interior is not such a mystery as you
imagine; though, of course, there may be tracts which have never yet
been penetrated by a white man. At one time and another I have been
many miles inland of Lauli’i, but I never got so far but what every
gully had a name, every acre an owner. Why our people should dispute
among themselves for such blocks of worthless forest and rock is a
thing beyond my comprehension; but as a matter of fact they do attach
an inordinate value to them, and it would astound you to find how
exactly the boundaries are remembered.”
“You interest me immensely,” said the lay brother. “I see that you can
tell me everything I want to know, and I congratulate myself again that
my lucky star has brought me to your door. In Nukualofa they could not
answer half my questions.”
“In Nukualofa,” said Father Studby, bitterly, “they know nothing,--less
than nothing,--for they mislead you and tell you lies. The natives
there, besides, are of a low stock, interbred with out-islanders and
without an ancestry among them. You will look in vain for such a man
as our Maunga, who goes back seventeen generations to the legendary
Fasito’o, or a family such as the Sā; Satupaialā;, who have what you
might almost call a special language of their own. They die, they spit,
they moor a boat, they steal breadfruit, they commit adultery, all in
different words from those commonly employed. It has been my pleasure,
you might almost call it my folly, to absorb myself in such studies. I
am afraid you will find me nothing more than an old Kanaka pundit, with
my cracked head full of legends and ancient songs.”
The priest saw very little of his guest, who followed the doctor’s
prescription of fresh air with a literalness that made him almost
a stranger in the house. Every morning, after participating in the
service in the little church, Brother Michael would take his gun
and disappear for the day, returning at sundown with what pigeons he
had shot, and an appetite that played havoc with his host’s frugal
housekeeping. He would eat a pound of meat at a sitting, make way
with an entire loaf of bread, and thought nothing of helping himself
four times to marmalade, in spite of the father’s disapproving looks,
and the calculated contrast of his bare plate. In the light of that
frightful inroad on his provisions, Father Studby’s good opinion of the
stranger began to change into a sentiment approaching aversion, and it
seemed to him an added injury that the young man would no longer eat
his own pigeons, insisting, with gross self-indulgence, on an unending
succession of chicken, ham, and costly preserves. He said that _taro_
gave him heartburn, evoked the physician’s ban on all native food,
and demanded, on the same shadowy authority, a daily ration of brandy
from the father’s slender stock. It was hard on the old missionary,
who was abstemious to a degree and seldom allowed himself the comfort
of a dram, to pour his liquor down that insatiable throat, and be
condemned to hold the bottle, while the other smacked his lips like a
beach-comber in a bar, in no wise ashamed to drink alone. The bottle,
too, until it was placed under lock and key, showed a tendency to
decline unduly, and even biscuit and sardines were not exempt from a
similar and no less exasperating shrinkage. And then, in his religious
exercises the lay brother betrayed a disheartening coldness, and what
spiritual fire had ever been in him seemed smothered over with torpor
and indifference. His vocation meant no more to him than a means to
live. He yawned at mass, nodded intermittently through the priest’s
interminable sermons, and when it was proposed that he should take
temporary charge of the school he did not hesitate for a moment to
refuse.
Of course, a word to Nukualofa would have speedily rid Father Studby
of his guest; he had only to write, to expostulate, and the thing
was done. More than once, under the influence of some particular
indignation, he had set himself to the task. But he had never got
beyond the first few lines before his natural generosity reasserted
itself. Who was he, that he should make himself the young man’s judge;
that he should help, perhaps, to mar prospects none too bright, and
throw the last stone at one already tottering to his fall? Besides,
were the grounds of his objection as sincere as he imagined? Was he
not meanly condemning the lay brother for his appetite, for the hole
that he was making in that dwindling larder, rather than for his lack
of religious conviction which at times seemed so shocking? After
all, was it not natural for a young man to eat well, to help himself
unchecked to marmalade, to devour expensive tinned meats like a wolf?
It was the result of those immense walks, ordered by the doctor, to
which Michael so assiduously applied himself. Was there not something
even admirable in so strict an obedience to hygiene, especially in one
constitutionally slothful and self-indulgent?
One afternoon Michael returned from his walk in a state of high
excitement. His black eyes were burning, and for once, contrary to
his usual habit, he was extraordinarily noisy and talkative. He kept
breaking out into wild laughter, even when not a word was said, and
seemed to possess, buried somewhere within him, the secret of an
unextinguishable entertainment. Instead of dozing after supper in his
chair, he grew, if anything, wider awake than ever, and his hilarity
continued with a kind of violence. Father Studby was carried off his
feet by that wave of gaiety; he felt the contagion of that singular
fever which had so transformed his companion; he, too, laughed at
nothing, and found himself talking with an animation that he could
not remember to have displayed for years. But with it all he had
an unaccountable sense of suspicion, of being on his guard against
something, he knew not what, of some pitfall yawning for his unwary
feet. He felt that he was watched; that those strange, mocking eyes
of his companion were mutely tempting him to evil; at times he almost
wondered whether the dark lay brother were not the devil himself.
The young man’s talk was rambling and inconsequent, a mere rattle of
autobiography, punctuated with laughter. He had much to say of his
college days; his penury; his struggles; his shabby makeshifts; the
pranks he and his companions had played on the professors. He roared
as he recalled them, and hammered the table with his fist. He spoke of
his mother and her hard life; the ne’er-do-well father; the brother
that drank; the sister with the hip disease. And from that again to
the price of native land, the way to secure good titles, the need, as
he had been told, to buy the same property from a dozen conflicting
owners. Then he broke out about the power of money, the unlimited power
of money, the lawlessness of money in unprincipled hands; the way it
could buy everything the world had to offer, social position, beautiful
women, the entrée to great houses. With money, what could a man ask
for in vain! In this world, he meant, of course--in this world. In the
next, thank God, it would be different; the rich would pay through
the nose then for their pleasures. But some of them perhaps would not
repent it; the most would be as bad again, if only the chance were
offered; the dogs would return to their vomit.
Father Studby listened to these confidences with amazement; they
depressed and angered him unspeakably; they seemed to disclose in his
companion a cynicism and a moral deficiency that he had not previously
suspected. He felt, too, as he had never felt before, the full
horror of that brutal civilisation, so merciless, so inexorable, its
obliterating march whitened with the bones of thousands; everything
with its price, even to the honour of shrinking women and the corpses
of the dead. If you had no money the wheels rolled over you; if you
had no money you sank and died. There was no one to help, no one to
pity; all were scrambling horribly to save themselves on the shoulders
of those below. What a contrast to the calm of that Samoan life,
primitive, kindly, and religious, in which accursed money was unknown!
He was led to declaim hotly on the high breeding and chivalry of
these misjudged people, and protested that they had more to teach than
to learn. Where, he demanded of the lay brother, could one find such
hearts as these? where such brave men and compassionate women? where
else a land with neither rich nor poor? Here, if one starved, all
starved; here, if need be, the last banana was divided into a hundred
pieces; here they would all take shame if a single child went hungry.