SONGS AND INCANTATIONS
That I might obtain permanent records of their songs and incantations,
I carried with me a large-sized phonograph, with all needful
appliances. With much relish I anticipated the consternation of the
natives when they saw and heard a box whence issued a living human
voice and music played by all sorts of instruments.
In order to introduce them to it with due paralysing effect, I made
a selection of band music and several songs in English; with these I
intended to charm them before requesting them to speak or sing into
that embarrassing, expressionless metal horn. Experience had taught
me, however, the impossibility of foretelling the fashion in which
untutored minds will accept such miracles, and I was not altogether
unprepared to have their bewilderment find expression in a shower of
well-directed coconuts at the first bars of “Lead kindly light” or
other soothing, peaceful hymns. But what was my unexpected amazement
and infinite chagrin, when the audience I had gathered displayed not
the faintest interest in the performance beyond the sight of the
revolution of the little wax cylinder. A living, human voice, singing
a sweet English love-song, and issuing from a brass horn attached to a
machine, was, to them, not half as awesome as the whirling wheels and
the buzz of clock-work; some of the audience actually turned away in
indifference, if not in disgust, and went off to resume their work of
husking coconuts.
Completely crestfallen, I ventured to ask one man when the tune was
finished what he thought of it; “An all right sort of _tom-tom_”
was his careless and patronizing reply. (_Tom-tom_ is an adopted
word which they apply to cheap musical boxes,--in fact to any variety
of musical instrument,--introduced many years ago by whalers and
copra traders.) Friedlander himself was astounded at their mortifying
indifference, and suggested very justly that it was probably
because the words meant nothing to them, and that the phonograph was
to them only another form of hurdy-gurdy. A human voice uttering
incomprehensible sounds had to them no more meaning than the beating of
a tin pan.
Cast down, but not utterly discouraged, I tried a second song by a
melodious female voice, but this fell just as absolutely flat as the
former. As a final and desperate resource, I put on a blank roll and
the recording needle, and then induced one of the youths to speak a few
native words into the horn, and immediately ground off a reproduction
of his very words. The effect was magical! The audience forgot to
breathe in awed silence! Their eyes dilated! Their jaws fell! And
they began repeating after the instrument the words of their very own
language, in the boy’s very own voice, now issuing from the bottom
of the horn! Was the boy himself imprisoned there? For five or six
seconds after the voice ceased, they remained silent, looking from
one to another, and then--then they burst into peals and peals of
screaming laughter, clamourously and vehemently imploring me to repeat
it. Of course I complied. The coconut huskers dropped their work and
hurried back helter-skelter, to hear a little machine that after only
a minute’s acquaintance could talk as well as they could themselves!
The conquest was complete! Thereafter I had no difficulty whatsoever
in finding volunteers to sing or repeat set speeches. The miracle of
a “_tom-tom_ that talked and sung” was assured, and its success
unbounded!
[Illustration: A PHONOGRAPHIC MATINÉE]
At my first and second exhibition men alone happened to be present. A
request then came to me from the women, through Friedlander’s wife,
that I should give them an exhibition, to which, as they were shy,
no men should be admitted. Accordingly, kind-hearted Friedlander had
one of his copra storehouses cleared,--it was a little house on low
piles, with walls and floor of bamboo slats, about twenty feet long
and ten feet wide. At one end I set up my phonograph, and the audience
duly gathered in bunches and bundles,--I use the words advisedly,
so enormous and expansive are the skirts of dried grasses and leaves.
The hall was filled to overflowing. But in a house of bamboo the walls
and floor have many a chink, and I think I may truly say there was no
single crevice without its outside ear. I tried the same experiment
with the women as with the men, and first of all I gave them an
English song; and precisely the same result followed; the performance
emphatically bored them, and they conversed with each other and pointed
to the different parts of the machine as if the entertainment was yet
to begin. But the native song, that I gave them next, awed them into
silence in a trice; with dilated eyes they scrutinised me wonderingly,
before, behind and on every side, to see that there was no living man
concealed who was the real singer. The silence, however, lasted but
a minute, and was then broken by shouts of delighted laughter, and
thereupon followed such a commotion and eager shifting of places to get
a nearer view of the mystery, that I really expected every minute that
the whole audience, myself included, would crash through the frail
floor to the ground below. The rows of jet black teeth on a broad grin
from ear to ear, seemed to darken the room. During the intermission,
while I was putting on another record, cigarettes burned hard and fast
to brace up the nerves for another thrill. After two or three men’s
songs, I asked for a song from the women; they were reluctant and
very shy, but finally they induced two young girls to sing a duet,
which they said is wont to be sung at funerals, setting forth the good
qualities of the deceased and the intense grief of the survivors. It
must have been the identical tune that the original “old cow died
on,” so monotonous, so lugubrious, so discordant was it. Evidently
the débutantes had not assisted at many funerals; they frequently
made awkward pauses and looked around despairingly until kind friends
prompted them loudly. It did not turn out to be a good record, but it
served to interest the women intensely, and render them anxious to hear
their own voices as others hear them.
[Illustration: FOUR DAMSELS WHO SANG INTO THE PHONOGRAPH]
Thereafter the fame of the _tom-tom-ni-non_,--the “talking
_tom-tom_,”--spread all over the island. I think that eventually I
must have been visited by every human being in Uap, from babies in arms
to hoary age,--everything that could creep, walk, or hobble. From far
and near there came crowds so insistent that almost every day I had to
give a session in the morning for the men, and a select session for the
women in the afternoon, but I no longer crowded them into the little
copra house; open air exhibitions were perfectly satisfactory.
It was intensely interesting to watch their expression as they
recognised the words of a familiar song, or speech, and knew the
speaker’s voice. There was one particular chant, sung for me by three
men from the adjacent _failu_, which Lian, the chief, cautioned me
not to play for the women; it was quite as well they should not hear
it. Pleased with this unexpected display of refinement, I assured him
at once that I would do my best to comply with his request. At that
early stage of my knowledge of their song-language the songs were all
so much alike, and the tunes so completely indistinguishable one from
another, that one afternoon, in my innocency, before I was aware, the
forbidden song was droning away on the phonograph, and I was awakened
to my oversight by the “nods and becks and wreathèd smiles” of the
women before me; but I had gone too far to retreat. I glanced up and
saw Lian at a little distance off, standing in the doorway of our
house. He was both smiling and scowling, but from his position at one
side he was watching keenly the women’s faces while they were listening
to that mysterious song. There were also a few other men standing
further off behind the rows of women who were sitting cross-legged on
the ground. The women’s eyes danced with merriment and, as soon as the
song was recognized, a suppressed giggle went round the audience and
they turned to one another with up-lifted brows and wide open eyes,
with a sort of “did-you-ever!--no-I-never” expression; it evidently
diverted them, so I submitted to fate. Lian still stood watching, and I
saw his lips repeating each word; then came several bars of the song
which gave forth nothing but a low humming, with plaintive cadences.
The women all cast their eyes on the ground, laughing, but ashamed to
laugh. Lian gave a foolish, sickly smile and, shaking his head weakly,
retreated into the obscurity of the house; the men in the background
could not suppress two or three loud guffaws, and then, stooping down
to hide their embarrassment, busied themselves at once with splitting
the husks of some coconuts.
Illustration: LIAN, CHIEF OF DULUKAN]
I had, indeed, quite innocently proved a marplot, and suffered the
women to hear one of the secret songs of the _failu_. The combined
questioning of Friedlander and myself failed to elicit its meaning, or
why the men should have been so particularly anxious to keep it from
the women’s ears. We never could get any further explanation than that
it was “merely one of the songs sung only in the _failu_.”
An odd feature of all their songs and incantations is that they are
not in the modern Uap language at all, nor in a language used by the
people in any other island. They say it is the primitive language of
Palalagab, the ancient name of Uap, and they use these words when they
compose a new song. It is, however, impossible to extract any meaning,
or, rather, any literal meaning out of these mere strings of words;
they translated them for us into modern Uap, but this yielded merely a
collection of what seemed to be absolutely disconnected and irrelevant
statements. They usually began with an appeal for attention, such
as “Hear what we have been doing;” “Listen to what we are saying,”
or “Open your ears to hear;” then follow immediately one after
another, such sentences as “Brave men, all the same as devils, make a
_mach-mach_ for good weather at sea”--“When we go in a canoe and
see a bird, we say we are near to land, when we see a fish, we say we
are near to land”--“Listen to what we young boys dreamt about”--“We all
got in a canoe;” etc.
These are the sentences of a song which Tomak, a high-class man, sang
into the phonograph and then told us proudly that he himself composed
it, but he could give us no more than the above sentences translated
into modern Uap, and he was unable to say what meaning he intended
to convey. This same incomprehensible language is, of course, a
heaven-sent boon to the _mach-mach_ men; luckily nobody, not even
themselves, can tell what they are talking about.[2]
Powerful spells may be purchased and learned from the _mach-mach_
men for large sums; at times they are heirlooms and pass on from
father to son or younger brother. Since they must all be transmitted
by word of mouth, is it surprising that they should become at last
mere nondescript jargon? It is not, however, beyond possibility
that the wizards understand these random sentiments and disjointed
sentences; they are experts at reading between lines, and what to us
is the merest platitude, becomes in their ears a lyric overflowing
with sentiment. Nay, is it not even so with the Japanese whom we have
lately learned to admire in the arts of peace as well as of war, and
especially in Painting, Poetry’s twin sister? There flits across my
memory the following Japanese “Poem” consisting of these three lines
and no more:
“At the time of being far away!
If the moon were a looking-glass!
Delightful!”
To a Japanese this is all sufficient to conjure up a picture of two
lovers sundered by cruel fate, each happy in the thought that both are
gazing at the same moon and longing for the moon’s mirror to reflect an
image of the beloved face, while the “Delightful” at the close has all
the convincing emphasis of the “Assuredly” in the Koran.
Indeed it is not straining probability too far to suggest that a Uap
song, which was thus translated for me:--
“I have a canoe,
I will stick to you like a burr,
I have lost my mind.”
may, to the languishing Uap youths or lovelorn maids express all the
tenderness of Lover’s
“What would you do, love, if I were going,
With white sail flowing,
The seas beyond?” etc.
In both songs we have a limitless expanse of seas, and eternal fidelity
(how full is the image of a “burr” with its side glance of annoying
persistence!). It is in the last line, however, that the Uap song bears
the palm, and rises to a height of self-knowledge rarely attained by
poets, of all men, and beyond all praise in its open confession of what
is patent to all.
Let no one hereafter cast a slur on Uap poetry,--least of all those who
admire Emily Dickinson, that belated Uap poetess, who would have been
hailed as a Sappho had she been born under the palms of The Carolines.