THE MAROON
Of the beauties of Anaho books might be written. I remember waking about
three, to find the air temperate and scented. The long swell brimmed
into the bay, and seemed to fill it full and then subside. Gently,
deeply, and silently the _Casco_ rolled; only at times a block piped
like a bird. Oceanward, the heaven was bright with stars and the sea
with their reflections. If I looked to that side, I might have sung with
the Hawaiian poet:
_Ua maomao ka lani, ua kahaea luna_,
_Ua pipi ka maka o ka hoku_.
(The heavens were fair, they stretched above,
Many were the eyes of the stars.)
And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the
mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped ten
thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that when the
day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern, and roofs of
turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien speech that should
next greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka.
And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts. I have watched
the morning break in many quarters of the world--it has been certainly
one of the chief joys of my existence; and the dawn that I saw with most
emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho. The mountains abruptly overhang the
port with every variety of surface and of inclination, lawn, and cliff,
and forest. Not one of these but wore its proper tint of saffron, of
sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of
satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a
solemn bloom appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the
ordinary light of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of
jewels, pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the
hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red coals
of cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the awakening
business of the day; along the beach men and women, lads and lasses,
were returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and blue and green,
such as we delighted to see in the coloured little pictures of our
childhood; and presently the sun had cleared the eastern hill, and the
glow of the day was over all.
The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part,
ceased before it had begun. Twice in the day there was a certain stir of
shepherding along the seaward hills. At times a canoe went out to fish.
At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in the cotton patch.
At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of a house, ringing the
changes on its three notes, with an effect like _Que le jour me dure_
repeated endlessly. Or at times, across a corner of the bay, two natives
might communicate in the Marquesan manner with conventional whistlings.
All else was sleep and silence. The surf broke and shone around the
shores; a species of black crane fished in the broken water; the black
pigs were continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might
never have awaked, or they might all be dead.
My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in a
cove under a lianaed cliff. The beach was lined with palms and a tree
called the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in growth, and
bearing a flower like a great yellow poppy with a maroon heart. In
places rocks encroached upon the sand; the beach would be all
submerged; and the surf would bubble warmly as high as to my knees, and
play with cocoa-nut husks as our more homely ocean plays with wreck and
wrack and bottles. As the reflux drew down, marvels of colour and design
streamed between my feet; which I would grasp at, miss, or seize: now to
find them what they promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in
gold upon a lady's finger; now to catch only _maya_ of coloured sand,
pounded fragments and pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as
dull and homely as the flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this
childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my incurable
ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed. Meanwhile, the
blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be fluting in the thickets
overhead.
A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in the
bottom of a den, thence spilling down a stair of rock into the sea. The
draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very bottom of the
den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In front it stood open on
the blue bay and the _Casco_ lying there under her awning and her
cheerful colours. Overhead was a thatch of puraos, and over these again
palms brandished their bright fans, as I have seen a conjurer make
himself a halo out of naked swords. For in this spot, over a neck of low
land at the foot of the mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay
in a flood of almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly
coolness.
It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove with Mrs. Stevenson and
the ship's cook. Except for the _Casco_ lying outside, and a crane or
two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a
prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense
of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the trade wind,
coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the
palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native,
motionless as an idol and watching us, you would have said, without a
wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This
discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had
supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the
thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck
us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose
conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and
twice, when the _Casco_ appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was
amusing to observe that man's alacrity; death, he was persuaded,
awaiting him upon the beach. It was more than a year later, in the
Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were
drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law; and when the wind thus
suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless more troubled than
ourselves.
At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man of
the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in the
Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the American
whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his English, his
down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent life. For one
captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to Nuka-hiva and
marooned him there among the cannibals. The motive for this act was
inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were thus economised,
would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners. And the
act itself was simply murder. Tari's life must have hung in the
beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror of that time, it is not
unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which he was still liable; or
perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and ordained him to be
spared. He escaped at least alive, married in the island, and when I
knew him was a widower with a married son and a granddaughter. But the
thought of Oahu haunted him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he
beheld it, looking back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and
dance; and in his dreams I dare say he revisits it with joy. I wonder
what he would think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the
modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its
guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms
and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown
faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land sold for
planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the
last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs
on Molokai? So simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so sadly, the
changes come.
Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run up
by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the
shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its
contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron sauce-pan, several
cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil;
while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the
open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for
me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink,
and carried me up the den "to see my house"--the only entertainment that
he had to offer. He liked the "Amelican," he said, and the "Inglisman,"
but the "Flessman" was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain
that if he had thought us "Fless," we should have had none of his nuts,
and never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can partly
understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-Saxon. The next
day he brought me a pig, and some days later one of our party going
ashore found him in act to bring a second. We were still strange to the
islands; we were pained by the poor man's generosity, which he could ill
afford, and, by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder, we
refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no
more; being what he was, the most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man,
he took a revenge a hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe
with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the _Casco_
was boarded from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because
he had no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming
thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a stranger
in the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my family basely
fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured friend alone; and
the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour, for he was loath to
tear himself away. "You go 'way. I see you no more--no, sir!" he
lamented; and then, looking about him with rueful admiration, "This
goodee ship--no, sir!--goodee ship!" he would exclaim; the "no, sir,"
thrown out sharply through the nose upon a rising inflection, an echo
from New Bedford and the fallacious whaler. From these expressions of
grief and praise, he would return continually to the case of the
rejected pig. "I like give plesent all 'e same you," he complained;
"only got pig: you no take him!" He was a poor man; he had no choice of
gifts; he had only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it. I have
rarely been more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so
grey, so poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to
appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so innocently
dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech is vain.
Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of
sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most
Anaho-women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a mite of
a creature at the breast. I went up the den one day when Tari was from
home, and found the son making a cotton sack, and madame suckling
mademoiselle. When I had sat down with them on the floor, the girl began
to question me about England; which I tried to describe, piling the pan
and the cocoa shells one upon another to represent the houses and
explaining, as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the
over-population, the hunger, and the perpetual toil. "_Pas de cocotiers?
pas de popoi?_" she asked. I told her it was too cold, and went through
an elaborate performance, shutting out draughts, and crouching over an
imaginary fire, to make sure she understood. But she understood right
well; remarked it must be bad for the health, and sat a while gravely
reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows. I am sure it roused her
pity, for it struck in her another thought always uppermost in the
Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me
out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people. "_Ici
pas de Kanaques_," said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she
held it out to me with both her hands. "_Tenez_--a little baby like
this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more." The smile, and
this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood
affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile
the husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled
to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had just
brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw their case
as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day already numbered when
there should be no more Beretani, and no more of any race whatever, and
(what oddly touched me) no more literary works and no more readers.