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In 1948 Sir Arthur retired from the Colonial Service, and not long after his return to England embarked on a new career. In his leisure he began to jot down narratives of some of his more personal experiences in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, took them to the A Pattern of Islands, which was made into a film in 1956. He later wrote the companion volume, Return to the Islands. He also contributed a series of distinguished essays to the journals of the Migrations, Myth and Magic from the Gilbert Islands.
Sir Arthur died in 1956.
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This book is dedicated to the District Officers of the Colonial Administrative Service and their long-suffering wives
My acknowledgements are due to the Wide World Magazine and the National Geographic Magazine of America for permission to use the material which originally appeared in two articles of mine in their pages
I was nominated to a cadetship in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate at the end of 1913. The cult of the great god Jingo was as yet far from dead. Most English households of the day took it for granted that nobody could be always right, or ever quite right, except an Englishman. The Almighty was beyond doubt Anglo-Saxon, and the popular conception of Empire resultantly simple. Dominion over palm and pine (or whatever else happened to be noticeably far-flung) was the heaven-conferred privilege of the Bulldog Breed.
The
I was a tallish, pinkish, long-nosed young man, fantastically thin-legged and dolefully mild of manner. Nobody could conceivably have looked, sounded or felt less like a leader of any sort than I did at the age of twenty-five. Apart from my dislike of the genus Stalky, I think the only positive things about me were a consuming hunger for sea-travel and a disastrous determination to write sonnets. The sonnet-writing had been encouraged by Squirrel, sitting abaft with a book in his hand, 'giving signs of joy' to his fellow-adventurers in the Golden Hinde and roaring at them through the wild Atlantic gale that engulfed him, 'We are as near heaven by sea as by land' so often as they approached within hearing. I tried at
The fear of being packed home from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in disgrace, after three years of probation, for having failed to become the kind of leader my uncles wanted me to be, began to give me nightmares. A moment came when I felt that the instant sack for some honest admission of my own ineptitude would be easier to bear than that long-drawn-out ignominy. In any case, I decided, someone at the top ought to be warned of my desperate resolve never to become like Stalky. It sounded rather fine, and lonely, and stubborn, put like that; but I fear I didn't live up to the height of it. I did, indeed, secure an interview at the
The quiet old gentleman was Mr. Johnson, a Chief Clerk in the
'Let us see, now,' he murmured, settling into his chair 'Let us see … yes … let us go on a voyage of discovery together. Where … precisely … are the Gilbert and Ellice Islands? If you will believe me, I have often been curious to know.'
He started whipping over the pages of the atlas; I could do nothing but goggle at him while he pursued his humiliating research.
'Ah!' he chirruped at last, 'here we have them: five hundred miles of islands lost in the wide Pacific. Remote … I forbear, in tenderness for your feelings, from saying anything so Kiplingesque as far-flung. Do we agree to say remote and not far-flung?' He cocked his wicked little eye at me.
I made sounds in my throat, and he went on at once, 'Remote not pines, ha-ha! … the lagoon islands, the not pines? Do we stake our lives on not not the romance of dominion? I should appreciate your answer.'
I joyfully accepted Puck of Pook's Hill and Kim, and the
I replied yes, sir, certainly, sir, but how was I going to tackle this thing about leadership, sir.
He peered at me incredulously, rose at once, and lifted his coat-tails again at the fire, as if I had chilled whatever it was. 'I had imagined,' he confided in a thin voice to the ceiling, 'that I had already — and with considerable finesse — managed to put all that in its right perspective for this queer young man.'
'However,' he continued, after a long and, to me, frightful silence, 'let us dot our i's and cross our t's. The deplorable thing about your romanticism is that you display it as a halo around your own head. You seem to think that, when you arrive in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the entire population will forthwith stop work to stand with bated breath awaiting your apotheosis as a leader among them.'
The blend of venomous truth and ghastly unfairness in this bit deep into my young soul; I opened my mouth to protest, but
Though his tone had been as cutting as his words, the flicker of a smile had escaped once or twice, as if by permission, through his beard. I got the notion that the smiles meant, 'You incredible young ass! Can't you see this is the way round to put it to your uncles?' But when I gave him back a timid grin, he asked me sharply why. I answered sheepishly that he had eased my mind, because truly, truly I didn't want to go ordering anybody round any more than he wanted me to.
At that, his manner changed again to one of sprightly good humour. He began to tell me a whole lot of things about a cadet's training in the field (or, at least, the training he thought I was destined to get in the
… It was dawn. I was hurrying, loaded with papers of the utmost import, through the corridors of a vast white office building set on an eminence above a sapphire ocean. I had been toiling all night with the Chief Secretary, the Treasurer, the Magistrate, the Collector of Customs, the Commissioner of Works, the Chief of Police, the Postmaster General, and the Keeper of the Prisons. The job was done! I had pulled them all through. Just in time! There in the bay below lay a ship with steam up, waiting for final orders. I opened a door. A man with a face like a sword – my beloved Chief, the Resident Commissioner himself – sat tense and stern-eyed at his desk. His features softened swiftly as he saw me:'Ah … you, all to me.' My voice was very quiet, quiet but firm …
'… and remember this,' broke in the voice of Mr Johnson, 'a cadet is a nonentity.' The vision fled. The reedy voice persisted: 'A cadet washes bottles for those who are themselves merely junior bottle-washers. Or so he should assess his own importance, pending his confirmation as a permanent officer.'
He must have seen something die in my face, for he added at once, 'Not that this should unduly discourage you. All Civil Servants, of whatever seniority, are bottle-washers of one degree or another. They have to learn humility. what thou shalt be, nothing: thou shalt not be less." Sane advice, especially for cadets! Nevertheless, you would do well to behave, in the presence of your seniors, with considerably less contempt for high office than
Who was I, to question the rightness of this advice? I certainly
And that was that about the cost of living. I was too timid to recover my list from the mantelpiece.
Thus finally primed in the
We reached Moresby, a typical Pacific tramp of those days -1,300 tons register, thirty-three years old, but still A1 at Lloyd's and still game to plug her stinking way at the rate of six knots an hour through any weather to any palm-green shore where pearl-shell or bêche-de-mer, shark-fins or copra were to be picked up. By the time we met her, her battered hull, surviving god-knows-how-many hurricanes at sea
'Look at those lovely plates!' he would exclaim, pointing to the incredibly buckled decks. 'All bent to hell, but not a leak in 'em anywhere! Because why? They're beautiful soft iron, not this here cheap steel. She can knock her way into lagoons through horses' heads and coral mushrooms … crack-crack, like that, port and starboard, the dear old what-not, just taking a few more dents in her old bottom but never springing a blanky leak anywhere.' A sweet old lady she was, he always finished up, a sweet old lady. She must have been, in her fashion, for the memory of her still tugs somehow at my heart; but she had not been designed for the comfort of land-lubbers like us, nor had her business occasions sweetened the smell of her for our kind of noses. She reeked of dead shark, putrid oyster and rancid copra from stem to stern of her aged body, and the ruinous wooden hutch on the forward well-deck where we tried to sleep was undoubtedly the chief concentrating-point of all her odours. Then, too, there were the cockroaches.
Those three-and-a-half-inch monsters, fattened on the oily refuse that clotted every crevice of the holds, swarmed up at night into our bunks, looking for a change of diet. Pacific cockroaches eat feet. They would willingly devour any other exposed part of the human body, for that matter, if one let them; but the tickle of a dozen or so on a hand or face usually wakes a sleeper before they can get down to a meal. A foot, though, is a different proposition; the thick skin on the sole is insensitive, and the victim feels nothing until they have gnawed that down to the quick. When he does wake, the ball and heel have been stripped pink, and he hobbles for the next week or so, to the exquisite enjoyment of all true sailormen and shell-backs. I know, because it happened to me in the Moresby. It was then that I heard for the first time that side-splitting joke, so
We did learn later to accept cockroaches as domestic pets (or almost) for, in the Moresby, because, but for our first maniac terror of the brutes, we might never have slept on deck. The captain had strong ideas about the propriety of such a thing for a young woman. Nothing but our most haggard entreaties persuaded him to let us, at last, drag our mattresses up to the boat-deck amidships. Once we were there, however, he gave us a tarpaulin sheet for extra cover against rain squalls. We needed it a lot at first, but the weather cleared as we slid past the Santa Cruz group; and then we found out what it was to lie at night overleaned by nothing but a firmament of flaming stars — for the tropic stars did flame for us, just as the travel books had promised. The nights were amethyst clear and cool. Eddies of warm air, loaded with earth scents and jungle dreams from islands beyond sight enmeshed us and were gone again. The swing of the old ship was so quiet, she seemed to be poised moveless while the stars themselves were rocking to the croon of the bow-wave, back and forth above her mastheads, as we lay tranced with watching.
There were Gilbertese deck-hands in the crew, copper-skinned boys, thick muscled and short in the leg but as active as cats in the rigging. They were shy with strangers, stern featured and remote-looking when they worked alone. We thought them dour folk until we saw them get together. That was somewhere on the edge of the tropics, when the trousers and jerseys that had veiled the glorious moulding of their bodies had been discarded for the belted waist-cloths, trimmed to the knee, of ordinary
One evening, we heard them singing on the forecastle-head. We could make out, from where we listened, a circle of sitting shapes, their torsos stippled in black-against the night sky. Their heads and shoulders were bowed, their voices muted; the queer inflections of their chant were cadenced, even for our alien ears, with grief beyond bearing. We knew it could not be one of the ancient island sagas of war or wonder-voyage that we had read about. We were to hear many of those later, triumphantly intoned, in the packed meeting-houses of the Gilberts; but this was a new song and a sad song made by one of the crew for love of his cruel lady. I got the words of it from Teburea, the boatswain's mate, before we left the ship. He wrote them down for me and I still have the paper; here is the ungarnished translation of them:
Teburea told me that the suffering poet could not, for shame of seeming boastful, himself join in the singing. His part was to teach his song to friends who loved him, and sit weeping in their circle while they sang it for him. They too wept as they sang, Teburea said, because they knew their tears would make their friend a little happy, and because the words were very beautiful, and because all of them were sick for their own sweethearts, over there across the sea to eastward. Or perhaps, if they were not sick for sweethearts, they wanted to see their fathers and mothers again. 'Me sick, too, for my old man,' Teburea finished simply (I know now that he meant his adoptive grandfather), 'he love me too much; me love him too much, too,' and walked away.
It began to dawn on me then that, beyond the teeming romance that lies in the differences between men — the diversity of their homes, the multitude of their ways of life, the dividing strangeness of their faces and tongues, the thousand-fold mysteries of their origins — there lies the still profounder romance of their kinship with each other, a kinship that springs from the immutable constancy of man's need to share laughter and friendship, poetry and love in common. A man may travel a long road, and suffer much loneliness, before he makes that discovery. Some, groping along dark byways, never have the good fortune to stumble upon it. But I was luckier than most. The islands I had chosen blindly, for the only reason that they were romantically remote, were peopled by a race who, despite the old savagery of their wars and the grimness born of their endless battle with the sea, were princes in laughter and friendship, poetry and love. Something in the simple way Teburea had spoken of that love song and the singing of it gave me a sudden
We raised
The shudder of (Taumarawa, the Holder-of-the-Skies), Tabakea sidled his way through the nurseries at sea-level, so to speak, into the daily life of the people. He became Tau-marawa, the
The fisherman's notion that the land was perched on a column of rock was not so very wide of the truth.
Aeons ago, its crest must have lain under water, yet just near enough to the top for the reef-building polyps to live there, for it was capped in that age with a platform of coral rock. Perhaps, when the reef broke surface after countless centuries of growth,
That was the age of birds; it was ended by a subsidence; the island disappeared, and the age of fishes began. One relic that remains for man out of the era of engulfment is the fossil tooth of a shark so enormous that a motor lorry could be driven through its reconstructed jaws. The heaped bird-droppings, overlaid by the rich refuse of the depths, suffered a sea-change from guano into phosphate of lime. Then again the ocean's bed was convulsed, and the coral platform with its load of precious phosphate was pushed three hundred feet above the water. It did not sink again. New generations of polyps got to work to build a cornice of reef around the island's foot; birds flew in from places afar bearing seeds in their feathers; the land was covered in scrub that rotted, and grew, and rotted again, to form a topsoil of black earth; a forest of great calophyllum trees appeared on the heights.
Maybe it was not so very many millions of years after the last upheaval that seafaring men – the people of Tabakea, the People of Au, and who knows what other land-hungry swarms before them – arrived and built their villages above the south-west facing bay. Only a few score centuries more were to pass from then until the
The Company, never a very rich concern, was tottering towards financial collapse in the late eighteen-nineties. Its old ship, the Ocean Queen, sailing out of Ocean Queen, and broke the gloomy news to him.
But
'Yes, yes,' they cut him short wearily, 'you needn't go on.' He had said the same thing before, a dozen, a hundred times. He believed the rock might have phosphate of lime in it. But they believed otherwise. They were so certain he was wrong, nobody had ever even thought of having the thing analysed. They scoffed at his plea for an analysis now, at the eleventh hour. 'Fortune doesn't play fairy-godmother tricks these days, boy,' they said. 'Now drop it and hop it.'
But he was not to be put off this time. He could ill afford to pay for an analysis himself, but he rode his hunch and took the rock to an expert.
A week or so later, he stalked into the directors' room again and reported what he had done. 'I'm not asking for a refund of the fee,' he told the astonished board, 'because I think you're going to raise my pay quite soon.'
'My poor boy,' answered the fatherly managing director, 'you shall certainly have your money back. Foolish as you were, you acted in our interests and you shan't lose by it. But we can't raise your pay. The firm is closing down.'
'Oh-no-it's-not!' shouted the irrepressible
On the strength of that report, a Ocean Queen prospecting up to
The romance of the Company, however, was far from being the first point to strike us as the old Moresby brought us lurching into Home Bay. What stood out initially was a dreadful, corrugated-iron factory building above the water-front, from which enormous clouds of dust were being thrown sky-high. It was the crushing-mill of the Company, busy pulverizing its daily quota of a thousand tons of phosphate rock for the export market. The dust it flung up drifted heavily down the still air, to load all the greenery of the island's flank with a grey pall. Its belchings seemed to us as grossly out of place as a series of eructations in the face of the infinite. Yet the major impertinence was ours; the unmannerly monster we saw before us was helping to keep a million acres of pasture-land green in
Stuartson Collard bonhomie that day. The mails from the Moresby were, of course, worth coming out for, but the idea of hoiking ashore a curio called a cadet – a phenomenon until then most happily unknown in the and his wife (heaven pity her whoever she might be), and their frightful luggage scratching the boat's beautiful paintwork to hell … well, I ask you, he said. We know he said it, because Ruby told us so in due course, and anyhow, we saw it sticking out of every angular Scottish inch of his six-foot-three, as he walked up to us like a one-man procession in resplendent ducks.
'I am
When I explained that there was still a big box to come from the baggage room, he exclaimed, 'Oh, my God!' in a high, shaken whisper, and walked away to give some orders. On his return, he said, 'I suppose you've seen to the Way Bill,' and when I asked what the Way Bill was, he whispered 'Oh, my God!' again, falsetto, but allowed me to gather that the thing was a kind of receipt for the mails, which I should have saved him the trouble of signing. So I went and did it at once, and that was my very first official gesture in the service of His Majesty overseas. I felt the job had been done with considerable éclat until
The top end of a Jacob's ladder hung over a ship's side is the only part of it made fast to anything. It follows that, when the ship rolls towards that side, the bottom end swings gaily out over the depths, only to crash back against the plates when the roll is reversed. The terror of the landsman at the bottom end is the greater or less in proportion to the extravagance of the rolling. Olivia was near the bottom when the prize-winning outward swing happened. The accompanying downward plunge caused an uprush of air beneath her skirts which lifted them over her head. Skirts were worn voluminous in those days; Olivia's got so firmly entangled with her hat that the downward draught caused by the following upward rush failed to dislodge them. She groped her way blind after that, through a series of sick swings and crashes, until her questioning feet found no more steps to step upon, and she was left dangling in the void by her hands only, for somebody to do something about. It was
The swells got steeper where the bottom rose towards the reef. As their racing slopes snatched up our stern and tossed it high, the oarsmen fought to keep pace with the forward' scend of them, and the boat drove on, impossibly tilted, into valleys that forever fled away from under the plunging bows. But the bronze giant at the steer-oar stood easily poised on the tiny locker-deck behind us. His bare feet braced against the gunwales, he swung in lovely rhythm to the heave and thrust of the seas upon his oar, and sang aloud for the joy of his mastery as he brought the boat swooping like a gull towards the boat harbour. His voice cut across the crashing diapason of the surf with the gay challenge of a clarion. When we came to the very edge of the reef – so near it seemed nothing could stop our
From the boat jetty we climbed again, up the steep incline of a narrow-gauge cable-way which handled all the Company's imports in those times. The first terrace in the island's westward slopes was at the top. There stood the Company's trade store and office. Strung out farther to the left, above the curve of Home Bay, were the electric power house, the machine shop, the
We passed through the brazen heat and clamour of it ridiculously perched upon minute flat-cars furnished with benches far too high for safety. These were pushed by poles in the manner of punts – but at breakneck speed – along a narrow-gauge railway line. The benches were built to suit the length of
But the pace slowed as we took the slight gradient beyond the locations; suddenly, too, we were out of the torrid glare and running in the latticed shade of palms. The din of machinery was magically snuffed out as we rounded a bend; the dwellings of a Baanaban village over-arched by palms came in sight on the seaward slopes below us. We caught glimpses, through twined shadow and sunlight, of crimson and cream hibiscus, of thatches raised on corner-posts, of neatly matted floors beneath them, of bronze bodies in brightly coloured loin-cloths. We heard the chatter of laughing women and the shouts of children across a murmur of surf that rose muted through the trees. Scents of gardenia and frangipani floated up to us mixed with savours of cooking. The grim civilization of Home Bay lay
We reached the government siding and got down from our cars. A hundred yards up-hill from there, we came upon a squalid-looking wooden bungalow, without side-verandahs, perched among rocks. The rear edge of its floor squatted up against the hillside; the front edge was propped, visibly sagging, on concrete stilts. Part of the space between the stilts had been boxed in, and the hutch so formed, said
So this was the vast white office building with corridors, et cetera, of my vision in
It clearly pleased worked here. There was first the Old Man (in other words, the Resident Commissioner) who operated as his own Chief Secretary, Private Secretary, District Officer and Magistrate, except, of course, when his wife interfered. The Secretariat, as I had called it, consisted of a Clerk. Presumably, when I spoke of the Treasurer, I meant the Accountant, who comprised the entire financial personnel, besides being the Postmaster General, the
I gathered from his tone that there was a good deal of local feeling about that.
We learned, further, as we trudged past the Police Barracks and Prison, up the steep mile to the Residency, that the rest of the Protectorate' s European staff consisted of a doctor employed on
We had reached an open plateau overlooking the tremendous emptiness of the ocean to south and west. The northern edge of the cricket ground lay cool beneath a green bank fringed with coconut palms. Behind the palms stood the Residency, a pleasant white bungalow, backed by a towering forest of
'That's the Old Man,' said
He was healthy for me in another way, too, though the pleasure of it was at the time not so obvious. The prospect of having a cadet to lick into shape did not entrance him. There were reasons for this. His parents had not been rich and, as a youth, he had been obliged to forgo for the sake of a brilliant elder brother in the Diplomatic Service a number of things that it hurt him to miss, including his hope of a university education. I never heard him complain of it, but the handicaps he had suffered and the very success with which he had overcome them had affected his attitude towards beginners. He had started his own official career, while still in his teens, as a clerk of the fifth grade in the civil service of a
Another neat thing he used to shoot off about my species was that we thought we had been despatched across the starlit foam with special warrants in our pockets to dispense celestial wisdom direct from the
While Mrs Eliot talked to Olivia on the front verandah, he took me into his office and sat me before his desk. He was a neat, slim man of medium height with the very black hair and rather Phoenician features one sometimes sees in
I remember he asked me first if I played cricket. When I said I liked it, he replied, 'Well, that's one good thing, anyhow!' in a way that left me wondering what next. I did not have to conjecture long. He went on, with irritation in his voice, 'You know,
There wasn't much I could say to that. I sat sweating while he gave me his ideas about the right man for the job. What he wanted was someone who had knocked around … not an official … preferably a fellow who had done a bit of trading and planting somewhere. A sahib, naturally … right kind of breeding, right kind of school … all that. But definitely not a cub from a university. Above all, not a heavenly-born selection from the
I forget what I replied to this (if anything), but I recollect asking him if I could get lessons in Gilbertese from someone on the island, and the request seemed to brighten him for a little. He said the Government would pay the official interpreter to teach me. He turned gloomy again, though, in the course of wondering how the
I remember that his last words gave me another of those sudden visions I used to get. It was not as sanguine as the one I had had with Mr Johnson. I saw myself standing (for some peculiar reason) on the sun-smitten railway line above the crushing mills, hemmed in by a circle of Company's men with hairy forearms and noble looks enhanced by the walrus moustaches of my uncles. They held themselves erect in silence, arms folded, looking at me with contempt in their eyes for my gross ignorance of everything a real man should know.
As a matter of fact, I could not have been more mistaken about the Company's staff. Olivia and I were to find out almost at once that our ignorance could not have fallen among friendlier neighbours; only the vision was depressing in its moment. But for all that, there was a lot of comfort, too, in what
The comfortable course of my education as a Bottle-washer for bottle-washers was very early interrupted by tragedy. Only three weeks after our arrival at
The combination of office chores, attendance at magistrate's sessions with the Old Man, and getting ready for my examinations in law and language made a fairly hard day's work as a rule, but not quite as hard as it might sound to a modern ear. There was no wireless station yet on
Field work meant for me, among other things, picking up what I could of building methods. District Officers had to began to run away with Empire-building on a grand scale. It was a very good idea, and I liked it, if only because I nursed a notion that I had a real flair for public works. But it was anxious going for
Water was a problem on
I chose the Residency backyard for my first independent blasting operation. A cistern had been ordered for it, and I thought it would be a nice surprise for everyone to find a beautiful, big hole all ready for the concrete work. My only real mistakes were that I chose a Saturday afternoon, warned nobody, put down 100 per cent too many charges, and used 100 per cent too much gelignite in each of them. The initial result was an aggregate explosion of volcanic force. The surface of the backyard rose bodily into the air, to overhang the Residency in the form of a black cloud. Boulders of gigantic size rained from the cloud and fell crashing through the roof into the dining-room. The Resident Commissioner and his lady were taking their siesta at the time. They addressed me at once and both at once from the back verandah, in their underclothes. But they did not continue long, for this was not the end. One of the fuses had burned slower than the rest. A second explosion – trifling compared with the first yet still a thunder-blast – roared out. My chief and his partner fled to cover, and so did I, in the opposite direction.
The next morning, after an interview which need not be recorded, my Chief addressed the following minute to
Please note that I have today prayed Mr Cadet Grimble, in the interests of public safety, to abstain from indulgence in public works of any kind.
Police and Prisons,
Methven considered this document to be so educative in itself that he invited me to take a copy of the text before returning it to the Old Man, endorsed —
Resident Commissioner
A mile inland from the Residency, due north through the deep forest of calophyllum trees on the island's crest, was
Except that there was no lagoon, Uma nestling so snug by the waterside was very much like a hundred other villages I was to see in the
Deeper among the trees, the mwenga, or dwellings, stood ranged with careful art on both sides of a broad main street that followed the shoreline, the deep eaves of their thatches falling to within a boy's height of the ground. Their floors of coconutleaf midribs laid across joists were raised like decks two or three feet clear of the soil, to let the cool air breathe below them. There were no walls to shut out the sane winds of heaven, only screens of plaited leaf hung within the eaves, ready to lower against prying eyes or stormy weather. Two trees supplied all the material needed for building these airy lodges; thatch, rafters, joists, and corner-posts came from the pandanus; the coconut-palm gave leaves for the screens and fibre for string to lash the parts together, as well as midribs for the decking. There were no nails, no dowel-pins. Where the main timbers crossed or were spliced, the barred and chequered patterns of the lashings were the pride of the builders.
The mwenga were set back five yards or so from the roadside, with white-shingled spaces before them. Palms stood in the wide intervals between home and home, their crests spreading arches of latticed gold and green above the silver-brown thatches. There was dappled shadow and sunlight below. The deep green of bread-fruit trees and the flaming vermilion of poinsiana made an avenue down the roadway. Everywhere there were crinum lilies at your feet, that grew like tiger-lilies, but waxen white, in orderly shingled borders and clustered in starry clumps up against the tree-trunks. Crimson of hibiscus and scarlet-gold of Barbados pride burned insolent and tender round the lodges. The weft of frangipani perfume stealing across a warp of sea-scents from the reef made a net of fragrances,
Walking down the bright avenue, the white man had no need to pry if he wanted to see the villagers at home. The people did not use their screens to shut out friendly eyes or conversation. Men back from fishing or cultivation loved to loll at ease on ther floors, smoking and bandying talk from house to house. Women and girls sat brushing their hair, braiding flower-chains, changing garments, bathing children, plaiting mats, chattering all the time, but alive to the littlest thing that passed in the village street. If you wanted a silent and reflective stroll, you avoided a village, for it was almost beyond human power to resist the temptation of their charming and curious gossip. Everything was news for the villagers, especially the women.
You might contrive to avoid sitting or standing talk, but there was always that bare minimum of conversation you must give to everyone who greeted you. The form of exchange never varied:
And if you met the same person again on your way back, which was most probable at the idle hour of the sundown stroll:
I ventured once in the very early days to tell the Old Man that I found these exchanges a little redundant. He bent his thin dark look on me; 'You probably think,
He only gave one of his curiously narrow-nosed double-barrelled sniffs at my denial, and continued: 'Well … I'll tell you something that happened to me not long ago. I carpeted the Tabiang kaubure (village headman) the other day to complain to him about the old men's habit of hawking and spitting when they get excited in the Native Court. I told him he must talk to them about it. My grievance was that a sudden outburst of that kind had drowned my voice when I was speaking to them …' He broke off to tell me coldly on a point of my own manners, that he would proceed when I had wiped that grin from my face.
'If I had put the thing to him as an offence against hygiene,' he continued, 'the kaubure would have got on their tails at once, but I didn't. All I talked to him about was the breach of courtesy to me. And this is what he did. He came forward to my desk and laid his hands on mine. Then he looked me straight in the eyes and said, "How can I speak for you to the old men of Tabiang when you did what you did there only yesterday? Even you, who hold us in the palm of your hand?"'
It appeared that, in walking through Tabiang the day before, he had passed between two women – the wife and daughter of an elder – as they were chatting to each other across the road. Seeing them in conversation, he should have stopped before crossing their line of vision and asked permission to go on. There was a proper formula of words for that: 'E matauninga te aba? (Are the people offended?)' Had he used it, he would have been assured at once that nobody could be the least bit offended. But even then, it would have been proper for him to pass forward with head and shoulders bowed well below their eye-line. His
'The kaubure told me all this so quietly,' went on the Old Man, 'that I felt a fearful bounder. Of course, I asked him to take my apologies to Tabiang, and all was well again. But it was lucky for me he had the guts to talk as he did. Sometimes they don't talk, but keep it bottled up, and then things happen, and they get the blame in the long run when the initial fault was really ours. You may walk round the villages satisfied you're a hell of a fellow, while all the time they're thinking what a mannerless young pup you are … yes, and forgiving you too, and staying loyal in spite of everything. Let that sink in, and go and learn a bit about them. Yours is the honour, not theirs.'
He made me feel as if the brick he had dropped had been mine, not his.
The loving kindness of the Baanabans, in common with the whole Gilbertese race, towards Europeans sprang from no feeling of inferiority, but on the contrary, from a most gracious sense of kinship. Their chief ancestral heroes had been, according to tradition, fair-skinned like ourselves. Au of the Rising Sun with his sister-spouse Tituaabine of the Lightning; Tabuariki the Thunderer and his consort Tevenei of the Meteor; Riiki of the I-Matang; Inhabitants of Matang – ever since, and treated always, whatever their faults, with the proud brotherliness due to kinsmen.
I worked hard at my Gilbertese, and could make a crude show of talking it in four months. It was time then, the Old Man thought, for me to start learning about native customs. He told me to take lessons first of all from the kaubure of Tabiang village who had so gently reproved him. As a beginning, I prepared a list of questions about how a guest was received by the best Baanaban families, and how he ought to behave in reply. Nothing could have been more apt, as it turned out. Armed with the questionnaire, I went to the kaubure's house-place in the village an hour or so before sunset on the day arranged.
A little golden girl of seven, naked save for a wreath of white flowers on her glossy head, invited me to mount upon the raised floor of the mwenga. As she spread a fine guest-mat for me to sit upon, she told me her name was Tebutinnang – Movement-of-Clouds. Seated cross-legged on another mat, she explained with gravity that her grandfather had charged her to entertain me with conversation, should I arrive before his return from fishing. He would not be very long now; would I like to drink a coconut while she went on entertaining? When I said yes, please, she climbed down from the floor, brought in a nut which she had opened under the trees outside with a cutlass-knife almost as long as herself, sat down again, and offered it to me cupped in both hands, at arm's length, with her head a little bowed. 'You
She did not rise and run off with it as I expected, but sat on instead, with both arms clasping the nut to her little chest, examining me over the top of it.
'Alas!' she said at last in a shocked whisper, 'Alas! Is that the manners of a young chief of Matang?'
She told me one by one of the sins I have confessed, and I hung my head in shame, but that was not yet the full tale. My final discourtesy had been the crudest of all. In handing back the empty nut, I had omitted to belch aloud.
'How could I know when you did not belch,' she said, 'how could I know that my food was sweet to you? See, this is how you should have done it!'
She held the nut towards me with both hands, her earnest eyes fixed on mine, and gave vent to a belch so resonant that it seemed to shake her elfin form from stem to stern.
'That,' she finished, 'is our idea of good manners,' and wept for the pity of it.
Her grief was the more bitter because this was the first time her grandfather had ever charged her to receive a guest of his. I could not have let her down more abysmally. But one redeeming course seemed still open: I begged her to give me another chance when grandfather came in, and luckily the idea appealed to her. On his arrival, she sat him on his mat, smiled at me and clambered down from the floor to fetch a nut for each of us. I made no mistakes that time; the volume of my final effort shocked me, but it pleased grandfather profoundly and Movement-of-Clouds clapped her little hands for happiness of heart.
It was in my orders to submit written reports on these lessons to the Old Man. In that way, he said, he could keep track of my
People are fond of saying that you only have to set your mind on a thing firmly enough and long enough for it to come your way at last. My own experience in the service has (doubtless healthily for me) not always corroborated this encouraging doctrine, but I have found that Circumstance – or Providence, or whatever else you like to call it – has a way of returning quick and funny answers to a man's more unreasonable disgruntlements. I was taking a sunset walk one day, after about a year on
Looking ahead down the main avenue between the lines of dwellings, I saw a crowd collected in the open space up against the village maneaba (speak-house). The gathering was unusual for that time of day, because the sunset hour belonged by custom to the evening meal. They stood in a wide ring, so intent upon something at the centre that nobody noticed me until I touched an elderly man's shoulder. But, when he turned and saw me, he caught my hand in his and drew me forward.
'Look, all of you!' he cried, 'the Young Man of Matang has arrived!'
They evidently felt that my arrival had solved some problem for them, and when they had made a way through for me, I saw what it was.
A naked man of quite outrageous size (or so it seemed to me) was squatting on his heels at the centre of the circle. His shoulders were crouched forward so that his armpits were propped by his knees. His lank hair was in wild disorder, and he had smeared dust on the sweat of his face. A small knife dangled idly from his left hand; in his right was a cutlass, with which he was slashing around at objects in the air apparently visible to himself, though not to us. His teeth were bared in a rictus that struck me as even more sinister than the worst my Old Man had ever directed at me. But he took not the smallest notice of the crowd. It was as if we were not there for him, except that it stuck out of him about as plainly as death that he was alive to every movement we made.
'This man is mad,' explained my companions, quite unnecessarily, and added, 'we hope you will now bring him to reason for us.'
It appeared that bringing him to reason meant leading him to some place where he could be safely guarded until the fit was over.
'He will not resist you,' they assured me comfortably: 'Ourselves he would resist, for he has taken up his knives against us, and it would shame him now not to use them. Therefore, if we go to take him, we must use sticks and knives for our own defence; and this would not be suitable, for we are many, and he is mad, and we should probably kill him, and he is our brother.'
Their conviction that he could not possibly dream of doing violence to me was based upon the one fact that I was a Man of Matang. Not even a madman could forget that, they said. All I had to do was to approach him, take his hands in mine and say, 'Sir, I beg you to come with me.' The point was, I must not forget to use those words 'I beg you.' The high honour of being thus formally entreated by a chief of Matang would probably heal his sick mind at once, as well as oblige him to obey my every wish after that. The bigger the audience, of course, the more excellent the honour would seem to him. They would, therefore, sit in a semi-circle before him, while I went forward to do the doings.
They rushed around collecting fallen coconut leaves to sit upon, while I was left standing to survey my problem. He was still squatting and slashing the air. He must have heard every word of the excited talk, but he gave no sign whatever of appreciating my honourable intentions. The quality of his grin seemed, if anything, even more threatening than before. I could not help feeling that his chivalry towards me was definitely inferior to that of his fellows towards himself. I must confess also to wondering how soon it would be decent for me to get those saving words 'I beg you' said. Was it absolutely de rigueur for me to walk right up to him and lay my hands on his before uttering them? Surely this was a most unreasonable stipulation. But my craven thoughts were cut short: 'We are ready,' called a
I trod the first fifteen yards or so as delicately as Agag before his murderous Prophet. My eyes saw nothing but the whirling knife. If he didn't stop flourishing it when I got near him, what was I going to do? Walk right into it? My legs began to feel more stick-like even than they were. Oh, shut up, shouted my mind, and blacked out. I had no thoughts whatever for the last few paces.
He kept it up, with his teeth bared, until I was within a yard of him. Then he suddenly relaxed and smiled up at me. As I laid my hands on his wrists, I thought I had never seen such a welcome smile in my life before; but I did wish he would drop those knives. He did nothing of the kind; after I had said my piece, he got up, still holding them, and flung his arms round my neck. I heard a murmur of joyful approbation burst from the audience. This was evidently a good show, so far. But for that reassurance, I should have struggled to break out of his grip, for it was throttling me, and the little knife was round by my left ear, and the big one was searching my right ribs, and he was making inarticulate noises in his throat. The longer it went on, and the unhappier I felt, the happier the crowd became, and the longer it went on. When at last he found words, it was to bawl over my shoulder, 'O, Young Man of Matang, I love thee, I love thee!' This was the only protestation of its kind I had ever received from a male, and I did not really enjoy it; but the villagers groaned with delight, 'O, joy! O, blessings! He loves, he loves the Young Man of Matang,' and that encouraged him to further declarations of affection. My face was by this time purple and my hair, in every sense, on end. I don't know how much longer I could have borne the ignominy and terror of it; I don't think the audience would ever have intervened to cut short that riot of improving emotion. It was a sudden new arrival among them that saved me. The first thing I knew about it was the voice of a little girl shrilling from behind my back, 'Shameless, shameless Barane!' At once, my neck was released from the strangle-hold. I flung his limp arms from my shoulders. Barane stood alone with hanging head before the little girl. She was
'Give me those knives at once,' she shouted, and he surrendered them.
'Now tell this company you are sorry.'
He did.
'Now tell the Young Man of Matang you are sorry.'
He hesitated a little, and then murmured, 'I love, I love the Young Man of Matang. I wish him to go with me.'
'He shall lead you home,' she replied, without consulting me, 'take hold of his hand.' The order was addressed as much to myself as to him. I meekly obeyed it. It would be hard to say which of us looked the more sheepish as she drove us together, hand-in-hand before her, down the village street. I felt I must surely be living up to Mr Johnson's doctrine about the humility of leadership, but the thought gave me little or no sense of dignity.
When he was safely installed at home, I ventured to ask a group of villagers why they had not thought of fetching the little girl at once, instead of giving the job to me, a stranger. They had a perfect answer to that, from their point of view. Their case was that they certainly would have fetched her in the ordinary course, but my sudden arrival had placed an obligation on them. As a chief of Matang, I had the right to the first word and the last word in all things; therefore, the only possible course in politeness was to surrender to me the honour of handling the situation for Barane's family. And besides, it was somehow kamaiu (enlivening) when a Man of Matang shared their difficulties with them – much more kamaiu than when they worked alone. I gathered from this that they felt I had enjoyed the evening's fun as much as they had. I did not trouble to disabuse them and, for the rest, what objection could I possible have urged against their generous courtesy of heart towards my race?
I had few chances of making mistakes as a boarding officer under
The crew was indeed perfect, but when a young blaster but the young blaster, with reference to the backyard incident. But towards the end of 1915 he went over to Tarawa for a while, and I got a real chance of distinguishing myself.
Two days before Christmas, the old Moresby, bound for the Gilbert group, came weltering into Home Bay and signalled, about 4 p.m., that she had on board a new porcelain bath and three cases of whisky for the Residency. Would we take delivery at once, please, as a westerly blow had started and the captain wanted to make for Tarawa lagoon that night.
The boat-passage looked awful to me, and I don't think I should have tackled it only for the sake of the Resident Commissioner's bath. But the whisky was another matter; the station was dry of anything but beer, and the cheeriness of our Christmas season depended on the landing of those three cases; they were not for the Old Man alone, but for all of us. A full-blown District Officer,
We found the bath waiting for us in the ship's slings. Have
There was only one thing to be done. Dusk was falling when we got out to the ship again. We clawed the three cases aboard somehow, and started off on the homeward pull … and we pulled, and we pulled, and we pulled, and we gained not a yard shorewards. No boat in creation could have made it against that current. We were in the wrong end of a tide-rip that was scouring the bay. We found ourselves being swept round
'Well,' I thought, 'we've done the trick, anyhow. It's still Christmas Eve, and here we are with the goods.' Yes, that again could have been one of my life's high moments – if the whisky had been there. But it wasn't. The boat captain and I scrabbled through every nook of the boat, but it just was not there. And then the piteous truth came out; two men of that devoted crew had risked a lot the night before to get the liquor safely back on
When I got to the Residency, they were ail there, the married ones with wives annexed, waiting to greet me. Olivia was there, too. They cheered me from the front steps as I crawled up to them. They clapped me on the back. They were waiting to divide the whisky. 'My word, young need that kind of reminder.
Movement-of-Clouds, the little girl of Tabiang who had taught me party manners, had a grandmother, Nei Tearia, renowned for her authority as a teller of histories. Tearia was a straight, gaunt old woman, high-nosed and keen-faced as a Red Indian warrior. When she went shopping at the Company's trade-store, she would cover herself with a frilled Mother Hubbard of white cotton. But at home in her own lodge, she went proudly naked save for a short kilt of smoke-cured weeds about her waist. She told her stories in a low recitative, sitting very erect, eyes closed to look into the past, while Movement-of-Clouds gently brushed her flowing mane of silver hair. There were scarlet flowers in her ear-lobes whenever I went to see her.
When I had known her for about a year, she told me the myth of man's expulsion from the Happy Land of Matang. Fifteen years later, when she was well over seventy, I took the script back to her for checking. She repeated the story at that second sitting word for word as she had given it before, and I complimented her on the feat. Her austere face was lit by a smile, but she replied soberly (I took down her words), 'Sir, and shall it be otherwise? Each karaki (history) has its own body from the generations of old. These are the words of our grandfathers' fathers, and thus we pass them on to our children's children.
Her story of the expulsion from Matang is the myth of a dread being called Nakaa the Judge, the keeper of the gate of death, the law-giver, whose sentence of old drove men forth from the Happy Land and first brought death among them. It is, in parts, astonishingly like the tale of man's fall in
The godlike beings who sprang with Au of the Rising Sun from the branches and roots of the Tree of Matang (or the Tree of
Traces of the sun-god's former glory were still easy to see in my day. His clan, significantly named Karongoa of the Kings, enjoyed sacred privileges at every ceremony held in the community speak-house called the Maneaba of Karongoa. Under the shade of that roof, the first portion of every communal feast, the first word and the last word in every debate, belonged to its members. The stud of coral in the middle of the Maneaba's eastern side, against which the clan had its immemorial sitting place, was called faai – the Sun. No man dared contradict a final word whispered – it must always be whispered – from that seat, for fear the Sun might pierce his navel. Although, in ordinary life, the men of
The picture reflected as in a glass, darkly, from these stubborn remnants of power outworn, backed by the proud name of the clan, is that of a caste of royal priests who enjoyed sacred
But the key truths were held concealed down the ages by the clans of the Sun and the Moon, to whom they belonged, and Au – save for his fabled promise to return one day to his people, and the glamour that folk-lore shed upon him as the prince of lovers and far-voyagers – was neither greater nor less for the clans at large than any other hero-god born of the Tree of the Ancestors. Each clan of the Company of the Tree cultivated the guardian spirit of its own branch.
There were a number of offences which angered the tutelary shades and closed their ears to a man's entreaties for good crops or te mauri, which is to say, the blessed state of health, prosperity and freedom from the threat of evil spells. The heaviest moral crimes were those of incest and of dishonouring the paternal totem, of desecrating the shrines or refusing to honour the bones of recently dead ancestors, and of failing to perform the pious rituals for straightening the way of a near kinsman into paradise.
Yet, though the ancestral gods made it their business to avenge such sins among the living, they took no part in the judgement of the dead, and none among them was regarded as the originator of the moral code. The law-giver and ultimate judge was Nakaa. Nakaa the Judge was neither fruit of the ancestral Tree nor progenitor of any human stock, but absolute spirit. All wisdom was his. His unsleeping eye could count even the waves of the sea or the grains of sand upon the beach. Not even the Spirits of the Tree themselves could stand before him without fear. It was as much for dread of his eye as for anger of their own that they executed his justice upon living men and women. And when a man died,
Nakaa sat forever at the narrow gate between the lands of the living and the dead. He held a net in his hand to ensnare all who approached the gate, and beside him was a pit with a row of stakes at its lip. Strangulation in the net was the fate of the ghost whose living kin had neglected to do over his dead body the rituals ordained by Nakaa. Impalement upon the stakes was the price paid in the end by the neglectful kin. The same awaited the incestuous and the eaters of their totems, the desecrators of shrines and those who honoured not their fathers' bones. Strangled and impaled alike were flung into the pit. But the strangled were at least dead forever. The impaled writhed in endless torment down in the nether blackness.
But there was reward for the virtuous. If the ghost was sinless, not even Nakaa could deny him passage to the Land of Shades. He passed through the gate, and onward thence across the sea, to be gathered with his ancestors in the lands of Bouru and Marira, Mwaiku and Neineaba, below the western horizon. Only the perfection of Matang could never be his, because of man's disobedience to Nakaa in the beginning of time.
'Thus runs the history,' said Tearia.
'In Matang of old dwelt Nakaa the Judge, and he had lordship over all the people. The spirits of Matang also bowed before him, for they feared to look into his eyes. But no land ever seen by man was as beautiful as that land. It was great, it was high: many were its mountains; all manner of trees were there, and rivers of fresh water. The trees were heavy with fruit; there were lakes also with abundance of fish. No hunger, no thirst were in that place, never an ill wind visited it, and the people knew not death.
'Nakaa had his dwelling below a mountain, in a spot that was very fruitful. And behold! he planted two pandanus trees there, very wide and tall. One tree stood in the north, the other in the south. He said, 'The men shall be gathered under the tree in the north and the women shall be gathered under the tree in the south.' And so it was; the men turned north, the women turned south; each company turned away with its own happiness; and there was neither death nor grey hair among them.
'But there came a day when Nakaa was to go on a journey. He gathered the men and the women together in the midst between the trees, and behold! they looked on each other's bodies.
'And Nakaa said to all of them, "I go on a journey. See that ye turn away from each other when I am gone, the men to north, the women to south." He said again, "This is my word: there shall be no traffic between the men and women when I am gone." He said again, "There is a mark that I shall know when I return, if perchance the men play together with the women." Those three commands spake Nakaa before he went on his journey.
'And when he was gone, the men returned to their tree in the north, and the women returned to their tree in the south, and each company abode with its own thoughts. So it was for a long time. But their hearts were not at ease, for they had looked on each other's bodies. As it were, their hearts were turned over within them.
'And after a long time it was night, and a south wind moved in the trees. Cool was that wind and sweet with the scent of the flowers of the women's tree. And the scent was blown upon the company of the men where they lay sleeping in the north. Behold! the men stirred; they awoke; their hearts were drawn to the women. They arose. They said together, "We will go play with the women, for the scent of their tree is sweet." See them now! They go forth, they are running, they are beneath the tree of the women, they are playing with the women beneath the tree. Alas! the mark of Nakaa is upon them, but as yet they know it not.
'And after that, time was not long ere Nakaa returned. He arrived, he stood in the midst between the trees, he called the people to him, saying, "Come, gather here before me." They heard his word. They came to bow before him, and when they bowed he took their heads between his hands. He lifted the hairs of their heads with his fingers, he searched here, he searched there; and alas! he found his mark upon them; he saw grey hairs among the black, and he knew they had not hearkened to his word. He said, "Ye have played together under the women's tree," and the people answered nothing.
'And Nakaa said again, "Because ye could not hearken to my word, ye shall leave the land of Matang for ever."
'Then the men and the women entreated him, saying, "Drive us not forth. If thou hadst not gathered us together, we should not have looked upon each other's bodies, and our hearts would not have been overturned. This was thy work." So also the spirits of Matang spoke for them.
'And his heart was softened, but only a little; he said, "Sometimes ye shall see Matang in dreams. Yet ye shall not come near it. Think not to land upon its shores." And when the people wept, he said, "Enough! There shall be no return to Matang."
'He said again, "Here be two trees, the men's and the women's. One of them ye shall take with you, the other shall remain. Which tree do ye choose?" And the men answered, "We choose the trees of the women." And Nakaa said, "Ye have chosen the tree of Death. So be it. The tree of Life shall remain in Matang. Ye shall have Death always with you. And because this is my tree that ye take with you, the ghosts of your dead shall find me sitting at the gate between the lands of the living and the dead; and none shall escape my net or my pit whose way has not been straightened according to my word."
'And he gave them the ritual that is called Te Kaetikawai (The Straightening of the Way), saying, "Perform this over your dead, that they may escape my net and ye may escape my pit." And he said, "Let no man lie with his sister, or eat the totem of his fathers, or do dishonour to his father's bones if he would escape the stakes of my pit." And he said again, "Ye shall bury your dead in mats plaited by women of the leaves of the tree of Death. That is also my word to you." These were the judgements of Nakaa when the people had chosen their tree; and we have done his will from that day to this, lest the spirits of Matang turn away from us; for the spirits of Matang fear the eye of Nakaa.
'And when the people lifted the tree of the women to take it away, Nakaa plucked leaves from it. And he wrapped up in the leaves all the sicknesses and pains known to mankind – tooth-rot, and stomach-ache, and rheumatism, and coughing, and fever, and fading away – a multitude of ills; and he pelted the
'Alas! there is no return to the shores of Matang, no, not even in dreams. But Au of the Rising Sun will return to us one day with his Company of Matang, for this he has promised. And the gate of Nakaa is not shut for us when we die, for if we obey his words it will lie open before us, and the way will be straight to Bouru, and Marira, and Neineaba. And there we shall be happy, for there the ancestors await us, and we shall be gathered with them for ever.'
The beginnings of cricket in the Pacific were not invariably attended by the spirit of brotherhood that this noble sport was once believed to inspire. Something went wrong from the start in
Cricket was certainly going strong on
The cricket field was still very much in the making at that time. Starting with little but a pitch of tamped earth, over which a strip of coconut matting was laid,
The Company had an all-Australian team; the Government could put only two or three Europeans in the field; but half a dozen policemen – and especially the Fijian N.C.O.s – batted and bowled well up to the best of an average English club eleven. Despite that, I don't remember our ever winning a Government–Company Test rubber (for of course we played five
The Old Man was anxious to spread the gospel of the game more widely among the Gilbertese. He told me one Saturday to give the first lesson to twenty-two of the Company's labourers whom the police had inveigled up to the field. At the end of the practice, which had not proved very enthusiastic, I asked them if they would like another trial some time. 'Sir,' replied their spokesman with courtesy, 'we shall be happy to come, if that is your wish.'
I explained that there was no enforcement, but put it to him that the game was a good game: didn't he think so too? 'Sir,' he said again, 'we do not wish to deceive you. It seems to us a very exhausting game. It makes our hearts die inside us.'
I naturally asked why, in that case, he had said they were willing to have another go. He whispered seriously for a while with his companion. 'We will come back,' he answered at last, 'on account of the overtime pay which the Government, being just, will give us for playing on its ground.'
Those early teaching days provided some pretty problems of umpiring. In one case at least, no decision was ever reached. Ari, a little quick man, and Bobo, a vast and sluggish giant, were in together when Ari hit what he judged to be an easy two. He proceeded to run two, paying, as usual, not the slightest heed to his partner's movements. The gigantic Bobo ran only one, with the result that both players were at Ari's original crease when the ball was thrown in. But it was overthrown; seeing which, Ari hurled himself upon Bobo, started his great mass on a second run, and then himself careered away on his third. Bobo finished his second, but by that time Ari was back at his original crease again, having finished his fourth. He started on his fifth, but collided with Bobo, who was making heavy work of his
Another case was much discussed. One Abakuka (Habakkuk) so played a rising ball that it span up his arm and, by some fluke, lodged inside the yellow and purple shirt with which he was honouring our game. Swiftly the wicket-keeper darted forward and grappled with him, intending to seize the ball and so catch him out. After a severe struggle, Abakuka escaped and fled. The whole field gave chase. The fugitive, hampered by pads donned upside down (to protect his insteps from full-pitchers) was overtaken on the boundary. Even handicapped as he was, he would hardly have been caught had he not tried there, by standing on his head, to decant the ball from his shirt-front; and though held, feet in air, he resisted the interference with such fury that it took all that eleven masses of brown brawn could do to persuade the leather from his bosom. After so gallant a fight, it would have been sad to judge him out. Fortunately, we were saved the pain, as he was carried from the field on a stretcher.
Ten years later, cricket was popular everywhere, and a better grasp of its finer points was abroad, but odd things still happened now and then to keep us alert. When I became, in my turn, the Old Man on O, beere! The expletive usually denotes disgust at a nasty smell. We decided that a man's personal odour had little to do with the laws of cricket, and that batsman continued his innings. But, an over or two later, there was a legitimate appeal against him. In attempting a leg hit, he had flicked a strap of his pad and it looked from point's angle as if he had been caught at wicket.
'Ouchi!' yelled the umpire with splendid gusto.
'Ouchi?' queried his victim, 'and for what reason, O eater of unclean things, am I ouchi?'
'Rek piffor wikkut!' The decision was rendered to the sky, resonant with triumphant conviction.
We decided again that the batsman had better continue, but he was so shaken by that time that his stumps were pushed back by the very next ball, a deplorable long-hop.
'Ouchi!' gloated the umpire, 'ouchi-ouchi!' and followed his retreat, prancing with glad hoots, to the very pavilion.
We learned later that the complex behaviour of a light-hearted village girl was at the bottom of this regrettable business. But the sequel to the story has a nicer flavour for cricketers. Both men gave up playing for a while; a few weeks later, however, they came to the Residency hand in hand, with garlands on their heads, to say they wanted to be taken into practice games again. By that time, I knew the background of their quarrel, and said something severe about umpires who imported private feuds into their cricket. 'Yes, Old Man, of a truth,' the offender answered, 'our sin was to play this game while we were contending over that female person. It is not expedient for men at variance about women to be making kirikiti against each other, for behold! it is a game of brothers. But now we are brothers again, for we have turned away from that female.' As a matter of cold, hard fact, it was she who had turned away from them. But that aspect of the matter was, after all, beyond the cognizance of the M.C.C. whereas his finding that cricket is a game of brothers was sound beyond all argument.
But I like best of all the dictum of an old man of the Sun clan, who once said to me, 'We old men take joy in watching the kirikiti of our grandsons, because it is a fighting between factions which makes the fighters love each other.' We had not been talking of cricket up to that moment, but of the savage land-feuds in which he had taken a sanguinary part himself before the hoisting of the British flag in 1892. The talk had run mainly on the family loyalties which had held his faction together. His remark, dropping out of a reflective silence at the end, meant that cricket stood, in his esteem, for all the fun of fighting, and all the discipline needed for unity in battle, plus a
A new accountant had arrived early in 1915. His coming did not bring
The company recruited its Gilbert and Ellice workers under indenture for two years' service, in drafts of two or three hundred at a time. One-third of every draft was made up of married men, who were allowed to bring their wives and children with them; the rest were roronga, or bachelors. Living
The Company, which became the British Phosphate Commissioners, a nationalized industry, in 1915, was justly proud of its record as a thoughtful employer; I do not suppose its care for the welfare of native labourers has been often equalled or ever bettered in any other part of the British Empire. One way or another, the Gilbert and Ellice Islanders had to be prepared, in a world from which they could not remain forever segregated, for the shock of new ideas and disturbing influences from outside. Fate could not have given them a kindlier or more profitable teacher. Missionaries had brought them schools, the British administration had assured them protection in their homes, and they had learned from trading ships something about the value of their goods to the white man; but it remained for the phosphate industry alone to endow them as a nation, from 1900 onwards, with a sense of their own personal value to the world at large. From élan vital, the disintegrating effects of the Japanese invasion of 1941 followed by the American occupation of 1943, this miracle is greatly due to the new interest values, standing for a bridge of hope into the future, which the phosphate enterprise built up in them over the first forty years of the century.
Our big ship came up to the entrance of Tarawa lagoon a little before sunset. 'So this is a coral island,' said Olivia, who was coming round with us: 'Where's the lagoon? And is that all the land there is? I thought it was going to be a circle.' We were creeping up dead slow over coral heads, on a bearing by a beacon on a sandbank five miles east of us. The land was three miles to southward – a low, straight line of palms that tapered away to nothing over the horizon behind the beacon. There was a smudge on the horizon to north-east; it looked like a separate island about ten miles off. Running away due north was a reef drowned under surf, and beyond it emptiness. Save that the water ahead was calm, there was little to show that it was a lagoon enclosed by land on all sides but the west.
The picture in our dictionary showed an atoll as a small ring of sand and coconut-palms around a dead flat lagoon kept fresh by the ebb and flow of ocean tides through breaks here and there in the land. Marakei in the
Olivia's difficulty as a sightseer in Tarawa lagoon was its size. Though it had less than the area of
Your canoe is racing in mid-lagoon to the clip of the joyous trade-wind. Away to eastward beyond turquoise waves, the beaches of the near mainland flame golden above their emerald shallows. Waterside villages glow homely golden-brown against shadows of violet within the forest of palms. Beach and village and forest are fused in a single purple blur as they dwindle north and south towards the horizon. In the northern and southern bights the land is hull down, but its palms are seen etched tenuous on the sky-line, like the lashes of a great blue eye serenely open to the great blue dome of heaven. Along the bowstring of barrier reef to westward, a few islets vivid as gems float palm-tufted amid the rainbowed tumult of the surf. The blue-black ocean lies limitless beyond them. You shout for the immensity and the friendliness of it all as your lean craft hurls itself, shuddering as if for gladness of the wind's urge, through the singing water …
The captain of our ship would not take her into the lagoon before daylight. He lay at anchor in the twenty-fathom water outside the reef while the Company's Recruit Manager and I went ashore by boat to report to the District Officer,
My houndmaster for the trip, the famous
It was nearly midnight when the Recruit Manager and I reached his quarters. There was a small trading steamer (not one of Burns, Philp and Company's, I hasten to add) lying in the lagoon, and her captain was ashore with him, sitting hunched up on the verandah floor and groaning as if in great pain. 'The drunken old sailor,' said
It was difficult to extract details from the captain, but one gathered from his story that the second engineer was the terror of the ship – a man of gigantic size and demoniac temper. Everybody, according to the allegation, thought he was more than a bit mad. After he had flung the captain into the lagoon, the whole ship's company had fled ashore; so there he was now, alone, stamping the deserted decks.
'This,' said
'What – me?' was all I could find to say at the moment.
'You,' he confirmed, with a note of unmistakable unction in his voice,'… and you alone. A most instructive experience for a cadet! How I wish I were in your shoes! Now, attend to me closely. He is a European. There must be no initial show of force
We put the captain to bed between us. After a little more talk on the verandah,
The captain was snoring already. I spent the rest of the night wheedling from him a sworn statement to back the warrant of arrest. Every time I woke him up, he called me something different. I disturbed
He added with a remote smile as he signed, 'Now remember. Leave the policeman in the bum-boat. He will pick you up if you are unfortunate enough to be thrown overboard. Good-bye.'
The so-called bum-boat was in one of the canoe sheds. She was a rickety nine-foot dinghy with rowlocks for a pair of sculls up in the bows. With the policeman and myself aboard, she took in a lot of water amidships. A fresh wind was raising quite a lop in the lagoon, and the going was uncomfortable; but I got a little unexpected relief as we drew near the ship; there were several white men walking about the boat-deck. 'At least,' I thought, 'the crew have returned. I shan't be quite, quite alone with this murderous maniac'
A giant shape was leaning over the rail by the ship's ladder. He was glowering down straight into my eyes. He had a most frightful walrus moustache; there could be no mistaking the huge, bristling bulk of him, the wild and sullen look; that gorilla was my man. I tried hard to think only of the grand old
'Are you
He stepped back and stood glaring while I recited the usual warnings; then he spoke, as if groping in a haze; 'Well … spare me days … criminal assault … arrested … what … by you? Here, gimme that blanky paper.' He snatched the warrant from me. As he finished reading it, he emitted a hoarse bellow, which brought the first mate running. Now for the trouble, I thought; but instead of attacking me he looked down into the dinghy, burst into a howl of laughter, and said, 'All right, I'll come quiet, you poor little pup.' That beastly word again.
The whole ship's complement draped itself over the rail to watch us into the boat. 'Now, you all keep right out of this,' he bawled at them going down. 'You betcha life,' replied the first mate with a guffaw. They all guffawed. Of course, everyone knew perfectly well what would happen with
My prisoner took charge at once. He had it all planned in advance. 'Leave the blanky policeman to rescue the blanky little boat,' he commanded, 'an' I'll look after you. You're not too good in the water, are you, son?' I wasn't at that time; it was only with a lot of help from him that I got through the quarter-mile struggle to the shallows. 'Hold on to yer old uncle,' he said when the going got really bad, and I did; I had begun to like the chap. His arm was round me for support when we walked into the courthouse.
The place was a single-roomed building of native materials, beautifully cool and spacious; but it had no furniture that morning save a kitchen table, two kitchen chairs, a portrait of Queen
I groaned a few reasons, to which he replied 'Ah' non-committally and read the charges.
'Not guilty,' growled the accused, his arm still firmly around me.
'First witness for the prosecution,' called
'Other witnesses?' The question was directed at me.
I reported that, as far as I could judge, the entire ship's company was on board, and had never been anywhere else. I seized the occasion to enter upon a fuller story of the morning's events, but
'What … all of them, or who, sir? … what in? … in that little … that little bum of a boat?' I said, on an upsurge of the stubborn anger of the meek-hearted.
'All of them, or who?'
The captain raised his head from the table, leered at the Bench, slipped from his seat, and sank paralysed to the floor.
'No witnesses, case dismissed, court adjourned. And now,'
'I threw the old blank overboard,' replied the trustful
'Because he kicked your what?'
'Me kitty … me little cat.'
'And did he hurt her very grievously?'
'It ain't a her, it's a him, it's a little bull-cat.'
'Well, of course, that explains everything,' said
We left the captain under the table. The Recruit Manager was waiting for us at the house. He also had watched my landing with
Every Gilbertese village of any size had its own maneaba, or speak-house, in those days. The building was the focus of social life, the assembly hall, the dancing lodge, the news-mart of the community. Under that gigantic thatch, every clan had its ordained sitting-place up against the overhang of the eaves. Everybody's material was pooled to build it, each clan contributed its traditional portion of work to the construction. One manufactured thatch-pieces for the roof, another lashed them into place; there was a clan to gather the timbers, a clan to dress them, a clan to lay them in place; and so on for the capping of the ridge-pole, the trimming of the eaves, the setting up of the corner-stones, the shingling of the floor, the plaiting of coconut-leaf screens to cover the shingle and hang below the eaves. The ridge soared sixty feet high, overtopping the coconut-palms; the deep eaves fell to less than a man's height from the ground. Within, a man could step fifty full paces clear
Our recruiting-table was set, with a clear space before it, at one end of the maneaba, looking down the middle aisle. The space was kept open by a cordon of village kaubure, or headmen, seated cross-legged on their mats in uniform of white duck coats and waistcloths of navy-blue serge. Behind their immaculate and statuesque line sat the packed audience, a tumultuous sea of bronze torsos, its waves crested with the white foam of flowercrowned heads and aflame with the orange and scarlet of trade-store prints. Recruiting operations were as popular with the general public everywhere as with the men who rushed to get themselves recruited. There were fifteen hundred villagers there, by my reckoning, that day.
I sat at the right-hand end of the long table, lost in the delight of my first sight of the massed people in the superb setting of their maneaba. Next on my left sat the Native Magistrate; beyond him were the Company's hand-picked recruiting clerks, the Recruit Manager and, at the far end,
'And now,
My whole being cringed at once, and ignominiously, away from the notion. I pleaded with misery that, unaccustomed as I was to public speaking – especially in Gilbertese – there were reasons in the name of mercy to spare me this honour. I said that every word of the language had now gone out of my head. I said my memory was always like that, tricky; it ran in the family; two
The only point he troubled to answer was the last one: 'My dear fellow, I don't talk Gilbertese in public. It's far too dangerous. I invariably speak through my interpreter. And by the way – before you ask – no, you may not use my interpreter.'
So I got up amid a great hush and said (the words are burned on my memory), 'People of Tarawa, this is a beautiful island. This is the first time I have seen Tarawa. I think Tarawa is a beautiful island. This is the first time I have seen it. I think it is very beautiful. I have never seen it before. I think it is …'
There are no means of estimating exactly how long I should have continued had not
I had no next thought save a wild desire to have done: 'I think it is very, very beautiful,' I reminded the audience. 'This is the first time I have seen Tarawa. I am glad to meet you today and shall always be very, very glad to meet you,' and sat down incontinently.
I was, of course, aware of some difference of quality between this performance and my recently-imagined eloquence, but I did not expect the storm of laughter that rewarded my climax. It swept the maneaba like a hurricane, and lasted for minutes. The shadows of the soaring roof seemed to rock with it. My usually impassive chief himself was twisting on his chair. Everyone else at the table was convulsed. It seemed an ungracious response to my constantly favourable comments about Tarawa, and it made the worm within me turn. I got up amid the din and walked along to
He pulled himself together, wiped his eyes and explained. My first assurance of happiness at meeting the people had been successfully put across, but not so the more ambitious repetition, it all turned on the wrong use of the word ma, which could mean and, with or but, according to context, and a reckless addition of the prefix ka to the word for meeting. What I had said
Fortunately, this struck me too as funny. I will not claim that my smile was enthusiastic, but it was a smile; seeing which, the stately, big old Native Magistrate, in his beautiful white tunic and belt of office, did a thing that my heart is still wrung to remember, so typical it was of the royal tact of his race. He stood up, walked to my side and, putting an arm around my shoulder, laughed in company with me. The crowd responded with renewed ecstasies. When they were quiet again he said, still shielding me with his arm, 'You people, we have already heard from Baanaba of this Man of Matang. They say he likes our people over there. We know his heart, and we do not laugh at it. We laugh only because we know his tongue refused to say what was in his heart. The day will come when his tongue will obey him, and then, behold! his words shall blow upon us like a strong wind. May the day come soon. Stop laughing now, and say to him, Ko na mauri (thou shalt be blest).'
'Ko na mauri!' The traditional words of greeting came roaring back from the crowd while I stood, with my face saved whole, thinking how miraculously this old brown man had divined my secret dreams: 'Behold! his words shall blow upon us like a strong wind.' It came to me blindingly again in that moment that I had fared across the sea of the world to live in no strange land.
'As you will have observed,
The dialectic high-light of that particular meeting was contributed by a madder-brown lady of incredible age and agility dressed in a short riri, the old-time skirt of smoke-cured waterweed. She had sat crumpled up in the front row of sightseers, opposite a gap in the cordon of village kaubure, quietly awaiting the appearance of her adopted grandson at the recruiting table. Aware of her talents, everyone, including the kaubure responsible for the break in their line, had of course conspired to secure that exact jumping-off place for her. When the young man 'Anaia, anaia! (Go on, go on!)' and 'Katonua! (Round off the phrase!)' and 'Kanenea! (Make it blaze!)' roared back the audience whenever she showed signs of flagging. The Gilbertese believe in encouraging sore hearts to talk themselves out. Speech is privileged for the aged, and the stronger the merrier. A thunder of applause burst forth to reward her crescendo finale.
'It is true, Man of Matang!' she answered.
'She says it is true,' clamoured the crowd.
'Alas, it is a lie,' said the young man simply: 'Woman, thou art to be pitied for thou knowest thy lie.' She slapped his face and sprang away from him.
'He says she lies' – the crowd timed it perfectly – 'Woman, what of that?'
'She lies,' suddenly shouted a male and a female voice together: 'I am his father; I am his mother,' and the two stood up from seats a few rows back from the old lady's.
'Behold! His father and his mother!' vociferated everyone together, 'They say she lies! Woman what now?'
'But perhaps she does not lie,' the Native Magistrate intervened, 'perhaps you do not wish your son to go.'
'Do you wish him to go?' bawled voices.
'We wish him to go,' replied the mother, and the father nodded.
'See now, Magistrate! See now, Woman! They wish him to go,' the audience intoned.
'This, then, is the truth of it,' summed up the Magistrate: 'you wish him to go.'
'They certainly wish him to go,' the crowd came in again like a Greek chorus, as if to say 'We knew it all the time,' which, of course, was a fact.
The grandmother had stood arrow-straight throughout, facing them all as fearless as an old eagle.
She swept all of us with her arrogant eyes: 'I have laid no complaint before you. I came to talk not to you, but to my grandson,' she said in a low voice; and then, louder, 'I do not love him;' and finally, at the top of her lungs, 'He is a nikiranihobo.'
To European ears, the word ripples with the exact lilt of 'Sing-a-song-of-sixpence'. Not its ripple, however, but the ripsnorting shamelessness of it bursting at siren-strength from those aged jaws, was what made the ecstatic climax for everyone. You could translate all that matters of its meaning by the word runt. But there are ways of saying things, and this way shattered even the statuesque line of kaubure: they rolled on their mats, kicking for the perfection of fulfilment in nikiranibobo, and the people roiled kicking behind them. The Native Magistrate himself was sobbing, face between arms, on the table. 'I dare not translate this word, sir,' stammered the interpreter when he recovered himself; 'it is a very old and clever word, but it is not official.'
There were gasps of 'Ko raba, ko raba! (Thanks, thanks!)' from the multitude, as power of speech began to return to it.
The Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate was turned into a Colony in 1915, but this made no difference to our working relationship with the powers that were. Our Resident Commissioner (in company with his opposite numbers in charge of the British
Things are better today. In this year of grace 1952, the High Commissionership for the
A new Cadet had arrived at
The twenty-four Group islands, on the other hand, were almost devoid of European staff.
By early 1916 a proposal put up by
'We' by that time included Moresby with nostalgia, as it were the breath of some lost rose-garden. She, and the baby, and the
It was the friendly habit of all good sailormen in those times and climes to offer pork-fat to landlubbers suffering from sickness. They said there was nothing like it for settling the insides. They told stories of how, as young men before the mast – always in square rig and generally in the neighbourhood of the roaring forties – they had cured themselves of agonies of vomiting which could otherwise have ended only in dissolution by chewing gobbets of the grisly stuff from the brine-tub.
'Not the lean; that's too stringy-like; it must be the beautiful soft fat, like this-here,' bellowed the captain in our foetid little cabin, dangling a fearful, sweating ribbon of it before our eyes.
I was collapsed on the floor beside the nursemaid and the baby's basket. Olivia was lying in the single bunk, even more torn with spasms than I, but it was she who found the strength to say the right thing: 'Take the something stuff away, you silly something!' Her voice rang clear as a bugle on two words that girls born in Queen
The captain goggled at me for a second. 'Cripes!' he said.
It was not exactly a triumphal approach to a first command, and, when you come to examine it in the dull light of reason, the command itself, compared for land area, population and wealth with a District of tropical Africa, was not much to write home about. For area, the Tarawa and John Williams
showed up from
This list of official positives concerning my new charge did not make grandiose public arithmetic, even to my romanticism. And then, one had to take into account the list of domestic negatives. There was no doctor within call most of the time, because the one Medical Officer had to be forever on the move. Fresh milk, fresh butter and fresh meat were unobtainable, as there was no grass fit for grazing. Refrigerators, and therefore also chilled foods and drinks, were unknown. In consequence of these conditions, it was dangerous to keep children there after the age of five or six. Yet the Government gave almost no help (a grant of £60 every sixth year of service) to get an officer's family home. It was normal to get no home news for six, or eight, or ten months together, because of the lack of ships.
But there are ways of looking at things. In the fever-soaked
We in
What gave extra value to the friendship of a Gilbertese man was his rugged determination to be a person of his own. He remained inveterately an individual even on the islands where paramount chiefs were most firmly established. It is pretty certain that the last migrating swarm to invade the Gilberts (which came from Uea, or High Chiefs, on every unit. But the people of the southern islands had done away with Uea, and established democracies instead, centuries before the coming of the British flag in 1892, while, in the northern islands, the only royal lines still securely seated at that date were those of Kabowi (conclave) with his people, had passed against the drinking of fermented coconut toddy.
The recognition of drunkenness as a social evil by a rustic monarch two centuries before European influences were felt is a historic fact worthy noting by the way. Even more so is the constitutional method of legislation used by Totoka-ni-Matang. 'In Kabowi with his people' means that his law was made in the maneaba, where every man-whether chief, freeholder or villein-had a hereditary sitting-place and freedom to join in debates. There is proof in what followed that the rights of entry and speech meant something real in terms of democracy, for it was the villeins who took action in defence of the law. They went to Mangkia's house as he lay drunk one day and arrested him.
'And they took him to Tetoka-ni-Matang,' runs the tradition, 'and they said, "We are in thy hand, yet allow us to speak." And he answered "Speak." They said, "Thy brother Mangkia overpasses the judgement that was judged in the maneaba, for he drinks fermented toddy."
'Tetoka-ni-Matang answered, "My heart is heavy for him, for he is my brother." They said then, "Our hearts are heavy also for thee, for we love thee. But this is the way of it: Mangkia shall die or thou shalt not be Uea over us."
'Then Tetoka-ni-Matang begged them, saying "Kill him not but send him away from among us." They answered, "We are in thy hand, yet behold! thou hast begged us. It is good. We will not kill him. We will send him away, according to thy wish."
'So they took Mangkia, and set him in his canoe with food, and sent him away. And many chiefs and freeholders went in their canoes with him. And they all sailed to Marakei, but Marakei drove them off. So it was also at Tarawa. But when they
The ultimate triumph of the exiled drunkard does not make very gracious reading for teetotallers. 'But lay that aside,' said Airam Teeko of Abemama, himself a chief of Mangkia's line, who gave me the story: 'Tetoka-ni-Matang remained Uea over his people because he would not favour his brother above the judgement that was judged in the maneaba. A wise chief he. Our people do not like to be ruled by rulers who allow them no word in the judgements that are judged.'
This undying independence of spirit, which made the friendship of any average villager worth winning for its own sake, also gave the true yardstick for measuring the size of a District Officer's job. By commercial or cadastral standards, his little flakes of territory made less than a drop in the ocean of Empire economy; by human standards, it depends upon how you count. Ten thousand bodies, white or brown, do not amount to much in vital statistics or power politics. But ten thousand cheerfully pugnacious minds, each one vividly aware of its independence and passionately bent on remaining independent, call for quite a lot of individual attention. The District Officer who, outside his purely clerical functions as correspondent, sub-accountant, customs authority, and postmaster-general of his region, kept level with his island tours, his village tours, his countless interviews, his work with the Native Courts, and the queer surprise-packets that his duty as a leader sometimes pushed his way, lived days not less crowded with delight than labour; but he was a pretty tired man by nightfall.
Before
The busy village of Betio lay curved around the beach-head of its own bay beyond the police lines, at the southernmost extremity of the land. It was very much the same, on a big scale, as Baanaban Uma, with its canoe-sheds and airy lodges, its lily-bordered avenue and the flicker of shadow and sunlight beneath the moving canopy of its palm-crests. Only the hot crimson and vermilion of poinsiana and hibiscus were absent. All the flowers were starry white. It was as if Nature had conspired there to give tired eyes rest from the flames of beach and lagoon. It was form, not colour, that entranced us in the brown villages of the atolls-the grace of trees overleaning water, the rare sensitiveness of pencilled line and shadow, the matchless transparencies of atmosphere.
An ancient Austrian sailorman whom everyone called Old Anton had his trade-store in the village, and a Father of the Sacred Heart Mission was stationed there. Old Anton, the Father and the Senior Medical Officer were all the white company we had in those days, save for the aged Roman Catholic Bishop and two other Fathers who came to see us sometimes from up-lagoon. But we were not particularly looking for white company, and we were delighted with our lagoonside home. The old Residency was a handsome wooden house, a big one for that part of the world, built on two floors with deep verandahs shaded all round by louvred shutters. Upstairs were two large
We loved to walk down to Betio village half an hour before sunset with our nursemaid Faasolo pushing Joan in her pram between us. The trade-wind often dropped its wings (as the lovely Gilbertese idiom put it) when the expectation of dusk was falling on sea and forest. There was a pearly mist over the lagoon, infinitely fine-drawn and tender. A heavenly coolness, as of dewfall, pervaded the village. Shadows were purpling under the high vault of palm-leaves. People sang and children shouted. The canoes of the fishermen were home with the day's catch and the evening meal was cooking. The noise of life and laughter was stabbed randomly by the staccato of snapping sticks and the joyous crackle of embers. The babble of talking groups rose and fell like the beat of a pulse of happiness on the lily-scented air.
No white baby had ever been seen before on Tarawa. The villagers seemed never tired of looking at Joan's blue eyes and golden hair. One evening, a small naked girl in the crowd mustered at gaze around the pram piped aloud, 'Ai bia arau arante tei-n-aine aei (I would that this girl-child's name could be my name!)'
They hushed her and shushed her as if she had uttered an infamy. But, creeping to Olivia's side, she clung to her hand and gazed up into her eyes repeating in an urgent whisper, 'I would that her name could be mine!' Olivia drew her close and I protested, 'What's all the fuss about? Why shouldn't she take the name of Joan if she wants to? Would her parents mind?'
The crowd was silent. Then someone shouted, 'Here is her mother!' and they all fell back a step or two.
The mother stood forward in the ring, a tiny, vivid creature dressed only in a tight waistcloth of gay print. 'Sir, is this true?' she cried, taking both my hands in hers. 'Will the woman of Matang allow it? May my child take the name of her child?'
I turned to Olivia: 'Of course she may,' she said: 'What's to stop it if the mother likes it?'
There was a shout of pleasure from the audience. The mother, looking her thanks, led her small girl to the side of the pram and, bending over it, addressed our sleeping Joan with a smile of tender courtesy: 'Neiko (Woman), I have thrown away the name of this my girl-child and taken your name for her instead. Your mother says I may. See, here is your name-sister and servant for evermore, Joan of Betio, who shall obey your word in all things.'
And the new Joan, leaning in her turn over the pram, whispered, 'Joan-o-o, Joan-o-o, my name-sister and my toka (chief), I will love and serve you for evermore and obey your word in all things.' Then, turning to Olivia, she added with clear-eyed candour, 'Neiko, look you! I must go to school every day, or the Father will be angry. But after school every day, I will be ready to come to my sister, no matter when you call me.' And ready she always was, never intruding, never in the way, but infallibly on the spot with love and service for Joan or any one of us, for as long as we stayed on Tarawa.
On our walks through the village, we often turned into Old Anton's trade-store to pass the time of day. All our main shopping was, of course, done in the trading ships, whose supercargoes took our orders for bulk supplies to
It was pleasant to take small gifts to friends at the happy hour before sunset. The polite approach was to walk up to the side of a mwenga and stand there silent, with one hand resting on the edge of the raised floor as if begging leave to enter, until someone said the right welcoming words.
Usually, a grandfather or grandmother sitting inside spoke first: 'Sir and Woman, you shall be blest. Whence come you at the sunset hour?'
'You shall be blest. We come from our house over there in the east.'
'And you will do what in this place?' 'We will visit this mwenga and those who dwell in it.' 'Aia! It is well. You wish to gossip with us?' 'We wish to gossip a little. That is the way of it.' 'Ai-i-i-a!'—on a long, indrawn breath of deepest pleasure-'So it is well. Blessings and peace. Mount! Mount!'
On the last words, the young women of the household would dart forward to spread fine mats on the edge of the floor next to us. We would take our seats there with legs dangling over the side, saying as we mounted, 'We pray this mwenga may be blest with all of you within.'
'You shall be blest,' answered everyone together, and after that the gossip was free for all.
The gifts we brought would be given only just before leaving. We had a working agreement about how they must be given: Olivia did all the presentations to females, I to males, except where very old people were concerned. This arrangement seemed to guarantee us freedom from the least breath of scandal. Scandalous talk was, as a matter of fact, a thing much more to be guarded against on my side than on Olivia's. The attitude of Gilbertese men to white women was the perfection of reverent chivalry, wherever one went. The attitude of the laughing, golden girls towards white men was perhaps on the average, a little profane, for the simple reason that, on the average, the white men seldom qualified to be reverenced by them as saints. The idea of my never making a personal gift to a lady was absolutely sound. But there was just one case that our careful technique failed to provide against.
The thing happened when Olivia was expecting another baby early in the New Year, and the whole of Tarawa was agog with delight at the prospect. The new arrival would be the first child of the Breed of Matang ever to be born on their own soil of Tarawa. It was an epoch-making event for all the eighteen
They treated her like a beloved goddess wherever we went, and hung upon her every word, seeking to find in even the littlest things she said some guide to how they might help and protect her. They noticed me only as her husband, at most to ask how I thought they might ease the feet of Missis-as they were calling her by then-along the road to her great hour. That protective spirit, that eagerness to interpret her every need, was really the key to what followed-not forgetting, of course, the subtleties of custom in connection with gifts of perfumery.
Olivia and I had just finished tea one afternoon when a very sweet village girl, crowned with a wreath of white flowers, came up the front steps and stood with bowed head on the verandah waiting to be invited farther in.
'Why, hullo, Voice-of-the-Tide!' said Olivia. 'Do you want to talk to us? Come in and sit down.'
Voice-of-the-Tide crept forward, her head still deeply bowed, and sat on the mat before our feet. 'Yes, I come to speak … I come to say …' she murmured and fell silent, nervously clasping and unclasping her beautiful hands.
"Well, don't be afraid of us. We won't bite your head off'– Olivia and she had always been great friends-'What's on your mind?'
'I come to thank you for yesterday evening. I am very proud … I come to say … ' Speech failed her again. She had not yet lifted her eyes to ours.
'Te raoi (Don't mention it),' Olivia answered her word of thanks. We thought we knew what that referred to. We had visited her people's mwenga the evening before, and Olivia had given her a small bottle of scent. But why should a casual gift have left her so constrained?
It was only after a long, long silence that she raised her head and whispered, looking me in the eyes, 'The gift of love that Misses gave me …. I am very proud to be chosen … I am ready … when shall I come to the Man of Matang?' and burst into bitter tears. 'But my sweetheart will never
It was the custom for a Gilbertese lady of high birth to choose, during her last months of pregnancy, some young unmarried friend of hers for the nightly comfort of her husband. 'For look you,' said Voice-of-the-Tide's father to me later, 'it secures the safety of the child. And not that alone. It secures also for the mother the continual loving-kindness of her husband and that other woman.'
But the matter was one of such delicacy for all concerned that no preliminary words about it might ever pass between them. The husband and the not-impossible-shes simply waited for the expectant mother to give the customary sign of her choice. The sign was the handing of a gift of anything sweet-scented-a wreath of flowers, a bottle of perfume-to the chosen girl in the presence of the husband. So high was the compliment, so deeply felt the obligation of kindness to the pregnant, that no girl of good breeding could possibly refuse the charge thus laid upon her.
Nobody in the village doubted for an instant what Olivia had meant by her gift. The place was buzzing for joy at the delicate correctitude of it. Everyone was pleased, in fact, except Voice-of-the-Tide and her sweetheart. I felt that Olivia was a little malicious about that when Voice-of-the-Tide, most earnestly reassured by myself as to the purity of my own intentions towards her, dried her tears and smiled again: 'Tell me,' said Olivia, 'if you had not had a sweetheart, would you have felt differently about it?'
'I aki (Not I),' replied Voice-of-the-Tide without a moment's courteous hesitation.
'And why not?' Olivia's tone simply egged her on.
She eyed me up and down gravely before she answered: 'This chief of Matang is very kind … but'-she rippled into giggles.
Nothing, I am glad to say, would induce her to say more. I left them to their laughter. I had a few words to say in the village – alone.
The crux of the fresh-food problem for Europeans in the Gilberts was that humus just would not stay put on top of the pure, white coral sand. Coconuts and pandanus trees loved it; it kept their roots aerated; but it was not good for beans or tomatoes. One dug a trench, filled it with painfully prepared compost; the rains came; the compost disappeared underground. Or perhaps no rains came-because, every few years, there was a drought that might last as long as eighteen months. We could spare no water then for plants, seeing that our parched household was limited to two buckets a day for all purposes. The compost stayed on top, but we got no vegetables.
Sometimes-though not often-we were able to get breadfruit or pumpkins from the villages. There was also an enormous tuber of the arum family called babai, cultivated by the villagers in muddy pits. This could be eaten mashed with butter or in cheesy, steamed slabs and was incredibly indigestible either way. No other vegetable foods except coconuts grew locally, and the only sort outside tins that ships brought us every six months or so was potatoes. These always arrived looking depressed after their long, hot trip from
Some years were yet to pass before any type of refrigerator within the reach of £400 a year became known in the Gilbert group. Olivia never had the comfort of one as a District Officer's wife. And so, whatever oranges or apples the ships might get through to us in their primitive ice-boxes had to be consumed within a week of their arrival. But, as Olivia observed, we were saved from too much heartburning on this score, because the fruit hardly ever survived as far as the lagoon islands. By and large, therefore, no fresh fruit except a very occasional locally
The answer to all this was, of course, contained in tins. It sounds simple enough. Tinned goods in these synthetic days are often made to taste rather like the commodities so brightly pictured on their labels. But that was not so thirty years ago – not, at least, in the Pacific. With the honourable exceptions of asparagus and beetroot, which always seemed to retain faint memories of their better selves, the vegetables doomed to canning in 1916 entered their iron cells bleakly determined to betray every sweetness of their early promise. When they emerged, the eye dared hardly dwell upon their livid looks, and the taste of one and all-celery or onion, pea, cabbage, cauliflower, bean or potato-was as the taste of iron filings boiled in dishwater.
Nevertheless, with tinned asparagus and beetroot as sure standbys, babai at least always with us, potatoes, pumpkins, breadfruit and pawpaws now and then available (and, by the way, pawpaws cooked green made a reasonable substitute for vegetable marrow) we did not do so badly on the whole. Our goats, unfortunately, conspired among themselves to live a life of embittered chastity, which kept them forever fruitless and ourselves without the fresh milk we had dreamed of; but we found the tinned milk palatable enough. Our imported fowls refused to lay and died of gapes; but bush eggs were always to be had from the villages at the rate of three for a stick of trade tobacco, and these yielded sometimes as many as three or four to the dozen that did not explode like stink-bombs in the house-wife's hands. The bush fowls at sixpence each gave decent broth; there was plenty of rice in the trade-stores; the jelly-like flesh of green coconuts made a good vegetable food for infants; the sweet sap of the coconut blossom called toddy fed us with vitamins; the supply of fish from the lagoon was unlimited.
But it was difficult to get good cooks. Cooking for white folk
We couldn't help noticing now and then that spiritual sauces, however rich, left the gross flesh craving still for solid food; but this raised few problems when we were alone; if the fish course looked disastrous, a mere wave of the family tin-opener was enough to produce some kind of substitute. It was when we were not left alone that embarrassments assailed us. Our trouble with visitors was that they always came ashore fed to the teeth with the tinned provisions of their ships and filled with dreams of getting down to a lovely home-cooked meal or two before returning to their misery. Though they bore their disillusionments with courageous courtesy, we thought they failed in average cheerfulness. We never entertained one whose face brightened perceptibly when bullimacow and beetroot were placed before him in compensation for charred pumpkin and incinerated mullet.
The Resident Commissioner was gloomier still. He said once that he envied our casual guests the standing advantage they had over himself. They could always refuse a second venture at our table, and go far away and forget at last the things we had done to them. He was not in the same happy boat; it was his duty to tour the Gilbert and Ellice groups at least once a year, and he was forced to include Tarawa in the schedule of his visits; yet, as he bitterly concluded, landing there inevitably meant staying with us, because the Medical Officer's quarters had no spare
It all began with a quarrel in the back premises. About three hours before dinner on the day of his arrival from
Faasolo was a gentle, smiling person most days of the year, and Sila had always seemed to us an exemplary husband. I am still quite sure he was. But they were childless, and the reproach of her barrenness was never very far from poor Faasolo's thought. The sorrow and frustration of it turned sometimes to despairing fury when she saw the soft glances that other women threw at her kindly, handsome Sila. She had his lady visitor by the hair and was flogging her horribly with a broom-handle when we intervened. Fortunately, our formidable Chief was not there to hear her deep-chested roars of rage or the rending screams of her victim. He had taken a stroll round the hospital with the Medical Officer. By the time he returned, the unwelcome girl was gone and Sila was doing his best to placate Faasolo in their dwelling near the police lines.
But we could not leave them together for long. Dinner had to be cooked-and what a dinner too! Our Chief had most kindly brought with him from and some onions, and potatoes, and a tin of real French petits pois. We ourselves could put up such things as mint sauce or redcurrant jelly, as well as olives, salted almonds and the rest; beyond which, to crown perfection with beauty's ultimate grace, there was our plum pudding, tinned but delicious. It was so delicious, in fact, that we had decided to hoard this last of six trial tins for Christmas. I grudged the premature sacrifice of it at first, but Olivia was more generous. The Old Man liked a good sweet, she said; and anyhow, her argument ran on, what sort of a main course were we going to get at Christmas comparable to roast lamb? Why not decide to look on this night's feast as our Christmas dinner in advance and make an artist's job allegretto of the soup, the pastoral andante of the lamb and little peas, the scherzo of almonds and wittily stuffed olives running into the rollicking rondo of the pudding. My mouth watered. I withdrew my niggardly objections.
The joint was popped into the oven about an hour and a half before dinner, with Sila on guard. Faasolo was quiet now, he said. Last instructions were given. We bathed, changed, had a final look at the dinner-table, saw that it looked nice with our best glass and rose candleshades, felt young and adult and proud, passed out to the cool downstairs loggia, were presently joined there by our Chief, and relaxed a while with pleasant drinks beside us.
The hour after sunset was always the Old Man's best. That evening, he was mellower than I had ever seen him. He began to talk quietly about the rewards of living in the tropics, the relief of darkness after the day's glare, the night breeze, the whisper of palms, and, best of all-a gift that
'Yes,
It was marvellous, coming from him. I was stirred to the deep heart's core. As we took our seats at the rose-lit dining-table, I
But Sila's unhappy Faasolo had crept into the kitchen while we were at drinks and asked him to refill her hurricane lamp. I, for my part, never did much mind a soupçon of kerosene in any food except fish, so I went on with my helping. Olivia and the Old Man chose to abandon theirs in favour of sherry, toast and jeux d'esprit. That seemed rather a pity, but neither said a word about the soup. What was there to worry about, anyhow, with lamb and plum pudding still in prospect?
I was lapping up the last spoonfuls when Sila appeared at the door naked to the waist, in a not very clean state. He made no apology for intruding like that, but spoke in English, presumably in honour of our guest: 'Missus, come quick!' he cried urgently. 'Gravy, no bloody good!' and bolted back to the kitchen.
Olivia rushed wildly after him. The Old Man lit a cigarette and sat mum. I became aware of tension in his silence. I was tense myself. Gravy is important.
Looking back from now to then, I realize that Sila's report did little justice to himself. For gravy to be good or bad there must be some of it, and in this case there was none at all. That was his real problem, and it was one that no cook on earth could have solved in the circumstances. As for blaming anyone else, I can see that if he was innocent so also was poor Faasolo. She like him was, in the last analysis, but the driven puppet of calamity. She had come to the kitchen at seven o'clock intending to leave as soon as he filled her lamp. But she was a woman, and what woman in her place could have resisted the temptation that assailed her then? Her heart was bursting with heavy new thoughts about his lady visitor. She stayed to confide them to him. He paused in his work to reply. One thing led to the next; she went on, he went on. They lost themselves in each other, oblivious to all else until disaster fell upon them. It was the ooze of greasy fumes from the oven that told them what had
If this had been fiction, my story would have ended with the walkout of our furious Chief when cold bullimacow and beetroot were laid before him. But real life has small regard for climax and anticlimax; it just goes on, as that meal went on. We finished our gross substitutes for lamb and petits pois with little gaiety. He did indeed rise at the end and say he thought that would be about enough for that evening. Olivia, I could see, was keen to let him go, and be damned to the plum pudding. But something in me rebelled at the total waste of that one remaining treasure. So I told him the history of it, despite her reproachful glances. In the end, I was glad I had done so, because he consented with visible softening of temper to stay on. We all sat down again.
There was a longish wait before the pudding arrived. Sila came along at last himself to explain the delay. His first attempt at sauce had gone wrong, so he had made another just as good.
'Well, well, better later than never!' observed the Old Man brightly when it was uncovered. 'And, my word! what have we here? The sauce looks very handsome, I must say.' And so it did swimming crimson-red around the pudding's foot.
'Yes, he good Sah,' volunteered Sila, 'I makem myself. I boilem with plenty sugar.'
'Some kind of wine sauce, eh?' The Old Man had recaptured his benevolence with extraordinary decency. I could see Olivia was glad now that I had got him to stay.
'No, Sah,' replied Sila, 'he not wine-he juice. He beetroot juice outem tin.'
It was then that the Old Man walked out, and Olivia wept.
A few days after he had left Tarawa, I finished the sestet of my sonnet. I tried hard to make it say something about not wanting to return to civilization and all that; but every thought of what the Old Man had said was bound up with memories of lost lamb and little peas. The thing just wouldn't work itself out on his lines. What I actually wrote was:
When our houseboy Biribo married, it was only natural that Mareve, the lady of his choice, should take charge of his kitchen. The main job of a Gilbertese woman is to cook for her man, and Mareve's skill with the native earth-oven was a byword in the villages of Tarawa. The earth-oven is a bowl-shaped pit paved with hot stones on which food is left to cook covered over with a roof of matting. It is a tricky thing to manage, especially for the baking of those complicated puddings of babai and coconut called buatoro which so easily go sad at the centre. Mareve was famous in particular for her buatoro. But for this, I doubt if our kindly and laughter-loving Biribo would ever have married her, for she was a heavy, shrewish creature; and beyond that, she had made a point of bullying his sister-housekeeper Tanoata ever since the two had been children together at their village mission-school.
Tanoata, at nineteen, was everything Mareve, at twenty-two, was not-light-hearted, swift and very comely in the sleekness of her apricot-satin skin. But, as Biribo told me, her cooking was more than an orphaned bachelor could properly tolerate. He was quite tired of beating her for the undutiful messes she served up to him. So Tanoata was displaced; Mareve came to rule the hearth-place, and from then on nobody was at peace from her scourging tongue in Biribo's house by the lagoonside. We did not see much of Tanoata after that. She spent most of the time away in a village with her adoptive grandmother. Whenever she returned, there was furious squabbling in the back premises. The climax came when Biribo, at his wits' end one day, drove her out with blows, whereas, by rights, he should have given Mareve the beating.
I was pottering round Biribo's quarters after lunch a day or Tuki!' —meaning tense or tight-drawn, as if in piteous complaint at the spasms that racked her. I started forward: 'Oh, Tanoata!' Her legs and arms slumped to the floor. She lay for a moment all limp, staring up at me. Then with a shriek, she snatched a loincloth from beside her and bolted out along into the beach. I managed to catch her as she tried to double back into the bush. She made no struggle, but collapsed there, face to ground, writhing and groaning. It was quite a time before I grasped that the cause of her distress was neither epilepsy nor any form of pain, but a storm of laughter.
But I didn't find it funny. Tarawa women made little enough of clothes, but they were ferociously modest about entire nakedness. There was something very wrong about the girl's laughter. In any case, there was hysteria in it, I thought, so I gave her a good hard smack, of which I have never yet been ashamed. She stood up, immediately silent, put on her loincloth without haste, looked at me unsmilingly, and breathed: 'I want Biribo to thrash that woman Mareve. I want him to thrash her! Do you see?' I did not see at all. She suddenly wept then, and explained. When Biribo had driven her out, she had gone crying to her adoptive grandmother. The old woman had agreed with her that the only medicine for a woman like Mareve was the father and mother of a hiding. The difficulty was, Biribo was much too soft, but that could be changed. The solution was to put a spell on Mareve's earth-oven. The right ritual would infect with black
So Tanoata had learned an age-old spell called 'The Spoiling of the Oven'. She had been finishing the third performance when I stumbled upon her. Here is a translation of the words she muttered:
Tiiki and tiki, meaning in this context 'soggy and full of lumps', was the word I had heard her hiss as she lay twitching on her back. Her grandmother had told her to stiffen every muscle each time she repeated it. She must actually be in her own person, at that moment, a pudding refusing to rise. Otherwise, although the spell could be counted upon in any case to make Mareve's food nauseous to all comers, it could not succeed in sending Biribo fighting-mad. Hence the contortions I had taken for an epileptic fit.
If I had believed that anything could possibly come of this childish mummery, I should certainly have intervened on Mareve's behalf. But I did not believe, and did nothing except reprimand Tanoata and threaten to report her to her Mission authorities. Anyhow, the third day after her performance passed without the least outburst of conflict in the back premises; so also did the fourth day, a Sunday. But on Monday something queer did happen. Biribo said a word-a very vile word indeed – over the noon-day meal about Mareve's cooking. It was the first time he had done anything of the kind since his marriage. Tanoata, who happened to be there, crowed with delight, and that was more than enough for Mareve. She hurled the criticized food-a buatoro pudding-into Biribo's face and thrashed him disastrously with a stick while he was plucking the hot mess out
I got Biribo to change the site of his cooking-hut the same day. The move proved welcome to Mareve. She came especially to thank me. She felt her old hearth had somehow become unlucky. She said she had been having bad dreams about it. That struck me as rather queer. For four days after that, her puddings resumed their former mastery. I took care to inquire from Biribo himself. He lavished the most servile praise on them, and so did Tanoata. I was idiot enough to believe that everyone would now live happily ever after. But on the fourth evening, the comfortable dream was broken. As we sat at our sundown drink, there burst on our ears a tearing shriek from the back premises. It was the shriek of a woman in the extremity of pain and fear. I hurled myself off the verandah. As I ran, I heard a man's voice savagely rumbling, and the sick thuds of a stick on flesh, and newer, wilder shrieks with every thud. It was Biribo thrashing Mareve. He was mad; he hurled me aside when I tried to stop him; he would have beaten her to death if Tanoata had not helped me to drag him off. Even when we pinned him down, he struggled, gnashing his teeth, to get back at her. He raved all the time about her food; he kept shouting 'Tiiki! Tiiki!' It may have been pure chance-the word is common enough-but it gave me gooseflesh. I had to put two friendly policemen on guard over him all through the night.
Tanoata had disappeared when I returned from the police lines, but she crawled into our room and woke me at daybreak. She was too terrified at her own thoughts to excuse herself for breaking in at that hour. She began talking as soon as I sat up. I must change Biribo's cooking-hut again. Please, please, would I do it at once. Her confession poured itself out. She had been wicked; she had wanted her revenge; that was why she had stayed on after Mareve had thrashed her-to have her revenge. She had cursed the second oven. She had done everything properly this time. She had not laughed, for one thing: real anger had driven her. For another thing, she had been able to throw
The most probable explanation of all these happenings is, of course, that Tanoata's grandmother gave her something to bury in the bottom of the earth-oven-something or other that tainted the food as it cooked-maybe a fish-poison. Tanoata denied it, and I found no suspicious remains in either oven, but these two negatives might mean very little. The question that puzzled Olivia and me was: why did the poison (assuming there was some) leave Biribo meek enough to take a beating from his wife the first time, yet drive him killing mad the second time? Or if, for argument's sake, my intrusion the first time prevented Tanoata from putting the poison in place, what was it that suddenly made Mareve's cooking bad enough to wring that vile word out of him? And if there was no poison in either oven, then why did Mareve's hand resume its cunning only when she cooked somewhere else? I cannot pretend to know. The only thing that cheers me about this story is that the thrashing Mareve got did her a lot of good. It sounds all wrong, but it is a fact. She never resumed her nagging of Biribo: she was scared stiff of him; and from that time on there was shining peace in the back premises.
It is worth adding that Tanoata got herself married from Biribo's house a few months later. The wedding feast that Mareve put up for her was reckoned by all comers as the most delicious in human memory.
The chief business of a District Officer was to supervise the work of the island Kabowi, or Native Courts. A Kabowi was an
On the executive side, the Kabowi had power to make, subject to the Resident Commissioner's approval, regulations for the cleanliness and good order of the villages. The village kaubure, who were unpaid, assisted by village policemen, who earned the princely salary of £6 a year, or less on the smaller islands, saw to the maintenance of these regulations, looked after the general welfare of their parishioners and either voiced their grievances at the monthly sessions or introduced their delegated spokesmen to the Kabowi. A Chief Kaubure and a Chief of Police (at £12 each a year, or less) both resident on the Native Government station, were directed by the law to visit every village at least once between monthly meetings, so as to keep things on the move and give people the latest news from Headquarters. An Island Scribe (£12 a year or less) was charged with the registration of births, deaths, and marriages, the reporting of defaulters, the keeping of a cash book, and the duties of Island Postmaster.
In any matter of debate which demanded a moti, or judgement, by the Native Magistrate, a division of the assembled kaubure was taken. The kaubure, in effect, performed parliamentary functions as representatives of their people in conclave with regard to administrative affairs, and operated as
The method of electing village kaubure for office was democratic, though the ballot was an open one all along the line. The villagers assembled first in their own maneaba under the chairmanship of the Chief Kaubure and, by a show of hands, nominated two or three candidates, whose names were laid before the Kabowi at its next meeting. The majority vote of the Kabowi decided the final choice, and the new member took his seat at once. A small village had only one kaubure; the larger ones, where the population might run up to 1,000 or more souls, had sometimes as many as five. On the fifty-mile island of
The salaried heads of the system-the Native Magistrate and Chief Kaubure-were men who had qualified for appointment by many years of service as village Kaubure. In the early days,
The effect of the truly remarkable initiative wielded by the native courts and the representative nature of their constitution was to keep alive among them (quite independently of European supervision) a high sense of responsibility for their decisions, and to maintain among the people at large a vivid and critical interest in the conduct of their own affairs. The Kabowi system was established by an extraordinarily wise dispensation of the eighteen-nineties. 'Wise' is not to imply that the penal code was entirely devoid of flaws; for example, it forced monogamy, under pain of imprisonment, upon a historically polygynous people and made criminal offences of certain sex-relationships that were basic to the old moralities. That was itself a moral and anthropological crime of the first magnitude, which no British missionary body or government would have dared to attempt, even in those days, against a more powerful community. But, for all that, the Kabowi system as a whole stood for an almost unique effort, in the heyday of Imperialism and thirty years before the publication of Lord Lugard's Dual Mandate, to engage the genius of a subject race on a really big scale in the vital business of self-rule.
One of the Kabowi's most important annual tasks was the assessment of native taxation. Though nine-tenths of the colonial revenue spent on the maintenance of services in the two groups was drawn from the mining industry of
The task of allotting out individual proportions was never a simple one. The Gilbertese man in the street was no more in love with his copra tax than the Englishman with his income tax, and he had many more chances than an Englishman enjoys of arguing special pleas before his local authorities. Also, he was a humorist, a dramatist, and an orator in his bones, and the magnificent setting of the maneaba packed with listeners was a temptation that his artistry could never resist. The staging of an elaborate petition was pure joy for him. A man would begin to think over his piece and coach his witnesses for their parts months before the date of his great production. The rejection of his plea, qua plea, was of course a foregone conclusion; but it was neither here nor there that nobody but an idiot could be expected to take it seriously. He was a weaver of dreams, a creator. The delight of the crowd at his glorious flights of humour and fancy was all he needed to soothe the aching of his wistful heart.
'Sirs,' the Native Magistrate would say to his kaubure when the plaudits and the laughter died, 'what think you of the crying of this man? Does he speak truth or lies?'
'Ekeve (he lies),' the kaubure would answer, single-voiced save for those who preferred 'E banga ni keve (he is stuffed with lies).'
'Ai e aera (How about that)!' someone in the crowd would shout, and 'Ai ngaia naba anne (There's the truth of it)!' the rest would roar, while the petitioner stood with unruffled serenity awaiting the Magistrate's last word:
'Sir, thou hast heard the voice of the people. They think thou liest. So it is also with me, and that is my judgement. Thy wish cannot be granted. Yet calm thy heart and go in peace, for the crying of thy voice has been heard from beginning to end, and it was a good crying.' Wafted from the maneaba on the wings of that last compliment, the petitioner would go happily home to think up an even better piece for next year's production.
But invariably in cases of genuine hardship the petitioner presented his plea without rhetoric and unaided by witnesses of his own choosing. Every man's poverty or wealth was known to the last pound of copra by everyone else in his village. Nobody with the truth behind him needed to worry about the evidence; the kaubure would look after that. The crowd, with its acute sensitiveness to the truth, would show its sympathy by silence. In my eleven years as a District Officer I never met a case in which a taxpayer with a bona-fide hardship to present had been turned away without proper relief by his Kabowi.
The only real trouble about the copra tax that ever happened my way was a very grim business indeed. It began one April when the people of John Williams
was coming to visit them in June.
I was Resident Commissioner by then. I had known the Onotoans for sixteen years and counted them among the gentlest and merriest of all Gilbertese populations. But they were torn that April by a mass fury so terrible, I was tempted almost to believe in such a thing as possession by devils. Only Koata and a few strong souls resisted the sweep of it. Koata was the Native Magistrate, and this is the story of how he stood firm.
Halfway through the month, the people of two villages decided to get ready a fine gift of copra against the Mission vessel's John Williams
was licensed to trade through the
Koata was a moderate-minded man. When news of the intended gift came to him, he took a day or two to think things out. The main point was that, if the villagers were to reduce their offering to the Mission by about two-fifths, the balance of copra saved would be enough to cover the tax liability. So he called the native pastors and deacons of the villages to the maneaba and put the figures to them. In the course of his talk, he said he was not asking the people to deny God an offering of love, but only to limit the gift so that
It was a statesmanlike proposal, as typical of the old pagan courtesies as it was of the Christian charities, but the pastors and deacons would have none of it. They were men driven by the blind zeal of inquisitors. Koata, for them, was not merely a Roman Catholic sinner but one who, baptized a Protestant, had treacherously in his adult years gone over to the Scarlet Woman. It added blasphemy to his wickedness that he had dared to quote to them the Bible text about God's and
From that day on, they exhorted their congregations to persist in their gift to God and to welcome for His glory any form of martyrdom that the unjust judge might visit upon them. But though their speech was florid and Koata's name was branded with religious infamy, they preached no sedition at that stage. Their theme was at worst one of active work for God, passive
But he had to take some sort of line as father of his island (that was his own phrase) when, in the middle of May, the gift was handed over to the pastors. The only nuts now left on the villagers' trees were far too young for tax-copra making in June, and it was his duty to be firm about that. At the same time, he thought that the people, having satisfied their own leaders and consciences, might now be willing to take some worldly advice from himself. Everything could be straightened out if the two villages could be persuaded to borrow the copra for their tax from the rest of the island, subject to repayment in July, when their own young nuts would be ripe. So he called the congregations to the maneaba and put the suggestion to them, after warning them that their failure to pay in June could hardly be condoned by the Government. He even offered to negotiate the loan for them.
But an unexpected complication arose to balk him. The congregations had answered his call hoping for punishment, not help, from
He explained with kindness why he could not grant their plea. Their gift to the
The missed martyrdom was a crushing disappointment for them. They went back to their villages like children fooled of their reward and taxed their pastors with misleading them. It was a deflating moment. Shepherds and sheep alike might well have come to their senses then, as Koata hoped, but for a single man among them-the senior pastor, whom I shall call Ten Naewa.
Ten Naewa was a middle-aged man, sternly ascetic in his habits, arrogant and ignorant, but of acute political wit. He saw more clearly than most that, among his people, the only cure for a broken dream was the creation of a new wonder, so he pulled one out of the bag on the spot. Leaping to his feet and shouting down the flow of recriminations, he burst into perfervid speech about a message he had that very instant received from Heaven. By God's grace, he said, the chapel in which they were sitting was to become a place of miracles. O, sinful generation, to pollute it now with angry reproaches, for a light was to shine out of it-the light of a New Revelation. God Himself was about to speak to His people in dreams, for their gift had found favour in His sight. They were His Elect from that day forth for ever. In the dreams He was about to send them would lie concealed the key of the Day of His Second Coming, and the clue to all things that must be done before He appeared. But none among them could discover the key save only himself, God's Prophet. Let them therefore bring all their dreams to him so that he might interpret them there in the chapel of dreams.
His superb acting carried the day. They believed him. Koata said afterwards, in defence of him, that he had probably reached total belief in his own words before he rushed out into the forest, as a man possessed, yelling damnation upon the Roman Catholics and the Government.
So the people dreamed dreams and had visions from God, which Ten Naewa interpreted endlessly, between sessions of prayer and hate, in the place of miracles. The two congregations en masse out of their villages and set up a great encampment of leaf shacks around the chapel.
Almost at once, the habit of dreams became general; people from other villages began to flock into the camp, but not yet fast enough for Ten Naewa; success had set him hungering for more; so he issued a prophecy that the Last Day was but a month ahead, and launched a campaign upon it. God would arrive at high noon, he said. In the eleventh hour He had ordained that a wave should arise to the height of the Government's flagstaff and sweep away the Flag, the Roman Catholics and all traitorous Protestants who refused to be gathered near the chapel.
The threat started a terrified exodus from the villages, but still the Prophet was unsatisfied. To speed things up he embarked upon a course of propaganda that must surely be unique, even in the chequered annals of partisan religion. He began by limiting God's status to that of God the Father, changing his own title of Prophet to that of 'Father-of-God' and appointing his son to be 'God Almighty'. His next moves followed quickly. He organized a body of women, whom he called his Sheep, and charged them to stand around him wherever he went, shuddering or falling into trances at the sound of his voice. He interpreted somebody's vision of a flaming sword on the wall of his chapel as God the Father's direction to form a band of hooligans-The Swords of
Koata had done all a brave man could to prevent it. Ignoring the threats of the Swords of Gabriel, he followed hard on their heels to every village, trying to allay the terrors they spread. But it was not only physical force that drove the people. They believed, with all their capacity for fear, in the merciless new god of the pastors. The Last Day was at hand. What furies of
But there is one good thing to remember of those days. Two Protestant villagers took an open stand from the beginning against the sweeping madness. If ever the courage of a few just men saved the honour of a creed it was theirs. They went together one day to offer Koata their support. 'We are Protestants,' they said, 'but we think those pastors are mistaken. You do well to hold out against them, and you have always been a fair Magistrate. We will stand by you.'
The gesture put new heart in him. He needed it much, for some of his colleagues had deserted the
The day arrived. The distraught camp waited with fasting and prayer from sunrise to noon. But no wave from the sea came to destroy the wicked, no God appeared in the chapel.
Mutterings began. A few hundred of the quieter folk returned in sorrow to their villages that afternoon, but others stayed to reproach the man who had called himself God the Father: 'Where is thy wave, and where is thy Salvation now, thou man of many words? And who shall now save any of us from the law?'
He had no answer for them. The turmoil mounted. Not he, but the woman who called herself Christ-the-Forgiver, silenced them this time. It was near sundown when she suddenly shrieked, 'Fools! Fools and Sinners! A new vision has come to me. Listen, lest God strike you dead where you stand.' They stood dumb at the fearful threat.
She was a heavy, wild-haired creature with a voice of brass. She lumbered among them with upflung arms mixing curses with calls upon God to pity their unbelief: 'It is ye who have failed,' she screamed at them, 'ye, who have waited for God to send a wave from the sea. This is the meaning of my vision. God will send no wave; He waits for us; we are the wave that shall arise to make the way clear for His feet; we are the wave that shall
A great number fled from the camp in instant horror, but several hundreds stood convinced, and almost at once the Sheep and Swords, yelling, 'Kill them, kill them!' set forth from the chapel, Ten Naewa at their head the rest behind, their bodies contorted in an insane kind of dance towards the
Men ran to warn Koata of their coming. He begged his friends to go at once and hide among the trees, but not one deserted the Station, and his wife defied him to budge her from the house. He did not argue, but pulled out his best sleeping-mat and spread it on the floor. She knew what that meant; she was to bury his dead body in it. She said, 'Sir, it will be big enough for both of us,' and sat down beside it: He answered (she told me afterwards), 'Woman, it is well,' embraced her and went out.
He stood alone on the edge of the
The quietude of it seems to have shamed Ten Naewa. He looked down and gave no answer. Koata spoke again: 'Enough. Turn back now. Too much evil has already been done. Let the people return to their villages.'
That started a talk. Ten Naewa began to bargain for a general amnesty for all who had terrorized the villages. But Koata could not promise that; he could only guarantee a fair trial for anyone charged with an offence; the law could not be traded away for his own safety. His firmness, and the sight of their own leader actually pleading with him at last, enraged the crowd anew: 'Kill him, kill him!' they shouted. A dozen Swords of
It was a terrible head wound, which held him near death for many days, but it did not kill him. He would not have been left
Guards were set around the Ti a tia n teirake, ni mate (We have stood up to die)' was the way they summed it up. The old idiom meant that they had reckoned every chance of death from the beginning, and would not be running away from it now.
'And behold! the day dawned,' said one of them afterwards, 'and it was a day of life.' The Gilbertese tell their tales, whether in court or in private, with a fine sense of drama, and they expect their listeners to play up. A climax is a thing to be savoured. You must drag it out of them.
'How then, Aberamo? A day of life?'
'A day of life. Those others were waiting to kill us on the morrow, yet we died not. No, for death was prevented that day.'
'Prevented, Aberamo?'
'Ay, Sir … prevented by the ship.'
'Aberamo! … The ship?'
'Ay, truly. The ship.'
A long silence. The listeners are artists too. A deep sigh greets his finish, 'The ship of the
In more prosaic words, the John Williams
arrived, with a District Officer and the local heads of the
Though most of the people had deserted the camp overnight on hearing of the murders, a good many still remained, and some of these tried to bluff things through with the white representative of the Mission's local Board. One of their moves was to produce before him a Sheep of Ten Naewa's fold, who was alleged to have fallen into a trance at hearing the Prophet speak. Nothing could wake her, they said. The Missionary's reaction made island history. He was surrounded by fanatics of incalculable temper, to whom the prestige of the Men of Matang meant nothing but a hateful pagan memory. But he did not hesitate.
He looked at the Sheep for a while and then advised gravely, 'This woman is very sick. Nevertheless, I think I can cure her. Go quickly and bring me a bucket of water.'
They raced each other to get it. He took the bucket. 'Yes,' he murmured, 'water's the stuff; the colder, the better,' and emptied the lot over the Sheep. She came out of her trance with a yell, and fled. 'Hysteria,' he finished quietly, 'that's what we call it. Now I've shown you how, go do the same yourselves to anyone else who falls into these trances.'
It was touch and go for him in that moment, I fancy. Had he laughed, anything might have happened to him; had he even allowed the incident to prolong itself in words, their madness might well have worked itself up anew; but he did neither. 'Now, let's get down to business,' he said matter of factly, and held their minds firmly switched to other lines. It was beautifully done. His courage and deftness of touch throughout that day broke the last of the madness before nightfall.
There was a commission of inquiry, and sad things remained to be done when the leaders came to trial. The murderers of the
There is a four-fathom bank of Tarawa lagoon where the tiger-shark muster in hundreds for a day or two every month. If you let your canoe drift offshore at rising tide, you can watch their great striped bodies sliding and swooping with arrogant ease not six feet under your keel. They range in length from nine to fourteen feet, with an occasional giant of seventeen or eighteen feet among them. There is nightmare in the contrast between their hideous size and the slack grace of their movements in the glassy water. Their explosions out of quietude into action are even more atrocious. An evil shape comes gliding below you, smoothly, negligently, as if tranced in idleness; the next instant, one monstrous convulsion has flung it hurtling into attack.
In my earliest days at Tarawa, I spent a good deal of time
He smiled: 'When the rereba (trevally) are there, the tababa (tiger-shark) also are there. If you hook a rereba you will end with a hot bottom, for the tababa will take it from you.'
I paused to wonder what a hot bottom might be. 'Sir,' he replied, 'it is the fisherman's word for the state of one who sits, and sits, and catches nothing, and behold! as it were, his bottom burns.'
'And say now – if the tababa are there for the rereba, what are the rereba there for?'
'Kai ngkam,' he replied, meaning anything from 'I really couldn't say' to 'I'm not sure I ought to tell you that.'
But I had my clue. The inquiry that followed led me right back from the trevally in the four-fathom water, down through a gradually diminishing series of ravenous mouths to the shoreline.
The land in that part of Tarawa is cut by a tidal passage between lagoon and ocean. When the springs flood high through the passage, they bring riding in with them from outside a minute marine organism, which settles along the shallows. The weed, or animalcule, or plankton (I do not know which it is) makes tempting food for millions of tiny soft crabs that live on the water's edge. Great hosts of these, none much bigger than a sequin, are lured by the bait an inch or so deeper into the sea than they usually venture.
The next scene belongs to the teeming sardines. Perhaps they too have mustered in their millions because of the tide-borne food; or perhaps they know that the coming of the food spells crabs in the shallows. Whichever enticed them first, they
But sardines make just the food the grey mullet love best. The mullet have been massing for their own purposes a little farther out. If these again are initially attracted by the floating food, they soon forget it. They plunge in among the sardines, a ravening army of one-pounders. The small fish twist and scatter wildly into open water, the bigger ones after them.
And that is why the vivid, blue backed trevally have come so close inshore. Their meat is mullet. They sweep to landward of their quarry and hunt them out to sea, devouring as they go. But alas for their strength and beauty! Engrossed in their chase, they drive straight for the bank where the tiger-shark are mustered. A sixty-pound trevally is a streak of azure lightning over the shining bottom. He can zig-zag in a flash and leap a man's height sheer from the sea to escape a close pursuer. No heavy-barrelled tiger-shark, hunting alone, is a match for his dazzling tactics. But for all his desperate twists and turns, his breachings and his soundings, he is lost where a hundred rushing jaws are above and below and around him.
Yet, in the last act, it is not the tigers that triumph. The ultimate destroyer in that chain of hungry bellies and ravening jaws is no creature of the sea but man himself, out after shark-flesh in those innocently smiling waters.
Thirty-five years ago, the Gilbertese were beginning to use steel hooks for shark-fishing; but there were many who still claimed that the old-style twelve-inch ironwood hook, trained to the right shape on the living tree, was the only thing for tiger-shark. A twig of the tree (pemphis acidula) was bent so that it recurved upon itself, and left to grow lashed in that position for a year or two. When it was rather more than half an inch thick, it was cut and fashioned for service. The outstanding virtue of this gigantic instrument was that it could be grown with magic, trained with magic, cut with magic, and trimmed with magic. Good luck for the fisherman and bad luck for the shark could be poured into it at every stage of its manufacture, whereas a steel hook bought from a trade-store could only be
A three-foot length of plaited hair from the head of the fisher's wife or daughter made the trace for an old-style hook, and the line was a coconut-fibre rope as thick as a man's forefinger. The shark-hunter was not out for sport; he wanted nothing but dead shark. His gaff was not a gaff, but a glorious club with a ten-pound rock for its head. And it was not for simple fun that he did his fishing from a canoe not much longer than a man; the basic reason was that he could not handle the line himself; if he did, the bite of any sizeable shark would snatch him flying into the sea. He had to make the line fast to the middle of his craft; and that spelt a small canoe, because the resistance of a big one to the first furious jerks of his catch would tear the hull apart.
I imagine the broad technique of it is still very much as it used to be in those days. The fisher paddles out in his cockleshell, baits his hook, whether ironwood or steel, with a couple of pounds of almost any kind of offal, lets it hang from amidships on two or three fathoms of line, and drifts waiting for a bite, his club beside him. A big one takes the hook. The quiet canoe gives a sudden lurch and starts careering round in mad little circles; or it bounces insanely up and down; or it zig-zags like a misdirected rocket; or it rushes off in a straight line, forwards or backwards as the case may be, at sizzling speed, the fisherman holding on grimly whatever it does. Half a dozen small craft milling around like that all at the same time, without visible means of propulsion, make a wildly eccentric sight from the shore. But the fury of a tiger-shark's struggles soon exhausts it. It floats limply to the surface and then comes the high moment of the fisherman's day. He hauls the spent brute cautiously alongside and, letting out one piercing howl of pleasure, cracks it on the nose with his trusty club. That is the only part of the business, I think, that affords him anything like the savage thrill that civilized sportsmen get out of killing things.
But although safety first is the rule when tiger-shark are about in numbers, plenty of Gilbertese are ready to fight a lone prowler in its own element. Owing to his great girth, a tiger cannot turn
We lowered sail and drifted. He slid overboard with his knife and paddled around waiting to be noticed. He soon was. The fin began to circle him, and he knew he was being stalked; he trod water; it closed in gradually, lazily to fifteen yards.
He held his knife right-handed, blade down, the handle just above the water, his crooked right elbow pointed always towards the gliding fin. He would have a split second to act in when the charge came. It came from ten yards' range. There was a frothing swirl; the fin shot forward like an arrow; the head and shoulders of the brute broke surface, rolling as they lunged. My friend flicked aside in the last blink of time and shot his knife into the upswinging belly as it surged by. His enemy's momentum did the rest. I saw the belly rip itself open like a zip-fastener, discharging blood and guts. The tiger disappeared for a while, to float up dead a hundred yards off.
That kind of single combat used to be fairly common. It was rather like a nice score of fifty at cricket in England; the villagers applauded but did not make a great song about it. But the feat of Teriakai, another Tarawa man, became a matter of official record. Teriakai was a guest of His Majesty's at the time, having got himself into trouble for a rather too carefree interpretation of the marriage laws. He was an exceptionally welcome guest; his vital, stocky frame was the equal of a giant's for work, and the bubbling of his unquenchable humour kept his warders as well as his fellow-prisoners laughing and labouring from morning to night. A happy prison is a tremendous asset to any Tokelau – lying beached for cleaning in Tarawa lagoon – wanted to go out for a sail in weather that threatened to turn nasty, Teriakai went also to look after them.
The south-east trades have their treacheries on the Equator.
Two chief dangers threatened them then: tiger-shark were all around them, and they were near enough to the ocean reef to be sucked out to sea when the tide began to fall. Teriakai attended to the sharks first of all. He started by hacking the mainsail adrift with gaff and boom complete (His Majesty's guests are not supposed to carry sheath-knives, but he had one, bless his impertinence). The canvas, buoyed at head and foot by its spars, made a fine bag under water, into which he ushered the captain and engineer: 'Stay inside this,' he said, bridling their refuge by a length of halyard to the upturned boat, 'and the tababa won't smell you.' Then he looked for the anchor. The chain had fortunately been made fast to a thwart, but it took him an hour of diving and groping to get everything unsnarled so that the anchor reached bottom. 'I'll go and get help now,' he said when that was done: 'If I can get past those tababa, we shall perhaps be meeting again.'
He swam straight at the ring of tigers – the captain and engineer watched him – and the devils let him through. I asked him afterwards if he had any notion why. He replied, 'If you stay still in the sea, the tababa will charge you. If you swim away from them in fear, they will smell your fear and chase you. If you swim without fear towards them, they will be afraid and leave you in peace.' So he chose his shark, swam full speed towards it, and lo! the line melted away before him. There was absolutely nothing to it except a courage that passes belief.
He had gone about four miles before anything else happened. I have an idea it need not have happened at all unless he had wanted it to. He said the next tababa just attacked him, but he
The swift night of the equator fell on him in the next half-hour. The moon was not yet up, repeated busters from the north were whipping the water to fury. In the welter of waves about his head, he missed his direction and swam into a maze of reefs off the coast to left of his objective. The breaking seas flung him on cruel edges, rolled him over splintering coral branches, sucked him into clefts bristling with barbs, spewed him out again stabbed and torn until more than a quarter of the skin (so the doctor reported) was flayed from his body. But he got through still conscious, swam a mile to shore, waded and walked two more to a white trader's house, and collapsed on his verandah. The trader brought him round with a tot of rum, but refused to take his boat out to the rescue on a night like that.
Teriakai's answer was better than words. He grabbed the bottle of rum (forbidden by law to natives) from the man's hand and ran with it out into the night. He had another five miles to struggle to the next trader's house; I doubt if even his gay courage could have made it but for the liquor. In any case, it would be pettifogging to carp at the good cheer of his arrival. He awoke
There is just one kind of shark that really does scare the Gilbertese. They call it the rokea. It is a giant as slim as a panther, that doubles on its tracks at full speed. Fortunately, it never haunts lagoons, being a deep-sea hunter, but when the bonito hold their annual swarming over the forty-fathom banks outside some lagoons, the rokea are there too in their scores. The biggest of them run well over twenty feet long. You never see them lurk or prowl, for their dreadful quickness exempts them from any need of stalking. They flash like hurled lances through the water, and they can leap bodily from the sea, using tails as well as jaws to kill.
I had hooked a bonito outside Tarawa one day, when there was a jerk followed by a deadness at the end of the line. I started reeling in, but my canoe-mate jumped forward and without a by-your-leave cut the line. 'A rokea has bitten your fish in half,' he said then, 'give it the rest.' He explained that, if the half-fish had been hauled aboard, the enraged rokea might have attacked the canoe, and that would have been the end of us.
I did not really believe him then. It was only a couple of years later that I saw what he meant. My canoe with a dozen others was trolling for bonito off
As we looked up, there came another thud; a vast tail had frothed from the water and slammed the canoe's side. A second later, the whole fish leapt, and there was a third smashing blow. We saw the hull cave in and start sinking. The rokea leapt again, and one of the two fishermen on board was swept off the foundering deck by that frightful tail. We saw him butchered as we raced to rescue the other man. While we hauled the survivor aboard, the sea near us boiled with shark as other rokea, attracted by the victim's blood, fought each other for fragments of his body. The survivor, a boy of seventeen, confessed with tears that he was to blame; he had whipped a bonito aboard as a rokea was after it; the demon's attack followed in the very next instant. There was no more trolling there that day. They said the rokea would now connect every canoe-keel with human flesh, and attack unceasingly. We made off at once for other grounds, sailing bunched together for safety.
I gave up fishing after a few years, because I found my heart aching for the beauty and courage of the things I caught. But there were two terrors of the sea whose death I never could mourn – the octopus and the tiger-shark. These seemed to me as little worth pity as any prowling bully, and I felt no sense of guilt in killing them.
In the early days at Tarawa, I did want just one tababa all my own. I could not get the brutes to take any kind of trolled bait or cast lure, so I had to fall back on the villagers' technique with a one-man canoe, a twelve-inch ironwood hook bought as a curio, and a lovely loaded club. My cook-boy immediately doubled up with laughter when I announced my intention to him. I asked him why all that mirth, but he only clutched at his stomach and staggered some more around the verandah. He found further entertainment in watching me attach the hook to a trace of steel dog-chain, and in putting up an idiotic burlesque of magic-ritual over the finished work. His antics had the other servants hooting with him in the end. They clung to my arms, gurgling, 'O, the Man of Matang … the Man of Matang, o-o!' to show no offence was meant. But nobody would tell me exactly what was the great joke behind it all.
The next day, when we got to the sandspit where my little canoe lay waiting, it became clear that the whole village had been warned of the event. The beach was crawling with sightseers. They were all immensely courteous, but the shining of their beautiful eyes gave them away. I was wafted on to the canoe and pushed off in a silence that throbbed with joyous expectation. I found this more than a little embarrassing, but it was nothing to what followed.
Eighty yards offshore, I dropped the baited hook, made the line fast and, following instructions, set the canoe drifting beachwards with a paddle-stroke or two. I had certainly hoped for a quick bite, if only to save my face, but I was altogether unready for the fulminating success that fell upon me.
I was not yet settled back in my seat when the canoe took a shuddering leap backwards and my nose hit the foredeck. A roar went up from the crowd as I was drawn whizzing away from it on my face. I picked myself up with much care and was in the act of sitting again when the shark reversed direction. The back of my head cracked down on the deck behind me; my legs flew up; my high-riding bottom was presented to the sightseers shooting at incredible speed towards them.
In the next fifteen minutes, without one generous pause, that shark contrived to jerk, twist or bounce from my body for public exhibition every ignoble attitude of which a gangling frame, lost to all self-respect in a wild scrabble for handholds, is capable. The climax of its malice was in its last act. It floated belly up and allowed itself to be hauled alongside as if quite dead. I piloted it so into the shallows. There I tottered to my feet to deliver the coup-de-grâce. But it flipped as the club swung down; I missed, hit the sea, somersaulted over its body, and stood on my head under water with legs impotently flapping in the air.
This filled the cup of the villagers. As I waded ashore, there was not a soul on his feet. The beach was a sea of rolling brown bodies racked on the extremity of joy, incapable of any sound but a deep and tortured groaning. I crept silently from their presence to the seclusion of my home. When my cook-boy was able to stand, he staggered back and told me the point of it. A
I certainly should have never ventured out alone for pure sport, armed with nothing but a knife, to fight a tiger-shark in its own element. I am as little ashamed of that degree of discretion as the big-game hunter who takes care not to attack a rhinoceros with a shotgun. The fear I had for the larger kinds of octopus was quite different. It was a blind fear, sick with disgust, unreasoned as a child's horror of darkness. Victor Hugo was the man who first brought it up to the level of my conscious thought. I still remember vividly the impression left on me as a boy of fourteen by that account in Les Travailleurs de la Mer of Gilliatt's fight with the monster that caught him among the rocks of The Douvres. For years after reading it, I tortured myself with wondering how ever I could behave with decent courage if faced with a giant at once so strong and so loathsome. My commonest nightmare of the period was of an octopus-like Presence poised motionless behind me, towards which I dared not turn, from which my limbs were too frozen to escape. But that phase did pass before I left school, and the Thing lay dormant inside me until a day at Tarawa.
Before I reached Tarawa, however, chance gave me a swift glimpse of what a biggish octopus could do to a man. I was wading at low tide one calm evening on the lip of the reef at
This is not to say that all the varieties of octopus known to the Gilbertese are dangerous to man. Some of them are mere midgets, and very beautiful. Lying face down on a canoe anchored over rocks and sand in Tarawa lagoon, I sometimes used to watch for the smaller kinds through a water-glass.
The smallest I saw could have been comfortably spread on the lid of a cigarette tin. I noticed that the colours of all the little ones varied very much according to where they were crawling, from the mottled rust-red and brown of coral rock to the clear gold and orange-brown of sunlit sand speckled with seaweed. From the height of my top-window, most of them looked as flat as starfish slithering over the bottom, but there was one minute creature that had a habit of standing on its toes. It would constrict its tentacles into a kind of neck where they joined the head and, with its body so raised, would jig up and down rather like a dancing frog. But what appealed most to my wonder was the way they all swam. A dozen sprawling, lace-like shapes would suddenly gather themselves into stream-lines and shoot upwards, jet-propelled by the marvellous syphon in their heads, like a display of fairy water-rockets. At the top of their flight, they seemed to explode; their tails of trailed tentacles burst outwards into shimmering points around their tiny bodies, and they sank like drifting gossamer stars back to the sea-floor again.
The female octopus anchors her eggs to stalks of weeds and coral under water. It seems to be a moot point whether she
They cruised around the pinnacle for half a minute or more, and then went down to some small rocks at its base. While the little ones sprawled over the bottom, the mother remained poised above them. It looked to my inexpert eye exactly as if she were mounting guard over her young. And at that point a big trevally was obliging enough to become the villain of a family drama for my benefit. He must have been watching the little group from deeper water. As the mother hovered there, he came in at her like a blue streak. But she avoided him somehow; he flashed by and turned to dart in again, only to see a black cloud of squirted ink where the octopus had been. (Incidentally, that was the only time I myself ever saw an octopus discharge its ink-sac.) The trevally swerved aside, fetched a full circle and came very slowly back to the edge of the black cloud, while the mother and her family were escaping towards the shallows on the other side. He loitered around for a while, then seemed to take fright and flicked away at speed into the deep water.
The old navigators of the Gilberts used to talk with fear of a gigantic octopus that inhabited the seas between Octopus Apollyon. There were some who stated that this foul fiend of the ocean was also to be found in the waters between Onotoa, Tamana and Arorae in the Octopus Vulgaris, which swarms in all the lagoons. An Octopus Apollyon: laid out flat, it has a total spread of no more than nine or ten feet, but it is a wicked-looking piece of work, even in death, with those disgusting suckers studding its arms and those bulging, filmed eyes staring out of the mottled gorgon face.
Possibly, if you can watch objectively, the sight of Octopus Vulgaris searching for crabs and crayfish on the floor of the lagoon may move you to something like admiration. You cannot usually see the dreadful eyes from a water-glass straight above its feeding ground, and your feeling for crustaceans is too impersonal for horror at their fate between pouncing suckers and jaws. There is real beauty in the rich change of its colours as it moves from shadow to sunlight, and the gliding ease of its arms as they reach and flicker over the rough rocks fascinates the eye with its deadly grace. You feel that if only the creature would stick to its grubbing on the bottom, the shocking ugliness of its shape might even win your sympathy, as for some poor Caliban in the enchanted garden of the lagoon. But it is no honest grubber in the open. For every one of its kind that you see crawling below you, there are a dozen skulking in recesses of the reef that falls away like a cliff from the edge where you stand watching. When Octopus Vulgaris has eaten its fill of the teeming crabs and crayfish, it seeks a dark cleft in the coral face, and anchors itself there with a few of the large suckers nearest to its body. Thus shielded from attack in the rear, with tentacles gathered to pounce, it squats glaring from the shadows, alert for anything alive to swim within striking distance. It can hurl one or all of those whiplashes forward with the speed of dark lightning, and once its scores of suckers, rimmed with hooks for grip on slippery skins, are clamped about their prey, nothing but the brute's death will break their awful hold.
But that very quality of the octopus that most horrifies the imagination, its relentless tenacity, becomes its undoing when hungry man steps into the picture. The Gilbertese happen to value certain parts of it as food, and their method of fighting it is coolly based upon the one fact that its arms never change their grip. They hunt for it in pairs. One man acts as the bait, his partner as the killer. First, they swim eyes-under at low tide just
The partner on the reef above stares down through the pellucid water, waiting for his moment. His teeth are his only weapon. His killing efficiency depends on his avoiding every one of those strangling arms. He must wait until his partner's body has been drawn right up to the entrance of the cleft. The monster inside is groping then with its horny mouth against the victim's flesh, and sees nothing beyond it. That point is reached in a matter of no more than thirty seconds after the decoy has plunged. The killer dives, lays hold of his pinioned friend at arms' length, and jerks him away from the cleft; the octopus is torn from the anchorage of its proximal suckers, and clamps itself the more fiercely to its prey. In the same second, the human bait gives a kick which brings him, with quarry annexed, to the surface. He turns on his back, still holding his breath for better buoyancy, and this exposes the body of the beast for the kill. The killer closes in, grasps the evil head from behind, and wrenches it away from its meal. Turning the face up towards himself, he plunges his teeth between the bulging eyes, and bites down and in with all his strength. That is the end of it. It dies on the instant; the suckers release their hold; the arms fall away; the two fishers paddle with whoops of delighted laughter to the reef, where they string the catch to a pole before going to rout out the next one.
Any two boys of seventeen, any day of the week, will go out and get you half a dozen octopus like that for the mere fun of it. Here lies the whole point of this story. The hunt is, in the most literal sense, nothing but child's play to the Gilbertese.
As I was standing one day at the end of a jetty in Tarawa lagoon, I saw two boys from the near village shouldering a
'There's only one trick the decoy-man must never forget,' they said, 'and that's not difficult to remember. If he is not wearing the water-spectacles of the Men of Matang, he must cover his eyes with a hand as he comes close to the kika (octopus), or the sucker might blind him.' It appeared that the ultimate fate of the eyes was not the thing to worry about; the immediate point was that the sudden pain of a sucker clamping itself to an eyeball might cause the bait to expel his breath and inhale sea-water; that would spoil his buoyancy, and he would fail then to give his friend the best chance of a kill.
Then they began whispering together. I knew in a curdling flash what they were saying to each other. Before they turned to speak to me again, a horrified conviction was upon me. My damnable curiosity had led me into a trap from which there was no escape. They were going to propose that I should take a turn at being the bait myself, just to see how delightfully easy it was. And that is what they did. It did not even occur to them that I might not leap at the offer. I was already known as a young Man of Matang who liked swimming, and fishing, and laughing with the villagers; I had just shown an interest in this particular form of hunting; naturally, I should enjoy the fun of it as much as they did. Without even waiting for my answer, they gleefully ducked off the edge of the reef to look for another octopus – a fine fat one – mine. Left standing there alone, I had another of those visions …
It was dusk in the village. The fishers were home, I saw the cooking-fires glowing orange-red between the brown lodges. There was laughter and shouted talk as the women prepared the evening meal. But the laughter was hard with scorn. 'What?' they were saying, 'Afraid of a kika? The young Man of Matang? Why, even the boys are not afraid of a kika!' A curtain went down and rose again on the Residency; the Old Man was talking: 'A leader? You? The man who funked a schoolboy game? We don't leave your sort in charge of Districts.' The scene flashed to my uncles: 'Returned empty,' they said. 'We always knew you hadn't got it in you. Returned empty …'
Of course it was all overdrawn, but one fact was beyond doubt; the Gilbertese reserved all their most ribald humour for physical cowardice. No man gets himself passed for a leader anywhere by becoming the butt of that kind of wit. I decided I would rather face the octopus.
I was dressed in khaki slacks, canvas shoes and a short-sleeved singlet. I took off the shoes and made up my mind to shed the singlet if told to do so; but I was wildly determined to stick to my trousers throughout. Dead or alive, said a voice within me, an official minus his pants is a preposterous object, and I felt I could not face that extra horror. However, nobody asked me to remove anything.
I hope I did not look as yellow as I felt when I stood to take the plunge; I have never been so sick with funk before or since. 'Remember, one hand for your eyes,' said someone from a thousand miles off, and I dived.
I do not suppose it is really true that the eyes of an octopus shine in the dark; besides, it was clear daylight only six feet down in the limpid water; but I could have sworn the brute's eyes burned at me as I turned in towards his cranny. That dark glow – whatever may have been its origin – was the last thing I saw as I blacked out with my left hand and rose into his clutches. Then, I remember chiefly a dreadful sliminess with a herculean power behind it. Something whipped round my left forearm and the back of my neck, binding the two together. In the same flash, another something slapped itself high on my forehead, and I felt it crawling down inside the back of my singlet. My impulse was
I was awakened from my cowardly trance by a quick, strong pull on my shoulders, back from the cranny. The cables around me tightened painfully, but I knew I was adrift from the reef. I gave a kick, rose to the surface and turned on my back with the brute sticking out of my chest like a tumour. My mouth was smothered by some flabby moving horror. The suckers felt like hot rings pulling at my skin. It was only two seconds, I suppose, from then to the attack of my deliverer, but it seemed like a century of nausea.
My friend came up between me and the reef. He pounced, pulled, bit down, and the thing was over – for everyone but me. At the sudden relaxation of the tentacles, I let out a great breath, sank, and drew in the next under water. It took the united help of both boys to get me, coughing, heaving and pretending to join in their delighted laughter, back to the reef. I had to submit there to a kind of war-dance round me, in which the dead beast was slung whizzing past my head from one to the other. I had a chance to observe then that it was not by any stretch of fancy a giant, but just plain average. That took the bulge out of my budding self-esteem. I left hurriedly for the cover of the jetty, and was sick.
Most Europeans who believe in an after-life draw a clear horizon-line between the worlds of the living and the dead. The pagans of the
The belief was that the more recently departed could and did return. They were jealous. They wanted to see what their descendants were doing. Their skeletons or skulls were preserved in village shrines mainly for them to re-enter as they liked. If skulls at least were not kept, their ghosts would come and scream reproach by night with the voices of crickets from the palm-leaves that overhung the dwellings. And so, whether a man was pious or impious to his fathers, his house was a house forever brooded over by unseen watchers.
Not that the older folk thought of their dead only as threatening ghosts. There was love as well as fear in the ancient cult of the ancestor, and mostly the love predominated. I was looking round the waterfront of a Tarawa village one day when I came upon an old, old man alone in a canoe shed nursing a skull in the crook of his elbow. He was blowing tobacco smoke between its jaws. As he puffed, he chuckled and talking aloud: 'The smoke is sweet, grand-father – ke-e-e?' he was saying. 'We like it – ke-e-e?' He told me he was loving the skull because his grandfather – who was inside it at that moment – had been very good to him in years gone by. 'Is it not suitable,' he asked, 'for me to be good to him in return?' and answered himself at once, 'Aongkoa! (of course!)' He went on to say he had chosen tobacco as his offering of love because, as far as he knew, there was no supply
The sad thing was that the earliest Christian teachers in the
Then, too, there was the immanence of Things – Things that were not human. The new religion had not yet banished the fear of these. There was not a single inanimate object but had a Thing lurking inside it. A stick, a stone, a tree, a leaf, or the fragment of a leaf was not only its visible self but also a hidden presence. And every presence was a possible menace; it could be enlisted to destroy you. The more intimately it was attached to you, the more dangerous it could be. The spirit of your fish-hook could be turned by nothing more than the fixed stare of your enemy to bring you luckless fishing. The spirit of your cooking-oven could be made by sorcery to encompass your madness or death, the spirit of a fragment of your dress, or a nail-paring, or a stray hair of your head (especially if you were a woman) to work hideous things upon you. And crowding in at you out of the dark with the ghosts of the dead and the Things that lurked in things were the prowling familiars. Every sorcerer had his familiar. It was usually something alive like a
It seems a marvel that the race remained cheerful under the weight of so many dreads, for it did remain cheerful. I found plenty of evidence in the humorous legends and old burlesque songs and dances of the villagers that laughter never died in the
The appeal for protection was made in the form of invocations called tataro, which were, in effect, simple prayers. Taakeuta gave me two tataro for personal use. He recommended the first for what he courteously styled my 'bad luck' at fishing. It had to be recited sitting on my canoe, looking up at the sun (when it was at its noonday strength, ideally) with the luckless hook raised breast-high between joined palms:
The true characters of prayer appear more convincingly, perhaps, in the next example, for an attitude of supplication is associated there with an oblation and a plea of righteousness. My teacher gave me this one with others, as a sure defence against the death-spell I have mentioned. The instructions ran that, before beginning to eat any meal, I must raise a morsel of food on upturned palm before me and repeat aloud:
This is the lifting up of the portion of the Ancestors.
Here is thy food, Auriaria: I have committed no incest.
Here is thy food Tituaabine: I have not harmed thy creature (the Giant Ray).
I am excellent-e-e! I touch the Sun, I clasp the Moon.
Turn back the spirits of the death-magic; turn them back, for I,
I am not lost. Blessings and Peace are mine. Blessings and Peace.
Taakeuta said the prayer would please the Ancestors best if I could get one or two companions of my adoptive clan to repeat it with me, I speaking in the first person singular for myself, they using the first person plural for all of us. It was disclosed to me later by my servant and dear friend Kirewa – also an adopted member of the sun clan – that tataro of the same shape were used in collective ceremonials for the fructification of the pandanus tree and the eating of first-fruits. One of the fructification prayers Kirewa gave me is of double interest here because it refers to the birth of Karongoa's secret sun-god Au, so many times mentioned already, from the crest of a virgin pandanus tree in the ancestral lands of Abatoa (Aba-the-Great) and Abaiti (Aba-the-Little). Abaiti is, of course, the Gilbertese equivalent of the ancient Maori fatherland Jawaiki. The prayer was intoned by a single officiator sitting with hands upturned at the foot of an emblematic pandanus tree. There was no limit to the number of Karongoa folk, men or women, who might be present, and members of Maerua, the moon-clan, might be invited but all others were strictly excluded. The ceremony took place at noon, the sun's strongest hour for ritual purposes:
This is the planting of our emblem of a tree, Au-forever-rising-o-o!
This is the planting of our emblem of a tree, Au-forever-turning-over-o-o!
This is our planting of our emblem of a tree, Au-forever-setting-o-o! I have spread the branches of our tree of fruitfulness, our tree of the Sun and the Moon.
The lightning flashes, the thunder and the rain descend, even the fructifiers of the tree,
The virgin tree, the pandanus of Abatoa and Abaiti,
Thy tree, thy mother, Au-of-the-
Spirit of the Crest, son of the tree, Au-forever-rising,
Spirits of Matang, Tituaabine, Tabuariki, Tevenei, Riiki, I call to you, I call only to you:
Bless us under our tree of fruitfulness, fructify our pandanus trees, I beg you.
I beg you-o-o! I, Kirewa.
Blessings and Peace are ours. Blessings and Peace.
And when the first-fruits had been gathered in, sweet puddings called karababa were made of the best of them for an offering to the sun and moon. The officiator, sitting as before at the foot of the emblematic tree, with the congregation in a half-circle behind him facing east, lifted a fragment of the sweet stuff on upturned palms towards the crest, intoning:
This is your food, Sun and Moon,
Even the first-fruits of our pandanus tree.
This is thy food, child of the virgin tree, Au-forever-rising,
Even the first-fruits of our pandanus trees.
This is your food, spirits of Matang, Tituaabine, Tabuariki, Tevenei, Riiki,
Even the first-fruits of our pandanus trees.
We are blest under our tree of fruitfulness.
Blessings and Peace are ours. Blessings and Peace.
After which, he threw back his head to look up at the sun and in that position swallowed the oblation, and the congregation, with cries of 'Blessings and Peace are ours. Blessings and Peace,' turned their faces to the sky and joined in the ritual meal.
The Gilbertese word mauri which I have here construed 'blessings' might also, in a very general sense, mean 'safety'. It has compendious connotations of material prosperity, good health and security from the attacks of evil spirits. In its prayerful
But the active charities that went with the cult of the ancestor were confined within the family group. There was no obligation upon a man to abstain from the practice of sorcery against members of clans other than his own, except his mother's and that into which he might have been adopted. The same person could be Dr Jekyll and wawi and wairaakau, maniwairaa and terakunene, for aggression. As a sorcerer he was crudely animistic. He believed that everything in the world had inside it an anti – or spirit, that could be called up out of the darkness of its imprisoning stuff. Nothing was needed to evoke it but the use of the right words with the right movements. If every detail of his ritual were correct, the sorcerer became the master of the anti; there was no nonsense about its loving him or wanting his love.
But this is not to say that Gilbertese magic was wholly bent on evil. Its spells covered the entire range of village activities; there was not a cranny of a man's or a woman's life into which it did not penetrate, and great sections of it – especially those which covered childbirth, marriage, prosperity, and death – were untainted by human malice. My aged friend Tabanea, of whose traffic in the 'magic of kindness' I shall have more to say later, gave me some samples of spells meant to comfort, not to kill. One of them was of the family known as te Kaanangaraoi, the givers of good direction, i.e., roughly, the bringers of good
'Lead her to an eastern beach just before sunrise,' he instructed me, 'and seat her on a stone facing the dawn. You may take her to the stone I use for myself, if you like. When she is seated, anoint the crown of her head with a little coconut oil – a drop or two will be enough – and tie a fillet of young coconut-leaf about her brows, making a knot like this. Then let her sit very still, her hands upon her knees, waiting for the sun to rise. And when you see the top rim of the sun appear over the horizon, stand beside her with your right hand resting on her head, saying these words three times:
Spells of this benign quality lent themselves very easily as a bridge between paganism and Christianity in the days of groping from belief to belief. The old pagans of my time had seen the emissaries of the new faith working ruthlessly against their loved ancestors in the earlier days of missionary work, and for that reason most of them resisted to the very end every effort to christianize them. But they distinguished with extraordinary sensitiveness between the new God and His human prophets. Their stubborn resistance was directed not against the notion of a foreign deity but against the church organization as such. The Christian God seemed very powerful to them. Had He not saved from the anger of their own spirits the desecrators of their village shrines? They had need of the protection of such a
'And when I had said it three times,' said Katutu, 'the ill wind dropped its wings, the sea fell, a fair wind blew, and I came safe home.'
Katutu like Tabenea was a professional sorcerer who dealt only in the magic of kindness. His sort brought nothing but help to villagers nominally Christian yet still far less confident than pagan Katutu of the love of their accepted God. But there were few professionals like him; the majority were sinister beings; curses intended to bring madness, disease and death were their common stock-in-trade, and the terror of their works hung like a black cloud over the villages. Here are the words of a curse upon a cooking-oven. The sorcerer is to be imagined squatting naked in the dark before dawn over his enemy's fireplace and stabbing it with a stick as he mutters–
My old friend of the protective ritual, Taaketa of Marakei, gave me this spell as an example of the kind of curse that had been laid upon my shrinking self. Obviously, apart from their obscenity, such curses amounted to nothing more than any other pack of words. But the trouble was, they often worked. The sorcerers took care to back their rituals with something more than words. They knew a good deal about fish-poisons, and also about the blistering secretion of the cantharides fly, which swarms among the coconut-blossom. And even when no such adventitious aid was used, there was always man's fear working on the side of the sorcerer. It is an eerie thing to know yourself cursed, even if you are a European. A brown man with sixty generations of terror-struck belief whispering in his blood, and no trust any more in the saving love of his ancestors, and not yet any deep hold on the comforts of his new religion, was easy meat for the death-magic. The sorcerers had little to learn in practice about the murderous force of auto-suggestion.
I believe all these dark things are done with in the
I am not suggesting that ghosts returned from the dead, or familiars prowled, or presences lurked in things. I write as a sceptic about that kind of belief. But it is my experience that malice and fear are strong infections. They can taint things and places, just as human love can sweeten them. Generation upon generation of sorcerers who willed evil, and of people who dreaded their power, had lived out their lives in those islands. The piled-up horror of their convictions had achieved, down the ages, a weight and a shadow of its own, an imminence that brooded over everything. It was man's thought, more potent than ghosts, that haunted the habitations of men. One felt that practically anything could happen in that atmosphere.
I don't mind admitting I felt queer when old Taakeuta said a death-curse had been laid on me. You would have felt the same yourself at that hour of the morning. He crept out of his village between 3 and 4 o'clock and got my servant Kirewa to wake me up. As soon as I stirred, they both began begging me not to light a lamp, in case other eyes should see us. So I had to lie there under the mosquito net, listening to their talk of curses in the dark. They were just voices whispering doom at me out of the unseen, and it gave me the creeps.
White men were supposed to be immune from Gilbertese sorcery, but Taakeuta feared I might not be as safe as others because I had recently been made a member of the Sun clan. That gave me magical powers, but it also opened me to magical attack, he thought: the curse would surely work unless I would agree to do as he asked me. My one safety now lay in the prayers of the clan ancestors for warding off death-spells. They were infallible if used aright – but would I use them? He had come hurrying through the night to teach me how to do so before the
I knew the dark obscenity of the death-curses. Not that I really believed that a hotch-potch of words and gestures, however vile, could harm me. But I was alone on an island impregnated with age-old superstition, and I was young, and the living reality of these two friends' dread was heavy upon me. Then, too, there was the deep sincerity of Taakeuta's purpose. I couldn't just turn the shaky old fellow back into the night uncomforted. Maybe I was a little curious as well. Any how, what with one thing and another, I spent the last hour before sunrise over on the eastern beach, learning those protective prayers from him. All of them ended with the lovely benediction, 'Blessings and Peace are mine. Blessings and Peace.' I am not prepared to deny that it did a lot to calm ray twittering nerves.
The innocent cause of all this to-do was a poor, half-witted girl who had been brought before me in the Lands Court. It was a real-life case of a defenceless orphan and the wicked uncle. The uncle had contrived, at the death of her father and mother, to get himself registered by the Native Court as the owner of her whole patrimony, which amounted to nearly twenty acres of good coconut land. That was great wealth for a
It was no part of my court's job to pursue the wicked uncle. I merely recorded the facts about him for the judicial attention of the District Officer and got along with my he might pursue me. As a matter of fact, I'm sure there was more than a streak of insanity in him, which loss of face had whipped
It wasn't merely for me that people were afraid: they feared for themselves even more. No white man had ever yet been known to succumb to Gilbertese magic. The whole confidence of the brown men in the white race rested ultimately on that one fact. We were queer, often unmannerly creatures, but we were always above being corrupted or constrained by secret sorceries. Yet that terrible man seemed so sure of his powers. Could I resist him? If I could not, what white man was to be leaned on for protection any more? This was not a rhetorical question that I imagined for myself: it was the way my servant and loving friend Kirewa put things to me, and I knew that the stark simplicity of his view stood for the whole island's feeling. It was no good discounting it as mere hysteria: the hysteria itself was the fact that had to be faced. In that atmosphere of panic, the wicked uncle didn't even have to bring about my death to win a smashing victory. Any real illness that happened my way would be seen as a triumph of his sorcery. And, apart from the white man's prestige in general, there was the special matter of my work on the
As things fell out, however, I needn't have worried about dysentery. The pains that woke me up just before dawn two days
At that, it might have been only a severe attack of renal colic, but there were other symptoms too. They don't matter here, except that they told me beyond doubt what had hit me. I had had a mild sample of the same thing before, and it hadn't been caused by magic. The all-too-obvious fact was that I had swallowed before going to bed a considerable swig of the blistering stuff known to science as cantharidine. It was easy to make that particular mistake in the
The only coconut toddy ever allowed near me was that gathered by Kirewa. He was a martinet about that. I got none at all if he found even a single fly drowned in my liquor. But my toddy-tree was well out in the bush: anyone could have climbed it and doctored my drink unseen in the sleepy hours after noon-day. There wasn't a mite of evidence to show who had done it; but if nobody had, in fact, given me a dose of cantharidine, the inference was that nothing save the wicked uncle's curse was blistering my insides. Though this made satisfactory nonsense for me, it didn't for Kirewa. He thought the death curse was come upon me, and told me so with tears. It was not comforting. All the same, I did know I could count on his silence outside. He said himself he didn't care who or what was to blame, only one
Apart from the pains of my condition, its initial calls for attention were so importunate that they could not possibly have been kept dark without the help of luck – an accident of time, you might call it, unless you preferred just Providence. My trouble happened to begin on a Saturday and Saturday was a day of rest as far as my court work went. So I started off with the merciful gift of a clear week-end of seclusion. Nevertheless, when Sunday night came, I could not even sit up. There wasn't the remotest hope of my being able to open the Lands Court as usual at six o'clock on Monday morning. I lay torn in half with pain wondering what message I should send to the packed meeting-house. Should I say outright that I was ill, but ill, of course, only because somebody unspecified had poisoned me? My mind replied: if my Kirewa didn't believe in the poisoning theory, why should a single other soul in those spell-haunted villages? So, alternatively, should I without a word of explanation suspend court sessions until further notice? The answer to that one was that it would simply bring a swarm of fearful folk, driven by the gibes of the sorcerer himself, rushing round to confirm his triumph. There was absolutely nothing I could do to avoid disaster. Yet I must do something. My mind went on and on; rigors began to seize my body; by four o'clock, I was semi-delirious. And then, in the same dark hour of Taakeuta's warning visit and the first onset of my sickness, more help came. You can call it an accident out of space this time, unless you still prefer Providence. A roaring westerly gale blew up, unprecedentedly late in the season, and pushed over half the dwellings on the island. Nobody was hurt, but it took the villagers a full week of intensive communal work to get their homes standing again. Until the following Monday, not a mother's son wanted to be bothered with me or my
So I had nine grace-days in all for secret running repairs. Kirewa easily kept the odd caller at a distance by saying I was buried in my writing work. My difficult temper when interrupted at that was well known. The searing flame inside me pretty nearly cooked my goose on Monday and Tuesday, I
I got to the meeting-house steadily enough next morning, on a bicycle: there are no hills in the
There followed what seemed an age of stunned silence. I thought my feeble effort had failed disastrously. As a matter of fact, I never have been sure that it would have caught on at all,
Six weeks later, I finished my work on that island. The evening before I left, Taakeuta took both my hands in his old gnarled ones: 'Sir,' he said, 'what might have happened but for the prayers of the ancestors?' He knew nothing of my illness. I could not bring myself to tell him that I had not used his prayers. In any case, a blank denial would have amounted to an evasion. My rehearsal with him on the ocean beach had left me haunted with a thought. I felt that the ancestors had stumbled on something considerable when they put that phrase about blessings and peace in the form of an affirmation. It seemed to me then that blessings and peace truly were, in the last analysis, entities within a man for him to lean upon at need. Perhaps that was merely wishful thinking, but I found it a very comforting bed-companion in my sickness.
It was common rumour in the
'A chief of chiefs,' he said, 'is recognized by his shape. He is fleshy from head to foot. But his greatest flesh is his middle; when he sits, he is based like a mountain upon his sitting place; when he stands, he swells out in the midst, before and behind, like a porpoise.' It seemed that in order to maintain that noble bulge a high chief simply must have a regular diet of porpoise-meat; if he didn't, he would soon become lean and bony like a commoner or a white man. The white man was doubtless of chiefly race, thought Kitiona, but his figure could hardly be called beautiful. 'And you,' he added, looking me up and down with affectionate realism, 'are in truth the skinniest white man ever seen in these islands. You sit upon approximately no base at all.'
I laughed (heartily I hope) and asked what he thought could be done about that. 'You should eat porpoise-flesh,' he said simply, 'then you too would swell in the proper places.' That led me to inquire how I might come by a regular supply of the rare meat. The long and the short of his reply was that his own kinsmen in Kuma village, seventeen miles up-lagoon, were the hereditary porpoise-callers of the High Chiefs of
Having led them to the lagoon entrance, he would fly forward to rejoin his body and warn the people of their coming. It was quite easy for one who knew the way of it. The porpoise never failed to arrive. Would I like some called for me? After some rather idle shilly-shallying, I admitted that I would; but did he think I should be allowed to see them coming? Yes, he replied, that could probably be arranged. He would talk to his kinsmen
No further word came from Kitiona until his big canoe arrived one morning to collect me. There was not a breath of wind, so sailing was out of the question. The sun was white-hot. It took over six hours of grim paddling to reach our destination. By the time we got there, I was cooked like a prawn and wrapped in gloom. When the fat, friendly man who styled himself the High Chief's hereditary porpoise-caller came waddling down the beach to greet me, I asked irritably when the porpoise would arrive. He said he would have to go into his dream first, but thought he could have them there for me by three or four o'clock. Please, though, he added firmly, would I be careful to call them, from now on, only 'our friends from the west'. The other name was tabu. They might not come at all if I said it aloud. He led me as he spoke to a little hut screened with newly plaited coconut leaves, which stood beside his ordinary dwelling. Alone in there, he explained, he would do his part of the business. Would I honour his house by resting in it while he dreamed? 'Wait in peace now,' he said when I was installed, 'I go on my journey,' and disappeared into the screened hut.
Kuma was a big village in those days: its houses stretched for half a mile or more above the lagoon beach. The dreamer's hut lay somewhere near the centre of the line. The place was dead quiet that afternoon under its swooning palms. The children had been gathered in under the thatches. The women were absorbed in plaiting garlands and wreaths of flowers. The men were silently polishing their ceremonial ornaments of shell. Their friends from the west were being invited to a dance, and everything they did in the village that day was done to maintain the illusion.
Even the makings of a feast lay ready piled in baskets beside the houses. I could not bring myself to believe that the people expected just nothing to come of all this careful business.
But the hours dragged by, and nothing happened. Four o' clock passed. My faith was beginning to sag under the strain when a strangled howl burst from the dreamer's hut. I jumped 'Teirake! Teirake! (Arise! Arise! … They come! Let us go … Our friends from the west … They come! … Let us go down and greet them.' He started at a lumbering gallop down the beach.
A roar went up from the village, 'They come, they come!' I found myself rushing helter-skelter with a thousand others into the shallows, bawling at the top of my voice that our friends from the west were coming. I ran behind the dreamer; the rest converged on him from north and south. We strung ourselves out, line abreast, as we stormed through the shallows. Everyone was wearing the garlands woven that afternoon. The farther out we got, the less the clamour grew. When we stopped, breast deep, fifty yards from the reef's edge, a deep silence was upon us; and so we waited.
I had just dipped my head to cool it when a man near me yelped and stood pointing; others took up his cry, but I could make out nothing for myself at first in the splintering glare of the sun on the water. When at last I did see them, everyone was screaming hard; they were pretty near by then, gambolling towards us at a fine clip. When they came to the edge of the blue water by the reef, they slackened speed, spread themselves out and started cruising back and forth in front of our line. Then, suddenly, there was no more of them.
In the strained silence that followed, I thought they were gone. The disappointment was so sharp, I did not stop to think then that, even so, I had seen a very strange thing. I was in the act of touching the dreamer's shoulder to take my leave when he turned his still face to me: 'The king out of the west comes to meet me,' he murmured, pointing downwards. My eyes followed his hand. There, not ten yards away, was the great shape of a porpoise poised like a glimmering shadow in the glass-green water. Behind it followed a whole dusky flotilla of them.
They were moving towards us in extended order with spaces
A babble of quiet talk sprang up; I dropped behind to take in the whole scene. The villagers were welcoming their guests ashore with crooning words. Only men were walking beside them; the women and children followed in their wake, clapping their hands softly in the rhythm of a dance. As we approached the emerald shallows, the keels of the creatures began to take the sand; they flapped gently as if asking for help. The men leaned down to throw their arms around the great barrels and ease them over the ridges. They showed no least sign of alarm. It was as if their single wish was to get to the beach.
When the water stood only thigh deep, the dreamer flung his arms high and called. Men from either flank came crowding in to surround the visitors, ten or more to each beast. Then, 'Lift!' shouted the dreamer, and the ponderous black shapes were half-dragged, half-carried, unresisting, to the lip of the tide. There they settled down, those beautiful, dignified shapes, utterly at peace, while all hell broke loose around them. Men, women and children, leaping and posturing with shrieks that tore the sky, stripped off their garlands and flung them around the still bodies, in a sudden dreadful fury of boastfulness and derision. My mind still shrinks from the last scene – the raving humans, the beasts so triumphantly at rest.
We left them garlanded where they lay and returned to our houses. Later, when the falling tide had stranded them high and dry, men went down with knives to cut them up. There was feasting and dancing in Kuma that night. A chief's portion of the meat was set aside for me. I was expected to have it cured as a diet for my thinness. It was duly salted, but I could not bring myself to eat it. I never did grow fat in the
The Gilbertese had few waterside villages before the British Protectorate. The only buildings ordinarily near the sea then were the canoe-sheds. Every household had its home-place on its own land, and the aim beyond that was to scatter the dwellings of a group settlement to the best tactical advantage across the breadth of the coconut forest from lagoon to ocean beach. The siting of each house in relation to its neighbours was as carefully planned as the siting of a pill-box in modern warfare. Every home-place was, in fact, a strong point. The whole idea was to secure defence-in-depth against the infiltration of enemy forces from up or down the length of the land. The muddy pits which were dug for the cultivation of the arum tuber known as babai (which science calls A locasia Indica) were also placed so as to impede the movements of invaders between the strong points. In the savage land-wars that forever racked the islands, every major activity of the private household had to be thus subordinated to the defence of the settlement. The darkness of the times was reflected in the family homes. The lodges were not the companionable mwenga of today, but uma-toro — literally, squatting roofs – which is to say thatches resting on the ground, closed at both gables, under whose eaves no spying eye could penetrate.
Except on the islands where dynasties of High Chiefs had managed to remain paramount, a state of faction warfare was the normal condition of Gilbertese life of old. There were wars that involved only two or three villages at a time, and wars that split whole islands into opposing camps. The feuds, on whatever scale, were deathless. In Tarawa, the struggle for supremacy between two factions that called themselves The House of Royalist, to proclaim the British Protectorate on the very morning when the forces of
Pax-Britannica was a phrase perhaps too often used by Imperialists to cover a multitude of sins, but it really did mean the dawn of a newer, richer life for the Gilbertese, as the old folk of my day were never tired of acknowledging. Exactly twenty-five years after the House of
We were in her village house. Besides myself, sitting around her on their floor-mats, were her son, hale and active still in his late seventies, a grandson of fifty-five or so, a great-grandson of twenty-four, and several great-great-grandchildren of ages up to ten. All the grown-ups were busy at some kind of handiwork as we listened to her story. Her son and grandsons were fashioning the shanks of pearl-shell hooks, as beautiful as gems, for bonito-fishing; she herself, still quick-fingered and keen-eyed for all her years, was plaiting the multitudinous strands of a new sleeping-mat across her knees. The murmur of contented talk drifted in from other houses. The peace of it all seemed to stab her with sudden happiness: 'Listen to the voices of the people in their lodges!' she broke off her tale of fighting to exclaim. 'We work in peace, we talk in peace, for the days of anger are done.'
She resumed an account of her husband's death in battle the day before h.m.s. Royalist
appeared, and held soberly to that theme until one of her great-grand-daughters arrived home from a visit to the next village. The interruption loosed the floodgates of a new surge of happiness from within her: 'See that!' she cried triumphantly, 'see that! This woman arrives from walking in the north, yet no man has molested her, for we walk in peace.'
She herself, up to the coming of the Flag — when she must
'In those days,' she continued, 'death was on the right hand and on the left. If we wandered north, we were killed or raped. If we wandered south, we were killed or raped. If we returned alive from walking abroad, our husbands themselves killed us, for they said we had gone forth seeking to be raped. That was indeed just, for a woman who disobeys her husband is a woman of no account, and it matters not how she dies. Yet how beautiful is life in our villages, now that there is no killing and war is no more.'
She told me of how she had found the body of her husband eyeless after the battle. It was the Gilbertese warrior's ultimate gesture of triumph in the field to pluck out the eyes of a stricken foeman and bite them in two while straddling his corpse. As she spoke, I had a picture of generations of grieving women before her, searching the floor of the forest for the eyes of their dead, lest the departing souls go blind into the Land of Shades. But she was just to her husband's killer: "Bon te katei (It was the custom),' she said, 'and I found his eyes beside him.' And it was on her theme of triumphant serenity that she finished: 'Behold, my son and my grandson! These would have died with me that day at Nea if the warship had not arrived. And these' – she pointed to her great-and great-great-grandchildren – 'would never have been born. We live because the Government of
It was the Christian missionaries, not the Government, who gave schools to the villages, and the schools taught rudiments that the villagers had to master if they were to survive the alien pressures which, sooner or later, were bound to drive in upon them. The
When I had been only a few months on Tarawa, I heard from an aged pagan why he had always resisted conversion to Christianity. It would be purposeless to reveal the denomination of the missionary responsible for the stand the old man took, for both Protestants and Roman Catholics had their iconoclasts – not many, but some, and the hate of a few may often betray the love of many. The pagan was a gentle old fellow, recognized in his village for te akoi, which means, broadly, loving-kindness, and I was curious to know his reasons for remaining pagan.
He pointed to a rectangle of coral slabs planted edgewise beside his dwelling. 'See there!' he said. 'That was the baangota (shrine) of my ancestors. My father's skull was buried there, and his father's, and his father's fathers' to five generations. I buried them so that their crowns stood forth above the sand. I saw them near me as I lay down to sleep; every evening I went down and anointed them with oil; and I spoke to them, and they answered me, and I was happy with them. Thus it was until those men came and took them away from me.'
'Those men' were a white missionary and a rabble of native teachers whom he had trained to his ways.
'It began in this manner,' the old man went on. 'The white missionary sent a teacher to me one day, and the teacher said to me, "Thou shalt root up the skulls of thy baangota and throw them away."
'And this was my word to the teacher: "These are the skulls of my fathers. They hurt no man and I love them. Why should I root them up and throw them away?"
'The teacher answered, "Thy baangota is an offence to the Christians who dwell in this village, for it is a sin in the eyes of our God, the only true God."
'But I said to him, "I beg thee, let each man turn away content with his own spirits. I am content with mine. Leave me alone with them."
'He answered, "Other men have obeyed the voice of the white missionary and thrown away their skulls. Thou alone in this village hast refused."
'I said, "The voices of my fathers are more precious to me than the voice of the white missionary. They are my roots and my trunk. I die without them. I beg thee, leave me alone with them."
'But he arose in anger, saying, "If thou art stiff-necked, our God will come to this village and destroy it because of thee."
'And the people of the village heard him and were afraid. They said to me, "We beg thee to throw away the skulls, lest we be destroyed because of thee."
'But I answered, "Fear not. My spirits will protect all of us from the anger of that cruel God. What kind of God is he who will not let me love my fathers? Is he a slave without ancestry?"
'They said, "He is the God of Wrath. We do not know his origins, only we fear to offend him." But none laid hand upon my baangota, for they feared to offend my spirits also.
'And the teacher himself was afraid, so he said, "We will all return with the white man tomorrow, and he will destroy thy baangota." And all the people answered him, "Yes, return, we beg thee, and destroy it."
'So that night, I anointed the heads of my fathers and spoke to them, and I knew in my heart that it was the last time.
'And on the morrow, the white man, and his teachers, and his company — a great crowd — came with shouting and singing into the village. They gathered by my baangota here. All the village came to behold. I sat in my house. My heart was dead within me. There was nothing I could do save only sit.
'Then the white man told them to be silent. And when they were silent, he walked to the side of the baangota, saying, "Where are now the spirits of this place? Ho there, you spirits! Come and strike me dead if you can! You answer not? Fie! Are you afraid?"
'And alas! he trampled upon the heads of my fathers, and they were crushed under his feet. And he danced upon them.
'And when he was tired of dancing, he took the broken bones in his hands, and made as if to spit upon them, and scattered
'So no one was any more afraid of my spirits. They all fell together upon my baangota. They laughed, they danced, they pelted the trees with the bones of my fathers, shouting. "See here! Another piece of dung. Throw it away!" And the white man danced with them, as if he were a madman or a slave. And when the bones were all gone, they spat upon my baangota and left.'
I wish I could have added that that day's wickedness did not go unpunished. But it did, and the noble game of shrine-ragging in the name of Christianity flourished well into the time of the Protectorate. There was, to be sure, a clause in the
But a few skull shrines still survived in and around the villages of the Central and
The worst of interfering with the customs of simple peoples, all for their own good, is that it can end by leaving them bereft of their national will to live. The fiddler is a killer on a grand scale. There have been in the past some grim cases of depopulation – especially in
During my salad days as a District Officer, my closest friend Mautake-Maeke, Chief Kaubure of Tarawa and a member of the moon clan called Maerua, read me a sound lesson in what you might call the doctrine of compensating values or, alternatively, the anthropological approach to changes of native custom.
Walking one day on the ocean shore of Tarawa, I had chanced on a box-shaped arrangement of coral slabs about eighteen inches square half-buried in the tussocky grass at the beach-head. It looked, with its flat top, like the kind of seat the old pagans were fond of building in such lonely, treeless places for their various rituals to the rising sun. But, though it was three miles from any village, it might just possibly have been a shrine for an ancestral skull, so I lifted the lid to make sure before venturing to sit on it myself.
No skull was inside, but a heap of two-shilling pieces – perhaps thirty or forty of them. The coins lay within a circle of pebbles on the sandy floor. On top of them was a piece of knotted coconut leaf, obviously a rabu, or cover against pilfering. Thus protected, the money was indeed pretty safe from thieves, for Christian and pagans alike had a hearty dread of the curses that actuated these magical spring-guns. The rabu spells were not nicely worded:
Yet a solitary, exposed beach-head seemed a strange place for the owner to leave his money, guarded only by spirits. I felt, as I closed the lid again, that the man was simply asking for trouble. 'He must be warned,' I thought, 'that people aren't as credulous nowadays as they used to be,' and returned to the Native Government station simmering with excellent urges.
But when I spoke to Mautake-Maeke about it, he quickly disabused me of the notion that anyone needed my advice. 'The thing out there is not what you think,' he said. 'It is a thing made by the villagers for a certain old man named Tabanea. The rabu was put there by the people themselves to prevent anyone but him from taking the money.'
It appeared that Tabanea was a professional wizard famed te wawi.
'And so,' said Mautake, 'Tabanea sends a message before him when he is about to pass through a village: and the people bring gifts or money to the place you saw today; then Tabanea renews his bonota (protective spell) over their village, and everyone is happy.'
'But, Mautake,' I exclaimed, the young fiddler within me suddenly aroused at all this talk of trading in sorcery, 'this thing must be stopped at once.'
He looked at me blankly: 'How?' he said, 'I don't understand.'
'The thing must be stopped,' I repeated.
'Why?'
'Because the man's levying a kind of tax on the villagers.'
'He levies no tax,' Mautake replied firmly. 'The people want his help, and pay for it in advance. What he does makes them happy.'
'But do you believe that they are any the safer for his spells?'
'What I believe or you believe is of no account,' was his notable reply: 'They believe. Only that matters. They believe and so they are happy, and because they are happy they are safe.'
'But,' I protested, 'most of the villagers are baptized Protestants or Roman Catholics. Why should so great a majority be forced to pay Tabanea a tribute just because a few pagans still fear the wawi?'
He smiled: 'The Christians want Tabanea's protection as much as the pagans. Nobody is obliged to pay anything; nor is it known who pays or who refuses; yet the money of Christians is always in that box. The Christians say that their own prayers cannot save them from wawi. They as well as the pagans will die of fear if you take Tabanea's bonota away from the villages.'
'I don't want to do away with the bonota,' I said fretfully: 'That's no affair of mine; but the money part of the business is,
'And the missionaries?' Mautake questioned, and paused. 'Well? What about them?'
'Only this. The missionaries bring us their prayers and their schools, and they ask for gifts in return. We think that is just; we are happy to have them among us; so we give them much money. And then? Does the Government step in to prevent us? Does the Government measure the gifts we give? Does the Government accuse the missionaries of levying a tax upon us?'
While I was still digesting that one, he continued, 'Tabanea brings comfort to the villages which the missionaries cannot bring. What is his sin in this? Is it that he is a pagan and not a Christian? And will you say to the people, "You are not being taxed when you club together to make gifts to the missionaries; but you are indeed being taxed when you club together to make gifts for protection against the wawi?" If you say this, they will answer, "Alas! are we no longer free to buy comfort and peace as we will?" and if you punish Tabanea for accepting their gifts, they will say, "Where shall we any more find safety from the sorcerers who work in the dark," and they will die of fear in their villages.'
And then, without waiting for my reply, he turned to the general question. The Christians, he claimed, stood even more in need than the pagans of the professionals who dealt in the magic of kindness. Every pagan still had his own private spells for good luck, long life and so forth, inherited from the lore of his fathers. But the children and grandchildren of Christians had no such cheerful heritage, because the actual practice of magic rituals, whether cruel or kind, had been abandoned in all good faith by the earliest converts.
'And so, he continued, 'if you punish those who are willing to sell tabunea (spells) for good luck, what must the Christians do then? Where will they go to find magic for good eating and good sleeping, for excellent fishing and success in love, for being favoured by their masters or their friends, for happiness in their dwellings and their work, for blessings upon their canoes and land and cooking ovens, for finding out their lucky days and their unlucky days, for making their wives fruitful and their
His words meant in effect that the magic of kindness filled the life of his people, Christians and pagans alike, with a mass of daily interests for the sudden loss of which nothing that the white man gave or sold could properly compensate them. He was specific on the point of compensating values: 'If the government or missionaries could give them something to keep their hearts alive night and day even as the magic of kindness does, perhaps they could be happy without Tabanea and his like,' he said. 'But if you cannot give them an equal thing in return, you will kill their hearts by robbing them of their loved wizards.'
Of course he was right. His wisdom saved me from an error I should never have ceased to rue. I did nothing whatever about Tabanea except to seek his acquaintance. He was a fine, kindly old gentleman, whose contribution to the easier passage of his people through the psychological darkness between paganism and Christianity I learned to appreciate deeply. Some years after Mautake-Maeke had given me his 'Hands off!' warning, I returned to England and sat for a while at the feet of that colossus among anthropologists,
It is clearly up to a District Officer to be listening and learning all the time. But there is a mortal difference of spirit between genuine research and prying. The danger is, the genuine thing can deteriorate by such subtle and unconscious stages into mere over-curiosity that a bona-fide student may find himself poised on the very brink of fiddling before he wakes up to the horrid change that has gone on inside him. That was what happened to me on Makin-Meang.
Perhaps the eeriness of the island's reputation for ghosts, added to the odd taciturnity of its villagers, had something to do with my ineptitude. But I base no defence on that. The District
I had heard of the ghosts of Makin-Meang before I got there. The people of Tarawa and Maiana and Abaiang were full of tales about them. They told me that the whole Gilbertese race, for over thirty generations by their count (it was sixty or so by mine), had looked on that most northerly island of the group as their halfway house between the lands of the living and the dead.
The story went that, when anyone died, his shade must first travel up the line of islands to Makin-Meang. Going ashore there on a southern beach, it must tread the length of the land to a sand-spit at the northern tip called the Place of Dread. This was not an actual place-name, but simply a term of fearful reference to the locality — for there sat Nakaa, the Watcher at the Gate, waiting to strangle all dead folk in his terrible net. The ghost had no hope of winning through to paradise except by way of the Gate, and no skill or cunning of its own could save it from the Net. Only the anxious family rituals, done over its dead body, could avail for that; and even these might fail if any outsider were to break in upon their course.
The reasonableness or not of these beliefs is of no concern. It was the age and intensity of them that weighed on Makin-Meang. Every yard of the island was loaded with the terrors and hopes that sixty generations of the living, and the dying, and the long-dead, from end to end of the Gilbert group, had focused upon it. The impress of man's thought was as heavy as footfalls on its paths. I wondered if that was why those silent villagers always seemed to be listening inside their ears for some sound I could never hear.
They were courteous and gentle, but they would not talk to me about the place where Nakaa sat; they did not even try to change the subject when I raised it; they simply dropped their eyes and removed themselves into abysses of reserve. It was not from them but from my orderly, a Tarawa man, that I learned how best to avoid the horror of meeting a ghost face to face. He lived in such open fear of doing so himself that the Native Magistrate had let him know out of pity.
He told me that the shades of all the folk who died on the other fifteen islands found their way to Nakaa by the road above the western beach, whereas only those of local people used the eastern path. There were therefore many more chances of meeting ghosts on the west side than on the east. Not that it mattered greatly which way you chose going north, because you were travelling with the stream anyhow, and the only thing you had to remember was never, never to look behind you. But coming back against the northbound traffic, you must take no road save the eastern one. You could find out in advance when that was safe or not by asking if any local death was expected the day you planned to use it.
When I had finished my routine work on the island, I naturally wanted to see the Place of Dread, so I called the Native Magistrate along one morning and asked him to find me a guide.
I have never seen a face change and darken as swiftly as his did at my simple request. He stood dumb for a while with downcast eyes; then, still looking at the ground, 'Do not go to that place,' ' he exclaimed, and again, on a higher note, passionately, 'Do not go!' The edge on his voice made it seem almost as if he had said, I order you not to go.'
'But why?' I said irritably. 'What's all this nonsense about Nakaa's place? What's all the mystery? Shall I offend anyone by going?'
'Nobody will be offended,' he replied, 'but do not go. The place is perilous.'
'But why perilous for me, a Man of Matang?'
His only reply was to wrap himself away in a cloak of silence. So I tried another line: 'You're a member of a Christian church. You surely can't believe still that souls go that way to Heaven or Hell. Or do you?'
He lifted his eyes to mine, crossing himself. 'Not Christian souls,' he whispered, 'but pagan ones … to Hell … they still walk the island … and Nakaa stays there … and there is fear …' His voice trailed off into mumbles; I got no more out of him.
I should of course have made up my mind in all decency then to find the place for myself. The island is a straight, lagoonless
He looked at me mutely, spread his hands in a hopeless little gesture, and left. The constable, a giant of a man with bushy eyebrows and a grimly smileless face, appeared within the next half-hour. He said before we started that, as I was a stranger, I must take the western path going northward, just as the ghosts of strangers did, and that I must be careful not to look back.
'And if I do look back?' I said.
'If you look back and see a ghost,' he replied, 'you will be dead within a year,' and marched off ahead of me without another word.
I followed him in silence, eyes front, for perhaps half an hour, when he stepped suddenly into the coconut forest on our right. 'Come in among the trees,' he called without turning his head: 'This is my land. There is a thing you must carry to Nakaa.'
The thing was a seed-coconut. It appeared that every stranger, on his first visit to the Place of Dread, must bring with him a sprouting nut to plant in Nakaa's grove. I thought well of the idea until he told me I must carry it myself. It had an enormous sprout. I am inclined to believe he chose that particular one with deliberate malice, seeing that the only correct way to carry it (or so he said) was upright in my cupped hands with elbows well in against my ribs. I felt a complete ass sweating meekly behind him in that ridiculous attitude for the next five or six miles with my aspidistra-like trophy fluttering in the wind.
I planted the nut at his order where the trees petered out in a sandy desolation at the island's tip. When it was done to his liking, he just walked away into the forest.
'Here!' I called. 'Where are you going now?'
'I will wait here,' he replied. 'There in the north is the place you seek,' and was lost among the trees.
There was nothing in that empty waste to distinguish it from fifty other such promontories in the Gilbert group. It was merely a blazing acre or two of coral rock shaken by bellowing surf and strident with the shrieks of swarming sea-birds. I walked to the
Nevertheless, the brazen heat of rocks and sand that drove me out at last did have its importance, because it gave me the thirst that led to what followed. I went straight back to my guide among the trees and asked him in all innocence to pick me a drinking nut.
He sprang back as if I had struck him: 'I cannot do that,' he almost barked, 'I cannot do that. These trees are Nakaa's.' Fear oozed out of him, almost as tangible as sweat.
I could not press him to violate his belief; nor had I learned yet to scale a forty-foot tree for myself; so I had to sit down there in Nakaa's grove to a sickeningly dry lunch of bully-beef and biscuit. I remember muttering to myself, 'This is how the old devil strangles foreign ghosts, anyhow,' as I gulped the stuff down.
It was past two o'clock when we started for home down the eastern path. My friend told me that his proper place going south was in the rear, and dropped forty paces behind. Perhaps he just wanted to keep out of my sight as well as the sound of my voice; anyway, it was I who led the way against the traffic-stream of local ghosts.
After ten minutes' walking, with thirst at concert pitch, I stopped and croaked back at him (he would not come near), 'Are we out of Nakaa's grove yet?'
Not yet, he shouted back, there was still a mile or more of it. It was then that an unpleasant little worm within me turned. I made up my mind to disregard his scruples and ask anyone we met, anywhere, to pick me a nut. And there, in the midst of that
Across the arc of a curving beach, I saw him appear round a point. I could follow every yard of his course as he came nearer. My eyes never left him, because my intent was pinned on his getting me that drink. He walked with a strong limp (I thought that might make it hard for him to climb a tree). He was a stocky, grizzled man of about fifty, clad rather ceremoniously in a fine mat belted about his middle (a poor kit for climbing, commented my mind). As he came up on my left, I noticed that his left cheek was scored by a scar from jawbone to temple, and that his limp came from a twisted left foot and ankle. I can see the man still in memory.
But the question is did he see me? He totally ignored the greeting I gave him. He did not even turn his eyes towards me. He went by as if I didn't exist. If anyone was a ghost on that pathway, I was – for him. He left me standing with one futile hand flapping in the air to stay him. I watched his dogged back receding towards my on-coming guide. I was shocked speechless. It was so grossly unlike the infallible courtesy of the islanders.
He was just about to pass the constable when I found voice again: 'Ask that chief to stop,' I called back, 'he may need some help from us.' It had struck me he might be a lunatic at large: possibly harmless, but we ought to make sure of that. But the din of the surf may have smothered my voice, for the constable didn't seem to hear. He passed the newcomer twenty yards from where I stood, without a sign of recognition.
I ran back to him. 'Who is that man?' I asked.
He stopped in his tracks, gazing at my pointed finger. 'How?' he murmured hesitantly, using the Gilbertese equivalent for, 'Say it again.'
I said it again, sharply, still pointing. As we stood dumbly looking at each other, I saw swift beads of sweat – big, fat ones – start out of his forehead and lose themselves in his eyebrows.
Then it was as if something suddenly collapsed inside him. It was horrible. 'I am afraid in this place!' he screamed high in his head, like a woman, and, without another word, he bolted out
But there he was when I arrived, on the verandah with the Native Magistrate. I saw the two of them absorbed in talk, the constable violently gesturing now and then as I approached the house. But they stepped apart as soon as they heard my footsteps, and stood gravely collected when I entered, waiting for me to speak.
I plunged head-first into my petulant story. The sum of it was that the constable had witnessed the discourtesy of the man with the limp, and was now trying his silly best to shield him from censure. It might be very loyal, but did he take me for a fishheaded fool? To pretend he hadn't seen the fellow … well … really! And so on. I was very young.
The native Magistrate waited with calm good manners for me to run down, and then asked what the man was like.
I told him of the twisted foot, and the belted mat, and the scar.
He turned to exchange nods with the constable: 'That was indeed Na Biria,' he murmured, and they nodded at each other again.
'Na Biria?' I echoed. 'Is he a lunatic?'
He dropped his eyelids, meaning, 'No.'
'Then bring him to me this evening.'
He looked me straight in the eyes: 'I cannot do that.'
'Cannot? What word is this … cannot? Is everybody here dotty today? Why cannot you bring him?'
'He is dead,' said the Magistrate, and added as I stood dumb, 'He died this aftenoon, soon before three o'clock.'
They were both so remote; the whole place was so secretive; my mind was as fagged as my body; everything in that moment conspired to weaken its resistance against the improbable. Perhaps I was being bluffed; I don't know; but I suddenly had the picture of Na Biria in the article of death projecting his dying thought, with sixty generations of fear behind it, along that path through Nakaa's grove to the Place of Dread beyond. Had I received the impact of his thought as it passed my way? Or if not, what was it I had seen?
I knew it was not only thirst that made my mouth so dry, and that angered me. 'If he only died at three, he is not yet buried, and I can see his body,' I exclaimed.
'His body lies in the village,' replied the Magistrate.
'And I can see it?' I insisted.
He paused a long time before bowing his head in assent. But brusquely then the constable interrupted: 'No! The Man of Matang is a stranger! They are straightening the way of the dead. No stranger must break in … No! … No!'
The Magistrate silenced him with a gesture. 'I am a Christian,' he said solemnly to me: 'I will take you. Let us go at once.'
I followed him out of the house.
We heard the mourners wailing from a hundred yards off. I saw a dozen of them flogging the purlieus of the open-sided house with staves, to frighten away strange ghosts. I went near enough to see people sitting with raised arms at the head and feet of a body. But I halted outside the circle of beaters. It was finding them so earnestly at work that brought me back to the decencies. These folk believed utterly in what they were doing. For them, the dead man's whole eternity depended on their ritual. For them, the intrusion of me, a stranger, would send him to certain strangulation in Nakaa's net. What earthly or heaven-born right had I, for a moment's peevishness, to condemn them for the rest of their days to that hideous conviction? I suddenly felt as small as I was. I could go no farther. I turned away from the house. The Native Magistrate followed me in silence.
There are between twenty and thirty clans scattered up and down the bou, or sitting-piace, of his ancestors. His local kin could not ignore the challenge of that gesture. It was now theirs to come and question him.
My friend Mautake-Maeke once put me through the maneaba ceremonial as if I were a stranger claiming kinship with the clan of
We beached our canoe, passed straight into the great building from its seaward side, spread our mats by Karongoa's sun-stone, and waited there for the elders of the clan to come and question me. I was supposed for argument's sake to have arrived from the island of Beru. I had brought with me, according to usage, a stranger's gift (in this case, five pounds of stick-tobacco) to soften hearts and tongues for the encounter.
Nearly a hundred keen-eyed old men came to take part, but they were not all of Karongoa; representatives of Bakoa, the shark clan, and of Keaki, the tropic-bird people, were among them. These went to sit in their own boti as an audience; the examination of a stranger was something the whole village was entitled to hear if it liked. All were dressed in their ceremonial waist-mats of fine mesh girt about the middle with belts of their womenfolk's hair. Most had thrust ornaments of rolled wildalmond leaf, flaming with summer tints of gold and scarlet, through the pierced lobes of their ears. Some carried their pipes slung in that convenient rack. The white-headed senior of Karongoa wore the sun-clan's ceremonial fillet of coconut leaf knotted about his brows. He was the question-master.
His grandson spread a mat for him, and he took his seat facing me across the gift of tobacco, which lay before my crossed legs. There was deep silence in the maneaba save for the echoed hiss-hiss of the wind in the coconut crests outside. I was to be adopted as a member of the Karongoa clan a little later and everybody knew it. This was the real thing acted in earnest by old men to whom the history and customs of their folk were still
'Nao, ko ma mauri (Sir, thou shalt be blest),' he began quietly.
'And thou also, thou shalt be blest.' It was right in answering to push the gift with a gesture of offering towards his feet.
He touched the small pile with his right hand. No word was spoken, but there was a sibilance of insucked breath from among the elders grouped behind him. The gift had been kindly accepted. After a long pause he began again:
'Sir, I have a question.'
'I listen, for I am in thy hand.'
'Whence comest thou?'
'I come from the south.' Pause. 'I come from that island there in the south.' Pause. 'I come from Beru.'
The elder turned back to his companions. They had of course heard for themselves, but it was for him to speak first: 'This man says he comes from the south,' he informed them; 'he comes from Beru.'
'Ai-i-a!' they answered in chorus. 'He comes from Beru,' and the news was shouted to the clans of Bakoa and Keaki: 'This man says he comes from Beru.'
'We hear,' answered Bakoa and Keaki; 'He comes from Beru. And what then?'
The filleted elder addressed me anew: 'Thou art a man of Beru. But where sittest thou now?'
'I sit in the boti of my ancestors – my ancestors of Beru and Tarawa.'
'And what is the name of that boti?'
'It is the boti of Karongoa-n-Uea.'
The news was passed back again as before: 'He says he sits in the boti of Karongoa-n-Uea. He says it is the boti of his ancestors.'
'We hear,' replied Bakoa and Keaki, 'he sits in Karongoa-n-Uea. Yet perhaps it is not the boti of his ancestors.'
The elders of Karongoa reported to their leaders: 'The men of
'How, then, shall the stranger answer?' he asked them.
'He shall establish his generations of Karongoa, so that the truth may appear.'
'Ai-i-a' echoed Keaki and Bakoa. 'Let him establish his generations.'
'Sir,' the old man turned to me once more, 'we say thou shalt establish thy generations of Karongoa.'
So Mautake traced my descent, with masses of impromptu detail by the way, back to Taane-the-Hero, an old-time Karongoa Uea of Beru. Taane was born a Tarawa man, for his fathers were Beia and Tekai, the famous twins who ruled the island between twenty and thirty generations ago, sharing the throne and their wives in common. Beyond Beia and Tekai, the Tarawa line stretched back through a succession of local Uea, all named Kirata, into a fabulous haze of heroes who had come as conquerors from
The telling took nearly two hours. The sun had set before it ended. In the long stillness that followed, the soaring shadows of the maneaba were peopled for all of us with ghosts of the men of old. Some dividing veil between past and present had been pulled away. There was no longer any time as the dead yet living generations crowded down upon us. The old men sat mute, as if listening to voices; I felt the darkness tense with listening; I was so lost in fantasy myself that my heart missed a beat when the elder of Karongoa suddenly snapped the silence:
'It is enough.'
The old men stirred; there were coughs and murmurs. Memories hung still in the vaulted gloom, but the ghosts were gone and time was upon us again. Not much remained to be
'They fit,' answered all but one, but he had a point to raise. I think he spoke only to show me how important even the smallest detail of history was to his people: 'This man has said that Beia and Tekai had a slave of old called Noubwebwe. But this was not so. Noubwebwe was the slave of the first Kirata, not Beia and Tekai.'
There were arguments about that, but the chief cut them short. 'This is a little thing,' he said, 'lay it aside. What think ye of this man's telling of the generations? Does it stand firm?'
'It stands firm,' they answered all together, and shouted their finding to Bakoa and Keaki.
'And what is the judgement of Karongoa?' the clans called back. 'Shall the stranger dwell among us?'
'He shall dwell among us as our son.'
'Sir,' the elder finished addressing me, 'thou shalt dwell among us as our son. Our children are thy brothers and sisters, our grandchildren are thy children, our possessions are thy possessions.'
'The judgement is judged,' intoned Karongoa. 'He shall dwell among us as our son,' and at their word the men of Bakoa and Keaki, with cries of approval and friendship, arose and trooped out of the maneaba, leaving the stranger, no longer strange, alone with his kinsmen.
Over the next three months, I had to learn by heart the genealogy of my prospective adopter, old Tekirei, who traced his descent down through twenty-three local generations in the male line from the sacred twin kings, Beia and Tekai. That took us back perhaps five hundred years to what he called the age of toa, or heroes.
Beia and Tekai were the last of the toa. Their dynasty had been established on Tarawa by invading hordes which, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, had swept wave after wave up the Gilberts in their great seventy-foot ocean-going canoes from
Those invaders from
The colonists who stayed in the
They had to fight for a landing on many islands. But according to Tekirei, there was no fighting at Tarawa, because the newcomers were led by the sacred clan – our clan – Karongoa of the Kings. The reigning dynasty of the day on Tarawa was also of Karongoa. It was not meet that king-priests of the sun should be fighting each other: 'For behold!' explained Tekirei, 'Karongoa ruled by love, not war. Its word was always "Blessings and Peace" to those who came as brother.' The immigrants were welcomed as long-lost kinsmen. And so, round about the time when
There ensued a line of hero-kings named Kirata, which culminated in the twins Beia and Takai. All of these married wives from places far away in the west – from Nabanaba, the land of skulls and bones; from Onouna, the land of bird-men; from Ruanuna, which might have been Liueniua by the
I was deemed ready for adoption only when I could not be caught out in the details of those marriages or the travel-stories and collateral pedigrees that belonged to them, or about the doings of what Tekirei called his twenty-three 'human' generations and their marriages and adoption outside the Karongoa clan to the third degree of cousinship.
Tekirei said that, by rights, he should confirm his adoption of me by a gift of land, which custom called 'the land of the adopted'. I had a hard time convincing him that he could not do so, He did not see why the law which forbade every European from holding land in the Gilberts, except under short leases, should apply to my particular case. 'We have made thee our son,' he protested; 'we wish thee and thy children and their children and all their generations for ever to inherit a piece of our soil. It shall be written in the Book of the Government. So shall the name of Kurimbo (
I managed to persuade him at last that
He looked at me doubtfully. 'I have indeed a token … a mark … but would the Man of Matang accept it?'
'What mark is this that a Man of Matang might not accept, Tekirei?'
'It is the mark of the serpent … this mark, Kurimbo,' he replied, thrusting both arms forward, palms up, to display on each two straight lines of tattooing, a quarter of an inch apart,
I knew he meant that I must not repeat what he said except in whispers and among members of our clan.
'N'gkoa-ngkoa-ngkoa (long, long ago),' he went on, 'perhaps in the Land of Matang before the children were driven forth, the sun loved a serpent. Others will tell you that the sun is a woman, but we of Karongoa know that he is a man, and that he begot children upon the serpent, even the burning twins, Bue and Rirongo.
'And the sun appeared to the kings of Karongoa in their maneaba, a great light up against the sun-stone. He said to them, "I love the serpent and I have made her my wife."
'They answered, "We hear. What shall we do?"
'He said, "You shall make the mark of the serpent on your arms, so that, when you lift your arms sitting before my stone, I shall see there the body of my wife."
'They answered, "We hear. What else shall we do?"
'He said, "You shall teach your children to dance sitting before my stone, thus and thus, so that their arms move this way and that. And to those who are most skilled in the sitting dance, you shall give the mark of the serpent, so that, when their arms move, the body of my wife may move before my eyes."
'And the kings of Karongoa did even as the sun said. They have carried the mark of the serpent on their arms ever since. And they taught the people how to lift their arms thus and thus in the sitting dance before the sun-stone; and to those who were most skilled they gave the mark of the serpent, so that the sun might behold the body of his wife and be happy.'
I thought as I listened to the old man's story, that there was as much of history in it as of myth. I have believed ever since that the bino, as the Gilbertese sitting dance is called, had its origin long ago in a series of ritual gestures performed with sacred song before an altar of the sun in a temple dedicated, perhaps, to the union of the sun-god with his spouse, a serpent. My
I went to Tekirei's mwenga on a day appointed, just before noon. Only he and Mautake-Maeke with two girls of fifteen or sixteen, dressed in minute kilts of leaf, were there to receive me. The girls ranged themselves on either side of me as soon as Tekirei brought them forward, and stood silent, holding my arms against their small bosoms.
'Thus it is right,' said Tekirei; 'these are Sea-Wind and
He addressed the children sternly: 'Women, you have heard my warning. What say you now? Are you safe from the sun's anger?'
'We are safe,' they said together, 'we are not afraid,' and smiled serenely back at him.
As we stood so, Tekirei showed me the tattooing comb. It was a flat splinter of bone a quarter of an inch broad and an inch and a half long, beautifully fashioned at one end into a row of five needle-sharp teeth. 'I made this,' he said, 'from the shin-bone of my grandfather. How happy he will be to feel his bone entering the flesh of my adopted son!'
He went on to explain how the comb was to be mounted for use, in the position of an adze-blade, at the end of a little wooden
'This thing' was the ivory-like, eighteen-inch spear of a spearfish, the thick end of which was to serve as a mallet-head. All the courage of the dead brute was concentrated in the thick end, and would pass into my blood with every stroke.
Tekirei and Mautake first drew guide-lines on my arms with stretched strings, which they dipped in their tattooing dye and pressed down on the skin to leave transfer marks. The dye was made of soot mixed with a bright yellow juice wrung from the roots of a Malay custard-apple bush (morinda citrifolia).
They began on my right arm. It was high noon, the sun's strong hour for protection, when Tekirei laid the charged comb at its starting-point on my wrist, saying, 'Strike!'
Mautake struck. The teeth bit deep. Tekirei pulled them out, dipped them afresh in the dye, laid them in place again immediately above their first five punctures, called, 'Strike!' and Mautake struck once more.
So it went on – dip, strike, dip, strike – creeping up my arm quarter-inch by quarter-inch, in sets of five punctures at a time, until they reached the top. They worked quickly and deftly. Half an hour saw the first line finished. Then they returned to the bottom and began on the second line. As soon as that was done, they went over to the left arm and dealt with that. The once-over for both arms took rather less than two hours to complete.
Custom dictated that it was my duty to Tekirei to show no shameful sign of suffering under this treatment. If there were groans to be groaned, the tender companions of my pain were there to emit them on my behalf, which they did at exactly the right moments. They had been told in advance that I should hardly feel the stab of the comb during the first pricking-in except at certain points – the wrist, the elbow crook, the shoulder – and it was only around those soft spots that their voices were raised in piteous whimpers. But, as the two men returned to my right arm for the second round, Mautake whispered to Sea-Wind, who was in charge of it, 'Woman, it is fitting that thou shouldst wail all the time now.'
As soon as the crack of the mallet drove the ancestor's shinbone down into the raw holes left by the first round, I saw what he meant. The synchronized stings of five hornets could not have improved upon the smart of it. Fortunately, I managed to stifle a yelp of surprised anguish and produce a sick smile instead. Happily too, custom allowed me to indicate my true emotions to Sea-Wind by way of contrary statements. 'There is no pain whatever in this thing,' I said: 'How delicate is the bone of the ancestor!'
Sea-Wind, knowing perfectly well that what I meant was 'It hurts like hell,' responded with a scream of mortal agony.
It was even more so for all parties in the third and last round. The twice-harrowed traces up my arms had become continuous lines of raging rawness. 'How delicate is the bone of the ancestor!' I repeated explosively, as no longer five but fifty hornets at a time now began to stab me, 'How delicate, how persuasive!' and burst into a hooting giggle to conceal a craven grunt. This way of transposing an exclamation of pain into the wild key of a banshee's laugh was another of the personal reliefs allowed by
No further ritual attended my adoption. Tekirei simply asked me one evening to go alone with him to the maneaba. Seated there by the sun-stone at the fall of night he asked me to recite in a whisper, close to his ear, the whole tale of his generations, but not backwards into the past as Mautake-Maeke had recited mine three months before – forwards instead, from the creation of the First Land and the First Men down to himself and his scores of collaterals.
When it was done, he took my hands in his. 'Thou hast made no mistake,' he said.
We sat silent, secluded together in the velvet darkness. But the busy village life lapped close around the shores of our aloneness. Cooking-fires made globes of misty-golden light up and down the lines of mwenga outside. Bronze arms and faces glowed happy and kind where people bent over the flames. Friendly voices and scents of food came wafting in under the eaves in rising, falling waves, as if moved by the winnowing of fans in the night to ebb and flow within the confines of our silence and draw us, for all our absorption in the bygone generations, close back again to the warm, the living present.
I think the old man must have divined the hidden urges of my thought – my upwelling gratitude to him and the way I was longing to use the things he had taught me, if only I could, as stepping-stones deeper into the heart of his people – for the first words he threw into the pool of our silence were, 'Yes … our roots are the generations of old. Know the roots and thou shalt know the tree. Know the tree and behold! it shall answer to thy cultivation.'
There was another long pause until he said, rising as he spoke, 'Enough! The judgement is judged. I give thee my
That was a rare privilege. The customary place for the magistracy, whether Native or European, was in the boti of Strangers at the north end of the Karongoa maneaba. It had always struck me that, thus segregated in the sitting-place of aliens, the table of justice was made to appear, in the last analysis, rather as the symbol of an imported authority never to be wholly admitted to the freedom of the land than as the emblem of a working partnership sealed with the people's own domestic seal. It was not I, but the decay of custom, that eventually made nothing of the discrimination. Within the next fifteen or twenty years, most people had forgotten the entire system of sitting-places in the maneaba. But I dare say my promotion to Karongoa's boti was useful in its day. It certainly is a fact that the villagers who had business with the court began to reveal their intimate griefs and happiness to me more freely than they had ever ventured to do before, as soon as I moved my table into the shadow of the sun-stone.
Taakeuta of Marakei, the teller of histories, was an elder of
The urge to tell stories used to seize him every month anew, round about the full moon. That was his vigorous season, because of the prayer he never failed to make to the young moon
And, as the moon waxed bigger, he felt the virtue of his prayer surging up like a great wave within him; so that, on the eleventh or twelfth day, the weight of his eighty years was as nothing upon his shoulders, and all the generations of his fathers began to shout in his blood, saying, 'Arise! Gird on thy most beautiful waist mat. Take thy staff and thy pipe. Go forth to the maneaba and tell of the wonderful things of old.'
You would find him sitting in the seat of the sun at any time between forenoon and dusk, a big-boned, gaunt old man with the torso of a time-worn
And so, whatever rendering of the creation-story you heard from Taakeuta in public, you could be quite sure that it was not Karongoa's private version. Indeed, his own navel would have been in danger of impalement by a sun-ray had he ventured to throw that one away on outsiders. The Creators of whom he spoke under the sun-stone were called Naareau the Elder and Naareau the Younger. These, you might say, were the popular First Causes as opposed to Au, the priestly one.
If, as I have supposed,
A man was free to think, if he liked, that Naareau the Elder was a being evolved from the void through a genealogical series of abstractions and things; or he could begin with an absolute Naareau seated alone in the void from all eternity. Original matter could be a chaos of stuff tunelessly coexistent with the god in the void; or, alternatively, a mixture of elemental things directly created by him; or, alternatively again, the result of an evolution totally distinct from him. Naareau the Younger could be the son of the Elder, born of his sweat, or his finger-tips, or a tear of his right eye; or he could be the descendant of a genealogical series beginning with a woman and a man created by the First of All. And so on, multitudinously. All along the line, the conflicting notions of a unique creating power and a creation self-evolved out of the void were found overlapping each other in the popular cosmogonies.
Every elder of every clan claimed outside the maneaba that his
I pass on now the first rendering he ever gave me.
Dusk was falling as he told his story. All his audience save only myself had straggled away to the evening meal. Odours of cooking mixed with sea-scents and the eternal perfume of lilies hung poised in the maneaba's sanctuaried gloom. The rumour of a chanted song came drifting in from far away.
Taakeuta began, as he always began, 'Sir, I remember the voices of my fathers. Hearken to the words of Karongoa …
'Naareau the Elder was the First of All. Not a man, not a beast, not a fish, not a thing was before him. He slept not, for there was no sleep; he ate not, for there was no hunger. He was in the Void. There was only Naareau sitting in the Void. Long he sat, and there was only he.
'Then Naareau said in his heart, "I will make a woman." Behold! a woman grew out of the Void: Nei Teakea. He said again, "I will make a man." Behold! a man grew out of his thought: Na Atibu, the
'And Naareau the Elder said to Naareau the Younger, "All knowledge is whole in thee. I will make a thing for thee to work upon." So he made that thing in the Void. It was called the Darkness and the Cleaving Together; the sky and the earth and the sea were within it; but the sky and the earth clove together,
'And when his work was done, Naareau the Elder said, "Enough! It is ready. I go, never to return." So he went, never to return, and no man knows where he abides now.
'But Naareau the Younger walked on the overside of the sky that lay on the land. The sky was rock, and in some places it was rooted in the land, but in other places there were hollows between. A thought came into Naareau's heart; he said, "I will enter beneath it." He searched for a cleft wherein he might creep, but there was no cleft. He said again, "How then shall I enter? I will do it with a spell." That was the First Spell. He knelt on the sky and began to tap it with his fingers, saying:
'And at the third striking, the sky opened under his fingers. He said, "It is ready," and he looked down into the hollow place. It was black dark, and his ears heard the noise of breathing and snoring in the darkness. So he stood up and rubbed his fingertips together. Behold! the First Creature came out of them-even the Bat that he called Tiku-tiku-toumouma. And he said to the Bat, "Thou canst see in the darkness. Go before me and find what thou findest."
'The Bat said, "I see people lying in this place." Naareau answered, "What are they like?" and the Bat said, "They move not; they say no word; they are all asleep." Naareau answered again, "It is the Company of Fools and Deaf Mutes. They are a Breed of Slaves. Tell me their names." Then the Bat settled on the forehead of each one as he lay in the darkness and called his name to Naareau: "This man is Uka the Blower. Here lies Naawabawe the Sweeper. Behold, Karitoro the Roller-up. Now Kotekateka the Sitter. Kotei the Stander now" – a great multitude.
'And when they were all named, Naareau said, "Enough. I will go in." So he crawled through the cleft and walked on the underside of the sky; and the Bat was his guide in the darkness. He stood among the Fools and Deaf Mutes and shouted, "Sirs, what are you doing?" None answered; only his voice came back out of the hollowness, "Sirs, what are you doing?" He said in his heart, "They are not yet in their right minds, but wait."
'He went to a place in their midst; he shouted to them "Move!" and they moved. He said again "Move!" They set their hands against the underside of the sky. He said again, "Move!" They sat up; the sky was lifted a little. He said again "Move! Stand!" They stood. He said again "Higher!" But they answered, "How shall we lift it higher?" He made a beam of wood, saying, "Lift it on this." They did so. He said again, "Higher! Higher!" But they answered, "We can no more, we can no more, for the sky has roots in the land." So Naareau lifted up his voice and shouted, "Where are the Eel and the Turtle, the Octopus and the Great Ray?" The Fools and Deaf Mutes answered, "Alas! they are hidden away from the work." So he said, "Rest," and they rested; and he said to that one among them named Naabawe, "Go, call Riiki, the conger eel."
'When Naabawe came to Riiki, he was coiled asleep with his wife, the short-tailed eel. Naabawe called him; he answered not, but lifted his head and bit him. Naabawe went back to Naareau, crying, "Alas! the conger eel bit me." So Naareau made a stick with a slip-noose, saying "We shall take him with this, if there is a bait to lure him." Then he called the Octopus from his hiding place; and the Octopus had ten arms. He struck off two arms and hung them on the stick as bait; therefore the octopus has only eight arms to this day. They took the lure to Riiki, and as they offered it to him Naareau sang:
'When Riiki heard the spell, he lifted up his head and the sleep went out of him. See him now! He puts forth his snout. He seizes the bait. Alas! they tighten the noose; he is fast caught. They haul him! he is dragged away from his wife the short-tailed eel, and Naareau is roaring and dancing. Yet pity him not, for the sky is ready to be lifted. The day of sundering has come.
'Riiki said to Naareau, "What shall I do?" Naareau answered, "Lift up the sky on thy snout; press down the earth under thy tail." But when Riiki began to lift, the sky and the land groaned, and he said, "Perhaps they do not wish to be sundered." So Naareau lifted up his voice and sang.
'When the Great Ray and the Turtle and the Octopus heard the words of Naareau, they began to tear at the roots of the sky that clung to the land. The Company of Fools and Deaf Mutes stood in the midst. They laughed; they shouted, "It moves! See how it moves!" And all that while Naareau was singing and Riiki pushing. He pushed up with his snout, he pushed down with his tail; the roots of the sky were torn from the earth; they snapped! the Cleaving Together was split asunder. Enough! Riiki straightened out his body; the sky stood high, the land sank, the Company of Fools and Deaf Mutes was left swimming in the sea.
'But Naareau looked up at the sky and saw that there were no sides to it. He said, "Only I, Naareau, can pull down the sides of the sky." And he sang:
Behold, I am seen in the west, it is west! There is never a ghost, nor a land, nor a man; There is only the Breed of the First Mother, and the First Father and the First Beginning;
There is only the First Naming of Names and the First Lying Together in the Void;
There is only the lying together of Na Atibu and Nei Teakea, And we are flung down in the waters of the western sea. It is west!
'So also he sang in the east, and the north, and the south. He ran, he leapt, he flew, he was seen and gone again like the lightnings in the sides of heaven; and where he stayed, there he pulled down the side of the sky, so that it was shaped like a bowl.
'When that was done, he looked at the Company of Fools and Deaf Mutes, and saw that they were swimming in the sea. He said in his heart, "There shall be the First Land." He called to them "Reach down, reach down-o-o! Clutch with your hands. Haul up the bed-rock. Heave!" They reached down; they hauled up the First Land from the bottom of the sea. The name of it was Aba-the-Great, and there was a mountain that smoked in its midst. It was born in the Darkness.
'And Naareau stood on Aba-the-Great in the west. He said to his father, "Na Atibu, it is dark. What shall I do?" Na Atibu answered: "Take my eyes, so that it may be light." Then Naareau slew his father and laid his head on the slope of the mountain that smoked. He took his right eye and flung it east: behold! the Sun. He took his left eye and flung it west: behold! the Moon. He took the fragments of his body and scattered them in the sky: behold! the Stars. He took Riiki the Great Eel; he flung him overhead; and behold! his belly shines there to this day, even the
'And Naareau planted in Aba-the-Great the beam of wood that had lifted the sky: behold! the First Tree, the Ancestor Sun. The spirits of the underworld grew from its roots; and from the whirlpool where its roots went down to the sea grew the Ancestress, Nei Nimanoa, the far-voyager, from whom we know the navigating stars.
'And when it was light, Naareau made Aba-the-Little in the west and
'And Naareau plucked the flowers of the tree of
'So at last all things were finished according to his thought. He said in his heart, "Enough. It is finished. I go, never to return." And he went, never to return.'
A second application I had made for permission to go to the front was turned down at the end of 1916. Our second daughter, Rosemary
My great advantage as a beginner at Abemama was that
It was an easy trip across to him in the 35-ton ketch Choiseul, which Burns,
'Now that's what I call talking, laddie,' he answered: 'You come to your old uncle, and he'll teach ye … he'll teach ye,' and from that time on we were friends.
He was a little sandy-grey man, as wiry and alert as a foxterrier, always spotlessly turned out in starched ducks. There
He was born at Greenock in 1887, the son of a small painter and glazier. He grew up, in his own words, a sickly bairn with a continuous running cold until, at twelve years old, he began coughing blood. By the next year, his condition had worsened. His parents could afford no more medical treatment for him, and would not accept charity. So, on the doctor's advice that a long sea-voyage might do him good, they got him employed at short notice as captain's boy in a barque sailing out of Greenock for
The captain, according to
The sick child deserted ship at
The next fragment is the story of how
The captain landed with a search-party at daybreak, but by then the boy was hidden in a village five miles away with a brother of
He was allowed to idle day-long by the lagoonside at first, bathing whenever he liked and fortified by enormous doses of shark-liver oil that
At twenty, working now on a good wage as
But, as
I could never get Equator to settle ashore. It was not te kangenge, the wasting sickness that the Gilberts had cured in himself, and this, according to Benuaakai, was the ultimate argument he used to beat down Tern Binoka's resistance. It makes a strange picture – the grossbodied and ruthless island potentate, who held the lives of his own subjects so cheap that he would shoot them down from tree-tops for the amusement of seeing them fall sprawling, nevertheless touched by the pleading of his little white factor for the health of a sick stranger. How deeply and urgently
So, R.L.S. remained always for
'But why didn't you make sure he knew,
'There are things a man doesn't run around explaining about himself,' was all he troubled to reply.
Three years after the Stevensons left, the British Protectorate was established, with pairsonal collaboration in the matter. He was impressed and pleased. I made a by-ordinary good citizen of the old reprobate before he died.'
'I was a proud man,' he told me, 'when I first put on those trappings. I cannot say they precisely suited my style of beauty … and the wee sword had a habit of tripping me up, times; my mother would have looked at it poking between my wee legs and said, "
But the high climax of his career came in 1912 when, forty years after he had strayed the streets of
'Ay,' he said, 'I felt grand up there at the Residency. I used to stand looking out over the sea and say to myself, "
The Government station at Abemama, which
Inland among the palms stood the District Officer's quarters, a three-roomed thatched house built wholly of native materials, its servants' quarters grouped nearby. A generous government had furnished it free, gratis (and, incidentally, for almost nothing) with floor-mats made in the female gaol; string beds – meaning beds sprung with string, not springs – manufactured by the station carpenter; six Austrian bentwood chairs; a squatter's chair; a kerosene lamp that the faintest breeze blew out; a kitchen table for the kitchen; another kitchen table for the dining-room; a china basin with ewer (not a single crack in either); and two japanned chamberpots. There was, however, also a stationery cupboard in the office, which we eventually appropriated for a wardrobe, and that, with one or two additions of our own, spelt luxury enough for us. It is astonishing how a few packing-cases with cretonne frills, and books, and photographs in silver frames, and a cheap vase or two here and there, can make a home, and I think District Officers' wives more than most others have a genius for charming miracles out of these simplicities. They have to.
Scattered around us through the trees were a small box of an office, a beautiful maneaba, and two handsome gaols, one for Choiseul, who were at sea most of the time. It was a lonely life for any white woman prone to sitting down and twiddling thumbs, but Olivia was not a twiddler. I dare not claim that her methods were always strictly legal, but she certainly was addicted to go-getting.
She began, irreproachably enough, by combing the villages for sick children and establishing a kind of nursing-home-cum-mother's-education-centre in one of the houses of the servants' quarters. There was no doctor on the island for fifty-one and a half weeks of the year, but the Dresser at the visiting station supplied simple medicines from his stock and, with the writings of Dr
Most of her cases called only for sensible hygiene or care about diet, but there were emergencies which demanded a certain inventiveness. One day, the Dresser brought along a year-old baby who, he thought, must be very near death. It looked as if he were right. The little boy's entire back and buttocks were red-raw, stripped of skin by some spreading infection. For two months in hospital the rawness had continued to eat outwards from an original rash in the small of his back. He had screamed and struggled with the pain of it at first, but now he was so weak
We had one of those medical guides issued by the
Our back premises were conveniently situated for Olivia's less innocent purposes up against the enclosure of the female gaol. That commodious building consisted of a single forty-by-thirty-foot room enclosed in heatproof walls of packed coral lime. Its deep-eaved thatch of pandanus leaf was raised on studs five feet above the top of the wall, so as to allow a continuous play of fresh air beneath the roof. It was the most heavenly-cool building on the Government station and, as Olivia observed in our third or fourth month there, absolutely wasted for the most part, because Abemama women were so law-abiding.
I personally felt that the chronic emptiness of the gaol owed
The Native Magistrate was delighted with the arrangement, and co-operated in a way that threatened to cause embarrassment at first. His argument (as we heard later) was that, as the gaol had been converted from an aridly penal institution into a first-class school for expectant mothers, it was now worth practically any young woman's while to be locked up in it. He accordingly directed his village kaubure and policemen to take more vigilant cognizance than they had formerly taken of offences committed by females of child-bearing age, in order that these, by being sent to prison, might take advantage of the course of instruction initiated by Olivia. We first learned of his commendable enthusiasm when, after a session of the Native Court that I had not attended, a flood of eleven cheerful young women (convicted of offences ranging from abusive language to assault upon a policeman) suddenly presented themselves to the wardress, with garlands of flowers on their heads, for immediate incarceration.
Olivia had at the time five patients comfortably housed in the gaol, and said she could not possibly move a single one of them out on the spur of the moment. The floor-space admitted of only seven more inmates, allowing an area of ten by ten for each person. The immediate problem was, therefore, to reduce from eleven to seven the number of the new candidates for admission. I felt that this might solve itself by natural erosion in the course of my routine review of the sentences inflicted. But the hope was a vain one; all the sentences were in perfect order and, beyond that, not a single young woman showed the least wish to appeal. On the contrary, one and all said they wanted to stay as long as the law allowed them, and longer if possible, so as to
I could, of course, hardly admit their main argument that, having been sentenced in due and proper order to terms of imprisonment, they now had an absolute right to use the prison as their education centre. But, on the other hand, an absolute obligation was upon me to see that the sentences duly and properly passed by the Native Court were carried out. So all the ladies had to be taken in. The wardress was surprised and annoyed at my weakness; it meant an unprecedented amount of work for her, and besides, she regarded the gaol as belonging now solely to Olivia, herself and the ailing expectant mothers. She made me feel as if I were quite the worst criminal in the piece. I had some initial difficulty with Olivia too; she said the idiotic working of the law would be very bad for her patients. However, we managed to get round the problem of overcrowding at once. The convicted ladies most kindly agreed to sleep in the clean thatched working sheds that stood shaded by palms within the gaol yard. It was, therefore, only innocent folk – that is to say, the wardress and patients – who occupied the actual lock-up at night.
The Native Magistrate was delighted with that arrangement too, because, as he said, it not only provided for the proper segregation of the criminal population but also made everyone feel free in spite of being in prison. I felt the same myself, but ventured to warn him that if the wave of female delinquency continued on Abemarna at that rate, it would be a pity, because it would force me to drive the ailing expectant mothers out of gaol. He replied with a cautiously worded conjecture that we had seen the worst of it, and, strangely enough, we never had more than three convictions a month after that. Furthermore, there were no new cases whatever until all but two of the
I abstained, after due reflection, from reporting the matter to headquarters. The truth is, I found it more than difficult to make out a convincing case for the summary misappropriation of one of His Majesty's Proclaimed Gaols in furtherance of a little scheme of the District Officer's wife's, however benevolently inspired. The facts, as set forth in writing and staring at me from the paper, seemed to shout of jiggery-pokery from first to last. Olivia would not admit this – she said the facts were all right: it was only the crude way I put them – but she did suggest another good reason for keeping things off the record. Her basic contention was that the
Yet, I cannot forbear from claiming that the issue was an extraordinarily happy one for all parties concerned. The village police and kaubure, inspired by the advantages which the prison offered to female offenders, became at least moderately zealous in bringing their womenfolk to court for breaches of the peace. The womenfolk, eager to learn what Olivia had to teach them, knew that all they had to do to qualify for a course of instruction was to indulge in the pleasure of cracking a village official on the head or some other equally rewarding crime. The ailing expectant mothers, surrounded by constantly renewed drafts of these interested and willing helpers, ailed so luxuriously that it was difficult to get rid of them, even when they ceased altogether to ail. The end result was the dissemination of a very reasonable knowledge of pre-natal hygiene and infant welfare among the women of Abemama. As a respectable retired official
My being the husband of a healer like Olivia and the successor of a man like
This was all I ever got out of him personally. It was O'
A sting-ray is a dangerous fish to catch on hook and line
'But why cut it out?' I said. 'Why not just pull it out with a pair of pinchers?'
'If you pull it out,' they replied, 'the barbs will break off inside him, and then, in a day or a week, he will die of the poison. The doctor always cuts them out whole and cleans the wound with the brown medicine that burns.'
I supposed they meant iodine by the brown medicine that burned. I had iodine, but, as I protested, I was not a doctor, and had nothing to stop the bleeding with.
They looked at me sorrowfully: 'The flesh will bleed. But the sting is buried in a muscle, and muscles, as you know, do not bleed.'
I did not know anything of the kind; the fact was entirely new to me, and I only half believed them until the Hospital Dresser confirmed it. 'Very well,' I said to him in a last wriggle, 'you know a lot more about it than I do – you get ahead with it.'
'Sir,' he replied, 'if I cut him and he dies, I shall be dismissed, for I have no certificate for performing operations. But if you cut him and I sew him up, I shall not be dismissed even in the event of his death, because I shall be able to say to the Doctor, "Behold!
That seemed to settle it to everyone's moral satisfaction. I felt that not even the
I was a little more experienced in midwifery than surgery, thanks to the teaching of Native Medical Practitioner Sowani. Mighty-limbed, six-foot Sowani, son of a Fijian father and a Tongan mother, prince of fishermen and king of canoe-racers, was also the pride and glory of the Gilbert and
It was necessarily the cases of abnormal presentation that Sowani introduced me to at Tarawa. No Gilbertese woman of those days would dream of calling for medical help in normal circumstances. Childbearing as a function had no terror and little discomfort for those lissom-bodied mothers. When the hour of labour came, their single fear was for the evil magic that enemy sorcerers might direct against them, and that was a thing their mothers and grandmothers knew better how to circumvent than any imported medical authority, they thought. Beyond this too, the Gilbertese women's deep modesty about being seen
As I was struggling one morning in the office with accounts, the queer high-pitched wailing of a woman began to distract me from my work. It did not strike loud on my ears, for it came wavering through the trees from the Native Government quarters a hundred yards off; what forced it on my notice was its insistence; it fluctuated between two monotonous semitones and there was hardly a break in it. I fought it with irritation for half an hour, but, as I listened, the strange quality of it began to make me uneasy. I got up at last and walked over to the Native Government lines.
I found the wailing girl in the home of her father, one of the station policemen. She sat there naked, head back, eyes shut, her mouth stiffly agape, as if levered open by an unseen hand to make way for her desolate cry. The cry itself seemed, queerly, not to be hers at all, but rather a sound forced through her throat by some alien thing inside her. But perhaps that was only my morbid reaction to the terrible distension of her stomach. From immediately under her ribs she was so swollen that the taut skin, stretched as it seemed to bursting point, shone like satin.
Her mother tried to cover her with a sheet when I entered, but, without a moment's interruption of her keening, she flung it away. She had first stripped off her clothes, the old woman said, when her stomach had begun to swell the night before. The swelling had started after she had woken with a wild scream, round about midnight. Since then, she had sat naked and bolt upright, impregnably silent and grinding her teeth while the distension grew and grew, until this morning, an hour ago, when she had started to wail.
'But why didn't you call someone last night,' I asked: 'the Dresser or me? You knew she was ill.'
The old woman remained dumb. I turned to the father. 'And what did you do about it?' He hung his head mutely too. I scribbled a note to the Dresser, telling him to bring sedatives –I couldn't think of anything better – and rounded on the parents again; but I could get only one thing out of them before the Dresser arrived: 'Nothing can be of any avail against this sickness,' they said, 'for it is the work of Terakunene. She called his name when she awoke.'
Terakunene was the sword-fish spirit, the procurer of women for men. It was to him that a rejected suitor turned for revenge upon the girl who refused him. His help was enlisted, according to tradition, through a hair of the girl's head. If the unsuccessful suitor could possess himself of one, he tied it around his thigh, just above the knee, and wore it so for three days, fasting alone in some solitary place by the ocean beach. On the third evening, just after dark, he built a small fire of sticks, sat before it with his face towards the sea, plucked the hair from his thigh, and, waving it back and forth over the flames, muttered north, west and south in turn:
With the last 'dead', he threw the hair into the fire. The belief was that unless the girl gave him his will of her within the next three days, the sword-fish spirit himself would visit her on the third night. She would wake mad from a dream of his embraces, shrieking his name, her belly swelling with his child. On the third night after that, she would die.
The Dresser arrived with bromide, the only sedative he had. It proved useless. I would have tried putting her to sleep with
If Terakunene magic did come into this case, as the parents and villagers believed, it is probable that the poor girl's revengeful lover told her he was about to set the sword-fish spirit on her; in that event, self-hypnosis, quickened by her inheritance of age-old dreads, could conceivably have done the rest – or so I have been told. But I never found a scrap of evidence to show that Terakunene magic had indeed been used. The parents clung hard to the fact that she had woken up screaming the spirit's name; but this proved nothing save that she had had a nightmare. For the rest, her sickness had followed the course traditionally ascribed to the working of Terakunene spells; but village traditions and inferences drawn from them do not make medico-legal evidence. My personal belief is not that the symptoms of the disease were brought on, in this or any other case, by magic, but that the magic and the people's belief in it were simply the by-products of a myth which attempted to explain the symptoms. What the terrible sickness was is more likely to be discovered by medical investigation than by psychical research.
By good fortune, one of the abnormal cases I had seen Sowani deal with at Tarawa was what he called in Gilbertese a double-hand presentation. I was glad of the experience a year or so later on the island of
I was on my back with dysentery at the time, but I could not possibly ignore such a summons. I sent the messenger off at once with a promise to be there anon, and had myself rowed, with such paraphernalia and antiseptics as I possessed, up lagoon to the village. But I did not feel good-tempered on the way. Amoebic dysentery is a fretful, weakening business and I thought Fate might have timed things better for all concerned, especially my grudging self. I mention this because of the pretty, golden-brown girl who met us on the village beach. She signalled us in from where she leaned, crowned with a white-wreath and smoking a pipe, against a palm tree at the beach head. She was evidently there to guide me, but she did not move from her restful position when I stumbled up the loose sand towards her. That irritated me in my peevish mood. I was angrier still when my groggy legs gave out and I fell sprawling. I shouted, 'Here, come and help me up,' with never a 'please' or a smile.
She was dressed only in a short kilt of smoke-cured water weeds and it was easy to see, as she came to pick me up, that she was pregnant. When she got closer, I saw that her face was pallid and deeply drawn. That in itself reproved my rudeness. But it was her kindness that most abashed me. 'Alas!' she cried as soon as she saw how weak I was, 'you are ill, Man of Matang. Alas! They should not have called you!' and, putting her arm around my waist, made me walk with mine about her shoulders while she carried my bag for me.
I knew that by 'they' she meant the sick woman's midwives and told her – I am glad to remember – that they had been quite
The coarseness of her phrase about another woman's misfortune and the callousness of her laughter made a too shocking contrast with her dignity and kindness of a moment before. My anger flared up again. I drew away from her: 'You laugh, woman – you will yourself be bearing a child before long? Nei
She laughed again in my face, with plain merriment this time: 'I am not wicked. I am not a fool. I know that woman is nearly dead. But I do not pity her. Why should she be afraid of dying? Perhaps she would like to die.'
She had the brilliant laughter of her race, carefree and golden voiced, but I was too outraged to respond. 'We waste time,' I said. 'Bring me quickly to the house.'
We walked down the lily-bordered village street, she chuckling from time to time, I aloof from her ruthless humour, leaning nevertheless heavily upon her shoulders. The villagers called cheerful greeting to us as we passed. After a hundred yards or so, she stopped at a house with no one in it, saying, 'I pray you, be seated here a little, while I go and prepare that woman for your coming.' She leaned forward over the raised floor, put my bag down, and pulled a mat to the edge for me to sit upon. Then, 'We shall meet again,' she murmured and slowly walked to a house across the road, hung with leaf screens. Before she lifted a screen to enter, she turned her beautiful smile once more towards me and called, 'We think the baby is dead. But that woman does not in truth want to die. Perhaps she is indeed afraid, a little. O, that you could drag the baby out of her!'
The repetition of that crude phrase, and the wambling of my
Nei
I tried to do things as I had seen Sowani do them at Tarawa. I was helped a little in my geography by having read
I gave her ergot and the baby was born at last. Though it was not living, there was no trouble with the after-birth, or haemorrhage, or temperature, or any other complication; the mother was, in short, saved. That was important, but it is not, for all that, the point of the story. Doing last things for my patient before leaving, I suddenly remembered the girl on the beach. I felt pretty righteous by that time, and it seemed to me that a slating for her heartless crudities would do her a lot of good. I asked Nei
The old woman looked at me but did not speak. I repeated my question, with more information about what the girl had said.
'But, Sir, you have indeed dragged the baby out of this woman,' she replied with a smile, 'and we thank you for it.'
'But who is this girl? That is what I am asking you,' I insisted
'Then where is she? She must be near at hand. Bring her to me.'
She suddenly took my hand in hers and smiled into my eyes: 'Sir, I have only one daughter, and she lies here before you. Please do not be angry with her.'
My service in the amoeba) from which I was rescued by the providential arrival of a ship at the end of 1917. The doctor on board ordered me to
When I got as far as Tarawa, I found there would be no ship to Abemama for three or four months. I was glad of that excuse to stay a while, for things were in a queer state there. The District Officer who had replaced me in the
The situation was due, in a way, to my own silly fault. Passing through Tarawa on the way to
Tarawa was always at high tension about land-ownership. It dated from the dramatic day I have already told of, when the coming of h.m.s. Royalist
had interrupted a war between the House of Teabike and the House of
From 1892 onwards, the people of Teabike flooded successive District Officers with claims for the 'return' of the land which they had just not conquered, and, unfortunately, many of them got their way. This excited counter-claims from status quo ruling of
It was Mautake-Maeke's own father, 'Old Maeke', as we used to call him, who had started the trouble I found on my return from Royalist, and hand these over lock, stock and barrel to the House of Teabike.
His whisper was put out in Betio, Teabike's village at the south end of Tarawa. It gathered force there, and went forth as a shout of triumph across-lagoon to Buariki at the north end. Buariki's maneaba roared with the news. The lie swept like a storm from north and south through the other sixteen villages. The people of
All these things had happened in early January, four months before my return. Since then, Mautake had done all he could to give the lie to Maeke's boast. Disowned as a traitor by his own folk and constantly stoned as the arch-enemy in his passage through the villages of
For three months and two weeks his courageous constancy
He replied without hesitation, 'It is good: I shall be with you tomorrow.'
He had been a pagan until then, but the next day he went to Father Guichard of the Sacred Heart Mission. 'I am going oack to that village at once,' he said; 'my ancestor the Moon will protect me. Nevertheless, if perhaps I am killed and my body is thrown to the sharks there can be no straightening of the path of my ghost past Nakaa's net. Therefore baptize me, so that I may go the Christians' road to paradise.' The Father baptized him after hesitation, as a man on the point of death.
He returned to the village that night. Walking between the black shadows of the houses, he discarded his usual message for another: 'Here I am, you people, Mautake the son of Maeke. You said you would kill me if I returned. Let it be so if you will: I sleep in your maneaba tonight. I will die so that you may better remember these, my last words, the House of Teabike lies; wait for Kurimbo.'
When I arrived, three weeks later, it was not he but Father Guichard who told me of how he had gone to be baptized. What happened to him in the village was revealed to me later, in a way so typical of the Gilbertese idea of drama that I dare not pre-empt the climax. The immediate, personal account he gave me of the part he had played treated his lonely patrol as nothing but a piece of ordinary official routine.
Neither resentment against anyone nor any sign of hankering after praise came out of him. He was the perfect official, absolutely uninterested in himself as the hero of a piece, bent only on getting the thing settled and forgotten for everybody's happiness. His only reply to my thanks for what he had done was, 'There is peace for a little now, but the path is not yet open to the end. Perhaps, if you will call a meeting at Abaokoro, we shall find the end together.'
Abaokoro was the Native
A week after that, I took my place at the table in the vast Native Government maneaba under the scrutiny of two thousand pairs of watchful, unsmiling eyes. There was dead silence as I plugged my painful way through the things I was bound to say of Teabike's lies, and
As I talked into their rigid silence, I remembered rather wryly how, three years earlier in that very maneaba, the old Native Magistrate had predicted that my words would one day blow upon them like a strong wind. It was not happening so this day, I thought. But yet it came through to me somehow that the minds behind those veiled eyes were not unfriendly to Mautake or myself. Something in the air – I don't know what – said quite distinctly that the force that held them so grimly unresponsive was the precarious balance of some kind of apprehension that they felt for each other.
What I did not know was that every man in that packed crowd had a knife handy for self-defence under the mat at his feet. Mautake knew, but he did not tell me until afterwards. I think his judgement was right. Had I known it at the time, I should almost certainly have taken the gesture for a prelude to attack, not defence, and tried to be heavy-handed about it, with who-can-say-what consequences. As things were, I did get the right impression: their fear of each other was what I had chiefly to guard against, and I managed to avoid saying anything that might set them fighting for shame of seeming fearful.
Mautake himself invented the way for me to set
It was a brilliant idea and I followed it to the letter. Everybody was bursting to talk, but nobody wanted to commit himself. I could almost hear the tension in the maneaba relaxing – like the hum of a dynamo running down – as I explained the notion of a council composed of village elders and myself which promised to treat them to nothing but advice. A relieved murmur swept through the place as I finished. But there was just one more thing that
Nobody rose to speak; only a voice called from far back in the crowd, 'Mautake-o-o!'
'Stand and speak!' answered Mautake.
Still nobody stood, but the voice came again, 'Mautake! Will Kurimbo not be afraid?' and stopped short.
Mautake smiled: 'What marvel is this? Afraid of what?'
'Will Kurimbo come to us in our village and sleep there without the men of Teabike around him?'
'Which village, O man without a name?'
'Any village of
'I will bring myself to Tabontebike tomorrow night.'
'Not with thee, Mautake-o-o! Not with any man. Alone. We of
Some voices were raised in protest, but Mautake silenced them: 'Kurimbo has walked much with the men of Teabike in Betio,' he said. 'Is it not right that those of
In the circumstances, there was nothing left for me to say but what he himself had said to
The next evening, an orderly took me down to Tabontebike by canoe, strung up my mosquito-net in the maneaba there, and left me with some tins of food and a book of
The stage certainly seemed set for drama when they did arrive. A sound of creeping steps awoke me. I lifted my net to find a dozen of them surrounding me. By the dim light of my hurricane lamp I saw spears in their hands. They stood wordless while I arose, trussed the slack of the net up over its canvas roof, and sat down again on the sleeping mat.
I won't deny that the spears struck me as sinister. The sight of them made me feel strangely naked in my pyjamas. But I did manage, as soon as I was seated, to give them an ordinary greeting. I got an immediate reward for that. The quick heartiness of their response, 'Ko na auri-o-o' all together, swept away any notion I may have had that they had come to do me in.
'Sit down,' I said, perhaps a trifle breathlessly, and they sat. I handed tobacco around.
It was only when pipes were going strong that their leader spoke, and I learned why they had made such a point of my being alone. They wanted to tell me a story. 'It was thus, with spears in our hands,' said the spokesman, 'that we came to kill that friend of thine, even Mautake the son of Maeke, when he dared to return that night and sleep alone in our maneaba …'
I remembered as he talked how Mautake's cousin, Teriakai, had said to me once, 'If you stay still in the sea, the tiger-shark will charge you. If you swim away from them in fear, they will smell your fear and chase you. If you swim without fear towards them, they will be afraid and leave you in peace.' I think it is the same with angry men as with tiger-sharks, except that, with
'We had sworn among ourselves to kill him if he returned,' he said; 'and so, when he came, we took up our spears. And when it was past midnight, we crept to our meeting-place near this maneaba. But I came with sadness in my heart. I said in my heart, "I do not want to kill this man", for I was kunainga (awed), as it were in the presence of a spirit. Yet if I had been alone, I should surely have killed him, because I had sworn to do so. Each man of us, alone, would have killed him, for shame of breaking the oath.
'We gathered in the blackness under the trees, because the moon was bright. There were twelve of us. And we knew that Mautake would be lying in the boti of Maerua, the place of his fathers within the maneaba, with his feet towards the west. So we said, "Let six of us stand on his north side and six on the south, and strike all together when the word is given.' I myself was to say the word. I did not refuse, because I was ashamed. And we went to the side of the maneaba by the boti of Maerua.
'We stood by the side of the maneaba, but behold then a marvellous thing! The moon stepped between two clouds, and it was light. We saw each others' faces. I looked into the eyes of my friends, and I knew that their hearts refused that work, even as mine did, because they also were kunainga. And because the first word had been given to me, I said, "Men-o-o! What are we about to do? Our hearts refuse this work!" One answered me, "It is true. Our hearts are heavy." Others said after him, "It is true. This man is, as it were, a spirit and we are kunainga in his presence." Others said again, "If this man is so ready to die for what he has told us, perhaps his word and not the word of his father is the true one." So I said, "Men-o-o! Let us free each other of our oath." And we freed each other, and were glad, and returned to our houses.
'And many among us said after that night, "Perhaps Mautake has indeed not lied to us. Perhaps Kurimbo will indeed not take away our lands and give them to the men of Teabike." So we stoned Mautake no more when he walked through our villages.
'And there were some who said, "Let us tell Mautake now that we will listen to the
'And others said again, "Yes, and even if Kurimbo speaks us fair when he arrives, how shall we know his inward thought? How shall we know he is our true friend after what we have done to Mautake?"
'So, when Mautake came to call us to the meeting at Abao-koro, this was the way of it: we agreed among ourselves that we would go to the meeting, but we said to one another, "We will seek a sign from Kurimbo, whether he is our friend or not. If he is not our friend, he will refuse to come alone to us. But if he does not refuse to come alone, then we shall know that there is no anger against us in his heart." And behold! you did not refuse. So we know you are our friend.'
Dawn made a garden of wild rose and daffodil in the sky as they sailed me back to Abaokoro. We shared my bully-beef and biscuits among us for breakfast on the way. I don't know when I have ever enjoyed a meal more than that one.
I went straight to Mautake from the landing. He was glad to hear my story of the night's happenings, but he only smiled when I talked of his courage: 'I knew myself safe in my boti of Maerua,' he explained. 'Sleeping there, I was in the hand of the Moon, my Ancestor. And was I not right to believe in his love?' (The moon was male for the Gilbertese.) 'Did not those men of
But the people of his father's house could measure just how much cold nerve it had taken to risk what he had risked that night. The men of Teabike were proud to reclaim him as son and brother. The men of
Hundreds flocked to our court. Thousands of lies were told. Wars two centuries old were dragged up. Victories nobody had
But they talked. They talked themselves dry. All the goading, gnawing prides and envies of five generations came surging out of them in that grand three months of free-for-anybody before the packed audience of the maneaba. You might think it could only have doubled the fury of ancient bitternesses to encourage such goings-on, but it did just the opposite. Mautake knew his people. The freedom to let themselves go, unrestrained, before the whole listening world of their island, friends and enemies alike, was what mattered to them most of all. It was as if the deepest need they felt was to purge themselves of a century of clotted rancours, regardless of consequences, in one last tremendous orgy of words.
As claim after egregious claim was found wanting,
'It is over' – Tata made him say – 'and where shall I go now?
It is over, you people: I shall get me a ship and disappear over the horizon.
For all is said, the first word and the last. I shall go out there, where the porpoise and the whale are sunk; I shall be High Chief of the ocean and Royalist
comes again to prevent me.'
And then, to round it off, the poet's own envoi:
Behold! the back-and-forth, the dartings, the stabbings of my words are done!
The poem was reckoned by the experts of Teabike to be a masterpiece of diction and, beyond that, a glorious joke against themselves. They set it to the music and statuesque gestures of a bino (sitting dance), put one hundred and twenty of their finest performers to practise it secretly, and produced it one gala night in the Native Government maneaba before an enthralled audience of two thousand. The thing swept Tarawa off its feet for admiration and laughter. For the next six months, nothing but that bino was danced in the villages of
The work of the Choiseul
had come up from Abemama on her own business some days before and was waiting to take me back to the
Our first landfall was
There was no talk in the canoe until we had shot the big surf in the boat-passage, but when we had made calm water the Native Magistrate said suddenly apropos of nothing, 'We hear Tabanea is dead.'
The Tabanea he meant was my old friend the professional sorcerer of Tarawa. The death of a man like that could not fail to set the whole group talking, for there was not an island where he had not a crowd of customers for his peerless love-potions and amulets. But he wasn't dead, I told the Native Magistrate; I had seen him only the week before, heartily enjoying the great song and dance at Tarawa.
It did not seem to impress him, though; he chatted on as if I had not spoken; 'They say he died the day before yesterday, in the evening, of te bo maiaona (a blow from above him).'
'What's a blow from above him? Who says? What ship brought the news? Certainly not ours,' I countered irritably.
It appeared that a blow from above him meant what we might call a seizure or stroke. He did not state who had spread the rumour, but said no ship had brought it. He was bound to say that; ours was, in fact, the only deep-sea craft in the Gilberts at the moment; the other was down in the Ellice group.
'So there you are,' I wound up rather pompously, 'it's just another silly bit of village tittle-tattle.'
'Tao eng (perhaps, yes),' he murmured, 'tao eng' – meaning roughly, 'Oh, well, let it go at that' – and changed the subject.
The whole thing had slipped out of my mind by the time we landed. I was so used to village rumours of that sort. Nobody else mentioned Tabanea to me for the forty-eight hours I stayed on Onotoa; probably the Magistrate had warned everybody that the subject irritated me: in any case, it was not until I got to Arorae, the last island of the
Arorae lies out in the blue, 100 miles from Onotoa. It is a lagoonless wisp of coral sand and coconuts, open on every side to the towering Pacific swells. When westerly gales sweep up at it, the huge surf bellows week-long on the weather reef like a million driven bulls raging at the thresholds of the villages. The westerlies blew hard for most of my stay. I couldn't get away from that tortured roar, or the yelling of the coconut-crests in the wind. The ceaseless, smothering din did something to my relations with the people; somehow, it seemed to be always between us. I felt very lonely among them. Perhaps that made me a good subject for a game of brown man's bluff.
Bluff or not, it began when I had endured nearly a week of the place. My one familiar friend on Arorae, a retired Tarawa policeman, married to a local woman and on a visit to his in-laws, came to look me up. Tarawa men adore a comfortable chin-wag, especially in their own dialect when they are among strangers. I fancy that was what tempted him to be so extra-communicative
I smiled, 'Now, now … you got that bit of gossip from Onotoa … by our ship.'
He denied this blankly. He said he had heard it the Sunday before last. I pointed out that his timing made nonsense for me: our ship had not even arrived at Onotoa by this date. But he persisted that our ship had nothing to do with the case. He had heard about Tabanea's death the Sunday before last from his wife's very aged and absolutely infallible kinswoman, Nei Watia.
'Nei Watia has another name as a baptized Christian, but, for this kind of thing, one must always call her Watia,' he explained.
'What kind of thing?' I naturally asked.
He was too wrapped up in his main theme to answer that at once. The old woman, he drove on, had mentioned two important details: Tabanea had died just before sunset, of a blow from above him.
I rubbed it in that the phrase was precisely the one that the Native Magistrate of Onotoa had used, but he overrode the irony: 'Naturally the words are the same,' he said, 'the news-bearers do not speak with two voices. What they reported in Onotoa they reported to Nei Watia also, here in Arorae.'
This was at least good entertainment, so I asked for more about Nei Watia's exceedingly single-voiced news-bearers.
It appeared they were alternatively called Taani-kanimomoi – The Whistlers. He said the Whistlers were the ghosts of dead relations … not the very long dead ones … the more recently dead. These made a constant habit of returning to the Gilberts. Their domain was the air (he called it 'the layer of wind' – as it were, the invisible plane) just above the level of the coconut-crests. At that height, they flew up and down the islands seeing and hearing everything that happened. They came lower from time to time and passed the news on to anyone alive who understood their speech. Not many people did understand it, because they spoke in whistles; but Watia was an adept; she had power; she could actually order her particular ghost to come along and answer questions whenever she wanted.
I took his talk for a big boast. It was only by way of calling his bluff that I asked whether his infallible relation-in-law would undertake to ask her ghost a question from me. But, far from piping down, he put me on the spot instead.
'Aongkoa (Of course)' he replied at once. 'Is it indeed your wish that I should ask her?'
I found it was not particularly my wish, but I could not withdraw. The upshot was that he came back the next night with an invitation for me to go with him at once to Nei Watia.
I followed him through the bush to a stony, treeless space above the weather beach. It was a wild night; the place was shuddering and thundering with the fury of the surf; but the moonlight flooded it starkly between racing cloud-shadows. A solitary screened shack stood out in the open, fifty paces away. I saw the glimmer of a faint light through the plaited screens. He pointed: 'There is Nei Watia,' he said; 'I cannot go in with you,' and left me standing there. I watched him plunge back into the blackness of the bush.
The thatch was so low that I could not stand upright inside. A hurricane lamp was burning on the floor. An incredibly aged face was glaring up at me round the light, almost from floor-level. It had a cutty pipe in its mouth; its lips were moving but I heard no words. I stood there mute until a skeleton hand flailing above the face ordered me to be seated. I squatted, cross-legged as she was, on my side of the lamp, fascinated by that ruinous, wild-haired mask. The lips moved again, but the roaring of the night drowned her voice. I craned an ear forward. Then with atrocious suddenness the mask was convulsed and lunged up at me. She tore the pipe from her gums and shrieked into my face, 'Tabanea is dead!' Nothing but that. I had not recovered from the shock of it when the whistling began.
A single note, strident, like a cricket's, sounded from behind my left ear. I whipped my head around. Nobody was there. A second chirrup fell from the roof. I sprang to my feet; my head struck the ridge pole; the witch screamed with laughter; but I hardly noticed it, for the whistling was at once all around me. It wasn't harsh now, but multitudinous. It crowded in on my ears
I dived out into the moonlight and pelted round the shed. In that white glare everything was visible. There was nobody on the roof, no tree, no sizeable rock within fifty yards where anyone could be hiding. Back under the thatch, I fell on hands and knees to stare into the crone's face. Her gums were clenched, but still the twittering went on overhead. There was no break in it even when she shouted at me, 'The Ancestor waits. What is your question?'
The Ancestor might have been her father for all I knew. I did not ask, but shouted back at once, sprawling there on my knees, 'When will the Japanese ship be returning to Arorae?'
She stared at me for a long moment: 'You have told us the ship will not return,' she said at last.
'Yes, yes, grandmother,' I replied, 'but perhaps I was wrong. What does the Ancestor say?'
Her answer was to twist her face over her huddled shoulder and howl at the roof, 'The Man of Matang asks when the ship of the
The twittering ceased. For half a minute I heard nothing but the noises of the night. Then there came a morse-like succession of strident chirrups, followed by a dozen phrases of something like birdsong that faded gradually back into the clamour of wind and sea.
'The Ancestor has spoken,' muttered the witch; 'count twenty-three days from tonight, and the ship will arrive.' That ended the session.
'Well – so much for the whistling ghosts and their news!' I said to myself outside. 'A mere trick of ventriloquism.' Just how she could have whistled and talked at the same time, or thrown a chirrup with her mouth shut, I couldn't imagine; and I was puzzled to think why she should have said the ship would come when I said it wouldn't. I decided she had been caught in my little trap 'perhaps I was wrong'. 'What an old hoax – she and her precious Ancestor!' I thought, clinging to the hoax idea rather desperately as I groped my way home through the screaming darkness of the bush.
But the fact is, Tabanea was dead, and he had died in the evening, and the cause of his death was a blow from above him – an embolism, the doctor called it. He was found lying in his dwelling-house at just about the time I went on board the ketch at Tarawa. The ketch lay anchored eleven miles down-lagoon from his village. Obviously, the crew could have heard the news before we left next morning. But, knowing how fond I was of him, they wouldn't – they couldn't conceivably – have kept the thing to themselves on our southward run, had they heard it. It was the very first news they rushed to tell me when they came back to pick me up.
Also, the Japanese ship did return. The prediction was a little out in point of time; she arrived on the twenty-second day not the twenty-third. She came to pick up two copra-lighters which she had left at Arorae.
When a man is dying, the main concern of Christians is that he should be at peace with his Maker before he goes. In pagan rituals, the emphasis is not usually upon what happens before death: the rightness of the ceremonies performed immediately after death is what matters most for the safe passage of the departing ghost to paradise. The two kinds of belief are poles apart, but either can raise problems for the living.
Father Choblet, a French priest of the Sacred Heart Mission in the
Father Choblet's parish was
The regulations, as they stood then, prohibited canoe-voyages between the islands from the end of September to the end of March every year. That period, in the
One morning, a westerly gale was working up to full fury around
It was Father Choblet's canoe-boys who told me what happened next. 'When he came and ordered us to launch the canoe,' they said, 'we thought he had gone mad. So we spoke to him softly of the Government's laws about travelling. That made him laugh, laugh; and then he did not laugh any more, but told us about Father Franchiteau. Yet still we thought he was mad, for there was death in the sea for all of us that day. When we told him of our fear he turned away, saying, "All of us? Who spoke of all? I am going alone," and he put his little bag on the canoe. Then suddenly he looked to us like a spirit. He is a very small
Only a Gilbertese canoe-man could tell you just how they fought through the terrible surf, but they did. None of the crew could ever remember clearly how they got within sight of
The bureaucratic sequel is worth recording. Officialdom, of course, simply had to take notice of the affair. The Father had incited three Gilbertese boys to break the law and risk almost certain death in doing so. He was not himself subject to the native regulations. Only the boys could be prosecuted, and, legally speaking, the religious motive of their errand gave them not a leg to stand on in defence. I was not the District Officer who saw that they were brought to court. It was
It was
Tabanaora was the eldest of eight brothers who lived in a northern village of Tarawa. He was a man of thirty or more when Tebina, the youngest, came up for initiation into manhood. He himself had schooled Tebina, through twelve long months of ritual segregation, to face the stern ordeal. The boy went through the terrible test by fire without the flicker of an eyelid. Tabanaora's love soared (in the words of my old friend) as proud as the frigate-bird up against the noon-day sun. But his joy was short-lived, for Tebina was killed by a tiger-shark the very day after he had been pronounced cured of his burns.
The shark took him after sunrise, as he stood fishing with rod and line, breast-deep on a sandbank by his home village. He was seen from the shore to fling up his arms of a sudden and go under. That was the last of him. A dozen canoes went to search the bank, but no trace of his body remained.
It was not only grief for his personal loss that weighed on Tabanaora, but fear for the boy's after-life too. Baptized Christian or not, he still believed in Nakaa, the guardian of the gate between earth and paradise. There at the gate he sat forever, waiting to strangle in his net the ghosts of those unhappy dead whose way into the life beyond had not been ritually straightened. The straightening of Tebina's way was impossible – and he was doomed to everlasting extinction – unless at least
But Tabanaora had a hope to buoy him. The shark would probably return at the same hour next day to the bank where it had made its kill. Such is the habit of the brutes, and he built upon it. He prepared himself for what he had to do next by fasting all day alone in his screened hut by the lagoonside.
At sunset he emerged and crossed the narrow breadth of the land to the ocean beach, carrying with him his ten-foot spear of fire-hardened wood. He laboured all night by torchlight, to the thunder of the surf, arming the spear's edges from hilt to tip with the razor-sharp teeth of tiger-sharks that he himself had slain. Shark eats shark, as everybody knows. At dawn he stood on the beach naked, to call a blessing on his finished handiwork. My old mission-teacher gave me the exact words of his prayer: this is the literal translation of them—
So fortified in the strength of all the powers he believed benign, he turned and strode through the morning stillness of the coconut grove back to the quiet lagoonside. He walked without speech or pause into the shallows. The villagers crowded to stare in silence from the beach-head as he waded and swam with his spear to meet his brother's killer.
The shark gave him no time to wait and think. It was already on the prowl nearby. His feet were hardly planted on the sandbank when its dorsal fin was seen racing straight in at him from behind. The watchers roared a warning. He whipped round, saw, side-stepped, and thrust. The point of the spear glanced off its leather hide. But he was safe for a few moments: tiger-sharks cannot turn quickly; the monster surged past, to reverse direction thirty yards off.
Its approach was more cautious this time; it began to circle him slowly, and that was just what Tabanaora wanted. It gave him the chance to measure his distances as the circles gradually
He hauled it ashore by the tail, triumphantly intoning the Onward Christian Soldiers. It was dragged to his house-place under the arching palms, where he cut it open with incantations to Nakaa and the ancestral shades. The remains of Tebina his brother were in its maw. There was enough of them, by his reckoning, to ensure the straightening of the boy's path past Nakaa's strangling net, through the gate, and so into Bouru, and Mwaiku, and Neineaba, those lands of ancient desire beyond the western horizon. The pious rites began at once. Both the divination by leaves and the divination by stones on the third day showed them to have been wholly successful.
Tabanaora's fight happened before the Flag came to the islands. Of course, if it had happened under British rule, this story, like Father Choblet's, would have had its bureaucratic sequel. Not that anyone ever invented a law to prohibit duels with tiger-sharks; but Tabanaora's night-session on the ocean beach would have constituted an infringement of the curfew regulations. Very serious. Nevertheless, I conjecture that his District Officer would have managed to square the law with justice, as
But what I like best of all to remember about Father Choblet's act and Tabanaora's is the common denominator of their courage. It is an exact one. The priest knew that he himself would die unshriven if he failed to reach
The trouble that had kept me five weeks at Arorae was a quarrel between the whole people and an acting District Officer, which ended in his return to
The history of our doings at or near Beru began at sea, five miles out from the weather reef, an hour and a half before sunset on an evening of ferocious westerly squalls. There is no ship's entrance to Beru lagoon and the bottom is dangerous for half a mile outside the boat-passage. The captain of our ship was justified in standing well clear of a lee shore in weather like that; but we felt he had rather overdone it when we contemplated the landing-craft he had set at our disposal. He said the rickety launch and two boats towed behind it were all he could spare for the accommodation of Olivia and three infants; three
We sixteen humans were huddled one on top of the other into the stern-sheets of the launch. Olivia was perched on the knee of Sila, the cook, while I sat in the lap of full-bosomed Faasolo, his wife, Joan's nursemaid. The dunnage was piled in the boats, mountains high, with the goats balanced on the peaks as if back in their native highlands. The sea was brutally steep and the squalls brought driving rain that had soaked us through before we left the ship's side. The captain lost his nerve in the last minute, when he looked down at the wallowing, overloaded craft: 'Don't you think you had better take a third boat?' he yelled overside, as if we hadn't asked for one.
'Tell him,' said Olivia to me, 'I wouldn't accept another boat from him if he were the Emperor of
Chickens cackling, goats bleating, children wailing for wetness, misery and fear, we lurched off on the five-mile run to the boat-passage. If the ancient engine had conked out – as it showed signs of doing – before we reached safety, we should have been swept helplessly by sea and wind down on the raging reef, for there wasn't a hope of getting oars out in those packed craft. But it did not conk out, and suddenly, in the middle of a blinding rain squall from the south-west, when nothing but the sea-sense of our steersman held us true on our south-east course from ship to passage, we found ourselves in calm water. Guided by ear alone, with visibility zero, he had turned suddenly due east through a break in the crashing surf at exactly the right moment. 'Moment' is no exaggeration; a mistake of ten seconds more or less would have destroyed us. But Gilbertese steersmen do not make such mistakes.
It was low tide. Beru lagoon is very shallow inside the passage, and the boats could not go far in, so Olivia, the children, their cots, their nursemaids, and I transhipped into canoes that had come to meet us. We took a few tins of milk and soup with us. The others stayed behind to deal with the rest of the stuff.
'There's the kitchen roof,' I said, pointing to a thatch just visible between trees two miles across the water; 'we'll soon be there now.'
Our spirits rose. We began to organize as we went along. I had seen the District Officer's quarters on my first recruiting trip three years before, as
The blustering night was upon us before we reached shore. 'We'll put the children in the middle room,' Olivia decided: 'We'll have the one next to your office for ourselves, and that will leave the one nearest the kitchen for a dining-room.' We said how marvellous it was, after all our goings and comings in strange houses, to be able to plan surely, cosily like that again. It looked to us almost as if Providence had set the stage – the comfortless ship, the screaming squalls, the perilous passage into safety – to sharpen our delight at having a home of our own waiting to take us in now … at once … just over there, where that light was glimmering through the sodden darkness.
'We'll get a roaring fire started right away in the kitchen stove and warm the children by it while we're waiting for the things to come ashore,' I said.
'Yes, and we'll hot up some milk for them and have a tin of soup for ourselves, to keep us going,' Olivia answered, as another rain squall plunged down on us.
It was black dark on the beach, but the Native Magistrate and Chief Kaubure were there with a hurricane lamp to guide us. It
There was, in fact, no stove. The Magistrate said something about it having been taken to Onotoa by my predecessor. However, that was no moment to be bemoaning details. The children were crying with cold and hunger. The first thing to do was to get a fire started somehow. The Magistrate and Chief Kaubure brought in dry sticks from somewhere and soon had a blaze going on the floor, with a kerb of big coral rocks around it. We took the babies out of their dripping clothes, wrapped them in blankets and stood their cots around the glow. The smoke was appalling, but there was warmth. 'And now for a saucepan and some milk,' said Olivia.
But there was no saucepan either. Everything of that kind had gone to Onotoa with the stove. My predecessor had made Onotoa his headquarters for the past year or more. The fact was known to me and I was the goat for not having foreseen the natural consequences. However, as Olivia said, we had our own utensils, and in the meantime a kettle would do for the milk if anybody had one. The Magistrate did have one, and the children got their warm drink with some biscuits we had brought for them. But before we got down to the soup, a thought struck Olivia: 'Perhaps we shouldn't move the children tonight. There's room in here for a double bed if we push out one of the cots. I'll share it with Joan by the fire; I'm pretty cold myself; there'll be no smoke when the fire burns clear.'
It seemed to me an excellent idea. The storm had blown itself out, the rain had stopped and I saw stars through the holes in the thatch. I believed I could squeeze a single bed into a corner for myself. We put the soup on and called for beds. They arrived eventually, on loan, from houses in the Native Government lines. The beds belonging to our own quarters had, unfortunately gone to Onotoa along with the stove and saucepans.
The substitutes so kindly lent to us were solid wooden affairs,
I went out by the way we had come in and made straight through the trees for the canoes, eighty yards away. The night was now still, but very dark. It was fumbling work getting all that stuff dumped on the beach from the canoes by the dim light of hurricane lamps. I picked out the bundles of bedding and sent them back to the kitchen. 'Now get the rest taken and spread out on the front verandah,' I told my orderly.
He was a Tarawa man and strange to the place: 'Where is the verandah?' he asked.
I pointed inland: 'Up there, as straight as you can go.'
He went through the screen of trees with a lamp to get the lie of the land and I returned to report all well to Olivia. Our troubles were over. This had been a real adventure … fun to write home about when we had settled in and all that … but thank heaven it was only for a night. We were just getting ready to turn in when the orderly appeared at the door: 'I cannot find the verandah,' he said simply: 'I have searched south, I have searched north, I have searched middle. In the south there is another thatched house like this, very old and dirty, but in the midst between that and this there is no verandah.'
'You'd better go and see what he means,' said Olivia. She smiled, but she already knew in her heart as well as I did what the answer was. There was in very truth no verandah in the midst between. It had accompanied the stove, and the saucepans, and the beds to Onotoa. So had the rest of the house and everything in it except two kitchen chairs. We were, in short,
But morning came and we bathed in the lagoon. The waters sparkled emerald-clear over the white sand bottom. We seemed to be swimming in limpid green light. In the cool of early day, the palms towered still and patient, like tall saints with folded hands gathering strength to face the burning noon. Their peace came dropping slow upon us as we walked back up the beach. 'After all,' Olivia said, 'we can have a really beautiful native-built house now, with great big rooms. I've always wanted to live in one of our own design. Then you can use that special warrant of £50 to buy a stove and a sink, and a roof-tank, and a new bath, and a cistern, and some chairs, and a wardrobe … oh, and I don't know what-not else instead of paint for that rotten old wooden bungalow.'
We began to design a grand new home that day. It was easy to consider ourselves on picnic until it was ready. The kitchen we were in was turned into a sitting-room-dining-room-office and the other shack, formerly the office, became our collective bedroom and night-nursery. The domestic staff lodged out in the Native Government lines, our cooking was done mostly in a native earth-oven. We had two squatter's chairs for comfort among our bits and pieces, and the station carpenter was asked to make us two string beds as soon as he could. Everything went blithely from the word go, except that Olivia and I were attacked by a queer irritation of the skin. But, as the children didn't get it and we felt very fit, we dismissed it for what
The beautiful headquarters and training school of the Je suis français de la Vendée, moi!' he used to shout at his most redoubtable moments – brave as a lion, kind as an angel. His station and the house of two teaching sisters of the Sacred Heart lay only two miles north of us. We had had no such glut of European contacts ever before in the Gilbert group. The children were bursting with health. The only small nuisance was that skin-irritation.
I scratched an itching eyebrow one morning as I was writing, and a tiny speck fell on the paper. It was alive. I had never seen that particular insect before, so I showed it to my orderly. He laughed: 'That is what we call te uti-baraaki. Where did it come from?' But the smile went out of his face when I told him. 'Alas!' he cried, 'this is an evil thing. It eats its way under the skin, and lays eggs, and multiplies exceedingly, and the itching thereof is beyond bearing, and, before it can be rooted out, it is necessary to shave the hair from those places where it abides.'
We were suffering, not to put too fine a point on it, from crab-lice caught from the wooden beds so kindly lent to us. We swarmed with them. That was the second and last time I ever saw Olivia weep at the mischances of domestic life in the
We never discovered if the Old Man had known there were no quarters for us. He was a queer bird, but probably he hadn't. In the absence of a District Officer at Beru, the only places he would have landed at on visits of inspection would have been the two Mission Stations. Incidentally also, he could not have got a clue to the situation from anything he found at Onotoa, because the timbers of the missing house were never reassembled there in recognizable shape. They simply disappeared. It was just another of those Gilbert and Sullivan twists that added zest
Our new house was to be built, according to plan, entirely of native materials, round three sides of a square, its courtyard turned inland. A big lounge between two bedrooms was to face the lagoon, and in the wings we were to have another bedroom, a day nursery, my office, the kitchen, and the bathroom. But a home like that was going to take five or six months to finish, whereas we wanted to be out of the shacks by Christmas Eve (which was also Olivia's birthday) only two months ahead. Work was therefore concentrated on the three front rooms first of all. These were ready a week or so before Christmas and we settled in happily, leaving the two shacks to be used as a kitchen and an office until the new ones came along.
The weather was not very good to us, as the westerly season was now at its zenith; but the driving rain taught us just where more leaf-screens were needed to make the house cosier for Christmas, and those took no more than a few minutes each to plait. We were all snug by Christmas Eve, with the weather doors and windows blinded against possible storms. 'The great thing is to be ready for trouble,' said Olivia on her birthday morning: 'Thank heaven we are out of those wretched shacks. They'll probably lose their roofs if these tremendous squalls go on.'
The squalls were indeed tremendous. News came in of village houses blown down, and I began to regret having felled a good many of the trees that had screened the house to westward; they had spoiled our view over the lagoon, but the lack of them now exposed us to the wind's full force. However, the weather abated in the afternoon, and by dinner-time all was quiet. We filled the children's Christmas stockings and turned in, more than ever serenely rooted in our new home.
But at midnight another squall awoke us. It hit the house with the impact of a solid mass. We heard the walls cracking with the strain. The whole universe shrieked, and so did the children. I leapt out of bed and tried to light a hurricane lamp; but the house was full of whirling gusts; I could not. Olivia groped her way through to the children in the pitchy darkness. I groped after her
But we thought our new house the grandest thing in the Gilberts when it was finished. Not a fragment of European stuff went into it except a corrugated-iron kitchen roof for a water-catchment. Lime burned from coral rocks made the base it stood on. The walls were of coconut-leaf midribs lashed upright side by side. Door and window frames were of moulded coconut timber. Lattice work of ivory-white pandanus-root slats filled the windows and garnished the tops of inside walls. String made of coconut fibre held the whole together with intricate and beautiful patterns of cross-lashing. The cool, twilight interior was a study in dun-browns, silver-greys and old-ivory, so complete in its own beauty that it refused all wall-decorations save here and there a patterned native mat and an etching or two, sparsely distributed. We got our stove, and bath, and roof-tank, and cistern, and what-not-else at last, thanks to an extra-special warrant the Old Man granted. The roof was built doubly strong after that educative Christmas Eve, and life went swimmingly from then on in our adorable home by the lagoonside.
Of the five islands officially called the
At nearly sixty, he was a stocky, pink-faced, white-haired figure – rather like
To be honest, Government lassitude was responsible for most of this. The administration of the
One of the first things I had to do was to secure a reasonable representation of Roman Catholic opinion in the Native Courts. It was prima facie bad in principle, I suppose, to identify the representation of the people with denominational religion. But there were no overt non-Christians in the laissez faire policy; it affected the administration of the law. As the Native Courts sat in judgement on members of both the warring sects, clearly the only thing to do – and quickly – was to give the Roman Catholic minority at least some voice in their deliberations.
Eventually, as retirements permitted, we worked up to a ratio of one Roman Catholic kaubure to every three Protestants in the Native Courts of Beru and
Timoteo was one of his village teachers, and a very good one too. I haven't the least doubt that the Father, by ways and means known to his cloth, had made very sure that that individual and no other would be freely elected by his parishioners. However, everyone else was doing the same thing on Beru, so why not he? 'Il faut étre toujours réaliste,' as he was always fond of saying when annoyed. The election (or selection) took place when I had been about three months there, just before I left on a tour of the central islands.
When I got back four weeks later, Iuta, the Native Magistrate, a gentle little Protestant, greeted me on the beach with a very long face: 'Alas! I am about to be dismissed from office, for I have deeply sinned,' he said. 'Why, what have you been up to, you old villain?' I asked. I could not imagine a man like him guilty of any crime worse than over-kindness.
He did not brighten up: 'I have suspended Timoteo, and the Father has told me that you will at once dismiss me for that evil act. And he has said also that if you do not dismiss me, he will make the Old Man on
It appeared that, from the day of my departure, Timoteo had looked upon himself as an officially authorized crusader for his own church. 'The day has now come,' he told the Protestant villagers, 'for the truimph of the one true faith over darkness. Here I stand to prove it, all you heretics.' When they politely ignored that, he began to shout it up and down the village street, mentioning names, articles of faith and the penalties he, as kaubure, would cause to be inflicted upon all unbelievers. But it was only when he made a habit of bawling insults mixed with curious dogma outside the Protestant school that public patience cracked, and even then the report went not to Iuta, but to the Father: 'Relieve us of this madman, we beg you,' it ran, 'for he talks very vilely, and of
Though it was perhaps unhappily worded, it did at least throw the initiative, with extraordinary forbearance, whole into the Father's hands. He, however, read it as a gratuitous insult, and took it to the Native Magistrate, demanding the immediate official vindication of Timoteo. His claim was that Timoteo had done nothing but testify like a good Catholic to the faith that was in him. But Iuta investigated the facts and wisely suspended Timoteo. After further inquiries of my own, I found nothing for it but to ask the Father to put up a less militant candidate for the office.
He said that he didn't want a fresh candidate. Timoteo was the best qualified of his flock to speak out for the Catholic church as a kaubure. Timoteo must be reinstated.
'But Father,' I protested, 'he wasn't appointed to speak out for your church or anyone else's. That's the whole point. The government isn't a proselytizing organization.'
"Mais soyons réalistes au moins! Regard those others. Are they not all deacons of their church, et quelle église, ma foi! And do they not bawl their canticles day and night, to pierce the ears of my poor people?'
'Yes but … Father, they don't demonstrate in official uniform … with official threats … shouting insults outside your school. They do their singing and praying reasonably, in chapel.'
'Insults, you say? Reasonably? O, but the insults and unreason I have supported from that Buddha! C'est à fou-rire … c'est inoui! I implore your justice. I demand the reinstatement of Timoteo.'
'That Buddha' was his engaging name for
T simply can't appoint a Roman Catholic kaubure just to give you the pleasure of getting a kick-back at
'But he is a good Catholic … the best in my flock. His influence cannot fail to be good. Regard the principles. I beg you …'
'Yes but … Father we're arguing from different premises. You must look at the facts …'
And so on: facts, premises, principles – we went round and round in that age-old contention between passionate priestliness and bureaucratic beastliness. 'You have lifted me up only to throw me down,' he shouted as he left: 'You have destroyed my prestige. You have trampled upon my church as the Boches trampled on defenceless
And he never ceased his loving kindness. A bunch of bananas from his garden (he was a great gardener as well as a great man) arrived with the scorching letter he wrote me. Every one I ate made me feel more like a worm. The reproachful looks of
I did return. He was his sanguine, dominant self again by then. 'As a human being with human sentiments,' he opened, leaning forward to hold my hand as he sat, 'I permit myself to say that you have done me a great wrong. As a Christian and a friend-though you are not of my church – I forgive you nevertheless.'
My cantankerousness found that difficult to swallow whole. I asked him if he would also forgive me if I went on thinking I had done him no wrong at all. He leapt to his feet, addressing heaven with upflung arms, 'O juste ciel! How I have prayed for patience to support this monster!' Then, as suddenly as he had arisen, he sat down again, doubled up with laughter, pointing at me. When he came out of it, he took both my hands, speaking very quietly: 'Voyons, let us speak no more of it. Let us be good friends.' I don't think I have ever had an acuter sense of receiving an honour.
We argued and grew hot many times after that. He tried to dictate to me about divorce and to interfere with the marriage laws. His rudeness when angry was staggering. He used abusive epithets like knuckle-dusters. He enraged me once by saying the Great War had been God's judgement on England because her Kings refused to bow to
I had returned from my tour of the central islands with a slight attack of dysentery, which neglect did not improve. Emetine was not yet being used in the
Father Choblet was constant in his visits. I remember his talking to me much at that time of how, in seven or eight years from then, he hoped to return to his beloved
I knew that opening gambit of his; it meant he was about to tell me something insufferably true about my ego. He did. I leaned back sulkily on my pillows to take the withering blast of it. He began mildly enough by saying that the time had come when I ought to make an effort to eat something. According to his diagnosis, I was starving myself to death instead of fighting back at the disease. But his last words had a sting in them: 'Your mind is sicker than your body,' he told me; 'Despair … that's your trouble … and despair is a mortal sin as well as being cowardly.'
It stabbed the deeper because I had a feeling he was right. Only that morning, I had decided I couldn't last long at the rate the colitis was going. But I mumbled something about being at the end of my patience, and fed to the teeth, and justifiably so, and be damned to everything. That set him really talking Choblet.
'Impatient? Fed to the teeth? Justifiably?' he barked, 'Mais ça me fait rire! C'est tordant, ça! Ha-ha! Regard how I mock you, and take another look at yourself. There is Providence – Divine Providence – waiting at your elbow with a lagoon full of fish – kind foods – strengthening foods – and what do you do? You talk to me of justification when you haven't even the courage to use divine help. Impatient… Justified, are you? Well, I have some
There was much more of it, but that is the gist of what he shouted as his tiny figure in its white soutane hurled itself hopping and gesticulating around the room. He only stood still to laugh at my furious retort. 'You can treat me to bad names if you like: you are a privileged invalid. But you know I am right. That is why you swear so,' he smiled when I dried up. He left me with the quiet advice that I should begin my cure by eating a little boiled fish with more confidence in the mercy of Providence and less fear of stomach aches.
The contempt in that gorgeous phrase 'pusillanimous prig' shamed me into trying. It hurt at first, but Nature (or, if you like, Providence), given a fair chance, began to fight on my side. I was on my feet in a fortnight. Father Choblet's whip-lash truths about my spirit, in effect, saved my body.
A month later, it was his turn to fall ill. I knew nothing about it until a laconic note from
The only medicines left in my depleted chest were half a bottle of castor-oil and five morphine hydrochloride tablets of a strength I have forgotten. There was a hypodermic syringe too, with a rusty needle. I took the lot. He was doubled up and groaning when I got there. His murky box of a room was stifling hot. A solid mass of villagers swarmed around his bed, robbing him of air. I told them impatiently to give breathing space. He raised himself a little, to whisper, 'Ah, be gentle with them,' and fell back again. He had not slept for three nights and days, they told me. His temperature was soaring, his pulse racing and feeble; he was semi-delirious. He called it appendicitis himself. Maybe it was; I don't know. But I do know that the pain that racked his body meant almost nothing to him. One thought
He babbled his tortured thoughts to me between paroxysms. He had risked his life in raging seas three years before to save Father Franchiteau from that selfsame horror of dying unshriven on 'Hélas! mea maxima culpa!' It was not despair but a humility beyond belief, which accepted the imagined savagery of his God as justice perfected.
It did not occur to me that I could save his life. My only hope was to ease his passing. I knew the morphine could do that, but he would have refused it as a mere anodyne. So I lied to him. I told him the injection was the very latest thing for abscess of the appendix. The effect was electric. It was like pressing a button and starting a dynamo.
I wanted him to die thinking like that of the ultimate decencies, not the man-made horrors of his God. Nothing else seemed to matter. So I embroidered the tale with more lies. I was not, and am not now, ashamed of any of them, because they did confirm him in the belief that Providence was back at his elbow. I had proof of it. Though my first timid dose of the drug-a single tiny tabloid – brought him little relief from pain, he lay there for an hour gasping gratitude to Heaven and poking fun at my glum face. His joke was that, as an instrument of Providence, I ought to look a lot happier. Confidence swept out of him like a rushing wind; it raced alive through the gloomy little room and infected the villagers still crowded at the doorway: 'The Father will live,' they shouted, 'he will live!' and rushed out to tell their friends – all save one, who ran in to hold my hands. He looked weeping into my eyes for a moment and went out without speaking. It was the poor Timoteo I had had to sack
I had to make a choice in the next few minutes. Should I spend the last few tabloids of morphine in one big, comforting dose or eke them out in two small ones? A single hundredth of a grain had barely eased him; one of his most urgent needs was sleep; I did not think that two would put him under. I gave him all the rest. Perhaps I hoped he might die sleeping; I was so certain he could not live. As he floated serenely into unconsciousness, I slid two tablespoons of castor oil into him. I couldn't conceive it would help much, but it couldn't do him any harm, I thought.
He woke in six hours with the pains clutching at him again. He asked, writhing, if it was time for another injection. I had nothing for his help now save more lies. It struck me of a sudden that the pure power of his belief might put him to sleep again, if I could give it something to cling to. I had heard of such miracles; it seemed worth trying. I said, 'Father, I'm going to double the dose this time,' and made a big show of putting tabloids in the syringe and filling up with boiled water to melt them. 'I'll have to reduce again next shot,' I told him as I injected pure water into his arm: 'Can't afford to risk an overdose.'
And it worked, or, rather, his faith did. His body relaxed; he was asleep within two minutes, and remained so for another three hours, until the castor oil took charge. The pains were less after that, but still heavy. I injected more water, and once more he plunged into sleep like a small boy. The temperature left him and his pulse rallied while he slept. I told him when he woke that he would have to bear the rest of his aches unaided for twenty-four hours, as I dare not give him another dose earlier. 'But I have no more than a little tenderness left,' he said: 'Let me have a drink of water, and I will sleep … I am still very sleepy.' Even the tenderness was gone by the time he woke again.
So he lived to face the rest of his strange destiny. Maybe there was nothing so wonderful about his cure, after all. His temperature might have come from a chill, his pains from some kind of colic, for all I know. In that case, the castor oil was all he needed to put him right, with perhaps a spice of heretical ergo, and inevitably, Providence had sent each to the other properly equipped at the proper moment. The proper moment was when faith was most ready to work. I said, 'What about the faith of an agnostic?' and that led to some of the finest linguistics I ever heard him use. He won the argument by pointing out that I wasn't an agnostic but a heretic Christian, anyhow, which I was proud to accept.
The story leaps forward eight or nine years (I forget exactly how many) for the sequel. I was Resident Commissioner when his joyful letter came to tell me that, at long last, he was going back to
He arrived three months later, shrunk to almost nothing in his soutane, and leaden-skinned, as if the blood in him had changed to some grey liquid. Only his face seemed not to have shrunk, but its features were strangely altered. The fine-bridged nose had broadened between the eyes; the ears and the high arches of the brows were somehow thickened. They thought in the group that he had some kind of anaemia.
But what did it matter what he had, he smiled. The good doctors of Trente-six ans! Bon Dieu! Mais tiens … bon Dieu … it was well said, that!
But it did matter what he had. Of all the sicknesses that possibly might have forbidden his twelve thousand mile way home, he had the most dreadful – leprosy. I did not see him for a week after the doctor's heart-breaking verdict. He wanted to be alone. From things he said later, I humbly guessed at the bitter struggle he had had with the fury of despair. But he came out of it superhumanly serene. 'I clung too much to the happiness I vowed to renounce,' he told me: 'That was a sin. I should have begged Monseigneur to let me stay. There is work for me to do among the lepers. God has been merciful in allowing me to redeem my sin.' No lies this time had helped him back to his faith in the goodness of Providence.
We built a two-roomed house for him, at his own request, in the asylum where our forty or fifty lepers lived. We would have put him elsewhere had he wished, but he wanted to be with the others. The settlement was a new one, laid out as much like a village as possible, in a cheerful spot not too far from Tarawa hospital. One or two cases had begun to respond to gynocardate injections, but results were so rare, known failures so many. Hopelessness deepened by the awful lassitude of the disease itself was our constant enemy. It robbed even the vivid, fighting Gilbertese of their will to live. They withered in their new home as they had withered in the old one, hoping for a quick end. They did nothing but sit and wait. There was never a smile in that camp of the walking dead. I feared much for the Father.
But I need not have feared. I was able to visit him at Tarawa five or six months after he had settled in. The first thing I noticed was a beautiful new order in the settlement. No coconut-leaves littered the ground between houses as before; crinum lilies grew in neatly kerbed borders along the paths. The place had the air of a village proud of itself. There was industry everywhere; I saw men making nets, women plaiting mats. People chatted from house to house as they worked. And there was laughter. They called cheerful greetings to me, where once they had sat as mute as the doomed. The asylum had become a real refuge, alive and glad of life.
'Here, what have you been doing with my lepers?' I said to the Father when I sat in his house.
'Ah, you have noticed? But did you not know? I am the new District Officer, Leper Asylum. And, ma foi, my people listen to my advice better than to any bureaucrat's,' he laughed.
That was beyond all argument. I asked him how he had got them going.
'I began by doing my duty as a priest. The rest followed,' was his reply; 'When the soul is awakened, life is worth living. But you have to be a good Catholic to understand that, cher hérétique!'
I sidestepped that one by asking him how he was. He said the doctor reported progress already, but added, 'mais vous savez, je ne me tracasse plus de tout ça. Je suis bien content de laparoisse que m'a donnée le Bon Dieu.' He was absorbed in his job. Providence had turned up trumps for him again.
We had managed to get a message through to Tarawa in early March, 1919, that Olivia expected another baby in August. Word came back in May that the Senior Medical Officer and Nurse
I remember well how pleased we were at the idea of having a doctor at hand for a whole month or even longer. It was not that either of us was ever particularly anxious about falling ill. The post-war spate of pseudo-medical journalism that was to succeed in creating so many recondite diseases for nervous minds to dwell upon had not yet afflicted us. In our comfortable ignorance, we recked not at all of psychoses, and still expected castor-oil, bread poultices, iodine, and aspirin to cure most ailments. They usually did, too. Olivia had a score of questions to ask about the cases she had contrived, as usual, to collect from the villages for treatment in our back premises. Also, I personally wanted advice about Obadaia, a difficult prisoner in the men's
The average Gilbertese prisoner of those days – msensible man - seldom took his incarceration as a great hardship. A few weeks or months in the lock-up meant nothing locally in terms of social stigma. Why should a man be penalized for paying on the nail for his mistakes? was the reasonable public view; and also, what the Government called hard labour was a glorious joke. No government that prized its reputation for humanity could, in fact, possibly dare to load any prisoner with the merciless stint of daily work a free man's family demanded of him in his village. So, a fellow could always count on a nice rest in gaol, and recalcitrants were very rare indeed. But Obadaia was one of the few.
He was a craggy
Olivia kept very well until the last week of June. Nothing had happened before the birth of the other three children to make us expect trouble this time. The fair-weather season was at its best; chills were almost impossible to catch; there were no influenza
Both of us guessed that if the fever stayed up there for long there might be a premature birth. Maybe we could have prevented that from happening, had we known how; but we didn't know, and aspirin failed to bring the temperature down. All we could think of doing towards midnight was to get a few things ready at once against any event. Olivia said there was no need to pull long faces about it, anyhow; I myself had been a seven months' child; my mother had told her so: 'And just look at you now!' she ended. 'As merry as an undertaker!' Thus encouraged, I went out to prepare for the worst.
The main thing was to sterilize everything likely to be used, including gallons and gallons of water. It was the water that brought Obadaia into the picture, because I had to organize watches of prisoners in the kitchen to keep heaps of it continually on the boil. I admit that the use of His Majesty's guests for domestic purposes was strictly forbidden, but I did not happen to be thinking much of rules and regulations at the time. The prisoners themselves – there were nine of them, all in for mere peccadillos except Obadaia – were quick to respond when I woke them up in the gaol and explained the situation. Obadaia took the lead at once: 'Men-o-o!' he called, 'we are asked to save Missis and her baby! We prisoners! We bad men! How wonderful is this thing we are given to do! Let us make a plan now.' And there, crowding around a hurricane lamp in the big, dark prison-house, they eagerly resolved themselves into an organizing committee. It was arranged that they should work in four-hour watches of three men each, the first to go on duty at once, headed by Obadaia.
I left the midnight watch at work in the kitchen. When I returned in ten minutes to see how the fire was going, Obadaia whispered, 'Sir, is Missis asleep?' I told him she was, but burning, and muttering, and very restless. He returned back to the stove without comment, and I left again, for there was a big job of reading to get through. I had to study as quickly as I could
As I settled to my reading in the lounge, Olivia's fevered mutterings came to me brokenly across the hissing, clicking whisper of the trade wind through the palms outside. In the night, when the cheerful rumours of life going forward are stilled, anxious ears are not easily stopped to noises that come so lonely out of the dark. But, one by one,
But it was not Olivia who hummed. Though the fever still burned in her, she lay silent in an untroubled sleep. The sound seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. Wherever I groped it was around my ears, neither nearer nor farther, like a vibrant mist hung on the darkness. It was not until I brought in the lamp that I found Obadaia sitting on the step of the verandah doorway. He had been there for three hours, he said. His heart had been heavy when I told him Missis was not sleeping well, and he thought I would not mind if he came and sang to her the way his grandmother had taught him. There were no special words to his song, only a trick of making what he called a ghost-voice that floated over sick people and gave them dreamless sleep. Olivia had reacted to it very quickly, and had not stirred since. He could guarantee her sleeping on without
I thanked him for what he had done, but he had lain twisted with one of his pains only that morning; if it had been genuine, he ought to go and get some more sleep now, I told him. His stern face was lit with a sudden smile: 'Listen!' he answered, 'how the trees are crying in the wind! This morning an ill wind blew through my heart and it also cried …' He broke off, looking me in the eyes, and I left it at that, more touched by the beautiful discretion of his phrase than shocked at the confession of malingering. So he sat on in the dark crooning his strange, wordless lullaby while the kitchen watch was changed, and I pored once again over the passages I had marked in
She herself, on waking, volunteered a word about how she had slept: 'It was queer. I kept on having nightmares and waking up mumbling and grumbling half the night. Then I remember thinking I was wide awake and hearing a kind of quiet humming sound all round me, and everything seemed marvellous. I suppose that was a dream too, but I didn't have another after that. I still feel wonderful, as if nothing could possibly go wrong.'
It seemed best not to tell her yet of Obadaia. Her temperature was only a few points down, and I thought she might have further need of his help.
The kitchen watch went on, but I sent Obadaia off to get some food and sleep. He said he wanted nothing but a drink of tea, and begged leave to lie under the trees near the house, if the law allowed it. The law did nothing of the kind, but I did, on condition that he would stay off shift until nightfall and eat something solid at midday. I saw nothing more of him until that night, when he returned to duty in the kitchen.
I doubt if many women in the civilized world have ever made a trial trip into self-anaesthesia as Olivia did. A Dr Woinarski of
There were several bottles of chloroform in stock at the medical visiting station. I asked the Native Dresser to bring one along and time me while I tried the idea out on myself first of all. He reported that my tumbler-hand fell in about half a minute, and that I stayed under for about forty seconds. After that, as Olivia agreed, the important thing was for her personally to get the hang of it; which she did with distinction and much good cheer, though her temperature was over 104 degrees again, towards seven o'clock of the second day. 'This will make it all as easy as falling off a log,' she remarked when it was over: 'I think I'll have another sleep before the great event. It won't be long now.' If, from that time I felt any fortitude, it was only because hers sufficed for both of us.
She slept almost on the moment, but not restfully until Obadaia came to magic her once more. I watched the effect this time. She had lain twitching and flinging on her back for half an hour before I called him. Three or four minutes after he began, she turned on her side and seemed to be engulfed at once in peace. She stayed so until near eleven o'clock when Obadaia got up from the doorstep. 'I think it will not be long now,' he whispered. 'It is expedient to make all things ready,' and went back to the kitchen. I followed mechanically. His prediction had been so much the same as Olivia's, it did not strike me to wonder how he had guessed until I was halfway through the final preparations. 'The thought came into my heart as I sang,' he answered. Somehow I was sure that that clinched the matter, and so indeed it fell out.
I carried a sterilized tray of sterilized things in sterilized hands out of the kitchen and stood it on a sterilized cloth in the room.
'Well, that's that,' Olivia murmured, as I handed the baby over to Faasolo, Joan's
Mother and child were doing well when I came out of it. 'I've been thinking,' Olivia said: "This is really rather lucky. I'll be up and about again by the time Doctor arrives. Now, what I'm going to tell him is … ' It was all about her ailing expectant mothers.
For the next three weeks there was nothing but sunshine from Obadaia. We were building a sea-wall of coral blocks at the time, which made heavier chores than usual for the prisoners, but he did the work of any other four of them together, laughing and splashing while he heaved great foundation blocks around like a boy-giant happy with his playthings. Iuta, the Magistrate, was concerned about the uproarious noise he made; he felt that such a flow of gaiety was indecent in a prisoner. I thought myself it was simply Obadaia's way of showing regret for past malingering. Iuta said perhaps-yes, but there was something else behind it, he was sure. He turned out to be right, though I never told him how. The whole thing was too complicated for explanation on the official plane.
There was that malingering, to begin with. I went out to the sea-wall workers one day to say something to Obadaia. He was not among them. They said he had gone to lie down in a clump of salt-bush not far off, being tired. I found him sitting alone there clasping his stomach and gasping.
When a man wants to swing the lead, he does not go off and hide himself to do so. I had him carried to the house.
The doctor, who arrived the following week, found he had
His young wife was there holding his hand when I went to see him in hospital. I told her in front of him how much he had helped Olivia, and how we had all misjudged him before that. But instead of smiling she hung her head and whispered, 'Ti maama (We are ashamed),' and again after a long silence, but looking at Obadaia this time, Ti maama.'
'Ti maama,' he whispered back at her, 'but I cannot tell the Man of Matang.'
'You must tell him,' she insisted: 'If you do not, I will.'
'Still your heart, woman,' he pleaded, 'and I will tell Missis when I am no longer sick.'
'You will tell him now, because of your love and honour for Missis.'
He yielded to that. Clinging tight to her hand, he began hesitantly but gathered strength as his tale went on: 'Sir, you remember? I slept under the trees at daybreak of the second day, after I had sung to Missis. And when it was noon, I awoke, and all were gathered in their houses to eat. A thought came to me then, an evil thought. I said in my heart, "Perhaps that woman my wife is not faithful to me, now that I am shut up in the calaboose." I said again, "I will go and search in her eyes, and if I see lies there, I will kill her." So I went, and no man saw me go. I came up to the house of my mother from among the trees. None saw me arrive in the village, for all men were sleeping after the noon-day meal. And I went in …'
He broke off, looking at his wife: 'It is enough, woman. I have told him of my sin against the law.'
'It is not enough,' she said inexorably, 'for those other things also are forbidden to prisoners, and I sinned with you in doing them.'
He sighed heavily and looked at me again: 'I went in. I woke my mother. I said to her, "Let down the screens of the house." When she had done that, I said, "Leave me alone with my wife." She left us alone. I looked into this woman's eyes, and I knew
'The tale is not done, Man of Matang,' she said, staring at the floor.
He groaned: 'Is it not enough? Will you have me locked in the calaboose for ever?'
'Peace,' she murmured, 'I also shall be locked up, for I sinned with you.'
'So I returned when it was dark,' he went on drearily, 'and sang to Missis again. When that was done, I lied to the policeman; I told him that the Man of Matang had ordered me to sleep near at hand on the side verandah. He answered, "Aia!" I went to the side verandah. And when everyone was waiting for news of Missis, I crept away. I went back to my wife, and we lay again until the morning …'
'I have greatly sinned,' he added after a long pause. 'Yet since that time I have had no more evil thoughts, and I have worked with a glad heart, because I know this woman is true to me.'
Naturally, my thought ran first to the moral of his disastrous story for the moral-minded: this seemed to be that a District Officer should never, never accept personal favours from prisoners. It subverts all discipline. What interested me most at the moment, however, was the moral courage of Obadaia and his wife and its inspiration: 'Tell me your thought,' I said to the young woman; 'Did he sin most against the Government, or against me, or against Missis?'
'If he had sinned only against the Government and you,' she assured me solemnly, 'it would have been a thing for secret laughter between us …' She made it admirably plain; to hell with the law and its minions; his sin had been a personal sin against Olivia – using her illness as a stalking-horse for prison-breaking and illicit love-making with herself.
'And how many months in prison do you expect to get for your part in the crime?' I asked her.
'I thought perhaps a year, for I said to him, "Come back to me tonight, or I shall die," and he came back, and I was not ashamed until he left me alone again.' She wept.
The abundantly clear point in all this welter of facts and
My old enemy, 'Amoeba', was at me again two months before Christmas, 1919. This time, the only medicine available was a I-ounce packet of Epsom-salt, which proved unhelpful. For fear of another crack like 'pusillanimous prig' from Father Choblet, I gave an earnest trial to that dietetic idea of his that had lifted me out of the last bout. But perhaps I lacked faith, or started eating too early, or ate too much or too little boiled fish, for it didn't seem to work. Nevertheless, Providence, by the Father's reckoning, remained active. On Christmas Eve, a totally unhoped-for schooner turned up and removed what remained of me to
The event undoubtedly was providential for me as a person, but it didn't look like that for anyone else. The schooner was a small one, crammed with native passengers. There was not even deck space aboard for the four children and their nurses. Olivia stayed with the family on Beru. Fate had celebrated her birthday-cum-Christmas Eve the year before by ripping the roof off our house; this year it left her with a roof but without a husband in her solitude.
The captain promised to return and pick them all up within six weeks. Had he been able to do so, he would have found Olivia busily engaged, without benefit of medicines, in fighting an attack of dysentery on her own account and nursing Rosemary, aged three, through a raging temperature that seemed to come from blood poisoning. Rosemary had splintered her shin in a tumble. The splinter, as Olivia remarked afterwards, clicked back nicely into place under manipulation by a village bonesetter, but the sore festered. I fancy that the need of keeping it poulticed day and night was Olivia's main incentive for regarding herself-as cured of her dysentery. Perhaps, too, a light diet
The Old Man had departed on long leave before she arrived, and that had meant a fortunate turn of the official wheel for me. My luck was that
And then, out of the blue, came the astounding order from
I well remember how the Old Man reacted to this grotesque proposition. Grotesque was his word for it. I agreed with him in principle but pleaded that, as a matter of practice, I should much like to accept the offer. He replied with one of his saturnine, double-barrelled sniffs and drew me into the dining-room: 'Look here,' he said, rolling back the mat and pointing to some deep dents in the floor boards: 'Do these remind you of anything?' They did. They had been made by the rain of boulders that had crashed through the roof when I blasted his back yard.
'Now,' he went on, 'I'll leave you with a word of advice. It's this – remember it. When you want to dynamite your official seniors, don't attack them from overhead. Their heads are quite invulnerable. Lay your shot near where they do their thinking – under their seats. That gets them every time. You may perish in the process, but what does a genius more or less matter to the Colonial Service, anyhow?'
I was still trying to work out the exact implications of this utterance for me when he emitted a short yelp, something like a laugh, clapped me on the shoulder and finished: 'Well, the ball's in your hands,
So it came about that Olivia and I woke up one morning to find ourselves in charge at the Residency. It was almost six years to the day since we had climbed the front doorsteps as not very welcome intruders into the
We sailed for home, via
Our ship was held up for a week in
We descended upon my father's and mother's house in late November, three months and a week after leaving
I sought conversation with numerous uncles in the early days of my leave. I thought a few first-hand impressions of what they loved to call our far-flung possessions in the Pacific would be sure to hold them spellbound. But somehow the talk never got as far as impressions. It almost invariable developed something like this:
Uncle: 'Hullo, my boy, glad to see you back. Sit down. Have a cigar. Now, tell us what you've been up to all these years out there.'Self: 'Oh, I've been -'Uncle: 'You don't look too well on it, whatever it was. Did you keep up your riding?'Self: 'Well – no – you see – there aren't any horses there. But I-'Uncle: 'What? No riding? Hm! Now, the other day, Jackie Jack-(Jackie's dicta on fox-hunting as an aid to health here omitted.) But you must have got a bit of fishing.'Self: 'Oh, yes, I had plenty of that. The tiger-shark -'Uncle: 'What? Tiger-shark? Now, the other day, I was talking to a feller back from (Ensuing tale of a fight to the death with an eight pound salmon omitted.) But I suppose you had a shot at the tigers in those jungles.'Self: 'Well – no – you see – there aren't any jungles or tigers. But I did-'Uncle: 'Good God! No big game? Then what in the world were you doing with youself in your spare time?'Self: 'Well – you see – a district officer is kept pretty busy as a rule. He -'Uncle: 'Oh, yes, now I see. Those cannibals and head-hunters, eh!'Self: 'Well, no – you see – there aren't any cannibals in the Gilberts.Uncle: 'And all this time we've been calling you the king of the cannibal islands. Just fancy! No cannibals.'Self: 'Well – you see-'
But the total loss of horses, salmon, tigers, and cannibals was usually more than enough for my uncles. They weren't unkind about it. They felt the shame of the thing as deeply for me as for themselves. It was out of pure tact that they hurriedly looked at the clock and remembered they had men to see about dogs, and ushered me out with floods of talk about those damned radicals.
'My dear fellow!' he exclaimed, 'you're not asking me to put all this on record, are you?'
I answered, meekly enough, that this had been the idea, and tried to explain why. But he interrupted me again.
'But – my dear fellow! I mean to say! Good heavens! If we told our applicants even a quarter of these facts in advance, we'd never get a bally recruit!'
I borrowed £150 at the end of my leave to pay my way (emigrant class again) back to the Pacific and leave the family in
Stranger and funnier than fiction – the true story of an Englishman in the
As an administrator in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands,
'He is a born raconteur' –
'His pages are enlivened with a gleaming humour which enhances the book's overwhelming attraction.
A triumph!' –
The cover shows one of the