Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (821 page)

CHAPTER V - A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL

No, I had no guess of these men’s terrors.  Yet I had received ere that a hint, if I had understood; and the occasion was a funeral.

A little apart in the main avenue of Rotoava, in a low hut of leaves that opened on a small enclosure, like a pigsty on a pen, an old man dwelt solitary with his aged wife.  Perhaps they were too old to migrate with the others; perhaps they were too poor, and had no possessions to dispute.  At least they had remained behind; and it thus befell that they were invited to my feast.  I dare say it was quite a piece of politics in the pigsty whether to come or not to come, and the husband long swithered between curiosity and age, till curiosity conquered, and they came, and in the midst of that last merrymaking death tapped him on the shoulder.  For some days, when the sky was bright and the wind cool, his mat would be spread in the main highway of the village, and he was to be seen lying there inert, a mere handful of a man, his wife inertly seated by his head.  They seemed to have outgrown alike our needs and faculties; they neither spoke nor listened; they suffered us to pass without a glance; the wife did not fan, she seemed not to attend upon her husband, and the two poor antiques sat juxtaposed under the high canopy of palms, the human tragedy reduced to its bare elements, a sight beyond pathos, stirring a thrill of curiosity.  And yet there was one touch of the pathetic haunted me: that so much youth and expectation should have run in these starved veins, and the man should have squandered all his lees of life on a pleasure party.

On the morning of 17th September the sufferer died, and, time pressing, he was buried the same day at four.  The cemetery lies to seaward behind Government House; broken coral, like so much road-metal, forms the surface; a few wooden crosses, a few inconsiderable upright stones, designate graves; a mortared wall, high enough to lean on, rings it about; a clustering shrub surrounds it with pale leaves.  Here was the grave dug that morning, doubtless by uneasy diggers, to the sound of the nigh sea and the cries of sea-birds; meanwhile the dead man waited in his house, and the widow and another aged woman leaned on the fence before the door, no speech upon their lips, no speculation in their eyes.

Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped in white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind - not many, for not many remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these were poor; the men in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or the gorgeous parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women, with a few exceptions, brightly habited.  Far in the rear came the widow, painfully carrying the dead man’s mat; a creature aged beyond humanity, to the likeness of some missing link.

The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone with the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and a layman took his office.  Standing at the head of the open grave, in a white coat and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and one eye bound with a red handkerchief, he read solemnly that chapter in Job which has been read and heard over the bones of so many of our fathers, and with a good voice offered up two prayers.  The wind and the surf bore a burthen.  By the cemetery gate a mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue.  In the midst the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the coffin-stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned her back to the grave and was playing with a leaf.  Did she understand?  God knows.  The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered and threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral.  Dust to dust: but the grains of this dust were gross like cherries, and the true dust that was to follow sat near by, still cohering (as by a miracle) in the tragic semblance of a female ape.

So far, Mormon or not, it was a Christian funeral.  The well-known passage had been read from Job, the prayers had been rehearsed, the grave was filled, the mourners straggled homeward.  With a little coarser grain of covering earth, a little nearer outcry of the sea, a stronger glare of sunlight on the rude enclosure, and some incongruous colours of attire, the well-remembered form had been observed.

By rights it should have been otherwise.  The mat should have been buried with its owner; but, the family being poor, it was thriftily reserved for a fresh service.  The widow should have flung herself upon the grave and raised the voice of official grief, the neighbours have chimed in, and the narrow isle rung for a space with lamentation.  But the widow was old; perhaps she had forgotten, perhaps never understood, and she played like a child with leaves and coffin-stretchers.  In all ways my guest was buried with maimed rites.  Strange to think that his last conscious pleasure was the
Casco
and my feast; strange to think that he had limped there, an old child, looking for some new good.  And the good thing, rest, had been allotted him.

But though the widow had neglected much, there was one part she must not utterly neglect.  She came away with the dispersing funeral; but the dead man’s mat was left behind upon the grave, and I learned that by set of sun she must return to sleep there.  This vigil is imperative.  From sundown till the rising of the morning star the Paumotuan must hold his watch above the ashes of his kindred.  Many friends, if the dead have been a man of mark, will keep the watchers company; they will be well supplied with coverings against the weather; I believe they bring food, and the rite is persevered in for two weeks.  Our poor survivor, if, indeed, she properly survived, had little to cover, and few to sit with her; on the night of the funeral a strong squall chased her from her place of watch; for days the weather held uncertain and outrageous; and ere seven nights were up she had desisted, and returned to sleep in her low roof.  That she should be at the pains of returning for so short a visit to a solitary house, that this borderer of the grave should fear a little wind and a wet blanket, filled me at the time with musings.  I could not say she was indifferent; she was so far beyond me in experience that the court of my criticism waived jurisdiction; but I forged excuses, telling myself she had perhaps little to lament, perhaps suffered much, perhaps understood nothing.  And lo! in the whole affair there was no question whether of tenderness or piety, and the sturdy return of this old remnant was a mark either of uncommon sense or of uncommon fortitude.

Yet one thing had occurred that partly set me on the trail.  I have said the funeral passed much as at home.  But when all was over, when we were trooping in decent silence from the graveyard gate and down the path to the settlement, a sudden inbreak of a different spirit startled and perhaps dismayed us.  Two people walked not far apart in our procession: my friend Mr. Donat - Donat-Rimarau: ‘Donat the much-handed’ - acting Vice-Resident, present ruler of the archipelago, by far the man of chief importance on the scene, but known besides for one of an unshakable good temper; and a certain comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the comeliest on the isle, not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite.  Of a sudden, ere yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she made a leap at the Resident, with pointed finger, shrieked a few words, and fell back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth.  ‘What did she say to you?’ I asked.  ‘She did not speak to
me
,’ said Donat, a shade perturbed; ‘she spoke to the ghost of the dead man.’  And the purport of her speech was this: ‘See there!  Donat will be a fine feast for you to-night.’

‘M. Donat called it a jest,’ I wrote at the time in my diary.  ‘It seemed to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as though she would divert the ghost’s attention from herself.  A cannibal race may well have cannibal phantoms.’  The guesses of the traveller appear foredoomed to be erroneous; yet in these I was precisely right.  The woman had stood by in terror at the funeral, being then in a dread spot, the graveyard.  She looked on in terror to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit, loosed upon the isle.  And the words she had cried in Donat’s face were indeed a terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to dedicate another in her stead.  One thing is to be said in her excuse.  Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-caste.  For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of talisman against the powers of hell.  In no other way can they explain the unpunished recklessness of Europeans.

CHAPTER VI - GRAVEYARD STORIES

WITH my superstitious friend, the islander, I fear I am not wholly frank, often leading the way with stories of my own, and being always a grave and sometimes an excited hearer.  But the deceit is scarce mortal, since I am as pleased to hear as he to tell, as pleased with the story as he with the belief; and, besides, it is entirely needful.  For it is scarce possible to exaggerate the extent and empire of his superstitions; they mould his life, they colour his thinking; and when he does not speak to me of ghosts, and gods, and devils, he is playing the dissembler and talking only with his lips.  With thoughts so different, one must indulge the other; and I would rather that I should indulge his superstition than he my incredulity.  Of one thing, besides, I may be sure: Let me indulge it as I please, I shall not hear the whole; for he is already on his guard with me, and the amount of the lore is boundless.

I will give but a few instances at random, chiefly from my own doorstep in Upolu, during the past month (October 1890).  One of my workmen was sent the other day to the banana patch, there to dig; this is a hollow of the mountain, buried in woods, out of all sight and cry of mankind; and long before dusk Lafaele was back again beside the cook-house with embarrassed looks; he dared not longer stay alone, he was afraid of ‘spirits in the bush.’  It seems these are the souls of the unburied dead, haunting where they fell, and wearing woodland shapes of pig, or bird, or insect; the bush is full of them, they seem to eat nothing, slay solitary wanderers apparently in spite, and at times, in human form, go down to villages and consort with the inhabitants undetected.  So much I learned a day or so after, walking in the bush with a very intelligent youth, a native.  It was a little before noon; a grey day and squally; and perhaps I had spoken lightly.  A dark squall burst on the side of the mountain; the woods shook and cried; the dead leaves rose from the ground in clouds, like butterflies; and my companion came suddenly to a full stop.  He was afraid, he said, of the trees falling; but as soon as I had changed the subject of our talk he proceeded with alacrity.  A day or two before a messenger came up the mountain from Apia with a letter; I was in the bush, he must await my return, then wait till I had answered: and before I was done his voice sounded shrill with terror of the coming night and the long forest road.  These are the commons.  Take the chiefs.  There has been a great coming and going of signs and omens in our group.  One river ran down blood; red eels were captured in another; an unknown fish was thrown upon the coast, an ominous word found written on its scales.  So far we might be reading in a monkish chronicle; now we come on a fresh note, at once modern and Polynesian.  The gods of Upolu and Savaii, our two chief islands, contended recently at cricket.  Since then they are at war.  Sounds of battle are heard to roll along the coast.  A woman saw a man swim from the high seas and plunge direct into the bush; he was no man of that neighbourhood; and it was known he was one of the gods, speeding to a council.  Most perspicuous of all, a missionary on Savaii, who is also a medical man, was disturbed late in the night by knocking; it was no hour for the dispensary, but at length he woke his servant and sent him to inquire; the servant, looking from a window, beheld crowds of persons, all with grievous wounds, lopped limbs, broken heads, and bleeding bullet-holes; but when the door was opened all had disappeared.  They were gods from the field of battle.  Now these reports have certainly significance; it is not hard to trace them to political grumblers or to read in them a threat of coming trouble; from that merely human side I found them ominous myself.  But it was the spiritual side of their significance that was discussed in secret council by my rulers.  I shall best depict this mingled habit of the Polynesian mind by two connected instances.  I once lived in a village, the name of which I do not mean to tell.  The chief and his sister were persons perfectly intelligent: gentlefolk, apt of speech.  The sister was very religious, a great church-goer, one that used to reprove me if I stayed away; I found afterwards that she privately worshipped a shark.  The chief himself was somewhat of a freethinker; at the least, a latitudinarian: he was a man, besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer.  Hear the sequel.  I had discovered by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in the village graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible authority, to task.  ‘There is something wrong about your graveyard,’ said I, ‘which you must attend to, or it may have very bad results.’  ‘Something wrong?  What is it?’ he asked, with an emotion that surprised me.  ‘If you care to go along there any evening about nine o’clock you can see for yourself,’ said I.  He stepped backward.  ‘A ghost!’ he cried.

In short, in the whole field of the South Seas, there is not one to blame another.  Half blood and whole, pious and debauched, intelligent and dull, all men believe in ghosts, all men combine with their recent Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the old island deities.  So, in Europe, the gods of Olympus slowly dwindled into village bogies; so to-day, the theological Highlander sneaks from under the eye of the Free Church divine to lay an offering by a sacred well.

I try to deal with the whole matter here because of a particular quality in Paumotuan superstitions.  It is true I heard them told by a man with a genius for such narrations.  Close about our evening lamp, within sound of the island surf, we hung on his words, thrilling.  The reader, in far other scenes, must listen close for the faint echo.