Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (825 page)

A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my observation, depicts him in his two capacities.  A chief in Little Makin asked, in an hour of lightness, ‘Who is Kaeia?’  A bird carried the saying; and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a committee of three.  Mr. Corpse was chairman; the second commissioner died before my arrival; the third was yet alive and green, and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him the name of Abou ben Adhem.  Mr. Corpse was troubled with a scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in such a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse than awkward.  ‘I will strike the blow,’ said the venerable Abou; and Mr. Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise.  The quarry was decoyed into the bush; he was set to carrying a log; and while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow.  Justice being thus done, the commission, in a childish horror, turned to flee.  But their victim recalled them to his side.  ‘You need not run away now,’ he said.  ‘You have done this thing to me.  Stay.’  He was some twenty minutes dying, and his murderers sat with him the while: a scene for Shakespeare.  All the stages of a violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of Mr. Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery.  I was never more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the king’s thoughts; and yet I had but the one sight of him at unawares.  I had once an errand for his ear.  It was once more the hour of the siesta; but there were loiterers abroad, and these directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where Tebureimoa lay unguarded.  We entered without ceremony, being in some haste.  He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his Gilbert Island Bible with compunction.  On our sudden entrance the unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled on the floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having recognised his visitors, sank again upon the mats.  So Eglon looked on Ehud.

The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just; Nakaeia, the author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity.  Not the nature, but the congruity of men’s deeds and circumstances damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed.  At home, in a quiet bystreet of a village, the man had been a worthy carpenter, and, even bedevilled as he is, he shows some private virtues.  He has no lands, only the use of such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot enrich himself in the old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of his future, and he knows and uses it.  Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a shilling for a child: allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total of three hundred pounds a year.  He had been some nine months on the throne: had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure unknown, and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent his brother’s photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced that brother’s legacy of debt and had still sovereigns in his pocket.  An affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides a handy carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace.  It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues; that Tebureimoa should have a diversion filled me with surprise.

CHAPTER III - AROUND OUR HOUSE

When we left the palace we were still but seafarers ashore; and within the hour we had installed our goods in one of the six foreign houses of Butaritari, namely, that usually occupied by Maka, the Hawaiian missionary.  Two San Francisco firms are here established, Messrs. Crawford and Messrs. Wightman Brothers; the first hard by the palace of the mid town, the second at the north entry; each with a store and bar-room.  Our house was in the Wightman compound, betwixt the store and bar, within a fenced enclosure.  Across the road a few native houses nestled in the margin of the bush, and the green wall of palms rose solid, shutting out the breeze.  A little sandy cove of the lagoon ran in behind, sheltered by a verandah pier, the labour of queens’ hands.  Here, when the tide was high, sailed boats lay to be loaded; when the tide was low, the boats took ground some half a mile away, and an endless series of natives descended the pier stair, tailed across the sand in strings and clusters, waded to the waist with the bags of copra, and loitered backward to renew their charge.  The mystery of the copra trade tormented me, as I sat and watched the profits drip on the stair and the sands.

In front, from shortly after four in the morning until nine at night, the folk of the town streamed by us intermittingly along the road: families going up the island to make copra on their lands; women bound for the bush to gather flowers against the evening toilet; and, twice a day, the toddy-cutters, each with his knife and shell.  In the first grey of the morning, and again late in the afternoon, these would straggle past about their tree-top business, strike off here and there into the bush, and vanish from the face of the earth.  At about the same hour, if the tide be low in the lagoon, you are likely to be bound yourself across the island for a bath, and may enter close at their heels alleys of the palm wood.  Right in front, although the sun is not yet risen, the east is already lighted with preparatory fires, and the huge accumulations of the trade-wind cloud glow with and heliograph the coming day.  The breeze is in your face; overhead in the tops of the palms, its playthings, it maintains a lively bustle; look where you will, above or below, there is no human presence, only the earth and shaken forest.  And right overhead the song of an invisible singer breaks from the thick leaves; from farther on a second tree-top answers; and beyond again, in the bosom of the woods, a still more distant minstrel perches and sways and sings.  So, all round the isle, the toddy-cutters sit on high, and are rocked by the trade, and have a view far to seaward, where they keep watch for sails, and like huge birds utter their songs in the morning.  They sing with a certain lustiness and Bacchic glee; the volume of sound and the articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we anticipate the chattering of fowls.  And yet in a sense these songs also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred; few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was understood the cutters ‘prayed to have good toddy, and sang of their old wars.’  The prayer is at least answered; and when the foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a beverage well ‘worthy of a grace.’  All forenoon you may return and taste; it only sparkles, and sharpens, and grows to be a new drink, not less delicious; but with the progress of the day the fermentation quickens and grows acid; in twelve hours it will be yeast for bread, in two days more a devilish intoxicant, the counsellor of crime.

The men are of a marked Arabian cast of features, often bearded and mustached, often gaily dressed, some with bracelets and anklets, all stalking hidalgo-like, and accepting salutations with a haughty lip.  The hair (with the dandies of either sex) is worn turban-wise in a frizzled bush; and like the daggers of the Japanese a pointed stick (used for a comb) is thrust gallantly among the curls.  The women from this bush of hair look forth enticingly: the race cannot be compared with the Tahitian for female beauty; I doubt even if the average be high; but some of the prettiest girls, and one of the handsomest women I ever saw, were Gilbertines.  Butaritari, being the commercial centre of the group, is Europeanised; the coloured sacque or the white shift are common wear, the latter for the evening; the trade hat, loaded with flowers, fruit, and ribbons, is unfortunately not unknown; and the characteristic female dress of the Gilberts no longer universal.  The
ridi
is its name: a cutty petticoat or fringe of the smoked fibre of cocoa-nut leaf, not unlike tarry string: the lower edge not reaching the mid-thigh, the upper adjusted so low upon the haunches that it seems to cling by accident.  A sneeze, you think, and the lady must surely be left destitute.  ‘The perilous, hairbreadth ridi’ was our word for it; and in the conflict that rages over women’s dress it has the misfortune to please neither side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous finding it unlovely in itself.  Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would look her best, that must be her costume.  In that and naked otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia.  Bundle her in a gown, the charm is fled, and she wriggles like an Englishwoman.

Towards dusk the passers-by became more gorgeous.  The men broke out in all the colours of the rainbow - or at least of the trade-room, - and both men and women began to be adorned and scented with new flowers.  A small white blossom is the favourite, sometimes sown singly in a woman’s hair like little stars, now composed in a thick wreath.  With the night, the crowd sometimes thickened in the road, and the padding and brushing of bare feet became continuous; the promenades mostly grave, the silence only interrupted by some giggling and scampering of girls; even the children quiet.  At nine, bed-time struck on a bell from the cathedral, and the life of the town ceased.  At four the next morning the signal is repeated in the darkness, and the innocent prisoners set free; but for seven hours all must lie - I was about to say within doors, of a place where doors, and even walls, are an exception - housed, at least, under their airy roofs and clustered in the tents of the mosquito-nets.  Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house like a moving bonfire.  Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants.  I used to hate their treacherous presence; their captain in particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked nightly about my premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat him.  But the rogue was privileged.

Not one of the eleven resident traders came to town, no captain cast anchor in the lagoon, but we saw him ere the hour was out.  This was owing to our position between the store and the bar - the
Sans Souci
, as the last was called.  Mr. Rick was not only Messrs. Wightman’s manager, but consular agent for the States; Mrs. Rick was the only white woman on the island, and one of the only two in the archipelago; their house besides, with its cool verandahs, its bookshelves, its comfortable furniture, could not be rivalled nearer than Jaluit or Honolulu.  Every one called in consequence, save such as might be prosecuting a South Sea quarrel, hingeing on the price of copra and the odd cent, or perhaps a difference about poultry.  Even these, if they did not appear upon the north, would be presently visible to the southward, the
Sans Souci
drawing them as with cords.  In an island with a total population of twelve white persons, one of the two drinking-shops might seem superfluous: but every bullet has its billet, and the double accommodation of Butaritari is found in practice highly convenient by the captains and the crews of ships:
The Land we Live in
being tacitly resigned to the forecastle, the
Sans Souci
tacitly reserved for the afterguard.  So aristocratic were my habits, so commanding was my fear of Mr. Williams, that I have never visited the first; but in the other, which was the club or rather the casino of the island, I regularly passed my evenings.  It was small, but neatly fitted, and at night (when the lamp was lit) sparkled with glass and glowed with coloured pictures like a theatre at Christmas.  The pictures were advertisements, the glass coarse enough, the carpentry amateur; but the effect, in that incongruous isle, was of unbridled luxury and inestimable expense.  Here songs were sung, tales told, tricks performed, games played.  The Ricks, ourselves, Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the ships, and perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their boats or by the road on foot, made up the usual company.  The traders, all bred to the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business; ‘South Sea Merchants’ is the title they prefer.  ‘We are all sailors here’ - ‘Merchants, if you please’ - ‘
South Sea
Merchants,’ - was a piece of conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed to lose in savour.  We found them at all times simple, genial, gay, gallant, and obliging; and, across some interval of time, recall with pleasure the traders of Butaritari.  There was one black sheep indeed.  I tell of him here where he lived, against my rule; for in this case I have no measure to preserve, and the man is typical of a class of ruffians that once disgraced the whole field of the South Seas, and still linger in the rarely visited isles of Micronesia.  He had the name on the beach of ‘a perfect gentleman when sober,’ but I never saw him otherwise than drunk.  The few shocking and savage traits of the Micronesian he has singled out with the skill of a collector, and planted in the soil of his original baseness.  He has been accused and acquitted of a treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which inclines me to suppose him innocent.  His daughter is defaced by his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to disfigure, and in the darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco-brandy, fastened on the wrong victim.  The wife has since fled and harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands from deaf ears her forcible restoration.  The best of his business is to make natives drink, and then advance the money for the fine upon a lucrative mortgage.  ‘Respect for whites’ is the man’s word: ‘What is the matter with this island is the want of respect for whites.’  On his way to Butaritari, while I was there, he spied his wife in the bush with certain natives and made a dash to capture her; whereupon one of her companions drew a knife and the husband retreated: ‘Do you call that proper respect for whites?’ he cried.  At an early stage of the acquaintance we proved our respect for his kind of white by forbidding him our enclosure under pain of death.  Thenceforth he lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on his English lips incredibly incongruous.