We
WE sighted Mauké at dawn. The cabin lamp was still burning when the boy brought my coffee; I drank it, lit a cigarette, and went on deck in apareu. The skipper himself was at the wheel; half a dozen men were in the shrouds; the native passengers were sitting forward, cross-legged in little groups, munching ship's biscuit and gazing ahead for the expected land.
The day broke wild and gray, with clouds scudding low over the sea, and squalls of rain. Since we had left Mangaia, the day before, it had blown heavily from the southeast; a big sea was running, but in spite of sixty tons of copra the schooner was reeling off the knots in racing style, running almost free, with the wind well aft of the beam, rising interminably on the back of each passing sea, and taking the following slope with a swoop and a rush. We had no log; it was difficult to guess our position within a dozen miles; the low driving clouds, surrounding us like a curtain, made it impossible to see more than a few hundred yards. Until an observation could be obtained, the landfall was a matter of luck and guesswork. Our course had been laid almost due north-northeast—topass a little to the west of Mauké—which gave us the chance of raising Mitiaro or Atiu if we missed the first island; but ocean currents are uncertain things, and with a horizon limited to less than half a mile, nothing would be easier than to slip past the trio of low islands and into the stretch of lonely ocean beyond. Every trading skipper is accustomed to face such situations; one can only maintain a sharp lookout and hold on one's course until there is an opportunity to use the sextant, or until it becomes obvious that the land has been passed.
A squall of rain drove down on us; for five minutes, while we shivered and the scuppers ran fresh water, our narrow circle of vision was blotted out. Then suddenly, with the effect of a curtain drawn aside, the clouds broke to the east, flooding the sea with light. A shout went up. Close ahead and to starboard, so near that we could see the white of breakers on the reef, was Mauké—densely wooded to the water's edge, a palm top rising here and there above the thick bush of ironwoods. Next moment the curtain descended; gray clouds and rearing seas surrounded us; it was as though we had seen a vision of the land, unreal as the blue lakes seen at midday on the desert. But the skipper was shouting orders in harsh Mangaian; the schooner was swinging up into the wind; the blocks were clicking and purring as half a dozen boys swayed on the mainsheet.
Presently the land took vague form through the mist of squalls; we were skirting the reef obliquely, drawing nearer the breakers as the settlement came in view. A narrow boat passage, into which an ugly surf was breaching, had been blasted through the hard coralof the reef; a path led up the sloping land beyond, between a double row of canoe houses to the bush. A few people were gathering by the canoe houses; it was evident that we had just been sighted, and that it would be some time before a boat could put out, if, indeed, the boatmen were willing to risk the surf. Meanwhile we could only stand off and on until they came out to us, for the skipper had no intention of risking his ship's boat and the lives of his men on such a forbidding shore. "Arari!" he sang out, dwelling long on the last syllable of this Cook Island version of "hard alee." The schooner rounded into the wind with a ponderous deliberation calculated to make the nerves of a fair-weather sailor twitch; she seemed to hesitate, like a fat and fluttering grandmother; at last, after an age of bobbing and ducking into the head sea, while boom tackles were made fast and headsails backed, she made up her mind, and filled away on the port tack.
Riley, the American coconut planter, who was recruiting labor for the season on his island, turned to me with a wink. "If this old hooker was mine," he remarked in a voice meant to reach the skipper's ears, "I'd start the engine every time I came about; she can't sail fast enough to keep steerageway!"
The skipper sniffed a British sniff; they are old friends. "If this damn fine schooner was yours," he observed, without turning his head, "she'd have been piled up long ago—like as not in broad daylight, on an island a thousand feet high."
Riley chuckled. "Too early for an argument," he said. "Let's go below and have a drink."
I have not often run across a more interesting manthan Riley. Thrown together, as he and I have been, in circumstances which make for an unusual exchange of confidence, I have learned more of him in two months than one knows of many an old acquaintance at home. At thirty-five years of age he is a living object lesson for those who bewail the old days of adventure and romance, and wish that their lives had been cast in other times. His blood is undiluted Irish; he has the humor, the imagination, the quick sympathy of the race, without the Irish heritage of instability. Born in South Boston and reared with only the sketchiest of educations, he set out to make his way in the world at an age when most boys are playing marbles and looking forward with dread to the study of algebra. For fifteen years he wandered, gathering a varied background of experience. He worked in mills; he drifted west and shipped as cabin boy on vessels plying the Great Lakes; he drifted farther west to become a rider of the range. Finally he reached San Francisco and took to the sea. He has been a sealer, an Alaska fisherman, an able-bodied seaman on square-riggers sailing strange seas. He has seen Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope; he speaks of the ports of India, China, Africa, the Java Sea, as you would speak of Boston or New York.
In the days when a line of schooners ran from San Francisco to Tahiti, touching at the Marquesas on the way, he felt a call to the South Seas, and shipped for a round trip before the mast. When he returned to San Francisco a change seemed to have come over him; the old, wandering life had lost its charm—had gone flat and stale. Like many another, he had eaten of the wild plantain unaware. The evenings of carousalashore no longer tempted him; even the long afternoons of reading (for reading has always been this curious fellow's chief delight), stretched on his bed in a sailor's boarding house, had lost their flavor—the print blurred before his eyes, and in its place he saw lands of savage loveliness rising from a warm blue sea; shadowy and mysterious valleys, strewn with the relics of a forgotten race; the dark eyes of a girl in Tai-o-Hae.
Remember that Riley was both a sailor and an Irishman—a rough idealist, keenly susceptible to beauty and the sense of romance. It is stated that the men who live romance are seldom aware of it; this may be true, though I doubt it—certainly in Riley's case the theory does not work out. He is the most modest of men, untainted by a trace of egoism; in his stories, superbly told with the Irish gift for circumstantial detail and dramatic effect, the teller's part is always small. And yet as one listens, thrilled by the color and artistry of the tale, one is all the while aware that this man appraises his memories at their full value—reviews them with a ripened gusto, an ever-fresh appreciation. In short, he is one of those fortunate, or unfortunate, men for whom realities, as most of us know them, do not exist; men whose eyes are incapable of seeing drab or gray, who find mystery and fresh beauty in what we call the commonplace.
It is scarcely necessary to say that Riley was aboard the next schooner bound south for the islands. Nukuhiva knew him for a time, but the gloom and tragedy of that land—together with an episode of domestic infelicity—were overpowering to a man of his temperament. From the Marquesas he went to Tahiti, and his wanderings ended in the Cook group, six hundredmiles to the west. Perhaps the finding of his journey's end wrought the change, perhaps it was due to his rather practical Tahitian wife—in any case, the wanderer ceased to rove, the spendthrift began to save and plan. In the groups to the eastward he had picked up a smattering of coconut lore; it was not long before he got a berth as superintendent of a small plantation. With a native wife and the Irishman's knack for languages, he soon mastered the dialect of his group; he is one of a very few men who speak it with all the finer shadings. This accounts in part for his success with labor—the chief difficulty of the planter throughout Polynesia. To one interested as I am in the variations of this oceanic tongue, it is a genuine pleasure to talk with Riley. In school he learned to read and write; beyond that he is entirely self-educated. A good half of his earnings, I should say, in the days when he followed the sea, were spent on books; a native intelligence enabled him to criticize and select; he has read enormously, and what he has read he has remembered. Each time a new subject attracted him he hastened to the book shops of San Francisco, or Liverpool, or Singapore, and gathered a little forecastle library of reference. Like most intelligent men in this part of the world, he has grown interested in the subject of Polynesian research; it is odd to hear him discuss—with a strong accent of South Boston and the manner of a professor of ethnology—some question of Maori chronology, or the variations in a causative prefix. Once he made clear to me a matter often referred to in print, but which I had never properly understood. He was speaking of the language of Tahiti.
"When you hear a Tahitian talk," he said, "itsounds different, but really it's the same as Hawaiian, or Marquesan, or Rarotongan, or New Zealand Maori. Tahiti is the oldest settled place, and the language has kind of rotted away there. Nowadays the Tahitian has lost the strong, harsh sounds of the old lingo, thekandng; in place of them there is simply a catch between two vowels. If you know Rarotongan and understand the system of change, you can get on all right in Tahiti. Take our wordakatangi—to play a musical instrument.Tangimeans 'wail' or 'weep';akais the old causative prefix; the combination means 'cause to weep.' Now let's figure that word out in Tahitian. First we've got to take out thekandng; that leaves a bad start—it doesn't sound good, so the Tahitians stick on anfat the beginning. That's all there is to it;fa'ata'iis the word. It makes me laugh to think of when I first came down here. I was working in Tahiti, and when I came home in the evening my girl would look up from her sewing and sing out, 'O Riley!' 'For the love of Mike,' I'd tell her, 'don't you know my name yet? It's Riley, not O'Riley!' Finally I caught on; I'd been fooled on the same proposition as Cook and all the rest of them. You remember they called the island Otahiti. That O is simply a special form of the verb used before personal pronouns and proper nouns. The old navigators, when the canoes came out to meet them, pointed to the land and asked its name. 'O Tahiti' said the natives ('It is Tahiti'). My girl didn't mean to call me O'Riley at all; she was simply saying, 'It's Riley.'"
A serious white man, particularly when he is able to recruit and handle native labor, is always in demand in the islands; it was not long before Riley's talentswere recognized; now he is manager and part owner of an entire atoll. I have listened with a great deal of interest to his accounts of the life there. Every year, at about Christmas time, a schooner comes to load his copra and take his boys back to their respective islands. Not a soul is left on the atoll; Riley boards the schooner with his wife and takes passage to Papeete for a couple of months of civilization. When the time is up he makes a tour of the Cook group to recruit twenty or thirty boys for the new season, and is landed on his island with a nine months' supply of medicine, provisions, and reading matter. He is the only white man on the atoll; one would suppose such a life deadly monotonous and lonely, but just now he is pining to get back. It is really the pleasantest of lives, he says; enough routine in keeping the men properly at work, superb fishing when one desires a touch of sport, plenty of time to read and think, the healthiest climate in the world, and a bit of trouble now and then to give the spice a true Irishman needs.
Riley is a man of medium size, with thick brown hair and eyes of Celtic dark blue, perpetually sparkling with humor. I have never seen a stronger or more active man of his weight; on his atoll he spends an hour every day in exercise, running, jumping, working with dumbbells and Indian clubs. From head to foot he is burnt a deep, ruddy brown—a full shade darker than the tint of his native wife. Sometimes, he says, he works himself into such a pink of condition that he aches to pick a fight with the first comer, but I fancy he finds trouble enough to satisfy another man. Once a huge, sullen fellow from the Gambier group attempted to spear him, and Riley called all of his men in fromtheir work, appointed the foreman referee, and beat the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound native—fierce and lithe and strong as a tiger—slowly and scientifically, to a pulp. On another occasion, a half-savage boy, from a far-off island of the southern Paumotus, took a grudge against the manager and bided his time with the cunning of a wild animal. The chance came one afternoon when Riley was asleep in the shade behind his house. The Paumotan stole up with a club and put him still sounder asleep with a blow on the head that laid his scalp open and nearly fractured his skull. Half a dozen kicks from the ball of a toughened foot stove in the ribs on one side of his chest; with that, the native left his victim, very likely thinking him dead. Riley's wife, from whom I got the story, was asleep in the house at the time; toward evening she went to look for her husband, and found him stretched out, bloody and unconscious, on the sand. In spite of her agitation—her kind are not much use in a crisis—she managed to get him to the house and revive him. Riley's first act was to drink half a tumbler of whisky; his second, to send for the foreman. The Paumotan boy had disappeared; overcome by forebodings of evil, he had taken a canoe and paddled off to hide himself on an uncleared islet across the lagoon. Riley gave the foreman careful instructions; early in the morning he was to take all the boys and spend the day, if necessary, in running down the fugitive, who under no circumstances was to be injured or roughly handled.
They brought the boy in at noon—deadly afraid at first, sullen and relieved when he learned his punishment was no worse than to stand up to the manager before the assembled plantation hands. It must havebeen a grievous affair; Tetua could scarcely describe it without tears. Riley was still sick and dizzy; his ribs were taped so tightly that he could breathe with only half his lungs, and a two-inch strip of plaster covered the wound on his head. The Paumotan was fresh and unhurt; he outweighed his antagonist by twenty pounds, and fought with confidence and bitterness. The Kanaka is certainly among the strongest men of the world, a formidable adversary in a rough-and-tumble fight. It went badly with Riley for a time; the boy nearly threw him, and a blow on his broken ribs almost made him faint, but in the end—maddened by pain and the thought of the treacherous attack—he got his man down and might have killed him if the foreman and half a dozen others had not intervened.
Riley's island is a true atoll—a broad lagoon inclosed by an oval sweep of reef along which are scattered islets of varying size. Many people must have lived on it in the past; everywhere there are traces of man's occupation. A dozen inhabitants were there within the memory of living men, but the dead outnumbered the living too heavily—the place became unbearable to them, and in the end a schooner took them away.
The outlying Cook Islands are places full of interest. I determined, when I began this letter, to give you a real account of Mauké—the island itself, its people, the number of tons of copra produced annually, and other enlightening information. But somehow, when one begins to write of this part of the world it seems a hopeless task to stick to a train of facts—there are too many diverging lines of fancy; too many intangible stimuli to thought, stirring to the imagination.
Our landing on Mauké was a ticklish business. Like Mangaia, Mitiaro, and Atiu, this island is of mixed volcanic and raised-coral origin—the pinnacle of a submerged peak, ringed with millions of tons of coral, and without any lagoon worthy of the name. The polyps have built a sort of platform around the land, low inshore and highest—as seems usually the case—just before it drops off into the sea. Breaching across the outer ridge, the surf fills a narrow belt of shallows between it and the shore; the result is a miniature edition of a lagoon—a place of rocky pools where children wade knee-deep, on the lookout for crayfish and baby octopus. On the outer edge the reef is steep, too, dropping off almost at the perpendicular. It is difficult to realize, when one has been brought up on the friendly coasts of America, that if a boat capsizes off these reefs one must swim offshore and wait to be picked up—that it is wiser to chance the sharks than to attempt a landing in the surf, for the sea is breaking along the summit of a sunken cliff—jagged and sharp as broken glass, poisonous as the venom of a snake.
They came out to us in a whaleboat; Riley, the supercargo, and I were the first to go ashore. As we pulled away from the schooner a high-pitched argument began. One of the principal men of the island had come out as a passenger and was sitting beside me. He insisted that as they had got off safely from the boat passage it was best to return the same way. The boat steerer disagreed; it was all very well to put out from the passage, with a score of men to hold the boat until the moment came, and launch her out head-on to the breakers, but now the situation was different; the passage was narrow; it must be enteredjust so, and a mishap might have unpleasant consequences in such a surf. The steersman had the best of it; he took us a quarter of a mile beyond the passage, and let his men rest on their oars off a place where the reef seemed a little lower than elsewhere.
Each time we swung up to the crest of a swell I got a look at the surf, and the prospect was not reassuring. Once or twice, as the backwash poured off in a frothy cascade, I caught a glimpse of the coral—reddish-black, jagged and forbidding. Little by little we drew near the land until the boat lay just where the waves began to tower for the final rush; the oarsmen backed water gently—the boat steerer turned his head nervously this way and that, glancing at the reef ahead and at the rearing water behind. I thought of a day, many years before, when my father had taken me for a first experience of the "chutes," and our little boat seemed to pause for an instant at the summit of the tower before it tilted forward and flew down the steep slope to the water—infinitely far off and below. The feeling was the same—fear mingling with delight, an almost painful exhilaration.
All of us, saving the watchful figure in the stern, were waiting for a signal which would make the oarsmen leap into activity, the passengers clench their teeth and grip the rail. Suddenly it came—a harsh shout. Six oars struck the water at once; the whaleboat gathered way; a big sea rose behind us, lifted us gently on its back, and swept us toward the reef. Next moment I saw that we had started a breath too late. We were going like the wind, it was true, but not tilted forward on the crest as we should have been; the wave was gradually passing beneath us. Rileyglanced at me and shook his head with a humorous turndown of the mouth. It was too late to stop—the men were pulling desperately, their long oars bending at every stroke. When the sea broke we were slipping down into the trough behind; as we passed over the edge of the reef the wave was beginning its backward wash. There were shouts; I found myself up to my waist in a foaming rush of water, struggling with might and main to keep my footing and to hold the boat from slipping off into the sea. We stopped her just on the brink; her keel grated on the coral; another sea was coming at us, towering high above our heads. Riley, the supercargo, and I leaped aboard in response to a sharp command. The boys held her stern-on to the last; as they scrambled over the sides the sea caught us, half swamping the boat and lifting her stern high in the air. She tilted wildly as her bow crashed on the coral, but a rare piece of luck saved her from turning broadside on. Next moment we were over the reef and gliding smoothly into the shallow water beyond. As I drew a long, satisfying breath I heard Riley chuckle. "I think I'll get a job diving for shell," he remarked. "I'll swear I haven't breathed for a good three minutes!"
When we stood on the beach a dozen men came forward, smiling, to greet their friend Rairi. With a decently pronounceable name—from the native standpoint—Riley has got off easily; I never tire of wondering what these people will call a white man. They seem to prefer the surname if it can be pronounced; if not, they try the given name, and Charley becomes Teari, or Johnny, Tioni. If this fails, or if they take a dislike to one, the fun begins. I have a friend who,unless he leaves the islands, will be called Salt Pork all his life; and I know another man—a second-rate colonial of the intolerant kind—who goes blissfully about his business all unaware that hundreds of people know him by no other name than Pig Dung. No doubt you have noticed another thing down here—the deceptive simplicity of address. In these eastern islands the humblest speaks to the most powerful without any title of respect, with nothing corresponding to our "mister" or "sir." At first one is inclined to believe that here is the beautiful and ideal democracy—the realization of the communist's dream—and there are other things which lead to the same conclusion. Servants, for one example, are treated with extraordinary consideration and kindliness; when the feast is over the mistress of the household is apt as not to dance with the man who feeds her pigs, or the head of the family to take the arm of the girl who has been waiting on his guests. The truth is that this impression of equality is false; there are not many places in the world where a more rigid social order exists—not of caste, but of classes. In the thousand or fifteen hundred years that they have inhabited the islands the Polynesians have worked out a system of human relationships nearer the ultimate, perhaps, than our own idealists would have us believe. Wealth counts for little, birth for everything; it is useless for an islander to think of raising himself in a social way—where he is born he dies, and his children after him. On the other hand, except for the abstract pleasure of position, there is little to make the small man envious of the great; he eats the same food, his dress is the same, he works as little or as much, and the relationsbetween the two are of the pleasantest. There is a really charming lack of ostentation in these islands, where everything is known about everyone, and it is useless to pretend to be what one is not. That is at the root of it all—here is one place in the world, at least, where every man is sure of himself.
We were strolling up the path between the canoe houses when Riley stopped me. "Come and have a look," he said; "this is the only island I know of where you can see an old-fashioned double canoe."
There were two of them in the shed we entered, under a roof of battered galvanized iron—long, graceful hulls fashioned from the trunks of trees, joined in pairs by timbers of ironwood laid across the gunwales and lashed down with sinnet. They were beautifully finished—scraped smooth and decorated with carving. In these craft, my companion told me, the men of Mauké still voyage to Atiu and Mitiaro, as they had done for generations before Cook sailed through the group. There is an ancient feud between Mauké and Atiu; it is curious how hard such grudges die. The men of Atiu were the most warlike of all the Cook Islanders; even in these times of traders and schools and missionaries no firearms are allowed on the island. Time after time, in the old days, they raided Mauké, stealing by night upon the sleeping villages, entering each house to feel the heads of the sleepers. When they felt the large head of a warrior they seized his throat and killed him without noise; the children and women—the small heads and the heads with long hair—were taken back alive to Atiu. Terrible scenes have been enacted under the old ironwoods of Mauké, when the raiders, maddened with theheat of killing, danced in the firelight about the opened ovens and gorged on the bodies of the slain; for the Cook-Islanders, excepting perhaps the people of Aitutaki, were cannibals as fierce as the Maoris of New Zealand or the tawny savages of the Marquesas. Why should Aitutaki have bred a gentler and finer people? The group is not widely scattered as islands go; there must have been fighting and intermarriage for ages past. Yet any man who has been here long can tell you at a glance from which island a native hails; even after my few weeks I am beginning to have an eye for the differences. The Mangaian is certainly the most distinct, recognizable at once by his dark skin, his wide, ugly mouth, his uncouth and savage manner. The full-blooded Rarotongan, who will soon be a rarity, is another type—handsome in a square-cut leonine way, with less energy and far more dignity of presence. The people of Aitutaki are different still—fair as the average Tahitian, and pleasing in features and manner; I have seen girls from that island who would be called beautiful in any country. These differences are not easy to account for, it seems to me, when one considers that the islanders are all of one race, tracing their ancestry back to common sources and speaking a common tongue.
The trader, a friend of Riley's, took us to his house for lunch. The day was Sunday and a feast was already preparing, so we were spared the vocal agonies of the pig. Times must be changing—I have seen very few traders of the gin-drinking type one expects to find in the South Seas; nowadays they seem to be rather quiet, reflective men, who like to read and play their phonographs in the evening, and drink excellentwhisky with soda from a sparklet bottle. This one was no exception; I found him full of intelligence and a dreamy philosophy which kept him content in this forgotten corner of the world. He was young and English; there were cricket bats and blazers in his living room, and shelves filled with the kind of books one can read over and over again. He was pessimistic over Riley's chances of getting men—the people of Mauké were growing lazier each year, he said, and seemed to get along with less and less of the European things for which, at one time, they had worked. As for copra, they no longer bothered much with it; the nuts were left to sprout under the palms. The taro patches were running down; the coffee and breadfruit dropped off the trees unpicked; the oranges, which brought a good price when a vessel came to take them off, were allowed to drop and rot.
As we sat smoking after lunch, a native boy came in, with a vague air of conspiracy, to hold a whispered conversation with Riley. When he had gone the American winked at our host and turned to me.
"There's a beer tub going full blast out in the bush," he said. "I think I'll drop in on them and see if I can pick up a man or two. You'd better come along."
Liquor is prohibited to the natives throughout the Cook Islands; even the white man must buy it from the government in quantities regulated by the judgment of the official in charge. The manufacture of anything alcoholic is forbidden, but this latter law is administered with a certain degree of tolerance. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the art of making palm toddy has never been introduced; when the Cook-Islander feels the need of mild exhilaration he takesto the bush and brews a beverage known as orange beer. The ingredients are sugar, orange juice, and yeast—the recipe would prove popular, I fancy, in our own orange-growing states. The story goes that when the Cook Island boys went overseas to war they found a great drought prevailing in their eastern field of action—Palestine, I think it was. But there were oranges in plenty, and these untutored islanders soon showed the Tommies a trick that brought them together like brothers. I have tasted orange beer at all stages (even the rare old vintage stuff, bottled two or three months before) and found it not at all difficult to take; there are worse varieties of tipple, though this one is apt to lead to fighting, and leaves its too-enthusiastic devotee with a headache of unusual severity.
We found fifteen or twenty men assembled under an old utu tree; a dance ended as we drew near, and the cup was being passed. Two five-gallon kerosene tins, with the tops cut off and filled with the bright-yellow beer, stood in the center of the group. Women are never present on these occasions, which correspond, in a way, to Saturday evenings in a club at home. A sort of rude ceremonial—a relic, perhaps, of kava-drinking days—is observed around the beer tub. The oldest man present, armed with a heavy stick, is appointed guardian of the peace, to see that decency and order are preserved; the natives realize, no doubt, that any serious disturbance might put an end to their fun. The single cup is filled and passed to each guest in turn; he must empty it without taking breath. After every round one of the drinkers is expected to rise and entertain the company with a dance or a song.
Riley was welcomed with shouts; he was in a gaymood and when we had had our turns at the cup he stripped off his tunic for a dance. He is a famous dancer; unhampered by the native conventions, he went through the figures ofheiva,otea, andura—first the man's part, then the woman's—while the men of Mauké clapped their hands rhythmically and choked with laughter. No wonder Riley gets on with the people; there is not an ounce of self-consciousness in him—he enters into a bit of fun with the good-natured abandon of a child. As for dancing, he is wonderful; every posture was there, every twist and wriggle and flutter of the hands—what old Bligh called, with delightful, righteous gusto, the "wanton gestures" of theheiva.
Riley had told his friends on the beach that he was on the lookout for labor; by this time, probably, the whole island knew he was on his way to the atoll and that he needed men. Before we took leave of the drinkers three of them had agreed to go with my companion. The sea was calmer now, and, since Riley's wife was on the schooner, we decided to go aboard for dinner. Four more recruits were waiting by the canoe houses to sign on—it was odd to see their response to the Irishman's casual offer when half the planters of the group declare that labor is unobtainable.
The whaleboat was waiting in the passage. It was evening. The wind had dropped; the sky overhead was darkening; out to the west the sun had set behind banks of white cloud rimmed with gold. The oarsmen took their places; friendly hands shot us out in a lull between two breakers; we passed the surf and pulled offshore toward where the schooner was riding an easy swell, her lights beginning to twinkle in the dusk.
Rutiaro
Palm
Chance
CHANCEbegan to move of set purpose in Papeete, on the day I was to sail with the one-hundred-and-ten-ton schooner,Caleb S. Winship, for the Cloud of Islands. I was on my way to the water front, and, having plenty of time, walked leisurely, thinking of the long journey so nearly at hand, of the strange and lonely islands I was to see, and wondering, as an Anglo-Saxon must when presented with a piece of good fortune, what I had done to merit it. Oro, the cabin boy of theWinship, was following with my luggage. He kept at some distance, a mark of respect, as I thought, until I saw him sublet his contract to a smaller boy. Then he retired to spend the unearned increment in watermelon and a variety of cakes sold at the Chinese stalls along the street. Not wanting him to think that I begrudged him his last little fling on shore, I became interested of a sudden in the contents of a shop window, and there I saw a boxful of marbles. In a moment Oro was forgotten. Papeete faded from view, and the warm air, fragrant with the odors of vanilla and roasting coffee, became more bracing. There was a tang in it, like that of early April, in Iowa, for example, at the beginning of the marble-playingseason. Fifteen years dropped lightly from my shoulders and I was back at the old rendezvous in the imagination, almost as really as I had ever been in the flesh. The lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son lay on the right hand and the Rock Island Railroad tracks on the left. Between, on a stretch of smooth cinder right of way, a dozen games were in full swing. There were cries of, "Picks and vents!" "Bunchers!" "Sneakers!" "Knucks down!" the sharp crack of expert shots; the crunch of cinders under bare and yet tender feet. Meadow larks were singing in a nearby pasture, and from afar I heard the deep whistle of the Rocky Mountain Limited as it came down the Mitchellville grade.
I bought the marbles—the whole box of them. They cost fifty francs, about four dollars American, as the exchange was then, but I considered the investment a good one. I knew that, no matter where I might be, to lift the lid of my box was to make an immediate and inexpensive journey back to one of the pleasantest periods of boyhood. Oro was awaiting me at the quay, and carried my small sea chest on board with an air of spurious fatigue. I gave him my purchase and told him to stow it away for me in the cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find it again until we were within view of Rutiaro. TheCaleb S. Winshipwas homeward bound then, from Tanao, where we had left Crichton, the English planter. Rutiaro lying on our course, it was decided to put in there in the hope that we might be able to replace our lost deck cargo of copra, washed overboard in a squall a few days previously.
Neither Findlay'sSouth Pacific Directorynor theBritish Admiralty Sailing Directionshad much to say about the atoll. Both agreed that the lagoon is nine miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887, the French surveying vessel,St. Étienne, found the tide running through a narrow pass at two knots per hour, the flood as swift as the ebb. It was further stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship,Prince Edward, anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from shore in front of the village, which is situated on the most westerly island; and that a few pigs and chickens were purchased at a nominal price from the inhabitants. With this information I had to be content in so far as my reading was concerned. There was nothing of a later date in either volume, and the impression I had was that the atoll, having been charted and briefly described, had remained unvisited, almost forgotten, for a period of thirty-one years.
This, of course, was not the case. Tinned beef and kerosene oil had followed the flag there as elsewhere in the world. Religion, in fact, had preceded it, leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black mother-hubbards still in evidence among the older generation. But skippers of small trading schooners are rarely correspondents of the hydrographic associations, and the "reports from the field" of itinerant missionaries are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals, so that Rutiaro is as little known to the world at large as it has always been. Findlay's general remarks about it were confined to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." It certainly looked lonely enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the archipelago, more than six hundred miles from thenearest steamship route, and that one infrequently traveled. I sought further information from Tino-a-Tino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American despite his Tahitian name. He had been trading in the Low Islands for twenty years, and during that time had created a voluminous literature with reference to their inhabitants. But it was all of an occupational nature and confined to the ledgers of the Inter-Island Trading Company. I found him at his usual task in the cabin, where he gave me some specimen compositions for criticism.
"I wish you'd look them over," he said. "These copra bugs drive a man wild. They get in your eyes, in your liquor, in your mouth—Lord! What a life!"
The cabin was filled with unsacked copra to the level of the upper tier of bunks. One had to crawl in on hands and knees. The copra bugs were something of a nuisance, and the smell and heat oppressive. I had traveled on more comfortable vessels, with tennis courts on the boat decks and Roman swimming baths below—but they didn't touch at Rutiaro.
I went through his accounts, verifying long lists of items, such as:
The work of checking up finished, we went out for a breath of air. The atoll lay abeam and still far distant; a faint bluish haze lifted a bare eighth of an inch abovethe circle of the horizon. Behind us, rain fell in a straight wall of water from a single black cloud which cast a deep shadow over the path we had come. Elsewhere the sky was clear and the sea the incredible blue of the tropics. Tino broke a long silence.
"Look here," he said. "What is it that interests you in these islands? I've never known anyone to visit them for pleasure before. Is it the women, or what?"
Under pressure, I admitted that Nature seemed to have spent her best effort among the Paumotuans in fashioning the men.
"You're right," said Tino. "The women are healthy enough, of course, but they don't set your heart beating a hundred to the minute. They have fine hands and white teeth, and you won't find such black hair in all the world as you find in these atolls. But that's the size of it. You can't praise them any further for looks. Maybe you haven't noticed their ears, because they always cover them up with their hair; but they're large, and their feet and ankles—tough as sole leather and all scarred over with coral cuts. That is well enough for the men, but with the women it's different. Makes you lose your enthusiasm, don't it?"
I had seen a good many striking exceptions in our wanderings, but I agreed that, in the main, what he said was true.
"Well, if it isn't the women, what else is there to be interested in? Not the islands themselves? Lord! When you've seen one you've seen the lot. Living on one of them is like living aboard ship. Not room to stretch your legs. They're solid enough, and theydon't sink; but in a hurricane I'd a heap rather take my chances out to sea with theWinshipthan to be lashed to the stoutest coconut tree in the whole group. Now you take Rutiaro. It was washed over seventeen years ago and all but twenty of the people killed. They are back to seventy-five now, but wait till the next bad blow down that way. They'll drown like rats just as they did before.
"Well, we won't have to stop long," he added, grouchily. "I'll take what copra they have and get out. It's a God-forsaken hole. They only make about twenty-five tons a year. The island could produce three times that amount under decent management. They're a lazy, independent lot, at Rutiaro. You can't get 'em to stir themselves."
I asked him what they had to gain by stirring themselves.
"Gain?" he said. "They have everything to gain. There are only two frame houses on the place. The rest of them are miserable little shelters of coconut thatch. I haven't sold them enough corrugated iron in ten years to cover this cockpit. You remember Takaroa and Niau and Fakahina? Well, there's my idea of islands. Nice European furniture—iron beds, center tables, phonographs, bicycles—"
A further catalogue of the comforts and conveniences of civilization which the inhabitants of Rutiaro might have and didn't convinced me that this was the atoll I had been looking for, and I regretted that our stay there was to be so brief. I did not begrudge the inhabitants of richer atolls their phonographs and bicycles. They got an incredible amount of amusement out of them; listened with delight to the strange music, and spent entire evenings taking turns with the bicycles, riding them back and forth from the lagoonbeach to the ocean shore. But the frame houses were blots on the landscape, crude, barnlike structures, most of them, which offend the eye like factory chimneys in a green valley. Rutiaro had none of these things and, having no interest in it from the commercial point of view, I awaited impatiently our arrival there.
At ten o'clock we were three miles to windward of the village island. It lay at the narrower end of the lagoon, the inner shore line curving around a broad indentation where the village was. The land narrowed in one direction to a ledge of reef. At the farther end there was a smallmotunot more than three hundred yards in length by one hundred broad, separated from the main island by a strip of shallow water. Seen from aloft, the two islands resembled, roughly, in outline, an old-fashioned, high-pooped vessel with a small boat in tow. I could see the whole of the atoll from the mainmast crosstrees, the lagoon, shimmering into green over the shoals, darkening to an intense blue over unlit valleys of ocean floor; a solitude of sunlit water, placid as a lake buried in the depths of inaccessible mountains. I followed the shore line with my glasses. Distant islands, ledges of barren reef, leaped forward with an effect of magic, as though our atom of a vessel, the only sail which relieved the emptiness of the sea, had been swept in an instant to within a few yards of the surf. Great combers, green and ominous looking in the sunlight, broke at one rapidly advancing point, toppled and fell in segments, filling the inner shallows with a smother of foam. Beyond it lay the broad fringe of white, deserted beach,the narrow forest of shrub and palm, the empty lagoon, a border of misty islands on the farther side. I had seen the same sort of a picture twenty times before, always with the same keen sense of its desolate beauty, its allurement, its romantic loveliness. Tino had said, "When you've seen one you've seen them all," and an old skipper once told me that "the atolls are as much alike as the reef points on that sail." It is true. They are as monotonous as the sea itself and as fresh with varying interest.
The village was hidden among the trees, but I saw the French flag flying near a break in the reef which marked the landing place for small boats. Farther back, a little knot of people were gathered, some of them sitting in the full glare of the sun, others in the deep shade, leaning against the trees in attitudes of dreamy meditation. Three girls were combing their hair, talking and laughing in an animated way. They were dressed in all their European finery, gowns of flowered muslin pulled up around their bare legs to prevent soilure. A matronly woman in a red wrapper had thrown the upper covering aside and sat, naked to the waist, nursing a baby. I put down my glasses, feeling rather ashamed of my scrutiny, as though I had been peeping through a window at some intimate domestic scene. The island leaped into the distance; the broad circle of foam and jagged reef narrowed to a thread of white, and theCaleb S. Winshipcrept landward again under a light breeze, an atom of a ship on a vast and empty sea. Eight bells struck, a tinkling sound, deadened, scarcely audible in the wide air. I heard Tino's voice as though coming from an immense distance: "Hello, up there!Kai-kai'sready!" I said:"All right! I'm coming," and was surprised at the loudness of my own shout. But I waited for a moment to indulge myself in a last reflection: "It is thirty-one years since thePrince Edwardput in here. Excepting a few traders and missionaries, there isn't probably one man in one hundred thousand who has ever heard of this atoll; not one in a million who has ever seen it or ever will see it. What a piece of luck for me!" Then I saw Oro at the galley door with a huge platter of boiled beef and sweet potatoes. The sight of it reminded me that I was very hungry. As I climbed down to the deck I was conscious of the fact that a healthy appetite and a good digestion were a piece of luck, too, and that as long as one could hold it the lure of islands would remain, and one's love of living burn with a clear flame. Jack, the monkey, seemed to divine my thought, to agree with it. As Oro, the food bearer, passed him, he reached down from his perch in the rigging, seized the largest sweet potato on the platter, and clambered out of reach. Assured of his safety, he fell to greedily, looking out wistfully toward the land.
The pass was at the farther end of the lagoon, and in order to save time in getting the work ashore under way, the supercargo and I, with three of the sailors, put off in the whaleboat, to land on the ocean side of the village. Half a dozen men rushed into the surf, seized and held the boat as the backwash poured down the steep incline at the edge of the reef. Among them was the chief, a man of huge frame, six feet two or three in height. Like the others who assisted at the landing, he was clad only in apareu, but he lost none of his dignity through his nakedness. He was fifty-fiveyears old, as I afterward learned, and as he stood bidding us welcome I thought of the strange appearance certain of the chief men in America or France or England would make under similar circumstances, deprived of the kindly concealment of clothing. What a revelation it would be of skinniness or pudginess! What an exhibition of scrawny necks, fat stomachs, flat chests, flabby arms! To be strictly accurate, I had seen some fat stomachs among elderly Paumotuans, but they were exceptions, and always remarkable for that reason. And those who carried them had sturdy legs. They did not give one the uneasy feeling, common at home, at the sight of the great paunches of sedentary men toppling unsteadily along a strip of crimson carpet, from curb to club doorway.
Wherever one goes in Polynesia one is reminded, by contrast, of the cost physically to men of our own race of our sheltered way of living. There on every hand are men well past middle life, with compact, symmetrical bodies and the natural grace of healthy children. One sees them carrying immense burdens without exertion, swimming in the open sea for an hour or two at a time while spearing fish, loafing ashore with no greater apparent effort for yet longer periods. Sometimes, when they have it, they eat enormous quantities of food at one sitting, and at others, under necessity, as sparingly as so many dyspeptics. It would be impossible to formulate from their example any rules for rational living in more civilized communities. The daily quest for food under primitive conditions keeps them alert and sound of body, so that, whether they work or loaf, feast or fast, they seem always to acquire health by it.
There had been no boats at Rutiaro in five months and the crowd on the beach was unfeignedly glad to see us. The arrival of a schooner at that remote island was an event of great importance; the sight of new faces lighted their own with pleasure, which warmed the heart toward them at once. We had brought ashore a consignment of goods for Moy Ling, the Chinese storekeeper, and when the handshaking was over they gathered around it as eagerly as a group of American children at a Christmas tree. Even the village constable seemed unconscious of any need for a show of dignity or authority. The only badge of his office was a cigarette-card picture of President Poincaré, fastened with a safety pin to his old felt hat. He neglected his duties as a keeper of order, and was one of the most excited of Moy Ling's helpers with the cargo. He kept patting him affectionately on the back, saying, "Maitai! maitai!" which in that situation may be freely translated as, "You know me, Moy Ling!" And the old Chinaman smiled the pleasant, noncommittal smile of his countrymen the world over.
Tino's was the only sour face on the beach. He moved through the crowd, giving orders, grumbling and growling half to himself and half to me. "I told you they were a lazy lot," he said. "They've seen us making in for three hours, and what have they been doing? Loafing on the beach, waiting for us instead of getting their copra together! Moy Ling is the only one in the village who is ready to do business. Five tons all sacked for weighing. He's worth a dozen Kanakas. Well, I'll set 'em to work in quick time now. You watch me! I'm going to be loaded and out of here by six o'clock."
But chance, using me as an innocent accomplice, ordered it otherwise. It was Sir Thomas Browne who said, "Those who hold that all things are governed by fortune had not erred had they not persisted there." He may be right, although I don't remember now where his own nonpersistence lay. But there are some things, some events, which chance or fortune—whatever one wishes to call it—governs from the outset with an amazing show of omnipotence. Tracing them back, one becomes almost convinced of a fixed intent, a far-sighted, unwavering determination in its apparently haphazard functioning. It is clear to me now that, because I had been fond of playing marbles as a boy, I was to be marooned, fifteen years later, on a fragment of land, six thousand miles from the lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son. Tino had no more to do with that result than I did. He merely lost his temper because chance disorganized his plans for an early departure; tried to quench his anger in rum, and became more furious still because he was drunk. Then off he went in theCaleb S. Winship, leaving me stranded ashore. I can still hear his parting salutation which he roared at me though a megaphone across the starlit lagoon, "You can stay—" But this is anticipating. The story moves in a more leisurely fashion.
As I have said, my box of marbles came to light again only a few hours before we reached Rutiaro. I took them ashore with me, thinking they might amuse the children. They had a good knowledge of the technic of shooting, acquired in a two-handed game common among the atolls, which is played with bits of polished coral. But theirs had always seemed to me a tame pastime, lacking the interest of stakes to bewon or lost. I instructed them in the simple rules of "bull-ring" and "Tom's-dead," which they quickly mastered. Then I divided the marbles equally among them and gave them to understand that the winner held his gains, although marbles, like trade goods, might be bartered for. I emphasized that feature of the game because of a recollection remaining from my own marble-playing days, of the contempt in which boys were held who refused to hazard their marbles in a test of skill. They refused to play "for keeps," and the rest of us had nothing to do with them. The youngsters of Rutiaro were not of that stamp. They took their losses in good part. When I saw that I left them to themselves and went for a walk through the village. I knew—at least I thought I did—that our stay was to be brief and I wanted to make the most of it.
I followed the street bordering the lagoon, past the freshly thatched houses with their entryways wide to the sun and wind, and came at length to a small burying ground which lay in an area of green shadow far from the village. There were a dozen or more graves within the inclosure, some of them neatly mounded over with broken coral and white shell, others incased in a kind of sarcophagus of native cement to keep more restless spirits from wandering abroad. Most of them were unmarked. Two or three had wooden headboards, one of which was covered with a long inscription in Chinese. Beneath this the word "Repose" was printed in English, as though it had some peculiar talismanic significance for the Chinaman who had placed it there. It was the grave of a predecessor of Moy Ling's. I fell to thinking of him as I sat there, and of all theChinamen I had met in the earlier days, lonely, isolated figures, most of them, without family or friends or the saving companionship of books. What was it that kept them going? What goal were they striving toward through lives which held so little of the comfort or happiness essential to the rest of humankind? Repose? A better end than that, surely. The air rang with the sound of the word, the garish sunlight fell pitilessly on the print of it. To most men, I believe, with the best of life still before them, there is something terrible, infamous, in the thought of the unrelieved blackness of an endless, dreamless sleep. I turned from the contemplation of it; let my thoughts wander in a mist of dreams, of half-formed fancies which glimmered through consciousness like streaks of sunlight in a dusty attic. These vanished at length and for a time I was as dead to thought or feeling as Moy Ling's predecessor, sleeping beside me.
I was awakened by some one shaking me by the shoulder. A voice said, "Haere i te pai!" ("Come down to the boat!") and a dark figure ran on before, turning from time to time to urge me to greater speed. It was almost night, although there was still light enough to see by. I remembered that Tino had told me to be at the copra sheds at five. The tide would serve for getting through the pass until eight, but I hurried, nevertheless, feeling that something unusual had happened. Rounding a point of land which cut off the view from the village and the inner lagoon, I saw the schooner, about three hundred yards off shore, slim and black against a streak of orange cloud to the northward. She was moving slowly out, under power; the whaleboat was being hoisted over the side, and atthe wheel I saw the familiar silhouette of the supercargo.
I shouted: "Hi! Tino! Wait a minute! You're not going to leave me behind, are you?"
A moment of silence followed. Then came the answer with the odd deliberation of utterance which I knew meant Tahiti rum:
"You can stay there and play marbles till hell freezes over! I'm through with you!"
What had happened, as nearly as I could make out afterward, was this: my box of marbles which I had brought ashore for the amusement of the children, interested the grown-ups as well, particularly the hazard of stakes in the games I had shown them. Paumotuans have a good deal of Scotch acquisitiveness in their make-up. They coveted those marbles—they were really worth coveting—and it was not long until play became general, a family affair, the experts in one being pitted against those in another, regardless of age or sex. Tino's threats and entreaties had been to no purpose. All work came to an end, and the only copra which got aboard theWinshipwas Moy Ling's five tons, carried out by the sailors themselves. Evidently Puarei, the chief, had been one of the most enthusiastic players. He was not a man to be bulldozed or browbeaten. He had great dignity and force of character, for all his boyish delight in simple amusements. What right had Tino to say that he should not play marbles on his own island? He gave me to understand, by means of gestures, intonation, and a mixture of French and Paumotuan, that this was what the supercargo had done. At last, apparently, Tino had sent Oro on an unsuccessful search for me. He thought,I suppose, that, having been the cause of the marble-playing mania, I might be able and willing to check it. Balked there, he went on board in a fit of violent temper and had not been seen again, although his voice was heard for an hour thereafter. Of a sudden anchor was weighed and I was left, as he assured me, to play marbles with the inhabitants of Rutiaro for an impossibly long time.
Most of these details I gathered afterward. At the moment I guessed just enough of the truth not to be wholly mystified. The watery sputtering of theWinship'stwenty-five horse-power engine grew faint. Then, with a ghostly gleam of her mainsail in the starlight, she was gone. I was thinking, "By Jove! I wouldn't have missed this experience for all the copra in the Cloud of Islands!" I was glad that there were still adventures of that sort to be had in a humdrum world. It was so absurd, so fantastically unreal as to fit nothing but reality. And the event of it was exactly what I had wanted all the time without knowing it. There was no reason why I shouldn't stop at Rutiaro. To be sure, I was shortly to have met my friend Nordhoff at Papeete, but our rendezvous was planned to be broken. We were wandering in the South Pacific as opportunity and inclination should direct, which, I take it, is the only way to wander.
For a few moments I was so deeply occupied with my own thoughts that I was not conscious of what was taking place around me. All the village was gathered there, watching the departing schooner. As she vanished a loud murmur ran through the crowd, like a sough of wind through trees—a long-drawn-out Polynesian, "Aue!" indicative of astonishment, indignation,pity. Paumotuan sympathies are large, and I had been the victim of treachery, they thought, and was silently grieving at the prospect of a long exile. They gathered around, patting me on the back in their odd way, expressing their condolences as best they could, but I soon relieved their minds on that score. Then Huirai, the constable with the cigarette-card insignia, pushed his way through with the first show of authority I had seen him make.
"I been Frisco," he said, with an odd accent on the last syllable. He had made the journey once as a stoker on one of the mail boats. Then he added, "You go to hell, me," his eyes shining with pride that he could be of service as a reminder of home to an exiled American. He was about to take charge of me, in view of his knowledge of English, but the chief waved him away with a gesture of authority. I was to be his guest, he said, at any rate for the present. He began his duties as host by entertaining me at dinner at Moy Ling's store. I was a little surprised that we did not go to his house for the meal until I remembered that the Chinaman had received the only consignment of exotic food left by theWinship. Puarei ordered the feast with the discrimination of a gourmet and the generosity of a sailor on shore leave for the first time in months. We had smoked herring forhors-d'œuvre, followed by soup, curried chicken and rice, edible birds' nests flavored with crab meat, from China, and white bread. For dessert we had small Chinese pears preserved in vinegar, which we ate out of the tin—"Woman Brand Pears," the label said. There was a colored picture on it of a white woman, in old-fashioned puffed sleeves and a long skirt, seated in a garden,while a Chinaman served her deferentially with pears out of the same kind of a container. Underneath was printed in English: "These pears will be found highly stimulating. We respectfully submit them to our customers." That was the first evidence I had seen of China's bid for export trade in tinned fruit. "Stimulating" may not have been just the word, but I liked the touch of Chinese courtesy which followed it. It didn't seem out of place, even coming from a canning factory.
Puarei gave all his attention to his food, and consumed an enormous quantity. My own appetite was a healthy one, but I had not his capacity of stomach; furthermore, he ate with his fingers, while I was handicapped from the first with a two-prong fork and a small tin spoon. I believe they were the only implements of the sort on the island, for the village had been searched for them before they were found. It was another evidence to me of the unfrequented nature of Rutiaro, and of its slender contact, even with the world of Papeete traders. At most of the islands we had visited, knives and forks were common, although rarely used except in the presence of strangers. The onlookers at the feast—about half the village, I should say—watched with interest my efforts to balance mouthfuls of rice on a two-prong fork. I could see that they regarded it as a ridiculous proceeding. They must have thought Americans a strange folk, checking appetite and worrying digestion with such doubtful aids. Finally I decided to follow the chief's example and set to with my fingers. They laughed at that, and Puarei looked up from his third plate of rice and chicken to nod approval. It was a strangemeal, reminding me of stories I had read as a boy, of Louis XV dining in public at Versailles, with a roomful of visitors from foreign courts looking on; whispering behind fans and lace cuffs; exchanging awestruck glances at the splendor of the service, the richness of the food, and the sight of majesty fulfilling a need common to all humankind. There was no whispering among the crowd at the Chinaman's shop, no awestruck glances other than Moy Ling's, at the majesty of Puarei's appetite. I felt sorry for him as he trotted back and forth from his outdoor kitchen, bringing in more food, thinking of his depleted stock, smiling with an expression of wan and worried amiability. Louis XV would have given something, I'll venture, for that old Paumotuan chief's zest for food, for the kingly weight of bone and muscle which demanded such a store of nourishment. He pushed back his chair at length, with a sign of satisfaction, and a half-caste girl of seventeen or eighteen removed the empty dishes.
Paumotuan hospitality is an easy, gracious thing, imposing obligations on neither host nor guest. Dinner over, I told Puarei that I wanted to take a walk, and he believed me. I was free at once, and I knew that he would not be worrying meanwhile about my entertainment. I would not be searched for presently, and pounced upon with the dreaded: "See here! I'm afraid you are not having a good time," of the uneasy host. I was introduced to no one, dragged nowhere to see anything, free from the necessity of being amused. I might do as I liked—rare and glorious privilege—and I went outside, grateful for it, and for the cloak of darkness which enabled me to move aboutunobserved. It lifted here and there in the glow of supper fires, or a streak of yellow lamplight from an open doorway. I saw family groups gathered around their meals of fish and coconuts, heard the loud intake of breath as they sucked themitisauce from their fingers. Dogs were splashing about in the shallows of the lagoon, seeking their own supper of fish. They are a strange breed, the dogs of the atolls, like no other that I have ever seen, a mixture of all breeds one would think, a weird blending of good blood and bad. The peculiar environment and the strange diet have altered them so that they hardly seem dogs at all, but, rather, semiamphibious animals, more at home in the sea than on land. They are gentle-mannered with their masters and with strangers, but fierce fighters among themselves. I sat down behind a clump of bushes, concealed from the light of one of the smoldering supper fires, and watched a group of Rutiaroan dogs in their search for food. They had developed a sort of team work in the business, leaped toward the shore all together with a porpoise-like curving of their bodies, and were as quick as a flock of terns to see and to seize their prey.
Returning from my walk, I found the village street deserted and all of the people assembled back of Moy Ling's shop. He was mixing bread at a table while one of the sons of his strange family piled fresh fuel on the fire under a long brick oven. It was a great event, the bread making, after the long months of dearth, and of interest to everyone. Mats were spread within the circle of the firelight. Puarei was there, with his wife—a mountain of a woman—seated at his side. She was dressed in a red-calico wrapper, and herlong black hair fell in a pool of shadow on the mat behind her. She was a fit wife for a chief, in size, in energy, in the fire and spirit living in the huge bulk of flesh. Her laughter came in a clear stream which it was a delight to hear. There was no undertone of foreboding or bitter remembrance, and the flow of it, as light-hearted as a child's, heightened the merrymaking mood of the others. There was a babble of talk, bursts of song, impromptu dancing to the accompaniment of an accordion and the clapping of hands. As I looked on I was minded of an account I had read of the Paumotuans in which they were described as "a dour people, silent, brooding, and religious." Religious some of them assuredly are, despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary, and they are often silent in the dreamy way of remote island people whose moods are drawn from the sea, whose minds lie fallow to the peace and the beauty of it. But "dour and brooding" is very far from the truth.
I took a place among them as quietly as possible, for I knew by repeated experience how curious they are about strangers, and first meetings were usually embarrassing. Without long training as a freak with a circus, it would try any man's courage to sit for an hour among a group of Paumotuans while he was being discussed item by item. There is nothing consciously brutal or callous in the manner of it, but, rather an unreflecting frankness like that of children in the presence of something strange to their experience. I knew little of the language, although I caught a word here and there which indicated the trend of the comment. It was not general, fortunately, but confined to those on either side of me. Two old grandmothersstarted a speculation as to whether or not I had any children, and from this a discussion rose as to which of the girls of Rutiaro would be best suited as a wife for me. I was growing desperate when Chance, the godfather of all wanderers, intervened again in my favor.
Moy Ling's fire was burning brightly and it occurred to several of the youngsters to resume their marble playing. I saw Puarei's face light with pleasure, and he was on his feet at once with his stake in the ring. Others followed, and soon all those who had marbles were in the sport. I understood clearly then how helpless Tino had been. I could easily picture him rushing from group to group, furious at the thought of his interests being neglected through such childish folly. Those marbles were more desirable than his flour and canned goods, which he stood ready to exchange for copra. The explanation of this astounding fact may have been that no one thought he would go off as he did, and to-morrow would do just as well for getting down to business. Since he had gone, there was an end of that. It was futile to worry about the lost food. Certainly it was forgotten during the great tournament which took place that evening. Moy Ling worked at his bread making unnoticed. His fire died down to a heap of coals, but another was built and the play went on. Puarei was a splendid shot, in marble playing as in other respects, the best man of the village; but there was a slip of a girl who was even better. During the evening she accumulated nearly half of the entire marble supply, and at length these two met for a test of skill. It was a long-drawn-out game. I had never seen anything to equal the interest of both players and spectators; not even atBrown's lumber yard when the stakes were a boy's most precious possessions, cornelian stone taws. No one thought of sleep except a few of the old men and women, who dozed off at intervals with their heads between their knees.
The lateness of the hour—the bizarre setting for a game so linked with memories of boyhood, combined to give me an impression of unreality. I had the feeling that the island and all the people on it might vanish at any moment, and the roar of the surf resolve itself into the rumble of street traffic in some gray city. And, though it were the very city where marbles are made, where in the length or breadth of it could there be found anyone who knew the use of them, with either the time or the inclination to play? I might search it, street by street, to the soot-stained suburbs; I might go on to the green country, perhaps; visit all the old-time marble-playing rendezvous from one coast to the other, with no better success. And, though I passed through a thousand villages of the size of Rutiaro, could an evening's amusement be provided in any one of them, for men, women, and children, at an outlay of four dollars, American? The possibility would not be worth considering. People at home live too fast in these days, and they want too much. I could imagine Tino, in a sober mood, giving a grudging assent to this. "But, man!" he would have added, "I wish they had more of their marble-making enthusiasm at Rutiaro. I would put in here three times a year and fill theWinshipwith copra to within an inch of the main boom every trip."
Moy Ling had enough of it for the whole island, it seemed to me. His ovens were opened as the tournamentcame to an end, and for half an hour he was kept busy passing out crisp brown loaves and jotting down the list of creditors in his account book. It must have been nearly midnight. The crowd began to disperse. Puarei joined me, smiling ruefully, holding out empty hands. He had lost all of his marbles to a mite of a girl whom he could have put in his vest pocket had he owned one. His wife teased him about it on the way home, laughed heartily at his explanations and excuses. They discussed the events of the day long after the other members of the household had retired to their mats on the veranda. At last I heard their quiet breathing, and a strip of light from the last quarter moon revealed them asleep, two massive heads on the same pillow. I lay awake for a much longer time, thinking of one thing and another—of my friend Crichton at Tanao, the loneliest atoll in the world I should say; of theWinshipfar out to sea, homeward bound with one hundred and forty tons of copra in her hold; of Tino with his fits of temper, and his passion for trade which blinded him to so much of the beauty and the joy of life. But, after all, I thought, it is men like Tino who keep wheels turning and boats traveling the seas. If he were to die, his loss would be felt; there would be an eddy in the current of life around him. But men like Crichton or myself—we should go down in our time, and the broad stream would flow over our heads without a ripple to show where we had been, without a bubble rising to the surface to carry with it for a moment the memory of our lives. It was not a comforting thought, and I tried to evade it; but I realized that my New England conscience was playing a part in these reflections and was not to besoothed in any such childish manner. "How much copra have you ever produced or carried to market?" it appeared to say. I admitted that the amount was negligible. "How do you mean to justify your presence here?" was the next question, and before I could think of a satisfactory answer, "What good will come of this experience, either to yourself or to anyone else?" That was a puzzler until I happened to think of Findlay'sSouth Pacific Directory. I remembered that his information about Rutiaro was very scant, the general remarks confined, as I have already said, to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." As a sop to my conscience, it occurred to me that I might write to the publishers of that learned work, suggesting that, in the light of recent investigations, they add to that description, "Fond of playing marbles."