ROMEO AND JULIET.
Romeo loved Juliet, there was not the slightest doubt about that; for although Juliet had been tattooed round the mouth, and had already married Tybalt, and had dug Tybalt’s yams and cut Tybalt’s firewood for the last two years, yet was Romeo ready to die for her. Verona slept peacefully in the bosom of a tiny green valley, shut in by great jagged mountains, and soothed by the lazy music of a tiny river whose water must travel many days before it mixed with the great salt ocean. The hot air quivered in the burning sun, which no breeze ever came to cool, and at night not even a mosquito broke the utter silence. No street brawls here in this Verona of Southern seas, for the humpbacked pig and half-clothed chicken were past getting up a brawl, and they were the only occupants of Verona’s single street. Old Capulet could tell you of brawls enough, in which club took the place of rapier, and the bodies of the slain were disposed of in a peculiar way; but that was before the white man and the measles arrived, when Mongondro still made the earth tremble, and before these white lunatics came and made him wrap calico round his loins, and practise incantations with a hymn-book (which were a waste of time, because nobody died of them as they do of the real incantations), and taught him, in outlandish Bauan, that when he was dead he would be made alive again to be burnt, and asked him to give a shilling every now and again to the Great Spirit not to burn him, and then took the shilling away with them. But old Capulet doesn’t talk about these things any more, because last year the teacher overheard him telling stories to the young men, and threatened to burn him up with a flash of lightning if he ever did it again.
Decidedly Verona was not an exciting place to live in; and so long as the yam-crop was good, and the missionary left them alone, and that other white man who came sometimes on a horse, and told them to hoe their roads, life was easy and monotonous.
Old Capulet had never heard of a romance. There wasn’t a word for it in his vocabulary, and so he, at any rate, may be excused for what he did when Tybalt came and told him what had happened. Why, in Capulet’s day, women were not worth more than a whale’s tooth, however well they could dig! and as for a girl refusing to marry the man who had paid for her, or being untrue to the man she married—why, the thing was unheard of; or at least, if it ever had happened, the case had always been dealt with in the same way—the club, with sometimes the oven to follow.
So when Tybalt came that evening with the story about Romeo and Juliet his wife—Romeo, a man of the hated Noikoro clan,—it was not surprising that old Capulet repaired to Tybalt’s house with his long walking-staff, and, with Tybalt’s active co-operation, gave Juliet a rather severe thrashing. Nor did the old women see any more romance in the affair than did Capulet; and from the day when Tybalt’s suspicions became certainties, the course of true love ran very roughly indeed. Did poor Juliet don her newest liku, with a fringe nearly ten inches long, to go wood-cutting in the hope of a stolen meeting with her adorer, she was sure to find some old village hag dogging her steps. Did she put on Koroisau’s old pinafore to impress Romeo on Sunday with her superior sense of the decencies, her most sacred feelings were sure to be harrowed in the evening by injurious remarks about her figure, and the folly of old women trying to pass for young girls.
Romeo, poor fellow, fared no better. He was no longer welcome in the village of his adoption. When the yams were boiled he was not even asked to partake of them. Some one trampled his yam-vines in the night, and, last insult of all, Capulet’s nephew threw a stone at his pig. He loved Juliet with a great and overwhelming passion. He did not know why. She was not beautiful, though her mouth, it is true, was a triumph of the tattooer’s skill; but time had over-ripened her charms, and the lines of her youthful figure were a trifle blurred and indistinct. Yet Romeo was quite sure in his own mind that nobody had ever loved as he did in the world before, and Juliet returned his passion—at least she said she did.
Life was becoming unbearable for both of them. They could not fly together, for whither could they fly? Romeo had once seen the sea from the mountain-pass at Naloto, and he had heard that the water closed in his land all round. He knew well enough that if he fled with her to any village he had heard of, in two weeks they would be brought back; and as for the bush, the idea of living there alone was not to be thought of for a moment. There was one refuge. He did not know where it was, but he knew the path that led to it, which many another had trod before him. The white men said it was a very pleasant place if you were a missionary, but a very hot and uncomfortable place if you were only a mountaineer. But Romeo didn’t believe that. The spirits of the coast natives jumped from the north-west cliffs into the sea, and the wraiths of the old mountain chiefs lived in the thick forest—at least so the old men said; but as no one had ever been there and come back, how could any one know? True, the teacher said that a white man had been there and come back, but then white men eat biscuits and things out of tins, and have other gods, and so they probably go to a different place. For the place Romeo was thinking of, with bitterness gnawing at his savage heart, was Death, and the path that led to it was Langaingai.
Romeo knew all about Langaingai, for had not Gavindi drunk of it last year and died, and those two Naloto girls, who smoked after drinking it to make it doubly sure, and Janeti, Buli Nandrau’s daughter,—only her relations poured cocoa-nut milk down her throat when she had only traversed the path half-way? He knew not who had discovered it, for the old men did not know it. In their day the path was always open to him who would travel it—by an enemy’s club. Perhaps some wise woman taught Gavindi, and showed him how to mix orange-bark with it, and smoke away his life when he had drunk.
FRIAR LAURENCE’S HOUSE.
Now Friar Laurence, though unconnected with the cloth, had in his time performed the last offices to a larger number of people than any other practitioner in the mountains. In his own person he had not unfrequently united the offices of both sexton and grave. But that side of his business was recreation rather than solid work. His real calling might rank as one of the fine arts. Like the painter and the author, his stock-in-trade was small, and easily obtained. The art lay in employing his properties with skill. They consisted in a bamboo, a banana-leaf, a bit of bark, a leaf or two, and a little human hair. Furnished with these simple tools, Friar Laurence would, for the trifling sum of a whale’s tooth, or a bolt of bark-cloth, lay low the head on which the hair had grown. So widespread was the Friar’s reputation that, when the mad white men had come and forbidden the noble art of war, he had found it convenient to reside for some months in an inaccessible mountain-cave, and had returned to Verona with his occupation gone, and a head crammed with the wisdom born of solitary meditation.
To Friar Laurence then did Romeo repair one dark still night. The wise man sat on a log at his threshold airing his shrunken legs. He eyed Romeo’s whale’s tooth with bleared and watery eyes, and asked enigmatically what tree he wanted felled. When he understood the situation he seemed disappointed, and only told Romeo to return the following night with a white man’s bottle full of the stuff they call kerosene. This entailed a journey of thirty miles the following day to fetch the precious liquid from the nearest store; but Romeo was ready to do more than this, and at sunset the Friar received the bottle, a square black one. He emptied into a cocoa-nut shell all the oil except a wine-glassful, and filled up the bottle with an opaque muddy-looking fluid.
That night beneath the tavola-tree, where they had their tryst, did Romeo tell Juliet that the moment for carrying out their sorrowful plan had come. She had just been telling him that her misery was so great that she could not bear to live longer. But when Romeo showed her in the dim light the ominous gin-bottle, two huge cigarettes, and a box of matches, and further whispered the dread name Langaingai, life seemed suddenly to have become less unbearable than before. But Romeo was terribly in earnest, and she, half consenting, followed him. Silently they trod the narrow path that led to Romeo’s yam-patch. A babbling stream bordered it, and on the bank beneath a huge banyan-tree they sat down side by side. Juliet was weeping, but Romeo, with set face, stared at the bottle tight clenched in his hand. Sadly he lighted one of the cigarettes, and, handing it to Juliet, said, “You shall drink first, and when you are dead I will drink too, and follow you. You must smoke this as soon as you have drunk down to there,” and he indicated the place half-way down the bottle with his thumb-nail.
Juliet’s blood ran cold. With a little shiver she pushed the bottle away, saying, “Be of a good mind, Aisala, and drink first, for you are the stronger; and when you are dead it will be easy for me to die after you.”
But Romeo saw that she was dissembling, and that black fear filled her heart. He gloomily drew the cork, and put the neck of the bottle to his nose. It smelt horrible, for the kerosene was floating on the top. He turned fiercely upon Juliet.
“Are you going to fool me?” he cried. “Know now that you shall drink first, that we may die together.”
He seized her roughly by the wrist and tried to force the foul-smelling bottle between her lips. Life had never seemed so sweet to Juliet as at that moment. If Romeo chose to die—well, that was his affair; but as for her—she preferred life. She struggled and screamed, and with a bitter cry Romeo released her, and putting the bottle to his own lips drank greedily. Seeing this, and beside herself with fear, Juliet fled shrieking down the path to Verona, and roused the whole village with her cries.
“In his yam-patch,” she cried—“he is dead! He has drunk Langaingai.”
All Verona was soon beneath the banyan-tree—all Verona except Friar Laurence, who was accustomed to this kind of thing. There lay Romeo unconscious, his head pillowed on an empty gin-bottle, with a half-smoked suluka between his nerveless fingers. Gently they lifted him, and bore him to Capulet’s house, and lit torches, and drove out the women, and brought young cocoa-nuts, and prised open Romeo’s jaws with a digging-stick, and forced the milk down his throat; and all the while the teacher sat by in a clean white shirt, bursting to question the reviving Romeo about the details of his love affair, to draw a moral therefrom for his next Sunday’s sermon.
At last Romeo, half drowned in cocoa-nut milk, spluttered, coughed, and opened his eyes. He thought perhaps for a moment that he was in another world; but this was no time for vain regrets, for the teacher had them in his grip, and was cross-examining the frightened Juliet as to how many months their liaison had continued. Meanwhile the village officer arrived with a rusty pair of handcuffs, and before daylight Romeo, but half recovered from his journey to “that bourne,” found himself embarked on that rougher journey over the rocky path that leads to the Tuatuacoko court-house.
Why could not the story have ended here, with the romance all unspoilt, with the old story of love till death, and faithless timorous beauty? But I must tell the story to the end as it really happened, and not as I would fain tell it.
The Commissioner’s court sat, the assessors were sworn, the charge was attempted suicide, the chief witness for the prosecution was Juliet, and poor Romeo was in the dock. He was quite the ugliest man I have ever seen—deeply pitted with smallpox, and with a mouth which, seen full face, might have extended completely round his head for all one could see to the contrary. The defence was ingenious. Romeo pleaded that the people of Verona had treated him so badly that they deserved a fright and a warning, and the alleged poison was nothing more noxious than a decoction of orange-bark mixed in an old kerosene-bottle; that he had drunk this off and shammed being dead until he saw the joke had gone far enough, and that then he came to life again. The empty gin-bottle was brought, the dregs poured into a saucer, and a policeman was sent into the bush to bring some real Langaingai. It was a slender, small-leafed plant, about eighteen inches in height, with a fibrous woody bark. The bark was scraped in court, and kneaded up with a little water, and strained. The result was a muddy-looking yellow fluid. The alleged poison smelt abominably of kerosene; but the liquids had to be compared somehow, and the assessors, one English and one native, volunteered to furnish the vile body. The court also tried half a teaspoonful of each. After imbibing the kerosene, one became conscious of an acrid biting flavour, unlike any known taste. There was no doubt that the liquids were identical. Of the after effects, I need only say that the court adjourned, and no more evidence was taken that day, both court and assessors spending their time in drinking cocoa-nut milk, and trying to resume control over their interior mechanism. When they did recover, Romeo was convicted.