TAUYASA OF NASELAI, REFORMER.
Tauyasa, commoner, of Naselai village, of the tribe Kai Nuku, lived years before his time. It was his misfortune that he was born a savage with a brown skin: it should not be his fault if he did not enjoy the sweets of civilisation. White men owned land on the banks of the great river: so did he. White men wore trousers and ate with a knife and fork: so would he. White men owned cutters and paid his countrymen to work for them: and so he bought a cutter of his own and paid his fellow-villagers to plant his bananas. White men had chairs and tables, glass windows and wooden floors, horses and saddles, and an account at the bank: Tauyasa persevered until at last he possessed all these. And so Tauyasa came to be well thought of and patronised by his white neighbours, and the more he rose in their estimation the deadlier grew the envy of his own people. For Tauyasa was no chief, and among his people to attempt to rise above the station to which one is born, and to refuse to give to him who asks, are social crimes beside which all other sins are mere errors of judgment. But Tauyasa cared for nothing but that his bananas should have fifteen “hands” to the bunch, and that his cutter should not be too late for the steamer. When the commission agent showed him his account sales, he took the cheque straight to the bank, and received from the teller a slip on which his total balance was written, which he would compare with some cabalistic signs he had in a soiled copy-book at home. For Tauyasa applied his knowledge of human nature wherever his financial reasoning failed him. “The foreigner,” he argued, “who owns this bank does not guard my money and make it multiply because he loves me, but because he hopes some day to steal some of it. Therefore will I ask him every two weeks to confess how much he has. Then, although I am black, he will not rob me unless he robs the other foreigners whose money he keeps, and this he will not dare to do.”
“On the night of each return from the capital.”
But on the night of each return from the capital he could not escape from the ties of kindred. First, there came his uncle, a plaintive old man, who carefully bolted the door before unburdening himself of his troubles. He had no lamp, for the kerosene was dry, and there was no sugar to drink with his tea, so he drank no tea, and his stomach felt so bad that he thought some foreign drink was the only medicine that would cure him. Then a peremptory voice from without summoned him to open the door, and Alivate, the chief’s henchman, was admitted. He had all the self-confidence that distinguishes those who bask in the smiles of royalty. “Greeting!” he said. “The chief has sent me to you to borrow your horse for to-morrow. I will take it now with the saddle. Also he wants a root of yangona.”
“Will the chief send the horse back? The last time he left the horse at Namata, and the saddle was lost.”
“Perhaps he will send it back. Give me the saddle.”
He gave place to a man in a white shirt, with a book and pencil, all deprecating piety and smiles, who called Tauyasa “sir,” and seemed in his way of speaking to be perpetrating a cruel caricature of the neighbouring Wesleyan missionary.
“I have come, sir,” he said at last, with a little chuckle, “about the vaka-misonari. Paula has promised to give one pound, the same as you gave last year. It is written in the book that Paula will give this. You, sir, will doubtless give two pounds this year. Your name will then be printed so that all will know. I will write down two pounds, sir. Is it not so?”
After him came Savuke, Tauyasa’s second cousin, with a pitiful tale about her husband, sentenced that day by the courts to pay five pounds for beating an Indian with a stick. “If he does not pay to-morrow,” she said tearfully, “they will crop his hair, and he will work, and then who will feed me and the child? The Indian was a bad Indian, as they all are, nor did he beat him hard, but only twice—on the head. And I, knowing your pitiful nature, have come to you, Tauyasa, because you are my relation and have much money, and afterwards Joseva will pay you back.”
“Joseva owes me seven pounds already.”
“Yes, he knows that, and the remembrance is heavy with him. He is still seeking money with which to pay you.”
“Well, then, I will release him from the debt that his mind may be at rest, but this money that you ask I cannot give.”
Then Tauyasa’s wife, who had been visiting a neighbour, came to greet her lord. Their child was lately dead, though Tauyasa had bought two cows and fed it upon milk, and otherwise followed all the directions for rearing infants that were printed in ‘Na Mata.’ She, too, was the bearer of bad news. Some one—presumably an enemy—had stolen the cows’ tether-ropes, and one of them, the spotted one, had been found in the Company’s cane-field, having damaged many stools of cane, and the white one could not be found at all. “I think it is the Indians,” she said; but Tauyasa thought otherwise, and said nothing.
The man with the book had accomplished his devastating raid, and had set down the names of half the village to give “to the Lord” more than they possessed. Therefore, rather than break faith so pledged, they must beg, borrow, or steal enough to meet their obligations. First, of course, they tried Tauyasa, but he had heard a friend of his, a white storekeeper, assailed in the same way, and he knew the logical answer. “If you must owe money at all, it is better to owe it ‘to the Lord,’ who can afford it, than to me who cannot. Besides, you would be giving my money and calling it yours, which is a lie, for which you would certainly be punished in hell.” But that night several of Tauyasa’s imported hens were missing.
At last they all went and left him alone to take the cure for all the cares of civilised life; and, a little less than half drunk, he went off to the store to associate with his equals. There his voice might have been heard haranguing the knot of grinning colonists who frequented the store, and his peroration ran thus: “God made a mistake when He made me black. Um [tapping his chest], black man! Um [tapping his forehead], white man!”
But though Tauyasa increased in wealth and substance, his life was not happy. It is true that his people had given up kerekere, and no longer begged his money from him; but they took no pains to hide their hatred and contempt. It was in vain for him to show them that so long as they held their goods in common they must remain savages. They preferred to live from day to day, as their fathers did, leaving the morrow to take care of itself. It was well enough for a foreigner, who knew no better, to work all day, and to hoard money, and to give nothing for nothing; but here was one of themselves aping the ways of foreigners as an excuse to cover his natural churlishness and inhospitality. “To do like Tauyasa” became a by-word in the village. Truly, he was born before his time: he was of the stuff of which reformers are made, and he met the reformer’s fate. He had quarrelled with his wife because she gave away his things in his absence; his own people would have nothing to do with him, and the foreigners whom he imitated despised him.
So Tauyasa began to worry, and the native who does that is doomed, because he was born to a life free from care, and has had no training in the curse of Adam. He grew thin and irritable, and no longer joined the nightly meetings at the store. But the more he worried the bitterer were the taunts of his people, and a kind friend, of course, repeated them to him. Then a day came when the cutter’s sails were stripped, and the bananas hung uncut, although a steamer had come in these two days; for Tauyasa would ship no more bananas, having taken to his mat, and given out that he would die that day week. It was in vain for those of his white friends that had heard of his illness to send him soup, and medicines, and milk-puddings cunningly devised, for Tauyasa would eat none of them, knowing that he must die, and caring not to live—for there was bitterness in his heart against the world and all men in it. And upon the day appointed Tauyasa died as he had said, and his body was wrapped in rolls of white masi and mats, and buried, and his spirit went to its own place.
Then it was found how many brothers Tauyasa had, and how many brothers his father and mother had. They all came to his house after the funeral to transact some little matters of business. There was a want of brotherly love at this meeting, for Tauyasa had owned a cutter worth £200, and a cutter cannot be satisfactorily divided among several eldest brothers. There was a horse, too, and a table, and cupboards, and many camphor-wood boxes made in China, and in one of the boxes there were many bottles that would each have cost the vendor fifty pounds in fines had the police known. There was not much said about Tauyasa. It was a sad thing, no doubt, that he was dead, but did not his possessions remain? At evening it was all settled. The eldest uncle had the house with the glass windows, and the brothers had all the rest: only Tauyasa’s wife got nothing because she was a bad woman, and did not love Tauyasa; and besides, she belonged to a different tribe.
And on the Sabbath the lali beat for service, and the same teacher took the pulpit that had come to Tauyasa about his contribution to the vaka-misonari. It was a powerful sermon—all about the wicked and hell, and such things, and it was none the less powerful that the preacher was mimicking the ravings and the whispers, and the cushion-thumping denunciations, of the district missionary who had taught him. They were all sinners, he summed up—they broke the Commandments every day: but there was forgiveness for all there present. Yet, he added in a hoarse whisper, there were some who could never be forgiven. Then with the roar of an angry bull he shouted, “Who shipped China bananas on the Sabbath?” “On the Sabbath,” repeated the echo from the other side of the river. “Who shipped China bananas on the Sabbath?” Then in the hushed pause that followed he whispered hoarsely, “Tauyasa! Tauyasa!”
Again he roared, banging the table with his fist, “Where is Tauyasa now? Where is Tauyasa now?”—“yasa now” cried the echo. He glared at the village policeman as if expecting him to answer, and lifted his clenched fist before him, twisting it slowly from side to side, and hissing from behind his teeth, “Sa mongimongi tiko e na mbuka wanga. He is squirming in the everlasting fire.”
Thus ended Tauyasa, Reformer,—condemned in this world and the next, like his prototypes.