I.
The first cool breaths of the land breeze, chilled by its passage through the dew-laden forest, touched our cheeks softly that night as we sat on the traders' verandah, facing the white, shimmering beach, smoking and watching the native children at play, and listening for the first deep boom of the wooden logo or bell that would send them racing homewards to their parents and evening prayer.
“There it is,” said our host, who sat in the farthest corner, with his long legs resting by the heels on the white railing; “and now you'll see them scatter.”
The loud cries and shrill laughter came to a sudden stop as the boom of the logo reached the players, and then a clear boyish voice reached us—“Ua ta le logo” (the bell has sounded). Like smoke before the gale the lithe, half-naked figures fled silently in twos and threes between the cocoanuts, and the beach lay deserted.
One by one the lights gleamed brightly through the trees as the women piled the fires in each house with broken cocoanut shells. There was but the faintest breath of wind, and through the open sides of most of the houses not enough to flicker the steady light, as the head of the family seated himself (or herself) close to the fire, and, hymn-book in hand, led off the singing. Quite near us was a more pretentious-looking structure than the others, and looking down upon it we saw that the gravelled floor was covered with fine, clean mats, and arranged all round the sides of the house were a number of camphorwood boxes, always—in a Samoan house—the outward and visible sign of a well-to-do man. There was no fire lighted here; placed in the centre of the one room there stood a lamp with a gorgeous-looking shade, of many colours. This was the chief's house, and the chief of Aleipata was one of the strong men of Samoa—both politically and physically. Two of our party on the verandah were strangers to Samoa, and they drew their chairs nearer, and gazed with interest at the chief and his immediate following as they proceeded with their simple service. There were quite a number of the aua-luma (unmarried women) of the village present in the chief's house that evening, and as their tuneful voices blend in an evening hymn—
“Matou te nau e faafetai”—we wished that instead of four verses there had been ten.
“Can you tell us, Lester,” said one of the strangers to our host, “the meaning of the last words?—they came out so clearly that I believe I've caught them,” and to our surprise he sang the last line—
Ia matou moe tau ia te oe.
“Well, now, I don't know if I can. Samoan hymns puzzle me; you see the language used in addressing the Deity is vastly different to that used ordinarily, but I take it that the words you so correctly repeated mean, 'Let us sleep in peace with Thee.' Curious people these Samoans,” he muttered, more to himself than for us: “soon be as hypocritical as the average white man. 'Let us sleep in peace with Thee,' and that fellow (the chief), his two brothers, and about a paddockful of young Samoan bucks haven't slept at all for this two weeks. All the night is spent in counting cartridges, melting lead for bullets, and cleaning their arms, only knocking off for a drink of kava. Well, I suppose,” he continued, turning to us, “they're all itching to fight, and as soon as the U.S.S. Resacca leaves Apia they'll commence in earnest, and us poor devils of traders will be left here doing nothing and cursing this infernal love of fighting, which is inborn with Samoans and a part of their natural cussedness which, if the Creator hadn't given it to them, would have put many a dollar into my pocket.”
“Father,” said a voice that came up to us from the gloom of the young cocoanuts' foliage at the side of the house, “Felipe is here, and wants to know if he may come up and speak to the alii papalagi (white gentlemen).”
“Right you are, Felipe, my lad,” said the trader in a more than usual kindly voice, “bring him up, Atalina, and then run away to the chief's and get some of the aua-luma to come over, with you and make a bowl of kava.”
“Now, Doctor L———,” Lester continued, addressing himself to one of his guests, the surgeon of an American war vessel then stationed in Samoa, and a fellow-countryman of his, “I'll show you as fine a specimen of manhood and intelligence as God ever made, although he has got a tanned hide.”
The native that ascended the steps and stood before us with his hat in his hand respectfully saluting, was indeed, as Lester called him, “a fine specimen.” Clothed only in a blue and white lava lava or waist-cloth, his clean-cut limbs, muscular figure, and skin like polished bronze, stood revealed in the full light that now flooded room and verandah from the lamp lit in the sitting-room. The finely-plaited Manhiki hat held in his right hand seemed somewhat out of place with the rest of his attire, and was evidently not much worn. Probably Felipe had merely brought it for the occasion, as a symbol to us of his superior tastes and ideas.
He shook hands with us all round, and then, at Lester's invitation, followed us inside, and sat down cross-legged on the mats and courteously awaited us to talk to him. The American surgeon offered him a cigar, which he politely declined, and produced from the folds of his lava lava a bundle of banana-leaf cigarettes, filled with strong tobacco. One of these, at a nod from the trader, he lit, and commenced to smoke.
In a few minutes we heard the crunching of the gravelled path under bare feet, and then some three or four of the aua-luma—the kava-chewing girls—ascended the steps and took up their position by the huge wooden kava bowl. As the girls, under the careful supervision of the trader's wife, prepared the drink, we fell into a general conversation.
“I wonder now,” said the doctor to the trader, “that you, Lester, who, by your own showing, are by no means infatuated with the dreamy monotony of island life, can yet stay here, year after year, seeing nothing and hearing nothing of the world that lies outside these lonely islands. Have you no desire at all to go back again into the world?”
A faint movement—the index of some rapidly passing emotion—for a moment disturbed the calm, placid features of Lester, as he answered quietly: “No, doctor, I don't think it's likely I'll ever see the outside world, as you call it, again. I've had my hopes and ambitions, like every one else; but they didn't pan out as I expected,... and then I became Lester the Trader, and as Lester the Trader I'll die, have a whitey-brown crowd at my funeral; and, if you came here ten years afterwards, the people couldn't even tell you where I was planted.”
The doctor nodded. “Just so. Like all native races, their affections and emotions are deep but transient—no better in that way than the average American nigger.”
The kava was finished now, and was handed round to us by the slender graceful hands of the trader's little daughter. As Felipe, the last to drink, handed back the ipu to the girl, his eyes lit up, and he spoke to our host, addressing him, native fashion, by his Christian name, and speaking in his own tongue.
“How is it, Tiaki (Jack), that I hear thee tell these thy friends that we of the brown skins have but shallow hearts and forget quickly? Dost think that if, when thy time comes, and thou goest, that thy wife and child will not grieve? Hast thou not heard of our white man who, when he died, yet left his name upon our hearts?—and yet we were in those days heathens and followers of our own gods.”
The trader nodded kindly, and turned to us. “Do you want to hear a yarn about one of the old style of white men that used to live like fighting-cocks in Samoa? Felipe here has rounded on me for saying that his countrymen soon forget, and has brought up this wandering papalagi tafea (beachcomber) as an instance of how the natives will stick to a man once he proves himself a man.”