I must tell you of the fashions of those times. Some of the chiefs wore a dirty white collar only, and a waistbelt wherein was stuck an old-fashioned revolver and rusty knife. Another stood on the shore as proud as possible attired in a waistcoat. Men and women seemed to vie with one another at making themselves look ridiculous and outrageous too. Of course, most people were amused by them. I shall never forget how the Dane laughed; he was a real good fellow that poet. I laughed too, but not like him; I was getting a bit used to sights of that kind. As for Hornecastle he simply looked on and yawned. Finding that he was staying the night and did not intend leaving till late the next day, I made up my mind to have a look round and go into the interior, so off I went alone. I am constituted that way and am never so happy as when I am completely alone with no one to ply me with questions or tell me their experiences while I am keenly interested in my own at that precise moment.
About a mile from the shore I came across a village of native homesteads built on a beautiful spot shaped out and shaded by the hand of instinct. There they stood dotting the landscape by the cooling shade of palms, yams, orange and other trees of luxuriant tropic foliage. In the cleared spaces by those huts squatted the tribes of powerful mothers and men, all of them dressed in no clothes excepting their hair, which sprouted upwards on the top of their heads and shone in the sunlight. As I emerged from the forest trees into full view the tiny children stopped from their gambolling, stared at me for a moment and then all raced off towards the village homesteads as though for dear life. They ran so fast that I could only see their legs twinkling in the sun-gleam. Then uprose the wild mothers and stalwart forest men, and between their bare legs, with little wistful demon-like faces, those frightened children peeped at me as I walked across the scrub and waved my hand, smiling as I approached them.
I found them a very hospitable people; they gave me food and drink and I well repaid those wild mothers for their kind thoughtfulness as I stroked the small frizzing heads of their babes and raced the little naked beggars, boys and girls, across the track and gave the winners buttons for prizes. “Moora, moora,” they shouted as I gave the last button away, and then I held on to myself tightly as they scrambled around me and tried to steal the buttons off my clothes! “No, no,” I shouted to one persevering little imp, and his mother, seeing my annoyance, picked up a large plank and struck him over the head with a terrible crash! By Jove, I was astonished when she did that, but the poor little devil simply looked a bit crestfallen, looked up to me for sympathy, instead of his mother, and I rubbed the top of his head and made him happy. I found out afterwards that the top of their heads is the safest place to hit, the South Sea Island skull being very thick indeed.
I don’t know how those natives lived or what employment they followed. I suppose some of them worked at copra gathering or some other work which was useful to the white traders; anyway they all looked fat and well and their native villages like little bits of paradise compared with European cities. Away further in the interior were living (so I heard) tribes that still encouraged the cannibalistic tendency. I suppose they were still under the influence of the older men and women who had memories in their heads of the olden days when they dined off their enemies and discovered the good points of old rivals at the festive board. I never went off into the interior to see if it was so; my past experience was quite sufficient for me and I did not intend to take any more risks.
Before I leave that native village I must tell you of their idol worship. Before sunset I went back to the beach, and loitering about got in with some sailors, and together that night we went over the hills and down into the village and strolled among the natives, and going behind one of the larger huts there stood before us monstrous effigies with hideous faces and eyes bulging out like unburst soap-bubbles, and before them on little mats knelt the elder native men bowing and chanting prayers at the top of their voices, throwing their long arms up over their heads all the time. They were earnest enough in those fetish rites, and as we stood there, white-faced men of the Western world, watching, they took not the slightest notice of us, so deeply were they engrossed in their pleadings to those dirty wooden deaf idols. Of course I could not understand a word they were saying, but the note of the chant had grief in it and sounded to me like “Winga-wonga, wonga-winga,” repeated over and over again to a minor cadence that fell and rose as their bodies and arms moved up and down.
My comrades and I were somehow impressed by that strange sight of religious old-world grief which sounded the same note and showed the same earnestness as the creed expression of the modern civilised world. The missionaries were, and are, of course, dead against the idol worship, and so as time goes on and the methods of Christianity get hold of the people the idols rot away or are touched up and hidden in the secret depths of the forest, safe from the destroying hands of those who have gone over to the new creed. Often the wanderer among the primeval woods will come across the relics of those gods standing in some secluded gully under the shade of banyan-trees and rotting tropic trunks, covered with wild vines, vividly coloured with gorgeous flowers, still upright, with perhaps one eye missing and the face thus obliterated by decaying rot made more hideous than ever. Yet some indefinable awe still clings to them as they stand there deserted by the poor heathen children who once appealed to them with their whole hearts, sorrowing over “the giant agony of the world,” now long dead in their forest graves.
I have told you all this because I once saw it, just as I have attempted to describe it to you, and as I stood gazing, quite alone, I looked up over the rotting, eyeless head and saw a branch with about twenty human skulls hanging in a row. The tropic rains had washed them quite white and as they swayed and clinked one against the other as the wind swept mournfully through the trees I became nervous and made off from the spot as quickly as I could. I am very fond of music, but the funereal notes of those tinkling skulls did not appeal to me and make me brave.
XI
Back in Samoa—My Friend the Missionary—Musings