RALUVE.
Vere did not tell me the story himself. He does not talk about his past; but squalid as his life is, he cannot help looking like a man with a history, albeit unkempt and half-starved in the struggle to keep his half-caste brats from want. Hoskins, the father of district magistrates, is my authority. He saw no pathos in it, only thought it “an awful pity”; but years of tinned provisions are apt to dull the sense of poetry in any man.
Vere was the usual kind of younger son who leaves a public school with more knowledge of field-sports than Latin, and having passed the limit of age for the army, straightway joins the hosts of unemployed whose ultimate refuge is the States or the Colonies. Unlike most of the young gentlemen who graduate at an army crammer’s, Vere had no vices, and when his turn came to tackle station-life in Australia, he found no temptation to take the usual downward plunge, but hated the life with all his heart. His letters home brought him unexpected relief. The Colonial Office was asked to find a few young men to recruit the Civil Service of a South Sea colony, and Vere, in common with half-a-dozen others, was appointed, through the medium of a friendly chief clerk.
He was kept at headquarters just long enough to wear off the novelty, and to wonder why English-speaking mankind, especially when they hail from Australia, succeed so wonderfully in stamping out all that is picturesque from their surroundings; and then he was sent to Commissioner Austin to be instructed in the mysteries of the native language and customs, until such time as he should be fit for the responsibilities of a Commissioner himself. Now Mr Commissioner Austin was not a gentleman to be entrusted with the care of youth, and to do him justice, he was the last person in the world to desire such a responsibility. The Government had taken him over with the other fixtures of a former régime, and if he had any belongings for whom he ever cared, he had long ago forgotten them. In his own province the Commissioner was a very great man indeed—that is to say, the natives grunted at him when he passed, clapped their hands after touching his, and generally left his presence smacking that part of the human frame that is held in least esteem. But the law of the honour paid to prophets is reversed in the islands, and the Commissioner found that his importance in the social scheme sensibly diminished with every mile from the boundaries of his district, and had therefore allowed his visits to the capital to become very rare. Vere found the great man affable and not inhospitable. “You will stay with me until you can make your own arrangements,” he said; and Vere, not caring to prolong his visit upon such terms, though he had nothing with him but his clothes, lost no time in invoking the good offices of a friendly storekeeper. With his help he found himself in a few days established in a small native house, belonging to a petty chief, without a stick of furniture but the mats that belonged to his landlord, and a mosquito-screen. He wanted nothing more. The mats, with dried grass under them, were soft enough to sleep on, and the floor was cooler and more comfortable than any chair. For the first few days he attended the office regularly in the hope of finding work to do, but his chief never seemed to want him. “No, thanks, Mr Vere, not to-day. This work would be a little beyond you. Perhaps you could not do better than work at the language.” Vere realised later on that the Commissioner had the best of reasons for not finding work for him. He had not enough for himself. There were no coolies in his district, and the native magistrates disposed of the court work. So Vere worked at the language in the only effective way—that is, he spent day after day with his landlord’s family fishing from a canoe, diving for figota, and drinking yangona. He bathed in a stream a few yards from his hut, and had his meals with his native landlord or with a neighbouring storekeeper. The life was too new to be monotonous.
One night as he was dropping off to sleep on his mats, tired out with doing nothing all day, he heard the distant note of a conch-shell mingled with the eternal murmur of the reef. “Turtle-fishers returning with a big bag,” he thought, trying to remember what natives blow conch-shells for, and turned over on the other side. But presently distant voices, as of people aroused and hurrying, awoke the lazy curiosity of one bound to study native customs. A light breeze from the sea was rustling the great palm-leaves like heavy curtains, and though the moon had set, the stars gave light enough to show the dim outline of the rocky island near the anchorage. A light was creeping in towards the beach, and he could just make out the huge triangular sail of a double canoe. Then a hoarse voice from the canoe shouted to the people who were assembling on the beach. Immediately, with a deep exclamation, the babble of voices ceased, and every figure squatted as if by word of command. Two or three men ran off into the village, and Vere drew near the group in the hope of finding some one to explain the situation. He soon found his landlord, who, in pidgin English, told him that the dusky potentate who had despoiled the district for many years had gone to his own place, and that his son reigned in his stead, and had come to receive their homage. The men who had run to the town came back with whale’s teeth, and as the canoe grated on the coral sand the grey-headed village chief squatted with his feet in the sea, and gave the deep grunt of respect, and delivered in low voice a rapid and unintelligible harangue. The crew sprang into the water, and standing waist-deep, dragged the canoe through the yielding sand until her prow rested above the dry beach, and the old man, still squatting, gave the whale’s teeth, hanging in a bunch, to the new-comers. A fire of dead palm-leaves threw a red glare upon the brown faces and glistening bodies of the strangers as they disembarked. A tall young man, evidently the new chief, was the first. He was followed by a number of men and women, who stood aside to wait for another woman who now rose from the little thatched house on the deck. From her bearing, and the respect paid to her, Vere saw she was to be classed far above any he had yet seen. The chief seemed to ask in a whisper who the strange white man was, and learning probably that he was a Government officer, stopped to shake hands with him. The girl stopped too, and looked at Vere as if expecting to be spoken to; but before he could take her hand, she hurried off after the others. They were followed by the whole village into the deep shadow of the palms, and Vere was left alone with the dying fire to watch the crew of the canoe making her snug for the night.
Vere heard all about the new arrivals next day. Of Nambuto he had heard before, a good deal that was discreditable, as is natural and proper to a young leader of the people. The girl was all that an epidemic of measles had left of a line of chiefs beside whom the present rulers of the district were parvenus. Weakened by the ravages of the disease that had thinned out his fighting men, her father had succumbed to the chief who was just dead, and both conquerors and conquered had agreed that Andi Raluve should heal the hereditary quarrel by marrying Nambuto, the eldest son of the victor. It was a tribal matter, and in tribal matters women have no voice, least of all when they are of rank.
The villagers seemed to take their loss with much philosophy. They cut their hair and beards, it is true, and there was a run on black cashmere in the nearest store, but they wasted no time in vain regrets for one whose lightest word a week ago they would have tremblingly obeyed. They devoted all their energies instead to the entertainment of the living. Long-nosed slab-sided pigs were dragged by the hind-legs to the ovens, protesting indignantly, until a few dull thuds clearly explained the situation to them; and Vere’s friends chopped wood, butchered, and cooked under a dense cloud of flies as if their lives depended on their activity. Vere, driven to walk by himself, was idling about near the sea, thinking how a native canoe, improved on, would be an ideal sailing craft, when he came suddenly upon a figure sitting under a great dilo-tree, bent almost double, and shaking with convulsive sobs. Now the natives of these islands are not given to displaying whatever emotions they have, and seeing that the figure was a woman’s, all his English chivalry was startled into life; so, forgetting that she could not understand him, he stooped down, saying, “What is the matter? Can’t I do anything for you?” In the tear-stained face that looked up he recognised Raluve, the lady of the previous night, her big black eyes round with surprise. Reassured by his evident concern, she gave him rapidly and in a low voice what might have been an explanation of her distress, but as it was in her own dialect, he understood not one word of it. With a desperate effort he plunged into Fijian. “If you are in trouble I will help you,” is not a difficult nor complicated sentence in any language. He attempted it, and the result exceeded his expectations, for the girl struggled a moment, and then burst into ringing peals of laughter. Evidently he had used the wrong word, and this girl’s manners were no better than any other savage’s. But she got up as he began to move off, and before they reached the village she had promised to teach him her language.
Next morning he received a visit of ceremony. His door was darkened, there was a whispering and a rustling outside, and then Raluve came in, shyly followed by two attendants of discreet age and mature charms. She sank gracefully on the mats, doubling her feet under her, and the matrons giggled. There was a constrained pause. Clearly this girl could not be amused by the exhibition of a cunningly devised knife or an alarum-clock. Desperately he fell back on photographs. Raluve took each one, looked at it indifferently, and handed it to the nearest duenna, who, being skittish, gazed at it upside down, and poked her companion in the ribs, chuckling immoderately. But the photographs required explanations, and then the lesson began in earnest; for every remark Vere hazarded was first severely corrected, and then criticised by the two frolicsome dames, with vast amusement to themselves. The system of education was primitive, but it satisfied both pupil and mistresses.
