This question of dress is a burning one among island ladies. The native loose robe, hung straight down from a yoke, is very much cooler, and the doctors say, healthier, than belted and corseted dresses such as European women wear. But there is nevertheless a strong feeling against it, because it is supposed to mean a tendency to “go native,” and the distinguishing customs of the race acquire, in the island world, a significance quite out of proportion to their surface importance, because of the greatness of the thing they represent. Therefore, the white woman, unless she is suffering from bad health, and needs every possible help to withstand the heat of the climate, sticks to her blouses and corsets, as a rule, and sometimes “says things” about people who do not. For all that, and all that, the native woman is in the right, and if the other would agree to adopt the pretty, womanly, and essentially graceful robe of the native, no one would be the loser, and half of island humanity would be greatly the gainer.
Later, when the dusk is coming down, and the magic moon of the islands is creeping, big and round and yellow-gold, out of a purple sea, we drive home again through the scented gloom of the forest, the endless song of the reef accompanying the voices of the native women, as they chant strange island melodies of long ago, that no one in these days, not even the singers themselves, can fully translate or understand. The moon climbs quickly up as we drive, and the road is as light as day, when our wheels roll into the sleeping town.
CHAPTER VI
The Simple Life in the South Seas—Servant Problems again—Foods and Fruits of the Country—The Tree that digests—Home-made Vanilla—The Invaluable Lime—How to cook a Turtle—In an Island Bungalow—The Little House on the Coral Shore—Humours of Island Life—Burying a Cycle—A Network of Names—Mr. Zebedee-Thunderstorm-Tin-Roof—The Night-dress that went to Church—The Extraordinary Wedding—South Sea Musicians—A Conductor’s Paradise—Society Journalism in Song.
HOUSEKEEPING in the South Sea Islands demands a section to itself. All who are uninterested in such matters may, and doubtless will, begin to skip at this point.
Nothing helps the white house-mistress more than the simple standard of living set in most of the islands. It is true that if you are the wife of an important official in the Government House entourage of Fiji, or if you live in civilised, Americanised Honolulu, you will have to “do things” much as they are done at home. But, with these two exceptions, life in that enormous section of the globe known as the South Seas (much of it, by the way,—is north of the Line) is simple and unpretentious. In describing the home life of the white settlers in Raratonga, I describe what is, with small local variations, the life of settlers in almost every group of the Pacific, certainly, the life of all in the eight different groups I visited myself, during the years I spent in the South Seas. All over the island world, people dine in the middle of the day, except when entertaining friends, keep few servants or none, and dress and feed simply, because nothing else is possible. The trade cottons in the stores form the material of every lady’s dresses, and as for the making, common consent, not to speak of climatic conditions, votes the simplest style the best. Where every stitch of sewing in dress or blouse must be done by the person who is to wear the garment, it is astonishing how soon one grows to regard elaborate tuckings, flouncings, inlayings, with hostility, and how satisfied the eye becomes with the simpler and less “fatigued” lines of the garments fashioned by women who cannot hire a dressmaker for love or money. Evening dress is almost always of the “blouse” description, and in a climate which works universal mischief with delicate white skins, no matter how they are protected, this is no matter for regret. Men buy their drill suits ready-made from the trading stores at a few shillings apiece, and, with a white dinner-jacket and black cummerbund, any one is ready for the gayest of evening entertainments.
The great dress question—being thus resolved into the simple elements of a few cotton frocks for every day, and a muslin or two for best, behold! half the worry of modern life is lifted at a blow. “One must look like other people”—the goad of the toiling townswoman—becomes in the islands, “One looks like other people because one must,” and the words are a lullaby of rest.
After dress, comes servants, in the list of small worries that turn a woman’s fair locks grey, and swell the takings of the fashionable hairdressers. Well, it cannot be said that there is no servant trouble in the islands. White servants simply do not exist; they are far too much in demand in America and Australasia to desert either of these domestic paradises for the hotter and lonelier islands. Native girls cannot be had either, since they marry at thirteen or thereabouts. Native boys and men are the only resource. They come to work by the day, and are fed in the house; their wages are generally about five shillings weekly, in the case of a boy, and ten shillings for a man. So far as they go, they are satisfactory enough; they work hard, and are extremely honest, and they are amiability and good-nature itself. But their scope is decidedly limited. They can garden, under direction; they can sweep, fetch wood and water, clean the cooking-stove, husk and open the cocoanuts, wash, peel and boil the vegetables, scrub the verandah floor, clean the knives, wash up dishes, and whiten the shoes. That is about all. The mistress of the house and her daughters, if she is lucky enough to have any, must do all the serious cooking, make the beds, dust, tidy, and lay the table for meals.