Happily for the Resident Agent and the trader, however, European music is not known in Manahiki, and when a singing fit seizes the people, they can generally be stopped after about a day, unless somebody has composed something very new and very screaming. If the two ends of the village have begun one of their musical competitions, there may also be difficulty in bringing it to a period; for the rival choruses will sing against each other with cracking throats and swelling veins, hour after hour, till both sides are completely exhausted.
Dancing, however, is the Manahikian’s chief reason for existing. The Manahikian dances are infinitely superior to those of most other islands, which consist almost altogether of a wriggle belonging to the danse du ventre family, and a little waving of the arms. The Manahiki dance has the wriggle for its groundwork, but there are many steps and variations. Some of the steps are so rapid that the eye can hardly follow them, and a camera shutter which works up to 1/100 of a second does not give a sharp result. The men are ranged in a long row, with the women opposite; there is a good deal of wheeling and turning about in brisk military style, advancing, retreating, and spinning round. The men dance very much on the extreme tips of their toes (they are, of course, barefooted) and keep up this painful posture for an extraordinary length of time. Every muscle in the whole body seems to be worked in the “fancy” steps; and there is a remarkable effect of general dislocation, due to turning the knees and elbows violently out and in.
The women, like Miss Mercy Pecksniff, seem chiefly to favour the “shape and skip” style of locomotion. There is a good deal of both these, a great deal of wriggle, and plenty of arm action, about their dancing. They manoeuvre their long, loose robes about, not at all ungracefully, and do some neat step-dancing, rather inferior, however, to that of the men.
Both men and women dress specially for the dance, so the festival that was organised to greet our arrivals took some time to get up, as all the beaux and belles of the village had to hurry home and dress. The women put on fresh cotton loose gowns, of brilliant pink, purple, yellow, white and green, oiled their hair with cocoanut oil scented with the fragrant white tieré flower, and hung long chains of red and yellow berries about their necks. About their waists they tied the dancing girdle, never worn except on these occasions, and made of twisted green ferns. The men took off their cool, easy everyday costume, of a short cotton kilt and gay coloured singlet, and attired themselves in shirts and heavy stuff trousers (bought from the trader at enormous expense, and considered the acme of smartness). Both sexes crowned themselves with the curious dancing headdress, which looks exactly like the long-rayed halo of a saint, and is made by splitting a palm frond down the middle, and fastening it in a half-circle about the back of the head.
The music then struck up and the dancers began to assemble. The band consisted of two youths, one of whom clicked a couple of sticks together, while the other beat a drum. This does not sound attractive; but as a matter of fact, the Manahiki castanet and drum music is curiously weird and thrilling, and arouses a desire for dancing even in the prosaic European. On board our schooner, lying half a mile from shore, the sound of the measured click and throb used to set every foot beating time on deck, while the native crew frankly dropped whatever they were at, and began to caper wildly. Close at hand, the music is even more impressive; no swinging waltz thundered out by a whole Hungarian band gets “into the feet” more effectively than the Manahiki drum.
A much-cherished possession is this drum. It is carved and ornamented with sinnet, and topped with a piece of bladder; it seems to have been hollowed out of a big log, with considerable labour. The skill of the drummers is really remarkable. No drumsticks are used, only fingers, yet the sound carries for miles. While drumming, the hands rise and fall so fast as to lose all outline to the eye; the drummer nods and beats with his foot in an ecstasy of delight at his own performance; the air is full of the throbbing, rhythmical, intensely savage notes. The dancers at first hesitate, begin and stop, and begin again, laugh and retreat and come forward undecidedly. By-and-by the dancing fervour seizes one or two; they commence to twirl and to stamp wildly, winnowing the air with their arms. Others join in, the two rows are completed, and Manahiki is fairly started for the day. Hour after hour they dance, streaming with perspiration in the burning sun, laughing and singing and skipping. The green fern girdles wither into shreds of crackling brown, the palm haloes droop, the berry necklaces break and scatter, but on they go. The children join in the dance now and then, but their small frames weary soon; the parents are indefatigable.
Perhaps both ends of the settlement are dancing; if that is so, the competitive element is sure to come in sooner or later, for the feeling between the two is very like that between the collegers and oppidans at Eton, each despising the other heartily, and ready on all occasions to find a cause for a fight. They will dance against each other now, striving with every muscle to twinkle the feet quicker, stand higher on the tips of the toes, wriggle more snakily, than their rivals. Evening comes, and they are still dancing. With the night, the dance degenerates into something very like an orgy, and before dawn, to avoid scandal, a powerful hint from the native pastor and the agent causes the ball to break up.