From Place to Place

by Irvin S. Cobb

Every two months the steamer came. Then the white population of the station doubled and trebled itself. Traders and storekeepers came by canoe from outlying islands or from remote stations on the farther side of his own island, for Good Friday Island had but one port of entry and this was it. Beachcombers who had been adopted into villages in the interior sauntered in over jungle trails. Many of them were deserters from whalers or from naval vessels; nearly all were handsome chaps in an animal sort of way.

For this common sharing of a common comeliness among them there was a reason. In a land where physical perfection literally is worshipped, good-looking men, brawny and broad, are surest of winning an asylum and wives and tribal equality. To Pratt it seems to have been a source of wonderment that almost without exception they were blue-eyed and light-haired; he could understand of course why their skins, once fair and white, had changed to the colour of well-tanned calfskin. The sun beating upon their naked bodies had done that.

There also would be present a party of overseers and managers from a big German plantation on an adjacent island. The traders and the Germans would appear in white ducks with white shoes smartly pipe-clayed, and white straw hats. The beachcombers would be in clean pyjama suits with bright-coloured neckties. Ordinarily these latter went about bare-headed, bare-legged and bare-bodied except for the lava-lava made of fibre from the paper mulberry tree and worn like a kilt about the hips; but now, in white men's garments, they sought to prove that they still were white men and civilised white men too. If the steamer were late, as very often happened, some of the visitors would take advantage of the wait to make themselves roaring drunk on gin.

So much briefly, for the stage setting of Ethan Pratt's environment; now for the personality of the man: Of all the breeds and the mixed breeds that have gravitated out of white lands into these sea islands of darker-skinned peoples, there surely was never a more incongruous, more alien figure than this man presented. For you should know that in all things he was most typical of what is most typical in a certain cross-section of New England life—not the coastwise New England of a seafaring, far-ranging, adventurous race, but the New England of long-settled remote interior districts. He came of a farming stock and a storekeeping stock, bred out of the loins of forbears made hard by the task of chiselling a livelihood off of flinty hillsides, made narrow by the pent-up communal system of isolated life, made honest and truthful by the influences behind them and the examples before them of generations of straight-walking, strait-laced, God-dreading folk.

That form of moral dyspepsia known as the Puritanical conscience was his by right of inheritance. In his nature there was no flexibility, no instinct for harmonious adaptability to any surroundings excepting those among which he had been born and in which he intended to end his days. Temperamentally he was of a fast colour. The leopard cannot change the spots and neither could he change his; nor did he will so to do. In short he was what he was, just as God and prenatal reactions had fashioned him, and so he would remain to the end of the chapter.

For all the four years he had spent out there the lure of the South Seas—about which so much has been written that it must be a verity and not a popular myth—had never laid hold upon him. Its gorgeous physical beauty, its languor, its voluptuous colour and abandon, its prodigally glorious dawns and its velvety nights—held for him no value to be reckoned as an offset against climatic discomforts; it left him untouched. In it he never saw the wonderland that Stevenson made so vivid to stay-at-homes, nor felt for one instant the thrill that inspired Jack London to fine rhapsodising. In it he saw and he felt only the sense of an everlasting struggle against foreign elements and hostile forces.

Among the missionaries he had acquaintances but no friends. He despised the swaggering beachcombers who had flung off the decencies of civilisation along with the habiliments of civilisation and who found a marrowy sweetness in the husks of the prodigal. Even more he despised the hectoring Germans with their flaming red and yellow beards, their thick-lensed spectacles, their gross manners when among their own kind and their brutishness in all their dealings with the natives—a brutishness so universal among them that no Polynesian would work at any price for a German, and every German had to depend for his plantation labour upon imported black boys from the Solomons and from New Guinea, who having once been trapped or, to use the trade word, indented, were thereafter held in an enforced servitude and paid with the bond-man's wage of bitter bread and bloody stripes.

He had never been able to get under the skin of a native; indeed he had never tried. In all the things that go to make up an understanding of a fellow mortal's real nature they still were to him as completely strangers as they had been on the day he landed in this place. Set down in the midst of a teeming fecundity he nevertheless remained as truly a castaway as though he had floated ashore on a bit of wreckage. He could have been no more and no less a maroon had the island which received him been a desert island instead of a populous one.

When a chief paid him a formal visit, bringing a gift of taro root and sitting for hours upon his veranda, the grave courtesy of the ceremony, in which a white man differently constituted might have taken joy, merely bored him unutterably. As for the native women, they had as little of sex appeal for him as he had for them—which was saying a good deal now, because he was short and of a meagre shape, and the scorn of the Polynesian girl for a little man is measureless. The girls of Good Friday Island called him by a name which sounded like "Pooh-pooh."

Among an English-speaking people it would have been a hard-enough lot to be pooh-poohed through life by every personable female one met. Here the coupled syllables carried an added sting of contemptuousness. In the language of the country they meant runty, mean-figured, undersized. A graceful girl, her naked limbs glistening with coconut oil, a necklet of flowers about her throat and a hibiscus bloom pasted to her cheek like a beauty spot, meeting him in the road would give him a derisive smile over her shoulder and with the unconscious cruelty of primitive folk would softly puff out "Pooh-pooh" through her pursed lips as she passed him by. And it hurt. Certain of the white residents called him Pooh-pooh too, which hurt more deeply.