Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

The village was hidden among the trees, but I saw the French flag flying near a break in the reef which marked the landing place for small boats. Farther back, a little knot of people were gathered, some of them sitting in the full glare of the sun, others in the deep shade, leaning against the trees in attitudes of dreamy meditation. Three girls were combing their hair, talking and laughing in an animated way. They were dressed in all their European finery, gowns of flowered muslin pulled up around their bare legs to prevent soilure. A matronly woman in a red wrapper had thrown the upper covering aside and sat, naked to the waist, nursing a baby. I put down my glasses, feeling rather ashamed of my scrutiny, as though I had been peeping through a window at some intimate domestic scene. The island leaped into the distance; the broad circle of foam and jagged reef narrowed to a thread of white, and the Caleb S. Winship crept landward again under a light breeze, an atom of a ship on a vast and empty sea. Eight bells struck, a tinkling sound, deadened, scarcely audible in the wide air. I heard Tino's voice as though coming from an immense distance: "Hello, up there! Kai-kai's ready!" I said: "All right! I'm coming," and was surprised at the loudness of my own shout. But I waited for a moment to indulge myself in a last reflection: "It is thirty-one years since the Prince Edward put in here. Excepting a few traders and missionaries, there isn't probably one man in one hundred thousand who has ever heard of this atoll; not one in a million who has ever seen it or ever will see it. What a piece of luck for me!" Then I saw Oro at the galley door with a huge platter of boiled beef and sweet potatoes. The sight of it reminded me that I was very hungry. As I climbed down to the deck I was conscious of the fact that a healthy appetite and a good digestion were a piece of luck, too, and that as long as one could hold it the lure of islands would remain, and one's love of living burn with a clear flame. Jack, the monkey, seemed to divine my thought, to agree with it. As Oro, the food bearer, passed him, he reached down from his perch in the rigging, seized the largest sweet potato on the platter, and clambered out of reach. Assured of his safety, he fell to greedily, looking out wistfully toward the land.

The pass was at the farther end of the lagoon, and in order to save time in getting the work ashore under way, the supercargo and I, with three of the sailors, put off in the whaleboat, to land on the ocean side of the village. Half a dozen men rushed into the surf, seized and held the boat as the backwash poured down the steep incline at the edge of the reef. Among them was the chief, a man of huge frame, six feet two or three in height. Like the others who assisted at the landing, he was clad only in a pareu, but he lost none of his dignity through his nakedness. He was fifty-five years old, as I afterward learned, and as he stood bidding us welcome I thought of the strange appearance certain of the chief men in America or France or England would make under similar circumstances, deprived of the kindly concealment of clothing. What a revelation it would be of skinniness or pudginess! What an exhibition of scrawny necks, fat stomachs, flat chests, flabby arms! To be strictly accurate, I had seen some fat stomachs among elderly Paumotuans, but they were exceptions, and always remarkable for that reason. And those who carried them had sturdy legs. They did not give one the uneasy feeling, common at home, at the sight of the great paunches of sedentary men toppling unsteadily along a strip of crimson carpet, from curb to club doorway.

Wherever one goes in Polynesia one is reminded, by contrast, of the cost physically to men of our own race of our sheltered way of living. There on every hand are men well past middle life, with compact, symmetrical bodies and the natural grace of healthy children. One sees them carrying immense burdens without exertion, swimming in the open sea for an hour or two at a time while spearing fish, loafing ashore with no greater apparent effort for yet longer periods. Sometimes, when they have it, they eat enormous quantities of food at one sitting, and at others, under necessity, as sparingly as so many dyspeptics. It would be impossible to formulate from their example any rules for rational living in more civilized communities. The daily quest for food under primitive conditions keeps them alert and sound of body, so that, whether they work or loaf, feast or fast, they seem always to acquire health by it.

There had been no boats at Rutiaro in five months and the crowd on the beach was unfeignedly glad to see us. The arrival of a schooner at that remote island was an event of great importance; the sight of new faces lighted their own with pleasure, which warmed the heart toward them at once. We had brought ashore a consignment of goods for Moy Ling, the Chinese storekeeper, and when the handshaking was over they gathered around it as eagerly as a group of American children at a Christmas tree. Even the village constable seemed unconscious of any need for a show of dignity or authority. The only badge of his office was a cigarette-card picture of President Poincaré, fastened with a safety pin to his old felt hat. He neglected his duties as a keeper of order, and was one of the most excited of Moy Ling's helpers with the cargo. He kept patting him affectionately on the back, saying, "Maitai! maitai!" which in that situation may be freely translated as, "You know me, Moy Ling!" And the old Chinaman smiled the pleasant, noncommittal smile of his countrymen the world over.

Tino's was the only sour face on the beach. He moved through the crowd, giving orders, grumbling and growling half to himself and half to me. "I told you they were a lazy lot," he said. "They've seen us making in for three hours, and what have they been doing? Loafing on the beach, waiting for us instead of getting their copra together! Moy Ling is the only one in the village who is ready to do business. Five tons all sacked for weighing. He's worth a dozen Kanakas. Well, I'll set 'em to work in quick time now. You watch me! I'm going to be loaded and out of here by six o'clock."

But chance, using me as an innocent accomplice, ordered it otherwise. It was Sir Thomas Browne who said, "Those who hold that all things are governed by fortune had not erred had they not persisted there." He may be right, although I don't remember now where his own nonpersistence lay. But there are some things, some events, which chance or fortune—whatever one wishes to call it—governs from the outset with an amazing show of omnipotence. Tracing them back, one becomes almost convinced of a fixed intent, a far-sighted, unwavering determination in its apparently haphazard functioning. It is clear to me now that, because I had been fond of playing marbles as a boy, I was to be marooned, fifteen years later, on a fragment of land, six thousand miles from the lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son. Tino had no more to do with that result than I did. He merely lost his temper because chance disorganized his plans for an early departure; tried to quench his anger in rum, and became more furious still because he was drunk. Then off he went in the Caleb S. Winship, leaving me stranded ashore. I can still hear his parting salutation which he roared at me though a megaphone across the starlit lagoon, "You can stay—" But this is anticipating. The story moves in a more leisurely fashion.

As I have said, my box of marbles came to light again only a few hours before we reached Rutiaro. I took them ashore with me, thinking they might amuse the children. They had a good knowledge of the technic of shooting, acquired in a two-handed game common among the atolls, which is played with bits of polished coral. But theirs had always seemed to me a tame pastime, lacking the interest of stakes to be won or lost. I instructed them in the simple rules of "bull-ring" and "Tom's-dead," which they quickly mastered. Then I divided the marbles equally among them and gave them to understand that the winner held his gains, although marbles, like trade goods, might be bartered for. I emphasized that feature of the game because of a recollection remaining from my own marble-playing days, of the contempt in which boys were held who refused to hazard their marbles in a test of skill. They refused to play "for keeps," and the rest of us had nothing to do with them. The youngsters of Rutiaro were not of that stamp. They took their losses in good part. When I saw that I left them to themselves and went for a walk through the village. I knew—at least I thought I did—that our stay was to be brief and I wanted to make the most of it.

I followed the street bordering the lagoon, past the freshly thatched houses with their entryways wide to the sun and wind, and came at length to a small burying ground which lay in an area of green shadow far from the village. There were a dozen or more graves within the inclosure, some of them neatly mounded over with broken coral and white shell, others incased in a kind of sarcophagus of native cement to keep more restless spirits from wandering abroad. Most of them were unmarked. Two or three had wooden headboards, one of which was covered with a long inscription in Chinese. Beneath this the word "Repose" was printed in English, as though it had some peculiar talismanic significance for the Chinaman who had placed it there. It was the grave of a predecessor of Moy Ling's. I fell to thinking of him as I sat there, and of all the Chinamen I had met in the earlier days, lonely, isolated figures, most of them, without family or friends or the saving companionship of books. What was it that kept them going? What goal were they striving toward through lives which held so little of the comfort or happiness essential to the rest of humankind? Repose? A better end than that, surely. The air rang with the sound of the word, the garish sunlight fell pitilessly on the print of it. To most men, I believe, with the best of life still before them, there is something terrible, infamous, in the thought of the unrelieved blackness of an endless, dreamless sleep. I turned from the contemplation of it; let my thoughts wander in a mist of dreams, of half-formed fancies which glimmered through consciousness like streaks of sunlight in a dusty attic. These vanished at length and for a time I was as dead to thought or feeling as Moy Ling's predecessor, sleeping beside me.

I was awakened by some one shaking me by the shoulder. A voice said, "Haere i te pai!" ("Come down to the boat!") and a dark figure ran on before, turning from time to time to urge me to greater speed. It was almost night, although there was still light enough to see by. I remembered that Tino had told me to be at the copra sheds at five. The tide would serve for getting through the pass until eight, but I hurried, nevertheless, feeling that something unusual had happened. Rounding a point of land which cut off the view from the village and the inner lagoon, I saw the schooner, about three hundred yards off shore, slim and black against a streak of orange cloud to the northward. She was moving slowly out, under power; the whaleboat was being hoisted over the side, and at the wheel I saw the familiar silhouette of the supercargo.

I shouted: "Hi! Tino! Wait a minute! You're not going to leave me behind, are you?"