Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

Moy Ling's fire was burning brightly and it occurred to several of the youngsters to resume their marble playing. I saw Puarei's face light with pleasure, and he was on his feet at once with his stake in the ring. Others followed, and soon all those who had marbles were in the sport. I understood clearly then how helpless Tino had been. I could easily picture him rushing from group to group, furious at the thought of his interests being neglected through such childish folly. Those marbles were more desirable than his flour and canned goods, which he stood ready to exchange for copra. The explanation of this astounding fact may have been that no one thought he would go off as he did, and to-morrow would do just as well for getting down to business. Since he had gone, there was an end of that. It was futile to worry about the lost food. Certainly it was forgotten during the great tournament which took place that evening. Moy Ling worked at his bread making unnoticed. His fire died down to a heap of coals, but another was built and the play went on. Puarei was a splendid shot, in marble playing as in other respects, the best man of the village; but there was a slip of a girl who was even better. During the evening she accumulated nearly half of the entire marble supply, and at length these two met for a test of skill. It was a long-drawn-out game. I had never seen anything to equal the interest of both players and spectators; not even at Brown's lumber yard when the stakes were a boy's most precious possessions, cornelian stone taws. No one thought of sleep except a few of the old men and women, who dozed off at intervals with their heads between their knees.

The lateness of the hour—the bizarre setting for a game so linked with memories of boyhood, combined to give me an impression of unreality. I had the feeling that the island and all the people on it might vanish at any moment, and the roar of the surf resolve itself into the rumble of street traffic in some gray city. And, though it were the very city where marbles are made, where in the length or breadth of it could there be found anyone who knew the use of them, with either the time or the inclination to play? I might search it, street by street, to the soot-stained suburbs; I might go on to the green country, perhaps; visit all the old-time marble-playing rendezvous from one coast to the other, with no better success. And, though I passed through a thousand villages of the size of Rutiaro, could an evening's amusement be provided in any one of them, for men, women, and children, at an outlay of four dollars, American? The possibility would not be worth considering. People at home live too fast in these days, and they want too much. I could imagine Tino, in a sober mood, giving a grudging assent to this. "But, man!" he would have added, "I wish they had more of their marble-making enthusiasm at Rutiaro. I would put in here three times a year and fill the Winship with copra to within an inch of the main boom every trip."

Moy Ling had enough of it for the whole island, it seemed to me. His ovens were opened as the tournament came to an end, and for half an hour he was kept busy passing out crisp brown loaves and jotting down the list of creditors in his account book. It must have been nearly midnight. The crowd began to disperse. Puarei joined me, smiling ruefully, holding out empty hands. He had lost all of his marbles to a mite of a girl whom he could have put in his vest pocket had he owned one. His wife teased him about it on the way home, laughed heartily at his explanations and excuses. They discussed the events of the day long after the other members of the household had retired to their mats on the veranda. At last I heard their quiet breathing, and a strip of light from the last quarter moon revealed them asleep, two massive heads on the same pillow. I lay awake for a much longer time, thinking of one thing and another—of my friend Crichton at Tanao, the loneliest atoll in the world I should say; of the Winship far out to sea, homeward bound with one hundred and forty tons of copra in her hold; of Tino with his fits of temper, and his passion for trade which blinded him to so much of the beauty and the joy of life. But, after all, I thought, it is men like Tino who keep wheels turning and boats traveling the seas. If he were to die, his loss would be felt; there would be an eddy in the current of life around him. But men like Crichton or myself—we should go down in our time, and the broad stream would flow over our heads without a ripple to show where we had been, without a bubble rising to the surface to carry with it for a moment the memory of our lives. It was not a comforting thought, and I tried to evade it; but I realized that my New England conscience was playing a part in these reflections and was not to be soothed in any such childish manner. "How much copra have you ever produced or carried to market?" it appeared to say. I admitted that the amount was negligible. "How do you mean to justify your presence here?" was the next question, and before I could think of a satisfactory answer, "What good will come of this experience, either to yourself or to anyone else?" That was a puzzler until I happened to think of Findlay's South Pacific Directory. I remembered that his information about Rutiaro was very scant, the general remarks confined, as I have already said, to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." As a sop to my conscience, it occurred to me that I might write to the publishers of that learned work, suggesting that, in the light of recent investigations, they add to that description, "Fond of playing marbles."

Chapter VI tailpiece

CHAPTER VII

A Debtor of Moy Ling

Puarei's house stood halfway down the village street at Rutiaro, facing a broad indentation from the lagoon. The Catholic church adjoined it on one side, the Protestant church on the other. Neither of them was an imposing structure, but they towered above the small frame dwelling of the chief with an air of protection, of jealous watchfulness. On sunny days they shaded his roof in turn; and, when it rained, poured over it streams of water, through lead pipes projecting from their own ampler roofs—a purely utilitarian function, since the drainage from the three buildings furnished the fresh-water supply of the settlement. If the showers were light the overflow from the largess of the rival churches, plashing on the sheets of corrugated iron, filled the house with a monotonous murmur, like the drowsy argument of two soft-voiced missionaries; but during a heavy downpour the senses were stunned by the incessant thunder, as though one were inclosed in an immense drum, beaten with nonsectarian vigor by all the Salvation Armies in the world.

It was during such a deluge, one day in early spring, that I lay on the guest bed in Puarei's one-room house, watching Poura, his wife, who had washed my linen with her own hands and was then ironing it. It was not, strictly speaking, linen. The articles were three—a sleeveless gauze singlet, a cotton handkerchief, and a faded khaki shirt. A pair of khaki trousers, a pair of canvas tennis shoes, and a pandanus hat completed my wardrobe. Since I needed the whole of it when going abroad about the island, it was necessary to go to bed on washing day, and to wait there until the laundering was finished, and such repairs made as constant wear had caused and further wear demanded. How to replenish it and to meet other simple urgent needs gave me cause for some concern, and I was going over the problem as I lay on Puarei's guest bed. It was toward the end of my second week at Rutiaro, and already I was beginning to look decidedly shabby. My shoes were rotted out with sea water, and both shirt and trousers, which were far from new at the time of my arrival, gave evidence of early dissolution. Poura had washed, sewed on buttons, drawn seams together, but the garments were chronically ailing, as hopeless of effective repair as an old man far gone in senile decay. Poura was becoming discouraged about them, and I knew that she must be wondering why I didn't buy some fresh ones. I had a very good reason for not doing so—I had no money. I had been left at Rutiaro without so much as a twenty-five-centime piece, and the Banque de l'Indo-Chine was six hundred miles away.

It would not occur to either Puarei or his wife that I was in need of funds. Theirs was one of the more primitive atolls of the Low Archipelago, where all white men are regarded as mysteriously affluent. If, instead of being marooned at Rutiaro through Tino's fit of temper, I had been discovered a mile outside the reef, making toward the land clad only in a pair of swimming trunks, upon reaching it my rescuers would have expected me, as a matter of course, to take a bulky parcel of thousand-franc notes from beneath that garment. I had, in fact, made a secret inventory of my wealth after the sudden departure of the Caleb Winship, hoping there might be a forgotten bank note in one of my trousers pockets. What I found was a cotton handkerchief, a picture post card of the Woolworth Building, and a small musical instrument called an ocharina, or, more commonly, a sweet-potato whistle. The handkerchief I needed; the post card seemed of no practical use as a means of barter; and, while I might have given up the ocharina, it had but a slight monetary value, and Moy Ling, the Chinese storekeeper of the village, was not interested in it. I didn't offer it to him outright. Instead, I played on it, in front of his shop, "The March of the Black Watch," which I could render with some skill. Thereafter every youngster on the island coveted the instrument, but Moy Ling made no offers and the prospect of a wardrobe was as far away as ever.