On leaving the church, the father took him on a little tour of the garden: showed him the cemented oven where the bread was baked, the roofed-in spring, the hives, the cow, the imported cock, everything, in fact, down to the grindstone and the rusty scythe.
Michael followed as in duty bound; asked the proper questions; showed everywhere a becoming interest; endured it all with propriety. He asked his host many questions, some of them the inspiration of mere politeness, such as the best food for chickens, and the precautions to be taken in handling bees; others, in which he seemed more genuinely concerned, as to the nature of the inland country and its resources. He was surprised to hear that the island had only once been crossed by whites; he was impatient of the priest’s statement that it did not greatly matter, as the natives suffered in social consideration by living too far from the sea, and were, besides, better off for the fish it afforded and the easy means of communication.
“There are other things in Samoa besides Samoans,” exclaimed Brother Michael, with a disdain that he could but ill conceal. “Here is an island scarcely forty miles wide, which apparently has only once been crossed in the memory of living man. Why, the thing stirs the imagination; it makes the blood tingle in one’s veins; it makes one speculate on a thousand possibilities. In those secluded depths there may be the ruins of ancient cities; mouldering tombs covered with hieroglyphs; perhaps even another race still surviving in those inner valleys! There may be whole forests of sandalwood, beds of fine coal, deposits of rich ores. Who knows, but there may be gold!”
Father Studby crossed himself.
“God forbid,” he said.
“You must remember,” he went on, “that every village has some knowledge of the land behind it, and if you could combine what they know you would find that the interior is not such a mystery as you imagine; though, of course, there may be tracts which have never yet been penetrated by a white man. At one time and another I have been many miles inland of Lauli’i, but I never got so far but what every gully had a name, every acre an owner. Why our people should dispute among themselves for such blocks of worthless forest and rock is a thing beyond my comprehension; but as a matter of fact they do attach an inordinate value to them, and it would astound you to find how exactly the boundaries are remembered.”
“You interest me immensely,” said the lay brother. “I see that you can tell me everything I want to know, and I congratulate myself again that my lucky star has brought me to your door. In Nukualofa they could not answer half my questions.”
“In Nukualofa,” said Father Studby, bitterly, “they know nothing,—less than nothing,—for they mislead you and tell you lies. The natives there, besides, are of a low stock, interbred with out-islanders and without an ancestry among them. You will look in vain for such a man as our Maunga, who goes back seventeen generations to the legendary Fasito’o, or a family such as the Sā; Satupaialā;, who have what you might almost call a special language of their own. They die, they spit, they moor a boat, they steal breadfruit, they commit adultery, all in different words from those commonly employed. It has been my pleasure, you might almost call it my folly, to absorb myself in such studies. I am afraid you will find me nothing more than an old Kanaka pundit, with my cracked head full of legends and ancient songs.”
The priest saw very little of his guest, who followed the doctor’s prescription of fresh air with a literalness that made him almost a stranger in the house. Every morning, after participating in the service in the little church, Brother Michael would take his gun and disappear for the day, returning at sundown with what pigeons he had shot, and an appetite that played havoc with his host’s frugal housekeeping. He would eat a pound of meat at a sitting, make way with an entire loaf of bread, and thought nothing of helping himself four times to marmalade, in spite of the father’s disapproving looks, and the calculated contrast of his bare plate. In the light of that frightful inroad on his provisions, Father Studby’s good opinion of the stranger began to change into a sentiment approaching aversion, and it seemed to him an added injury that the young man would no longer eat his own pigeons, insisting, with gross self-indulgence, on an unending succession of chicken, ham, and costly preserves. He said that taro gave him heartburn, evoked the physician’s ban on all native food, and demanded, on the same shadowy authority, a daily ration of brandy from the father’s slender stock. It was hard on the old missionary, who was abstemious to a degree and seldom allowed himself the comfort of a dram, to pour his liquor down that insatiable throat, and be condemned to hold the bottle, while the other smacked his lips like a beach-comber in a bar, in no wise ashamed to drink alone. The bottle, too, until it was placed under lock and key, showed a tendency to decline unduly, and even biscuit and sardines were not exempt from a similar and no less exasperating shrinkage. And then, in his religious exercises the lay brother betrayed a disheartening coldness, and what spiritual fire had ever been in him seemed smothered over with torpor and indifference. His vocation meant no more to him than a means to live. He yawned at mass, nodded intermittently through the priest’s interminable sermons, and when it was proposed that he should take temporary charge of the school he did not hesitate for a moment to refuse.
Of course, a word to Nukualofa would have speedily rid Father Studby of his guest; he had only to write, to expostulate, and the thing was done. More than once, under the influence of some particular indignation, he had set himself to the task. But he had never got beyond the first few lines before his natural generosity reasserted itself. Who was he, that he should make himself the young man’s judge; that he should help, perhaps, to mar prospects none too bright, and throw the last stone at one already tottering to his fall? Besides, were the grounds of his objection as sincere as he imagined? Was he not meanly condemning the lay brother for his appetite, for the hole that he was making in that dwindling larder, rather than for his lack of religious conviction which at times seemed so shocking? After all, was it not natural for a young man to eat well, to help himself unchecked to marmalade, to devour expensive tinned meats like a wolf? It was the result of those immense walks, ordered by the doctor, to which Michael so assiduously applied himself. Was there not something even admirable in so strict an obedience to hygiene, especially in one constitutionally slothful and self-indulgent?