One afternoon Michael returned from his walk in a state of high excitement. His black eyes were burning, and for once, contrary to his usual habit, he was extraordinarily noisy and talkative. He kept breaking out into wild laughter, even when not a word was said, and seemed to possess, buried somewhere within him, the secret of an unextinguishable entertainment. Instead of dozing after supper in his chair, he grew, if anything, wider awake than ever, and his hilarity continued with a kind of violence. Father Studby was carried off his feet by that wave of gaiety; he felt the contagion of that singular fever which had so transformed his companion; he, too, laughed at nothing, and found himself talking with an animation that he could not remember to have displayed for years. But with it all he had an unaccountable sense of suspicion, of being on his guard against something, he knew not what, of some pitfall yawning for his unwary feet. He felt that he was watched; that those strange, mocking eyes of his companion were mutely tempting him to evil; at times he almost wondered whether the dark lay brother were not the devil himself.
The young man’s talk was rambling and inconsequent, a mere rattle of autobiography, punctuated with laughter. He had much to say of his college days; his penury; his struggles; his shabby makeshifts; the pranks he and his companions had played on the professors. He roared as he recalled them, and hammered the table with his fist. He spoke of his mother and her hard life; the ne’er-do-well father; the brother that drank; the sister with the hip disease. And from that again to the price of native land, the way to secure good titles, the need, as he had been told, to buy the same property from a dozen conflicting owners. Then he broke out about the power of money, the unlimited power of money, the lawlessness of money in unprincipled hands; the way it could buy everything the world had to offer, social position, beautiful women, the entrée to great houses. With money, what could a man ask for in vain! In this world, he meant, of course—in this world. In the next, thank God, it would be different; the rich would pay through the nose then for their pleasures. But some of them perhaps would not repent it; the most would be as bad again, if only the chance were offered; the dogs would return to their vomit.
Father Studby listened to these confidences with amazement; they depressed and angered him unspeakably; they seemed to disclose in his companion a cynicism and a moral deficiency that he had not previously suspected. He felt, too, as he had never felt before, the full horror of that brutal civilisation, so merciless, so inexorable, its obliterating march whitened with the bones of thousands; everything with its price, even to the honour of shrinking women and the corpses of the dead. If you had no money the wheels rolled over you; if you had no money you sank and died. There was no one to help, no one to pity; all were scrambling horribly to save themselves on the shoulders of those below. What a contrast to the calm of that Samoan life, primitive, kindly, and religious, in which accursed money was unknown! He was led to declaim hotly on the high breeding and chivalry of these misjudged people, and protested that they had more to teach than to learn. Where, he demanded of the lay brother, could one find such hearts as these? where such brave men and compassionate women? where else a land with neither rich nor poor? Here, if one starved, all starved; here, if need be, the last banana was divided into a hundred pieces; here they would all take shame if a single child went hungry.
The old priest went on and on with his tale of Samoan virtue, of Samoan superiority. God had never made such a people; there was in them the seed that would regenerate the world. There was nothing in which they did not excel. He carried his reluctant hearer into the mazes of native poetry; he repeated hundreds of lines in his resounding voice, blowing out clouds of tobacco smoke between each stanza. Where, he asked, were the whites who could match such things as these; who could bring the tears to your eyes or convulse you with laughter at will? He would repeat that last verse, if his companion did not mind; it described how To, wandering on the sea-shore at dawn, met Tingalau returning from his fishing, and led on to twenty stanzas more of what To said to Tingalau, and Tingalau to To!
Michael lay back in his chair, scarce heeding the soft gibberish that to him meant nothing. He was living in a tumult of his own thoughts—thoughts in which Kanaka poetry had no part, though the priest himself was sometimes present, but whether as a friend or foe he could not yet determine; and while he wondered and conjectured the old man himself seemed to disappear in his own smoke, until nothing remained of him but a faint, passionate buzzing, like that of a bumblebee in a field.
The next day Michael was up and gone before daybreak, and the little service in the church proceeded for once without him. The father was vexed at such remissness, and tolled the bell with pious indignation. Was the young man no better than a heathen, thus to scamp God’s morning hour—to attend so grossly to the fleshly needs and let the soul go wanting? Depend upon it, he had not left without something to stay his stomach, though God’s claim on him might wait. The priest turned a cold face to his guest when the latter returned at dusk with the invariable pigeons in his hand. But Michael was too tired to notice these altered looks, nor did he seem concerned when at last his delinquency was pointed out to him in no uncertain words. His church, he answered, with mocking defiance, his church was in the woods, at the foot of a towering banyan, or in some dim recess beside a stream; he knelt when the impulse came to him, like some primitive monk wandering with God in the wilds. The priest received this explanation with a dubious silence; he was not at all satisfied with its truth, and yet scarcely knew what to reply, feeling himself helpless and outwitted. He was almost glad that the pigeons, still lying on the floor, gave him an obvious excuse to leave the room.
“The chief has done well to-day,” he said to Ngalo, his servant.
The boy laughed.
“Excellency,” he said, “the Helper does not shoot these pigeons. He buys them for sixpences from our people.”
“Impossible!” cried the old man. “Thou talkest like a delirious person.”