Many of the inhabitants of Vao are refugees from the big island of Malekula, who were vanquished in battle and literally driven off the earth by their enemies. Soon after our arrival, a powerful savage named Tethlong, one of the Small Numbers people, arrived on Vao with twenty of his men. All the remaining men of his tribe had been killed and the women and children had been taken captive. The natives of Vao received the newcomers as a welcome addition to their fighting force, and Tethlong set about to insure his position among his new neighbors. He invited the entire population to a feast, and at once sent his men to neighboring islands to buy up pigs and chickens for the occasion. The devil-devils—great, hollowed logs, carved roughly to represent human faces, which are erected everywhere in the New Hebrides to guard against evil spirits—were consulted to find a propitious time for the feasting, and on the appointed day the celebration began with much shouting and singing and dancing and beating of tom-toms. It lasted for several days. Before it was over, seven hundred and twenty pigs had been slaughtered. The island had never before seen such a feast. As a result of his political strategy, Tethlong became the Big Chief of Vao, taking precedence over the chiefs already there.
I got some fine pictures of Tethlong’s feast, but they were the only pictures I took for some days. For one thing, I was too busy for camera work; for the job of checking over our supplies and fortifying our place against a heavy rain kept us busy. For another, I was anxious to keep our savage neighbors at a distance, so long as we were alone.
Though they got over their curiosity concerning us and our effects within a few days, about half a dozen loafers continued to appear every morning and beg for tobacco. They were too lazy to work, and their constant presence annoyed us. They were in the way, and, besides, they grew cheekier day by day. The limit was reached one evening when Osa was playing her ukulele. Several natives wandered over from the village to listen. It was pretty music—I liked it a lot—and Osa was flattered when some of the boys came to talk to us about it. But it soon developed that they were demanding tobacco as compensation for listening!
DANCE OF TETHLONG’S MEN
We managed to get hold of a fairly trustworthy boy—Arree by name—to help with the housework. He claimed to have gone to the Catholic mission school at Vila, and, strange to say, he did not approve of the ways of his own people, though he was never absent from one of their festivals. He always told us the local gossip. It was from him that we learned what had happened to the mission boy who had worked for us on our former visit. He had aroused the ill-will of a neighbor and two weeks before our arrival had died from poison placed in his lap-lap, a pudding made of coconuts and fish.
Osa could write volumes regarding the difficulties of training her scrubby native recruit to the duties of housework. He spoke good bêche-de-mer, but bêche-de-mer is a language capable of various interpretations. Osa spoke it better than I, but even she could not make simple orders clear to our muddle-brained black slavey. One morning, she told Arree to heat an iron for her. She waited for a long time to get it, and then went after it. She found Arree crouched before the fire, gravely watching the iron boiling in a pot.
Arree murdered the King’s English in a way that must have made old Webster turn over in his grave. He never said “No.” His negative was always “No more,” and his affirmative was an emphatic “Yes-yes.” When I called for warm water in the morning, he would reply, blandly, “Hot water, he cold fellow,” and I would have to wait until, in his leisured way, Arree built the fire and heated the water. He had a sore leg, which I healed with a few applications of ointment. A few days later, he came to me with one eye swollen nearly shut, and my medicine kit in his hand. “Me gottem sore leg along eye-eye,” he informed me. Sometimes he achieved triumphs. I asked him once to tell another native to bring me the saw from Osa. In order to air his knowledge of English, Arree said: “You go along Mary (woman) belong Master catchem one fellow something he brother belong ackus (axe), pullem he come, pushem he go.” And then he translated the command, for his admiring, wide-eyed brother, into the native dialect.
Osa and I often caught ourselves falling into this queer English even when there were no natives around. It gets into the blood like baby-talk.