That was admirable, I said. And what was the second sanitary improvement in which he took so much pride?
Beyond the hemp fields untidy black women loafed in the shade, revealing their baggy breasts; they were spitting bloody streams of betel-juice or smoking short clay pipes. “We have fourteen now,” the planter said. “We’ve sent some away—gonorrhea, you know. Bring a few more in this week. Yes, they have the ration of trade tobacco, rice and tinned food. They’re all married, so it’s just a matter of seeing the husband.”
Admirable. But what had that to do with sanitation?
The manager held me with clean gray eyes, and said: “Do you know what happens to men without women? These natives are only animals. You’ve seen how animals behave, when they can’t get what they want naturally? Indenturing men, taking them in herds away from the wives and the whores, teaches them a lot of tomfoolery. Europeans don’t think that the primitive man goes homosexual. Humbug! The missionaries think the savages will live like Christ, and they’ve made it illegal to have prostitutes on plantations. Well, these ladies here are just good hard-working wives. Ask any of the big planters—and they’re he-men if ever there were any—ask ’em about the native boys that weave their hips and ogle at the work-gangs going by. We call ’em ‘queens,’ and they’re a nuisance we’ve jolly well got to get rid of.”
The planter’s idea was brutal, like Papua. But his object was kindly, and, in its way, scientific. Since then I have seen much of the turning of simple people to the ways of perversion. The hard-hitting Queenslander, manly as a frontiersman can be, was doing his best to square the vicious circle.
******
That night I saw my first ghost. We had sat up rather late with the manager, who mumbled in a corner with Archie McAlpin. Once I heard him ask, “Is it still around?” Heads were together, voices lowered. Finally Archie McAlpin, who had finished his share of whisky, and mine, rambled upstairs. I rambled up too, for I was tired. That evening there had been a long lecture before an audience of sedate cannibals, earnestly attentive to what I told Ahuia to say in Motu to a Goaribari interpreter.
The Papuan servant never wakes you harshly, because when you sleep your soul has left your body to wander among dreams. Wake the body suddenly, and where is the soul? Still loitering with a dream. Therefore you die. When Ahuia wished to rouse me he would move a chair or give a polite cough. His cough woke me and I saw him, shadowy in a patch of moonlight. His jittery voice was imploring the taubada to “Look along veranda.... Devil-devil belong him outside.”
A voice was yammering somewhere. I looked out and saw a white figure that appeared to float as it gestured. I hadn’t many hairs to stand up, but they all stood. Yammering, yammering, the voice of the pale apparition beat out a long speech in Motu, then in English. “No, don’t come here again!”
The specter turned. It was Archie McAlpin. The voice hadn’t been that of a drunken man; under the white moon his look was sober. He shook his head, the debate was over. He didn’t see me, he appeared not to see anything as he went back to bed.