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I had not known that buying and selling was ever part of the scheme of things among people whose needs were as few as those of the South-Sea islanders. Saints and philosophers are always teaching us that the most desirable state is that in which wants are few, and their indulgence is still more limited. But it seems to me that where that condition holds, the few necessaries of life become so much more desirable and so much more difficult to obtain that, instead of a release from slavery, slavery is even more rigorous. Our pictured impressions of the tropics are full of breadfruit-trees and fruits growing in abundance without labor. But quite the contrary is the case. The fear of famine and the insecurity of life have dampened the joys of many a wild man, and the pressure of population has only too frequently resulted in infanticide and cannibalism.
When, therefore, I heard that there was to be a native bazaar across the Rewa River, in Vita Levu, the largest island of the Fiji group, I defied the yellow sun that hung overhead, secured a complement of guides in two Fijian boys who were more afraid of me than they were of their chief, and set out for real primitive excitement. We were pulled across the river on a punt secured to each shore by a cable, and made our way up the banks in the direction of the sugar-mill.
It was noon when we arrived at the fair-grounds. Aside from long wooden tables that stood beneath arbors of palms, there was nothing completed by way of preparation. A few straggling natives wended their ways from hut to hut of slab-board and thatch, their quiet manners reminding me of the monks in monasteries, absorbed in their duties. Gradually, venders arrived; the tables began to sprout with banana-leaves and flowers. Strings of berry beads were displayed, like fish out of water,—appealing eyes of the plant world asking why, with nature so near at hand, they needed to be torn from life. Bottles of liquid fats, like capsules of the castor-plant, stood ensconced in green-leaved packages containing sweet messes that left the eager natives, old and young, literally web-handed.
The goods displayed, the crowds from the surrounding huts arrived, drawn by an irresistible charm. A Fijian never came with his mate; maiden never approached on her lover's arm. Though they all appeared indiscriminately, there was no obvious grouping of friends with friends. They moved like shoals of fish that had got the scent or the sight of food. It was a crowd with every evidence of cohesiveness except that of companionship.
To me there was something pathetic in that crowd. An outsider by all the laws of centuries of contrary development, I had no means of entering their emotional lives, of guessing the promptings which made them leave privacy for herding. I had only the most outward signs to go by, and I thought what spiritless, barren lives they must lead who could be brought together on such an occasion in so casual a mood. For aside from the bottles of oil, the strings of beads, and the wrappings of stuff in banana-leaves, there was nothing from my view to make a hundred or two hundred thousand pounds of sluggish flesh rise from its mats and dare the piercing sun.
Yet the women, who did most of the selling, with their unkempt hair and their crude alien costumes, awoke to something universal under the game of barter they were here called upon to play crudely. Rummage-sales and carnivals, dog-shows and dances, likewise change the glitter of blue eyes and pink cheeks; and I smiled at the thought of Lao-tsze and Tolstoy, who between 650 B.C. and A.D. 1910 preached the ugliness of trade.
When the play of barter and exchange had stirred these primitive folk to a little more life, they quite naturally sought a way of giving it off again; but so foreign did a real bazaar seem to them that they entered the recreations with little zest. In these days of savage sedateness, with trade becoming more and more a feature and a pastime of life, it is not surprising that the natives attend with spirits in abeyance. Following the great exchange of beads and oils and edible messes, the crowds moved out to a more open space, under the clear sun. There, with the aid of a native band, under the conductorship of a Catholic priest, they made merry, with strange sounds and more familiar dances. But it all seemed perfunctory and not without a touch of sadness. The Fijian voice at its best is rich, deep, and stately. One cannot imagine it attuned to singing jazz or rag-time. It seems exclusively made for hymns. In consequence, the crowds could not rise to the occasion, and stood behind the entertainers like so many solemn Japanese in the presence of royalty.