As the guests were led out into the dance-hall, one young stalwart took the remnant of the watermelon rind he had been gnawing and slung it straight at the pretty back of a Euro-Polynesian girl in evening frock. She tittered at him. The jollity was running too high for any one to be disturbed by anything like that.
Soon the dance was in full swing. Not the tango, which we regard as primitive and wild, but sober editions of dances with us long out of date. The need is more pressing in the tropics among folk of part-white parentage than an appearance of real civilization. And though it is not so long in the history of the Pacific since the coming of the first white man, there is already an intermediate race growing up which, beginning with Samoa, spreads northward and southward and all around as far as the reaches of the sea. Nor is the mixture always to be deprecated.
The night wore on. The dancing ceased. Flushed faces and perspiring forms slipped out into the moonlight. The white collar which had adorned the tuxedo of the clerk was now brother to the pajamas. The white men who had tried to drown their objections to intermarriage had yielded to the lure of the pretty half-caste maidens. One of them now disappeared with his "tart."
A traveling-salesman from Suva, thin and wiry, had been in dispute with a new civil officer. They contradicted each other just to be contrary. The officer had a wife at home to whom he was bound to be faithful in matters of sex; in the matter of spirits he could not be unfaithful, since in that all the world is one. When the two of them and I left the party, they were still disputing the question of intermarriage, in which neither believed but on which both had pronounced complexes.
To change the subject, which was bordering on a fight, I asked: "Why do the palms bend out toward the sea?"
"Now, what difference does it make to you?" said the salesman. "You're always asking why this, why that?"
"Why shouldn't he?" grumbled the officer, more sober and more intelligent.
We rambled along. The salesman soon slipped into his hotel. The officer and I wandered toward the native village.
"Strange," he said, somewhat sobered by the sea air. "If I met him in Auckland I wouldn't speak to him. He's beneath me."
Free and easy as the relationship of marriage seems to be here, one not infrequently runs across descendants of very happy and desirable unions. I had gone on a little motor jaunt with some of the men of the British Club. Our way was along the road the natives had built in gratitude to R. L. S., and our destination the home of a friend of his, who had married a native woman. The house was of European construction, solid and comfortable, with a veranda affording a view of the open sea. The interior was in every way as typical of British colonial life as any I later saw in New Zealand. There were photographs on the wall, hanging shelves, bric-á-brac, a piano,—all importations of crude Western manufactories.