Standards of beauty vary so widely among different races, from the fat, round-faced beauties alleged to predominate in Turkish harems, to the thin oval-faced belles of Japan, and to the long-eared, black-toothed maidens of Borneo, that I was anxious to learn what in masculine eyes of Uap constituted feminine beauty. One day, after a phonograph recital for the men, fifteen or twenty from different parts of the island lingered behind to watch the putting of the tom-tom in its box; I then took the opportunity of asking them who, in their opinion, was the prettiest girl of all they knew on the island. They seemed to take a great interest in the discussion which followed, and several girls were named and their charms discussed and compared, but finally a unanimous voice was given to Migiul the mispil of Magachagil, in the south of Uap. Their good taste may be verified by turning to her photograph on the opposite page.
MIGIUL, A “MISPIL”
Migiul was a frequent visitor at Friedlander’s house, being an intimate friend of his wife, and whenever she came to visit her parents, who lived close by in Dulukan, she spent the greater part of the day gossiping in Mrs. Friedlander’s cosy little home and learning to speak the Marianne Island language. She was an exceptionally bright girl, about seventeen or eighteen years old, with a sad, plaintive expression and a soft, gentle voice,—a universal favourite with the women, and the admiration of all the men. Nor was this all. Her reputation as a ballad singer was widespread, hence she was pushed forward on all occasions when a new song “record” was to be made, and seemed modestly conscious of her proficiency; I cannot honestly affirm, however, that I sympathised with her admirers in their ecstasy over her high or low notes, which to my dull, untrained ears too closely resembled, in all seriousness, the cry of a cat in agony. Notwithstanding her peculiar position in that small community, there was no trace of boldness in her demeanour; her voice in speaking was always low, “an excellent thing in woman;” she never obtruded herself, but retreated quickly to the background when she had finished her song; in fact, she was the personification of unstudied, innate femininity. This may be surely accepted, whether among primitive people or amid the conventionalities of modern society, as a high standard of refinement and an essential element of a thorough lady. Poor little Migiul, according to the exactest code of propriety is in her own eyes and in those of all her Uap world, a thoroughly blameless, moral girl.
FATUMAK
Of all my friends among the men, old Fatumak, the mach-mach or soothsayer, was the most faithful, the most intelligent, and, consequently, to me, invaluable. In his youth he had fallen from a coconut tree and so injured his spine, that he was permanently deformed and had a dwarf-like figure with a pronounced distortion. One evening, when he had been rehearsing to Friedlander and myself some of the legends of Uap, I asked him how it was that he knew so much; he said he had heard these stories from the old people when he was a boy, and then he added, pointing to a long row of notches on the handle of a little adze that he always carried:—“Those marks, each one,—one moon; twenty-eight moons after I fell, I lay in my house; no one to talk to; I think and think over everything; I talk to myself; I remember these stories. Some I think true; some I think foolish.” This had been his school,—two years of solitary self-communion, and during this time he had pondered on the problems of nature and the human mind, and solved them in his simple primitive way, to his own satisfaction. He emerged a wise man among his own people and endowed, as they believed, with prophetic foresight. He was ready with an answer to every question and made his living by interpreting omens and telling fortunes by mysterious combinations of knots in Bei leaves.
His house, wherein he lived quite alone, never having taken to himself a wife, was a veritable magpie’s nest, so full was it of odds and ends of every description, piled in corners or suspended from rafters, mostly discarded rubbish from the houses of Spanish or German traders. It was enclosed by an open fence of bamboo, fairly well built but naturally flimsy; in this fence there stood a gate which at night and invariably in the absence of the owner, was kept closed with a ponderous, rusty padlock, although a single, slight push would have been enough to throw the whole fence flat; indeed, I doubt that anyone hurrying along on a dark night and happening to stumble into Fatumak’s fence, would have been aware of it, or recognized any difference between it and other obstructive patches of thick undergrowth; but it was a great comfort to the old fellow to feel that “fast bind” ought to mean “fast find.” In the house his most valued possessions, such as bits of brass wire, nails, beads, extra blades for his adze, empty baking-powder boxes, the key-board of an ancient accordion, and innumerable other articles calculated to set a Uap’s “pugging tooth on edge,” were kept secure in a large tin biscuit-box, whereof the top had been cut on three sides, and the third side served as a hinge. He had contrived to punch holes through this lid and the side of the box, and through them he had inserted the hasp of another padlock almost as unwieldy as the one on his front gate. I think that after locking it he had lost the key,—the corners of the lid looked as if they had been bent upward to extract what he wanted without disturbing the lock; in fact, it was through these openings that I was able to examine the treasures of this safe.
The old man,—I call him old, but I doubt that he was over fifty, yet seemed older because of his deformed body and his quiet, sedate, and thoughtful bearing,—had a pleasant, pensive face, with somewhat negroid features, a broad flat nose and thick re-curving lips; his hair, just beginning to show grey, was, however, wavy and curly, with no trace of the wool of African negroes or of Papuans. He smiled easily and took good humouredly the chaff which we constantly poked at him for his thrifty devices, which closely verged on miserliness, and, occasionally, for the prices he charged poor unfortunates who invoked his skill in foretelling the future. He was not able, on account of his misshapen back, to paddle his own canoe, but he had constructed a raft of palm stems and bamboos, which he called his “barco,” after the Spanish, and many a time I saw him start off in the early morning to make his rounds of fortune-telling, poling his “barco” up the coast in the shallow lagoon, and return again in the evening with his decks almost awash with ripe coconuts,—his fees for consultation collected on the spot. His method of foretelling the future by means of bei leaves, he himself believed in implicitly, and invariably became serious and reserved if we alluded to it lightly. Many a time when he was squatting beside us as we ate our lunch or dinner at a little table in the yard under the palms, he would be called aside by an anxious client to interpret some mysterious combinations of knots which had been tied at random in strips of palm leaf. There are only a favoured few who know the hidden significance of marriages of the kan or demons, indicated by these knots, and this knowledge is kept sacredly secret and never revealed until the father, at the approach of death, discloses it to his son; thus it is handed down from generation to generation.