Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (810 page)

I recall with interest two interviews with Stanislao.  The first was a certain afternoon of tropic rain, which we passed together in the verandah of the club; talking at times with heightened voices as the showers redoubled overhead, passing at times into the billiard-room, to consult, in the dim, cloudy daylight, that map of the world which forms its chief adornment.  He was naturally ignorant of English history, so that I had much of news to communicate.  The story of Gordon I told him in full, and many episodes of the Indian Mutiny, Lucknow, the second battle of Cawn-pore, the relief of Arrah, the death of poor Spottis-woode, and Sir Hugh Rose’s hotspur, midland campaign.  He was intent to hear; his brown face, strongly marked with small-pox, kindled and changed with each vicissitude.  His eyes glowed with the reflected light of battle; his questions were many and intelligent, and it was chiefly these that sent us so often to the map.  But it is of our parting that I keep the strongest sense.  We were to sail on the morrow, and the night had fallen, dark, gusty, and rainy, when we stumbled up the hill to bid farewell to Stanislao.  He had already loaded us with gifts; but more were waiting.  We sat about the table over cigars and green cocoa-nuts; claps of wind blew through the house and extinguished the lamp, which was always instantly relighted with a single match; and these recurrent intervals of darkness were felt as a relief.  For there was something painful and embarrassing in the kindness of that separation.  ‘
Ah, vous devriez rester ici, mon
cher ami
!’ cried Stanislao.  ‘
Vous êtes les gens qu’il faut pour les Kanaques; vous êtes doux, vous et votre famille
;
vous seriez obéis dans toutes les îles
.’  We had been civil; not always that, my conscience told me, and never anything beyond; and all this to-do is a measure, not of our considerateness, but of the want of it in others.  The rest of the evening, on to Vaekehu’s and back as far as to the pier, Stanislao walked with my arm and sheltered me with his umbrella; and after the boat had put off, we could still distinguish, in the murky darkness, his gestures of farewell.  His words, if there were any, were drowned by the rain and the loud surf.

I have mentioned presents, a vexed question in the South Seas; and one which well illustrates the common, ignorant habit of regarding races in a lump.  In many quarters the Polynesian gives only to receive.  I have visited islands where the population mobbed me for all the world like dogs after the waggon of cat’s-meat; and where the frequent proposition, ‘You my pleni (friend),’ or (with more of pathos) ‘You all ‘e same my father,’ must be received with hearty laughter and a shout.  And perhaps everywhere, among the greedy and rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat to catch a whale.  It is the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that they do not lose.  But for persons of a different stamp the statement must be reversed.  The shabby Polynesian is anxious till he has received the return gift; the generous is uneasy until he has made it.  The first is disappointed if you have not given more than he; the second is miserable if he thinks he has given less than you.  This is my experience; if it clash with that of others, I pity their fortune, and praise mine: the circumstances cannot change what I have seen, nor lessen what I have received.  And indeed I find that those who oppose me often argue from a ground of singular presumptions; comparing Polynesians with an ideal person, compact of generosity and gratitude, whom I never had the pleasure of encountering; and forgetting that what is almost poverty to us is wealth almost unthinkable to them.  I will give one instance: I chanced to speak with consideration of these gifts of Stanislao’s with a certain clever man, a great hater and contemner of Kanakas.  ‘Well! what were they?’ he cried.  ‘A pack of old men’s beards.  Trash!’  And the same gentleman, some half an hour later, being upon a different train of thought, dwelt at length on the esteem in which the Marquesans held that sort of property, how they preferred it to all others except land, and what fancy prices it would fetch.  Using his own figures, I computed that, in this commodity alone, the gifts of Vaekehu and Stanislao represented between two and three hundred dollars; and the queen’s official salary is of two hundred and forty in the year.

But generosity on the one hand, and conspicuous meanness on the other, are in the South Seas, as at home, the exception.  It is neither with any hope of gain, nor with any lively wish to please, that the ordinary Polynesian chooses and presents his gifts.  A plain social duty lies before him, which he performs correctly, but without the least enthusiasm.  And we shall best understand his attitude of mind, if we examine our own to the cognate absurdity of marriage presents.  There we give without any special thought of a return; yet if the circumstance arise, and the return be withheld, we shall judge ourselves insulted.  We give them usually without affection, and almost never with a genuine desire to please; and our gift is rather a mark of our own status than a measure of our love to the recipients.  So in a great measure and with the common run of the Polynesians; their gifts are formal; they imply no more than social recognition; and they are made and reciprocated, as we pay and return our morning visits.  And the practice of marking and measuring events and sentiments by presents is universal in the island world.  A gift plays with them the part of stamp and seal; and has entered profoundly into the mind of islanders.  Peace and war, marriage, adoption and naturalisation, are celebrated or declared by the acceptance or the refusal of gifts; and it is as natural for the islander to bring a gift as for us to carry a card-case.

CHAPTER X - A PORTRAIT AND A STORY

I have had occasion several times to name the late bishop, Father Dordillon, ‘Monseigneur,’ as he is still almost universally called, Vicar-Apostolic of the Marquesas and Bishop of Cambysopolis
in partibus
.  Everywhere in the islands, among all classes and races, this fine, old, kindly, cheerful fellow is remembered with affection and respect.  His influence with the natives was paramount.  They reckoned him the highest of men - higher than an admiral; brought him their money to keep; took his advice upon their purchases; nor would they plant trees upon their own land till they had the approval of the father of the islands.  During the time of the French exodus he singly represented Europe, living in the Residency, and ruling by the hand of Temoana.  The first roads were made under his auspices and by his persuasion.  The old road between Hatiheu and Anaho was got under way from either side on the ground that it would be pleasant for an evening promenade, and brought to completion by working on the rivalry of the two villages.  The priest would boast in Hatiheu of the progress made in Anaho, and he would tell the folk of Anaho, ‘If you don’t take care, your neighbours will be over the hill before you are at the top.’  It could not be so done to-day; it could then; death, opium, and depopulation had not gone so far; and the people of Hatiheu, I was told, still vied with each other in fine attire, and used to go out by families, in the cool of the evening, boat-sailing and racing in the bay.  There seems some truth at least in the common view, that this joint reign of Temoana and the bishop was the last and brief golden age of the Marquesas.  But the civil power returned, the mission was packed out of the Residency at twenty-four hours’ notice, new methods supervened, and the golden age (whatever it quite was) came to an end.  It is the strongest proof of Father Dordillon’s prestige that it survived, seemingly without loss, this hasty deposition.

His method with the natives was extremely mild.  Among these barbarous children he still played the part of the smiling father; and he was careful to observe, in all indifferent matters, the Marquesan etiquette.  Thus, in the singular system of artificial kinship, the bishop had been adopted by Vaekehu as a grandson; Miss Fisher, of Hatiheu, as a daughter.  From that day, Monseigneur never addressed the young lady except as his mother, and closed his letters with the formalities of a dutiful son.  With Europeans he could be strict, even to the extent of harshness.  He made no distinction against heretics, with whom he was on friendly terms; but the rules of his own Church he would see observed; and once at least he had a white man clapped in jail for the desecration of a saint’s day.  But even this rigour, so intolerable to laymen, so irritating to Protestants, could not shake his popularity.  We shall best conceive him by examples nearer home; we may all have known some divine of the old school in Scotland, a literal Sabbatarian, a stickler for the letter of the law, who was yet in private modest, innocent, genial and mirthful.  Much such a man, it seems, was Father Dordillon.  And his popularity bore a test yet stronger.  He had the name, and probably deserved it, of a shrewd man in business and one that made the mission pay.  Nothing so much stirs up resentment as the inmixture in commerce of religious bodies; but even rival traders spoke well of Monseigneur.

His character is best portrayed in the story of the days of his decline.  A time came when, from the failure of sight, he must desist from his literary labours: his Marquesan hymns, grammars, and dictionaries; his scientific papers, lives of saints, and devotional poetry.  He cast about for a new interest: pitched on gardening, and was to be seen all day, with spade and water-pot, in his childlike eagerness, actually running between the borders.  Another step of decay, and he must leave his garden also.  Instantly a new occupation was devised, and he sat in the mission cutting paper flowers and wreaths.  His diocese was not great enough for his activity; the churches of the Marquesas were papered with his handiwork, and still he must be making more.  ‘Ah,’ said he, smiling, ‘when I am dead what a fine time you will have clearing out my trash!’  He had been dead about six months; but I was pleased to see some of his trophies still exposed, and looked upon them with a smile: the tribute (if I have read his cheerful character aright) which he would have preferred to any useless tears.  Disease continued progressively to disable him; he who had clambered so stalwartly over the rude rocks of the Marquesas, bringing peace to warfaring clans, was for some time carried in a chair between the mission and the church, and at last confined to bed, impotent with dropsy, and tormented with bed-sores and sciatica.  Here he lay two months without complaint; and on the 11th January 1888, in the seventy-ninth year of his life, and the thirty-fourth of his labours in the Marquesas, passed away.

Those who have a taste for hearing missions, Protestant or Catholic, decried, must seek their pleasure elsewhere than in my pages.  Whether Catholic or Protestant, with all their gross blots, with all their deficiency of candour, of humour, and of common sense, the missionaries are the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific.  This is a subject which will follow us throughout; but there is one part of it that may conveniently be treated here.  The married and the celibate missionary, each has his particular advantage and defect.  The married missionary, taking him at the best, may offer to the native what he is much in want of - a higher picture of domestic life; but the woman at his elbow tends to keep him in touch with Europe and out of touch with Polynesia, and to perpetuate, and even to ingrain, parochial decencies far best forgotten.  The mind of the female missionary tends, for instance, to be continually busied about dress.  She can be taught with extreme difficulty to think any costume decent but that to which she grew accustomed on Clapham Common; and to gratify this prejudice, the native is put to useless expense, his mind is tainted with the morbidities of Europe, and his health is set in danger.  The celibate missionary, on the other hand, and whether at best or worst, falls readily into native ways of life; to which he adds too commonly what is either a mark of celibate man at large, or an inheritance from mediaeval saints - I mean slovenly habits and an unclean person.  There are, of course, degrees in this; and the sister (of course, and all honour to her) is as fresh as a lady at a ball.  For the diet there is nothing to be said - it must amaze and shock the Polynesian - but for the adoption of native habits there is much.  ‘
Chaque pays a ses coutumes
,’ said Stanislao; these it is the missionary’s delicate task to modify; and the more he can do so from within, and from a native standpoint, the better he will do his work; and here I think the Catholics have sometimes the advantage; in the Vicariate of Dordillon, I am sure they had it.  I have heard the bishop blamed for his indulgence to the natives, and above all because he did not rage with sufficient energy against cannibalism.  It was a part of his policy to live among the natives like an elder brother; to follow where he could; to lead where it was necessary; never to drive; and to encourage the growth of new habits, instead of violently rooting up the old.  And it might be better, in the long-run, if this policy were always followed.

It might be supposed that native missionaries would prove more indulgent, but the reverse is found to be the case.  The new broom sweeps clean; and the white missionary of to-day is often embarrassed by the bigotry of his native coadjutor.  What else should we expect?  On some islands, sorcery, polygamy, human sacrifice, and tobacco-smoking have been prohibited, the dress of the native has been modified, and himself warned in strong terms against rival sects of Christianity; all by the same man, at the same period of time, and with the like authority.  By what criterion is the convert to distinguish the essential from the unessential?  He swallows the nostrum whole; there has been no play of mind, no instruction, and, except for some brute utility in the prohibitions, no advance.  To call things by their proper names, this is teaching superstition.  It is unfortunate to use the word; so few people have read history, and so many have dipped into little atheistic manuals, that the majority will rush to a conclusion, and suppose the labour lost.  And far from that: These semi-spontaneous superstitions, varying with the sect of the original evangelist and the customs of the island, are found in practice to be highly fructifying; and in particular those who have learned and who go forth again to teach them offer an example to the world.  The best specimen of the Christian hero that I ever met was one of these native missionaries.  He had saved two lives at the risk of his own; like Nathan, he had bearded a tyrant in his hour of blood; when a whole white population fled, he alone stood to his duty; and his behaviour under domestic sorrow with which the public has no concern filled the beholder with sympathy and admiration.  A poor little smiling laborious man he looked; and you would have thought he had nothing in him but that of which indeed he had too much - facile good-nature.