Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (822 page)

This bundle of weird stories sprang from the burial and the woman’s selfish conjuration.  I was dissatisfied with what I heard, harped upon questions, and struck at last this vein of metal.  It is from sundown to about four in the morning that the kinsfolk camp upon the grave; and these are the hours of the spirits’ wanderings.  At any time of the night - it may be earlier, it may be later - a sound is to be heard below, which is the noise of his liberation; at four sharp, another and a louder marks the instant of the re-imprisonment; between-whiles, he goes his malignant rounds.  ‘Did you ever see an evil spirit?’ was once asked of a Paumotuan.  ‘Once.’  ‘Under what form?’  ‘It was in the form of a crane.’  ‘And how did you know that crane to be a spirit?’ was asked.  ‘I will tell you,’ he answered; and this was the purport of his inconclusive narrative.  His father had been dead nearly a fortnight; others had wearied of the watch; and as the sun was setting, he found himself by the grave alone.  It was not yet dark, rather the hour of the afterglow, when he was aware of a snow-white crane upon the coral mound; presently more cranes came, some white, some black; then the cranes vanished, and he saw in their place a white cat, to which there was silently joined a great company of cats of every hue conceivable; then these also disappeared, and he was left astonished.

This was an anodyne appearance.  Take instead the experience of Rua-a-mariterangi on the isle of Katiu.  He had a need for some pandanus, and crossed the isle to the sea-beach, where it chiefly flourishes.  The day was still, and Rua was surprised to hear a crashing sound among the thickets, and then the fall of a considerable tree.  Here must be some one building a canoe; and he entered the margin of the wood to find and pass the time of day with this chance neighbour.  The crashing sounded more at hand; and then he was aware of something drawing swiftly near among the tree-tops.  It swung by its heels downward, like an ape, so that its hands were free for murder; it depended safely by the slightest twigs; the speed of its coming was incredible; and soon Rua recognised it for a corpse, horrible with age, its bowels hanging as it came.  Prayer was the weapon of Christian in the Valley of the Shadow, and it is to prayer that Rua-a-mariterangi attributes his escape.  No merely human expedition had availed.

This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was abroad by day.  And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of the night watch and the many references to the rising of the morning star, it is no singular exception.  I could never find a case of another who had seen this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in its habits; but others have heard the fall of the tree, which seems the signal of its coming.  Mr. Donat was once pearling on the uninhabited isle of Haraiki.  It was a day without a breath of wind, such as alternate in the archipelago with days of contumelious breezes.  The divers were in the midst of the lagoon upon their employment; the cook, a boy of ten, was over his pots in the camp.  Thus were all souls accounted for except a single native who accompanied Donat into the wood in quest of sea-fowls’ eggs.  In a moment, out of the stillness, came the sound of the fall of a great tree.  Donat would have passed on to find the cause.  ‘No,’ cried his companion, ‘that was no tree.  It was something
not right
.  Let us go back to camp.’  Next Sunday the divers were turned on, all that part of the isle was thoroughly examined, and sure enough no tree had fallen.  A little later Mr. Donat saw one of his divers flee from a similar sound, in similar unaffected panic, on the same isle.  But neither would explain, and it was not till afterwards, when he met with Rua, that he learned the occasion of their terrors.

But whether by day or night, the purpose of the dead in these abhorred activities is still the same.  In Samoa, my informant had no idea of the food of the bush spirits; no such ambiguity would exist in the mind of a Paumotuan.  In that hungry archipelago, living and dead must alike toil for nutriment; and the race having been cannibal in the past, the spirits are so still.  When the living ate the dead, horrified nocturnal imagination drew the shocking inference that the dead might eat the living.  Doubtless they slay men, doubtless even mutilate them, in mere malice.  Marquesan spirits sometimes tear out the eyes of travellers; but even that may be more practical than appears, for the eye is a cannibal dainty.  And certainly the root-idea of the dead, at least in the far eastern islands, is to prowl for food.  It was as a dainty morsel for a meal that the woman denounced Donat at the funeral.  There are spirits besides who prey in particular not on the bodies but on the souls of the dead.  The point is clearly made in a Tahitian story.  A child fell sick, grew swiftly worse, and at last showed signs of death.  The mother hastened to the house of a sorcerer, who lived hard by.  ‘You are yet in time,’ said he; ‘a spirit has just run past my door carrying the soul of your child wrapped in the leaf of a purao; but I have a spirit stronger and swifter who will run him down ere he has time to eat it.’  Wrapped in a leaf: like other things edible and corruptible.

Or take an experience of Mr. Donat’s on the island of Anaa.  It was a night of a high wind, with violent squalls; his child was very sick, and the father, though he had gone to bed, lay wakeful, hearkening to the gale.  All at once a fowl was violently dashed on the house wall.  Supposing he had forgot to put it in shelter with the rest, Donat arose, found the bird (a cock) lying on the verandah, and put it in the hen-house, the door of which he securely fastened.  Fifteen minutes later the business was repeated, only this time, as it was being dashed against the wall, the bird crew.  Again Donat replaced it, examining the hen-house thoroughly and finding it quite perfect; as he was so engaged the wind puffed out his light, and he must grope back to the door a good deal shaken.  Yet a third time the bird was dashed upon the wall; a third time Donat set it, now near dead, beside its mates; and he was scarce returned before there came a rush, like that of a furious strong man, against the door, and a whistle as loud as that of a railway engine rang about the house.  The sceptical reader may here detect the finger of the tempest; but the women gave up all for lost and clustered on the beds lamenting.  Nothing followed, and I must suppose the gale somewhat abated, for presently after a chief came visiting.  He was a bold man to be abroad so late, but doubtless carried a bright lantern.  And he was certainly a man of counsel, for as soon as he heard the details of these disturbances he was in a position to explain their nature.  ‘Your child,’ said he, ‘must certainly die.  This is the evil spirit of our island who lies in wait to eat the spirits of the newly dead.’  And then he went on to expatiate on the strangeness of the spirit’s conduct.  He was not usually, he explained, so open of assault, but sat silent on the house-top waiting, in the guise of a bird, while within the people tended the dying and bewailed the dead, and had no thought of peril.  But when the day came and the doors were opened, and men began to go abroad, blood-stains on the wall betrayed the tragedy.

This is the quality I admire in Paumotuan legend.  In Tahiti the spirit-eater is said to assume a vesture which has much more of pomp, but how much less of horror.  It has been seen by all sorts and conditions, native and foreign; only the last insist it is a meteor.  My authority was not so sure.  He was riding with his wife about two in the morning; both were near asleep, and the horses not much better.  It was a brilliant and still night, and the road wound over a mountain, near by a deserted marae (old Tahitian temple).  All at once the appearance passed above them: a form of light; the head round and greenish; the body long, red, and with a focus of yet redder brilliancy about the midst.  A buzzing hoot accompanied its passage; it flew direct out of one marae, and direct for another down the mountain side.  And this, as my informant argued, is suggestive.  For why should a mere meteor frequent the altars of abominable gods?  The horses, I should say, were equally dismayed with their riders.  Now I am not dismayed at all - not even agreeably.  Give me rather the bird upon the house-top and the morning blood-gouts on the wall.

But the dead are not exclusive in their diet.  They carry with them to the grave, in particular, the Polynesian taste for fish, and enter at times with the living into a partnership in fishery.  Rua-a-mariterangi is again my authority; I feel it diminishes the credit of the fact, but how it builds up the image of this inveterate ghost-seer!  He belongs to the miserably poor island of Taenga, yet his father’s house was always well supplied.  As Rua grew up he was called at last to go a-fishing with this fortunate parent.  They rowed the lagoon at dusk, to an unlikely place, and the lay down in the stern, and the father began vainly to cast his line over the bows.  It is to be supposed that Rua slept; and when he awoke there was the figure of another beside his father, and his father was pulling in the fish hand over hand.  ‘Who is that man, father?’ Rua asked.  ‘It is none of your business,’ said the father; and Rua supposed the stranger had swum off to them from shore.  Night after night they fared into the lagoon, often to the most unlikely places; night after night the stranger would suddenly be seen on board, and as suddenly be missed; and morning after morning the canoe returned laden with fish.  ‘My father is a very lucky man,’ thought Rua.  At last, one fine day, there came first one boat party and then another, who must be entertained; father and son put off later than usual into the lagoon; and before the canoe was landed it was four o’clock, and the morning star was close on the horizon.  Then the stranger appeared seized with some distress; turned about, showing for the first time his face, which was that of one long dead, with shining eyes; stared into the east, set the tips of his fingers to his mouth like one a-cold, uttered a strange, shuddering sound between a whistle and a moan - a thing to freeze the blood; and, the day-star just rising from the sea, he suddenly was not.  Then Rua understood why his father prospered, why his fishes rotted early in the day, and why some were always carried to the cemetery and laid upon the graves.  My informant is a man not certainly averse to superstition, but he keeps his head, and takes a certain superior interest, which I may be allowed to call scientific.  The last point reminding him of some parallel practice in Tahiti, he asked Rua if the fish were left, or carried home again after a formal dedication.  It appears old Mariterangi practised both methods; sometimes treating his shadowy partner to a mere oblation, sometimes honestly leaving his fish to rot upon the grave.

It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and the Polynesian
varua ino
or
aitu o le
vao
is clearly the near kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire.  Here is a tale in which the kinship appears broadly marked.  On the atoll of Penrhyn, then still partly savage, a certain chief was long the salutary terror of the natives.  He died, he was buried; and his late neighbours had scarce tasted the delights of licence ere his ghost appeared about the village.  Fear seized upon all; a council was held of the chief men and sorcerers; and with the approval of the Rarotongan missionary, who was as frightened as the rest, and in the presence of several whites - my friend Mr. Ben Hird being one - the grave was opened, deepened until water came, and the body re-interred face down.  The still recent staking of suicides in England and the decapitation of vampires in the east of Europe form close parallels.

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear.  During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why) was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death.  When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoanuu, where the struggle was long centred and the loss had been severe.  Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight.  The place of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground; and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it.  If any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested.  The rite was practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the soul was its object: its motive, reverent affection.  The present king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful.  And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents the views of the enlightened.  But the flight of my Lafaele marks the grosser terrors of the ignorant.

This belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites perhaps explains a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all to share our European horror of human bones and mummies.  Of the first they made their cherished ornaments; they preserved them in houses or in mortuary caves; and the watchers of royal sepulchres dwelt with their children among the bones of generations.  The mummy, even in the making, was as little feared.  In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was made by the household with continual unction and exposure to the sun; in the Carolines, upon the farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the family hearth.  Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in Samoa.  And not ten years ago, in the Gilberts, the widow must disinter, cleanse, polish, and thenceforth carry about her, by day and night, the head of her dead husband.  In all these cases we may suppose the process, whether of cleansing or drying, to have fully exorcised the aitu.

But the Paumotuan belief is more obscure.  Here the man is duly buried, and he has to be watched.  He is duly watched, and the spirit goes abroad in spite of watches.  Indeed, it is not the purpose of the vigils to prevent these wanderings; only to mollify by polite attention the inveterate malignity of the dead.  Neglect (it is supposed) may irritate and thus invite his visits, and the aged and weakly sometimes balance risks and stay at home.  Observe, it is the dead man’s kindred and next friends who thus deprecate his fury with nocturnal watchings.  Even the placatory vigil is held perilous, except in company, and a boy was pointed out to me in Rotoava, because he had watched alone by his own father.  Not the ties of the dead, nor yet their proved character, affect the issue.  A late Resident, who died in Fakarava of sunstroke, was beloved in life and is still remembered with affection; none the less his spirit went about the island clothed with terrors, and the neighbourhood of Government House was still avoided after dark.  We may sum up the cheerful doctrine thus: All men become vampires, and the vampire spares none.  And here we come face to face with a tempting inconsistency.  For the whistling spirits are notoriously clannish; I understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk only, and that the medium was always of the race of the communicating spirit.  Here, then, we have the bonds of the family, on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on the other, helpfully persisting.