Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (830 page)

Almost from the first it was apparent that the people of the city were defeated.  I might have thought them even good, only I had the other troop before my eyes to correct my standard, and remind me continually of ‘the little more, and how much it is.’  Perceiving themselves worsted, the choir of Butaritari grew confused, blundered, and broke down; amid this hubbub of unfamiliar intervals I should not myself have recognised the slip, but the audience were quick to catch it, and to jeer.  To crown all, the Makin company began a dance of truly superlative merit.  I know not what it was about, I was too much absorbed to ask.  In one act a part of the chorus, squealing in some strange falsetto, produced very much the effect of our orchestra; in another, the dancers, leaping like jumping-jacks, with arms extended, passed through and through each other’s ranks with extraordinary speed, neatness, and humour.  A more laughable effect I never saw; in any European theatre it would have brought the house down, and the island audience roared with laughter and applause.  This filled up the measure for the rival company, and they forgot themselves and decency.  After each act or figure of the ballet, the performers pause a moment standing, and the next is introduced by the clapping of hands in triplets.  Not until the end of the whole ballet do they sit down, which is the signal for the rivals to stand up.  But now all rules were to be broken.  During the interval following on this great applause, the company of Butaritari leaped suddenly to their feet and most unhandsomely began a performance of their own.  It was strange to see the men of Makin staring; I have seen a tenor in Europe stare with the same blank dignity into a hissing theatre; but presently, to my surprise, they sobered down, gave up the unsung remainder of their ballet, resumed their seats, and suffered their ungallant adversaries to go on and finish.  Nothing would suffice.  Again, at the first interval, Butaritari unhandsomely cut in; Makin, irritated in turn, followed the example; and the two companies of dancers remained permanently standing, continuously clapping hands, and regularly cutting across each other at each pause.  I expected blows to begin with any moment; and our position in the midst was highly unstrategical.  But the Makin people had a better thought; and upon a fresh interruption turned and trooped out of the house.  We followed them, first because these were the artists, second because they were guests and had been scurvily ill-used.  A large population of our neighbours did the same, so that the causeway was filled from end to end by the procession of deserters; and the Butaritari choir was left to sing for its own pleasure in an empty house, having gained the point and lost the audience.  It was surely fortunate that there was no one drunk; but, drunk or sober, where else would a scene so irritating have concluded without blows?

The last stage and glory of this auspicious day was of our own providing - the second and positively the last appearance of the phantoms.  All round the church, groups sat outside, in the night, where they could see nothing; perhaps ashamed to enter, certainly finding some shadowy pleasure in the mere proximity.  Within, about one-half of the great shed was densely packed with people.  In the midst, on the royal dais, the lantern luminously smoked; chance rays of light struck out the earnest countenance of our Chinaman grinding the hand-organ; a fainter glimmer showed off the rafters and their shadows in the hollow of the roof; the pictures shone and vanished on the screen; and as each appeared, there would run a hush, a whisper, a strong shuddering rustle, and a chorus of small cries among the crowd.  There sat by me the mate of a wrecked schooner.  ‘They would think this a strange sight in Europe or the States,’ said he, ‘going on in a building like this, all tied with bits of string.’

CHAPTER VII - HUSBAND AND WIFE

The trader accustomed to the manners of Eastern Polynesia has a lesson to learn among the Gilberts.  The
ridi
is but a spare attire; as late as thirty years back the women went naked until marriage; within ten years the custom lingered; and these facts, above all when heard in description, conveyed a very false idea of the manners of the group.  A very intelligent missionary described it (in its former state) as a ‘Paradise of naked women’ for the resident whites.  It was at least a platonic Paradise, where Lothario ventured at his peril.  Since 1860, fourteen whites have perished on a single island, all for the same cause, all found where they had no business, and speared by some indignant father of a family; the figure was given me by one of their contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived.  The strange persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or a series of romantic passions; gin is the more likely key.  The poor buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case; they drank; their brain was fired; they stumbled towards the nearest houses on chance; and the dart went through their liver.  In place of a Paradise the trader found an archipelago of fierce husbands and of virtuous women.  ‘Of course if you wish to make love to them, it’s the same as anywhere else,’ observed a trader innocently; but he and his companions rarely so choose.

The trader must be credited with a virtue: he often makes a kind and loyal husband.  Some of the worst beachcombers in the Pacific, some of the last of the old school, have fallen in my path, and some of them were admirable to their native wives, and one made a despairing widower.  The position of a trader’s wife in the Gilberts is, besides, unusually enviable.  She shares the immunities of her husband.  Curfew in Butaritari sounds for her in vain.  Long after the bell is rung and the great island ladies are confined for the night to their own roof, this chartered libertine may scamper and giggle through the deserted streets or go down to bathe in the dark.  The resources of the store are at her hand; she goes arrayed like a queen, and feasts delicately everyday upon tinned meats.  And she who was perhaps of no regard or station among natives sits with captains, and is entertained on board of schooners.  Five of these privileged dames were some time our neighbours.  Four were handsome skittish lasses, gamesome like children, and like children liable to fits of pouting.  They wore dresses by day, but there was a tendency after dark to strip these lendings and to career and squall about the compound in the aboriginal
ridi
.  Games of cards were continually played, with shells for counters; their course was much marred by cheating; and the end of a round (above all if a man was of the party) resolved itself into a scrimmage for the counters.  The fifth was a matron.  It was a picture to see her sail to church on a Sunday, a parasol in hand, a nursemaid following, and the baby buried in a trade hat and armed with a patent feeding-bottle.  The service was enlivened by her continual supervision and correction of the maid.  It was impossible not to fancy the baby was a doll, and the church some European playroom.  All these women were legitimately married.  It is true that the certificate of one, when she proudly showed it, proved to run thus, that she was ‘married for one night,’ and her gracious partner was at liberty to ‘send her to hell’ the next morning; but she was none the wiser or the worse for the dastardly trick.  Another, I heard, was married on a work of mine in a pirated edition; it answered the purpose as well as a Hall Bible.  Notwithstanding all these allurements of social distinction, rare food and raiment, a comparative vacation from toil, and legitimate marriage contracted on a pirated edition, the trader must sometimes seek long before he can be mated.  While I was in the group one had been eight months on the quest, and he was still a bachelor.

Within strictly native society the old laws and practices were harsh, but not without a certain stamp of high-mindedness.  Stealthy adultery was punished with death; open elopement was properly considered virtue in comparison, and compounded for a fine in land.  The male adulterer alone seems to have been punished.  It is correct manners for a jealous man to hang himself; a jealous woman has a different remedy - she bites her rival.  Ten or twenty years ago it was a capital offence to raise a woman’s
ridi
; to this day it is still punished with a heavy fine; and the garment itself is still symbolically sacred.  Suppose a piece of land to be disputed in Butaritari, the claimant who shall first hang a
ridi
on the tapu-post has gained his cause, since no one can remove or touch it but himself.

The
ridi
was the badge not of the woman but the wife, the mark not of her sex but of her station.  It was the collar on the slave’s neck, the brand on merchandise.  The adulterous woman seems to have been spared; were the husband offended, it would be a poor consolation to send his draught cattle to the shambles.  Karaiti, to this day, calls his eight wives ‘his horses,’ some trader having explained to him the employment of these animals on farms; and Nanteitei hired out his wives to do mason-work.  Husbands, at least when of high rank, had the power of life and death; even whites seem to have possessed it; and their wives, when they had transgressed beyond forgiveness, made haste to pronounce the formula of deprecation -
I Kana Kim
.  This form of words had so much virtue that a condemned criminal repeating it on a particular day to the king who had condemned him, must be instantly released.  It is an offer of abasement, and, strangely enough, the reverse - the imitation - is a common vulgar insult in Great Britain to this day.  I give a scene between a trader and his Gilbert Island wife, as it was told me by the husband, now one of the oldest residents, but then a freshman in the group.

‘Go and light a fire,’ said the trader, ‘and when I have brought this oil I will cook some fish.’  The woman grunted at him, island fashion.  ‘I am not a pig that you should grunt at me,’ said he.

‘I know you are not a pig,’ said the woman, ‘neither am I your slave.’

‘To be sure you are not my slave, and if you do not care to stop with me, you had better go home to your people,’ said he.  ‘But in the mean time go and light the fire; and when I have brought this oil I will cook some fish.’

She went as if to obey; and presently when the trader looked she had built a fire so big that the cook-house was catching in flames.

‘
I Kana Kim
!’ she cried, as she saw him coming; but he recked not, and hit her with a cooking-pot.  The leg pierced her skull, blood spouted, it was thought she was a dead woman, and the natives surrounded the house in a menacing expectation.  Another white was present, a man of older experience.  ‘You will have us both killed if you go on like this,’ he cried.  ‘She had said
I Kana Kim
!’  If she had not said
I Kana Kim
he might have struck her with a caldron.  It was not the blow that made the crime, but the disregard of an accepted formula.

Polygamy, the particular sacredness of wives, their semi-servile state, their seclusion in kings’ harems, even their privilege of biting, all would seem to indicate a Mohammedan society and the opinion of the soullessness of woman.  And not so in the least.  It is a mere appearance.  After you have studied these extremes in one house, you may go to the next and find all reversed, the woman the mistress, the man only the first of her thralls.  The authority is not with the husband as such, nor the wife as such.  It resides in the chief or the chief-woman; in him or her who has inherited the lands of the clan, and stands to the clansman in the place of parent, exacting their service, answerable for their fines.  There is but the one source of power and the one ground of dignity - rank.  The king married a chief-woman; she became his menial, and must work with her hands on Messrs. Wightman’s pier.  The king divorced her; she regained at once her former state and power.  She married the Hawaiian sailor, and behold the man is her flunkey and can be shown the door at pleasure.  Nay, and such low-born lords are even corrected physically, and, like grown but dutiful children, must endure the discipline.

We were intimate in one such household, that of Nei Takauti and Nan Tok’; I put the lady first of necessity.  During one week of fool’s paradise, Mrs. Stevenson had gone alone to the sea-side of the island after shells.  I am very sure the proceeding was unsafe; and she soon perceived a man and woman watching her.  Do what she would, her guardians held her steadily in view; and when the afternoon began to fall, and they thought she had stayed long enough, took her in charge, and by signs and broken English ordered her home.  On the way the lady drew from her earring-hole a clay pipe, the husband lighted it, and it was handed to my unfortunate wife, who knew not how to refuse the incommodious favour; and when they were all come to our house, the pair sat down beside her on the floor, and improved the occasion with prayer.  From that day they were our family friends; bringing thrice a day the beautiful island garlands of white flowers, visiting us any evening, and frequently carrying us down to their own maniap’ in return, the woman leading Mrs. Stevenson by the hand like one child with another.

Nan Tok’, the husband, was young, extremely handsome, of the most approved good humour, and suffering in his precarious station from suppressed high spirits.  Nei Takauti, the wife, was getting old; her grown son by a former marriage had just hanged himself before his mother’s eyes in despair at a well-merited rebuke.  Perhaps she had never been beautiful, but her face was full of character, her eye of sombre fire.  She was a high chief-woman, but by a strange exception for a person of her rank, was small, spare, and sinewy, with lean small hands and corded neck.  Her full dress of an evening was invariably a white chemise - and for adornment, green leaves (or sometimes white blossoms) stuck in her hair and thrust through her huge earring-holes.  The husband on the contrary changed to view like a kaleidoscope.  Whatever pretty thing my wife might have given to Nei Takauti - a string of beads, a ribbon, a piece of bright fabric - appeared the next evening on the person of Nan Tok’.  It was plain he was a clothes-horse; that he wore livery; that, in a word, he was his wife’s wife.  They reversed the parts indeed, down to the least particular; it was the husband who showed himself the ministering angel in the hour of pain, while the wife displayed the apathy and heartlessness of the proverbial man.