Part 8

The trader, a friend of Riley's, took us to his house for lunch. The day was Sunday and a feast was already preparing, so we were spared the vocal agonies of the pig. Times must be changing--I have seen very few traders of the gin-drinking type one expects to find in the South Seas; nowadays they seem to be rather quiet, reflective men, who like to read and play their phonographs in the evening, and drink excellent whisky with soda from a sparklet bottle. This one was no exception; I found him full of intelligence and a dreamy philosophy which kept him content in this forgotten corner of the world. He was young and English; there were cricket bats and blazers in his living room, and shelves filled with the kind of books one can read over and over again. He was pessimistic over Riley's chances of getting men--the people of Mauke were growing lazier each year, he said, and seemed to get along with less and less of the European things for which, at one time, they had worked. As for copra, they no longer bothered much with it; the nuts were left to sprout under the palms. The taro patches were running down; the coffee and breadfruit dropped off the trees unpicked; the oranges, which brought a good price when a vessel came to take them off, were allowed to drop and rot.

As we sat smoking after lunch, a native boy came in, with a vague air of conspiracy, to hold a whispered conversation with Riley. When he had gone the American winked at our host and turned to me.

"There's a beer tub going full blast out in the bush," he said. "I think I'll drop in on them and see if I can pick up a man or two. You'd better come along."

Liquor is prohibited to the natives throughout the Cook Islands; even the white man must buy it from the government in quantities regulated by the judgment of the official in charge. The manufacture of anything alcoholic is forbidden, but this latter law is administered with a certain degree of tolerance. Fortunately for everyone concerned, the art of making palm toddy has never been introduced; when the Cook-Islander feels the need of mild exhilaration he takes to the bush and brews a beverage known as orange beer. The ingredients are sugar, orange juice, and yeast--the recipe would prove popular, I fancy, in our own orange-growing states. The story goes that when the Cook Island boys went overseas to war they found a great drought prevailing in their eastern field of action--Palestine, I think it was. But there were oranges in plenty, and these untutored islanders soon showed the Tommies a trick that brought them together like brothers. I have tasted orange beer at all stages (even the rare old vintage stuff, bottled two or three months before) and found it not at all difficult to take; there are worse varieties of tipple, though this one is apt to lead to fighting, and leaves its too-enthusiastic devotee with a headache of unusual severity.

We found fifteen or twenty men assembled under an old utu tree; a dance ended as we drew near, and the cup was being passed. Two five-gallon kerosene tins, with the tops cut off and filled with the bright-yellow beer, stood in the center of the group. Women are never present on these occasions, which correspond, in a way, to Saturday evenings in a club at home. A sort of rude ceremonial--a relic, perhaps, of kava-drinking days--is observed around the beer tub. The oldest man present, armed with a heavy stick, is appointed guardian of the peace, to see that decency and order are preserved; the natives realize, no doubt, that any serious disturbance might put an end to their fun. The single cup is filled and passed to each guest in turn; he must empty it without taking breath. After every round one of the drinkers is expected to rise and entertain the company with a dance or a song.

Riley was welcomed with shouts; he was in a gay mood and when we had had our turns at the cup he stripped off his tunic for a dance. He is a famous dancer; unhampered by the native conventions, he went through the figures of _heiva_, _otea_, and _ura_--first the man's part, then the woman's--while the men of Mauke clapped their hands rhythmically and choked with laughter. No wonder Riley gets on with the people; there is not an ounce of self-consciousness in him--he enters into a bit of fun with the good-natured abandon of a child. As for dancing, he is wonderful; every posture was there, every twist and wriggle and flutter of the hands--what old Bligh called, with delightful, righteous gusto, the "wanton gestures" of the _heiva_.

Riley had told his friends on the beach that he was on the lookout for labor; by this time, probably, the whole island knew he was on his way to the atoll and that he needed men. Before we took leave of the drinkers three of them had agreed to go with my companion. The sea was calmer now, and, since Riley's wife was on the schooner, we decided to go aboard for dinner. Four more recruits were waiting by the canoe houses to sign on--it was odd to see their response to the Irishman's casual offer when half the planters of the group declare that labor is unobtainable.

The whaleboat was waiting in the passage. It was evening. The wind had dropped; the sky overhead was darkening; out to the west the sun had set behind banks of white cloud rimmed with gold. The oarsmen took their places; friendly hands shot us out in a lull between two breakers; we passed the surf and pulled offshore toward where the schooner was riding an easy swell, her lights beginning to twinkle in the dusk.

*Rutiaro*

*CHAPTER VI*

*Rutiaro*

Chance began to move of set purpose in Papeete, on the day I was to sail with the one-hundred-and-ten-ton schooner, _Caleb S. Winship_, for the Cloud of Islands. I was on my way to the water front, and, having plenty of time, walked leisurely, thinking of the long journey so nearly at hand, of the strange and lonely islands I was to see, and wondering, as an Anglo-Saxon must when presented with a piece of good fortune, what I had done to merit it. Oro, the cabin boy of the _Winship_, was following with my luggage. He kept at some distance, a mark of respect, as I thought, until I saw him sublet his contract to a smaller boy. Then he retired to spend the unearned increment in watermelon and a variety of cakes sold at the Chinese stalls along the street. Not wanting him to think that I begrudged him his last little fling on shore, I became interested of a sudden in the contents of a shop window, and there I saw a boxful of marbles. In a moment Oro was forgotten. Papeete faded from view, and the warm air, fragrant with the odors of vanilla and roasting coffee, became more bracing. There was a tang in it, like that of early April, in Iowa, for example, at the beginning of the marble-playing season. Fifteen years dropped lightly from my shoulders and I was back at the old rendezvous in the imagination, almost as really as I had ever been in the flesh. The lumber yard of S. M. Brown & Son lay on the right hand and the Rock Island Railroad tracks on the left. Between, on a stretch of smooth cinder right of way, a dozen games were in full swing. There were cries of, "Picks and vents!" "Bunchers!" "Sneakers!" "Knucks down!" the sharp crack of expert shots; the crunch of cinders under bare and yet tender feet. Meadow larks were singing in a nearby pasture, and from afar I heard the deep whistle of the Rocky Mountain Limited as it came down the Mitchellville grade.

I bought the marbles--the whole box of them. They cost fifty francs, about four dollars American, as the exchange was then, but I considered the investment a good one. I knew that, no matter where I might be, to lift the lid of my box was to make an immediate and inexpensive journey back to one of the pleasantest periods of boyhood. Oro was awaiting me at the quay, and carried my small sea chest on board with an air of spurious fatigue. I gave him my purchase and told him to stow it away for me in the cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find it again until we were within view of Rutiaro. The _Caleb S. Winship_ was homeward bound then, from Tanao, where we had left Crichton, the English planter. Rutiaro lying on our course, it was decided to put in there in the hope that we might be able to replace our lost deck cargo of copra, washed overboard in a squall a few days previously.

Neither Findlay's _South Pacific Directory_ nor the _British Admiralty Sailing Directions_ had much to say about the atoll. Both agreed that the lagoon is nine miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887, the French surveying vessel, _St. Etienne_, found the tide running through a narrow pass at two knots per hour, the flood as swift as the ebb. It was further stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship, _Prince Edward_, anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from shore in front of the village, which is situated on the most westerly island; and that a few pigs and chickens were purchased at a nominal price from the inhabitants. With this information I had to be content in so far as my reading was concerned. There was nothing of a later date in either volume, and the impression I had was that the atoll, having been charted and briefly described, had remained unvisited, almost forgotten, for a period of thirty-one years.

This, of course, was not the case. Tinned beef and kerosene oil had followed the flag there as elsewhere in the world. Religion, in fact, had preceded it, leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black mother-hubbards still in evidence among the older generation. But skippers of small trading schooners are rarely correspondents of the hydrographic associations, and the "reports from the field" of itinerant missionaries are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals, so that Rutiaro is as little known to the world at large as it has always been. Findlay's general remarks about it were confined to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." It certainly looked lonely enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the archipelago, more than six hundred miles from the nearest steamship route, and that one infrequently traveled. I sought further information from Tino-a-Tino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American despite his Tahitian name. He had been trading in the Low Islands for twenty years, and during that time had created a voluminous literature with reference to their inhabitants. But it was all of an occupational nature and confined to the ledgers of the Inter-Island Trading Company. I found him at his usual task in the cabin, where he gave me some specimen compositions for criticism.

"I wish you'd look them over," he said. "These copra bugs drive a man wild. They get in your eyes, in your liquor, in your mouth--Lord! What a life!"

The cabin was filled with unsacked copra to the level of the upper tier of bunks. One had to crawl in on hands and knees. The copra bugs were something of a nuisance, and the smell and heat oppressive. I had traveled on more comfortable vessels, with tennis courts on the boat decks and Roman swimming baths below--but they didn't touch at Rutiaro.

I went through his accounts, verifying long lists of items, such as:

To Terii Tuahu, Dr., 1 dozen beacon lanterns............at 480 frs....Frs. 480 To Ohiti Poene, Dr., 12 sacks Lily-Dust flour...........at 300 frs....Frs. 3600 To Low Hung Chin, Dr., 1 gross Night-King flash lamps.....at 3600 frs...Frs. 3600

The work of checking up finished, we went out for a breath of air. The atoll lay abeam and still far distant; a faint bluish haze lifted a bare eighth of an inch above the circle of the horizon. Behind us, rain fell in a straight wall of water from a single black cloud which cast a deep shadow over the path we had come. Elsewhere the sky was clear and the sea the incredible blue of the tropics. Tino broke a long silence.

"Look here," he said. "What is it that interests you in these islands? I've never known anyone to visit them for pleasure before. Is it the women, or what?"

Under pressure, I admitted that Nature seemed to have spent her best effort among the Paumotuans in fashioning the men.

"You're right," said Tino. "The women are healthy enough, of course, but they don't set your heart beating a hundred to the minute. They have fine hands and white teeth, and you won't find such black hair in all the world as you find in these atolls. But that's the size of it. You can't praise them any further for looks. Maybe you haven't noticed their ears, because they always cover them up with their hair; but they're large, and their feet and ankles--tough as sole leather and all scarred over with coral cuts. That is well enough for the men, but with the women it's different. Makes you lose your enthusiasm, don't it?"

I had seen a good many striking exceptions in our wanderings, but I agreed that, in the main, what he said was true.

"Well, if it isn't the women, what else is there to be interested in? Not the islands themselves? Lord! When you've seen one you've seen the lot. Living on one of them is like living aboard ship. Not room to stretch your legs. They're solid enough, and they don't sink; but in a hurricane I'd a heap rather take my chances out to sea with the _Winship_ than to be lashed to the stoutest coconut tree in the whole group. Now you take Rutiaro. It was washed over seventeen years ago and all but twenty of the people killed. They are back to seventy-five now, but wait till the next bad blow down that way. They'll drown like rats just as they did before.

"Well, we won't have to stop long," he added, grouchily. "I'll take what copra they have and get out. It's a God-forsaken hole. They only make about twenty-five tons a year. The island could produce three times that amount under decent management. They're a lazy, independent lot, at Rutiaro. You can't get 'em to stir themselves."

I asked him what they had to gain by stirring themselves.

"Gain?" he said. "They have everything to gain. There are only two frame houses on the place. The rest of them are miserable little shelters of coconut thatch. I haven't sold them enough corrugated iron in ten years to cover this cockpit. You remember Takaroa and Niau and Fakahina? Well, there's my idea of islands. Nice European furniture--iron beds, center tables, phonographs, bicycles--"

A further catalogue of the comforts and conveniences of civilization which the inhabitants of Rutiaro might have and didn't convinced me that this was the atoll I had been looking for, and I regretted that our stay there was to be so brief. I did not begrudge the inhabitants of richer atolls their phonographs and bicycles. They got an incredible amount of amusement out of them; listened with delight to the strange music, and spent entire evenings taking turns with the bicycles, riding them back and forth from the lagoon beach to the ocean shore. But the frame houses were blots on the landscape, crude, barnlike structures, most of them, which offend the eye like factory chimneys in a green valley. Rutiaro had none of these things, and, having no interest in it from the commercial point of view, I awaited impatiently our arrival there.

At ten o'clock we were three miles to windward of the village island. It lay at the narrower end of the lagoon, the inner shore line curving around a broad indentation where the village was. The land narrowed in one direction to a ledge of reef. At the farther end there was a small _motu_ not more than three hundred yards in length by one hundred broad, separated from the main island by a strip of shallow water. Seen from aloft, the two islands resembled, roughly, in outline, an old-fashioned, high-pooped vessel with a small boat in tow. I could see the whole of the atoll from the mainmast crosstrees, the lagoon, shimmering into green over the shoals, darkening to an intense blue over unlit valleys of ocean floor; a solitude of sunlit water, placid as a lake buried in the depths of inaccessible mountains. I followed the shore line with my glasses. Distant islands, ledges of barren reef, leaped forward with an effect of magic, as though our atom of a vessel, the only sail which relieved the emptiness of the sea, had been swept in an instant to within a few yards of the surf. Great combers, green and ominous looking in the sunlight, broke at one rapidly advancing point, toppled and fell in segments, filling the inner shallows with a smother of foam. Beyond it lay the broad fringe of white, deserted beach, the narrow forest of shrub and palm, the empty lagoon, a border of misty islands on the farther side. I had seen the same sort of a picture twenty times before, always with the same keen sense of its desolate beauty, its allurement, its romantic loveliness. Tino had said, "When you've seen one you've seen them all," and an old skipper once told me that "the atolls are as much alike as the reef points on that sail." It is true. They are as monotonous as the sea itself and as fresh with varying interest.

The village was hidden among the trees, but I saw the French flag flying near a break in the reef which marked the landing place for small boats. Farther back, a little knot of people were gathered, some of them sitting in the full glare of the sun, others in the deep shade, leaning against the trees in attitudes of dreamy meditation. Three girls were combing their hair, talking and laughing in an animated way. They were dressed in all their European finery, gowns of flowered muslin pulled up around their bare legs to prevent soilure. A matronly woman in a red wrapper had thrown the upper covering aside and sat, naked to the waist, nursing a baby. I put down my glasses, feeling rather ashamed of my scrutiny, as though I had been peeping through a window at some intimate domestic scene. The island leaped into the distance; the broad circle of foam and jagged reef narrowed to a thread of white, and the _Caleb S. Winship_ crept landward again under a light breeze, an atom of a ship on a vast and empty sea. Eight bells struck, a tinkling sound, deadened, scarcely audible in the wide air. I heard Tino's voice as though coming from an immense distance: "Hello, up there! _Kai-kai's_ ready!" I said: "All right! I'm coming," and was surprised at the loudness of my own shout. But I waited for a moment to indulge myself in a last reflection: "It is thirty-one years since the _Prince Edward_ put in here. Excepting a few traders and missionaries, there isn't probably one man in one hundred thousand who has ever heard of this atoll; not one in a million who has ever seen it or ever will see it. What a piece of luck for me!" Then I saw Oro at the galley door with a huge platter of boiled beef and sweet potatoes. The sight of it reminded me that I was very hungry. As I climbed down to the deck I was conscious of the fact that a healthy appetite and a good digestion were a piece of luck, too, and that as long as one could hold it the lure of islands would remain, and one's love of living burn with a clear flame. Jack, the monkey, seemed to divine my thought, to agree with it. As Oro, the food bearer, passed him, he reached down from his perch in the rigging, seized the largest sweet potato on the platter, and clambered out of reach. Assured of his safety, he fell to greedily, looking out wistfully toward the land.

The pass was at the farther end of the lagoon, and in order to save time in getting the work ashore under way, the supercargo and I, with three of the sailors, put off in the whaleboat, to land on the ocean side of the village. Half a dozen men rushed into the surf, seized and held the boat as the backwash poured down the steep incline at the edge of the reef. Among them was the chief, a man of huge frame, six feet two or three in height. Like the others who assisted at the landing, he was clad only in a _pareu_, but he lost none of his dignity through his nakedness. He was fifty-five years old, as I afterward learned, and as he stood bidding us welcome I thought of the strange appearance certain of the chief men in America or France or England would make under similar circumstances, deprived of the kindly concealment of clothing. What a revelation it would be of skinniness or pudginess! What an exhibition of scrawny necks, fat stomachs, flat chests, flabby arms! To be strictly accurate, I had seen some fat stomachs among elderly Paumotuans, but they were exceptions, and always remarkable for that reason. And those who carried them had sturdy legs. They did not give one the uneasy feeling, common at home, at the sight of the great paunches of sedentary men toppling unsteadily along a strip of crimson carpet, from curb to club doorway.

Wherever one goes in Polynesia one is reminded, by contrast, of the cost physically to men of our own race of our sheltered way of living. There on every hand are men well past middle life, with compact, symmetrical bodies and the natural grace of healthy children. One sees them carrying immense burdens without exertion, swimming in the open sea for an hour or two at a time while spearing fish, loafing ashore with no greater apparent effort for yet longer periods. Sometimes, when they have it, they eat enormous quantities of food at one sitting, and at others, under necessity, as sparingly as so many dyspeptics. It would be impossible to formulate from their example any rules for rational living in more civilized communities. The daily quest for food under primitive conditions keeps them alert and sound of body, so that, whether they work or loaf, feast or fast, they seem always to acquire health by it.

There had been no boats at Rutiaro in five months and the crowd on the beach was unfeignedly glad to see us. The arrival of a schooner at that remote island was an event of great importance; the sight of new faces lighted their own with pleasure, which warmed the heart toward them at once. We had brought ashore a consignment of goods for Moy Ling, the Chinese storekeeper, and when the handshaking was over they gathered around it as eagerly as a group of American children at a Christmas tree. Even the village constable seemed unconscious of any need for a show of dignity or authority. The only badge of his office was a cigarette-card picture of President Poincare, fastened with a safety pin to his old felt hat. He neglected his duties as a keeper of order, and was one of the most excited of Moy Ling's helpers with the cargo. He kept patting him affectionately on the back, saying, "_Maitai! maitai!_" which in that situation may be freely translated as, "You know me, Moy Ling!" And the old Chinaman smiled the pleasant, noncommittal smile of his countrymen the world over.

Tino's was the only sour face on the beach. He moved through the crowd, giving orders, grumbling and growling half to himself and half to me. "I told you they were a lazy lot," he said. "They've seen us making in for three hours, and what have they been doing? Loafing on the beach, waiting for us instead of getting their copra together! Moy Ling is the only one in the village who is ready to do business. Five tons all sacked for weighing. He's worth a dozen Kanakas. Well, I'll set 'em to work in quick time now. You watch me! I'm going to be loaded and out of here by six o'clock."