Part 5

The New Zealanders are born footballers. You see the children playing everywhere. On every Saturday afternoon there is a big football match, and crowds of people look on. Rugby football is the national game of New Zealand, and I suppose the New Zealanders are the best players in the world.

At the Athletic Park Ground you often see two matches going on at once. It is extremely difficult to watch two matches at once; because the moment you begin to watch something in the one, something interesting is sure to happen in the other. One would think, speaking as an outsider, that the Rugby game is far more interesting to look on at than the Association game. But the Londoner does not think so. Every Saturday in London, and, indeed, all over England, thousands of people look on at the Association game, and they care very much less for Rugby, which they consider to be a “toff’s game.” There is, they say, “too much shirt-tearing” about it for their taste.

Rugby football in New Zealand has not yet been spoiled by professionalism. People think it is an honour to play for a team, and they are willing to travel and play all over the country for the honour of it, and without remuneration.

In England professionalism has spoiled not only football but almost every other game, with the possible exception of “Old Maid,” cribbage, and “My Bird Sings.”

The result is:--

(1) People prefer looking on at games to playing them themselves.

(2) They demand professionals and they bet on them.

(3) Some games become so professionally perfect that people no longer care to look on at them.

The passion of the crowd in England for watching football is looked upon by many people as the most ominous sign of national decadence, and as a manifestation resembling that of the gladiatorial shows in ancient Rome. They say it is this passion for watching, and for betting in the watching, that is responsible for the prevalence of professionalism. In England one local club buys a celebrated player from another local club. Therefore, it is obvious that this is the death of any real local spirit.

As for the games becoming so professional that people lose interest in them, this does not apply to football: but it does apply to cricket. In the last years there is in England a great falling-off in the public interest in cricket. The play has become so perfect that nobody cares to look at it.

And even, or rather especially, at the schools in England, games have become ultra-professional.

All this is a pity, but it does not apply to New Zealand. New Zealand has, up to now, been unspoiled by professionalism. Long may it remain so. One football enthusiast told me that the cloven hoof was making its appearance.

* * * * *

What most people want to hear about New Zealand are facts with regard to the economic situation of the country: the labour question, the effects of woman’s suffrage, the drink question, prohibition, etc. Now, unless one makes a really thorough and serious study of these questions, which it is impossible to do without devoting considerable time to it, without, in fact, living in the country for a reasonable period, it is worse than useless to fire off a few superficial and dogmatic generalizations. It is for this reason that I forbear from discussing them here.

_Wellington: September_

The first manifestations of the spring have taken the form of rain and wind. Whenever the wind is in the south, the weather is cold: for the wind comes straight from the South Pole. But luckily the rain does not last long. Changes of weather in New Zealand are very sudden. The hills are now covered with gorse in bloom. Daffodils are out everywhere; and in the town you see arum lilies that grow wild in New Zealand in great profusion; but I imagine their time is later.

I am leaving the country just as the pleasant season is beginning, and I am leaving before I have had time to see the most interesting places in it. I have not seen New Zealand; but I have seen Wellington, and I have had a glimpse of the country. I have seen the Parliament sitting. I have met many interesting people. I have been to two concerts, one picture-show, one hospital, one theatre, and four football matches. I have not been to one thing: and that is morning tea.

Morning tea is, I believe, a custom peculiar to New Zealand. The New Zealanders give teas at eleven o’clock in the morning.

Eleven o’clock in the morning is the time when one feels most exhausted. Refreshment of some kind at 11 A.M. is surely a need of human nature; and the New Zealanders have done well to crystallize the need into a tradition and a habit.

Tea and whisky seem to be the national drinks of New Zealand--especially whisky. But tea is often drunk at meals.

The impression that prevails in England that New Zealand is a place where you can’t get anything to drink, is a false one. Of course, some of the cities in the country are under the ban of prohibition, and so are certain portions of Wellington itself: from these you have to cross the street into such territory as lies outside the ban. The railway cars are teetotal.

The people here often tell you that they are being over-legislated. And one notable New Zealander told me that what the country most needed was improvement in higher education. The people, he said, did not care for higher education. Their point of view was material. They wouldn’t do things unless there was something to show for it.

In Wellington there are four large, long streets full of shops, tall stone buildings, English in character, hotels, banks, etc., with verandahs covering the pavement the whole way, and cars running through them. Outside of these streets, the houses are mostly built of wood, and resemble, as I have already said, those of a Russian provincial town.

The prices strike an Englishman as high, and the cost of living in New Zealand is undoubtedly high. The wages are, from our point of view, enormously high. A good chauffeur (I know of a case in point) can get £4 a week, and a house. From the English point of view such wages are very high indeed.

The New Zealanders strike me as being much more like English people than the Australians. Of course they have characteristics of their own. One thing is certain--a more friendly, hospitable people does not exist.

To go into the matter of their institutions, life, etc., would need a far more prolonged study and stay than I have been able to make, and I have already said, three or four times, that I don’t believe in pronouncing judgments on a country before you know it thoroughly.

One of the most interesting people I have met here is a French lady of the highest culture and education, Sœur Marie Joseph, who is at the head of a Home of Compassion for derelict children. She went out to the Crimean War under Florence Nightingale and looked after the wounded on the battlefields that knew nothing of anæsthetics. She told me that sometimes the doctors, after a day of surgical operations, would be drunk with the fumes of the blood. The wounded had to be tied down to be operated on, and sometimes, where this was not practicable, people had to sit on them to hold them down.

Sœur Marie Joseph is very fond of New Zealand. She came out, attracted by what she heard of the Maoris, and she knows the Maoris with an intimate thoroughness. She has a great admiration for them; and she gave me many instances of their chivalry and nobility of character. She has seen great changes since she has been in New Zealand. When she first came, she told me, New Zealand was covered with bush--that is to say, with magnificent forests; and the population, then, she says, was like one large family.

* * * * *

This morning at one of the Catholic churches here the priest preached a most interesting sermon. Among other things he told the following story. He said, “The other day I met a man who said, ‘I am a better Catholic than you are; because I go to all the churches: the Catholic, the Anglican, the Presbyterian, etc.’” On the following Sunday the priest passed this same man as he was working in his garden, and he said to him, “You may go to all the churches, but you don’t obey the precepts of any of them; for they all tell you not to work on Sunday.” The man laughed.

A few days after the priest met the man again in the town, and the man said to him: “I have just had the narrowest escape. I fell off a car and my legs were underneath it, and I was within an ace of being run over, when mercifully it stopped just in time.”

“Well,” said the priest, “I think that was due to me, because, when I saw you working last Sunday, I prayed for the salvation of your legs.”

_Roratonga and Tahiti: September_

I left Wellington on September 13 on the steamship Moana, one of the steamers belonging to the Union Steamship Company.

There was a great deal of excitement at the send-off, because the Rugby Union Football Team from Australia were on board. They had come from Sydney and were on their way to San Francisco, in order to play against the local teams there. These football boys had arrived the day before, and had had a respite of twenty-four hours from the inclemency of the sea, which they had greatly enjoyed (the respite, I mean, not the sea). Some of them had never been away from Australia before. Several of them, or, indeed, nearly all of them with the exception of about seven, were indifferent sailors. They remained on shore as long as they possibly could, one of them climbing up the gangway as it was actually being pulled up. The ship sailed amidst cheering and singing.

The southern Pacific, especially that part of it which is near New Zealand, is not a pleasant sea. The steamer pitched, and altogether the comfort of passengers was considerably interfered with during the first two days of the voyage. We started on Friday, and owing to the change of time we had two Saturdays running. (Let mathematicians explain that if they can.) It was not until the Sunday which followed the two Saturdays that the sea began to be smooth enough to allow the passengers to behave like human beings instead of like half-inanimate corpses.

On Sunday most of the football boys emerged from their cabins and began training on the upper deck. They boxed, they wrestled, they ran, they played leap-frog, they formed scrimmages; in fact, they displayed every form of energy which human bones and muscles are capable of.

The weather grew warmer, and on the Tuesday we got to the southeast trade winds. The day after this the steamer called at the island of Roratonga. Roratonga is an island which consists of sharp and jagged little hills entirely covered with a riotous green vegetation.

In thinking of the South Sea Islands, and of tropical islands in general, if you have never seen them, one may not realise that the general appearance of them must necessarily be green, since they are entirely covered with vegetation. One imagines a few palm-trees sticking up out of the sea, instead of a range of mountains covered with trees. As you first catch sight of Roratonga, you realise what New Zealand must have been like when it was covered with bush, only, of course, the climate of Roratonga is far milder and far warmer. The moment the steamer reaches Roratonga a great quantity of natives set out in boats from the shore and swarm on board. They are not black; they are not copper-coloured; they are a sort of dull almond colour, with very black hair and very dark brown eyes. They wear large straw hats; some of them have flowers in their hair and behind their ears.

As soon as you reach the shore the aspect of the island, which you might think disappointing at a distance, changes entirely. You are caught in a sort of warm embrace of aromatic deliciousness. Hibiscus bushes, with great scarlet blossoms, surround you on every side; cocoa palms, and all vegetation which you expect to see in a tropical island, are there before your eyes. But you will say, “If it is just the same as any other tropical island, what is the use of describing it--if it is merely what one sees in the East? You have already spoken of Ceylon.” Well, Roratonga and the islands of the South Seas are not in the least like Ceylon, and they are not in the least like anything in the Near or Far East. They have a peculiar charm which is completely individual, and totally unlike anything else. The sights and the people of these Southern places are utterly unlike the sights and people you see in the East--in Ceylon, for instance. There is nothing here of that hard, metallic element which you get in the East; nothing of that inscrutable mystery, that shadow of cruelty, which you feel in the Orient. The people are like the climate--soft and gentle; and they talk in musical tones, like the twittering of birds; and their speech is careless as the laughing talk of children. They reminded me of that race of people whom H. G. Wells describes in his book “The Time Machine,” that same people whom he imagines as living aboveground in the far, far distant future, when the industrial population of the world had grown into a sort of human flesh-eating lemur, which could only live underground and could only see in the dark. Mr. Wells represents the other and the civilized half of the population as having progressed or degenerated, whichever you like, into a race of childlike, amiable, and playful little people, who live on fruit in tumble-down houses, and who are as careless and irresponsible as butterflies. The people of Roratonga reminded me of this fancy of Mr. Wells’s.

At a little hotel where I stopped to eat some fresh bananas (and, oh, the difference between the fresh bananas and those which one buys at a store in Europe!) the woman who kept the hotel, and who had come from South Africa, talked of the natives. She said: “It is impossible to get them to work. If you find any fault with them they go away. It is we poor white people who have to do all the work. I would like,” she said, “to shambok them as they do in South Africa, so lazy and impossible they are sometimes, but we are not allowed to touch them. But then,” she added, “of course one can’t blame them, because they are quite well off without working. They have got enough to live on without doing any work.” I thought that it would, indeed, be unreasonable to blame these natives for not slaving for white people if they were not obliged to do so. The fact is that in these islands work for the natives is not a necessity; it is a hobby. It is to them what gardening must have been to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in the days before the Fall. If Adam and Eve gardened then, they gardened for fun. After the Fall of Man, they had to garden for a living and not from choice. Well, the native inhabitants of the South Sea Islands seem to have escaped or to be exempted from the primal curse; in fact, I believe that the islands of Tahiti and Roratonga are two bits of the Garden of Eden which were allowed to remain in the world so as to show mankind what they had lost by Eve’s curiosity, Adam’s disobedience, and the Devil’s spite.

We walked along the coast of this island up to the house of the missionary, where there was a large field. The football boys wanted to practise. We certainly envied the missionary his house. It stood under a huge shelving hill covered with palm-trees, in a perfect labyrinth of flowers. When the boys began to play football, the natives came in great crowds and stood round chirping with delight like birds; and when the boys had finished practising, they threw the football to the natives and told them they might play. At first, the natives fought shy of the football,--I imagine that they thought they would have to play against these terrifically efficient and muscular representatives of New South Wales; but when they realised that the boys did not want to play with them, and that they could play among themselves, they took to the game with great eagerness, and were soon enjoying themselves greatly. It was curious that by just looking on they had picked up a very good idea of the game, the main features of which they mimicked with some skill; one little boy was an excellent tackler.

One was struck by the extraordinarily musical quality of their voices and their language, which consists almost entirely of soft open vowels, and which is, I suppose, the most melodious of all human languages.

Before going back to the steamer, which was to sail in a few hours, I bathed in the sea, in a warm azure sea, and then, after eating more bananas and a delicious bitter fruit called “Brazilian cherries,” I went on board once more.

From Roratonga it only takes two days to get to the island of Tahiti, and the steamer anchored at Papeete on Friday, the 20th September.

Roratonga gives you a kind of foretaste of the whole charm and beauty of the South Seas. It is the appetizer, the _hors-d’œuvre_, not the whole meal. Tahiti is the whole thing; the real thing; the thing one has dreamt about all one’s life; the thing which made Stevenson leave Europe forever. All tellers of fairy tales, and all poets from Homer downwards, have always imagined the existence of certain islands which were so full of magic and charm that they turned man from his duty and from all tasks, labour, or occupation in which he was engaged, and held him a willing captive, who would not sell his captivity for all the prizes of the busy world.

Stevenson in one of his books--“The Wrecker,” I think--says that if a man who was toiling in some English town were to be suddenly transported to one of the South Sea Islands, in the neighbourhood of Tahiti, and had a vision of the beauty that is there, and then were to be transported back again to his prosaic and ugly surroundings, he would say, “At any rate, I have had my dream.” That is how one feels when one has seen Tahiti. One feels one has had one’s dream.

The Bay of Papeete curves inward. As you sail into it you are sure to see several white schooners at anchor. At one side is a range of light-blue volcanic hills stretching out into the crystalline sea, reminding one of Naples, Capri, and Sorrento, and in the middle of the bay there is a tiny little island, consisting of a few cocoa palms. The sea is a transparent azure; little white houses are dotted all along the line of the beach, nestling in greenery. We got there in the afternoon and landed at once. We walked along the beach into the little town, and into the suburbs of it. It was spring in Tahiti, and every kind of imaginable blossom was flaunting its reckless and extravagant beauty. Everything grows wild in Tahiti. Nobody seems to bother about gardening or anything of that kind. It is not only the lilies who do not toil and spin, but the gardeners also. The unaided results of nature are so prodigious that the imagination is staggered to think of what might be done supposing an energetic gardener were let loose in these islands and allowed to try experiments. He would produce such a garden as the world has never seen.

I scarcely knew the names of any of the fruits or any of the blossoms which I saw. There were mango-trees, laden with mangoes which were not yet ripe; bamboo-trees, breadfruit-trees, cocoa palms, banana-trees, hibiscus bushes, a tree with a bright pink blossom which looked like a Judas-tree, but which was not one, bushes with intense mauve- and deep lilac-coloured flowers, and broad avenues of large green trees which shaded the road from the hot sun with great fanlike branches. As we walked along this avenue, on both sides of which there are little houses, we caught glimpses of wonderfully luxuriant and untrained gardens.

There seemed to be no birds except blackbirds and mina birds, which were hopping about in great quantities.

The people seem extraordinarily contented and invincibly indolent. I was walking along the main street and I wanted to get to the post-office, which I knew was somewhere along that street. I stopped at a store and asked whether I was going the right way. The storekeeper--who was a Frenchman--said, yes, I was going right. I then asked if it was far. The storekeeper said, oh, yes, it was very far; indeed, it would take me a good quarter of an hour or twenty minutes to walk there. I asked him if I could hire a conveyance, as I was in a hurry. He shook his head and thought it unlikely. I then went on my way. I thought I would just time myself and see how long it did take to reach the post-office. I walked fast; but I found, to my amazement, that it took me exactly three minutes to get there. Doubtless it would have taken a native of Tahiti twenty minutes. There is no such thing as hurry and no such thing as energy in these islands.

At five o’clock in the evening the football boys gave a display in front of the Governor’s house, and crowds of natives witnessed it. After that we all went to bathe in the bay, where sharks rarely come, although they do come sometimes.

In the evening we went to a picture-show, where there was a boxing-match between some native champions.

The people say that if you once drink of the water of Tahiti you will be bound to go there again, and I do not wonder at this. It is certainly the most fascinating and most beautiful spot I have ever seen. Its fascination lies not so much in the profusion and wealth of luxuriant vegetation and exotic colouring as in its subtle and indescribable charm. You do not feel as if you were in a hothouse. You feel as if you were in a most delicious country. You walk along by the side of streams where you see people doing their washing; you hear the cry of poultry; you see people driving oxen along the shady road. There is a wonderful fragrance in the air. Schooners come into the harbour from the other islands: the Marquesas Islands, etc. The Europeans walking about in their white clothes do not look like the Europeans you see in Ceylon, all washed out and wearied from the heat and strain; they look as if they were enjoying life, as if they were happy where they were.

There is a large Chinese population in Tahiti, but they busy themselves for the most part with agriculture. They do not do much work for the white people. The labour problem in Tahiti is consequently very vexatious for the white people. It is difficult to get work done at all; therefore, life in Tahiti is expensive. Often, for instance, the natives on market-day will bring no meat to the market, because it bothers them to do so. Of course, if white people consented to live entirely on fruit, as the natives do, the question would be solved, and certainly the fruit there is excellent. But man cannot live by breadfruit alone. He insists on sucking-pig and other more substantial delicacies; and to get these, in Tahiti, he has to pay money.

There is practically only one small hotel in Tahiti, a little two-storied house with a verandah. There are many French stores; the Governor’s House; the post-office; and a theatre. When the Panama Canal is opened, steamers, I suppose, will call at Tahiti in greater numbers than they do now, and that will be the time for speculators to build a larger hotel there. I have no fears of Tahiti ever being spoiled. It is the kind of place that will conquer civilization rather than be conquered by it. It was, at present,--I was told by people who had visited all the islands in the Pacific,--the most unspoiled of all of them. That is why I chose that route. Fiji is far more progressive, and I dare say far more satisfactory from a business and European point of view, but it is less interesting from a picturesque point of view.

I cannot imagine anything more ideal than to possess a schooner fitted with a small motor, in case of calm, and to cruise about the waters between Tahiti and the Marquesas, which, one is told, are indescribably beautiful.