CHAPTER IV

THE SUBLIMATED, SAVAGE FIJIANS

1

Fiji is to the Pacific what the eye is to the needle. Swift as are the vessels which thread the largest ocean on earth, travelers who do more than pass through Fiji on their way between America and the Antipodes are few. Yet the years have woven more than a mere patchwork of romance round these islands. In climate they are considered the most healthful of the South Sea groups, though socially and from the point of view of our civilization they do not occupy the same place in our sentiments as do Samoa, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Sandwich Islands. Largely, I suppose, because of the ethnological accident that planted there a race of people that is farther from Europeans than the Polynesians. The Fijians are Melanesians, a negroid people said by some to be a "sub-branch" of the Polynesians. They have been slightly mixed through their contact with the Tongans and the Samoans, but they are not definitely related to either and full mixture is unlikely.

A century ago a number of Australian convicts escaped to Fiji. They brought to these savage cannibal islanders all the viciousness and arrogance of their type, and imposed themselves upon the primitive natives. The effect was not conducive of the best relations between white people and natives, nor did it have an elevating influence upon the latter. However, despite their cannibalism and their unwillingness to yield to the influence of our benign civilization, the Fijians are a people in many ways superior to both the Polynesians east of them and the true Melanesians or Papuans to the west. They are more moral; they are cleanly; their women occupy a better position in relation to their men; and in character and skill they are superior to their neighbors. I was impressed with this dignity of the Fijians, conscious and unconscious, from the time I first laid eyes on them. I felt that, notwithstanding all that was said about them, here was a people that stood aloof from mere imitation.

Yet such is the nature of reputation that when I announced my intention of breaking my journey from Honolulu to Australia at Fiji, my fellow-passengers were inclined to commiserate with me. They wondered how one with no special purposes--that is, without a job--could risk cutting loose from his iron moorings in these savage isles. Had they not read in their school geographies of jungles and savages all mixed and wild, with mocking natives grinning at you from behind bamboo-trees, living expectations of a juicy dinner? They warned me about dengue fever; they extolled the virtues of the Fijian maidens, and exaggerated the vices of the Fijian men. The word "cannibals" howled round my head as the impersonal wind had howled round the masts of the steamer one night. But the adventurer soon learns that there is none so unknowing as the average globe-trotters (the people who have been there); so he listens politely and goes his own way.

When, therefore, I got the first real whiff of tropical sweetness, mixed though it was with copra and mold, all other considerations vanished. From the cool heights the hills looked down in pity upon the little village of Suva as it lay prostrate beneath the sun. If there was any movement to be seen, it was upon the lapping waters of the harbor, where numerous boats swarmed with black-bodied, glossy-skinned natives in that universal pursuit of life and happiness. As the _Niagara_ sidled up to the pier and made fast her hawsers, these black fellows rushed upon her decks and into the holds like so many ants, and what had till then been inanimate became as though possessed.

2

I had been under the impression that the natives were all lazy, but the manner of their handling of cargo soon dissipated that notion. Further to discredit the rumor-mongers, three Fijians staged an attempt to lead a donkey ashore which would have shamed the most enthusiastic believer in the practice of counting ten before getting angry and trying three times before giving up. The Fijian is as indifferent to big as to little tasks, and seems to be alone, of all the dwellers in the tropics, in this apathetic attitude toward life. There is none in all the world more lazy, indolent, and do-nothing than the white man. As soon as he comes within sight of a native anywhere, that native does his labor for him; you may count on it.

So it was that with fear and trembling I announced to the stewards that I had a steamer trunk which I wanted ashore with me. They grunted and growled as the two of them struggled with it along the gang-plank and dropped it as Atlas might have been expected to drop the earth, and stood there with a contemptuous look of expectation. I took out two half-dollars and handed one to each. The sneer that formed under their noses was well practised, I could see, and they took great pains to inform me that they were no niggers, they would not take the trunk another foot. There it was. I was lost, scorned, and humiliated. Why did I have so much worldly goods to worry about? Just then a portly Fijian stepped up. Beside him I felt puny, doubly humble now. Before I had time to decide whether or not he was going to pick me up by the nape of the neck and carry me off to a feast, he took my trunk instead. Though it weighed fully a hundred and sixty-five pounds, it rose to his shoulders--up there a foot and a half above me--and the giant strode along the pier with as little concern as though it were empty. The two stewards stood looking on with an air of superiority typical of the white men among colored.

I cannot say that mere brawn ever entitles any man to rank, and that the white generally substitutes brain for brawn is obvious. But I failed to see wherein they justified their conceit, for to men of their type the fist is still the symbol of their ideal, as it is to the majority of white men. And as I came away from the ship again that afternoon I found a young steward, a mere lad, standing in a corner crying, his cheek swollen and red. I asked him what happened. "The steward hit me," he said, trying to restrain himself from crying. "I thought I was through and went for my supper so as to get ashore a bit. He came up and asked me what I was doing. I told him, and he struck me with his fist." Yet the stewards thought themselves too good to do any labor with black men about. No ship in a tropical port is manned by the sailors; there they take a vacation, as it were.

From the customs shed to my hotel the selfsame Fijian carried my trunk majestically. I felt hopeful that for a time at least I should see the last of stewards and their ilk. But before I was two days in Suva I learned that shore stewards are often not any better, and was happy to get farther inland away from the port for the short time I could afford to spend in the tropics.

Meanwhile, some of the younger of my fellow-passengers came on shore and began doing the rounds, into which they inveigled me. From one store to the other we went, examining the moldy, withered, incomplete stocks of the traders. Magazines stained brown with age, cheap paper-covered novels, native strings of beads formed part of the stock in trade. We soon exhausted Suva.

At the corner of the right angle made by Victoria Parade and the pier stood a Victoria coach. A horse slept on three legs, in front of it, and a Hindu sat upon the seat like a hump on an elongated camel. We roused them from their dozing and began to bargain for their hire. Six of us climbed into the coach and slowly, as though it were fastened to the ground, the horse began to move, followed by the driver, the carriage, and the six of us. For an hour we continued in the direction in which the three had been standing, along the beach, up a little knoll, past corrugated-iron-roofed shacks, and down into Suva again; the horse stopped with the carriage behind him in exactly the same position in which we had found them, and driver and beast went to sleep again.

Much is heard these days about the effects of the railroad and the steamer and the wireless telegraph on the unity of the world, but to those travelers and that Hindu and to the Fijians whom we passed en route, not even the insertion of our six shillings in the driver's pocket has, I am sure, as much as left the faintest impression on any of us except myself. And on me it has left the impression of the utter inconsequence of most traveling.

Thus Suva, the eye of Fiji and of the needle of the Pacific, is threaded, but there is nothing to sew. The unexpected never happens. There are no poets or philosophers, no theaters or cabarets in Suva, as far as mere eye can see,--nothing but smell of mold and copra (cocoanut oil).

In Suva one cannot long remain alert. The sun is stupefying. The person just arrived finds himself stifled by the sharp smells all about him as though the air were poisoned with too much life. The shaggy green hills, rugged and wild in the extreme, show even at a distance the struggle between life and death which moment by moment takes place. Luxuriant as on the morning of creation, the vegetation seems to be rotting as after a period of death. In Suva everything smells damp and moldy. You cannot get away from it. The stores you buy in, the bed you sleep in, the room you eat in,--all have the same odor. The books in the little library are eaten full of holes through which the flat bookworms wander as by right of eminent domain. Offensive to the uninitiated is the smell of copra. The swarms of Fijians who attack the cargo smell of it and glisten with it. The boats smell of it and the air is heavy with it. If copra and mold could be banished from the islands, the impression of loveliness which is the essence of the South Seas would remain untainted. Yet to-day, let me but get a whiff of cocoanut-oil from a drug store and I am immediately transported to the South Seas and my being goes a-wandering.

3

I seldom dream, but at the moment of waking in strange surroundings after an unusual run of events my mind rehearses as in a dream the experiences gained during consciousness. When the knuckles of the Fijian--and he has knuckles--sounded on my door at seven to announce my morning tea, I woke with a sense of heaviness, as though submerged in a world from which I could never again escape. At seven-fifteen another Fijian came for my laundry; at seven-thirty a third came for my shoes. Seeing that it was useless to remain in bed longer, I got up. I was not many minutes on the street before I realized the urgency in those several early visits. Daylight-saving is an absolute necessity in the tropics, for by eight or nine one has to endure our noonday sun, and unless something is accomplished before that time one must perforce wait till late afternoon for another opportunity. To keep an ordinary coat on an ordinary back in Suva is like trying to live in a fireless cooker while angry. Even in the shade one is grateful for white duck instead of woolens, so before long I had acquired an Irish poplin coat. Yet Fiji is one of the most healthful of the South Sea islands.

Owing to the heat, most likely--to give the white devils their due--procrastination is the order of life. "Everything here is 'malua,'" explained the manager of "The Fiji Times" to me. "No matter what you want or whom you ask for it, 'wait a bit' will be the process." And he forthwith demonstrated, quite unconsciously, that he knew whereof he spoke. I wanted to get some information about the interior which he might just as easily have given me off-hand, but he asked me to wait a bit. I did. He left his office, walked all the way up the street with me to show me a photographer's place where I should be able to get what I was after, and stood about with me waiting for the photographer to make up his mind whether he had the time to see me or not. There's no use rushing anybody. The authorities have been several years trying to get one of the off streets of Suva paved. It has been "worked on," but the task, turned to every now and then for half an hour, requires numerous rest periods.

In Fiji, every one moves adagio. The white man looks on and commands; the Indian coolie slinks about and slaves; the Fijian works on occasion but generally passes tasks by with sporty indifference. Yet there is no absence of life. Beginning with the noise and confusion at the pier, there is a steady stream of individuals on whom shadows are lost, though they have nothing on them but their skins and their sulus. The Fijian idles, allows the Indian to work, happy to be left alone, happy if he can add a shilling to his possessions,--an old vest, a torn pair of trousers of any shape, an old coat, or a stiff-bosomed shirt sans coat or vest or trousers. Tall, mighty, and picturesque, his coiffure the pride of his life, he watches with a confidence well suited to his origin and his race the changes going on about him.

Thus, while his island's fruits are being crated and carted off by the ship-load for foreign consumption, he helps in the process for the mere privilege of subsidized loafing. All the fun he gets out of trade in the tropics seems to be the opportunity of swearing at his fellows in fiji-ized versions of curses taught him by the white man. Or he stands erect on the flat punt as it comes in from regions unknown, bearing bananas green from the tree, the very picture of ease and contentment. Yet one little tug with foreign impertinence tows half a dozen punts, depriving him even of this element of romance in his life.

Still, there is nothing sullen in his make-up. A dozen mummy-apples--better than bread to him--tied together with a string, suffice to make his primitive heart glad. Primitive these people are; their instincts, never led astray very far by such frills and trappings as keep us jogging along are none the less human. Unfold your camera and suggest taking a picture of any one of them and forthwith he straightens up, transforms his features, and adjusts his loin-cloth; nor will he forget to brush his hair with his hand. What a strange thing is this instinct in human nature anywhere in the world which substitutes so much starch for a slouch the moment one sees a one-eyed box pointing in his direction! None ever hoped to see a print of himself, but all posed as though the click of that little shutter were the recipe for perpetual youth.

The motive is not always one of vanity. Generally, at the sound of the shutter, a hand shoots out in anticipation of reward. In the tropics it is no little task to bring oneself together so suddenly, and the effort should be fully compensated. The expenditure of energy involved in posing is worthy of remuneration. Nevertheless, vanity is inherent in this response. The Fijian is a handsome creature, and he knows it. He knows how to make his hair the envy of the world. "Permanent-wave" establishments would go out of business here in America if some skilled Fijian could endure our climate. He would give such permanence to blondes and brunettes as would cost only twenty-five cents and would really last. He would not plaster the hair down and cover it with a net against the least ruffle of the wind. When he got through with it it would stand straight up in the air, four to six inches long, and would serve as an insulator against the burning rays of the sun unrivaled anywhere in the world. While I squinted and slunk in the shade, the native chose the open highway. Give him a cluster of breadfruit to carry and a bank messenger with a bag of bullion could not seem more important.

The Fijians, notwithstanding the fact that they take less to the sentimental in our civilization than the Samoans, are a fine race. Their softness of nature is a surprising inversion of their former ferocity. What one sees of them in Suva helps to fortify one in this conclusion; a visit farther inland leaves not a shadow of doubt. And pretty as the harbor is, it is as nothing compared with the loveliness of river and hills in the interior.

I was making my way to the pier in search of the launch that would take me up the Rewa River, when a giant Fijian approached me. He spoke English as few foreign to the tongue can speak it. A coat, a watch, and a cane--a lordly biped--he did not hesitate to refer to his virtues proudly. He answered my unspoken question as to his inches by assuring me he was six feet three in his stocking feet (he wore no stockings) and was forty-five years old. For a few minutes we chatted amicably about Fiji and its places of interest. There was never a smug reference to anything even suggestive of the lascivious--as would have been the case with a guide in Japan, or Europe--yet he cordially offered to conduct and protect me through Fijiland. Had I had a billion dollars in gold upon me I felt that I might have put myself in his care anywhere in the world. But I was already engaged to go up the Rewa River and could not hire him. Cordially and generously, as an old friend might have done, he told me what to look for and bid me have a good time.

4

I took the launch which makes daily trips up the Rewa. The little vessel was black with natives--outside, inside, everywhere, streaming over to the pier. It was owned and operated by an Englishman named Message. Even in the traffic on this river combination threatens individual enterprise. "The company has several launches. It runs them on schedule time, stopping only at special stations, regardless of the convenience to the Fijians. It is trying to force me out of business," said Mr. Message, a look of troubled defiance in his face. "But I am just as determined to beat it."

So he operates his launch to suit the natives, winning their good-will and patronage. It was interesting to see how his method worked. No better lesson in the instinctive tendency toward coöperation and mutual aid could be found. He had no white assistant, but every Fijian who could find room on the launch constituted himself a longshoreman. They enjoyed playing with the launch. They helped in the work of loading and unloading one another's petty cargo, such as kerosene, corrugated iron for roofing (which is everywhere replacing thatch), and odd sticks of wood. And the jollity that electrified them was a delightful commentary on this one white man's humanity.

Delight rides at a spirited pace on this river Rewa. The banks are seldom more than a couple of feet above the water. The launch makes straight for the shore wherever a Fijian recognizes his hut, and he scrambles off as best he can. Here and there round the bends natives in _takias_ (somewhat like outrigger canoes with mat sails, now seldom used), punts, or rowboats slip by in the twilight.

The sun had set by the time all the little stops had been made between Suva and Davuilevu, the last stopping-place. Each man, as he stepped from this little float of modernism, clambered up the bank and disappeared amid the sugar-cane. What a world of romance and change he took into the dark-brown hut he calls his own! What news of the world must he not have brought back with him! A commuter, he had probably gone in by that morning's launch, in which case he spent three full hours in "toil" or in the purchase of a sheet of corrugated iron or a tin of oil. He may have helped himself to a shirt from somebody's clothes-line in the spare time left him. One thing was certain, there were no chocolates in his pockets, for he had no pockets, and I saw no young woman holding a baby in her arms for daddy to greet.

Yet even from a distance one recognized something of family affection. To enter and examine closely would perhaps have made a difference in my impressions. I was content with these hazy pictures, to see these dark-skinned people merge with their brown-thatched huts curtained by shadows within the cane-fields. When night came on all was dissolved in shadow, and voices in song rose on the cool air.

5

The Rewa River runs between two antagonistic institutions. At Davuilevu (the Great Conch-Shell) there is a mission station on one side and a sugar-mill on the other. Both are deeply affecting the character and environment of the Fijians, yet the contrast in the results is too obvious to be overlooked by even the most casual observer.

As I stepped off the boat a young New Zealander whose cousin had come down with us on the _Niagara_ and whom I had met the day of our arrival in Suva, came out of a building across the road. He was conducting a class in carpentry composed of young Fijian students of the mission. They were so absorbed in their work that they barely noticed me, and the atmosphere of sober earnestness about the place was thrilling. From time out of mind the Fijians have been good carpenters, the craft being passed down from generation to generation within a special caste. Their shipbuilding has always been superior to that of their neighbors, the Tongans. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, that the main department here should be that of wood-turning, and some of the work the students were doing at the time was exceptionally fine.

The buildings of the mission had all been constructed with native labor under the direction of the missionaries. They were simply but firmly built, the absence of architectural richness being due fully as much to the spirit of the missionaries as to the lack of decorativeness in the character of the natives.

However, there was something to be found at the mission which was harshly lacking at the sugar-mill. The students moved about in a leisurely manner, cleanly and thoughtful; whereas across the river not only were the buildings of the very crudest possible, but the Hindus and the Fijians roamed around like sullen, hungry curs always expecting a kick. Those who were not sullen, were obviously tired, spiritless, and repressed. Their huts were set close to one another in rows, whereas the mission buildings range over the hills. The crowding at the mill, upon such vast open spaces, gave the little village all the faults of a tenement district. Racial clannishness seems to require even closer touch where space is wide. The very expanse of the world seems to intensify the fear of loneliness, so men huddle closer to sense somewhat of the gregarious delights of over-populated India. But there is also the squeezing of plantation-owners here at fault, and the total disregard of the needs of individual employees.

The mill is worked day and night, in season, but it is at night that one's reactions to it are most impressive. The street lamps, assisted by a dim glow from within the shacks, the monotonous invocation of prayer by Indians squatting before the wide-open doors, the tiny kava "saloons," and the great, giant, grinding, grating sugar-mills crushing the juice out of the cane and precipitating it (after a chain of processes) in white dust for sweetening the world, are something never to be forgotten. The deep, pulsating breath of the mill sounded like the snore of a sleeping monster. Yet that monstrous mill never sleeps.

The sound did not cease, but rather, became more pronounced after I returned that night. Deeply imprinted on my memory was the figure of a sullen-looking Indian at his post--small, wiry, persistent--with the whirring of machinery all about him, the steaming vats, the broken sticks of cane being crunched in the maw of the machine. The toilers sometimes dozed at their tasks. I was told that once an Indian fell into one of the vats in a moment of dizzy slumber. The cynical informer insisted that the management would not even stop the process of turning cane into sugar, and that into the tea-cups of the world was mixed the substance of that man. My reflection was along different lines,--that into the sweets of the world we were constantly mixing the souls of men.

6

But unfortunately those who look after the souls of these men at the mission are apt to forget that they have bodies, too, and that body is the materialization of desire. There is something wonderful, indeed, in the sight of men known to have been of the most ferocious of human creatures going about their daily affairs in an attitude of great reverence to the things of life. And reverence added to the extreme shyness of the Fijian is writ large in the manner of every native across the way from the mill. Sometimes I felt that there was altogether too much restraint, too much checking of wholesome and healthy impulses among them for it to be true reverence. That was especially marked on Sunday morning, when from all the corners of the mission fields gathered the sturdy black men in the center of the grounds where stood the little church.

They were a sight to behold, altogether too seriously concerned to be amusing, and to the unbiased the acme of gentleness. There they were--muscular, huge, erect, and black, their bushy crops of coarse hair adding six inches to their heads; dressed in sulus neatly tucked away, and stiff-bosomed white shirts over their bodies. Starched white shirts in the tropics! And the Bible in Fijian in their hands. In absolute silence they made their way into the church, the shuffle of their unshod feet adding intensity to that silence. When they raised their voices in the hymns it seemed to me that nothing more sincere had ever been sung in life. But then something occurred which made me wonder.

From the Solomon Islands had come on furlough the Rev. Mr. Ryecroft and his delicate wife. He was a man of very gentle bearing and great fervor. He and his plucky wife had suffered much for their convictions. All men who really believe anything suffer. The missionary is as much anathema in his field as the anarchist is in America, and is generally as violent an agent for the disruption of custom. Mr. Ryecroft rose to speak before the congregation. He spoke in English and was interpreted by the missionary in charge. He told of his trials in the Solomon Islands, and appealed for Fijian missionaries to go back with him and save the blood-thirsty Solomons. I watched the faces of these converted Fijians. Some of them were intent upon the speaker, repugnance at the cruelties rehearsed coming over them as at something of which they were more afraid as a possible revival in themselves than as an objective danger. Some, however, fell fast asleep, their languid heads drooping to one side. I am no mind-reader, nor is my observation to be taken for more than mere guess-work, but I felt that there were two conflicting thoughts in the minds of the listeners, for while Mr. Ryecroft was urging them to come arrest brutality in the Solomons there were other recruiters at work in Fiji for service in Europe. While one told that the savage Solomon Islanders swooped down upon the missionary compound and left sixteen dead behind them, in Europe they were leaving a thousand times as many every day, worse than dead. To whom were they to listen!

That afternoon Mr. Waterhouse, one of the missionaries, asked me to give the young men a little talk on my travels, he to interpret for me. I asked him what he would like to have me tell them and he urged me to advise them not to give up their lands. I complied, pointing out to them how quickly they would go under as a race if they did so. The response was more than compensating.

The outlook is all the more reassuring when you sit of an evening as I did in the large, carefully woven native house, elliptical in shape, with thatched roof and soft-matted floors, which serves as a sort of night school for little tots. The children, who were then rehearsing some dances for the coming festival, sat on tiers of benches so built that one child's feet were on a level with the shoulders of the one in front. Like a palisade of stars their bright eyes glistened with the reflections of the light from the kerosene lamps hanging on wires from the rafters. Lolohea Ratu, a girl of twenty, educated in Sydney, Australia, spoke to them in a plaintive, modulated voice, soft and low. All Fijian voices are sad, but hers was slightly sadder than most of them, tinged, it seemed, with knowledge of the world. She had studied the Montessori method and was trying to train her little brothers and sisters thereby. But she was not forgetful of what is lovely in her own race, primitive as it is, and was preparing these children in something of a compromise between native and foreign dances. Round and round the room they marched, the overhanging lamps playing pranks with their shadows. Others sat upon the mats, legs crossed, beating time and clapping hands in the native fashion. Their glistening bodies and sparkling, mischievous eyes, their response to the enchanting rhythm and melody borrowed from a world as strange to them as theirs is to us, showed their delight. I wondered what strange images--ghostly pale folk--they were seeing through our songs. Perhaps the music was merely another kind of "savage" song to them, even a wee bit wilder than their own. On the following day they were to sing and dance to the amazement of their skeptical elders.

Thus does Fijian "civilization" steer its uncertain course between the two contending influences from the West--the planters and the missionaries--just as the river Rewa runs between them over the jungle plains, struggling to supplant wild entangling growths with earth culture.

7

And that "civilization" leans at one time toward the mill and at another toward the mission. Frankly, Fiji grows more interesting as one gets away from these two guy-wires and floats on the sluggish river. My opportunity of seeing that Fiji which is least confused by either influence came unexpectedly. The missionaries generously invited me to go with them up the river in their launch early Monday morning. Everywhere along the banks of the broad, deep stream stood groups of huts and villages amid the sugar-cane fields. I gazed up the wide way of the river toward the hazy blue mountains which stood fifty miles away. They seemed to be a thousand miles and farther still from reality. The Himalayas which lured the Lama priest and _Kim_ could not have been more enticing. Because of the cloying atmosphere of the day, this distant coolness was like an oasis in the desert, and I longed for some phantom ship to bear me away on the breeze.

For twenty miles we glided on through cane plantations, banana- and cocoanut-trees, and miniature palisades here and there rising to the dignity of hills. We landed, toward noon, at a village which stood on a little plateau,--quiet, self-satisfied, though in no way elaborate. The best of the huts stood against the hill across the "street" formed by two rows of thatch-roofed and leaf-walled huts. It belonged to the native Christian teacher. He turned it over to us, himself and his wife and baby disappearing while we lunched. Much of our repast remaining, the missionary offered it to the teacher, but I noticed that he looked displeased and turned the platter over to the flock of children which had gathered outside,--a brood of little fellows, their bellies bulging out before them, not even the shadow of a garment covering their nakedness.

I returned to the hut a little later for my camera, not knowing that any one was there. Inside, in one corner, lay the teacher's wife, stretched face downward, nursing her baby, which lay on its back upon the soft mats. She smiled, slightly embarrassed, and I withdrew. Here, then, was the place where civilization and savagery met.

There were few Fijians in the village, mostly children and several old women. A Solomon Islander, who had got there during the days when blackbirding or kidnapping was common, moved among them. He had quite forgotten his own language and could not understand Mr. Ryecroft when the missionary spoke to him. An elderly man beckoned to me from his hut and there offered to sell me a heavy, ebony carved club that could kill an ox, swearing by all the taboos that it was a sacred club and had killed many a man in his father's time.

A narrow path climbing the hill close behind the village led us to a view over the long sweep of the river and its valley. The utmost of peace and tranquillity hung, without a tremor, below us. Twenty huts fringed the plateau, forming a vague ellipse, interwoven with lovely salvias, coleuses, and begonias. The village seemed to have been caught in the crook of the river, while a field of sugar-cane filled the plain across the stream, the shaggy mountains quartering it from the rear. Distant, reaching toward the sun, ranged the mountains from which the river is daily born anew.

As our launch chugged steadily, easily down-stream, and the evening shadows overstepped the sun, Fiji emerged fresh and sweet as I had not seen it before. The missionaries, till then sober and reserved, relaxed, the men's heads in the laps of their wives. Sentimental songs of long ago, like a stream of soft desire through the years, supplanted precept in their minds, and I realized for the first time why some men chose to be missionaries. It was to them no hardship. The trials and sufferings were romance to their natures, and the giving up of everything for Christ was after all only living out that world-old truism that in order to have life one must be ready to surrender it.

8

Next day Mr. Waterhouse and I wandered about the village of the sugar factory. At the bidding of several minor chiefs who had described a circle on the mats, we entered one of the dark huts by way of a low door. In a corner a woman tended the open fire, and near an opening a girl sat munching. The room was thick with smoke, the thin reeds supporting the roof glistening with soot. Everything was in order and according to form. They were making _kava_ (or _ava_ or _yangana_), the native drink. This used to be the work of the chieftain's daughter, who ground the ava root with her teeth and then mixed it with water. The law doesn't permit this now; so it is crushed in a mortar (_tonoa_). Specialization has reached out its tentacles even to this place, so that now the captain of this industry is an Indian.

The ava mixed, it was passed round in a well-scraped cocoanut-shell cut in half. As guests we were offered the first drink. Extremely bitter, it is nevertheless refreshing. After I made a pretense of drinking, the bowl was passed to the most respected chief. With gracious self-restraint he declined it. "This is too full. You have given me altogether too much." A little bit of it was poured back, and he drank it with one gulp. He would really have liked twice as much, not half, but there is more modesty and decorum among savages than we imagine. In fact, our conventions are often only atrophied taboos.

But the women, not so handsome nor so elegantly coifed as the men, were excluded from a share in the toast. They were not even part of the entertainment. The sexes seldom meet in any form of social intercourse. The boys never flirt with the girls, nor do they ever seem to notice them. In public there is a never-diminishing distance between them. A world without love-making, primitive life is outwardly not so romantic as is ours. The "romance" is generally that of the foreigner with the native women, not among the natives themselves.

The daughter of the biggest living Fijian chief wandered about like an outcast. She wore a red Mother-Hubbard gown, and nothing else. Her hair hung down to her shoulders. Having gone through the process of discoloration by the application of lime, according to the custom among the natives in the tropics, it was reddish and stiff, but, being long, had none of the leonine quality of the men's hair. Andi Cacarini (Fijian for Katherine), daughter of a modern chief, spoke fairly good English. She wasn't exactly ashamed, but just shy. The better class of Fijians, they who have come in contact with white people, all manifest a timid reticence. Andi Cacarini was shy, but hardly what one could call bashful or fastidious. She posed for me as though an artist's model, not at all ungraceful in her carriage or her walk.

The male Fijian is extremely timid, but none the less fastidious. The care with which he trains and curls his hair would serve as an object-lesson to the impatient husband of the vainest of white women. This doesn't mean that the Fijian man is effeminate in his ways, but he is particular about his hair. The process of discoloring it is exact. A mixture of burnt coral with water makes a fine substitute for soap. When washed out and dried, the hair is curled and combed and anointed. From the point of view of sanitation, the treatment is excellent, and from that of art--just watch the proud male pass down the road!

No matter where one goes in Fiji--or any of the South Sea Islands--the dance goes with one. Here at Davuilevu one afternoon in the hot, scorching sun, the natives gathered on the turf for merrymaking. It was no special holiday, no unusual event. To our way of thinking it is a tame sort of dance they do. We hear much of the freedom between the sexes in the tropics, and one gains the impression that there are absolutely no taboos. But just as there is nothing in all Japan--however delightful--to compensate the child, or even grown-ups, for the lack of the kiss, so none of the Fijian dances fill that same emotional requirement which with us is secured through the embrace of men and women in the dance. From the Fijian point of view, the whirling of couples about together must be extremely immodest, if not immoral.

Sitting in a double row, one in front of the other, were oiled and garlanded Fijians. Behind them and in a circle sat a number of singers and lali-players. As they began beating time, the oiled natives began to move from side to side rhythmically. Their arms and bodies jerked in a most fascinating and interpretative manner. No voices in the wide world are lovelier than the voices of Fijians in chorus; no other music issues so purely as the Fijian music from the depths of racial experience. Sometimes the dancers swung half-way round from side to side, with arms akimbo, or extended their arms in all directions, clapping their hands while chanting in soothing, melodious deep tones.

Judging from what I heard of the music of the Tongans, the Samoans, and the Fijians, I give the prize to the Fijians for richness of tone. More primitive than the plaintive Tongans, the Fijian music is a weird combination of the intellectual, the martial, and the industrial,--more fascinating than the passionate, voluptuous tunes and dances of the Samoans and the Hawaiians. The Polynesians, probably because of their close kinship with the Europeans, are much more sentimental in their music. The Fijian is more vigorous and to me more truly artistic.

No study, it seems to me, would throw more light on the history and unity of the human race than that of the dance and music. Why two races so far apart as the Japanese and the Maories of New Zealand should be so strikingly alike in their cruder dances, is hard to say. And the Fijians seem in some way the link between these two. The Fijian doubtless inherits some of his musical qualities from his negroid mixture, but he has certainly improved upon it if that is so. He has no regrets, no sentimental longings, and in consequence his songs are free from racial affectation.

The Fijians always sing. The instant the day's work is done and groups form they begin to sing. Half a dozen of them sit down and cross their legs before them, each places a stick so that one end rests lightly on one toe, the other on the ground; and while they tap upon these sticks, others sing and clap hands, swaying in an enchantment of loveliness. One carries the melody in a strained tenor, the others support him with a bass drawl. Once in a while an instrument is secured, as a flute, and the ensemble is complete. Even the tapping on the stick becomes instrumental in its quality.

As the day draws to a close, from the cane-fields smoke rises in all directions. The plantation workers have gathered piles of cane refuse for destruction. Like miniature volcanoes, these, with the coming of darkness, shine in the lightless night. It makes one slightly sad, this clearing away of the remnants of daily toil, this purification by fire. Then the sound of that other lali (the hollow tree-trunk), once the war-alarum or call to a cannibal feast, now at Davuilevu the invitation to prayer, the dampness, and the sense of crowding things in growth,--this is what will ever remain vivid to me.

9

Poor untroubled Fijians! This simple love of harmony, a majestic sense of force and brutality,--yet, withal, so naïve, withal so easily satisfied, so easily led. Once a foreigner met a native who seemed in great haste and trembling. The native inquired the time, in dread lest he miss the launch for Suva. In his hand he carried a warrant for his own arrest, with instructions to present himself at jail. When the foreigner told him that it was up to the jailer to worry about it, he seemed greatly shocked. One of the missionaries had been asked to keep his eye on a friend's house. In the absence of the owner, the missionary found a Fijian in the act of burglarizing. When questioned it was found that the native wanted to get into jail, where he was sure of three meals and shade, without worry. This is almost worthy of civilized man, by whom it is perhaps more commonly practised.

But the kind of jail in which men were at that time incarcerated was not enough to frighten the most liberty-loving individual. Because of the humidity and dampness, the structure was left open on one side, only three substantial walls and a roof being practical. Before the white man got full control and the native had some iron injected into his nature, it was not an arduous life the prisoners led. The missionary told me that once the head jailer was found sitting out of sight, with the officer in charge of the prisoners, tilting his chair against the wall of the jail. The prisoners had been ordered to labor. The officer in charge was to execute the command. Between puffs of tobacco, he would shout: "Up shot!" and rest a while; then "Down shot!"--more rest. Not a prisoner moved a muscle, the weights never rose from the ground. The men were deep within the shadows. The period of punishment over, they were ordered into their heaven of still more rest and more shade.

From our way of thinking, these are flagrant deceptions. But to the Fijian (and to most South Sea races) the inducements for greater exertion are simply non-existent. His revelries have been tabooed, his wars have been stopped, his native arts are in constant competition with cheap importations from our commercialized, industrialized world. What is there, then, for him to do? Little wonder that his native indifference to life is growing upon him. His conception of life after death never held many horrors. Even in the fierce old days it was easy for a Fijian to announce most casually that he would die at eight o'clock the following day. He would be oiled and made ready, and at the stated time he died. Most likely a state of catalepsy, but he was buried and none thought a second time about it. One boy was recently roused from such a condition and still lives.

The only means of counteracting this apathy are education and the awakening of ambition through manual training and the teaching of trades. This, the head of the mission told me, was his main object. Missionary efforts, according to one man, were directed more to this purpose than to the inculcation of any special religious precepts. And there is no question that that will work. The will to live may yet spring afresh in the Fijian.

From the nucleus formed by the mission is growing a more elaborate educational system. Recently the several existing schools have been amalgamated under a new ordinance. A proposal in reference to a more efficient system of vernacular or sub-primary schools was embodied in a bill put before the legislative council. A more satisfactory method of training teachers was deliberated upon. The Fijians are, it is seen, outgrowing the kindergarten stage, but the grown-ups are largely children still.

10

A fortnight after I landed in Suva I was steaming for Levuka, the former capital of the islands, situated on a much smaller land-drop not many hours' journey away. These are the only two important ports in the group, and inter-island vessels seldom go to one without visiting the other. Levuka is a much prettier place than Suva. Its little clusters of homes and buildings seem to have dug their heels into the hillside to keep from sliding into the sea.

Along the shore to the left stood a group of Fijian huts,--a suburb of Levuka, no doubt. Only a few old women were at home, and one old man. Nothing in the wide world is more restful to one's spirit than to arrive at a village which is deserted of toilers. Nothing is more symbolic of the true nature of home, the village being more than an isolated home, but a composite of the home spirit which is not tainted by any evidence of barter and trade.

On the other side of Levuka, however, was an altogether different kind of village, that of the shipwrights. Upon dry-docks stood the skeletons of ships, fashioned with hands of love and ambition. In such vessels these ancient rovers of the sea wandered from island to island, learning, teaching, mixing, and disturbing the sweetness of nature, with which no race on earth was more blessed.

The _Atua_, on which I had sailed from Suva, was a fairly large inter-island steamer that made the rounds of all the important groups. She was bound for Samoa, whither I had determined to go. There is no better opportunity of getting a glimpse of the contrast between the natives of the various South Sea islands than on board one of these inter-island vessels. They are generally manned by the natives of one of the groups,--in this case, the Fijians. These men handle the cargo at all ports, and remain on board until the vessel returns to Fiji en route to the Antipodes. They feed and sleep on the open deck and make themselves as happy and as noisy as they can. A gasoline tin of tea, baked potatoes, hard biscuit, and a chunk of fat meat, which is all placed before them on the dirty deck (they are given no napkins),--that is Fijian joy.

After their work, which in port sometimes keeps them up till the morning hours, these strange creatures, untroubled by thought, stretch themselves on the wooden hatchway and sleep. There I found them at half-past five in the morning, all covered with the one large sheet of canvas and never a nose poking out. Air! Perhaps they got some through a little hole in the great sheet. Some stood and slept like tired, overworked horses.

One queer Fijian with turbaned head grinned in imitation of none other than himself, a vague, undefined curiosity rolling about in his skull. He followed me everywhere, his white eyes staring and his mouth wide open. Here was a future Fijian statesman in the process of formation. His nebular, chaotic mentality was taking note of a creature as far removed from his understanding as a star from his reach.

One white soldier, an elderly man, wished to protect himself from the wind, and asked a Fijian to haul over a piece of canvas. The black man did so, but when the boatswain saw it, he was enraged. The Fijian took all the scolding, said never a word, and quickly replaced the sheet. As the boatswain moved away, the soldier handed the native a cigarette, saying: "Have one of these, old sport. One must expect reverses in war." The native grinned and felt the row was worth while.

There were Tongans, Indians, Samoans, and whites on board, and though these are nearer kin to us, I liked the Fijians most. Yet the Tongans are an attractive lot, refined in feature, in manner, and in person. Perhaps that is why they have the distinction of being the only South Sea people with their own kingdom, a cabinet, and a parliament.

The noise the Fijians make while in port is excruciating. It is something unclassifiable. They roll their r's, shout as though mad with anger, and then burst out in childish laughter at nothing. These boyish barbarians enjoy themselves much more in yelling than they would in chorus with a Caruso. How torrential is the stream of invective which issues against some fellow-laborer! With what a terrific crash it falls upon its victim! But how utter the disappointment when, after one has expectantly waited for a scrap, a gurgle of hilarity breaks from the throats which the moment before seemed such sirens of hate and malice!

And so they toil, happy to appear important, busy, honestly busy, loading the thousands of crates of green bananas, the cargo which passes to and fro. Happier than the happiest, sharing the scraps of a meal without the growl so common among our sailors, each always seems to get just what he wants and helps in the distribution of the portions to the others. The missus never bothers him, no matter how long he is away, and instantly labor ceases the group is "spiritualized" into a singing society and the racial opera is in full swing.

I had anticipated relief at their absence when the steamer set off for the colder regions south. Yet something pleasant was gone out of life the moment the ship steamed out. The sailors moved about like pale ghosts who had mechanically wandered back to a joyless life. The white man's virtues are his burdens. His tasks are done so that he may purchase pleasure. The ship was orderly, everything took its place, even the cursing and yelling came within control. We were heading again for civilization.

I felt somewhat like the old folks after their wish had rid the town of all mischievous little boys, and my heart strained back for an inward glimpse of the life behind. The smell of mold and copra returned; the damp beds; the cool, clear night air; the moonlight upon the shallow reefs; dappled gray breakers, playing upon the shore as upon a child's ocean; in the dark, along Victoria Parade, the shuffle of bare feet in the dust, the dim figures of tall, bushy-haired men and slim, wiry Hindus; the thud of heeled boots on the dry earth. And far off there, the sound of the lali, the singing of deep voices, the vision of an earthly paradise,--shattered by the sighting of land ahead.