Part 15

“When Patsy had read it to an end, he uttered a great, mocking laugh, and struck the paper with his club, so that the whole house shook, and old Ta’a came tumbling out like a scared rat. Then he laughed again until the whole bay reëchoed round, and every time he laughed his voice grew more shrill and screaming, like that of a woman in a fit. But there was no laughter at all in the little Pig-face, who went and lay down in the sand, hiding her eyes with her hands. And old Ta’a, the thief, the evil-hearted, the out-islander, she tore down the curse with derisive shoutings, and danced on it a shameful dance which is prohibited by the church. But for all that, we could see that she and Patsy were greatly discountenanced, as well they might have been; for who could read such a curse without trembling, or regard with calm the smoky air now thick with the smell of matches? As for the little Pig-face, she was helped inside the house like a drowning person from the sea, for her legs would no longer carry her, and she could not breathe for very terror. The clubs were left untouched where they had fallen; and when Patsy and Ta’a had carried Sina into the devil-house they shut the door and locked themselves within.

“I don’t know how long it was after this that we lay still spying from our _ti’a_, but it seemed to me like the space of many hours. For my part, I should have gladly returned home, for I was gnawed with hunger, and stiff with the cold night watching; so also was Tu, who spoke piteously of his love for Java, and how it might be the means, through this lawless dabbling with the unseen world, of cutting him off in his prime. But so rock-like was Java’s heart, so fierce the flame of her revenge, that she had no compassion for this beautiful young man, nor a single word for the comfort of his spirit. With her burning eyes fixed on Patsy’s house, she lay motionless on the ground like a dead person, her only thought to see the curse accomplished.

“Suddenly we were startled by a peal of thunder; low at first, and then tumultuously rising, which, with repeated explosions like those of cannon, seemed to shake the island to its bottommost roots. We jumped to our feet, clinging wildly to one another, while the earth shook under us like the sea, and the skies above were rent with a thousand burstings. Even as we stood there, swaying and horror-stricken, I felt Java’s fingers tighten on my arm and heard her voice in my ear, crying, ‘Look, look!’ And behold! what did I see but Patsy’s house rising in the air and darting seaward at the tail of the great rope, which, hand over fist, the devil was now pulling in from hell. The rope was covered with long, green sea-grass, and all manner of curious shells, which sparkled and twisted in the sun; and it went thus in jumps, like the crackling of a mighty whip; and with every jerk the house skimmed forward like a boatswain-bird, showing us at a broken window the faces of the accursed, who with frenzied movements climbed the one above the other, striving to escape like a tangle of worms in a pot, each one pushing away the other, until at last the water closed over them all. And from that day to this, Siosi, nothing has ever been seen of Ta’a, nor of Sina, nor of the devil’s white man.”

THE PHANTOM CITY

THE PHANTOM CITY

“God has sent you to the right place here,” said Father Studby, solemnly, to the lay brother. “Life in Lauli’i flows in the same channel, day by day, year by year, so that we wonder to grow old and are surprised to see our changing faces in the glass. When we think, it is of the goodness of God; when we fear, it is for the sick or for the machinations of the Evil One. Our little bay is a monastery, remote from all the passions and fevers of mankind; and the people we live among are pleasant children, naïve, gay, and pious.”

“You must not consider me a sick man,” said Brother Michael, with his dark smile. “I am worn out with teaching, and the hot bustle of Nukualofa. The doctor said I needed rest, that I needed peace and fresh air, and the bishop has sent me here to get them.”

“In Nukualofa,” said the old priest, who entertained a partisan’s contempt for the neighbouring island, “in Nukualofa they do not know the meaning of those words. They exist in a frenzy of excitement, amid the intrigues of three conflicting nationalities; one’s ear is dinned with rumours; and one wearies with the very names of consuls and captains. One cannot take a walk without beholding a fresh proclamation on a cocoanut-tree, or turn round without offending some preposterous regulation. The natives wear trousers and drink whisky; they model themselves on the dissolute whites set over them, and degenerate as rapidly as their masters.”

“I never could see what people found to like in the natives,” said the lay brother. “I dare say they are good enough in their way, and fill a necessary place in the world, but to me they are greasy and offensive.”

“Ah, but you have never seen the true Samoan,” exclaimed the priest. “Here it is so different from Nukualofa. Here our people are better born; here they are self-respecting, honest, and kind; here you will see at once an astonishing contrast to those you have left.”

Once launched on his favourite topic, the superiority of Lauli’i to all the villages of the group, the old missionary knew not when to stop, and his interminable tongue ran on in an unceasing harangue. The new-comer listened with a sort of detachment, as he might have done to some strange parrot screaming in a zoo, assenting by perfunctory nods to that long tale of Samoan virtue, religion, and generosity. His black eyes ranged about the room and through the open window at its back, where, within a distance of a dozen yards, a little church half barred the vista of peaks and forest. Still talking, Father Studby led him away to see it, this scene of his professional life which had been raised, stone upon stone, by his own assiduous hands. The lay brother was shown the altar, with its artless decoration of tissue-paper flowers; the pulpit inlaid with pearl-shell; the sacramental vessels in their wrappings of tapa-cloth. The father seated himself at a crazy harmonium, which was planted on the sandy floor like some derelict cast up by the sea, and ran his fingers over the yellow keys. He played, after a manner, with considerable skill and vivacity, his preference being for the sentimental ballads of his youth, and the dance-music which had then been in fashion. It was strange to hear these old waltzes, so long dead and forgotten, coming to life again in that darkened chapel and from the hands of such a player. The lay brother leaned against an open window, from which there was a wonderful view of wooded mountains half screened in mist, and sighed moodily as he gazed about him. Under the spell of those swaying measures, his heart returned to the Australian plains where he had been born, and he felt himself, indeed, an exile.

On leaving the church, the father took him on a little tour of the garden: showed him the cemented oven where the bread was baked, the roofed-in spring, the hives, the cow, the imported cock, everything, in fact, down to the grindstone and the rusty scythe.

Michael followed as in duty bound; asked the proper questions; showed everywhere a becoming interest; endured it all with propriety. He asked his host many questions, some of them the inspiration of mere politeness, such as the best food for chickens, and the precautions to be taken in handling bees; others, in which he seemed more genuinely concerned, as to the nature of the inland country and its resources. He was surprised to hear that the island had only once been crossed by whites; he was impatient of the priest’s statement that it did not greatly matter, as the natives suffered in social consideration by living too far from the sea, and were, besides, better off for the fish it afforded and the easy means of communication.

“There are other things in Samoa besides Samoans,” exclaimed Brother Michael, with a disdain that he could but ill conceal. “Here is an island scarcely forty miles wide, which apparently has only once been crossed in the memory of living man. Why, the thing stirs the imagination; it makes the blood tingle in one’s veins; it makes one speculate on a thousand possibilities. In those secluded depths there may be the ruins of ancient cities; mouldering tombs covered with hieroglyphs; perhaps even another race still surviving in those inner valleys! There may be whole forests of sandalwood, beds of fine coal, deposits of rich ores. Who knows, but there may be gold!”

Father Studby crossed himself.

“God forbid,” he said.

“You must remember,” he went on, “that every village has some knowledge of the land behind it, and if you could combine what they know you would find that the interior is not such a mystery as you imagine; though, of course, there may be tracts which have never yet been penetrated by a white man. At one time and another I have been many miles inland of Lauli’i, but I never got so far but what every gully had a name, every acre an owner. Why our people should dispute among themselves for such blocks of worthless forest and rock is a thing beyond my comprehension; but as a matter of fact they do attach an inordinate value to them, and it would astound you to find how exactly the boundaries are remembered.”

“You interest me immensely,” said the lay brother. “I see that you can tell me everything I want to know, and I congratulate myself again that my lucky star has brought me to your door. In Nukualofa they could not answer half my questions.”

“In Nukualofa,” said Father Studby, bitterly, “they know nothing,--less than nothing,--for they mislead you and tell you lies. The natives there, besides, are of a low stock, interbred with out-islanders and without an ancestry among them. You will look in vain for such a man as our Maunga, who goes back seventeen generations to the legendary Fasito’o, or a family such as the Sā; Satupaialā;, who have what you might almost call a special language of their own. They die, they spit, they moor a boat, they steal breadfruit, they commit adultery, all in different words from those commonly employed. It has been my pleasure, you might almost call it my folly, to absorb myself in such studies. I am afraid you will find me nothing more than an old Kanaka pundit, with my cracked head full of legends and ancient songs.”

The priest saw very little of his guest, who followed the doctor’s prescription of fresh air with a literalness that made him almost a stranger in the house. Every morning, after participating in the service in the little church, Brother Michael would take his gun and disappear for the day, returning at sundown with what pigeons he had shot, and an appetite that played havoc with his host’s frugal housekeeping. He would eat a pound of meat at a sitting, make way with an entire loaf of bread, and thought nothing of helping himself four times to marmalade, in spite of the father’s disapproving looks, and the calculated contrast of his bare plate. In the light of that frightful inroad on his provisions, Father Studby’s good opinion of the stranger began to change into a sentiment approaching aversion, and it seemed to him an added injury that the young man would no longer eat his own pigeons, insisting, with gross self-indulgence, on an unending succession of chicken, ham, and costly preserves. He said that _taro_ gave him heartburn, evoked the physician’s ban on all native food, and demanded, on the same shadowy authority, a daily ration of brandy from the father’s slender stock. It was hard on the old missionary, who was abstemious to a degree and seldom allowed himself the comfort of a dram, to pour his liquor down that insatiable throat, and be condemned to hold the bottle, while the other smacked his lips like a beach-comber in a bar, in no wise ashamed to drink alone. The bottle, too, until it was placed under lock and key, showed a tendency to decline unduly, and even biscuit and sardines were not exempt from a similar and no less exasperating shrinkage. And then, in his religious exercises the lay brother betrayed a disheartening coldness, and what spiritual fire had ever been in him seemed smothered over with torpor and indifference. His vocation meant no more to him than a means to live. He yawned at mass, nodded intermittently through the priest’s interminable sermons, and when it was proposed that he should take temporary charge of the school he did not hesitate for a moment to refuse.

Of course, a word to Nukualofa would have speedily rid Father Studby of his guest; he had only to write, to expostulate, and the thing was done. More than once, under the influence of some particular indignation, he had set himself to the task. But he had never got beyond the first few lines before his natural generosity reasserted itself. Who was he, that he should make himself the young man’s judge; that he should help, perhaps, to mar prospects none too bright, and throw the last stone at one already tottering to his fall? Besides, were the grounds of his objection as sincere as he imagined? Was he not meanly condemning the lay brother for his appetite, for the hole that he was making in that dwindling larder, rather than for his lack of religious conviction which at times seemed so shocking? After all, was it not natural for a young man to eat well, to help himself unchecked to marmalade, to devour expensive tinned meats like a wolf? It was the result of those immense walks, ordered by the doctor, to which Michael so assiduously applied himself. Was there not something even admirable in so strict an obedience to hygiene, especially in one constitutionally slothful and self-indulgent?

One afternoon Michael returned from his walk in a state of high excitement. His black eyes were burning, and for once, contrary to his usual habit, he was extraordinarily noisy and talkative. He kept breaking out into wild laughter, even when not a word was said, and seemed to possess, buried somewhere within him, the secret of an unextinguishable entertainment. Instead of dozing after supper in his chair, he grew, if anything, wider awake than ever, and his hilarity continued with a kind of violence. Father Studby was carried off his feet by that wave of gaiety; he felt the contagion of that singular fever which had so transformed his companion; he, too, laughed at nothing, and found himself talking with an animation that he could not remember to have displayed for years. But with it all he had an unaccountable sense of suspicion, of being on his guard against something, he knew not what, of some pitfall yawning for his unwary feet. He felt that he was watched; that those strange, mocking eyes of his companion were mutely tempting him to evil; at times he almost wondered whether the dark lay brother were not the devil himself.

The young man’s talk was rambling and inconsequent, a mere rattle of autobiography, punctuated with laughter. He had much to say of his college days; his penury; his struggles; his shabby makeshifts; the pranks he and his companions had played on the professors. He roared as he recalled them, and hammered the table with his fist. He spoke of his mother and her hard life; the ne’er-do-well father; the brother that drank; the sister with the hip disease. And from that again to the price of native land, the way to secure good titles, the need, as he had been told, to buy the same property from a dozen conflicting owners. Then he broke out about the power of money, the unlimited power of money, the lawlessness of money in unprincipled hands; the way it could buy everything the world had to offer, social position, beautiful women, the entrée to great houses. With money, what could a man ask for in vain! In this world, he meant, of course--in this world. In the next, thank God, it would be different; the rich would pay through the nose then for their pleasures. But some of them perhaps would not repent it; the most would be as bad again, if only the chance were offered; the dogs would return to their vomit.

Father Studby listened to these confidences with amazement; they depressed and angered him unspeakably; they seemed to disclose in his companion a cynicism and a moral deficiency that he had not previously suspected. He felt, too, as he had never felt before, the full horror of that brutal civilisation, so merciless, so inexorable, its obliterating march whitened with the bones of thousands; everything with its price, even to the honour of shrinking women and the corpses of the dead. If you had no money the wheels rolled over you; if you had no money you sank and died. There was no one to help, no one to pity; all were scrambling horribly to save themselves on the shoulders of those below. What a contrast to the calm of that Samoan life, primitive, kindly, and religious, in which accursed money was unknown! He was led to declaim hotly on the high breeding and chivalry of these misjudged people, and protested that they had more to teach than to learn. Where, he demanded of the lay brother, could one find such hearts as these? where such brave men and compassionate women? where else a land with neither rich nor poor? Here, if one starved, all starved; here, if need be, the last banana was divided into a hundred pieces; here they would all take shame if a single child went hungry.

The old priest went on and on with his tale of Samoan virtue, of Samoan superiority. God had never made such a people; there was in them the seed that would regenerate the world. There was nothing in which they did not excel. He carried his reluctant hearer into the mazes of native poetry; he repeated hundreds of lines in his resounding voice, blowing out clouds of tobacco smoke between each stanza. Where, he asked, were the whites who could match such things as these; who could bring the tears to your eyes or convulse you with laughter at will? He would repeat that last verse, if his companion did not mind; it described how To, wandering on the sea-shore at dawn, met Tingalau returning from his fishing, and led on to twenty stanzas more of what To said to Tingalau, and Tingalau to To!

Michael lay back in his chair, scarce heeding the soft gibberish that to him meant nothing. He was living in a tumult of his own thoughts--thoughts in which Kanaka poetry had no part, though the priest himself was sometimes present, but whether as a friend or foe he could not yet determine; and while he wondered and conjectured the old man himself seemed to disappear in his own smoke, until nothing remained of him but a faint, passionate buzzing, like that of a bumblebee in a field.

The next day Michael was up and gone before daybreak, and the little service in the church proceeded for once without him. The father was vexed at such remissness, and tolled the bell with pious indignation. Was the young man no better than a heathen, thus to scamp God’s morning hour--to attend so grossly to the fleshly needs and let the soul go wanting? Depend upon it, he had not left without something to stay his stomach, though God’s claim on him might wait. The priest turned a cold face to his guest when the latter returned at dusk with the invariable pigeons in his hand. But Michael was too tired to notice these altered looks, nor did he seem concerned when at last his delinquency was pointed out to him in no uncertain words. His church, he answered, with mocking defiance, his church was in the woods, at the foot of a towering banyan, or in some dim recess beside a stream; he knelt when the impulse came to him, like some primitive monk wandering with God in the wilds. The priest received this explanation with a dubious silence; he was not at all satisfied with its truth, and yet scarcely knew what to reply, feeling himself helpless and outwitted. He was almost glad that the pigeons, still lying on the floor, gave him an obvious excuse to leave the room.

“The chief has done well to-day,” he said to Ngalo, his servant.

The boy laughed.

“Excellency,” he said, “the Helper does not shoot these pigeons. He buys them for sixpences from our people.”

“Impossible!” cried the old man. “Thou talkest like a delirious person.”

“Excellency,” said the boy, “saving thy presence, the Helper lies. Behold in this pigeon the truth of what I say. Does the chief use gravel in his gun, like a Samoan, to whom there is no lead?”

“Perhaps he does,” said the priest. “Such a thing had not occurred to me.”

“Perhaps he does _not_,” exclaimed Ngalo, meaningly. “On Tuesday he bought eight birds of my mother’s brother’s son; one was scented and had to be thrown away.”

“Ngalo,” cried the priest, with a sudden change of tone, “is there a woman in this hidden business? Is there gossip in the village?”

Ngalo shook his head.

“He is blameless of such an evil,” he said. “But the village talks continually, and the people ask, ‘What does the Helper in the bush?’”

Father Studby breathed a great sigh of relief.

“He walks about,” he explained, “this way and that, according to the command of the wise doctor in Nukualofa. The peace refreshes him and makes him well. I, too, in my youth, used to wander in the mountains and find consolation.”

Ngalo’s face showed that he had more to tell.

“The Helper does strange things,” he said. “He goes along, even as you say, through the village and the outlying plantations like an uncaring child, with no purpose in what it does. But when he reaches a certain _ifi_-tree on the land we call Lefoa, behold, all is changed. He stops, he looks about, he listens assiduously like a warrior on the outpost. Then he puts his gun in a hidden place, and with it his shot-bottle and his powder-bottle; then he girds up his dress to the knee, and runs into the bush with the swiftness of a dog. When he returns, late in the afternoon, it is with the same quickness until the tree is reached. There he takes breath, composes himself, and with slow steps returns seaward buying what pigeons he can on the road.”

“Well, and what else, Mr. Make-the-News?” demanded the father, as Ngalo hesitated.

“There are those in the village who know nothing,” he went on, “mere worthless heathen of no family, without consideration or land of their own, living meanly like slaves on the bounty of others, who say strenuously, with the persistency of barking dogs, that the Helper is under the spell of Saumaiafe!”

The priest stamped his foot with anger. Was that superstition never to die? Saumaiafe, the fabled witch, who, in the guise of a beautiful woman, lured men to ruin in the bush! Saumaiafe, that intolerable myth with which he had been combating for more than eighteen years! Saumaiafe!

“Thou art a fool!” he cried. “You are all fools. Sometimes I feel as though I had spent my life in vain. I, too, was a fool to ever think you teachable.”

“Your Excellency is right,” said Ngalo. “It is an unendurable village altogether, and ignorant beyond anything before conceived. Indeed, so weak are men’s hearts in this matter of Saumaiafe and the Helper that none now go into the bush, even those who are distressed for bamboo, or for red clay with which to beautify their hair.”

The priest turned away without a word. He was almost inclined to laugh as he went back to the other room, and to tell the lay brother the commotion his actions had excited. But the sight of Michael’s face somehow daunted him; those suspicious, bloodshot eyes suggested dangers that he was at a loss to name. He remembered the hiding of the gun; the strange deceit about the pigeons; he seemed to see the young man kilting up his cassock and plunging furtively into the dark forest. What did it all mean? he asked himself again and again. Mercy of God, what did it mean?