The Pacific Triangle Part 5

The motive is not always one of vanity. Generally, at the sound of the shutter, a hand shoots out in antic.i.p.ation 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 a.s.suring 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 j.a.pan, 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 cooperation and mutual aid could be found. He had no white a.s.sistant, but every Fijian who could find room on the launch const.i.tuted himself a longsh.o.r.eman. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 inst.i.tutions. At Davuilevu (the Great Conch-Sh.e.l.l) 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ces, gave the little village all the faults of a tenement district. Racial clannishness seems to require even closer touch where s.p.a.ce 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, a.s.sisted 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 att.i.tude 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 st.u.r.dy black men in the center of the grounds where stood the little church.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CORNER OF SUVA, FIJI The unexpected happened--the cab moved]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FOOD FOR A DAY'S GOSSIP]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT My Fijian guides]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HINDU PATRIARCH On board the launch going up the Rewa River, with shy Fijians all about]

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 coa.r.s.e 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 rehea.r.s.ed 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 rea.s.suring 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 embarra.s.sed, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INSTRUCTOR OF THE FIJIAN CONSTABULARY At Suva]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SCOWL INDICATES A COMPLEX For he is not quite certain that the missionaries are right about that club not being a G.o.d]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A FIJIAN MAIN STREET The corrugated iron-roofed shack is the one we ate our lunch in]

[Ill.u.s.tration: LITTLE FIJIANS The only things some of these had on were sores on the tops of their heads]

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 s.h.a.ggy 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 pa.s.sed round in a well-sc.r.a.ped cocoanut-sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed 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.