White Shadows in the South Seas Part 34

Now, my acquaintance is a man of university education, a quoter of Haeckel and Darwin, with "survival of the fittest" as his guiding motto since his Jena days. Says he, quoting a Scotchman:

"Tone it down as you will, the fact remains that Darwinism regards animals as going up-stairs, in a struggle for individual ends, often on the corpses of their fellows, often by a blood-and-iron compet.i.tion, often by a strange mixture of blood and cunning, in which each looks out for himself and extinction besets the hindmost."

Further says my stern acquaintance, specially when in his cups:

"The whole system of life-development is that of the lower providing food for the higher in ever-expanding circles of organic existence, from protozoea to steers, from the black African to the educated and employing man. We build on the ribs of the steers, and on the backs of the lower grade of human."

Scientific books have taken the place of the Bible as a quotation-treasury of proof for whatever their reader most desires to prove. Now I am no scientist and take, indeed, only the casual interest of the average man in the facts and theories of science.

But it appears to me that in his theory of the survival of the fittest my acquaintance curiously overlooks the question of man's own survival as a species.

If we are to base our actions upon this cold-blooded and inhuman view of the universe, let us consider that universe as in fact inhuman, and having no concern for man except as a species of animal very possibly doomed to extinction, as many other species of animal have been doomed in the past, unless he proves his fitness to survive not as an individual, but as a species.

Now man is a gregarious animal; he lives in herds. The characteristic of the herd is that within it the law of survival of the fittest almost ceases to operate. The value of a herd is that its members protect each other instead of preying upon each other.

Nor, in what we are pleased to call the animal kingdom, do herds of the same species prey upon each other. They rather unite for the protection of their weaker members.

So far as I am informed, mankind is the only herd of which this is not true. Cattle and horses unite in protecting the young and feeble; sheep huddle together against cold and wolves; bees and ants work only for the welfare of the swarm, which is the welfare of all. This, we are told, is the reason these forms of life have survived. But s.h.i.+p officers beat sailors because sailors have no firearms and fear charges of mutiny. Policemen club prisoners who are poorly dressed.

Employees make profits from the toil of children. Strong nations prey on weak peoples, and the white man kills the white man and the black and brown and yellow man in mine, plantation, and forest the world over.

He defends this murder of his own kind by the pat phrase "survival of the fittest." But man is not a solitary animal, he is a herd animal, and within the herd nature's definition of fitness does not apply. The herd is a refuge against the law of tooth and fang.

Importing within the herd his own interpretation of that law, man is destroying the strength of his shelter. By so much as one man preys upon or debases another man, he weakens the strength of the man-herd.

And for man it is the herd, not the individual, that must meet that stern law of "the survival of the fittest" on the vast impersonal arena of the universe.

"Bully 'Ayes was the man to make the Kanakas work!" said Lying Bill Pincher. "I used to be on Penryn Island and that was 'is old 'ang-out.

'Ayes was a pleasant man to meet. 'E was 'orspitable as a 'ungry shark to a swimming missionary. Bald he was as a bloomin' crab, stout and smiling.

"'E 'ad two white wives a-setting in his cabin on the schooner, and they called it the parlor. Smart wimmen they was, and saved 'is life for 'im more 'n once. 'E 'd get a couple of chiefs on board by deceiving 'em with rum, and hold 'em until 'is bloomin' schooner was chock-a-block with copra. The 'ole island would be working itself to death to free the chiefs. Then when 'e 'ad got the copra, 'e 'd steal a 'undred or two Kanakas and sell 'em in South America.

"'E was smart, and yet 'e got 'is'n. 'Is mate seen him coming over the side with blood in his eye, and batted 'im on 'is conch as 'is leg swung over the schooner's bul'ark. 'Ayes dropped with 'is knife between 'is teeth and 'is pistols in both 'ands.

"'E'd murdered 'undreds of white and brown and black men, and 'e was smart, and 'e got away with it. But 'e made the mistake of not having made a friend of 'is right 'and man."

CHAPTER XXIX

The white man who danced in Oomoa Valley; a wild-boar hunt in the hills; the feast of the triumphant hunters and a dance in honor of Grelet.

Grelet had gone in a whale-boat to Oia, a dozen miles away, to collect copra, and I was left with an empty day to fill as I chose.

The house, the garden, and the unexplored recesses of Oomoa Valley were mine, with whatever they might afford of entertainment or adventure. Every new day, wherever spent, is an adventure, but when to the enigmatic morning is added the zest of a strange place, it must be a dull man who does not thrill to it.

I began the day by bathing in the river with the year-old Tamaiti, Grelet's child. Her mother was Hinatiaiani, a laughing, beautiful girl of sixteen years, and the two were cared for by Pae, a woman of forty, ugly and childless. Hinatiaiani was her adopted daughter, and Pae had been sorely angered when Grelet, whose companion she had been for eighteen years, took the girl. But with the birth of Tamaiti, Pae became reconciled, and looked after the welfare of the infant more than the volatile young mother.

Tamaiti had never had a garment upon her st.u.r.dy small body, and looked a plump cherub as she played about the veranda, crawling in the puddles when the rain drove across the floor.

"The infant has never been sick," Grelet had said. "One afternoon I was starting for the river to bathe, when that girl was making herself a bed of cocoanut-leaves under the house. She said she expected the baby, as, when she climbed a cocoanut-tree a moment earlier, she had felt a movement. She would not lie in a bed, but, like her mother before her, must make her a nest of cocoanut-leaves.

When I returned from my bath, Tamaiti was born. She was chopping wood next day--the mother, I mean."

Though scarcely a twelve-month old, the baby swam like a frog in the clear water of the river, gurgling at intervals sc.r.a.ps of what must have been Marquesan baby-talk, unintelligible to me, but showing plainly her enjoyment. Something of European caution, however, still remained with me and, perhaps unnecessarily, I picked up the dripping little body and carried her up the garden path to the house when I returned for breakfast. Pae received her with no concern, and gave her a piece of cocoanut to suck. I saw the infant, clutching it in one hand, toddling and stumbling river-ward again when after breakfast I set out for a walk up Oomoa Valley.

Oomoa was far wilder than Atuona, more lonely, with hundreds of vacant _paepaes_. Miles of land, once cultivated, had been taken again by the jungle, as estates lapsed to nature after thousands of years of man. Still, even far from the houses, delicate trees had preserved themselves in some mysterious way, and oranges and limes offered themselves to me in the thickets.

The river that emptied into the bay below Grelet's plantation flowed down the valley from the heights, and beside it ran the trail, a road for half a mile, then a track growing fainter with every mile, hardly distinguishable from the tangle of trees and bushes on either side. Here and there I saw a native house built of bamboo and matting, very simple shelters with an open s.p.a.ce for a doorway, but wholesome, clean, and, to me, beautiful. I met no one, and most of the huts were on the other side of the river, but from one nearer the track a voice called to me, "_Kaoha! Manihii, a tata mai!_ Greeting, stranger, come to us!"

The hut, which, by measurement, was ten feet by six, held six women and girls, all lying at ease on piles of mats. It was a rendezvous of gossips, a place for siestas and scandal. One had seen and hailed me, and when I came to their _paepae_, they all filed out and surrounded me, gently and politely, but curiously. Obviously they had seen few whites.

The six were from thirteen to twenty years of age, four of them strikingly beautiful, with the grace of wild animals and the bright, soft eyes of children. Smiling and eager to be better acquainted with me, they examined my puttees of spiral wool, my pongee s.h.i.+rt, and khaki riding-breeches, the heavy seams of which they felt and discussed. They discovered a tiny rip, and the eldest insisted that I take off the breeches while she sewed it.

As this was my one chance to prevent the rip growing into a gulf that would ultimately swallow the trousers, I permitted the st.i.tch in time, and having nothing in my pockets for reward, I danced a jig.

I cannot dance a step or sing a note correctly, but in this archipelago I had won inter-island fame as a dancer of strange and amusing measures, and a singer of the queer songs of the whites.

Recalling the cake-walks, sand-sifting, pigeon-winging, and Juba-patting of the south, the sailor's hornpipe, the sword-dance of the Scotch, and the metropolitan version of the tango, I did my best, while the thrilled air of Oomoa Valley echoed these words, yelled to my fullest lung capacity:

"There was an old soldier and he had a wooden leg, And he had no tobacco, so tobacco did he beg.

Said the soldier to the sailor, 'Will you give me a chew?'

Said the sailor to the soldier, 'I'll be d.a.m.ned if I do!

Keep your mind on your number and your finger on your rocks, And you'll always have tobacco in your old tobacco box.'"

Dancing and singing thus on the flat stones of the _paepae_ of the six Fatu-hiva ladies, I gave back a thousand-fold their aid to my disordered trousers. They laughed till they fell back on the rocks, they lifted the ends of their _pareus_ to wipe their eyes, and they demanded an encore, which I obligingly gave them in a song I had kept in mind since boyhood. It was about a young man who took his girl to a fancy ball, and afterward to a restaurant, and though he had but fifty cents and she said she was not hungry, she ate the menu from raw oysters to pousse-cafe, and turned it over for more.

It went with a Kerry jig that my grandfather used to do, and if grandfather, with his rare ability, ever drew more uproarious applause than I, it must have been a red-letter day for him, even in Ireland. My hearers screamed in an agony of delight, and others dwelling far away, or pa.s.sing laden with breadfruit and bananas, gathered while I chortled and leaped, and made the mountain-side ring with Marquesan bravos.

With difficulty I made my escape, but my success pursued me.

"_Menike haka!_" came the cry from each house I pa.s.sed, for the news had been called over the distance, and to the farthest reaches of the valley it was known that an American, the American who had come on the _Roberta_, with a box that wrote, was dancing along the route.

As in the old days of war or other crisis, the cry had been raised, and was echoed from all directions, and from hut to cocoanut-tree to crag the call was heard, growing fainter and more feeble, dying gradually from point to point, echoing farther and yet farther in the distance. This was the ancient telegraph-system of the islanders, by which an item of information sped in a moment to the most remote edges of the valley. Unwittingly, in my grat.i.tude, I had raised it, and now I pursued my way in the glare of a pitiless publicity.

I was met almost immediately by a score of men and women who had left the gathering of fruit or the duties of the household to greet me. Fafo, the leader, besought me earnestly to accompany them to a neighboring _paepae_ and dance for them.

He had the finest eyes I have ever seen in a man's head, dark brown, almond-shaped, large and l.u.s.trous, wells of melancholy. There was something exquisite about the young man, his lemon-colored skin, his delicate hands and feet, his slender, though strong, body, and his regular, brilliant teeth. Some Spanish don had bred him, or some moody Italian with music in his soul, for he was a Latin in face and figure. His eyes had that wistfulness as they sought mine which the Tahitians have put well in one of their picture-words, _ano-ano'uri_, "the yearning, sorrowful gaze of a dog watching his master at dinner."

A belated shrinking from renown, however, made me reject his pleas, and perceiving a pool near at hand, I softened refusal by a suggestion that we bathe. The pool, I learned, was famous in the valley, for one could swim forty feet in it, and on the other side the hill rose straight, with banana-trees overhanging the water forty feet above. We climbed this rocky face and dived into the water again and again, rejoicing in its coolness and in that sheer pagan delight of the dive, when in the air man becomes all animal, freed from every restraint and denied every safeguard save the strength of his own muscle and nerve.

We saw at last, on the edge of the bank, one of Grelet's dogs, whining for attention. He was badly wounded in two places, blood dripped on the rocks from open cuts three inches long, and one paw hung helpless, while with eager cries and beseeching looks he urged us to avenge him in his private feud with a boar. a.s.sured of our interest, he stayed not to be comforted or cured, but hobbled eagerly up the trail, begging us with whines to accompany him.

Five men and several other dogs followed the wounded hound, and I went with them. The Marquesans had war-clubs and long knives like undersized machetes. Every Islander carries such a knife for cutting underbrush or cocoanut-stems, and usually it is his only tool for building native houses, so that he becomes very expert with it, as the Filipino with his bolo or the Cuban with his machete.

For several hours we climbed the slopes, until we came upon a narrow trail cut in the side of a cliff, a path perhaps two feet wide, with sheer wall of rock above and abrupt precipice below. On this the chief hunter stationed himself and two men while the others scouted below. This leader was a man of sixty, tattooed from toes to scalp on one side only, so that he was queerly parti-colored, and capping this odd figure, he wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. He motioned to me to take my place in a niche of the cliff, where I could stand and sweep the trail with my eyes, secure from a.s.sault.

He had given directions to the others and intended to provide for me a rare sight, and to gain for himself a trifle of the glory that had been his as a young man in wars against neighboring valleys.

For an hour we waited and smoked, hearing from time to time the clamor of men and dogs in the thickets below. The common way of hunting boars, said the chief, was to chase them through the woods and kill them by throwing tomahawks at them. This method allows the hunter to have a tree always within a short run, and about these trees he dodges when pursued, or if too closely pressed, climbs one.

It is dangerous sport, as only a cool and experienced man can drive a knife into a vital part of a boar in full career, and no wound in non-vital parts will cause the desperate beast even to falter.

Gradually the cries of the men and the barking of the dogs grew nearer, and suddenly, bursting from the bushes some distance down the trail, we saw ten bristling hogs. They had been driven upward until they reached the artificial shelf, and behind them hounds and hunters cut off all escape.

"_Apau! Aia oe a!_" shouted the rear-guard as the boars took the trail. "Lo! Prepare to strike!"

The three slayers gripped their clubs and braced their feet. I was above the chief, who was the last of the trio. Where he planted his feet, the path was most narrow, so that two could not pa.s.s. His knife was in his _pareu_, which, to leave his legs unhampered, he had rolled and tucked in until it was no more than a G-string. His muscles were like the cordage of the _faufee_--the vine that strangles--and his chest like a great buckler, half blue and half copper.