a cockney and his fijian bride—nature’s lady—south sea dress fashions—idol worship

after the exciting experience which i related to you in the last chapter, when i think i was within an ace of being eaten by that cannibal tribe, i started off cruising with “castle” and my friend the danish poet. we made a happy trio and many were the subsequent adventures which we had together. hornecastle hired a sloop and made a good bit of cash at times by trading around the islands, and i was delighted to go off with him. it took us several days to reach the fiji islands. i shall never forget the times we had together and the strange people we came in contact with. the fijians struck me as a very different type of people from the samoans, who are much more intellectual-looking, and when hornecastle and the poet and i went ashore we soon found plenty to interest us. there were plenty of whites there, half-castes and indians who worked on the plantations.

i chummed in with an australian fellow and we went up towards the mountains and saw the fijians in their homesteads. they were neat little thatched homes; some of them shaped something like a haystack as seen in english fields. i and my friend, who 104could speak a bit of their language, went inside one or two of these and watched them squatting on their haunches at dinner eating steaming stuff out of earthen bowls, using their fingers as knives and forks. i made friendly signs to a fijian mother and her eyes quickly brightened up as i took her baby in my arms and examined its tiny wild face, its jewel-like eyes twinkling with fright. i never saw such pretty babies anywhere in the world as the mites of the south seas. their little plump bodies are as soft as velvet and the expression on the face like that of a baby kitten, and the mothers are as proud as punch when you admire and kiss them, as i have often done, but you have to be careful that you kiss them all—i mean the babies—because mothers are just as jealous in the south seas as in the isles of the english seas. and so after i had committed myself and held up that little fijian kid, i went from one mother to the other and did likewise to their offspring, and those dark naked mothers (for they were only dressed in a loin-cloth) all admired me and even the eyes of the men looked pleased as they offered me food, and the native youths clambered around us as we crept out of the door, and tried to steal the buttons off our clothes. they are all terrible thieves and the thieving instinct is so strong in all of the islanders of the pacific that they only place half the value on goods which are given them and jealously guard and over-estimate all that they steal.

i shall always remember vividly that ramble in 105the mountains of fiji, because we came across a white man who had married a native woman. i suppose the marriage was something after the wild bird marriage act, anyway there he was sitting by his dusky beauty on the slopes that rolled seaward, quite as proud as any english father of his two tiny half-caste brats. his wife, dressed only in an old red flannel skirt, smoked a cigarette by the hut door, and every now and again gave the little whitish beggars as they romped and quarrelled with each other a terrible spank. i never saw children turn head over heels as those two nippers did; over and over they went down the slope like two big brown balls, uncurled themselves and came racing up to us again and then off once more as i stood sweltering under the tropic sun fanning myself with a large palm leaf speaking to their proud father. he was a cockney from mile end! you can imagine my astonishment when he asked all sorts of questions about my own birthplace and sighed as he said, “the dear old smoke,” meaning london town. from the little that he let out i could see that he had previously been to sea as a coal trimmer on a tramp steamer. he was a man of about thirty-eight to forty years of age, but looked older through growing a scrubby beard, possibly to disguise himself from the english police! he seemed happy enough sitting there under his big umbrella hat, with white pants to his waist, and beyond those two articles of dress quite bare and cool.

his wife could speak english very well indeed and 106i must say i admired her husband’s taste, for though she was the descendant of south sea savages, cannibals, she would have put nearly all the mile end women of his native land into the shade, and the west end ones too! she had a fine head for a woman, a voluptuous soft curved body, earnest dark eyes, darkish high-bunched hair, and a freedom of manner and modest exposure of the upper part of her body and lower limbs which was very fascinating. she would have created an enormous sensation could she have been transported just as she was to piccadilly or the strand. i am quite sure that the mile end cockney would have been envied and would have had to keep his weather-eye open too, as the christians of london town came into contact with the innocence of the heathen south seas.

“you come england?” she said, as i spoke to her husband. “yes,” i said, “same country,” and she smiled with approval that such as i should have had the honour of hailing from the same country as her children’s father, and going into the hut brought my chum and me both a drink. i don’t know what it was, but english beer tastes like poison compared to it. i have been to many afternoon teas since that time, but never have i had a sweeter hostess or seen softer eyes, and all those things that make nature’s lady. i have heard a lot about “nature’s gentleman,” but i tell you this, nature’s lady is nicer to meet and as rare, and i’ve found her just as she was turned out of the garden 107of eden and just as beautiful and innocent, as she sat on that little stump, bare as at her birth, excepting for her lava-lava, with her pretty one-month-old baby’s tiny mouth toiling away at her breast for all it was worth. as the sunset faded out seaward the cockney sailor, his “savage” wife, my chum and i sang all together, to the sailor’s accordion, “the old rustic bridge by the mill,” also “white wings they never grow weary,” and i can never hear those songs now but i see that scene again, the half-dressed sailor, my freckled lanky australian chum, the fijian beauty, singing at the top of her voice on the pacific slope by the island hut.

we only stayed at that island two days and then sailed off to lakemba and other isles of the same group. we carried hornecastle on board and dropped him in his bunk when we left suva. i do not know what he had been drinking, but it made him pretty bad. we set the jibs and big mutton sail and the trade-wind took us along at a splendid pace. i was the second in command, and though she was a rotten old tub i was the proudest officer on the high seas! hornecastle kept me awake that night. the poet and i got a bit worried; we thought he’d got a touch of the d.t.’s, and from what i could gather by his delirious mutterings he’d actually got married during that short stay and was frightened out of his life of being pursued by his irate bride!

next day he was on his legs again and looked better than ever. i tried to pump him and find out 108what he had done to get so drunk and look so worried, but he would not budge an inch, and to all my innocent queries only told me to mind my own business and look after the wind!

i cannot for the life of me tell you the correct name of the isle we next called at; they all had native names and i never could understand half of them. i think it was called mulooka; anyway it was a fine place and well wooded. i shall never forget the beautiful sight of the forest-clad country and the intense loneliness of the wooded depths away from the tracks. i stood in the wood alone and gazed up at the branches overhead. they were covered with big breathing blossoms that had beaks on them; they were big fat parrot-birds chuckling away to themselves as the trade-wind swept across, blew the top branches aside and revealed the deep blue skies. i turned round and looked west; there through the trees far away stretched the dark blue crinkling pacific, dotted here and there with native canoes, paddled along swiftly from shore to shore. on the beach far below were groups of dark men and half-castes by our little sloop.

i must tell you of the fashions of those times. some of the chiefs wore a dirty white collar only, and a waistbelt wherein was stuck an old-fashioned revolver and rusty knife. another stood on the shore as proud as possible attired in a waistcoat. men and women seemed to vie with one another at making themselves look ridiculous and outrageous too. of course, most people were amused 109by them. i shall never forget how the dane laughed; he was a real good fellow that poet. i laughed too, but not like him; i was getting a bit used to sights of that kind. as for hornecastle he simply looked on and yawned. finding that he was staying the night and did not intend leaving till late the next day, i made up my mind to have a look round and go into the interior, so off i went alone. i am constituted that way and am never so happy as when i am completely alone with no one to ply me with questions or tell me their experiences while i am keenly interested in my own at that precise moment.

about a mile from the shore i came across a village of native homesteads built on a beautiful spot shaped out and shaded by the hand of instinct. there they stood dotting the landscape by the cooling shade of palms, yams, orange and other trees of luxuriant tropic foliage. in the cleared spaces by those huts squatted the tribes of powerful mothers and men, all of them dressed in no clothes excepting their hair, which sprouted upwards on the top of their heads and shone in the sunlight. as i emerged from the forest trees into full view the tiny children stopped from their gambolling, stared at me for a moment and then all raced off towards the village homesteads as though for dear life. they ran so fast that i could only see their legs twinkling in the sun-gleam. then uprose the wild mothers and stalwart forest men, and between their bare legs, 110with little wistful demon-like faces, those frightened children peeped at me as i walked across the scrub and waved my hand, smiling as i approached them.

i found them a very hospitable people; they gave me food and drink and i well repaid those wild mothers for their kind thoughtfulness as i stroked the small frizzing heads of their babes and raced the little naked beggars, boys and girls, across the track and gave the winners buttons for prizes. “moora, moora,” they shouted as i gave the last button away, and then i held on to myself tightly as they scrambled around me and tried to steal the buttons off my clothes! “no, no,” i shouted to one persevering little imp, and his mother, seeing my annoyance, picked up a large plank and struck him over the head with a terrible crash! by jove, i was astonished when she did that, but the poor little devil simply looked a bit crestfallen, looked up to me for sympathy, instead of his mother, and i rubbed the top of his head and made him happy. i found out afterwards that the top of their heads is the safest place to hit, the south sea island skull being very thick indeed.

i don’t know how those natives lived or what employment they followed. i suppose some of them worked at copra gathering or some other work which was useful to the white traders; anyway they all looked fat and well and their native villages like little bits of paradise compared with european cities. 111away further in the interior were living (so i heard) tribes that still encouraged the cannibalistic tendency. i suppose they were still under the influence of the older men and women who had memories in their heads of the olden days when they dined off their enemies and discovered the good points of old rivals at the festive board. i never went off into the interior to see if it was so; my past experience was quite sufficient for me and i did not intend to take any more risks.

before i leave that native village i must tell you of their idol worship. before sunset i went back to the beach, and loitering about got in with some sailors, and together that night we went over the hills and down into the village and strolled among the natives, and going behind one of the larger huts there stood before us monstrous effigies with hideous faces and eyes bulging out like unburst soap-bubbles, and before them on little mats knelt the elder native men bowing and chanting prayers at the top of their voices, throwing their long arms up over their heads all the time. they were earnest enough in those fetish rites, and as we stood there, white-faced men of the western world, watching, they took not the slightest notice of us, so deeply were they engrossed in their pleadings to those dirty wooden deaf idols. of course i could not understand a word they were saying, but the note of the chant had grief in it and sounded to me like “winga-wonga, wonga-winga,” repeated over and over again to a minor cadence 112that fell and rose as their bodies and arms moved up and down.

my comrades and i were somehow impressed by that strange sight of religious old-world grief which sounded the same note and showed the same earnestness as the creed expression of the modern civilised world. the missionaries were, and are, of course, dead against the idol worship, and so as time goes on and the methods of christianity get hold of the people the idols rot away or are touched up and hidden in the secret depths of the forest, safe from the destroying hands of those who have gone over to the new creed. often the wanderer among the primeval woods will come across the relics of those gods standing in some secluded gully under the shade of banyan-trees and rotting tropic trunks, covered with wild vines, vividly coloured with gorgeous flowers, still upright, with perhaps one eye missing and the face thus obliterated by decaying rot made more hideous than ever. yet some indefinable awe still clings to them as they stand there deserted by the poor heathen children who once appealed to them with their whole hearts, sorrowing over “the giant agony of the world,” now long dead in their forest graves.

i have told you all this because i once saw it, just as i have attempted to describe it to you, and as i stood gazing, quite alone, i looked up over the rotting, eyeless head and saw a branch with about twenty human skulls hanging in a row. the tropic rains had washed them quite white and 113as they swayed and clinked one against the other as the wind swept mournfully through the trees i became nervous and made off from the spot as quickly as i could. i am very fond of music, but the funereal notes of those tinkling skulls did not appeal to me and make me brave.