We entered by the north passage (Sunday, September 1st), dodging
among shoals.  It was a day of fierce equatorial sunshine; but the
breeze was strong and chill; and the mate, who conned the schooner
from the cross-trees, returned shivering to the deck.  The lagoon
was thick with many-tinted wavelets; a continuous roaring of the
outer sea overhung the anchorage; and the long, hollow crescent of
palm ruffled and sparkled in the wind.  Opposite our berth the
beach was seen to be surmounted for some distance by a terrace of
white coral seven or eight feet high and crowned in turn by the
scattered and incongruous buildings of the palace.  The village
adjoins on the south, a cluster of high-roofed maniap's.  And
village and palace seemed deserted.

We were scarce yet moored, however, before distant and busy figures
appeared upon the beach, a boat was launched, and a crew pulled out
to us bringing the king's ladder.  Tembinok' had once an accident;
has feared ever since to entrust his person to the rotten chandlery
of South Sea traders; and devised in consequence a frame of wood,
which is brought on board a ship as soon as she appears, and
remains lashed to her side until she leave.  The boat's crew,
having applied this engine, returned at once to shore.  They might
not come on board; neither might we land, or not without danger of
offence; the king giving pratique in person.  An interval followed,
during which dinner was delayed for the great man--the prelude of
the ladder, giving us some notion of his weighty body and sensible,
ingenious character, had highly whetted our curiosity; and it was
with something like excitement that we saw the beach and terrace
suddenly blacken with attendant vassals, the king and party embark,
the boat (a man-of-war gig) come flying towards us dead before the
wind, and the royal coxswain lay us cleverly aboard, mount the
ladder with a jealous diffidence, and descend heavily on deck.

Not long ago he was overgrown with fat, obscured to view, and a
burthen to himself.  Captains visiting the island advised him to
walk; and though it broke the habits of a life and the traditions
of his rank, he practised the remedy with benefit.  His corpulence
is now portable; you would call him lusty rather than fat; but his
gait is still dull, stumbling, and elephantine.  He neither stops
nor hastens, but goes about his business with an implacable
deliberation.  We could never see him and not be struck with his
extraordinary natural means for the theatre:  a beaked profile like
Dante's in the mask, a mane of long black hair, the eye brilliant,
imperious, and inquiring:  for certain parts, and to one who could
have used it, the face was a fortune.  His voice matched it well,
being shrill, powerful, and uncanny, with a note like a sea-bird's.
Where there are no fashions, none to set them, few to follow them
if they were set, and none to criticise, he dresses--as Sir Charles
Grandison lived--'to his own heart.'  Now he wears a woman's frock,
now a naval uniform; now (and more usually) figures in a masquerade
costume of his own design:  trousers and a singular jacket with
shirt tails, the cut and fit wonderful for island workmanship, the
material always handsome, sometimes green velvet, sometimes
cardinal red silk.  This masquerade becomes him admirably.  In the
woman's frock he looks ominous and weird beyond belief.  I see him
now come pacing towards me in the cruel sun, solitary, a figure out
of Hoffmann.

A visit on board ship, such as that at which we now assisted, makes
a chief part and by far the chief diversion of the life of
Tembinok'.  He is not only the sole ruler, he is the sole merchant
of his triple kingdom, Apemama, Aranuka, and Kuria, well-planted
islands.  The taro goes to the chiefs, who divide as they please
among their immediate adherents; but certain fish, turtles--which
abound in Kuria,--and the whole produce of the coco-palm, belong
exclusively to Tembinok'.  'A' cobra berong me,' observed his
majesty with a wave of his hand; and he counts and sells it by the
houseful.  'You got copra, king?' I have heard a trader ask.  'I
got two, three outches,' his majesty replied:  'I think three.'
Hence the commercial importance of Apemama, the trade of three
islands being centred there in a single hand; hence it is that so
many whites have tried in vain to gain or to preserve a footing;
hence ships are adorned, cooks have special orders, and captains
array themselves in smiles, to greet the king.  If he be pleased
with his welcome and the fare he may pass days on board, and, every
day, and sometimes every hour, will be of profit to the ship.  He
oscillates between the cabin, where he is entertained with strange
meats, and the trade-room, where he enjoys the pleasures of
shopping on a scale to match his person.  A few obsequious
attendants squat by the house door, awaiting his least signal.  In
the boat, which has been suffered to drop astern, one or two of his
wives lie covered from the sun under mats, tossed by the short sea
of the lagoon, and enduring agonies of heat and tedium.  This
severity is now and then relaxed and the wives allowed on board.
Three or four were thus favoured on the day of our arrival:
substantial ladies airily attired in ridis.  Each had a share of
copra, her peculium, to dispose of for herself.  The display in the
trade-room--hats, ribbbons, dresses, scents, tins of salmon--the
pride of the eye and the lust of the flesh--tempted them in vain.
They had but the one idea--tobacco, the island currency, tantamount
to minted gold; returned to shore with it, burthened but rejoicing;
and late into the night, on the royal terrace, were to be seen
counting the sticks by lamplight in the open air.

The king is no such economist.  He is greedy of things new and
foreign.  House after house, chest after chest, in the palace
precinct, is already crammed with clocks, musical boxes, blue
spectacles, umbrellas, knitted waistcoats, bolts of stuff, tools,
rifles, fowling-pieces, medicines, European foods, sewing-machines,
and, what is more extraordinary, stoves:  all that ever caught his
eye, tickled his appetite, pleased him for its use, or puzzled him
with its apparent inutility.  And still his lust is unabated.  He
is possessed by the seven devils of the collector.  He hears a
thing spoken of, and a shadow comes on his face.  'I think I no got
him,' he will say; and the treasures he has seem worthless in
comparison.  If a ship be bound for Apemama, the merchant racks his
brain to hit upon some novelty.  This he leaves carelessly in the
main cabin or partly conceals in his own berth, so that the king
shall spy it for himself.  'How much you want?' inquires Tembinok',
passing and pointing.  'No, king; that too dear,' returns the
trader.  'I think I like him,' says the king.  This was a bowl of
gold-fish.  On another occasion it was scented soap.  'No, king;
that cost too much,' said the trader; 'too good for a Kanaka.'
'How much you got?  I take him all,' replied his majesty, and
became the lord of seventeen boxes at two dollars a cake.  Or
again, the merchant feigns the article is not for sale, is private
property, an heirloom or a gift; and the trick infallibly succeeds.
Thwart the king and you hold him.  His autocratic nature rears at
the affront of opposition.  He accepts it for a challenge; sets his
teeth like a hunter going at a fence; and with no mark of emotion,
scarce even of interest, stolidly piles up the price.  Thus, for
our sins, he took a fancy to my wife's dressing-bag, a thing
entirely useless to the man, and sadly battered by years of
service.  Early one forenoon he came to our house, sat down, and
abruptly offered to purchase it.  I told him I sold nothing, and
the bag at any rate was a present from a friend; but he was
acquainted with these pretexts from of old, and knew what they were
worth and how to meet them.  Adopting what I believe is called 'the
object method,' he drew out a bag of English gold, sovereigns and
half-sovereigns, and began to lay them one by one in silence on the
table; at each fresh piece reading our faces with a look.  In vain
I continued to protest I was no trader; he deigned not to reply.
There must have been twenty pounds on the table, he was still going
on, and irritation had begun to mingle with our embarrassment, when
a happy idea came to our delivery.  Since his majesty thought so
much of the bag, we said, we must beg him to accept it as a
present.  It was the most surprising turn in Tembinok's experience.
He perceived too late that his persistence was unmannerly; hung his
head a while in silence; then, lifting up a sheepish countenance,
'I 'shamed,' said the tyrant.  It was the first and the last time
we heard him own to a flaw in his behaviour.  Half an hour after he
sent us a camphor-wood chest worth only a few dollars--but then
heaven knows what Tembinok' had paid for it.

Cunning by nature, and versed for forty years in the government of
men, it must not be supposed that he is cheated blindly, or has
resigned himself without resistance to be the milch-cow of the
passing trader.  His efforts have been even heroic.  Like Nakaeia
of Makin, he has owned schooners.  More fortunate than Nakaeia, he
has found captains.  Ships of his have sailed as far as to the
colonies.  He has trafficked direct, in his own bottoms, with New
Zealand.  And even so, even there, the world-enveloping dishonesty
of the white man prevented him; his profit melted, his ship
returned in debt, the money for the insurance was embezzled, and
when the Coronet came to be lost, he was astonished to find he had
lost all.  At this he dropped his weapons; owned he might as
hopefully wrestle with the winds of heaven; and like an experienced
sheep, submitted his fleece thenceforward to the shearers.  He is
the last man in the world to waste anger on the incurable; accepts
it with cynical composure; asks no more in those he deals with than
a certain decency of moderation; drives as good a bargain as he
can; and when he considers he is more than usually swindled, writes
it in his memory against the merchant's name.  He once ran over to
me a list of captains and supercargoes with whom he had done
business, classing them under three heads:  'He cheat a litty'--'He
cheat plenty'--and 'I think he cheat too much.'  For the first two
classes he expressed perfect toleration; sometimes, but not always,
for the third.  I was present when a certain merchant was turned
about his business, and was the means (having a considerable
influence ever since the bag) of patching up the dispute.  Even on
the day of our arrival there was like to have been a hitch with
Captain Reid:  the ground of which is perhaps worth recital.  Among
goods exported specially for Tembinok' there is a beverage known
(and labelled) as Hennessy's brandy.  It is neither Hennessy, nor
even brandy; is about the colour of sherry, but is not sherry;
tastes of kirsch, and yet neither is it kirsch.  The king, at
least, has grown used to this amazing brand, and rather prides
himself upon the taste; and any substitution is a double offence,
being at once to cheat him and to cast a doubt upon his palate.  A
similar weakness is to be observed in all connoisseurs.  Now the
last case sold by the Equator was found to contain a different and
I would fondly fancy a superior distillation; and the conversation
opened very black for Captain Reid.  But Tembinok' is a moderate
man.  He was reminded and admitted that all men were liable to
error, even himself; accepted the principle that a fault handsomely
acknowledged should be condoned; and wound the matter up with this
proposal:  'Tuppoti I mi'take, you 'peakee me.  Tuppoti you
mi'take, I 'peakee you.  Mo' betta.'

After dinner and supper in the cabin, a glass or two of 'Hennetti'-
-the genuine article this time, with the kirsch bouquet,--and five
hours' lounging on the trade-room counter, royalty embarked for
home.  Three tacks grounded the boat before the palace; the wives
were carried ashore on the backs of vassals; Tembinok' stepped on a
railed platform like a steamer's gangway, and was borne shoulder
high through the shallows, up the beach, and by an inclined plane,
paved with pebbles, to the glaring terrace where he dwells.



CHAPTER II--THE KING OF APEMAMA:  FOUNDATION OF EQUATOR TOWN



Our first sight of Tembinok' was a matter of concern, almost alarm,
to my whole party.  We had a favour to seek; we must approach in
the proper courtly attitude of a suitor; and must either please him
or fail in the main purpose of our voyage.  It was our wish to land
and live in Apemama, and see more near at hand the odd character of
the man and the odd (or rather ancient) condition of his island.
In all other isles of the South Seas a white man may land with his
chest, and set up house for a lifetime, if he choose, and if he
have the money or the trade; no hindrance is conceivable.  But
Apemama is a close island, lying there in the sea with closed
doors; the king himself, like a vigilant officer, ready at the
wicket to scrutinise and reject intrenching visitors.  Hence the
attraction of our enterprise; not merely because it was a little
difficult, but because this social quarantine, a curiosity in
itself, has been the preservative of others.

Tembinok', like most tyrants, is a conservative; like many
conservatives, he eagerly welcomes new ideas, and, except in the
field of politics, leans to practical reform.  When the
missionaries came, professing a knowledge of the truth, he readily
received them; attended their worship, acquired the accomplishment
of public prayer, and made himself a student at their feet.  It is
thus--it is by the cultivation of similar passing chances--that he
has learned to read, to write, to cipher, and to speak his queer,
personal English, so different from ordinary 'Beach de Mar,' so
much more obscure, expressive, and condensed.  His education
attended to, he found time to become critical of the new inmates.
Like Nakaeia of Makin, he is an admirer of silence in the island;
broods over it like a great ear; has spies who report daily; and
had rather his subjects sang than talked.  The service, and in
particular the sermon, were thus sure to become offences:  'Here,
in my island, _I_ 'peak,' he once observed to me.  'My chieps no
'peak--do what I talk.'  He looked at the missionary, and what did
he see?  'See Kanaka 'peak in a big outch!' he cried, with a strong
ring of sarcasm.  Yet he endured the subversive spectacle, and
might even have continued to endure it, had not a fresh point
arisen.  He looked again, to employ his own figure; and the Kanaka
was no longer speaking, he was doing worse--he was building a
copra-house.  The king was touched in his chief interests; revenue
and prerogative were threatened.  He considered besides (and some
think with him) that trade is incompatible with the missionary
claims.  'Tuppoti mitonary think "good man":  very good.  Tuppoti
he think "cobra":  no good.  I send him away ship.'  Such was his
abrupt history of the evangelist in Apemama.

Similar deportations are common:  'I send him away ship' is the
epitaph of not a few, his majesty paying the exile's fare to the
next place of call.  For instance, being passionately fond of
European food, he has several times added to his household a white
cook, and one after another these have been deported.  They, on
their side, swear they were not paid their wages; he, on his, that
they robbed and swindled him beyond endurance:  both perhaps
justly.  A more important case was that of an agent, despatched (as
I heard the story) by a firm of merchants to worm his way into the
king's good graces, become, if possible, premier, and handle the
copra in the interest of his employers.  He obtained authority to
land, practised his fascinations, was patiently listened to by
Tembinok', supposed himself on the highway to success; and behold!
when the next ship touched at Apemama, the would-be premier was
flung into a boat--had on board--his fare paid, and so good-bye.
But it is needless to multiply examples; the proof of the pudding
is in the eating.  When we came to Apemama, of so many white men
who have scrambled for a place in that rich market, one remained--a
silent, sober, solitary, niggardly recluse, of whom the king
remarks, 'I think he good; he no 'peak.'

I was warned at the outset we might very well fail in our design:
yet never dreamed of what proved to be the fact, that we should be
left four-and-twenty hours in suspense and come within an ace of
ultimate rejection.  Captain Reid had primed himself; no sooner was
the king on board, and the Hennetti question amicably settled, than
he proceeded to express my request and give an abstract of my
claims and virtues.  The gammon about Queen Victoria's son might do
for Butaritari; it was out of the question here; and I now figured
as 'one of the Old Men of England,' a person of deep knowledge,
come expressly to visit Tembinok's dominion, and eager to report
upon it to the no less eager Queen Victoria.  The king made no
shadow of an answer, and presently began upon a different subject.
We might have thought that he had not heard, or not understood;
only that we found ourselves the subject of a constant study.  As
we sat at meals, he took us in series and fixed upon each, for near
a minute at a time, the same hard and thoughtful stare.  As he thus
looked he seemed to forget himself, the subject and the company,
and to become absorbed in the process of his thought; the look was
wholly impersonal; I have seen the same in the eyes of portrait-
painters.  The counts upon which whites have been deported are
mainly four:  cheating Tembinok', meddling overmuch with copra,
which is the source of his wealth, and one of the sinews of his
power, 'PEAKING, and political intrigue.  I felt guiltless upon
all; but how to show it?  I would not have taken copra in a gift:
how to express that quality by my dinner-table bearing?  The rest
of the party shared my innocence and my embarrassment.  They shared
also in my mortification when after two whole meal-times and the
odd moments of an afternoon devoted to this reconnoitring,
Tembinok' took his leave in silence.  Next morning, the same
undisguised study, the same silence, was resumed; and the second
day had come to its maturity before I was informed abruptly that I
had stood the ordeal.  'I look your eye.  You good man.  You no
lie,' said the king:  a doubtful compliment to a writer of romance.
Later he explained he did not quite judge by the eye only, but the
mouth as well.  'Tuppoti I see man,' he explained.  'I no tavvy
good man, bad man.  I look eye, look mouth.  Then I tavvy.  Look
EYE, look mouth,' he repeated.  And indeed in our case the mouth
had the most to do with it, and it was by our talk that we gained
admission to the island; the king promising himself (and I believe
really amassing) a vast amount of useful knowledge ere we left.

The terms of our admission were as follows:  We were to choose a
site, and the king should there build us a town.  His people should
work for us, but the king only was to give them orders.  One of his
cooks should come daily to help mine, and to learn of him.  In case
our stores ran out, he would supply us, and be repaid on the return
of the Equator.  On the other hand, he was to come to meals with us
when so inclined; when he stayed at home, a dish was to be sent him
from our table; and I solemnly engaged to give his subjects no
liquor or money (both of which they are forbidden to possess) and
no tobacco, which they were to receive only from the royal hand.  I
think I remember to have protested against the stringency of this
last article; at least, it was relaxed, and when a man worked for
me I was allowed to give him a pipe of tobacco on the premises, but
none to take away.

The site of Equator City--we named our city for the schooner--was
soon chosen.  The immediate shores of the lagoon are windy and
blinding; Tembinok' himself is glad to grope blue-spectacled on his
terrace; and we fled the neighbourhood of the red conjunctiva, the
suppurating eyeball, and the beggar who pursues and beseeches the
passing foreigner for eye wash.  Behind the town the country is
diversified; here open, sandy, uneven, and dotted with dwarfish
palms; here cut up with taro trenches, deep and shallow, and,
according to the growth of the plants, presenting now the
appearance of a sandy tannery, now of an alleyed and green garden.
A path leads towards the sea, mounting abruptly to the main level
of the island--twenty or even thirty feet, although Findlay gives
five; and just hard by the top of the rise, where the coco-palms
begin to be well grown, we found a grove of pandanus, and a piece
of soil pleasantly covered with green underbush.  A well was not
far off under a rustic well-house; nearer still, in a sandy cup of
the land, a pond where we might wash our clothes.  The place was
out of the wind, out of the sun, and out of sight of the village.
It was shown to the king, and the town promised for the morrow.

The morrow came, Mr. Osbourne landed, found nothing done, and
carried his complaint to Tembinok'.  He heard it, rose, called for
a Winchester, stepped without the royal palisade, and fired two
shots in the air.  A shot in the air is the first Apemama warning;
it has the force of a proclamation in more loquacious countries;
and his majesty remarked agreeably that it would make his labourers
'mo' bright.'  In less than thirty minutes, accordingly, the men
had mustered, the work was begun, and we were told that we might
bring our baggage when we pleased.

It was two in the afternoon ere the first boat was beached, and the
long procession of chests and crates and sacks began to straggle
through the sandy desert towards Equator Town.  The grove of
pandanus was practically a thing of the past.  Fire surrounded and
smoke rose in the green underbush.  In a wide circuit the axes were
still crashing.  Those very advantages for which the place was
chosen, it had been the king's first idea to abolish; and in the
midst of this devastation there stood already a good-sized maniap'
and a small closed house.  A mat was spread near by for Tembinok';
here he sat superintending, in cardinal red, a pith helmet on his
head, a meerschaum pipe in his mouth, a wife stretched at his back
with custody of the matches and tobacco.  Twenty or thirty feet in
front of him the bulk of the workers squatted on the ground; some
of the bush here survived and in this the commons sat nearly to
their shoulders, and presented only an arc of brown faces, black
heads, and attentive eyes fixed on his majesty.  Long pauses
reigned, during which the subjects stared and the king smoked.
Then Tembinok' would raise his voice and speak shrilly and briefly.
There was never a response in words; but if the speech were
jesting, there came by way of answer discreet, obsequious laughter-
-such laughter as we hear in schoolrooms; and if it were practical,
the sudden uprising and departure of the squad.  Twice they so
disappeared, and returned with further elements of the city:  a
second house and a second maniap'.  It was singular to spy, far off
through the coco stems, the silent oncoming of the maniap', at
first (it seemed) swimming spontaneously in the air--but on a
nearer view betraying under the eaves many score of moving naked
legs.  In all the affair servile obedience was no less remarkable
than servile deliberation.  The gang had here mustered by the note
of a deadly weapon; the man who looked on was the unquestioned
master of their lives; and except for civility, they bestirred
themselves like so many American hotel clerks.  The spectator was
aware of an unobtrusive yet invincible inertia, at which the
skipper of a trading dandy might have torn his hair.

Yet the work was accomplished.  By dusk, when his majesty withdrew,
the town was founded and complete, a new and ruder Amphion having
called it from nothing with three cracks of a rifle.  And the next
morning the same conjurer obliged us with a further miracle:  a
mystic rampart fencing us, so that the path which ran by our doors
became suddenly impassable, the inhabitants who had business across
the isle must fetch a wide circuit, and we sat in the midst in a
transparent privacy, seeing, seen, but unapproachable, like bees in
a glass hive.  The outward and visible sign of this glamour was no
more than a few ragged coco-leaf garlands round the stems of the
outlying palms; but its significance reposed on the tremendous
sanction of the tapu and the guns of Tembinok'.

We made our first meal that night in the improvised city, where we
were to stay two months, and which--so soon as we had done with it-
-was to vanish in a day as it appeared, its elements returning
whence they came, the tapu raised, the traffic on the path resumed,
the sun and the moon peering in vain between the palm-trees for the
bygone work, the wind blowing over an empty site.  Yet the place,
which is now only an episode in some memories, seemed to have been
built, and to be destined to endure, for years.  It was a busy
hamlet.  One of the maniap's we made our dining-room, one the
kitchen.  The houses we reserved for sleeping.  They were on the
admirable Apemama plan:  out and away the best house in the South
Seas; standing some three feet above the ground on posts; the sides
of woven flaps, which can be raised to admit light and air, or
lowered to shut out the wind and the rain:  airy, healthy, clean,
and watertight.  We had a hen of a remarkable kind:  almost unique
in my experience, being a hen that occasionally laid eggs.  Not far
off, Mrs. Stevenson tended a garden of salad and shalots.  The
salad was devoured by the hen--which was her bane.  The shalots
were served out a leaf at a time, and welcomed and relished like
peaches.  Toddy and green cocoa-nuts were brought us daily.  We
once had a present of fish from the king, and once of a turtle.
Sometimes we shot so-called plover along on the shore, sometimes
wild chicken in the bush.  The rest of our diet was from tins.

Our occupations were very various.  While some of the party would
be away sketching, Mr. Osbourne and I hammered away at a novel.  We
read Gibbon and Carlyle aloud; we blew on flageolets, we strummed
on guitars; we took photographs by the light of the sun, the moon,
and flash-powder; sometimes we played cards.  Pot-hunting engaged a
part of our leisure.  I have myself passed afternoons in the
exciting but innocuous pursuit of winged animals with a revolver;
and it was fortunate there were better shots of the party, and
fortunate the king could lend us a more suitable weapon, in the
form of an excellent fowling-piece, or our spare diet had been
sparer still.

Night was the time to see our city, after the moon was up, after
the lamps were lighted, and so long as the fire sparkled in the
cook-house.  We suffered from a plague of flies and mosquitoes,
comparable to that of Egypt; our dinner-table (lent, like all our
furniture, by the king) must be enclosed in a tent of netting, our
citadel and refuge; and this became all luminous, and bulged and
beaconed under the eaves, like the globe of some monstrous lamp
under the margin of its shade.  Our cabins, the sides being propped
at a variety of inclinations, spelled out strange, angular patterns
of brightness.  In his roofed and open kitchen, Ah Fu was to be
seen by lamp and firelight, dabbling among pots.  Over all, there
fell in the season an extraordinary splendour of mellow moonshine.
The sand sparkled as with the dust of diamonds; the stars had
vanished.  At intervals, a dusky night-bird, slow and low flying,
passed in the colonnade of the tree stems and uttered a hoarse
croaking cry.



CHAPTER III--THE KING OF APEMAMA:  THE PALACE OF MANY WOMEN



The palace, or rather the ground which it includes, is several
acres in extent.  A terrace encloses it toward the lagoon; on the
side of the land, a palisade with several gates.  These are scarce
intended for defence; a man, if he were strong, might easily pluck
down the palisade; he need not be specially active to leap from the
beach upon the terrace.  There is no parade of guards, soldiers, or
weapons; the armoury is under lock and key; and the only sentinels
are certain inconspicuous old women lurking day and night before
the gates.  By day, these crones were often engaged in boiling
syrup or the like household occupation; by night, they lay ambushed
in the shadow or crouched along the palisade, filling the office of
eunuchs to this harem, sole guards upon a tyrant life.

Female wardens made a fit outpost for this palace of many women.
Of the number of the king's wives I have no guess; and but a loose
idea of their function.  He himself displayed embarrassment when
they were referred to as his wives, called them himself 'my
pamily,' and explained they were his 'cutcheons'--cousins.  We
distinguished four of the crowd:  the king's mother; his sister, a
grave, trenchant woman, with much of her brother's intelligence;
the queen proper, to whom (and to whom alone) my wife was formally
presented; and the favourite of the hour, a pretty, graceful girl,
who sat with the king daily, and once (when he shed tears) consoled
him with caresses.  I am assured that even with her his relations
are platonic.  In the background figured a multitude of ladies, the
lean, the plump, and the elephantine, some in sacque frocks, some
in the hairbreadth ridi; high-born and low, slave and mistress;
from the queen to the scullion, from the favourite to the scraggy
sentries at the palisade.  Not all of these of course are of 'my
pamily,'--many are mere attendants; yet a surprising number shared
the responsibility of the king's trust.  These were key-bearers,
treasurers, wardens of the armoury, the napery, and the stores.
Each knew and did her part to admiration.  Should anything be
required--a particular gun, perhaps, or a particular bolt of
stuff,--the right queen was summoned; she came bringing the right
chest, opened it in the king's presence, and displayed her charge
in perfect preservation--the gun cleaned and oiled, the goods duly
folded.  Without delay or haste, and with the minimum of speech,
the whole great establishment turned on wheels like a machine.
Nowhere have I seen order more complete and pervasive.  And yet I
was always reminded of Norse tales of trolls and ogres who kept
their hearts buried in the ground for the mere safety, and must
confide the secret to their wives.  For these weapons are the life
of Tembinok'.  He does not aim at popularity; but drives and braves
his subjects, with a simplicity of domination which it is
impossible not to admire, hard not to sympathise with.  Should one
out of so many prove faithless, should the armoury be secretly
unlocked, should the crones have dozed by the palisade and the
weapons find their way unseen into the village, revolution would be
nearly certain, death the most probable result, and the spirit of
the tyrant of Apemama flit to rejoin his predecessors of Mariki and
Tapituea.  Yet those whom he so trusts are all women, and all
rivals.

There is indeed a ministry and staff of males:  cook, steward,
carpenter, and supercargoes:  the hierarchy of a schooner.  The
spies, 'his majesty's daily papers,' as we called them, come every
morning to report, and go again.  The cook and steward are
concerned with the table only.  The supercargoes, whose business it
is to keep tally of the copra at three pounds a month and a
percentage, are rarely in the palace; and two at least are in the
other islands.  The carpenter, indeed, shrewd and jolly old Rubam--
query, Reuben?--promoted on my last visit to the greater dignity of
governor, is daily present, altering, extending, embellishing,
pursuing the endless series of the king's inventions; and his
majesty will sometimes pass an afternoon watching and talking with
Rubam at his work.  But the males are still outsiders; none seems
to be armed, none is entrusted with a key; by dusk they are all
usually departed from the palace; and the weight of the monarchy
and of the monarch's life reposes unshared on the women.

Here is a household unlike, indeed, to one of ours; more unlike
still to the Oriental harem:  that of an elderly childless man, his
days menaced, dwelling alone amid a bevy of women of all ages,
ranks, and relationships,--the mother, the sister, the cousin, the
legitimate wife, the concubine, the favourite, the eldest born, and
she of yesterday; he, in their midst, the only master, the only
male, the sole dispenser of honours, clothes, and luxuries, the
sole mark of multitudinous ambitions and desires.  I doubt if you
could find a man in Europe so bold as to attempt this piece of tact
and government.  And seemingly Tembinok' himself had trouble in the
beginning.  I hear of him shooting at a wife for some levity on
board a schooner.  Another, on some more serious offence, he slew
outright; he exposed her body in an open box, and (to make the
warning more memorable) suffered it to putrefy before the palace
gate.  Doubtless his growing years have come to his assistance; for
upon so large a scale it is more easy to play the father than the
husband.  And to-day, at least to the eye of a stranger, all seems
to go smoothly, and the wives to be proud of their trust, proud of
their rank, and proud of their cunning lord.

I conceived they made rather a hero of the man.  A popular master
in a girls' school might, perhaps, offer a figure of his
preponderating station.  But then the master does not eat, sleep,
live, and wash his dirty linen in the midst of his admirers; he
escapes, he has a room of his own, he leads a private life; if he
had nothing else, he has the holidays, and the more unhappy
Tembinok' is always on the stage and on the stretch.

In all my coming and going, I never heard him speak harshly or
express the least displeasure.  An extreme, rather heavy,
benignity--the benignity of one sure to be obeyed--marked his
demeanour; so that I was at times reminded of Samual Richardson in
his circle of admiring women.  The wives spoke up and seemed to
volunteer opinions, like our wives at home--or, say, like doting
but respectable aunts.  Altogether, I conclude that he rules his
seraglio much more by art than terror; and those who give a
different account (and who have none of them enjoyed my
opportunities of observation) perhaps failed to distinguish between
degrees of rank, between 'my pamily' and the hangers-on,
laundresses, and prostitutes.

A notable feature is the evening game of cards when lamps are set
forth upon the terrace, and 'I and my pamily' play for tobacco by
the hour.  It is highly characteristic of Tembinok' that he must
invent a game for himself; highly characteristic of his worshipping
household that they should swear by the absurd invention.  It is
founded on poker, played with the honours out of many packs, and
inconceivably dreary.  But I have a passion for all games, studied
it, and am supposed to be the only white who ever fairly grasped
its principle:  a fact for which the wives (with whom I was not
otherwise popular) admired me with acclamation.  It was impossible
to be deceived; this was a genuine feeling:  they were proud of
their private game, had been cut to the quick by the want of
interest shown in it by others, and expanded under the flattery of
my attention.  Tembinok' puts up a double stake, and receives in
return two hands to choose from:  a shallow artifice which the
wives (in all these years) have not yet fathomed.  He himself, when
talking with me privately, made not the least secret that he was
secure of winning; and it was thus he explained his recent
liberality on board the Equator.  He let the wives buy their own
tobacco, which pleased them at the moment.  He won it back at
cards, which made him once more, and without fresh expense, that
which he ought to be,--the sole fount of all indulgences.  And he
summed the matter up in that phrase with which he almost always
concludes any account of his policy:  'Mo' betta.'

The palace compound is laid with broken coral, excruciating to the
eyes and the bare feet, but exquisitely raked and weeded.  A score
or more of buildings lie in a sort of street along the palisade and
scattered on the margin of the terrace; dwelling-houses for the
wives and the attendants, storehouses for the king's curios and
treasures, spacious maniap's for feast or council, some on pillars
of wood, some on piers of masonry.  One was still in hand, a new
invention, the king's latest born:  a European frame-house built
for coolness inside a lofty maniap':  its roof planked like a
ship's deck to be a raised, shady, and yet private promenade.  It
was here the king spent hours with Rubam; here I would sometimes
join them; the place had a most singular appearance; and I must say
I was greatly taken with the fancy, and joined with relish in the
counsels of the architects.

Suppose we had business with his majesty by day:  we strolled over
the sand and by the dwarfish palms, exchanged a 'Konamaori' with
the crone on duty, and entered the compound.  The wide sheet of
coral glared before us deserted; all having stowed themselves in
dark canvas from the excess of room.  I have gone to and fro in
that labyrinth of a place, seeking the king; and the only breathing
creature I could find was when I peered under the eaves of a
maniap', and saw the brawny body of one of the wives stretched on
the floor, a naked Amazon plunged in noiseless slumber.  If it were
still the hour of the 'morning papers' the quest would be more
easy, the half-dozen obsequious, sly dogs squatting on the ground
outside a house, crammed as far as possible in its narrow shadow,
and turning to the king a row of leering faces.  Tembinok' would be
within, the flaps of the cabin raised, the trade blowing through,
hearing their report.  Like journalists nearer home, when the day's
news were scanty, these would make the more of it in words; and I
have known one to fill up a barren morning with an imaginary
conversation of two dogs.  Sometimes the king deigns to laugh,
sometimes to question or jest with them, his voice sounding shrilly
from the cabin.  By his side he may have the heir-apparent, Paul,
his nephew and adopted son, six years old, stark naked, and a model
of young human beauty.  And there will always be the favourite and
perhaps two other wives awake; four more lying supine under mats
and whelmed in slumber.  Or perhaps we came later, fell on a more
private hour, and found Tembinok' retired in the house with the
favourite, an earthenware spittoon, a leaden inkpot, and a
commercial ledger.  In the last, lying on his belly, he writes from
day to day the uneventful history of his reign; and when thus
employed he betrayed a touch of fretfulness on interruption with
which I was well able to sympathise.  The royal annalist once read
me a page or so, translating as he went; but the passage being
genealogical, and the author boggling extremely in his version, I
own I have been sometimes better entertained.  Nor does he confine
himself to prose, but touches the lyre, too, in his leisure
moments, and passes for the chief bard of his kingdom, as he is its
sole public character, leading architect, and only merchant.

His competence, however, does not reach to music; and his verses,
when they are ready, are taught to a professional musician, who
sets them and instructs the chorus.  Asked what his songs were
about, Tembinok' replied, 'Sweethearts and trees and the sea.  Not
all the same true, all the same lie.'  For a condensed view of
lyrical poetry (except that he seems to have forgot the stars and
flowers) this would be hard to mend.  These multifarious
occupations bespeak (in a native and an absolute prince) unusual
activity of mind.

The palace court at noon is a spot to be remembered with awe, the
visitor scrambling there, on the loose stones, through a splendid
nightmare of light and heat; but the sweep of the wind delivers it
from flies and mosquitoes; and with the set of sun it became
heavenly.  I remember it best on moonless nights.  The air was like
a bath of milk.  Countless shining stars were overhead, the lagoon
paved with them.  Herds of wives squatted by companies on the
gravel, softly chatting.  Tembinok' would doff his jacket, and sit
bare and silent, perhaps meditating songs; the favourite usually by
him, silent also.  Meanwhile in the midst of the court, the palace
lanterns were being lit and marshalled in rank upon the ground--six
or eight square yards of them; a sight that gave one strange ideas
of the number of 'my pamily':  such a sight as may be seen about
dusk in a corner of some great terminus at home.  Presently these
fared off into all corners of the precinct, lighting the last
labours of the day, lighting one after another to their rest that
prodigious company of women.  A few lingered in the middle of the
court for the card-party, and saw the honours shuffled and dealt,
and Tembinok' deliberating between his two; hands, and the queens
losing their tobacco.  Then these also were scattered and
extinguished; and their place was taken by a great bonfire, the
night-light of the palace.  When this was no more, smaller fires
burned likewise at the gates.  These were tended by the crones,
unseen, unsleeping--not always unheard.  Should any approach in the
dark hours, a guarded alert made the circuit of the palisade; each
sentry signalled her neighbour with a stone; the rattle of falling
pebbles passed and died away; and the wardens of Tembinok' crouched
in their places silent as before.



CHAPTER IV--THE KING OF APEMAMA:  EQUATOR TOWN AND THE PALACE



Five persons were detailed to wait upon us.  Uncle Parker, who
brought us toddy and green nuts, was an elderly, almost an old man,
with the spirits, the industry, and the morals of a boy of ten.
His face was ancient, droll, and diabolical, the skin stretched
over taut sinews, like a sail on the guide-rope; and he smiled with
every muscle of his head.  His nuts must be counted every day, or
he would deceive us in the tale; they must be daily examined, or
some would prove to be unhusked; nothing but the king's name, and
scarcely that, would hold him to his duty.  After his toils were
over he was given a pipe, matches, and tobacco, and sat on the
floor in the maniap' to smoke.  He would not seem to move from his
position, and yet every day, when the things fell to be returned
the plug had disappeared; he had found the means to conceal it in
the roof, whence he could radiantly produce it on the morrow.
Although this piece of legerdemain was performed regularly before
three or four pairs of eyes, we could never catch him in the fact;
although we searched after he was gone, we could never find the
tobacco.  Such were the diversions of Uncle Parker, a man nearing
sixty.  But he was punished according unto his deeds:  Mrs.
Stevenson took a fancy to paint him, and the sufferings of the
sitter were beyond description.

Three lasses came from the palace to do our washing and racket with
Ah Fu.  They were of the lowest class, hangers-on kept for the
convenience of merchant skippers, probably low-born, perhaps out-
islanders, with little refinement whether of manner or appearance,
but likely and jolly enough wenches in their way.  We called one
Guttersnipe, for you may find her image in the slums of any city;
the same lean, dark-eyed, eager, vulgar face, the same sudden,
hoarse guffaws, the same forward and yet anxious manner, as with a
tail of an eye on the policeman:  only the policeman here was a
live king, and his truncheon a rifle.  I doubt if you could find
anywhere out of the islands, or often there, the parallel of Fatty,
a mountain of a girl, who must have weighed near as many stones as
she counted summers, could have given a good account of a life-
guardsman, had the face of a baby, and applied her vast mechanical
forces almost exclusively to play.  But they were all three of the
same merry spirit.  Our washing was conducted in a game of romps;
and they fled and pursued, and splashed, and pelted, and rolled
each other in the sand, and kept up a continuous noise of cries and
laughter like holiday children.  Indeed, and however strange their
own function in that austere establishment, were they not escaped
for the day from the largest and strictest Ladies' School in the
South Seas?

Our fifth attendant was no less a person than the royal cook.  He
was strikingly handsome both in face and body, lazy as a slave, and
insolent as a butcher's boy.  He slept and smoked on our premises
in various graceful attitudes; but so far from helping Ah Fu, he
was not at the pains to watch him.  It may be said of him that he
came to learn, and remained to teach; and his lessons were at times
difficult to stomach.  For example, he was sent to fill a bucket
from the well.  About half-way he found my wife watering her
onions, changed buckets with her, and leaving her the empty,
returned to the kitchen with the full.  On another occasion he was
given a dish of dumplings for the king, was told they must be eaten
hot, and that he should carry them as fast as possible.  The wretch
set off at the rate of about a mile in the hour, head in air, toes
turned out.  My patience, after a month of trial, failed me at the
sight.  I pursued, caught him by his two big shoulders, and
thrusting him before me, ran with him down the hill, over the
sands, and through the applauding village, to the Speak House,
where the king was then holding a pow-wow.  He had the impudence to
pretend he was internally injured by my violence, and to profess
serious apprehensions for his life.

All this we endured; for the ways of Tembinok' are summary, and I
was not yet ripe to take a hand in the man's death.  But in the
meanwhile, here was my unfortunate China boy slaving for the pair,
and presently he fell sick.  I was now in the position of Cimondain
Lantenac, and indeed all the characters in Quatre-Vingt-Treize:  to
continue to spare the guilty, I must sacrifice the innocent.  I
took the usual course and tried to save both, with the usual
consequence of failure.  Well rehearsed, I went down to the palace,
found the king alone, and obliged him with a vast amount of
rigmarole.  The cook was too old to learn:  I feared he was not
making progress; how if we had a boy instead?--boys were more
teachable.  It was all in vain; the king pierced through my
disguises to the root of the fact; saw that the cook had
desperately misbehaved; and sat a while glooming.  'I think he
tavvy too much,' he said at last, with grim concision; and
immediately turned the talk to other subjects.  The same day
another high officer, the steward, appeared in the cook's place,
and, I am bound to say, proved civil and industrious.

As soon as I left, it seems the king called for a Winchester and
strolled outside the palisade, awaiting the defaulter.  That day
Tembinok' wore the woman's frock; as like as not, his make-up was
completed by a pith helmet and blue spectacles.  Conceive the
glaring stretch of sandhills, the dwarf palms with their noon-day
shadows, the line of the palisade, the crone sentries (each by a
small clear fire) cooking syrup on their posts--and this chimaera
waiting with his deadly engine.  To him, enter at last the cook,
strolling down the sandhill from Equator Town, listless, vain and
graceful; with no thought of alarm.  As soon as he was well within
range, the travestied monarch fired the six shots over his head, at
his feet, and on either hand of him:  the second Apemama warning,
startling in itself, fatal in significance, for the next time his
majesty will aim to hit.  I am told the king is a crack shot; that
when he aims to kill, the grave may be got ready; and when he aims
to miss, misses by so near a margin that the culprit tastes six
times the bitterness of death.  The effect upon the cook I had an
opportunity of seeing for myself.  My wife and I were returning
from the sea-side of the island, when we spied one coming to meet
us at a very quick, disordered pace, between a walk and a run.  As
we drew nearer we saw it was the cook, beside himself with some
emotion, his usual warm, mulatto colour declined into a bluish
pallor.  He passed us without word or gesture, staring on us with
the face of a Satan, and plunged on across the wood for the
unpeopled quarter of the island and the long, desert beach, where
he might rage to and fro unseen, and froth out the vials of his
wrath, fear, and humiliation.  Doubtless in the curses that he
there uttered to the bursting surf and the tropic birds, the name
of the Kaupoi--the rich man--was frequently repeated.  I had made
him the laughing-stock of the village in the affair of the king's
dumplings; I had brought him by my machinations into disgrace and
the immediate jeopardy of his days; last, and perhaps bitterest, he
had found me there by the way to spy upon him in the hour of his
disorder.

Time passed, and we saw no more of him.  The season of the full
moon came round, when a man thinks shame to lie sleeping; and I
continued until late--perhaps till twelve or one in the morning--to
walk on the bright sand and in the tossing shadow of the palms.  I
played, as I wandered, on a flageolet, which occupied much of my
attention; the fans overhead rattled in the wind with a metallic
chatter; and a bare foot falls at any rate almost noiseless on that
shifting soil.  Yet when I got back to Equator Town, where all the
lights were out, and my wife (who was still awake, and had been
looking forth) asked me who it was that followed me, I thought she
spoke in jest.  'Not at all,' she said.  'I saw him twice as you
passed, walking close at your heels.  He only left you at the
corner of the maniap'; he must be still behind the cook-house.'
Thither I ran--like a fool, without any weapon--and came face to
face with the cook.  He was within my tapu-line, which was death in
itself; he could have no business there at such an hour but either
to steal or to kill; guilt made him timorous; and he turned and
fled before me in the night in silence.  As he went I kicked him in
that place where honour lies, and he gave tongue faintly like an
injured mouse.  At the moment I daresay he supposed it was a deadly
instrument that touched him.