He died some months before my arrival on the islands, and no one
regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor.  This
was by repute the hero of the family.  Alone of the four brothers,
he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old;
it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia
turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right
hand of the vigorous Nakaeia.  Nontemat', Mr. Corpse, was his
appalling nickname, and he had earned it well.  Again and again, at
the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of
night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families.  Here was
the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia redux.  He came, summoned from
the tributary rule of Little Makin:  he was installed, he proved a
puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the
reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the
name of Tebureimoa.

The change in the man's character was much commented on in the
island, and variously explained by opium and Christianity.  To my
eyes, there seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency.
Mr. Corpse was afraid of his brother:  King Tebureimoa is afraid of
the Old Men.  Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of
desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of
government.  He played his part of bravo in the past, following the
line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence:
to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible,
perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and
his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he
capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits
among his guards in dreadful expectation.  The same cowardice that
put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the
sceptre of a king.

A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my
observation, depicts him in his two capacities.  A chief in Little
Makin asked, in an hour of lightness, 'Who is Kaeia?'  A bird
carried the saying; and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a
committee of three.  Mr. Corpse was chairman; the second
commissioner died before my arrival; the third was yet alive and
green, and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him
the name of Abou ben Adhem.  Mr. Corpse was troubled with a
scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in such
a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the
blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse
than awkward.  'I will strike the blow,' said the venerable Abou;
and Mr. Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise.  The
quarry was decoyed into the bush; he was set to carrying a log; and
while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow.
Justice being thus done, the commission, in a childish horror,
turned to flee.  But their victim recalled them to his side.  'You
need not run away now,' he said.  'You have done this thing to me.
Stay.'  He was some twenty minutes dying, and his murderers sat
with him the while:  a scene for Shakespeare.  All the stages of a
violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing
features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of Mr.
Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he
has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery.  I
was never more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the
king's thoughts; and yet I had but the one sight of him at
unawares.  I had once an errand for his ear.  It was once more the
hour of the siesta; but there were loiterers abroad, and these
directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where
Tebureimoa lay unguarded.  We entered without ceremony, being in
some haste.  He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his
Gilbert Island Bible with compunction.  On our sudden entrance the
unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled
on the floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having
recognised his visitors, sank again upon the mats.  So Eglon looked
on Ehud.

The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just; Nakaeia, the
author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of
kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity.
Not the nature, but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances
damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been
incongruously placed.  At home, in a quiet bystreet of a village,
the man had been a worthy carpenter, and, even bedevilled as he is,
he shows some private virtues.  He has no lands, only the use of
such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot enrich himself in the
old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of his future, and
he knows and uses it.  Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a
hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the
rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a
shilling for a child:  allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total
of three hundred pounds a year.  He had been some nine months on
the throne:  had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure
unknown, and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent
his brother's photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two
hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced that brother's
legacy of debt and had still sovereigns in his pocket.  An
affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides a handy
carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace.
It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues; that Tebureimoa
should have a diversion filled me with surprise.



CHAPTER III--AROUND OUR HOUSE



When we left the palace we were still but seafarers ashore; and
within the hour we had installed our goods in one of the six
foreign houses of Butaritari, namely, that usually occupied by
Maka, the Hawaiian missionary.  Two San Francisco firms are here
established, Messrs. Crawford and Messrs. Wightman Brothers; the
first hard by the palace of the mid town, the second at the north
entry; each with a store and bar-room.  Our house was in the
Wightman compound, betwixt the store and bar, within a fenced
enclosure.  Across the road a few native houses nestled in the
margin of the bush, and the green wall of palms rose solid,
shutting out the breeze.  A little sandy cove of the lagoon ran in
behind, sheltered by a verandah pier, the labour of queens' hands.
Here, when the tide was high, sailed boats lay to be loaded; when
the tide was low, the boats took ground some half a mile away, and
an endless series of natives descended the pier stair, tailed
across the sand in strings and clusters, waded to the waist with
the bags of copra, and loitered backward to renew their charge.
The mystery of the copra trade tormented me, as I sat and watched
the profits drip on the stair and the sands.

In front, from shortly after four in the morning until nine at
night, the folk of the town streamed by us intermittingly along the
road:  families going up the island to make copra on their lands;
women bound for the bush to gather flowers against the evening
toilet; and, twice a day, the toddy-cutters, each with his knife
and shell.  In the first grey of the morning, and again late in the
afternoon, these would straggle past about their tree-top business,
strike off here and there into the bush, and vanish from the face
of the earth.  At about the same hour, if the tide be low in the
lagoon, you are likely to be bound yourself across the island for a
bath, and may enter close at their heels alleys of the palm wood.
Right in front, although the sun is not yet risen, the east is
already lighted with preparatory fires, and the huge accumulations
of the trade-wind cloud glow with and heliograph the coming day.
The breeze is in your face; overhead in the tops of the palms, its
playthings, it maintains a lively bustle; look where you will,
above or below, there is no human presence, only the earth and
shaken forest.  And right overhead the song of an invisible singer
breaks from the thick leaves; from farther on a second tree-top
answers; and beyond again, in the bosom of the woods, a still more
distant minstrel perches and sways and sings.  So, all round the
isle, the toddy-cutters sit on high, and are rocked by the trade,
and have a view far to seaward, where they keep watch for sails,
and like huge birds utter their songs in the morning.  They sing
with a certain lustiness and Bacchic glee; the volume of sound and
the articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we
anticipate the chattering of fowls.  And yet in a sense these songs
also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred;
few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was
understood the cutters 'prayed to have good toddy, and sang of
their old wars.'  The prayer is at least answered; and when the
foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a beverage well
'worthy of a grace.'  All forenoon you may return and taste; it
only sparkles, and sharpens, and grows to be a new drink, not less
delicious; but with the progress of the day the fermentation
quickens and grows acid; in twelve hours it will be yeast for
bread, in two days more a devilish intoxicant, the counsellor of
crime.

The men are of a marked Arabian cast of features, often bearded and
mustached, often gaily dressed, some with bracelets and anklets,
all stalking hidalgo-like, and accepting salutations with a haughty
lip.  The hair (with the dandies of either sex) is worn turban-wise
in a frizzled bush; and like the daggers of the Japanese a pointed
stick (used for a comb) is thrust gallantly among the curls.  The
women from this bush of hair look forth enticingly:  the race
cannot be compared with the Tahitian for female beauty; I doubt
even if the average be high; but some of the prettiest girls, and
one of the handsomest women I ever saw, were Gilbertines.
Butaritari, being the commercial centre of the group, is
Europeanised; the coloured sacque or the white shift are common
wear, the latter for the evening; the trade hat, loaded with
flowers, fruit, and ribbons, is unfortunately not unknown; and the
characteristic female dress of the Gilberts no longer universal.
The ridi is its name:  a cutty petticoat or fringe of the smoked
fibre of cocoa-nut leaf, not unlike tarry string:  the lower edge
not reaching the mid-thigh, the upper adjusted so low upon the
haunches that it seems to cling by accident.  A sneeze, you think,
and the lady must surely be left destitute.  'The perilous,
hairbreadth ridi' was our word for it; and in the conflict that
rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to please neither
side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous
finding it unlovely in itself.  Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would
look her best, that must be her costume.  In that and naked
otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and
life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia.  Bundle her in a gown,
the charm is fled, and she wriggles like an Englishwoman.

Towards dusk the passers-by became more gorgeous.  The men broke
out in all the colours of the rainbow--or at least of the trade-
room,--and both men and women began to be adorned and scented with
new flowers.  A small white blossom is the favourite, sometimes
sown singly in a woman's hair like little stars, now composed in a
thick wreath.  With the night, the crowd sometimes thickened in the
road, and the padding and brushing of bare feet became continuous;
the promenades mostly grave, the silence only interrupted by some
giggling and scampering of girls; even the children quiet.  At
nine, bed-time struck on a bell from the cathedral, and the life of
the town ceased.  At four the next morning the signal is repeated
in the darkness, and the innocent prisoners set free; but for seven
hours all must lie--I was about to say within doors, of a place
where doors, and even walls, are an exception--housed, at least,
under their airy roofs and clustered in the tents of the mosquito-
nets.  Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative
to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising
himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares
from house to house like a moving bonfire.  Only the police
themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants.
I used to hate their treacherous presence; their captain in
particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked nightly about my
premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat him.  But
the rogue was privileged.

Not one of the eleven resident traders came to town, no captain
cast anchor in the lagoon, but we saw him ere the hour was out.
This was owing to our position between the store and the bar--the
Sans Souci, as the last was called.  Mr. Rick was not only Messrs.
Wightman's manager, but consular agent for the States; Mrs. Rick
was the only white woman on the island, and one of the only two in
the archipelago; their house besides, with its cool verandahs, its
bookshelves, its comfortable furniture, could not be rivalled
nearer than Jaluit or Honolulu.  Every one called in consequence,
save such as might be prosecuting a South Sea quarrel, hingeing on
the price of copra and the odd cent, or perhaps a difference about
poultry.  Even these, if they did not appear upon the north, would
be presently visible to the southward, the Sans Souci drawing them
as with cords.  In an island with a total population of twelve
white persons, one of the two drinking-shops might seem
superfluous:  but every bullet has its billet, and the double
accommodation of Butaritari is found in practice highly convenient
by the captains and the crews of ships:  The Land we Live in being
tacitly resigned to the forecastle, the Sans Souci tacitly reserved
for the afterguard.  So aristocratic were my habits, so commanding
was my fear of Mr. Williams, that I have never visited the first;
but in the other, which was the club or rather the casino of the
island, I regularly passed my evenings.  It was small, but neatly
fitted, and at night (when the lamp was lit) sparkled with glass
and glowed with coloured pictures like a theatre at Christmas.  The
pictures were advertisements, the glass coarse enough, the
carpentry amateur; but the effect, in that incongruous isle, was of
unbridled luxury and inestimable expense.  Here songs were sung,
tales told, tricks performed, games played.  The Ricks, ourselves,
Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the ships, and
perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their boats
or by the road on foot, made up the usual company.  The traders,
all bred to the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business;
'South Sea Merchants' is the title they prefer.  'We are all
sailors here'--'Merchants, if you please'--'South Sea Merchants,'--
was a piece of conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed
to lose in savour.  We found them at all times simple, genial, gay,
gallant, and obliging; and, across some interval of time, recall
with pleasure the traders of Butaritari.  There was one black sheep
indeed.  I tell of him here where he lived, against my rule; for in
this case I have no measure to preserve, and the man is typical of
a class of ruffians that once disgraced the whole field of the
South Seas, and still linger in the rarely visited isles of
Micronesia.  He had the name on the beach of 'a perfect gentleman
when sober,' but I never saw him otherwise than drunk.  The few
shocking and savage traits of the Micronesian he has singled out
with the skill of a collector, and planted in the soil of his
original baseness.  He has been accused and acquitted of a
treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which
inclines me to suppose him innocent.  His daughter is defaced by
his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to
disfigure, and in the darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco-
brandy, fastened on the wrong victim.  The wife has since fled and
harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands
from deaf ears her forcible restoration.  The best of his business
is to make natives drink, and then advance the money for the fine
upon a lucrative mortgage.  'Respect for whites' is the man's word:
'What is the matter with this island is the want of respect for
whites.'  On his way to Butaritari, while I was there, he spied his
wife in the bush with certain natives and made a dash to capture
her; whereupon one of her companions drew a knife and the husband
retreated:  'Do you call that proper respect for whites?' he cried.
At an early stage of the acquaintance we proved our respect for his
kind of white by forbidding him our enclosure under pain of death.
Thenceforth he lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not
what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face
(which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours
across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged
himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite
inoffensive, on his English lips incredibly incongruous.

Our enclosure, round which this composite of degradations wandered,
was of some extent.  In one corner was a trellis with a long table
of rough boards.  Here the Fourth of July feast had been held not
long before with memorable consequences, yet to be set forth; here
we took our meals; here entertained to a dinner the king and
notables of Makin.  In the midst was the house, with a verandah
front and back, and three is rooms within.  In the verandah we
slung our man-of-war hammocks, worked there by day, and slept at
night.  Within were beds, chairs, a round table, a fine hanging
lamp, and portraits of the royal family of Hawaii.  Queen Victoria
proves nothing; Kalakaua and Mrs. Bishop are diagnostic; and the
truth is we were the stealthy tenants of the parsonage.  On the day
of our arrival Maka was away; faithless trustees unlocked his
doors; and the dear rigorous man, the sworn foe of liquor and
tobacco, returned to find his verandah littered with cigarettes and
his parlour horrible with bottles.  He made but one condition--on
the round table, which he used in the celebration of the
sacraments, he begged us to refrain from setting liquor; in all
else he bowed to the accomplished fact, refused rent, retired
across the way into a native house, and, plying in his boat, beat
the remotest quarters of the isle for provender.  He found us pigs-
-I could not fancy where--no other pigs were visible; he brought us
fowls and taro; when we gave our feast to the monarch and gentry,
it was he who supplied the wherewithal, he who superintended the
cooking, he who asked grace at table, and when the king's health
was proposed, he also started the cheering with an English hip-hip-
hip.  There was never a more fortunate conception; the heart of the
fatted king exulted in his bosom at the sound.

Take him for all in all, I have never known a more engaging
creature than this parson of Butaritari:  his mirth, his kindness,
his noble, friendly feelings, brimmed from the man in speech and
gesture.  He loved to exaggerate, to act and overact the momentary
part, to exercise his lungs and muscles, and to speak and laugh
with his whole body.  He had the morning cheerfulness of birds and
healthy children; and his humour was infectious.  We were next
neighbours and met daily, yet our salutations lasted minutes at a
stretch--shaking hands, slapping shoulders, capering like a pair of
Merry-Andrews, laughing to split our sides upon some pleasantry
that would scarce raise a titter in an infant-school.  It might be
five in the morning, the toddy-cutters just gone by, the road
empty, the shade of the island lying far on the lagoon:  and the
ebullition cheered me for the day.

Yet I always suspected Maka of a secret melancholy--these jubilant
extremes could scarce be constantly maintained.  He was besides
long, and lean, and lined, and corded, and a trifle grizzled; and
his Sabbath countenance was even saturnine.  On that day we made a
procession to the church, or (as I must always call it) the
cathedral:  Maka (a blot on the hot landscape) in tall hat, black
frock-coat, black trousers; under his arm the hymn-book and the
Bible; in his face, a reverent gravity:- beside him Mary his wife,
a quiet, wise, and handsome elderly lady, seriously attired:-
myself following with singular and moving thoughts.  Long before,
to the sound of bells and streams and birds, through a green
Lothian glen, I had accompanied Sunday by Sunday a minister in
whose house I lodged; and the likeness, and the difference, and the
series of years and deaths, profoundly touched me.  In the great,
dusky, palm-tree cathedral the congregation rarely numbered thirty:
the men on one side, the women on the other, myself posted (for a
privilege) amongst the women, and the small missionary contingent
gathered close around the platform, we were lost in that round
vault.  The lessons were read antiphonally, the flock was
catechised, a blind youth repeated weekly a long string of psalms,
hymns were sung--I never heard worse singing,--and the sermon
followed.  To say I understood nothing were untrue; there were
points that I learned to expect with certainty; the name of
Honolulu, that of Kalakaua, the word Cap'n-man-o'-wa', the word
ship, and a description of a storm at sea, infallibly occurred; and
I was not seldom rewarded with the name of my own Sovereign in the
bargain.  The rest was but sound to the ears, silence for the mind:
a plain expanse of tedium, rendered unbearable by heat, a hard
chair, and the sight through the wide doors of the more happy
heathen on the green.  Sleep breathed on my joints and eyelids,
sleep hummed in my ears; it reigned in the dim cathedral.  The
congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they groaned
aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear a
dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom.  In vain
the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by
name particular hearers.  I was myself perhaps a more effective
excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my
successful struggles against sleep--and I hope they were
successful--cheered the flight of time.  He, when he was not
catching flies or playing tricks upon his neighbours, gloated with
a fixed, truculent eye upon the stages of my agony; and once, when
the service was drawing towards a close, he winked at me across the
church.

I write of the service with a smile; yet I was always there--always
with respect for Maka, always with admiration for his deep
seriousness, his burning energy, the fire of his roused eye, the
sincere and various accents of his voice.  To see him weekly
flogging a dead horse and blowing a cold fire was a lesson in
fortitude and constancy.  It may be a question whether if the
mission were fully supported, and he was set free from business
avocations, more might not result; I think otherwise myself; I
think not neglect but rigour has reduced his flock, that rigour
which has once provoked a revolution, and which to-day, in a man so
lively and engaging, amazes the beholder.  No song, no dance, no
tobacco, no liquor, no alleviative of life--only toil and church-
going; so says a voice from his face; and the face is the face of
the Polynesian Esau, but the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a
different world.  And a Polynesian at the best makes a singular
missionary in the Gilberts, coming from a country recklessly
unchaste to one conspicuously strict; from a race hag-ridden with
bogies to one comparatively bold against the terrors of the dark.
The thought was stamped one morning in my mind, when I chanced to
be abroad by moonlight, and saw all the town lightless, but the
lamp faithfully burning by the missionary's bed.  It requires no
law, no fire, and no scouting police, to withhold Maka and his
countrymen from wandering in the night unlighted.



CHAPTER IV--A TALE OF A TAPU



On the morrow of our arrival (Sunday, 14th July 1889) our
photographers were early stirring.  Once more we traversed a silent
town; many were yet abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their
open houses; there was no sound of intercourse or business.  In
that hour before the shadows, the quarter of the palace and canal
seemed like a landing-place in the Arabian Nights or from the
classic poets; here were the fit destination of some 'faery
frigot,' here some adventurous prince might step ashore among new
characters and incidents; and the island prison, where it floated
on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed for the
repository of the Grail.  In such a scene, and at such an hour, the
impression received was not so much of foreign travel--rather of
past ages; it seemed not so much degrees of latitude that we had
crossed, as centuries of time that we had re-ascended; leaving, by
the same steps, home and to-day.  A few children followed us,
mostly nude, all silent; in the clear, weedy waters of the canal
some silent damsels waded, baring their brown thighs; and to one of
the maniap's before the palace gate we were attracted by a low but
stirring hum of speech.

The oval shed was full of men sitting cross-legged.  The king was
there in striped pyjamas, his rear protected by four guards with
Winchesters, his air and bearing marked by unwonted spirit and
decision; tumblers and black bottles went the round; and the talk,
throughout loud, was general and animated.  I was inclined at first
to view this scene with suspicion.  But the hour appeared
unsuitable for a carouse; drink was besides forbidden equally by
the law of the land and the canons of the church; and while I was
yet hesitating, the king's rigorous attitude disposed of my last
doubt.  We had come, thinking to photograph him surrounded by his
guards, and at the first word of the design his piety revolted.  We
were reminded of the day--the Sabbath, in which thou shalt take no
photographs--and returned with a flea in our ear, bearing the
rejected camera.

At church, a little later, I was struck to find the throne
unoccupied.  So nice a Sabbatarian might have found the means to be
present; perhaps my doubts revived; and before I got home they were
transformed to certainties.  Tom, the bar-keeper of the Sans Souci,
was in conversation with two emissaries from the court.  The
'keen,' they said, wanted 'din,' failing which 'perandi.'  No din,
was Tom's reply, and no perandi; but 'pira' if they pleased.  It
seems they had no use for beer, and departed sorrowing.

'Why, what is the meaning of all this?' I asked.  'Is the island on
the spree?'

Such was the fact.  On the 4th of July a feast had been made, and
the king, at the suggestion of the whites, had raised the tapu
against liquor.  There is a proverb about horses; it scarce applies
to the superior animal, of whom it may be rather said, that any one
can start him drinking, not any twenty can prevail on him to stop.
The tapu, raised ten days before, was not yet re-imposed; for ten
days the town had been passing the bottle or lying (as we had seen
it the afternoon before) in hoggish sleep; and the king, moved by
the Old Men and his own appetites, continued to maintain the
liberty, to squander his savings on liquor, and to join in and lead
the debauch.  The whites were the authors of this crisis; it was
upon their own proposal that the freedom had been granted at the
first; and for a while, in the interests of trade, they were
doubtless pleased it should continue.  That pleasure had now
sometime ceased; the bout had been prolonged (it was conceded)
unduly; and it now began to be a question how it might conclude.
Hence Tom's refusal.  Yet that refusal was avowedly only for the
moment, and it was avowedly unavailing; the king's foragers, denied
by Tom at the Sans Souci, would be supplied at The Land we Live in
by the gobbling Mr. Williams.

The degree of the peril was not easy to measure at the time, and I
am inclined to think now it was easy to exaggerate.  Yet the
conduct of drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and
at home our populations are not armed from the highest to the
lowest with revolvers and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a
debauch by the whole townful--and I might rather say, by the whole
polity--king, magistrates, police, and army joining in one common
scene of drunkenness.  It must be thought besides that we were here
in barbarous islands, rarely visited, lately and partly civilised.
First and last, a really considerable number of whites have
perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through their own misconduct; and
the natives have displayed in at least one instance a disposition
to conceal an accident under a butchery, and leave nothing but dumb
bones.  This last was the chief consideration against a sudden
closing of the bars; the bar-keepers stood in the immediate breach
and dealt direct with madmen; too surly a refusal might at any
moment precipitate a blow, and the blow might prove the signal for
a massacre.

Monday, 15th.--At the same hour we returned to the same muniap'.
Kummel (of all drinks) was served in tumblers; in the midst sat the
crown prince, a fatted youth, surrounded by fresh bottles and
busily plying the corkscrew; and king, chief, and commons showed
the loose mouth, the uncertain joints, and the blurred and animated
eye of the early drinker.  It was plain we were impatiently
expected; the king retired with alacrity to dress, the guards were
despatched after their uniforms; and we were left to await the
issue of these preparations with a shedful of tipsy natives.  The
orgie had proceeded further than on Sunday.  The day promised to be
of great heat; it was already sultry, the courtiers were already
fuddled; and still the kummel continued to go round, and the crown
prince to play butler.  Flemish freedom followed upon Flemish
excess; and a funny dog, a handsome fellow, gaily dressed, and with
a full turban of frizzed hair, delighted the company with a
humorous courtship of a lady in a manner not to be described.  It
was our diversion, in this time of waiting, to observe the
gathering of the guards.  They have European arms, European
uniforms, and (to their sorrow) European shoes.  We saw one warrior
(like Mars) in the article of being armed; two men and a stalwart
woman were scarce strong enough to boot him; and after a single
appearance on parade the army is crippled for a week.

At last, the gates under the king's house opened; the army issued,
one behind another, with guns and epaulettes; the colours stooped
under the gateway; majesty followed in his uniform bedizened with
gold lace; majesty's wife came next in a hat and feathers, and an
ample trained silk gown; the royal imps succeeded; there stood the
pageantry of Makin marshalled on its chosen theatre.  Dickens might
have told how serious they were; how tipsy; how the king melted and
streamed under his cocked hat; how he took station by the larger of
his two cannons--austere, majestic, but not truly vertical; how the
troops huddled, and were straightened out, and clubbed again; how
they and their firelocks raked at various inclinations like the
masts of ships; and how an amateur photographer reviewed, arrayed,
and adjusted them, to see his dispositions change before he reached
the camera.

The business was funny to see; I do not know that it is graceful to
laugh at; and our report of these transactions was received on our
return with the shaking of grave heads.

The day had begun ill; eleven hours divided us from sunset; and at
any moment, on the most trifling chance, the trouble might begin.
The Wightman compound was in a military sense untenable, commanded
on three sides by houses and thick bush; the town was computed to
contain over a thousand stand of excellent new arms; and retreat to
the ships, in the case of an alert, was a recourse not to be
thought of.  Our talk that morning must have closely reproduced the
talk in English garrisons before the Sepoy mutiny; the sturdy doubt
that any mischief was in prospect, the sure belief that (should any
come) there was nothing left but to go down fighting, the half-
amused, half-anxious attitude of mind in which we were awaiting
fresh developments.

The kummel soon ran out; we were scarce returned before the king
had followed us in quest of more.  Mr. Corpse was now divested of
his more awful attitude, the lawless bulk of him again encased in
striped pyjamas; a guardsman brought up the rear with his rifle at
the trail:  and his majesty was further accompanied by a Rarotongan
whalerman and the playful courtier with the turban of frizzed hair.
There was never a more lively deputation.  The whalerman was
gapingly, tearfully tipsy:  the courtier walked on air; the king
himself was even sportive.  Seated in a chair in the Ricks'
sitting-room, he bore the brunt of our prayers and menaces unmoved.
He was even rated, plied with historic instances, threatened with
the men-of-war, ordered to restore the tapu on the spot--and
nothing in the least affected him.  It should be done to-morrow, he
said; to-day it was beyond his power, to-day he durst not.  'Is
that royal?' cried indignant Mr. Rick.  No, it was not royal; had
the king been of a royal character we should ourselves have held a
different language; and royal or not, he had the best of the
dispute.  The terms indeed were hardly equal; for the king was the
only man who could restore the tapu, but the Ricks were not the
only people who sold drink.  He had but to hold his ground on the
first question, and they were sure to weaken on the second.  A
little struggle they still made for the fashion's sake; and then
one exceedingly tipsy deputation departed, greatly rejoicing, a
case of brandy wheeling beside them in a barrow.  The Rarotongan
(whom I had never seen before) wrung me by the hand like a man
bound on a far voyage.  'My dear frien'!' he cried, 'good-bye, my
dear frien'!'--tears of kummel standing in his eyes; the king
lurched as he went, the courtier ambled,--a strange party of
intoxicated children to be entrusted with that barrowful of
madness.

You could never say the town was quiet; all morning there was a
ferment in the air, an aimless movement and congregation of natives
in the street.  But it was not before half-past one that a sudden
hubbub of voices called us from the house, to find the whole white
colony already gathered on the spot as by concerted signal.  The
Sans Souci was overrun with rabble, the stair and verandah
thronged.  From all these throats an inarticulate babbling cry went
up incessantly; it sounded like the bleating of young lambs, but
angrier.  In the road his royal highness (whom I had seen so lately
in the part of butler) stood crying upon Tom; on the top step,
tossed in the hurly-burly, Tom was shouting to the prince.  Yet a
while the pack swayed about the bar, vociferous.  Then came a
brutal impulse; the mob reeled, and returned, and was rejected; the
stair showed a stream of heads; and there shot into view, through
the disbanding ranks, three men violently dragging in their midst a
fourth.  By his hair and his hands, his head forced as low as his
knees, his face concealed, he was wrenched from the verandah and
whisked along the road into the village, howling as he disappeared.
Had his face been raised, we should have seen it bloodied, and the
blood was not his own.  The courtier with the turban of frizzed
hair had paid the costs of this disturbance with the lower part of
one ear.

So the brawl passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to
the inhumane.  Yet we looked round on serious faces and--a fact
that spoke volumes--Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar.
Custom might go elsewhere, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased,
but Tom had had enough of bar-keeping for that day.  Indeed the
event had hung on a hair.  A man had sought to draw a revolver--on
what quarrel I could never learn, and perhaps he himself could not
have told; one shot, when the room was so crowded, could scarce
have failed to take effect; where many were armed and all tipsy, it
could scarce have failed to draw others; and the woman who spied
the weapon and the man who seized it may very well have saved the
white community.

The mob insensibly melted from the scene; and for the rest of the
day our neighbourhood was left in peace and a good deal in
solitude.  But the tranquillity was only local; din and perandi
still flowed in other quarters:  and we had one more sight of
Gilbert Island violence.  In the church, where we had wandered
photographing, we were startled by a sudden piercing outcry.  The
scene, looking forth from the doors of that great hall of shadow,
was unforgettable.  The palms, the quaint and scattered houses, the
flag of the island streaming from its tall staff, glowed with
intolerable sunshine.  In the midst two women rolled fighting on
the grass.  The combatants were the more easy to be distinguished,
because the one was stripped to the ridi and the other wore a
holoku (sacque) of some lively colour.  The first was uppermost,
her teeth locked in her adversary's face, shaking her like a dog;
the other impotently fought and scratched.  So for a moment we saw
them wallow and grapple there like vermin; then the mob closed and
shut them in.

It was a serious question that night if we should sleep ashore.
But we were travellers, folk that had come far in quest of the
adventurous; on the first sign of an adventure it would have been a
singular inconsistency to have withdrawn; and we sent on board
instead for our revolvers.  Mindful of Taahauku, Mr. Rick, Mr.
Osbourne, and Mrs. Stevenson held an assault of arms on the public
highway, and fired at bottles to the admiration of the natives.
Captain Reid of the Equator stayed on shore with us to be at hand
in case of trouble, and we retired to bed at the accustomed hour,
agreeably excited by the day's events.  The night was exquisite,
the silence enchanting; yet as I lay in my hammock looking on the
strong moonshine and the quiescent palms, one ugly picture haunted
me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile
embrace.  The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have
looked on death and massacre with less revolt.  The return to these
primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his ferality,
shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost
of battles.  There are elements in our state and history which it
is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not
to dwell on.  Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day's work;
the imagination readily accepts them.  It instinctively rejects, on
the contrary, whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its
lowest terms, as the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling
pell-mell and hugger-mugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the
caves of old.  And yet to be just to barbarous islanders we must
not forget the slums and dens of our cities; I must not forget that
I have passed dinnerward through Soho, and seen that which cured me
of my dinner.



CHAPTER V--A TALE OF A TAPU--continued



Tuesday, July 16.--It rained in the night, sudden and loud, in
Gilbert Island fashion.  Before the day, the crowing of a cock
aroused me and I wandered in the compound and along the street.
The squall was blown by, the moon shone with incomparable lustre,
the air lay dead as in a room, and yet all the isle sounded as
under a strong shower, the eaves thickly pattering, the lofty palms
dripping at larger intervals and with a louder note.  In this bold
nocturnal light the interior of the houses lay inscrutable, one
lump of blackness, save when the moon glinted under the roof, and
made a belt of silver, and drew the slanting shadows of the pillars
on the floor.  Nowhere in all the town was any lamp or ember; not a
creature stirred; I thought I was alone to be awake; but the police
were faithful to their duty; secretly vigilant, keeping account of
time; and a little later, the watchman struck slowly and repeatedly
on the cathedral bell; four o'clock, the warning signal.  It seemed
strange that, in a town resigned to drunkenness and tumult, curfew
and reveille should still be sounded and still obeyed.

The day came, and brought little change.  The place still lay
silent; the people slept, the town slept.  Even the few who were
awake, mostly women and children, held their peace and kept within
under the strong shadow of the thatch, where you must stop and peer
to see them.  Through the deserted streets, and past the sleeping
houses, a deputation took its way at an early hour to the palace;
the king was suddenly awakened, and must listen (probably with a
headache) to unpalatable truths.  Mrs. Rick, being a sufficient
mistress of that difficult tongue, was spokeswoman; she explained
to the sick monarch that I was an intimate personal friend of Queen
Victoria's; that immediately on my return I should make her a
report upon Butaritari; and that if my house should have been again
invaded by natives, a man-of-war would be despatched to make
reprisals.  It was scarce the fact--rather a just and necessary
parable of the fact, corrected for latitude; and it certainly told
upon the king.  He was much affected; he had conceived the notion
(he said) that I was a man of some importance, but not dreamed it
was as bad as this; and the missionary house was tapu'd under a
fine of fifty dollars.

So much was announced on the return of the deputation; not any
more; and I gathered subsequently that much more had passed.  The
protection gained was welcome.  It had been the most annoying and
not the least alarming feature of the day before, that our house
was periodically filled with tipsy natives, twenty or thirty at a
time, begging drink, fingering our goods, hard to be dislodged,
awkward to quarrel with.  Queen Victoria's friend (who was soon
promoted to be her son) was free from these intrusions.  Not only
my house, but my neighbourhood as well, was left in peace; even on
our walks abroad we were guarded and prepared for; and, like great
persons visiting a hospital, saw only the fair side.  For the
matter of a week we were thus suffered to go out and in and live in
a fool's paradise, supposing the king to have kept his word, the
tapu to be revived and the island once more sober.

Tuesday, July 23.--We dined under a bare trellis erected for the
Fourth of July; and here we used to linger by lamplight over coffee
and tobacco.  In that climate evening approaches without sensible
chill; the wind dies out before sunset; heaven glows a while and
fades, and darkens into the blueness of the tropical night; swiftly
and insensibly the shadows thicken, the stars multiply their
number; you look around you and the day is gone.  It was then that
we would see our Chinaman draw near across the compound in a
lurching sphere of light, divided by his shadows; and with the
coming of the lamp the night closed about the table.  The faces of
the company, the spars of the trellis, stood out suddenly bright on
a ground of blue and silver, faintly designed with palm-tops and
the peaked roofs of houses.  Here and there the gloss upon a leaf,
or the fracture of a stone, returned an isolated sparkle.  All else
had vanished.  We hung there, illuminated like a galaxy of stars in
vacuo; we sat, manifest and blind, amid the general ambush of the
darkness; and the islanders, passing with light footfalls and low
voices in the sand of the road, lingered to observe us, unseen.

On Tuesday the dusk had fallen, the lamp had just been brought,
when a missile struck the table with a rattling smack and rebounded
past my ear.  Three inches to one side and this page had never been
written; for the thing travelled like a cannon ball.  It was
supposed at the time to be a nut, though even at the time I thought
it seemed a small one and fell strangely.

Wednesday, July 24.--The dusk had fallen once more, and the lamp
been just brought out, when the same business was repeated.  And
again the missile whistled past my ear.  One nut I had been willing
to accept; a second, I rejected utterly.  A cocoa-nut does not come
slinging along on a windless evening, making an angle of about
fifteen degrees with the horizon; cocoa-nuts do not fall on
successive nights at the same hour and spot; in both cases,
besides, a specific moment seemed to have been chosen, that when
the lamp was just carried out, a specific person threatened, and
that the head of the family.  I may have been right or wrong, but I
believed I was the mark of some intimidation; believed the missile
was a stone, aimed not to hit, but to frighten.

No idea makes a man more angry.  I ran into the road, where the
natives were as usual promenading in the dark; Maka joined me with
a lantern; and I ran from one to another, glared in quite innocent
faces, put useless questions, and proffered idle threats.  Thence I
carried my wrath (which was worthy the son of any queen in history)
to the Ricks.  They heard me with depression, assured me this trick
of throwing a stone into a family dinner was not new; that it meant
mischief, and was of a piece with the alarming disposition of the
natives.  And then the truth, so long concealed from us, came out.
The king had broken his promise, he had defied the deputation; the
tapu was still dormant, The Land we Live in still selling drink,
and that quarter of the town disturbed and menaced by perpetual
broils.  But there was worse ahead:  a feast was now preparing for
the birthday of the little princess; and the tributary chiefs of
Kuma and Little Makin were expected daily.  Strong in a following
of numerous and somewhat savage clansmen, each of these was
believed, like a Douglas of old, to be of doubtful loyalty.  Kuma
(a little pot-bellied fellow) never visited the palace, never
entered the town, but sat on the beach on a mat, his gun across his
knees, parading his mistrust and scorn; Karaiti of Makin, although
he was more bold, was not supposed to be more friendly; and not
only were these vassals jealous of the throne, but the followers on
either side shared in the animosity.  Brawls had already taken
place; blows had passed which might at any moment be repaid in
blood.  Some of the strangers were already here and already
drinking; if the debauch continued after the bulk of them had come,
a collision, perhaps a revolution, was to be expected.

The sale of drink is in this group a measure of the jealousy of
traders; one begins, the others are constrained to follow; and to
him who has the most gin, and sells it the most recklessly, the
lion's share of copra is assured.  It is felt by all to be an
extreme expedient, neither safe, decent, nor dignified.  A trader
on Tarawa, heated by an eager rivalry, brought many cases of gin.
He told me he sat afterwards day and night in his house till it was
finished, not daring to arrest the sale, not venturing to go forth,
the bush all round him filled with howling drunkards.  At night,
above all, when he was afraid to sleep, and heard shots and voices
about him in the darkness, his remorse was black.

'My God!' he reflected, 'if I was to lose my life on such a
wretched business!'  Often and often, in the story of the Gilberts,
this scene has been repeated; and the remorseful trader sat beside
his lamp, longing for the day, listening with agony for the sound
of murder, registering resolutions for the future.  For the
business is easy to begin, but hazardous to stop.  The natives are
in their way a just and law-abiding people, mindful of their debts,
docile to the voice of their own institutions; when the tapu is re-
enforced they will cease drinking; but the white who seeks to
antedate the movement by refusing liquor does so at his peril.

Hence, in some degree, the anxiety and helplessness of Mr. Rick.
He and Tom, alarmed by the rabblement of the Sans Souci, had
stopped the sale; they had done so without danger, because The Land
we Live in still continued selling; it was claimed, besides, that
they had been the first to begin.  What step could be taken?  Could
Mr. Rick visit Mr. Muller (with whom he was not on terms) and
address him thus:  'I was getting ahead of you, now you are getting
ahead of me, and I ask you to forego your profit.  I got my place
closed in safety, thanks to your continuing; but now I think you
have continued long enough.  I begin to be alarmed; and because I
am afraid I ask you to confront a certain danger'?  It was not to
be thought of.  Something else had to be found; and there was one
person at one end of the town who was at least not interested in
copra.  There was little else to be said in favour of myself as an
ambassador.  I had arrived in the Wightman schooner, I was living
in the Wightman compound, I was the daily associate of the Wightman
coterie.  It was egregious enough that I should now intrude unasked
in the private affairs of Crawford's agent, and press upon him the
sacrifice of his interests and the venture of his life.  But bad as
I might be, there was none better; since the affair of the stone I
was, besides, sharp-set to be doing, the idea of a delicate
interview attracted me, and I thought it policy to show myself
abroad.

The night was very dark.  There was service in the church, and the
building glimmered through all its crevices like a dim Kirk
Allowa'.  I saw few other lights, but was indistinctly aware of
many people stirring in the darkness, and a hum and sputter of low
talk that sounded stealthy.  I believe (in the old phrase) my beard
was sometimes on my shoulder as I went.  Muller's was but partly
lighted, and quite silent, and the gate was fastened.  I could by
no means manage to undo the latch.  No wonder, since I found it
afterwards to be four or five feet long--a fortification in itself.
As I still fumbled, a dog came on the inside and sniffed
suspiciously at my hands, so that I was reduced to calling 'House
ahoy!'  Mr. Muller came down and put his chin across the paling in
the dark.  'Who is that?' said he, like one who has no mind to
welcome strangers.