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.
