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.
What had the man been after? I have found my music better
qualified to scatter than to collect an audience. Amateur as I
was, I could not suppose him interested in my reading of the
Carnival of Venice, or that he would deny himself his natural rest
to follow my variations on The Ploughboy. And whatever his design,
it was impossible I should suffer him to prowl by night among the
houses. A word to the king, and the man were not, his case being
far beyond pardon. But it is one thing to kill a man yourself;
quite another to bear tales behind his back and have him shot by a
third party; and I determined to deal with the fellow in some
method of my own. I told Ah Fu the story, and bade him fetch me
the cook whenever he should find him. I had supposed this would be
a matter of difficulty; and far from that, he came of his own
accord: an act really of desperation, since his life hung by my
silence, and the best he could hope was to be forgotten. Yet he
came with an assured countenance, volunteered no apology or
explanation, complained of injuries received, and pretended he was
unable to sit down. I suppose I am the weakest man God made; I had
kicked him in the least vulnerable part of his big carcase; my foot
was bare, and I had not even hurt my foot. Ah Fu could not control
his merriment. On my side, knowing what must be the nature of his
apprehensions, I found in so much impudence a kind of gallantry,
and secretly admired the man. I told him I should say nothing of
his night's adventure to the king; that I should still allow him,
when he had an errand, to come within my tapu-line by day; but if
ever I found him there after the set of the sun I would shoot him
on the spot; and to the proof showed him a revolver. He must have
been incredibly relieved; but he showed no sign of it, took himself
off with his usual dandy nonchalance, and was scarce seen by us
again.
These five, then, with the substitution of the steward for the
cook, came and went, and were our only visitors. The circle of the
tapu held at arm's-length the inhabitants of the village. As for
'my pamily,' they dwelt like nuns in their enclosure; only once
have I met one of them abroad, and she was the king's sister, and
the place in which I found her (the island infirmary) was very
likely privileged. There remains only the king to be accounted
for. He would come strolling over, always alone, a little before a
meal-time, take a chair, and talk and eat with us like an old
family friend. Gilbertine etiquette appears defective on the point
of leave-taking. It may be remembered we had trouble in the matter
with Karaiti; and there was something childish and disconcerting in
Tembinok's abrupt 'I want go home now,' accompanied by a kind of
ducking rise, and followed by an unadorned retreat. It was the
only blot upon his manners, which were otherwise plain, decent,
sensible, and dignified. He never stayed long nor drank much, and
copied our behaviour where he perceived it to differ from his own.
Very early in the day, for instance, he ceased eating with his
knife. It was plain he was determined in all things to wring
profit from our visit, and chiefly upon etiquette. The quality of
his white visitors puzzled and concerned him; he would bring up
name after name, and ask if its bearer were a 'big chiep,' or even
a 'chiep' at all--which, as some were my excellent good friends,
and none were actually born in the purple, became at times
embarrassing. He was struck to learn that our classes were
distinguishable by their speech, and that certain words (for
instance) were tapu on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war; and he
begged in consequence that we should watch and correct him on the
point. We were able to assure him that he was beyond correction.
His vocabulary is apt and ample to an extraordinary degree. God
knows where he collected it, but by some instinct or some accident
he has avoided all profane or gross expressions. 'Obliged,'
'stabbed,' 'gnaw,' 'lodge,' 'power,' 'company,' 'slender,'
'smooth,' and 'wonderful,' are a few of the unexpected words that
enrich his dialect. Perhaps what pleased him most was to hear
about saluting the quarter-deck of a man-of-war. In his gratitude
for this hint he became fulsome. 'Schooner cap'n no tell me,' he
cried; 'I think no tavvy! You tavvy too much; tavvy 'teama', tavvy
man-a-wa'. I think you tavvy everything.' Yet he gravelled me
often enough with his perpetual questions; and the false Mr. Barlow
stood frequently exposed before the royal Sandford. I remember
once in particular. We were showing the magic-lantern; a slide of
Windsor Castle was put in, and I told him there was the 'outch' of
Victoreea. 'How many pathom he high?' he asked, and I was dumb
before him. It was the builder, the indefatigable architect of
palaces, that spoke; collector though he was, he did not collect
useless information; and all his questions had a purpose. After
etiquette, government, law, the police, money, and medicine were
his chief interests--things vitally important to himself as a king
and the father of his people. It was my part not only to supply
new information, but to correct the old. 'My patha he tell me,' or
'White man he tell me,' would be his constant beginning; 'You think
he lie?' Sometimes I thought he did. Tembinok' once brought me a
difficulty of this kind, which I was long of comprehending. A
schooner captain had told him of Captain Cook; the king was much
interested in the story; and turned for more information--not to
Mr. Stephen's Dictionary, not to the Britannica, but to the Bible
in the Gilbert Island version (which consists chiefly of the New
Testament and the Psalms). Here he sought long and earnestly; Paul
he found, and Festus and Alexander the coppersmith: no word of
Cook. The inference was obvious: the explorer was a myth. So
hard it is, even for a man of great natural parts like Tembinok',
to grasp the ideas of a new society and culture.
