Part 4 (2/2)
Fiji is to the Pacific what the eye is to the needle. Swift as are the vessels which thread the largest ocean on earth, travelers who do more than pa.s.s through Fiji on their way between America and the Antipodes are few. Yet the years have woven more than a mere patchwork of romance round these islands. In climate they are considered the most healthful of the South Sea groups, though socially and from the point of view of our civilization they do not occupy the same place in our sentiments as do Samoa, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Sandwich Islands. Largely, I suppose, because of the ethnological accident that planted there a race of people that is farther from Europeans than the Polynesians. The Fijians are Melanesians, a negroid people said by some to be a ”sub-branch” of the Polynesians. They have been slightly mixed through their contact with the Tongans and the Samoans, but they are not definitely related to either and full mixture is unlikely.
A century ago a number of Australian convicts escaped to Fiji. They brought to these savage cannibal islanders all the viciousness and arrogance of their type, and imposed themselves upon the primitive natives. The effect was not conducive of the best relations between white people and natives, nor did it have an elevating influence upon the latter. However, despite their cannibalism and their unwillingness to yield to the influence of our benign civilization, the Fijians are a people in many ways superior to both the Polynesians east of them and the true Melanesians or Papuans to the west. They are more moral; they are cleanly; their women occupy a better position in relation to their men; and in character and skill they are superior to their neighbors. I was impressed with this dignity of the Fijians, conscious and unconscious, from the time I first laid eyes on them. I felt that, notwithstanding all that was said about them, here was a people that stood aloof from mere imitation.
Yet such is the nature of reputation that when I announced my intention of breaking my journey from Honolulu to Australia at Fiji, my fellow-pa.s.sengers were inclined to commiserate with me. They wondered how one with no special purposes--that is, without a job--could risk cutting loose from his iron moorings in these savage isles. Had they not read in their school geographies of jungles and savages all mixed and wild, with mocking natives grinning at you from behind bamboo-trees, living expectations of a juicy dinner? They warned me about dengue fever; they extolled the virtues of the Fijian maidens, and exaggerated the vices of the Fijian men. The word ”cannibals” howled round my head as the impersonal wind had howled round the masts of the steamer one night. But the adventurer soon learns that there is none so unknowing as the average globe-trotters (the people who have been there); so he listens politely and goes his own way.
When, therefore, I got the first real whiff of tropical sweetness, mixed though it was with copra and mold, all other considerations vanished.
From the cool heights the hills looked down in pity upon the little village of Suva as it lay prostrate beneath the sun. If there was any movement to be seen, it was upon the lapping waters of the harbor, where numerous boats swarmed with black-bodied, glossy-skinned natives in that universal pursuit of life and happiness. As the _Niagara_ sidled up to the pier and made fast her hawsers, these black fellows rushed upon her decks and into the holds like so many ants, and what had till then been inanimate became as though possessed.
2
I had been under the impression that the natives were all lazy, but the manner of their handling of cargo soon dissipated that notion. Further to discredit the rumor-mongers, three Fijians staged an attempt to lead a donkey ash.o.r.e which would have shamed the most enthusiastic believer in the practice of counting ten before getting angry and trying three times before giving up. The Fijian is as indifferent to big as to little tasks, and seems to be alone, of all the dwellers in the tropics, in this apathetic att.i.tude toward life. There is none in all the world more lazy, indolent, and do-nothing than the white man. As soon as he comes within sight of a native anywhere, that native does his labor for him; you may count on it.
So it was that with fear and trembling I announced to the stewards that I had a steamer trunk which I wanted ash.o.r.e with me. They grunted and growled as the two of them struggled with it along the gang-plank and dropped it as Atlas might have been expected to drop the earth, and stood there with a contemptuous look of expectation. I took out two half-dollars and handed one to each. The sneer that formed under their noses was well practised, I could see, and they took great pains to inform me that they were no n.i.g.g.e.rs, they would not take the trunk another foot. There it was. I was lost, scorned, and humiliated. Why did I have so much worldly goods to worry about? Just then a portly Fijian stepped up. Beside him I felt puny, doubly humble now. Before I had time to decide whether or not he was going to pick me up by the nape of the neck and carry me off to a feast, he took my trunk instead. Though it weighed fully a hundred and sixty-five pounds, it rose to his shoulders--up there a foot and a half above me--and the giant strode along the pier with as little concern as though it were empty. The two stewards stood looking on with an air of superiority typical of the white men among colored.
I cannot say that mere brawn ever ent.i.tles any man to rank, and that the white generally subst.i.tutes brain for brawn is obvious. But I failed to see wherein they justified their conceit, for to men of their type the fist is still the symbol of their ideal, as it is to the majority of white men. And as I came away from the s.h.i.+p again that afternoon I found a young steward, a mere lad, standing in a corner crying, his cheek swollen and red. I asked him what happened. ”The steward hit me,” he said, trying to restrain himself from crying. ”I thought I was through and went for my supper so as to get ash.o.r.e a bit. He came up and asked me what I was doing. I told him, and he struck me with his fist.” Yet the stewards thought themselves too good to do any labor with black men about. No s.h.i.+p in a tropical port is manned by the sailors; there they take a vacation, as it were.
From the customs shed to my hotel the selfsame Fijian carried my trunk majestically. I felt hopeful that for a time at least I should see the last of stewards and their ilk. But before I was two days in Suva I learned that sh.o.r.e stewards are often not any better, and was happy to get farther inland away from the port for the short time I could afford to spend in the tropics.
Meanwhile, some of the younger of my fellow-pa.s.sengers came on sh.o.r.e and began doing the rounds, into which they inveigled me. From one store to the other we went, examining the moldy, withered, incomplete stocks of the traders. Magazines stained brown with age, cheap paper-covered novels, native strings of beads formed part of the stock in trade. We soon exhausted Suva.
At the corner of the right angle made by Victoria Parade and the pier stood a Victoria coach. A horse slept on three legs, in front of it, and a Hindu sat upon the seat like a hump on an elongated camel. We roused them from their dozing and began to bargain for their hire. Six of us climbed into the coach and slowly, as though it were fastened to the ground, the horse began to move, followed by the driver, the carriage, and the six of us. For an hour we continued in the direction in which the three had been standing, along the beach, up a little knoll, past corrugated-iron-roofed shacks, and down into Suva again; the horse stopped with the carriage behind him in exactly the same position in which we had found them, and driver and beast went to sleep again.
Much is heard these days about the effects of the railroad and the steamer and the wireless telegraph on the unity of the world, but to those travelers and that Hindu and to the Fijians whom we pa.s.sed en route, not even the insertion of our six s.h.i.+llings in the driver's pocket has, I am sure, as much as left the faintest impression on any of us except myself. And on me it has left the impression of the utter inconsequence of most traveling.
Thus Suva, the eye of Fiji and of the needle of the Pacific, is threaded, but there is nothing to sew. The unexpected never happens.
There are no poets or philosophers, no theaters or cabarets in Suva, as far as mere eye can see,--nothing but smell of mold and copra (cocoanut oil).
In Suva one cannot long remain alert. The sun is stupefying. The person just arrived finds himself stifled by the sharp smells all about him as though the air were poisoned with too much life. The s.h.a.ggy green hills, rugged and wild in the extreme, show even at a distance the struggle between life and death which moment by moment takes place. Luxuriant as on the morning of creation, the vegetation seems to be rotting as after a period of death. In Suva everything smells damp and moldy. You cannot get away from it. The stores you buy in, the bed you sleep in, the room you eat in,--all have the same odor. The books in the little library are eaten full of holes through which the flat bookworms wander as by right of eminent domain. Offensive to the uninitiated is the smell of copra. The swarms of Fijians who attack the cargo smell of it and glisten with it. The boats smell of it and the air is heavy with it. If copra and mold could be banished from the islands, the impression of loveliness which is the essence of the South Seas would remain untainted. Yet to-day, let me but get a whiff of cocoanut-oil from a drug store and I am immediately transported to the South Seas and my being goes a-wandering.
3
I seldom dream, but at the moment of waking in strange surroundings after an unusual run of events my mind rehea.r.s.es as in a dream the experiences gained during consciousness. When the knuckles of the Fijian--and he has knuckles--sounded on my door at seven to announce my morning tea, I woke with a sense of heaviness, as though submerged in a world from which I could never again escape. At seven-fifteen another Fijian came for my laundry; at seven-thirty a third came for my shoes.
Seeing that it was useless to remain in bed longer, I got up. I was not many minutes on the street before I realized the urgency in those several early visits. Daylight-saving is an absolute necessity in the tropics, for by eight or nine one has to endure our noonday sun, and unless something is accomplished before that time one must perforce wait till late afternoon for another opportunity. To keep an ordinary coat on an ordinary back in Suva is like trying to live in a fireless cooker while angry. Even in the shade one is grateful for white duck instead of woolens, so before long I had acquired an Irish poplin coat. Yet Fiji is one of the most healthful of the South Sea islands.
Owing to the heat, most likely--to give the white devils their due--procrastination is the order of life. ”Everything here is 'malua,'”
explained the manager of ”The Fiji Times” to me. ”No matter what you want or whom you ask for it, 'wait a bit' will be the process.” And he forthwith demonstrated, quite unconsciously, that he knew whereof he spoke. I wanted to get some information about the interior which he might just as easily have given me off-hand, but he asked me to wait a bit. I did. He left his office, walked all the way up the street with me to show me a photographer's place where I should be able to get what I was after, and stood about with me waiting for the photographer to make up his mind whether he had the time to see me or not. There's no use rus.h.i.+ng anybody. The authorities have been several years trying to get one of the off streets of Suva paved. It has been ”worked on,” but the task, turned to every now and then for half an hour, requires numerous rest periods.
In Fiji, every one moves adagio. The white man looks on and commands; the Indian coolie slinks about and slaves; the Fijian works on occasion but generally pa.s.ses tasks by with sporty indifference. Yet there is no absence of life. Beginning with the noise and confusion at the pier, there is a steady stream of individuals on whom shadows are lost, though they have nothing on them but their skins and their sulus. The Fijian idles, allows the Indian to work, happy to be left alone, happy if he can add a s.h.i.+lling to his possessions,--an old vest, a torn pair of trousers of any shape, an old coat, or a stiff-bosomed s.h.i.+rt sans coat or vest or trousers. Tall, mighty, and picturesque, his coiffure the pride of his life, he watches with a confidence well suited to his origin and his race the changes going on about him.
Thus, while his island's fruits are being crated and carted off by the s.h.i.+p-load for foreign consumption, he helps in the process for the mere privilege of subsidized loafing. All the fun he gets out of trade in the tropics seems to be the opportunity of swearing at his fellows in fiji-ized versions of curses taught him by the white man. Or he stands erect on the flat punt as it comes in from regions unknown, bearing bananas green from the tree, the very picture of ease and contentment.
Yet one little tug with foreign impertinence tows half a dozen punts, depriving him even of this element of romance in his life.
Still, there is nothing sullen in his make-up. A dozen mummy-apples--better than bread to him--tied together with a string, suffice to make his primitive heart glad. Primitive these people are; their instincts, never led astray very far by such frills and trappings as keep us jogging along are none the less human. Unfold your camera and suggest taking a picture of any one of them and forthwith he straightens up, transforms his features, and adjusts his loin-cloth; nor will he forget to brush his hair with his hand. What a strange thing is this instinct in human nature anywhere in the world which subst.i.tutes so much starch for a slouch the moment one sees a one-eyed box pointing in his direction! None ever hoped to see a print of himself, but all posed as though the click of that little shutter were the recipe for perpetual youth.
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