XIV

SOME NIGGERS

"Look at those niggers! Whose are they?" (An American Suffragist lady on board S.S. 'Ventura,' entering Pago-Pago Harbour, Samoa, October 1913. Apropos of the Samoans.)

I suppose that if news came that the National Gallery was burnt down, one might feel, while hearing of the general damage, the rooms gutted or untouched, the Rembrandts and Titians saved, harmed, or lost, a sudden disproportionately keen little stab of wonder: "The Pisanello St Hubert," or "The Patinir Flight into Egypt—What's happened to that?" So now there must be a handful of wanderers here and there who, among all the major conflagration and disasters of nations and continents, have felt the tug of the question, "What of Samoa?"

The South Sea Islands have an invincible glamour. Any bar in 'Frisco or Sydney will give you tales of seamen who slipped ashore in Samoa or Tahiti or the Marquesas for a month's holiday, five, ten, or twenty years ago. Their wives and families await them yet. They are compound, these islands, of all legendary heavens. They are Calypso's and Prospero's isle, and the Hesperides, and Paradise, and every timeless and untroubled spot. Such tales have been made of them by men who have been there, and gone away, and have been haunted by the smell of the bush and the lagoons, and faint thunder on the distant reef, and the colours of sky and sea and coral, and the beauty and grace of the islanders. And the queer thing is that it's all, almost tiresomely, true. In the South Seas the Creator seems to have laid Himself out to show what He can do. Imagine an island with the most perfect climate in the world, tropical, yet almost always cooled by a breeze from the sea. No malaria or other fevers. No dangerous beasts, snakes, or insects. Fish for the catching, and fruits for the plucking. And an earth and sky and sea of immortal loveliness. What more could civilisation give? Umbrellas? Rope? Gladstone bags?.... Any one of the vast leaves of the banana is more waterproof than the most expensive woven stuff. And from the first tree you can tear off a long strip of fibre that holds better than any rope. And thirty seconds' work on a great palm-leaf produces a basket-bag which will carry incredible weights all day, and can be thrown away in the evening. A world of conveniences. And the things which civilisation has left behind or missed by the way are there, too, among the Polynesians: beauty and courtesy and mirth. I think there is no gift of mind or body that the wise value which these people lack. A man I met in some other islands, who had travelled much all over the world, said to me, "I have found no man, in or out of Europe, with the good manners and dignity of the Samoan, with the possible exception of the Irish peasant." A people among whom an Italian would be uncouth, and a high-caste Hindu vulgar, and Karsavina would seem clumsy, and Helen of Troy a frump.

The white population of Heaven, as one would expect, is very small; but, as one wouldn't expect, it is composed of Americans, English, and Germans. About half Germans, for it has been a German colony for some fourteen years. But it is one of the few white 'possessions,' I suppose, where a decent white needn't feel ashamed of himself. For, though it's proper to deny that Germans can colonise, they have certainly ruled Samoa very well. In some part, no doubt, the luck has been with them— with the world—in this success. Samoa was one of their later and wiser attempts in colonising. The first governor was Herr Solf, the present Secretary for the Colonies, who is reputed to have started the administration of Samoa after a careful examination of our method of ruling Fiji, and with a due, but not complete, regard for the advice of the chief English and American settlers in Samoa. Certainly he started it very ably and wisely. By luck and good management those various forces which might destroy the beauty of Samoa are almost ineffectual. The fact that the missionaries are nearly all English puts a slight sufficient chasm between the spiritual and civil powers, and avoids that worst peril of these places—hierocracy. The trade of the islands is largely a monopoly of the 'German firm,' a big affair which pays a few people in Hamburg fabulous percentages. So smaller traders aren't encouraged to flourish unduly; and the German firm itself is too well fed to bother about extending. The Samoans, therefore, aren't exploited, spiritually or commercially, as much as they might be. By such slight chances beauty keeps a foothold in the world. The missionary's peace of mind may require that the Samoan should wear trousers, or the trader's pocket that he should drink gin and live under corrugated iron. But the Government has discovered that these things are not good for the health of the Polynesian, so the Samoan wears his lava-lava and drinks his kava, and lives in his cool and lovely thatched hut, and is happy. And—final test of administration—the population is no longer decreasing.

But I think there's more than luck or German wisdom at the bottom of the happy condition of Samoa. Something in the very magic of the place seems to subdue or soften the evil in men. Heaven forbid I should deny that mean and treacherous and cruel acts of white men and brown are on record. But as a rule the greedy or the boorish, once they settle there, appear to mellow and grow quiet. Between this sea and sky even a trader becomes almost a gentleman, even a Prussian almost lovable, and the very missionaries are betrayed by beauty, and contentment takes them unaware.

Samoa has been well governed. The people have been forbidden a few perils of civilisation, and for the rest are left pretty well to themselves. Go up from Apia across the mountains, or round the coast, or take a boat over to the other big island, Savaii, and you find them living their old life, fishing and bathing and singing, and never a sign of a white man. They are guaranteed possession of their land. They'll sometimes complain faintly of 'taxation'—a small head-tax the Government exacts, which compels the individual to some four or five days' work a year. The English inhabitants themselves have had no grumble against the Germans except that they incline to be 'too kind to the natives'—an admirable testimonial. And traders in the Pacific say they always get far better treatment from the customs and harbour authorities at Apia than at the British Suva, in Fiji.

And yet the Samoans do not like the Germans. When I was there, nearly a year ago, I was often asked, "When will Peritania (Britain) fight Germany, and send her away from Samoa?" They have no complaint against the Germans. They have merely a sentimental and highly flattering preference for the English. On a recent visit of an English gunboat to Apia, the officers were entertained at a Samoan dinner party, with music and dances, by an eminent and very charming young princess. The princess is a famous beauty, with the keen intelligence Samoans have if they care, a wonderful dancer, possessed of a glorious singing voice and a perfect knowledge of English. The party was a great success. The princess led her guests afterwards to the flag-staff. Before anyone could stop her, she leapt on to the pole and raced up the sixty feet of it. That also is among the accomplishments of a Samoan princess. She seized the German flag, tore it to pieces, brought it down, and danced on it. So the tale is; and it is probably true. In the villages where I stayed it was amusing how swiftly and completely the children forgot the few words of German the Government sometimes had them taught; while one or two common phrases, 'Morgen,' 'gut,' etc., were retained as extremely good jokes by the boys and girls, occasions of inextinguishable laughter, through the absurdity of their sound and the very ridiculous German-ness of them....

I wish I were there again. It is a country, and a life, that bind the heart. There is a poem:

"I know an island, Lovely and lost, and half the world away; And there, 'twixt lowland and highland, Lies a pool, rich with murmur and scent and glimmer, And there my friends go, all the radiant day, Each golden-limbed and flower-crowned laughing swimmer,"

—and so on. It tells how ugly and joyless by comparison the fellow's own country sometimes seems, filled with money-making and fogs and such grey things:

"Evil, and gloom, and cold o' nights in my land; But,—I know an island Where Beauty and Courtesy, as flowers, blow."

So it goes, with a jolly return on the rhyme. But the whole poem is a bad one. Still, the man felt it, the magic. It is a magic of a different way of life. In the South Seas, if you live the South Sea life, the intellect soon lapses into quiescence. The body becomes more active, the senses and perceptions more lordly and acute. It is a life of swimming and climbing and resting after exertion. The skin seems to grow more sensitive to light and air, and the feel of water and the earth and leaves. Hour after hour one may float in the warm lagoons, conscious, in the whole body, of every shred and current of the multitudinous water, or diving under in a vain attempt to catch the radiant butterfly- coloured fish that flit in and out of the thousand windows of their gorgeous coral palaces. Or go up, one of a singing flower-garlanded crowd, to a shaded pool of a river in the bush, cool from the mountains. The blossom-hung darkness is streaked with the bodies that fling themselves, head or feet first, from the cliffs around the water, and the haunted forest-silence is broken by laughter. It is part of the charm of these people that, while they are not so foolish as to 'think,' their intelligence is incredibly lively and subtle, their sense of humour and their intuitions of other people's feelings are very keen and living. They have built up, in the long centuries of their civilisation, a delicate and noble complexity of behaviour and of personal relationships. A white man living with them soon feels his mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those glorious golden-brown bodies. But even he soon learns to be his body (and so his true mind), instead of using it as a stupid convenience for his personality, a moment's umbrella against this world. He is perpetually and intensely aware of the subtleties of taste in food, of every tint and line of the incomparable glories of those dawns and evenings, of each shade of intercourse in fishing or swimming or dancing with the best companions in the world. That alone is life; all else is death. And after dark, the black palms against a tropic night, the smell of the wind, the tangible moonlight like a white, dry, translucent mist, the lights in the huts, the murmur and laughter of passing figures, the passionate, queer thrill of the rhythm of some hidden dance—all this will seem to him, inexplicably and almost unbearably, a scene his heart has known long ago, and forgotten, and yet always looked for.

And now Samoa is ours. A New Zealand Expeditionary Force took it. Well, I know a princess who will have had the day of her life. Did they see Stevenson's tomb gleaming high up on the hill, as they made for that passage in the reef? Did Vasa, with his heavy-lidded eyes, and that infinitely adorable lady Fafaia, wander down to the beach to watch them land? They must have landed from boats; and at noon, I see. How hot they got! I know that Apia noon. Didn't they rush to the Tivoli bar—but I forget, New Zealanders are teetotalers. So, perhaps, the Samoans gave them the coolest of all drinks, kava; and they scored. And what dances in their honour, that night!—but, again, I'm afraid the houla-houla would shock a New Zealander. I suppose they left a garrison, and went away. I can very vividly see them steaming out in the evening; and the crowd on shore would be singing them that sweetest and best-known of South Sea songs, which begins 'Good-bye, my Flenni' ('Friend,' you'd pronounce it), and goes on in Samoan, a very beautiful tongue. I hope they'll rule Samoa well.



AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN

Some say the Declaration of War threw us into a primitive abyss of hatred and the lust for blood. Others declare that we behaved very well. I do not know. I only know the thoughts that flowed through the mind of a friend of mine when he heard the news. My friend—I shall make no endeavour to excuse him—is a normal, even ordinary man, wholly English, twenty-four years old, active and given to music. By a chance he was ignorant of the events of the world during the last days of July. He was camping with some friends in a remote part of Cornwall, and had gone on, with a companion, for a four-days' sail. So it wasn't till they beached her again that they heard. A youth ran down to them with a telegram: "We're at war with Germany. We've joined France and Russia."

My friend ate and drank, and then climbed a hill of gorse, and sat alone, looking at the sea. His mind was full of confused images, and the sense of strain. In answer to the word 'Germany,' a train of vague thoughts dragged across his brain. The pompous middle-class vulgarity of the building of Berlin; the wide and restful beauty of Munich; the taste of beer; innumerable quiet, glittering cafes; the Ring; the swish of evening air in the face, as one skis down past the pines; a certain angle of the eyes in the face; long nights of drinking, and singing, and laughter; the admirable beauty of German wives and mothers; certain friends; some tunes; the quiet length of evening over the Starnberger-See. Between him and the Cornish sea he saw quite clearly an April morning on a lake south of Berlin, the grey water slipping past his little boat, and a peasant-woman, suddenly revealed against apple-blossom, hanging up blue and scarlet garments to dry in the sun. Children played about her; and she sang as she worked. And he remembered a night in Munich spent with a students' Kneipe. From eight to one they had continually emptied immense jugs of beer, and smoked, and sung English and German songs in profound chorus. And when the party broke up he found himself arm-in-arm with the president, who was a vast Jew, and with an Apollonian youth called Leo Diringer, who said he was a poet. There was also a fourth man, of whom he could remember no detail. Together, walking with ferocious care down the middle of the street, they had swayed through Schwabing seeking an open cafe. Cafe Benz was closed, but further up there was a little place still lighted, inhabited by one waiter, innumerable chairs and tables piled on each other for the night, and a row of chess-boards, in front of which sat a little bald, bearded man in dress-clothes, waiting. The little man seemed to them infinitely pathetic. Four against one, they played him at chess, and were beaten. They bowed, and passed into the night. Leo Diringer recited a sonnet, and slept suddenly at the foot of a lamp-post. The Jew's heavy-lidded eyes shone with a final flicker of caution, and he turned homeward resolutely, to the last not wholly drunk. My friend had wandered to his lodgings, in an infinite peace. He could not remember what had happened to the fourth man....

A thousand little figures tumbled through his mind. But they no longer brought with them that air of comfortable kindliness which Germany had always signified for him. Something in him kept urging, "You must hate these things, find evil in them." There was that half-conscious agony of breaking a mental habit, painting out a mass of associations, which he had felt in ceasing to believe in a religion, or, more acutely, after quarrelling with a friend. He knew that was absurd. The picture came to him of encountering the Jew, or Diringer, or old Wolf, or little Streckmann, the pianist, in a raid on the East Coast, or on the Continent, slashing at them in a stagey, dimly-imagined battle. Ridiculous. He vaguely imagined a series of heroic feats, vast enterprise, and the applause of crowds....

From that egotism he was awakened to a different one, by the thought that this day meant war and the change of all things he knew. He realised, with increasing resentment, that music would be neglected. And he wouldn't be able, for example, to camp out. He might have to volunteer for military training and service. Some of his friends would be killed. The Russian ballet wouldn't return. His own relationship with A—-, a girl he intermittently adored, would be changed. Absurd, but inevitable; because—he scarcely worded it to himself—he and she and everyone else were going to be different. His mind fluttered irascibly to escape from this thought, but still came back to it, like a tethered bird. Then he became calmer, and wandered out for a time into fantasy.

A cloud over the sun woke him to consciousness of his own thoughts; and he found, with perplexity, that they were continually recurring to two periods of his life, the days after the death of his mother, and the time of his first deep estrangement from one he loved. After a bit he understood this. Now, as then, his mind had been completely divided into two parts: the upper running about aimlessly from one half-relevant thought to another, the lower unconscious half labouring with some profound and unknowable change. This feeling of ignorant helplessness linked him with those past crises. His consciousness was like the light scurry of waves at full tide, when the deeper waters are pausing and gathering and turning home. Something was growing in his heart, and he couldn't tell what. But as he thought 'England and Germany,' the word 'England' seemed to flash like a line of foam. With a sudden tightening of his heart, he realised that there might be a raid on the English coast. He didn't imagine any possibility of it succeeding, but only of enemies and warfare on English soil. The idea sickened him. He was immensely surprised to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him a quality which he found in A—-, and in a friend's honour, and scarcely anywhere else, a quality which, if he'd ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he'd have called 'holiness.' His astonishment grew as the full flood of 'England' swept him on from thought to thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness of a lover. Grey, uneven little fields, and small, ancient hedges rushed before him, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses. He seemed to be raised high, looking down on a landscape compounded of the western view from the Cotswolds, and the Weald, and the high land in Wiltshire, and the Midlands seen from the hills above Prince's Risborough. And all this to the accompaniment of tunes heard long ago, an intolerable number of them being hymns. There was, in his mind, a confused multitude of faces, to most of which he could not put a name. At one moment he was on an Atlantic liner, sick for home, making Plymouth at nightfall; and at another, diving into a little rocky pool through which the Teign flows, north of Bovey; and again, waking, stiff with dew, to see the dawn come up over the Royston plain. And continually he seemed to see the set of a mouth which he knew for his mother's, and A—-'s face, and, inexplicably, the face of an old man he had once passed in a Warwickshire village. To his great disgust, the most commonplace sentiments found utterance in him. At the same time he was extraordinarily happy....

My friend, who has always, though never very passionately, believed himself a most unusual young man, rose to his feet. Feeling a little frightened, and more than a little unwell—for he is a person of quiet mental habits—he wandered down the hill. He kept slowly moving his head, like a man who wishes to dodge a pain. I gather that he was conscious of few definite thoughts till he reached the London train. He kept remembering, unwillingly, a midnight in Carnival-time in Munich, when he had seen a clown, a Pierrot, and a Columbine tip-toe delicately round the deserted corner of Theresien-strasse, and vanish into the darkness. Then he thought of the lights on the pavement in Trafalgar Square. It seemed to him the most desirable thing in the world to mingle and talk with a great many English people. Also, he kept saying to himself—for he felt vaguely jealous of the young men in Germany and France—"Well, if Armageddon's on, I suppose one should be there." ... Of France, he tells me, he thought little. The French always seemed to him people to be respected, but very remote; more incomprehensible than the Japanese, more, even, than the Irish. Of Russia, less. She meant nothing to him except a sense of hysteria and vague evil which he had been given by some of her music and literature. He thought often and heavily of Germany. Of England, all the time. He didn't know whether he was glad or sad. It was a new feeling.

THE END