The Sketcher.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1037, 15 January 1892, Page 14

The Sketcher.

V By Robert Louis Stevenson. Author of ‘Treasure Island,’ ‘Kidnapped, ‘The Strange Story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ etc.

[copyright.] The South. Seas.

CHAPTER XLT. The Kino- of Apemama—Foundation of Eqoatob Town. Our first sight of Tembinok’ was a matter of concern, almost alarm, to my whole party. We had a fame to seek, we approached in the propor courtly attitude of a suitor, and must either please him or fail in the main purpose of our voyage. It was our wish to land and live in Apemama, and see more at hand the odd character of the man and the odd, or rather ancient, condition of his island. In all other isles of the South Seas a white man may land with his chest and set up house for a lifetime if lie choose and have the money or the trade ; no hindrance is conceivable. But Apemama is a close island, lying there in the sea with closed doors, the King himself, like a vigilant officer, ready at the wicket to scrutinise and reject . intrenching visitors. Hence the attraction of our enterprise, not merely because it was a little difficult bat because this social quarantine, a curiosity in itself, has been the preservation of others.

Tembinok’, like most tyrants, is a conservative ; like many conservatives, he eagerly welcomes new ideas, and, except in the fields of politics, leans to practical reform. When the missionaries came, professing a knowledge of the truth, he readily received them, attended their worship, acquired the accomplishment of public prayer and made himself a student at their feet. It is thus —it is by the cultivation of similar passing chances—that he has learned to read, to write, to cipher, and to speak his queer, personal English, so different from ordinary * Beach de Mar,’ so much more obscure, expressive, and condensed. His education attended to, he found time to become critical of the new inmates. Like Nakaeia of Makin, he is an; admirer of silence in the island, broods over it like a gi’eat ear, has spies who report daily, and had rather his subjects sing than talk. The service and in particular the sermon, came thus sure to become eyesores. * Here in my island, I ’peak’, ’he once observed to me, *My chiefs no ’peak—do what I talk.’ He looked at the missionary, and what did he see ? ‘ See Konna ka ’peak’, in a big ’outch 1’ he cried, with a strong ring of sarcasm. Yet he endured the subversive spectacle, and might even have continued to endure it had not a fresh point arisen. He look again, to employ his own figure ; and the Kanaka was no longer speaking. He was doing worse ; he wa9 building a copra house. The King was touched in his chief interests; revenue and prerogative were threatened. He considered, besides (and some think with him) that trade is incompatible with the missionary claims. ‘ Tuppoti mitionary think “good man very good. Tuppoti he think cobra no good. I send him away ship.’ Such was his abrupt history of the evangelist in Apemama. ,

Similar deportations are common. * I send him away ship’ is the epitaph of not a few, His Majesty paying the exile’s fare to the next place of call. For instance, being passionately fond of European food, he lias several times added to his household a white cook, and one after another these have been deported. They, on their side, swear they were not paid their wages ; he, on his, that they robbed and swindled him beyond en. durance ; .both, perhaps, justly. A more important case was that of an agent, despatched (as I have heard the story) by a firm of merchants to worm his way into the King’s good graces, become, if possible, Premier, and handle the' copra in the interest af his employers. He obtained authority to land, practised his fascinations, was patiently listened to by Tembinok’, supposed himself on the highway to success, and behold 1 when the next ship touched at Apemama the Premier was flung into a boat, had on board his fare paid, and so good-bye. But it is needless to multiply examples —the proof of the pudding is the eating of it. IfV'hen we came to Apemama, of bo many white men who have scrambled for a place in that rich, market one remained —a silent, sober, solitary, niggardly recluse of whom the King remarks : * I think he good : he no ’peak.’ I was warned at the outset we might very well fail in our design ; yet never dreamed of what proved to be the fact, that we should be left four and twenty hours in suspense, and come within an ace o£ ultimate rejection. Capt. Reid had primed himself; no sooner was the King on board and the Hennetti question amicably settled, than he proceeded to express my request, and give an abstract of my claims and virtues. The gammon about Queen Victoria’s son might do for Butaritari > it was out of the question here, aiid I now figured aa ‘ one of the Old Men of England,’ a person of deep knowledge, come expressly to visit Tembinok’s dominion, and eager to report upon it to the no less eager Queen Victoria. The King made no shadow of an answer, and presently began upon a different subject. We might have thought he had not heard or not understood, only that we found ourselves the subject of a constant study. As we sat at meals he took us in series and fixed upon each for near a minute at a time the same hard and thoughtful stare. As he thus looked he seemed to forget him* self, the subject, and the company, and to become absorbed in the process of hiß thought; the look was wholly impersonal. I have seen the same in the eyes of portrait painters. The counts upon which whites have been deported are mainly four • Cheating Tirabinok’; meddling overmuch with copra, which is the -source of his wealth, and one of the sinewß of ;|»iß power; ’peaking, and political intrigue. I

felt guiltless upon all; but how to show it — I would not have taken copra as a gift—how to express that quality by dinner-table bearing ? The rest of the party shared my innocence, and my embarrassment. They shai’ed also in my mortification when, after two whole meal-times, and the odd-moments of an afternoon devoted to this recruiting, Tembinok took his leave in silence. Next morning the same undisguised study, the same silence, was resumed, and the second day had come to its maturity beforo I was informed abruptly that I had stood the ordeal. “ I look your eye. You good man. You no lie,* said the King, a doubtful compliment to a writer of romance. Later he explained lie did not quite judge by the eye only, but the mouth as well. ‘Tuppoti I see man,’ he explained, ‘ I no tavvy good man, bad man. I look eye, look mouth. Then I tavvy. Look eye, look mouth,’ he repeated. And, indeed, lin one case the mouth had the most to. do with it, and it was by our talk we gained admission to the island, the King promising himself (and I believe really amassing) a vast amount of useful knowledge ere we left. The terms of our admission were as follows : —WA were to choose a site, and the King should there build us a town. His people should work for us, but the Kiug only was to give them orders. One of his cooks should come daily to help mine and to learn of him. In case our stores ran out lie would supply us and be repaid on the return of the Equator. On the other hand, be was to come to meals with us when so inclined ; when he stayed at home a dish was to be sent him from our table ; and I solemnly enguged to give his subjects no liquor or money (both of which they are forbidden to possess), and no tobacco, which they were to receive only from the royal hand. I think I remember to have protested against the stringency of this last article; at least it was relaxed, and when a man worked for me I was allowed, to give him a pipe of tobacco on the premises, but none to take a wav.

The site of Equator town —we named our city for the schooner—was soon chosen. The immediate shores of the lagoon are windy and blinding—Tembinok’ himself is glad to grope blue-spectacled on his terrace; and wo fled the neighbourhood of the red conjunction, the mattering eyeball, and the beggar who pursues and beseeches the passing foreigner for eye-wash. Behind the town the country is diversified, here opeD, sandy, uneven, and dotted with, dwarfish palms ; here cut up with taro trenches, deep and shallow, and, according to the grovvth of the plants, presenting now the appearance of a sandy tannery, now of an alleyed and green garden. A path leads towards the sea, mounting abruptly to the main level of the island—twenty or even thirty feet, although Einlay gives five, and just by the top of the rise, where the cocoa palms begin to be well grown, we found a grove of pandames and a piece of soil pleasantly covered with green underbrush. A well was not far off under a rustic well house ; nearer still, in a sandy cup of the land, a pond where we might wash our clothes. The place was out of the wind, out of the sun, and , out of sight of the village. It was eliown to the King, and the town promised for the morrow. |

The morrow came. Mr Strong and Mr Osborne‘landed, found nothing done, and carried their oompla : nt to Tembinok’. He heard them, rose, called for a Winchester, stepped without the royal palisade, and fired two shots in the air. A shot in the air is the first Apemama warning; it has the force of a proclamation in more loquacious countries, and his Majesty remarked agreeably that it would make his labourers ‘ mo’ bright.’ In less than thirty minutes, accordingly, the men had mustered, tho work was begun, and we .were told that we might bring our baggage when wo pleased.

It was two in the afternoon ere the first boat was beached, and the long procession of chest and crates and sacks began to struggle through the sandy desert toward Equator town. The grove of pandames was practically a thing of the past. Fire surrounded and smoke rose in the green underbush. In a wide circuit the axes were still crashing. Those very advantages for which the place was chosen, it had been the King’s first idea to abolish; and in the midst of this devastation there stood already a good-sized moniap and a small, closed house. A mat was spread near by for Tembinok’: hero he sat superintending, in cardinal red, a pith helmet on his head, a meerschaum pipe in his mouth, a wife stretched at his back with custody of the matches and tobacco. Twenty or thirty feet in front of him the bulk of the workers squatted on the ground ; some of the bußh bore survived ; and in this the commons sat nearly to their shoulders, and presented only an arc of brown faces, black heads, and attentive eyes fixod on his Majesty. Long pauses reigned, during which the subjects stared and the King smoked. Then Tembinok, would raise his voice and speak shrilly and briefly. There was never a response in words ; but if the speech were jesting, there came by way of answer discreet, obsequious laughter, such laughter as wo hoar in schoolrooms, and, if it were practical, the sudden uprising of the squad. Twice they so disappeared and returned with further elements of the city, a second house and a second moniap’. It was singular to spy far off through the cocoa stems tho silent oncoming of tho moniap’ ; at first it, seemed swimming spontaneously in tho air, but on a nearer view betraying under the eaves many scores of moving, naked legs. In all tho affair senile obedience was no less remarkable than senile deliberation. Tho gang had here mustered by the note of a deadly weapon. The man who looked on was the unquestioned master of their lives ; and, except for civility, they bestirred themselves like so many American hotel clerks. The spectator was aware of an unobstrucive yet invincible inertia, at which the skipper of a trading dandy might have torn his hair. Yet the work was accomplished. By dusk, when bis Majesty withdrew, the town was founded and cofnplete, a new and ruder Ampbiou having called it from nothing with three cracks of a rifle. And the next morning the same conjuror obliged us with a further miracle, a mystic rampart fencing us, so the path which ran by our doors

became suddenly impassable, the inhabitants who bad business across the line must fetch a wide circuit, and we sat in the midst in transparent privacy, seeing, seen, but unapproachable, like bees in a glass hive. The outward and visible sign of this glamour was no more than a few ragged cocoa-leaf garlands ound the stems of the outlying palms; but its significance reposed on the tremendous sanction of the taboo and the guns of Tembinok’.

We made our first meal that night in the improvised city, where we were to stay two months, and which —so soon as we had done with it —was to vanish in a day as it appeared, its elements returning whence they came, the Taboo raised, the traffic on the patli resumed, the sun and the moon peering in vain between the palm trees for the bygone work, the wind blowing over an empty site. Yet the place, which is now only an episode in some memories, seemed to have been built and to be destined to endure for years. It was a busy hamlet. One of the moniap’s we made our dining-room, one the kitchen. The houses we reserved for sleeping. They were on the admirable Apemama plan, out and away the best house in the South Seas, standing some three feet above the ground on posts ; the sides of woven flaps, which can bo raised to admit light and air; or lowered to shut out the wind and the l-ain ; airy, healthy, clean and watertight. We had a hen of a remarkable kind —almost unique in my experience—being a lien that occasioually laid eggs. Not far off Mrs Stevenson tended a garden of salad and shallots. The salad was devoured by the hen—which wi£s her bane. The shallots were served out a leaf at a time , and welcomed and realislied like peaches. ‘ I Toddy and green cocoanuts were brought U 3 daily. We once had a present of some fish from the King, and onoe of a turtle. Sometimes we shot so-called plover along the shore, sometimes wild chickens in tho bush. The rest of our diet-was from tins. Our occupations wore various—all varying. Mr Osborne and I hammered away at a novel, Mr Strong would be away sketching. Wo read Gibbon and Carlyle aloud, we blew on flageolets, we strummed our guitars, we took photographs by the light of the sun, the moon, and detonating powder, sometimes employed cards. Pot-hunting engaged a part of our leisure. I have myself passed afternoons in the exciting but innocuous pursuit of winged animals with a revolver, and it was fortunate there were better shots of the party, and fortunate the King could lend us a more suitable weapon in the form of an excellent fowling-piece, or our spare diet would have been sparer still.

Night was tbe time to see our city, after the moon was up, after the lamps were lighted, and so long as the fire sparkled in the cook house. We suffered from a plague of flies and mosquitoes, comparable to that of Egypt. Our dinner table (sent, like all our furniture, by tbe King) must be enclosed in a tent of netting, our citadel and refuge, and this became all luminous, and bulged and beaconed under the eaves, like the globe ol some monstrous lamp under the margin of its shade. Our cabins, the sides being propped at a variety of inclinations, spilled out strange, angular patterns of brightness. In his roofed and open kitchen, Ah Foo was to bo seen by lamp and firelight, dabbling among pots. Over all there fell in the season an extraordinary splendour of mellow moonshine. The sand sparkled as with the dust of diamonds, the stars had vanished. At intervals a dusky night bird, slow and low flying, passed in the colonnade of the tree stems and uttered a hoarse, croaking cry.