‘WHAT WERE YOU before you came to the islands?’ old William asked one evening when a little group of men were gathered in the store.
It happened that I was thinking of ranching days, so I answered thoughtlessly, ‘A cowboy.’
‘A cowboy!’ William cried.
‘What! A cowboy?’ shouted George.
The announcement created great excitement, for the myth of the American cowboy has even reached Puka-Puka. The few natives who have been to Rarotonga, Tahiti or Apia have, of course, attended the cinemas there and brought back wonderful tales of cowboys. Island exhibitors have long since learned that Wild West movies are the big drawing-card, and the more bloodthirsty the picture, the larger the crowd. So the American cowboy is known, by report at least, all through the South Seas, even on such remote islands as Puka-Puka. He is regarded as a fierce, Indian-killing, seducing, stage-coach-robbing, reckless-riding hero, and among the islands nothing makes such a profound impression upon the natives as the admission that one has ‘cowboyed’ now and then.
As a salve to my conscience I tried to explain to my admirers that a cowboy is really a quite ordinary person who takes care of cattle, driving them from one range to another, but old William, the much-travelled one, called me a liar, straight out.
‘You can’t fool me, Ropati-Cowboy!’ he shouted. ‘Maybe you fool these goddam Kanakas, but gota-hell! You not fool me!’ His great ears bobbed up and down in his excitement. ‘Damn fool son-of-a-gun! Didn’t Hosea that shipped to Apia with me tell how cowboys steal cattle? Ho, ho! Ropati-Cowboy! I savee too much. You not fool this old sailor, Ropati-Cowboy!’
William’s line of profanity – Puka-Pukan, English, and even Spanish – is not particularly elegant, of course, but it is so much a part of the man that I can’t leave all of it out if I am to show him as he is. His name for me, Ropati-Cowboy, took hold at once and to this day I have retained this honourable appellation. It adds more distinction than if I were to be called Sir Ropati or Lord Ropati, and infinitely more than such a title as Revd Ropati, for like all healthy human animals, Puka-Pukans admire a sinful person.
Nothing would do, then, but that Aparo (Apollo), the island horse, must be brought, so that I might give an exhibition of my skill as a cowboy. The rest of the villagers, having been roused from their final evening slumbers, quickly gathered. Knowing that I would forever lose caste if I refused, I cut a few fathoms of rope, spliced a noose at one end, mounted the evil-eyed old nag and kicked him into a stiff-legged trot. Taking a turn among the howling villagers, I cut out Ura, chief of police, from the crowd, dropped the noose over his head, and dragged him a few yards down the road, to the great delight of the spectators.
Having proved to their satisfaction that I was a cowboy, I dismounted and returned in triumph to the store.
My sins were turned against me that night. Having publicly shamed the chief of police by roping him, it was only fair that I should be roped in my turn, and so it happened: Maloko appeared on the scene. She walked shamelessly into my house, seated herself cross-legged on the floor, and proceeded to giggle. There are prettier girls on the island than Maloko, but she is far from plain – a little too rounded, perhaps, as to body, and with features not so regular as they might be, but on the whole not unattractive. I made use of my small vocabulary to ask what she wanted.
‘To be your cook and housekeeper,’ she replied.
I was rather surprised at this; however, I nodded reflectively, gave her an appraising glance in search of the earmarks of a good cook, and although I found none, engaged her at once. I told her to come back in the morning and learn from Mama how to make coffee.
An expression of genuine concern came over her face. For a few moments she bent her head in thought as deep as her tiny brain was capable of. At length her face brightened and she replied: ‘No, if I am to be your cook and housekeeper, I shall sleep here.’
Certainly there were prettier girls at Puka-Puka, and Maloko was approaching the dangerous age of eighteen, which is past the prime for Polynesian women; but at last I said: ‘All right. You may sleep on a mat in the corner.’ I went on to explain in a fatherly manner that it would be sinful to think of any other arrangement: the church positively forbade it, and I could not even consider going against the dictates of the church.
‘But aren’t you a cowboy?’ she asked.
Maloko had charm, no doubt, but I was still haunted by the firelight vision I had seen on my first night at Puka-Puka – and several times since as well – of a lovely little savage with a perfect olive skin, a bewitching oval face and the slim body of a Diana. I explained as well as I could that cowboys are really very virtuous people and had little or nothing to do with women. If she insisted upon sleeping in my house, then she must be satisfied with a distant corner of the room, and on no condition was she to leave it. With that I blew out the light and crawled under my mosquito-net.
For some reason or other I slept restlessly that night. It may have been because I heard an occasional affected sigh from Maloko’s corner, or because of a pernicious habit I have of enhancing the beauty of things when I hang them in my mental picture-gallery. However that may be, I tossed and turned for a long time before I fell into a light slumber.
I was awakened by someone shaking me by the shoulder.
‘Ropati-Cowboy!’ a voice whispered, ‘there are many mosquitoes tonight, and I have no net.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘all right.’
I was really annoyed the next day when I found that Maloko had bragged through the three villages about how she had roped and tied the cowboy.
I was not long in learning the Puka-Puka language, for all the Polynesian tongues are allied, and already I had a fair knowledge of Tahitian, Rarotongan, and half a dozen other dialects of the Maori speech. In three months’ time I could speak the language with considerable fluency, but for a year or more I had difficulty in following conversations between natives when they slurred their words or expressed themselves in obscure Puka-Pukan metaphors.
The chief difficulty was distinguishing between homonymous words which usually have a subtle analogy, such as the word ara, for example. It was Benny who first pointed out to me that this word means both to sin and to waken; ‘for,’ he explained, ‘is it not a sin to waken a person who is deep in slumber, and very likely in the midst of pleasant dreams?’
At times I read the Rarotongan Bible to retain my knowledge of that language; this practice also helped me with the local vernacular, drawing my attention to contrasts in word-building.
With Puka-Pukan acquired, there was little left to do, so I devoted myself to my books. I have been a bookworm since childhood, but it was only when I settled down to reading on Puka-Puka that I lost myself completely in the world of books. They seemed to become living creatures; their sharply contrasting personalities often materialised so vividly before me that I would find myself talking aloud with them. They possessed me completely; some of them filled me with terror because of my realisation of the power they had over me – all of which is difficult to explain, unless it be to some other recluse who has lived, alone of his kind, with only books for companions.
The great stylists haunted me: Pepys, Casanova, Swinburne, Borrow, Mungo Park, John Stowe, Sterne, Dumas, Pierre Loti. One of Swinburne’s poems, ‘Hendecasyllabics’, ran through my head for weeks until I feared for my sanity. To this day when I repeat the lines:
In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
I cannot, for the life of me, stop until I have reached the last line. And even then I find myself repeating it over and over, to waken at night with such lines as –
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow,
echoing and re-echoing in my mind.
It required many weeks to finish Pepys’s Diary, for if I read from it more than a half-hour at a time the book would open before me in my dreams, and I would read on the whole night through, my mind inventing gossip in Pepys’s peculiar style.
Casanova and Borrow did not haunt me so much in dreams, but I would lose myself in Lavengro and the Memoirs, becoming oblivious of existence itself, until Benny came tramping through the house to open the store, or Maloko diffidently shook me to say that coffee was ready, and with a start I would realise that my lamp had burned out and I was reading by daylight.
Today I have a thousand carefully selected volumes on my shelves, the wonder of the natives, who, knowing no other book than the Bible, take it for granted that all my books are Bibles of a sort. A few of my more intelligent neighbours realise that some of these Bibles are different, containing, perhaps, stories of Jesus and Noah and Abraham which were not thought proper for Puka-Puka readers.
Sometimes I relate to them the Hellenic myths, the traditions of King Arthur, stories from the Arabian Nights, or one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, explaining that one is from the old Bible of the Greeks and another from the Bible of the early Britons, etc., but my audiences are never convinced. When I have carefully explained the matter, someone is sure to ask, ‘But why was it left out of our Bible?’ Then, more than likely, they will laugh and say: ‘Ah, Ropati-Cowboy, we know you! You are a sinful man who steals cattle and then says he is only driving them from one place to another! You can’t fool us! All those books are Bibles!’