LITTLE SEA AND DESIRE sat outside my cookhouse while I prepared supper. I would not allow them to come in, for I wanted to surprise them with a European meal. I made a soup and fried some croutons; then I fried some chicken Maryland style. Entrées were string beans and taro au gratin. There was also a fine salad made from a coconut tree bud Benny had brought; a tin of pineapple cubes and a saucer of condensed milk and Benedictine for dessert; and with coffee and tinned cheese to wind up with. To wash all this down I mixed a Janusfaced rum punch which tasted like lemonade but encouraged conversation. The table was set with my best gilt-edged china, knives, forks and all the other furnishings of the civilised dinner-table. When all was ready I sent my assistant, Benny, about his business and asked the two sea nymphs to join me.
They had neglected to dress for the occasion, and came in grass skirts and nothing else. Mistaking my soup for a curious kind of sauce, they mashed the taro and beans in it and ate the mess with their fingers. The knives and forks were used to beat dance rhythms on the table.
After a round of punch, Little Sea and her cousin began to chatter like a flock of mynah birds. I followed them in matters of etiquette and we had a jolly time of it.
While dallying over our coffee and cheese – Desire used the cheese to putty cracks in the table – Little Sea told me that the men of Leeward Village were going to meet that night to discuss the matter of King-of-the-Sky’s wife, who claimed that she had not received as large a share of the turtle as her neighbour enemy, Mrs George. The discussion was to take place at the village meeting-house in the interior of the islet, where nobody would disturb them.
We agreed to eavesdrop at the meeting, and after a final round of punch we blew out the light, sneaked through the village and followed a path into the coconut groves.
The night was pitch black. I could barely distinguish Little Sea moving before me like a shadow on a black curtain. Often I stumbled off the trail altogether, when Desire, who was behind, would catch me by the pareu tail and pull me back on the path with some disparaging remark about cowboys who can’t see in the dark.
Before long a rumbling sound reached our ears: it was the first low mutterings of the discussion which was soon to echo through the groves from the lagoon beach to the outer reef.
The meeting-house was built on a knoll made by the ancients, who had banked up the sand in excavating their taro-beds, and was nothing but a thatch roof supported by a dozen six-foot poles. Within sat the fathers of Leeward Village, all of them talking at once, no one listening to the others and, as is the case the world over, each disputant glorying in the belief that his cogent arguments were being heard.
King-of-the-Sky, whose wife had been so shabbily treated in the turtle division by not being given more than her due share, sat with his great back to one of the house posts. He roared intermittently, sweeping his paws in comprehensive gestures; and at such times I thought that the others were silenced, but by the dim shell fire burning nearby I could see that their mouths were still working: it was only that King-of-the-Sky’s roarings had deafened my ears to the others.
It was a glorious debate. Thus would King-of-the-Sky present his wife’s complaint, holding strictly to the matter in question: ‘Liars! Thieves! Who are you to dare speak to me? Who am I to stand your insults? I am King-of-the-Sky, son of the great canoe-builder Hog-Tooth, grandson of the marvellous fisherman Nose, and a descendant of the superman Great Stomach, who caught turtles by flying over the reef and picking them up by their tails! Who am I? I am King-of-the-Sky, the greatest man on Puka-Puka!’
Here the air reverberated as he struck his barrel-like chest.
‘I am King-of-the-Sky, the strongest man on Puka-Puka, the strongest man in all the Cook Islands! Didn’t I sail my great canoe, the largest in the world, four days out to sea with the wife of Sore-Nose? Didn’t I catch the shark that it required four men to pull in? Haven’t the women of Puka-Puka been ravished by me?’ Again he struck his chest a resounding blow.
Up jumped a sawn-off little man, screaming in a high-pitched voice and never once mentioning the turtle, merely relating the exploits of his ancestors and telling what a redoubtable man he himself was. Then the discussion again became general – a general pandemonium – until King-of-the-Sky bellowed out again, when all other voices were drowned by his lion’s roar.
Little Sea had edged comfortably close to me. ‘Aué!’ she said. ‘King-of-the-Sky will win as he always does. He isn’t even hoarse yet.’
‘Are the debates won by the man who makes the most noise?’ I asked.
‘Of course! How else should they be won?’ she asked quite seriously. ‘Isn’t that the way it is in your country?’
I was reminded of a Democratic national convention I had once heard from a distance of six blocks, and I was forced to admit that it was even the same in the white man’s land.
One by one the Leeward Villagers left the meeting until, at midnight, only King-of-the-Sky and half a dozen other lusty-throated ones were left. Soon after we too returned to the village, whereupon Desire went into the hut, while Little Sea and I sat on a coconut frond that lay invitingly before the door. Then – we slept. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but it seemed the only thing to do under the circumstances, and I could think of no reason for not doing it; furthermore, I felt that our happiness depended upon it. So I lay down and fell asleep with Little Sea’s head resting on my arm.
Some time afterwards I was aroused by the sound of voices. They belonged to Mr Chair and his brotherhood, returning from a midnight assembly on the outer beach.
Mr Chair saw the two dim objects lying before the door. ‘That’s why Mr Cigarette was absent tonight!’ I heard him say. ‘It’s against the rules, for Little Sea has not been initiated!’
‘Oh, well, never mind,’ said Mr Horse. ‘He’s a cowboy and isn’t supposed to understand the customs of Puka-Puka.’
Then I heard Miss Button say, snappishly: ‘Who cares? The little hussy! What does she amount to? As for that person Ropati-Cowboy, I didn’t like him anyway. There are plenty of other fish in the sea.’
The society then disappeared and vanished in the shadows.
I awoke about four. Little Sea was still fast asleep. She was mine now, I reflected, for it is an old Puka-Puka custom that a man shall publicly proclaim a woman as his mate by sleeping at her side before the door of her father’s house.
I turned to Little Sea and kissed her cheek.
There was a rumbling sound from somewhere in the depths of the islet. King-of-the-Sky was sitting alone in the Leeward Village meeting-house, gesticulating to the attentive shades of night, roaring out the genealogy of his ancestors, telling the sleeping world of his greatness.