ONE EVENING, shortly after the adventure related in the last chapter, I was walking through the groves thinking about Desire. I had about made up my mind to have nothing more to do with her: it appealed to my pride to make a gesture of abnegation and be true to Little Sea; furthermore, for all the fact that I had lived for so many years in the South Seas, vestiges of my northern birth and training still remained with me. I found it difficult to convince myself that, whatever the relations might become between Desire and me, they could not injure Little Sea in the least.
Observing a coconut palm growing at an easily scalable angle, I decided to climb it to catch the breeze while I smoked my evening pipe. Upon reaching the top, whom should I find there but my old friend William perched on a cluster of nuts jammed between a frond-butt and the tree. He was leaning comfortably back in a mass of foliage, sucking an empty pipe. I offered him my pouch, which he gravely accepted, filled his pipe, and motioned me to a perch on a neighbouring bunch of nuts.
Having made myself comfortable, I lit my own pipe and leaned back to enjoy a quiet smoke while the wind swayed the tree gently, with a pleasant cradlelike motion.
Old William livened up at my arrival. Producing a six-foot piece of string, he tied the ends together and, after looping it around the index and little fingers of each hand, proceeded by rapid manipulations to form complex patterns in the string between his fingers. Schoolgirls in America often amuse themselves in this way, making what they call ‘cat’s cradles’, but their patterns are simplicity itself in comparison with old William’s.
The Puka-Puka string figures are of very ancient origin. Local legends tell how the gods of Puka-Puka taught them to the people. One legend relates how the famous Polynesian god, the oldest Maui (Mauimatua), visited Puka-Puka and challenged the people to test his wisdom. The local heroes and gods started making string patterns before him, asking what they represented. Each pattern he named correctly: ‘This is Po-nao-nao; this is the oven of Lautara; this is Tii-koni-koni,’ etc. But one hero made a puzzle which Maui was to unravel. The god tried and failed. In order to save his honour he directed the attention of the local hero to a large bird in an adjacent tree, and while the hero was looking away Maui undid the puzzle by breaking the string, much as Alexander cut the Gordian knot.
Heathen William, like the rest of the inhabitants, had made a life study of string patterns. His skill was really marvellous. The old man’s bony fingers were almost invisible as he manipulated the string; then he would stop abruptly, spread his hands, and show me a new design. Throughout the performance his coarse old face was wrinkled with a self-satisfied smile.
‘This is a shark,’ he would say, showing me a new pattern, and he would grunt a song specially composed for that particular picture; ‘this is a flock of birds over a school of fish; this is Ko Islet after a great hurricane.’ Many of his patterns were of such a nature that they could hardly have been shown at a Ladies’ Sewing Circle; as for his explanations of their meaning, it is enough to say that they were what one would expect from old Danger Island William.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘I will show you one of the most difficult of all. Not many people can make this one.’ His fingers moved so rapidly that it was impossible to follow their movements, and the string was crossed and recrossed so many times that at last there was a space of only a few inches between his hands. He stopped, spread his fingers, and exhibited the pattern. ‘What would you call that?’ he asked, grinning at me.
I shook my head.
‘Carramba! What-ta-hell! Don’t you know what that is? What they teach you in the white man’s school? It’s a cowboy having a great battle on the outside beach at night.’ He rolled his eyes and wiggled his thumbs, whereupon the complicated tangle worked back and forth in an indescribable manner. Old William roared with laughter and nearly fell out of the tree in his merriment. Then he put the string back in his pocket, saying that he would show me some more patterns at another time.
I shifted to a softer cluster of nuts and relit my pipe, which had gone out in the thick of William’s graphic battle. We were silent for some time. At length I said, ‘William, what is your greatest pleasure in life?’
Without a moment’s hesitation the sage of Puka-Puka replied: ‘Shooting marbles; that is, nowadays. But when I was a wild youth I was a terror with the women. Now I am a worthless old lubber and no one but a koari will even look at me!’
‘A koari?’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
He explained that a koari is a green undeveloped coconut that has fallen from a tree due to the depredations of wind, rats or small boys. The nut shrivels like an old woman, becoming practically worthless.
‘In these days,’ he went on, ‘the Puka-Puka youth are as foolish as the white men, for they listen to the teachings of the missionaries and try to ape the white men’s ways. Now when a young Puka-Puka man wants a wife he asks her father’s permission to marry, and he wastes his money buying her worthless trinkets from the trading schooners: dresses and shoes and pareus and the like, when it would be much better to spend his money on himself, buying all-day suckers, tops, marbles or Japanese kites. In the end he often marries the girl without having known her more than a month or two in the love fests. Blood and damnation! Unless you live with a wench a few years, how are you going to know what she is? More than likely you’ll find that she won’t do any work at all, and then what compensation have you got for your loss of freedom?’
William expressed his opinion of such modern practice in a singeing blast of curses. He spat venomously over the side of the tree and proceeded to tell me how different things had been when he was young. Those were the good old times when real men lived. When he wanted a wife, as was often the case, he chose her without asking her father, her mother, or even herself. He simply took her, whether she liked it or not. He had learned early in life that all women like masterful men.
The old heathen chuckled to himself as he thought of past days. ‘Ah, when I was a youth,’ he resumed presently, ‘women were nice and fat.’
‘It seems to me, William,’ I said, ‘although of course I am no fit judge, being only a white trader, that a fat woman is not a desirable mate.’
‘Why?’ he asked, surprised. ‘Carramba! They are a lot better than the koaris, the skinny ones.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘my wife, Little Sea, whom you have admitted to be a fine girl, is slender.’
‘Haw, haw, haw!’ roared the old heathen. ‘Why, she’s nothing but a koua!’
A koua is a young budding coconut about the size of a golf-ball.
‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘she’ll fill out in time to a nice fat uivaka; then she’ll become a niumata kati-kati; after that she’ll be a niumata, and after that a niumatua, and by and by she’ll be waddling around your house, a nice filled-up niukatea.’ He described all the stages in the development of the coconut, and ended by saying: ‘Bleed me! and when all’s finished and she’s turned out nice and brown, with plenty of meat on her, she’ll be just like a fine round akaari’ (a mature coconut).
Somewhat awed by this display of island erudition, I said: ‘But can’t you find a more suitable way of describing Puka-Puka women than by comparing them to the various stages in the growth of a coconut?’
‘No,’ said William, ‘there’s nothing equal to a coconut for describing women from childhood to old age. We can hoist them sky-high when we say they are like a koari. Bones and blood! And when a woman grows old and hard we say: “Oh, all right, she’s a good-enough taka-taka!” You savee the taka-taka? It’s an old coconut that’s got no juice inside and the meat dried to a fine brown colour, like copra.
‘Aué! Hell’s pickles! But I’m an old lubber now and not even a koari cares anything about old William any more! Vamose! Finish! Anyhow, I get some pleasure playing marbles in my old age.’
‘But look at old Bones,’ I said. ‘He’s as old as you are, William, but he’s still a great hand with the women.’
‘That old fool!’ said William, snorting scornfully. ‘But he plays the mouth organ; and when the fine fat niukateas hear him they think he’s a young man again!’
The sun was just setting, but William and I, having refilled our pipes, had no intention of leaving our comfortable perch. A wayward hen, too proud to roost with the other hens on the village church, had come to our coconut palm and was cluck-clucking petulantly, for halfway up the tree she had spied us occupying her roost. The breeze had died away and the tree was now quite motionless save when William’s statements required forcible gesticulations, which made it sway in a gentle nodding manner as though it were confirming every word the old sage uttered.
‘Speaking of women,’ he went on, ‘have you heard the death chant I am making for old Mama?’
‘What!’ I said, ‘do you mean to say you are composing a death chant for old Mama?’
‘Carramba! Yes! Why not? She’s an old woman; she won’t last many more moons.’
Then in his wheezy guttural voice he began chanting a song beginning:
Akaru na ke, akat’ia,
Opotia ki te konga et’i,
Ru na niwan’unga vavare …
I shall gather them all in one place,
My wife and her three sisters,
For they have all been kind to old William …
I remarked that I thought it was a shame to compose a death chant for his wife when she was still in her usual health, and furthermore, to brag about his past love affairs with his wife’s sisters. ‘You don’t know the Bible, William, because you are an old heathen; but there it says: “Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, … beside the other, in her lifetime.”’
‘The Bible! I don’t want to know anything about that foolishness! If it says that it’s wrong to make love to your wife’s sisters, then it’s even more foolish than I thought. Your wife is glad when you take a fancy to her sisters. She knows then that you’re not making love to some other woman’s sisters.’
‘Then you think it’s natural for a man to make love to more than one woman?’
‘Of course! What you think? You think any man makes love to only one woman? No Puka-Puka woman believe that, or Puka-Puka man either – not when they’re young. But listen to the rest of my song.’
He chanted away for at least twenty minutes, speaking now and then of poor old Mama, but for the most part exalting himself, speaking of his whaling days, of his liaisons with women of other islands and giving a list of the names of those he had at various times honoured with his affections.
I confess that I was rather shocked at William’s callousness, at the thought that he was so little concerned over the prospect of old Mama’s death that he could compose a long, and certainly lewd, song in her, or rather in his own, honour. I wondered what would happen if I were to die on Puka-Puka. The natives would have a big time, unquestionably. They would compose a death chant – Bosun-Woman would very likely be given the job of composing it; Little Sea and Desire would wail piteously over my body for a day, and then I should be quickly forgotten.
And what was I, after all, but a somewhat more highly sensitised Mama? She was an old savage who gesticulated furiously, wore a grass skirt much too thin, and had the most absurd notions about the world beyond Puka-Puka. When she died it would be merely the dissolving into Nirvana of various illusions about steamboats, foreign lands and the ways to make taro pudding. As for myself, it would be much the same thing, except that illusions would be a trifle more concrete, and those concerned with taro pudding replaced by others concerning the best method of making homebrew. William interrupted my musing. ‘Here’s the ending of the song,’ he said. But the ending, I am afraid, was rather too broad to be translated here.
Dusk had deepened as we sat there, and people were waking from their all-day slumbers. William, apparently, had only just begun to talk. He proposed that he should give me the complete history of his life; but I was cramped from sitting so long in the same position, so we slid down the tree and returned to the village.