第81章 A TALE OF A TAPU(3)

He was even rated,plied with historic instances,threatened with the men-of-war,ordered to restore the tapu on the spot -and nothing in the least affected him.It should be done to-morrow,he said;to-day it was beyond his power,to-day he durst not.'Is that royal?'cried indignant Mr.Rick.No,it was not royal;had the king been of a royal character we should ourselves have held a different language;and royal or not,he had the best of the dispute.The terms indeed were hardly equal;for the king was the only man who could restore the tapu,but the Ricks were not the only people who sold drink.He had but to hold his ground on the first question,and they were sure to weaken on the second.Alittle struggle they still made for the fashion's sake;and then one exceedingly tipsy deputation departed,greatly rejoicing,a case of brandy wheeling beside them in a barrow.The Rarotongan (whom I had never seen before)wrung me by the hand like a man bound on a far voyage.'My dear frien'!'he cried,'good-bye,my dear frien'!'-tears of kummel standing in his eyes;the king lurched as he went,the courtier ambled,-a strange party of intoxicated children to be entrusted with that barrowful of madness.

You could never say the town was quiet;all morning there was a ferment in the air,an aimless movement and congregation of natives in the street.But it was not before half-past one that a sudden hubbub of voices called us from the house,to find the whole white colony already gathered on the spot as by concerted signal.The SANS SOUCI was overrun with rabble,the stair and verandah thronged.From all these throats an inarticulate babbling cry went up incessantly;it sounded like the bleating of young lambs,but angrier.In the road his royal highness (whom I had seen so lately in the part of butler)stood crying upon Tom;on the top step,tossed in the hurly-burly,Tom was shouting to the prince.Yet a while the pack swayed about the bar,vociferous.Then came a brutal impulse;the mob reeled,and returned,and was rejected;the stair showed a stream of heads;and there shot into view,through the disbanding ranks,three men violently dragging in their midst a fourth.By his hair and his hands,his head forced as low as his knees,his face concealed,he was wrenched from the verandah and whisked along the road into the village,howling as he disappeared.

Had his face been raised,we should have seen it bloodied,and the blood was not his own.The courtier with the turban of frizzed hair had paid the costs of this disturbance with the lower part of one ear.

So the brawl passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to the inhumane.Yet we looked round on serious faces and -a fact that spoke volumes -Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar.

Custom might go elsewhere,Mr.Williams might profit as he pleased,but Tom had had enough of bar-keeping for that day.Indeed the event had hung on a hair.A man had sought to draw a revolver -on what quarrel I could never learn,and perhaps he himself could not have told;one shot,when the room was so crowded,could scarce have failed to take effect;where many were armed and all tipsy,it could scarce have failed to draw others;and the woman who spied the weapon and the man who seized it may very well have saved the white community.

The mob insensibly melted from the scene;and for the rest of the day our neighbourhood was left in peace and a good deal in solitude.But the tranquillity was only local;DIN and PERANDIstill flowed in other quarters:and we had one more sight of Gilbert Island violence.In the church,where we had wandered photographing,we were startled by a sudden piercing outcry.The scene,looking forth from the doors of that great hall of shadow,was unforgettable.The palms,the quaint and scattered houses,the flag of the island streaming from its tall staff,glowed with intolerable sunshine.In the midst two women rolled fighting on the grass.The combatants were the more easy to be distinguished,because the one was stripped to the RIDI and the other wore a holoku (sacque)of some lively colour.The first was uppermost,her teeth locked in her adversary's face,shaking her like a dog;the other impotently fought and scratched.So for a moment we saw them wallow and grapple there like vermin;then the mob closed and shut them in.

It was a serious question that night if we should sleep ashore.

But we were travellers,folk that had come far in quest of the adventurous;on the first sign of an adventure it would have been a singular inconsistency to have withdrawn;and we sent on board instead for our revolvers.Mindful of Taahauku,Mr.Rick,Mr.

Osbourne,and Mrs.Stevenson held an assault of arms on the public highway,and fired at bottles to the admiration of the natives.

Captain Reid of the EQUATOR stayed on shore with us to be at hand in case of trouble,and we retired to bed at the accustomed hour,agreeably excited by the day's events.The night was exquisite,the silence enchanting;yet as I lay in my hammock looking on the strong moonshine and the quiescent palms,one ugly picture haunted me of the two women,the naked and the clad,locked in that hostile embrace.The harm done was probably not much,yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt.The return to these primeval weapons,the vision of man's beastliness,of his ferality,shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of battles.There are elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to forget,which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell on.Crime,pestilence,and death are in the day's work;the imagination readily accepts them.It instinctively rejects,on the contrary,whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its lowest terms,as the partner of beasts,beastly itself,dwelling pell-mell and hugger-mugger,hairy man with hairy woman,in the caves of old.And yet to be just to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and dens of our cities;I must not forget that I have passed dinnerward through Soho,and seen that which cured me of my dinner.