Snowbound in Fiji

I

ARE you an expert on Fiji? No? I thought not. Nor am I. But I am no longer quite the whole-hided jackass who a month ago first set his ignorant hoof on King’s Wharf, Suva. My braying now has some authority.

During that month, like a conjuring trick about me, Fiji has expanded from a dot on the map to hundreds of mountainous isles, ranging in bigness from the Connecticut size down to ones made for a hermit or honeymoon. It has been clothed in the unfamiliar greenery of huge gnarled vutus, nakanakas that stream in the wind, and pale reeds in endless miles of naked upland country. It has been filled with the songs of new strange birds, pigeons that bark and doves that grunt, and babbler wrens that repeat the shadow of the bush darkness and the brilliance of its leaf-wavering sun in a cry half sad, half merry. It has been enlivened by the flight of the firetail finch and black velvet wandering butterflies, and the motion of reef fish like splinters of living sapphire. And it has been peopled for my wonder with new Adams and new Eves.

Now whether malaria, fevers, poison ivy, alligators, and serpents venomous rather than merely untrustworthy in counsel, are assumed to have been created in The Beginning I do not know. It would seem theologically more discreet to ascribe them to blind evolution. However, from both the creation and the evolution of Fiji they have been omitted. One of the first things I had to learn when I got ashore was that my goings and comings were to be fearless. If sickness overtook me it would be no tropical disorder, but homelike influenza. Of course, if careless, I might be eaten by an unfastidious shark, or in the course of years be blown upside down by a hurricane. But as for being smashed flat by some impatient taxicab while on my way to post a letter, that could happen to me much better at home, and the same can be said of the likelihood of being devoured by cannibals. Indeed, the longer I ponder the people of these unfamiliar islands, the more bashfully aware I am that for the first time in all my life I am in a Christian country.

Another thing I had to learn was that the Fijian tropics are really not very hot. Henry Adams long ago proposed the South Seas as a summer cooling-off place for parboiled Washingtonians; to the Minnesotan just released from his accustomed summer oven, Fiji has sometimes seemed downright chilly. Not many nights ago in latitude 17 degrees I sat hunched over a grate fire and read Snowbound. I had by no means fore-imagined any such scene, in fact should have thought it inappropriate to Fiji. But the fire and the book were certainly not inappropriate that night. The wind howled in from the frigid South; for all I knew I was destined next morning to crawl out the transom on drift-tops, though, of course, no such thing did happen. The azaleas were blossoming as usual. But when I think back to that wintry poem by that welcome fire, in tropical Fiji, it seems an apt symbol of the unexpectedness of the place — of my ignorance concerning it, and how experience has taught me something of the truth.

II

Samoa is another matter. Henry Adams, Stevenson, and especially the lens of the motion-picture photographer, have made the place familiar. My delight in Samoa was that of a man who finds his bright notion of a place verified.

Here was the cockscomb of mountain risen above the driving blue sea, and, when we drew nearer, palm groves, half revealing tawny-hued villages where there was a bit of flat land between the mountain’s toes.

Here was Pago Pago, a chasm of luscious greenery, paved with turquoise on which my sleek white ocean-going home, the Monterey, rode peacefully at anchor.

And here was the boat-day market. Superb basketry, curiously carved bowls, tapa cloth, fantastic wooden toys, were spread out on the town green. The Samoans, with that stately politeness no writer on the South Seas ever fails to mention, sat among their wares ready to sell, but quietly unimportunate. Ten minutes farther, beyond white-man shanties hid in flowers and divided from one another not by wall or hedge, but by swift-flowing brooks, were native huts in a rambling village all along the bay. . . . But it is an impudence to speak of Samoan or Fijian architecture as an architecture of huts. I herewith abandon the practice. Judged by the canons of suitability, craftsmanship, and grace, this South Seas architecture can be very fine indeed. The Samoans build not huts but pavilions, and by the pebbly terraces on which they build them grow flowering plumarias in clouds of white. Samoa was as I had hoped to find it — houses, market, cockscomb mountains and all.

But what did I know of Suva? I had never heard of the place until I was going to Fiji and had perforce to disembark there. People on the Monterey told me I should find shops that sold tortoise shell. In the midst of a general blank I pictured such a shop — it was a lonely scrap of information. But once I was ashore the white canvas rapidly began to glow with detail.

I had come to a little island capital, complete with Governor’s Mansion, Botanical Gardens, and Victoria Parade. Red roofs and phenomenally flowery terraces enlivened the green of several hills. The principal street, spindlingly arcaded, clean, and here and there overarched by some great tree, wandered back and forth in a sauntering kind of way, now humping over a white bridge, or edging out to follow the sea wall and so to look toward the placid harbor, the chaos of dark Fijian mountains beyond, and the sudden fires of the tropical sunset.

‘Prams retyred,’ said a sign over one door. I was in a British land again, and here sure enough were my old friends the British, that long-wearing race, with their teapots and blazers and cricket as usual. They never change. As Bernard Shaw has pointed out, they regard the customs of their mother country as the laws of nature. Thus, though I was glad to see them again, they were no novelty. But the Fijians were.

What engines of strength! Where the Hawaiian is built elegantly, the Fijian is built powerfully. He has the appearance of being gigantic. Indeed I felt as if I had hired Goliath for my porter as I panted along behind his seven-league steps on the way to the hotel. This fellow with the great head of dense bushy hair, neat white shirt and sulu, had snatched up my ponderous bags as if they were soap bubbles. The broad wedge of his powerful feet, the smile that could transform his face from a dark mask to a sunburst of infectious gladness, were, like his dress and his physique, typically Fijian: so much I learned hanging out of my window watching the street crowds. The womenfolk, in Mother Hubbards usually freshly clean, with hair dyed a sultry auburn, came striding along too, plump and formidable. They held hands, or fell into one another’s arms to laugh the better.

Though before arrival I had no notion what Fijians were like, I certainly expected to learn. But it was a complete surprise when I got here to find that I was not only in Fiji, but in Little India. For every five natives on the islands there are four Asiatic Indians; in Suva there are more Indians than natives: they loom large in any view of the city. Since I have never seen India, to find myself thus unexpectedly in Little India seemed very lucky. The turbans and looped-up trousers, the voluminous sleazy skirts, draped shawls, and clinking burden of bracelets, anklets, necklaces, rings, headbands and nose buttons, the ornate unhappy interminable music winding out of the dark boot-makers’ shops, the jewelers’ dens lit up heathenly with their crucible fires, or the tailors without number treading their whirring sewing machines with delicate bare black feet forever and ever in caves hung with rainbow-hued dry goods — the restless laborious ant hill of Little India that I found in Suva was a discovery. When I looked into the delicate Indian faces haunted by the miseries of a too long-suffering history, I knew I had indeed come to a far land.

III

To visit some hundreds of islands in a month’s time requires a yacht and a navigator half Houdini, half archangel. While waiting for such a skipper to offer his boat and services, I resolved to take a look at Vitilevu, the island on which I had landed. As it fell out I got no farther. I did see the Yasawas like a string of jagged jewels all along the horizon, and Benga of the firewalkers in a distant storm of rain. But Kandavu, Taveuni, the scattered innocent Laus, and great Vanualevu, I never saw at all. Vitilevu kept me quite busy enough.

First I rode around it as far as roads would take me, in the little rattling buses the Indians so numerously drive. Then from Singatoka, where the road now ends, I completed the circuit on foot with a native boy called Stingaree, who served as carrier, interpreter, and social manager.

You perhaps think that travel in Fiji must be a barbarous adventure. Be disillusioned. The hotel diet, thanks to the British, errs in being too familiar rather than too horrifyingly strange. The plumbing, though spare and in some cases rudimentary, is clean enough. In fact, to a mildly adventurous person like myself, Fiji extends a colonial hospitality very easy to enjoy.

For example, at Nandarivatu in the highlands my path crossed that of a sprightly Danish journalist just by the District Commissioner’s cosmopolitan cocktail tray. On the tray were Scotch whiskey, French and Italian vermouth, West Indian bitters; American music direct from Salt Lake City came in by radio. To be sure the music was yesterday’s, thanks to the tricks the near-by date line plays in the calendar in these parts. The copy of Punch lying on the table was hardly contemporaneous. But I, the brisk-hopping American, was no freshlier armed with world news than my island host, perched on his mountain top, nor was the much-traveled Dr. Rosenberg.

In Fiji, you see, the world tumults of month before last are learned about gradually and not very fully. They can be viewed from the larger calm, or twisted to illustrate one’s own idea of how the cosmos works without much danger of contrary evidence coming in to spoil the thesis. Perhaps this is one reason why the talk at Nandarivatu (or Singatoka) can be so good. Opinions formed with not quite complete evidence perhaps require some actual wisdom and reasoning in them; whereas a man buried daily under fresh bales of printed matter, and bombarded hourly with news by radio, finds it difficult to come to any conclusions whatever.

If this has troubled you, and you would like to come to some settled thought on Fascism or the modern church, you might try a holiday at Nandarivatu. An obliging Indian skipping about among the kettles and the mosquito nets at the government rest house will supply you with service and a clean bed for fifty cents a day. The mountains abound in turfy parklike bridle paths, there is swimming in a ravine pool, and a view of sea and mountain and green sugar lands far below that is breath-takingly ample and handsome.

Singatoka, on the other hand, is perhaps too easy a place in which to be happily busy to make a fit setting for the philosopher. As Dr. Johnson’s friend said, who was trying to be one, cheerfulness is always breaking in. The native villages are too many, too near, and too hospitable; the walks are too long and fascinating. The talk turns to legends and natural history more often than to the problems of politics. As for the sea, that teacher of large truths, its surf, rushing in unhampered from the remote Antarctic, beats on the dunes too violently to allow the bather time to ponder a syllogism. On the road the Fijians interrupt his reverie with an offer of sugar cane or a coconut to suck. The school children joyously break into song in the visitor’s honor, if he peers in at the door. Or there is a wedding, or yangona drinking, or a little dancing party at the homelike hotel. Or a plantation overseer upriver will hospitably whisk him away, on a hand car pumped by six brawny natives, to dinner, with coffee afterward in Dresden cups.

On the last leg of the island circuit, the walk down the breezy south coast, I did certainly leave plumbing and Dresden cups behind. But I have absented myself from such fripperies before. Kindliness and good talk I found in as great a measure as ever; I can report that the barbarous hospitality of a Fiji village is a very sweet thing. Nor was I faced with its problems at once; the first night out I spent with the Bucknells of Korolevu.

These isolated settlers had reared a family of thirteen on the shores of that palmy bay. I sat up late to look at photographs of the thirteen and listen to Fijian tales. At Korolevu — I offer the information in the same earnest spirit in which it was offered to me — the whitebait in season roost in the trees at low tide. It is a place of marvels. Marvelously good, certainly, was the heart-of-palm salad I ate there: the life of a grown coconut tree was sacrificed to give the visitor a treat. And I slept, not in a ‘hut,’ but in a cottage of iron. To be sure, the crabs industriously rasped it all night with their claws, but it was still standing next morning.

Nor at the end of the journey was the transition abrupt, back to Suva’s colonial amenities. The last night was spent with the Marist fathers of Lomary, where, as if by magic, my rain-drenched self in dry clothes again was presented with an omelette auxfines herbes, hot tea, and a crusty loaf on whose bottom Father Desbois made the sign of the cross before he cut it. Under his voluminous umbrella we went at nightfall to chat with the nuns; while the rainy tropic night smothered up their formal garden, we talked of Fiji and the Fijians, India and the Indians, on the quiet verandah. Then I went to bed monastically on mats, in a whitewashed room beside the archway of whose door teetered a pair of tall bookcases. The books exhaled a rich leathery smell, redolent of theology and decay; from the case tops nodded carved bishops in kindly benediction on this partisan of error.

Snowbound in Fiji!

IV

Between Korolevu and Lomary are many villages. At Vunaniu we stopped for lunch, Stingaree and I, on Saturday, and somehow the hospitality of that first meal extended on and on, until we had spent the whole week-end at Vunaniu.

Alivate, the Mayor, was our host. Seated cross-legged with him and another elder on the platform in their Wesleyan Church, the power of his great bass voice vibrating the floor so that it tickled me, I remembered him at home rolling on the mats almost sick with the giggles at some drollery or other; perhaps hymns are sung best by those who can laugh most heartily. Alivate also had the power of quiet. I think of him cross-legged and erect, his gentle-handed wife lying beside him, in the early morning before the house doors were opened; they watched for the kettle to boil on the little fire in the corner. And presently, without a word, a basin of hot water was softly set on the mat outside the honored guest’s mosquito netting. For a cold bath each day the tall Fijian mayor took his short American friend to a fresh-water pool in the valley, where they shared a cake of soap.

His household, as if nothing could be more a pleasure, labored to make the visitor comfortable. There was a fan waving over me when I ate, pillows and the best mat wherever I chose to sit. As for the food they cooked, it was no hardship to eat it. Oscar of the Waldorf has imagined, perhaps, but never achieved such a clam broth as I drank from a polished coconut shell in Vunaniu. It was inimitable in richness, strength, and piquancy. Only a shade less memorable was a broth of reef fish and coconut water, tinctured with the spice of some native leaf — the very ingredients beyond the great Oscar’s powers of assembling. There were fish and taro, yams, and cassava fried and hid away one brown slice at a time to keep hot in a large green leaf, and pawpaw with the abundant juice of the Fijian lemon to squeeze over it.

And since a white man, especially one who stops and tells yarns about that land of wonder America, is a rarity in Vunaniu, the village united in large-scale doings in his honor. There was yangona-drinkig all afternoon with the men, and a meke or dance almost all night with the girls, and on the Sabbath the young folks gathered for an afternoon of hymns in Alivate’s house and sang in the organ-like grand natural harmony these people invent and embroider without effort. ‘Abide with Me’ in Fijian in such a setting, with the sea lapping up at one door and a clean little pig pausing to look in at the other, takes on a sweetness that is very moving.

The meke was more in the barbarous style. Good heavens! The responsibilities of an honored guest on so strenuous an occasion!

Like a shah of Persia, I was seated on a dais leaning among pillows. Always I was served the yangona first by the kneeling girl, and must remember (or forget) the full ritual of acceptance, drinking, and returning the coconut cup. At the close of each dance I must make a proper demonstration of approval. At the proper moment a gift of tactful proportion must be made to orchestra, singers, and dancers; in Fiji it is taken for granted that for guest as well as host it is more blessed to give than to receive. And for a finale I must dance the Fijian two-step as best I could over and over again with every girl present.

It was an occasion worth paying for in these various responsible ways. The orchestra was a matter of bamboo drums and hands clapped or beaten on the floor mats in complex rhythms. The songs, come down wild and fresh out of prehistoric island days, began like rounds, the voices entering one at a time, until, with the words for a pulse, they beat in great broad brassy shifting chords. In them I was hearing the legends of the race, the annals of later times, a history of the cession of the islands to Great Britain, and other events, as Stingaree explained. Moreover I was seeing them danced in formal pantomime. Four girls, dressed in red sulus and crocheted Wesleyan bodices that yet managed to show a generous portion of oil-polished bosom, with marigolds in their hair and coleus sprigs bound around their arms, were the dancers. They danced not standing, but seated cross-legged in a row with the soles of their bare feet touching. Nor were they facing the honored guest at first, but the orchestra and singers at the far end of the lampsmoky room. However, after a stanza or two, their rocking motions were elaborated in such a way as to make them revolve first toward the sea, then toward the much excited honored guest, like dark swans effortlessly turning on wind-blown water. I now saw the full grace of their united motion, arms weaving in unison, faces turning or lifted like shining masks. In the cession meke, here they were with hands extended, reading the letter from Queen Victoria, their bodies subtly swaying, their pink fingernails all in a row. It was somehow wistful to see them read that letter. They had put their lives in the hands of the far-away queen, and now in trust read the royal promises she made them.

Then crash! Here was the end of the party. The drummers on the last note of the song smashed their instruments to splinters, and the Sabbath came in.

V

The very sleep in Vunaniu was sweet. I had seen in another village how the Fijians build their houses; sleep in such a dwelling must do the soul good, I think. Certain months are set aside yearly for renewing houses out of repair; the superstructure is torn off, the timber skeleton is strengthened, and the village as a whole sets to work. The young collect reeds from the hills and bamboos and tough vines from the bush, and do the climbing; the old gather in talkative groups beating out fibres to braid into rope, or weaving the roof mats, or splitting bamboos for the coarse floor covering. The man whose family will use the house takes no part in its construction, but provides the food for all who do, and keeps the yangona bowl flowing. So the house rises, woven and bound and tied together on its sturdy frame, with deep thatch to keep it cool, soft mats spread on the bamboo floor, and tapa cloth hung on the beams for ornament. Finally coleus and bright cannas are planted about it in the close-cropped lawn common to every village; a table or shelf is put up inside to carry the long-toothed wooden comb, the lantern, and a much-thumbed Bible, and on an earth space in the corner a fire is lighted. The home is made.

But whose is it? Not this man’s, nor that, though he habitually closes himself in it at night with his family. It is instead just another room in that greater house, the village as a whole. Like the green, and the bush, and the reef, and the coconut trees, and the songs and laughter and story-telling woven into it when it was made, it is everybody’s. There is no thought of installing a doorbell to keep the Joneses at a proper distance.

To an American like myself, who has very often seen houses that cost more than was intended, with a lien slapped on by the plumber, and a court action in which all parties fight for their rights and their profits for the crowning grace, this Fijian method of building seemed downright holy. Even to call the system it typifies by its proper name, communism, fails to make it appear very dreadful.

As for talk, there was a good deal of it — cumbrous, of course, since I spoke no Fijian. But Stingaree loved the rôle of interpreter.

Two deaf girls came forward on one occasion to ask me to tell them about the deaf and blind people in America. I was surprised to find how much there was to tell. Stingaree was soon relaying to them, in a roar that they could hear, news of the deaf-and-dumb congregation in New York that repeats the hymns in the sign language without making a sound, and other such items. My watch and camera were the themes of many inquiries, and it was earnestly requested that I take my shoes off and pass them around, whereupon they were pinched and peered into and exclaimed over, for no Fijians wear shoes; even the high chiefs in Suva in evening dress wear sulus and go barefoot, and very grand they look. Then, no one ever tired of hearing about the cold at home in America, and when I would tell again that the cold made the rivers harden so that you could skate on them with knives on your shoes, they clucked in wonder. If water behaved like that, I was asked, how did we get ships through the Panama Canal?

There were many questions about schools in America. Which, for example, was the largest? Columbia, I told them; then, to make the information impressive, explained that at Columbia there was a building larger than the South Sea Company’s warehouses at Suva, just to keep books in, and how a man going there could learn the answer to any question and find out everything he wanted to know. Stingaree translated this news to my listeners, then relayed back to me the comment of one grinning old man: ‘ It must be the place where they tell you what the dog says when he is howling.’

This was a very subtle thrust. Alas for the white man and his proud libraries! The Fijian, in one witty phrase, pricked our system where it is thinnest. As a matter of fact, it would seem that the Fijian, while making no pretense of knowing what the dog says when he howls, has solved the very problems that tease and agonize the white man most cruelly. Unassisted by Epicurus or by whiskey, he yet knows how to be happy. He is quite superior to needing a job or money; usually he has neither and gets along very well, whereas the white man, as we are learning, in a like fix must go either to the government or to his eternal reward. Columbia Library seems to offer no intermediate solution.

Even the religion the white man has brought him the Fijian seems to understand with more simplicity than the bringer does. Certainly it is a commonplace that the white man with no little library research interprets the Scriptures in a marvelous way. ‘Lay not up treasures on earth’ becomes ‘ Lay up spiritual treasure in heaven, but on earth something more substantial, just in case there is some emergency like old age or football tickets, and of course we should be glad to give to charity if these welfare organizations were not so riddled with graft,’ and so forth. But the Fijian accepts Scripture as meaning what it so obviously says.

I had never before been among a people of this kind. At first it gave me the creeps, since the isolated samples of such thinking at home invariably brand their thinkers as quite, quite daffy. But my creeps subsided. I was ready to applaud when Stingaree, a Catholic, not only taught the young Wesleyans of Vunaniu what he called ‘a love song to Jesus,’ but helped them to perform it as an anthem in their Wesleyan Church at vespers. Critics of the Fijians complain that they never grow up, but remain children all their lives; but, if we are to believe what we read, that innocent quality is obligatory in any of us if we are to scrape through the Pearly Gates. How well prepared the Fijian is for that gateway! It is no needle’s eye for him to drive his camel at. His soul comes to it in just the right child size, after a life of sharing, modesty, prayer, joyful praise, and unhypocrisy. Indeed, so far as I am acquainted with these matters, the only cause for denying the Fijians admittance might be that they are not ardent enough in spreading the Master’s kingdom. Do not Philadelphia and Paris ache for the gospel? Are there no souls to be saved on Wall Street? While there are sugar refiners walking in darkness shall the good light be hid under a palm-leaf bushel?

Upon hearing such reproaches from Saint Peter the Fijians will think he is joking. They are rather fond of legpulling themselves, and so will laugh in infectious gayety; whereupon the venerable Saint, seeing that the newcomers are indeed innocent, will distribute harps and let them in.

VI

Now let us take a look at Little India; for instance, go to the Indian movies in Lautoka, its chief town, and sit upstairs with its more substantial citizens.

At the two ends of the balcony are King George and Queen Mary looking down calmly on their beloved subjects. The view from their gilt frames is not very restful. The beloved subjects seem to be in a frenzy. Turbans and shawls heave and toss in the ‘pit’ below; the noise is terrific. The centre of the battle is the management, which frequently forces its way down among the benches to exhort, supplicate, upbraid, and denounce somebody or other: it would seem he had got in without paying. Each brawl is a signal for the gentlemen in the balcony to rush forward to the rail to watch, and then to sink back into the more expensive front seats from which, with the utmost difficulty, they are pried loose again by the sweating usher. Such a waving of hands, so many outraged bellows, such tenacity in fighting for what has not been paid for, make a very lively picture.

But now let us examine the movie these people have come to see. It is a puzzle. But one impression stands out above all others — the ostentatious wealth of the principal characters in it. They are so decked in feathers and jewels that it is hard to distinguish one from another. They live in a palace that is a positive morass of luxury.

For a supplementary study here is an Indian home in the cane fields. It is a corrugated iron hovel, or an abandoned Fijian house which has been patched into some kind of repair with bits of tin and ragged sugar-tops. There is no grass. A few marigolds do their best to look bright in the dirt. As for the inhabitants, they are wonderfully picturesque. What draperies of yolk yellow and mulberry red! As the women go shuffling with bare feet through the corn that dries spread out on the matting, to turn it in the sun, they make a fit subject for the color photographer. But it would seem an improvement in the picture if some of the family earnings could go, not into the savings bank of jewelry every Indian woman is doomed to carry, but into soap to bring those skirts or looped-up trousers back toward their original color.

For a contrast here are the Indians of the government offices, the shops, or the hotels. They are tireless, suave, watchful, admirably at your service. Charley, our young waiter at the Metropole, is a servant so alert and perfect that a cult has grown up about him. His service is that of a sympathetic magician.

But the longer I look about me in Little India the more I dread its influence and effect on Fiji. The Fijian, who ‘loves everybody,’ as Stingaree said, gets along well enough with the Indian who, with tireless pressure and industry, comes creeping into his world. But between the two is a profound incompatibility. The ideals of the one or the other must triumph; they are too fundamentally antagonistic ever to merge. Personally, I hold the Fijian ideal more precious, more worthy of cherishing. I am on his side. But the distracted British governors, from the Olympian heights of their tea tables, must look on the slow struggle impartially if they can; it is their own manufacture; they are responsible for the welfare of both armies.

The ‘governors of the subject races’ in such places as Fiji are faced by three duties; the duty to the ‘subject race’ whose affairs they administer in trust, the duty to themselves as ‘governors,’ and the duty to the abstract real estate they hold in common.

The first, duty is one the British are famed for keeping in remembrance. It is the bright star in the Imperial Crown. The letter that the Queen wrote to the Fijians, read again in pantomime for me by the girls of Vunaniu, I am sure was a promise of that kind. ‘Fiji for the Fijians,’ until very recent years, has been the guiding principle in island rule. The governing British have learned Fijian instead of forcing the Fijians to learn English, have strengthened rather than weakened the communal system, have encouraged harmless yangona drinking while relentlessly banning the vastly more profitable trade in alcohol, have educated native physicians to bring gradual health reforms each to his own district instead of bewildering a simple people with a sudden right-about-face in those matters, and, while teaching them to read and to do sums in shillings and pence, have not bedeviled them with -ologies, -isms, and other educational -itises. Fiji ‘for the Fijians’ has been unique among all the islands in the Pacific in that, its native population has increased rather than diminished under white-man dominion.

Meanwhile it has not been possible for the governors to forget their duty to themselves. A colony should be self-supporting, and toward this end white-man enterprise has been encouraged to enter Fiji. The Fijians themselves, who lay up their treasure inaccessibly in heaven, make very poor taxpayers. They will work out their taxes in trail clearing and other supervised short-term labor, but in ready cash they are notoriously shy.

Then there is the third duty, that to abstract island real estate. To me it is not at present obvious why a hill is better for having the minerals in it dug out, but it is the white man’s ingrained conviction that he has not done his duty by a hill until he has extracted from it everything on which he can make a profit. To the Fijian, content to let a thousand acres yield him a few yams and thatch for his house, this point of view is very foreign. Out of nature’s bounty he takes what he needs, no more, and ignores the surplus. Let the white man have it.

This all seems very simple. But when the three duties are merged into a Policy, out goes simplicity through the nearest window.

The British governors of Fiji can be pardoned for their perplexity, I think. Though the land is potentially rich, the natives are wealthless Christian communists. Their childlike ways, until the League of Nations can guarantee safety to political children in the streets of this wicked world, require a guardian. The guardian deserves to be paid for his services. White-man exploitation of island resources will do this. But exploitation requires labor, and a Christian communist in a land where the food grows on trees is the world’s least useful long-term employee. He is not interested in money. A dateless history of sharing, and a plane of class equality so nearly level that the very chiefs (though they be kowtowed to and died for) eat the same food, wear the same sulu, and walk the same common in their bare feet, make him a very poor servant. The thrift that unchristianly takes thought of the morrow, the servility that springs from wide class inequalities, are not found in the Fijian. If you want a man to serve you year in and year out for pay, do not hire him. On Wednesday next, after having done his best, he will have a headache to soften the surprise to you of his departure. That evening in the hills there will be a feast at his expense with yangona and many songs. And on Thursday, after a dreamless sleep, he will resume his village existence as moneyless and content as ever.

It does not take much imagination to see how the bringing in of the Indian helped first to solve, and then to complicate, the problem. No one on earth comes from a land where the difference between rich and poor is more spectacularly emphasized. The Fiji Little Indian, living in dirt and a hovel, loading his wife with jewelry, sneaking into and fighting to retain theatre seats for which he has not paid, gloating over scenes of fabulous wealth, is ready and eager for any slavery that will bring him money. Oh, perfect employee, that dotes on his wages! As for subservience, he has been schooled in it a thousand years; in cleverness too; his civilization is old and cynically experienced.

With such a servant, white-man enterprise can prosper, pay taxes, and heap up profits. The scraping servant, too, begins to have money. Of course it is a pleasure to see new (if not very willing) taxpayers sprouting in every cane field; but the new taxpayer, for his taxes, wants more privileges, more lands open to him, and a voice in the government to use in his own behalf. And what reasoning can be resorted to, to deny him? The lowly servant is the prop that supports everything.

It is all very progressive. Real estate is developed. Along the highways blossoms Little India’s deplorable hovel architecture. Trade is brisk — as brisk, that is, as our hard times will permit, when copra is valueless, bananas are shut out of Sister Australia by sisterly excise duties, and sugar is a matter of prayer. The courts bulge richly with quarrelsome Indian litigation.

The duty of the governors to themselves is meanwhile fulfilled as a matter of course. Salaries are paid on the dot. Unfortunately, however, the governing white man’s sons must look beyond Fiji for their careers. The places they might be expected to fill are taken by ambitious young Indians at salaries insufficient for a white man’s pride.

And what of the first duty, to the native race which in trust put its lives and lands in the hands of the good Queen? It seems to have been a little obscured. Of course it can be said that it is Indian industry that supports Fiji for the Fijians. Tammany Hall, too, sweetens a year’s robberies with a Christmas basket. If Fiji is to be maintained for the Fijians by gradually taking it from them, it would seem that the cost of British rule were high, and as if the slogan were being interpreted by the white man as he interprets Scripture, most perversely. Nor is it heartening in the dilemma to see an attempt being made to convert the Fijian into an individual capitalist capable of meeting the Indian on his own ground. Judging by the history of our own red men and Hawaiians, a people steeped in the communal life urged into the rôle of farmers and traders, each man for himself, makes a wretched failure of it. The spirit of competition is not in him. Give a crowd of Fijian boys a football and they will not divide into two teams, one to win, one to lose, but join in one big jovial game of tag in which old and young and any number of players can take part. Such people, forced into a game of life whose elaborate rules are made to suit our long-civilized selves, generally lose. We grow rich — they die.

VII

Now, for a finale, let me tell you a story.

In Civil War times Fiji, then an independent chiefdom, was a busy place. The cotton which our South could no longer supply to the English spinners was fetched instead from these distant but fertile islands. American influence was strong in Fiji then; it would seem that perhaps a few patriotic Americans were not at home fighting, but safe at the antipodes making money. In fact the American consul was in so strong a position that one Fourth of July, when he had the misfortune to burn down his house as the last item in a grand display of fireworks, he sent the High Chief a bill for damages. This masterpiece of impudence quite stunned the chief. He had long since learned to regard the white man as inscrutable, and was ready to shed his political responsibilities on any one of the Superior Nations that would take it. Britain at first refused the offer; he now wrote to Washington proposing to cede the islands to the United States to wipe out this mysterious and galling debt. Lincoln, busy with a war, did not reply.

What if he had? What if the girls of Vunaniu had pantomimed reading a letter from the great Lincoln rather than the great Victoria? We should have acquired title to two hundred and fifty South Sea Islands at a cost of $160 apiece, but what then? The consul would have made a good first governor, I think. He would have kept Fiji for the Fijians very devotedly, eh?

Meanwhile, here is one traveler grateful to have found the Fijians still admirable in these much-troubled times. Their lives, where not yet broken into by mischievous alien civilizations, are still lived out in simple sharing of work and goods, in singing, yarn-telling, and laughter. You need not catch the next boat to find beauty in Fiji yet unspoiled. But do not wait too long. And when you see the cannas blossoming under the thatch eaves, and hear the fishermen joyously singing as they wade in from the reef, perhaps you will wonder, as I did, what Fiji would be like if Lincoln had answered that letter.

Or, for another last thought, suppose Satan had not been so clever and overplayed himself by tempting Christ with dominion over the whole world, but had shown Him instead one small green Pacific isle . . . But no. It is an idle, though delicious, fancy. He is a brave God, and still would have started His work where it was hardest.