The Pacific Triangle

THE STREET ALONG THE WATERFRONT OF APIA, SAMOA

I THOUGHT THE VILLAGE BACK OF APIA, SAMOA, WAS DESERTED, BUT IT WAS ONLY THE NOON HOUR

But I couldn't help contrasting in my own mind the little gathering on the shingle-paved floor of that corrugated iron hut with the more elaborate club that changed its name from German to British with no little hauteur. More than once I wished that I had had command of the language of those people in the hut where allegory, mixed with superstition but seasoned with gentle hospitality—and not rum—was the order of the day.

Weary of refusing booze and more booze, I set off for the shore. Though military order forbade either natives or Germans or any one else without a permit to be out after ten o'clock, I had had no difficulty in securing a permit to roam about at will, day or night. The new military Inspector of Police strolled out with me and we took to the road that led out of Apia to the left, past the barracks, past the school, and the church, past all the crude replicas of our civilization.

"Oh, how I loathe it all!" said Heasley to me. "God, what wouldn't I give to be back with my wife and kiddies! This everlasting boozing, this mingling with people whom I wouldn't recognize in Wellington, being herded with the riffraff of the world. They talk of the lovely maidens. Tell me, Greenbie, have you seen any here you'd care to mess about with? The tropics!—rot!"

I saw that I had to deal with a frightfully homesick man, and there was no point in running counter to him. The fact that to me the tropics were lovely only when seen as an objective thing, not as something to feel a part of, would have made little impression on his mind. He was condemned to an indefinite sojourn, whereas I was foot-loose, had come of my own free will, and was going as soon as I had had enough of it. To him the daily round of drink and cheap disputes, the longing for his wife and kiddies, the heat, the mosquitos, the mold, the cheap beds and unvaried fare, the weeks during which the British troops had virtually camped on the beach in the steady downpouring tropical rains; the inability to dream his way into appreciation of South Sea life; the necessity of looking upon the natives as possible rebels; suspicions of the few Germans there, suspicions of every new-comer, suspicions of even the death-dealing sun,—no wonder there was nothing romantic about it to him!

But as we wandered along, chatting in an intimate way, as only men gone astray from home will chat when they meet on the highways of the world, he seemed to grow more cheerful. Time and again he told me what a relief I was to him, how being able really to talk freely with me was balm to his troubled spirit. I knew that an hour after my departure he would forget all about me, that there was nothing permanent in his regard, that I really meant nothing to him beyond an immediate release for his pent-up mind,—but I felt that he was sincere.

As we kicked our way along the dusty road we came to a stretch where the palm-trees stood wide apart. The smooth waters covered the reefs, and a million moonbeams danced over them. Within the palm groves camp-fires blazed beneath domes of moon-splattered thatch, and from all directions deep, clear voices quickened the night air. We of the Northern lands do not know what communal life is. We move in throngs, we crowd the theaters, we crowd the summer resorts,—but still we do not know what communal life is. We are separate icicles compared with the people of the tropics. Only to one adrift at night within a little South Sea village is the meaning of human commonalty revealed. It seemed to touch Heasley as nothing had done before. After our little conversation he appeared relieved and receptive. We wandered about till long after midnight, long after the village had sung itself to sleep, even then reluctant to take to our musty beds.

Thus did one day pass in Samoa, and every day is like the other, and my tale is told.

4

I tapped one man after another in Samoa for some personal recollections of Stevenson, but without success. At last I heard of an American trader who had been an intimate friend of R. L. S. and knew more about him than any other. So to him I went. He was a round-headed, red-faced, bald individual in the late fifties, deeply engrossed in the sumptuous accumulations he had made during more than a quarter-century of residence in Samoa. His reactions to my declaration of interest in Stevenson made me think he was turning to lock his safe and order his guard, but instead he really opened the safe and dismissed all pretense. In other words, he realized, it seemed to me, that he had another chance of adding luster not to Stevenson, but to himself. Stevenson he dismissed with, "Well, you know, after all he was just like other men. Often he was disagreeable, ill-tempered," etc. The thing worth while was the fact that he had written a book about Stevenson, in which he had exhausted all he knew of the man, so why did I not read that and not bother him about it! I felt apologetic, almost inclined to bow myself out, backward, when he announced that he too had written stories of the South Seas. My interest was whetted. I asked to be shown. He drew from among his bills and invoices a packet of manuscripts, and handed one to me to read. I thought of Setu and his enthusiasm at the recognition at sea of the light from Vailima, and felt that, as far as Stevenson's own life went, Setu was, to me at least, more important.

Notwithstanding all the cynics who laugh at those who come to Samoa to climb to Stevenson's grave, I was determined to make the ascent. I could get no one to make it with me. At five o'clock in the morning I mustered what energy I had left from the North, ready to spend it all for the sake of seeing Stevenson's grave. By six, the wind was already warm and dragged behind it heavy rain-clouds. Hot and brain-fagged, I pressed on, my body pushing listlessly forward while my mind battled with the temptation to turn back. Near the end of European Apia I turned toward the hills, into a wide avenue cut through the growths of shaggy palms. Suddenly opening out from the main street, it as suddenly closes up, an oblong that dissipates in a narrow, irregular roadway farther on. It was too overgrown to indicate any great usefulness, yet in the history of roads, none, I believe, is more unique. In the days when Samoa was the scene of cheap international squabbles among England, France, Germany, and America, Stevenson, the Scotsman, mindful of the fate of Scotland and of the similarity between his adopted and his native land, stood by the natives as against the foreign powers (Germany in particular). He took up the challenge for Mataafa, courageously cuddled these children while in prison, and won their everlasting good-will. Later, as a mark of gratitude, they decided voluntarily to build a wide road to Vailima, Stevenson's home. Their ambitions did not live long. The road was never finished. But this is indicative not of diminished gratitude, but of the overwhelming hopelessness of their situation in face of foreign pressure and native temperature.

For everything in the tropics seems on the verge of exhaustion, a keen enthusiasm in life which finds its ebb before it has reached high tide. Only a supreme endeavor, a will sharper than nature, can overcome the spirit of non-resistance which condemns native life from very birth. And it was the remnant of determination bred in another climate that carried me on toward the remains of the object of that gratitude which this road symbolized.

Vailima was four miles from Apia, hidden within a rich tropical growth well up the mountain side. Half the time I rested in the shade, taking my cue from my idol that it was better to travel than to arrive. No one was about, except here and there a child in search of fruit dropped from the tall trees. Presently I came to a set of wooden buildings on the road which upon investigation turned out to be the temporary barracks for the guard of Colonel Logan, commander of the forces of occupation. The soldiers directed me most cordially to a path near the barracks, and there a board sign announced the way to "Stevenson's Grave."

Crossing a creek and turning to the right, I found myself immediately at the foot of Mount Vaea. At this juncture lay a small concrete pool obviously belonging to the cottage, well-preserved and clean. So was the path upward. Strange contrasts here, for both pool and path were the result of the private interest of the German Governor of Samoa who, despite Stevenson's bitter opposition to German possession of the islands, had generously had the path cleared and widened so that lovers of the great man might visit his tomb with ease. It had been neglected for ten years until this German reclaimed it.

For a decade the grave lay untended. At the moment of death, the silence is deep. The pain is too fresh. Out of very love neglect is justifiable, for it is the train of dejected mourners who cannot think of niceties. But then come the "knockers at the gate," they who know nothing of the frailties of men and revel in an immortality that is memory.

I paused frequently during that half-hour climb. Cooing doves called to one another understandingly across the death-like stillness which filled the valley below. From the direction of Apia came the sound of the lali, which seemed only to quicken mystery into being. I breathed more heavily. There, alone on the slopes of that peak, with the only thing that makes it memorable beneath the sod on the summit, I felt strangely in touch with the dead. The isolation gave distinction to him who had been laid there, which no monument, however superb, can give in the crowded graveyard. The personality of the departed hovers round in the silence.

Still, the thought of death itself is alien here. Fear is barren. One climbs on with an easy, smiling recognition of the summit of all things,—not as death, but as life. Oh, the sweet silence that muffles all!

A strange relapse into the ordinary came to me as I reached the top. I took a picture of the tomb, gazed out across the hazy blue world about,—and thought of nothing. I was not disappointed, nor sad. Had I found myself sinking, dying, I believe that it would not have ruffled my emotions any more than the flight of a bird leaves ripples in the air. Below, five miles away, the waves broke upon the reefs and spread in smooth foam which reached endlessly toward the shore. "It is better to travel than to arrive," they seemed to say to me across the void.

The red hibiscus was in bloom around the tomb. A sweet-scented yellow flower made the air heavy with its rich perfume. The trees speckled the simple concrete casing over the grave with their restless little shadow leaves. The spot was cool and free from growths. And it was, then, a symbol of a quarter of a century made real.

Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will.

Savage, child, romancer, literary stylist,—all have been under the influence of this wandering Scotsman, and the manner of showing him love and gratitude has been not in imitation only. At Monterey in California he was nursed by an old Frenchman through a long period of illness; in semi-savage Samoa men untutored in our codes of affection beat not a path but a road to his door, and carried his body up the steep slope of Mount Vaea. And the month before I stood beside his tomb, the ashes of his wife and devoted helpmate were deposited beside him by his stepdaughter, who had journeyed all the way from California to unite their remains.

Tusitala, the tale-teller, the natives called him, and in the sheer music of that strange word one senses something of the regard it was meant to convey. And in the years to come, when Samoans become a nation in the Pacific, part of the Polynesian group, Tusitala will doubtless be one of the heroes, tales of whose beneficence will light the way for little Polynesians growing to manhood.

It was becoming too hot up there on the peak for me before breakfast-time was over, so I slipped down into the valley. At the barracks the soldiers invited me to have a bite with them. The simple porridge, the crude utensils, the bare benches would elsewhere after so long a walk and so steep a climb have been a Godsend; but here, in the tropics, it seemed that more would have been a waste of human life. The sergeant-at-arms asked me if I should like to have some breadfruit. He stepped out into the yard and gathered a round, luscious melon-like fruit which, when cut, opened the doors of alimentary bliss to me. The trees grow in bisexual pairs, male and female, the female tree bearing the fruit.

The sergeant then took me to Vailima, Stevenson's last home, now the residence of the governor-general. It was, of course, stripped of everything which once was Stevenson's, and had acquired wings and porticos, gaunt and disproportioned. I could not work up any sentimental regret at this change, for that is what Stevenson himself would have wished. The best way to preserve a thing is to keep it growing. Stevenson worked here for four years; others may tamper with it for four hundred years without completely obliterating the character given it by its first maker.

When I entered I was somewhat surprised at the hangings on the walls. Pictures of the kaiser, pretty scenes along the Rhine, German castles,—what had they to do with Stevenson? what with Colonel Logan and British occupation? The chambers are so large and the woodwork is so somber that these pictures fairly shrieked out at one, like a flock of eagles in high altitudes. I felt almost guilty, myself, simply for being in the presence of such enemy decorations, and remarked about them to my guide.

"The colonel won't touch them," he said, respectfully. "They are the property of the German Governor, and till the disposition of the islands is finally settled, the colonel won't move them. He's a soldier, y'know."

We came out again upon the veranda just in time to see Colonel and Mrs. Logan arrive in their trap. He was tall, straight, an icy chill of reserve in his bearing. Mrs. Logan was a pretty young woman, as warm and cordial as he was stiff. He preceded her up the steps and was saluted by the sergeant with the explanation of my presence.

"Am showing this gentleman round a bit," he said.

"Has he had a look round?" said the colonel, perfunctorily, saluted stiffly, and passed by as though I didn't exist. As Mrs. Logan came up behind she suppressed a smile that threatened to make her face still more charming, and the two passed within.

I smiled to myself. How should I have been received had Stevenson come up those steps that day? To the colonel there was nothing in my journey to the tomb. Nor was there anything in it to the soldiers at the barracks. Yet the fact that I had been there made me one of them.

"How'd ye like it?" asked a soldier on my return, with the same manner as though I had gone to see a cock-fight. "Blaim me if Oi'd climb that yer 'ill on a day as 'ot as this to see a dead man's grave."

They asked me if I'd like to take a swim in the stream Stevenson liked so well, and on the strength of my great interest three of them got leave to accompany me. They winked to me when the sergeant agreed. We wandered along, jumping fences, crossing a grassy slope, and cutting through a spare woods. The bamboo-trees creaked like rusty hinges. Cocoa plantations stood ripe for picking. The luscious mango kept high above our reach, so that we were compelled to devise means of getting at it. The soldiers seemed concerned about my seeing everything, tasting everything, learning everything the place afforded. We chatted sociably, plunging about in the stream, with only a few stray natives looking on. Then we made our way back as leisurely as possible, they being in no hurry to return to the barracks. How I got back to Apia I haven't the faintest recollection.

5

I had set out to see the world without any definite notion of whither I was drifting. I had bartered the liquid sunshine of Hawaii for Fiji's humid shade, and twisted a day in a knot between Suva and Apia so that I hardly knew whether or not Fiji was more devilishly hot than Samoa. And then for four days I endured the stench of ripening bananas in the hold of a resurrected vessel which, if ships are feminine, as sailors seem to believe, was decidedly beyond the age of spinsterhood. I was headed for New Zealand. Little wonder, then, that when I found that we had finally arrived with our olfactory senses still sane and were about to land in a real country with real cities and a social life dangerously near perfection, I felt as though I were coming to after ether.

When I suddenly found myself alone on the streets of Auckland, a sense of the icy chill of reserve in civilization came over me. The weeks in the tropics were of the past. There, though the faces were more than strange to me and the speech quite unintelligible, there was a sense of human kinship which stole from man to man through the still air. There was the lali thumping its way across the valley; the chatter of voices by day, the mutter of voices by night when the people gathered beneath their thatched roofs; the gradual infusion of native melody with the swish of palms and the hiss of the sea; call answering call across the village; songs with that deep, primitive harmony which effects a ferment of emotion not in one's heart, but in the pit of the stomach. In such a place, the word alone has no meaning. One cannot be a stark outsider. Everything is done so freely and sociably that even the stranger, despite thousands of years of restraint in civilization, merges into an at-one-ment known to no group in our world.

Social life in New Zealand (as in all white communities) contained no such admixture. Not even on Sunday, on which day I landed, did the crowds that sauntered up and down the street, present any kindred closeness. People just sauntered back and forth across the three or four business blocks known as Queens Street. The sweeps and curves and windings which were its offshoots made a short thoroughfare look picturesque, but they were just flourishes. They did not lead to anything. And one immediately returned to Queens Street.

There, the wheeled traffic having been withdrawn, the people leaving church flooded the wide way, coursing up and down in what seemed to me an utterly aimless journey between the monument at the upper fork in the street and the piers at its foot. As a white man's city goes, in the three-story structures and spacious business fronts, and the massing of architecture tapering in an occasional turret, there was stability enough in the appearance of things.

There were jolly flirtations, girls singly and in pairs, some mere children in short skirts, gadding about with eyes on young men whom they doubtless knew, and of whom they seemed in eternal pursuit. Groups gathered for political or religious argument; platitudes and pleasantries were exchanged, some interesting, some dull, seldom truly cordial. A vague suspicion one of another was manifest in every relationship.

Suddenly the crowd vanished. A few persistent ones hung about the lower extremity of the street or lurked about the piers, spooning. The street became deserted. Not a sound from anywhere. No joyous singing under the eaves, no flickering lamp-lights beneath thatched roofs. Blinds drawn, doors locked. Sunday evening in civilization! I had returned.

CHAPTER VI
THE APHELION OF BRITAIN

First impressions in older countries are generally confusing. Ages of accumulations pile up, covered with the dust of centuries which has gone through innumerable processes of sifting. But the stranger in the Antipodes is plunged into a bath of youth. Every aspect of the country is young. The volcanoes are mostly extinct, but about them lurks the warmth of the camp fire just died down. In mountain, bush, and plain something of the childhood of Mother Earth is still felt; at most, an adolescence, rich in possibilities. One almost feels that the very rivers are only the remnants of the receding floods after the rising of the land from beneath the sea. There is nothing old anywhere. Instead of being disappointed at the apparent paucity of man-made products, one is greatly surprised that so little and young a country should have so much. There is room, much room, ample acres which lie fallow, the winds of opportunity blowing over them, wild with abandon.

New Zealand, as I said, was a kind of resting-place. It was the point where the lines of interest in the native peoples of the Pacific, and those of the efforts of the white men, intersected, just as later I was to find a point of intersection between the white men and the Orientals at Hongkong. For here the new social life of the South Pacific, and the remnants of the old races of the Pacific equally divide the attention.

I had some little difficulty locating Auckland from the steamer, so many suburbs littered the forty miles of irregular bluff which surrounds the harbor. The homes upon the hills seemed reserved and unambitious. There were no streams of smoke from factory and mill. One felt, at the moment of arrival, that were it morning, noon, or night, whatever the season, Auckland would still be the same, and New Zealand would continue to be proud of the resemblance the youngest of its cities has for its parent. All seemed quiet, restful and inactive.

If all these were inactive, not so the human elements. Their rumblings on localisms were to be heard even before we landed. As a new-comer, I was made aware of Wellington, the capital, and its winds; of the city of Christchurch and its plains; of prides and jealousies which provincial patriots acclaimed in good-natured playfulness. Dunedin's raininess was said to have been a special providence for the benefit of the Scotch who have isolated themselves there. The wonders of this place and the beauty of that broke through the mists of my imagination like tiny star-holes through the night.

2

I had returned to civilization, and though all my instincts settled into an assurance which was comforting, a feeling that dengue fever was no more, that damp and moldy beds and smell of copra would not again be mingled with my food and slumber, still, I knew I was not a part of it. Almost immediately my mind began moving spiral-like, outward and upward, to escape. I was to do it all in a month. I was to see Auckland, with its neighbor, Mt. Eden, an extinct volcano; I was to visit the other large cities,—vaguely their existence was becoming real to me,—I was to penetrate at least some of New Zealand's dangerous bush, to see the primitive-civilized lives of the native Maories. But, strange to say, return to civilization had the identical effect on me that return to primitive life is said to have on the white man. It entered my being in the form of indolence. I did not want to move. I wanted to rest. To stay a while in that place, to make myself part of the life of the city, to remain fixed, became a burning desire with me. And days went by without my being able to stir myself on again.

The life in the Dominion was conducive to ease and dreaming. Nobody seemed in any hurry about anything, least of all about taking you in. Every one went upon a way long worn down by the tread of familiar feet. The conflicts of pioneer aggressiveness were over. The differences between the aboriginal and the foreign elements were lost in the overpowering crowding in of the alien. The stone and wooden structures, the railways and the piers, the homes wandering along over the hills as far as the eye could see, completely concealed that which originally was New Zealand.

I spent one month wandering up and down Auckland's one main street, and I can assure you it was like no other main street in the world, except those of every other city in New Zealand. There were the carts and the cars by day, and the clearing of the pavement of every vehicle for pedestrian parades by night. There were the carnivals and the fêtes on Queens Street, and on every other royal highway during the summer months; and during the two hours which New Zealanders require for lunch, there was nothing to be done but to lunch too. And then on Sunday nights there was the confusion of cults and isms each with its panacea for spiritual and social ills. Nobody was expected to do anything but go to church; hence the street cars didn't run during church hours, and the bathing-places were closed. And after ten o'clock it was as impossible to get a cup of tea outside one's own home as it is to get whisky in an open saloon in New York to-day.

On the Niagara I had been assured by a young lady from New Zealand that we Americans didn't know what home life was and that she would show me the genuine thing when I got to her little country. She did, and I have been most grateful to her for it. It was sober and clean and quiet, and I accepted with great satisfaction every invitation offered me, because it was a thousand times better than being alone on the deserted streets. But the good Lord was wise when He made provision for one Sunday a week, as His human creation could hardly endure it more frequently; and that is what one might say of New Zealand home life. It is all that is good and wholesome, all that is necessary for the rearing of unobstreperous young, but red blood should not be made to run like syrup, though I quite agree with my New Zealand friend that it should not be kept at the boiling-point, either. Our evenings were usually spent in quiet chatting on safe generalities interspersed with home songs and nice cocoa; and at ten o'clock we would separate. I hope that my New Zealand friends will not feel hurt at what I say. Let them put it down to my wild-Americanism. But home life on a Sunday evening was not worth going all the way diagonally across the Pacific to taste.

Hence, a month in Auckland was quite enough for me. By that time the call of the mountains and lakes had come to me, and in natural beauty New Zealand can rival any other country of its size I have ever been to, except Japan. In answering that call I accepted the swagger's account of how life should be lived and took to the open road. In the year that followed I filled my memory with treasures that cannot be classified in any summary. From Auckland in the North Island to Dunedin in the South Island I journeyed on foot through three long months, zigzagging my way virtually from coast to coast, dreaming away night after night along the great Waikato River, holding taut my soul in the face of the mysteries of the hot-springs districts, and quenching feverish experiences upon the shores of placid cold lakes and beneath snow-covered peaks of mountain ranges thirteen thousand feet high; gripping my reason during long night tramps in the uninhabited bush (forests) or in Desolation Gully, forty miles from nowhere. I know what wild life in New Zealand is, as well as tame. It is not all that it used to be when men left their home lands for that new start in life which Heaven knows every man is entitled to, considering what our notions of childhood are and the eagerness of man to pounce upon any one who has not reached insurmountable success.

In between I saw the courageous struggles these selfsame men have gone through and are still enduring in order to make of the whole of New Zealand what it is as yet only in parts. Those parts are rich farm lands, with swiftly scouting motor-cars used by great capitalist-farmers who have more than one station to look after. It is a strange phenomenon of New Zealand life that the small farm towns are generally much more alert and progressive than the big cities. The New Zealanders build houses that look like transplanted suburbs from around New York, and bring to their villages some of the love of plant life that the city-dweller is soon too sophisticated to share. They draw out to themselves the moving-picture theaters, which are now the all-possessing rage in the Dominion as elsewhere, and read the latest periodicals with the interest of the townsman. There are over a thousand newspapers in the Dominion, which for a population of a million is a goodly number, though one cannot regard this as too great an indication of the intellectual advancement of the people. Yet literacy is the possession of the farmer as much as and frequently more than the city-dweller in New Zealand. His children go to school even if they have to use the trains to get there; free railway passes on these are accorded by the Government. And on the whole the farmer's life in New Zealand is richer than that of most rural communities. But the struggle is still great. I have seen some who do not feel that the promise is worth it.

Though each of the big cities in the Dominion has its own special characteristics, they are all considerably alike. The three chief ones are all port cities of about 80,000 inhabitants each, and except for the fact that Dunedin in the far south is essentially Scotch and somewhat more stolid than the rest, and Wellington in the center is the capital of the Dominion and therefore suspicious, one may go up and down their steep hills without any change in one's social gears. The colonial atmosphere is at once charming and chilling. There is a certain sobriety throughout which makes up for lack of the luxuries of modern life. But one cannot escape the conviction that regularity is not all that man needs. Everything moves along at the pace of a river at low level,—broad, spacious, serene, but without hidden places to explore or sparkling peaks of human achievement to emulate. One paddles down the stream of New Zealand life without the prospect of thrills. One might be transported from Auckland in the north to Wellington or Dunedin in the south during sleep, and after waking set about one's tasks without realizing that a change had been made.

Every city is well lighted; good trams (trolley-cars) convey one in all directions, but at an excessively high fare; the water and sewerage systems are never complained of; the theaters are good and the shops full of things from England and America. There are even many fine motor-cars. But there are few signs of great wealth, though comparatively big fortunes are not unknown. It is rumored that ostentation is never indulged in, as the attitude of the people as a whole is averse to it.

On the other hand, neither are there any signs of extreme poverty, though it exists; and slums to harbor it. While the usual evils of social life obtain, the small community life makes it impossible for them to become rampant. Every one knows every one else and that which is taboo, if indulged in, must be carried out with such extreme secrecy as to make it impossible for any blemish to appear upon the face of things.

In these circumstances, one is immediately classified and accepted or rejected, according as one is or is not acceptable. Having recognized certain outstanding features of the gentleman in you, the New Zealander is Briton enough to accept you without further ado. There is in a sense a certain naïveté in his measurement of the stranger. He is frank in questioning your position and your integrity, but shrinks from carrying his suspicions too far. He will ask you bluntly: "Are you what you say you are?" "Of course I am," you say. "Then come along, mate." But he does not take you very far, not because he is niggardly, but because he is thrifty.

As a result of this New Zealand spirit I found myself befriended from one end of New Zealand to the other by a single family, the elder brother having given me letters of introduction to every one of his kin,—in Hamilton, Palmerston North, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. And with but two or three exceptions I have always found New Zealanders generous and open-hearted. Wherever I went, once I broke through a certain shyness and reserve, I found myself part of the group, though generally I did not remain long, because I felt that new sensations could not be expected.

My one great difficulty was in keeping from falling in love with the New Zealand girls. Rosy-cheeked, sturdy, silently game and rebellious, they know what it is to be flirtatious. For them there is seldom any other way out of their loneliness. Only here and there do parents think it necessary to give their daughters any social life outside the home. In these days of the movies, New Zealand girls are breaking away from knitting and home ties. But even then few girls care to preside at representations of others' love-affairs without the opportunity of going home and practising, themselves. Hence the streets are filled with flirtatious maidens strolling four abreast, hoping for a chance to break into the couples and quartets of young men who choose their own manly society in preference to that of expensive girls. I have seen these groups pass one another, up and down the streets, frequent the tea-houses and soda fountains, carry on their flirtations from separate tables, pay for their own refreshments or their own theater tickets; but real commingling of the sexes in public life is not pronounced.

At the beaches! That is different. There the dunes and bracken are alive with couples all hours of the day or night during the holiday and summer seasons. Thence emerge engagements and hasty marriages, nor can parental watchfulness guard against it.

3

The most difficult thing in all my New Zealand experiences was to reconcile the latent conservatism of the people with their outstanding progressiveness. It would be easy to assert without much fear of contradiction that notwithstanding all the talk of radicalism in the matter of labor legislation there is little of it in practice in the Dominion. The reason for this is twofold. First, New Zealand, unlike Australia and America, was not a rebellious offshoot of England, not a protest against Old-World curtailment. Quite the contrary, it was made in the image of the mother country, and natural selection for the time being was dormant. Furthermore, it was simple for labor to dominate in a country where labor was to be had only at that premium.

Nowhere in the whole Dominion did I come across concrete evidence of awakened consciousness on the part of the masses to their opportunities. None of that feverish haste to raise monuments of achievement to accompany the legislative enactments which have given New Zealand an illustrious place among the nations. True, the country is young; true, there are not enough people there to pile creation on creation. But that is not it. It is that they are not keyed up to any great notions of what they ought to expect of themselves, but are content with what freedom and leisure of life they possess.

Throughout the length and breadth of the two islands, islands more than two thirds the size of Japan, there isn't an outstanding structure of any great architectural value; there isn't a statue or a monument of artistic importance; there is hardly a painting of exceptional quality; nor, with all the remarkable beauty of nature which is New Zealand's, is there any poetic outpouring of love of nature that one would expect from a people heirs to some of the finest poetry in the world. Even British India has its Kipling and its Tagore. With all the excellence of their efforts to solve the problem of the welfare of the masses, New Zealanders show no excessive largeness of heart in the sort of welcome they extend to labor of other lands. Here, it would seem, is a land where the world may well be reborn, where there is every opportunity for the correction of age-long wrongs that have become too much a part of Europe for Europeans to resent them too heartily. Yet what is New Zealand doing and what has it done in seventy-five years to approximate Utopia?

This is not meant as a criticism of New Zealand; rather is it meant to let New Zealand know that the eyes of the world are upon it and expect much from it. Possession may be nine points of the law; but the utilization of opportunity which possession entails is the tenth point toward the retention of that which one has.

Babies are cared for better in New Zealand than any other place in the world, yet boys and girls still receive that antiquated form of correction, corporal punishment, and thought of letting the youth find his own salvation, with guidance only, not coercion, is still alien to the New Zealand pedagogic mind. Women have had the vote for over twenty-five years, but the freedom of woman to seek her own development, to become a factor in the social life of the community apart from the man's, is still a neglected dream. And young women are dying of ennui because they aren't given enough to do. The country is fairly rich, with its enormous droves of sheep, great pastures full of cattle, its coöperative capitalistic farming-schemes; but the human genius for beauty and self-expression must find opportunity in Britain or America. And even the old romance of pioneer life is virtually of the past. In all my wanderings I came across only one home that made me throw out my emotional chest to contain the spirit of the pioneer life of which we all love to hear. It was a house as rough as it was old, laden with shelving and hung with guns, horns, and lithographs, and cheered by a blazing open fire,—an early virility New Zealand has now completely outgrown. The house must have been fifty years old, to judge from the Scotsman living there. He was keen, alert, and quick, a most interesting opponent in discussion, most firm in his beliefs without being offensive. Here, in the very heart of one of the earliest of New Zealand's settlement districts in the South Island, he lived with his family; and something of the old sweetness of life, the atmosphere of successful conquest, obtained. And ever as I dug down into New Zealand's past, I found it charming. The present is too steeped in cheap machine processes to be either durable or really satisfying.

Discouraging as this may sound, he who has lived in the little Dominion and has learned to love its people and their ways, hastens to contradict his own charges. For in time, as one becomes better acquainted, one finds a healthy discontent brewing beneath that apathetic exterior. Just as the Chinese will do anything to "save face" so the Briton will do anything not to "lose face." He loses much of his latent charm in so restricting himself, but when assured that a new convention is afoot and that it is safe for him to venture forth with it, he will do so with a zest that is itself worth much.

Furthermore, there is in the atmosphere of staid New Zealand life a passion for the out-of-doors which is worth more than all the Greenwich Village sentiment twice over. Girls are always just as happy in the open and more interesting than when indulging in cigarettes and exposing shapely legs in intellectual parlors. Given twenty million people instead of one New Zealand would blossom forth into one of the loveliest flowers of the Pacific.

4

In the Auckland (New Zealand) Art Gallery hangs a picture representing the coming of the Maories to New Zealand. Their long canoe is filled with emaciated people vividly suggesting the suffering and privation they must have undergone in coming across the mainland some four hundred years ago. Venturing without sail or compass, these daring Polynesians must have possessed intrepid and courageous natures.

Yet at the time I was in that gallery the place was full of stifled boyish laughter. A half-dozen little tots, with spectacles and school-bags, one with blazing red hair, had come to see the pictures. They were not Maori children, but the offspring of the white race, which less than a hundred years ago came in their sailing-vessels and steamers, with powder and lead, and took with comparative ease a land won by such daring travail.

I had heard much of these natives,—idyllic tales of their charm and the lure of their maidens. Those lovely Maori girls! I expected to see them crowding the streets of Auckland. But they were conspicuous by their absence. Occasionally a few could be seen squatting on the sidewalks, more strangers to the city than I, more outstanding from the display of color and manner which thronged Queens Street than any American could be in so ultra a British community as dominates New Zealand. Where are the Maories? I wondered. Upon their "reservations" like our own Amerinds, or lost to their own costumes and even to their own blood and color?

I had returned to Auckland from a visit with a friend whose wife was Maori, in the company of her nephew. He carried with him a basket of eels as a gift to his mother, and walked up the street with me. At a corner he was hailed by a dark-skinned man in a well-cut business suit, and said, "There is my father. I must leave you." In another moment he was in a large touring car and was whizzed away by his Maori father at the wheel. No wonder I hadn't been able to see any Maories.

I visited a school where Maori boys are being encouraged to artificial exercises,—sports, hurdle-jumping, running. I watched them make ready, eager for the petty prizes offered. Off went their shoes, out went their chests, expanded with ancestral joy. In their bare feet, still as tough as in former days before they were induced to buy cowhides, they skipped over the ground, filled for the moment with the glory of being alive. Their faces broke out in fantastic, native grimaces and contortions as though an imaginary enemy confronted them. But alas, they were seeking him in the wrong direction! The enemy comes with no spears, and no clang, but he is more deadly. He is not without but within. He makes them cough. They fall behind.

"They do not last long," said the Briton who was instructing them. "They are dying rapidly of consumption. As long as we keep them here in school they are all right. Finer specimens of human physique could not be found anywhere. But as soon as they return to their pas, and live in the squalor of the native villages, they return to all the old methods of life and soon go under."

I set out on my tramp through New Zealand. At Bombey, a few days' jaunt from Auckland, I met an old settler, whose accounts of the great and last war of the redcoats with the fierce fighters of Maoriland dated back to our own Civil War, 1861-64. Until that time both Maories and Britons said, with few exceptions, "Our races cannot mix. One or the other of us must give away." Naturally, the Maories had the prior claim, but they finally yielded, surrendering their lands to the aliens at Ngaruawahia, "The Meeting of the Waters," that little hamlet lying in the crotch between the beautiful Waikato River and one of its tributaries. And henceforward, the two races were constrained to meet, and rush down together into that green sea of human commonalty, albeit one of them contributes the dominant volume.

Maori legend has it that the Maories are the descendants of the great Rangatira (chief) who was the offspring of a similarly great Tanewa (shark). He was born in the dark southern caves of the Tongariro Mountains, and the spirits of their ancestors have always dwelt along the broad Waikato. Along this river I wandered for many days, but I found few of the Rangatira's descendants. If one is quiet and alone the voice of the great Tanewa will call softly through the marsh rushes from out of the heart of the quivering flax. It is peaceful and encompassing, modest and almost afraid. I heard it and I am sure those Maories hear it who are not too engrossed in the scramble after foreign trinkets. It said: "The last mortal or man descendant of mine will be the offspring of a Pakeha-Maori (a white man who lives among the Maories) who will live in the cities and rush about in motor-cars, but I shall remain in the marshes, the calm rivers, and near the glittering leaves of flax."

A few miles farther on I came to Huntley, and hearing that there was a native village across the Waikato River, I turned thither by way of the bridge. I overtook two wahines, slovenly, indolent, careless in their manners. They spoke to me flippantly. They wanted to know if I was bound for the missionaries' place. This led to questions from me: Why were they turning Mormon? Which sect did they prefer? But I could obtain answers only by innuendo. I left these two women behind and found three others chasing a pig in an open field, three boys bathing a horse in the deep river. All about the village was strewn refuse; vicious dogs slunk hungrily about,—neglect, neglect, on every hand. But instead of flimsy native huts there were wooden shacks with corrugated iron roofs, the longer to remain unregenerate, breeders of disease and wasters of human energy.

But the more elaborate native village at Rotorua, at the other end of the island, where visitors are frequent, was more up-to-date and cleaner. And on a little knoll was a model of an old Maori pah, such as was used in the days before guns made it possible to fight in ambush and in the valleys, and brought the sturdy savages down not only from their more wholesome heights but from their position of vantage as a race.

Here I met an odd sort of article in the way of human ware. Only seventeen, he was twice my size, and lazy and pliable in proportion. He would come into my room and just stay. With a steady, piercing, yet stolid and almost epileptic stare, cunning, yet not shrewd, not steady, nor guided by any evident train of thought, he would watch me write. I was a mystery to him, and he frankly doubted the truth of things I told him.

First he said I had the build of a prize-fighter; then, perhaps on thinking it over, he doubted that I had ever done any hard work in my life. As to himself, he said he loved to break in wild horses. His father, according to one tale, was wealthy; two of his brothers were engineers on boats. But he hated study. He was altogether lacking in any notion of time, but he was not lazy. He was even ready to do work that was not his to do.

One afternoon he was in a most jovial mood. He was about to have a tent raised in which he would spend the summer, instead of the hotel room allotted to the help. He was full of glee at the prospect. Primitive instincts seemed to waken in him. But there was a sudden reaction,—whimsical. We had stepped upon the lawn which afforded an open view across Lake Rotorua.

"Strange, isn't it," he said without any preamble, "how money goes from one man to another, from here to Auckland and to Sydney? So much money." He became reminiscent: "Maories didn't know a thing about money. They were rich. See, across this lake,—that little island,—the whole was once a battle-field. The Maories went out in their canoes and fought with their battle-axes. What for? Oh, to gain lands. But now they are poor. Things are so dead here now. Nothing doing." A moment later he was called and disappeared. It was the only time he was ever communicative. The tent had roused in him racial regrets.

One evening he came up to my door and told me there was a dance at the hall, and that he was going to it. Again that strange revival of racial memories, but these of hope and prospect, came into his face, "I'm going to take my 'tart' (girl) with me," he announced. And later in the evening, as I sat alone, watching the moon rise over the lake, the laughter of those Maories rang out across the hills.

Though I wandered for many miles, running into the hundreds, the number of Maori villages and people I came across were few and far between. Yet records show that once these regions were alive with more than a hundred thousand fighting natives. At Rotorua, the hot-springs district in the North Island, the pah was in exceptionally good condition, but it was so largely because the New Zealand Government has made of the place one of its most attractive tourist resorts and the natives are permitted to exact a tax from every visitor who wishes to see the geysers. Elsewhere the villages are dull, dreary, and neglected: the farther away from civilization, the worse they get. The consequence is not surprising.

According to the census of 1896, there were 39,854 people of the Maori race: 21,673 males, 18,181 females, of which 3,503 were half-castes who lived as Maories, and 229 Maori women married to Europeans. The Maori population fell from 41,993 in 1891 to 39,854 in 1896, a decrease in five years of 2,139. But in 1901 it had risen to 43,143, going steadily up to 49,844 in 1911, and dropping to 49,776 in 1916 on account of the European war.

There was considerable discussion in the New Zealand Parliament on the question of whether the Maories should be included in the Draft Act, most white men declaring that a race which was dying, despite this seeming increase, should not be taxed for its sturdiest young men in a war that was in truth none of its concern. But the Maories—that is, their representatives—objected, saying they did not wish to be discriminated against. Among the young men, however, I found not a few who were inclined to reason otherwise. So it was that while I was talking to the young fellows who were washing their horse in the Waikato, one of them said to me:

"Yes. Years ago the white men came to us with guns and cannon and powder and compelled us to give up our warfare, which kept us in good condition individually and as a race. We put aside our weapons. Now they come to us and tell us we must go to Europe and fight for them." And he became silent and thoughtful.

As I came back into Huntly from my visit to the pah I passed the little court-house, before which was a crowd of Maories. Some of the wahines sat with shawls over their heads smoking their pipes as though they were in trousers, not skirts. I chatted with the British Bobby who stood at the door, asking him what was bestirring Maoriland so much.

"Oh, that bally old king of theirs has been subpoenaed to answer for his brother. The blighter has been keeping him out of sight so that he won't be taken in the draft."

"But," I protested—democrat though I was, my heart went out to the old "monarch"—"can't the king get his brother, the archduke and possible successor to the throne, out of performing a task that might hazard the foundation of the imperial line?"

"King be damned! Wait till we get the blighter in here," said the servant of the law, pressing his heels into the soft, oozy tar pavement as he turned scornfully from me.

5

A few days later I was cutting my way through a luxuriant mountain forest above Te Horoto in the North Island, listening to the melodious tui, the bell-bird, and to the song of the parson-bird in his black frock of feathers with a small tuft of white under his beak, like the reversed collar of a cleric. No sound of bird in any of the many countries I have been to has ever filled me with greater rapture than did this. There are thousands of skylarks in New Zealand, brought from England, but had Shelley heard the tui he might have written an ode more beautiful even than that to the "blithe spirit" he has immortalized. Yet, like the human natives, these feathery folk have vastly decreased since the coming of the white man. No wonder Pehi Hetan Turoa, great chief of a far country on the other side of the island, in complaining of the decay of his race, said: "Formerly, when we went into a forest, and stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds—every tree was full of them.... Now, many of the birds have died out."

Enraptured with the loveliness of the native bush and the clear, sweet air, I pressed up the mountain side with great strides. Presently I passed a simple Maori habitation. It was about noon. Seeing smoke rise out of an opening in the roof, indicating that the owners were at home, I entered the yard. My eyes, full of the bright, clear sunlight, could not discern any living thing as I poked my head in at the door, but I could hear a voice bidding me enter. I stepped into a sort of antechamber, a large section of the hut with a floor of beaten earth and a single pillar slightly off the center supporting the roof. Gradually, as my eyes became accustomed to the subdued light, I saw an aged couple within a small alcove on the farther side. An open fire crackled in the center of its floor. The old woman sitting on her bed-space, was bending over the flame, fanning it to life. The old man, who was very tall, lay on a mat-bed to the right, his legs stretched in my direction. The two beds, the fire, and the old couple took up the entire space of the alcove,—a sort of kitchenette-bedroom affair like our modern "studio" apartments.

"Where are you from?" asked the old man, after I had seated myself before the fire. "America," I said. My reply evoked no great surprise in him.

"The village is quiet," I said. "Where are the people?"

"Oh, down in the valley, working in the fields."

"Don't you go out, too?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm too old now. My legs ache with rheumatism. I go no more. Let the young fellows work. Stay and have tea with us," he urged.

I looked at their stock. They did not seem to have any too much themselves, and the old woman seemed a little worried. I knew that the heart of the hostess was the same the world over, so I assured them I had had my meal, and only wished to rest a while away from the sun. The old woman showed relief.

We chatted as cordially as it is possible where tongues cannot fully make themselves understood. I learned that the man was an old chief. He could not fall in with the times, acknowledged his inability to direct the affairs of this strange world, and only asked for rest and quiet, and the respect due one of his position. He did not expect to live long, nor did he much care. "These are not days for me," he said with a smile. He did not speak of the former glories of his race. Doubtless he could not exactly make up his mind whether to look before or after: if there were great chiefs before, are there not big M.P.'s now?

The fire was burning low, and I knew that the old woman would have to go for more wood unless she hurried with the preparation of her meal, and that as long as I was there I was delaying her. So I rose to go. The old man excused himself for not rising by pointing to his lame legs. She saw me to the gate, and as I struck down the road she waved her hand after me in farewell, and remained behind the screen of trees round which I veered.

Down in the valley lying almost precipitately below me were a number of natives working in their fields; but my road led me on to the cities, and it is there that the future of this race hangs in the balance.

Some months later, while I was living in Dunedin in the far south of the South Island, the newspapers came out in a way almost American, so exciting was the bit of news. The editorial world forgot all decorum and dignity and pulled out the largest type it had on hand. It was announced that the Maori priest, Rua, was caught. Several persons were wounded and one, I believe, was killed in the process. The priest was treated with no respect and little consideration and thrown into prison,—all because he believed in having several wives as his men-folk always had, if they were chiefs and priests, and was trying to put a little life into his race, trying to stir it up to casting out these "foreign devils." He had built himself a temple that was an interesting work of art, but it holds worshipers no more, even though the priest has since been released. His efforts to rouse his people failed. Such efforts are only the reflex action of a dying race.

CHAPTER VII
ASTRIDE THE EQUATOR
The Second Side of The Triangle