Читать книгу South-Sea Idyls - Charles Warren Stoddard - Страница 6

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When people began asking me queer questions about my chum Kána-aná, some of them even hinting that "he might possibly have been a girl all the time," I resolved to send down for him, and settle the matter at once. I knew he was not a girl, and I thought I should like to show him some American hospitality, and perhaps convert him before I sent him back again.

I could teach him to dress, you know; to say a very good thing to your face, and a very bad one at your back; to sleep well in church, and rejoice duly when the preacher got at last to the "Amen." I might do all this for his soul's sake; but I wanted more to see how the little fellow was getting on. I missed him so terribly,—his honest way of showing likes and dislikes; his confidence in his intuitions and fidelity to his friends; and those quaint manners of his, so different from anything in vogue this side of the waters.

That is what I remarked when I got home again, and found myself growing as practical and prosy as ever. I awoke no kindred chord in the family bosom. On the contrary, they all said, "It was no use to think of it: no good could come out of Nazareth." The idea of a heathen and his abominable idolatry being countenanced in the sanctity of a Christian home was too dreadful for anything. But I believed some good might come out of Nazareth, and I believed that, when it did come, it was the genuine article, worth hunting for, surely. I thought it all over soberly, finally resolving to do a little missionary work on my own account. So I wrote to the Colonel of the Royal Guards, who knows everybody and has immense influence everywhere, begging him to catch Kána-aná, when his folks weren't looking, and send him to my address, marked C. O. D., for I was just dying to see him. That was how I trapped my little heathen and began to be a missionary, all by myself.

I informed the Colonel it was a case of life and death, and he seemed to realize it, for he managed to get Kána-aná away from his distressed relatives (their name is legion, and they live all over the island), fit him out in real clothing,—the poor little wretch had to be dressed, you know; we all do it in this country,—then he packed him up and shipped him, care of the captain of the bark S——. When he arrived, I took him right to my room and began my missionary work. I tried to make all the people love him, but I'm afraid they found it hard work. He wasn't half so interesting up here anyhow! I seemed to have been regarding him through chromatic glasses, which glasses being suddenly removed, I found a little, dark-skinned savage, whose clothes fitted him horribly, and appeared to have no business there. Boots about twice too long, the toes being heavily charged with wadding; in fact, he looked perfectly miserable, and I've no doubt he felt so. How he had been studying English on the voyage up! He wanted to be a great linguist, and had begun in good earnest. He said "good mornin'" as boldly as possible about seven P. M., and invariably spoke of the women of America as "him." He had an insane desire to spell, and started spelling-matches with everybody, at the most inappropriate hours and inconvenient places. He invariably spelled God d-o-g; when duly corrected,—thus, G-o-d,—he would triumphantly shout, dog. He jumped at these irreverent conclusions about twenty times a day.

What an experience I had, educating my little savage! Walking him in the street by the hour; answering questions on all possible topics; spelling up and down the blocks; spelling from the centre of the city to the suburbs and back again, and around it; spelling one another at spelling,—two latter-day peripatetics on dress parade, passing to and fro in high and serene strata of philosophy, alike unconscious of the rudely gazing and insolent citizens, or the tedious calls of labor. A spell was over us: we ran into all sorts of people, and trod on many a corn, loafing about in this way. Some of the victims objected in harsh and sinful language. I found Kána-aná had so far advanced in the acquirement of our mellifluous tongue as to be very successful in returning their salutes. I had the greatest difficulty in convincing him of the enormity of his error. The little convert thought it was our mode of greeting strangers, equivalent to their more graceful and poetic password, Aloha, "Love to you."

My little cannibal wasn't easily accustomed to his new restraints, such as clothes, manners, and forbidden water-privileges. He several times started on his daily pilgrimage without his hat; once or twice, to save time, put his coat on next his skin; and though I finally so far conquered him as to be sure that his shirt would be worn on the inside instead of the outside of his trousers (this he considered a great waste of material), I was in constant terror of his suddenly disrobing in the street and plunging into the first water we came to,—which barbarous act would have insured his immediate arrest, perhaps confinement; and that would have been the next thing to death in his case.

So we perambulated the streets and the suburbs, daily growing into each other's grace; and I was thinking of the propriety of instituting a series of more extended excursions, when I began to realize that my guest was losing interest in our wonderful city and the possible magnitude of her future.

He grew silent and melancholy; he quit spelling entirely, or only indulged in rare and fitful (I am pained to add, fruitless) attempts at spelling God in the orthodox fashion. It seemed almost as though I had missed my calling; certainly, I was hardly successful as a missionary.

The circus failed to revive him; the beauty of our young women he regarded without interest. He was less devout than at first, when he used to insist upon entering every church we came to and sitting a few moments, though frequently we were the sole occupants of the building. He would steal away into remote corners of the house, and be gone for hours. Twice or three times I discovered him in a dark closet, in puris naturalibus, toying with a singular shell strung upon a feather chain. The feathers of the chain I recognized as those of a strange bird held as sacred among his people. I began to suspect the occasion of his malady: he believed himself bewitched or accursed of some one,—a common superstition with the dark races. This revelation filled me with alarm; for he would think nothing of lying down to die under the impression that it was his fate, and no medicine under the heaven could touch him further.

I began telling him of my discovery, begging his secret from him. In vain I besought him. "It was his trouble; he must go back!" I told him he should go back as soon as possible; that we would look for ourselves, and see when a vessel was to sail again. I took him among the wharves, visiting, in turn, nearly all the shipping moored there. How he lingered about them, letting his eyes wander over the still bay into the mellow hazes that sometimes visit our brown and dusty hills!

His nature seemed to find an affinity in the tranquil tides, the far-sweeping distances, the alluring outlines of the coast, where it was blended with the sea-line in the ever-mysterious horizon. After these visitations, he seemed loath to return again among houses and people; they oppressed and suffocated him.

One day, as we were wending our way to the city front, we passed a specimen of grotesque carving, in front of a tobacconist's establishment. Kána-aná stood eying the painted model for a moment, and then, to the amazement and amusement of the tobacconist and one or two bystanders, fell upon his knees before it, and was for a few moments lost in prayer. It seemed to do him a deal of good, as he was more cheerful after his invocation,—for that day, at least; and we could never start upon any subsequent excursion without first visiting this wooden Indian, which he evidently mistook for a god.

He began presently to bring tributes, in the shape of small cobble-stones, which he surreptitiously deposited at the feet of his new-found deity, and passed on, rejoicing. His small altar grew from day to day, and his spirits were lighter as he beheld it unmolested, thanks to the indifference of the tobacconist and the street contractors.

His greatest trials were within the confines of the bath-tub. He who had been born to the Pacific, and reared among its foam and breakers, now doomed to a seven-by-three zinc box and ten inches of water! He would splash about like a trout in a saucer, bemoaning his fate. Pilgrimages to the beach were his greatest delight; divings into the sea, so far from town that no one could possibly be shocked, even with the assistance of an opera-glass. He used to implore a daily repetition of these cautious and inoffensive recreations, though, once in the chilly current, he soon came out of it, shivering and miserable. Where were his warm sea-waves, and the shining beach, with the cocoa-palms quivering in the intense fires of the tropical day? How he missed them and mourned for them, crooning a little chant in their praises, much to the disparagement of our dry hills, cold water, and careful people!

In one of our singular walks, when he had been unusually silent, and I had sought in vain to lift away the gloom that darkened his soul, I was startled by a quick cry of joy from the lips of the young exile,—a cry that was soon turned into a sharp, prolonged, and pitiful wail of sorrow and despair. We had unconsciously approached an art-gallery, the deep windows of which were beautified with a few choice landscapes in oil. Kána-aná's restless and searching eye, doubtless attracted by the brilliant coloring of one of the pictures, seemed in a moment to comprehend and assume the rich and fervent spirit with which the artist had so successfully imbued his canvas.

It was the subject which had at first delighted Kána-aná,—the splendid charm of its manipulation which so affected him, holding him there wailing in the bitterness of a natural and incontrollable sorrow. The painting was illuminated with the mellowness of a tropical sunset. A transparent light seemed to transfigure the sea and sky. The artist had wrought a miracle in his inspiration. It was a warm, hazy, silent sunset forever. The outline of a high, projecting cliff was barely visible in the flood of misty glory that spread over the face of it,—a cliff whose delicate tints of green and crimson pictured in the mind a pyramid of leaves and flowers. A valley opened its shadowy depths through the sparkling atmosphere, and in the centre of this veiled chasm the pale threads of two waterfalls seemed to appear and disappear, so exquisitely was the distance imitated. Gilded breakers reeled upon a palm-fringed shore; and the whole was hallowed by the perpetual peace of an unbroken solitude.