Читать книгу The Pacific Triangle - Sydney Greenbie - Страница 25

I had been under the impression that the natives were all lazy, but the manner of their handling of cargo soon dissipated that notion. Further to discredit the rumor-mongers, three Fijians staged an attempt to lead a donkey ashore which would have shamed the most enthusiastic believer in the practice of counting ten before getting angry and trying three times before giving up. The Fijian is as indifferent to big as to little tasks, and seems to be alone, of all the dwellers in the tropics, in this apathetic attitude toward life. There is none in all the world more lazy, indolent, and do-nothing than the white man. As soon as he comes within sight of a native anywhere, that native does his labor for him; you may count on it.

So it was that with fear and trembling I announced to the stewards that I had a steamer trunk which I wanted ashore with me. They grunted and growled as the two of them struggled with it along the gang-plank and dropped it as Atlas might have been expected to drop the earth, and stood there with a contemptuous look of expectation. I took out two half-dollars and handed one to each. The sneer that formed under their noses was well practised, I could see, and they took great pains to inform me that they were no niggers, they would not take the trunk another foot. There it was. I was lost, scorned, and humiliated. Why did I have so much worldly goods to worry about? Just then a portly Fijian stepped up. Beside him I felt puny, doubly humble now. Before I had time to decide whether or not he was going to pick me up by the nape of the neck and carry me off to a feast, he took my trunk instead. Though it weighed fully a hundred and sixty-five pounds, it rose to his shoulders—up there a foot and a half above me—and the giant strode along the pier with as little concern as though it were empty. The two stewards stood looking on with an air of superiority typical of the white men among colored.

I cannot say that mere brawn ever entitles any man to rank, and that the white generally substitutes brain for brawn is obvious. But I failed to see wherein they justified their conceit, for to men of their type the fist is still the symbol of their ideal, as it is to the majority of white men. And as I came away from the ship again that afternoon I found a young steward, a mere lad, standing in a corner crying, his cheek swollen and red. I asked him what happened. "The steward hit me," he said, trying to restrain himself from crying. "I thought I was through and went for my supper so as to get ashore a bit. He came up and asked me what I was doing. I told him, and he struck me with his fist." Yet the stewards thought themselves too good to do any labor with black men about. No ship in a tropical port is manned by the sailors; there they take a vacation, as it were.

From the customs shed to my hotel the selfsame Fijian carried my trunk majestically. I felt hopeful that for a time at least I should see the last of stewards and their ilk. But before I was two days in Suva I learned that shore stewards are often not any better, and was happy to get farther inland away from the port for the short time I could afford to spend in the tropics.

Meanwhile, some of the younger of my fellow-passengers came on shore and began doing the rounds, into which they inveigled me. From one store to the other we went, examining the moldy, withered, incomplete stocks of the traders. Magazines stained brown with age, cheap paper-covered novels, native strings of beads formed part of the stock in trade. We soon exhausted Suva.

At the corner of the right angle made by Victoria Parade and the pier stood a Victoria coach. A horse slept on three legs, in front of it, and a Hindu sat upon the seat like a hump on an elongated camel. We roused them from their dozing and began to bargain for their hire. Six of us climbed into the coach and slowly, as though it were fastened to the ground, the horse began to move, followed by the driver, the carriage, and the six of us. For an hour we continued in the direction in which the three had been standing, along the beach, up a little knoll, past corrugated-iron-roofed shacks, and down into Suva again; the horse stopped with the carriage behind him in exactly the same position in which we had found them, and driver and beast went to sleep again.

Much is heard these days about the effects of the railroad and the steamer and the wireless telegraph on the unity of the world, but to those travelers and that Hindu and to the Fijians whom we passed en route, not even the insertion of our six shillings in the driver's pocket has, I am sure, as much as left the faintest impression on any of us except myself. And on me it has left the impression of the utter inconsequence of most traveling.

Thus Suva, the eye of Fiji and of the needle of the Pacific, is threaded, but there is nothing to sew. The unexpected never happens. There are no poets or philosophers, no theaters or cabarets in Suva, as far as mere eye can see,—nothing but smell of mold and copra (cocoanut oil).

In Suva one cannot long remain alert. The sun is stupefying. The person just arrived finds himself stifled by the sharp smells all about him as though the air were poisoned with too much life. The shaggy green hills, rugged and wild in the extreme, show even at a distance the struggle between life and death which moment by moment takes place. Luxuriant as on the morning of creation, the vegetation seems to be rotting as after a period of death. In Suva everything smells damp and moldy. You cannot get away from it. The stores you buy in, the bed you sleep in, the room you eat in,—all have the same odor. The books in the little library are eaten full of holes through which the flat bookworms wander as by right of eminent domain. Offensive to the uninitiated is the smell of copra. The swarms of Fijians who attack the cargo smell of it and glisten with it. The boats smell of it and the air is heavy with it. If copra and mold could be banished from the islands, the impression of loveliness which is the essence of the South Seas would remain untainted. Yet to-day, let me but get a whiff of cocoanut-oil from a drug store and I am immediately transported to the South Seas and my being goes a-wandering.