Читать книгу Savage Island: An Account of a Sojourn in Niué and Tonga - Thomson Basil - Страница 6

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AFFAIRS OF STATE

MR. LAWES' fears were relieved by the messenger who had carried my invitation to the king at Tuapa. The old gentleman, far from being offended at our choice of Alofi for the meeting, had beamed upon him with his left eye (the right is missing, and it was all he had to beam with), and was already half-way to the royal lodging in Alofi. The other messengers, returning from the more distant villages at intervals during the evening, brought back news no less favourable. Early in the morning persons sent out to reconnoitre reported that men were erecting awnings on the green before the school-house, that the headmen of villages had all arrived, and that His Majesty was being helped into his uniform. Ten was the hour, and on the stroke of the hour Captain Ravenhill landed with the portrait of the Queen, sent from Windsor as a present to the king. The sun was very hot: English uniforms are not built for a thermometer above eighty in the shade, and there was therefore some excuse for our feelings when we walked on to the green and found three men trying to fasten a mat to four stakes planted anyhow in the grass. Half a dozen children were amusing themselves with a running commentary upon how not to rig an awning, and that was all.

The hour that we spent in the school-house was the sultriest of my experience, but it was cool and comfortable beside the language that might have clothed our thoughts had Mr. Lawes not been present. That we were impotent made it no better. There were no means of knowing whether the king's unpunctuality was an intentional slight or merely the innate inability of a native to keep an appointment, and there was no certainty that he would choose to come at all. But although, as the green began to fill with a gay-coloured, chattering crowd, I was at one moment almost resolved to get to business without His Majesty, I was restrained by the mortification of poor Mr. Lawes, who felt that he had been charged with the arrangements, and whose hope that his flock would do nothing to disgrace themselves was suffering so cruel a check. The messengers who trod heels in the road leading to the royal quarters brought back conflicting rumours. One said that the king was arraying himself in the new rifle-green uniform imported for him by a storekeeper; another that he was taking off his royal trousers at the behest of a Samoan teacher, who asserted that trousers were no trappings for an interview with the Queen's Commissioner; another that he had sent for a trusted councillor to decide whether, if he wore a Samoan petticoat, he might retain his military helmet with the cock-feather plume to which he clave. What Mr. Lawes did not know about the people was not worth knowing, and yet, so long have form and ceremonial been abandoned by the Niuéans, that he was still inclined to think that the king would stroll on to the green as if he was taking the air, despite these reports of elaborate preparations.

The awnings were rigged at last—one for us, floored with planks, at the door of the school-house, and the other facing it, with a couple of wooden chairs for Their Majesties, and benches for the retinue. A crowd of several hundred people—women and children for the most part—had assembled when a man ran in to say that the royal procession was coming up the road. There was but just time to post Amherst Webber with his camera when the procession burst from behind the angle of the Mission fence.

It was worth waiting for. I heard Mr. Lawes murmur, "Well, I never thought they would do this!" The procession was headed by a dozen men in slop clothes and villainous, billycock hats set at a rakish angle. They all carried spears and paddle-shaped clubs in either hand, and a similar rabble brought up the rear. In the middle of this grotesque bodyguard walked the king and queen, both in petticoats, as befits the sex to which they belonged, for if the queen was a young woman, the king was assuredly an old one. To their united ages of ninety-four His Majesty contributed seventy-six, but what he lacked in youthful elasticity he made up in condescension, for she had been but a beggar-maid—or what corresponds therewith in Niué, where beggary is unknown—when he had played Cophetua to her a few months before our visit. She wore a wreath of roses, he the soldier's helmet with the cock's plume, which was all that the officious Samoan teacher would leave him of his military uniform, and from which he refused to be divided, although it assorted ill with his petticoat. To tell the brutal truth, His Majesty was unsexed by the garments that had been chosen for him, and his appearance justified the remark of a friend who, holding the photographs of Their Majesties in his hand and confusing them, exclaimed, "Why, the queen's got a beard!" With the king was an angular old man in a strange, ill-fitting uniform and a tall hat of ancient date, carefully brushed the wrong way to show its wealth of nap; his uniform was bespattered with yellow anchors and other nautical devices, and he carried a spear in either hand. Though we could not discover that he had any connection with the court, he certainly imparted to the royal procession an air of dignity that it sadly needed.