A Gift of Crackers

It happened soon after the Pioneer had brought me back to Ocean Island. It never would have happened, I'm sure, if Stuartson Methven had still been O/C police and prisons there. But he had lately been sent as district officer to Fanning and Washington Islands, 1,600 miles to eastwards of the page 163Gilberts, and I was under orders to hold down his job at Head-quarters as well as Reggie's until further notice.

That was in itself a dangerous arrangement. With all the racial tension there was, I should have been wise to forget for the moment that I was acting resident commissioner and give all my time to police and prisons. But I tried to do both jobs and saw my mistake only too late, when Sergeant-Major Taitusi came to report the madness of Corporal Teakai.

Teakai was at that time the sole Gilbertese N.C.O. in the police force, the rest being Fijians and Ellice Islanders. Through all his eleven years of service he had a name for gentleness. It was because of his known patience that we put him and nobody else in charge of Chinese prisoners, working parties. Yet Sergeant-Major Taitusi had caught him flogging one poor, weedy little coolie before him up the precipitous bush track that led from the beach to the prison yard. His weapon was a tarred rope-end; his victim had a heavy load of sand hoisted on his shoulder. Taitusi sprang forward to snatch the rope from Teakai's hand. Teakai resisted. In the tussle that followed, the prisoner quietly dropped his load to the ground and slipped away into the dense bush. The sun set twenty minutes later. We searched in vain for the missing man through the whole of the following week.

During that time, Teakai stood his trial. There could be no defence for what he had done, but Chinese witnesses proved beyond doubt that it was his only offence of the kind. Also, he was the only man in the colony who held a medal for life-saving from the Royal Humane Society.

I felt too small a man myself to decide out of hand that these things, together with all his years of perfect service, should be passed over as though they had never been because of that single hour's madness that had seized him on the hillside. So I gave him his own choice between dismissal with three months' imprisonment on one hand and reduction to the third grade of constable with a flogging from his sergeant-major page 164on the other. He choose the second and, next morning, took his punishment with fortitude and dignity from Taitusi. We were able to get him transferred to the Gilbert Group within the next few days. He never returned to Ocean Island.

Three days after he was gone, we found the escaped prisoner. He had been hiding in the desolation of a dug-out mining area, a wilderness of blazing rocks where never a blade of green could grow for cover from the sun's blistering glare. Things had gone fairly easily for him at first, nevertheless, for he had been able to feed with his friends at night in the Chinese location, and stay hidden with them until the dark before dawn. But on the third or fourth morning, scrambling down steep crags back into his hiding-place, he had had a fall which, though it broke no bones, so terribly bruised and wrenched his frail body that he could no longer walk. He had lain trapped and starving and flayed raw in the furnace heat of that inferno for five days before our search patrols found him. His bruises were found to have gone gangrenous when he was brought to hospital. He died a day or two later.

His death was the signal for an instant strike by the Chinese labourers. A deputation told the manager that they would remain out until repatriated unless the government agreed to their terms. The terms were that the whole police force, as a gesture of contrition for what they called Teakai's murder of their comrade, should follow the dead man's body to the graveside with uniforms stripped of buttons, badges, stripes, or any other kind of distinguishing mark.

The manager referred this ultimatum to me. His note arrived just as all the strikers came streaming up the hillside to surround our lonely office, and as our Chinese interpreter put it, "to plead aloud for reasonable conference with some honourable representative of the government."

As I looked over the verandah rail at that yelling mob, it came to me that, whatever else might happen, this must be the end of my official career. A man was dead who would page 165have been alive but for his escape from prison—who would never have wanted to escape but for the savagery of a policeman —who could not have suffered that savagery had I, the man in charge, been a hundred per cent on my job. Yet, responsible as the government had become through me, there could be no question of accepting either their mistaken charge of murder or their half-malicious, half-piteous plan to humiliate the police. Not even the ghost of a compromise on those two points was possible, and, as surely as I ruled them out of court, the strike would be on. There would probably be riots, too, judging from the temper of the crowd already.

There was a boulder-strewn space over-arched by coconut palms on the hillside below the office. While the interpreter invited them to meet me there, I walked down to a shaded rock a little higher than the rest. They let me through in silence, but making only just enough room for passageway. I shall remember until I die the acrid reek of phosphate dust and sweat that closed around me in those moments. All the crude toil and poverty of their lives seemed summed up in it. I was wrung with a sudden, shamed sense of the gross handicaps they suffered, the cushioned ease of my own lot. It did nothing to lighten my feeling of personal guilt towards them and the dead man as I waited for everyone to find seats.

They said their say quietly to begin with; but it was hopeless from the start; since leaving the manager, their committee had stiffened the terms: in addition to the humiliation of the police, they now required the recall of Teakai from Tarawa and his trial for murder. We argued round that single point quite uselessly for two hours, I doing nothing but explain why I couldn't agree, they retorting with ever-mounting clamour that nothing but a murder trial would satisfy them. We had not even began on the matter of the funeral when a wild fellow whom we called Peter the Painter leapt from his seat, yelled at the rest to follow him and started to walk off. They were all on their feet together then, screaming at the interpreter with brandished fists.

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"Sir," he said to me, his voice bland, his manner unperturbed, "this would seem to be a serious emergency. The saying of something of a highly constructive kind at once is indicated, if it happens to occur to Your Honour," and, without pausing for an answer, he raised his voice to a siren screech, bidding them be reseated.

They obeyed him.

I hadn't a word more to say about their terms. I was sick to death of the argument. My mind was already resigned to the strike and its consequences, whatever they might be. The only thing I did want to say was something entirely personal. It was that, strike or no strike, I was as grieved as they were at the death of their friend, because I felt that my negligence had indirectly led to it. Though I couldn't, as head of the government, do as they demanded, I could at least make a private grief-offering of all the fireworks they thought necessary for a happy funeral, if they would allow me to do so.

I did know how much they valued fire-crackers at burials; but the idea of bribing them back to work with such an offer was so far from my mind that I got up to leave as soon as the interpreter had finished talking. I wasn't surprised when the whole crowd sprang up, with renewed clamour. They were evidently yelling their contempt of me and my crackers. "No wonder!" I thought, sick at heart. "It must have sounded pretty cheap to them."

I had turned on my heel to get out when a bunch of them, headed by Peter the Painter, surged forward through the shouting mob. It looked like instant trouble. "What now?" I asked the interpreter, turning back to stand my ground as shakily as you like to imagine. In the same second, Peter the Painter stopped ten feet short of me, screamed a few words through the din with his arm raised high as if to strike, then suddenly swerved left and led the whole seven hundred of them, except for two men, at a gallop down the hillside.

The interpreter turned to me in a convulsion of high-pitched, expressionless sniggers. "The organizing committee paused page 167before leaving to tell you your face is like a looking-glass," he explained when he could manage to speak.

I had expected some sort of insult, but definitely not this contemptuous comment on my looks, topped off with his shameless, open amusement. "And you dare to stand there giggling while they march off to play hell in the settlement!" I began. "Why you…"

But he let me go no further. "Excuse … excuse! No hell whatever in settlement. My giggles the laughter of congratulation. 'Looking-glass face' high expression of Chinese esteem. Courteous gift of crackers-money is graciously accepted; these two men are waiting to receive same from your hands."

They returned to work the same day. There was not another anti-police strike on Ocean Island while Peter the Painter remained there.