page 112

Forgiving Sinner

Poor pretty Marina of Tarawa found that not even the walls of our central prison made sanctuary enough, back in 1916, to save the tip of her impudent nose from amputation. The government's extreme poverty was the real root of her trouble: we simply could not afford big prison staffs in those days. It followed that our cheerful brown wrongdoers roamed the government station from sun-up to sundown doing outside chores almost wholly unguarded. Not that they disliked their all-but-freedom under the whispering palms; but it suited Marina's husband too well: he had only to stroll into the station and spy long enough from behind some bush to see exactly when she separated herself from her working-party.

She had been set to weed a path by my office the morning he chose to strike. But a sister of hers from the village had kindly dropped a pipe of tobacco and matches beside her as she worked, and what could a poor girl do then but fall to the temptation. She grabbed her contraband treasure and made for the seclusion of a clump of flowering uri-trees fifty yards from the office.

I don't know how long she had enjoyed her smoke in the scented shadows before he was upon her. It was her rending screams that first brought me and the office staff rushing into the picture. We found her lying in a welter of blood under the uri-trees, her cotton jumper off and held against her face. "Bairiu! Bairiu! (My nose! My nose!)" she was moaning as I knelt on the sand beside her.

Not to put too fine a point on it (if I may use that expression here) the tip of her nose was gone. Her husband had bitten it off. It was one of the things short of murder that jealous husbands sometimes did to fickle wives—an absurdity and a horror grossly compounded. But it did not spell tragedy for a heart as stout as Marina's. Even in the extremity of grief for her broken beauty, she lost neither her head nor her humour. page 113"He spat it out at me before he ran off, saying, 'Do what you like with that!'" she told us with a faint giggle, as she stood up and walked off to hospital. "Perhaps, if you can find it now, Doctor Sowani will sew it on again, and it will stick, and that man will be somewhat disappointed."

None of us had the smallest hope of any such miracle for her, but we did start a search and presently someone found the piteous fragment. Within half an hour the doctor—or, rather, Chief Native Medical Practitioner Sowani, the mainstay of Tarawa hospital and trusted friend of all the islands—had it back in its place again. Yes, and, by heaven! Nei Marina's gallant faith in him proved utterly justified. I don't know whether he sewed it on or merely used adhesive tape, but it did most gloriously stick.

The nose came out of hospital slightly changed in shape, but what it had lost in academic beauty, it turned out to have gained a hundred times over in glamour. It became the first wonder of Tarawa. Visitors from all the group came to look at it. A number of young men offered to marry it. But, as she pointed out, the repaired job still belonged to her husband. He hadn't started divorce proceedings and she certainly didn't intend to take any against him, she said.

I had a long private talk with her shortly before her husband was brought to trial for malicious wounding. She was by then passionately against the idea of a prosecution. I like to dwell on this part of the story. Her argument was that he would never have been tempted to bite her nose off but for her initial unfaithfulness. Therefore she herself, not he, was the one to blame for the whole thing. And now that he was good enough to want her back, unclean, self-spoiled thing that she was, why should the law come butting in to punish him?

Well … who was a district officer to interfere with a wife's conscience or call her generous constancy in question? I didn't try to do so, but pointed out instead, that she herself was, so far, the only known witness against her husband. He had been found innocently working on his own land after the assault. page 114This evidently stuck in her mind because, when he came to trial before the Native Court, she testified on oath that she hadn't really seen the man who had bitten her and hadn't recognized his voice either. As nobody could catch her out, and her previous allegations had been quite informal, and the accused had a copper-bottomed alibi anyhow, he left the court without a stain on his character. It was rank perjury all round—I haven't a doubt of it; but, legal quibbling apart, what is ultimate truth? Nobody knows for sure, but people have visions of it and Nei Marina clearly valued hers higher than a bite in the nose. Perhaps she confounded it in her poor simple heart with such things as love, and love again with such things as humility and forgiveness. But I can't swear to that. What I can vouch for is that it led her back to her man. She and he lived very happily together from that time on.