II

There were a number of nationalities represented at Aliepata: a Belgian and a German trader; Gillespie, the Resident Commissioner, a New Zealander; Father Dumas, a French Roman Catholic priest; and one or two others, including a Russian. These on certain nights in the week would meet on the veranda of one of the stores, to engage in conversation around a bowl of kava; and were known throughout the island as "the Aliepata League of Nations."

Gillespie, about whom there was something patriarchal, and whose district ran with a clockwork-like precision, was interesting if somewhat prosy. (I was to see more of him later.) It cost him a lot of humming and hawing to narrate his stories. He had come to Samoa with the military forces, and at one time was Provost Marshal. During the disastrous influenza epidemic of 1918, he told me, when a fifth of the native population died, his duties took him along the coast from Apia in a motor-lorry on a tour of inspection. He came to a village which he page 129inspected, where lay a number of dead, long unburied, in the native houses: all the living being sick. He continued on to a Protestant mission station that also was there, with able-bodied men attached—the only mission station in the vicinity—and asked of the white missionary in charge how it was that there were corpses putrefying in many of the fales. "Oh," replied the missionary, "they are Catholics! We have buried our own dead." Gillespie, unmoved by this reasoning, sent to his lorry for tins of gasoline, proposing to burn the mission to the ground, should its inmates not get to work instantly disposing of the bodies; which, according to his account, they very promptly did.