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XV.
Incubation.

In February our prospects began to look brighter. The copra contract was at an end, and we were free to accept coin for taxes. In order to show defaulters that we were in earnest, we directed the police to sue those of two or three villages, and to follow the judgments with execution so closely that they should not have time to transfer their chattels to a neighbour and usher the bailiff into a house swept of its contents, as was the usual custom. After patrolling the town for half an hour with a handbell to attract buyers, the police swooped down upon the doomed house, planted the Tongan ensign before the door, and seized all the portable property in it. Then the fakatautuki (sale by the hammer) began. The mats, pots, and gnatu were knocked down without much attempt being made to obtain the highest available price, and then as many of the horses, fowls, and pigs as could be caught were sold at an average price—for the horses and poultry at eighteen pence each, and for the pigs at fifteen or twenty times that amount. There are recorded cases of horses being disposed of at these sales for three pence.

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This unusually spirited conduct of the Government produced a panic among the defaulting taxpayers. They became, indeed, almost as unscrupulous in their way of raising money for the Government as for the Churches. In the next three weeks we began to see our way out of our financial difficulties. The debt could already be discharged by instalments, and the arrears of salary to officials could safely be left to Parliament, upon whose rather reckless imagination it might have a healthy restraining influence when the Budget came to be discussed. My chief concern was to prevent my colleagues from revolting against the rigid economy I had enforced upon them, now that they knew there was a balance in the Treasury. About this time a meeting of the Cabinet was held to decide finally upon the Budget that was to be laid before Parliament. Tukuaho fully explained that the sole object of the meeting was to secure unanimity among the Ministers. We took the items seriatim—salaries first. When we came to the Premier's department, Kubu proposed that Tukuaho should withdraw, and thus relieve us of the delicacy of discussing the question of his emoluments in his presence. And now began a very elegant display of log-rolling. Tukuaho's salary was raised at one stroke from £400 a-year to £700. Then Kubu's turn came, and he withdrew, to receive an addition of £50; and the whole of the Cabinet, except the Chief-Justice, who was absent, were in like manner handsomely provided for. My lips were sealed, because my own salary was being voted for the additional term of six months for which the High Commissioner, at the king's request, had allowed me to remain, and the Ministers would have been in-page 236capable of distinguishing between voting an ordinary salary and voting themselves an addition, since both acts sprang from a high-minded liberality. But that night Tukuaho, who was the one member of the Cabinet who cared more for his work than for its emoluments, came to ask me whether the minutes of the meeting might not be cancelled and expunged from the book. He wanted no increase of salary, he said; but when they had voted him one, he could not in decency refuse the same courtesy to others. It was a mea fakatonga—a necessity of Tongan etiquette; and since even the incorruptible Sateki had yielded to the prevailing spirit of generosity, and had accepted an increase of £30, I suppose that it was.

We now gave political dinners almost nightly. As Parliament drew near, and rumours reached us of vengeance vowed over the kava-bowls of Vavau, Tukuaho lost no opportunity of seizing and converting all the influential Vavauans who chanced to visit Nukualofa. No sooner did they set foot in the capital than they received an invitation to dine with me. Besides G and myself, the party usually consisted of Tukuaho, his father or Kubu, and the victim. Our quarry would fain have borrowed from his friends for the occasion the full panoply of European dress, but the invitation always specified native attire. There was a dinner with champagne, and as soon as the only lady had withdrawn, whisky and politics. The guest always went away with triumph in his heart that among all the chiefs of Vavau the Cabinet had thought his advice only as worth seeking. He generally wept over the parting glass: he always swore by "Jihovah" to support us to the death. From page 237that day forth he had no part with his fellow-mal-contents. What knew they of the secrets that had been intrusted to him? When they grumbled he wagged his head as befits one who could speak 'an he would.

My code was nearly finished. My little clerk had well earned the copy of 'Hymns Ancient and Modern' he had begged as the guerdon of his services, and a large part of the Tongan version had come back in type from the Auckland printers. Parliament was to be opened in May, and there was little enough time for holding the general election. The existing code contained elaborate directions for the guidance of the electoral officers, and laid down as one of the qualifications for electors that they should have paid up all arrears of taxes before voting. In this we thought we recognised an opportunity for a final effort to induce the defaulters to pay their debts to the State. Nightly for a whole week the crier proclaimed throughout the villages that defaulters would be deprived of the priceless right of choosing their representatives in Parliament. It was perhaps the experience of past elections that robbed our scheme of the result we had so good a right to expect. If the proper ritual had been followed, an election should have been just such a ceremony as would delight the soul of a Tongan. By law an elector could write the name of his dearest friend on the ballot-slip and pop it into the box, and until the result was declared the excitement must have far transcended the stir at the most hotly contested election in England, since even the meanest elector might find parliamentary honours showered upon him unsought. I understood, however, from my colleagues, that in practice the free and enlightened elec-page 238tors played a very secondary part. "We were called," said my informant, "to a fono on the grass behind the Government offices. Mr Baker came out on the verandah and said, 'You are summoned to-day to choose a representative of the people. I propose So-and-so. Those who are in favour of So-and-so will hold up their hands!' Then several held up their hands, and Mr Baker said that So-and-so was elected, and we all went home."

It was not to be hoped that after such experiences the privilege of being an elector would succeed where the terrors of the law had failed. We heard afterwards, when it was too late, that had the hundreds of disqualified electors known the nature of the entertainment we provided for them, they would have sold their goods and given to the Government rather than miss it.

To invest the first free election with proper solemnities a deputation of his Majesty's Ministers presided. Below the verandah where we sat was a table furnished with writing materials and the ballot-box. The entire male adult population of Nukualofa sat in a semicircle on the grass-plot, hemmed in with police as at a fono. Tukuaho read the clauses of the Constitution relating to elections, and explained that every qualified elector might write the name of whomever he would upon the ballot-slip. Then he called upon those who still owed their taxes for the year 1889 to withdraw: about half the people rose and went away laughing. The dismissal of the defaulters for 1890 sent away fully one-half of the remainder; and when "all persons under twenty-one years of age" had left us, page 239there remained barely one hundred persons, composed, I saw with growing consternation, almost exclusively of Wesleyans—returned exiles—and men so old and infirm as to be excused from taxes altogether. It was our own fault. We had forgotten that the Wesleyans, having been excused all taxes due for the period of their exile, had only had one dollar to pay, and had paid it in order to prove that their loyalty to the State was stronger than that of the Free Churchmen. The qualified electors were, therefore, Wesleyans almost to a man. The inevitable came to pass. Each man came to the ballot-box and filled up his paper without hesitation, and the scrutiny showed that four Wesleyans had been chosen to represent a constituency in which a vast majority were Free Churchmen. Fortunately one of them was a British subject, and I was able to give him his choice between repudiation of his nationality or voidance of his seat. As I expected, he chose the latter, and in his place Hoho, pre-eminent among Roman Catholic schoolmasters, was elected. Having thus initiated Sibu, the new ballot-clerk, in his duties, we left him to hold the other elections throughout the kingdom.

"He never yet stood sure that stands secure." With a balance in the treasury, and an ever-strengthening party, we were comfortably congratulating ourselves when the bolt fell. One evening while the Ministry were playing bowls on the sea-front after a protracted meeting of the Cabinet, a schooner was seen bearing down upon the anchorage. She was recognised as Maatu's vessel from Vavau, and we were idly speculating on her errand when she brought to unexpectedly and lowered a boat without page 240going to the wharf. Two men sprang ashore and ran towards us. Their news justified their haste. Tubou was dying, and they were sent to summon the lords of Tongatabu to be with him at the last. Divested of the exaggeration natural to all bearers of evil tidings, the story ran that four days previously the king had bathed as usual at daybreak and had caught a chill. For two days his illness caused no alarm, but on the third he grew worse and sent for his chiefs. When old Tungi heard this he collapsed and said, "If Tubou summoned his chiefs, it is the end; by this time the heavens have fallen!" (kuo hala ae langi.)

For me, no less than the country, no more disastrous event could have happened than the king's death. The whole castle of cards that I had been so painfully rearing during the last eight months would topple headlong to the ground. The balance in the Treasury, nursed with unflinching watchfulness and parsimony, would be swallowed up at one gulp in the expenses of the funeral; the public servants, trained to attend their offices by a system of judicious nagging, would, in the idleness inseparable from great public ceremonies, return to their former habits; public tranquillity, so hardly won, would give place to disturbance, and perhaps civil war. Even if, by a miracle, all these disasters could be averted, and Parliament be brought together, the Ministry could not hope to pass the new laws without the king's sanction. If the king was dead there was nothing left for me but to stay and try to keep the peace. It was idle to hope that the work on which I had built so much could survive It was one of those crises in which one is paralysed by the page 241knowledge that effort is useless. Impending misfortune that calls for action is endurable: it is the passive waiting for the bolt to fall that is so hard to bear.

After the first moment of consternation all the paraphernalia of civilisation were thrown to the winds, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of old Tonga. In the presence of death the king's Ministers sank each to the social status his forefathers had held for generations before him. Ata, Lord of Hihifo, who was, politically speaking, a nonentity, became now the chief figure. He with Tungi must be at the dying king's side. Tukuaho and Kubu, having fathers still living, sank into obscurity. The schooners were victualled and loaded far below safety mark with a living freight of chiefs and matabules. Tongatabu was left to the care of Sateki and me, for neither of us had concern in the great affairs that were toward. A hush fell upon the island—the hush of a great expectancy. Men spoke to one another in low voices when they met in the street, and all traffic of carts from the plantations was suspended. The houses were all crowded with men and women, even at high noon, always talking earnestly of the time that was coming upon them.

Tukuaho had sailed primed with good advice for all emergencies. I spent two days of great anxiety. On the third a sail was seen in the northern passage. A huge concourse of people had collected on the beach when she brought to, and suppressed excitement was in every face. Scarcely a word was spoken as the dinghy pulled ashore. Would the men never speak? At last the steersman, a grey-haired matabule, stood up and cried, "Oku lelei a Tubou!" (It is well with Tubou!) and a great sob of page 242gratitude and relief went up from the assembled people. The suspense of the mob turned to wild garrulous joy, and the news ran from mouth to mouth that the king had awakened from a long stupor and had called for food, and that from that moment his recovery had been rapid and sure. Two days later we learned that he and all his chiefs were on their way to the capital; and at daybreak one morning the five schooners that formed the fleet of Tonga, led by the Toafa Haamea flying the royal standard, made their appearance in the passage.

Strange are the uses of flattery! I had occasion to see the king alone a few days after his arrival. He was at his best when seen informally, and I generally found my way to his room unannounced, leaving-if the conversation was to be of a private nature-a trusty policeman, sworn to Tukuaho's interest, to keep the sentry from playing eavesdropper at the corner of the Palace verandah. The room was empty, and hearing voices from the backverandah, I reconnoitred from the screen of an oleanderbush. The old man was sitting cross-legged between two burly native carpenters, and was trying with his tremulous hands to shave down an axe-haft to fit the steel head, discoursing to his companions of his ancient prowess in their craft. They meanwhile watched his nerveless efforts with affected admiration, looking like schoolboys who are taking their first, lesson in tying flies from the village poacher. At last the king flung his knife and axe-haf petulantly aside, saying, "What has come to me? You do it." A burly courtier took up the tool with a silly smile. For him the job was the work of a moment; but as the knife neared the wood his hand shook so that not a page 243single shaving curled off. He kept up the farce until the king snatched the tool from him with a good-humoured laugh, saying, "You're worse than I am!" I do not know whether that axe was ever finished, because in the laugh that followed I was seen and recognised, and the carpenters disappeared. This was delicate flattery, for besides his prowess in battle and on the sea Tubou was most famous for his skill in carpentry, and in Tonga the carpenter enjoys the same consideration as the artist in Europe.

In the South Seas imitation is not always the sincerest flattery. Some years ago I was walking with Roko Tui Nandronga on an impassable goat-path, which he dignified with the title of "Government road." We had to pass along a steep descent of red clay, ice-slippery with the night's rain. The Roko was followed by a dozen or so of his retainers in single file. Half-way down the hill the chief slipped and fell flat on his back with a loud shout, and almost simultaneously every one of his followers did the same, leaving me standing alone. When they got up, with their clean white sulus bedaubed with red mud, they pretended one and all not to have seen the chief's fall, and for the next ten minutes they discoursed to each other of the exact cause of their tumble. One knew from the first that he would fall, another had a sore toe, and so on. Of course the chief knew perfectly well that the falls were intentional, as did each one of his followers; but the act has become conventional, and so they all play their proper parts in the farce. Can we, who limp in imitation of a personage's deformity, or who wore crinolines which were designed to conceal a personage's misfortune, afford to laugh at them?

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Hardly had the king returned when a new task was thrust upon my collar-galled shoulders. The contractor for the tax-copra, to whom I have before alluded, brought an action against the Government in the High Commissioner's Court to recover damages for the losses he had sustained through over-estimating the amount of copra the taxpayers would bring in. To the Tongans, knowing nothing of civil jurisdiction, the position of defendant in a court of law has mysterious terrors. "Here," they said, "is the fruit of this new Government! We are to be haled to court and punished for the sins of Tukuaho and his foreign adviser. We shall be lined, and then a man-of-war will come and perhaps seize the country." There being no counsel within reach, I had to conduct the case in person. I felt sure enough of my ground to promise the king a victory, or at least that, in the event of defeat, I would myself pay whatever damages were given against us; and this confident assurance went far to dispel his alarm: but the case occupied seventeen precious days at a time when they could least be spared. Yet our victory afterwards proved to be almost worth the waste of time, for the fickle mind of the Tongans leans ever to the winning side, and our contractor unwittingly gained us many adherents in Parliament.

The Free Church ministers, aghast no doubt at the portent of the election of four Wesleyans to represent Nukualofa, now shot their last bolt. They began to preach against me in the pulpit. Early one Monday morning a letter written in Fijian was handed to me with great secrecy by a mounted messenger from Hihifo, who had followed me about until he found me alone. It page 245was from an old Fijian friend of mine, who wrote to tell me that in two pulpits at least I had been the text for the sermon of the previous day. One preacher, after describing the distrust with which my arrival had in spired him, said, "We hear a great deal about stealing and embezzlement. What? Do foreigners never steal? This one who guides our Government has stolen 7000 dollars from the Treasury, and who knows how much more of our money he will take? In the sermon of the other there was a passage not less startling. "When the theft became known the foreigner went to Tukuaho and said, 'Who told the people this?' And Tukuaho said, 'It was Sateki. You know his way: let a matter be ever so secret, Sateki will find it out.' Hearing this the foreigner was silent and cast down."

I put the matter in Tukuaho's hands. The police made inquiries, and traced the story to its source in the fertile brain of the first preacher. The Cabinet decided that policy demanded a prosecution for slander, but that if the man was convicted I might obtain a pardon for him from the king. This course was taken. The incident was instructive in the light it threw upon the estimation in which Europeans are held in Tonga. No calumny against them is thought too gross to be ridiculous. The responsibility for such a state of things must rest upon those Europeans—missionaries as well as laymen—who have stooped to defame one another to the natives.

The High Commissioner, in H.M.S. Cordelia, now appeared upon the scene. It chanced that the gunboat Goldfinch, bound from Rarotonga to Fiji, had put in on the preceding day in search of coal, knowing nothing of the page 246Cordelia's visit. Tongans never admit coincidences. I was asked for explanations and gave them, but my questioners shook their heads gravely, and spread it abroad that the gunboat had been sent by the High Commissioner to prepare his way, but that for his own purposes "the expounder" had chosen to shroud the truth in mystery. Since this self-deception was more likely to do good than harm, I made no effort to belittle the importance of Sir John Thurston's visit. The king received him with effusion, and had evidently lost all uneasiness about the ulterior objects of his coming. An amendment to the treaty between Great Britain and Tonga was to be signed, and I found myself in the odd position of representing a foreign Government in negotiations with my chief—being, in fact, at the same time an officer in the English and the Tongan services. The presence of the Cordelia had a curious effect upon my relations with the king and my colleagues. They seemed suddenly to remember that I was not one of them, and the old confidence between us gave place to an almost imperceptible constraint, which, as soon as the ship sailed, disappeared as suddenly as it had come. To Sir John Thurston, who remembered the anxieties that had beset him a year before, the visit must have brought that satisfaction which is the reward of every one who, having chosen one of two opposite courses, finds that it was the wisest as well as the most courageous.