Horror in Paradise (21 page)

There was not one to be seen. Every mother’s son had bolted for his hut, and was safely inside with lights burning, howling songs for all he was worth. I went from hut to hut trying to cajole and threaten them to make up a party to go and catch the poor beast. I could do absolutely nothing. Ordinarily servilely obedient, now they were as stubborn as mules. I offered lanterns, dynamite, cartridges, even “trade” mouth organs, but nothing would give them confidence. I could do nothing by myself, and feeling fever coming on I turned in to see what morning brought.

In the morning I sent for the head man and gave him a long jaw. He seemed partly ashamed and partly sulky at my interference with what didn’t concern me. He would only tell me his old story over and over again, so I sent them all to work. About an hour afterwards in walked Mr. Siva, not a penny the worse for his adventure. He wouldn’t tell me a word about it, but went and got his tools and went off to work. I noticed that none of the other men would work near him all day, and if he tried to speak to a man, that man immediately put his fingers in his ears. Whether the fact that Siva had returned whole meant that he had made some fearful pact with the devils or not, I can’t say. Anyhow the whole thing was odd.

September 11th.

THE wretched Siva is dead. When I called the roll this morning he didn’t answer, and no one would tell me anything, so I went straight off to his hut and found him stiff. I am convinced he has been poisoned, but what can I do? I couldn’t perform a post-mortem even if I wanted to; and these beggars use vegetable poisons that are instantaneous in action and quite undiscoverable. I don’t know what to do. I suppose I must let the matter drop. If I pressed things much further I should have an open revolt, and I can’t fight a hundred niggers with guns single-handed. I have the moral support of the man-of-war at Vila, which might arrive six months after I was dead and buried (or eaten), so I shall wait on events.

W. Somerset Maugham

One of the most versatile and widely read English authors of this century, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), while serving as a British secret agent during World War I, spent several months in 1916 and 1917 visiting various islands of Polynesia. He stopped first at Hawaii and then went on to Samoa and Tahiti. These islands provided him with material for two of his best books of fiction:
The Moon and Sixpence
(1919), a novel based on the life of Paul Gauguin; and
The Trembling of a Leaf
(1921), a collection of six stories, including “Red,” which he regarded as his most successful short story, and “Rain,” the one that is best known.

In the brief tale that follows, a true one which has never been collected, Maugham tells of a curious experience he had while living on a small coral island near Tahiti.

I HAVE always thought it must be the most delightful thing in the world to own an island; not Ireland, of course, or Borneo—that would really be too much of a good thing—but an island that you could walk round without hurrying yourself in a couple of hours; and now and then I have been offered one, if not for a song, at least for no more than I shall get for this article. But it was always at least a thousand miles from where I happened to be, and that seemed a considerable distance to go (especially as there was no means of getting there) in order to inspect an island which, after all, might not be exactly the sort of island I wanted. Besides, if I were not living on it, I should always be worried about it; I should awake in the night in London and wonder anxiously whether anyone had run away with it. You have to be so careful with portable property in the South Seas.

But in Tahiti I met a man who owned an island, and when I told him that I envied him he offered to lend it to me. There was something so casual about the suggestion, like a man in a railway carriage who asks you if you would like his
Punch,
that I accepted at once.

The island happened to be no more than a hundred miles away from anywhere else (that in the Pacific is cheek by jowl, no farther than Piccadilly Circus from Trafalgar Square), so that it was a wonderful chance to enjoy the satisfaction of proprietorship.

I found a small cutter with a gasoline engine to take me over; I had a native servant whose extraordinary incompetence was only equaled by his unfailing good nature, and I engaged a Chinese cook—for I thought this was an occasion to do things in style.

I bought a bag of rice, a quantity of tinned goods, a certain amount of whisky, and a great many bottles of soda, for the owner had warned me that there was no water on the island.

I set my foot on the beach. The island was mine for as long as I chose to inhabit it. The beach really had the silver whiteness that you read of in descriptions of the South Sea islands, and when I walked along in the sunshine it was so dazzling that I could hardly bear to look at it. Here and there were the white shells of dead crabs and the skeletons of sea birds.

I walked up through the coconuts and came upon a grove of enormous, old, and leafy trees; they gave coolness and a grateful shade. It was among these that the tiny settlement was built. There was the headman’s hut and another for the workman, two more to store the copra, and a somewhat larger one, trim and clean, which the owner of the island used when he visited it and in which I was to dwell.

I unloaded my stores and bedding and proceeded to make myself at home. But I had not reckoned with the mosquitoes. There were swarms of them; I have never seen so many; and they were bold and fierce and pitiless. I rigged up a net in the veranda of my hut and placed a table and a chair beneath it, but the mosquitoes were ingenious to enter, and I had to kill twenty at least before I could sit down in peace.

Here I took my frugal meals, but when a dish was hurriedly passed between the curtains a dozen mosquitoes dashed in and I had to kill them one by one before I could eat.

I set about exploring the island. It had evidently been raised from the sea at a comparatively recent date, and much of the interior was barren and almost swampy, so that I sank in as I walked. I suppose what was now dry land had not very long ago been brackish lake. Beside the coconuts nothing much seemed to grow but rank grass and a shrub something like a broom.

There were no animals on the island but rats, perhaps, and though throughout the Pacific you find everywhere the mynah bird, noisy and quarrelsome, to this lonely spot he had never found his way; and the wild fowl I saw were great black gulls with long beaks. They had a piercing, almost a human, whistle. I thought that in them abode, restless and menacing, the souls of dead seamen drowned at sea. They gave something sinister to the smiling sunlit island.

But it was not till I had been on the island for several days that I discovered they were not the only sinister things there. I thought I had explored every inch of it, and I was surprised one evening to catch through the coconuts a glimpse of a little grass hut. I saw a moving shape, and I wondered if it was possible that anyone lived there.

I strolled toward the hut and I saw what was certainly a man, but as I approached he vanished. I supposed that I had startled him and he had slunk away among the brushwood. But I wondered why he had chosen this lonely dwelling, who he was, and how he lived.

The Polynesians are a friendly and sociable race, and I was intrigued to find anyone in that tiny island who needed solitude so much that he must live away even from the halfdozen persons who formed the island’s entire population. I puzzled my brains. It could not be a watchman, for among the coconuts there was nothing to watch and no danger to guard against.

When I returned to my own house I told the headman what I had seen and asked him who this solitary creature was; but he would not, or could not, understand me. It was not till I was once more in Papeete that I found out. I thanked the owner of the island for the loan of it and then I asked him who was the mysterious man who seemed so to shun the approach of his fellows.

“Oh, that’s my leper,” he said. “I thought he’d amuse you”

“He tickled me to death,” I answered. “But haven’t you rather a peculiar sense of humor?”

Sir Arthur Grimble

With a degree from Cambridge University and further education in France and Germany, Arthur Grimble (1888-1956) joined the British Colonial Service at the age of twenty-six. On his first assignment he was posted to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate, a remote possession in the equatorial Pacific. There he served for nineteen years, first as cadet and then, having proved his competence, as resident commissioner, chief administrator of both groups. Later he became governor of the Seychelles Islands, was knighted in 1938, and ended his career in the Colonial Service as governor of the Windward Islands.

His experiences in the Gilberts, now the Republic of Kiribati, resulted in two volumes of recollections:
We Chose the Islands
(1953) (the British title is
A Pattern of Islands
); and
Return to the Islands
(1957). “A Stinking Ghost” is chosen from the latter volume.

THERE were five European houses scattered through the whispering glades of the palm forest on Betio station in 1923. Two of these had been put up by myself in 1916; the other three were much older; and every one of them, according to the people of Betio village next door, was haunted. The basic trouble was not, I gathered, that they had all happened to be built on prehaunted ground; there wasn’t a foot of soil anywhere up the creeping length of Tarawa that wasn’t the lurking place of one fiend or another, and you had to take these as you found them. It was how you dealt with them when you laid out your ground plan and built your house that really mattered. If you didn’t turn on the proper spells—and how could you if you were a white man?—it followed as a matter of course that the ghosts or the elementals got in.

One of the two bungalows that I had built had been occupied without delay by an earth spirit called Na Kun, who showed himself in the form of a noddy. He croaked “Kun-kun-kun” at you in the dark of night, and aimed his droppings at your eye, and blinded you for life if he made a bull’s-eye of it. The other house had a dog on its front veranda: not just a
kamea
(that is, a “come-here”), as the white man’s dogs were called, but a
kiri
—one of the breed the ancestors had brought with them out of the west when, shortly after the creation of the world by Naareau the Elder, they came to settle on Tarawa. I could never make out why everyone was so frightened of this beast. He never
did
anything, simply
was
in the house. For my own purposes, I came to the conclusion that he was like the “mopoke” in the celebrated Australian story, so deceptive that what I occasionally thought I saw on the front veranda and took to be something else actually was what I took it for, namely, a mongrel of the old
kiri
strain from the village.

There was a cheerful tale among the villagers that, round about 1910, an aged friend of mine, a widely loved sorcerer who dealt in what was called the magic of kindness (meaning any kind of ritual or charm not intended to hurt anybody) had posted one of his familiars, the apparition of a gray heron, on the front veranda of a decrepit bungalow near the hospital. His intent, so the story went, was to get hold of a few medical secrets for the improvement of his repertoire of curative potions, especially those which had to do with the revitalization of flagging manhood. But his constructive plan was most untimely frustrated when the resident medical officer was transferred to another house, only just built, but nevertheless already haunted by a hag with two heads. This unpleasant creature made a most frightful scene when the wizard tried to take the new premises over for his inquisitive bird. I learned all these facts from a glorious burlesque show put up for me one Saturday night by the lads, young and old, of Betio village. The miming of the demon lady’s fury, her inhospitable gestures, the rout of the sorcerer, and the total desolation of the heron left all of us, including the venerable gentleman himself, helpless with laughter. But, in the last analysis, behind all the mirth of that roaring crowd, there wasn’t a soul present except myself who didn’t accept both the familiar and the demon for cold and often terrifying fact.

The oldest house on our station, the one we called the old residency, was a pleasant, two-floored structure near the lagoonside haunted by a nameless white beachcomber. This ghost was held in peculiar dread by the villagers, because they regarded it as earthbound for ever, its body having been murdered and left unburied on the beach for the Betio dogs to devour. That kind of revenant was always more
iozvawa
(malicious) than any other, everyone believed.

The unhappy man, so the story ran, had been killed on the site of the residency with a glass bottle by a fellow beachcomber named Tom, a generation or so before the coming of the British flag in 1892, which is to say, somewhere back in the late 1860’s. Nothing else was remembered of him except that he was wearing a sailor’s dark shore clothes and thick black boots when he came by his death. Or, at least, that is how his ghost was said to be dressed whenever it allowed itself to be seen about the house.

The villagers talked about him so much and with such conviction that Europeans began to accept the haunt as a fact. It is hard to resist belief in such things when you are lonely and the whole air around you palpitates with horrified credulity. Good Father Guichard of the Sacred Heart Mission, bless him, came down-lagoon fifteen miles when Olivia and I arrived at Tarawa in 1916, especially to warn us against living in the house. But we did live there. We couldn’t see why the poor ghost, if it existed, should want to do us any harm. So we had our beds and the baby’s cot on the airy gable veranda where he was supposed to walk, clump-clump, in his great thick boots; and all the time we were there, we never saw or heard a thing or had the smallest feeling of his unseen presence.