Horror in Paradise (30 page)

All that night we were annoyed by a harmless mad woman named Herena, who walked round and round the house crying “Kimueli”—“Kimueli.” We thought nothing of it, as we were quite accustomed to her. Next day I went down early to Albert’s house. He was just going out to his work in the bush. I said, “Albert, why have you not been to see me for two nights?”

“Me ‘fraid,’ said Albert, “dead man he walks.”

“What dead man?”

“Kimueli.”

Of course I laughed at him. It was an everyday occurrence for natives who had been out late at night in the bush to come home saying they had seen ghosts. If I wished to send a message after sunset it was always necessary to engage three or four men to take it. Nothing would have induced any man to go by himself. The only man who was free from these fears was my interpreter, Friday. He was a native, but had lived all his life among white people. When Friday came down from his own village to my house that morning, he was evidently a good deal troubled in his mind. He said,

“You remember that man Kimueli, sir, that Tom killed.”

I said, “Yes, Albert says he is walking about.”

I expected Friday to laugh, but he looked very serious and said,

“Everyone in Motusa has seen him, sir; the women are so frightened that they all sleep together in the big house.”

“What does he do?” said I. “Where has he been to? What men have seen him?”

Friday mentioned a number of houses into which Kimueli had gone. It appeared that his head was tied up with banana leaves and his face covered with blood. No one had heard him speak. This was unusual, as the ghosts I had heard the natives talk about on other occasions invariably made remarks on some commonplace subject. The village was very much upset. For two nights this had happened, and several men and women had been terribly frightened.

It was evident that all this was not imagination on the part of one man. I thought it possible that some madman was personating Kimueli, though it seemed almost impossible that anyone could do so without being found out. I announced my determination to sit outside Albert’s house that night and watch for him. I also told Albert that I should bring a rifle and have a shot, if I saw the ghost. This I said for the benefit of anyone who might be playing its part.

Poor Albert had to undergo a good deal of chaff for being afraid to walk two hundred yards through the bush to my house. He only said,

“By-and-bye you see him too, then me laugh at you.”

The rest of the day was spent in the usual manner. Allardyce and I were to have dinner in Albert’s house; after that we were going to sit outside and watch for Kimueli All the natives had come in very early that day from the bush. They were evidently unwilling to run the risk of being out after dark. Evening was now closing in, and they were all sitting in clusters outside their houses. It was, however, a bright moonlight night, and I could plainly recognize people at a considerable distance. Albert was getting very nervous, and only answered my questions in monosyllables.

For about two hours we sat there smoking, and I was beginning to lose faith in Albert’s ghost when all of a sudden he clutched my elbow and pointed with his finger. I looked in the direction pointed out by him, and he whispered “Kimueli.”

I certainly saw about a hundred yards off what appeared to be the ordinary figure of a native advancing. He had something tied round his head, as yet I could not see what. He was advancing straight towards us. We sat still and waited. The natives sitting in front of their doors got closer together and pointed at the advancing figure. All this time I was watching it most intently. A recollection of having seen that figure was forcing itself upon my mind more strongly every moment, and suddenly the exact scene, when I had gone with Gordon to visit the murdered man, came back on my mind with great vividness. There was the same man in front of me, his face covered with blood, and a dirty cloth over his head, kept in its place by banana leaves which were secured with fiber and cotton thread. There was the same man, and there was the bandage round his head, leaf for leaf, and tie for tie, identical with the picture already present in my mind.

“By Jove, it
is
Kimueli,” I said to Allardyce in a whisper. By this time he had passed us, walking straight in the direction of the clump of bush in which my house was situated. We jumped up and gave chase, but he got to the edge of the bush before we reached him. Though only a few yards ahead of us, and a bright moonlight night, we here lost all trace of him. He had disappeared, and all that was left was a feeling of consternation and annoyance on my mind.

We had to accept what we had seen; no explanation was possible. It was impossible to account for his appearance or disappearance. I went back to Albert’s house in a most perplexed frame of mind. The fact of its being Christmas day, the anniversary of Tom’s attack on Kimueli, made it still more remarkable.

I had myself only seen Kimueli two or three times in life, but still I remembered him perfectly, and the man or ghost, whichever it was who had just passed, exactly recalled his features. I had remembered too in a general way how Kimueli’s head had been bandaged with rag and banana leaves, but on the appearance of this figure it came back to me exactly, even to the position of the knots. I could not then, and do not now, believe it was in the power of any native to play the part so exactly. A native could and often does work himself up into a state of temporary madness, under the influence of which he might believe himself to be anyone he chose, but the calm, quiet manner in which this figure had passed was, I believe, entirely impossible for a native, acting such a part and before such an audience, to assume. Moreover, Albert and everyone else scouted the idea. They all knew Kimueli intimately, had seen him every day, and could not be mistaken. Allardyce had never seen him before, but can bear witness to what he saw that night.

I went back to my house and tried to dismiss the matter from my mind, but with indifferent success. I could not get over his disappearance. We were so close behind him that, if it had been a man forcing his way through the thick undergrowth, we must have heard and seen him. There was no path where he had disappeared.

I determined to watch again next night. Till two in the morning I sat up with Albert smoking. No Kimueli made his appearance. Albert said he would not be seen again, and during my stay on the island he certainly never was.

A month after this event I went on board a schooner bound for Sydney; my health had suffered severely, and it was imperative for me to go to a cooler climate. I can offer no explanation for this story. Till my arrival in England I never mentioned it to anyone; at the request of my friends, however, I now consent to publish it.

I am not a believer in ghosts. I believe a natural explanation of the story to exist, but the reader, who has patiently followed me thus far, must find it for himself, as I am unable to supply one.

Louis Becke

George Lewis Becke (1855-1913) is generally acclaimed as the best writer of South Sea stories to have lived for many years in the region he evoked in his fact and fiction.

After spending two decades as a trader, beachcomber, black-birder, and wanderer “from Rapa to Palau,” Louis Becke at the age of thirty-eight began to write stories for the famed Sydney
Bulletin,
and in 1896 went to London to embark on a literary career. Before his death he published thirty-five books about the Pacific, six of them in collaboration with Walter James Jeffery. This selection comes from Becke’s first book,
By Reef and Palm
(1894).

“A Basket of Breadfruit,” the adventures of a trader during the civil war days in Samoa when Colonel Albert Barnes Steinberger, an American filibuster, was intervening in the three-way struggle of the chiefs for supremacy, has the ring of truth. In fewer than two thousand words, the reader is plunged into a life-or-death situation, following the involvement of a South Sea trader hurrying his small schooner inside the perilous reef.

IT WAS in Steinberger’s time. A trader had come up to Apia in his boat from the end of Savaii, the largest of the Samoan group, and was on his way home again when the falling tide caused him to stop awhile at Mulinu’u Point, about two miles from Apia. Here he designed to smoke and talk and drink kava at the great camp with some hospitable native acquaintances during the rising of the water. Soon he was taking his ease on a soft mat, watching the bevy of
aua luma
[the local girls] “chawing” kava.

Now the trader lived at Falealupo, at the extreme westerly end of Savaii; but the Samoans, by reason of its isolation and extremity, have for ages called it by another name—an unprintable one—and so some of the people present began to jest with the trader for living in such a place. He fell in with their humor, and said that if those present would find him for a wife a girl unseared by the breath of scandal, he would leave Falealupo for Safune, where he had bought land.

“Malie!” said an old dame, with one eye and white hair, “the
papalagi
[foreigner] is inspired to speak wisdom tonight; for at Safune grow the sweetest nuts and the biggest taro and breadfruit; and, lo! here among the kavachewers is a young maid from Safune—mine own granddaughter Salome. And against her name can no one in Samoa laugh in the hollow of his hand,” and the old creature, amid laughter and cries of
Isa! e le ma le lo matua
[the old woman is without shame], crept over to the trader, and, with one skinny hand on his knee, gazed steadily into his face with her one eye.

The trader looked at the girl—at Salome. She had, at her grandmother’s speech, turned her head aside, and taking the “chaw” of kava root from her pretty mouth, dissolved into shamefaced tears. The trader was a man of quick perceptions, and he made up his mind to do in earnest what he had said in jest—this because of the tears of Salome. He quickly whispered to the old woman, “Come to the boat before the full of the tide and we will talk.”

When the kava was ready for drinking, the others present had forgotten all about the old woman and Salome, who had both crept away unobserved, and an hour or two was passed in merriment, for the trader was a man well liked. Then, when he rose and said
to fa,
they begged him not to attempt to pass down in his boat inside the reef, as he was sure to be fired upon, for how were their people to tell a friend from an enemy in the black night? But he smiled, and said his boat was too heavily laden to face the ocean swell. So they bade him
to fa,
and called out
manuia oe!
[Bless you!] as he lifted the door of thatch and went.

The old woman awaited him, holding the girl by the hand. On the ground lay a basket, strongly tied up. Salome still wept, but the old woman angrily bade her cease and enter the boat, which the crew had now pushed bow-on to the beach. The old woman lifted the basket and carefully put it on board.

“Be sure,” she said to the crew, “not to sit on it, for it is but ripe breadfruit I am taking to my people in Manono.”

“Give them here to me,” said the trader, and he put the basket in the stem out of the way. The old woman came aft, too, and crouched at his feet and smoked a
sului.
The cool land-breeze freshened as the sail was hoisted, and then the crew besought the trader not to run down inside the reef. Bullets, they said, if fired in plenty, always hit something, and the sea was fairly smooth outside the reef. And old Lupetea grasped his hand and muttered in his ear, “For the sake of this my little daughter, go outside. See, now, I am old, and to lie when so near death as I am is foolish. Be warned by me and be wise; sail out into the ocean, and at daylight we will be at Salua in Manono. Then thou canst set my feet on the shore—I and the basket. But the girl shall go with thee. Thou canst marry her, if that be to thy mind, in the fashion of the
papalagi,
or take her
fa’a Samoa.
Thus will I keep faith with thee. If the girl be false, her neck is but little and thy fingers strong.”

Now the trader thought in this wise: “This is well for me, for if I get the girl away thus quietly from all her relations I will save much in presents,” and his heart rejoiced, for although not mean he was a careful man. So he steered his boat between the seething surf that boiled and hissed on both sides of the boat passage.

As the boat sailed past the misty line of cloud-capped Upolu, the trader lifted the girl up beside him and spoke to her. She was not afraid of him, she said, for many had told her he was a good man, and not a
ula vale
[scamp], but she wept because now, save her old grandmother, all her kinsfolk were dead. Even but a day and a half ago her one brother was killed with her cousin. They were strong men, but the bullets were swift, and so they died. And their heads had been shown at Matautu. For that she had grieved and wept and eaten nothing, and the world was cold to her.

“Poor little devil!” said the trader to himself—“hungry.” Then he opened a locker and found a tin of sardines. Not a scrap of biscuit. There was plenty of biscuit, though, in the boat, in fifty-pound tins, but on these mats were spread, whereon his crew were sleeping. He was about to rouse them when he remembered the old dame’s basket of ripe breadfruit. He laughed and looked at her. She, too, slept, coiled up at his feet. But first he opened the sardines and placed them beside the girl, and motioned her to steer. Her eyes gleamed like diamonds in the darkness as she answered his glance, and her soft fingers grasped the tiller. Very quickly, then, he felt among the packages aft till he came to the basket.