Cloud Atlas (65 page)

I begged the Horroxes’ leave to explore Bethlehem Bay, but its beach was unbearably hot & its sand flies pestilential, so I retraced our steps up the “Main Street” towards the church, whence issued the sound of psalmody. I intended to join in the afternoon worship. Not a soul, not a dog, not even a Native, stirred the Sabbath stillness. I peered into the dim church & so thick was the smoke within, I feared, erroneously, the building was aflame! The singing was now over & substituted by choruses of coughing. Fifty dark backs faced me & I realized the air was thick with the smoke not of fire nor incense but raw-cut tobacco! for every man jack of them was puffing on a pipe.

A rotund White stood in the pulpit sermonizing in that hybrid accent “Antipodean Cockney.” This shew of informal religiosity did not offend until the content of the “sermon” became apparent. I quoth: “So it came to pass, see, Saint Peter, aye, ’im ‘oo Mistah Jesus called Sweeter Peter Piper, he cameth from Rome an’ he taughteth them hooky-nosed Jews in Palestine what was what with the Old Baccy, an’ this is what I’m teachin’ you now, see.” Here he broke off to give guidance to an individual. “Nah, Tarbaby, you’re doing it all wrong, see, you load your baccy in
the fat
end, aye, that one, see, oh, J——s sneezed! how many times I told you,
this
is the
stem
, this is the d——d
bowl
! Do it like Mudfish next to you, nah, let me shew you!”

A sallow, stooping White leant against a cabinet (containing, I later verified, hundreds of Holy Bibles printed in Polynesian—I must request one as a souvenir ere our departure) watching the smoky proceedings. I made myself known to him in whispers so as not to distract the smokers from their sermon. The young man introduced himself as Wagstaff & explained the pulpit’s occupant was “the Headmaster of the Nazareth Smoking School.”

I confessed, such an academy was unknown to me.

“An idea of Father Upward’s, at the Tahitian Mission. You must understand, sir, your typical Polynesian spurns industry because he’s got no reason to value money. ‘If I hungry,’ says he, ‘I go pick me some, or catch me some. If I cold, I tell woman, “Weave!’ “Idle hands, Mr. Ewing, & we both know what work the Devil finds for them. But by instilling in the slothful so-an’-sos a gentle craving for this harmless leaf, we give him an incentive to earn money, so he can buy his baccy—not liquor, mind, just baccy—from the Mission trading post. Ingenious, wouldn’t you say?”

How could I disagree?

The light ebbs away. I hear children’s voices, exotic avian octaves, the surf pounding the cove. Henry is grumbling at his cuff links. Mrs. Horrox, whose hospitality Henry & I are enjoying tonight, has sent her maid to inform us dinner is served.

Monday, 9th December
—

A continuance of yesterday’s narrative. After the smoking school was dismissed (several of the students were swaying & nauseous, but their teacher, an itinerant tobacco trader, assured us, “They’ll be hooked like pufferfish in no time!”), the back of the heat was broken, though Cape Nazareth still broiled in glowing sunshine. Mr. Wagstaff strolled with me along the wooded arm of land shouldering northwards from Bethlehem Bay. The youngest son of a Gravesend curate, my guide had been drawn to the missionary’s vocation since infancy. The Society, by arrangement with Preacher Horrox, sent him hither to wed a widow of Nazareth, Eliza, née Mapple, & be a father to her son, Daniel. He arrived on these shores last May.

What fortune, I declared, to dwell in such an Eden, but my pleasantry punctured the young man’s spirits. “So I believed in my first days, sir, but now I don’t rightly know. I mean, Eden’s a spick ‘n’ span place, but every living thing runs wild here, it bites & scratches so. A pagan brought to God is a soul saved, I know it, but the sun never stops
burning
& the waves & stones are always so bright, my eyes ache till dusk comes. Times are, I’d give anything for a North Sea fog. The place puts a straining on
our
souls, to be truthful, Mr. Ewing. My wife’s been here since she was a small girl, but that doesn’t make it easier for her. You’d think the savages’d be grateful, I mean, we school them, heal them, bring employment & eternal life! Oh, they say ‘Please, sir,’ an’ ‘Thank you, sir’ prettily enough, but you feel
nothing”
—Wagstaff pounded his heart—”here. Aye,
look
like Eden it might, but Raiatea is a fallen place, same as everywhere, aye, no snakes, but the Devil plies his trade here as much as anywhere else. The ants! Ants get everywhere. In your food, your clothes, your nose, even. Until we convert these accursed ants, these islands’ll never be truly ours.”

We arrived at his modest dwelling, crafted by his wife’s first husband. Mr. Wagstaff did not invite me in but went inside to fetch a flask of water for our walk. I took a turn around the modest front garden, where a Black gardener was hoeing. I asked what he was growing.

“David is dumb,” a woman called to me from the doorway dressed in a loosened, grubby pinafore. I am afraid I can only describe her appearance and manner as slovenly. “Dumb as a stone. You’re the English doctor staying at the Horroxes’.”

I explained I was an American notary & asked if I might be addressing Mrs. Wagstaff.

“My wedding banns and marriage lines say so, yes.”

I said Dr. Goose was holding an ad hoc surgery at the Horroxes’, if she wished to consult with him. I assured her of Henry’s excellence as a physician.

“Excellent enough to spirit me away, restore the years I’ve wasted here & set me up in London with a stipend of three hundred pounds per annum?”

Such a request was beyond my friend’s powers, I admitted.

“Then your excellent physician can do nothing for me, sir.”

I heard giggles in the bushes beyond me, turned around & saw a host of little Black boys (I was curious to note so many light-skinned issue of “cross-racial” unions). I ignored the children & turned back to see a White boy of twelve or thirteen, as grubby as his mother, slip by Mrs. Wagstaff, who did not attempt to waylay him. Her son frolicked as naked as his Native playmates! “Ho, there, young fellow,” I reprimanded, “won’t you get a sunstroke running about in that state?” The boy’s blue eyes held a feral glint & his answer, barked in a Polynesian tongue, baffled me as much as it amused the pickaninnies, who flew off like a flock of greenfinches.

Mr. Wagstaff followed in the boy’s wake, much agitated. “Daniel! Come back!
Daniel!
I know you hear me! I’ll lash you! Do you hear? I’ll lash you!” He turned back to his wife.
“Mrs
. Wagstaff! Do you
want
your son to grow up a savage? At the very least make the boy wear clothes! Whatever will Mr. Ewing be thinking?”

Mrs. Wagstaff’s contempt for her young husband, if bottled, could have been vended as rat poison. “Mr. Ewing will think whatever Mr. Ewing will think. Then, tomorrow, he will leave on his handsome schooner, taking his thinkings with him. Unlike you & I,
Mr
. Wagstaff, who’ll die here. Soon, I pray God.” She turned to me. “My husband could not compleat his schooling, sir, so it is my sorry lot to explain the obvious, ten times a day.”

Averse to seeing Mr. Wagstaff’s humiliation at the hands of his wife, I gave a noncommittal bow & withdrew outside the fence. I heard male indignation trampled by female scorn & concentrated my attention on a nearby bird, whose refrain, to my ears, sounded thus:—
Toby isn’t telling, nooo … Toby isn’t telling …

My guide joined me, most visibly glum. “Beg pardon, Mr. Ewing, Mrs. Wagstaff’s nerves are fearful frayed today. She don’t sleep much on account of the heat & flies.” I assured him the “eternal afternoon” of the South Seas taxes the sturdiest physiologies. We walked under slimy fronds, along the tapering headland, noxious with fertility, & furry caterpillars, plump as my thumb, dropped from talons of exquisite heliconia.

The young man narrated how the Mission had assured Mr. Wagstaff’s family of his intended’s impeccable breeding. Preacher Horrox had married them a day after his arrival in Nazareth, while the enchantment of the Tropics still dazzled his eyes. (Why Eliza Mapple had consented to such an arranged union remains uncertain: Henry speculates the latitude & clime “unhinges” the weaker sex & renders them pliable.) Mr. Wagstaff’s bride’s “infirmities,” true age & Daniel’s obstreperous nature came to light scarcely after their signatures on the wedding documents had dried. The stepfather had tried beating his new charge, but this led to such “wicked recriminations” from both mother & stepson that he knew not where to turn. Far from helping Mr. Wagstaff, Preacher Horrox chastised him for a weakling & the truth is, nine days out of ten he is wretched as Job. (Whatever Mr. Wagstaff’s misfortunes, could any compare to a parasitic Worm gnawing his cerebral canals?)

Thinking to distract the brooding youth with matters more logistical, I asked why such an abundance of Bibles lay untouched (& read only by book lice, to tell the truth) in the church. “Preacher Horrox should by rights tell it, but briefly, the Matavia Bay Mission first translated the Lord’s Word into Polynesian & Native missionaries using those Bibles achieved so many conversions that Elder Whitlock—one of Nazareth’s founders what’s dead now—convinced the Mission to repeat the experiment here. He’d once been ‘prenticed to a Highgate engraver, see. So with guns & tools the first missionaries brought a printing press, paper, bottles of ink, trays of type & reams of paper. Within ten days of founding Bethlehem Bay, three thousand primers was printed for Mission schools, before they’d dug the gardens, even. Nazareth Gospels came next & spread the Word from the Societies to the Cooks to Tonga. But now the press is rusted up, we’ve got thousands of Bibles begging for an owner & why?”

I could not guess.

“Not enough Indians. Ships bring disease dust here, the Blacks breathe it in & they swell up sick & fall like spinny tops. We teach the survivors about monogamy & marriage, but their unions aren’t fruitful.” I found myself wondering how many months had passed since last Mr. Wagstaff smiled. “To kill what you’d cherish & cure,” he opined, “that seems to be the way of things.”

The path ended down by the sea at a crumbling “ingot” of black coral, twenty yards in length & in height two men. “A
marae
, this is called,” Mr. Wagstaff informed me. “All over the South Seas you see ’em, I’m told.” We scrambled up & I had a fine view of the
Prophetess
, an easy “dip” away for a lusty swimmer. (Finbar emptied a vat over the side & I spied Autua’s black silhouette atop the mizzen, furling the fore-skysail lifts.)

I inquired after the origins & purpose of the
marae
& Mr. Wagstaff obliged, with brevity. “Just one generation ago, the Indians did their screaming & bloodletting & sacrificing to their false idols right on these stones where we’re standing.” My thoughts went back to the Banquet Beach on Chatham Isle. “The Christ Guards gives any Black who sets foot here now a hefty flogging. Or would do. The Native children don’t even know the names of the old idols no more. It’s all rats’ nests & rubble now. That’s what all beliefs turn to one day. Rats’ nests & rubble.”

Plumeria petals and scent enwrapped me.

———

My neighbor at the dinner table was Mrs. Derbyshire, a widow well into her sixth decade, as bitter & hard as green acorns. “I confess to a disrelish for Americans,” she told me. “They killed my treasured uncle Samuel, a colonel in His Majesty’s Artillery, in the War of 1812.” I gave my (unwanted) condolences, but added that notwithstanding my own treasured uncle was killed by Englishmen in the same conflict, some of my closest friends were Britons. The doctor laughed too loudly & ejaculated, “Hurrah, Ewing!”

Mrs. Horrox seized the rudder of conversation ere we ran onto reefs. “Your employers evince great faith in your talents, Mr. Ewing, to entrust you with business necessitating such a long & arduous voyage.” I replied that, yes, I was a senior enough notary to be entrusted with my present assignment, but a junior enough scrivener to be obligated to accept the same. Knowing clucks rewarded my humility.

After Preacher Horrox had said grace over the bowls of turtle soup & invoked God’s blessing on his new business venture with Cpt. Molyneux, he sermonized upon a much-beloved topic as we ate. “I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our Civilizing World, manifests himself not in the Miracles of the Biblical Age, but in Progress. It is Progress that leads Humanity up the ladder towards the Godhead. No Jacob’s Ladder this, no, but rather ‘Civilization’s Ladder,’ if you will. Highest of all the races on this ladder stands the Anglo-Saxon. The Latins are a rung or two below. Lower still are Asiatics—a hardworking race, none can deny, yet lacking our Aryan bravery. Sinologists insist they once aspired to greatness, but where is your yellow-hued Shakespeare, eh, or your almond-eyed da Vinci? Point made, point taken. Lower down, we have the Negro. Good-tempered ones may be trained to work profitably, though a rumbunctious one is the Devil incarnate! The American Indian, too, is capable of useful chores on the Californian
barrios
, is that not so, Mr. Ewing?”

I said ’tis so.

“Now, our Polynesian. The visitor to Tahiti, O-hawaii, or Bethlehem for that matter, will concur that the Pacific Islander may, with careful instruction, acquire the ‘A-B-C’ of literacy, numeracy & piety, thereby surpassing the Negroes to rival Asiatics in industriousness.”

Henry interrupted to note that the Maori have risen to the “D-E-F” of mercantilism, diplomacy & colonialism.

“Proves my point. Last, lowest & least come those ‘Irreclaimable Races,’ the Australian Aboriginals, Patagonians, various African peoples &c., just one rung up from the great apes & so obdurate to Progress that, like mastodons & mammoths, I am afraid a speedy ‘knocking off the ladder’—after their cousins, the Guanches, Canary Islanders & Tasmanians—is the kindest prospect.”

“You mean”—Cpt. Molyneux finished his soup—”extinction?”

“I do, Captain, I do. Nature’s Law & Progress move as one. Our own century shall witness humanity’s tribes fulfill those prophecies writ in their racial traits. The superior shall relegate the overpopulous savages to their natural numbers. Unpleasant scenes may ensue, but men of intellectual courage must not flinch. A glorious order shall follow, when all races shall know & aye, embrace, their place in God’s ladder of civilization. Bethlehem Bay offers a glimpse of the coming dawn.”