“Oh, there, Tangatu, your son left his knife in a tree last night.
I have brought it back to you.”
He flung it down on the ground in the midst of the circle, and with a low burst of laughter ambled off.
On Monday he went out to see if they had started work.
There was no sign of it. He rode through the village.
The inhabitants were about their ordinary avocations. Some were weaving mats of the pandanus leaf, one old man was busy with a kava bowl, the children were playing, the women went about their household chores.
Walker, a smile on his lips, came to the chief’s house.
“Talofa-li,” said the chief.
“Talofa,” answered Walker.
Manuma was making a net.
He sat with a cigarette between his lips and looked up at Walker with a smile of triumph.
“You have decided that you will not make the road?”
The chief answered.
“Not unless you pay us one hundred pounds.”
“You will regret it.”
He turned to Manuma.
“And you, my lad, I shouldn’t wonder if your back was very sore before you’re much older.”
He rode away chuckling. He left the natives vaguely uneasy.
They feared the fat sinful old man, and neither the missionaries’ abuse of him nor the scorn which Manuma had learnt in Apia made them forget that he had a devilish cunning and that no man had ever braved him without in the long run suffering for it.
They found out within twenty-four hours what scheme he had devised.
It was characteristic.
For next morning a great band of men, women, and children came into the village and the chief men said that they had made a bargain with Walker to build the road.
He had offered them twenty pounds and they had accepted.
Now the cunning lay in this, that the Polynesians have rules of hospitality which have all the force of laws; an etiquette of absolute rigidity made it necessary for the people of the village not only to give lodging to the strangers, but to provide them with food and drink as long as they wished to stay.
The inhabitants of Matautu were outwitted.
Every morning the workers went out in a joyous band, cut down trees, blasted rocks, levelled here and there and then in the evening tramped back again, and ate and drank, ate heartily, danced, sang hymns, and enjoyed life.
For them it was a picnic.
But soon their hosts began to wear long faces; the strangers had enormous appetites, and the plantains and the bread-fruit vanished before their rapacity; the alligator-pear trees, whose fruit sent to Apia might sell for good money, were stripped bare.
Ruin stared them in the face.
And then they found that the strangers were working very slowly.
Had they received a hint from Walker that they might take their time?
At this rate by the time the road was finished there would not be a scrap of food in the village.
And worse than this, they were a laughing-stock; when one or other of them went to some distant hamlet on an errand he found that the story had got there before him, and he was met with derisive laughter.
There is nothing the Kanaka can endure less than ridicule.
It was not long before much angry talk passed among the sufferers. Manuma was no longer a hero; he had to put up with a good deal of plain speaking, and one day what Walker had suggested came to pass: a heated argument turned into a quarrel and half a dozen of the young men set upon the chief’s son and gave him such a beating that for a week he lay bruised and sore on the pandanus mats. He turned from side to side and could find no ease.
Every day or two the administrator rode over on his old mare and watched the progress of the road.
He was not a man to resist the temptation of taunting the fallen foe, and he missed no opportunity to rub into the shamed inhabitants of Matautu the bitterness of their humiliation.
He broke their spirit.
And one morning, putting their pride in their pockets, a figure of speech, since pockets they had not, they all set out with the strangers and started working on the road.
It was urgent to get it done quickly if they wanted to save any food at all, and the whole village joined in.
But they worked silently, with rage and mortification in their hearts, and even the children toiled in silence.
The women wept as they carried away bundles of brushwood.
When Walker saw them he laughed so much that he almost rolled out of his saddle.
The news spread quickly and tickled the people of the island to death.
This was the greatest joke of all, the crowning triumph of that cunning old white man whom no Kanaka had ever been able to circumvent; and they came from distant villages, with their wives and children, to look at the foolish folk who had refused twenty pounds to make the road and now were forced to work for nothing.
But the harder they worked the more easily went the guests.
Why should they hurry, when they were getting good food for nothing and the longer they took about the job the better the joke became?
At last the wretched villagers could stand it no longer, and they were come this morning to beg the administrator to send the strangers back to their own homes.
If he would do this they promised to finish the road themselves for nothing.
For him it was a victory complete and unqualified.