第78章 AROUND OUR HOUSE(4)

Yet I always suspected Maka of a secret melancholy -these jubilant extremes could scarce be constantly maintained.He was besides long,and lean,and lined,and corded,and a trifle grizzled;and his Sabbath countenance was even saturnine.On that day we made a procession to the church,or (as I must always call it)the cathedral:Maka (a blot on the hot landscape)in tall hat,black frock-coat,black trousers;under his arm the hymn-book and the Bible;in his face,a reverent gravity:-beside him Mary his wife,a quiet,wise,and handsome elderly lady,seriously attired:-myself following with singular and moving thoughts.Long before,to the sound of bells and streams and birds,through a green Lothian glen,I had accompanied Sunday by Sunday a minister in whose house I lodged;and the likeness,and the difference,and the series of years and deaths,profoundly touched me.In the great,dusky,palm-tree cathedral the congregation rarely numbered thirty:the men on one side,the women on the other,myself posted (for a privilege)amongst the women,and the small missionary contingent gathered close around the platform,we were lost in that round vault.The lessons were read antiphonally,the flock was catechised,a blind youth repeated weekly a long string of psalms,hymns were sung -I never heard worse singing,-and the sermon followed.To say I understood nothing were untrue;there were points that I learned to expect with certainty;the name of Honolulu,that of Kalakaua,the word Cap'n-man-o'-wa',the word ship,and a description of a storm at sea,infallibly occurred;and I was not seldom rewarded with the name of my own Sovereign in the bargain.The rest was but sound to the ears,silence for the mind:

a plain expanse of tedium,rendered unbearable by heat,a hard chair,and the sight through the wide doors of the more happy heathen on the green.Sleep breathed on my joints and eyelids,sleep hummed in my ears;it reigned in the dim cathedral.The congregation stirred and stretched;they moaned,they groaned aloud;they yawned upon a singing note,as you may sometimes hear a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom.In vain the preacher thumped the table;in vain he singled and addressed by name particular hearers.I was myself perhaps a more effective excitant;and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my successful struggles against sleep -and I hope they were successful -cheered the flight of time.He,when he was not catching flies or playing tricks upon his neighbours,gloated with a fixed,truculent eye upon the stages of my agony;and once,when the service was drawing towards a close,he winked at me across the church.

I write of the service with a smile;yet I was always there -always with respect for Maka,always with admiration for his deep seriousness,his burning energy,the fire of his roused eye,the sincere and various accents of his voice.To see him weekly flogging a dead horse and blowing a cold fire was a lesson in fortitude and constancy.It may be a question whether if the mission were fully supported,and he was set free from business avocations,more might not result;I think otherwise myself;Ithink not neglect but rigour has reduced his flock,that rigour which has once provoked a revolution,and which to-day,in a man so lively and engaging,amazes the beholder.No song,no dance,no tobacco,no liquor,no alleviative of life -only toil and church-going;so says a voice from his face;and the face is the face of the Polynesian Esau,but the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a different world.And a Polynesian at the best makes a singular missionary in the Gilberts,coming from a country recklessly unchaste to one conspicuously strict;from a race hag-ridden with bogies to one comparatively bold against the terrors of the dark.

The thought was stamped one morning in my mind,when I chanced to be abroad by moonlight,and saw all the town lightless,but the lamp faithfully burning by the missionary's bed.It requires no law,no fire,and no scouting police,to withhold Maka and his countrymen from wandering in the night unlighted.