The Pacific Triangle Part 23

Yet the women, who did most of the selling, with their unkempt hair and their crude alien costumes, awoke to something universal under the game of barter they were here called upon to play crudely. Rummage-sales and carnivals, dog-shows and dances, likewise change the glitter of blue eyes and pink cheeks; and I smiled at the thought of Lao-tsze and Tolstoy, who between 650 B. C. and A. D. 1910 preached the ugliness of trade.

When the play of barter and exchange had stirred these primitive folk to a little more life, they quite naturally sought a way of giving it off again; but so foreign did a real bazaar seem to them that they entered the recreations with little zest. In these days of savage sedateness, with trade becoming more and more a feature and a pastime of life, it is not surprising that the natives attend with spirits in abeyance.

Following the great exchange of beads and oils and edible messes, the crowds moved out to a more open s.p.a.ce, under the clear sun. There, with the aid of a native band, under the conductors.h.i.+p of a Catholic priest, they made merry, with strange sounds and more familiar dances. But it all seemed perfunctory and not without a touch of sadness. The Fijian voice at its best is rich, deep, and stately. One cannot imagine it attuned to singing jazz or rag-time. It seems exclusively made for hymns. In consequence, the crowds could not rise to the occasion, and stood behind the entertainers like so many solemn j.a.panese in the presence of royalty.

3

But lest the little pig who stays at home may really starve to death, the world sometimes indulges him a little by letting the market go to him, and never have I seen a market more picturesque and more self-possessed than one of this sort that visited our steamer as she lay anch.o.r.ed in the harbor of Manila.

All about us during the night had crept Filipino lighters, their gunwales capped with low-arched mats. They hugged the steamer like a brood of younglings waiting for their food. They were to receive the cargo of boxes and canned goods from New York and other markets of the world.

It was still cool. A native Filipino woman squatted on the ridge of a lighter top between two men. She was enjoying her morning cigarette. As she caught my gaze her face beamed flirtatiously. Then and there I tried my tongue for the first time in the real use of Spanish, and failed. As the morning advanced, children crept from the darkness of the covered lighters; charcoal pails were fanned into a glow like that of the dawn; and roosters, tied to the boats by one leg with a string, crowed, their contempt, protest, or indifference to a gluttonous and unjust world.

As the hour of breakfast's needs arrived, a thin, long canoe came up, insinuating its way among the many more capacious crafts, quietly, slowly, like a thing just stirring with the new day. On its narrow bottom flopped dozens of little fish in agony, dying of too much air.

They looked like so many bars of silver when they lay dead. A basket of bananas and a few simple vegetables comprised the rest of the stock of these aquatic tradespeople, this man and his woman. She squatted comfortably, looking from side to side for customers, while he pushed the canoe along with easy strokes. They did not cry their wares, and handed their stores out as though known to all for fair dealing and fearless of compet.i.tion. Thus with the freshness of morning air they stimulated this little world to action.

By noon that day I was slipping through narrow streets, avoiding the moldy shops of the main street, seeking out the men and women who make life interesting. The coolness of the morning was gone, crowded out by steaming noon. The casual, gift-like manners of those two aquatic traders was now a thing not even to expect, for I was in the midst of civilized trade. Unexpectedly, I came upon the public market.

What a different world! The hand of the law was in evidence. Here, despite the general confused appearance, the concrete drains and stone tables gave an a.s.surance of at least periodical cleansing. Here the laws of barter held men tied to fair dealing, as the roosters were tied to those lighters. Venders make a mad dash for freedom through cheating, but were jerked back to honesty by the bargain-hunter who watches the scales and knows the laws. Values are measured by the size of the pupil or the intensity of the gaze; if eagerness is manifest, up goes the price.

A Buddhist, looking upon a market like this, if he were unaccustomed to pagan ways, would shrink from the sight as we would at a cannibal feast.

Here the world was calmly cruel. All the things we eat lay in their naked ghastliness,--the thin streams of blood, the bulging eyes of little creatures, the stiff inflexibility of limbs once quick and supple. And the men and women were unconsciously affected by the scene.

For nothing stimulates the snarling quarrelsomeness of human beings more than the sight of food or the fear of imposition. The appeals of the sellers were mingled with the bargainings and bickerings of the buyers, a compet.i.tion among both to best one another. Two women stood over a fish-bin engaged in a matching of wits that might well have been envied by filibustering senators. The debate was over a tray of tiny fish.

A white woman, firmly knit in body and in character, made her way through the many aisles, purchasing with a precision as clearly civilized as it was silent. A Spanish woman, dark and das.h.i.+ng, swung through the same aisles like a little whirlwind. There was brilliance in her eyes, and brilliancy in the gems on her fingers and in her ears. She was exceedingly well dressed, buxom, and attractive, but every purchase was made with a gust of austerity and command quite uncalled for. She bullied the fisherwoman, she bullied her hackman, she bullied the servant who had come to carry her purchases for her; and then she sat down at one of the little restaurant tables and ate the strange concoctions with a dexterity obviously native to her. She was a half-caste, but the Spanish vein was strong in her blood, and Spanish pa.s.sion actuated her. She got into her ancient-looking hackney-coach with flash and gusto; but not, however, before she had gained her point in the matter of an extra piece of fat upon which she was insisting. She was the little pig who had roast beef because she knew how to market economically.

4

But the little pig that has none, and the one who cries, _wee! wee!

wee!_ all the way home, in the Far East, is like the Greek about to be ostracized by the community in the agora. Indeed, he has been ostracized in j.a.pan for hundreds of years, and even modernization and imperial edict have changed his status but little. He is known as the _eta_. To him has been allotted the task of attending to dead animals, whether edible or not, and though his touch profanes the lowest cla.s.ses of j.a.pan, his labor keeps the country clean after a fas.h.i.+on. Much more. Not only do these outcasts remove dead carca.s.ses from a careless Oriental world, but in one place at least they have been given the sweetest of all professions,--that of selling flowers with which to decorate the _tokonoma_, the most honorable place in the j.a.panese home. And all through the day, if one is not too much engrossed in the marts of the foreign settlement, one will hear the voice of these flower-girls calling plaintively, "_Hana! hana-i! hana-iro!_" Flowers are the things that stand between her and the degradation of her cla.s.s, because for years the shrine of a loyal servant of the neglected emperor who was struggling against a greater and more powerful group of disloyal j.a.panese had been kept fresh with flowers by these _eta_, or outcasts, who did not know whose grave they cherished.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIJIAN VILLAGE One is content with its peaceful aspects]

[Ill.u.s.tration: LITTLE FISH WENT TO THIS MARKET Before j.a.pan woke up Harper Brothers]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A FIJIAN BAZAR IS A RED LETTER DAY]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOOD LUCK MUST ATTEND THESE TRADERS AT THE DOORS OF THE CATHEDRALS IN MANILA]

Otherwise the market in j.a.pan is in the hands of j.a.panese now in good social standing, men who before the opening of the country numbered among those not much above the outcasts. To be in trade was worse in j.a.pan than in England, and when one watches the behavior of men at markets, one is not surprised. One who takes the average trader at his word in j.a.pan--not the big concerns, to be sure--deserves to cry, _wee!

wee! wee!_ all the way home.

While all over the world woman goes to market, in j.a.pan the market goes to her. She has had to have most of her daily supplies brought to her door by the cobbler, the bean-curd-maker, or the fisherman. In consequence, except when she has servants, she has been deprived of the educational advantages of market gossip, and has been kept in her sphere more easily. She will be the last to come forward to freedom.

Not so the men. All the social advantages of barter and exchange are theirs. They communicate their experiences to one another at four o'clock in the morning over the fish-tub. They test their wits and their eyes with the auctioneer who starts them running in compet.i.tion with one another over an attractive specimen from the sea. Or the more imaginative resist confusion in the pit of the stock-market, where they keep in touch with their entire country and with the world. They are becoming, in consequence, more efficient and more practised in world-wide ethics of business.

Yet within the last few years public markets have sprung into vogue in j.a.pan, and I look toward a revolution in the relations of the s.e.xes, for no woman who goes to market remains long an obedient and submissive little soul. This is obvious to any one who wanders into the market of Shanghai. There one can see the status of the various women who replenish their household supplies and the most humble, it seemed to me, was the woman of j.a.pan. She moved about like _Priscilla_ suddenly brought back to life and sent to compete with the modern American woman.

5

In ancient Greece, of course, no woman of refinement went marketing herself. She sent her slaves. But in modern New Zealand not only are there no slaves, but there is no one to do any personal service of that nature. In the old days, in Europe, the market was the general rendezvous where life played its pranks at all levels. The religious festivals also afforded dramatic pageantry, and sometimes the two interplayed with each other. But in our modern times, when the public market is largely supplanted by the great department store, s.h.i.+elded, protected, organized into a minimum of human interest and a maximum of efficiency, the charm of the market is no more. So, too, our festivals have surrendered much of their artistry. This was somewhat revived during the war. New Zealand, because of the still evident atmosphere of pioneer life, the lack of interlocking systems of communication, and its distance from the most advanced places in the world, still affords some of that simple charm of a life one reads about. The streets of the main cities nightly resemble something one has dimly heard of and never hoped to see. The people have laid aside all thought of business or barter. There is in their att.i.tude something of that suppressed amazement that revealed the thoughts of the South-Sea islanders when asked to thrill to an alien band conducted by the Catholic priest. Both the whites and the primitives seemed to recall that once they knew how to celebrate.

Queens Street of Auckland was decorated one day, and booths were erected on which simple products were offered for sale. A parade of two fire-department machines, a number of men in Chinese costumes, others painted and foolscapped, boys with enormous masks, and girls in dominoes, marched through the city, and in their wake was a rush of just plain pedestrians. Other than that nothing happened. From five to ten thousand people jammed the street. The crowd was essentially like every other crowd in the world,--the same in gregariousness, the same in hunting after pleasure that abideth but a moment.

One evening the events were more thrilling. Sulky races, men driven by girls, and May-pole dances round the street lamps that stand between the tram-lines gave a suggestion of antiquity to the city. The only difference between these performances and those in the upper regions of the tropics was in the absence of palms and green arbors. In place of wide s.p.a.ces were narrow streets, lined with brick buildings and studded with iron poles whose only blossoms were glowing electric lights, and whose only branches were pairs of stiff arms holding the trolley wires.

So, too, the market side of this carnival was a sharp contrast to the fairs and markets in more modernized communities. Britons are essentially traders, but they trade by rule. Even when they play trading, as at this carnival, they are more constrained. What little was done to allay the sober spirit was revived by the element of barter. The gambling spirit, checked in normal times, was stimulated. Raffles, wheels, and rings were employed to extract coins from the under-zealous.

The only abandon was in the confetti, which was scattered generously about in the throngs.

In the booths conservation was the key-note. Everything, from motor-cars to potatoes, was auctioned and raffled. A man from Coney Island, accustomed to that hysterical release of emotion, would have felt that he was attending not a carnival, but an open market in which only the basic necessities of life were in demand.

Not so in Napier, New Zealand, or in Sydney, Australia. There they seem as different from their British ancestry as Hottentots are from Polynesians. There men and women know how to make merry in ways almost unforgettable, and to ripple the smooth surface of sedate civilization with lovely flirtations that would weaken the most stoic of mortals and paragons of propriety.

Otherwise, in all New Zealand, life goes along in its leisurely, businesslike way. Men attend horse-sales with great zest; salesmen rush across the country in their little motor-cars, bringing the wares of the world's elaborate markets to the doors of stations or ranches; auctioneers dash hither and thither to confuse, if they can, farmers into the exchange of sheep or cattle.

While tramping along the road to Wellington, I was overtaken by a touring-car.

"Want a ride?" asked the driver. And when I mounted, he asked: "Seeing our little country, are you? Nothing like it in the world. Ever been to a sheep auction? Want to come along?" And the next thing I knew we were rus.h.i.+ng over the dirt road toward Onga Onga. We drew up at the accommodation house with a sudden jolt.

The guest-room was filled with farmers. Sallow, hollow-cheeked, with voices that seemed to plow through their brains for thoughts, their conversation was labored. Dinner was devoured in semi-silence.

But when they got to the stockyards, they became more alert. The auctioneer mounted the fence like an orator. He began cackling like a bewitched hen. The farmers moved about, feeling sheep offered for sale, the more expert glancing at them with pride in judgment. One sleek farmer, whose elaborate motor-car stood by the roadside, scrutinized the yards as one who might buy the entire lot as a whim.

The psychology of the auction-sale crowd is distinct from that of the bargain-hunter. The latter believes himself to be the winner because of the confessed misjudgment of the trader. But the auction-buyer moves about quietly, makes his own judgments of values, exchanges opinions only with his a.s.sociates, and waits his chances. At a bargain-counter every one rushes for the thing he wants; here the very thing most wanted is ignored, as though to lead other hunters off the scent. As soon as the sale was over, men fell apart, like boiling rice in a pot when suddenly douched with cold water.

So far has civilized man made certain the processes by which he secures the satisfaction of his wants that one begins to wonder why men like to buy and sell at all. They are like the artisans and the mechanists who have become specialized and divorced from contact with the living, finished product. So much so is this true that much of New Zealand's real marketing is done in London. Once the manager of a station wired his London princ.i.p.als:

SNOWING DURING LAMBING

The princ.i.p.als, according to New Zealand's version, replied:

STOP LAMBING AT ONCE

6

Wander where one may this wide world over, one finds that the places to which tourists are drawn mostly are the markets. There one finds the richest reward for curiosity. The traveler in foreign lands, especially if he is alone and somewhat homesick, knows no pleasanter thrill than the sight upon the pier, amid cargoes from every known quarter of the globe, of a box of canned goods stamped in black-stenciled letters with the seven signs of bliss, "NEW YORK."

When lost in that good old town, it had never occurred to him that s.h.i.+ps trail the seven seas carrying canned soups and fruits and vegetables to black-faced, sprawling-toed savages. But out there in the wide s.p.a.ces of the globe he realizes how strikingly alike are the alimentary failings of mankind. Lost in reminiscences, when on Broadway again, he thinks himself forever cut off from romance, until he happens to turn into a side street, a public market, or even a small chain-store grocery. There he finds that in a way romance is not dead. The sedate housewife permits herself on occasion to flirt with the butcher or the baker; incidents the on-looker has not thought possible prevail here as well as in the markets of the Orient. And packages with the imprint of j.a.pan, of China, coffee from South America, awaken in him memories irresistible. He goes away wis.h.i.+ng he were again off there where New York seems like romance to him. The day will never come when silks and spices and marts will not conjure up in the minds of the most prosaic the very essence of romance.

BOOK THREE

DISCUSSION OF THE POLITICAL PROBLEMS INVOLVING AUSTRALASIA, ASIA AND AMERICA