The Four Brothers
THE kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little Makin; some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi — independent chieftains do him qualified1 homage2. The importance of the office is measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be absolute; and both extremes have been exemplified within the memory of residents.
On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa’s father, Nakaeia, the eldest3 son, succeeded. He was a fellow of huge physical strength, masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift4 and some intelligence of men and business. Alone in his islands, it was he who dealt and profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and his subjects toiled5 for his behoof in servitude. When they wrought6 long and well their taskmaster declared a holiday, and supplied and shared a general debauch7. The scale of his providing was at times magnificent; six hundred dollars’ worth of gin and brandy was set forth8 at once; the narrow land resounded9 with the noise of revelry: and it was a common thing to see the subjects (staggering themselves) parade their drunken sovereign on the fore-hatch of a wrecked12 vessel13, king and commons howling and singing as they went. At a word from Nakaeia’s mouth the revel10 ended; Makin became once more an isle14 of slaves and of teetotalers; and on the morrow all the population must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling15 under his bloodshot eye.
The fear of Nakaeia filled the land. No regularity16 of justice was affected17; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault and midnight murder were the forms of process. The king himself would play the executioner: and his blows were dealt by stealth, and with the help and countenance18 of none but his own wives. These were his oarswomen; one that caught a crab19, he slew20 incontinently with the tiller; thus disciplined, they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance21, which he would then execute alone and return well-pleased with his connubial22 crew. The inmates23 of the harem held a station hard for us to conceive. Beasts of draught24, and driven by the fear of death, they were yet implicitly25 trusted with their sovereign’s life; they were still wives and queens, and it was supposed that no man should behold26 their faces. They killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of Nakaeia the palace was beset27 with some tall coco-palms which commanded the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove28 was in a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered. Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal. But during the remainder of that reign11 he must lurk29 and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted him without remission, although still in vain; and the palms, accessories to the fact, were ruthlessly cut down. Such was the ideal of wifely purity in an isle where nubile30 virgins31 went naked as in paradise. And yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia’s well-guarded harem. He was at that time the owner of a schooner32, which he used for a pleasure — house, lodging33 on board as she lay anchored; and thither34 one day he summoned a new wife. She was one that had been sealed to him; that is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets. She would be arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented35, garlanded, decked with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her friends supposed; for death, as she well knew. ‘Tell me the man’s name, and I will spare you,’ said Nakaeia. But the girl was staunch; she held her peace, saved her lover and the queens strangled her between the mats.
Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated. Deeds that smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice; his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall with respect the firmness of his government; and even the whites, whom he long opposed and kept at arm’s-length, give him the name (in the canonical36 South Sea phrase) of ‘a perfect gentleman when sober.’
When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse37 on royal policy, and warned him he was too weak to reign. The warning was taken to heart, and for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia’s. Nanteitei dispensed38 with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag. To conceal39 his weakness he affected a rude silence; you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof40, appeal, and menace alike remained unanswered.
The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief means of buttressing41 the throne. Nakaeia kept his harem busy for himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others. In his days, for instance, Messrs. Wightman built a pier42 with a verandah at the north end of the town. The masonry43 was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and waded44 there like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished, lest by chance he should look down and see them.
It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang. For some time already Hawaiian missionaries45 had been seated at Butaritari — Maka and Kanoa, two brave childlike men. Nakaeia would none of their doctrine46; he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some affection for their persons. In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching47 on their backs to knife them, and menacing the missionary48 if he interfered49; yet he not only spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled) with some expressions of respect. Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more completely under the spell. Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence on the king which soon grew paramount50. Nanteitei, with the royal house, was publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal missionaries disavow, the harem was at once reduced. It was a compendious51 act. The throne was thus impoverished52, its influence shaken, the queen’s relatives mortified53, and sixteen chief women (some of great possessions) cast in a body on the market. I have been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was successively married to two of these IMPROMPTU54 widows, and successively divorced by both for misconduct. That two great and rich ladies (for both of these were rich) should have married ‘a man from another island’ marks the dissolution of society. The laws besides were wholly remodelled55, not always for the better. I love Maka as a man; as a legislator he has two defects: weak in the punishment of crime, stern to repress innocent pleasures.
War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet Nanteitei died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession of the throne, and it was in the reign of the third brother, Nabakatokia, a man brave in body and feeble of character, that the storm burst. The rule of the high chiefs and notables seems to have always underlain56 and perhaps alternated with monarchy57. The Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in the Speak House and debate: and the king’s chief superiority is a form of closure — ‘The Speaking is over.’ After the long monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous of the influence of Maka. Calumny58, or rather caricature, was called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed affront59, the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings60. In the space of one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled61 in the dust. The king sat in the maniap’ before the palace gate expecting his recruits; Maka by his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in the door of a house at the north entry of the town, a chief had taken post and diverted the succours as they came. They came singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung62 about his neck. ‘Where are you going?’ asked the chief. ‘The king called us,’ they would reply. ‘Here is your place. Sit down,’ returned the chief. With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was summoned and surrendered. About this period, in almost every part of the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to ambition. Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia; and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in debt.
He died some months before my arrival on the islands, and no one regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor. This was by repute the hero of the family. Alone of the four brothers, he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia. Nontemat’, MR. CORPSE63, was his appalling64 nickname, and he had earned it well. Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia REDUX. He came, summoned from the tributary65 rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators66; and the reader has seen the remains67 of him in his summer parlour under the name of Tebureimoa.
The change in the man’s character was much commented on in the island, and variously explained by opium68 and Christianity. To my eyes, there seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency69. Mr. Corpse was afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men. Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of government. He played his part of bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible, perhaps a penitent70, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds71, and his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits among his guards in dreadful expectation. The same cowardice72 that put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the sceptre of a king.
A tale that I was told, a trifling73 incident that fell in my observation, depicts74 him in his two capacities. A chief in Little Makin asked, in an hour of lightness, ‘Who is Kaeia?’ A bird carried the saying; and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a committee of three. Mr. Corpse was chairman; the second commissioner75 died before my arrival; the third was yet alive and green, and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him the name of Abou ben Adhem. Mr. Corpse was troubled with a scruple76; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in such a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse than awkward. ‘I will strike the blow,’ said the venerable Abou; and Mr. Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise. The quarry77 was decoyed into the bush; he was set to carrying a log; and while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly78 at a blow. Justice being thus done, the commission, in a childish horror, turned to flee. But their victim recalled them to his side. ‘You need not run away now,’ he said. ‘You have done this thing to me. Stay.’ He was some twenty minutes dying, and his murderers sat with him the while: a scene for Shakespeare. All the stages of a violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing79 features, the changed hue80, are thus present in the memory of Mr. Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery. I was never more sure of anything than the tragic81 quality of the king’s thoughts; and yet I had but the one sight of him at unawares. I had once an errand for his ear. It was once more the hour of the siesta82; but there were loiterers abroad, and these directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where Tebureimoa lay unguarded. We entered without ceremony, being in some haste. He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his Gilbert Island Bible with compunction. On our sudden entrance the unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled on the floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having recognised his visitors, sank again upon the mats. So Eglon looked on Ehud.
The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just; Nakaeia, the author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing83 on the craft of kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity. Not the nature, but the congruity84 of men’s deeds and circumstances damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed. At home, in a quiet bystreet of a village, the man had been a worthy85 carpenter, and, even bedevilled as he is, he shows some private virtues86. He has no lands, only the use of such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot enrich himself in the old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of his future, and he knows and uses it. Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a shilling for a child: allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total of three hundred pounds a year. He had been some nine months on the throne: had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure unknown, and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent his brother’s photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced that brother’s legacy87 of debt and had still sovereigns in his pocket. An affectionate brother, a good economist88; he was besides a handy carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace. It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues; that Tebureimoa should have a diversion filled me with surprise.
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qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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eldest
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| adj.最年长的，最年老的 | |
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thrift
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| adj.节约，节俭；n.节俭，节约 | |
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toiled
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| 长时间或辛苦地工作( toil的过去式和过去分词 )； 艰难缓慢地移动，跋涉 | |
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wrought
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| v.引起；以…原料制作；运转；adj.制造的 | |
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debauch
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| v.使堕落，放纵 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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resounded
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| v.（指声音等）回荡于某处( resound的过去式和过去分词 )；产生回响；（指某处）回荡着声音 | |
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revel
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| vi.狂欢作乐，陶醉；n.作乐，狂欢 | |
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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wrecked
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| adj.失事的，遇难的 | |
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vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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isle
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| n.小岛，岛 | |
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toiling
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| 长时间或辛苦地工作( toil的现在分词 )； 艰难缓慢地移动，跋涉 | |
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regularity
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| n.规律性，规则性；匀称，整齐 | |
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affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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crab
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| n.螃蟹，偏航，脾气乖戾的人，酸苹果；vi.捕蟹，偏航，发牢骚；vt.使偏航，发脾气 | |
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slew
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| v.（使）旋转；n.大量，许多 | |
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vengeance
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| n.报复，报仇，复仇 | |
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connubial
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| adj.婚姻的，夫妇的 | |
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inmates
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| n.囚犯( inmate的名词复数 ) | |
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draught
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| n.拉，牵引，拖；一网（饮，吸，阵)；顿服药量，通风；v.起草，设计 | |
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implicitly
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| adv. 含蓄地, 暗中地, 毫不保留地 | |
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behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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beset
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| v.镶嵌；困扰，包围 | |
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grove
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| n.林子，小树林，园林 | |
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lurk
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| n.潜伏，潜行；v.潜藏，潜伏，埋伏 | |
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nubile
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| adj.结婚期的 | |
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virgins
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| 处女，童男( virgin的名词复数 )； 童贞玛利亚（耶稣之母） | |
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schooner
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| n.纵帆船 | |
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lodging
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| n.寄宿，住所；(大学生的)校外宿舍 | |
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thither
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| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
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scented
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| adj.有香味的；洒香水的；有气味的v.嗅到(scent的过去分词) | |
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canonical
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| n.权威的；典型的 | |
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discourse
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| n.论文，演说；谈话；话语；vi.讲述，著述 | |
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dispensed
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| v.分配( dispense的过去式和过去分词 )；施与；配（药） | |
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conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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reproof
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| n.斥责，责备 | |
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buttressing
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| v.用扶壁支撑，加固( buttress的现在分词 ) | |
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pier
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| n.码头；桥墩，桥柱；[建]窗间壁，支柱 | |
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masonry
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| n.砖土建筑；砖石 | |
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waded
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| （从水、泥等）蹚，走过，跋( wade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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missionaries
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| n.传教士( missionary的名词复数 ) | |
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doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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missionary
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| adj.教会的，传教(士)的；n.传教士 | |
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interfered
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| v.干预( interfere的过去式和过去分词 )；调停；妨碍；干涉 | |
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paramount
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| a.最重要的，最高权力的 | |
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compendious
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| adj.简要的，精简的 | |
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impoverished
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| adj.穷困的，无力的，用尽了的v.使（某人）贫穷( impoverish的过去式和过去分词 )；使（某物）贫瘠或恶化 | |
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mortified
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| v.使受辱( mortify的过去式和过去分词 )；伤害（人的感情）；克制；抑制（肉体、情感等） | |
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impromptu
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| adj.即席的，即兴的；adv.即兴的(地)，无准备的(地) | |
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remodelled
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| v.改变…的结构[形状]( remodel的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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underlain
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| v.位于或存在于（某物）之下( underlie的过去分词 )；构成…的基础（或起因），引起 | |
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monarchy
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| n.君主，最高统治者；君主政体，君主国 | |
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calumny
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| n.诽谤，污蔑，中伤 | |
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affront
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| n./v.侮辱，触怒 | |
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gatherings
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| 聚集( gathering的名词复数 )； 收集； 采集； 搜集 | |
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humbled
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| adj. 卑下的，谦逊的，粗陋的 vt. 使 ... 卑下，贬低 | |
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slung
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| 抛( sling的过去式和过去分词 )； 吊挂； 遣送； 押往 | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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tributary
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| n.支流；纳贡国；adj.附庸的；辅助的；支流的 | |
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orators
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| n.演说者，演讲家( orator的名词复数 ) | |
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remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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opium
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| n.鸦片；adj.鸦片的 | |
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consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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penitent
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| adj.后悔的；n.后悔者；忏悔者 | |
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71
hatreds
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| n.仇恨，憎恶( hatred的名词复数 )；厌恶的事 | |
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72
cowardice
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| n.胆小，怯懦 | |
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73
trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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74
depicts
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| 描绘，描画( depict的第三人称单数 )； 描述 | |
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75
commissioner
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| n.（政府厅、局、处等部门）专员，长官，委员 | |
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76
scruple
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| n./v.顾忌，迟疑 | |
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77
quarry
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| n.采石场；v.采石；费力地找 | |
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78
belly
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| n.肚子，腹部；(像肚子一样)鼓起的部分，膛 | |
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79
decomposing
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| 腐烂( decompose的现在分词 )； （使）分解； 分解（某物质、光线等） | |
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80
hue
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| n.色度；色调；样子 | |
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81
tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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82
siesta
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| n.午睡 | |
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83
discoursing
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| 演说（discourse的现在分词形式） | |
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84
congruity
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| n.全等，一致 | |
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85
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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86
virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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87
legacy
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| n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西 | |
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economist
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| n.经济学家，经济专家，节俭的人 | |
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