Judgment of a Solomon

A Trader's Tale

By “Tukapa Koko”

1%/gY native neighbours were having words. Native words, of a variety; yet of weirdly European rococo de sign, strangely familiar, smacking of Billingsgate or verbose Broadway, strings of mordant syntax entangling the ear: “Paka! paka!'’

“Tonopipi!”

“Puaka! puaka!”

“E koe atu!”

Which is, being interpreted: “ ! !” (a word this respectable journal could not print, taken from English, and easily adapted to a native tongue defi cient in woundy verbiage). “Offspring of a female canine!” (The which goeth by sound alone.) And in reply; “Pig! pig!” (A dreadful epithet in Polynesia). “And the same to you!” (With excrescences and decorations, presumably.) I went out into the next-door com pound to see what it was all about, the males of the village being away fishing and I, village trader, the sole, trousered representative of male law and order; qualified to bestow clouts or good advice, such as might be required.

Mrs. Kina and Mrs. Manu, her sister, were the protagonists. It was a job for the Jewish potentate of ancient fame, but no sword might decide this case, for in the arms of Mrs. Kina wailed a live babe, the bone of contention, that be longed to neither lady.

I knew the child. It was half white, one of those poor little creatures that are the sequel pf some tourist’s visit to Poly nesia—a native girl’s pride and cross combined—and the child of a niece of both women.

The erring niece was gone. Bearing the child had cost her her life before it had time to take her happiness. No “feeding parent”, as the brown folk call an adopted one, had been named. Up till now, Mrs.

Manu had had charge of the babe; but Mrs. Kina coveted the little yellow morsel, attracted by its blonde hair and blue eyes, and she chose this male-less day to make her claim and forcibly take that possession that is nine points of the law.

Mrs. Manu objected. She voiced her ob jections, as detailed, with one hand round the babe’s little foot, and the other twisted in the hair of Mrs. Kina, who, fearing hurt to the little casus belli , was unable to make active resistance.

I, benevolently neutral, intervened so far as was consistent with policy.

Mrs. Manu relaxed her grip on Mrs.

Kina s locks, and the combatants parted —but Mrs. Kina kept strictly to the legal proposition heretofore detailed.

We conferred. I heard evidence for both prosecution and defence, based prin cipally on the grounds, advanced by both, of being able to provide the better domi cile for the coveted Nordic babe.

They talked of princely edifices—on one side, a gallant hut thatched with pan danus, floored with straw, un-expector ated, luxurious. On the other, a goodly “stone house”, erected from native cement by adherents of an early mis sionary half a century ago.

Conflicting claims. But what is hidden from a village trader, who knows all, from godly deacon with external shirt tails (the diaconal privilege in Mangaia), to toughest village buck? And, so, I took thought.

Of the miserable, reed-walled, gaping thatched, dog-hole that was the reality of Mrs. Kina’s pleasure-dome built in air.

Of the tumbledown, gap-walled, dingy grey cement dungeon, damp, dark and dirty, streaked, the wood floor sinking into the basement, that was the Marble Hall where Mrs. Manu lived and had her being, sprinkled on wet days by leaks in the rusty iron roof that dripped on the just and unjust alike.

I cogitated.

The ladies, anxious for an immediate decision in the favour of both, waited restlessly, restoring their energies for an other set-to.

I cogitated some more. We stood, statue like, a dramatic group that would have inspired Praxiteles.

And then I saw swart Manu, dusky Kina, their fishing successfully concluded coming up the village street.

“Let your husbands settle it!” was my verdict.