Magic Dances

I

AFTER many years’ residence among savage people I have come to believe that with them the correlation between imitative magic and its desired result assumes a far more conscious form than among civilized people. When a primitive man dances to arouse the love instinct in his chosen woman, he is vividly aware of the purpose of his dance. Likewise, when the Danger Islanders — the last of the Polynesians who have not been utterly ‘denativized’ by the missionaries — chant their long romantic songs, they believe their description of a blissful state for the dead is actually evoking such a state. The Danger Island woman chants over the dead body of her husband: —

And even at the present day natives declare that without these chants — and dances too, for the chants are accompanied by a rhythmic movement of the body and arms — the dead man’s soul would meet with but a poor reception in the hereafter. And moreover, though the chants are no more than an imaginative prospect of the future state, the natives believe so implicitly in them that even the missionaries have failed to cast them upon the rubbish heap to which bigotry has long since consigned Polynesia’s vestiges of a beautiful civilization.

I have lived on Danger Island for many years, the only white inhabitant, isolated from the outside world until it has become no more than a faint memory. I have almost forgotten that I am a foreigner; and yet I have not become as a native, but have merged into an even more isolated state; for I feel myself an exotic thing, quite alone in a strange land — I belong neither to the world beyond nor to this tiny island world. I am alone, except for my books, and even they belong to another sphere, for they are mostly old, musty ones, written by men long dead, — Lamb, Boswell, Mungo Park, Borrow, and the like, — and they have created a fantastic world, ever changing as I slip a volume back on its shelf and choose another. Twice a year a schooner comes, bringing supplies for my trading station. Then the captain will glance at me in a quizzical manner, as though about to ask, ‘How in the dickens can you stand it alone on this miserable little island?’ But he never asks that question, and I do not bother to tell him that I am dancing a magic dance as the natives do, only that in my dance I sit very still on a quiet night to lose myself in wandering thoughts on my version of Elysium — childlike, believing that the exemplary Paradise I evoke will not dissolve with other dreambuilt castles.

II

One clear moonless night I left my verandah to walk along the lagoon beach. Passing beyond the village, I presently came to a deep bay some quarter of a mile across. The water lay cool and beguiling before me, of a light baby-blue where it shelved over the coral sand, to deepen gradually to a dark sheet sprinkled with the dancing reflections of the stars — or the ‘skyeyes of the night,’ as my neighbors call them. Hardly aware of the action, I tucked my pareu between my legs, waded into the bay, and swam leisurely toward the opposite bank. I could see coconut-shell fires flaring in the village behind, and as I moved through the water a phosphorescence rose like sunset clouds in my wake. When halfway across I heard from the bank ahead a measured beat, which I recognized as the clapping of hands. Guessing what it might mean, I swam faster, and, reaching the beach, slipped through the groves, following the sound of the clapping.

As I neared the outer reef I could hear the intermittent rumble of seas and the wind murmuring its interminable song in the fronds. Through a gap in the swaying palms I caught a glimpse of the Southern Cross, tilted to westward as though the body of the Saviour were weighing it down. The constellation of Argo rose above, a wreckage of masts and spars, looking as if it had been flung into that calm empyrean haven from the turmoil of some Euxine gale.

Soon I came upon four people in a little glade; they were in the midst of a magical ceremony. One was an old woman who tended a fire; two other grandams sat facing each other, clapping their hands, while in the space between them was a brown baby, of perhaps five years, dancing. There was no laughter, nor even a smile to break the intense seriousness of that ritual, for the child was imitating the exotic dances of the women, so that some day she would grow into womanhood and become a desirable thing — she was foreseeing a felicitous future, thereby to assure such a future.

The old women leaned forward, fixing fascinated eyes on her as they muttered a song so old that it is doubtful if even they understood more than the general sense of it. The little girl danced tirelessly. Her tiny hands would fly to her hips as she wriggled through a movement voluptuous for an older woman, but only pretty for her. Then her hands would join daintily above her head, and, gazing at some imagined lover in the overhanging darkness, she would repeat, step for step, the movements performed by the older people on the great fête days.

I did not eavesdrop long, for it came strongly to me that here was something far more sacred than the church lore which is so assiduously crammed down my neighbors’ throats; I slipped away, with reverence and awe upon me. Since that night I have often wondered if the child knew the meaning of her dance — knew that it was as truly imitative magic as the dance of the warriors who celebrate a victory before the battle is fought. When musing thus, I have remembered my own childhood, when everything was acted in a land of imagination long before it was experienced in reality. I have remembered how girls play with dolls, and how boys play at soldiers, and how when left to themselves they are quite as serious as the little island girl who was playing at love. Only in the latter case the brown girl, in spite of her years, must have been aware of being in the midst of a magical rite which would gain her a fine husband when she grew older. She had been told that by playing at love she would eventually obtain love.

III

I saw a far more spectacular dance a few months ago, when one moonlight night my store boy, Benny, induced me to leave the comfortable atmosphere of my house and books.

Benny led me to a moonlit fairy glade, where we lay on a knoll under the pandanus trees. Before us was the glistening coral sand leading down to the sea, where land crabs scuttled at the water’s edge and hermit crabs peeped from their shells. The odor of roasting fish rode on the wind that crooned a drunken lullaby in the coconut trees. The sea hiccoughed on the reef. The woods were alive with unfamiliar noises. Inland hovered the dim silhouettes of thatched houses, where old folks, afraid of the spirits, crouched around tiny fires.

Across the glade, limned against the moon-paled sky, was a naked brownskinned boy, perched on the end of a dead pandanus limb high up off the ground. He was as silent as the Sphinx. A baby moon shone over his shoulder, illuminating his profile. Once he stood erect, yawned, stretched himself, looked about, and then resumed his squatting position. He was like a young cock roosting before the moon.

Under the trees, by the beach, was a grass hut with the land side open. Before it flared a fire of coconut shells, its white flame casting shadows on two ancient men who squatted near by and roasted fish.

Suddenly the almost palpable silence of the groves was shattered by the shrill cry of a boy who came leaping through the glade, waving a flambeau as he yelled that the old women were coming — coming to dance in the moonlight!

Benny edged close to me. Touching my arm, he warned me to lie low among the shadows, and when I had done so the wind trembled with the boom of shark-skin drums, and the old women came dancing into the moonlight.

They formed a double line down the glade, dancing to a rhythm beaten out by old men. Some were lean and some were fat; two of the youngest held babies in their arms — late-born babies of gray-haired mothers. Bones rattled and heads bobbed as they danced a witches’ rigadoon — grinning, grownold sirens with toothless gums and limp-skinned faces; fat old grandams unsteady on their feet; and, to lead them, a dear old lady bedecked with a flower behind her withered ear and rags of lace hanging from a mildewed dress. She shrieked the orders of the dance in a ducking-stool tone as she wriggled in sensuous movements, barren of their significance. Children played in and out of the line, screaming an accompaniment to the old dames’ cackle, and sometimes imitating the dance. The boy gazed down owlishly from his perch before the moon. One of the old men let his fish burn on the coals as he watched the dancers, muttering that he could remember the day when they were hard-breasted young virgins. He turned to grin at the other old man, and then cursed as he picked his scorched fish from the fire.

‘My grandmother dances well,’ said Benny, pointing to an old lady at the end of the line, I kept my answer to myself, for the truth was that she seemed a trifle dense. She did not follow the movements of the dance. When other bony arms shot out, hers remained by her sides, or rocked at her breast in a cradling motion; and when other fleshless hips gyrated, she did a tottering pas seul of her own. She gazed starward, smiling weirdly, unconscious that she was alone in her dance. Her dress hung in rags to her feet, and there was a wilted flower stuck jauntily in hair damp with fish oil.

It happened that one hoary old crone saw me where I lay among the shadows. She came hopping to me with the self-confidence of the beautiful — for perhaps in the magic of the dance even she thought herself young again. Before I was aware of it she had pressed a kiss on my cheek. Her lips were cold and harsh, but in her rheumy eyes still burned a vague fire.

One by one the old women withdrew into the shadows of the groves, until only the one dense old crone danced on, unaware that she was alone. Still she gazed at the stars, and still the weird smile lingered on her lips, as she tottered through a spectral reel, rocking her body in a vaguely remembered way. And oh! I wish you could have seen her there, etched against the crisp midnight sky, with the Magellanic clouds over her head, and below them the star dust. But suddenly she stopped to look about her, and lo! she was alone in the world. The woods slept in asphodel silence; the boy had slipped from his perch, and the moon had sunk into the sea. The old men’s fire was dead, the thatched huts had crumbled into the darkness, and even the land crabs and hermit crabs were asleep. A harsh wind blew through the old woman’s bones. She trembled. The solitude frightened her. Crying plaintively, she ran into the woods to find her old companions.

That, too, was a magic dance. It was the only dance of the kind I had ever seen, though undoubtedly it was common enough in the old days. As we walked homeward I asked Benny why these women tired their old bones in the seductive movements of the love dance. Benny explained, and then I understood that it was the same form of magic the little girl had practised, only where she had been looking forward to life the old women were looking forward to death — preparing a paradise for themselves by moving their withered limbs through the dance of love, as they will again when they are