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PREFACE xv
his life was gleaned from here and there and then put together.
Another characteristic was his tolerance of people. Whether
he felt tolerant towards people of different traditions and opinions
from himself I don't know, but if he did not do so he kept it to
himself as far as I knew, for personally I never heard him say
anything cruel of or to anyone. He also seemed to me utterly
lacking in conceit, as though it did not matter to him at all that
he had an inï¬Ånitely better intellect than anyone else in the
room. Another remarkable thing about him was the wideness
of his interests. I remember so well one evening at An-nstrong's
when we got him talking of Russian literature—he seemed to
have read a very great deal and he compared it with French and
English literature and explained in what ways he thought it
lost by being translated. He always kept up his interest in
Russia, and one used to see Russian newspaper cuttings in his
room. But he never seemed to realize that others would care
to know about his time in Russia. At least I never heard him
speak of it. About his ethnology you, of course, know more
than I do. I can only say that his power of hard work and his
grasp of salient facts and their relation to each other always
astounded me. It seemed ridiculous that he should be younger
than I was, for intellectually and emotionally he was in many
ways so amazingly mature. He was one of the most courteous
people I ever knew." Deacon was a frequent and welcome
visitor to our Sunday afternoon gatherings and my wife and
Ibecame very fond of him.
' -It‘ was during his last term that Bernard wrote a suggestive
paper (" The Kakihan Society of Ceram and New Guinea Initia-
tion Cults,â€ù Fulk—Ltmi, vol. xxxvi, I925, pp. 332-61) in which
heicorrelated the ghost societies with initiation cults of the
Nielanesiamspeaking peoples in the Mandated Territory of New
Guinea on the one hand and with the Kakihan of Ceram, in
Indonesia, on the other ; the latter is essentially a ghost society
and most completely represents the original cult. On 4th
February, I927, he wrote from Malekula, “ I still feel that what
I Wrote was sound: on the whole my work here accords with
what I said in the article. , . . My great point is that the
Kakihan cult reappears in areas hundreds, or thousands, of miles
apart, and that it is therefore of great importance for tracing