The banners of the tropics fly in wild disorder
Mystic Isles of the South Seas
By Frederick O’Brien
Ia Ora Na!
This is a simple record of my days and nights, my thoughts and dreams, in the mystic isles of the South Seas, written without authority of science or exactitude of knowledge. These are merely the vivid impressions of my life in Tahiti and Moorea, the merriest, most fascinating world of all the cosmos; of the songs I sang, the dances I danced, the men and women, white and tawny, with whom I was joyous or melancholy; the adventures at sea or on the reef, upon the sapphire lagoon, and on the silver beaches of the most beautiful of tropics.
In this volume are no discoveries unless in the heart of the human. I went to the islands below the equator with one thought—to play. All that I have set down here is the profit of that spirit.
The soul of man is afflicted by the machine he has fashioned through the ages to achieve his triumph over matter. In this light chronicle I would offer the reader an anodyne for a few hours, of transport to the other side of our sphere, where are the loveliest scenes the eyes may find upon the round of the globe, the gentlest climate of all the latitudes, the most whimsical whites, and the dearest savages I have known.
“Mystic Isles of the South Seas” precedes in experience my former book, “White Shadows in the South Seas,” and will be followed by “Atolls of the Sun,” which will be the account of a visit to, and a dwelling on, the blazing coral wreaths of the Dangerous Archipelago, where the strange is commonplace, and the marvel is the probability of the hour.
These three volumes will cover the period I spent during three journeys with the remnants of the most amazing of uncivilized races, whose discovery startled the old world, and whom another generation will cease to know.
Tirara!
Maru-tané.
Kaoha, Sausalito, California.
In this book the reader may be tempted to stumble over some foreign words. I have put them in only when necessary, to give the color and rhythm of Tahiti. The Tahitian words are very easily pronounced and they are music in the mouth of any one who sounds them properly. Every letter and syllable is pronounced plainly. The letters have the Latin value and if one will remember this in reading, the Tahitian words will flow mellifluously. For instance, “tane” is pronounced “tah-nay,” “maru” is pronounced “mah-ru.” “Tiare” is “tee-ah-ray.” The Tahitian language is dying fast, as are the Tahitians. Its beauties are worth the few efforts necessary for the reader to scan them.
Frederick O’Brien.
Contents
Departure from San Francisco—Nature man left behind—Fellow-passengers on the Noa-Noa—Tragedy of the Chinese pundit—Strange stories of the South Seas—The Tahitian Hula
The Discovery of Tahiti—Marvelous isles and people—Hailed by a wind-jammer—Middle of the voyage—Tahiti on the horizon—Ashore in Papeete
Description of Tahiti—A volcanic rock and coral reef—Beauty of the scenery—Papeete the center of the South Seas—Appearance of the Tahitians
The Tiare Hotel—Lovaina the hostess, the best-known woman in the South Seas—Her strange ménage—The Dummy—A one-sided tryst—An old-fashioned cocktail—The Argentine training ship
The Parc de Bougainville—Ivan Stroganoff—He tells me the history of Tahiti—He berates the Tahitians—Wants me to start a newspaper
The Cercle Bougainville—Officialdom in Tahiti—My first visit to the Bougainville—Skippers and merchants—A song and a drink—The flavor of the South Seas—Rumors of war
The Noa-Noa comes to port—Papeete en fête—Rare scene at the Tiare Hotel—The New Year celebrated—Excitement at the wharf—Battle of the Limes and Coal
Gossip in Papeete—Moorea, a near-by island—A two-days’ excursion there—Magnificent scenery from the sea—Island of fairy folk—Landing and preparation for the feast—The First Christian Mission—A canoe on the lagoon—Beauties of the sea-garden
The Arearea in the pavilion—Raw fish and baked feis—Llewellyn, the Master of the Revel; Kelly, the I. W. W. and his himene—The Upaupahura—Landers and Mamoe prove experts—The return to Papeete
The storm on the lagoon; making safe the schooners—A talk on missing ships—A singular coincidence—Arrival of three of the crew of the shipwrecked El Dorado—The Dutchman’s Story—Easter Island
I move to the Annexe—Description of the building—The baroness and her baby—Evoa and Poia—The corals of the lagoon—The Chinese shrine—The Tahitian sky
The princess suggests a walk to the falls of Fautaua, where Loti went with Rarahu—We start in the morning—The suburbs of Papeete—The Pool of Loti—The birds, trees and plants—A swim in a pool—Arrival at the cascade—Luncheon and a siesta—We climb the height—The princess tells of Tahitian women—The Fashoda fright
The beach-combers of Papeete—The consuls tell their troubles—A bogus lord—The American boot-blacks—The cowboy in the hospital—Ormsby, the supercargo—The death of Tahia—The Christchurch Kid—The Nature men—Ivan Stroganoff’s desire for a new gland
The market in Papeete—Coffee at Shin Bung Lung’s with a prince—Fish the chief item—Description of them—The vegetables and fruits—The fish strike—Rumors of an uprising—Kelly and the I. W. W.—The mysterious session at Fa’a—Hallelujah! I’m a Bum!—the strike is broken
A drive to Papenoo—The chief of Papenoo—A dinner and poker on the bench—Incidents of the game—Breakfast the next morning—The chief tells his story—The journey back—The leper child and her doll—The Alliance Française—Bemis and his daughter—The band concert and the fire—The prize-fight—My bowl of velvet
A journey to Mataiea—I abandon city life—Interesting sights on the route—The Grotto of Maraa—Papara and the Chief Tati—The plantation of Atimaono—My host, the Chevalier Tetuanui
My life in the house of Tetuanui—Whence came the Polynesians—A migration from Malaysia—Their legends of the past—Condition of Tahiti when the white came—The great navigator, Cook—Tetuanui tells of old Tahiti
The reef and the lagoon—Wonders of marine life—Fishing with spears and nets—Sponges and hermit crabs—Fish of many colors—Ancient canoes of Tahiti—A visit to Vaihiria and legends told there
The Arioi, minstrels of the tropics—Lovaina tells of the infanticide—Theories of depopulation—Methods of the Arioi—Destroyed by missionaries
Rupert Brooke and I discuss Tahiti—We go to a wedding feast—How the cloth was spread—What we ate and drank—A Gargantuan feeder—Songs and dances of passion—The royal feast at Tetuanui’s—I leave for Vairao—Butscher and the Lermantoffs
A heathen temple—The great Marae of Oberea—I visit it with Rupert Brooke and Chief Tetuanui—The Tahitian religion of old—The wisdom of folly
I start for Tautira—A dangerous adventure in a canoe—I go by land to Tautira—I meet Choti and the Greek god—I take up my home where Stevenson lived
My life at Tautira—The way I cook my food—Ancient Tahitian sports—Swimming and fishing—A night hunt for shrimp and eels
In the days of Captain Cook—The first Spanish missionaries—Difficulties of converting the heathens—Wars over Christianity—Ori-a-Ori, the chief, friend of Stevenson—We read the Bible together—The church and the himene
I meet a sorcerer—Power over fire—The mystery of the fiery furnace—The scene in the forest—Walking over the white-hot stones—Origin of the rite
Farewell to Tautira—My good-bye feast—Back at the Tiare—A talk with Lovaina—The Cercle Bougainville—Death of David—My visit to the cemetery—Off for the Marquesas
Chapter I
Departure from San Francisco—Nature man left behind—Fellow-passengers on the Noa-Noa—Tragedy of the Chinese pundit—Strange stories of the South Seas—The Tahitian Hula.
The warning gong had sent all but crew and passengers ashore, though our ship did not leave the dock. Her great bulk still lay along the piling, though the gangway was withdrawn. The small groups on the pier waited tensely for the last words with those departing. These passengers were inwardly bored with the prolonged farewells, and wanted to be free to observe their fellow-voyagers and the movement of the ship. They conversed in shouts with those ashore, but most of the meanings were lost in the noise of the shuffling of baggage and freight, the whistling of ferries, and the usual turmoil of the San Francisco waterfront. I was glad that none had come to see me off, for I was curious about my unknown companions upon the long traverse to the South Seas, and I had wilfully put behind me all that America and Europe held to adventure in the vasts of ocean below the equator.
But the whistle I awaited to sound our leaving was silent. Officers of the ship rushed about as if bent on relieving her of some pressing danger, and I caught fragments of orders and replies which indicated that until a search was completed she could not stir on her journey. Then I heard cries of anger and protest, and caught a glimpse of a man whose appearance provoked confusing emotions of astonishment, admiration, and laughter. He was dressed in a Roman toga of rough monk’s-cloth, and had on sandals. He was being hustled bodily over the restored gangway, and was resisting valiantly the second officer, purser, and steward, who were hardly able to move him, so powerfully was he made. One of his sandals suddenly fell into the bay. He had seized hold of the rail of the gangway, and the leather sandal dropped into the water with a slight splash. His grasp of the rail being broken, he was gradually being pushed, limping, to the dock. His one bare foot and his half-exposed and shapely body caused a gale of laughter from the docks and the wharf.
The gangway was quickly withdrawn, and our ship began to move from the shore. The ejected one stood watching us with sorrow shadowing his large eyes. He was of middle size; with the form of a David of Michelangelo, though lithe, and he wore no hat, but had a long, brown beard, which, with his brown hair, parted in the middle and falling over his shoulders, and his archaic garb, gave me a singular shock. It was as if a boyhood vision, or something seen in a painting, was made real. His eyes were the deepest blue, limpid and appealing, and I felt like shouting out that if it was a matter of money, I would aid the man in the toga.
“Christ!” yelled the frantic dock superintendent. “Get that line cast off and let her go! Are you ceemented to that hooker?”
Instantly before me came Munkácsy’s picture of the Master before Pilate, evoked by the profanity of the wharf boss, but explaining the vision of a moment ago. The Noa-Noa emitted a cry from her iron throat. The engines started, and the distance between our deck and the pier grew as our bow swung toward the Golden Gate. The strange man who had been put ashore, with his one sandal in his hand, and holding his torn toga about him, hastened to the nearest stringer of the wharf and waved good-by to us. It was as if a prophet, or even Saul of Tarsus, blessed us in our quest. He stood on a tall group of piles, and called out something indistinguishable.
The passengers hurried below, to return in coats and caps to meet the wind that blows from China, and the second officer and the surgeon came by, talking animatedly.
“Oh, yus,” said the seaman, chuckling, ”’e wuz ’auled out finally. The beggar ’ad ’id ’imself good and proper this time. ’E wuz in the linen-closet, and ’ad disguised ’imself as a bundle o’ bloomin’ barth-towels. ’E wuz a reg’lar grand Turk, ’e wuz. Blow me, if you’d ’a’ knowed ’im from a bale of ’em, ’e wuz so wrapped up in ’em. ’E almost ’ad us ’ull down this time. The blighter made a bit of a row, and said as ’ow he just could n’t ’elp stowin’ aw’y every boat for T’iti.”
“He’s a bally nut,” said the surgeon. “I say, though, he did take me back to Sunday school.”
I recalled a man who walked the streets of San Francisco carrying a small sign in his upraised hand, “Christ has come!” He looked neither to the right nor the left, but bore his curious announcement among the crowds downtown, which smiled jestingly at him, or looked frightened at the message. If many had believed him, the panic would have been illimitable. He was dressed in a brown cassock, and looked like the blue-eyed man who had been refused passage to my destination. Probably, that American in the toga and sandals, exiled from the island he loved so well, had a message for the Tahitians or others of the Polynesian tribes of the South Seas; Essenism, maybe, or something to do with virginal beards and long hair, or sandals and the simple life. I wished he were with us.
We were in the Golden Gate now, that magnificent opening in the California shores, riven in the eternal conflict of land and water, and the rending of which made the bay of San Francisco the mightiest harbor of America. Before our bows lay the immense expanse of the mysterious Pacific.
The second officer was directing sailors who were snugging down the decks.
“What did the queer fellow want to go to Tahiti for?” I asked him.
He regarded me a moment in the stolid way of seamen.
“The blighter likes to live on bananas and breadfruit and that kind of truck,” he replied. “The French won’t let ’im st’y there. ’E’s too bloomin’ nyked. ’E’s a nyture man. They chysed ’im out, and every steamer ’e tries to stow ’imself aw’y. ’E’s a bleedin’ trial to these ships.”
That was puzzling. Did not these natives of Tahiti themselves wear little clothing? Who were they to object to a white man doffing the superfluities of dress in a climate where breadfruit and bananas grow? Or the French, the governors of Tahiti? Were they, in that isle so distant from Paris, their capital, practising a puritanism unknown at home? Was nature so fearful? The figure of the barefooted man often arose as I watched the Farallones disappear, the last of land we would see until we arrived at Tahiti, nearly two weeks later.
The days fell away from the calendar; they obliterated themselves as quietly as our ship’s wake to the north, as we planed over the smooth waters toward the equator. Gradually the passengers took on character, and out of the first welter of contacts came those definite impressions which are almost always right and which, though we modify them or reverse them by acquaintance, we return to finally.
There was a Chinese, the strangest figure of an Asiatic, with a thin mustache, and wearing always a black frock-coat and trousers, elastic gaiters, and a stiff, black hat. His face was long and oval and the color of old ivory. He had tried to gain admission to Australia and New Zealand, and then the United States, and had been excluded under some harsh laws. He was plainly a scholar, but had brought with him from China a store of curios, probably to enable him to earn money in the land of the white. Australia had refused him; he had been shut out of San Francisco, and the very steamship that brought him was compelled to take him away. He had failed to bring a necessary certificate, or something of the sort, and the inexorable laws of three Christian countries had sent him wandering, so that it was inevitable he must return to China by the route he had come. He was the most mournful of sights, sitting most of the day in a retired spot, brooding, apparently over his fate. He never smiled, though I who have been much in China, tried to stir him from his sadness by exclamations and gestures. His race has a very keen sense of humor. They see a thousand funny things about them, and laugh inwardly; but they never see anything amusing in themselves. The individual man conceives himself a dignified figure in a world of burlesque.
This man’s face was rid of any self-pity. I think he was stunned by the horror of the thing, that he, a man of Chinese letters, who had departed from the centuried custom of his pundit caste of remaining in their own country, who had left his family or clan to increase his store of lesser knowledge, should be denied the door by these inferior nations of the West. He might have recalled Chien Lung, a Manchu emperor, who, when apologized to in writing by a Dutch governor of Batavia who had murdered almost all the Chinese there, replied that China had no interest in wretches who had left their native land. A thousand years ago the Chinese put the soldier lowest in the scale and the scholar highest, with the man of business as of no importance. And yet these commercial peoples barred their gates to him! For a number of days he took his place in the shade of a davited boat, and now and again he read from a quaint book the Analects of Confucius.
We sailed on Wednesday, and on Sunday made the first tropic, nearly twenty-three and a half degrees above the line. No rough weather or unkindly wind had disturbed us from the hour we had left the “too nyked” man upon the wharf, and Sunday, when I went to take my bath before breakfast, I felt the soft fingers of the South caress my body, and looking out upon the purple ocean, whose expanse was barely dimpled by gleams of silver, I saw flying-fish skimming the crests of the swinging waves. The officers and stewards appeared in white; the passengers, too, put off their temperate-zone clothes, and the decks were gay with color. We all seemed to feel that we must be in consonance with the loving nature that had made the sky so blue and the sea so still.
The Chinese—he was Leung Kai Chu on the list—did not change his melancholy black. The deck sports were organized, ship tennis, quoits, and golf, and the disks rattled about his feet; but though he often moved his chair to aid those seeking a lost quoit or ring, and bowed ceremoniously to those who begged his pardon for bothering him, he kept his position. I felt a somber sense of gathering tragedy. In his face was a growing detachment from everything about him; he hardly knew that we were there, that he ate and slept, and took his seat by the boat. All of us felt this, but with many it meant merely remarking that “the Chink is getting off his head,” and a wish that he would not obtrude his grief when we were filled with the joy of sunny skies and a merry company.
The tragedy came sooner than expected by me. I had cast a thought to my understanding that the philosophy of Confucius did not contemplate self-destruction, and had been divided between relief and wonder that it was so.
It was dusk of Monday. The sun had sunk behind the glowing rim of the western horizon, and the air was suffused with a trembling rose color, when Leung Kai Chu tapped at my cabin-door, which gave on the boat-deck. I opened it, and he bowed, and handed me an image. It was of porcelain, precious, and I was at a loss to know whether he had felt the need of a little money and had brought it to sell, or had been impelled to give it to me because of my feeble efforts to cheer him. I made a gesture which might have meant payment, but he raised his hand deprecatingly, and for the first time I saw him smile, and I was afraid. He bowed, and in the mandarin language invoked good fortune upon me. He had the aspect of one beyond good and evil, who had settled life’s problem. When he left me I stood wondering, holding in my hands the majestic god seated upon the tiger, the symbol of the conquest of the flesh.
I heard a shout, and dropping the image, I rushed aft. Leung Kai Chu had thrown himself over the rail just by the purser’s office. A steward had seen him fling himself into the white foam. I tore a gas-buoy from its rack and tossed it toward the screw, in which direction he must have been swept. A sailor ran to the bridge, the whistle blew, and the ship shook as the engines ceased revolving, and then reversed in stopping her. Orders were flung about fast. A man climbed to the lookout as the first officer began to put a boat into the water. The crew of it and the second officer were already at the oars and the tiller as the ropes slid in the blocks. The passengers came crowding from their cabins, where they were dressing for dinner, and there were many expressions of surprise and slight terror. Death aboard ship is terrible in its imminence to all. The buoy, with its flaming torch, had drifted far to leeward, and the lookout could do no more than follow its fainting light as the dark of the tropics closed in. An hour the Noa-Noa lay gently heaving upon the mysterious waters in which the despairing pundit had sought Nirvana, until the boat returned with a report that it had picked up the buoy, but had seen no sign of the man. Doubtless he had been swept into the propellers, but if not quickly given release in their cyclopean strokes, he may have watched for a few minutes our vain attempt to negative his fate. If so, I imagine he smiled again, as when he gave me the god upon the tiger.
As they hoisted the boat to its davits, I found in the lantern light his ancient volume, the “Analects of Confucius,” and claimed it for my own. It was the very boat he had been accustomed to sit under, and he must have laid down the ancient philosopher to procure the gift for me, his grim determination already made. I had caught a glimpse of him Sunday morning listening to the Christian services conducted by the captain in the social hall, and when I told the brooding captain that, he was struck by the idea that perhaps some word of his preachment might have come to Leung Kai Chu’s mind in his agony in the waters, and that at the last moment he might have repented and been saved.
“One aspiration, and he might be washed as white as snow. ‘This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise,’ ” said the commander, who was known as the parson skipper, dour, but ever on the watch for the first sign of repentance.
On the other hand, Hallman more nearly stated the general feeling:
“By God, he spoiled sport, that black ghost on deck. He was like a tupapau, a Polynesian demon.”
Hallman was in his early forties, with twenty years of South-Seas trading, a tall, strong, well-featured, but hard-faced, European, with thin lips over nearly perfect teeth, and cold, small, pale-blue eyes. He talked little to men, but isolated young women whenever possible, and bent over them in attempted gay, but earnest, converse. He was one of those cold sensualists whose passion is as that of some animals, insistent, prowling, fierce, but impersonal. An English South-Sea trader aboard gave me an astonishing light upon him:
“Some dozen years ago,” he said, “I made a visit of a few weeks to the Marquesas Islands. Hallman had kept a store there then for more than ten years, and had a good part of the business of buying and shipping copra and selling supplies to the natives and a few whites. He lived in a shack back of his little store, with his native woman and four or five half-naked children. They told me queer stories about his madness for women. They said he would go out of his house and into the jungle near the trails and would lie in wait. If a woman he coveted passed, he would seize her, and even if her husband or consort was ahead of her, in the custom of these people, he would grab her feet, and make her call out that she was delaying a minute, that her companion was to go along, and she would catch up in a minute. He had some funny power over those women. Anyhow, that’s the story they told me in those cannibal islands. And yet, you know, there’s something different in him, because he sent two of his sons to school, and afterward to a university in Europe. To make it queerer yet, one of them is here on this ship, in the second class, and wouldn’t dare to speak to his father without being asked. Of course he’s a half-Marquesan—the son—and looks it. I know them all, and only yesterday I heard Hallman call his son on the main-deck, away from where any one could see him, and threaten him with ‘putting him back in the jungle, where he came from,’ if he appeared again near the first-class space. I tell you, I’d hate to be in his hands if I was in his way.”
Fictionists who take the South Seas for their scenery too often paint their characters in one tone—black, brown, or yellow, or even white. Their bad men are super-villains, and yet there are no men all bad. I know there are no supermen at all, bad or good, but only that some men do super acts now and then; none has the grand gesture at all times. Napoleon had a disgraceful affliction at Waterloo, which rid him of strength, mental and physical; the thief on the cross became wistful for an unknown delight.
Hallman had said to me in the smoking-room that he never drank alcohol or smoked tobacco, because “it took the edge off the game.” Now, a poet might say that, or even a moralist, but he was neither.
That night I walked through the waist of the ship and on to the promenade-deck of the third-class passengers, where a huddle of stores, coiled ropes, and riff-raff prevented these poor from taking any pleasurable exercise. I stood at the taffrail and peered down at the welter of white water, the foam of the buffets of the whirling screws, and then at the wide wake, which in imagination went on and on in a luminous path to the place we had departed from, to the dock where we had left the debarred lover of nature. The deep was lit with the play of phosphorescent animalculae whom our passage awoke in their homes beneath the surface and sent questing with lights for the cause. A sheet of pale, green-gold brilliancy marked the route of the Noa-Noa on the brine, and perhaps far back the corpse of the celestial philosopher floated in radiancy, with his face toward those skies, so brazen to his desires.
A Swiss with a letter of introduction to me presented it when seven days out. It was from the manager of a restaurant in San Francisco, and asked me to guide him in any way I could. The Swiss was middle-aged, and talked only of a raw diet. He was to go to the Marquesas to eat raw food. One would have thought a crude diet to be in itself an end in life. He spoke of it proudly and earnestly, as if cooking one’s edibles were a crime or a vile thing. He told me for hours his dictums—no alcohol, no tobacco, no meat, no fish; merely raw fruit, nuts, and vegetables. He was a convinced rebel against any fire for food, making known to any one who would listen that man had erred sadly, thousands of years ago, in bringing fire into his cave for cooking, and that the only cure for civilization’s evils was in abolishing the kitchen. He would live in the Marquesas as he said the aborigines do. Alas! I did not tell him they ate only their fish raw.
Ben Fuller, the Australian theatrical manager, frowned on him. Fuller was as round as a barrel, and he also was certain of the remedies for a sick world.
“How you ’re goin’ a get any bloody fun with no roast beef, no mutton, no puddin’, and let alone a drop of ale and a pipe?”
The Swiss smiled beatifically.
“You can get rid of all those desires,” he said.
“My Gawd! I don’t want to get rid o’ them, I don’t. I’m bringing up my kiddies right, and I’m a proper family man, but I want my meat and my bread and my puddin’. The world needs proper entertainment; that’s what’ll cure the troubles.”
The Swiss was also ardent in attention to the women aboard, and I wondered if there was a new school of self-denial. The old celibate monks eschewed women, but had Gargantuan appetites, which they satisfied with meat pasties, tubs of ale, and vats of wine.
There were two Tahitians aboard, both females. One was an oldish woman, ugly and waspish. She counted her beads and spoke to me in French of the consolations of the Catholic religion. She had been to America for an operation, but despaired of ever being well, and so was melancholy and devout. I talked to her about Tahiti, that island which the young Darwin wrote, “must forever remain classical to the voyager in the South Seas,” and which, since I had read “Rarahu” as a boy, had fascinated me and drawn me to it. She warned me.
“Prenez-garde vous, monsieur!” she said. “There are evils there, but I am ashamed of my people.”
The other was about twenty-two years old, slender, kohl-eyed, and black-tressed. She was dressed in the gayest colors of bourgeois fashion in San Francisco, with jade ear-rings and diamond ornaments. Her face was of a lemon-cream hue, with dark shadows under her long-lashed eyes. Her form was singularly svelt, curving, suggestive of the rounded stalk of a young cocoa-palm, her bosom molded in a voluptuous reserve. Her father, a clergyman, had cornered the vanilla-bean market in Tahiti, and she was bringing an automobile and a phonograph to her home, a village in the middle of Tahiti.
One night when a Hawaiian hula was played on the phonograph, she danced alone for us. It was a graceful, insinuating step, with movements of the arms and hands, a rotating of the torso upon the hips, and with a tinge of the savage in it that excited the Swiss, the raw-food advocate. Hallman was also in the social hall, and, after waltzing with her several times, had persuaded her to dance the hula. He clapped his hands loudly and called out:
“Maitai!”
That is Tahitian for bravo, and I saw a look in Hallman’s face that recalled the story by the Englishman of the jungle trail. He was always intent on his pursuit.
Was I hypercritical? There was Leung Kai Chu with the sharks, and the nature man left behind! The one had lost his dream of returning to Tahiti, in which the Chinese might freely have lived, and the other had thrown away life because he could not enter the America that the other wanted so madly to leave. The lack of a piece of paper had killed him. Was it that happiness was a delusion never to be realized? If the pundit had bribed the immigration authorities, as I had known many to do, he might now have been studying the strange religion and ethics which had caused the whites to steal so much of China, to force opium upon it at the cannon’s mouth, to kill tens of thousands of yellow men, and to raise to dignities the soldiers and financiers whom he despised, as had Confucius and Buddha. And if that white of the sandals had kept his shirt on in Tahiti, he might be lying under his favorite palm and eating breadfruit and bananas.
People have come to be afraid to say or even to think they are happy for a bare hour. We fear that the very saying of it will rob us of happiness. We have incantations to ward off listening devils—knocking on wood, throwing salt over our left shoulders, and saying “God willing.”
What was I to find in Tahiti? Certainly not what Loti had with Rarahu, for that was forty years ago, when the world was young at heart, and romance was a god who might be worshiped with uncensored tongue. But was not romance a spiritual emanation, a state of mind, and not people or scenes? I knew it was, for all over the earth I had pursued it, and found it in the wild flowers of the Sausalito hills in California more than among the gayeties of Paris, the gorges of the Yangtse-Kiang, or in the skull dance of the wild Dyak of Borneo.
Chapter II
The Discovery of Tahiti—Marvelous isles and people—Hailed by a windjammer—Middle of the voyage—Tahiti on the horizon—Ashore in Papeete.
What did Tahiti hold for me? I thought vaguely of its history. The world first knew its existence only about the time that the American colonies were trying to separate themselves from Great Britain. An English naval captain happened on the island, and thought himself the first white man there, though the Spanish claim its discovery. The Englishman called it King George Island, after the noted Tory monarch of his day; but a Frenchman, a captain and poet, the very next spring named it the New Cytherea, esteeming its fascinations like the fabled island of ancient Greek lore. It remained for Captain James Cook, who, before steam had killed the wonder of distance and the telegraph made daily bread of adventure and discovery, was the hero of many a fireside tale, to bring Tahiti vividly before the mind of the English world. That hardy mariner’s entrancing diary fixed Tahiti firmly in the thoughts of the British and Americans. Bougainville painted such an ecstatic picture that all France would emigrate. Cook set down that Otaheite was the most beautiful of all spots on the surface of the globe. He praised the people as the handsomest and most lovable of humans, and said they wept when he sailed. That was to him of inestimable value in appraising them.
About the beginning of the nineteenth century the first English missionaries in the South Seas thanked God for a safe passage from their homes to Tahiti, and for a virgin soil and an affrightingly wicked people to labor with. The English, however, did not seize the island, but left it for the French to do that, who first declared it a protectorate, and made it a colony of France, in the unjust way of the mighty, before the last king died. They had come ten thousand miles to do a wretched act that never profited them, but had killed a people.
All this discovery and suzerainty did not interest me much, but what the great captains, and Loti, Melville, Becke, and Stoddard, had written had been for years my intense delight. Now I was to realize the dream of childhood. I could hardly live during the days of the voyage.
I remembered that Europe had been set afire emotionally by the first reports, the logs of the first captains of England and France who visited Tahiti. In that eighteenth century, for decades the return to nature had been the rallying cry of those who attacked the artificial and degraded state of society. The published and oral statements of the adventurers in Tahiti, their descriptions of the unrivaled beauty of the verdure, of reefs and palm, of the majestic stature of the men and the passionate charm of the women, the boundless health and simple happiness in which they dwelt, the climate, the limpid streams, the diving, swimming, games, and rarest food—all these had stirred the depressed Europe of the last days of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth centuries beyond the understanding by us cynical and more material people. The world still had its vision of perfection.
Tahiti was the living Utopia of More, the belle île of Rousseau, the Eden with no serpent or hurtful apple, the garden of the Hesperides, in harmony with nature, in freedom from the galling bonds of government and church, of convention and clothing. The reports of the English missionaries of the nakedness and ungodliness of the Tahitians created intense interest and swelled the chorus of applause for their utter difference from the weary Europeans. Had there been ships to take them, thousands would have fled to Tahiti to be relieved of the chains and tedium of their existence, though they could not know that Victorianism and machines were to fetter and vulgarize them even more.
Afterward, when sailors mutinied and abandoned their ships or killed their officers to be able to remain in Tahiti and its sister islands, there grew up in England a literature of wanderers, runagates, and beach-combers, of darkish women who knew no reserve or modesty, of treasure-trove, of wrecks and desperate deeds, piracy and blackbirding, which made flame the imagination of the youth of seventy years ago. Tahiti had ever been pictured as a refuge from a world of suffering, from cold, hunger, and the necessity of labor, and most of all from the morals of pseudo-Christianity, and the hypocrisies and buffets attending their constant secret infringement.
One morning when we were near the middle of our voyage I went on deck to see the sun rise. We were that day eighteen hundred miles from Tahiti and the same distance from San Francisco, while north and west twelve hundred miles lay Hawaii. Not nearer than there, four hundred leagues away, was succor if our vessel failed. It was the dead center of the sea. I glanced at the chart and noted the spot: Latitude 10° N.; Longitude 137° W. The great god Ra of the Polynesians had climbed above the dizzy edge of the whirling earth, and was making his gorgeous course into the higher heavens. The ocean was a glittering blue, an intense, brilliant azure, level save for the slight swaying of the surface, which every little space showed a flag of white. The evaporation caused by the blazing sun of these tropics made the water a deeper blue than in cooler latitudes, as in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans the greens are almost as vivid as the blues about the line.
I watched the thousand flying-fishes’ fast leaps through the air, and caught gleams of the swift bonitos whose pursuit made birds of their little brothers. Then, a few miles off, I saw the first vessel that had come to our eyes since we had sunk the headlands of California more than a week before. She was a great sailing ship, under a cloud of snowy canvas, one of the caste of clippers that fast fades under the pall of smoke, and, from her route, bound for the Pacific Coast from Australia. The captain of the Noa-Noa came and stood beside me as we made her out more plainly, and fetching the glasses, he glanced at her, started, and said in some surprise:
“She ’s signaling us she wants to send a boat to us. That’s the first time in thirty years in this line I have ever had such a request from a wind-jammer. She left her slant to cross our path.”
Half a mile away a beautiful, living creature, all quivering with the restraint, she came up into the eye of the wind, and backed her fore-yard. A boat put off from her, and we awaited it with indefinable alarm. It was soon at the gangway we had hastily lowered, unknowing whether woman or child might not be our visitor. It was a young Russian sailor whose hand had been crushed under a block a fortnight before, and who, without aid for his injury other than the simple remedies that make up the pharmacopoeia of sailing vessels, was like to die from blood-poisoning. Had our ship not been met, he would undoubtedly have perished, for no other steamer came to these points upon the chart, and, as we were to learn, his own ship did not reach her port for many weeks. He was a mere boy, his face was drawn with continued pain, but, with the strong repression of emotion characteristic of the sailor, he uttered no sound. The passengers, relieved from silent fears of any catastrophe aboard the sailing ship, and perhaps salving their souls for fancied failure toward the drowned Leung Kai Chu, crowded to fill the boat with books, fruit, and candy, and to help the unfortunate boy. When he had been made comfortable by the surgeon, he was overwhelmed with presents.
My vis-à-vis at table, Herr Gluck, a piano manufacturer of Munich, was a follower of Horace Fletcher, the American munching missionary. Unlike the Swiss, who craved raw food, Herr Gluck ate everything, but each mouthful only after thorough maceration, salivation, and slow deglutition. At breakfast he absorbed a glass of milk and a piece of toast, but took longer than I did to bolt melon, bacon and eggs, toast, coffee, and marmalade. He sold the pianos his family had made for a hundred years, and munched all about the world. He professed rugged health, and never tired of dancing; but he looked drawn and melancholy, and had naught of the rugged masculinity of the bolters. Once or twice he drank in my company a cocktail, and he munched each sip as if it were mutton. He would occupy the entire dinner-time with one baked potato. I was endeared to him because I had known his master, Fletcher, and with him, too, had chewed a glass of wine in the patio of the Army and Navy Club in Manila. I longed to pit the Swiss and Herr Gluck in argument, but in sober thought had to give the laurel to the latter, because, in case of stress, one might, with his system, live on a trifle, while raw, nourishing food might be difficult to get in quantity.
Most of the passengers were Australians and New-Zealanders returning home, and only a few were bound for Tahiti—the Tahitian women, the Swiss, Hallman and his son, and M. Leboucher, a young merchant, born there, of a Spanish mother. William McBirney of County Antrim, but long in Raratonga, an island two days’ steaming from Tahiti, was going back to his adopted home.
“Sure,” he said, “I’m never happy away from the sound of the surf on the reef and the swish of the cocoanuts. I was fourteen years in the British army in England when I made up my mind to quit civilization. I put it to the missus, a London woman, and she was for it. I’ve had nearly ten years now in the Cook group. D’ye know, I’ve learned one thing—that money means very little in life. Why, in Aitutaki you can’t sell fish. The law forbids it, but do you suppose people don’t fish on that account? Why, a man goes out in his canoe and fishes like mad. He brings in his canoe, and as he approaches the beach he’s blowing his pu, the conch-shell, to let people know he has fish. Fish to sell or to barter? Not at all. He wants the honor of giving them away. Now, if he makes a big catch, do you see, he has renown. People say, ‘There’s Taiere, who caught all those fish yesterday.’ That’s worth more to him than money. But if he could sell those fish, if there was competition, only the small-minded, the business souls, would fish. I’m not a socialist, but Aitutaki shows that, released from the gain, man will serve his fellows for their plaudits. And, mind you, no person took more fish than he needed. There was no greed.”
“That’s rot!” broke in Hallman, who entered the smoking-room. “The natives are frauds. You’ve got to kick ’em around or bribe ’em to do any work. Haven’t I lived with ’em twenty years? They’re swine.”
“It depends on what you bring them and what you seek,” said McBirney. “Ah, well, it’s getting too civilized in Raratonga. There’s an automobile threatening to come there, though you could drive around the island in half an hour. And they’re teaching the Maoris English. I must get away to the west’ard soon. It’s a fact there are two laws for every inhabitant.”
Would I, too, “go native”? Become enamored of those simple, primitive places and ways, and want to keep going westward? Would I, too, fish to be honored for my string? Would I go to the Dangerous Archipelago, those mystic atolls that sent to the Empress Eugénie that magnificent necklace of pearls she wore at the great ball at the Tuileries when the foolish Napoleon made up his mind to emulate his great namesake and make war? Would I there see those divers who are said to surpass all the mermen of legend in the depths they go in their coral-studded lagoons in search of the jewels that hide in gold-lipped shells? Was it for me to wander among those fabulous coral isles flung for a thousand miles upon the sapphire sea, like wreaths of lilies upon a magic lake?
The doldrums brought rain before the southeast wind came to urge us faster on our course and to clear the skies. Now we were in the deep tropics, five or six hundred miles farther south than Honolulu, and plunging toward the imaginary circle which is the magic ring of the men who steer ships in all oceans. Our breeze was that they pray for when the wind alone must drive the towering trees of canvas toward Australia from America.
The breeze held on while games of the formal tournaments progressed, and prizes were won by the young and the spry.
One night I came on deck when the moon had risen an hour, and saw as strange and beautiful a sight as ever made me sigh for the lack of numbers in my soul. A huge, long, black cloud hung pendent from midway in the sky, with its lower part resting on the sea. It was for all the world of marvels like a great dragon, shaped rudely to a semblance of the beast of the Apocalypse, and with its head lifted into the ether, so that it was framed against the heavens. The moon was in its mouth; the moon shaped like an eye, a brilliant, glowing, wondrous orb, more intensely golden for its contrast with the ominous blackness of the serpentine cloud. I felt that I had found the origin of the Oriental fable. Some minutes the illusion held, and then the cloud lowered, and the moon, alone against a pale-blue background, the horizon a mass of scudding draperies of pearly hue, lit the ocean between the ship and the edge of the world in a tremulous and mellow gilded path.
There was dancing on the boat-deck, the Lydian measures of the Hawaiian love-songs, those passionate melodies in which Polynesian pearls have been strung on European filaments, filling the balmy air with quivering notes of desire, and causing dancers to hold closer their partners. The Occident seemed very far away; even older people felt the charm of clime that had come upon them, and laughter rang as stories ran about the group in the reclining-chairs.
The captain, though grim from a gripping religion that had squeezed all joy from his scripture-haunted soul, added an anecdote to the entertainment.
“Passing from Fiji to Samoa,” he said, “I had to leave the mail at Niuafou, in the Tongan Islands. It is a tiny isle, three miles long by as wide, an old crater in which is a lagoon, hot springs, and every sign of the devastation of many eruptions. The mail for Niuafou was often only a single letter and a few newspapers. We sealed them in a tin can, and when we met the postmaster at sea, we threw it over. He would be three miles out, swimming, with a small log under arm for support, and often he might be in company with thirty or forty of his tribe, who, with only the same slight aids to keeping afloat, would be fishing leisurely. They carried their tackle and their catch upon their shoulders, and appeared quite at ease, with no concern for their long swim to shore or for the sharks, which were plentiful. They might even nap a little during the middle afternoon.”
“When our people wanted to sleep at sea,” said McBirney, “if there were two of them, though we never bothered to take along logs, one rested on the other’s shoulder.”
One listened and marveled, and smiled to think that, had one stayed at home, one might never know these things. Forgotten was the wraith of Leung Kai Chu, the jungle trail of Hallman, and even the trepidation with which we had awaited the sailing ship’s boat. I was soon to be in those enchanted archipelagoes, and to see for myself those mighty swimmers and those sleepers upon the sea. I might even get a letter through that floating postmaster.
There was a Continental duchess aboard, whom I pitied. She was oldish and homely, and couldn’t forget her rank. She had a woman companion, an honorable lady, a maid, and a courier, but she sat all day knitting or reading poor novels. She had nothing to do with the other passengers, eating with her companion at an aloof table, and sitting before her own cabin, apart from others. The courier and I talked several times, and once he said that her Highness was much interested in a statement I had made about the origin of the Maori race, but she did not invite me to tell her my opinion directly. Poor wretch! as Pepys used to say, she was entangled in her own regal web, and sterilized by her Continental caste.
For days and nights we moved through the calm sea, with hardly more than the sparkling crests of the myriad swelling waves to distinguish from a bounded lake these mighty waters that wash the newest and oldest of lands. It seemed as if all the world was only water and us. The ship was as steady in her element as a plane in those upper strata of the ether where the winds and clouds no longer have domain. The company in a week had found themselves, and divided into groups in which each sought protection from boredom, ease of familiar manners, and opportunity to talk or to listen.
Often when all had left the deck I sat alone in the passage before the surgeon’s cabin to drink in the coolness of the dark, and to wonder at the problem of life. If a man had not his dream, what could life give him? In his heart he might know by experience that it never could come true, but without it, false as it might be, he was without consolation.
One night, the equator behind, I saw the Southern Cross for the first time on the voyage, its glittering crux, with the alpha and beta Centaur stars, signaling to me that I was beyond the dispensation of the cold and constant north star, and in the realm of warmth and everchanging beauty.
Tahiti, the second Sunday out, was a day off. I arose Monday with a feeling of buoyancy and expectancy that grew with the morning. I was as one who looks to find soon in reality the ideal on earth his fancy has created. The day became older, and the noontide passed. I had gone forward upon the forecastle head to seize the first sign of land, and was leaning over the cathead, watching the flying-fish leaping in advance of the bow, and the great, shining albacore throwing themselves into the rush of our advance, to be carried along by the mere drive of our bows.
I drew a deep breath of the salt air when there came to me a new and delicious odor. It seemed to steal from a secret garden under the sea, and I thought of mermaids plucking the blossoms of their coral arbors for the perfuming and adornment of their golden hair. But sweeter and heavier it floated upon the slight breeze, and I knew it for the famed zephyr that carries to the voyager to Tahiti the scents of the flowers of that idyllic land. It was the life vapor of the hinano, the tiare and the frangipani exhaled by those flowers of Tahiti, to be wafted to the sailor before he sights the scene itself, the breath of Lorelei that spelled the sense of the voyager. No shipwrecked mariner could have felt more poignancy in his search for a hospitable strand than I on the plunging prow of the Noa-Noa in my quest through the bright sunshine of that afternoon for the haven of desire. I strained my eyes to see it, to realize the gossamer dream I had spun since boyhood from the leaves of beloved poets.
It was shortly after three o’clock that the vision came in reality, more marvelous, more exquisite, more unimaginable than the conception of all my reveries—a dim shadow in the far offing, a dark speck in the lofty clouds, a mass of towering green upon the blue water, the fast unfoldment of emerald, pale hills and glittering reef. Nearer as sailed our ship, the panorama was lovelier. It was the culmination of enchantment, the fulfilment of the wildest fantasy of wondrous color, strange form, and lavish adornment.
The island rose in changing shape from the soft Pacific sea, here sheer and challenging, there sloping gently from mountain height to ocean sheen; different all about, altering with hiding sun or shifting view its magic mold, with moods as varied as the wind, but ever lovely, alluring, new.
I marked the volcanic make of it, cast up from the low bed of Neptune an eon ago, its loftiest peaks peering from the long cloud-streamers a mile and a half above my eyes, and its valleys embracing caverns of shadow. It was a stupendous precipice suspended from the vault of heaven, and in its massive folds secreted the wonders I had come so far to see. Every minute the bewildering contours were transmuted by the play of sun and cloud and our swift progression toward the land.
Red spots appeared rare against the field of verdure where the mountain-side had been stripped naked by erosion, and the volcanic cinnabar of ages contrasted oddly with the many greens of frond and palm and hillside grove. Curious, fantastic, the hanging peaks and cloud-capped scarps, black against the fleecy drift, were tauntingly reminiscent of the evening skies of the last few days, as if the divine artist had sketched lightly upon the azure of the heavens the entrancing picture to be drawn firmly and grandly in beetling crag and sublime steep.
Most of all, as the island swam closer, the embracing fringe of cocoanut-trees drew my eyes. They were like a girdle upon the beautiful body of the land, whose lower half was in the ocean. They seemed the freewaving banners of romance, whispering always of nude peoples, of savage whites, of ruthless passion, of rum and missionaries, cannibals and heathen altars, of the fierce struggle of the artificial and the primitive. I loved these palms, brothers of my soul, and for me they have never lost their romantic significance.
From the sea, the village of Papeete, the capital and port, was all but hidden in the wood of many kinds of trees that lies between the beach and the hills. Red and gray roofs appeared among the mass of growing things at almost the same height, for the capital rested on only a narrow shelf of rising land, and the mountains descended from the sky to the very water’s-edge. Greener than the Barbadoes, like malachite upon the dazzling Spanish Main, Tahiti gleamed as a promise of Elysium.
A lighthouse, tall minister of warning, lifted upon a headland, and suddenly there was disclosed intimately the brilliant, shimmering surf breaking on the tortuous coral reef that banded the island a mile away. It was like a circlet of quicksilver in the sun, a quivering, shining, waving wreath. Soon we heard the eternal diapason of these shores, the constant and immortal music of the breakers on the white stone barrier, a low, deep, resonant note that lulls the soul to sleep by day as it does the body by night.
Guardian sound of the South Seas it is, the hushed, echoic roar of a Jovian organ that chants of the dangers of the sea without, and the peace of the lagoon within, the reef.
A stretch of houses showed—the warehouses and shops of the merchants along the beach, the spire of a church, a line of wharf, a hundred tiny homes all but hidden in the foliage of the ferns. These gradually came into view as the ship, after skirting along the reef, steered through a break in the foam, a pass in the treacherous coral, and glided through opalescent and glassy shallows to a quay where all Papeete waited to greet us.
The quay was filled with women and men and children and dogs. Carriages and automobiles by the score attended just outside. Conspicuous above all were the Tahitian and part-Tahitian girls. In their long, graceful, waistless tunics of brilliant hues, their woven bamboo or pandanus hats, decorated with fresh flowers, their feet bare or thrust into French slippers, their brown eyes shining with yearning, they were so many Circes to us from the sea. They smiled and looked with longing at these strangers, who felt curious thrills at this unknown openness of promise.
Louis de Bougainville wrote in his diary at his first coming to Tahiti a hundred and fifty years ago:
The boats were now crowded with women, whose beauty of face was equal to that of the ladies of Europe, and the symmetry of their forms much superior.
Leboucher called to his mother. “Madre mia! Como estas tu?”
Cries rang out in French, in Tahitian and in English. Islanders, returning, demanded information as to health, business ventures, happenings. Merry laughter echoed from the roof of the great shed, and I felt my heart suddenly become joyous.
The girls and women absorbed the attention of passengers not of Tahiti. The New-Zealanders of the crew called excitedly to various ones. Most of the men passengers, tarrying only with the vessel, planned to see a hula, and they wondered if any of those on the wharf were the dancers.
A white flower over the ear seemed a favorite adornment, some wearing it on one side and some on the other. What struck one immediately was the erect carriage of the women. They were tall and as straight as sunflower-stalks, walking with a swimming gait. They were graceful even when old. Those dark women and men seemed to fit in perfectly with the marvelous background of the cocoas, the bananas and the brilliant foliage. The whites appeared sickly, uncouth, beside the natives, and the white women, especially, faded and artificial.
The Noa-Noa was warped to the wharf, and I was within a few feet now of the welcoming crowd and could discern every detail.
Those young women were well called les belles Tahitiennes. Their skins were like pale-brown satin, but exceeding all their other charms were their lustrous eyes. They were very large, liquid, melting, and indescribably feminine—feminine in a way lost to Occidental women save only the Andalusians and the Neapolitans. They were framed in the longest, blackest, curly lashes, the lashes of dark Caucasian children. They were the eyes of children of the sun, eyes that had stirred disciplined seamen to desertion, eyes that had burned ships, and created the mystery of the Bounty, eyes of enchantresses of the days of Helen.
“Prenez-garde vous!” said Madame Aubert, the invalid, in my ear.
Mixed now with the perfumes of the flowers was the odor of cocoanuts, coming from the piles of copra on the dock, a sweetish, oily smell, rich, powerful, and never in foreign lands to be inhaled without its bringing vividly before one scenes of the tropics.
The gangway was let down. I was, after years of anticipation, in Tahiti.
Chapter III
Description of Tahiti—A volcanic rock and coral reef—Beauty of the Scenery—Papeete the center of the South Seas—Appearance of the Tahitians.
Tahiti was a molten rock, fused in a subterranean furnace, and cast in some frightful throe of the cooling sphere, high up above the surface of the sea, the seething mass forming into mountains and valleys, the valleys hemmed in except at their mouths by lofty barriers that stretch from thundering central ridges to the slanting shelf of alluvial soil which extends to the sand of the beach. It is a mass of volcanic matter to which the air, the rain, and the passage of a million years have given an all-covering verdure except upon the loftiest peaks, have cut into strangely shaped cliffs, sloping hills, spacious vales, and shadowy glens and dingles, and have poured down the rich detritus and humus to cover the coral beaches and afford sustenance for man and beast. About the island countless trillions of tiny animals have reared the shimmering reef which bears the brunt of the breaking seas, and spares their impact upon the precious land. These minute beings in the unfathomable scheme of the Will had worked and perished for unguessed ages to leave behind this monument of their existence, their charnel-house. Man had often told himself that a god had inspired them thus to build havens for his vessels and abodes of marine life where man might kill lesser beings for his food and sport.
Always, in the approach to the island in steamship, schooner, or canoe, one is amazed and transported by the varying aspect of it. A few miles away one would never know that man had touched it. His inappreciable structures are erased by the flood of green color, which, from the edge of the lagoon to the spires of La Diadème, nearly eight thousand feet above the water, makes all other hues insignificant. In all its hundred miles or so of circumference nature is the dominant note—a nature so mysterious, so powerful, and yet so soft-handed, so beauty-loving and so laughing in its indulgences, that one can hardly believe it the same that rules the Northern climes and forces man to labor in pain all his days or to die.
The scene from a little distance is as primeval as when the first humans climbed in their frail canoes through the unknown and terrible stretches of ocean, and saw Tahiti shining in the sunlight. A mile or two from the lagoon the fertile land extends as a slowly-ascending gamut of greens as luxuriant as a jungle, and forming a most pleasing foreground to the startling amphitheater of the mountains, darker, and, in storm, black and forbidding.
Those mountains are the most wonderful examples of volcanic rock on the globe. Formed of rough and crystalline products of the basic fire of earth, they hold high up in their recesses coral beds once under the sea, and lava in many shapes, tokens of the island’s rise from the slime, and of mammoth craters now almost entirely obliterated by denudation—the denudation which made the level land as fertile as any on earth, and the suitable habitation of the most leisurely and magnificent human animals of history.
A thousand rills that drink from the clouds ever encircling the crags, and in which they are often lost from view, leap from the heights, appearing as ribbons of white on a clear day, and not seldom disappearing in vapor as they fall sheer hundreds of feet, or thousands, in successive drops. When heavy rains come, torrents suddenly spring into being and dash madly down the precipitous cliffs to swell the brooks and little rivers and rush headlong to the sea.
Tahiti has an unexcelled climate for the tropics, the temperature for the year averaging seventy-seven degrees and varying from sixty-nine to eighty-four degrees. June, July, and August are the coolest and driest months, and December to March the rainiest and hottest. It is often humid, enervating, but the south-east, the trade-wind, which blows regularly on the east side of the islands, where are Papeete and most of the settlements, purifies the atmosphere, and there are no epidemics except when disease is brought directly from the cities of America or Australasia. A delicious breeze comes up every morning at nine o’clock and fans the dweller in this real Arcadia until past four, when it languishes and ceases in preparation for the vesper drama of the sun’s retirement from the stage of earth.
Typhoons or cyclones are rare about Tahiti, but squalls are frequent and tidal waves recurrent. The rain falls more than a hundred days a year, but usually so lightly that one thinks of it as liquid sunshine. In the wet quarter from December until March there are almost daily deluges, when the air seems turned to water, the land and sea are hidden by the screen of driving rain, and the thunder shakes the flimsy houses, and echoes menacingly in the upper valleys.
Papeete, the seat of government and trade capital of all the French possessions in these parts of the world, is a sprawling village stretching lazily from the river of Fautaua on the east to the cemetery on the west, and from the sea on the north to half a mile inland. It is the gradual increment of garden and house upon an aboriginal village, the slow response of a century to the demand of official and trading white, of religious group and ambitious Tahitian, of sailor and tourist. Here flow all the channels of business and finance, of plotting and robbery, of pleasure and profit, of literature and art and good living, in the eastern Pacific. Papeete is the London and Paris of this part of the peaceful ocean, dispensing the styles and comforts, the inventions and luxuries, of civilization, making the laws and enforcing or compromising them, giving justice and injustice to litigants, despatching all the concomitants of modernity to littler islands. Papeete is the entrepot of all the archipelagoes in these seas.
The French, who have domination in these waters of a hundred islands and atolls between 8° and 27° south latitude, and between 137° and 154° west longitude, a stretch of about twelve hundred miles each way, make them all tributary to Papeete; and thus it is the metropolis of a province of salt water, over which come its couriers and its freighters, its governors and its soldiers, its pleasure-seekers and its idlers. From it an age ago went the Maoris to people Hawaii and New Zealand.
Papeete has a central position in the Pacific. The capitals of Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and California are from two and a half to three and a half thousand miles away. No other such group of whites, or place approaching its urbanity, is to be found in a vast extent of latitude or longitude. It is without peer or competitor in endless leagues of waves.
Yet Papeete is a little place, a mile or so in length and less in width, a curious imposition of European houses and manners upon a Tahitian hamlet, hybrid, a mixture of loveliness and ugliness, of nature savage and tamed. The settlement, as with all ports, began at the waterfront, and the harbor of Papeete is a lake within the milky reef, the gentle waters of which touch a strip of green that runs along the shore, broken here and there by a wall and by the quay at which I landed. Coral blocks have been quarried from the reef and fitted to make an embankment for half a mile, which juts out just far enough to be usable as a mole. It is alongside this that sailing vessels lie, the wharf being the only land mooring with a roof for the housing of products. A dozen schooners, small and large, point their noses out to the sea, their backs against the coral quay, and their hawsers made fast to old cannon, brought here to war against the natives, and now binding the messengers of the nations and of commerce to this shore. Where there are no embankments, the water comes up to the roots of the trees, and a carpet of grass, moss, and tropical vegetation grows from the salt tide to the roadway.
Following the contour of the beach, runs a fairly broad road, and facing this original thoroughfare and the sea are the principal shops of the traders and a few residences. French are some of these merchants, but most are Australasian, German, American and Chinese. France is ten thousand miles away, and the French unequal in the struggle for gain. Some of the stores occupy blocks, and in them one will find a limited assortment of tobacco, anchors, needles, music-boxes, candles, bicycles, rum, novels, and silks or calicos. Here in this spot was the first settlement of the preachers of the gospel, of the conquering forces of France, and of the roaring blades who brought the culture of the world to a powerful and spellbound people. Here swarmed the crews of fifty whalers in the days when “There she blows!” was heard from crows’-nests all over the broad Pacific. These rough adventurers, fighters, revelers, passionate bachelors, stamped Tahiti with its first strong imprint of the white man’s modes and vices, contending with the missionaries for supremacy of ideal. They brought gin and a new lecherousness and deadly ills and novel superstitions, and found a people ready for their wares. An old American woman has told me she has seen a thousand whalemen at one time ashore off ships in the harbor make night and day a Saturnalia of Occidental pleasure, a hundred fights in twenty-four hours.
As more of Europe and America came and brought lumber to build houses, or used the hard woods of the mountains, the settlement pushed back from the beach. Trails that later widened into streets were cut through the brush to reach these homes of whites, and the thatched huts of the aborigines were replaced by the ugly, but more convenient, cottages of the new-comers. The French, when once they had seized the island, made roads, gradually and not too well, but far surpassing those of most outlying possessions, and contrasting advantageously with the neglect of the Spanish, who in three hundred years in the Philippines left all undone the most important step in civilization. One can drive almost completely around Tahiti on ninety miles of a highway passable at most times of the year, and bridging a hundred times the streams which rush and purl and wind from the heights to the ocean.
The streets of Papeete have no plan. They go where they list and in curves and angles, and only once in a mile in short, straight stretches. They twist and stray north and south and nor’nor’west and eastsou’east, as if each new-comer had cleft a walk of his own, caring naught for any one else, and further dwellers had smoothed it on for themselves.
I lost myself in a maze of streets, looked about for a familiar landmark, strolled a hundred paces, and found myself somewhere I thought a kilometer distant. Everywhere there are shops kept by Chinese, restaurants and coffee-houses. The streets all have names, but change them as they progress, honoring some French hero or statesman for a block or two, recalling some event, or plainly stating the reason for their being. All names are in French, of course, and many are quaint and sonorous.
As the sea-wall grew according to the demands of defense or commerce the sections were rechristened. The quai des Subsistences tells its purpose as does the quai de l’Uranie. The rue de l’Ecole and the rue de la Mission, with the rue des Remparts, speak the early building of school and Catholic church and fortifications.
Rue Cook, rue de Bougainville and many others record the giant figures of history who took Tahiti from the mist of the half-known, and wrote it on the charts and in the archives. Other streets hark back to that beloved France to which these French exiles gaze with tearful eyes, but linger all their years ten thousand miles away. They saunter along the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, and see again the magnificence of the Tuileries, and hear the dear noises of la belle Paris. They are sentimental, these French, patriots all here, and overcome at times by the flood of memories of la France, their birthplaces, and their ancestral graves. Some born here have never been away, and some have spent a few short months in visits to the homeland. Some have brown mothers, half-islanders; yet if they learn the tripping tongue of their French progenitor and European manners, they think of France as their ultimate goal, of Paris their playground, and the “Marseillaise” their himene par excellence.
One might conjure up a vision of a tiny Paris with such names in one’s ears, and these French, who have been in possession here nearly four-score years, have tried to make a French town of Papeete.
They have only spoiled the scene as far as unfit architecture can, but the riot of tropical nature has mocked their labors. For all over the flimsy wooden houses, the wretched palings, the galvanized iron roofing, the ugly verandas, hang gorgeous draperies of the giant acacias, the brilliant flamboyantes, the bountiful, yellow allamanda, the generous breadfruit, and the uplifting glory of the cocoanut-trees, while magnificent vines and creepers cover the tawdry paint of the façades and embower the homes in green and flower. If one leaves the few principal streets or roads in Papeete, one walks only on well-worn trails through the thick growth of lantana, guavas, pandanus, wild coffee, and a dozen other trees and bushes. The paths are lined with hedges of false coffee, where thrifty people live, and again there are open spaces with vistas of little houses in groves, rows of tiny cabins close together. Everywhere are picturesque disorder, dirt, rubbish, and the accrued wallow of years of laissez-aller; but the mighty trade-winds and the constant rains sweep away all bad odors, and there is no resultant disease.
“My word,” said Stevens, a London stockbroker, here to rehabilitate a broken corporation, “if we English had this place, wouldn’t there be a cleaning up! We’d build it solid and sanitary, and have proper rules to make the bally natives stand around.”
The practical British would that. They have done so in a dozen of their far-flung colonies I hare been in, from Singapore to Barbadoes, though they have failed utterly in Jamaica. Yet, I am at first sight, of the mind that only the Spanish would have kept, after decades of administration, as much of the simple beauty of Papeete as have the Gauls. True, the streets are a litter, the Government almost unseen as to modern uplift, the natives are indolent and life moves without bustle or goal. The republic is content to keep the peace, to sell its wares, to teach its tongue, and to let the gentle Tahitian hold to his island ways, now that his race dies rapidly in the spiritual atmosphere so murderous to natural, non-immunized souls and bodies.
Many streets and roads are shaded by spreading mango-trees, a fruit brought in the sixties from Brazil, and perfected in size and flavor here by the patient efforts of French gardeners and priests. The trees along the town ways are splendid, umbrageous masses of dark foliage whose golden crops fall upon the roadways, and which have been so chosen that though they are seasonal, the round mango is succeeded by the golden egg, and that by a small purple sort, while the large, long variety continues most of the year. Monseigneur Jaussen, the Catholic bishop who wrote the accepted grammar and dictionary of the Tahitian language, evolved a delicious, large mango, with a long, thin stone very different from the usual seed, which occupies most of the circumference of this slightly acidulous, most luscious of tropical fruits. Often the pave is a spatter of the fallen mangos, its slippery condition of no import to the barefooted Tahitian, but to the shod a cause of sudden, strange gyrations and gestures, and of irreverence toward the Deity.
Scores of varieties of fruits and flowers, shade-trees, and ornamental plants were brought to Tahiti by ship commanders, missionaries, officials, and traders, in the last hundred years, while many of the indigenous growths have been transplanted to other islands and continents by those whose interests were in them. The Mutiny of the Bounty, perhaps the most romantic incident of these South Seas, was the result of an effort to transport breadfruit-tree shoots from Tahiti to the West Indies. It is a beautiful trait in humankind, which, maybe, designing nature has endowed us with to spread her manifold creations, that even the most selfish of men delight in planting in new environments exotic seeds and plants, and in enriching the fauna of faraway islands with strange animals and insects. The pepper- and the gum-tree that make southern California’s desert a bower, the oranges and lemons there which send a million golden trophies to less-favored peoples, are the flora of distant climes. Since the days of the white discoverers, adventurers and priests, fighting men and puritans, have added to the earth’s treasury in Tahiti and all these islands.
Walking one morning along the waterfront, I met two very dark negresses. They had on pink and black dresses, with red cotton shawls, and they wore flaming yellow handkerchiefs about their woolly heads. They were as African as the Congo, and as strange in this setting as Eskimos on Broadway. They felt their importance, for they were of the few good cooks of French dishes here. They spoke a French patois, and guffawed loudly when one dropped her basket of supplies from her head. They were servants of the procureur de la République, who had brought them from the French colony of Martinique.
Many races have mingled here. One saw their pigments and their lines in the castes; here a soupçon of the French and there a touch of the Dane; the Chileño, himself a mestizo, had left his print in delicacy of feature, and the Irish his freckles and pug, which with tawny skin, pearly teeth, and the superb form of the pure Tahitian, left little to be desired in fetching and saucy allurement. Thousands of sailors and merchants and preachers had sowed their seed here, as did Captain Cook’s men a century and a half ago, and the harvest showed in numerous shadings of colors and variety of mixtures. Tahiti had, since ship of Europe sighted Orofena, been a pasture for the wild asses of the Wanderlust, a paradise into which they had brought their snakes and left them to plague the natives.
There were phonographs shrieking at one from a score of verandas. The automobile had become a menace to life and limb. There were two-score motor-cars in Tahiti; but as the island is small, and most of them were in the capital, one met them all the day, and might have thought there were hundreds. Motor-buses, or “rubberneck-wagons,” ran about the city, carrying the natives for a franc on a brief tour, and, for more, to country districts where good cheer and dances sped the night. A dozen five- and seven-passenger cars with drivers were for hire. Most nights until eleven or later the rented machines dashed about the narrow streets, hooting and hissing, while their care-free occupants played accordions or mouth-organs and sang songs of love. Louis de Bougainville, once a French lawyer, and afterward soldier, sailor, and discoverer and a lord under Bonaparte, had a monument in a tiny green park hard by the strand and the road that, beginning there, bands the island. He is best known the world about because his name is given to the “four-o’clock” shrub in warm countries, as in Tahiti, which sends huge masses of magenta or crimson blossoms climbing on trellises and roofs. I walked to this monument from the Tiare along the mossy bank of a little rivulet which ran to the beach. It was early morning. The humble natives and whites were about their daily tasks. Smoke rose from the iron pipes above the houses, coffee scented the air, men and women were returning from the market-place with bunches of cocoanuts, bananas, and breadfruit, strings of fish and cuts of meat in papers. Many of them had their heads wreathed in flowers or wore a tiare blossom over an ear.
The way in which one wears a flower supposedly signifies many things. If one wore it over the left ear, one sought a sweetheart; if over the right, it signified contentment, and though it was as common as the wearing of hats, there were always jokes passing about these flowers, exclamations of surprise or wishes of joy.
“What, you have left Terii?”
“Aita. No.”
“Aue! I must change it at once.”
Now, really there was no such idea in the native mind. It was invention for tourists. The Tahitian wears flowers anywhere, always, if he can have them, and they do express his mood. If he is sad, he will not put them on; but if going to a dance, to a picnic, or to promenade, if he has money in his pocket, or gaiety in his heart, he must bloom. Over one ear, or both, in the hair, on the head, around the neck, both sexes were passionately fond of this age-old sign of kinship with nature. The lei in Hawaii around the hat or the neck spells the same meaning, but the flood of outsiders has lost Hawaii all but the merest remnant of its ancient ways, while here still persisted customs which a century of European difference and indifference has not crushed out. Here, as there, more lasting wreaths for the hat were woven of shells or beads in various colors.
As I strolled past the houses, every one greeted me pleasantly.
“Ia ora na,” they said, or “Bonjour!” I replied in kind. I had not been a day in Tahiti before I felt kindled in me an affection for its dark people which I had never known for any other race. It was an admixture of friendship, admiration, and pity—of affection for their beautiful natures, of appreciation of the magnificence of their physical equipment, and of sympathy for them in their decline and inevitable passing under the changed conditions of environment made by the sudden smothering of their instinctive needs in the sepia of commercial civilization. I saw that those natives remaining, laughing and full of the desire for pleasure as they were, must perish because unfit to survive in the morass of modernism in which they were sinking, victims of a system of life in which material profits were the sole goal and standard of the rulers.
The Tahitians are tall, vigorous, and superbly rounded. The men, often more than six feet or even six and a half feet in height, have a mien of natural majesty and bodily grace. They convey an impression of giant strength, reserve power, and unconscious poise beyond that made by any other race. American Indians I have known had much of this quality when resident far from towns, but they lacked the curving, padded muscles, the ease of movement, and, most of all, the smiling faces, the ingratiating manner, of these children of the sun.
The Tahitians’ noses are fairly flat and large; the nostrils dilated; their lips full and sensual; their teeth perfectly shaped and very white and sound; their chins strong, though round; and their eyes black and large, not brilliant, but liquid. Their feet and hands are mighty—hands that lift burdens of great weight, that swing paddles of canoes for hours; feet that tread the roads or mountain trails for league on league.
The women are of middle size, with lines of harmony that give them a unique seal of beauty, with an undulating movement of their bodies, a coordination of every muscle and nerve, a richness of aspect in color and form, that is more sensuous, more attractive, than any feminine graces I have ever gazed on. They have the forwardness of boys, the boldness of huntresses, yet the softness and magnetism of the most virginal of their white sisters. One thinks of them as of old in soft draperies of beautiful cream-colored native cloth wound around their bodies, passed under one arm and knotted on the other shoulder, revealing the shapely neck and arm, and one breast, with garlands upon their hair, and a fragrant flower passed through one ear, and in the other two or three large pearls fastened with braided human hair.
The men never wore beards, though mustaches, copying the French custom, are common on chiefs, preachers, and those who sacrifice beauty and natural desires to ambition. The hair on the face is removed as it appears, and it is scanty. They abhor beards, and their ghosts, the tupapau, have faces fringed with hair. The usual movements of both men and women are slow, dignified, and full of pride.
Chapter IV
The Tiare Hotel—Lovaina the hostess, the best-known woman in the South Seas—Her strange ménage—The Dummy—A one-sided tryst—An old-fashioned cocktail—The Argentine training ship.
The Tiare Hotel was the center of English-speaking life in Papeete. Almost all tourists stayed there, and most of the white residents other than the French took meals there. The usual traveler spent most of his time in and about the hotel, and from it made his trips to the country districts or to other islands. Except for two small restaurants kept by Europeans, the Tiare was the only eating-place in the capital of Tahiti unless one counted a score of dismal coffee-shops kept by Chinese, and frequented by natives, sailors, and beach-combers. They were dark, disagreeable recesses, with grimy tables and forbidding utensils, in which wretchedly made coffee was served with a roll for a few sous; one of them also offered meats of a questionable kind.
The Tiare Hotel was five minutes’ walk from the quay, at the junction of the rue de Rivoli and the rue de Petit Pologne, close by Pont du Remparts. It was a one-storied cottage, with broad verandas, half hidden in a luxuriant garden at the point where two streets come together at a little stone bridge crossing a brook—a tiny bungalow built for a home, and stretched and pieced out to make a guest-house.
I was at home there after a few days as if I had known no other dwelling. That is a distinctive and compelling charm of Tahiti, the quick possession of the new-comer by his environment, and his unconscious yielding to the demands of his novel surroundings, opposite as they might be to his previous habitat.
Very soon I was filled with the languor of these isles. I hardly stirred from my living-place. The bustle of the monthly steamship-day died with the going of the Noa-Noa, the through passengers departing in angry mood because their anticipated hula dance had been a disappointment—wickedness shining feebly through cotton gowns when they had expected nudity in a pas seul of abandonment. There was a violent condemnation by the duped men of “unwarranted interference by the French Government with natural and national expression.”
Hogg, an American business traveler, said “The Barbary Coast in Frisco had Tahiti skinned a mile for the real thing,” and Stevens, a London broker, that the dance was “bally tame for four bob.”
Papeete, with the passing throng gone, was a quiet little town, contrasting with the hours when the streets swarmed with people from here and the suburbs, the band playing, the bars crowded, and all efforts for gaiety and coquetry and the selling of souvenirs and intoxicants. What exotic life there was beyond the clubs, the waterfront, and the Asiatic quarter revolved around the Tiare, and entirely so because of its proprietress, Lovaina. She was the best-known and best-liked woman in all these South Seas, remembered from Australia to the Paumotus, from London to China, wherever were people who had visited Tahiti, as “dear old Lovaina.”
She was very large. She was huge in every sense, weighing much more than three hundred pounds, and yet there was a singular grace in her form and her movements. Her limbs were of the girth of breadfruit-trees, and her bosom was as broad and deep as that of the great Juno of Rome, but her hands were beautiful, like a plump baby’s, with fascinating creases at the wrists, and long, tapering fingers. Her large eyes were hazel, and they were very brilliant when she was merry or excited. Her expansive face had no lines in it, and her mouth was a perfection of curves, the teeth white and even. Her hair was red-brown, curling in rich profusion, scented with the hinano-flower, adorning her charmingly poised head in careless grace.
When she said, “I glad see you,” there was a glow of amiability, an alluring light in her countenance, that drew one irresistibly to her, and her immense, shapely hand enveloped one’s own with a pressure and a warmth that were overpowering in their convincement of her good heart and illimitable generosity.
Lovaina was only one fourth Tahitian, all the remainder of her racial inheritance being American; but she was all Tahitian in her traits, her simplicity, her devotion to her friends, her catching folly as it flew, and her pride in a new possession.
One morning I got up at five o’clock and went to the bath beside the kitchen. It was a shower, and the water from the far Fautaua valley the softest, most delicious to the body, cool and balmy in the heat of the tropic. Coming and going to baths here, whites throw off easily the fear of being thought immodest, and women and men alike go to and fro in loin-cloths, pajamas, or towels. I wore the pareu, the red strip of calico, bearing designs by William Morris, which the native buys instead of his original one of tapa, the beaten cloth made from tree bark or pith.
I met Lovaina coming out of the shower, a sheet about her which could not cover half of her immense and regal body. She hesitated—I was almost a stranger,—and in a vain effort to do better, trod on the sheet, and pulled it to her feet. I picked it up for her.
“I shamed for you see me like this!” she said.
I was blushing all over, though why I don’t know, but I faltered:
“Like a great American Beauty rose.”
“Faded rose too big,” exclaimed Lovaina, with the faintest air of coquetry as I hastily shut the door.
A little while later, when I came to the dining-room for the first breakfast, I met Lovaina in a blue-figured aahu of muslin and lace, a close-fitting, sweeping nightgown, the single garment that Tahitians wear all day and take off at night, a tunic, or Mother Hubbard, which reveals their figures without disguise, unstayed, unpetticoated. Lovaina was, as always, barefooted, and she took me into her garden, one of the few cultivated in Tahiti, where nature makes man almost superfluous in the decoration of the earth.
“This house my father give me when marry,” said Lovaina. “My God! you just should seen that arearea! Las’ all day, mos’ night. We jus’ move in. Ban’s playin’ from war-ship, all merry drinkin’, dancin’. Never such good time. I tell you nobody could walk barefoot one week, so much broken glass in garden an’ street.”
Her goodly flesh shook with her laughter, her darkening eyes suffused with happy tears at the memory, and she put her broad hand between my shoulders for a moment as if to draw me into the rejoicing of her wedding feast. She led me about the garden to show me how she had from year to year planted the many trees, herbs, and bushes it contained. It had set out to be formal, but, like most efforts at taming the fierce fecundity of nature in these seas, had become a tangle of verdure, for though now and then combed into some regularity, the breezes, the dogs, the chickens, and the invading people ruffled it, the falling leaves covered the grass, and the dead branches sighed for burial. Down the narrow path she went ponderously, showing me the cannas, jasmine and rose, picking a lime or a tamarind, a bouquet of mock-orange flowers, smoothing the tuberoses, the hibiscus of many colors, the oleanders, maile ilima, Star of Bethlehem, frangipani, and, her greatest love, the tiare Tahiti. There were snakeplants, East-India cherries, coffee-bushes, custard-apples, and the hinano, the sweetness of which and of the tiare made heavy the air.
I said that we had no flower in America as wonderful in perfume as these.
Lovaina stopped her slow, heavy steps. She raised her beautiful, big hand, and arresting my attention, she exclaimed:
“You know that ol’ hinano! Ol’ time we use that Tahiti cologne. Girl put that on pareu an’ on dress, by an’ by make whole body jus’ like flower. That set man crazee; make all man want kiss an’ hug.”
Doubtless, our foremothers when they sought to win the hunters of their tribes, took the musk, the civet, and the castor from the prey laid at their feet, and made maddening their smoke- and wind-tanned bodies to the cave-dwellers. When they became more housed and more clothed, they captured the juices of the flowers in nutshells, and later in stone bottles, until now science disdains animals and flowers, but takes chemicals and waste products to make a hundred essences and unguents and sachets for toilet and boudoir. These odors of the hinano and tiare were philters worthy of the beautiful Tahitian girls, with their sinuous, golden bodies so sensualized, so passionate, and so free.
The ordinary life of the Tiare Hotel was all upon the broad verandas which surrounded it, their high lattices covered with the climbing bougainvillea and stephanotis vines, which formed a maze for the filtering of the sunlight and the dimming of the activities of the streets. On these verandas were the tables for eating, and in the main bungalow a few bedrooms, with others in detached cottages within the inclosure.
There was a parlor, and it was like the parlors of all ambitious Europeans or Americans in all islands—a piano with an injured tone, chairs blue and scarlet with plush covers that perspiring sitters of years had made dark brown, a phonograph, and signed photographs of friends and visitors who had said farewell to Tahiti. There were paintings of flowers by Lovaina, showing not a little talent and much feeling. All these were the pride of her birthright—“Murricaine” fashion, as the hostess said pensively.
I have said that the life of the hotel was upon the veranda, and so it was at meal-time and for the casual tourist staying a day with a steamship to or from New Zealand or the United States; but to the resident of Tahiti, the American, Britisher, or non-Latin European, the place of interest in Papeete other than the clubs was a small porch approached from the street by a few steps.
On this tiny porch was a large table, and behind it a couch. The table was the only desk for letter-writing, the serving-stand for meals, the board for salad and cake-making, and the drink-bar. A few feet removed from this table, and against the wall, was a camphorwood chest on which two might sit in comfort and three might squeeze at angles. In the chest was kept all the bed and table linen, so that one might often be disturbed by the quest of sheets or napkins.
Upon this little porch the kitchen, bath, and toilets opened, a few feet from the table. It was the sleeping and amusement quarters of five dogs, the loafing place for the girls, the office of the hotel, the entry for guests to the dining-room or to the other conveniences. Through it streamed all who came to eat or drink or for any other purpose. The hotel having grown slowly from a home, hardly any changes of plumbing had been made, and men and women in dressing-gowns, in pajamas, or in other undress came and went, under the interested gaze of idlers and drinkers, and they had often to endure intimate questions or badinage. All were on a footing as to the arrangements, and I saw the haughty duchess of the Noa-Noa follow Lovaina’s American negro chauffeur, while a former ambassador waited on the chest. There was no distinction of rank, since Tahiti, excepting for an occasional French official, was the purest democracy of manners in the world, a philosophy the whites had learned from the natives, who think all foreigners equally distinguished.
Those not of the South Seas, and unused to the primitive publicity of the natural functions there, suffered intensely at first from embarrassment, but in time forgot their squeamishness, and perhaps learned to carry on conversations with those who drank or chatted outside.
The Tahitian cook slept all day between meals on a chair, with his head hanging out a window. He was ill often from a rush of blood to his head. Lovaina had offered him a mat to lie on the floor, but he pleaded his habit. All the refuse of the kitchen was thrown into the garden under this window, and with the horses, chickens, dogs, and cats it was first come, first served.
On the couch back of the table Lovaina sat for many hours every day. Her great weight made her disinclined to walk, and from her cushions she ruled her domain, chaffing with those who dropped in for drinks, advising and joking, making cakes and salads, bargaining with the butcher and vegetable-dealer, despatching the food toward the tables, feeding many dogs, posting her accounts, receiving payments, and regulating the complex affairs of her ménage. She would shake a cocktail, make a gin-fizz or a Doctor Funk, chop ice or do any menial service, yet withal was your entertainer and your friend. She had the striking, yet almost inexplicable, dignity of the Maori—the facing of life serenely and without reserve or fear for the morrow.
Underneath the table dogs tumbled, or raced about the porch, barking and leaping on laps, cats scurried past, and a cloud of tobacco smoke filled the close air. Lovaina, in one of her sixty bright gowns, a white chemise beneath, her feet bare, sat enthroned. On the chest were the captain of a liner or a schooner, a tourist, a trader, a girl, an old native woman, or a beach-comber with money for the moment. It was the carpet of state on which all took their places who would have a hearing before the throne or loaf in the audience-chamber.
In her low, delightfully broken English, in vivid French, or sibilant Tahitian, Lovaina issued her orders to the girls, shouted maledictions at the cook, or talked with all who came. Through that porch flowed all the scandal of the South Seas—tales of hurricanes and waterspouts, of shipwrecks, of accidents, of lucky deals in pearls or shells, of copra, of new fashions and old inhabitants, of liaisons of white and brown, of the flirtations of tourists, of the Government’s issuing an ultimatum on the price of fish, of how the consuls quarreled at a club dinner, and of how one threw three ribs of roasted beef at the other, who retorted with a whole sucking pig just from the native oven, of Thomas’ wife leaving him for Europe after a month’s honeymoon; and all the flotsam and jetsam of report and rumor, of joke and detraction, which in an island with only one mail a month are the topics of interest.
The porch was the clearing-house and the casual, oral record of the spreading South Seas. It was the strangest salon of any capital, and Lovaina the most fascinating of hostesses. Stories that would be frowned down in many a man’s club were laughed at lightly over the table, but not when tourists, new-comers, were present. Then the dignified Lovaina, repressing the oaths of potvaliant skippers, putting her finger to her lips when a bald assertion was imminent, said impressively:
“That swears don’t go! What you think? To give bad name my good house?”
Only when old-timers were gathered, between steamships, when the schooners came in a drove from the Paumotu atolls, and gold and silver rang on the table at all hours, there was little restraint.
With only one mail a month to disturb the monotony, and but trifling interest in anything north of the equator except prices of their commodities, these unrepressed rebels against the conventions and even the laws of the Occident must have their fling. On that camphor-wood chest had sat many a church-going woman and dignified man of Europe or America, resident for a month or longer in Tahiti, and shuddered at what they heard—shuddered and listened, eager to hear those curious incidents and astonishing opinions about life and affairs, and to mark the difference between this and their own countries. It was without even comment that people who at home or among the conventions would be shocked at the subjects or their treatment, in these islands listened thrilled or chucklingly to stories as naked as the children. Double entendre is caviar to the average man and woman of Tahiti, who call the unshrouded spade by its aboriginal name. The Tahitians were ever thus, and the French have not sought to correct their ways. I heard Atupu, one of the girls of the hotel, in a Rabelaisian passage of wit the while she opened Seattle beer for thirsty Britishers, old residents, traders, and planters. One could not publish the phrases if one could translate them.
Lovaina, in her bed just off the porch, was laughing at the retorts of Atupu, who by her native knowledge of the tongue was discomfiting the roisterers, who spoke it haltingly. I heard an apt interjection on the part of the proprietress which set them all roaring, and so lowered their self-esteem that they left summarily.
One day when I was hurrying off to swim in the lagoon, I asked Lovaina to guard a considerable sum of money in bank-notes. She assented readily, but when several days later I mentioned the money she struck her head in alarm. She thought and thought, but could not remember in what safe place she had hidden the paper francs.
“My God! Brien,” she said in desperation, “all time I jus’ like that crazee way. One time one engineer big steamship come here, he ask me keep two thousan’ dollar for him. I busy jus’ like always, an’ I throw behin’ that couch I sit on. My God! he come back I fore-get where I put. One day we look hard. I suffer turribil, but the nex’ day I move couch and find money. Was n’t that funny?”
I suggested we try the couch again, but though we turned up a number of lost odds and ends, it was not the cache of my funds. By way of cheering her, I ordered a rum punch, and when she went to crack the ice, a gleam of remembrance came to her, and, lo! my money was found in the reserve butter supply in the refrigerator, where she had artfully placed it out of harm’s way. It was quite greasy, but intact.
The first breakfast at the Tiare began at 6:30, but lingered for several hours. It was of fruit and coffee and bread; papayas, bananas, oranges, pineapples, and alligator-pears, which latter the French call avocats, the Mexicans ahuacatl, and were brought here from the West Indies. To this breakfast male guests dropped in from the bath in pajamas, but the déjeuner à la fourchette, or second breakfast at eleven, was more formal, and of four courses, fish, bacon and eggs, curry and rice, tongues and sounds, beefsteak and potatoes, feis, roast beef or mutton, sucking pig, and cabbage or sauer-kraut. For dessert there was sponge- or cocoanut-cake. All business in Papeete opened at seven o’clock and closed at eleven, to reopen from one until five. Dinner at half-past six o’clock was a repetition of the late breakfast except that a vegetable or cabbage soup was also served.
Two Chinese youths, To Sen and Hon Son, were the regular waiters, but were supplemented by Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Akura, Tetua, Maru, and Juillet, all Tahitian girls or young women who had a mixed status of domestics, friends, kinfolk, visitors, and hetairae, the latter largely in the sense of entertainers. I doubt if they were paid more than a trifle, and they were from the country districts or near-by islands, moths drawn by the flame of the town to soar in its feverish heat, to singe their wings, and to grow old before their time, or to grasp the opportunity to satiate their thirst for foreign luxuries by semi-permanent alliances with whites.
Lovaina’s girls! How their memory must survive with the guests of the Tiare Hotel! One read of them in every book of travel encompassing Tahiti. One heard of them from every man who had dropped upon this beach. Once in Mukden, Manchuria, I sat up half the night while the American consul and a globe-trotter painted for me the portraits of Lovaina’s girls.
I was atop a disorderly camel named Mark Twain nosing about the Sphinx when my companion remarked that that stony-faced lady looked a good deal like Temanu of Lovaina’s. Then I had to have the whole story of Lovaina and her household. I have heard it away from Tahiti a dozen times and always different.
Doubtless, in the dozen years the gentle Lovaina ministered to the needs of travelers and residents, many girls came and went in her house. Some have married, and some have gone away without a ring, but all have been made much of by those they served, and have lived gayly and by the way.
Lovaina, herself, said to me:
“You know those girl’, they go ruin. That girl you see here few minutes ago I bring her up just like Christian; be good, be true, do her prayers, make her soul all right. Then I go San Francisco. What you think? When I come back she ruin. ’Most break my heart. That man he come to me, he say: ‘Lovaina, I take good care that girl. I love her.’ That girl with him now. She happy, got plenty dress, plenty best to eat, and nice buggy. I tell you, I give up trying save those girl’. I think they like ruin best. I turn my back—they ruin.”
Iromea was the sturdy veteran of the corps. Tall, handsome, straight, mother of four children, obliging, wise in the way of the white, herself all native.
“And the babies?” I inquired.
“They all scatter. Some in country; some different place,” answered Iromea, who ran from English to French to Tahitian, but of course not with the ease of Lovaina, for that great heart knew many of the cities of her father’s land, was educated in needlework style, and with a little dab of Yankee culture, now fast disappearing as she grew older. One marked that tendency to reversion to the native type and ways among many islanders who had been superficially coated with civilization, but whom environment and heredity claim inexorably.
Iromea was thirty years old. She had been loved by many white men, men of distinction here; sea-rovers, merchants, and lotus-eaters, writers, painters, and wastrels.
Juillet, whose native name was Tiurai, helped old Madame Rose to care for the rooms at the Tiare. She was thirteen years old, willowy, with a beautiful, smiling face, and two long, black plaits. Though innocent, almost artless, in appearance, she was an arch coquette, and flirted with old and young. One day a turkey that shared the back yard with two automobiles, a horse, three carriages, several dogs, ten cats, and forty chickens, disappeared. Juillet was sent to find the turkey. She was gone four days, and came back with a brilliant new gown. She brought with her the turkey, which she said she had been trying to drive back all the four days.
Juillet was named for the month of July. Her mother was the cook of a governor when she was born on the fourteenth of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile, and the governor named her for the month. She was also named Nohorae, and noho means to be naked and rae forehead. Juillet had a high forehead.
Lovaina pointed out to me the man who had taken away her favorite helper. He was about forty years old, tall, angular, sharp-nosed, with gold eyeglasses. I would have expected to meet him in the vestry of a church or to have been asked by him at a mission if I were saved, but in Tahiti he had gone the way of all flesh. His voice had the timbre of the preacher. He had come to the hotel in an expensive, new automobile to fetch cooked food for himself and Ruiné.
“Seven or eight leper that man support,” said Lovaina to me. “They die for him, he so good to them. He help everybodee. He give them leper the Bible, and sometime he go read them.”
It would be the Song of Solomon he would read to Ruiné. She had red hair, red black or black red, a not unusual color in Tahiti, and her eyes had a glint of red in their brown. She was exquisite in her silken peignoir, a wreath of scarlet hibiscus-flowers on her head, and a string of gorgeous baroque pearls about her rounded neck.
My room at the Tiare was in the upper story of an old house that sat alone in the back garden, among the domestics, automobiles, carriages, horses, pigs, and fowls. The house had wide verandas all about it, and the stairway outside. A few nights after I had arrived in Tahiti I was writing letters on the piazza, the length of the room away from the stairs. I had a lamp on my table, and the noise of my type-writer hushed the sounds of any one entering the apartment. It was about ten o’clock, and between sentences I looked at the night. The stars were in coruscating masses, the riches of the heavens disclosed as only at such a cloudless hour in this southern hemisphere, the Milky Way showing ten thousand gleaming members of the galaxy that are hidden in our skies. I thought of those happy mariners who first sailed their small, wooden ships into these mysterious seas, and first of our race, saw this strangely brilliant macrocosm, and appreciated it for its marvels and its differences from their own bleaker, Western vault.
There were no doors in the openings into my room from the verandas, but hangings of gorgeous scarlet calico, pareus, kept out the blazing sun, and lent a little privacy at night. All the furniture was a chair, a dressing-table, and two large beds, canopied with mosquito-nets, evidently provided for a double lodging if needed.
As I finished my letters twenty feet away, a Tahitian girl parted the farther curtain nearest the stairway, and slipped into the room with the silence of the accustomed barefooted. Imagine her in her gayest gown of rose color, a garland of hinano-flowers on her glossy head, her tawny hair in two plaits to her unconfined waist, and her eyes shining with the spirit of her quest!
She looked through the room to where I sat in the semi-obscurity, and then knelt down by the first bed, and waited. I gazed again at the starry heavens, and, stepping over the threshold, entered the chamber, lamp in hand. I undressed leisurely, and putting about me the pareu Lovaina had given me, I threw the light upon the two beds to make my nightly choice. I surveyed them both critically, but the one nearest to me having the netting arranged for entrance, I selected it, and setting the lamp upon the dresser, extinguished it, groped to the bed in darkness, and lay down upon the coverless sheet. A few minutes I stayed awake going over the happenings of the day, and fell asleep in joyful mood that I was in the island I had sought so long in desire and dream. I knew nothing of my visitor, for she had made no audible sound, and the shadows had hidden her.
At breakfast the next morning I was waited on by Atupu, the beauty. Her face was tear-stained, and a deep weariness was upon her. She regarded me with a glance of mixed anger and hurt.
“Vous etes faché avec moi?” she inquired accusingly.
“I angry with you?” I repeated. “Why what have I done to show it?”
And then she told me of her visit and vigil. Seeing me alone in Tahiti, and kind-hearted, she said, she had thought to tell me of the Tahitian heart and the old ways of the land. She had robed, perfumed, and adorned herself, and entered my sleeping-place, as she said was the wont of Tahitian girls. I had certainly heard her enter, and seen her kneel to await my greeting, and if not then, I had seen her plainly when I lifted the lamp, for the light had streamed full upon her. She had remained there upon the floor half an hour until my audible breathing had compelled her to believe against her will that I was asleep. Then she had fled and wept the night in humiliation. Never in her young life had such a horror afflicted her.
I was stunned, and could only reiterate that I had not known of her presence, and with a trinket from my pocket I dried her tears.
Rupert Brooke in a letter to a friend in England drew a little etching of our lodging:
I am in a hovel at the back of my hotel, and contemplate the yard. The extraordinary life of the place flows round and near my room—for here no one, man or woman, scruples to come through one’s room at any moment, if it happens to be a shortcut. By day nothing much happens in the yard—except when a horse tried to eat a hen, the other afternoon. But by night, after ten, it is filled with flitting figures of girls, with wreaths of white flowers, keeping assignations.... It is all—all Papeete—like a Renaissance Italy with the venom taken out, No, simpler, light-come and light-go, passionate and forgetful, like children, and all the time South Pacific, that is to say unmalicious and good-tempered.
When a steamship was in port the Tiare was a hurly-burly. Perhaps forty or even a hundred extra patrons came for meals or drinks. It was amusing to hear their uncomprehending anger at their failure to obtain quick service or even a smile by their accustomed manner toward dark peoples. The British, who were the majority of the travelers, have a cold, autocratic attitude toward all who wait upon them, but especially toward those of the colored races. In Tahiti they suffered utter dismay, because Tahitians know no servitude and pay no attention to sharp words.
I saw a red-faced woman giving an order for apéritifs to To Sen, the Chinese waiter.
“Two old-fashioned gin cocktails,” she iterated. “You savee, gin and bitters? Be sure it’s Angostura, and lemon and soda, and two Manhattans with rye whisky. Hurry along now! Old-fashioned, remember!”
In ten minutes Temanu came for the order. To Sen knew no English, and Temanu only, “Yais, ma darleeng,” and “Whatnahell?”
“Spik Furanche?” she begged.
“Oui, oui!” said the red-faced lady. “Dooze cocktail! Vous savez cocktail, à la mode des ancients? Gin, oon dash bittair, lem’ et soda!”
“Mais, madame, douze cocktail!” and the half-caste Chinese girl held up all her fingers and added two more. “Vous n’êtes que quatre ici! Quatre cocktails, n’est-ce pas?”
“Dooze gin, dooze Manhattan? My heavens! They ought to understand my French in this out-of-the-way place when they do in Paris. Listen! Dooze is two in French,” and she held up two pudgy fingers. But Temanu was gone and returned with four cocktails made after her own liking.
All the girls, Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Maru, Tetua, and Mme. Rose and Mama-Maru, helped in the service, some beginning with shoes and stockings, but soon slipping them off as the crowd grew and their feet became weary. Lovaina herself moved happily about the salle-à-manger telling her friends that she was a grandmother. A letter had given the information that her daughter had a child. She was a doting parent, and we all must toast the newborn. Two grave professors of the University of California, ichthyologists or entomologists, sat entranced at the unconventionality of the scene, drinking vin ordinaire and gazing at the Tahitian girls, or eating breadfruit, raw fish, and taro, as if they were on Mars and did not know how they got there.
I saw an entry in Lovaina’s day-book on the table:
“Germani to Fany 3 feathers.”
This was a charge made by Atupu against a Dane for three cocktails. He took his meals at Mme. Klopfer’s restaurant. Her first name is Fanny, and Atupu thinks all men not English, French, or Americans, are Germans; so she identified the Dane as the German who went to Fanny’s for his meals.
Lovaina said to me:
“I hear you look one house that maybe you rent. You don’t get wise if you rent from that French woman. I don’t say nothing about her, but you know her tongue? So sharp jus’ like knife. All time she have trouble. Can’t rent her house so sharp. Some artist he rent; she take box, peep over see what he do jus’ because he have some girl. Nobody talk her down. No, I take back. Jus’ one French woman who know to swear turribil. This swear woman she call her turribil name and say, ‘Everybody don’t know you was convict in Noumea for killing one man for money.’ That turribil talk, and she jus’ fell down. Good for her, I think.”
Lovaina seldom rode in her automobile, which she kept primarily for renting to guests for country tours. She had had for years a carriage, a surrey, drawn by one horse, which had grown old and rickety with the vehicle. The driver was a mute, Vava, his name meaning dumb in Tahitian, and the English and Americans called him the Dummy. He was attached to Lovaina as a child to his mother—a wayward, jealous, cloudy-minded child, who almost daily broke into fits of anger over incidents misunderstood by his groping mentality, and because of his incommunicable feelings. The hotel was in a fearsome uproar when Vava fell into a tantrum, women patrons afraid of his possible actions and men threatening to club him into a mild frame of mind. I doubt if any one there could have subdued him physically, for he was a thick-bodied man in his thirties, with a stamina and a strength incredibly developed. I had seen him once lift over a fence a barrel of flour, two hundred pounds in weight, and without full effort. His skin was very dark, his facial expression one of ire and frustration, but of conscious superiority to all about him. He had had no aids to overcome his natal infirmity of deafness and consequent dumbness, none of the educational assistance modern science lends these unfortunates, no finger alphabet, or even another inarticulate for sympathy. He was like the mutes of history, of courts and romances, condemned to suffer in silence the humor and contempt of all about him, though he felt himself better than they in body and in the understanding of things, which he could not make them know. This repression made him often like a wild beast, though mostly he was half-clown and half-infant in his conduct. He had a gift of mimicry incomparably finer than any professional’s I knew of. This, with his gestures, stood him instead of speech. A certain haughty English woman whose elaborate hats in an island where women were hatless, or wore simple, native weaves, were noted atrocities, and whose chin was almost nil, kept the carriage and me waiting for breakfast while she primped in her lodging. The Dummy uttered one of his abortive sounds, much like that of an angry puma, contorted his face, and put his hand above his head, so that I had a very vivid suggestion of the lady, her sloping chin and her hat, at which all Papeete laughed. Vava’s gesticulations and grimaces were unerring cartoons without paper or ink. If one could have seen him draw one-self, one’s pride would have tumbled. He saw the most ridiculous aspect of one. His indication of Lovaina’s figure made one shriek, and the governor would have sentenced him for lese-majesty had he seen himself taken off. The sounds he made in which he greeted any one he liked, or in anger, were terrible, dismaying. They; must have been those made by our ancestors, the first primates, when they began the struggle toward intelligent language. Vava’s sounds were as the muttering of an ape, deep in his throat, or, when he was roused, high and shrill, like the cry of a rabbit when the hound seizes it. He could make Lovaina know anything he wanted to, and she could direct him to do anything she wished. In that house of mirth, brightness, and laughter, he was as a cunning and, at times, hateful jester, feared by the Tahitians, and, indeed, to whites a shadowy skeleton at the feast, a thing of indescribable possibilities. I knew him, he liked me, and I drew from him by motions and expressions some measure of his feelings and sufferings. But I, too, occasionally, shuddered at the animal cries and frightful grimaces wrung from him in beating down his soul bent on murder.
Lovaina was a spendthrift, giving money liberally to relatives, lending it to improvident borrowers, and dispensing it with open hands when she had it, though always herself in debt. Yet she liked to make money, and to have her hotel filled with tourists who patronized her little bar or drank at meals other wines than the excellent Bordeaux, white or red, which was free with food. Most she loved the appearance of prosperity, the crowding of casual voyagers on steamer-days, the visit of war-ships, the sound of music in her parlor, the rustling of dancers, and the laughter and excitement when the maids were busied carrying champagne and cheaper drinks to the verandas.
I saw her at her best when El Presidente Sarmiento, an Argentine training-ship, came to port with a hundred cadets. A madness then possessed the girls of Tahiti.
Forsaking their old loves or those of the moment, they threw themselves into the arms of the visitors, determined on conquest. The quays where the launches of the Sarmiento landed their passengers, and the streets about the saloons, restaurants, and theaters, were thronged with the fairest and gayest girls of the island. They poured in from the country to share in the lovemaking. The cafés were filled with dancing and singing crowds, the volatile Argentineans matching the Tahitians in abandon and ardor.
Accordions, violins, guitars, and mandolins were played everywhere. The scores of public automobiles were engaged by joyous parties who sallied to the rural resorts, each Juan with his vahine. Mostly unable to exchange a word, they were kissing and embracing in their seats. The ship had been there a year before, and many of the men were hunting former sweethearts. They found that very difficult, as they had not accurate descriptions.
“A beauty named Atupu,” or “A black-eyed girl?” They had no aid among the girls they interrogated.
“Why bother with some one who may be dead when we are here?” they asked. And Juan listened to the sirens and rested content.
At Lovaina’s there were seventy to dinner. Captain and officers were cheek by jowl with gunners and plain sailors. The veranda was jammed with tables, corks hitting the ceiling, glasses clinking, and Spanish, French, English, and Tahitian confused in the chatter and the shouts of To Sen, Hon Son, the maids, and a dozen friends of the hostess who always came at such times to share the glory of the service.
Lovaina was at the serving-table with volunteers cutting cakes and taking the money. The parlor, with its red and blue plush chairs, was filled with Argentineans playing the piano and singing songs of their country. Suddenly Lovaina discovered that some one had stolen the album of portraits from the piano-top. These were of her family, and of notable visitors who had written grateful notes after their return home, and sent their pictures to her. Professor Hart, teacher of English aboard the Sarmiento, was asked to find the thief, and he promised that he would have the ship searched.
Lovaina lamented her loss, but counted her sovereigns. The Argentineans had English gold, and Lovaina passed the shining, new pieces from one hand to the other, enjoying their glitter and sound. She liked to play with coins, and often amused herself as did the king in the blackbird-pie melody.
“My God!” said Lovaina, as she pulled me down to her bench and rubbed my back, “that Argentina is good country! Forty dollars lime squash by himself.” She opened her purse, and poured out more gold. With it fell a cloth medallion, red letters on white flannel, “The Apostleship of Prayer in League with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
“I find that on the floor two day’ ’go,” said Lovaina, “and I put it in purse to see if good luck. What you think? Argentinas come in nex’ day. I don’ know, but that thing is good to me. See those bottle’ champagne goin’ in?”
Perhaps I shall carry longer than any other memory of Tahiti that of the endearing nature, the honest heart, and the laughing, starry eyes of Lovaina, with a tiarè-blossom over her ear, or a chaplet of those flowers upon her head, as she sat on her throne behind the serving-table, and I on the camphor-wood chest.
Chapter V
The Parc de Bougainville—Ivan Stroganoff—He tells me the history of Tahiti—He berates the Tahitians—Wants me to start a newspaper.
In the parc de Bougainville I sat down on a bench on which was an old European. He was reading a tattered number of “Simplicissimus,” and held the paper close to his watery eyes. I said, “Good morning” and he replied in fluent though accented English.
His appearance was eccentric. He was stout, and with a rough, white beard all over his face and neck, and even on his chest. He wore a frock coat and a large cow-boy hat of white felt. His sockless feet were in old base-ball shoes of “eelskin,” which were of the exact color of his coat, a dull green, like moldy, dried peas. Apparently the coat was his only garment; but it was capacious, and came almost to his knobby knees. Missing buttons down its front were replaced by bits of cord or rope. The pockets were stuffed with papers, mangos, and a hunk of bread. A stump of lead-pencil was behind his ear. His hair, a dusty white, met the frayed collar of the coat, and through the temporary gaps which he made in its length to cool his body, I saw it like a gnarled and mossy tree. His hands were grimy and his nails black-edged, but there was intellect in his eye, and a broken force in his huddled, loosed attitude. He was not decrepit, or with a trace of humility, but had the ease of the philosopher and also his detachment. It was plain he did the best he could with his garb, and was entirely undisturbed, and perhaps even unmindful, of its ludicrousness. He was as serene as Diogenes must have been when he crawled naked from his tub into the sun.
We talked first of the horses in the lagoon a dozen yards from us, their grooms or their owners submerging them, and squatting on the ground to chat as the horses wallowed willingly in five feet of salt water. We agreed that the Tahitians were as bad drivers as the Chinese, and that they were, wittingly or unwittingly, cruel to their beasts of burden. This led to a discussion of native traits, and he was caustic in his castigation of the Tahitians. He asked me my name and what brought me to Tahiti; and when, wanting to be as honest-spoken as he, I said, “Romance, adventure,” he burst out that I was crazy.
“I have been here seventeen years,” he said bitterly—“me, Ivan Stroganoff, who was once happy as secretary to the governor of Irkutsk! I was better off when I was on the Merrimac fighting the Monitor, or with Mosby, the guerilla, than I am in this accursed island. I think a man is mad who can leave Tahiti and stays here. I wish I could go away. I would like to die elsewhere. I am eighty years old, I starve here, and I sleep in a chicken-coop in the suburbs.”
“You are lodged exactly as was Charlie Stoddard, who wrote ‘South Sea Idylls,’ ” I interposed.
“They have lied always, those writers about Tahiti,” said Ivan Stroganoff. “Melville, Loti, Moerenhout, Pallander, your Stevenson,—I don’t know that Stoddard,—all are meretricious, with their pomp of words and no truth. I have comparisons to make with other nations. I am more than sixty years a traveler, and I am here seventeen years without cessation, in hell all the time.”
“You Russians always like the French. How about their achievements here?” I questioned, hoping to lift his shade of melancholy.
“The French?” he repeated. “They are brigands and weak governors. They have been in Tahiti four generations. Do you want to know how they got hold here? A monarchy, a foolish Louis, sent a marine savant and soldier named Dumont D’Urville to the South Seas with the casual orders:
“ ‘D’apprivoiser les hommes, et de rendre les femmes un peu plus sauvages;’ to tame the men and make the women a little more savage. The French did both, and took all of this part of the world they could find unseized by Europe, and tamable, at not too great a shedding of French blood. They said that it was their duty to restore Temoana his kingdom in the Marquesas Islands, eight hundred miles from here, northward, Temoana had been a singer of psalms at the Protestant mission in his valley of Tai-o-hae, in the island of Nukahiva, a victim of shanghaiers, a cook on a whaler, a tattooed man in English penny shows, a repatriate, a protege of the Catholic archbishop of the Marquesans, and finally, through the influence of the Roman church, a king. He worked damned hard for the French flag and the church, and the generous colonial bureau of France paid his widow a pension of ten dollars a month until she died of melancholy among the nuns. I knew her and I knew men who knew him. He was given a gorgeous uniform of gold lace by his promoters, which I think killed him, though when he sweated, he would strip to his handsomely marked skin and sit naked in the breeze. The queen never wore more than a diaper or a gown.
“With the Marquesas Islands taken, the French warships came to Tahiti. French Catholic priests had been deported from here because the Protestants were already in possession, and objected to competition, saying that the priests were children of Beelzebub, and taught false doctrines and morals. The Queen of Tahiti, whose dynasty the Protestant missionaries had created, advised the pope’s men to seek a heathen people not already worshiping the true God. The zealous priests who had come with explicit commands to found a mission in Tahiti, launched the curse of Rome upon the king, the Protestant ministers, and especially upon Mr. Pritchard, the British consul and the queen’s physician and spiritual adviser.
“Pritchard had the interests of England and the Lord at heart, and his whispers in the queen’s ear sent the earnest priests aboard a ship bound for a distant port. They complained, and the French admiral then arrived and pointed his guns at the palace and the Protestant mission, and demanded thirty thousand dollars for the insult to the French flag; and for the jibe at the pope, the matching of every Protestant church in the islands, by a Catholic edifice. The queen had a panic and fled to Moorea in a canoe. The admiral then put Consul Pritchard in jail for ten days, and after chastening his mood, put him on an English ship at sea homeward bound. France and England were showing their teeth at each other over more important differences, which ended in a revolution in Paris and a change of kings, so that the admiral had his way. The queen came back, the priests established their mission and their churches, and the Tahitians with any blood in them went to war again. The French built forts about the island, and killed off with their guns all the natives they could get sight of. Then they took all the other islands around here that England didn’t have, declared Tahiti had to be a protectorate in 1843, and in 1880 gave King Pomaré Fifth twelve thousand dollars a year to let them annex his kingdom. You see, after all, his crown was made by the British puritans, and taken from him by the French or Romish Church.”
The aged Russian laughed in his huge whiskers. He fished in the rear of his frock and produced the stump of a cigar, for which I yielded a match.
“I found that on the steps of the Roman Catholic bishop’s carriage, which was standing near here an hour ago,” he said. “They’ll tell you that you will burn in hell; but they smoke here, and good Havana tobacco.”
“I think it’s a pity the Tahitians weren’t left alone,” I asserted.
He gave me a look such as Diogenes might have given the man who stood in his sunlight. He lit his cigar-end, puffed it diligently for a minute, and then said arbitrarily:
“The Tahitian is, first, a coward, afraid to fight the white; but if he can, in a group or by secret, kill or hurt you, he will. He is treacherous, and the more he pretends to be your friend, the more he connives to cheat you. I should have said first of all that he is lazy, but that is not to be disputed. He was corrupt to begin with, and religion accentuates every evil passion in him. He is a profound hypocrite, and yet a puritan for observance of the ceremonies and interdictions of his faith. He has more guile than a Japanese guide, and in land deals can skin a Moscow Jew. He will sell you land and get the money, and later prove that his father or brother is the real owner, and that relation will do the same, and you will pay several times for the same land. In the Paumotus, where the missionaries are like a swarm of gnats, this deception is threefold as bad.”
“But the Tahitians are at least generous,” I broke in.
Stroganoff combed his whiskers with a twig of the flamboyant tree under which we sat. He glared at me.
“Generous! If you have money they will overwhelm you with presents, looking for a double return; but if you are poor, they will treat you as dirt under their feet. I know, for I am poor, and I live among them. They are like those mina birds here, which will steal the button off your coat if you do not guard it.”
“Does not Christianity improve them?”
“No. The combats between Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons ended all hope of that. They are never sincere except when they become fanatics, and even then they never lose their native superstitions. Beliefs in the ghosts of Tahiti, the tupapau, ihoiho, and varua ino, are common to all of them.”
“My dear Mr. Stroganoff,” I expostulated, “your czars believed in icons. My grandmother believed in werewolves and banshees, and we burned blessed candles and sprinkled holy water in our houses on All Souls’ night to keep away demons. I have seen a clergyman, educated in Paris and Louvain, exorcising devils with bell, book, and candle in Maryland, in one of the oldest and proudest cities of the United States. I have seen the American Governor-General of the Philippines carrying a candle in a procession in honor of a mannikin from a shrine at Antipolo, near Manila. Why, I could tell you—”
“Please, please, let me talk,” Ivan Stroganoff interrupted. “What I say is true, nevertheless. The Tahitian has not one good quality. He is not to be compared with the American negro for any desirable trait.”
“Do you know the negro?” I asked.
The old man grunted. He relit his cigar, now only an inch long, and said:
“I was on the Merrimac when she fought the Monitor in two engagements. I was a sailor on other Confederate men-of-war. I was one of Colonel Mosby’s guerillas, and was wounded with them. I have lived thirteen years in the United States. I know the coon well. I fought to keep him a slave.”
“You are not an American?”
“I am a Russian, an anarchist once, and now I am for Root and Lodge, the stand-pats. I lived in Russia in its darkest days, under several czars, when your life was the forfeit of a wink. I was a lawyer there, a politician, an intrigant. I knew Bebel and Jaurès and the men before them. I lived in Germany many years, in France, in England, anywhere, everywhere. I first came to New York from Siberia. I was broke. The Civil War was on. There were agents of Lee and Jeff Davis in New York seeking sailors. They offered lots of money,—thousands,—and I went along, smuggled into the South by an underground road.”
Stroganoff threw away the shreds of tobacco, now a mere fiery wafer that threatened his mouth’s seine of silver strands. He put his hand in his Prince Albert and scratched his stomach.
“Mr. Stroganoff,” I queried, with a moral tide rising, “how could you join in a life-and-death issue like that of the Civil War, and kill men without hatred of their cause in your heart?”
He patted my shoulder.
“My dear young American,” he replied, “you join anything, even a sheriff’s posse, into which you are dragged, and have a bullet from the other side slit your ear, or a round shot bang against your deck, and you’ll soon convince yourself that you are in the right, or, anyway, that your adversary is a scoundrel. I handled a gun on the Merrimac in Hampton Roads when that cheese-box of a Monitor rattled her solid shot on our slippery sides. I was two years in that damned un-Civil War, and as I started on the Southern side, I stayed on it. I left the navy to go with John Mosby and burn houses. When the war was over, and I recovered from my wound, I went to ’Frisco and crossed to Siberia, and thus back to Moscow. No, I never was an exile in Siberia or in a Russian prison. I knew and worked for the leaders of the old Nihilists. I was with them till I knew them, and then I saw they were selfish and fakers. I knew the socialist chiefs in France and Germany, the fathers of the present movement there. I was red-hot for the cause until I knew them, and I quit.”
He sat meditatively for a few moments.
“I’m all but eighty years old,” the raider of the ’60’s continued sorrowfully. “I work now for Chinese, preparing their mail, their custom-house papers, and orders. I scrape along like a watch-dog in a sausage factory, getting sufficient to eat, but fearful all the time that the job will kill me. Most of the time I live a few kilometers from Papeete, toward Fa’a, and come in to town about steamer-time. I sleep in the chicken-coop or anywhere. I make about forty francs a month.” He stamped upon the grass. “I take it you are a journalist, and, do you know, what is needed here most is publicity. Graft permeates the whole scheme. Mind you, there are no secrets. You could not whisper anything to a cocoanut-tree but that the entire island would know it to-morrow. But there is no open publicity. Start a newspaper!”
“In what language?” I demanded, interested.
“Huh? That’s it. If in French, only the French would read it; and if in Tahitian, the French won’t touch it; and English is known only by the Chinese and the few British and Americans here. I hate that Tahitian. I don’t know a word of it after seventeen years. Say what you will, Roosevelt made them stand around. I liked him for many things; but, after all, the old order must stand, and Root is the boy for me. This fellow Wilson is a regular pedagogue.”
“But they have newspapers here?” I asked.
“Newspapers? They call them that.”
He stood up and searched in the pockets of his voluminous coat, which he opened. I saw that the lining was of silk, but now worn and torn. He brought out a roll of papers.
“Here is ‘La Tribune de Tahiti,’ ” he said. “It is edited by Jean Delpit, the lawyer whose offices are next to the Bellevue Restaurant. It’s a monthly, published in San Francisco, and has a brief summary of world events, besides articles on the administrative affairs of Tahiti. It’s against the Government. Then there’s ‘Le Liberal,’ a socialist journal, with Eugène Brunschwig editor, which pours hot shot into the Government. Look at his announcement! Do you understand that? He is fierce. He is an anarchist and wants to be bought up. Of course he is attacking from outside Tahiti.
“There is no newspaper printed here except the ‘Journal Officiel’ which, of course, is not a newspaper, but a gazette of governmental notices, etc. The Government has its own printing-office, but if these other, the ‘Tribune’ and the ‘Liberal,’ had establishments here, they would be raided and closed, for they would hardly be allowed to criticize the Government as harshly as they do. The ‘Tribune’ is in French and Tahitian, the ‘Liberal’ and the ‘Journal Officiel’ in French. One time it was recommended that the official paper might be more popular if it had some fiction for the natives, so they printed a translation of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ but everybody laughed, so it was dropped.
“The Mormons have the best paper here. It is a monthly, too. There is plenty need here for a fearless newspaper. The faults, weaknesses, and venality of the Government call for publicity, but I’m afraid the journalist might soon find himself in prison. You can do nothing. The fault is in this damned climate—la fièvre du corail. Paul Deschanel, senator of France, who wrote a book on this island without ever leaving his chair in Paris, says:
“In presence of the apparent facts one is forced to ask himself if there is not in the climate of this enchanted Tahiti, in the soft air that one breathes, a force sweet but invincible which at length penetrates the soul, enervates the will and enfeebles all sense of usefulness or right, or the least energy necessary to make them triumph.
“It is this spirit, without any harmony, bereft of all real cordiality between neighbors, of family and family, which one must find in the ambient air and which is called the coral fever.”
“It torments these French, former sailors or petty officials gone into trade or speculation, with delusions and ambitions of grandeur. There is no remedy. The King of Apamama said it all when he divided the whites into three classes, ‘First, him cheat a litty; second, him cheat plenty; and third, him cheat too much.’ ”
Stroganoff got on his feet, rubbed his knees to limber them, and began to move off slowly toward Fa’a, his place of abode.
“But, Mr. Stroganoff,” I called to him, “you said all that about the Tahitians, also.”
The Russian octogenarian drew an over-ripe mango from his skirt, and bit into it, with dire results to his whiskers and coat,—it should be eaten only in a bathtub,—and replied wearily:
“I except nobody here.”
Chapter VI
The Cercle Bougainville—Officialdom in Tahiti—My first visit to the Bougainville—Skippers and merchants—A song and a drink—The flavor of the South Seas—Rumors of war.
In Papeete there were two social clubs, the Cercle Bougainville and the Cercle Militaire. Even in Papeete, which has not half as many people as work in a certain building in New York, there is a bureaucracy, and the Cercle Militaire, in a park near the executive mansion on the rue de Rivoli, is its arcanum. Only members of the Government may belong, and a few others whose proposals must be stamped by the political powers. There is a garden, with a small library, but not many read in this climate, and the atmosphere of the Cercle Militaire was tedious. The governor himself and the black procureur de la Republique, born in Martinique, the secretary-general, naval officers, and the file of the upper office-holders frequent the shade of the mangos and the palms, but themselves confessed it deadly dull there. Bureaucracy is ever mediocre, ever jealous, and in Papeete the feuds among the whites were as bitter as in a monastery or convent. Every man crouched to leap over his fellow, if not by position, at least by acclaim. None dared to discuss political affairs openly, but nothing else was talked of. It was a round of whispered charges and recriminations and audible compliments. A few jolly chaps, doctors or naval lieutenants, passed the bottle and laughed at the others.
Every now and then a new governor supplanted the incumbent, who returned to France, and a few of the chiefer officials were changed; but the most of them were Tahitian French by birth or long residence. Republics are wretched managers of colonies, and monarchies brutal exploiters of subject peoples. Politics controlled in the South Seas, as in the Philippines, India, and Egypt. Precedence at public gatherings often caused hatreds. The procureur was second in rank here, the governor, of course, first, the secretary-general third, and the attorney-general fourth. When the secretary-general was not at functions, the wife of the governor must be handed in to dinner and dances by the negro procureur. This angered the British and American consuls and merchants, and the French inferior to him in social status, although the Martinique statesman was better educated and more cultivated in manners than they.
The indolence of mind and body that few escape in this soft, delicious air, the autocracy of the governing at such a distance from France, and the calls of Paris for the humble taxes of the Tahitians, robbed the island of any but the most pressing melioration. The business of government in these archipelagoes was bizarre comedy-drama, with Tartarins at the front of the stage, and a cursing or slumbrous audience.
Count Polonsky, a Russian-born Frenchman, appeared in court to answer to the charge of letting his automobile engine run when no one was in the car. He was fined a franc, which he would take from his pocket then and there, but must wait many days to pay, until circumlocution had its round, six weeks after the engine had been at fault. I was assessed two sous duty on a tooth-brush. I reached for the coins.
“Mais, non” said the préposé de le douane, “pas maintenant. No hurry. We will inform you by post.”
These officials had pleasing manners, as do almost all Frenchmen, and though they uttered many sacrés against the home Government and that of these islands, they were fiercely chauvinistic toward foreigners, as are all nationals abroad where jingoism partakes of self-aggrandizement. The American consul, a new appointee, addressed the customs clerk in his only tongue, Iowan, and received no response. I spoke to him in French, and the préposé replied in mixed French and English, out of compliment to me. The consul was enraged, considering himself and the American eagle affronted. I interposed, but the customs-man answered coldly in English:
“This is a French possession, and French is the language, or Tahitian. I speak both. Why don’t you? You are supposedly an educated man.”
The Stars and Stripes were unfolded in a breeze of hot words that betrayed the consul’s belief in the préposé’s sinister ancestry and in eternal punishment. No entente cordiale could ever be cemented after that lingual blast.
The consuls all had honorary memberships in the Cercle Militaire, and none of them entered the Cercle Bougainville, it not being de rigueur. I had a carte d’invite personelle to that club, and there I went with roused curiosity to hear the other sides of questions already settled for me by the amiable officials and officers on the rue de Rivoli. I had been warned against the Cercle Bougainville by staid pensioners as being the resort of commoners and worse, of British and American ruffians, of French vulgarians, and of Chinese smugglers. This advice made a seductive advertisement of the club to me, anxious to know everything real and unveiled about the life here, and to find a contrast to the ennui of the official temple.
A consul said to me: “Look out for some of those gamblers in that Bougainville joint! They’ll skin you alive. They drink like conger-eels.”
M. Leboucher, my fellow-passenger on the Noa-Noa, sent me the card to the Jacobin resort, and I got in the habit of going there just before the meat breakfast and before dinner. I found that the warning of the aristocratic bureaucrats was of a piece with their philosophy and manners, hollow, hypocritical, and calculated to deny me the only real human companionship I could endure. From about eleven to one o’clock and from five until seven, and in the evenings, the Cercle Bougainville held more interesting and merry white skins than the remainder of Tahiti. Merchants and managers of enterprises and shops, skippers of the schooners that comb the Dangerous Archipelago and the dark Marquesas for pearl and shell and copra, vanilla- and pearl-buyers, planters, and lesser bureaucrats, idlers or retired adventurers living in Tahiti, and tourists made the club for a few hours a day a polyglot exchange of current topics between man and man, a place of initiation and of judgment of business deals, a precious refuge against smug bores and a sanctuary for refreshment of body and soul with cooling drinks. Naturally, every one played cards, dominoes, or dice for the honor of signing the chits, and it goes without saying that one might roar out an oath against the Government and go unscathed. Even in the Bougainville lines were drawn; only heads of commercial affairs were admitted. It was bourgeois absolutely, but bosses could not imbibe and play freely in the presence of their employees whom they might have to reprimand severely for bad habits, nor scold them for inattention to trade when their employers spent precious hours at écarté or razzle-dazzle.
The club was within fifty feet of the lagoon, close to the steamship quay, its broad verandas overlooking the fulgent reef and the quiet waters within it. In odd hours one might find Joseph, the steward, angling on the coral wall for the black and gold fish, and a shout from the balcony would bring him to the swift succor of a thirsty member. During the four hours before the late déjeuner and dinner, he had incessant work to answer the continuous calls.
When Joseph became overwhelmed with orders he summoned his family from secret quarters in the rear, and father, mother, and children squeezed, shook, and poured for the impatient crowd.
When the monthly mail between America and Australasia was in, few packs of cards were sold, for every one was busied with letters and orders for goods. But only three or four days a month were so disturbed, and for nearly four weeks of the month Papeete lolled at ease, with endless time for games and stimulants. Leisure, the most valuable coin of humanity in the tropics, was spent by white or brown in pleasure or idleness with a prodigality that would have made Samuel Smiles weep.
The entrance to the Cercle Bougainville was very plain, with no name-plate, as had the Militaire,—a mere hole in the front wall of Leboucher’s large furniture shop. One could be going along the street in full view of important and respectable people, and suddenly disappear. A few steep stairs, a quick turn, and one was on the broad balcony, with easy-chairs and firm tables, and bells to hand for Joseph’s ear.
In a room off the balcony there was a billiard-table, the cloth patched or missing in many spots, and with cues whose tips had long since succumbed to perpetual moisture. A few old French books were on a shelf, and a naughty review or two of Paris on a dusty table. Undoubtedly, this club had begun as a mariner’s association, and there was yet a decided flavor of the sea about it. Indeed, all Tahiti was of the sea, and all but the mass of natives who stayed in their little homes were at times sailors, and all whites passengers on long voyages. Everything paid tribute to the vast ocean, and all these men had an air of ships and the dangers of the waves.
Nautical almanacs, charts, and a barometer were conspicuous, and often were laid beside the social glasses for proof in hot arguments. Occasionally an old Chinese or two, financiers, pearl-dealers, labor bosses, or merchants, drained a glass of eau de vie and smoked a cigarette there. One sensed an atmosphere of mystery, of secret arrangements between traders, or hard endeavors for circumvention of competitors in the business of the dispersed islands of French Oceania.
A delightful incident enlivened my first visit, and gave me an acquaintance with a group of habitués, When I reached the balcony I saw a group of Frenchmen at a table who were singing at the top of their voices. I sat down at the farthest table and ordered a Dr. Funk.
I did not look at them, for I felt de trop; but suddenly I heard them humming the air of “John Brown’s Body,” and singing fugitive words.
“Grory, grory, harreruah!” came to my ears, and later, “Wayd’ ’un S’ut’ in le land de cottin.”
They were making fun of me I thought, and turned my head away. It would not do to get angry with half a dozen jovial Frenchmen.
“All Coons Look alike to Me,” I recognized, though they sang but fragments of the text.
Through a corner of my eye I saw them all anxiously staring at me; then one of the merrymakers came over to me. I had a fleeting thought of a row before he bowed low and said in English:
“If you please, we make good time, we sing your songs, and must be happy to drink with you.”
He announced himself as M. Edmond Brault, chief clerk of the office of the secretary-general, fresh-faced, glowing and with a soul for music and for joy. He was so smiling, so ingenuous, that to refuse him would have been rank discourtesy. I joined the group.
“I am twenty-eight times married this day,” said M. Brault, “and my friends and I make very happy.”
The good husband was rejoicing on his wedding anniversary, and I could but accept the champagne he ordered. “I am great satisfaction to drink you,” he said. “My friends drink my wife and me.”
We toasted his admirable wife, we toasted the two republics; Lafayette, Rochambeau, and Chateaubriand.
“Ah, le biftek!” said M. Leboucher.
We toasted Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and then we sang for an hour. M. Brault was the leading composer of Tahiti. He was the creator of Tahitian melodies, as Kappelmeister Berger was of Hawaiian. For our delectation Brault sang ten of his songs between toasts. I liked best “Le Bon Roi Pomare,” the words of one of the many stanzas being:
Il était un excellent roi
Dont on ne dit rien dans l’histoire,
Qui ne connaissait qu’une Loi:
Celle de chanter, rire, et boire.
Fervent disciple de Bacchus
Il glorifiait sa puissance,
Puis, sacrifiait à Venus
Les loisirs de son existence.
REFRAIN:
Toujours joyeux, d’humeur gauloise,
Et parfois même un peu grivoise
Le généreux Roi Pomarè
Par son peuple est fort regretté.
S’il avait eu de l’eloquence
Il aurait gouverné la France!
Mais nos regrets sont superflus;
Puisqu’il est mort, n’en parlons plus!
“Ah, he was a chic type, that last King of Tahiti,” said M. Brault, who had written so many praiseful, merry verses about him. “He would have a hula about him all the time. He loved the national dance. He would sit or lie and drink all day and night. He loved to see young people drink and enjoy themselves. Ah, those were gay times! Dancing the nights away. Every one crowned with flowers, and rum and champagne like the falls of Fautaua. The good king Pomaré would keep up the upaupa, the hula dance, for a a week at a time, until they were nearly all dead from drink and fatigue. Mon dieu! La vie est triste maintenant.”
Before we parted we sang the “Marseillaise” and the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Nobody knew the words, I least of any; so we la-la-la’d through it, and when we parted for luncheon, we went down the crooked stairway arm in arm, still giving forth snatches of “Le Bon Roi Pomaré” in honor of our host:
Mais, s’il aimait tant les plaisirs,
Les chants joyeux, la vie en rose,
Le plus ardent de ses désirs,
Pour lui la plus heureuse chose,
Fut toujours que l’humanité
Regnât au sein de son Royaume;
De même que l’Egalité
Sous son modeste toit de chaume.
Hallman, with whom I journeyed on the Noa-Noa, dropped into the Cercle Bougainville occasionally, but he was ordinarily too much occupied with his schemes of trade. Besides, he had only one absorbing vice other than business, and with merely wine and song to be found at the club, Hallman went there but seldom, and only to talk about pearl-shell, copra, and the profits of schooner voyages. However, through him I met another group who spoke English, and who were not of Latin blood. They were Llewellyn, an islander—Welsh and Tahitian; Landers, a New Zealander; Pincher, an Englishman; David, McHenry, and Brown, Americans; Count Polonsky, the Russo-Frenchman who was fined a franc; and several captains of vessels who sailed between Tahiti and the Pacific coast of the United States or in these latitudes.
The Noa-Noa was overdue from New Zealand, by way of Raratonga, and her tardiness was the chief subject of conversation at our first meeting. A hundred times a day was the semaphore on the hill spied at for the signal of the Noa-Noa’s sighting. High up on the expansive green slope which rises a few hundred feet behind the Tiare Hotel is a white pole, and on this are hung various objects which tell the people of Papeete that a vessel is within view of the ancient sentinel of the mount. An elaborate code in the houses of all persons of importance, and in all stores and clubs, interprets these symbols. The merchants depended to a considerable extent upon this monthly liner between San Francisco and Wellington and way ports, and all were interested in the mail and food supplies expected by the Noa-Noa. Cablegrams sent from any part of the world to New Zealand or San Francisco were forwarded by mail on these steamships. Tahiti was entirely cut off from the great continents except by vessel. There was no cable, and no wireless, on this island, nor even at the British island of Raratonga, two days’ steaming from Papeete. The steamships had wireless systems, and kept in communication with San Francisco or with New Zealand ports for a few days after departure.
There were many guesses at the cause of the delay.
“Nothing but war!” said the French post-office clerk who sat at another table, with his glass of Pernoud. “Germany and England have come to blows. Now that accursed nation of beer-swillers will get their lesson.”
The subject was seriously discussed, the armaments of the two powers quoted, and the certainty of Germany’s defeat predicted, the Frenchman asserting vehemently that France would aid England if necessary, or to get back Alsace-Lorraine. There were gatherings all over Papeete, the war rumor having been made an alleged certainty by some inexplicable communication to an unnamed merchant.
The natives hoped fervently that the war was between France and Germany, and that France would be defeated. After generations of rule by France, the vanquished still felt an aversion to their conquerors here, as in the Holy Land when Herod ruled.
“I hope France get his,” said a chief, aside, to me.
The mail’s delay upset all business. Letters closed on the day the liner was expected were reopened. For three days the girls at Lovaina’s had worn their best peignoirs, and several times donned shoes and stockings to go to the quay. Passengers for San Francisco who had packed their trunks had unpacked them. The air of expectancy which Papeete wore for a day or two before steamer-day had been so heated by postponement that nerves came to the surface.
Tahiti was a place of no exact knowledge. Few residents knew the names of the streets. Some of the larger business houses had no signs to indicate the firms’ names or what they sold. Hardly any one knew the names of the trees or the flowers or fishes or shells.
A story once told, even facts thoroughly well known, changed with each repetition. A month after an occurrence one might search in vain for the actuality. It was more difficult to learn truthful details than anywhere I had been. The French are niggardly of publications concerning Tahiti. An almanac once a year contained a few figures and facts of interest, but with no newspapers within thousands of miles, every person was his own journal, and prejudices and interest dictated all oral records.
McHenry hushed war reports to talk about Brown, an American merchant who had left the club a moment before, after a Bourbon straight alone at the bar. McHenry was a trader, mariner, adventurer, gambler, and boaster. Rough and ready, witty, profane, and obscene, he bubbled over with tales of reef and sea, of women and men he had met, of lawless tricks on natives, of storm and starvation, and of his claimed illicit loves. Loud-mouthed, bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped by a hundred sordid deeds, he must get the center of attention by any hazard.
“Brown’s purty stuck up now,” he said acridly. “I remember the time when he didn’t have a pot to cook in. He had thirty Chile dollars a month wages. We come on the beach the same day in the same ship. His shoes were busted out, and he was crazy to get money for a new girl he had. There was a Chink had eighteen tins of vanilla-beans worth about two hundred American dollars each. He got the Chink to believe he could handle the vanilla for him, and got hold of it, and then out by the vegetable garden Brown hit the poor devil of a Chink over the nut with a club.”
McHenry got up from the table, and with Llewellyn’s walking-stick showed exactly how the blow was struck. He brought down the cane so viciously against the edge of the table that he spilled our rum punches.
“Mac,” exclaimed Llewellyn, testily, as he shot him a hot glance from the melancholy eyes under his black thatch of brows, “behave yourself! You know you’re lying.”
McHenry laughed sourly, and went on:
“I was chums with Brown then, and when I caught up to him,—I was walkin’ behind them,—he asked me to see if the Chink was dead. I went back to where he had tumbled him. He was layin’ on his back in a kind o’ ditch, and he was white instead o’ yeller. He was white as Lyin’ Bill’s schooner. How would you ’a’ done? Well, to protect that dirty pup Brown, I covered him over with leaves from head to foot—big bread-fruit and cocoanut-leaves. He never showed up again, and Brown had the vanilla. That’s how he got his start, and, so help me God! I never got a franc from the business.”
There was venom in McHenry’s tone, and he looked at me, the newcomer, to see what impression he had made. The others said not a word of comment, and it may have been an often-told tale by him. He had emptied his glass of the potent Martinique rum four or five times.
“Was the Chinaman sure dead when you put the leaves over him?” I asked, influenced by his staring eyes.
McHenry grinned foully.
“Aye, man, you want too much,” he replied. “I say his face was white, and he was on his back in the marsh. If he was alive, the leaves didn’t finish him, and if he was croaked, it didn’t matter. I was obligin’ a friend. You’d have done as much.” He took up his glass and muttered dramatically, “A few leaves for a friend.”
I shuddered, but Landers leaned over the table and said to me, sotto voce:
“McHenry’s tellin’ his usual bloody lie. Brown got the vanilla all right, but what he did was to have the bloomin’ Chink consign it to him proper’, and not give him a receipt. Then he denied all knowledge of it, and it bein’ all the bleedin’ Chinaman had, he died of a broken heart—with maybe too many pipes of opium to help him on a bit. McHenry and Pincher are terrible liars. They call Pincher ‘Lyin’ Bill,’ though I ’d take his word in trade or about schooners any day.”
I had been introduced to a Doctor Funk by Count Polonsky, who told me it was made of a portion of absinthe, a dash of grenadine,—a syrup of the pomegranate fruit,—the juice of two limes, and half a pint of siphon water. Dr. Funk of Samoa, who had been a physician to Robert Louis Stevenson, had left the receipt for the concoction when he was a guest of the club. One paid half a franc for it, and it would restore self-respect and interest in one’s surroundings when even Tahiti rum failed.
“Zat was ze drink I mix for Paul Gauguin, ze peintre sauvage, here before he go to die in les îsles Marquises,” remarked Levy, the millionaire pearl-buyer, as he stood by the table to be introduced to me.
“Absinthe seul he general’ take,” said Joseph, the steward.
“I bid fifty thousand francs for one of Gauguin’s paintings in Paris last year,” Count Polonsky said as he claimed his game of écarté against Tati, the chief of Papara district. “I failed to get it, too. I bought many here for a few thousand francs each before that.”
“Blow me!” cried Pincher, the skipper of the Morning Star. ”’E was a bleedin’ ijit. I fetched ’im absinthe many a time in Atuona. ’E said Dr. Funk was a bloomin’ ass for inventin’ a drink that spoiled good Pernoud with water. ’E was a rare un. ’E was like Stevenson ’at wrote ‘Treasure Island.’ Comes into my pub in Taiohae in the Marquesas Islands did Stevenson off’n his little Casco, and says he, ‘’Ave ye any whisky,’ ’e says, ‘’at ’asn’t been watered? These South Seas appear to ’ave flooded every bloomin’ gallon,’ ’e says. This painter Gauguin wasn’t such good company as Stevenson, because ’e parleyvoud, but ’e was a bloody worker with ’is brushes at Atuona. ’E was cuttin’ wood or paintin’ all the time.”
“He was a damn’ fool,” said Hallman, who had come in to the Cercle to take away Captain Pincher. “I lived close to him at Atuona all the time he was there till he died. He was bughouse. I don’t know much about painting, but if you call that crazy stuff of Gauguin’s proper painting, then I’m a furbelowed clam.”
“Eh bien,” Count Polonsky said, with a smile of the man of superior knowledge, “he is the greatest painter of this period, and his pictures are bringing high prices now, and will bring the highest pretty soon. I have bought every one I could to hold for a raise.”
Polonsky was a study in sheeny hues. He was twenty-seven, his black and naturally curled hair was very thin, there were eight or nine teeth that answered no call from his meat, and he wore in his right eyesocket a round glass, with no rim or string, held by a puckering of cheek and brow, giving him a quizzical, stage-like stare, and twisting his nose into a ripple of tiny wrinkles. He weighed, say, one hundred pounds or less, was bent, but with a fresh complexion and active step. I saw him rise naked from his cot one morning, and the first thing he put on was the rimless monocle. The natives, who name every one, called him “Matatitiahoe,” “the one-windowed man.” He had journeyed about the world, poked into some queer places, and in Japan had himself tattooed. On his narrow chest he had a terrible legendary god of Nippon, and on his arms a cock and a skeleton, the latter with a fan and a lantern. On his belly was limned a nude woman. He had certain other decorations the fame of which had been bruited wide so that a keen curiosity existed to see them, and they were discussed in whispers by white femininity and with many “Aucs!” of astonishment by the brown. They were Pompeiian friezes in their unconventionality of subject and treatment.
Llewellyn, McHenry, David, and I accompanied the count to his residence on the outskirts of Papeete to taste a vintage of Burgundy he had sent him from Beaune. Like most modern houses in Tahiti, his was solely utilitarian, and was built by a former American consul. It exactly ministered to the comforts of a demanding European exquisite. The house was framed in wide verandas, and was in a magnificent grove of cocoanut-trees affording beauty and shade, with extensive fields of sugar-cane on the other side of the road, and a glimpse of the beach and lagoon a little distance away. A singing brook ran past the door. The bedrooms were large and open to every breeze, and the tables for dining and amusement mostly set upon the verandas.
Polonsky’s toilet-table was covered with gold boxes and bottles and brushes; scents and powders and pastes. If he moved out, Gaby de Lys might have moved in and lacked nothing. He was a boulevardier, his clothes from Paris, conforming not at all to the sartorial customs of Tahiti, and his varnished boots and alpine hat, with his saffron automobile, marked him as a person. In that he resembled Higby, an Englishman in Papeete, who wore the evening dress of London whenever a steamship came in, though it might be noon, and on the king’s birthday and other British feasts put it on when he awoke. He was the only man who went to dinner at the Tiare in the funeral garb of society. He said he was setting up a proper standard in Tahiti. It was suspected really that he was short of clothes, with perhaps only one or two cotton suits, and that when those were soiled he had to resort to full dress during the laundering.
Little sister guards her flock
About to plunge in
Photo by Bopp
While David and I inspected the house and grounds, McHenry and Llewellyn sat at the wine. Polonsky had a curious and wisely chosen household. His butler was a Javanese, his chef a Quan-tung Chinese, his valet a Japanese, his chambermaid a Martinique negress, and his chauffeur an American expert. These had nothing in common and could not ally themselves to cheat him, he said.
The haven of Papetoai, in Moorea
As I came back to the front veranda McHenry and Llewellyn were talking excitedly.
“I’ve had my old lady nineteen years,” said McHenry, boastfully, “and she wouldn’t speak to me if she met me on the streets of Papeete. She wouldn’t dare to in public until I gave her the high sign. You’re a bloody fool makin’ equals of the natives, and throwin’ away money on those cinema girls the way you do.”
This incensed Llewellyn, who was of chiefly Tahitian blood, and who claimed kings of Wales as his ancestors. Although extremely aristocratic in his attitude toward strangers, his native strain made him resent McHenry’s rascally arrogance as a reflection upon his mother’s race.
“Shut up, Mac!” he half shouted. “You talk too much. If it hadn’t been for that same old lady of yours, you’d have died of delirium-tremens or fallen into the sea long ago.”
“Aye,” said the trader, meditatively, “that vahine has saved my life, but I’m not goin’ to sacrifice my dignity as a white man. If ye let go everything, the damn’ natives’ll walk over ye, and ye’ll make nothin’ out o’ them.”
Lovaina had occasionally called me Dixey, and had explained that I was the “perfec’ im’ge” of a man of that name, and that he owned a little cutter which traded to Raiaroa, on which atoll he lived. I walked like him, was of the same size, and had the “same kin’ funny face.”
She piqued my curiosity, and so when I found him at the round table of the Polonsky-Llewellyn group at the Cercle Bougainville, I looked him over narrowly. His name was Dixon,—Lovaina never got a name right,—an Englishman, a wanderer, with an Eton schooling, short, solidly built, with a bluff jaw and a keen, blue eye. He was not good-looking. He had learned the nickname given me, and was in such a happy frame of mind that he ordered drinks for the club.
“I’m lucky to be here at all,” he said seriously. “I have a seven-ton cutter, and left the Paumotus four days ago for Papeete. We had eight tons of copra in the hold, filling it up within a foot of the hatch. Eight miles off Point Venus the night before last, at eleven o’clock, we hoped for a bit of wind to reach port by morning. It was calm, and we were all asleep but the man at the wheel, when a waterspout came right out of the clear sky,—so the steersman said,—and struck us hard. We were swamped in a minute. The water fell on us like your Niagara. Christ! We gave up for gone, all of us, the other five all kanakas. We heeled over until the deck was under water,—of course we’ve got no freeboard at all,—and suddenly a gale sprung up. We pulled in the canvas, but to no purpose. Under a bare pole we seemed every minute to be going under completely. We have no cabin, and all we could do was to lay flat on the deck in the water, and hold on to anything we could grab. The natives prayed, by God! They ’re Catholics, and they remembered it then. The mate wanted to throw the copra overboard. I was willing, but I said, ‘What for? We’re dead men, and it’ll do no good. She can’t stand up even empty.’ We stayed swamped that way all night, expecting to be drowned any minute, and I myself said to the Lord—I was a chorister once—that if I had done anything wrong in my life, I was sorry—”
“But you knew you had?” I interposed.
“Of course I did, but I wasn’t going to rub it in on myself in that fix. I knew He knew all about me. My father was a curate in Devon. Well, we pulled through all right, because here I am, and the copra’s on the dock. What do you think—the wind died away completely, and we had to sweep in to Papeete.”
I touched his glass with mine. He was very ingenuous, a four-square man.
“Did the prayers have anything to do with your pulling through and saving the copra?” I questioned, curious.
“I don’t know. I didn’t make any fixed promises. I was bloody well scared, and I meant what I said about being sorry. But that’s all gone. Let’s drink this up and have another. Joseph!”
Hélas! the waterspout did not harm my twin half so much as the rum-spout, which soon had him three sheets in the wind and his rudder unmanageable. When I went down the rue de Rivoli that night to the Cercle Militaire, he had drifted into the Cocoanut House, and was sitting on a fallen tree telling of the storm to a woman in a scarlet gown with a hibiscus-blossom in her hair. I got him by the arm, and with an expressed desire to know more of the details of the escape, steered him to the Annexe, where he had a room.
A good sort was Dixon. He had in the Paumotus a little store, a dark mother-girl of Raiaroa who waited for him, and a new baby. He had been only a year in the group. He referred to “my family” with honest pride.
The captains of the Lurline and the O. M. Kellogg were at the club. The Lurline was twenty-seven years old, and the Kellogg, too, high up in her teens, if not twenties. Their skippers were Americans, the Kellogg’s master as dark as a negro, burned by thirty years of tropical sun.
“I used to live in Hawaii in the eighties,” he said. “I used to pass the pipe there in those days. There’d be only one pipe among a dozen kanakas, and each had a draw or so in turn. They have that custom in the Marquesas, too, and so had the American Indians.”
I walked with the Kellogg’s skipper to his vessel, moored close to the quay in front of the club. He gave an order to the mate, who told him to go to sheol. The mate had been ashore.
“Come aboard,” cried the mate, “and I will knock your block off.”
The whole waterfront heard the challenge. Stores were deserted to witness the imminent fight.
The dark-faced captain ascended the gang-plank, and walked to the forecastle head, where the mate was directing the making taut a line.
“Now,” said the skipper, a foot from the mate, “knock!”
The mate hesitated. That would be a crime; he would go to jail and the captain would be delighted.
The master taunted him:
“Knock my block off! Touch my block, and I’ll whip you so your mother wouldn’t know you, you dirty, drunken, son of a sea-cook!”
The mate looked at him angrily, but uncertainly. He heard the laughter and the cheers of the bystanders on the quay and in the embowered street. He looked down at the deck, and he caught sight of a capstan-bar, which he gazed at longingly. Any blow would send him to prison, but why not for a sheep instead of a lamb?
He hesitated, and lifted his eyes to the black brow of the skipper, lowering within touch.
“Make fast your line about that cannon!” said the master, sharply.
The sailors waited joyfully for the fray, and the Raratonga stevedores on other vessels stopped their work. But nothing happened.
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the mate, and shouted the order to the men ashore. The captain regarded him balefully, muttered a few words, and returned to the club for a Dr. Funk. That medical man ranked here above Colonel Rickey, who invented the gin-rickey in America.
Herr Funk was better known in the Cercle Bougainville than Charcot or Lister or Darwin. The doctor part of the drink’s name made it seem almost like a prescription, and often, when amateurs sought to evade a second or third, the old-timers laughed at their fears of ill results, and said:
“That old Doctor Funk knew what he was about. Why, he kept people alive on that mixture. It’s like mother’s milk.”
Chapter VII
The Noa-Noa comes to port—Papeete en féte—Rare scene at the Tiare Hotel—The New Year celebrated—Excitement at the wharf—Battle of the Limes and Coal.
The Noa-Noa came in after many days of suspense, during which rumors and reports of war grew into circumstantial statements of engagements at sea and battles on land. A mysterious vessel was said to have slipped in at night with despatches for the governor. All was sensation and canard, on dit and oui dire, and all was proved false when the liner came through the passage in the reef. Nothing had happened to disturb the peace of nations, but a dock strike in Auckland had tied up the ship. The relief of mind of the people of Papeete caused a wave of joy to pass over them. Business men and officials, tourists who expected to leave for America and the outside world on the Noa-Noa, overflowed with evidence of their delight. The consuls of the powers met at the Cercle Militaire the governor, and laughed hectically at the absurd balloon of tittle-tattle which had been pricked by the Noa-Noa’s facts. There had been absolutely nothing to the rumors but the fears or the antipathies of nationals in Tahiti.
It was the holiday season, the New Year at hand, and, moreover, there was added cause for rejoicing in the safety of the Saint Michel, a French-owned inter-island steamship which had been missing six weeks. She had left one of the Paumotu atolls and failed to reach her next port, thirty miles away. Rumor had sent her to the bottom. She was a crank vessel, with a perpetual list, and a roll of twenty-five degrees in the quietest sea; the dread of all compelled by affairs to take passage on her.
“She’s sunk; rolled over too much, and turned turtle,” was the verdict at the Cercle Bougainville. Her agents had sent the Cholita, a small power schooner, to go over the Saint Michel’s course, and find trace of her, if possible. Imagine the excitement along the waterfront when, almost coincident with the sighting of the Noa-Noa, the Saint Michel appeared, pulled by the Cholita. Familiar faces of passengers appeared on her deck as she made fast to the quay, holding cigarettes as if they had waked up after a night in their own beds. The Cholita had found the Saint Michel at the Marquesas Islands, whither she had drifted after losing her rudder on a rock. After a month lying inert at the Marquesas, the Cholita had taken hold and dragged the crippled Saint back to Papeete.
The joy and surprise of the families and friends of the passengers and the crew must have the vent usual here, and what with the Noa-Noa’s crew of amateur sailors, firemen, and yachtsman, and six licensed captains, taking the places of the strikers, the town was filled with pleasure-seekers. A high mass of thanksgiving at the cathedral was followed by a day of explanations, anathemas upon the owners of the Saint Michel, and the striking labor-unions, and of music, dancing, and toasts.
New Year’s eve, two picture shows, hulas, and the festivities of the wedding of Cowan, the prize-fighter, brought in a throng from the districts to add to the Papeete population and the voyagers.
The streets were a blaze of colored gowns and flower-crowned girls and women. The quays were lined with singing and playing country folk. Small boats and canoes were arriving every few minutes during the afternoon with natives who preferred the water route to the Broom Road. Cowan was a favorite boxer, and shortly to face the noted Christchurch Kid, of Christchurch, New Zealand, whose fist was described on the bill-boards as “a rock thrown by a mighty slinger.” Cowan, a half-Polynesian, was beloved for his island blood, and was marrying into a Tahitian family of note and means. The nuptials at the church were preceded by a triumphal procession of the bride and groom in an automobile, with a score of other cars following, the entire party gorgeously adorned with wreaths,—hei in Tahitian,—and the vehicles lavishly decorated with sugar-cane and bamboo tassels. The band of the cinema led the entourage, and played a free choice of appropriate music, “Lohengrin” before the governor’s palace, and “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night” as they passed Lovaina’s. The company sang lustily, and toasts to the embracing couple were drunk generously from spouting champagne-bottles as the cortege circled the principal streets.
There was rare life at Lovaina’s, for besides all the diners in ordinary and extraordinary in the salle-à-manger, Stevens, the London stockbroker, had a retired table set for the American, British, and German consuls, and their wives. The highest two officials of France in this group, Messieurs, l’Inspecteurs des Colonies, were there, eating solemnly alone, as demanded by their exalted rank, and their mission of criticism. They glanced down often at their broad bosoms to see that their many orders were on straight, to note the admiration of lesser officialdom, and to make eyes at the women. Their long and profuse black beards were hidden by their napkins, which all Frenchmen of parts hereabouts tuck in their collars, and draw up to their mouths, a precaution which, when omitted, is seen to have been founded on an etiquette utilitarian and esthetic.
The company was complex. At a table opposite me sat the juge inferieur and the daughter of the Chinese cook at the Hotel Central, a smart, slender woman with burning eyes, and with them, in full uniform, were two French civil officials, who wore, as customary, clothes like soldiers. One unfamiliar with their regalia might mistake, as I did, a pharmacist for an admiral. Mary, the cook’s half-Tahitian daughter, was in elaborate European dress, with a gilded barret of baroque pearls in her copious, ebon tresses, and with red kid shoes buckled in silver and blister pearls.
The son of Prince Hinoe, who would have been the King of Tahiti had the dynasty continued to reign, had a dozen chums at a table, oafs from seventeen to twenty, and with the fish course they began to chant. The captain of the Saint Michel was with Woronick, the pearl-buyer, who had made the fearful trip to the Marquesas with him. There was Heezonorweelee, as the natives call the Honorable Walter Williams, the most famous dentist within five thousand miles, and the most distinguished white man of Tahiti; Landers; Polonsky; David; McHenry; Schlyter, the Swedish tailor; Jones and Mrs. Jones, the husband, head of a book company in Los Angeles; a Barbary Coast singer and her man; a demirep of Chicago and her loved one; three Tahitian youths with wreaths; the post-office manager, and with him the surgeon of the hospital; a notary’s clerk, the governor’s private secretary; the administrateur of the Marquesas Islands, Margaret, Lurline and Mathilde, Lena, and Lucy, lovely part-Tahitian girls who clerked in stores; the Otoman, chauffeur for Polonsky; English tourists; Nance, the California capitalist; and others.
Curses upon Saint Michel, threats of damage suits for fright and delay, laughable stories of the mistakes of the volunteer crew of the Noa-Noa; discussions of the price of copra, mingled with the chants of the native feasters and ribald tales. The Tiare girls, all color and sparkle, exchanged quips with the male diners, patted their shoulders, and gigglingly fought when they tried to take them into their laps.
In the open porch, Lovaina, gaily adorned, her feet bare, but a wreath of ferns on her head, sped the dishes and the wine. She kept the desserts before her and cut portions to suit the quality of her liking for each patron.
“Taporo e taata au ahu” said Atupu.
“The lime and the tailor,” that means, and identified Landers and Schlyter. Landers was the “lime” because a former partner of his establishment exported limes, and Landers succeeded to his nickname. Landers and Schlyter were good customers, so they got larger slices of dried-apple pie.
Chappe-Hall, being bidden farewell on his leaving for Auckland, was apostrophizing Tahiti in verse, all the stanzas ending in “And the glory of her eyes over all.” There were bumpers and more, and “Bottoms up,” until a slat-like American woman bounced off the veranda with her sixth course uneaten to complain to Lovaina that her hotel was no place for a Christian or a lady. Lovaina almost wept with astonishment and grief, but kept the champagne moving toward the Chappe-Hall table as fast as it could be cooled, meanwhile assuring the scandalized guest that nothing undecorous ever happened in the Tiare Hotel, but that it were better it did than that young men should go to evil resorts for their outbursts.
“My place respectable,” Lovaina said dignifiedly. “I don’ ’low no monkey bizeness. Drinkin’ wine custom of Tahiti. Make little fun, no harm. If they go that Cocoanut House, get in bad.”
Lovaina told me all about it. She was quite hurt at the aspersions upon her home, and entered the dining-room in a breathing spell to sit at my table, a rather unusual honor I deeply felt. I pledged my love for her in Pol Roger, but she would have nothing but water.
“I no drink these times,” she explained. “Maybe some day I do again. Make fat people too much bigger. That flat woman from ’Nited States, ain’t she funny? I think missionary.”
From the screened area in which the consuls dined with the broker one heard:
“Here’s to the king, God bless him!” “Hoch der Kaiser!” “Vive la Republique!” “The Stars and Stripes!” as the glasses were emptied by the consuls and their wives and host.
Lovaina had taken up the rug in the parlor, and a graphophone ground out the music for dancing. Ragtime records brought out the Otoman, a San Franciscan, bald and coatless. He took the floor with Mathilde, a chic, petite, and graceful half-caste, and they danced the maxixe. David glided with Margaret, Landers led out Lucy, and soon the room was filled with whirling couples. A score looked on and sipped champagne, the serving girls trying to fill the orders and lose no moment from flirtation. On the camphor-wood chest four were seated in two’s space.
When midnight tolled from the cathedral tower, there was an uncalled-for speech from a venerable traveler who apparently was not sure of the date or the exact nature of the fête:
“Fellow-exiles and natives bujus Teetee. We are gathered together this Fourth of July—”
Cries of “Altai” “Ce n’est-pas vrai!” “Shove in your high! It’s New Year!”
”—to cel’brate the annivers’ry of the death of that great man—”
Yells of “Sit down!” “Olalala!” “Aita maitai!” and the venerable orator took his seat. He was once a governor of a territory under President Harrison, and now lived off his pension, shaky, sans teeth, sans hair, but never sans speech.
The Englishmen and Americans clattered glasses and said “Happy New Year!” and the Tahitians: “Rupe-rupe tatou iti! I teienei matahiti api!” “Hurrah for all of us! Good cheer for the New Year!”
Monsieur Lontane, second in command of the police, arrived just in time to drink the bonne année. He executed a pas seul. He mimicked a great one of France. He drank champagne from a bottle, a clear four inches between its neck and his, and not a drop spilled.
Lovaina sat on her bench in the porch and marked down the debits:
| Fat face............ | 3 Roederer.......... |
| New Doctor.......... | 5 champag........... |
| Hair on nose........ | 2 champ............. |
| Willi............... | 4 pol.............. |
The electric lights went out. There was a dreadful flutter among the girls. Some one went to the piano and began to play, “Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot,” and the Americans and English sang, the French humming the air. The wine flattened in the glasses and open bottles, but no one cared. They gathered in the garden, where the perfume of the tiare scented the night, and the stars were a million lamps sublime in the sky. Song followed song, English and French, and when the lazy current pulsated again, the ball was over.
We walked to the beach, Nance and I.
“It’s hell how this place gets hold of you,” said Nance, who had shot pythons in Paraguay and had a yacht in Los Angeles harbor. “I dunno, it must be the cocoanuts or the breadfruit.”
Walking back alone through a by-path, I saw the old folks sitting on their verandas and the younger at dalliance in the many groves. Voices of girls called me:
“Haere me ne!” “Come to us!” “Hoere mai u nei ite po ia u nei!”
The Himene tatou Arearea of our Moorea expedition came from many windows, the accordions sweet and low, and the subdued chant in sympathy with the mellow hour. “The soft lasceevious stars leered from these velvet skies.”
Lovaina had gone to bed, but, with the lights on again, patrons of the prize-fight had dropped in. The Christchurch Kid had beaten Teaea, a native, the match being a preliminary clearing of the ground before the signal encounter with the bridegroom.
The glass doors of the salle-à-manger were broken in a playful scuffle between the whiskered doctor of the hospital, and Afa, the majordomo of the Tiare. The medical man ordered five bottles of champagne, and, putting them in his immense pockets, returned to his table and opened them all at once. He had them spouting about him while their fizz lasted, and then drank most of their contents. He then threw all the crockery of his table to the roadway, and Afa wrestled him into a better state, during which process the doors were smashed. When the bombilation became too fearful, Lovaina called out from her bed:
“Make smaller noise! Nobody is asleep!”
At two in the morning the gendarmes advised the last revelers to retire, and the Tiare became quiet. But Atupu slept in a little alcove by the bar, and any one in her favor had but to enter her chamber and pull her shapely leg to be served in case of dire need.
The incidents of the departure of the Noa-Noa that day for San Francisco will live in the annals of Papeete. Its calamitous happenings are “in the archives.” I have the word of the secretary-general of the Etablissments Français de l’Oceanie for that, and in the saloons and coffee-houses they talked loudly of the “bataille entre les cochons Anglais et les héros les Français et les Tahitiens.”
It was a battle that would have rejoiced the heart of Don Quixote, and that redoubtable knight had his prototype here in the van of it, the second in command of the police of Papeete, M. Lontane, the mimic of the Tiare celebration.
The Noa-Noa’s amateur crew of wretched beach-combers, farm laborers, and impossible firemen, stokers, and stewards, a pitiable set, were about the waterfront all day, dirty, dressed in hot woolen clothes, bedraggled and as drunk as their money would allow. The ship was down to leave at three-thirty o’clock, but it was four when the last bag of copra was aboard. There were few passengers, and those who booked here were dismayed at the condition of the passageways, the cabins, and the decks. The crowd of “scabs,” untrained white sailors, and coal passers was supplemented by Raratonga natives, lounging about the gangway and sitting on the rails. On the wharf hundreds of people had gathered as usual to see the liner off. Lovaina was there in a pink lace dress, seated in her carriage, with Vava at the horse’s head. Prince Hinoe had gathered about him a group of pretty girls, to whom he was promising a feast in the country. All the tourists, the loafers, the merchants, and the schooner crews were there, too, and the iron-roofed shed in which it is forbidden to smoke was filled with them. The Noa-Noa blew and blew her whistle, but still she did not go. The lines to the wharf were loosened, the captain was on the bridge, the last farewells were being called and waved, but there was delay. Word was spread that some of the crew were missing, and as at the best the vessel was short-handed, it had to tarry.
At last came three of the missing men. They, too, had welcomed the New Year, and their gait was as at sea when the ship rises and falls on the huge waves. They wheeled in a barrow a mate whose mispoise made self-locomotion impossible. The trio danced on the wharf, sang a chantey about “whisky being the life of man,” and declared they would stay all their lives in Tahiti; that the “bloody hooker could bleedin’ well” go without them. They were ordered on board by M. Lontane, with two strapping Tahitian gendarmes at his back.
If there are any foreigners the average British roustabout hates it is French gendarmes, and the ruffians were of a mind to “beat them up.” They raised their fists in attitudes of combat, and suddenly what had been a joyous row became a troublesome incident.
Sacré bleu! those scoundrels of English to menace the uniformed patriots of the French republic! The second in command drew a revolver, and pointing at the hairy breast of the leader of the Noa-Noans, shouted: “Au le vapeur! Diable! What, you whisky-filled pigs, you will resist the law?”
He took off his helmet and handed it to one of the native policemen while he unlimbered the revolver more firmly in the direction of the seamen. The sailor shrank back in bewilderment. Guns were unknown in shore squabbles.
“I’ll ’ave the British Gov’ment after ye,” roared the leader. “I’ll write to the Sydney papers. Ye’ve pulled a gun in me face.”
Steadily and with some good nature the Tahitian officers pushed the trio toward the gangway and up it. Once aboard, the gangway was hoisted, the pilot clambered up the side, and it seemed as if the liner was away. But no; the three recalcitrants jumped on the bulwarks, and joined by a dozen others, yelled defiance at the authorities. As the Noa-Noa gradually drew out these cries became more definite, and the honor of France and of all Frenchmen was assailed in the most ancient English Billingsgate. Gestures of frightful significance added to the insults, and these not producing retorts in kind from the second in command and the populace, a shower of limes began to fall upon them.
Sacks of potatoes, lettuce-heads, yams, and even pineapples, deck cargo, were broken open by the infuriated crew to hurl at the police. The crowd on the wharf rushed for shelter behind posts and carriages, the horses pranced and snorted, and M. Lontane leaped to the fore. He advanced to the edge of the quay, and in desperate French, of which his adversaries understood not a word, threatened to have them dragged from their perches and sent to New Caledonia.
A well-aimed lime squashed on his cheek, and with a “Sapristi!” he fled behind a stack of boxes. The riot became general, the roustabouts heaving iron bars, pieces of wood, and anything they could find. No officer of the Noa-Noa said a word to stop them, evidently fearing a general strike of the crew, and when the missiles cut open the head of a native stevedore and fell even among the laughing girls, the courtesies began to be returned. Coal, iron nuts, stones, and other serious projectiles were thrown with a hearty good-will, and soon the crew and the passengers of the Noa-Noa were scuttling for safety.
The storm of French and Tahitian adjectives was now a cyclone, Tahitian girls, their gowns stained by the fruity and leguminous shot of the Australasians, seized lumps of coal or coral, and took the van of the shore legions. Atupu struck the leader of the Noa-Noa snipers in the nose with a rock, and her success brought a paean of praise from all of us.
The entente cordiale with Britain was sundered in a minute. The mêlée grew into a fierce battle, and only the increasing distance of the vessel from shore stopped the firing, the last shots falling into the lagoon.
The second in command had been reinforced by the first in command, and now, summoned by courier, appeared the secretary-general of the Etablissements Françaises de l’Oceanie, bearded and helmeted, white-faced and nervous, throwing his arms into the air and shrieking, “Qu’ est-que ce que ça? Is this war? Are we human, or are these savages?”
Lovaina, in the rear of whose carriage I had taken refuge, exclaimed:
“They say Tahiti people is savage! Why this crazy people must be finished. Is this business go on?”
“Non, non!” replied the secretary-general, with patriotic anger, “We French are long suffering, but c’est assez maintenant.”
He spoke to the first in command, and an order was shouted to M. Wilms, the pilot, to leave the Noa-Noa. That official descended into his boat and returned to the quay, while the liner hovered a hundred yards away, the captain afraid to come nearer, fearful of leaving port without expert guidance, and more so that the crew might renew the combat.
The secretary-general conferred with the private secretary of the governor, the first and second in command, and several old residents. They would apply to the British consul for warrants for the arrest of the ruffianly marksmen, they would wrench them from the rails, and sentence them to long imprisonments.
So for an hour more the steamship puffed and exhausted her steam, while the high officials paced the wharf shaking their fists at the besotted stokers, who shook theirs back.
The stores, closing at five o’clock, sent their quota of clerks to swell the mob at the quay, and the “rubberneck wagon,” alert to earn fares, took the news of the fray into the country, and hauled in scores of excited provincials, who had vague ideas that la guerre was on. The wedding party, only six motor-cars full on the second day, all in wreaths of tuberoses and wild-cherry rind, the bride still in her point-lace veil, and the groom and all the guests cheered with the champagne they had drunk, drove under the shed from the suburbs and honked their horns, to the horror of the secretary-general and the others.
The situation was now both disciplinary and diplomatic.
“C’est tres serieux,” whispered the secretary to the governor’s private secretary, a dapper little man whose flirting had made his wife a Niobe and alarmed the husbands and fathers of many French dames et filles.
“Serious, monsieur?” said the private secretary, twisting his black wisp of a mustache, “it is more than serious now; it is no longer the French Establishments of Oceania. It is between Great Britain and France.”
A peremptory order was given to drive every one off the quay, and though the crowd chaffed the police, the sweep of wharf was left free for the marchings and counter-marchings of the big men.
“What would be the result? Would the entire British population of the ship resist the taking away of any of the crew? Oh, if the paltry French administration at Paris had not removed the companies of soldiers who until recently had been the pride of Papeete! And crown of misfortune, the gun-boat, sole guardian of French honor in these seas, was in Australia for repairs. Eh bien, n’importe! Every Frenchman was a soldier. Did not Napoleon say that? Nom de pipe!”
Wilfrid Baillon, a cow-boy from British Columbia, was standing near me with his arms folded on his breast and a look of stern determination on his sunburned face.
“We must look sharp,” he said to me. “We may all have to stand together, we whites, against these French frog-eaters.”
The tension was extreme. The warrants had not come from the British consul, and there seemed no disposition on the Noa-Noa to save the face of la belle republique, for the blackened and blackguardly stokers still dangled their legs over the rail and made motions which caused the officials to shudder and the ladies to shut their eyes.
The agent of the vessel in Papeete, an American, appeared. He talked long and earnestly with the secretary-general and the first and second, and to lend even a darker color to the scene, the procureur-général, the Martinique black, tall, protuberant, mopping his bald head, took the center of the conclave. Noses were lowered and brought together, feet were stamped, hands were wiggled behind backs, and right along the American, the agent, talked and talked.
They demurred, they spat on the boards, they lifted their hands aloft—and then they ordered the pilot to return to the Noa-Noa, and that vessel, whistling long and relievedly, pointed her nose toward the opening in the reef.
Mon Dieu! the suspense was over. The people melted toward their homes and the restaurants, for it was nearly seven o’clock. I drifted into the knot about the officials.
“It is in the archives,” said the secretary-general. “It will go down in history. That is enough.”
The delightful M. Lontane, in khaki riding breeches,—he, as all police, ride bicycles—his khaki helmet tipped rakishly over his cigarette, blew a ringlet.
“C’est comme ça. We would not press our victory,” he said gallantly. “We French are generous. We have hearts.”
The secretary-general, the procureur-général, the first in command and the private secretary, sighted the carriage of the governor, who had not appeared until the Noa-Noa was out of the lagoon, and they went to tell him of the great affair.
The agent of the line, grim and unsmiling, climbed to the wide veranda of the Cercle Bougainville, and ordered a Scotch and siphon.
“There she goes,” he said to me, and pointed to the steamer streaking through the reef gate. “There she goes, and I’m bloody well satisfied.”
At tea the next afternoon the British consul cast a new light on the international incident. He was playing bridge with the governor and others when the demand for the warrants was brought.
“The blighters interrupted our rubber,” said the consul, “and the governor was exceedingly put out. I told them the Noa-Noa couldn’t proceed without the stokers, and as it carries the French mail, they patched it up to arrest them when they return. We quite lost track of the game for a few minutes.”
But the cruel war would not down. There was not a good feeling between the English and French in Tahiti. A slight opposition cropped out often in criticism expressed to Americans or to Tahitians, or to each other’s own people. New Zealand governs the Cook group, of which Raratonga is the principal island. Comparisons of sanitation, order, neatness, and businesslike management of these islands, with the happy-go-lucky administration of the Society, Paumotus, Marquesas, and Austral archipelagoes, owned by the French, were frequent by the English. The French shrugged their shoulders.
“The Tahitians are happy, and we send millions of francs to aid France,” they said. “The English talk always of neatness and golf links and cricket-grounds. Eh bien! There are other and better things. And as for drink, oh, la, la! Our sour wines could not fight one round of the English boxe with whisky and gin and that awful ale.”
The French residents protested at the missiles of the crew and the laissez-faire of the Noa-Noa officers, and the British consul received a letter from the governor in which the affair of the riot was revived in an absurd manner.
One might understand M. Lontane, second in command of the police forces,—six men and himself,—magnifying the row between the tipsy stokers and his battalions, but to have the governor, who was a first-rate hand at bridge, and even knew the difference between a straight and a flush, putting down in black and white, sealed with the seal of the Republique Française, and signed with his own hand, that “France had been insulted by the actions of the savages of the Noa-Noa,” was worthy only of the knight of La Mancha.
So thought the consul, but he was a diplomat, his adroitness gained not only in the consular ranks, but also in Persia as a secretary of legation, and in many a fever-stricken and robber-ridden port of the Near and Far East. He pinned upon his most obstreperous uniform the medal won by merit, straddled a dangling sword, helmeted his head, and with an interpreter, that the interview might lack nothing of formality, called upon the governor at his palace.
He told him that the letter of complaint had roused his wonderment, for, said his British Majesty’s representative, “There can be no serious result, diplomatically or locally, of this Donnybrook Fair incident. In a hundred ports of the world where war-ships and merchant ships go, their crews for scores of years have fought with the police. Besides, I am informed that Monsieur Lontane put a revolver against the stomach of one of the stokers, and that provoked the nastiness. Until then it had been uncouth mirth caused by the vile liquor sold by the saloons licensed by the Government, and against the Papeete regulations that no more intoxicants shall be sold to a man already drunk. But when this British citizen, scum of Sydney or Glasgow as he might be, saw the deadly weapon, he felt aggrieved. This revolver practice is all too common on the part of Monsieur Lontane. Six such complaints I have had in as many months. As to that part of your letter that the crew of the Noa-Noa not be allowed to land here on its return to Papeete, I agree with you, but it will be for you to enforce this prohibition.”
It was agreed that on the day the Noa-Noa arrived on her return trip, all gendarmes and available guard be summoned from the country to preserve order, and that, as asked in the letter, the consul demand that the captain of the steamship punish the rioters.
And all this being done through an interpreter, and the consul having unlimbered his falchion and removed his helmet, he and the governor had an absinthe frappé and made a date for a bridge game.
“Te tamai i te taporo i te arahu i te umaru,” the natives termed the skirmish. “The conflict of the limes, the coal, and the potatoes.” A new himene was improvised about it, and I heard the girls of the Maison des Cocotiers chanting it as I went to Lovaina’s to dinner.
It was something like this in English:
“Oh, the British men they drank all day
And threw the limes and iron.
The French in fear they ran away.
The brave Tahitians alone stood firm.”
And there were many more verses.
Chapter VIII
Gossip in Papeete—Moorea, a near-by island—A two-days’ excursion there—Magnificent scenery from the sea—Island of fairy folk—Landing and preparation for the feast—The First Christian mission—A canoe on the lagoon—Beauties of the sea-garden.
My acquaintances of the Cercle Bougainville, Landers, Polonsky, McHenry, Llewellyn, David, and Lying Bill, were at this season bent on pleasure. Landers, the head of a considerable business in Australasia, with a Papeete branch, had time heavy on his hands. Lying Bill and McHenry were seamen-traders ashore until their schooner sailed for another swing about the French groups of islands. Llewellyn and David were associates in planting, curing, and shipping vanilla-beans, but were roisterers at heart, and ever ready to desert their office and warehouse for feasting or gaming. Polonsky was a speculator in exchange and an investor in lands, and was reputed to be very rich. He, too, would leave his strong box unlocked in his hurry if cards or wassail called. These same white men were sib to all their fellows in the South Seas except a few sour men whom avarice, satiety, or a broken constitution made fearful of the future and thus heedful of the decalogue.
These merry men attended to business affairs for a few hours of mornings, unless the night before had been devoted too arduously to Bacchus, and the remainder of the day they surrendered to clinking glasses, converse, Rabelasian tales, and flirting with the gay Tahitian women in the cinemas or at dances. There was a tolerance, almost a standard, of such actions among the men of Tahiti, though of course consuls, high officials, a banker or two of the Banque de l’Indo-Chine, and a few lawyers or speculators sacrificed their flesh to their ambitions or hid their peccadillos.
A chorus of wives and widows—there were no old maids in Tahiti—condemned scathingly the conduct of the voluptuaries, and the preachers of the gospel lashed them in conversation or sermon now and then. But on the whole there was not in Tahiti any of the spirit of American towns and villages, which wrote scarlet letters, ostracized offenders against moral codes, and made Philistinism a creed. Gossip was constant, and while sometimes caustic, more often it partook of curiosity and mere trading of information or salacious prattle.
Tahitian women concealed nothing. If they won the favors of a white man, they announced it proudly, and held nothing sacred of the details. One’s peculiarities, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, physical or spiritual blemishes, all became delectable morsels in the mouths of one’s intimates and their acquaintances. One’s passions, actions, and whisperings were as naked to the world as the horns on a cow. Every one knew the import of Polonsky’s dorsal tattooings, that Pastor —— had a case of gin in his house, and that the governor, after a bottle or two of champagne, had squeezed so tightly the waist of an English lady with whom he waltzed that she had cried out in pain. Though bavardage accounted for much of the general knowledge of every one’s affairs, there was an uncanny mystery in the speed at which a particular secret spread. One spoke of the bamboo telegraph.
It was proposed at the Cercle Bougainville that we have a series of jaunts to points some distance away. I was promised that I would see fully the way my acquaintances enjoyed themselves in the open. Llewellyn was given charge of the first excursion. It was to Moorea, an island a dozen miles or so to the northwest from Papeete, and which, with Tetiaria and Mehetia and Tahiti, constitute les îles de Vent, or Windward Islands of the Society archipelago.
In clear weather one cannot look out to sea from Papeete, to the north or west, without Moorea’s weird grandeur confronting one. The island of fairy-folk with golden hair, it was called in ancient days by the people of other islands. A third of the size of Tahiti, it was, until the white man came, the abode of a romantic and gallant clan. Eimeo, it was called by the first whites, but the name of Moorea clings to it now. Over it and behind it sets the sun of Papeete, and it is associated with the tribal conflicts, the religion, and the journeys of the Tahitians. Now it is tributary to this island in every way, and small boats run to and from with passengers and freight almost daily.
We met at seven o’clock of a Saturday morning at the point on the coral embankment where the Potii Moorea was made fast, the gasolene-propelled cargo-boat which we had rented for the voyage. A hundred were gathered about a band of musicians in full swing when I appeared at the rendezvous on the prick of the hour. The bandsmen, all natives but one, wore garlands of purau, the scarlet hibiscus, and there was an atmosphere of abandonment to pleasure about them and the party.
A schooner swung at her moorings near by, under a glowing, flamboyant tree, and her crew was aboard in expectation of sailing at any hour. Another small craft, a sloop, was preparing to sail for Moorea, also. She was crowded with passengers and cargo, and all about the rail hung huge bunches of feis, the mountain bananas. Most of the people aboard had come from the market-place with fruit and fish and vegetables to cook when they arrived at home. A strange habit of the Tahitians under their changed condition is to take the line of least resistance in food, eating in Chinese stores, or buying bits in the market, whereas, when they governed themselves, they had an exact and elaborate formula of food preparation, and a certain ceremoniousness in despatching it. Only feasts bring a resumption nowadays of the ancient ways.
The crews of the schooner and of the other Moorea boat besides our own had a swarm of friends awaiting the casting off. Even a journey of a few hours meant a farewell ceremony of many minutes. They embrace one another and are often moved to tears at a separation of a few days. When one of them goes aboard a steamship for America or Australasia, the family and friends enact harrowing scenes at the quay. They are sincerely moved at the thought of their loved ones putting a long distance between them, and I saw a score of young and old sobbing bitterly when the Noa-Noa left for San Francisco though they stormed the stokers lustily when aroused. Their life is so simple in these beloved islands that the dangers of the mainland are exaggerated in their minds, and to the old the civilization of a big city appears as a specter of horrible mien. The electric cars, the crowds, the murders they read of and are told of, the bandits in the picture-shows, the fearful stranglers of Paris, the lynchers, the police, who in the films are always beating the poor, as in real life, the pickpockets, and the hospitals where willy-nilly they render one unconscious and remove one’s vermiform appendix—all these are nightmares to the aborigines whose relations are departing.
When heads were counted, Landers’s was missing, and jumping into Llewellyn’s carriage, an old-fashioned phaëton, I drove to Lovaina’s, where he occupied the room next to mine in the detached house in the animal-yard. He was sound asleep, having played poker and drunk until an hour before; but when I awoke him I could not but admire the serenity of the man. His body was in the posture in which he had lain down, and his breathing was as a child’s.
“Landers, get up!” I shouted from the doorway. He opened his eyes, regarded me intently, and without a word went to the shower-bath by the camphor-wood chest, returned quickly, and dressed himself. I fancied him a man who would have answered his summons before a firing-squad as calmly. He had a perfection of ease in his movements; not fast, for he was very big, but with never an unnecessary gesture nor word. He was one of the finest animals I had ever seen, and fascinating to men and women of all kinds.
The Potii Morea had taken on her passengers when we returned, and we put off from the sea-wall at once, with two barrels of bottled beer, and half a dozen demi-johns of wine prominent on the small deck. Often the sea between Tahiti and Moorea is rough in the daytime, and passage is made at night to avoid accident, but we were given a smooth way, and could enjoy the music. We sat or lay on the after-deck while the bandsmen on the low rail or hatch maintained a continuous concert.
During the several days between our first planning the trip and the going, a song had been written in honor of the junketing, and this they played scores of times before we set foot again in Papeete. It was entitled: “Himene Tatou Arcarea,” which meant, “Our Festal Song.”
One easily guessed the meaning of the word himene. The Polynesians’ first singing was the hymns of the missionaries, and these they termed himenes; so that any song is a himene, and there is no other word for vocal music in common use. The words of the first stanza of the “Himene Tatou Arearea” and the refrain were:
I teie nei mahana
Te tere no oe e Hati
Na te moana
Ohipa paahiahia
No te au
Tei tupi i Moorea
tamau a
Tera te au
Ei no te au
Tamua a—aue
Ei reo no oe tau here
I te pii raa mai
Aue oe Tamarii Tahiti te aroha e
A inu i te pia arote faarari
Faararirari ta oe Tamarii Tahiti
La, Li.
Llewellyn put the words into approximate meaning in English, saying it was as difficult to translate these intimate and slang phrases as it would be to put “Yankee Doodle” into French or German. His translation, as he wrote it on a scrap of paper, was:
Let us sing joyful to-day
The journey over the sea!
It is a wonderful and agreeable thing to happen in Moorea,
Hold on to it! That is just it;
And because it is just it,
Why hold on to it!
Your voice, O, Love, calls to us.
O Tahitian children,
Love to you!
Let us all drink beer,
And wet our throats!
And wet them again
To you, Tahitian Children!
The bandsmen were probably all related to Llewellyn, or at least they were of his mother’s clan. His own son and nephew by unmarried mothers were among them; so that they were of our party, and yet on a different footing. They were our guests, we paying them nothing, but they not paying their scot. They did not mingle with us intimately, although probably all the whites except myself knew them well, and at times were guests at their houses outside Papeete.
The air to which the himene was sung eluded me for long. It was, “Oh, You Beautiful Doll!” They had changed the tune, so that I had not recognized it. The Tahitians have curious variations of European and American airs, of which they adapt many, carrying the thread of them, but differentiating enough to cause the hearer curiously mixed emotions. It was as if one heard a familiar voice, and, advancing to grasp a friendly hand, found oneself facing a stranger.
None of these island peoples originally had any music save monotones. In fact, in Hawaii, after the missionaries, Kappelmeister Berger, who came fifty years ago from Germany to Honolulu, was largely the maker of the songs we know now as distinctively Hawaiian. He fitted German airs to Hawaiian words, composed music on native themes, and spontaneously and by adaptation he, with others, gave a trend to the music of Hawaii nei that, though European in the main, is yet charmingly expressive of the soft, sweet nature of the Hawaiians and of the contrasts of their delightful gaiety and innate melancholy. These native tongues of the South Seas, with their many vowels and short words, seem to be made for singing.
The voyage from Tahiti to Moorea was a two-hours’ panorama of magnificence and anomalism in the architecture of nature. Facing my goal was Moorea, and behind me Tahiti, scenes of contrary beauty as the vessel changed the distance from me to them. Tahiti, as I left it, was under the rays of the already high sun, a shimmering beryl, blue and yellow hues in the overpowering green mass, and from the loftiest crags floating a long streamer-cloud, the cloud-banner of Tyndal.
Moorea was the most astonishing sight upon the ocean that my eyes had ever gazed on. It was as if a mountain of black rock had been carved by the sons of Uranus, the mighty Titans of old, into gigantic fortresses, which the lightnings, temblors, and whirlwinds of the eons had rent into ruins. Its heights were not green like Tahiti’s, but bare and black, true children of the abysmal cataclysm which in the time of the making of these oases of the sea thrust them up from the fires of the deep.
Far up near the peak of Afareaitu, nearly a mile above the wave, in one of the colossal splinters of the basalt rocks, was an eye, an immense round hole through which the sky shone. One saw it plainly from Tahiti. It was made by the giant Pai of Tautira when he threw his spear a dozen miles and pierced a window in the solid granite that all might know his prowess. One felt like a fool to rehearse to a Tahitian, telling one the tale, the statement of scientists that the embrasure had been worn by water when Afareaitu was under the ocean during its million-year process of rising from the mud. It would be like asking Flammarion, the wisest of French astronomers, to cease believing in the mystery of transubstantiation. He would smile as would the autochthon.
There was one picture in murky monochrome which never could be forgotten—a long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle. It stood out against the tender blue of the morning sky like the ancient stronghold of some grisly robber-baron of medieval days; towers of dark sublimity, battlements whence invaders might have been hurled a thousand feet to death, slender minarets, escarpments and rugged casements through which fleecy clouds peeped from the high horizon. I once saw along the Mediterranean in Italy or France the fastness of a line of nobles, set away up on a lonely hill, glowering, gloomy, and unpeopled, the refuge, mayhap, of the mountain goat, the abiding-place of bats and other creatures of the night. Moorea’s fortress conjured up the vision of it, its wondrous ramparts and unscalable precipices strangely the counterpart of the Latin castle.
But if one dropped one’s eyes from the hills, gone was the recollection of aught of Europe. There was a scene which only the lavish colors of the tropics could furnish. The artist had spilled all his shades of green upon the palette, and so delicately blended them that they melted into one another in a very enchantment of green. The valleys were but darker variants of the emerald scheme.
The confused mass of lofty ridges resolved into chasms and combes, dark, sunless ravines, moist with the spray of many waterfalls, which nearer became velvet valleys of pale green, masses of foliage and light and shadow. The mountains of Moorea were only half the height of Tahiti’s, but so artfully had they been piled in their fantastic arrangement that they seemed as high, though they were entirely different in their impress upon the beholder. Tahiti from the sea was like a living being, so vivid, so palpitating was its contour and its color, but Moorea, when far away, was cold and black, a beautiful, ravishing sight, but like the avatars of a race of giants that had passed, a sepulcher or monument of their achievements and their end.
As about Tahiti, a silver belt of reef took the rough caresses of the lazy rollers, and let the glistening surf break gently on the beach. Along this wall of coral, hidden, but charted by its crown of foam, we ran for miles until we found the gateway—the blue buckle of the belt, it appeared at a distance.
Within the lagoon the guise of the island was more intimate. Little bays and inlets bounded themselves, and villages and houses sprang up from the tropic groves. The band, which so far as I knew had not been silent a moment to awaken me from my adoration of the sculpture and painting of nature, now poured out the “Himene Tatou Arearea” in token of our approaching landing, which was at Faatoai, the center of population. All its hundred or two inhabitants were at the tiny dock to greet us, except the Chinese, who stayed in their stores.
Headed by the pipe and accordion, the brass and wood, now playing “Onward, Christian Soldier,”—which, if one forgot the words, was an especially carnal melody,—we tramped, singing a parody, through the street of Faatoai, and into a glorious cocoanut grove, where breakfast was spread.
A pavilion had been erected for our feasting. It was of bamboo and pandanus, the interior lined with tree ferns and great bunches of scarlet oleander, and decorated with a deep fringe woven of hibiscus fiber. The roof was a thatch of pandanus and breadfruit leaves, the whole structure, light, flimsy, but a gamut of golds and browns in color and cool and beautiful.
A table fifty feet or longer was made of bamboo, the top of twenty half sections of the rounded tubes, polished by nature, but slippery for bottles and glasses. A bench ran on both sides, and underfoot was the deep-green vegetation that covers every foot of ground in Moorea except where repeated footfalls, wheels, or labor kills it, and which is the rich stamp of tropic fertility.
The barrels of beer were unheaded, the demi-johns from Bordeaux were uncorked, and from the opened bottles the sugary odor of Tahiti rum permeated the hot air. The captain of the Potii Moorea and the hired steward began to set the table for the déjeuner and to prepare the food, some of which was being cooked a few feet away by the steward’s kin. The guests disposed themselves at ease to wait for the call to meat, the bandsmen lit cigarettes and tuned their instruments or talked over their program, while they wetted their throats with the rum, as admonished by the “Himene Tatou Arearea.”
I strolled down the road along the shore of the lagoon. Here was erected the first Christian church in this archipelago. British Protestant missionaries, who had led a precarious life in Tahiti, and fled from it to Australia in fear of their lives, were induced to come here and establish a mission. The King of Tahiti, Pomaré, had fled to Moorea after a desperate struggle with opposing clans, and he welcomed the preachers as additions to his strength. The high priest of the district, Patii, collected all the gods under his care, and they were burned, with a Bible in sight, to the exceeding fear of the native heathen, and the holy anger of the other native clergy, who felt as Moses did when he saw his disciples worshiping a golden calf. On the very spot I stood had been the marae, or Tahitian temple, in which the images were housed, now a rude heap of stones. A hundred years ago exactly this exchange of deities had been made. Alas! it could not have been the true Christ who was brought to them, for they had flourished mightily under Oro, and they began almost at once to die. Not peace, but a sword, a sword of horrors, of frightful ills, was brought them.
There was a little canoe under a noble cocoanut-tree on the shell-strewn and crab-haunted coral beach, the roots of the palm partly covered by the salt water, and partly by a tangle of lilac marine convolvulus. I pushed the tiny craft into the brine, and paddled off on the still water of the shining lagoon.
No faintest agitation of the surface withheld a clear view of the marvelous growths upon the bottom. I peered into a garden of white and vari-colored flowers of stone, of fans and vases and grotesque shapes, huge sponges and waving bushes and stunted trees. Fish of a score of shapes and of all colors of the spectrum wove in and out the branches and caverns of this wondrous parterre.
Past the creamy reef the purple ocean glittered in the nooning sun, while the motionless waters of the lagoon were turquoise and bice near by and virescent in the distance. Looking toward the shore, the edge of milky coral sand met the green matting of moss and grass, and then the eye marked the fields of sugar-cane, the forests of false coffee on which grew the vanilla-vines, the groves of cocoanuts, and then the fast-climbing ridges and the glorious ravines, the misty heights and the grim crags.
Chapter IX
The Arearea in the pavilion—Raw fish and baked feis—Llewellyn, the Master of the Revel; Kelly, the I.V.W., and His Himene—The Upaupahura—Landers and Mamoe prove experts—The return to Papeete.
The company was assembled in the pavilion when I walked through the streets of Faatoai again, and the food was on the bamboo table. One might have thought the feast would have been spread on soft mats on the sward, as is the Tahitian custom, but these whites are perverse and proud, and their legs unbending to such a position.
We had raw fish cut up, with bowls of cocoanut sauce. It was delicious in taste, but raw fish is tough and at first hard to chew until one becomes accustomed to the texture. Whites learn to crave it.
This fish was cut in small pieces thicker and bigger than a domino, and steeped in fresh lime-juice for half a day. The sauce was made by pouring a cup of seawater over grated cocoanuts and after several hours’ straining through the fiber of young cocoanut shoots. It was thick, like rich cream.
We had excellent raw oysters and raw clams on the shell, crabs stewed with a wine sauce that was delicious, fish, boiled chicken, and baked pig. I had not tasted more appetizing food. It was all cooked in the native fashion on hot stones above or under ground. We saw the pig’s disinterment. On the brink of the stream which flowed past the bower the oven had been made. The cooks, Moorea men, removed a layer of earth that had been laid on cocoa-palm leaves. This was the cover of the oven. Immediately below the leaves were yams and feis and under them a layer of banana leaves. The pig came next. It had been cut into pieces as big as mutton-chops and had cooked two and a half hours. It was on stones, coral, under which the fire of wood had been thoroughly ignited, the stones heated, and then the different layers placed above. The pig was tender, succulent, and the yams and feis finely flavored.
The two native men, in pareus, and with crowns of scarlet hibiscus, waited on us, while the son of Llewellyn uncorked the bottles. As usual, the beverages were lavishly dispensed, beginning with Scotch whisky as an appetizer, and following with claret, sauterne, vintage Burgundy, and a champagne that would have pleased Paris. These more expensive beverages were for us hosts only.
We were an odd company: Llewellyn, a Welsh-Tahitian; Landers, a British New-Zealander; McHenry, Scotch-American; Polonsky, Polish-French; Schlyter, the Swedish tailor; David, an American vanilla-grower; “Lying Bill,” English; and I, American. There was little talk at breakfast. They were trenchermen beyond compare, and the dishes were emptied as fast as filled. These men have no gifts of conversation in groups. Though we had only one half-white of the party, Llewellyn, he to a large degree set the pace of words and drink. In him the European blood, of the best in the British Isles, arrested the abandon of the aborigine, and created a hesitant blend of dignity and awkwardness. He was a striking-looking man, very tall, slender, about fifty years old, swarthy, with hair as black as night, and eyebrows like small mustaches, the eyes themselves in caverns, usually dull and dour, but when he talked, spots of light. I thought of that Master of Ballantrae of Stevenson’s, though for all I remember he was blond. Yet the characters of the two blended in my mind, and I tried to match them the more I saw of him. He was born here, and after an education abroad and a sowing of wild oats over years of life in Europe, had lived here the last twenty-five years. He was in trade, like almost every one here, but I saw no business instincts or habits about him. One found him most of the time at the Cercle Bougainville, drinking sauterne and siphon water, shaking for the drinks, or playing écarté for five francs a game.
Below the salt sat his son and his nephew, men of twenty-five years, but sons of Tahitian mothers, and without the culture or European education of their fathers. With them two chauffeurs were seated. One of these, an American, the driver for Polonsky, had tarried here on a trip about the world, and was persuaded to take employment with Polonsky. The other was a half-caste, a handsome man of fifty, whose employer treated him like a friend.
Breakfast lasted two hours for us. For the band it kept on until dinner, for they did not leave the table from noon, when we sat down, until dark. When they did not eat, they drank. Occasionally one of us slipped down and took his place with them. I sat with them half an hour, while they honored me with “Johnny Burrown,” “The Good, Old Summertime,” and “Everybody Doin’ It.”
The heavy leads of the band were carried by an American with a two-horsepower accordion. He told me his name was Kelly. He was under thirty, a resolute, but gleesome chap, red-headed, freckled, and unrestrained by anybody or anything. He had no respect for us, as had the others, and had come, he said, for practice on his instrument. He had a song-book of the Industrial Workers of the World, a syndicalistic group of American laborers and intellectuals, and in it were scores of popular airs accompanied by words of dire import to capitalists and employers. One, to the tune of “Marching through Georgia,” threatened destruction to civilization in the present concept.
“I’m an I. W. W.,” said Kelly to me, with a shell of rum in his hand. “I came here because I got tired o’ bein’ pinched. Every town I went to in the United States I denounced the police and the rotten government, and they throwed me in the calaboose. I never could get even unlousy. I came here six weeks ago. It’s a little bit of all right.”
When Kelly played American or English airs and the Tahitians sang their native words, he gave the I. W. W. version in English. Some of these songs were transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the “Himene Tatou Arearea” in repetition. It was a crude travesty of a hymn much sung in religious camp-meetings and revivals, of which the proper chorus as often heard by me in Harry Monroe’s mission in the Chicago slums, was:
Hallelujah! Thine the glory! Hallelujah! Amen!
Hallelujah! Thine the glory! revive us again!
Kelly’s version was:
Hallelujah! I’m a bum! Hallelujah! Bum again!
Hallelujah! Give us a hand-out! To save us from sin.
He had the stanzas, burlesquing the sacred lines, one of which the natives especially liked:
Oh, why don’t you work, as other men do?
How the hell can we work when there ’s no work to do?
None of us had ever heard Kelly’s songs, nor had any one but I ever heard of his industrial organization, and I only vaguely, having lived so many years out of America or Europe. But they all cheered enthusiastically except Llewellyn. He was an Anglican by faith or paternal inheritance, and though he knew nothing of the real hymns, they being for Dissenters, whom he contemned, he was religious at soul and objected to making light of religion. He called for the “Himene Tatou Arearea.” He took his pencil and scribbled the translation I have given.
“This is the rough of it,” he said. “To write poetry here is difficult. When I was at Heidelberg and Paris I often spent nights writing sonnets. That merely tells the sense of the himene, but cannot convey the joy or sorrow of it. Well, let’s sink dull care fifty fathoms deep! Look at those band-boys! So long as they have plenty of rum or beer or wine and their instruments, they care little for food. Watch them. Now they are dry and inactive. Wait till the alcohol wets them, They will touch the sky.”
Llewellyn’s deep-set eyes under the beetling brows were lighting with new fires.
His idea of inactivity and drought was sublimated, for the musicians were never still a moment. They played mostly syncopated airs of the United States, popular at the time. All primitive people, or those less advanced in civilization or education, prefer the rag-time variants of the American negro or his imitators, to so-called good or classical music. It is like simple language, easily understood, and makes a direct appeal to their ears and their passions. It is the slang or argot of music, hot off the griddle for the average man’s taste, without complexities or stir to musing and melancholy.
The musicians had drunk much wine and rum, and now wanted only beer. That was the order of their carouse. Beer was expensive at two francs a bottle, and so a conscientious native had been delegated to give it out slowly. He had the barrel containing the quartbottles between his legs while he sat at the table, and each was doled out only after earnest supplications and much music.
“Horoa mai te pia!” “More beer!” they implored.
“Himene” said the inexorable master of the brew.
Up came the brass and the accordion, and forth went the inebriated strains.
Between their draughts of beer—they drank always from the bottles—the Tahitians often recurred to the song of Kelly. Having no g, l, or s among the thirteen letters of their missionary-made alphabet, they pronounced the refrain as follows:
Hahrayrooyah! I’m a boom! Hahrayrooyah! Boomagay!
Hahrayrooyah! Hizzandow! To tave ut fruh tin!
Landers being very big physically, they admired him greatly, and his company having been two generations in Tahiti, they knew his history. They now and again called him by his name among Tahitians, “Taporo-Tane,” (“The Lime-Man”), and sang:
E aue Tau tiare ate e!
Ua parari te afata e!
I te Pahi no Taporo-Toue e!
Alas! my dear, some one let slip
A box of limes on the lime-man’s ship,
And busted it so the juice did drip.
The song was a quarter of a century old and recorded an accident of loading a schooner. Landers’s father’s partner was first named Taporo-Tane because he exported limes in large quantities from Tahiti to New Zealand. The stevedores and roustabouts of the waterfront made ballads of happenings as their forefathers had chants of the fierce adventures of their constant warfare. They were like the negroes, who from their first transplantation from Africa to America had put their plaints and mystification in strange and affecting threnodies and runes.
All through the incessant himenes a crowd of natives kept moving about a hundred feet away, dancing or listening with delight. They would not obtrude on the feast, but must hear the music intimately.
The others of our party, having breakfasted until well after two, sought a house where Llewellyn was known. McHenry and I followed the road which circles the island by the lagoon and sea-beach. In that twelve leagues there are a succession of dales, ravines, falls precipices, and brooks, as picturesque as the landscape of a dream. We walked only as far as Urufara, a mile or two, and stopped there at the camp of a Scotsman who offered accommodation of board and lodging.
His sketchy hotel and outhouses were dilapidated, but they were in the most beautiful surrounding conceivable, a sheltered cove of the lagoon where the swaying palms dipped their boles in the ultramarine, and bulky banana-plants and splendid breadfruit-trees formed a temple of shadow and coolth whence one might look straight up the lowering mountain-side to the ghostly domes, or across the radiant water to the white thread of reef.
We met McTavish, the host of the hotel, an aging planter, who kept his public house as an adjunct of his farm, and more for sociability than gain. He was in a depressed and angry mood, for one of his eyes was closed, and the other battered about the rim and beginning to turn black and blue.
He knew McHenry, for both had been in these seas half their lives.
“In all my sixty years,” he said, “I have not been assaulted quite so viciously. I asked him for what he owed me, and the next I knew he was shutting out the light with his fists. I will go to the gendarme for a contravention against that villain. And right now I will fix him in my book.”
“Why, who hit you, and what did you do?” asked McHenry.
“That damned Londoner, Hobson,” said McTavish. “He was my guest here several years ago, and ate and drank well for a month or two when he hadn’t a sou marquis. I needed a little money to-day, and meeting him up the road, I demanded my account. He is thirty years younger than me, and I would have kept my eyes, but he leaped at me like a wild dog, and knocked me down and pounded me in the dirt.”
I sympathized with McTavish, though McHenry snickered. The Scot went into an inner room and brought back a dirty book, a tattered register of his guests. He turned a number of pages—there were only a few guests to a twelvemonth—and, finding his assailant’s name, wrote in capital letters against it, “THIEF.”
“There,” he said with a magnificent gesture. “Let the whole world read and know the truth!”
He set out a bottle of rum and several glasses, and we toasted him while I looked over the register. Hardly any one had neglected to write beside his name tributes to the charm of the place and the kind heart of McTavish.
Charmian and Jack London’s signatures were there, with a hearty word for the host, and “This is the most beautiful spot in the universe,” for Moorea and Urufara.
There were scores of poems, one in Latin and many in French. Americans seem to have been contented to quote Kipling, the “Lotus Eaters,” or Omar, but Englishmen had written their own. English university men are generous poetasters. I have read their verses in inns and outhouses of many countries. Usually they season with a sprig from Horace or Vergil.
“I’m goin’ to the west’ard,” said McTavish. “There are too many low whites comin’ here. When Moorea had only sail from Tahiti, the blackguards did not come, but now the dirty gasolene boat brings them. I must be off to the west’ard, to Aitutaki or Penrhyn.”
Poor Mac! he never made his westward until he went west in soldier parlance.
McHenry, on our way back to Faatoai, said:
“McTavish is a bloody fool. He gives credit to the bleedin’ beach-combers. If I meet that dirty Hobson, I’ll beat him to a pulp.”
From under the thatched roof of our bower came the sounds of:
Faararirari
to oe Tamarii Tahiti
La Li.
The himene was in its hundredth encore. The other barrel of bottled beer had been securely locked against the needs of the morrow, and the bandsmen’s inspiration was only claret or sauterne, well watered.
We sat down for dinner. The déjeuner was repeated, and eggs added for variety. We had risen from breakfast four hours before, yet there was no lack of appetite. The drink appeared only to make their gastric juices flow freely. I hid my surfeit. The harmonies had by now drawn the girls and young women from other districts, word having been carried by natives passing in carts that a parcel of papaa (non-Tahitians) were faarearea (making merry).
These new-comers had adorned themselves for the taupiti, the public fête, as they considered it, and as they came along the road had plucked ferns and flowers for wreaths. Without such sweet treasures upon them they have no festal spirit. There were a dozen of these Moorea girls and visitors from Tahiti, one or two from the Tiare Hotel, whose homes were perhaps on this island.
The dinner being finished, the bandsmen laid down their instruments and the girls were invited to drink. Tahitian females have no thirst for alcohol. They, as most of their men, prefer fruit juices or cool water except at times of feasting. They had no intoxicants when the whites came, not in all Polynesia. It was the humor of the explorers, the first adventurers, and all succeeding ones, to teach them to like alcohol, and to hold their liquor like Englishmen or Americans. Kings and queens, chiefs and chiefesses, priests and warriors, were sent ashore crapulous in many a jolly-boat, or paddled their own canoes, after areareas on war-ships and merchantmen. Some learned to like liquor, and French saloons in Papeete and throughout Tahiti and Moorea encouraged the taste. Profits, as ever under the business rule of the world overweighed morals or health.
These girls in our bower drank sparingly of wine, but needed no artificial spirits to spur their own. Music runs like fire through their veins.
The spirit of the upaupa veiled in cotton garments
Iromea of the Tiare Hotel—perhaps some of Lovaina’s maidens knew our plans and came over on the packet—took the accordion from Kelly. She began to play, and two of the Moorea men joined her, one with a pair of tablespoons and the other with an empty gasolene-can. The holder of the spoons jingled them in perfect harmony with the accordion, and the can-operator tapped and thumped the tin, so that the three made a singular and tingling music. It had a timbre that got under one’s skin and pulsated one’s nerves, arousing dormant desires. I felt like leaping into the arena and showing them my mettle on alternate feet, but a Moorea beauty anticipated me.
Matalini seeks a cocoanut for me
She placed herself before the proud Llewellyn, half of her own blood, and began an upaupahura. She postured before him in an attitude of love, and commenced an improvisation in song about him. She praised his descent from his mother, his strength, his capacity for rum, and especially his power over women. He was own brother to the great ones of the Bible, Tolomoni and Nebutodontori, who had a thousand wives. He drew all women to him.
The dance was a gambol of passion. It was a free expression of uninhibited sex feeling. The Hawaiian hula, the nautch, and minstrelsy combined. So rapid was the movement, so fast the music, so strenuous the singing, and so actual the vision of the dancer, that she exhausted herself in a few minutes, and another took the turf.
A thousand years the Tahitians had had these upaupahuras. Their national ballads, the achievements of the warrior, the fisherman, the woodsman, the canoe-builder, and the artist, had been orally recorded and impressed in this manner in the conclaves of the Arioi. Dancing is for prose gesture what song is for the instinctive exclamation of feeling, and among primitive peoples they are usually separated; but those cultured Tahitians from time immemorial had these highly developed displays of both methods of manifesting acute sensations. The Kamchadales of the Arctic—curious the similarities of language and custom between these far Northerners and these far Southerners—danced like these Tahitians, so that every muscle quivered at every moment.
The dancing in the bower was at intervals, as the desire moved the performers and bodily force allowed. The himene went on continuously, varying with the inspiration of the dancer or the whim of the accordion-player. They snatched this instrument from one another’s hands as the mood struck them, and among the natives, men and women alike had facility in its playing. Pepe of Papara, and Tehau of Papeari, their eyes flashing, their bosoms rising and falling tumultuously, and their voices and bodies alternating in their expressions of passion, were joined by Temanu of Lovaina’s, the oblique-eyed girl whom they called a half-Chinese, but whose ancestral tree, she said, showed no celestial branch. Temanu was tall, slender, serpent-like, her body flexuous and undulatory, responding to every quaver of the music. Her uncorseted figure, with only a thin silken gown upon it, wreathed harmoniously in tortile oscillations, her long, black hair flying about her flushed face, and her soul afire with her thoughts and simulations.
Now entered the bower Mamoe of Moorea, a big girl of eighteen. She was of the ancient chiefess type, as large as a man, perfectly modeled, a tawny Juno. Her hair was in two plaits, wound with red peppers, and on her head a crown of tuberoses. She wore a single garment, which outlined her figure, and her feet were bare. She surveyed the company, and her glance fell on Landers.
She began to dance. Her face, distinctly Semitic, as is not seldom the case in Polynesia, was fixed a little sternly at first; but as she continued, it began to glow. She did not sing. Her dance was the upaupa, the national dance of Tahiti, the same movement generally as that of Temanu, but without voice and more skilled. One saw at once that she was the première danseuse of this isle, for all took their seats. Her rhythmical swaying and muscular movements were of a perfection unexcelled, and soon infected the bandsmen, now with all discipline unleashed. One sprang from the table and took his position before her. Together they danced, moving in unison, or the man answering the woman’s motions when her agitation lulled. The spectators were absorbed in the hula. They clapped hands and played, and when the first man wearied, another took his place.
Mamoe stopped, and drank a goblet of rum. Her eyes wandered toward our end of the table, and she came to us. She put her hand on Landers. The big trader, who was dressed in white linen, accepted the challenge. He pushed back the bench and stood up.
Landers in looks was out of a novel. If Henry Dixey, the handsome actor, whose legs made his fame before he might attest his head’s capacity, were expanded to the proportions of Muldoon, the wrestler, he might have been Landers. Apparently about thirtythree, really past forty, he was as big as the young “David” of the Buonarroti, of the most powerful and graceful physique, with curling brown hair, and almost perfect features; a giant of a man, as cool as an igloo, with a melodious Australasian voice pitched low, and a manner with men and women that was irresistible.
He faced Mamoe, and Temanu seized the accordion and broke into a mad upaupa. An arm’s-length from Mamoe Landers simulated every pulsation of her quaking body. He was an expert, it was plain, and his handsome face, generally calm and unexpressive, was aglow with excitement. Mamoe recognized her gyratory equal in this giant, and often their bodies met in the ecstasy of their curveting. Landers, towering above her, and bigger in bone and muscle than she in sheer flesh, was like a figure from a Saturnalia. The call of the isles was ringing in his ears, and one had only to glance at him to hear Pan among the reeds, to be back in the glades where fauns and nymphs were at play.
I saw Landers a care-free animal for the moment, rejoicing in his strength and skill, answering the appeal of sex in the dance. When he sat down the animal was still in him, but care again had clouded his brow. I think our early ancestors must have been much like Landers in this dance, strong, and merry for the time, seeking the woman in pleasures, fiery in movement for the nonce, and relapsing into stolidity. I can see why Landers, who takes what he will of womankind in these islands, still dominates in the trading, and bends most people his way. The animal way is the way here. The way of the city, of mere subtlety, of avoidance of issues, of intellectual control, is not the way of Polynesia. Bulk and sinew and no fear of God or man are the rules of the game south of the line, as “north of 53.”
With Landers dancing, so must the others. Hobson had dropped in, and he, David, McHenry, Schlyter, and Lying Bill, trod a measure, and I, though with only a Celtic urge and a couple of years in Hawaii to teach me, faced Temanu. The bandsmen could not remain still, and, with Kelly to play the accordion, the rout became general. McHenry did not molest Hobson, who remained.
When we retired from the scene late at night, the upaupa was still active. We went to the house of Pai, a handsome native woman, whose half-caste husband was Mr. Fuller. There were only three beds in the house, which Landers, Lying Bill, and McHenry fell on before any one else could claim them. I contented myself with a mat on the veranda, and noticed that, besides the remainder of our party, Pai and her tane were also on that level.
At half past two in the morning we lay down. I could not sleep. From the bower the song and music rang out continuously, mingled with laughter and the sounds of shuffling feet.
I got up at five, and with a pareu about me, followed the stream until I found a delicious pool, where I bathed for an hour, while I read “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” The level land between the sea and the mountains was not more than a quarter mile broad, and the near hills rose rounded and dark green, with mysterious valleys folded in between them. All about were cocoanuts and bananas, their foliage wet with the rain that had fallen gently all night. The stream was edged with trees and ferns and was clear and rippling. At that early hour there was no sensation of chill for me, though the men of native blood balked at entering the water until the sun had warmed it. A Chinese vegetablegrower sat on the bank with his Chinese wife and cleaned heads of lettuce and bunches of carrots. She watched me apathetically, as if I were a little strange, but not interesting.
A dozen natives came by and by to bathe in the next pool. They observed me, and called to me, pleasantly, “Ia ora na!” which is the common greeting of the Tahitian, and is pronounced “yuranna.” The white is always a matter of curiosity to the native. These simple people have not lost, though generations of whites have come and bred and died or gone, at least some of their original awe and enjoyment of their conquerors and rulers.
When we had coffee in the morning, our serious and distinguished native hosts stood while we ate and drank. We, guests in their own comfortable house, did not ask them to join us. Llewellyn, when I put the question, answered:
“No. I am both white and of too high native rank. You cannot afford to let the native become your social equal.”
McHenry said:
“You’re bloody well right. Keep him in his stall, and he’s all right; but out of it, ye’ll get no peace.”
So the gentle Pai and her husband—they are religious people, and went to the Faatoai church three times this Sunday—stood while we lolled at ease. Courtesy here seems a native trait, though even a little native blood improves on the white as far as politeness is concerned. En passant, the average white here is not of the leisure class, in which manners are an occupation; the native, on the other hand, is of a leisure class by heredity, and it is only when tainted by a desire to make money quickly or much of it that he loses his urbanity.
We had breakfasted in the bower at ten o’clock, with the band in attendance. Not one of the musicians had slept except Kelly, who said he had forty winks. When the pastors and their flocks of the various competing churches passed on their way to services, the band was keyed up in G, and was parading the streets, so that the faith of the Tahitians was severely tried. Even the ministers tarried a minute, and had to hold tightly their scriptures to control their legs, which itched to dance.
Aboard the Potii Moorea the bandsmen came sober, a revelation in recuperation. Again we passed the idyllic shores of Moorea, glimpsed the grove of Daphne and McTavish’s bungalow at Urufara, and saw the heights, the desolated castle, the marvels of light and shade upon the hills and valleys, left the silver circlet of the reef, and made the open sea.
The glory of the Diadem, a crown of mountain peaks, stood out above the mists that cover the mountains of Tahiti, and the green carpet of the hills fell from the clouds to the water’s-edge, as if held above by Antæus and pinned down by the cocoanut-trees.
At landing I discovered that the bandsmen had stolen away the sleeping Mamoe, and had carried her aboard the Potii Moorea, and deposited her in the hold. She emerged fresh from her nap, and apparently ready for an upaupa that night. We marched to the Cercle Bougainville to recall the incidents of the excursion over a comforting Dr. Funk.
Chapter X
The storm on the lagoon; Making safe the schooners—A talk on missing ships—A singular coincidence—Arrival of three of crew of the shipwrecked El Dorado—The Dutchman’s story—Easter Island.
It blew a gale all one day and night from the north, and at break of the second day, when I went down the rue de Rivoli from the Tiare Hotel to the quay, the lagoon was a wild scene. Squall after squall had dashed the rain upon my verandas during the night, and I could faintly hear the voices of the men on the schooners as they strove to fend their vessels from the coral embankment, or hauled at anchor-ropes to get more sea-room.
The sun did not rise, but a gray sky showed the flying scud tearing at the trees and riggings, and the boom of the surf on the reef was like the roaring of a great steelmill at full blast. The roadway was littered with branches and the crimson leaves of the flamboyants. The people were hurrying to and from market in vehicles and on foot, soaked and anxious-looking as they struggled against the wind and rain. I walked the length of the built-up waterfront. The little boats were being pulled out from the shore by the several launches, and were making fast to buoys or putting down two and three anchors a hundred fathoms away from the quays.
The storm increased all the morning, and at noon, when I looked at the barometer in the Cercle Bougainville it was 29.51, the lowest, the skippers said, in seven years. The William Olsen, a San Francisco barkentine, kedged out into the lagoon as fast as possible, and through the tearing sheets of rain I glimpsed other vessels reaching for a holding-ground. The Fetia Taiao had made an anchorage a thousand feet toward the reef. The waves were hammering against the quays, and the lagoon was white with fury.
In the club, after all had been made secure, the skippers and managers of trading houses gathered to discuss the weather. Tahiti is not so subject to disastrous storms as are the Paumotu Islands and the waters toward China and Japan, yet every decade or two a tidal-wave sweeps the lowlands and does great injury. Though this occurs but seldom, when the barometer falls low, the hearts of the owners of property and of the people who have experienced a disaster of this kind sink. The tides in this group of islands are different from anywhere else in the world I know of in that they ebb and flow with unchanging regularity, never varying in time from one year’s end to another.
Full tide comes at noon and midnight, and ebb at six in the morning and six in the evening, and the sun rises and sets between half past five and half past six o’clock. There is hardly any twilight, because of the earth’s fast rotation in the tropics. This is a fixity, observed by whites for more than a century, and told the first seamen here by the natives as a condition existing always. Another oddity of the tides is that they are almost inappreciable, the difference between high and low tide hardly ever exceeding two feet. But every six months or so a roaring tide rolls in from far at sea, and, sweeping with violence over the reef, breaks on the beach. Now was due such a wave, and its possibilities of height and destruction caused lively argument between the traders and the old salts. More than a dozen retired seamen, mostly Frenchmen, found their Snug Harbor in the Cercle Bougainville, where liberty, equality, and fraternity had their home, and where Joseph bounded when orders for the figurative splicing of the main-brace came from the tables.
George Goeltz, a sea-rover, who had cast his anchor in the club after fifty years of equatorial voyaging, was, on account of his seniority, knowledge of wind and reef, and, most of all, his never-failing bonhommie, keeper of barometer, thermometer, telescopes, charts, and records. When I had my jorum of the eminent physician’s Samoan prescription before me, I barkened to the wisdom of the mariners.
Captain. William Pincher, who had at my first meeting informed me he was known as Lying Bill, explained to me that some ignorant landsmen stated that this tidal regularity was caused by the steady drift of the tradewinds at certain hours of the day.
“That don’t go,” said he, “for the tides are the same whether there’s a gale o’ wind or a calm. I’ve seen the tide ’ighest ’ere in Papeete when there wasn’t wind to fill a jib, and right ’ere on the leeward side of the bloody island, sheltered from the breeze. How about it at night, too, when the trade quits? The bleedin’ tide rises and falls just the same at just the same time. Those trades don’t even push the tidal waves because they always come from the west’ard, and the trades are from the east.”
“I can look out of the veranda of this Cercle Bougainville and tell you what time it is to a quarter of an hour any day in the year just by looking at the shore or the reef and seein’ where the water is,” said Goeltz. “You can’t do that any place on the globe except in this group.”
A beneficent nature has considered the white visitor in this concern, for he can go upon the reef to look for its treasures at low tide, at sun-up or sun-fall, when it is cool.
We fell to talking about missing ships, and Goeltz insisted on Lying Bill telling of his own masterful exploit in bringing back a schooner from South America after the captain had run away with it and a woman. Pincher was mate of the schooner, which traded from Tahiti, and the skipper was a handsome fellow who thought his job well lost for love. He became enamored of the wife of another captain. One night when by desperate scheming he had gotten her aboard, he suddenly gave orders to up anchor and away. The schooner was full of cargo, copra and pearl-shell and pearls, and was due to return to Papeete to discharge. But this amative mariner filled his jibs on another tack, and before his crew knew whither they were bound was well on his long traverse to Peru.
Lying Bill was the only other white man aboard, and he took orders, as he had to by law and by the might of the swashbuckler captain. The lady lived in the only cabin—a tiny corner of the cuddy walled off—and ate her meals with her lover while Pincher commanded on deck. At a port in Peru the pirate sold the cargo, and taking his mistress ashore, he disappeared for good and all from the ken of the mate and of the South Seas.
“Now,” said Captain George Goeltz, “Bill here could ’a’ followed suit and sold the vessel. Of course they had no papers except for the French group, but in South America twenty-five years ago a piaster was a piaster. Bill was square then, as he is now, and he borrows enough money to buy grub, and he steers right back to Papeete. Gott im Himmel! Were the owners glad to see that schooner again? They had given her up as gone for good when the husband told them his wife had run away with the captain. That’s how Bill got his certificate to command vessels in this archipelago, which only Frenchmen can have.”
Goeltz picked up the “Daily Commercial News” of San Francisco, and idly read out the list of missing ships. There was only one in the Pacific of recent date whose fate was utterly unknown. She was the schooner El Dorado, which had left Oregon months before for Chile, and had not been sighted in all that time. The shipping paper said:
What has become of the El Dorado, it is, of course, impossible to say with any degree of accuracy, but one thing is almost certain, and that is that the likelihood of her ever being heard of again is now practically without the range of possibility. Nevertheless she may still be afloat though in a waterlogged condition and drifting about in the trackless wastes of the South Pacific. Then again she may have struck one of the countless reefs that infest that portion of the globe, some entirely invisible and others just about awash. She is now one hundred and eighty-nine days out, and the voyage has rarely taken one hundred days. She was reported in lat. 35:40 N., long. 126:30 W., 174 days ago.
“There’ll be no salvage on her,” said Captain Pincher, “because if she’s still afloat, she ain’t likely to get in the track of any bloody steamer. I’ve heard of those derelic’s wanderin’ roun’ a bloody lifetime, especially if they’re loaded with lumber. They end up usually on some reef.”
This casual conversation was the prelude to the strangest coincidence of my life. When I awoke the next morning, I found that the big sea had not come and that the sun was shining. My head full of the romance of wrecks and piracy, I climbed the hill behind the Tiare Hotel to the signal station. There I examined the semaphore, which showed a great white ball when the mail-steamships appeared, and other symbols for the arrivals of different kinds of craft, men-of-war, barks, and schooners. There was a cozy house for the lookout and his family, and, as everywhere in Tahiti, a garden of flowers and fruit-trees. I could see Point Venus to the right, with its lighthouse, and the bare tops of the masts of the ships at the quays. Gray and red roofs of houses peeped from the foliage below, and a red spire of a church stood up high.
The storms had ceased in the few hours since dawn, and the sun was high and brilliant. Moorea, four leagues away, loomed like a mammoth battle-ship, sable and grim, her turrets in the lowering clouds on the horizon, her anchors a thousand fathoms deep. The sun was drinking water through luminous pipes. The harbor was a gleaming surface, and the reef from this height was a rainbow of color. All hues were in the water, emerald and turquoise, palest blue and gold. I sat down and closed my eyes to recall old Walt’s lines of beauty about the
—World below the brine.
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves.
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seed.
The thick tangle,... and pink turf.
When I looked again at the reef I espied a small boat, almost a speck outside the coral barrier. She was too small for an inter-island cutter, and smaller than those do not venture beyond the reef. She was downing her single sail, and the sun glinted on the wet canvas. I called to the guardian of the semaphore, and when he pointed his telescope at the object, he shouted out:
“Mais, c’est curieux! Et ees a schmall vessel, a sheep’s boat!”
I waited for no more, but with all sorts of conjectures racing through my mind, I hurried down the hill. Under the club balcony I called up to Captain Goeltz, who already had his glass fixed. He answered:
“She’s a ship’s boat, with three men, a jury rig, and barrels and boxes. She’s from a wreck, that’s sure.”
He came rolling down the narrow stairway, and together we stood at the quai du Commerce as the mysterious boat drew nearer. We saw that the oarsmen were rowing fairly strongly against the slight breeze, and our fears of the common concomitants of wrecks,—starvation and corpses—disappeared as we made out their faces through the glasses. They stood out bronzed and hearty. The boat came up along the embankment, one of the three steering, with as matter of fact an air as if they had returned from a trip within the lagoon. There was a heap of things in the boat, the sail, a tank, a barrel, cracker-boxes, blankets, and some clothing.
The men were bearded like the pard, and in tattered garments, their feet bare. The one at the helm was evidently an officer, for neither of the others made a move until he gave the order:
“Throw that line ashore!”
Goeltz seized it and made fast to a ring-bolt, and then only at another command did the two stand up. We seized their hands and pulled them up on the wall. They were as rugged as lions in the open, burned as brown as Moros, their hair and beards long and ragged, and their powerful, lean bodies showing through their rags.
“What ship are you from?” I inquired eagerly.
The steersman regarded me narrowly, his eyes squinting, and then said taciturnly, “Schooner El Dorado.” He said it almost angrily, as if he were forced to confess a crime. Then I saw the name on the boat, “El Dorado S. F.”
“Didn’t I tell you so?” asked Lying Bill, who was in the crowd now gathered. “George, didn’t I say the El Dorado would turn up?”
He glared at Goeltz for a sign of assent, but the retired salt sought kudos for himself.
“I saw her first,” he replied. “I was having a Doctor Funk when I looked toward the pass, and saw at once that it was a queer one.”
The shipwrecked trio shook themselves like dogs out of the water. They were stiff in the legs. The two rowers smiled, and when I handed each of them a cigar, they grinned, but one said:
“After we’ve e’t. Our holds are empty. We’ve come thirty-six hundred miles in that dinghy.”
“I’m captain N.P. Benson of the schooner El Dorado.” vouchsafed the third. “Where’s the American Counsul?”
I led them a few hundred feet to the office of Dentist Williams, who was acting as consul for the United States. He had a keen love of adventure, and twenty years in the tropics had not dimmed his interest in the marvelous sea. He left his patient and closeted himself with the trio, while I returned to their boat to inspect it more closely.
All the workers and loafers of the waterfront were about it, but Goeltz would let none enter it, he believing it might be needed untouched as evidence of some sort. There are no wharf thieves and no fences in Tahiti, so there was no danger of loss, and, really, there was nothing worth stealing but the boat itself.
Captain Benson and his companions hastened from the dentist’s to Lovaina’s, where they were given a table on the veranda alone. They remained an hour secluded after Iromea and Atupu had piled their table with dishes. They drank quarts of coffee, and ate a beefsteak each, dozens of eggs, and many slices of fried ham, with scores of hot biscuits. They never spoke during the meal. A customs-officer had accompanied them to the Tiare Hotel, for the French Government wisely made itself certain that they might not be an unknown kind of smugglers, pirates, or runaways. Their boat had been taken in charge by the customs bureau, and the men were free to do what they would.
When they came from their gorging to the garden, they picked flowers, smelled the many kinds of blossoms, and then the sailors lighted their cigars. This pair were Steve Drinkwater, a Dutchman; and Alex Simoneau, a French-Canadian of Attleboro, Massachusetts.
“Where’s the El Dorado?” I asked of the captain.
Again he looked at me, suspiciously.
“She went down in thirty-one degrees: two minutes, south and one hundred twenty-one: thirty-seven west,” he said curtly, and turned away. There was pride and sorrow in his Scandinavian voice, and a reticence not quite explicable. The three, as they stood a moment before they walked off, made a striking group. Their sturdy figures, in their worn and torn clothes, their hairy chests, their faces framed in bushes of hair, their bronzed skins, and their general air of fighters who had won a battle in which it was pitch and toss if they would survive, made me proud of the race of seamen the world over. They are to-day almost the only followers of a primeval calling, tainted little by the dirt of profit-seeking. They risk their lives daily in the hazards of the ocean, the victims of cold-blooded insurance gamblers and of niggardly owners, and rewarded with only a seat in the poorhouse or a niche in Davy Jones’s Locker. I was once of their trade, and I longed to know the happenings of their fated voyage.
Next morning the three were quite ordinary-looking. They were shorn and shaved and scrubbed, and rigged out in Schlyter’s white drill trousers and coats. They had rooms under mine in the animal-yard. They were to await the first steamship for the United States, to which country they would be sent as shipwrecked mariners by the American consulate. This vessel would not arrive for some weeks. The captain sat outside his door on the balcony, and expanded his log into a story of his experiences. He had determined to turn author, and to recoup his losses as much as possible by the sale of his manuscript. With a stumpy pencil in hand, he scratched his head, pursed his mouth, and wrote slowly. He would not confide in me. He said he had had sufferings enough to make money out of them, and would talk only to magazine editors.
“There’s Easter Island,” he told me. “Those curiosities there are worth writing about, too. I’ve put down a hundred sheets already. I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to any one. I’m going to take the boat with me, and exhibit it in a museum and speak a piece.”
He was serious about his silence, and as my inquisitiveness was now beyond restraint, I tried the sailors. They would have no log, but their memories might be good.
Alex Simoneau, being of French descent, and speaking the Gallic tongue, was not to be found at the Tiare. He was at the Paris, or other cafe, surrounded by gaping Frenchmen, who pressed upon him Pernoud, rum, and the delicate wines of France. So great was his absorption in his new friends, and so unbounded their hospitality, that M. Lontane laid him by the heels to rest him. Simoneau was wiry, talking the slang of the New York waterfront, swearing that he would “hike for Attleboro, and hoe potatoes until he died.” I was forced to seek Steve Drinkwater. Short, pillow-like, as red-cheeked as a winter apple, and yellow-haired, he was a Dutchman, unafraid of anything, stolid, powerful, but not resourceful. I called Steve to my room above Captain Benson’s, and set before him a bottle of schnapps, in a square-faced bottle, and a box of cigars.
“Steve,” I said, “that squarehead of a skipper of yours won’t tell me anything about the El Dorado’s sinking and your great trip in the boat. He said he’s going to write it up in the papers, and make speeches about it in a museum. He wants to make money out of it.”
“Vere do ve gat oop on dat?” asked the Hollander, sorely. “Ve vas dere mit ’im, und vas ve in de museum, py damage? Dot shkvarehet be’n’t de only wrider?”
I shuddered at the possible good fortune. I transfixed him with a sharp eye.
“Steve,” I asked gentry, “did you keep a log? Pour yourself a considerable modicum of the Hollands and smoke another cigar.”
“Vell,” said the seaman, after obeying instructions, “I yoost had vun hell of a time, und he make a long rest in de land, I do py dammage! I keep a leedle book from off de day ve shtart ouid.”
I heard the measured pace of the brave “shkvarehet” below as he racked his brains for words. I would have loved to aid him, to do all I could to make widely known his and his crew’s achievements and gain him fortune. However, he would sow his ink and reap his gold harvest, and I must, by master or by man, hear and record for myself the wonderful incidents of the El Dorado’s wreck. The insurance was doubtless long since paid on her, and masses said for the repose of the soul of Alex Simoneau. The world would not know of their being saved, or her owners of the manner of her sinking, until these three arrived in San Francisco, or until a few days before, when the steamship wireless might inform them.
Steve came back with a memorandum book in which he had kept day by day the history of the voyage. But it was in Dutch, and I could not read it. I made him comfortable in a deep-bottomed rocker, and I jotted down my understanding of the honest sailor’s Rotterdam English as he himself translated his ample notes in his native tongue. I pieced these out with answers to my questions, for often Steve’s English was more puzzling than pre-Chaucer poetry.
The El Dorado was a five-masted schooner, twelve years old, and left Astoria, Oregon, for Antofagasta, Chile, on a Friday, more than seven months before, with a crew of eleven all told: the captain, two mates, a Japanese cook, and seven men before the mast. She was a man-killer, as sailors term sailing ships poorly equipped and undermanned. The crew were of all sorts, the usual waterfront unemployed, wretchedly paid and badly treated. The niggardliness of owners of ships caused them to pick up their crews at haphazard by paying crimps to herd them from lodging-houses and saloons an hour or two before sailing to save a day’s wages. Once aboard, they were virtual slaves, subject to the whims and brutality of the officers, and forfeiting liberty and even life if they refused to submit to all conditions imposed by these petty bosses.
Often the crimps brought aboard as sailors men who had never set foot on a vessel. On the El Dorado few were accustomed mariners, and the first few weeks were passed in adjusting crew and officers to one another, and to the routine of the overloaded schooner. When they were fifteen days out they spoke a vessel, which reported them, and after that they saw no other. The mate was a bucko, a slugger, according to Steve, and was hated by all, for most of them during the throes of seasickness had had a taste of his fists.
On the seventy-second day out the El Dorado was twenty-seven hundred miles off the coast of Chile, having run a swelling semicircle to get the benefit of the southeast trades, and being far south of Antofagasta. That was the way of the wind, which forced a ship from Oregon to Chile to swing far out from the coast, and make a deep southward dip before catching the south-west trades, which would likely stay by her to her port of discharge.
They had sailed on a Friday, and on Wednesday, the eleventh of the third month following, their real troubles began. Steve’s diary, as interpreted by him, after the foregoing, was substantially as follows, the color being all his:
“From the day we sailed we were at the pumps for two weeks to bale the old tub out. Then she swelled, and the seams became tight. There was bad weather from the time we crossed the Astoria bar. The old man would carry on because he was in a hurry to make a good run. The mate used to beat us, and it’s a wonder we didn’t kill him. We used to lie awake in our watch below and think of what we’d do to him when we got him ashore. All the men were sore on him. He cursed us all the time, and the captain said nothing. You can’t hit back, you know. He would strike us and kick us for fun. I felt sure he’d be murdered; but when we got into difficulty and could have tossed him over, we never made a motion.
“On the seventy-third day out, came the terror. The wind is from the southeast. There is little light. The sea is high, and everything is in a smother. We took down the topsails and furled the spanker. The wind was getting up, and the call came for all hands on deck. We had watch and watch until then. That’s four hours off and four hours on. When the watch below left their bunks, that was the last of our sleep on the El Dorado. A gale was blowing by midnight. We were working all the time, taking in sail and making all snug. There was plenty of water on deck. Schooner was bumping hard on the waves and making water through her seams. We took the pumps for a spell.
“We had no sleep next day. In the morning we set all sails in a lull, but took them down again quickly, because the wind shifted to the northwest, and a big gale came on. Now began trouble with the cargo. We had the hold filled with lumber, planks and such, and on the deck we had a terrible load of big logs. These were to hold up the walls and roofs in the mines of Chile. Many of them were thirty-six feet long, and very big around. They were the trunks of very big trees. They were piled very high, and the whole of them was fastened by chains to keep them from rolling or being broken loose by seas. In moving about the ship we had to walk on this rough heap of logs, which lifted above the rails. They were hard to walk on in a perfectly smooth sea, and with the way the El Dorado rolled and pitched, we could hardly keep from being thrown into the ocean.
“This second day of the big storm, with the wind from the northeast, the El Dorado began to leak badly again. All hands took spells at the pumps. We were at work every minute. We left the ropes for the pumps and the pumps for the ropes. We double-reefed the mizzen, and in the wind this was a terrible job. It nearly killed us. At eight o’clock to-night we could not see five feet ahead of us. It was black as hell, and the schooner rolled fearfully. The deck-load then shifted eight inches to starboard. This made a list that frightened us. We were all soaking wet now for days. The after-house separated from the main-deck, and the water became six feet deep in the cabin.
“We had no sun at all during the day, and at midnight a hurricane came out of the dark. All night we were pulling and hauling, running along the great logs in danger always of being washed away. We had to lash the lumber, tightening the chains, and trying to stop the logs from smashing the ship to pieces. It did not seem that we could get through the night.
“This is Friday. When a little of daylight came, we saw that everything was awash. The sea was white as snow, all foam and spindrift. It did not seem that we could last much longer. The small boat that had been hanging over the stern was gone. It had been smashed by the combers. We should have had it inboard, and the mate was to blame. Now we took the other boat, the only one left, and lashed it upright to the spanker-stays. In this way it was above the logs and had a chance to remain unbroken.
“We sounded the well, and the captain ordered us again to the pumps. These were on deck between the logs, which were crashing about. We couldn’t work the pumps, as there was seven feet of water in there on deck. The second mate spoke to the captain that it would be best to start the steam pump. The smokestack and the rest of the steam fittings were under the fo’c’s’le head. It took a long time to get them out, and then the steam pump would not work. The water gained on us all the time now, and the captain ordered us to throw the deck-load overboard. We were nearly dead, we were so tired and sleepy and sore. This morning, the cook served coffee and bread when daylight came at six o’clock. That was the last bit of food or drink we had on the El Dorado.
“The taking off of the great chain was a murderous job. When we loosened it, the huge seas would sweep over the logs and us while we tried to get them overboard. It was touch and go. We had to use capstanbars to pry the big logs over and over. We tried to push them with the rolling of the ship. One wave would carry a mass of the logs away, and the next wave would bring them back, crashing into the vessel, catching in the rigging, and nearly pulling it down, and the masts with it. Dodging those big logs was awful work, and if you were hit by one, you were gone. They would come dancing over the side on the tops of the waves and be left on the very spot from which we had lifted them overboard. The old man should have thrown the deck-load over two days before. The water now grew deeper all the time, and the ship wallowed like a waterlogged raft. The fo’c’s’le was full of water. The El Dorado was drowning with us aboard.
“We were all on deck because we had nowhere else to go. There was nothing in the cabin or the fo’c’s’le but water. The sea was now like mountains, but it stopped breaking, so that there was a chance to get away. We were hanging on to stays and anything fixed.
“The captain now gave up hope, as we had long ago. He ordered all hands to make ready to lower the one boat we had left, and to desert the ship. We had a hard time to get this boat loose from the spanker-stay, and we lowered it with the spanker-tackle. Just while we were doing that, a tremendous wave swept the poop, with a battering-ram of logs that had returned. Luckily, the boat we were lowering escaped being smashed, or we had all been dead men now.
“We filled a tank with twenty-five gallons of water from the scuttle-butts and carried it to the boat. The old man ordered the cook and the boy to get some grub he had in a locker in his cabin, high up, where he had put it away from the flood. The cook and the boy were scared stiff, and when they went into the cabin, a sea came racing in, and all saved was twenty pounds of soda crackers, twelve one-pound tins of salt beef, three of tongue, thirty-two cans of milk, thirty-eight of soup, and four of jam.
“We went into the boat with nothing but what we wore, and that was little. Some of us had no coats, and some no hats, and others were without any shoes. We were in rags from the terrible fight with the logs and the sea. The old man went below to get his medicine-chest. He threw away the medicine, and put his log and the ship’s papers in it. He took up his chronometer to bring it, when a wave like that which got the cook and the boy knocked the skipper over and lost the chronometer. All he got away with was his sextant and compass and his watch, which was as good as a chronometer.
“We got into the boat at four o’clock. The boat had been put into the water under the stern and made fast by a rope to the taffrail. We climbed out the spankerboom and slid down another rope. The seas were terrific, and it was a mercy that we did not fall in. We had to take a chance and jump when the boat came under us. Last came the old man, and took the tiller. He had the oars manned, and gave the order to let go. That was a terrible moment for all of us, to cast loose from the schooner, bad as she was. There we were all alone in the middle of the ocean, bruised from the struggle on deck, and almost dying from exhaustion and already hungry as wolves. In twenty-four hours we had had only a cup of coffee and a biscuit.
“It was very dark, and we had no light. We were, however, glad to leave the El Dorado, because our suffering on her for weeks had been as much as we could bear. The last I saw of the schooner she was just a huge, black lump on the black waters. We rose on a swell, and she sank into a valley out of sight.
“The captain spoke to us now: ‘We have a good chance for life,’ he said. ‘I have looked over the chart, and it shows that Easter Island is about nine hundred miles northeast by east. If we are all together in trying, we may reach there.’
“None of us had ever been to Easter Island, and hardly any of us had ever heard of it. It looked like a long pull there. All night the captain and the mate took turns in steering, while we, in turn, pulled at the oars. We did not dare put a rag of canvas on her, for the wind was big still. The old man said that as we had both latitude and longitude to run, we would run out the latitude first, and then hope for a slant to the land. We were then, he said, in latitude 31° south, and longitude 121° west. That being so, we had about three hundred miles to go south and about six hundred east. He said that Pitcairn Island was but six hundred miles away, but that the prevailing winds would not let us sail there. We set the course, then, for Easter Island. We wondered whether Easter Island had a place to land, and whether there were any people on it. There might be savages and cannibals.
“It rained steady all night, and the sea spilled into the boat now and then. Two of us had to bale all the time to keep the boat afloat. We were soaked to the skin with fresh and salt water, weak from the days of exposure and hunger, and we were barely able to keep from being thrown out of the boat by its terrible rocking and pitching, and yet we all felt like singing a song. All but the Japanese cook. Iwata had almost gone mad, and was praying to his joss whenever anything new happened. During that night a wave knocked him over and crushed one of his feet against the tank of drinking water. The salt water got into the wound and swelled it, and he was soon unable to move.
“The second day in the small boat was the captain’s forty-eighth birthday. The old man spoke of it in a hearty way, hoping that when he was forty-nine he would be on the deck of some good ship. There was no sign of the El Dorado that morning. But with wind and sea as they were, we could not have seen the ship very far, and we had made some distance under oarpower during the night. We put up our little sail at nine o’clock, though the wind was strong. The skipper said that we could not expect anything but rough weather, and that we had to make the best of every hour, considering what we had to eat and that we were eleven in the boat. The wind was now from the southwest, and we steered northeast. We had to steer without compass because it was dark, and we had no light.
“We had our first bite to eat about noon of this second day out. We had then been nearly three months at sea, or, to be exact, it was seventy-eight days since we had left port. It was thirty hours after the coffee and biscuit on the El Dorado, and God knows how much longer since we had had a whole meal, and now we didn’t have much. The old man bossed it. He took a half-bucket of fresh water, and into this he put a can of soup. This he served, and gave each man two soda crackers and his share of a pound of corned beef. We dipped the crackers into the bucket. (I tell you it was better than the ham and eggs we had at the hotel when we landed.) We had this kind of a meal twice a day, and no more.
“The next day the wind was again very strong, with thunder and lightning, and we ran dead before the wind with no more sail than a handkerchief. The sea began to break over the boat, and our old man said that we could not live through it unless we could rig up a sea-anchor. We were sure we would drown. We made one by rolling four blankets together tightly and tying around them a long rope with which our boat was made fast to the ship when we embarked. This we let drag astern about ninety-feet. It held the boat fairly steady, and kept the boat’s head to the seas. We fastened it to the ring in the stern. We used this sea-anchor many times throughout our voyage, and without it we would have gone down sure. Of course we took in a great deal of water, anyhow; but we could keep her baled out, and the sea-anchor prevented her from swamping.
“The nights were frightful, and many times all of us had terrible dreams, and sometimes thought we were on shore. Men would cry out about things they thought they saw, and other men would have to tell them they were not so. We were always up and down on top of the swells, and our bodies ached so terribly from the sitting-down position and from the joggling of the motion that we would cry with pain. The salt water got in all of our bruises and cracked our hands and feet, but there was no help for us, and we had to grin and bear it. A shark took hold of our sea-anchor and we were afraid that he would tear it to pieces.
“Every day the captain took an observation when he could, and told us where we were. We made about a hundred miles a day, but very often we steered out of our course because we had no matches or lantern.
“On the eighteenth we were in latitude 26° 53′ South, and the captain said that Easter Island was in the 27th degree, so after all we had steered pretty well.
“On the night of the nineteenth, we had a fearful storm. It seemed worse than the hurricane we had on the El Dorado. All night long we thought that every minute would end us, and we lay huddled in misery, not caring much whether we went down or not. But the next morning, we set part of the sail again, and at noon that day the captain took a sight and found that we were in latitude 27° 8′ south. Easter Island is 27° 10′ south. And now we began to fear that we might run past Easter Island. If we did, we knew we could never get back with the wind. We had squall after squall now, but we felt sure that soon we must see land. Our soup was all gone, and we were living on the soda crackers mixed with water and milk. Each of us got a cupful of this stuff once a day.
“On the twenty-second, when we were nine days out, I saw the land at ten o’clock in the morning, thirty miles away. We felt pretty good over that, and had two cupfuls of the mixture, because we felt we were nearly safe. My God! what we felt when we saw the rise of that land! The captain said it was Easter Island for certain, but that it was not a place that any merchant ships ever went, as there was no trade there. Once we saw the land we could not get any nearer to it. We tried to row toward it, but the wind was against us. Two days we hung about the back of that island, just outside the line of breakers. We were afraid to risk a landing, for the coast was rocky. On the eleventh day we saw a spot where the rocks looked white, and we rowed in toward it with great pains and much fear. A big sea threw us right upon a smooth boulder, and we leaped from the boat and tried to run ashore. We were weak and fell down many times. Finally we got a hold and we carried everything out of the boat, and after hours hauled it up out of reach of the breakers.
“There was a cliff that went right up straight from the rocks, and we could not climb it, we were so weak from hunger and the cramped position we had had to keep in the boat. We laid down a while, and then it was decided that the first and second mates should have a good feed and try to get up the precipice. We were taking risks, because we had very little grub left. It was about a hundred feet up, and we watched them closely as they went slowly up. They did not come back, and we were much afraid of what they might find. We did not know but there might be savages there. During the day the other sailors also got up, leaving the old man and me to watch the boat.
“Help arrived for us. The mates had walked all night, and at daybreak they reached the house of the head man, employed by the owner of Easter Island. It was a sheep and horse island. The mates were fed, and then they went on to the house of the manager. Horses were gotten out, and bananas and poi sent to us. The water just came in time, because we were all out. They brought horses for all of us then, and after we had started the people of the island went ahead and came back with water and milk, which did us a world of good. At the house of the governor we had a mess of brown beans, and then we all fell asleep on the floor. God knows how long we slept, but when we waked up we were like wolves again. We then had beans with fresh killed mutton, and that made us all deathly sick because our stomachs were weak.”
* * * * *
Underneath us, while the red-cheeked and golden-haired Steve uttered his puzzling sentences in English, I heard from time to time the heavy tread of Captain Benson. He was, doubtless, living over again the hours of terror and resolution on the El Dorado and in the boat, and seeking to find words to amplify his log by his memories. I heard him sit down and get up more than once; while opposite me in an easy-chair, with his glass of Schiedam schnapps beside him, was the virile Dutchman, hammering in his breast-swelling story of danger and courage, of starvation and storm. I sighed for a dictaphone in which the original Dutch-English might be recorded for the delight of others.
Alex Simoneau came back after a night of the hospitality of M. Lontane, and soon was joyous again, telling his wondrous epic of the main to the beach-combers in the parc de Bougainville or in the Paris saloon, where the brown and white toilers of land and sea make merry.
“A man that goes to sea is a fool,” he said, with a bang of his fist on the table that made the schnapps dance in its heavy bottle. “My people in Massachusetts are all right, and like a crazy man I will go to sea when I could work in a mill or on a farm. They must think I’m dead by now.”
Alex was corroborative of all that Steve said, but I could not pin him down to hours or days. He was too exalted by his present happy fate—penniless, jobless, family in mourning, but healthy, safe, and full-stomached, not to omit an ebullience of spirits incited by the continuing wonder of each new listener and the praise for his deeds and by the conviviality of his admirers.
Alex was sure of one point, and that was that the El Dorado was overloaded.
“Dose shkvarehet shkippers vould dake a cheese-box to sea mit a cargo of le’t,” commented Steve. “All dey care for is de havin’ de yob. De owner he don’t care if de vessel sink mit de insurance.”
When Alex had shuffled out of the cottage, I gave the Dutchman the course of his narrative again.
“You were safe on Easter Island, and ill from stuffing yourself with fresh mutton,” I prompted, “And now what?”
Steve spat over the rail.
“Ram, lam’, sheep, und muddon for a hundred und fife days. Dere vas noding odder. Dot’s a kveer place, dot Easter Island, mit shtone gotts lyin’ round und det fulcanoes, und noding good to eat. Ve liffed in a house de English manager gif us. Dere’s a Chile meat gompany owns de island, und grows sheep. Aboud a gouple of hundred kanakas chase de sheep. Ve vas dreaded vell mit de vimmen makin’ luff und the kanakas glad mit it. Dere vas noding else to do. De manager he say no ship come for six months, und he vanted us to blant bodadoes, und ve had no tobacco. He say de bodadoes get ripe in eight months, und I dink if I shtay dere eight months I go grazy. Ve vas ragged, und efery day ve go und look for a vessel. Ve gould see dem a long vay ouid, und ve made signals und big fires, but no ship efer shtopped. De shkipper made a kvarrel mit de mates, und de old man he say he go away in de boat, und he bick Alex und me because ve was de bestest sailormen. Ve vas dere nearly four months ven ve shtart ouid. De oder men dey vas sore, but dey vanted de old man to bromise to gif dem big money, und ve go for noding. Ve fix oop de boat und ve kvit.”
Steve went on to describe how they fixed up the boat for the voyage by making guards of canvas about the sides, and an awning which they could raise and lower. They took a ten-gallon steel oil-drum and made a stove out of it. They cut it in two at the middle and kept the bottom half. They then made a place for holding a pot, with pieces of scrap-iron fixed to the side of the drum, so that they could make a fire under the pot without setting fire to the boat. Then the captain set them to learning to make fire by rubbing sticks, and after many days they learned it. The manager had a steer killed, and they jerked the meat and loaded up their boat beside with sweet potatoes, taro, white potatoes, five dozen eggs, and twenty gallons of water in their tank, with twenty-five more in a barrel.
Then bidding good-by to everybody who gathered to see them off, they steered for Pitcairn Island. They soon found that the prevailing wind would not permit them to make that course, and so they laid for Mangareva in 23° south and 134° west, sixteen hundred miles distant. They had to go from 28° south and 110° west, 5° of latitude and 24° of longitude. Again they were at the mercy of the sea, but now they had only three men in the boat, and had enough food for many days, rough as it was. In the latitude of Pitcairn, the island so famous because to it fled the mutineers of the Bounty, they all but perished. For two days a severe storm nearly overwhelmed them. The boat was more buoyant, and with the sea-anchor trailing, they came through the trial without injury. Steve said the lightning was “yoost like a leedle bid of hell.” It circled them about, hissed in the water, and finally struck their mast repeatedly, so that the wise captain took it down. The entire heavens were a mass of coruscating electricity, and they could feel the air alive with it. They were shocked by the very atmosphere, said Steve, and feared for their lives every moment. The sea piled up, the wind blew a gale, and death was close at hand. They wished they had not left Easter Island, and envied those who had remained there.
But they rode it out, with their pile of blankets a-trail, and with helm and oars alert to keep the boat afloat.
The gale amended after several days, and on the sixteenth day from their departure they reached Mangareva. That island is in the Gambier group, and a number of Europeans live there. The castaways were received generously, and were informed that a schooner was expected in a fortnight, which might carry them to some port on their way home. But the old man said they must push on. He had to report to his owners the loss of the El Dorado; he had to see his family. They had come twenty-six hundred miles since deserting the schooner, and the thousand miles more to Tahiti was not a serious undertaking. He persuaded Steve and Alex to his manner of thinking, and with the boat stocked with provisions they took the wave again, after a couple of days at Mangareva.
Now the bad weather was over. The sea was comparatively smooth, and the breeze favorable. But fate still had frowns for them, as if to keep them in terror. Sharks and swordfish, as though resenting the intrusion of their tiny craft in waters where boats were seldom seen, attacked them furiously. Five times a giant shark launched himself at their boat, head on, and drove them frantic with his menace of sinking them. They were so filled with this dread that they fastened a marlinespike in the spar, and despite probability of provoking the shark to more desperate onslaughts, maneuvered so that they were able to kill him with a blow.
The next day a swordfish of alarming size played about them, approaching and retreating, eying them and acting in such a manner that they felt sure he was challenging the boat as a strange fish whose might he disputed. One thrust of his bony weapon, and they might be robbed of their chance for life. They shouted and banged on the gunwales, and escaped.
Steve hurried through this part of his diary. So near to safety then, he had had not much thought for a record. There was little more to tell, for after the lightning, the sharks, and the swordfish, they had had no unusual experiences. They had made the voyage of nearly four thousand miles from the pit of water in which they had left the El Dorado, and were glad that they had not stayed behind on Easter Island. Steve had only good words for the skipper’s skill as a seaman, but now that they were there, he would like to be assured of his wages. The captain said he did not know what the owners would do about paying Steve for the time since the El Dorado sank. He was sure she had gone down immediately, for, he said, he would not have left his ship had he not been certain she could not stay on the surface. He contrasted his arrival in Papeete with his coming years before in the brig Lurline, when he brought the first phonograph to the South Seas. Crowds had flocked to the quay to hear it, and it was taken in a carriage all about the island.
The superb courage of these men, their marvelous seamanship, and their survival of all the perils of their thousands of miles’ voyage were not lessened in interest or admiration by their personality. But one realized daily, as one saw them chewing their quids, devouring rudely the courses served by Lovaina, or talking childishly of their future, that heroes are the creatures of opportunity. It is true Steve and Alex were picked of all the crew for their sea knowledge and experience, their nerve and willingness, by the sturdy captain, and that he, too, was a man big in the primitive qualities, a viking, a companion for a Columbus; but—they were peculiarly of their sept; types molded by the wind-swept spaces of the vasty deep, chiseled by the stress of storm and calm, of burning, glassy oceans, and the chilling, killing berg; men set apart from all the creeping children of the solid earth, and trained to seize the winds from heaven for their wings, to meet with grim contempt the embattled powers of sky and wave, and then, alas! on land to become the puny sport of merchant, crimp, and money-changer, and rum and trull.
Goeltz, Lying Bill, Llewellyn, and McHenry sat in the Cercle Bougainville with eager looks as I read them the diary of Steve Drinkwater. The seamen held opinions of the failure of Captain Benson’s seamanship at certain points, and all knew the waters through which he had come.
“Many of the people of Mangareva came from Easter Island,” said Lying Bill. “There was a French missionary brought a gang of them there. ’E was Père Roussel, and ’e ran away with ’em because Llewellyn’s bloody crowd ’ere tried to steal ’em and sell ’em. They lived at Mangareva with ’im till he died a few years ago, and they never went back.”
Llewellyn lifted his dour eyes. There was never such a dule countenance as his, dark naturally with his Welsh and Tahitian blood, and shaded by the gloom of his soul. He looked regretfully at Captain Pincher.
“You are only repeating the untruthful assertion of that clergyman,” he said accusingly. “He put it in a pamphlet in French. My people have had to do with Easter Island for forty years. I lived there several years and, as you know, I made that island what it is now, a cattle and sheep ranch. It is the strangest place, with the strangest history in the world. If we knew who settled it originally and carved those stone gods the Dutch sailor spoke of, we would know more about the human race and its wanderings.
“The Peruvians murdered and stole the Easter Islanders. Just before we took hold there, a gang of blackbirders from Peru went there and killed and took away many hundreds of them. They sold them to the guano diggings in the Chincha Islands. Only those escaped death or capture who hid in the dark caverns. Nearly all those taken away died soon. We then made contracts with some of those left, and took them to Tahiti to work. It is true they died, too, most of them, but some you can find where McHenry lives half a mile from here at Patutoa. We sold off the stock to Chileans, and that country owns the island now.
“I think the island had a superior race once. There are immense platforms of stone, like the paepaes of the Marquesas, only bigger, and the stones are all fitted together without cement. They built them on promontories facing the sea. Some are three hundred feet long, and the walls thirty feet high. On these platforms there were huge stone gods that have been thrown down; some were thirty-seven feet high, and they had redstone crowns, ten feet in diameter. There were stone houses one hundred feet long, with walls five feet thick. How they moved the stones no one knows, for, of course, these people there now were not the builders. Some race of whom they knew nothing was there before them.
“They are one of the greatest mysteries in the world. Easter is the queerest of all the Maori islands. They had nothing like the other Maoris had in any of these islands, but they had plenty of stone, their lances were tipped with obsidian, and they were terrible fighters among themselves. They had no trees, and so no canoes; and they depended on driftwood and the hibiscus for weapons. They are all done for now.”
Captain Benson was still busied with his log when the steamship from New Zealand arrived to take the shipwrecked men away. The El Dorado’s boat was stowed carefully on the deck of the liner. I saw the skipper watching it as the deck-hands put chocks under it and made it fast against the rolling of the ship. That boat deserved well of him, for its stanchness had stood between him and the maws of the sharks many days and nights.
I bade him and the two seamen good-by on the wharf. The old man was full of his plan to exhibit the boat in a museum and of selling his account of his adventures to a magazine.
The crew left on Easter Island were rescued sooner than they had expected. A British tramp, the Knight of the Garter, put into Easter Island for emergency repairs, having broken down. The castaways left with her for Sydney, Australia, and from there reached San Francisco by the steamship Ventura, ten months after they had sailed away on the El Dorado. That schooner was never sighted again.
Chapter XI
I move to the Annexe—Description of building—The baroness and her baby—Evoa and poia—The corals of the lagoon—The Chinese shrine—The Tahitian sky.
Lovaina suggested, since I liked to be about the lagoon, that I move to the Annexe, a rooming-house she owned and conducted as an adjunct to the Tiare. I moved there, and regretted that I had stayed so long in the animal-yard. And yet I should have missed knowing Lovaina intimately, the hour-to-hour incidents of her curious menage, the close contact with the girls and the guests, the El Dorado heroes, the Dummy, and others.
The Annexe fronted the lagoon. It was a two-story building, with broad verandas in front and rear, and stood back a few feet from the Broom Road. It had a very large garden behind, with tall cocoanut trees, and the finest rose-bushes in Tahiti. Vava, the Dummy, put all the sweepings from his stable on the flower beds, and Lovaina cut the roses for the tables at the Tiare Hotel and for presents to friends and prosperous tourists. Vava was often about the garden, and drove Lovaina to and fro in her old chaise.
When he brought me and my belongings from the Tiare, Lovaina came with us. She signed to him to go to the glacerie, the ice- and soda-water factory, to buy ice for the hotel. The Dummy was intensely jealous of new-comers whom Lovaina liked. He left on foot, but merely took a walk, and, returning, answered her question by opening his hands and shaking his head, conveying perfectly the statement that the glacerie had refused Lovaina credit because of her debt to it of two hundred francs, and that cash was demanded. He intimated that the proprietor had ridiculed her.
“That dam’ lie,” said Lovaina to him and to me,—she always supplemented her gestures to him with words,—and she made a sign that she had paid the bill. He uttered a choking sound of anger, accompanied by a dreadful grimace, and after a little while came back with a large piece of ice, which he placed in the carriage. Lovaina told him to break off a lump for my room. He became indignant, and in pantomime vividly described the suffering of guests at the Tiare with the ice exhausted, and Lovaina’s plight if she could sell no more drinks.
Lovaina persisted, and when I went to take the ice myself, he struck me with his horsewhip. Temanu, who had come with Lovaina, rushed out shrieking, and the Dummy, seeing his advantage, began to threaten all who came at the noise. Afa, a half-white, who lives in a cottage in the garden, and who alone could control him, slapped his face. The wretched mute sat down and wept bitterly until Lovaina rubbed his back, and informed him that he was again in her good graces. I, too, smiled upon him, and he became a happy child for a moment.
The Annexe was decaying fast. In the great storm of 1906 it was partly blown down, and was poorly restored. It was the prey of rat and insect, dusty, neglected, but endearing. It had had a season of glory. It was built for the first modern administration office of the French Government, over sixty years before, and was painted white with blue trimmings. In its bare and dusty entrance-hall hung two steel engravings entitled, “The Beginning of the Civil War in the United States” and “The End of the Civil War in the United States.” The former showed Freedom in the center; Justice with a sword and balance; the Stars and Stripes being torn from a liberty-tree, with a snake winding about it; an aged man labeled Buchanan asleep on a big book; and a gentleman named Floyd counting a bag of money; on the other side Abraham Lincoln exhorted a white-haired general who commanded a file of soldiers, and some rich-looking men were throwing money on the floor.
The other picture was indeed florid. It represented three ladies, Freedom, Justice, and Mercy, disputing the center, slaves being unshackled, the army of victory led by Grant claiming honors, Lee handing over a sword, an ugly fellow toting off a bag of gold (graft?) and a gang of conspirators egging on the madman Booth to slay Lincoln. In both these engravings there were scores of supposed likenesses, but I could not identify them. They were published by Kimmel & Forster in New York in 1865, and had probably decorated Papeete walls for half a century. There were large, ramshackle chambers on the first floor, and an exquisite winding staircase, with a rosewood balustrade, led to the second story, where I lived.
In this building all the pomp and circumstance of the Nations in Tahiti had been on parade, kings and queens of the island had pleaded and submitted, admirals and ensigns had whispered love to dusky vahines, and the petty wars of Oceanic had been planned between waltzes and wines. Here Loti put his arms about his first Tahitian sweetheart, and practised that vocabulary of love he used so well in “Rarahu,” “Madame Chrysantheme,” and his other studies of the exotic woman. A hundred noted men, soldiers, and sailors, scientists and dilettanti, governors and writers, had walked or worked in those tumbling rooms.
Lovaina had owned the building many years, buying it from the thrifty French Government.
My apartment was of two rooms, and my section of the balcony was cut off by a door, giving privacy unusual in Tahiti. The coloring of the wall was rich in hue.
Any color, so it’s red, said a satirist, who might have been characterizing my rooms. Turkey-red muslin with a large, white diamond figure was pasted on the plaster walls and hung in the doorways.
“It very bes’ the baroness could do in T’ytee,” explained Lovaina. “She must be bright all about, and she buy and fix rooms. She have whole top floor Annexe, and spen’ money like gentleman, two or three thousand dollar’ every month. I wish you know her. She talk beautiful’, and never one word smut. Hones’, true. Johnny, my son, read ‘Three Weeks’ that time, and he speak the baroness, ‘You jus’ like that woman in the book.’ She have baby here and take with her to Paris. She want that baby jus’ like ‘Three Weeks.’ Oh, but she live high! She have her own servants, get everything in market, bring peacocks and pheasants and turkeys from America. How you think? Dead? No. She sen’ man to bring on foot on boat. You go visit her, she give champagne jus’ like Papenoo River. She beautiful? My God! I tell you she like angel. She speak French, English, Russian, German, Italian, anything the same. She good, but she don’t care a dam’ what people say. When she go ’way Europe she give frien’s all her thing’. Now she back in her palace with her baby. She write once say she come back T’ytee some day by’n’by. She love T’ytee somethin’ crazee.”
At the Cercle Bougainville Captain William Pincher told me more of the baroness.
“Is the bloody meat-safe still on the back porch? The baroness made a voyage with me to the Paumotus just for the air. She sat on deck all the time, rain or shine. I’d put a’ awnin’ over ’er in fair weather or when it rained and there wasn’t much wind. She was a bloody good sailor, too, and ate like us, only she never went below except at night. I give her my cabin. She’d spen’ hours lookin’ over the side in a calm—we had no engine—an’ she’d listen to all the yarns.”
Lying Bill burst out with one of his choicest oaths.
“She wasn’t like some of those ladees I’ve ’ad aboard. She was a proper salt-water lass. She loved to ’ear my yarns of the sea. When she was big with child an’ I ashore, I ’ad the ’abit o’ droppin’ in o’ afternoons and ’avin’ a slice of ’am or chicken out o’ the safe. Afa ran ’er bloody show for ’er, an’ it cost ’er a bloody fortune. I used to lie for ’er to ’ear ’er laugh. You know I’m called Lyin’ Bill, but McHenry tells more real lies in a day than I do in a bloody year. She was the finest-looking girl of the delicate kind I ever saw, all pink and white an’ with fringy clothes an’ little feet. Oh! there was nothing between us but the sea, an’ I know that subject.”
Lying Bill sighed like a diver just up from the bottom of the lagoon.
“You know that big cocoanut tree in the garden of the Annexe? She would sit under that with me an’ smoke her Cairo cigarettes an’ talk about her bally kiddie. She wanted him to be strong an’ to love the sea, and she thought by talking with me about ’im an’ ships an’ the ocean she could sort of train him that way, though he’d been got in Paris an’ might be a girl. Is there anything in that bleedin’ idea? She could quote books all right about it.”
Ah, beautiful and brave baroness! I often thought of you during those months in the Annexe. You will come again, you say, to Tahiti, bathe again in its witching waters, and let the spell of its sweetness bind you again to its soil. Maybe, but baroness, you will never again be as you were, flinging all body and soul into the fire of passion, and yearning for motherhood! Such times can never be the same. We burn, even desire, and consume our dreams. Child of aristocracy, you found in this South Sea eyot the freedom your atavism, or shall I say, naturalness, craved, and you drank your cup to the lees and thought it good. I shall not be the one to point a finger at you, nor even to think too vivid the scarlet of my toilet set. That flamboyant outside my window, once yours, is as garish, and yet lacks no consonance with all about it.
The scene from my veranda was a changing picture of radiance and shadow. Directly below was the Broom Road. Umbrageous flamboyants—the royal poincianas, or flame-trees—sheltered the short stretch of sward to the water, and their blossoms made a red-gold litter upon the grass. A giant acacia whose flowers were reddish pink and looked like thistle blooms, protected two canoes, one my own and one Afa’s. The Annexe was bounded by the Broom Road and the rue de Bougainville, and across that street was the restaurant of Mme. Fanny. It was built over a tiny stream, which emptied fifty feet away into the lagoon. A clump of banana-trees hid the patrons, but did not obscure their view from Fanny’s balcony.
In the lagoon, a thousand yards from me, was Motu Uta, a tiny island ringed with golden sand, a mass of green trees half disclosing a gray house. Motu Uta was a gem incomparable in its beauty and its setting. It had been the place of revels of old kings and chiefs, and Pomaré the Fourth had made it his residence. Cut off by half a mile of water from Papeete, it had an isolation, yet propinquity, which would have persuaded me to make it my home were I a governor; but it was given over to quarantine purposes, with an old caretaker who came and went in a commonplace rowboat.
The Annexe housed many rats. I brought to my rooms a basket of bananas, and put it on a table by my bed, the canopied four-poster in which the son of the baroness was born. In the night I was awakened by a tremendous thump on the floor and a curious dragging noise. I listened breathlessly. But the rat must have heard me, for he ceased operations, only returning when he thought I was asleep. He leaped on the table, scratched a banana from the basket, threw it to the floor, and pulled it to his den near the wardrobe. The joists and floor boards were eaten away by the ants, and in one hole six or seven inches long this rat had entrance to his den between the floor and the ceiling of the room below. He had trading proclivities, and in exchange brought me old and valueless trifles. I once knew a miner in Arizona who found a rich gold-vein through a rat bringing him a piece of ore in exchange for a bit of bacon. He traced the rat to his nest and discovered the source of the ore. The rats had their ancient enemies to guard against, and the cats of Tahiti, not indigenous, slept by day and hunted by night. They cavorted through the Annexe in the smallest hours, and one often wakened to their shrieks and squeals of combat. The tom-cats had tails longer than their bodies, the climate, their habits and food developing them extraordinarily.
The roosters grew to a size unequaled, and those in the garden of the Annexe roused me almost at dawn. Their voices were horrific, and one that had fathered a quartet of ducks—an angry tourist had killed the drake because of his quacking—was a vrai Chantecler. When he waked me, the sun was coming over the hills from Hitiaa, brightened Papenoo and leaped the summits to Papeete, but it was long before the phantom of false morning died and the god of day rode his golden chariot to the sea. The Diadem was gilded first, and down the beach the long light tremulously disclosed the faint scarlet of the flamboyant-trees, their full, magnificent color yet to be revealed, and their elegant contours like those graceful, red-tiled pagodas on the journey to Canton in far Cathay.
Motu Uta crept from the obscurity of the night, and the battlements of Moorea were but dim silhouettes. The lagoon between the reef and the beach was turning from dark blue to azure pink. The miracle of the advent of the day was never more delicately painted before my eyes.
In my crimson pareu I descended the grand staircase, which had often echoed to the booted tread of admiral and sailor, of diplomat and bureaucrat, and outside the building I passed along the lower rear balcony to the bath. The Annexe, like the Tiare Hotel, made no pretense to elegance or convenience. The French never demand the latter at home, and the Tahitian is so much an outdoor man that water-pipes and what they signify are not of interest to him.
The bath of the Annexe was a large cement tank, primarily for washing clothes. Its floor was as slippery as ice. One held to the window-frame at the side, and turned the tap.
A shower fell a dozen feet like rose-leaves upon one. Ah, the waters of Tahiti! Never was such gentle, velvety rain, a benediction from the tauupo o te moua, the slopes of the mountains.
I deferred my pleasure a few minutes as the place under the shower was occupied by an entrancing pair, Evoa, the consort of Afa, and her four-months-old infant, Poia. Evoa was sixteen years old, tall, like most Tahitians, finely figured, slender, and with the superb carriage that is the despair of the corseted women who visit Tahiti. Her features were regular, but not soft. Her skin was ivory-white, with a glint of red in cheek and lip, and the unconfined hair that reached her hips was intensely black and fine, I could see no touch or tint of the Polynesian except in the slight harshness of the contours of her face, and that her legs were more like yellow satin than white. Her foot would have given Du Maurier inspiration for a brown Trilby. It was long, high-arched, perfect; the toes, never having known shoes, natural and capable of grasp, and the ankle delicate, yet strong. Her father she believed to have been a French official who had stayed only a brief period in Bora-Bora, her mother’s island, and whose very name was forgotten by her. She had not seen her mother since her first year, having, as is the custom here, been adopted by others.
Poia had a head like a cocoanut, her eyes shiny, black buttons, her body roly-poly, and her pinkish-yellow feet and hands adorable. Evoa was dressing her for the market in a red muslin slip, a knitted shawl of white edged with blue, and, shades of Fahrenheit! a cap with pink ribbons, and socks of orange. Evoa herself would wear a simple tunic, which was most of the time pulled down over the shoulder to give Poia ingress to her white breast. Poia was like a flower, and I had never heard her cry, this good nature being accounted for perhaps by an absence of pins, as she was usually naked. She had two teeth barely peeping from below.
Evoa spoke only Tahitian, which is the same tongue as that spoken in Bora-Bora, and she was totally without education. Afa had found her, and brought her to his cabin in the garden. He did not claim to be the father of Poia, but was delighted, as are all Polynesians, to find a mate and, with her, certainty of a little one. They have not our selfishness of paternity, but find in the assumed relation of father all the pride and joy we take only with surety of our relationship.
Afa was a handsome half-caste, his mustache and light complexion, his insouciance and frivolity, his perfect physique, skill with canoe and fish-net and spear, his flirtations with many women, and his ability to provide amusement for the guests, making him a superior type of the white-brown blood. There was a black tragedy in this life which, with all his heedlessness, often and again imprisoned him in deep melancholy.
His father was a wealthy Italian who lived near the home of a Tahitian princess, and who won the girl’s love against her father’s commands. Afa was born, the princess was sent away, and the child brought up in a good family. When he was fourteen years old he was taken to the United States. His father became engaged in a quarrel with certain natives whom he forbade to cross his land to gather feis in the mountains. As they had always had this right, they resented his imposition, and plotted to kill him. He disappeared, and a long time afterward his body was found loosely covered with earth, the feet above the surface. In court the surgeons swore that he had been alive when buried. A number of men were tried for the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment in New Caledonia.
Afa returned from America to find that much of his father’s property had been stolen or claimed by others, and he became a cook and servant. He had been many years with Lovaina, and though he owned valuable land, he preferred the hotel life, half domestic, half manager and confidant, to the quietude of the country. In Afa’s single room were two brass bedsteads, many gaudy tidies, an engraving of the execution of Nathan Hale, and a toilet-table full of fancy notions. Evoa was always barefooted, but Afa, on steamer days and when going to the cinematograph, appeared in immaculate white and with canvas shoes. Otherwise he wore only a fold of cloth about the loins, the real garment of the Tahitian, and the right one for that climate.
Again on my balcony, I saw the sun had passed the crown of the Diadem and was slanting hotly toward Papeete. Moorea was emerging from darkness, its valleys a deep brown, and the tops of the serried mountains becoming green.
Along the reef, outside, a schooner, two-masted, was making for the harbor. She was very graceful, and as she entered the lagoon through the passage in the barrier I was struck by her lines, slender, swelling, and feminine. She passed within a few hundred feet of me, and I saw that she was the Marara, the Flying-Fish.
I did not know it then, but I was to go on that little vessel to the blazing atolls of the Dangerous Archipelago, and to see stranger and more fascinating sights than I had dreamed of on the Noa-Noa during my passage to Tahiti.
I dragged my canoe to the edge of the quai des Subsistances, so-called because of the naval depot. The craft was dubbed out of a breadfruit-tree trunk, and had an outrigger of purau wood, a natural crooked arm, with a small limb laced to it. The canoe was steady enough in such smooth water, and I paddled off to Motu Uta. That islet is a rock of coral upon which soil had been placed unknown years before, and which produced fruits and flowers in abundance under the hand of the caretaker. Motu Uta is about as large as a city building lot, and the coral hummock shelves sharply to a considerable depth. Under this declining reef were the rarest shapes and colors of fish. They swam up and down, and in and out of their blue and pink and ivory-colored homes, slowly and majestically, or darting hither and thither, angered at the intrusion of my canoe in their domain, courting and rubbing fins, repelling invaders. The little ones avoiding dexterously the appetites of their big friends, and these moving pompously, but warily, seeking what they might devour.
A collector of corals would find many sorts there. They are wonderful, these stony plants, graceful, strange, bizarre. The Tahitian, who has a score of names for the winds, and who classifies fish not only by their names, but changes these names according to size and age, makes only a few lumps of the coral. It is to’a, and when round is to’a ati, to’a apu; when branching, uruhi, uruana; when in a bank, to’a aau; when above the surface of the water, to’a raa. A submerged mass is to’a faa ruru, and the coral on which the waves break, to’a auau. However, the native knows well that one species of coral, the ahifa, is corrosive, irritating the skin when touched, and another, which is poisoned by the hara plants, is termed to’a harahia.
Coral makes good lime for whitening walls, and is cut into blocks for building. Many churches in Tahiti were built of coral blocks. The puny fortifications erected by the French in the war with the Tahitians decades ago were of coral stones, and are now black with age and weather.
I headed my canoe toward the barrier reef, and tied it to a knob of coral. Then I stepped out upon the reef itself, my tennis shoes keeping the sharp edges from cutting my feet. It was the low tide succeeding sunrise, and the water over the reef was a few inches deep, so that I could see the marine life of the wall, the many kinds of starfish, the sea-urchins, and the curious bivalves which hide with their shell-tips just even with the floor of the lagoon, and, keeping them barely even, wait for foolish prey.
The floor of the lagoon was most interesting; the prodigality of nature in the countless number of low forms of life, their great variety, their beauty, and their ugliness, and, appealing to me especially, the humor of nature in the tricks she played with color and shape, her score of clowns of the sea equaling her funny fellows ashore, the macaws, the mandrills, the dachshunds, and the burros.
The sunlight on the water at that hour was like silver spangles on a sapphire robe. I paddled near to the Marara, and watched her let go her anchor and send her boat ashore with a stern line. Fastened to a cannon and passed around a bitt on the schooner, the crew hauled her close to the embankment, and soon she was broadside to, and her gangway on the quay. Her captain, M. Moet, Woronick, a pearl merchant, a government physician, and the passengers from the Paumotus were soon ashore shaking hands with friends. I walked behind them to Lovaina’s for coffee, and was introduced to them all.
Woronick took me to his house across the street from the Tiare Hotel, and there opened a massive safe and showed me drawer after drawer of pearls. They were of all sizes and shapes and tints, from a pear-shaped, brilliant, Orient pearl of great value, to the golden pipi of inconsiderable worth. Woronick spoke of a pearl he had bought some years ago in Takaroa, the creation of which, he said, had cost the lives of three men including a great savant.
“If you go to Takaroa,” said Woronick, “be sure to see old Tepeva a Tepeva. He used to be one of the best divers in the Low Islands, but he’s got the bends. He sold me the greatest pearl ever found in these fisheries in the last twenty years, and I made enough profit on it to buy a house in Paris and live a year. Get him to tell you his yarn. It beats Monte Cristo all hollow.”
Which I made a note to do.
In the afternoon, with Charlie Eager, a guest at the Annexe, I went to the worship-place of the Chinese, on the Broom Road. Outwardly, it had not the flaunting distinction of the joss-houses of the Far East or those of New York or San Francisco. The Chinese usually builds his temples even in foreign lands in the same Oriental superfluity of color and curve and adornment that makes them exclusively the Middle Kingdom’s own; but here he had been content to have a simple, whitewashed church which might be a meeting-house or school. It was set in the center of a great garden in which mango and cocoa and breadfruit abounded. We were struck by the superb breadth and immense height of a breadfruit-tree the shadows of which fell over a small brick pagoda. This tree was a hundred feet tall, and the always glorious leaves, as large as aprons, indented and a glossy, dark green, made it a temple in itself worthier of the ministrations of priests than the ugly brick or frame structure of our cities. The Druids in their groves were nearer to the real God than the pursy bishop in the steam-heated cathedral.
A native woman, aged and bent, said “Ia ora na!” to us, and we replied. With my few words of Tahitian I gained from her that the joss-house was open. We entered it, and found no one there. The center was wide to the sky, that the rain might fall and the stars shine within it. The altars were brilliant with memorial tablets, the green, red, and gold flower vases, and sandalwood taper-holders, so familiar to me, and all about were the written prayers of devotees, soliciting the favor of Heaven, asking success in business, or the averting of illness. They were evidently painted by the bonze of the fane, for his slab of India ink was on a table nearby, as also the brushes for the ideographs.
Sons expressed their filial duties in glittering excerpts from Confucius, carved and gilded on expansive boards, and the incense of the poor arose from the humble punksticks stuck in dishes of sand upon the floor.
No Levite sat within the shrine or watched to see if profane hand touched the sacred symbols, and were Charlie Eager sure of that before we left, he had secured a trophy. Not knowing but that from one of the numerous crannies or mayhap from the open roof the wrathful eye of a hierophant was upon him, he had to content himself with a prayer from the pagoda, which proved on close inspection to be a furnace for the burning of the paper slips on which the aspirations of the faithful were written. Whether the prayers had been granted, were out of date, or the time paid for hanging in the joss-house had expired, the crematory was four feet deep with the red and white rice-paper legends, awaiting an auspicious occasion for incineration. Eager of Inglewood, California, fished secretly, hidden by my body, until he found a particularly long and intricate set of hieroglyphics, and deposited it in his pocket. Then we fled.
More than two thousand Chinese in Tahiti, nearly all kin within a few degrees, found in this humble church a substitute for their family temples in China, where usually each clan has its own place of worship. The laboring class of this fecund people seldom extend their real devotion beyond their ancestors and the principle of fatherhood, their reasoning being that of the wise Jewish charge to honor one’s father (and mother) that one’s life may be long. Loving sons take care of old parents. It is the old Oriental patriarchy sublimated by the imposition of commerce upon agriculture.
The Chinese came to Tahiti during the American Civil War. They were brought by an English planter to grow cotton, then scarce on account of the blockade and desolation of the South. With the end of the war, and the looms of Manchester again supplied, the plantation languished, and the Chinese took other employment, became planters themselves, or set up little shops. They now had most of the retail business of the island, and all of it outside Papeete.
The secretary-general gave me figures about them.
“There are twenty-two hundred Chinese in Tahiti now,” said he. “We are willing to receive all who come. They are needed to restore the population. Who would keep the stores or grow vegetables if we did not have the Chinese? We exact no entrance fee, but we number every man, and photograph him, to keep a record. There is no government agent in China to further this emigration, but those here write home, and induce their relatives to come. We hope for enough to make labor plentiful. All cannot keep stores.”
“Have you no Japanese?”
“Only those who work for the phosphate company at the island of Makatea,” replied the secretary-general. “They are well paid, their fare to Tahiti and return secured, and otherwise they are favored. The Government has agreed with a company to promote Chinese emigration to the Marquesas. There are thousands needed. In French Oceanie there are twelve thousand possible workers for nearly a million acres of land. This land could easily feed two hundred thousand people. The natives are dying fast, and we must replace them, or the land will become jungle.”
“Couldn’t you bring French Chinese from Indo-China?” I asked.
“We haven’t any workers to spare there,” he answered.
In Papeete the Chinese were, as in America, a mysterious, elusive race, the immigrants remaining homogeneous in habits, closely united in social and business activities, and with a solid front to the natives and the whites. They lived much as in China, though in more healthful surroundings. Every vice they had in China they brought to Tahiti; their virtues they left behind, except those strict ethics in commerce and finance which must be carried out successfully to “save face.” Their community in this island, with a climate and people as different from their own as the land from the sea, was in their thoughts a part of Canton and the farms of Quan-tung. All the bareness, dirt, and squalid atmosphere of home they had sought to bring to the South Seas. They saw the other nationals here as objects of ridicule and spoilage. The amassing of a competence before old age or against a return to China, and the marrying there, or the resumption of marital relations with the wife he had left to make his fortune, was the fiercely sought goal of each.
Loti wrote nearly fifty years ago, a decade after their influx:
“The Chinese merchants of Papeete were objects of disgust and horror to the natives. There was no greater shame than for a young woman to be convicted of listening to the gallantries of one of them. But the Chinese were wicked and rich, and it was notorious that several of them, by means of presents and money, had obtained clandestine favors which made amends to them for public scorn.”
Had Admiral Julien Viaud returned now to Tahiti, he would have found the Chinese stores thronged by the handsomest girls, their restaurants thriving on their charms, and the Chinese the possessors of the pick of the lower and middle classes of young women. Ah Sin is persistent; he has no sense of Christian shame, and as in the Philippines, he dresses his women gaily, and wins their favors despite his evil reputation, his ugliness, and his being despised.
At the Cercle Bougainville I saw more than one Chinese playing cards and drinking. These were Chinese who had made money, and who in the give and take of business have pushed themselves into the club of the other merchants, who feared and watched them.
Women were not allowed in barrooms in Papeete. The result was that they went to the Chinese restaurants and coffee-houses to drink beer and wine at tables, as legalized. A concomitant of this was that men went to these places to meet women, and further that women were retained or persuaded by the Chinese to frequent their places so as to stimulate the sale of intoxicants. The Chinese restaurants naturally became assignation houses.
Walking back, late in the afternoon, from the joss-house, we met Lovaina in her automobile, with the American negro chauffeur, William, and Temanu, Atupu, and Iromea. She invited me to accompany them to swim in the Papenoo River, a few miles towards Point Venus. Other guests of the Tiare Hotel came in hired cars, and twenty or thirty joined in the bath. The river was a small flood, rains having swelled it so that a current of five or six knots swept one off one’s feet and down a hundred and fifty feet before one could seize the limb of an overhanging tree. We undressed in the bushes, and the men wore only pareus, while the girls had an extra gown. They were expert swimmers, climbing into the tops of the trees, and hurling themselves with screams into the water. They struck it in a sitting posture making great splashes and reverberations. Their muslin slips outlined their strong bodies, so that they were like veiled goddesses, their brownblack hair floating free, as they leaped or fought and tumbled with the tide. We stayed an hour at this sport, joined when school was dismissed by all the youth of Papenoo. Under twelve they bathed naked, but those older wore pareus.
It was hard to keep on a pareu in a swift-running stream unless one knew how to tie it. I lost mine several times, and had to grope shamefacedly in the race for it, until finally Lovaina made the proper knots and turned it into a diaper.
“I not go swim now,” she said regretfully, ”’cep’ some night-time. Too big. Before I marry, eighteen seven’y-nine, and before my three children grow up, I swim plenty then.”
“Lovaina,” I said, “it was hardly eighteen seventynine you were married. You are only forty-three now. Was it not eighty-nine?”
“Mus’ be,” she replied thoughtfully. “I nineteen when marry. My father give me that house, now Tiare Hotel, for weddin’ present. All furnish. You should see that marry! My God! there was bottle in yard all broken. Admiral French fleet send band; come hisself with all his officer’. Five o’clock mornin’-time still dance and drink. Bigges’ time T’ytee. You not walk barefoot long time ’count broken glass everywhere.”
I had heard that delicious incident before, but it never lost savor.
After dinner and a prolonged session upon the camphor-wood chest to hear Lovaina’s chatter, I came leisurely to the Annexe along the shore of the lagoon. It was after midnight, and the heavens sang with stars as the ripe moon dipped into the western sea.
The tropics only know the fullness of the firmament, the myriad of suns and planets, the brilliancy of the constellations, and the overpowering revelation of the infinite above. In less fervent latitudes one can never feel the bigness of the vault on high, nor sense the intimacy one had here with the worlds that spin in the measureless ether.
Two lofty-sparred ships but newly from the California coast swung at moorings within a dozen feet of the grass that borders the coral banks, and on their decks, under the light of lamps, American sailors lifted a shanty of the rolling Mississippi. I remembered when I had first heard it. I was a boy, and had stolen away on a bark, the Julia Rollins, bound for Rio, and as we hauled in the line let go by the tow-boat, a seaman raised the bowline song. To me, with “Two Years Before the Mast” and Clark Russell’s galley yarns churning in my mind, it was sweeter far than ever siren voiced to lure her victims to their death, and rough and tarry as was the shanty-man, Caruso had never seemed to me such a glorious figure.
This fascination of the sea and of its border had never left me, though I had passed years on ships and nearly all my life within sound of the surf. It is as strong as ever, holding me thrall in the sight of its waters and its freights, and unhappy when denied them. Best of all literature I love the stories of old ocean, and glad am I
That such as have no pleasure
For to praise the Lord by measure,
They may enter into galleons and serve him on the sea.
In Tahiti the sea was very near and meant much. One felt toward it as must the mountaineer who lives in the shadow of the Matterhorn; it was always part of one’s thoughts, for all men and things came and went by it, and the great world lay beyond it.
But dear or near as the sea might be to such a man as I, a mere traveler upon it to reach a goal, to the Tahitian it was life and road and romance, too. Legends of it filled the memories of those old ones who, though in tattered form, preserved yet awhile the deeds of daring of their fathers and the terrors of storm and sea monster, of long journeys in frail canoes, of discoveries and conquerings, of brides taken from other peoples, and of the gods and devils who were in turn masters of the deep.
Once a Tahitian stopped the sun as it sank beyond Moorea not to wage war, as Joshua, but to please his old mother. The sea and the heavens are brothers to the Tahitian. The sky had two great tales for him—guidance for his craft and prophecies for his soul; but he did not inhabit it with his gods or his dead, as do Christians and other religionists, for the mountains, the valleys, and the caves were the abiding-places of spirits, and the Tahitian had named only those stars which blazed forth most vividly or served him as compass on the sea. He did, however, mark the various phases of the sky, and in his musical tongue named them with particularity.
The firmament is te ao, te rai, and the atmosphere te reva, and when peaceful, raiatea. This is the name of one of the most beautiful islands of this Society group, “Raiatea la Sacrée,” it is called, “Raiatea the Blessed,” and its own serenity is betokened in its name.
E hau maru, e maru to oe rai
E topara, te Mahana
I Ra’ i-atea nei!
So ran the rhyme of Raiatea:
Full of a sweet peace, serene thy sky;
Bright are all thy days
At Raiatea here.
Rai poia or poiri, they say for the gloomy heavens, and rai maemae when threatening, parutu when cloudy, moere if clear; if the clouds presage wind, tutai vi. The sunset is tooa o te ra, and the twilight marumarupo.
The night is te po or te rui, and the moment before the sun rises marumaru ao. A hundred other words and phrases differentiate the conditions of sky and air. I learned them from Afa and Evoa and others.
The moon is te marama, and the full moon vaevae. Mars is fetia ura, the red star; the Pleiades are Matarii, the little eyes; and the Southern Cross, Tauha, Fetia ave are the comets, the “stars with a tail,” and the meteors pao, opurei, patau, and pitau.
The moon was gone, but the stars needed no help, for they shone as if the trump of doom were due at dawn, and they should be no more. Blue and gold, a cathedral ceiling with sanctuary lamps hung high, the dome of earth sparkled and glittered, and on the schooners by the Cercle Bougainville himenes of joy rang out on the soft air.
I passed them close, so close that a girl of Huahine who was dancing on the deck of the Mihimana seized me by the arm and embraced me.
“Come back, stranger!” she cried in Tahitian. “There is pleasure here, and the night is but just begun.”
A dozen island schooners swayed in the gentle breeze, their stays humming softly, their broadsides separated from the quays by just a dozen or twenty feet, as if they feared to risk the seduction of the land, and felt themselves safer parted from the shore. On all the street-level verandas, the entrances to the shops and the restaurants, the hundreds of natives who had not wanted other lodging slept as children in cradles until they should rise for coffee before the market-bell.
From the Chinese shop at the corner the strains of a Canton actor’s falsetto, with the squeak of the Celestial fiddles issued from a phonograph, but so real I fancied I was again on Shameen, listening over the Canton River to the noises of the night, the music, and the singsong girls of the silver combs.
I went on, and met the peanut-man. He sold me two small bags of roasted goobers for eight sous. He wore the brown, oilskin-like, two-piece suit of the Chinese of southern China, and he had no teeth and no hair, and his eyes would not stay open. He had to open them with his fingers, so that most of the time he was blind; but he counted money accurately, and he had a tidy bag of silver and coppers strapped to his stomach. He looked a hundred years old.
When I paid for the two bags, he raised his lids, believed that I was a speaker of English, and said, “Fine businee!”
As I went past the queen’s palace, the two mahus were chanting low, as they sat on the curbing, and they glanced coquettishly at me, but asked only for cigarettes. I gave them a package of Marinas, made in the Faubourg Bab-el-oued, in Algiers, and they said “Maruru” and “Merci” in turn and in unison. Strange men these, one bearded and handsome, the other slender and in his twenties, their dual natures contrasting in their broad shoulders and their swaying hips, their men’s pareus and shirts, and bits of lace lingerie. I met them half a dozen times a day, and as I was now known as a resident, not the idler of a month, they bowed in hope of recognition.
In the Annexe all was quiet, but in the great sailing canoe of Afa, on the grass by the water, there were two girls smoking and humming, and waiting for the cowboy and the prize-fighter who lived beside me, and who were dancing to-night at Fa’a. Like Indians, these Tahitians, especially the women, would sit and watch and wait for hours on hours, and make no complaint, if only their dear one—dear mayhap for only a night—came at last.
I was awakened from happy sleep by the cries of a frightened woman, confused with outlandish, savage sounds. I lit my lamp and leaned over the balcony. Under a flamboyant-tree was a girl defending herself from the attack of Vava. She was screaming in terror, and the Dummy, a giant in strength, was holding her and grunting his bestial laugh. I threw the rays full in his face, and he looked up, saw me, and ran away up the beach, yelping like a frustrated beast. In voice and action he resembled an animal more than any human I had ever seen. The guilelessness and cunning of child and fiend were in his dumb soul.
Chapter XII
The princess suggests a walk to the falls of Fautaua, where Loti went with Rarahu—We start in the morning—The suburbs of Papeete—The Pool of Loti—The birds, trees and plants—A swim in a pool—Arrival at the cascade—Luncheon and a siesta—We climb the height—The princess tells of Tahitian women—The Fashoda fright.
The falls of Fautaua, famed in Tahitian legend, are exquisite in beauty and surrounding, and so near Papeete that I walked to them and back in a day. Yet hardly any one goes there. For those who have visited them they remain a shrine of loveliness, wondrous in form and unsurpassed in color. Before the genius of Tahiti was smothered in the black and white of modernism, the falls and the valley in which they are, were the haunt of lovers who sought seclusion for their pledgings.
A princess accompanied me to them. She was not a daughter of a king or queen, but she was near to royalty, and herself as aristocratic in carriage and manner as was Oberea, who loved Captain Cook. I danced with her at a dinner given by a consul, and when I spoke to her of Loti’s visit to Fautaua with Rarahu, she said in French:
“Why do you not go there yourself with a Rarahu! Loti is old and an admiral, and writes now of Egypt and Turkey and places soiled by crowds of people, but Rarahu is still here and young. Shall I find you her?”
I looked at her and boldly said:
“I am a stranger in your island, as was Loti when he met Rarahu. Will you not yourself show me Fautaua?”
She gave a shrill cry of delight, and in the frank, sweet way of the Tahitian girl replied:
“We will run away to-morrow morning. Wear little, for it will be warm, and bring no food!”
“I will obey you literally,” I said, “and you must find manna or charm ravens to bring us sustenance.”
I had coffee opposite the market place in the shop of Wing Luey, and chatted a few moments with Prince Hinoe, the son of the Princesse de Joinville, who would have been king had the French not ended the Kingdom of Tahiti. No matter what time Hinoe lay down at night, he was up at dawn for the market, for his early roll and coffee and his converse with the sellers and the buyers. There once a day for an hour the native in Papeete touched the country folk and renewed the ancient custom of gossip in the cool of the morning.
The princess—in English her familiar Tahitian name, Noanoa Tiare, meant Fragrance of the Jasmine—was in the Parc de Bougainville, by the bust of the first French circumnavigator.
“Ia ora na!” she greeted me. “Are you ready for adventure?”
She handed me a small, soft package, with a caution to keep it safe and dry. I put it in my inside pocket.
The light of the sun hardly touched the lagoon, and Moorea was still shrouded in the shadows of the expiring night. As we walked down the beach, the day was opening with the “morning bank,” the masses of white clouds that gather upon the horizon before the tradewind begins its diurnal sweep, to shift and mold them all the hours till sunset.
Fragrance of the Jasmine was in a long and clinging tunic of pale blue, with low, white shoes disclosing stockings also of blue, and wore a hat of pandanus weave. She carried nothing, nor had I anything in my hands, and we were to be gone all day. I regretted that I had not lingered longer with Prince Hinoe over the rolls and coffee.
We fared past the merchants’ stores, the Cercle Bougainville, and the steamship wharf, and over the Pont de l’Est, or Eastern bridge, to Patutoa. The princess pointed out to me many wretched straw houses, crowded in a hopeless way. They were like a refugee camp after a disaster, impermanent, uncomfortable, barely holding on to the swampy earth. One knew the occupants to be far from their own Lares and Penates.
“Those are the habitations of people of other islands,” she said. “The people of the Paumotus, the Australs, and of Easter Island settled there. They were brought here by odious labor contractors, and died of homesickness. Those men murdered hundreds of them to gain un pen d’argent, a handful of gold. Eh b’en, those who did it have suffered. They have faded away, and most of their evil money, too. Aue!”
Llewellyn’s dark face as he protested against Lying Bill’s sarcastic statement of guilt came before me.
To lighten the thought of the princess I told her the thread of “The Bottle Imp,” and that the magic bottle had disappeared out of the story right there, by the old calaboose. She was glad that the white sailor who did not care for life had saved the Hawaiians.
Framed in the door of a rough cabin I saw McHenry. He was in pajamas, barefooted, and unshaven. I recalled that he had an “old woman” there. Llewellyn had reproved him for speaking contemptuously of her as beneath him socially. I waved to McHenry, who nodded charily, and pulled down the curtain which was in lieu of a door. The shack looked bare and cheap, as if little money or effort had been spent upon it. Perhaps, I thought, McHenry could afford only the drinks and cards at the Cercle Bougainville and economized at home. He did not reappear, but a comely native woman drew back the curtain, and stood a moment to view us. She was large, and did not look browbeaten, as one would have supposed from McHenry’s boast that he would not permit her even to walk with him except at a “respectful distance.” Of course I knew him as a boaster.
The church of the curious Josephite religion was near by, and in the mission house attached to it I saw the American preachers of the sect.
“What do they preach?” I asked Noanoa Tiare.
“Those missionaries, the Tonito? Oh, they speak evil of the Mormons. I do not know how they speak of God.” She laughed. “I am not interested in religions,” she explained. “They are so difficult to understand. Our own old gods seem easier to know about.”
We had arrived at the part of the beach into which the broad avenue of Fautaua debouched.
The road was beside the stream of Fautaua, and arching it were magnificent dark-green trees, like the locust-trees of Malta. This avenue was in the middle of the island, and looking through the climbing bow of branches I saw Maiauo, the lofty needles of rock which rise black-green from the mountain plateau and form a tiara, Le Diademe, of the French. A quarter of an hour’s stroll brought us to a natural basin into which the stream fell. It was of it Louis Marie Julien Viaud, shortly after he had been christened Loti, wrote:
The pool had numerous visitors every day; beautiful young women of Papeete spent the warm tropical days here, chatting, singing and sleeping, or even diving and swimming like agile gold fish. They went here clad in their muslin tunics, and wore them moist upon their bodies while they slept, looking like the naiads of the past.
We were already warm from walking, and I, in my pareu and light coat of pongee silk, looked longingly at the water sparkling in the sun, but the princess took me by the hand and led me on.
“It were better to go directly up the valley and out of the heat,” she advised. “We shall have many pools to bathe in.”
It was at the next that I took from my pocket “Rarahu, ou le mariage de Loti,” a thin, poorly printed book in pink paper covers that I had possessed since boyhood, and which I had read again on the ship coming to Tahiti. The princess, like all reading Tahiti, knew it better than I, for it was the first novel in French with its scenes in that island, and for more than forty years had been talked about there.
“Here at this pool,” she said, with her finger on the page, “Loti surprised Rarahu one afternoon when for a red ribbon she let an old and hideous Chinese kiss her naked shoulder. Mon dieu! That French naval officer made a bruit about a poor little Tahitian girl! We will talk about her when we are at déjeuner.”
Déjeuner! My heart leaped. Whence would the luncheon come? Had this child of Tahiti arranged beforehand that she should be met by a jinn with sandwiches and cakes? I dared not ask.
We pushed on, and passed many residences of natives. They were almost all of European construction, board cottages, because the houses of native sort are forbidden within the municipal limits. Beyond them we saw no houses. The Tahitian families were cooking their breakfasts, brought from the market, on little fires outside their houses. They all smiled, and called to us to partake with them.
“Ia ora na! Haere mai amu!”
“Greeting! Come eat with us!”
They looked happy in the sunshine, the smoke curling about them in milky wreaths, the men naked except for pareus, and the children quite as born. Fragrance of the Jasmine answered all with pleasant badinage, and each must know whither we were bound. They thought it not at all odd, apparently, that a princess of their race should be going to the waterfalls with a foreigner, and they beamed on me to assure me of their interest and understanding.
The broad avenue lessened into a broken road, roofed by many kinds of trees. Though the sun ascended from the ocean on the other side of Tahiti above the fantastic peak of Maiauo, it had not shed a beam upon the ferns and mosses. The guava was a dense growth. Like the lantana of Hawaii and Ceylon, imported to Tahiti to fill a want, it had abused hospitality, and become a nuisance without apparent remedy. How often man works but in circles! Everywhere in the world plants and insects, birds and animals, had been pointed out to me that had been acquired for a beneficent purpose, and had become a curse.
The mina-bird was brought to Tahiti from the Moluccas to eat wasps which came from South America, and were called Jack Spaniards. The mina, perhaps, ate the insects, but he also ate everything else, including fruit. He stole bread and butter off tables, and his hoarse croak or defiant rattle was an oft-repeated warning to defend one’s food. The minas were many in Tahiti, and, like the English sparrow in American cities and towns, had driven almost all other birds to flight or local extinction. The sparrow’s urban doom might be read in the increasing number of automobiles, but the mina in Tahiti, as in Hawaii, had a sinecure.
Noanoa Tiare said that the guava had its merits. Horses and cattle ate its leaves and fruit, and the wood was a common fuel throughout Tahiti. The fruit was delicious, and in America or England would be all used for jelly, but only Lovaina preserved it. The passion-flowers of the granadilla vines, white and star-like, with purpling centers, were intermingled with the guavas, a brilliant and aromatic show, the fruit like miniature golden pumpkins. Their acid, sweetish pulp contained many seeds, each incased in white jelly. One ate the seeds only, though the pulp, when cooked, was palatable.
The road dwindled into a narrower path, and then a mere trail. The road had crossed the brook many times on frail bridges, some tottering and others only remnants. Habitations ceased, and we were in a dark, splendid gorge, narrow, and affording one no vision straight ahead except at intervals.
The princess named many of the growths we passed, and explained their qualities. The native is very close to the ground. The lantana, with its yellow and magenta flowerets, umbrella ferns, and aihere, the herbe de vache, and the bohenia, used by the Tahitians for an eye lotion, were all about. Palms, with cocoanuts of a half dozen stages of growth, and giant banana-plants lined the banks, and bushes with blue flowers like violets, and one with red buttons, intermingled with limes and oranges to form a thicket through which we could hardly force our way.
We were yet on the level of the rivulet, but now, the princess said, must take to the cliff. We had come to a pool which in symmetry and depth, in coolness and invitingness, outranked all before. I was very hot, the beads of perspiration like those in a steamroom.
“We will rest here a few minutes, and you may bathe,” said my lovely guide. “I have not been to Fautaua vaimato for several years, but I never forget the way. I will make a basket, and here we will gather some fruit for our déjeuner for fear there might not be plenty at the waterfalls.”
I took off my tennis-shoes, hung my silk coat on a limb, and plunged into the pool. Never but in the tropics does the human being fully enjoy the dash into cool water. There it is a tingling pleasure. I dived time and again, and then sat in the small glitter of sunlight to dry and to watch Noanoa Tiare make the basket. She said she had a wide choice there, as the leaves of the banana, cocoanut, bamboo, pandanus, or aihere would serve. She had selected the aihere, the common weed, and out of its leaves she deftly fashioned a basket a foot long and wide and deep.
Although she had been in Paris and London and in New York, knew how to play Beethoven and Grieg and Saint-Saëns, had had gowns made by Paquin, and her portrait in the salon, she was at home in this glade as a Tahitian girl a hundred years ago. The airs of the avenue de l’Opéra in Paris, and, too, of the rue de Rivoli in Papeete, were rarefied in this simple spot to the impulses and experiences of her childhood in the groves and on the beaches of her beloved island.
When I had on my coat, we gathered limes, bananas, oranges, and a wild pineapple that grew near by in a tangle of coffee and vanilla, and the graceful acalypha. The yellow tecoma, a choice exotic in America, shed its seeds upon the sow thistle, a salad, and the ape or wild taro. The great leaves of the ape are like our elephant’s ear plant, and the roots, as big as war-clubs, are tubers that take the place of potatoes here. In Hawaii, crushed and fermented, and called poi, they were ever the main food. The juice of the leaf stings one’s skin.
The princess removed her shoes and stockings, and I carried them over my shoulder. We deflected from the rivulet to the cliff above it, and there forced our way along the mountain-side, feeling almost by instinct the trail hidden by the mass of creepers and plants.
It was a real jungle. Man had once dwelt there when his numbers in this island were many times greater. Then every foot of ground from the precipices to the sea was cleared for the breadfruit, the taro, the cocoanut, and other life-giving growths, which sowed themselves and asked no cultivation. Now, except for the faint trail, I was on primeval ground, from all appearances.
The cañon grew narrower and darker. The undefined path lay inches deep in water, and the levels were shallow swamp. Nature was in vast luxuriance, in a revel of aloofness from human beings, casting its wealth of blazing colors and surprising shapes upon every side. We slid down the edge of the hill to the burn, where the massive boulders and shattered rocks were camouflaged by the painting of moss and lichen, the ginger, turmeric, caladium, and dracaena, and by the overhanging palms covered with the rich bird’s-nest ferns.
We sat again in this wild garden of the tropic to invite our souls to drink the beauty and quietude, the absence of mankind and the nearness of nature. We became very still, and soon heard the sounds of bird and insect above the lower notes of the brawling stream.
The princess put her finger on her lips and whispered in my ear:
“Do you hear the warbling of the omamao and the olatare? They are our song-birds. They are in these high valleys only, for the mina has frightened them from below—the mina that came with the ugly Chinese.”
“Noanoa Tiare,” said I, “you Tahitians are the birds of paradise of the human family. You have been driven from the rich valleys of your old life to hills of bare existence by the minas of commerce and politics. I feel like apologizing for my civilization.”
She pressed my hand.
“Taisez-vous!” she replied, smiling. “Aita peapea. I am always happy. Remember I still live in Tahiti, and this is my time. My foremothers’ day is past. Allons! We will be soon at the vaimato, and there we will have the déjeuner.”
As we moved on I saw that the yellow flowers of the purau, dried red by the sun,—poultices for natives’ bruises,—and candlenuts in heaps,—torches ready to hand,—littered the moss.
The mountain loomed in the distance, and the immense Pic du Français towered in shadow. Faintly I heard the boom of the waterfall, and knew we were nearing the goal.
The cañon grew yet narrower and darker, and the crash of water louder. We had again attained a considerable height over the stream, and the trail seemed lost. The princess took my hand, and cautiously feeling the creepers and plants under our feet, we slipped and crept down the hidden path. Suddenly, the light became brilliant, and I found myself in a huge broken bowl of lava rock, the walls almost vertical. From the summit of the precipice facing me fell a superb cascade into a deep and troubled tarn. The stream was spun silver in the sun, which now was warm and splendid. So far it fell that much of it never reached the pool as water, but, blown by the gentle breeze, a moiety in spume and spray wet the earth for an acre about. Like the veil of a bride, the spindrift spread in argent clouds, and a hundred yards away dropped like gentle rain upon us. Verdure covered everything below except where the river ran from the tarn and hurried to the lesser things of the town. The giant walls, as black as the interior of an old furnace, were festooned with magnificent tree ferns, the exquisite maidenhair, lianas, and golden-green mosses, all sparkling in the sun with the million drops of the vaimato.
We withdrew a few paces from the vapor, and found a place on the edge of the brook to have our fruit and, perhaps, a siesta. A carpet of moss and green leaves made a couch of Petronian ease, and we threw ourselves upon it with the weariness of six miles afoot uphill in the tropics. It was not hot like the summer heat of New York, for Tahiti has the most admirable climate I have found the world over, but at midday I had felt the warmth penetratingly. Noanoa Tiare made nothing of it, but suggested that we both leap into the tarn.
I knew a moment of squeamishness, echo of the immorality of my catechism and my race conventions. I felt almost aghast at finding myself alone with that magnificent creature in such a paradisiacal spot. I wondered what thoughts might come to me. I had danced with her, I had talked with her under the stars, but what might she expect me not to do? And what was an Occidental, a city man, before her? She retired behind a bird’s-nest fern, on the long, lanceolate leaves of which were the shells of the mountain snail. At her feet was the bastard canna, the pungent root of which makes Chinese curry.
When she emerged, she was an amazing and enchanting personage. She had removed her gown, and wore a pareu of muslin, with huge scarlet leaves upon white. She was tall and voluptuously formed, but she had made the loin-cloth, two yards long and a yard wide, cover her in a manner that was modest, though revealing. It was the art of her ancestors, for this was the shape of their common garment of tapa, a native cloth. With a knot or two she arranged the pareu so that it was like a chemise, coming to a foot above her knees and covering her bosom.
Her black, glossy hair was loose and hung below her waist, and upon it she had placed a wreath she had quickly made of small ferns. That was their general custom, to adorn themselves when happy and at the bath. The eyes of Fragrance of the Jasmine were very large, deep brown, her skin a coppery-cinnamon, with a touch of red in the cheeks, and her nose and mouth were large and well formed. Her teeth were as the meat of the cocoanut, brilliant and strong. Her limbs were rounded, soft, the flesh glowing with health and power. She was of that line of Tahitian women who sent back the first European navigators, the English, to rave about an island of Junos, the French to call Tahiti La Nouvelle Cythère, the new isle of Venus.
I had but to tie up my own pareu of red calico with white leaves in the manner Lovaina had shown me to have an imitation of our usual swimming-trunks.
“Allons!” cried the princess, and running toward the waterfall, she climbed up the cliff to a height of a dozen feet, and threw herself, wreathed as she was, with a loud “Aue!” into the pool.
I followed her, and she dived and swam, brought up bottom, treaded water, and led me in a dozen exercises and tricks of the expert swimmer. The water was very cool, and ten minutes in it, with our sharpening hunger, were enough delight. Fragrance of the Jasmine, as she came dripping from water and lingered a few moments on the brink, was a rapturous object. With unconscious grace she flung back her head many times to shake the moisture from her thick hair, and ran her fingers through it until the strands were fairly separated. The pareu disclosed the rounded contour of her figure as if it were painted upon her. She was one of those ancient Greek statues, those semi-nudes on which the artists painted in vivid tints the blush of youth, the hue of hair, and a shadow of a garment. She entranced me, and I called out to her, “Nehenehe!” “Beautiful!”
She ran to her boudoir behind the bird’s-nest fern, and soon returned in her tunic, still barefoot, and with her pareu in her hand for drying on a rock. She brought two wreaths now and put one upon me. We resumed our couches upon the green sward, and the princess laid the basket of fruit between us.
“Maintenant pour le déjeuner!” she said.
We ate the bananas first, and then the pineapple, which we cut with a sliver of basalt,—we were in the stone age, as her tribe was when the whites came,—and last the oranges. She made cups of leaves and filled them with water, and into them we squeezed the limes for a toast.
“Inu i te ota no te!” she said and lifted her cup. “A health to you! He who eats the fei passes under a spell; he must return again to the islands. Have you eaten the fei?”
“Not yet, Princess,” I replied.
“There they are in abundance on the hillside,” she said. “Look! If we had fire, I would roast one for you, but to-morrow will be another day.”
The fei, the mountain banana, the staple of the Tahitian, was there aplenty. The plant or stalk was that of the banana, but very dark at the base, and the leaves thicker. The fruit was two or three times as large, and red, and a striking difference was that it was placed on the bunches erect, while bananas hang down from the stem.
I drank to her increasing charm, and I told her how much the beauty and natural grace of the Tahitians appealed to me; how I intended to leave Papeete and go to the end of the island to be among the natives only; that I had remained thus long in the city to learn first the ways of the white in the tropics, and then to gain the contrast by seeking the Tahitian as nearly as possible in his original habitat.
Noanoa Tiare took the orange-peel and rubbed it upon her hair.
“Noanoa!” she said. “Mon ami américain, I will give you a note to Aruoehau a Moeroa, the tava, or chief of Mataiea district, and you can stay with him. You will know him as Tetuanui. He will gladly receive you, and he is wise in our history and our old customs. Do not expect too much! We ate in the old day the simple things at hand, fish and breadfruit, feis and cocoanut milk, mangoes and bananas and oranges. Now we eat the dirty and prepared food of the Tinito, the Chinaman, and we depend on coffee and rum and beer for strength. The thin wheat bread has no nourishment compared with the breadfruit and the fei, the yam and the taro. And clothes! The fools taught us that the pareu, which left the body exposed to the air, clean and refreshed by the sun and the winds, was immodest. We exchanged it for undershirts and trousers and dresses and shoes and stockings and coats, and got disease and death and degeneration.
“You are late, my friend,” the princess went on, with a note of pity in her soft voice. “My mother remembered the days Loti depicted in ‘Rarahu.’ My grandmother knew little Tarahu of Bora-Bora of whom he wrote. Viaud was then a midshipman. We did not call him Loti, but Roti, our coined word for a rose, because he had rosy cheeks. But he could not call himself Roti in his novel, for in French, his language, that meant roasted, and one might think of boeuf à la rôti. We have no L in Tahitian. We also called him Mata Reva or the Deep-Eyed One. Tarahu was not born on Bora-Bora, but right here in Mataiea.”
She lay at full length, her uptilted face in her hands, and her perfect feet raised now and then in unaware accentuation of her words.
“What Tahitian women there were then! Read the old French writers! None was a pigmy. When they stood under the waterfall the water ran off their skins as off a marble table. Not a drop stayed on. They were as smooth as glass.”
Fragrance of the Jasmine sighed.
“Aue! Hélas!”
I had it in my mouth to say that she was as beautiful and as smooth-skinned as any of her forebears. She was as enticing as imaginable, her languorous eyes alight as she spoke, and her bare limbs moving in the vigor of her thoughts. But I could not think of anything in French or English not banal, and my Tahitian was yet too limited to permit me to tutoyer her. She was an islander, but she had seen the Midnight Follies and the Bal Bullier, the carnival in Nice, and once, New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. An Italian and a Scandinavian prince had wooed her.
I spoke of Loti again, and of other writers’ comments upon the attitude of women in Tahiti toward man.
The princess sat up and adjusted her hei of ferns. She studied a minute, and then she said:
“I have long wanted to talk with an intelligent American on that subject; with some one who knew Europe and his own country and these islands. There is a vast hypocrisy in the writing and the talking about it. Now, Maru (I already had been given my native name), the woman of Tahiti exercises the same sexual freedom as the average white man does in your country and in England or France. She pursues the man she wants, as he does the woman. Your women pursue, too, but they do it by cunning, by little lies, by coquetry, by displaying their persons, by flattery, and by feeding you.
“The Tahitian woman makes the first advances in friendship openly, if she chooses. She arranges time and place for amours as your women do. She does not take from the Tahitian man or from the foreigner his right to choose, but she chooses herself, too. I feel sure that often an American woman would give hours of pain to know well a certain man, but makes no honest effort to draw him toward her. They have told me so!”
I got up, and standing beside her, I quoted:
“Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and silence.”
“Mais, c’est vrai!” she said, musingly. “The Tahitian woman will not endure that. She is on a par with the man in seeking. Without fear and without shame, and, attendez, Maru, without any more monogamy than you men. I have told some of those suffrage ladies of London and of Washington that we are in advance of their most determined feminism. They will come to it. More women than men in Europe will bring it there.”
Her long, black lashes touched her cheeks.
“We are a little sleepy, n’est-ce pas?” she asked. “B’en, we will have a taoto.”
She made herself a pillow of leaves with her pareu, and arranging her hair in two braids, she stretched herself out, with her face toward the sky, and a cool banana-leaf laid over it. I copied her action, and lulled by the falling water, the rippling of the pool, and the drowsy rustling of the trees, I fell fast asleep, and dreamed of Eve and the lotus-eaters.
When I awoke, the princess was refreshing her face and hands in the water.
“A hio! Look!” she said eagerly. “O tane and O vahine!”
In the mist above the pool at the foot of the cascade a double rainbow gleamed brilliantly. O tane is the man, which the Tahitians call the real arch, and O vahine, the woman, the reflected bow. They appeared and disappeared with the movement of the tiny, fleecy clouds about the sun. The air, as dewy as early morn in the braes o’ Maxwelton, was deliciously cool.
“If you have courage and strength left,” the princess said excitedly, “we will go to the fort of Fautaua, and I will show you where the last of my people perished fighting to drive out the French invader, and where the French officials fled with the treasure-box when they feared war with England not very long ago.”
She pointed up to the brim of the precipice, where the river launched itself into the air, to drop six hundred feet before it fed the stream below. Sheer and menacing the black walls of the crevasse loomed, as if forbidding approach, but through a network of vines and bushes, over a path seldom used, we climbed, and after half a mile more of steeps, reached the fort. Rugged was the way, and we aided each other more than once, but rejoiced at our effort when we surmounted the summit.
The view was indescribably grand. One felt upon the roof of the island, though the farther heights of the valley culminated in a gigantic crag-wall, a saddle only a yard across, and wooded to the apex, and above that even towered Orohena, nearly a mile and a half high, and never reached by man despite many efforts. Tropic birds, the bo’s’ns of the sailor, their bodies whitish gray, with their two long tail-feathers, had their haunt there, and piped above the trees. The river was a fierce torrent, and leaped into a water-hewn lava basin, where it swirled and foamed before it rushed, singing, through a stone funnel to the border of the chasm, and sprang with a dull roar into the ether.
There was a chorus of sounds from the cataract, the river, the wind, the trees, and the birds, a mighty music of elements of the earth and of life, rising and falling rhythmically, and inspiring, but nerve-racking. Fragrance of the Jasmine seized my hand and held it.
“Let us go to a more peaceful spot, where I can tell you the story,” she said in my ear. We passed the rough fort, broken-down and mossy, and moving carefully along the trail, clambering over rocks and tearing away twigs and broad leaves, we reached a dismantled and crumbling chalet.
We sat down upon its steps, and I removed my coat and was naked to my pareu in the afternoon zephyr.
“That fort,” said the princess, “was built by the French in the forties, when they were stealing my country. From it they could command the gorge of Fautaua and that and other valleys. This place was the last stronghold of the Tahitian warriors before the enemy overcame them, and erected the ramparts and the fort. The last man to die fell by the river basin. The band of heroes would have held out longer, but were betrayed by a Tahitian. He led the French troops by night and by secret paths to a hill overlooking them, so that they were shot down from above. The traitor lived to wear the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor and to spend pleasantly the gold the French Government gave him. C’est la vie.”
We cast our eyes over the scene. There was a forest of wild ginger, ferns, and dracasna all about. Thousands of roses perfumed the air, and other flowers and strawberries, and feis, green or ripe-red, wondrous clusters of fruit, awaited man’s culling. The stream purled about worn rocks, and we came to two gloomy pools, black from the reflection of their bowls, the water bubbling and surging from springs beneath. It was deliciously cold, and we drank it from leaf cups.
“How about the time the French came here with the treasure?” I inquired. “Have we time for that history?”