White Shadows in the South Seas Part 4

On the veranda with the governor and Bauda were several whites, one a French woman to whom we were presented. Madame Bapp, fat and red-faced, in a tight silk gown over corsets, was twice the size of her husband, a dapper, small man with huge mustaches, a paper collar to his ears, and a fiery, red-velvet cravat.

On a table were bottles of absinthe and champagne, and several demijohns of red wine stood on the floor. All our company attacked the table freight and drank the warm champagne.

A seamy-visaged Frenchman, Pierre Guillitoue, the village butcher--a philosopher and anarchist, he told me--rapped with a bottle on the veranda railing. The governor, in every inch of gold lace possible, made a gallant figure as he rose and faced the people. His whiskers were aglow with dressing. The ceremony began with an address by a native, Haabunai.

Intrepreted by Guillitoue, Haabunai said that the Marquesans were glad to have a new governor, a wise man who would cure their ills, a just ruler, and a friend; then speaking directly to his own people, he praised extravagantly the newcomer, so that Guillitoue choked in his translation, and ceased, and mixed himself a gla.s.s of absinthe and water.

The governor replied briefly in French. He said that he had come in their interest; that he would not cheat them or betray them; that he would make them well if they were sick. The French flag was their flag; the French people loved them. The Marquesans listened without interest, as if he spoke of some one in Tibet who wanted to sell a green elephant.

In the South Seas a meeting out-of-doors means a dance. The Polynesians have ever made this universal human expression of the rhythmic principle of motion the chief evidence of emotion, and particularly of elation. Civilization has all but stifled it in many islands. Christianity has made it a sin. It dies hard, for it is the basic outlet of strong natural feeling, and the great group entertainment of these peoples.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Andre Bauda, Commissaire]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The public dance in the garden]

The speeches done, the governor suggested that the national spirit be interpreted to him in pantomine.

"They must be enlivened with alcohol or they will not move," said Guillitoue.

"_Mon dieu!_" he replied. "It is the 'Folies Bergere' over again!

Give them wine!"

Bauda ordered Flag, the native gendarme, and Song of the Nightingale, a prisoner, to carry a demijohn of Bordeaux wine to the garden. With two gla.s.ses they circulated the claret until each Marquesan had a pint or so. Song of the Nightingale was a middle-aged savage, with a wicked, leering face, and whiskers from his ears to the corners of his mouth, surely a strange product of the Marquesan race, none of whose men will permit any hair to grow on lip or cheek. While Song circulated the wine M. Bauda enlightened me as to the crime that had made him prisoner. He was serving eighteen months for selling cocoanut brandy.

When the cask was emptied the people began the dance. Three rows were formed, one of women between two of men, in Indian file facing the veranda. Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale brought forth the drums. These were about four feet high, barbaric instruments of skin stretched over hollow logs, and the "Boom-Boom" that came from them when they were struck by the hands of the two strong men was thrilling and strange.

The dance was formal, slow, and melancholy. Haabunai gave the order of it, shouting at the top of his voice. The women, with blue and scarlet Chinese shawls of silk tied about their hips, moved stiffly, without interest or spontaneous spirit, as though constrained and indifferent. Though the dances were licentious, they conveyed no meaning and expressed no emotion. The men gestured by rote, appealing mutely to the spectators, so that one might fancy them orators whose voices failed to reach one. There was no laughter, not even a smile.

"Give them another demijohn!" said the governor.

The juice of the grape dissolved melancholy. When the last of it had flowed the dance was resumed. The women began a spirited _danse du ventre_. Their eyes now sparkled, their bodies were lithe and graceful. McHenry rushed on to the lawn and taking his place among them copied their motions in antics that set them roaring with the hearty roars of the conquered at the asininity of the conquerors.

They tried to continue the dance, but could not for merriment.

One of the dancers advanced toward the veranda and in a ceremonious way kissed the governor upon the lips. That young executive was much surprised, but returned the salute and squeezed her tiny waist. All the company laughed at this, except Madame Bapp, who glared angrily and exclaimed, "_Coquine!_" which means hussy.

The Marquesans have no kisses in their native love-making, but smell one or rub noses, as do the Eskimo. Whites, however, have taught kisses in all their variety.

The governor had the girl drink a gla.s.s of champagne. She was perhaps sixteen years old, a charming girl, smiling, simple, and lovely. Her skin, like that of all Marquesans, was olive, not brown like the Hawaiians' or yellow like the Chinese, but like that of whites grown dark in the sun. She had black, streaming hair, sloe eyes, and an arch expression. Her manner was artlessly ingratiating, and her sweetness of disposition was not marked by hauteur. When I noticed that her arm was tattoed, she slipped off her dress and sat naked to the waist to show all her adornment.

There was an inscription of three lines stretching from her shoulder to her wrist, the letters nearly an inch in length, crowded together in careless inartistry. The legend was as follows:

"TAHIAKEANA TEIKIMOEATIPANIE PAHAKA AVII ANIPOENUIMATILAILI TETUATONOEINUHAPALIILII"

These were the names given her at birth, and tattooed in her childhood. She was called, she said, Tahiakeana, Weaver of Mats.

Seeing her success among us and noting the champagne, her companions began to thrust forward on to the veranda to share her luck. This angered the governor, who thought his dignity a.s.sailed. At Bauda's order, the gendarme and Song of the Nightingale dismissed the visitors, put McHenry to sleep under a tree, and escorted the new executive and me to Bauda's home on the beach.

There in his board shanty, six by ten feet, we ate our first dinner in the islands, while the wind surged through swis.h.i.+ng palm-leaves outside, and nuts fell now and then upon the iron roof with the resounding crash of bombs. It was a plain, but plentiful, meal of canned foods, served by the tawny gendarme and the wicked Song, whose term of punishment for distributing brandy seemed curiously suited to his crime.

At midnight I accompanied a happy governor to his palace, which had one spare bedroom, sketchily furnished. During the night the slats of my bed gave way with a dreadful din, and I woke to find the governor in pajamas of rose-colored silk, with pistol in hand, shedding electric rays upon me from a battery lamp. There was anxiety in his manner as he said:

"You never can tell. A chief's son tried to kill my predecessor. I do not know these Marquesans. We are few whites here. And, _mon dieu!_ the guardian of the palace is himself a native!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Antoinette, a Marquesan dancing girl]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Marquesans in Sunday clothes The daughter of t.i.tihuti, chieftess of Hiva-Oa. On the left her husband, Pierre Pradorat, on the right, his brother]

CHAPTER V

First night in Atuona valley; sensational arrival of the Golden Bed; t.i.ti-huti's tattooed legs.

It was necessary to find at once a residence for my contemplated stay in Atuona, for the schooner sailed on the morrow, and my brief glimpse of the Marquesans had whetted my desire to live among them.

I would not accept the courteous invitation of the governor to stay at the palace, for officialdom never knows its surroundings, and grandeur makes for no confidence from the lowly.

Lam Kai Oo, an aged Chinaman whom I encountered at the trader's store, came eagerly to my rescue with an offered lease of his deserted store and bakeshop. From Canton he had been brought in his youth by the labor bosses of western America to help build the transcontinental railway, and later another agency had set him down in Taha-Uka to grow cotton for John Hart. He saw the destruction of that plantation, escaped the plague of opium, and with his scant savings made himself a petty merchant in Atuona. Now he was old and had retired up the valley to the home he had long established there beside his copra furnace and his shrine of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

He led me to the abandoned shack, a long room, tumbledown, moist, festooned with cobwebs, the counters and benches black with reminiscences of twenty thousand tradings and Chinese meals. The windows were but half a dozen bars, and the heavy vapors of a cruel past hung about the sombre walls. Though opium had long been contraband, its acrid odor permeated the worn furnis.h.i.+ngs. Here with some misgivings I prepared to spend my second night in Hiva-oa.

I left the palace late, and found the shack by its location next the river on the main road. Midnight had come, no creature stirred as I opened the door. The few stars in the black velvet pall of the sky seemed to ray out positive darkness, and the spirit of Po, the Marquesan G.o.d of evil, breathed from the unseen, shuddering forest.

I tried to d.a.m.n my mood, but found no profanity utterable. Rain began to fall, and I pushed into the den.

A glimpse of the dismal interior did not cheer me. I locked the door with the great iron key, spread my mat, and blew out the lantern.

Soon from out the huge brick oven where for decades Lam Kai Oo had baked his bread there stole scratching, whispering forms that slid along the slippery floor and leaped about the seats where many long since dead had sat. I lay quiet with a will to sleep, but the hair stirred on my scalp.

The darkness was incredible, burdensome, like a weight. The sound of the wind and the rain in the breadfruit forest and the low roar of the torrent became only part of the silence in which those invisible presences crept and rustled. Try as I would I could recall no good deed of mine to s.h.i.+ne for me in that shrouded confine. The Celtic vision of my forefathers, that strange mixture of the terrors of Druid and soggarth, danced on the creaking floor, and witch-lights gleamed on ceiling and timbers. I thought to dissolve it all with a match, but whether all awake or partly asleep, I had no strength to reach it.

Then something clammily touched my face, and with a bound I had the lantern going. No living thing moved in the circle of its rays. My flesh crawled on my bones, and sitting upright on my mat I chanted aloud from the Bible in French with Tahitian parallels. The glow of a pipe and the solace of tobacco aided the rhythm of the prophets in dispelling the ghosts of the gloom, but never s.h.i.+pwrecked mariner greeted the dawn with greater joy than I.

In its pale light I peered through the barred windows--the windows of the Chinese the world over--and saw four men who had set down a coffin to rest themselves and smoke a cigarette. They sat on the rude box covered with a black cloth and pa.s.sed the panda.n.u.s-wrapped tobacco about. Naked, except for loin-cloths, their tawny skins gleaming wet in the gray light, rings of tattooing about their eyes, they made a strange picture against the jungle growth.

They were without fire for they had got into a deep place crossing the stream and had wet their matches. I handed a box through the bars, and by reckless use of the few words of Marquesan I recalled, and bits of French they knew, helped out by sc.r.a.ps of Spanish one had gained from the Chilean murderer who milked the cows for the German trader, I learned that the corpse was that of a woman of sixty years, whose agonies had been soothed by the ritual of the Catholic church.

The bearers were taking her to Calvary cemetery on the hill.

Their cigarettes smoked, they rose and took up the long poles on which the coffin was swung. Moving with the tread of panthers, firm, noiseless, and graceful, they disappeared into the forest and I was left alone with the morning sun and the glistening leaves of the rain-wet breadfruit-trees.

On the beach an hour later I met Gedge, who asked me with a quizzical eye how I had enjoyed my first night among the Kanakas. I replied that I had seldom pa.s.sed such a night, spoke glowingly of the forest and the stream, and said that I was still determined to remain behind when the schooner sailed.

"Well, if you will stay," said he, and the trader's look came into his eye, "I've got just the thing you want. You don't want to lie on a mat where the thousand-legs can get you--and if they get you, you die. You want to live right. Now listen to me; I got the best bra.s.s bed ever a king slept on. Double thickness, heavy bra.s.s bed, looks like solid gold. Springs that would hold the schooner, double-thick mattress, sheets and pillows all embroidered like it belonged to a d.u.c.h.ess. Fellow was going to be married that I brought it for, but now he's lying up there in Calvary in a bed they dug for him. I'll let you have it cheap--three hundred francs. It's worth double. What do you say?"

A bra.s.s bed, a golden bed in the cannibal islands!

"It's a go," I said.

On the deck of the _Morning Star_ I beheld the packing-cases brought up from the hold, and my new purchase with all its parts and appurtenances loaded in a s.h.i.+p's boat, with the iron box that held my gold. So I arrived in Atuona for the second time, high astride the sewed-up mattress on top of the metal parts, and so deftly did the Tahitians handle the oars that, though we rode the surf right up to the creeping jungle flowers that met the tide on Atuona beach, I was not wet except by spray.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Vai Etienne]