Story of the wondrous pearls planted in the lagoon of Pukapuka—Tepeva a
Tepeva, the crippled diver, tells it—How a European scientist
improved on nature—Tragedy of Patasy and Mauraii—The robbed coral
bank—Death under the sea.
THE palace of the governor was within half a mile of my abode in the
vale of Atuona, on the island of Hiva-Oa, the capital of the Marquesan
Archipelago. It was a broad and deep valley, “the most beautiful, and by
far the most ominous and gloomy, spot on earth,” said Stevenson.
Umbrageous and silent, it was watered by a stream, which, born in the
distant hills, descended in falls and rills and finally a chattering
brook to the bay. Magnificent forests of many kinds of trees, a hundred
vines and flowers, with rarest orchids, and a tangled mass of grasses
and creepers, lined the banks of the little river, and filled the rising
confines of the dell, which, as it climbed, grew narrower and darker,
and more melancholy of aspect, the poignant melancholy of a sad
loveliness past telling or analyzing. A huge fortress of rocks rose
almost sheer above my cottage, lowering in shadow and terrible in storm,
the highest point in the Marquesas. In sunshine it was the brilliant
rampart of the world-god’s battlement, reflecting his flashing rays, and
throwing a sheen of luminosity upon the depths of the strath. This lofty
peak of Temetiu, nearly a mile in the sky, was the tower of a vast
structure of broken hills, gigantic columns, pinnacles, tilted and
vertical rocks, ruins of titanic battles of fire and water in ages gone.
I had but to lift my eyes and lower them to know that man here as in the
Paumotus had but triflingly affected his environment. From the
castellated summits to the beach where I had landed, the dwellings of
humans seemed lost in the dense foliage dominated by the lofty cocoanuts
and the spreading breadfruits.
The palace of the young French administrator was in a garden in which
grew exotic flowers brought by predecessors who sought to assuage their
nostalgia by familiar charms. The palace had large verandas, and they
were most of it, as in all tropical countries where mosquitoes are not
too menacing. The reading and lounging, the eating and drinking, took
place there, and generally a delicious breeze cooled the humid air and
drove away any insects that might annoy. Almost daily I was the guest of
the governor at a meal, or in the evening after dinner, for a merry hour
or two. We might be alone, or with André Bauda, the tax collector,
postmaster, and chief of police, or not seldom with one or more of the
fairest of the Marquesan girls of the island of Hiva-Oa. For the
governor was host not only to the beauties of our valley of Atuona, but
sent Flag, the native _mutoi_, or policeman, of the capital, to other
villages over the mountains, to invite those whom Flag thought would
lessen his _ennui_. Far from his beloved Midi, the governor retained a
Gallic and gallant attitude toward young women, and never tired of their
prattle, their insatiable thirst for the beverages of France, and their
light laughter when lifted out of their habitual gravity by these.
Determined to learn their tongue as quickly as possible, being no longer
resident than I in the Marquesas, he kept about him a lively lexicon or
two to furnish him words and practice. Midnight often came with the rest
of the village already hours upon their sleeping-mats, but on the palace
porches a gabble of conversation, the lilt of a chant, or perhaps the
patter of a hula dance of bare feet upon the boards. The Protestant and
Catholic missionaries, though opposed to each other upon doctrinal and
disciplinary subjects, united in condemnation of the conduct of the high
representative of sovereignty. But, like the governor of the Paumotus,
he replied: “_La vie est triste; vive la bagatalle._” Life is sad; let
joy be unconfined.
The governor’s _ménage_ had only one attendant, Song of the Nightingale,
and he served only because he was a prisoner, and preferred the domestic
duties to repairing trails or sitting all day in the calaboose by the
beach. There was no servant in the Marquesas. Whatever civilization had
done to them,—and it had undone them almost entirely,—it had not made
them menials. There was never a slave. Here death was preferable. In
Tahiti one might procure native domestics with extreme difficulty
through their momentary craving for gauds, or through affection, but one
bought no subservience. The silent, painstaking European or American or
Asiatic, the humble, sir-ring butler and footman, could not be matched
in the South Seas. If they liked one, these indolent people would work
for one now and then, but must be allowed to have their own way and say,
and, if reproved, it must be in the tone one used to a child or a
relative. The governor himself was compelled to endure Song of the
Nightingale’s lapses and familiarities, because he was the only
procurable cook in the islands. He could not buy or persuade one of his
lovely guests, clothed as they were but in a single garment, to wash a
plate or shake a mat. I, it was true, was assisted by Exploding Eggs, a
boy of fourteen years, but I made him an honored companion and neophyte
whom I initiated into the mysteries of coffee-making and sweeping, and
he, too, often wandered away for a day or two without warning.
The table was spread on the veranda when at seven o’clock I opened the
garden gate of the palace. Flag had delivered to me an enveloped card
with studious ceremony, the governor sometimes observing the extreme
niceties of official hospitality, and again throwing them to the winds,
especially in very hot weather. Flag, barelegged and barefooted as
always, wore the red-striped jacket of the _mutoi_ and a loin-cloth, and
carried a capacious leather pouch from which he had extracted the
made-in-Paris _carte d’invitation_. To him it was a mysterious summons
to a Lucullan feast which he might not even look upon. The governor was
dressing when I mounted the porch, and I was received by Song of the
Nightingale. He was a middle-aged desperado, with a leering face, given
a Mephistophelian cast by a black whisker extending from ear to ear, and
by heavy lines of blue tattooing upon his forehead. He had white blood
in him, I felt sure, for he had a cunning wickedness of aspect that
lacked the simplicity of the Marquesan. He had been a prisoner many
years for various offenses, but mostly for theft or moonshining, at
which he was adept, and he was the one Marquesan I would not trust; he
had been too much with whites. One wondered at times whether one’s life
was not the pawn of a mood of such a villain, but the French had
hammered their dominion upon these sons of man-eaters with lead and
steel in the early days, though they were easy and negligent rulers over
the feeble remnant.
The handsome governor came from his boudoir as Vehine-hae and Tahia-veo
said “_Kaoha!_” Vehine-hae and Tahia-veo were their names in Marquesan,
which translated exactly Ghost Girl and Miss Tail. The latter was a
_petite_, engaging girl of seventeen, a brunette in color, and modest
and sweet in disposition. Ghost Girl was the enigma of her sex there,
nineteen or twenty, living alone in a detached hut, and singularly
beautiful. She was as dark as a Nubian, with a voluptuous figure, small
hands and feet, and baggage eyes of melting sepia that promised devotion
unutterable. Her nose was straight and perfect, and her sensual mouth
filled with shining teeth. Of all the Marquesan girls she wore a
travesty of European dress. They in public wore a tight-fitting
_peignoir_ or tunic, and in private a _pareu_, but Ghost Girl had on a
silk bodice open to disclose her ripe symmetry, and a lace petticoat
about which she wore a silk kerchief. In her ebon heap of hair she wore
the phosphorescent flowers of the Rat’s Ear. Her mind was that of a
child of ten, inquisitive and acquisitive, exhibitive and demanding.
The governor seated us, the ladies opposite each other, and the dinner
began with appetizers of vermouth. The aromatic wine, highly fortified
as it was, burned the throat of Miss Tail, but Ghost Girl drank hers
with zest, and said, “_Motaki!_ That’s fine!” Neither of the girls spoke
more than a few sentences of French, though they had both been in the
nuns’ school, but we were able with our knowledge of Marquesan and
Song’s fragmentary French to carry on a lively interchange of words, if
not of thought.
The governor had shot a few brace of _kuku_, the green doves of the
forest, and Song had spitted them over a _purau_ wood fire. With the
haunch of a wild goat from the hills we had excellent fare, with claret
and white wine from Sauterne. We two palefaces wielded forks, but as no
Polynesians use such very modern inventions the ladies lifted their meat
to their months without artificial aid. Ghost Girl, as befitting her
European attire, tried to use a fork, but shrieked with pain when she
succeeded in putting only the tines into her tongue. We hardly realize
the pains our mothers were at to teach us table-manners, nor that
gentlemen of Europe ate with their fingers at a period when chop-sticks
were in common use in China and Japan, except in time of mourning.
Song of the Nightingale, who, doubtless, had indulged his convict
hankering for alcohol in the secret recesses of the kitchen, laughed
loudly at Ghost Girl’s pain, and when he placed a platter of the _kuku_
on the cloth, and she refused to accept one of the grilled birds his
snigger became derisive. He took up the carving-fork and stuck it deep
into a _kuku’s_ breast and put it on her plate. She shuddered and
started back, with her hands covering her long-lashed eyes. The governor
demanded in a slightly angry tone to know what Song had done to frighten
her. The cook explained that Ghost Girl was of Hanavave, on the island
of Fatuhiva, a day’s journey distant, and that the _bon dieu_ or god—he
said _pony-too_—of Fatuhiva was the _kuku_. She had been appalled at his
suggestion that she should eat the symbolic tenement of her mother’s
deity, though she herself ate the transubstantiated host at communion in
the Catholic church at Atuona. Not content with his insult to her
ancestral god, and, taking his cue from the governor’s roar of laughter
at his French or his explanation, the cruel Song said a bitter thing to
Ghost Girl.
“Eat the _kuku_!” he said. “It will taste better than your grandmother
did.”
“_Tuitui!_ Shut your mouth!” retorted Vehine-hae. “There were no thieves
in our tribe.”
That was a hot shot at Song’s crimes and penal record, and so animated
became their repartee that the governor had to call a halt and demand
mutual apologies. The _chef_ informed him that his father in a foray
upon Hanavave had taken as a prize of war the grandmother of Ghost Girl,
and had eaten her, or at least, whatever tidbit he had liked. It was
history that she had been eaten in Taaoa, Song’s home, in the next
valley to Atuona. No more vindictive remark than this, nor more hateful
action than his offering the _kuku_ to Ghost Girl, could be imagined in
the rigid etiquette of Marquesas society. The tears were in the soft
eyes of Vehine-hae, and the alarmed governor dismissed Song from further
service that evening and took the weeping Fatuhivan in his arms to
console her.
“_Tapu!_ _Tapu!_” sobbed Ghost Girl. The _kuku_ was _tapu_ to her teeth,
as the American flag would be to the feet of a patriot. Song was without
other belief than in the delight of drink, but Ghost Girl was a woman,
the support of every new cult and the prop of every old one.
Superstition the world over will die last in the breast of the female.
She survives subjugated races, and conserves the past, because her
instincts are stronger and her faculties less active than man’s, and her
need of worship overwhelming.
That word _tapu_ was still one to conjure with in the Marquesas. Flag,
the policeman, and sole deputy of _Commissaire_ Bauda on the island of
Hiva-Oa, had invoked it a few days before, after an untoward incident.
Bauda and I had returned on horseback from a journey to the other side
of the island, and, at the post-tax-police office near the beach where
Bauda lived, encountered Flag, drunk. Son of a famous dead chief, and
himself an amiable, bright man of thirty, he had not resisted the
temptation of Bauda’s being gone for a day, to abstract a bottle of
absinthe from a closet and consume the quart. Bauda upbraided him and
ordered him to his house, but Flag seized a loaded rifle and sounded an
ancient battle-cry. It had the blood-curdling quality of an Indian
whoop.
Neither Bauda nor I was armed, and I was for shelter behind a
cocoanut-tree. That would not do for Bauda, nor for discipline.
“Me with six campaigns in Africa! _Moi qui parle!_” exclaimed the former
officer of the Foreign Legion, as he tapped his breast and voiced his
astonishment at Flag’s temerity. He strode toward the staggering
_mutoi_, and, with utter disregard of the rifle, reached his side. He
wrenched the weapon from him, and with a series of kicks drove him into
the calaboose and locked the door on him.
[Illustration:
Photo from L. Gauthier
Ghost girl
]
[Illustration:
A double canoe
]
“That means ten years in Noumea for him,” said the _commissaire_,
savagely. But after dinner, which I got, when he had meditated upon
Flag’s willingness as a cook and his ability to collect taxes, he
lessened the sentence to a year at hard labor. I was not surprised to
meet Flag at noon the next day with his accustomed white jacket with its
red stripe upon the arm. Man cannot live without cooks, and perhaps I
had aided leniency by burning a bird.
Flag explained to me, though sheepishly, that, overcome by the _litre_
of absinthe as he was, he would not have injured a hair of Bauda’s head.
“Bauda is _tapu_. I would meet an evil fate did I touch him,” said Flag,
when sober and sorry.
I stumbled on _tapus_ daily. Vai Etienne, my neighbor, gave me a feast
one day, and half a dozen of us, all men, sat at table. Vai Etienne,
having lived several years in Tahiti had Frenchified ways. His mother,
the magnificent Titihuti, who was splendidly tattooed from toe to waist,
and who was my adopted mother, waited upon us. Offering her a glass of
wine, and begging her to sit with us, I discovered that the glass her
son drank from and the chair a man sat in were _tapu_ to her. She took
her wine from a shell, but would not sit at table with us. Of course,
she never sat in chairs, anyhow, nor did Vai Etienne, but he had
provided these for the whites.
The subject of the _tapus_ of the South Seas was endless. The custom,
_tabu_ or _kapu_ in Hawaiian, and _tambu_ in Fijian, was ill expressed
in our “taboo,” which means the pressure of public sentiment, or family
or group feeling. _Tapus_ here were the conventions of primitive people
made awe-inspiring for enforcement because of the very willfulness of
these primitives. The custom here and throughout society dated from the
beginning of legend. Laws began with the rules laid down by the old man
of the family and made dread in the tribe or sept by the hocus-pocus of
the medicine man. _Tapus_ may have been the foundation of all penal laws
and etiquette. The Jews had a hundred niceties of religious, sanitary,
and social _tapus_. Warriors were _tapu_ in Homer’s day, and land and
fish were _tapu_ to Grecian warriors, according to Plato. Confucius in
the “Li Ki,” ordained men and women not to sit on the same mat, nor have
the same clothes-rack, towel, or comb, nor to let their hands touch in
giving and receiving, nor to do a score of other trivial things. The old
Irish had many _tapus_ and totems, and many legends of harm wrought by
their breaking, a famous one being “The Destruction of Da Derga’s
Hostel.”
In the Marquesas _tapus_ were the most important part of life, as
ceremony was at the court of the kings of France. They governed almost
every action of the people, as the rules of a prison do convicts, or the
precepts of a monastery monks. Death followed the disobedience of many,
and others preserved one from the hands of enemies. There being no
organized government in Polynesia, _tapus_ took the place of laws and
edicts. They were, in fact, spiritual laws, superstition being the force
instead of a penal code. They imposed honesty, for if a man had any dear
possession, he had the priest _tapu_ it and felt secure. _Tapus_
protected betrothed girls and married women from rakes.
A young woman who worked at the convent in Atuona, near me, was made
_tapu_ against all work. She was never allowed to touch food until it
had been prepared for her. If she broke the _tapu_ the food was thrown
away. From infancy, when a _taua_ had laid the prohibition upon her, she
lived in disagreeable idleness, afraid to break the law of the priest.
Only in recent years did the nuns laugh away her fears, and set her to
helping in their kitchen. She told me that she could not explain the
reason for her having been _tapu_ from effort, as the _taua_ had died
who chained her, without informing her.
If a child crawled under a house in the building, the house was burned.
If I were building a boat, and, for dislike of me, some one named aloud
the boat after my father, I destroyed the boat. Blue was _tapu_ to women
in Nuku-Hiva, and red, too. They could not eat bonito, _squid_, _popii_,
and _koehi_. They might not eat bananas, cocoanuts, fresh breadfruit,
pigs of brown color, goats, fowls and other edibles.
Females were forbidden to climb upon the sacred _paepaes_, to enter the
men’s club-houses (this _tapu_ was enforced in America until the last
few years), to eat with men, to smoke inside the house, to carry mats on
their heads, and, saddest of all, to weep. Children might not carry one
another pickaback. The _kuavena_ fish was _tapu_ to fishermen, as also
_peata_, a kind of shark.
To throw human hair upon the ground was strictly prohibited. It might be
trodden on, and bring mischief upon the former wearer. So the chiefs
would never walk under anything that might be trodden on, and aboard
ships never went below deck, for that reason. Perhaps our superstition
as to walking under ladders is derived from such a _tapu_. To stretch
one’s hand or an object over the head of any one was _tapu_. There were
a hundred things _tapu_ to one sex. Men had the advantage in these
rules, for they were made by men.
The earthly punishments for breaking _tapus_ ran from a small fine to
death, and from spoliation to ostracism and banishment. Though there
were many arbitrary _tapus_, the whims and fantasies of chiefs, or the
wiles of priests, the majority of them had their beginning in some real
or fancied necessity or desirability. Doubtless they were distorted,
but, like circumcision and the Mosaic barring of pork to the Jews, here
was health or safety of soul or body concerned. One might cite the Ten
Commandments as very old _tapus_.
The utter disregard for the _tapus_ of the Marquesans shown by the
whites eventually had caused them to fall into general disrepute. They
degenerated as manners decayed under the influx of barbarians into Rome,
as Greek art fell before the corruption of the people. The Catholic, who
bowed his head and struck his breast at the exaltation of the host,
could understand the veneration the Marquesans had for their chief
_tapus_, and their horror at the conduct of the rude sailors and
soldiers who contemned them. But when they saw that no gods revenged
themselves upon the whites, that no devil devoured their vitals when
they ate _tapu_ breadfruit or fish or kicked the high priest from the
temple, the gentle savages made up their minds that the magic had lost
its potency. So, gradually, though to some people _tapus_ were yet very
sacred, the fabric built up by thousands of years of an increasingly
elaborate system of laws and rites, melted away under the breath of
scorn. The god of the white man was evidently greater than theirs.
Titihuti, a constant attendent of the Catholic church, yet treasured a
score of _tapus_, and associated with them these others, the dipping of
holy water from the _bénitier_, the crossing herself, the kneeling and
standing at mass, the telling of her beads, and the kissing of the
cross.
The abandonment of _tapus_ under the ridicule and profanation of the
whites relaxed the whole intricate but sustaining Marquesan economy.
Combined with the ending of the power of chiefs of hereditary caste, the
doing away with _tapus_ as laws set the natives hopelessly adrift on an
uncharted sea. Right and wrong were no longer right or wrong.
This fetish system was very aptly called a plague of sacredness.
“Whoever was sacred infested everything he touched with consecration to
the gods, and whatever had thus the microbe of divinity communicated to
it could communicate it to other things and persons, and render them
incapable of common use or approach. Not till the priest had removed the
divine element by ceremonies and incantations could the thing or person
become common or fit for human use or approach again.”
The Marquesan priests strove with might and main to extend the _tapus_,
for they meant power and gain. Wise and strong chiefs generally had
private conferences with the priests and looked to it that _tapus_ did
not injure them.
Allied with _tapuism_ was what is called in Hawaii _kahunaism_, that is
the witchcraft of the priests, the old wizards, who combined with the
imposing and lifting of the bans, the curing or killing of people by
enchantment. Sorcery or spells were at the basis of most primitive
medicine. At its best it was hypnotism, mesmerism, or mind power. After
coming through thousands of years of groping in physic and surgery, we
are adopting to a considerable degree the methods of the ancient
priests, the theurgy, laying on of hands, or invoking the force of mind
over matter, or stated Christly methods of curing the sick. In Africa
witchcraft or voodooism attains more powers than ever here, but even in
Polynesia the test of a priest’s powers was his ability to kill by
willing it. In the New Zealand witchcraft schools no man was graduated
until he could make some one die who was pointed out as his subject. A
belief in this murderous magic is shared by many whites who have lived
long in Polynesia or New Zealand. It was still practised here, and held
many in deadly fear. The victims died under it as if their strength ran
out like water.
The most resented exclusion against women in the Marquesas, and one of
the last to be broken, was from canoes. Lying Bill, as the first seaman
who sailed their ships here, had met shoals of women swimming out miles
to the vessel as it made for port. In his youth they did not dare enter
a canoe in Hiva-Oa. They tied their _pareus_ on their heads and swam
out, clambered aboard the ships miles from land with the _pareus_ still
dry.
“They’d jump up on the bulwarks,” said Lying Bill, “an’ make their
twilight before touchin’ the deck. The men would come out in canoes an’
find the women had all the bloomin’ plunder.”
This _tapu_, most important to the men, was maintained until a Pankhurst
sprang from the ranks of complaining but inactive women. There being
many more men, women had always had a singular sex liberty, but, as I
have said, the artful men had invoked rigid _tapus_ to keep them from
all water-craft. The females might have three or four husbands, might
outshine an Aspasia in spell of pulchritude and collected tribute, and
the portioned men must submit for passion’s sake, but when economics had
concern, the pagan priests brought orders directly from deity.
The dread gods of the High Place, the demons of the _Paepae Tapu_, had
centuries before sealed canoes against women. In canoes women might
wander; they might visit other bays and valleys, even other islands, and
learn of the men of other tribes. They might go about and fall victims
to the enemies of the race. They might assume to enter the Fae Enata,
the House of Council, which was on a detached islet.
And they certainly would catch other fish than those they now snared
from rocks or hooked, as both swam in the sea. Fish are much the diet of
the Marquesans, and were propitiations to maid and wife—the current coin
of the food market. To withhold fish was to cause hunger. The men alone
assumed the hazard of the tossing canoe, the storms, the hot eye of the
vertical sun, and the devils of the deep who grappled with the fisher;
and theirs was the reward, and theirs the weapons of control.
But there were always women who grumbled, women who even laughed at such
sacred things, and women who persisted. Finally the very altar of the
Forbidden Height was shaken by their madness. How and what came of it
were told me by an old priest or sorcerer, as we sat in the shade of the
great banyan on the beach and waited for canoes to come from the
fishing.
The sorcerer and I passed the ceremonial pipe, and his words were slow,
as becoming age and a severe outlook on life.
“There were willful women who would destroy the _tapu_ against entering
canoes?” I asked, to urge his speech.
“_E_, it was so!” he said.
“_Me imui?_ What happened?” I queried further.
“A long time this went on. My grandfather told me of a woman who talked
against that _tapu_ when he was a boy.”
“And she—?”
“She enraged the gods. She corrupted even men. A council was held of the
wise old men, and the words went forth from it. She was made to keep
within her house, and a _tapu_ against her made it forbidden to listen
to her wildness. In each period another woman arose to do the same, and
more were corrupted. Some women stole canoes and were drowned. The
sharks even hated them for their wickedness. We pointed out what fate
had befallen them, but other women returned boasting. We slew some of
these. But still it went on. You know, foreigner, how the _pokoko_
enters a valley. One coughs and then another, and from the sea to the
peak of Temetiu, many are made sick by the evil. It was so with us, and
that revolt against religion.”
He sighed and rubbed his stomach.
“Is it not time they came?” he asked.
“_Epo_, by and by,” I answered. “Why did you men not yield? After all,
what did it really matter?”
“_O te Etua e!_ The gods of the High Place forbade, for the women’s own
sake!” he said indignantly, and muttered further.
To break down every sacred relation of centuries! To shatter the
tradition of ages! To unsex their beloved mothers, wives, and sisters by
the license of canoe riding! The dangers and the hardships of the carven
tree were to be spared the consolers of men’s labor and perils.
“Did the gods speak out plainly and severely?”
The _taua_ looked at me quizzically. Foreigners mock holy things of
nature. The bishop here had kicked the graven image of the deity of the
cocoanut-tree.
“_Ea!_ Po, the god of night, who rules the hereafter, spoke. The priest,
the high priest, received the message. You know that grove by the Dark
Cave. He heard the voice from the black recesses. _Tapu haa_, it said. A
double _tapu_ against any woman even lifting a paddle, or putting one
toe, or her heel, or her shadow within a canoe. All the women were not
wicked. Many believed their place was in the _huaa_, the home. These
refused to join the brazen hussies, the deserters of the _popoi_ pit.
But the dance was dull, and there was strife. The _huona_, the artists,
the women who rejoice men when they are merry, the women with three or
more husbands, they all seemed to have the madness. They gained some of
the younger men to their side, and they built that long house by those
breadfruit-trees. They held their palaver there, and they refused to lie
under their own _faa_, their roofs of pandanus. They would not dance by
the light of the blazing candlenuts the mad _hura-hura_, nor let those
bravers of the sea share their mats on the _paepae_ of the valley. Many
husbands fought one another when their wife did not return. The tribe
grew apart.”
He sighed and took a shark’s tooth from his loin-cloth, with which he
scraped our pipe.
I went and lay where the curling sea caressed my naked feet. I was
within easy distance of the _taua’s_ voice. One must not hurry even in
speech in these Isles of Leisure. The old man blew through the bowl and
then the stem, and, taking pieces of tobacco from his _pareu_, he packed
the pipe and lit it. He drew a long whiff first, as one pours wine first
in one’s own glass, and handed it to me.
He responded when I put the pipe again between his trembling fingers.
“The gods grew weary. Messages but few came from them. Priests’ wives
even ceased to cook the breadfruit on the hot stones, and went to live
in that accursed _haa ite_.”
“We esteem such a long house, and call it a club,” I interposed in
subconscious defense of my own habits.
“_Oti_! Maybe. Your island forgot wisdom early. You even cook your fish.
We will make the fire now.”
I rose and shook off the warm salt water from my body. My _pareu_ of
blue with white stars was on a descending branch of the banyan. I put it
about my thighs and folded it for holding. Then arm in arm we walked to
our own house on the raised _paepae_ of great basalt stones.
I heaped the dried cocoanut fiber in a hollow of a rock, and about it
set the polished coral of our kitchen. A spark from the pipe set it
afire, and, heaped with more fiber and wood of the hibiscus, before long
the stones blushed with the heat, and, growing redder yet, were ready
for their service.
The priest of old had withdrawn to make a sauce of limes and sea-water,
which he brought out within the half-hour from the penthouse in which we
stored our simple goods. It was in a _tanoa_ formerly used for _kava_, a
trencher of the false ebony, black in life, but turned by the years of
decoction of the mysterious narcotic to a marvelous green. It was like
an ancient bronze in the open. Here we were both ready for our delayed
food, I, beside the glowing coral stones, the bones of once living
organisms, and the old man, with his bowl of sauce. But the food
tarried.
He fluttered about the _paepae_ and chewed a bit of the hibiscus wood to
stay his hunger. In the breadfruit-grove the _komako_, the Marquesan
nightingale, deceived by a lowering cloud or perhaps impelled by a
sudden passion, was early pouring his soul into the shadowy air. I
tended my fire and wondered at man’s small relation to most of creation.
“Go, my son,” said the _taua_ impatiently, “to the opening of the
forest, and see if they do not come over the waves!”
I strolled to where the beach met the jungle. An outrigger canoe was
coming through the surf. A faint shout from it reached me. I ran back to
him where he still chewed an inedible splinter.
“_Epo_,” I said, and made the fire fiercer. He stirred his _mitiaroa_,
the sauce, and watered his lips.
“How was the _tapu_ broken finally?” I asked, casually.
“They are long away,” he observed with his eyes on the break in the
trees.
“They are just now beaching the canoe,” I said soothingly. “We will eat
in a moment. But _taua_, you leave me hungry for that last word.
“The women of Oomoa tried to break down your _tapu_ of time immemorial
against their entering canoes, and there was trouble. The gods were
against them, and yet to-day—”
“The gods got tired,” he interrupted me. “The chiefs became afraid of
the continuous _hakapahi i te faufau_, the excitement and turmoil. You
know the chiefs and priests decided all things. Now the women cried out
for a _vavaotina_, for each one of the tribe to lay a candlenut in one
of two _popoi_ troughs. One was assent to the _tapu_, and the other
against it.”
There was argument first, said the _taua_. After the priests had called
down the curse of Po and other gods of might on all who would invoke a
popular judgment of a sacred and time-webbed commandment, the chiefs
pictured the dangers to women and to canoes, to the tribe and the
valley, if women broke loose from the centuried bonds that forbade
canoeing. Older women and some younger beauties, the latter fearing hurt
to their prestige by less luxurious belles, urged the inviolability of
the _tapu_.
The women of the Long House, the rebels, merely demanded instant casting
of the _ama_ nuts into the _hoana_. He himself, the _taua_ said, then
made the great error of his life. He swiftly counted in his mind those
for and against, and, convinced that he had a huge majority for the
prevailing law and order, shouted out that the _vavaotina_, though long
disused, was just and truly Marquesan.
The troughs were brought from a near-by house to the beach, and the
trial was staged.
“At that moment,” said the old priest, “a canoe which had been cunningly
making its way to the shore, as if by a prearranged signal, suddenly
took the breakers and came careening upon the sand. Out of it stepped
Taipi, a woman of that red-headed tribe of Tahuata, arranged her kilt of
_tapa_, and advanced. She was like an apparition, but fatal to my count.
She was a _moi kanahau_, beautiful and strong, and the first woman who
had ever come except as a prisoner from that fierce island. But she was
stronger in her desires than any man. She was unbelieving and unafraid
of sacred things. A hundred men sprang forward to greet Taipi. American,
she was as the red jasmine, as the fire of the oven, odorous and lovely,
but hot to the touch and scorching to know. That woman laughed at the
men, and, as if word had been sent her, took her place among the women.
She seized a candlenut and threw it exactly into the unholy _hoana_.
“‘O men of Oomoa,’ she cried, ‘so you fear that women may paddle faster
and better than you! _Haametau hae!_ You are cowards. Look, I have come
a night and a day alone, and no shark god has injured me and I am not
weary.’
“There followed a shower of candlenuts into the demon trough, as the
stones from the slings in battle. We were beaten, as youth ever defeats
age when new gods are powerful. Our day and the power of all _tapus_
waned and ended soon. Once in the canoes those women made us release the
_tapu_ against their eating bananas and, later, pig. In a thousand years
no Marquesan woman had tasted a banana or eaten pig. They were for the
men and there were good reasons known to the gods. But let woman leave
ever so little way the narrow path of obedience and of doing without
things that are evil for her, and she knows no limits. She is without
the _koekoe_, the spirit that is in man. The race has fallen on sorrow.”
He sat down on his powerful haunches and chanted an improvisation about
the lost splendor. Low and mournful, the psalm of a Jeremiah, his deep
voice rumbled as he fixed his dark eyes on the great globes of the
breadfruit hanging by the plaited roof of the hut.
And through an opening of the forest came the two women of his
household, Very White and Eyes of the Great Stars, heavily laden with
their morning’s catch of fish. They came tripping over the green carpet
of the forest, laughing at some incident of their fishing, and threw
down beside him the strung circles of shining _ika_, large and brilliant
_bonito_, the mackerel of brilliancy, and the _maoo_, the gay and gaudy
flying-fish.
“Oh, ho! sorcerer,” said I. “Did ever men match with the cunning of
these scaly ones with greater luck? The stones are ready for their
broiling.”
The _taua_ made a wry face and stirred his sauce. He dipped a _popo_
into it and ate it greedily, bones and all.
“_E, e!_” he said and spat out the words. “_Piau!_ The women catch their
own fish now.”
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