Tragic Mademoiselle Narbonne—Whom shall she marry?—Dinner at the home of
Wilhelm Lutz—The _Taua_, the Sorcerer—Lemoal says Narbonne is a
Leper—I visit the _Taua_—The prophecy.
AS long as I live, I shall have, as my avatar of tragedy, Mademoiselle
Narbonne. Fate had marked her for desolation. The grim drama of the
half-caste whose spirit is riven by heredity and environment, fighting
for supremacy of the soul, was enacted here in scenes of rare intensity
and mournful fitness. While I did not await its final dénouement I saw
enough to stamp its pitiable acts upon my memory, and later I learned of
the last blows of an inevitable destiny.
Not even the pitiful plight of the bone-white daughter of the drunkard,
Peyral, appealed to me as did the conspiracy of life and ungenerous men
against the happiness of this singular creature, Mademoiselle Narbonne.
[Illustration:
From the painting by Oscar F. Schmidt
Nakohu, Exploding Eggs
]
[Illustration:
From the painting by Oscar F. Schmidt
Haabuani, the sole sculptor of Hiva-Oa
]
I recall the impression the first sight of her made upon me. I was by
the door of the Catholic Church, the service half over, when she came
in, and knelt at a _prie-dieu_ especially placed for her. Wealth had its
privilege in the house of God here as in the temple of Solomon. But
Mademoiselle Narbonne had another claim to distinction though it did not
win favor with the church. She was exotically beautiful, a distracting
and fascinating contrast with the almost savage girls who knelt in the
pews in their cotton tunics of red or white or pink. She had the grace
of a hothouse flower among these blossoms of half-savage nature. She was
an orchid among wild roses.
Peyral was then in process of winning me into his family, and both
communicative and monitory.
“She is old Narbonne’s daughter,” he croaked. “The richest person in the
Marquesas, now that her father is dead, but I wouldn’t be her with all
her money. Me, I value my skin!”
My whole attention was upon her, and the possible sinister meaning of
his comment escaped me. Whites blackguarded other whites so commonly in
the South Seas that one discounted or denied every judgment. I was to
understand his implication later. Mademoiselle Narbonne had no part in
the life of our valley of Atuona, nor did she come to it other times
than when she attended the services at the Catholic church or visited
the nuns with whom she had been from childhood until the death of her
father a few months before. Upon inheriting his vast cocoanut-groves and
considerable money she had said good-bye to her ascetic guardians and
left the convent walls to take possession of her dead parent’s house and
estate. These were in the adjoining valley of Taaoa, and with her in the
ugly European home built by him lived the stepmother she had known, and
the mother whom he had driven away with blows, years before, when he
caught her in a tryst with Song of the Nightingale.
I met her towards sunset a week later. During that time, I had often
wondered what her temperament might be, and what the future would spin
for her. Many Daughters, Ghost Girl, and other all Marquesan girls were
striking in their aboriginal, hatched-carved beauty, but seemed at
opposite poles to Mademoiselle Narbonne in sophistication and elegance.
And yet at times I caught in her a glimpse of savagery, of wilful
passion and abandonment to her senses beyond that upon the faces of
these daughters of cannibals. The key to that occasional shift into
barbarity I found in her home. Her father had been a driving, sober, and
fierce Frenchman, a native of Cayenne, in Guiana, where the French in
three hundred years have achieved only a devil’s island for convicts
with cruelty and foulness festering under the tricolor. Narbonne in the
Marquesas had risen from a discharged corporal of marines to manager of
the Catholic mission properties, and, by hook and crook, owner of
countless cocoanut-trees. This child of his thirty years of banishment
from his own deadly natal land was the one treasure he had cherished
besides property. He had endured dangers in his early career here,
fought and subdued swaggering chief and tropical nature, to erect a
massive tomb of concrete, and to leave this daughter. She was already
apathetic to his memory, and disregardful of the advice he had given
always with mingled caresses and cuffs.
Her mother, Climber of Trees Who Was Killed and Eaten, who had been
banished from his house for her unfaithfulness, had returned after his
death to share it with Daughter of a Piece of Tattooing, who had
replaced her. Between the two women was no jealousy, both enjoying the
ease their hard years of serving the _Cayennais_ had earned them. In
Climber of Trees I traced the source of those pagan moods which now and
then swept from the face of Barbe Narbonne the least vestige of the mask
the nuns had taught her to wear, and let be read the undammed passion
and wind-free will of the real Marquesan woman.
“I will not be a _sœur_,” she said to me. “The nuns are dear to me, and
they want me to come into the convent, or to go to France for training
to return here. I am waiting to know life. I am not satisfied with the
love of the saints and of the Blessed Virgin.”
“You are able to go where you please,” I answered. “You do not have to
go to France as a Religious. Paris would welcome you. Board the next
schooner for Tahiti, and you are on the way to the wide world.”
Mademoiselle Narbonne made a gesture of fear. Few Marquesans had ever
gone abroad; there were terrors in the thought. It had been _tapu_ to
leave their island home, and, though, as far as Christianity might work
the miracle, she had in the convent been purged of most of her mother’s
superstitions, she had not rid herself of this one.
“I would not care to go that great distance,” she said, dreamingly, “but
I would like to go to Tahiti, to see the cinema, and perhaps the
celebration of the fourteenth of July. I have for years sent to Paris
for my clothes. I have read many novels despite the sisters forbid it. I
have one here that I wish you might talk to me about. Many nights I have
sat up to read it.”
She handed me a yellow paper-covered book, “Jean et Louise,” by Antonin
Dusserre, a story of pastoral and village life in Auvergne, and the
unfortunate loves of a simple peasant youth and maid. Its atmosphere was
of the clean earth, the herds, and the harvests in a lost corner of
France. Its action did not cover ten miles, yet the hate and injustice,
the desires and defeats of its little world were drawn with such skill
that they became universal. The author, himself a man in _sabots_, had
breathed into his model of common clay the life of all humanity. I had
read the book, and I was eager to hear her opinion of it; of an
existence, artless as it was, still as alien to her knowledge as ancient
Greece.
“What do you think about it?” I asked. She spoke French vividly, though
with many Marquesan insets.
“Jean and Louise loved each other,” she replied, “and, because she was
poor and had no money to give a husband, his father separated them; and
Jean allowed it. Already, Monsieur Frederick, the girl had shown her
true love for him by spending the night with him in the hills with their
sheep, and everybody knew she would have a child. That Jean was an
assassin and a coward. Me, I would kill such a man if I loved him, but I
could not love that kind.”
Barbe Narbonne’s black eyes flashed with her feeling.
“I am frank with you, Monsieur, because you are a stranger. You are not
French nor Marquesan. I am both, and I hate and love both. I hate the
French for what they have done to my mother’s race, and I hate the
Marquesans for not preferring to die than to be conquered. I have not
had a lover. I cannot find one here that can satisfy me. If I did, he
might have all my money and land. I would want a man who could read
books, who was honest and strong, but who knew and liked this island of
Hiva-Oa, who could ride and fight. He must love me as”—she paused to
weigh her comparison—“as nuns love Christ, for whom they leave their
homes in France.”
Father David, seeing me with Mademoiselle Narbonne one day, spoke of her
to me.
“We have hoped all along that Jean Narbonne’s daughter would remain with
us,” he said, inquisitively. “But the sacred heart of Jesus does not
call every one. The church leaves all free to choose a vocation of
service to God or not. We know she can find happiness only with the
nuns, for there is only wickedness outside the convent. Barbe is now a
woman, and unfortunately too much like her mother, who was a Magdalen.
She cannot marry a native because she cannot live in the brush. What
white can she select. There is the governor and Bauda and Le Brunnec,
all bad Catholics, and who else?”
“There is Lutz, the big trader at Tahauku,” I said.
“Lutz? No, no! He is a German, an enemy of France, and he is a
Protestant, and, besides, he has had his own woman fourteen years. He is
not married to her, but God knows even the devil could not excuse
putting away such an old companion. What would he want of her but her
money?”
“He has some property himself.”
“No, no! It would be impossible. He is a German, a heretic, and I tell
you he has that Tahitian woman ever since he has been here. Some day he
will return to Germany, the Germany of Martin Luther, and leave behind
any woman here. These Europeans who come here, except the Fathers, have
no consciences. When they have made a little fortune, unless they are
like Guillitoue, or Hemeury François, who are more _Canaque_ than the
_Canaques_, they go back to marry innocent and unsuspecting women.”
I cannot imagine why I mentioned Lutz. I had never seen him with
Mademoiselle Narbonne, and she had not sounded his name. Of course, he
was the only possibly eligible man other than the whites already
enumerated. However, such thoughts did not come by chance, for the
apostolic vicar’s solicitude against him was matched by the boisterous
roarings of _Commissaire_ Bauda, the reincarnated musketeer. Over a
Doctor Funk at his beach house, my repeating of what Father David had
said brought from him an oath and a spluttering:
“_Sacré cochon!_ That Lutz will go too far on French territory. He has
the best lands, most of the trade, and is the only one who can sell
liquor. Do we not all pay tribute to him? Now, me, I have not thought of
marrying, but if that daughter of a French corporal should look for a
suitable mate, who but Bauda? I am a soldier, a veteran of wars in
Africa, I have the medal General Devinne pinned here,”—he slapped his
chest,—“and I am a Frenchman. I could not agree to live here, but why
not for her a house in Marseilles where there are so many dark people of
our colonies? I could be there, say half the year, and the rest of it in
Paris. I would defend her against the world, and in turn, would take my
pleasure in the capital. I do not seek it, but rather than the robber,
Lutz, should take the money to Germany, as I know he wants to do, it
might, perhaps, be arranged. And, _pire alors!_ I would soon send to the
devil all those notions the church has put in her little head. A drop of
absinthe, _mon vieux_? Bauda has his eyes on Lutz.”
I had met Herr Lutz each time that I had gone to his store at Tahauku,
but our social relations began when he sent me, by his cook, a Tongan, a
formal invitation to dinner. Like the young governor, this European
merchant, as often as the small voice of his civilization spoke to him,
cultivated the customs of his _bourgeois_ class in order to reassure
himself of his retaining them. I have the letter before me:
Tahauka, le 11 avril.
Dear Mr. O. Brien,
In case that you having nothing else to do, I shall be glad to
see you at Tahauku to-night. Do not bother please about
dressing, the roads are too bad. If it suits you, I invite you
to stay here over night.
With kindest regards,
Yours
WILHELM LUTZ
Certainly I had nothing else to do, except to explain to Exploding Eggs
that I would not need his services to gather cocoanut husks for my
dinner fire, and at five o’clock to start for Tahauku. Lutz’s kindly
sentence about not dressing was to me a joke, for I had to cross both
the Atuona and the Tahauku rivers, and a storm, the day before, had made
the trails—there were no roads—merely muddy indications of the
direction. The Atuona stream I was able to wade with my trousers rolled
and canvas shoes in my hands, and when I reached the Tahauku River, I
found it waist-deep, and the footing uncertain. A Chinese was gathering
the coarse grass by the river’s bank for Lutz’s horse. It is a rare man
who does not make a slave of his inferior who by conquest or necessity
is forced to do his will. A man’s a man for a’ that only when fighting
equality or mass strength makes him so. I myself, who abhor inequality,
proved a sinner there. Averse to getting my clothes wet, I tried to make
the Chinese understand my wish that he take me on his back across the
stream. Stupidity or a dislike to play horse caused him to assume a
vacant look, the Oriental blankness which is maddening to Occidentals. I
took him by the shoulder, mounted him, and drove him through the hundred
feet of rushing water. On the other side, I thanked him, but his slit
eyes gleamed balefully as he turned away.
The sky was racked with clouds, and they hung on the mountain like smoky
draperies. The evening air was humid and depressing. Tahauku was a
lonely, beautiful place, typical of the Marquesas, isolated, gloomy, but
splendid. There were no craft in the bay except two small cutters moored
near the foot of the stone stairs. A group of wooden buildings in an
extensive clearing lined the road that led along the cliffs, and about
it were thousands and thousands of palms, the finest cocoanut-grove that
I had ever seen in the South Seas or Asia or India. They were planted
regularly, not crowded, but with space for roots and for air. They had
been set out two generations ago by the grandfather of the stark
daughter of Peyral, the Irish cavalry officer, who was buried among
them. Then a thousand Marquesans had led there the life of their
ancestors; a score remained.
In the commodious house erected by the latter, Lutz lived in a
determined though inadequate effort to preserve his German birthright.
In the sitting-room in which he welcomed me stiffly, though courteously,
were the hangings and cheap ornaments of a Prussian lower middle-class
family, tidies, mottos, and books, including a large brass-bound Bible
and the kaiser’s portrait in colors. A bitters was drunk before the
meal. Lutz sat at the head of a longish table, and his two white
employees, a Hamburg apprentice just out, and Jensen, a Dane, joined us.
The talk was in English, and it was curious, in this far-away island
ruled by the French for seventy years, to find my tongue, as in almost
every corner of the world, the powerful solvent of our mixed thoughts.
Lutz talked about America, through which he had come from Germany on his
way to Tahiti and the Marquesas. He praised our strength in trade, and
derided the French and English, predicting that the Germans would divide
the South Seas commerce with us, to the exclusion of others.
I liked Lutz, and, after the Hamburg apprentice and the Dane had gone to
play chess, he and I passed some hours in chatting about music, books,
and history. He had the solid foundation of the German schools below the
universities, and he had read constantly his German reviews. Stolid,
ambitious, swift to take a business advantage, he lived in this
aloofness from the things he liked, in order to save enough to raise his
social status on his return to his fatherland. Just before he showed me
to my room for the night, he said:
“My old woman is going back to Tahiti. She is tired of it here after so
many years. When Captain Pincher comes in with the _Morning Star_, I’m
sending her back with him. She’s getting lonesome for her kin. You know
how those Tahitians are.”
I had seen but a glimpse of the “old woman” that evening. She had not
appeared openly, perhaps because of the rigid rule of Lutz, or perhaps
from pique. On the road, though, I had said good day to her, a huge sack
of a middle-aged creature, long past comeliness, but with an engaging
and strong personality. The words of _Père_ David and of Bauda recurred
to me before I slept. The “old woman” had been here fourteen years, and
her sudden repatriation coincided with Mademoiselle Narbonne’s coming
into her fortune, and her restlessness for a white husband.
I sensed a conflict. Tahitian women, as well as all these Polynesians,
were seldom afflicted by sexual jealousy, the soul-ravaging curse of
culture, yet they had a pride, an overwhelming dignity of personal
relations, which often brought the same dire results. The rejected one
many times had eaten the _eva_, the poisonous fruit, or leaped to death
from a cliff, though she would have shared the house mats with her rival
as a friend. That was because they ranked mere physical alliance as but
a part of friendship between men and women, often an unimportant
beginning, in the natural way of propertyless races.
“Lutz will not get rid of Maná so easily.” François Grelet, the shrewd
Swiss, of Oomoa, on the island of Fatuhiva, whom I had visited following
my evening with Lutz, had remarked to me: “She has as much strength of
will as he has. Her father was the chief of Papenoo, in Tahiti, and Lutz
had to steal her away to bring her here. I remember her then because the
schooner, on which they were, made port in Oomoa for a few days. Lutz
was in his twenties, with a year in Tahiti to learn the business before
his firm sent him to the Marquesas. Now, you know, for Maná to leave her
folks and her island meant a very unusual courage and will, and she has
stuck with Lutz all this time. He is heavy-handed, too, when vexed over
waste. I don’t think it will be a matter of settling with her as to
support; they all have a living at home. Also, the Tahitians do not love
the Marquesans. You will see!”
I had returned from my visit to Grelet, when, arriving at night in a
canoe to the stone steps at the Tahauku landing, Tetuahunahuna, the
steersman, pointed out to me the dark bulk of a schooner swinging at
anchor.
“_Fetia Taiao_,” he said. It was the schooner on which Lutz’s old woman
was to depart from her long-time abode.
In the weeks that had elapsed during my stay with Grelet, the affair of
Mademoiselle Narbonne and Herr Lutz had actually become the gossip of
Atuona. The church, the French nation, the masculinity of all the other
whites, were concerned. The suitor was said to pay almost daily visits
to the Narbonne house in Taaoa, and I saw him galloping past my house in
the afternoons, and heard sometimes in the night, his shod horse’s hoofs
on the pebbly road.
“It is terrible,” Sister Serapoline said to me, when I took her a catch
of _popo_ to the convent. “That German is a heathen, and has been living
in sin with a good woman for years. Now he will drag down to hell the
soul of our dear Barbe. We are offering a novena to Joan of Arc to bring
her to us. She has not been in the church or convent for a month. She
would make a wonderful sister, for she has a good heart and a true
devotion to Joan of Arc. And, to tell the truth, her money would be put
to a divine purpose instead of going into his business here or being
wasted in Germany.”
“What about Maná?” I asked. “Is she satisfied to go away?”
“That I doubt, but Maná, too, has not been inside the church for a long
time. Monsieur, I have heard that she has fallen from the true religion,
and is dealing with sorcery. The devil is astir in Atuona now.”
Song of the Nightingale was of Taaoa, the valley of Mademoiselle
Narbonne, and, as I said, had once been the lover of her mother. Through
serving a term of imprisonment for making intoxicants of oranges and of
the juice of the flower of the cocoanut-tree, his servitude spent as
cook for the Governor allowed him leisure for a few stolen hours with
his tribe. Song was a very evil man; of that perverse disposition which
afflicts great murderers like Gilles de Raiz or the Marquis de Sade, and
also cowardly ones who do in mean words and accursed inuendoes what the
arch villains do in deeds. He hated because he was thwarted. Before the
white régime he would have set valley against valley, and island against
island for mad spleen. I had seen his vileness in a ludicrous light when
he had put Ghost Girl’s god, the _kuku_, before her as food, and had
reviled her grandmother eaten by his clan. He often made fun of the
governor to me, and of me, doubtless, to many.
Song stopped at my house one night late. He was returning from Taaoa,
and had drunk deeply of the illicit _namu enata_, the cocoanut brandy.
He begged me for a drink of rum, and I could ill refuse him as he had
filled my glass so frequently at the palace. He tossed off a shell of
the ardent liquor, and filled his pipe from my tin. Then he began to
talk loosely and boastfully as was his habit. He ridiculed the churches,
and their teachings, and spoke of Gauguin, and his carven caricature of
the bishop. Gauguin was a “_chick tippee_,” he said again, and not any
more afraid of the sacrament than was he.
“They cannot hurt you if you are _tapu_ as I am,” he went on. “The
priest talks of Satan and his red-hot fork, and calls the _taua_, our
one remaining priest, a child of Satan. I have been to see that _taua_.
He is of my family, and, though he is very old, he does not believe in
the Christian magic, but in our own. He can do anything he wants to a
Marquesan. He can make them sick or well.”
“How about a white?” I asked, negligently.
“I don’t say that. The _taua_ might work his sorcery with some, but he
does not try. Do you know whom I saw in his hut to-night? Maná, the
woman of Lutz, the _Heremani_. What did she there? Why do you go to the
mission? To get the _bon Dieu_ to help you. Maná went to Taaoa to ask
the Marquesan Po, the god of night, to help her. The _Taua_ did not
inform me, but Maná said to me that if she sailed on the _Fetia Taiao_
to Tahiti, Ma’m’selle would never marry Lutz. The _taua_ would make her
_tapu_ to the _Heremani_, who would be afraid to take her to his bed.”
Song of the Nightingale poured himself another drink, and, muttering an
incantation in his own language, slunk out toward the palace to hoodwink
the governor. My heart misgave me, for I had a sincere admiration for
Mademoiselle Narbonne, and I could not help a kindly feeling for the
_Heremani_, Lutz, who had heaped favors on me. When my money had run
out, he had trusted me for months, though he had my bare word that I
expected a draft from America. My sympathies were divided odiously. Lutz
seemed to be mercenary in his pursuit of Narbonne’s daughter, and yet
might not love move him? He had been faithful to Maná for fourteen
years, according to everybody, which was a marvel for a white man. Maná
was to be pitied, and her endeavor to circumvent her competitor not to
be despised. I could not sneer at the sorcery of the _taua_. In Hawaii,
I had seen a charming half-English girl, educated and living in a
cultured home, yield to a belief in the necromancy of a Hawaiian
_kahuna_, and die. Her strength “ran out like water.” With everything to
live for, she faded into the grave at twenty.
How was _taua_ to aid _Maná_ to keep the affections of Lutz? The philter
that Julia sought on the slopes of Vesuvius to win the love of Glaucus
came to mind, but the _tauas_, I remembered, used no physical means to
work their spells. They depended entirely on the mind. They studied its
every intricacy, and the power of suggestion was, I reasoned, their
weapon and medicine as it was with Charcot, Freud, or Coué, the modern
_tauas_ of Europe. In my travels and residence of a dozen years in Asia
and the South Seas, I had been confronted often with phenomena
inexplicable except through control of others’ minds by the
thaumaturgist. Nevertheless, I had so frequently had such an opinion
shattered by a more artful and cunning material explanation that at each
instance I wavered as to the method of the mage.
The schooner _Morning Star_, the _Fetia Taiao_, swung about the
Marquesan group, from Tahauku to Taiohae, Oomoa, and Vaitahu, and after
a month dropped anchor again near the stone steps of Lutz’s _magazin_.
Lying Bill I met at the governor’s, and heard him say that he had as
passenger for Papeete the “old woman of the Dutchman.”
“I’ll sail with the first ‘an’ful o’ wind after we load our copra,” he
said. “That’ll be in three days. Maná is bloomin’ well angry at Lutz.
I’m wonderin’ if she won’t go over to Taaoa and ’ook out those purty
eyes o’ Ma’m’selle. ’E oughta ’ave Mc’Enry’s woman to deal with. She’d
take a war-club to im.”
Lutz had me to dinner again the night before the schooner left, and at
table were, besides Jensen and the Hamburg apprentice, Captain Pincher
and Ducat, his mate. I did not get a glimpse of Maná, though Lutz
appeared uneasy, and occasionally went out into the kitchen and once
into the garden. The good Patzenhofer beer was plentifully served by the
Tongan, and, un-iced as it was, we drank several cases of it with
“_Hochs!_” from Lutz and the Hamburger, “_Skoals!_” from Jensen, and
“‘Ere’s yer bloody ’ealths!” from Lying Bill.
McHenry, I learned, was keeping a store on the atoll of Takaroa. The
_rahui_ at Takaroa was finished, and the divers dispersed. No great
pearl had been brought up, though Mapuhi and his tribe had had a
bountiful season. Our party broke up about midnight, and, after the
seafarers had gone down the basalt stairs to their boat, and his clerks
were in bed, Lutz and I sat a few minutes. He, perhaps, wanted to avow
his intentions regarding Barbe Narbonne, to justify himself about Maná,
and to gain from me the comfort of my concurrence in his ethics and
ambitions, but his stiff Prussian bringing-up forbade him. Instead, he
spoke of his childhood at Frankfort, his education, and his failure to
go to a University on account of poverty. At seventeen, he had been put
to work in an exporting house in Hamburg, and had passed seven years as
an underling with small pay. His chance had come when debts due the
company in Tahiti called for an experienced man in goods and finance to
go to Papeete and wring a settlement from the debtor. He had been able
to please his firm, and to buy out the failing concern by Hamburg
backing. In the fourteen years since, he had been exiled in Tahauku, and
despite his grinding efforts and many voluntary privations, had not
amassed much. His mother and father in Germany were dependent on him,
and he had not been able once to visit them because of the expense.
Maybe the Patzenhofer had mellowed my sympathies, for I agreed with him
that he was a dutiful son and a worthy merchant, and that life had not
been quite fair to him. There was a moment when I feared he was about to
divulge his secret, but a noise outside made him start, and after he had
listened with frowning brow a minute he said good night. He did not wish
to be alone, it was evident, for he said he would sleep on a straw couch
in my room. I heard him tossing as I fell asleep.
From the hill of Calvary the next afternoon I saw the _Morning Star_ as
she glided past the opposite cliffs of Tahauku. At least the main
barrier to Lutz’s plans had gone from the Marquesas. As Mademoiselle
Narbonne no longer came to Atuona, I had not seen her for many Sundays,
and, although I still saw Lutz on his peregrinations, and from my Golden
Bed hearkened to the iron of his horse’s heels, I had no direct nor even
fairly certain knowledge that he had won her hand. Gradually a desire to
see her, to make sure of her intentions, grew in me, and I had fixed the
following Sunday as a date for my journey to Taaoa, when a stupefying
incident disarranged my scheme.
Le Brunnec, the trader, my companion of the wild cattle hunting, was
ever on the outlook for information or entertainment for me. Speaking a
little English, and by nature friendly, he now and again sent to my
cabin a stranger, with a sealed note explaining the bearer’s particular
interest to me. One day, there appeared an American citizen, Lemoal, a
twisted, haggard native of Paimpol, who had been an adventurer and
vagabond all about the world. After a shell of rum, he had boasted a
while, and then when I had given him another drop with a gesture of
farewell, he had said with a leer and a curse, that he had seen me with
Mademoiselle Narbonne, and that “I would better beware.”
“She is a leper, that rich girl,” he had said; “everybody here knows it
but you. Let the accursed German of Tahauku get it, not you!”
He ambled down the trail like an old kobold, a spirit of evil and filth,
wagging his long beard, and sucking at his pipe. I threw away the shell
from which he had drunk. But in my horror at what he had said, I could
not forget that Mademoiselle Narbonne had asked me a strange question,
at first meeting—whether it was true that the Government was segregating
the lepers in Tahiti, and immuring them in a leprosarium. I had answered
in the affirmative, and thought curiosity dictated the query. Now, with
Lemoal gone, his statement and her question rose together. Le Brunnec’s
note said that Lemoal was not to be believed always. He might have told
Le Brunnec about Barbe. It could not be true! Yet, the missionary’s
daughter a half a mile away from me was a leper, and Tahiatini, Many
Daughters, was suspect. The Chinese imported by the American, Hart, had
brought the terrible disease from Canton, and many had died from it in
the Marquesas. Those who had it were free to live as they pleased, for
there was no care of them by the authorities. But in Tahiti, for the
first time, they had taken them from their families, and were keeping
them in a separate estate. It was easy, with the abominable assertion of
Lemoal agitating me, to exaggerate or misinterpret the meaning of
Mademoiselle Narbonne’s interrogation.
Did the visit of Maná to the _taua_ have anything to do with Lemoal’s
wretched slander or gossip?
I should be a fool, I reckoned, to believe Lemoal. Even the vicar
apostolic had intimated that the Protestant pastor was a rake, and I
knew him to be a virtuous man. Gauguin had written in his journal that
the bishop was a “goat,” and I believed him a vow-observing celibate.
Much, then, I was to credit this lifetime villain, Lemoal! Men who
stayed too long in the South Seas became natural, simple children of the
sweet soil, or decayed and rejected, rotten fruit of civilization when
unsuited to assimilation.
A week after Lemoal had poisoned my mind with his intimation, I met
Mademoiselle Narbonne at Otupotu, the divide between the valleys of
Atuona and Taaoa, where Kahuiti, the magnificent cannibal of Taaoa, had
trapped the Mouth of God’s grandfather and eaten him. It was a precipice
facing the valleys of the island of Hiva-Oa, as it curved eastward. The
brilliant stretch of sea contrasted with dark glens in the torn,
convulsed panorama—gloomy gullies, suggestive of the old pagan days when
the Marquesans were free and strong. Above the shadowy caverns, the
mountains caught the light of the dying sun and shone green or black
under the cloudless sky. To sit there as the day declined and to view
the tragic marvel of the advent of night was to me a rapturous
experience made sorrowful by the final sinking of the sun. No long
twilight, no romantic gloaming followed the plunge of terror. I have
always peopled it with afrits and leprechawns, mischievous if not
malicious.
It was an hour before dusk when I arrived, and soon I heard, far down
the glade of Taaoa, the slow approach of a horse. As the rider came in
view, I waved my hand, and the daughter of the _Cayennais_ called to me,
with a trifle of surprise in her soft voice. She dismounted and sat
beside me. She had changed. In what exactly I could not define. She was
less self-centered, silent, melancholy. The savage had fled from her
face, and animation with it.
“I am half French, but all Marquesan,” she had said to me once.
She was all white this evening. The rich color had deserted her cheeks,
and in her pallor was tenderness and longing. I was drawn to her as
never before. Her delicate hand crept into mine, and we remained hushed
a few minutes. Curiously, the words of Lemoal did not recur. She was so
perfect, so beautiful, the nightfall so embracing, other thoughts were
banished. We were in a wild expanse, in a bed of ferns, and landward a
prodigal glory of palm and plant, vine and orchid. Nature had spent its
richest colors and scents, its rarest shapes and oddest forms, for bird
and insect, star and sun, to look upon and rejoice in, and with no count
of man. In her grandest or most subtle manifestations, nature had no
thought to suit herself to man, and only as he adapted himself to her
thousand smiles and frowns, could he remain alive upon an
inconsequential planet which was nothing with the blazing star now going
down in the west. A shudder, and man died by myriads; a breath, and he
perished. But ever nature swelled the seeds of her unthinking creations
and ornamented her body with fresh fruitage.
Sunset and death, the heat of the day and of life, and then the lapsing
years in the descent toward the cold grave, often stumbling and
trembling, and without the cadence and the color of the passing day; and
both ending in murk and fear. These tropical islands were for youth,
when every sense was a well of enjoyment. Age must only regret not
having known them sooner.
The slim hand of Barbe Narbonne, folded in mine, excited no pleasanter
thoughts than these as we sat at Otupoto. I felt that I must have drawn
them from her, for I was happy, and the tide of life running strong in
my veins.
She broke the quiet.
“What do you think of Monsieur Lutz?” she said suddenly.
“What do I think of Monsieur Lutz?” I parried. “I like him. Why do you
ask me that?”
“Because, Monsieur, he has asked me to marry him; and I am thinking.”
She took away her hand and smoothed her brow as if she swept away
cobwebs.
The crisis had come in which her future was at pitch and toss. The years
of childhood make most of us what we are. The white surrounded by
Polynesians in the early years of life, learning their language first,
and having them as playmates, willy-nilly becomes more than half
Polynesian. Their tastes, dreads, superstitions, pleasures, and ideals
become his. Barbe Narbonne had the savage blood of her mother to
accentuate her environment. The exigency that now confronted her had
kindled in her divided soul for the first time the conflict between the
white and the brown. From infancy she had been in the convent, and now
she had had a few months of unrestraint in the society of her two
mothers, and recently of release even from the rigors of the
confessional and the nuns’ admonitions. She had been slipping back fast
into the ways of the Marquesans; the palm-groves had claimed her, and
the jungle was closing in upon her. The courtship of the European, Lutz,
was a challenge to her white strain, but it was confusing, for it added
a third element. Her mothers’ semi-savagery, and the convent strictness
of rule were in strife now with this offer of relief from both by the
most important white in the Marquesas except the governor.
“Do you love him?” I asked her, and looked into her eyes.
She cast them down a moment in confusion or meditation. No longer she
wore black. That had been in imitation of the sisters’ dull dress, and
she had put it aside with the mass and the confession. Her tunic, the
simple flowing garment of the valley, was of pale blue. Her hair was
parted on her low, delicate forehead. Her legs were stockingless, her
feet thrust into small, brown shoes.
She raised her eyes, and replied slowly, seeking the answer herself,
maybe, at the moment.
“Monsieur Lutz is a gentleman. He says he loves me. I must marry a white
man. Who else is there? If I stay in Taaoa, I shall become a Marquesan
pure. It is so easy.”
Her manner was naïve and confiding, and affected me deeply. Where lay
her chance for happiness?
Abruptly, the accusation of Lemoal rung in my ears; and I could hardly
refrain from voicing it, in a wish to hear her fierce denial. Never had
she been more attractive, more the pattern of the most wholesome and
fairest of her mingled parentage. I could not resist saying:
“You know Lemoal?”
“That _canaille_! He worked for my father for long and cheated him. Ah,
he is a bad one! Only the last few weeks he has been hanging about my
house to wheedle food and drink from me without return. He is of no
account. Why do you ask?”
“He says that you are ill.”
“Ill! I?”
Her eyes closed, and her body became limp an instant. A flush spread
over her face.
“Lemoal said that!” she cried. “It is a lie! What ill have I?
Tuberculosis? Do I cough? Am I thin? The _miserable!_ It is strange.
Kahuiti and two others have asked me in the past few days if I were ill.
Monsieur Frederick, you are my friend. Look at me! Am I not well?”
She leaped to her feet. An instant she entertained the suggestion of
stripping her tunic from her, and revealing her entire body for
judgment. She bared her girlish bosom, and her hands tore at the gown,
and then the convent inhibitions conquered, and she hastily covered
herself.
She blushed darkly, and turned from me. The mortal sin of immodesty had
been the daily preachment of the nuns.
“I must go home before the night,” she said weakly. “I will not go on to
the convent. Good-by, my friend. Pray for me!”
The dusk was already thick as she mounted her horse, and I made out the
trail to Atuona with difficulty. Dimly, I discerned the workings of an
unholy spell, or my sympathy for her and my hatred for Lemoal conjured
up a web of witchcraft that would affright her suitor, and bind her to
the scene of her birth. How far this web had been spun I could only
guess. I put the matter flatly to Le Brunnec. Yes, he had had the same
story from Lemoal, and so had many others. As to Lutz’s hearing it, he
did not know, but Lemoal was despised by Lutz, who had quarreled with
him long ago. He would not dare to carry his tale to Tahauku, nor would
any one. The Prussian trader in his dealings had inculcated respect and
a decent fear of himself.
That evening I sent Exploding Eggs to tell Song of the Nightingale I
wanted to see him at my house. When he came, I referred, after the
customary drink of rum, to the _taua_, and declared my eager wish to
meet him. I knew Kahuiti, of the valley of Taaoa, who was still a
cannibal, and I must know the last of the pagan priests there. The cook
was well pleased, and we agreed that the first evening the governor took
his dinner at the house of Bauda he would come for me. Le Brunnec smiled
when I let him know my plan.
“Go ahead!” he said. “I am no believer in anything but a reasonable
profit, and a merry time. You can do nothing if you are trying to help
Mademoiselle Narbonne. I have seen too often the meddling white fail
with these Marquesans. They know more about many important things than
we do, even if they don’t wear shoes or eat with a fork. That old _taua_
may be a fool, but they don’t think so, and there’s the secret.”
Song of the Nightingale appeared at six, a few evenings later, and we
started on the five miles’ ride to Taaoa. I had borrowed a horse of
Mouth of God, and the prisoner-cook had no difficulty in finding one.
Too many people dreaded his bitter tongue and violent disposition to
refuse him. As we went through the pass at Otupotu and descended the
winding trail to the adjoining valley, the sun was below the far tops of
the green hills and was tinting all the sky in shades of softest red.
Clouds, edged with brilliant gold, were like lilies in a garden of
roses. The air was still and heavy when we rode by the sulphurous
springs where Mouth of God’s grandfather was slain by Kahuiti’s spear.
My guide avoided the village of Taaoa, and took a path which led by a
graveyard.
On an obelisk had been inscribed half a century before:
_Inei Teavi o te mata einana o Taaoa._
“Here lie the bodies of the people of Taaoa.” An all-inclusive
tombstone, for there was no other, but, instead, banana-plants,
_badamiers_, _vi_-apples, and chile peppers, the fiery-red pods of the
latter bright against the green and black. Behind the burial-place were
two great _aoa_ trees, giant banyans that must have been there when the
first adventurous white cast anchor in these waters. In the lessening
light, they had a mysterious air of life in death; they were moribund
with age, twisted and gnarled like those century-old Mission Indians of
California who sit outside their adobe hovels and show a thousand
wrinkles on their naked bodies. Yet these banyans were filled with life,
for a hundred new shoots were thrusting from above into the rich mold of
the earth, and presaging renewal of the dead limbs and greater growth of
the whole.
The trees covered acres, overpowering in their immensity, with columns
of regular and solemn symmetry. Their ponderous buttresses were like
towers, but divided into many separate chambers where the branches had
descended from heights to become roots, and later other columns. These
trees were individuals, shattered and worn by existence, broken by
storms, the boughs arching a hundred feet from the ground to let down
grotesque and curving branches that blindly groped for a grasp upon the
soil. They were tragedies in wood, and stirred in me memories of old
French tales of darksome wolds, of the shadowy, dripping spinneys where
the _loup garou_ lay in wait for the bodies and souls of his victims.
Into one of the cells of the banyan, Song of the Nightingale led me. As
large as an average room, it was divided by a _tapa_ hanging, and from
behind this came, at his call, the _taua_. He had a snow-white beard and
long hair, and was very old. His body was quite covered with tattooing,
the most elaborate designs I had seen. The candlenut ink, originally
blackish-brown upon his dark skin, had, as the result of decades of kava
drinking, turned to a verde-antique, like the patina upon an ancient
bronze.
“_Moa taputoho_,” said Song, with extreme seriousness. “A sacred
hermit.” One who had forsaken all the common things of existence to
commune with the gods.
The sorcerer’s surrounding were druidic, remindful of the Norns, who
dwelt beneath the world-tree Ygdrasil, Urd and Verdande and Skuld, and
decided the fate of men.
He gazed at me intently, raised his hand in a grave manner, and said
something to my companion which I did not understand.
“He asks if you want anything of him,” explained the convict.
“Yes, I do,” I replied. “Ask him if the daughter of Liha-liha is a
leper?”
My interpreter did not put the question direct, but I comprehended his
many sentences to state my meaning.
The _taua_ pursed his lips and withdrew behind the curtain. From his
hidden fane issued the deep rumbling of his voice in a chant.
“He is asking the _tiki_, the image of the god,” said Song, fearfully.
I confess I was aware of a depression approaching fear. It was dark in
the banyan cell, and a torch of candlenuts threw a fitful glimmer on the
_tapa_ and the scabrous walls.
Soon above the indistinct voice of the _taua_ was the sound of something
in the branches of the banyan, of a flapping of wings, and a knocking.
“It is a bat,” I whispered to Song.
“It is the god coming to answer,” said he, cowering with real horror.
A dreadful thing it is not to believe in the supernatural when in
ordinary surroundings, and yet to be subject to horrible misgivings when
circumstances conjure up visions of terror.
The uncanny noises in the tree increased, and then the mammoth banyan
shook as though an earthquake vibrated it. Song and I were now flat on
the ground, and I repeated an invocation of my childhood:
“From the powers of Lucifer, O, Mary, deliver us!”
I said it over and over again, and it numbed my senses during the few
minutes that the pandemonium continued.
When the _taua_ emerged, Song turned his back upon him, and, taking my
hand, reversed me, too.
“_Tapu!_” he said, nervously.
“_Tuitui!_” began the _moa taputoho_. “Be silent!” and in a staccato
manner pronounced his divination. His tone was orotund and dignified,
and impressive of sincerity. The words were symbolic, and of other
generations, and Song waited until he had finished to translate them.
Before he could do this, the _taua_ said, “_Apae!_” a word of dismissal,
and retired. Song seized me by the hand as I went toward the curtain,
and pulled me away; but, for a second, I had a glimpse of a rude, basalt
altar built against the trunk of the tree, and on it a stone image
before which was a heap of fruit. I was directed speedily away from the
banyan, and not until we had mounted our horses and galloped a hundred
feet did the convict answer my question.
“The _moa taputoho_ said that this girl will offend the god if she
marries a _haoe_, a foreigner, and that she knows already how the god
will punish her if she leaves her own valley of Taaoa.”
And flinging out the words as we pounded up the hill, it was as if the
maker of moonshine was more prophetical than the _taua_ himself, or was
a most interested mouthpiece, for he put into them a malevolence missing
from the aged hermit’s voice. That had been majestic though forboding,
while the intonation of Song of the Nightingale was personal and harsh.
Maybe he hated Lutz as did Lemoal. Le Brunnec corroborated my suspicion.
“Lutz found him stealing a demijohn of rum, and had him sent to prison
for several months,” said the Breton. “But, granted that every one hates
the German,” he continued, “you are wasting your sympathy and time. I
predict that Lutz will get Mademoiselle Narbonne, but that the _taua_
and his magic will snare her finally. These people are born to be
unhappy and to die under our Christian dispensation.”
So, from day to day, the rumor of her dismaying condition spread, until
it was known to almost everyone of the few thousand Marquesans in all
the islands, and to all others except Lutz. His wooing had not ceased,
and when the day’s work was done at Tahauku, and his evening meal
despatched, as for months, he thought nothing of the ten slippery miles
in the pitchy blackness to and from the home of his Golden Maid. His
hoof-beats entered into my dreams, and after midnight I often awoke as
they resounded on the little bridge across the stream by the Catholic
Church, Poor devil! He was to pay dear for his brief dream.
------------------------------------------------------------------------