Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Etablissements Français de l’Océanie—How the
School House was Inspected—I Receive My Congé—The Runaway
Pigs—Mademoiselle Narbonne goes with Lutz to Papeete to be
Married—Père Siméon, about whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote.
ONE must admit that the processes of government in my islands were
simple. Since only a couple of thousand Marquesans, of an original
myriad, were alive, after three score years of colonialism, officialdom
had lessened according to the mortuary statistics. Sovereignty was
evidenced by the tricolor that Song of the Nightingale occasionally
raised in the palace garden, while _Commissaire_ Bauda and two
_gendarmes_ aided the merry governor in exercising a lazy authority.
There was no hospital, nor school to distract the people from copra
making, and, excepting for the court sessions of Saturdays, to hear
moonshine cases, or a claim against Chinese rapacity, we might have
thought ourselves living in an ideal state of anarchy.
One morning we awoke to the reality of empire and the solicitude of
Paris. Flag, the _mutoi_, peered through the windowless aperture of my
cabin, shortly after dawn, and announced, with the pompousness of a
bumbailiff, that the French gunboat _Zélée_ was at Tahauku, and would
shortly land _Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Etablissements Français de
l’Océanie_. Flag called the visitor _’Sieu Ranisepatu_, and in pantomime
indicated his rank and power. The Zélée sent him ashore at the stone
steps of Lutz’s store, and departed for Vaitahu, ostensibly for a fresh
water-supply, but, as Painter Le Moine said with an oath, the commander
had gone to Le Moine’s adopted village, Vaitahu, to make love to
Vanquished Often, the artist’s model.
The inspector of colonies occupied the spare room at the palace and our
pleasant parties were suspended. He was a gross, corpulent man, in a
colonel’s gilded uniform. One could not see his collar, front or back,
for the rolls of his fat neck and his spacious beard. The _tapis_ was
full of troublesome affairs. The governor and Bauda had fallen out. Rum
was responsible. The governor had given Taiao Koe, Flatulent Fish, one
of my tattooed neighbors, a permit to buy a gallon of rum for Lutz.
Flatulent Fish lightened his jug too much. _Commissaire_ Bauda met him
wobbling from port to starboard on his horse, and took the jug. That for
Bauda, censor of morals! But the same day, during the difficult work of
repairing Bauda’s arm-chair, Bauda cheered the natives with rum, and
two, made utterly reckless, invaded the palace garden in search of more.
The inspector was stupefied, and the governor drove them away with
threats of prison and indignant exclamations that such a thing had never
happened before. Of course, Bauda had to let the inspector know of his
action in saving Flatulent Fish from a more wobbly state, and he did so
in ignorance of his chair-repairers having betrayed to the inspector his
own liberality. The governor did not fancy Flatulent Fish’s permit for
rum being brought before the inspector’s notice. So the great man had to
decide whether the Governor or the _Commissaire_ was supreme in rum
matters, rum, of course, being absolutely forbidden to the natives.
After two days, this matter was settled. The inspector became restless.
Every day he said, “I must see the schoolhouse. It is necessary that I
see that important building.”
He meant a tumbledown, unoccupied cabin up the valley, a dirty, cheap,
wooden building, bare planks and an iron roof.
Rain did not permit the inspector to go at once, for he did not stir out
of the Governor’s house while it was wet; but after three days of fair
weather he said very firmly, “I will visit the schoolhouse. It is my
duty and I wish to report on that.”
So, with the governor, he advanced up the broken road to the river,
which must be crossed to go up the valley. The river was two feet deep.
There were crossing-stones placed for him, but he was stout and they
were three feet apart. One must jump from one stone to the other. The
governor, in boots, plunged into the purling rill. The inspector cried
to the governor, “_Mais, mon brave, prenez garde aux accidents!_”
“It is not dangerous,” said the governor, who in five strides had
reached the other bank.
“But I may get my shoes wet,” said the inspector.
“It is better to take them off,” advised the governor.
“Yes, that is true. Naturally one removes one’s shoes when one crosses a
river on foot. And, in such a case as this, one must take chances. It is
imperative that I inspect the schoolhouse. _Mais, nom d’un chien!_ Where
shall I sit to take off my shoes?”
The governor suggested a certain boulder, but it was too low; another
was too high. But, after inspecting many boulders, one was found that
suited the _embonpoint_ of the big man. He bent over, then looked at the
river, and sat up straight.
“It is a wooden schoolhouse?” he queried.
“Yes, plain wood,” said the executive.
“And, _par conséquence_, it has a roof and a floor and sides, and maybe
some wooden desks for the scholars. Steps to enter, _n’est-ce pas?_ And
a _tableau noir_, to write the alphabet on. As a matter of fact, there
is little difference between schoolhouses. You have seen that
schoolhouse, _mon ami_?
“_Oui, Monsieur l’Inspecteur_, I have seen it. It is exactly as you
describe it. _Très simple_, and the blackboard is there, but a trifle
disfigured.”
“Ah, the blackboard is in bad condition! _Bien_, we must remedy that. I
am well satisfied. I will return to your house. These stones are very
hot.”
The _bon homme_ marched back, puffing, combing his fan-like whiskers
with his fingers, with that quietly exultant air of one who has done his
duty despite all risks.
The _Zélée_ returning, and this being the total of his inspection, he
ordered it to speed forthwith to Tahiti, where, doubtless, as in Paris,
he recited the dangers and difficulties of life in the cannibal islands.
He forgot to have the blackboard repaired. I learned by letter from
Malicious Gossip, two years after his notation, of its deplorable state.
The ingratitude of colonies toward their foster-mothers is proverbial.
Our own fat men, secretaries of war, senators, and congressmen, make as
cursory examinations of our American vassals in the Pacific and
Atlantic, and with as little help to them.
[Illustration:
Brunneck, the boxer and diver
]
[Illustration:
Photo from L. Gauthier
A village maid in Tahiti
]
[Illustration:
A Samoan maiden of high caste
]
The inspector’s _congé_ was almost synchronous with mine. The _Saint
François_ of Bordeaux, the first merchant steamship in the Marquesas,
arrived from Tahiti, to swing about the ports of my archipelago and
return to Papeete. My heart ached at leaving; the tendrils of the
purple-blossomed _pahue_-vine were about it. How could I forsake forever
my loved friends of Atuona and Vaitahu, Malicious Gossip, Mouth of God,
Vanquished Often, Seventh Man Who Is So Angry, Great Fern, Ghost Girl,
and the little leper lass, Many Daughters? I must make my choice, and
swiftly. If I stayed much longer, I would never live again in America;
the jungle would creep over me and I should lie, some day, on Calvary’s
hill near the lost remains of Paul Gauguin. There was Le Brunnec, the
best of the whites, but he was a Breton peasant, born to the sun and
simplicity and nature’s riches; I was of the shade and artificiality, of
pavements and libraries. Nor could I show an unabraded surface to these
savage tropics as did Lutz. His Prussianism, his Lutheranism, preserved
him cold, and ready to escape at fortune’s opening. My Irish forebears
and American generations gave me no such buckler, nor ambition.
The one passenger of the _Saint François_ who came ashore on our beach
weighted the balance for America. He was Brunneck, an American swimmer,
diver, and boxer, whom I had seen Sarah Bernhardt kiss when at Catalina
Island he rose through the clear waters of Avalon Bay to her
glass-bottomed boat and presented her with an abalone shell. I traded
him my coffee-pot and utensils for the memory of Sarah’s moment of
abandon, and Brunneck tipped the scales for me toward the America he had
deserted. He was an atavist in a grass skirt and a crown of ferns,
hatless, purseless, a set of boxing-gloves his only impedimenta. I could
not equal his serenity, that of a civilized being again in harmony with
the earth. I hurried aboard the steamship in Tahauku roadstead to decide
my vacillation.
By dark, the Tahauku River, into which some weary cloud had emptied,
sent a menacing current down the roadstead. The steamship rolled and
swung wildly. As madder grew the fresh torrent, the anchors dragged, and
the vessel drifted broadside toward the rocky cliff. Steam was down and
the engines would not turn. The captain yelling from the bridge, the
Breton sailors in noisy _sabots_, prancing alarmedly about the decks, a
search-light playing upon the rocks, and lighting the groups of natives
watching from the headlands, the shouting and swearing in French and
Breton with a word or two for my benefit in English, all made a dramatic
incident with a spice of danger.
The _Saint François_ swung until the rail on which I stood was four feet
from the jagged wall. A wild chant rose from the Marquesans on shore in
the moment of most peril. I made ready to leap, but soon heard the hum
of the screw as it began fighting the current. We gained little by
little, and, once clear of the rocks, pointed the prow for the
Bordelaise Channel and comparative safety. The cargo boats had not been
hoisted aboard, and they banged to pieces as, urged by the rushing
river, we drove through the door of the bay and out to sea.
I lay down on a bench, and when I awoke at dawn we were heading back for
Tahauku to finish loading. Exploding Eggs was beside me. I had not known
he was aboard. The adventures of the night, the fires, the engines, the
electric lights, and the danger had delighted him.
“_Sacré!_” muttered the red-faced captain at breakfast. “These Marquesas
are as bad as the Paumotus.”
No lighthouses, charts inaccurate, shore-guides lacking, treacherous
tides, winds, currents, reefs, and passages. Lying Bill said it took
“bloody near a gen’us to escape with his life after thirty years of
navigation in these waters.”
The Polynesians believed that souls animate flowers and plants, that
these are organized beings. For pigs, they had a special heaven,
_Ofetuna_. Each pig had a distinct and arbitrary name, which was never
changed, though men changed their names often.
On the deck of the _Saint François_ were half a dozen slender pigs that
had once played about my _paepae_ and were now engaged in resisting the
monopolistic tendencies of Alphonse, a ram bought from the trader. By
uniting, they made his habitat painful, and his outcries brought the
steward, who attempted to correct the ram, but was butted into profanity
and flight.
“You’re no lam’ o’ goodness! You’ll be chops mighty soon!” the negro
shouted, and threw a pan at him. The ram bolted, knocked open a swinging
port, and, followed by the pork, dived into the bay. He may have sensed
the threat of the steward.
“_A la chasse!_ _A la chasse!_” ordered the captain from the bridge.
“_Tonnerre de Dieu!_ Our meat is going ashore.”
If a boat coming to the _Saint François_ had not intercepted the bold
deserters, they would have succeeded in their break for liberty, and
probably have taken to the wilds. The recovering them was no easy task,
but, diverted from the rocks, they were run down, after half an hour of
fierce commands through a megaphone from the captain. They were fast
swimmers, being encumbered by no fat. Their adventure dispelled for me
the myth that pigs cannot swim. The story ran that in swimming pigs cut
their throats with their hoofs.
I had recognized in the English-African accent of the steward the lingo
of the West-India negro, and oddly, I remembered having seen the man
himself at Kowloon, in China, where he had been bartender at the Kowloon
Hotel. With no word of French, and ten days aboard from Tahiti, the
black man was bursting with conversation. Serving me with a bottle of
Bordeaux beer, he spoke of his hardships, and of familiar figures of his
happier days at Kowloon:
“Yes, sir, men can stand more than animiles,” he said. “They can, sir,
work or play. You remember that goriller that Osborne had in the Kowloon
Hotel grounds? He perished, sir, from his drinking habits. He took his
reg’lar with the soldiers and tourists, and his favoryte tonoc was gin
and whiskey mixed, but after he was started, he would ‘bibe near
anything ’toxicating. You remember how big he was? Big as Sikh, that
goriller was. He was a African ape like the white perfesser says he is
descended from.
“Week before Chrismus, that infantry regiment in barricks, in Kowloon,
kept him late every night, and I seen him climb to his house in that
tree hardly able to hold onto the limbs. Chrismus eve he let nothing
slip his paws. He began with the punch—you remember, sir, the punch I
used to make? and he overdone it, though he had a stummick like a India
major’s. He drank with the officers and he drank with the Tommies. When
I opened the bar, Chrismus morning, he was dead on the ground. He hadn’t
never been able to reach his home. Osborne gave him a Christian berrial
under the comquat trees, but as sure as you’re born every officer and
soldier turned up for more drink that night. Men can stand more than
animiles, sir.”
All morning I sat on the deck and took my fill of the scenes on either
shore, while copra was hoisted aboard from canoes and boats. Exploding
Eggs was examining minutely the wonders of the steamship, reporting to
me occasionally some astounding discovery. Until then I had refused to
consider taking him away from his people, but, in a moment of
selfishness, I drew a plat of America, to attract his thirteen
years,—the lofty buildings, motor-cars, telephones, ice and ice-cream,
snow and sleighs, roller-skates and moving pictures. He had seen none of
these, nor read of them, but, nevertheless, the fear of homesickness
caused him, after a few minutes to say:
“_Aoe metai, Nakohu mata!_” which meant, “No good; Exploding Eggs would
die!”
Characteristic of all primitive peoples was this nostalgia, and, far
from being sentiment easily smothered, it was more often than physical
ailment the predisposing, or even actual, cause of death when they were
separated from their homes. The Pitcairn youth who died in California
and the Easter Islanders who could not endure even their exile in Tahiti
were examples. The Maori Napoleon, Te Rauparaha, gazed upon his old
home, Kawhia, and wept in farewell. His legendary song says:
O my own home! Ah me! I bid farewell to you,
And still, at distance, bid farewell.
Before noon, I was overcome by a longing to see Atuona again. The voices
of the friends who had chanted their grief were in my ears. I landed at
Tahauku in one of the copra boats which were coming and going, and
walked along the cliffs until I came within sight of the beach where, so
often, I had ridden the surf. I went at a fast pace down the hill,
hoping for a familiar face. At a point overlooking the cove, that very
spot Stevenson thought the most beautiful on earth, I heard shouts and
merry laughter.
I moved to where I could survey the spot. There was a group of natives,
half the village, at least, and in the center of the chattering crowd
was Brunneck, naked to the waist, boxing with Jimmy Kekela, the
Hawaiian. The yellow hair of the American gleamed against his sun-burnt
skin, as he toyed with the amateur. Ghost girl, an absorbed spectator,
held the wreath of the American. Mouth of God, Haabuani, and Great Fern
were dancing about the circle in glee. Exploding Eggs, who had
accompanied me, left me without a word, and ran to the ring. I stood
fifty feet away, unnoticed. A new god had been thrown up by the sea. I
returned to the _Saint François_ more content to leave.
When I awoke from a siesta, in the late afternoon, I found preparations
for immediate departure. The anchors were being hauled short, the
hatches battened down, and the cargo booms uphoisted. We waited only the
final accounts from Lutz. He brought them himself in the last boat, in
which were also Mademoiselle Narbonne and two nuns. She was again in
black, and greeted me in a distraught manner with “_Kaoha!_” the native
salutation, as if in her hour of departure from her own island she clung
to its language. She went below to the cabins with the sisters, and only
after the screw had revolved and we turned head for the sea did the
three come on deck.
Tears suffused her eyes as we passed the opening of Atuona Bay. When
Exploding Eggs and others, including Song of the Nightingale, shouted
“_Kaoha_” to us from their canoes, she put her head upon the breast of
Sister Serapoline and wept passionately. The night drew on as, after
many bursts of her sad emotion, she leaned exhausted on the bosom so
long her shelter. In the flooding moonlight, she slept, while the nun
placidly counted her rosary.
The _Saint François_, steering in a smooth sea for Taiohae, on the
island of Nuku-hiva, the captain, Lutz, and I gathered about the table
for supper and wine. The vessel had narrowly escaped shipwreck in the
Paumotus, and had lain for six days on a reef while the barrels of
cement, intended for some improvement at Atuona, were thrown overboard
to lighten her.
Lutz did not seek any moment of intimacy with me, and said nothing to
explain Mademoiselle Narbonne’s presence aboard. Conforming to strict
native etiquette, he paid no attention to her, and a stranger would have
thought he hardly knew her. Lutz said that he had business affairs in
Tahiti and had jumped at the chance of a quick passage in the steamship.
At dawn, we were off the island of Nuku-hiva; high up on a green
mountain-side, we saw a silver thread which we knew to be the waterfall
of Typee Valley, the valley in which Hermann Melville had lived in
captivity and happiness. We rounded Cape Martens, and, as the sun lit
the rocky forelands guarding the bay of Taiohae, the morning breeze
brought from Typee the delicious odor of the wild flowers, the _hinano_,
the _tiare_, and the _frangipani_. This beach of Taiohae, months before,
I had visited in a whale-boat from Atuona. I hoped to see again my
friend, the good priest, Père Siméon Delmas, who had held the citadel of
God here for half a century.
In the first boat ashore went the captain and Lutz, and, when after
breakfast I asked the mate to be put on land, Mademoiselle Narbonne,
seeing me descending the ladder, joined me.
“Where do you go?” she asked, when we set foot on the sand.
“I have a message for Prince Stanislao from Le Brunnec,” I answered.
“I must be back before the nuns miss me, but I will go with you,” she
said.
Leaving the settlement, we were soon on a trail with which I was
familiar and reached a little wood. She took me by the sleeve.
“_Attendez_,” she half whispered. “I am going to be married to Monsieur
Lutz in Papeete. He is a foreigner, and the priest could not marry us.
At Papeete the judge can do it. The nuns are going with me to make sure.
They oppose, but I am determined. It is my one chance. Tell me,
American, do I make a mistake?”
“Do you love him?”
“Love him?” she said hesitatingly. “I do not know what love is. The nuns
have not taught me. Always it has been Joan of Arc, or the Sacred Heart
of Jesus. I want love and freedom, but I am afraid of staying there at
Taaoa alone with those two old women. They are true _Canaques_, and
would make me like them, and I am afraid of the convent. _Mon dieu!_ I
am puzzled by life!”
“Come!” I said, “you will have an hour of light-heartedness with
Stanislao. I am puzzled, too.”
Hardly more than a youth, Stanislao was the last of the blood royal of
the family that had ruled the Marquesas. Temoana had been the only king.
The Marquesans were communists, with chiefs, and had not the corroding
egocentrism of nationality until the French crowned Temoana. He had been
one of the few travelers from here. Kidnapped, a dime-museum man in
foreign seaports, he returned on a whaler to find favor with the bishop
and to be set on a Catholic throne. Prince Stanislao was not even chief
of Taiohae, for a half-Hawaiian, of the Kekela tribe, had that office,
and did the French policeman’s chores.
We entered the house of Stanislao and met, besides him, Antoinette, an
odalisque, most beautiful of dancers, who, like Ghost Girl, flitted from
island to island by the grace of her charms. I had known her in the
Cocoanut House in Papeete and her sister, Caroline. Neither she nor
Stanislao accepted the gospel of Christianity. Her warm blood had in it
an admixture of French and Italian, giving an archness and spice to her
manner and a coquetry to her eyes—black and dancing—that maddened many.
In the days about the fourteenth of July, when the French at Tahiti
celebrated the Fall of the Bastille, she was a prize exhibit, for then
governors and bankers, deacons and acolytes, lost the grace of God.
These three, Barbe, Antoinette, and Stanislao, were extraordinary in
their unity with the teeming vivid life here, the ferns and orchids and
flowers on the sward, the palms and breadfruit in the grove. By the
alchemy of the brilliant morning and the company of this pair of
youthful lovers, Barbe’s mood was suddenly transmuted into joyousness. I
took an accordion off a shelf, and played the _upaupahura_ of Tahiti.
Without a moment’s hesitation, and with no sense of consciousness, the
three danced on the grass.
Carlyle praises that countryman who, matching the boast of a doctor that
“his system was in high order,” answered that, for his part, “he had no
system.”
Few mortals, it is to be feared, are permanently blessed with
that felicity of “having no system”; nevertheless, most of us,
looking backward on young years, may remember seasons of a light
aerial translucency and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body
had not yet become the prison-house of the soul, but was its
vehicle and implement, like a creature of the thought, and
altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew not that we had limbs,
we only lifted, hurled and leapt; through eye and ear and all
avenues of sense came clear, unimpeded tidings from without, and
from within issued clear victorious forces. We stood as in the
center of Nature, giving and receiving in harmony with it all;
unlike Virgil’s husbandman, “too happy because we did not know
our blessedness.”
Stanislao seized the instrument and I danced. We four were the spirits
of a rare and vital esthetic, a harmony with being that denied all
knowledge but that of our acute and delicately-poised senses of warmth,
delicious odors, fresh colors of the plants, and mutual attraction. The
ship, Lutz, the nuns, heaven and hell, the _Taua_ and the _Tapus_ were
forgotten by me and by Barbe in the glowing hour of dance and play.
Tired we threw ourselves on the grass and drank from the cocoanuts which
Stanislao climbed a tree to bring us. The prince told us, with solemnity
in which Marquesans speak of olden things, an incident related to him by
his uncle:
“A French governor here forbade the girls to go to the war-ships in the
bay. They ruined discipline, he said. Nevertheless, three daughters of a
powerful chief swam out to a war vessel. The commander, discovering them
in the morning, sent them ashore to the governor, who put them in prison
for three days.
“Their father’s rage was terrible. It had ever been the custom for the
young women to visit the ships, he said, and that his daughters should
be the victims of a governor’s whim, abetted by French sailors
themselves, was a deadly insult.
“He sent a message to the governor: ‘I am a chief who has eaten my
enemies all my life. I will wash the hands of my daughters in French
blood.’
“The sailors were forbidden by their officers to leave the beach. They
had been going up the river to bathe in shady spots, but they were
warned of danger and a line was drawn beyond which they were not to go.
A guard was stationed a little higher up the stream, and for weeks the
barrier was not crossed. But sailors know no authority when woman
beckons,”—it has been so since Jason sought the Golden Fleece,—“and,
when, through the glade, they saw the alluring forms of the three
sisters, the governor’s orders were damned as tyranny. They outwitted
the guard and climbed the trail to the paepae of their inamoratas. The
chief and his warriors trapped six of them after a struggle. One sailor,
a man famed for strength, killed several with his hands. They were
outnumbered and were brought, some wounded and some dead, to an altar up
the valley, and there the daughters, at the command of their father,
bathed their hands in the men’s blood, as he had sworn. Parts of the
bodies were eaten and the remains fed to the pigs.
“The governor had troops brought ashore to pursue the chief. For a year
he evaded them, but then Vaekehu, the widow of Temoana, sent him word to
come to Taiohae and be shot. He obeyed, of course, and met death near
the hill of the fort.
“That was the palace of Queen Vaekehu,” said the prince, pointing up the
hill. It was by a pool, under a gigantic banyan, a lonely site, a
palisade of cocoanuts and tamarinds not availing to soften the gloomy
impression. Long before she died the queen forsook her royal residence
for the shelter of the convent, where all day she told her beads, or sat
in silent contemplation.
Bishop Dordillon who had written my dictionary, had given the queen a
Trinity, a Mother of God, and a band of saints to dwell upon, and more,
a bottomless pit of fire, with writhing sufferers and devils from it
ever at her ear to whisper distraction and temptation.
Mademoiselle Narbonne, hearing a warning whistle of the _Saint
François_, bethought her of her strange position, of the sisters and of
Lutz. She trembled, turned pale, and begged to be excused as she started
running to the beach to catch a boat about to shove off. I also bade
good-by to the two, with a sigh for their fleeting felicity, and
strolled to the Catholic mission.
_Père_ Siméon was seated at a table under an umbrageous _hao_ tree,
writing. He was in a frayed and soiled cassock of black. His hair was
white, and his beard grizzled, both long and uncut and flowing over his
religious gown. His face was broad and rubicund, and his remarkable
eyes—a deep, shining brown, eyes of childish faith—proclaimed him poet
and artist. Aged, he had yet the strength and heartiness of middle age,
and when I greeted him he rose and kissed me with warmth.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “Monsieur O’Brien, you have returned to hear more of
Jeanne d’Arc, is not that so? You have been too long in Atuona. You
should stay in Taiohae, and see what we have here. We go along well.
Joan of Arc looks after us.”
We entered the sitting-room of the mission, and were soon with a bottle
of wine, and cigarettes, in a discussion of affairs.
I asked to see any recent poems he had written, and, blushingly, he
handed me the paper over which he had been bending.
“There has been an excess of drinking recently,” he said ruefully, as he
took a sip of his mild claret. I read his stanzas aloud:
“Comment peut-on pour un moment d’ivresse,
Par le démon se laisser entrainer?
Que de regrets suivraient cette faiblesse!
Je n’ai qu’une âme et je veux la sauver.
“Oh! que je crains la perte de mon âme!
Pour la sauver je saurai tout braver,
J’ai mon refrain pour quiconque me blâme,
Je n’ai qu’une âme et je veux la sauver.”
Now I have no skill in rime, but, inspired by his ready gift, I took his
paper and wrote what might be called a free translation. I read it to
him as follows:
Oh, how can a man for a moment’s bibacity
Let the demon take hold of his soul?
Remorse is the fruit of such wicked vivacity;
Hell follows the flowing bowl.
“Oh, how I fear that I weakly may lose it,
And, to guard it, will everything brave!
I’ll tell the world that would tempt me to bruise it;
I have but one soul to save.
“_Hélas_!” commented the priest, “I cannot understand one word of it.
Doubtless it surpasses my poor lines in excellence. “I will multiply
copies of this poem on my hectograph,” said _Père_ Siméon, “and I will
distribute them where they will do most good.”
“Captain Capriata will receive one?” I ventured, recalling that in the
procession in honor of Joan of Arc’s anniversary the old Corsican
skipper had fallen with the banner of the Maid of Orleans.
_Père_ Siméon’s face glowed with zeal.
“I will name no names,” he said, “but Capriata is a good man and comes
often to church now.”
For months, I had desired to ask a question of _Père_ Siméon, since Lutz
had told me that Robert Louis Stevenson had written about him. The
trader had shown me his copy of “In the South Seas,” and had pointed out
the error of the printer, who had made Stevenson’s “Father Simeon
Delmas” “Father Simeon Delwar.”
“_Père_ Siméon,” I said, “a writer about the islands mentions you in his
book. He was here a long time ago in a little yacht, the _Casco_, and he
says that he went with you from Hatiheu, to a native High Place, and
that you named the trees and plants for him. You had a portfolio, he
said, from which you read.”
The missionary stopped a moment, and plucked his beard, inquiringly.
“There have been many come here, in fifty years,” he said slowly,
“yachtsmen and students. I do not recall the name Stevenson.”
Something pricked his recollection, and he took me into the rectory and
produced his portfolio.
“Here is the list; I must have read that author,” he said.
“You gave an abstract of the virtues of the trees and plants, Stevenson
says in his volume.”
“_Le voilà_” replied the priest. “Stevenson? Do you mean perhaps Louis,
who was a consumptive?”
He made a rapid movement of the hand to his face, and drew upon the air
a mustache and imperial, a slender figure with a slight stoop—in a word,
the very shadow of the master of romance.
“He was much with Stanislao, the king’s son. He was _très distingué_. He
was here but a little time. However, I remember him well, because he was
very _sympathique_, and a gentleman.
“I will tell you why he impressed me particularly. He was not French,
but he spoke it as I do, and he was curious about the cannibalism which
was then practically eradicated. There was another priest with me who
was then very ill. He died in my arms. I remember the evening he told
Stevenson of how he had saved the life of a foolish French governor.
There had been rumors of a cannibal feast at Hatiheu, and the governor
was incensed. He feared that the incident might be reported to Paris and
injure his prestige. He blamed the chief, and sent him word that if it
were proved he would personally blow out his brains.
“Soon word came that the Hatiheu people—I was pastor there for a quarter
of a century—had killed several of their enemies, and were eating them
and drinking _namu enata_. The governor started off in haste from
Taiohae, for Hatiheu and the priest went with him, as also several
_gendarmes_.
“Hundreds of natives were grouped in the public place, chanting,
dancing, and drinking.
“‘Where is the chief?’ demanded the governor.
“‘I am here,’ said a voice, stern and menacing, and the chief broke from
the throng and advanced toward the governor.
“The latter drew his revolver. ‘You have permitted this breaking of the
law, after I sent you word that I would kill you if you ate human
flesh?’
“‘_E!_’ replied the chief in a high voice. ‘I am the master in Hatiheu.
Do you wish to be eaten?’
“The war-drums sounded and the grim warriors began to surround the
party. My friend, who was, for safety, an adopted son of the chief, and
thus taboo, seized the governor and led him to the boat. They got away
by sheer courage on the priest’s part. He described this to Louis, who
wrote it down. I recall it clearly, because the poor martyr died the
next week. Did Louis write of the Marquesas much?”
I said that he had. I should have liked to stay and gain from _Père_
Siméon all I could of his memories of the poet, but a boy came running
up the road to say that the _Saint François_ was to leave very soon.
I embraced _Père_ Siméon. He kissed me on both cheeks, and gave me his
blessing. It had been worth a voyage to know him.
Jerome Capriata, the eater of cats, was outside his house. He invited me
in to meet his wife, a barefooted Frenchwoman who sat in a
scantily-furnished room, musing over a bottle of absinthe. I could stay
only a minute, as the _Saint François_ whistled insistently. His wife
set out the bottle and glasses before us, and we drank the farewell
_goutte_.
[Illustration:
Photo from Underwood and Underwood
Throwing spears at a cocoanut on a stake
]
[Illustration:
The raised-up atoll of Makatea
]
On the way to the beach I met Mrs. Fisher, whom Bishop Dordillon, my
dictionary writer, had as adopted mother, when he was old enough to be
her grandfather. That was because Queen Vaekehu had adopted him as a
grandson, and Mrs. Fisher as a daughter, and the bishop had observed the
pseudo-relationship strictly.
“Mrs. Stevenson gave me a shawl,” said Mrs. Fisher. “I have shown that
to many people. Madame Jack London wore it when she was here with her
husband on the _Snark_. They lived with Lutz, the German, who was then
here. _Pauvre Stevenson!_ He had to die young, and here I am, after all
these years!”
I waded through the surf to the boat, and reached the _Saint François_
to find all the others aboard. We shipped the buoy and were away in a
trice. The last sight I had of the shore was of the promontory where
Captain Porter raised the American flag a hundred years before. I was
never to see the Marquesas Islands again. The fresh breath of nature was
too foul with the worst of civilization.
------------------------------------------------------------------------