An Adventure in Solitude
I awoke sometime during the latter part of the night with the bemused
presentiment that a longed-for event was approaching or in the
process of happening. Hands had passed lightly over my face--either
that or I had dreamed it--and I heard a faint shout coming from the
borderland between sleeping and waking. Puarei's guest bed, with its
billowy mattress of kapok, seemed strangely hard, which led to the
discovery that I was not lying on a bed, but on a mat in the corner
of an empty room. The floor was covered with crushed krora shell
which made a faint radiance in the gloom, and a roof of green thatch
was alight with the reflections of moving water. I was trying to
puzzle out whose house this could be when I heard the shout again,
clearly this time, in a pause of silence between deafening claps
of thunder. From nearer at hand came the sound of subdued laughter.
Something elfish, light-hearted in the quality of it, stirred a dim
memory and there flashed into mind the lines of an old poem:
Come, dear children, come out and play.
The moon is shining as bright as day.
Up the ladder and over the wall--
Raising my head quickly, I saw through the open doorway their perfect
illustration. The wall was the smooth wall of the sea, with a waning
moon rising just clear of it, sending a path of light to the strip of
white beach in front of the house. The palm trees bordering the shore
swarmed with children who were throwing down nuts. One ancient tree,
its stem a fantastic curve, held its foliage far out over the water
at a point where the floor of the narrow outer lagoon shelved steeply
toward the reef some fifty yards distant. Both boys and girls were
shinning up the trunk, one after the other, diving from the plumed
top, dropping feet foremost, jumping with their hands clasped around
their knees into the foaming water--the wreckage of huge combers
which broke on the reef pouring across it into the inner shallows.
A second group had gathered in the moonlit area just before the
doorway. Several youngsters were peering intently in my direction.
Others were playing a sort of hand-clapping game to the accompaniment
of an odd little singsong. A small girl, with a baby riding astride
her hip, walked past, and I saw another, of ten or twelve, standing
at the edge of the track of shimmering light, holding a coconut to
her lips with both hands. Her head was bent far back and her hair
hung free from her shoulders as she drained the cool liquid to the
last drop.
Imagine coming out of the depths of sleep to the consciousness of
such a scene! I was hardly more sure of the reality of it than I had
been of the shout, the touch of hands. It was like a picture out of a
book of fairy tales, but one quick with life, the figures coming and
going against a background of empty sea where the long swell broke
in lines of white fire on a ledge of coral. I remembered where I was,
of course: in my own house, which stood on the ocean side of a small
_motu_ known in the Paumotuan legend as "The island where the souls
were eaten." The house had been built for me only the day before by
the order of Puarei, chief of the atoll of Rutiaro; and the _motu_
was one of a dozen uninhabited islands which lay on the thirty-mile
circumference to the lagoons.
It was ordered--by chance, which took me there, perhaps--that I
was never to see the place in the clear light of usual experience,
but rather through a glamour like that of remembered dreams--a
long succession of dreams in which, night after night, events
shape themselves according to the heart's desire, or even more
fantastically, with an airy disregard for any semblance to reality.
So it was, waking from sleep on the first night which I spent under
my own roof. I was almost ready to believe that my presence there
was not the result of chance. Waywardness of fancy is one of the most
godlike of the attributes of that divinity, but the display of it is
as likely as not to be unfriendly. Here there seemed to be reasoned
kindly action. "Providence," I said to myself--"Providence without a
doubt; a little repentant, perhaps, because of questionable gifts in
the past." A whimsical Providence, too, which delighted in shocking
my sense of probability. What could those children be doing on
Soul-Eaters' Island in the middle of the night? I, myself, had left
the village island, four miles distant, only a few hours earlier,
and at that time everyone was asleep. There was not a sound of
human activity in the settlement; not a glimmer of light to be seen
anywhere excepting in Moy Ling's, the Chinaman's, shop, and on the
surface of the lagoon where lay the misty reflections of the stars.
"Perhaps," I thought, "these are not earthly children. Maybe they are
the ghosts of those whose souls were eaten here so many years ago." I
was more than half serious in thinking of that possibility. Stranger
things had happened on islands not so far removed from the world of
men.
I dressed very quietly and went to the door, taking care to keep
well in the shadow so that I might look on for a moment without
being seen. My doubts vanished at once. Not only the children had
come out to play; fathers and mothers, as well. Tamitanga was there
and Rikitia and Nahea and Pohu and Tahere and Hunga; Nui-Tane and
Nui-Vahine, Tamataha, Manono, Havaiki; and I saw old Rangituki, who
was at least seventy and a grandmother several times over, clapping
her hands with others of her generation and swaying from side to side
in time to the music of Kaupia's accordion. All the older people
were grouped around Puarei, who was seated in an old deck chair,
a sort of throne which was carried about for him wherever he went.
Poura, his wife, lay on a mat beside him, her chin propped on her
hands. Both greeted me cordially, but offered no explanation for
the reason of the midnight visit. I was glad that they didn't. I
liked the casualness of it, which was quite in keeping with habits
of life at Rutiaro. But I couldn't help smiling, remembering my
reflections earlier in the evening. I believed then that I was
crossing the threshold of what was to be an adventure in solitude,
and was in a mood of absurdly youthful elation at the prospect.
"I was to delve deeply, for the first time, into my own resources
against loneliness. I had known the solitude of cities, but there
one has the comfortable sense of nearness to others; the refuge of
books, pictures, music--all the distractions which prevent any very
searching examination of one's capacity for a life of retirement. At
Soul-Eaters' Island I would have no books, no pictures, excepting a
colored post card of the Woolworth Building which had won me this
opportunity; and for music I was limited to what I could make for
myself with my _ocharina_, my sweet-potato whistle which had a range
of one octave. Thus scantly provided with diversions, I was to learn
how far my own thoughts would serve to make a solitary life not only
endurable, but pleasant."
So I had dreamed as I paddled down the lagoon, with my island taking
form against the starlit sky to the eastward. It was one of those
places which set one to dreaming, which seem fashioned by nature for
the enjoyment of a definite kind of experience. Seeing it, whether
by day or by night, the most gregarious of men, I am sure, would
have become suddenly enamored of his own companionship and the most
prosaic would have discovered a second, meditative self which pleads
for indulgence with gentle obstinacy. But, alas! my own unsocial
nature gained but a barren victory, being robbed, at the outset,
of the fruits of it, by the seventy-five convivial inhabitants of
Rutiaro. Here within six hours was half the village at my door, and
Puarei told me that the rest of it, or as many as were provided with
canoes, was following. Evidently he had suggested the invasion.
My new house needed warming--or the Paumotuan equivalent to that
festival--so they had come to warm it.
Preparations were being made on an elaborate scale. The children were
gathering green nuts for drinking and fronds for the cloth at the
feast. Women and girls were grating the meat of ripe nuts, pressing
out the milk for the _miti haari_; cleaning fish; preparing shells
for dishes. Some of the men and the older boys were building native
ovens--eight of them, each one large enough for roasting a pig. All
of this work was being carried out under Puarei's direction and to
the accompaniment of Kaupia's accordion. I wish that I might in some
way make real to others the unreal loveliness of the scene. It must
be remembered that it took place on one of the loneliest of a lonely
cloud of islands which lay in the midmost solitude of an empty ocean.
The moonlight must be remembered, too, and how it lay in splinters
of silver on the motionless fronds of the palms as though it were
of the very texture of their polished surfaces. And you must hear
Kaupia's accordion, and the shouts of the children as they dove into
the pool of silvered foam. The older ones, out of respect to me, I
think, wore wisps of parou cloth about their loins, but the babies
were as naked as on the day they were born. Tereki was standing
among these five-and-six-year-olders, who were too small for the
climb to the diving place, taking them up, sometimes two at once,
and tossing them into the pool among the others, where they were as
much at home as so many minnows. Watching them, I thought with regret
of my own lost opportunities as a child. I felt a deep pity for all
the children of civilization who must wear clothing and who never
know the joy of playing at midnight, and by moonlight too. Mothers'
clubs and child-welfare organizations would do well to consider the
advisability of repealing the old "to bed at seven" law, the bugbear
of all children. Its only merits, if it may be so called, is that
it fosters in children, a certain melancholy intellectual enjoyment
in such poems as, "Up the ladder and over the wall," where the
forbidden pleasures are held out to them as though they were natural
ones--which most of them are, of course--and quite possible of
attainment.
I was sorry that Tino, supercargo of the _Caleb S. Winship_, could
not be present to see how blithely the work went forward. He had
called the people of Rutiaro a lazy lot, and he was right--they
were lazy, according to the standards of temperate climates. But
when they worked toward an end which pleased them their industry was
astonishing. Tino's belief was that man was made to labor, whether
joyfully or not, in order that he might increase his wealth, whether
he needed it or not, and that of the world at large. I remember
meeting somewhat the same point of view in reading the lives and
memoirs of some of the old missionaries to the islands. It seems to
have irked them terribly, finding a people who had never heard that
doleful hymn, "Work, for the Night Is Coming." They, too, believed
that the needs of the Polynesians should be increased, but for
ethical reasons, in order that they should be compelled to cultivate
regular habits of industry in order to satisfy them. Although I
didn't agree with it, Tino's seemed to me the sounder conviction.
The missionaries might have argued as reasonably for a general
distribution of Job-like boils, in order that the virtues of patience
and fortitude might have wider dissemination. But neither trade nor
religion had altered to any noticeable extent the habits of life at
Rutiaro. The people worked, as they had always done, under the press
of necessity. Their simple needs being satisfied, their inertia was
a thing to marvel at. I have often seen them sitting for hours at
a time, moving only with the shadows which sheltered them. There
was something awe-inspiring in their immobility, in their attitude
of profound reverie. I felt at times that I was living in a land
under a perpetual enchantment of silence and sleep. These periods of
calm--or, as Tino would say, laziness--were usually brought to an end
by Puarei. It was a fascinating thing to watch him throwing off the
enchantment, so gradual the process was and so strange the contrast
when he was thoroughly awakened and had roused the village from its
long sleep. Then would follow a period of activity--fishing, copra
making, canoe building, whatever there was to do would be done, not
speedily, perhaps, but smoothly, and fasts would be broken--in the
case of many of the villagers for the first time in two or three
days. My house was built during such a period. I was still living
with Puarei on the village island, wondering when, if ever, I was to
have the promised dwelling. Then one afternoon, while I was absent
on a shell-gathering expedition, the village set out _en masse_ for
Soul-Eaters' Island, cut the timbers, branded the fronds, erected,
swept, and garnished my house, and were at the settlement again
before I myself had returned. That task finished, here they were back
for the warming festival, and the energy spent in preparing for it
would have more than loaded Tino's schooner with copra. I couldn't
flatter myself that all of this was done solely to give me pleasure.
They found pleasure in it too, and, furthermore, I knew that an
unusually long interval of fasting called for compensation in the way
of feasting.
Puarei was in a gay mood. Religion sat rather heavily upon him
sometimes--by virtue of his Papeete schooling, he was the chief
elder of his church; but once he sloughed off his air of Latter Day
Saintliness he made a splendid master of revels; and he threw it
aside the moment the drums began to beat, and led a dozen of the
younger men in a dance which I had not seen before. It was very much
like modern Swedish drill set to music, except that the movements
were as intricate and graceful as they were exhausting. Three kinds
of drums were used--one, an empty gasoline tin, upon which the
drummer kept up a steady roll while the dance was in progress. The
rhythm for the movements was indicated by three others, two of them
beating hollowed cylinders of wood, while a third was provided with
an old French army drum of the Napoleonic period. The syncopation
was extraordinary. Measures were divided in an amazing variety
of ways, and often when the opportunity seemed lost the fragments
joined perfectly just as the next one was at hand. The music was a
kaleidoscope in sound, made up of unique and startling variations in
tempo, as the dance moved from one figure to the next.
At the close of it Kaupia took up her accordion again, and dancing by
some of the women followed. At length, Rangituki, grandmother though
she was, could resist the music no longer. The others gave way to
her, and in a moment she was dancing alone, proudly, with a sort of
wistful abandon, as though she were remembering her youth, throwing a
last defiance in the teeth of Time. Kaupia sang as she played to an
air which had but four changes in it. The verse was five words long
and repeated endlessly.
_Tu fra to potta mi,
Tu fra to potta mi._
Both the words and the air had a familiar sound. They called to
mind a shadowy picture of three tall, thin women in spangled skirts,
all of them beating tambourines in unison and dancing in front of a
painted screen. I couldn't account for the strange vision at first.
It glimmered faintly, far in the depths of subconscious memory, like
a colored newspaper supplement, lying in murky water at the end of
a pier. Suddenly it rose into focus, drawn to the surface by the
buoyant splendor of a name--the Cherry Sisters. I remembered then
a vaudeville troupe which long ago made sorry capital of its lack
of comeliness; and I saw them again on the island where the souls
were eaten as clearly as ever I had as a youngster, knocking their
tambourines on bony elbows, shaking their curls, and singing
"Shoe, fly, don't bother me,"
in shrill, cracked voices. Kaupia's version was merely a phonetic
translation of the words. They meant nothing in the Paumotuan
dialect; and--old woman though she was--Rangituki's dance, which
accompanied the music, played in faster and faster time, was in
striking contrast to the angular movements of the Cherry Sisters,
tripping it in the background, across the dim footlights of the
eighteen nineties.
Other canoes were arriving during this time, and at last a large
canoe, which had put off from the ocean side of the village island,
was seen making in toward the pass. It was loaded with pigs and
chickens, the most important part of the feast, and had been eagerly
awaited for more than an hour. Shouts of anticipation went up from
the shore as the boat drew in with its wished-for freight; but these
were a little premature. There was a stretch of ugly, broken water
to be passed, where the swift ebb from the lagoon met the swell of
the open sea. The canoe was badly jostled in crossing it, and some
of the chickens, having worked loose from their bonds, escaped.
Like the dogs of the atolls, the chickens are of a wild breed, and
they took the air with sturdy wings. The chase from the shore began
at once, but it was a hopeless one. Soul-Eaters' Island is five
hundred yards long by three hundred broad, and there is another, on
the opposite side of the pass, which is more than a mile in extent.
We made frantic efforts to prevent them from reaching it. We threw
sticks and stones, tried to entice them with broken coconuts, the
meat temptingly accessible. It was to no purpose. They had been
enticed before; their crops were full, and several hours of captivity
had made them wary. Furthermore, like all Polynesian chickens, they
seemed to have a racial memory of what they had been in other times,
in less congenial environments--of the lean days when they had been
caught and eaten at will, chased by dogs, run down by horses. They
were not so far from all that as to have lost conscious pride in
their regained prerogative of flight. The last we saw of them they
were using it to splendid advantage over the rapid stream which
separated the two islands. One old hen, alone, remained perched in
the top of a coconut tree on Soul-Eaters' Island. She was in no hurry
to leave. She knew that she could follow the others whenever she
liked, and she knew that we knew it. She seemed drunk with a sense
of freedom and power, and cackled proudly, as though more than half
convinced that the nuts clustered in the nest of foliage beneath her
were eggs which she had laid.
Knowing the wholesomeness of the Paumotuan appetite, I could
understand why the loss of the chickens was regarded seriously.
A dozen of them remained, and we had eight pigs weighing from one
hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds each, to say nothing of some
fifty pounds of fish. All of this was good, in so far as it went,
but there was a gloomy shaking of heads as we returned from our
fruitless chase. Not that the Paumotuans are particularly fond of
chicken; on the contrary, they don't care greatly for fowl of any
sort, but it serves to fill odd corners of their capacious stomachs.
It was this they were thinking of, and the possible lack, at the
end of the feast, of the feeling of almost painful satiety which
is to them an essential after-dinner sensation. In this emergency
I contributed four one-pound tins of beef and salmon, my entire
stock of substantial provisions for the adventure in solitude; but
I could see that Puarei, as well as the others, regarded this as a
mere relish--a wholly acceptable but light course of _hors-d'œuvre_.
Fortunately there was at hand an inexhaustible reservoir of food--the
sea--and we prepared to go there for further supplies. I never lost
an opportunity to witness those fish-spearing expeditions. Once I had
tried my hand as a participant and found myself as dangerously out of
my element as a Paumotuan would be at the joy stick of an airplane.
I saw a great many fish, but I could not have speared one of them
if it had been moored to the bottom, and after a few absurd attempts
was myself fished into the boat, half drowned. I lay there for a few
minutes, gasping for breath, my ear drums throbbing painfully from
the attempt to reach unaccustomed depths.
The experiment convinced me that fish spearing in the open sea is not
an easily acquired art, but one handed down in its perfection through
at least twenty generations of Low Island ancestors. It is falling
into disuse in some of the atolls where wealth is accumulating and
tinned food plentiful; but the inhabitants of Rutiaro still follow
it with old-time zest. They handle their spears affectionately,
as anglers handle and sort their flies. These are true sportsman's
weapons, provided with a single unbarbed dart, bound with sinnet to
a tapering shaft from eight to ten feet long. Their water goggles,
like their spears, they make for themselves. They are somewhat like
an aviator's goggles, disks of clear glass fitted in brass rims,
with an inner cushion of rubber which cups closely around the eyes,
preventing the entrance of water. When adjusted they give the wearer
an owlish appearance, like the horn-rimmed spectacles which used to
be affected by American undergraduates. Thus equipped, with their
_pareus_ girded into loin cloths, a half dozen of the younger men
jumped into the rapid current which flows past Soul-Eaters' Island
and swam out to sea.
Tohetika, Tehina, Pinga (the boat steerer), and I followed in a
canoe. Dawn was at hand and, looking back, I saw the island, my
house, and the crowd on the beach in the suffused, unreal light
of sun and fading moon. In front of us the swimmers were already
approaching the tumbled waters at the entrance to the pass. Upon
reaching it they disappeared together, and I next saw them far on the
other side, swimming in a direction parallel to the reef, and some
fifty yards beyond the breaking point of the surf. When we joined
them the sun was above the horizon and they were already at the
sport. They lay face down on the surface of the water, turning their
heads now and then for a breath of air. They swam with an easy breast
stroke and a barely perceptible movement of the legs, holding their
spears with their toes, near the end of the long shaft. Riding the
long, smooth swell, it was hard to keep them in view, and they were
diving repeatedly, coming to the surface again at unexpected places.
Through the clear water I could see every crevice and cranny in
the shelving slope of coral; the mouths of gloomy caverns which
undermined the reef, and swarms of fish, as strangely colored as
the coral itself, passing through them, flashing across sunlit
spaces, or hovering in the shadows of overhanging ledges. It was
a strange world to look down upon and stranger still to see men
moving about in it as though it were their natural home. Sometimes
they grasped their spears as a poniard would be held for a downward
blow; sometimes with the thumb forward, thrusting with an underhand
movement. They were marvelously quick and accurate at striking. I had
a nicer appreciation of their skill after my one attempt, which had
proven to me how difficult it is to judge precisely the distance,
the location of the prey, and the second for the thrust. A novice
was helpless. He suffered under the heavy pressure of the water, and
the long holding of his breath cost him agonized effort. Even though
he were comfortable physically he might chase, with as good result,
the dancing reflections of a mirror, turned this way and that in the
sunlight.
As they searched the depths to the seaward side the bodies of the
fishers grew shadowy, vanished altogether, reappeared as they passed
over a lighter background of blue or green which marked an invisible
shoal. At last they would come clearly into view, the spear held
erect, rising like embodied spirits through an element of matchless
purity which seemed neither air nor water. The whistling noises
which they made as they regained the surface gave the last touch of
unreality to the scene. I have never understood the reason for this
practice which is universal among the divers and fishers of the Low
Islands, unless it is that their lungs, being famished for air, they
breathe it out grudgingly through half-closed teeth. Heard against
the thunder of the surf, the sounds, hoarse or shrill, according to
the wont of the diver, seemed anything but human.
We returned in an hour's time with the canoe half filled with
fish--square-nosed _tinga-tingas_, silvery _tamures_, brown spotted
_kitos_, _gnareas_; we had more than made good the loss of the
chickens. The preparations for the feast had been completed. The
table was set or, better, the cloth of green fronds was laid on the
ground near the beach. At each place there was a tin of my corned
beef or salmon; the half of a coconut shell filled with raw fish,
cut into small pieces in a sauce of _miti haari_--salted coconut
milk--and a green coconut for drinking. Along the center of the table
were great piles of fish, baked and raw; roast pork and chicken;
mounds of bread stacked up like cannon balls. The bread was not of
Moy Ling's baking, but made in native fashion--lumps of boiled dough
of the size and weight of large grape fruit. One would think that the
most optimistic stomach would ache at the prospect of receiving it,
but the Paumotuan stomach is of ostrichlike hardihood and, as I have
said, after long fasting it demands quantity rather than quality in
food.
It was then about half past six, a seasonable hour for the feast, for
the air was still cool and fresh. The food was steaming on the table,
but we were not yet ready to sit down to it. Fête days, like Sundays,
required costumes appropriate to the occasion, and everyone retired
into the bush to change clothing. I thought then that I was to be the
only disreputable banqueter of the lot, and regretted that I had been
so eager to see my new house. Not expecting visitors, I had come away
from the village with only my supply of food. Fortunately, Puarei had
been thoughtful for me. I found not only my white clothing, but my
other possessions--bolts of ribbon, perfume, the cheap jewelry, etc.,
which I had bought, on credit, of Moy Ling. And the house itself had
been furnished and decorated during the hour when I was out with
the fish spearers. There was a table and a chair, made of bits of
old packing cases, in one corner; and on the sleeping mat a crazy
quilt and a pillow with my name worked in red silk within a border
of flowers. Hanging from the ceiling was a faded papier-maché bell,
the kind one sees in grocers' windows at home at Christmas time. This
was originally the gift of some trader; and the pictures, too, which
decorated the walls. They had been cut from the advertising pages
of some American magazine. One of them represented a man, dressed
in a much-advertised brand of underwear, who was smiling with cool
solicitude at two others who were perspiring heavily and wishing--if
the legend printed beneath was true--that their underwear bore the
same stamp as that of their fortunate comrade. There was another,
in color, of a woman smiling across a table at her husband, who
smiled back while they ate a particular brand of beans. The four
walls of my house were hung with pictures of this sort, strung on
cords of coconut fiber--Huirai's work, I was sure, done out of the
kindness of his heart. He was merely an unconscious agent of the
gods, administering this further reproof for my temerity in seeking
consciously an adventure in solitude. As I changed my clothing I
pondered the problem as to how I could get rid of the gallery without
giving Huirai offense, and from this I fell to thinking of the people
smiling down at me. Is our race made up, in large part, of such
out-and-out materialists, whose chief joy in life lies in discovering
some hitherto untried brand of soup or talcum powder? Do they live,
these people? They looked real enough in the picture. I seemed to
know many of them, and I remembered their innumerable prototypes I
had met in the world I had left only the year before. "Well, if they
are real," I thought, "what has become of the old doomsday men and
women who used to stand at street corners with bundles of tracts in
their hands, saying to passers-by, 'My friend, is your soul saved?'?"
No answer came from the smiling materialists on all sides of me.
They smiled still, as though in mockery of my attempt to elude them
in whatsoever unfrequented corner of the world; as though life were
merely the endless enjoyment of creature comforts, the endless,
effortless use of labor-saving devices. One man, in his late fifties,
who really ought to have been thinking about his soul, had in his
eyes only the light of sensual gratification. He was in pajamas and
half shaven, announcing to me, to the world at large: "At last! A
razor!"
The sight of him offering me his useful little instrument put an end
to my meditation. I rubbed ruefully a three days' growth of beard,
thinking of the torture in store for me when I should next go to
Pinga for a shave. He was the village barber, as well as its most
skillful boat steerer. His other customers were used to his razor and
his methods, and their faces were inured to pain; for had not their
ancestors, through countless generations, had their beards plucked
out hair by hair? I, on the other hand, was the creature of my own
land of creature comforts. The anticipation of a shave was agony,
and the realization--Pinga sitting on my chest, holding my head
firm with one immense hand while he scraped and rasped with his dull
razor--that was to die weekly and to live to die again. I got what
amusement I could from the thought of the different set of values
at Rutiaro. I had only to ask for a house, and Puarei had given me
one, with an island of my own to set it on. He thought no more of the
request than if I had asked him for a drinking coconut. But not all
the wealth of the Low Island pearl fisheries, had it been mine to
offer, could have procured for me a safety razor with a dozen good
blades.
I heard Puarei shouting, "_Haere mai ta maa!_" and went out to join
the others, my unshaved beard in woeful contrast to my immaculate
white clothing. But my guests, or hosts, had the native courtesy of
many primitive people, and I was not made conscious of my unreaped
chin. Furthermore, everyone was hungry, and so, after Puarei had said
grace for the Church of Latter Day Saints, and Huirai a second one
for the Reformed Church of Latter Day Saints, and Nui-Tano a third as
the Catholic representative, we fell to without further loss of time.
The enjoyment of food is assuredly one of the great blessings of
life, although it is not a cause for perpetual smiling, as the
writers of advertisements would have one believe. According to the
Low Island way of thinking, it is not a subject to be talked about at
any length. I liked their custom of eating in silence, with everyone
giving undivided attention to the business in hand. It gave one the
privilege of doing likewise, a relief to a man weary of the unnatural
dining habits of more advanced people. It may be a trifle gross to
think of your food while you are eating it, but it is natural and, if
the doctors are to be believed, an excellent aid to digestion. Now
and then Puarei would say, "_É mea maitai, tera_" ("A thing good,
that"), tapping a haunch of roast pork with his forefinger. And I
would reply, "_É, é mea maitai roa, tera_" ("Yes, a thing very good,
that"). Then we would fall to eating again. On my right, Hunga went
from fish to pork and from pork to tinned beef, whipping the _miti
haari_ to his lips with his fingers without the loss of a drop. Only
once he paused for a moment and let his eyes wander the length of
the table. Shaking his head with a sigh of satisfaction, he said,
"_Katinga ahuru katinga_" ("Food and yet more food"). There is no
phrase sweeter to Paumotuan ears than that one.
Huirai, the constable, was the only one who made any social demands
upon me. As already related, he had once made a journey from
Papeete to San Francisco as a stoker on one of the mail boats and
was immensely proud of the few English phrases which he had picked
up during the voyage. He didn't know the meaning of them, but that
made no difference. He could put on side before the others, make
them believe that he was carrying on an intelligent conversation.
"What's the matter?" "Oh yes!" "Never mind" were among his favorite
expressions--unusually mild ones, it seemed to me, for one who had
been associated with a gang of cockney stokers; and he brought them
out apropos of nothing. He was an exasperating old hypocrite, but
a genial one, and I couldn't help replying to some of his feints
at conversation. Once, out of curiosity, wondering what his reply
would be, I said, "Huirai, you're the worst old four-flusher in the
seventy-two islands, aren't you?" He smiled and nodded, and came back
with the most telling of all his phrases, "You go to hell, me." On
that occasion it was delivered with what seemed something more than
mere parrotlike aptness of reply.
Clipped to his undershirt he wore a fountain pen, which was
as much a part of his costume on those dress occasions as his
dungaree trousers and pandanus hat. It had a broken point, was
always dry, and, although Huirai read fairly well, he could
hardly write his own name. No matter. He would no more have
forgotten his pen than a French soldier his _Croix de guerre_.
But he was not alone in his love for these implements of the
_popaa's_ (white man's) culture. There was Havaiki, for example,
who owned a small folding camera which he had bought from some
trader. The two men were very jealous of each other. Huirai had
traveled and had a fountain pen, but Havaiki's camera was a much
more complicated instrument. There had never been any films for
it, but he was quite satisfied without them. The camera stood
on a shelf at his house, an ever-present proof of his better
title to distinction. His chief regret, I believe, was that he
couldn't wear it, as Huirai did his pen. But he often carried
it with him on Sundays and went through the pretense of taking
pictures. Some of the more sanguine still believed that he would
one day surprise the village by producing a large number of
magnificent photographs.
A further account of the feast at Soul-Eaters' Island would be
nothing more than a detailed statement of the amount of food
consumed, and it would not be credited as truthful. It is enough
to say that it was a Latter Day miracle, comparable to the feeding
of the five thousand, with this reversal of the circumstances--that
food for approximately that number was eaten by twenty-two men. At
last Puarei sat back with a groan of content and said, "_Aué! Paia
'huru paia to tatou._" It is impossible to translate this literally,
but the exact meaning is, "We are all of us full up to the neck." It
was true. We were. That is, all of the men. The women and children
were waiting, and as soon as we gave them place they set to on the
remnants. Fortunately, there was, as Hunga had said, food and yet
more food, so that no one went hungry. At the close of the feast I
saw old Rangituki take a fragment of coconut frond and weave it into
a neat basket. Then she gathered into it all of the fish bones and
hung the basket from one of the rafters of my house. Rangituki was
pure heathen, one of the unredeemed of the Rutiaroans, but I noticed
that some of the Catholics and Latter Day Saints, even the Reformed
Saints of the later Latter Day persuasion, all in good standing in
their churches, assisted her in making the collection. I had observed
the same practice at other islands. At the beginning of a meal thanks
were given to the God of Christians for the bounty of the sea; but
fisherman's luck was a matter of the first importance, and, while
the old gods might be overthrown, there seemed to be a fairly general
belief that it would not do to trifle with immemorial custom.
It was midmorning before the last of the broken meats had been
removed and the beach made tidy. The breeze died away, and the
shadows of the palms moved only with the imperceptible advance of
the sun. It was a time for rest, for quiet meditation, and all of
the older people were gathered in the shade, gazing out over a sea
as tranquil as their minds, as lonely as their lives had always been
and would always be. I knew that they would remain thus throughout
the day, talking a little, after the refreshment of light slumbers,
but for the most part sitting without speech or movement, their
consciousness crossed by vague thoughts which would stir it scarcely
more than the cat's-paw ruffled the surface of the water. No sudden,
half-anguished realization of the swift passage of time would disturb
the peace of their reverie; no sense of old loss to be retrieved
would goad them into swift and feverish action.
A land crab moved across a strip of sunlight and sidled into
his hole, pulling his grotesque little shadow after him; and the
children, restless little spirits, splashed and shouted in the
shallows of the lagoon, maneuvering fleets of empty beef and salmon
tins--reminders of the strange beginning of my adventure in solitude.
[Illustration]