I lived at the Hôtel de la Fleur, and Mrs. Johnson, the proprietress,
had a sad story to tell of lost opportunity. After Strickland’s death
certain of his effects were sold by auction in the market-place at
Papeete, and she went to it herself because there was among the truck
an American stove she wanted. She paid twenty-seven francs for it.
“There were a dozen pictures,” she told me, “but they were unframed,
and nobody wanted them. Some of them sold for as much as ten francs,
but mostly they went for five or six. Just think, if I had bought them
I should be a rich woman now.”
But Tiaré Johnson would never under any circumstances have been rich.
She could not keep money. The daughter of a native and an English
sea-captain settled in Tahiti, when I knew her she was a woman of
fifty, who looked older, and of enormous proportions. Tall and
extremely stout, she would have been of imposing presence if the great
good-nature of her face had not made it impossible for her to express
anything but kindliness. Her arms were like legs of mutton, her breasts
like giant cabbages; her face, broad and fleshy, gave you an impression
of almost indecent nakedness, and vast chin succeeded to vast chin. I
do not know how many of them there were. They fell away voluminously
into the capaciousness of her bosom. She was dressed usually in a pink
Mother Hubbard, and she wore all day long a large straw hat. But when
she let down her hair, which she did now and then, for she was vain of
it, you saw that it was long and dark and curly; and her eyes had
remained young and vivacious. Her laughter was the most catching I ever
heard; it would begin, a low peal in her throat, and would grow louder
and louder till her whole vast body shook. She loved three things—a
joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome man. To have known her is a
privilege.
She was the best cook on the island, and she adored good food. From
morning till night you saw her sitting on a low chair in the kitchen,
surrounded by a Chinese cook and two or three native girls, giving her
orders, chatting sociably with all and sundry, and tasting the savoury
messes she devised. When she wished to do honour to a friend she cooked
the dinner with her own hands. Hospitality was a passion with her, and
there was no one on the island who need go without a dinner when there
was anything to eat at the Hôtel de la Fleur. She never turned her
customers out of her house because they did not pay their bills. She
always hoped they would pay when they could. There was one man there
who had fallen on adversity, and to him she had given board and lodging
for several months. When the Chinese laundryman refused to wash for him
without payment she had sent his things to be washed with hers. She
could not allow the poor fellow to go about in a dirty shirt, she said,
and since he was a man, and men must smoke, she gave him a franc a day
for cigarettes. She used him with the same affability as those of her
clients who paid their bills once a week.
Age and obesity had made her inapt for love, but she took a keen
interest in the amatory affairs of the young. She looked upon venery as
the natural occupation for men and women, and was ever ready with
precept and example from her own wide experience.
“I was not fifteen when my father found that I had a lover,” she said.
“He was third mate on the _Tropic Bird_. A good-looking boy.”
She sighed a little. They say a woman always remembers her first lover
with affection; but perhaps she does not always remember him.
“My father was a sensible man.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He thrashed me within an inch of my life, and then he made me marry
Captain Johnson. I did not mind. He was older, of course, but he was
good-looking too.”
Tiaré—her father had called her by the name of the white, scented
flower which, they tell you, if you have once smelt, will always draw
you back to Tahiti in the end, however far you may have roamed—Tiaré
remembered Strickland very well.
“He used to come here sometimes, and I used to see him walking about
Papeete. I was sorry for him, he was so thin, and he never had any
money. When I heard he was in town, I used to send a boy to find him
and make him come to dinner with me. I got him a job once or twice, but
he couldn’t stick to anything. After a little while he wanted to get
back to the bush, and one morning he would be gone.”
Strickland reached Tahiti about six months after he left Marseilles. He
worked his passage on a sailing vessel that was making the trip from
Auckland to San Francisco, and he arrived with a box of paints, an
easel, and a dozen canvases. He had a few pounds in his pocket, for he
had found work in Sydney, and he took a small room in a native house
outside the town. I think the moment he reached Tahiti he felt himself
at home. Tiaré told me that he said to her once:
“I’d been scrubbing the deck, and all at once a chap said to me: ‘Why,
there it is.’ And I looked up and I saw the outline of the island. I
knew right away that there was the place I’d been looking for all my
life. Then we came near, and I seemed to recognise it. Sometimes when I
walk about it all seems familiar. I could swear I’ve lived here
before.”
“Sometimes it takes them like that,” said Tiaré. “I’ve known men come
on shore for a few hours while their ship was taking in cargo, and
never go back. And I’ve known men who came here to be in an office for
a year, and they cursed the place, and when they went away they took
their dying oath they’d hang themselves before they came back again,
and in six months you’d see them land once more, and they’d tell you
they couldn’t live anywhere else.”