THE SONG AND DANCE IN TAHITI
The Tahitian word for song, _himine_, is a Kanakazation of the English
word hymn. Before the days of the missions there must have been some
other term, for singing was quite as prominent an occupation of the
native then as now, but it was discarded as a superfluity long ago. The
South Sea Islander does not cumber his memory with more than one name
at a time for any given thing, and when new words were forced upon him,
as was inevitable with the coming of the whites, the old ones quickly
disappeared through disuse.
Thus _himine_ was at first applied to nothing but the hymns which the
missionaries taught. Then the term expanded to include the rowing and
working chanteys of the natives, and finally to the folk and dance
songs. Today a Tahitian will speak of the _himine_ to which a _hula_
is danced. Shades of John Williams and James Chalmers! A _hula_ to a
_himine_! A native _danse du ventre_ to a missionary hymn!
"You sinful hussies are as full of airs as a music box," said a
missionary to the bevy of frolicksome _vahines_ who had replied with a
rollicking _himine_ to his invitation to come inside of the church and
listen to his Sunday sermon.
"That may be," answered one of the flower-crowned damsels, "but we
can't be turned by a crank, at any rate."
They tell you this story at the club in Papeete, and you, politely,
laugh--just as you did when you heard the original of that variation
ten years before in America. However, the local adaptation is a good
one--a Tahitian nymph is indeed as full of airs as a music box, and a
vast deal easier to start up and keep going.
The Tahitian is received into the world with a song, he is sped forth
from it with a song, and the only time in the interval when there is
not a song issuing from his lips is when he is asleep. The beat of
the sea is in his blood and a sense of time and an ear for tone are
instincts with him. It is as natural for him to hold a tune as it is
to walk, and it would be as remarkable for him to sing flat as to
fall flat. In fact, be it orange wine or coco toddy, sugar cane rum
or simple fatigue that starts his senses or his body reeling, he will
commence falling flat long before he starts to sing flat. As often
as not he dies with a song on his lips, and even his parting gasp is
pretty sure to be in the right key.
In the beginning the South Seas had no musical instruments beyond
the hollow-tree drum and the conch. The _eukelele_, so often spoken
of as the native Hawaiian guitar, was originally an importation from
Portugal, though it is now made in the islands; the concertina,
mouth-organ and jew's harp of the rest of the mid-Pacific latitudes
bear their foreign marks upon them. The Kanaka makes music on any
one of them the first time he takes it up; but so also does he with two
sticks and a coal oil can, or a piece of rolled-up floor mat--he cannot
help it.
But the Tahitian's heart is in his singing, not his playing, and in
choral rather than solo expression. He sings for the same reason that
the rational drinker drinks--sociability. He is, to be sure, usually
singing when he is on the road or working alone, but only because there
is no one else to sing with him. A native who sings alone by preference
is looked upon by his fellows much as we regard a man who is known to
be a solitary drinker.
I have never heard the point brought up, but it has struck me on more
than one occasion that much of the phenomenal success of the early
missionaries in the South Pacific was due to their rare judgment in
turning their first meetings into big song-fests. Even a meeting
of today is three quarters _himine_, and in the short intervals of
prayer and preaching the congregation is in a continual fidget in its
eagerness for the opening notes of the next song. Many a one slips down
from his seat, reclines at length on the floor and lights a banana-leaf
cigarette. The children run about, not over quietly, and amuse
themselves with pranks upon their elders. But at the first long-drawn
note of the _himine_ leader--the trumpet call to action--all leap to
the seats, throw away their cigarettes and sit at stiff attention, and
from then on to the end of the song have no eyes or ears for anything
but the business in hand.
All of the missionary hymns, and especially those which have come
down from the early days, are translations of old songs of the camp
meeting and revival order, and every one of them has the beat and swing
of a sailor's chantey. These lively new tunes tickled the natives'
fancy as soon as they were introduced, and the fact that the first
meetings consisted of even more singing and less preaching than those
of today must have done much toward winning the missionary tolerance
and even popularity, where the trader and the planter were ever
suspended by hair-fine threads above the cooking pots. The natives, won
and held through their love of hearing themselves sing, have thereby also
been rendered more plastic for spiritual moulding. What could not have
been done with them if their passion for dancing could have been
similarly played upon?
The two dominant sounds of island life, the boom of the breakers and
the hum of the wind in the trees, may be traced through all of the
native music, and, through improvisation, in much that one hears in
the churches. The sonorous chesty notes of the men's lower registers
echo faithfully the thunder of the sea upon the reef, and a high,
closed-mouth humming of the women is admirably imitative of the rise
and fall of the wind, the rubbing of branches and the lisp of split
palm fronds. The resonant over-tones of the bass in a men's chorus is
not unsuggestive of the dying rumble of a big hollow-log drum. "The
swing and entrain of the whole performance are intoxicating," writes an
English woman who made a study of the island music; "the chorus, be it
ten or a thousand voices, sweeps onward as resistlessly as a cataract,
and the beat of the measure is like the pulse of Father Time himself.
There are several parts as a rule, but they wander in and out of one
another at will, and every now and then a single voice will break
away and embroider a little improvisation of its own upon the melody
that is like a sudden scatter of spray from the crest of a rolling
breaker. Then the chorus takes it up and answers it, and the whole
mass of the voices hurls itself upon the tune like the breaker falling
and bursting upon the shore."
Dancing is the natural concomitant of singing in all of the South Sea
islands, and the only occasion on which one is enjoyed without the
other is at church service. As for dancing, singing is a _sine qua
non_. Not only can a native not dance without a singing accompaniment,
but his own voice must also be a part of that accompaniment. To bind a
Tahitian's dancer's mouth is equivalent to tying his feet quite as much
as tying a Latin's hands is tantamount to binding his mouth.
The first Tahitian dancers of whom there is any authentic record were
the members of the "Areo," a secret intertribal organization of the
old days, which would undoubtedly be credited to Bacchic inspiration
were there any way of tracing a possible connection. The "Areos" were
a roystering lot of madcaps, hardly comparable to anything else in
history, but partaking something of the character of a modern choral
society, a fancy dancing class and a band of brigands, with the avowed
encouragement of human sacrifice, murder, cannibalism and general
immorality thrown in.
The "Areo" was made up of the elite of each tribe, and the members
were carefully tutored in the fine points of singing and dancing, much
after the fashion of the _geishas_ of Japan and the _nautch_ girls of
India. They travelled from valley to valley and village to village
like a college glee-club, and the fact that their shows were open to
all-comers free of charge brought them unbounded popularity and made
them welcome guests in the palace of the king at the capital, or in
the huts of the meanest fishing hamlet on the island. What they desired
they took, and so powerful and popular were they that there was none
to gainsay them. What wonder that the budding youth of Tahiti centred
his ambition on growing up to become an "Areo" with an intensity
that the American youth, tossed on the horns of the inevitable
pirate-captain-or-president dilemma, can never know?
And then came the missionary ("Before the missionary came," in the
mouth of an old Tahitian, is fraught with all the wildness of regret
of "Before the Gringo came" on the lips of an old Spanish Don of
California) and the "Areo" grew less and less and finally was no
more. What of its legacies? We have seen how the missionaries adopted
and turned the song to their own good ends. Has the dance also had
the vitality to survive without the patronage of the real arbiters
of island destiny? Hardly in its pristine purity--or impurity. The
_hula_ in Tahiti today is in about the same state as "The Harp that
Once Through Tara's Halls"; the only evidence of its existence is when
some overstrung string of _vahines_ breaks (out) to show that still it
lives. If the "breaking" is in public you will probably see the frayed
ends of the string being chivvied down to the city bastile by a couple
of motherly gendarmes.
And yet the ancient dance is not quite dead; there are a few strings
that will yet give back a responsive chord if one knows how to twang
them. But don't think it will be you, Mr. Tourist. I never heard of
but one man who chanced to strike the "Lost Chord," and his fingers
had been wandering over the worn strings for a year or more before
they twanged the right combination. I will write of how this befell
presently.
The usual _hula_ that is arranged for those of the
"personally-conducted-limited-to-fifty-all-expenses-paid" party who
are in search of something deliciously naughty is about as devilish
as a quadrille at a Sunday school picnic--a squad of portly _vahines_
marching soberly through a half dozen simple figures to the music of
a couple of accordions and an old drum. But at every one of these
performances a darkly mysterious Kanaka is sure to slip quietly around
among the men of the party and hint vaguely of the "real thing" that
has been arranged for that very evening, and to which admission may
be gained for, say, ten Chilean _pesos_ apiece. Like half-starved trout
to the first grasshopper of the season they rise, and, with felicitous
mutterings of "A chance of a lifetime to see a _hula_--last one ever to
be pulled off; fancy it occurring during our visit"--a party of a dozen
or more, leaving its distractedly envious ladies behind, is steered off
from the hotel into the scented twilight.
The "subscriptions" are collected en route to a deserted shack on the
outskirts of the town, where, by the light of a couple of battered
ship side-lamps, the searchers for local colour see a dozen anaemic
frailties from the "beach"--dull-eyed, sad-looking _vahines_, flotsam
and jetsam from half the island groups of the South Pacific, with
strong hints of elephantiasis in their heavy ankles and blotchy
skin--writhe and wriggle for half an hour in action more suggestive
of the popular vaudeville imitation of a portly dame trying to make
the hooks of her evening gown meet than a terpsichorean performance.
The girls are a shameless lot of hussies of the class--you met them what
times you whiled away the tedium of your steamer stop in Singapore,
Colombo and Port Said with those swift but illuminating studies of
"native life"--that dextrously appropriates your scarf pin under pretence
of putting a flower in your button hole, and when you discover the loss
boldly challenges you to tell the police.
And yet--what an indescribable lure there is in the "real thing" bait
any time after you have been bitten by the "search-for-local colour"
bug! It would hardly be fair for me to hold the glass on the researches
of other Tahitian visitors without confessing that I, also, was once
an eager follower of the "real thing" will-o'-the wisp, and under
circumstances particularly aggravating. So here's for a clean breast of
it.
I had noticed with increasing curiosity as our Tahitian visit wore on
that the sailors from the yacht had been returning for several days
from shore leave with new hats and new neckties, and with wreaths of
flowers about their shoulders--sure signs that they were basking in
female favour in some part of the island capital--so that when the mate
came to me with a story of how he and his fellows had been adopted (a
not unusual Kanaka custom) by families of an outlying Papeetan suburb,
I accepted the truth of the yarn without question.
"As a special favour, sir, a lot of the _vahines_ are going to give us
the 'real thing' in the way of a _hula_ tomorrow night," he confided to
me, "and we thought that as you was saying that you didn't think much
of them tourist _hulas_ they get up for the steamer people that you
might like to see the genuine article."
"Thanks, Victor," I said eagerly. "Write down the directions for
reaching the place and I will pick up W---- and be there."
It isn't the custom to go sight-seeing with the sailors of one's
friend's yacht in Tahiti any more than elsewhere, but I told myself
that the role of patron would excuse it in this instance. And who in
his first year in "The Islands" ever failed to rise for the "real
thing" bait under any circumstances? W----, who joined me for the
evening, was a British ornithologist of considerable reputation, and
himself an earnest searcher after the fabled native of pristine purity.
We found the place without difficulty by locating it approximately and
then running down the bang of a beaten oil can and the whine of an
accordion. It is quite possible that the sailors had been taken to the
bosoms of some native families, as they claimed; it is even possible
that there may have been a right merry breakdown of a sort going on
before we came. But certain it is that it was nothing bordering on that
elusive will-o'-the-wisp, the "real thing," and more certain still that
our coming--perhaps through suspicions aroused by the official cut of
W----'s ducks--came pretty near to putting an end to even such activity
as had been in progress up to that moment.
The double line of capering _vahines_ broke for the unlighted corners
and in a trice had hidden their graceful flower-wreathed limbs under
flowing _holakaus_. They were a likely enough looking lot of girls, but
not even the dozen bottles of claret which we had brought as good-will
offering served to stir them to further action. In vain the chagrined
sailors implored and swore and pushed and pulled; the distrustful
nymphs only hung their flower-crowned heads and shrunk deeper into
the dark corners. There was only one of the lot that did not seem
paralysed with bashfulness, and this one, a long, rangy rack of bones
with close-cropped hair--the only uncomely member of the
party--started a lively whirling-dervish sort of a dance that threatened
to break through the rickety floor.
"Not an orthodox _hula_, but quite the best bit of quick stepping I've
seen in Tahiti," cried W---- enthusiastically. "Go it, girl! _Vite!
Vite!_"
Thus encouraged, the lengthy dancer let out another link and at the
same time lowered her song from a high falsetto humming to a booming of
chesty bass notes.
"My word!" gasped W----, "she's a man!"
And a man "she" proved to be, a light-stepping young Kanaka, called in
at the last moment to take the place of a girl who had fallen ill.
"Let's take a flash of that bunch of icebergs and get out of here,"
suggested W---- wearily; "I've had about enough of your 'real thing'
for one evening."
So while W---- and the sailors chivvied the reluctant dancers together
and grouped them in frozen poses, I set up my camera and put out the
flashlight powder. A sufficient quantity of the latter was poured from
a two-ounce tin box into its cover and set on a rickety table, the mate
being directed to light it at the click of my opening shutter. He lit
the powder at the proper moment, but confused the order to the extent
of putting his match to the contents of the nearly full box instead
of the small portion in its cover. There came an explosive "whish," a
blinding flash, and under a dense smoke-cloud the mate, his eyelashes
gone and his drooping Norwegian moustache burned to a few singed
stubs, was writhing on the floor and groaning with agony. An instant
later the light bamboo wall behind the table was observed to be afire,
and forthwith bedlam broke loose on all sides.
The sailors bellowed for water and W---- shouted for a quilt, while the
natives screamed back to the effect that, as the house was deserted and
isolated, neither could be had. There seemed nothing to do but to get
out and let the old shack burn, and through my mind flashed pictures of
an interminable series of complications incident to the red-tape of the
inevitable French official investigations. W---- and a sailor, with the
apparently stone-blind mate between them, were making for the door and
I was endeavouring to save the trampled fragments of my photographic
apparatus, when my eye caught a flash of red in one corner, and my ear
the twice or thrice repeated crash of breaking glass. In a quarter of
a minute more a vigorously swished wet rag had whipped out the darting
flame-tongues just before they reached the pendant frizzles of the
pandanus thatch.
A resourceful _vahine_, while all the rest of us were wasting our
breaths calling for water and quilts, and bewailing the absence of hand
grenades and chemical engines, had calmly whisked off her _pareo_,
broken all of the unopened claret bottles over it and slapped out the
fire.
Wasn't it Moll Pitcher who won the day and a monument by swabbing
out the cannon with some of her surplus lingerie? They don't erect
monuments to heroic fire-lassies in Tahiti, so W---- and I did the best
thing possible under the circumstances in subscribing the price of a
dozen new _pareos_.
It was a week or so after the incident just sketched had taken place
that W---- and I were at luncheon at the Cercle Militaire with a
distinguished German ethnologist who had spent many years in the
study of the fascinating problem of a prehistoric Polynesian
civilization. W----, after amusingly narrating several of the
experiences incident to his own study of native life in the South
Seas, made the statement that a genuine Tahitas _hula_ could not be
seen on the island for "love or money," an assertion in which I
stoutly supported him. The learned Teuton listened indulgently.
"Dat's a priddy zweeping stadement, chentlemen," he ventured. "You haf
tried money, no doubt, but haf you der oder alternative, der gindness
tried?"
We were compelled to admit that nothing systematic in the way of
kindness had been attempted, upon which the doctor launched into an
extended dissertation on the futility of trying to do anything with
South Sea natives on a "buy-and-sell" basis. Early in his sojourn
in Tahiti, he said, he had come to a realization of the banality of
anything not freely given by the islanders. Accordingly, he had taken
up his residence in Hiteaea, the least "civilized" village of the
island, and first by judicious presents, later by incessant intercourse
with them in the affairs of their daily life, succeeded in winning the
confidence and affection of the simple inhabitants. As a consequence
many privileges which other foreigners had vainly endeavoured to win
by purchase had been extended to him as a brother, among them being
attendance at the village's not infrequent festivals at its semi-secret
"sing-sing" grounds in an extinct crater far in the interior. An evening
of singing and dancing was scheduled for the following week, at the full
of the moon, and to this the good doctor, conditional on the consent of
his native friends, invited us to come.
The invitation was seconded in good time, and on the appointed day we
pushed through on horseback to Hiteaea--twenty-five miles down the
rough windward side of the island--reaching there in time for a light
mid-afternoon lunch which the doctor had waiting for us. The beautiful
hamlet was nearly deserted, the villagers having gone on earlier in
the day to enjoy a twilight feast before the dance. Our horses carried
us four or five miles back into the interior where, at an elevation of
3000 feet, the roughness and steepness of the trail and the thickness
of the creepers overhead made it necessary to abandon them and do the
rest of the climb through the sweat-box of the jungle on foot. We
arrived at our destination in time for a plunge in a hyacinth-fringed
pool of the coolest water we had known for months, a change of clothes
and the enjoyment of a number of thoughtfully saved dainties from the
feast. The latter had evidently been a jolly and somewhat convivial
affair, but nothing of an orgy. The dancers, with laughter and snatches
of song, were assisting each other with their toilets in the shelter of
a wing of rustling _feis_.
The "sing-sing" ground (this is a term of the "beach" vernacular used
in all parts of the South Pacific to designate a native ceremonial
meeting place) had once been a tiny blow-hole of the great parent
volcano, Orohena, and in its present condition it is not unlike the
"Punch Bowl" at Honolulu with a ten-degree segment cut cleanly out
of one side. The smooth floor is half rock, half turf, and the towering
sides of lava, curtained thickly with an impenetrable tangle of giant
fern, lantana and guava scrub and woven together with miles of
endless creepers.
By a strange chance the slice of the crater's side which, undermined
by the river below, fell away to the valley, left a clean-cut chasm of
great depth and scant width opening toward the east-southeast. Through
this chasm the full moon, from the moment it shows its glowing disc
above a saddle in the rocks to the east, throws a sharp beam across
the flower-strewn sward which, in its brilliant contrast to the almost
solid blackness of the unlighted sides, shines as clearly as a shaft of
calcium. In this lunar spot-light, in air almost sentiently sweet with
the perfumes of gardenia and fern, the magic of these Terpsichorean
necromancers is practised.
Stretched at our ease on a patch of mat-carpeted greensward in the
depths of the shadow, we puffed lazily at our native cigarettes, sipped
tiny _epus_ of fiery coco wine and waited for the dance to commence.
The chatter in the depths of the plantain-screened dressing room had
ceased, and only the liquid tinkle of the drip from the surrounding
walls, the distant mutter of the surf along the shore and the throaty
calls of waking wood pigeons broke the stillness. Overhead the stars
were blurring and blotting and twinkling again, as the disordered ranks
of the Trade-clouds shuffled on in their endless flight before the
scourges of the southeast wind; but to the east, where the flickering
silhouettes of flying-foxes showed with increasing brightness against
the moon-glow, the sky was clear.
The leap of the moon to its seat in the saddle of the eastern hills was
as startling in its suddenness as that of its glass bulb stage-property
prototype to the gauze heaven above the Grand Canal. As the
shadow-mottled shaft of light impinged upon the crater floor a single
drum note boomed out suddenly on the stillness and a blur of motion was
faintly distinguishable about the "green room" entrances. Presently,
as the shadows dissolved in the strengthening light, scores of prone
figures, motionless save for a gentle waving of the _riva-riva_ plumes
of the heads, could be dimly guessed, and the doctor whispered that the
opening number was evidently to be the "Dance of the Coconuts."
The plumes continued to nod for a few moments and then, representing
the sprouting and growth of the young trees, the prostrate dancers,
to the accompaniment of a low chanting, rose inch by inch to their
full heights. Now the Trade-wind was blowing through their tops, and
they bowed and swayed and bent and recovered, while the muffled nasal
chanting rose and fell undulatingly like the gusty southeast breeze.
Now it was harvest time, and new figures wove in and out among the
swaying trees gathering the ripe fruit, and chesty "boom-booms" in the
bass told of the cast-down nuts striking the ground underneath.
After a few minutes of indistinguishable pantomime which had to do
with the husking and drying of the nuts for copra, a change came over
the spirit of the quiet mimetic dance. The hum of the wind rose to a
shrill whistle, the low monotone of the surf on the reef changed to the
deep-mouthed roars of crashing combers as hard-smitten drum-logs
sent forth throbbing peals of heavy thunder. A hurricane was bursting
upon the coconut grove. No longer the trees bent to the caressing touch
of the gentle Trade. Torn by conflicting gusts, they jerked now this way
and now that, thrashing limbs striking each other in the pantomime of
bare arms and hands banging with resounding thwacks upon bare backs
and breasts. The wind and surf and thunder blend in a raucous roar as
the storm grows more furious, and now the trees are snapping and
falling before the terrific onslaught. Down they go, now falling alone,
now striking others and going to the earth together. In a few moments
all but two firmly rooted giants in the heart of the grove are tossing on
the ground, and these--represented by two magnificently muscled men--lean
together for support and defy the hurricane for a brief space longer.
Then they, too, give way, falling to the ground interlocked, and the
"Dance of the Coconuts" is over.
"My word!" gasped W----, as the roar of the storm gave way to laughter
and chatter, "what wouldn't it be worth to the man who could put that
on at Covent Garden or the Hippodrome?"
"_Himmel!_" snorted the doctor impatiently. "You'd haf der whole island
to London to move also und der ferdamte British glimate would right
away der whole thing kill."
While the dancers rested and slaked their thirsts with orange wine, our
host gave us a graphic description of the "Volcano Dance," which is
performed in the dark of the moon by the light of a huge bonfire. An
imitation crater of long creepers is built at a point where there is a
smooth grass chute of thirty or forty yards in length ending in the
jungle below. On the side opposite the spectators the dancers, swathed
in wreaths of red hibiscus, enter the crater through a small opening,
leap high in the air like erupting lava and go rolling off down the chute
to the thunder of drums and the subterranean growls of the male
chorus. From the lower end of the chute a back trail leads up to the
"stage-entrance" of the artificial crater, so that fifty or more dancers,
with a sufficiency of orange wine on tap at the crater door, have no
difficulty in keeping up a continuous eruption.
W---- asked how long the red hibiscus trimmings stood the rolling down
part of the eruption, but before the doctor could reply the opening
drum-beat of the next dance sounded and this weighty question was
never answered.
With short, sharp yells, a compact body of girls came charging out of
the "green room" like a "flying wedge" in the good old days of mass
play in football, and went scurrying straight across into the shadows
of the opposite side of the crater. This was the "launching of the
ship" for the "Pearling Schooner Dance." Directly canoefuls of stout
paddlers came towing her back into the moonlight with liana hawsers,
and all in an instant, as each of the dancers threw aloft a square of
white _tapa_, she was under sail and off to sea. Now she threaded,
in short tacks, the passage through the reef, and now, to low, sweet
crooning like a lullaby, she bowed and curtesied and pitched and rolled
in the swift-running ocean swells.
Presently she threaded another passage, anchored and took in her sails
in a still lagoon. Here, with the barely perceptible motion of the
schooner showing in the rhythmic rocking of the dancers, divers went
over the side and brought up pearl shell. One lusty diver lent colour to
his pantomime by bringing up a huge coconut, the incalculable value of
so sizable a "pearl" being told with a facility of gesture that would
have put to shame a moving picture "heavy."
But the comedy hit of this dance was the hooking and landing of a shark
on a strand of liana. Baited with the coconut pearl, the creeper line
was thrown over the rail, to attract the instant attention of a school
of glistening man-eaters, which, with crooked-elbow dorsals, went
wriggling about the grass under the schooner's bows. After an amazingly
clever bit of "shark-play" about the bait, one of the "monsters" rolled
over on his back and "swallowed" it, the crew promptly "tailing on" to
the liana to bring it aboard.
The "shark," as was explained to us afterwards, had drunk considerably
more orange wine than should have fallen to his share, and the fight
he put up before being landed and "cut to pieces" came pretty near to
sinking the graceful pearler then and there.
Floundering and snapping his teeth in a manner that would have done
credit to a monster of twice his size, and roaring as no shark of any
size ever roared, the gamy leviathan was no sooner laid alongside
than, with a vigorous swish of his tail (both feet planted squarely
in the pit of the stomach of the trim _vahine_ who chanced to be
representing the adjacent piece of taffrail) he stove a gaping hole
in the schooner's hull. An instant later his "triple row of barbéd
teeth" had closed on the arm of the slender miss who, sitting on
the shoulders of a lengthy Kanaka, was dancing the part of the
mainmast, and brought her crashing to the deck, squealing like a
roped pig. The "cutting up" of the shark, owing to this
obstreperousness, must have been a bit more realistic than usual,
for he still bore marks of it when I encountered him in Papeete
a week later.
After being "careened" for repairs the schooner, her hold bulging with
pearls, got up sail again and started for home, only to encounter
the inevitable hurricane and go to pieces on the rocks to the same
unleashed fury of wind and waves and thunder that had uprooted the
coconuts. For some minutes spars, planks and other bits of wreckage,
imploring help at the tops of their lungs, eddied and swirled about the
greensward; then a resistless current bore them relentlessly toward the
wine calabashes in the "green room" and the "Pearling Schooner Dance"
was over.
In the good doctor's original plan of the evening's entertainment
several more dances of the nature of those just described were called
for, but the carelessness of the commissariat in dealing out the
orange wine too rapidly ordained otherwise. The sounds of revelry
from the "green room" were keying higher every moment, and our host's
apprehensiveness showed in the quick glowings and palings of his
nervously puffed cigarette. When, instead of the sober _himine_ which
opens up the burlesque "Missionary Dance," there sounded the wail of
accordions, the roll of shark-hide drums and the clear, deep-throated
voices of the girls in the preliminary strains of the "Nuptial _Hula_,"
he sprang to his feet to explode into excited Anglo-German-Tahitian
with "_Nein! Nein!_ Das ist nichts was I tells them. _Hare! Hare! Go
back mit you, you teufels!_" But he might as well have tried to stem
the tide of the Pacific as that swirling onrush from the "green room."
By this time the shaft of lunar calcium, broadening slightly as the
moon rose, had moved across the dancing floor till its outer side was
just beginning to encroach upon our mat-covered dais, so that instead
of "back row, left," as at first, our seats now occupied approximately
the position of "First row, Orchestra, centre." We were in the
"bald-headed row" with a vengeance, and just at the right time.
Like a pack of hungry wolves charging down upon a fold of lambs, the
Bacchic throng swarmed out of the shadows into the spot-light about our
dais, and threw itself with the reckless abandon born of three hours
of steady tippling at the wine calabashes into the sinuous writhing
of a dance rarely performed in the past except at the wedding feasts
of royalty, and now, as it is strictly against the French law, almost
never under any circumstances.
To a spectator watching from a distance some suggestion of rhythm and
unity might have been apparent in the movement of the dance; from our
advanced position, as to a man in the thick of a battle, the general
action was lost sight of in the wealth of local interest. There was
nothing to do but to fix your attention on the nearest dancer and hope,
as at a multi-ringed circus, that nothing of greater interest was going
on anywhere else. Once your attention was fixed it was not likely to go
wandering far afield in search of a new centre of interest.
As an exhibition of eccentric muscular action alone, this dance is
worth making a journey to the South Pacific to see. In the slow opening
movements, to a seductive half-crooning, half-chirping air, it is as
though every square inch of the oil-glistening form before you is
trying to move in a different direction. There is something of the
suggestion of a coiling and uncoiling snake in it; something of that
of the twisting green stream of water where it shoots between two
mid-stream boulders; something of that of the whirling columns of the
"dust-devils" of the desert.
But what comparison can you find for the wild thing that springs into
life as the music quickens and the intoxication of the sensuous dance
enters into the blood of the dancers? There is still a suggestion of
the former undulating sinuousity of motion, but at a trip-hammer speed
which defies the eye to follow it; a double-action, reciprocating,
triple-expansion shiver, beginning at the plume-tips and ending at the
toes, that would make a Newfoundland dog shaking himself after a bath
look like a stuffed museum specimen in comparison.
For a minute, or two, or three--one loses count of time when elemental
forces like these are loosed--this rapid-fire action continues;
then they all sink into quivering heaps on the grass, with just
enough breath left to raise feeble cries for the wine calabashes, a
circumstance which led W---- to remark that their enthusiasm for the
dance had probably been due to the fact that they were "shaking for the
drinks."
That which was just finished was the first of the three climacteric
"movements" of the "Nuptial _Hula_," explained the doctor in the
short rest interval. He had not expected that it would be danced, but
now that it was started it would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette
to try to stop it. "Bezides," he added, chuckling, "you chentlemen haf
bewail der decadence of der hula in Tahiti, und said der white man can
not der 'real thing' see. In one leetle minute you der 'real thing'
shall see, yes."
And we did! But my most earnest efforts would fall so far short of
doing it justice that I have thought it best not to court certain
failure by attempting description.