The marriage of Malicious Gossip; matrimonial customs of the simple
natives; the domestic difficulties of Haabuani.
Mouth of God and his wife, Malicious Gossip, soon became intimates
of my _paepae_. Coming first to see the marvelous Golden Bed and to
listen to the click-click of the Iron Fingers That Make Words, they
remained to talk, and I found them both charming.
Both were in their early twenties, ingenuous, generous, clever, and
devoted to each other and to their friends. Malicious Gossip was
beautiful, with soft dark eyes, clear-cut features, and a grace and
lovely line of figure that in New York would make all heads whirl.
She was all Marquesan, but her husband, Mouth of God, had white
blood in him. Whose it was, he did not know, for his mother's
consort had been an islander. His mother, a large, stern, and
Calvinistic cannibal, believed in predestination, and spent her days
in fear that she would be among the lost. Her Bible was ever near,
and often, passing their house, I saw her climb with it into a
breadfruit-tree and read a chapter in the high branches where she
could avoid distraction.
They lived in a spacious house set in three acres of breadfruit and
cocoanuts, an ancient grove long in their family. Often I squatted
on their mats, dipping a gingerly finger in their _popoi_ bowl and
drinking the sweet wine of the half-ripe cocoanut, the while Mouth
of God's mother spoke long and earnestly on the abode of the damned
and the necessity for seeking salvation. In return, Malicious Gossip
spent hours on my _paepae_ telling me of the customs of her people
new and old.
"When I was thirteen," she said, "the whalers still came to Vait-hua,
my valley. There came a young _Menike_ man, straight and bright-eyed,
a passenger on a whaling-ship seeking adventure. I sighed the first
time in my life when I looked on him. He was handsome, and not like
other men on your ships.
"The kiss you white men give he taught me to like. He was generous
and gentle and good. Months we dwelt together in a house by the
stream in the valley. When he sailed away at last, as all white men
do who are worth wanting to stay, he tore out my heart. My milk
turned to poison and killed our little child.
"I met long after with Mouth of God. He took me to his house in the
breadfruit-grove. He was good and gentle, but I was long in learning
to love him. It was the governor who made me know that I was his
woman. It came about in this manner:
"That governor was one whom all hated for his coldness and cruelty.
Mouth of God worked for him in the house where medicines are made,
having learned to mix the medicines in a bowl and to wrap cloths
about the wounds of those who were sick. One day, according to the
custom of white men who rule, the governor said to Mouth of God that
he must send me to the palace that night.
"When he came home to the house where we lived together, Mouth of
God gave me his word. He said: 'Go to the river and bathe. Put on
your crimson tunic and flowers in your hair and go to the palace. The
governor gives a feast to-night, and you are to dance and to sleep
in the governor's bed.'"
Malicious Gossip shuddered, and rocked herself to and fro upon the
mats. "Then I would have killed him! I cried out to him and said: 'I
will not go to the governor! He is a devil. My heart hates him. I am
a Marquesan. What have I to do with a man I hate?'"
"'Go!' said Mouth of God, and his eyes were hard as the black stones
of the High Place. 'The governor asks for you. He is the government.
Since when have Marquesan women said no to the command of the
_adminstrateur_?'
"I wept, but I took my brightest _kahu ropa_ from the sandalwood
chest my _Menike_ man had given me, and I went down the path to the
stream. As I went I wept, but my heart was black, and I thought to
take a keen-edged knife beneath my tunic when I went to the palace.
But my feet were not yet wet in the edge of the water when Mouth of
God called to me.
"'Do not go,' he said.
"I answered: 'I will go. You told me to go. I am on my way.' My
tears were salt in my mouth.
"'No!' said Mouth of God. He ran, and he came to me in the pool
where I had flung myself. There in the water he held me, and his
arms crushed the breath from my ribs. 'You will not go!' he said. 'I
spoke those words to know if you would go to the governor. If you
had gone quickly, if you had not wept, I would kill you. You are my
woman. No other shall have you.'
"Then I knew that I was his woman, and I forgot my _Menike_ lover.
"You see," she said to me after a pause, "I would have gone to the
palace. But I would never have come back to the house of Mouth of God.
That was the beginning of our love. He would yield me to nobody. He
told the governor that I would not come, and he waited to kill the
governor if he must. But the governor laughed, and said there were
many others. Mouth of God and I were married then by Monsieur Vernier,
in the church of his mother.
"That was the manner of my marriage. The same as that of the girls
in your own island, is it not?"
It was much the same, I said. It differed only in some slight
matters of custom. She listened fascinated while I described to her
our complicated conventions of courtship, our calling upon young
ladies for months and even years, our gifts, our entertainments, our
giving of rings, our setting of the marriage months far in the future,
our orange wreaths and veils and bridesmaids. She found these things
almost incredible.
"Marriage here," she said, "may come to a young man when he does not
seek or even expect it. No Marquesan can marry without the consent
of his mother, and often she marries him to a girl without his even
thinking of such a thing.
"A young man may bring home a girl he does not know, perhaps a girl
he has seen on the beach in the moonlight, to stay with him that
night in his mother's house. It may be that her beauty and charm
will so please his mother that she will call a family council after
the two have gone to bed. If the family thinks as the mother does,
they determine to marry the young man to that girl, and they do so
after this fashion:
"Early in the morning, just at dawn, before the young couple awake,
all the women of the household arouse them with shrieks. They beat
their breasts, cut themselves with shells, crying loudly, _Aue! Aue!_
Neighbors rush in to see who has died. The youth and the girl run
forth in terror. Then the mother, the grandmother and all other
women of the house chant the praises of the girl, singing her beauty,
and wailing that they cannot let her go. They demand with anger that
the son shall not let her go. All the neighbors cry with them,
_Aue! Aue!_ and beat their breasts, until the son, covered with
shame, asks the girl to stay.
"Then her parents are sent the word, and if they do not object, the
girl remains in his house. That is often the manner of Marquesan
marriage."
Yet often, of course, she explained, marriage was not the outcome of
a night's wooing. The young Marquesan frequently brought home a girl
who did not instantly win his mother's affection. In that case she
went her way next morning after breakfast, and that was all. Our
regard for chastity was incomprehensible to Malicious Gossip,
instructed though she was in all the codes of the church. It was to
her a creed preached to others by the whites, like wearing shoes or
making the Sabbath a day of gloom, and though she had been told that
violation of this code meant roasting forever as in a cannibal pit
whose fires were never extinguished, her mind could perceive no
reason for it. She could attach no blame to an act that seemed to
her an innocent, natural, and harmless amusement.
The truth is that no value was, or is, attached to maidenhood in all
Polynesia, the young woman being left to her own whims without blame
or care. Only deep and sincere attachment holds her at last to the
man she has chosen, and she then follows his wishes in matters of
fidelity, though still to a large extent remaining mistress of
herself.
The Marquesan woman, however, often denies her husband the freedom
she herself openly enjoys. This custom persists as a striking
survival of polyandry, in which fidelity under pain of dismissal
from the roof-tree was imposed by the wife on all who shared her
affections.
This was exactly the status of a household not far from my cabin.
Haabuani, master of ceremonies at the dances, the best carver and
drum-beater of all Atuona, who was of pure Marquesan blood, but
spoke French fluently and earnestly defended the doctrine of the
Pope's infallibility,--even coming to actual blows with a defiant
Protestant upon my very _paepae_--explained his attitude.
"If I have a friend and he temporarily desires my wife, Toho, I am
glad if she is willing. But my enemy shall not have that privilege
with my consent. I would be glad to have you look upon her with favor.
You are kind to me. You have treated me as a chief and you have
bought my _kava_ bowl. But, _écoutez, Monsieur_, Toho does what she
pleases, yet if I toss but a pebble in another pool she is furious.
See, I have the bruises still of her beating."
With a tearful whine he showed the black-and-blue imprints of Toho's
anger, and made it known to us that the three _piastres_ he had of
me for the _kava_ bowl had been traced by his wife to the till of Le
Brunnec's store, where Flower, the daughter of Lam Kai Oo, had spent
them for ribbons. Toho in her fury had beaten him so that for a day
and a night he lay groaning upon the mats.
"That is as it should be," said Malicious Gossip, sternly, while her
curving lips set in straight lines. Sex morality means conformity to
sex _tapus_, the world over.
Free polyandry still exists in many countries I have seen, and in
others its dying out leaves these fragmentary survivals. I have
visited the tribe of Subanos, in the west and north of the island of
Mindanao in the Philippine archipelago, where the rich men are
polygamists, and the poor still submit to polyandry. Economic
conditions there bring about the same relations, under a different
guise, as in Europe or America, where wealthy rakes keep up several
establishments, and many wage-earners support but one prostitute.
Polyandry is found almost exclusively in poor countries, where there
is always a scarcity of females. Thus we have polyandry founded on a
surplus of males caused by poverty of sustenance. The female is, in
fact, supposed to be the result of a surplus of nutrition; more boys
than girls are born in the country districts because the city diet
is richer, especially in meat and sugar. It is notable that the
families of the pioneers of western America bore a surprising
majority of males.
In the Marquesas, where living was always difficult and the diet poor,
there were always more men than women despite the frequent wars in
which men were victims. Another reason was that male children were
saved often when females were killed in the practice of infanticide,
also forced by famine. The overplus of men made them amenable to the
commands of the women, who often dominated in permanent alliances,
demanding lavishment of wealth and attention from their husbands.
Yet--and this is a most significant fact--the father-right in the
child remained the basis of the social system.
Throughout all Australia, Melanesia, and Papuasis on the east, and
America on the west, the mother-right prevailed among primitive
peoples. Children followed the mother, took their name from her, and
inherited property through her. I have known a Hawaiian nobleman who,
commenting on this fact, said that the system had merit in that no
child could be called a bastard, and that the woman, who suffered
most, was rewarded by pride of posterity. He himself, he said, was
the son of a chieftess, but his father, a king, was the son of a
negro cobbler.
The father-right, so familiar to our minds that it seems to-day
almost the only natural or existing social system, was in fact
developed very lately among all races except the Caucasian and some
tribes of the Mongols. Yet in the Marquesas, these islands cut off
from all other peoples through ages of history, the father-right
prevailed in spite of all the difficulties that attended its
survival in polyandry.
Each woman had many husbands, whom she ruled. The true paternity of
her children it was impossible to ascertain. Yet so tenaciously did
the Marquesans cling to the father-right in the child, that even
this fact could not break it down. One husband was legally the
father of all her children, ostensibly at least the owner of the
household and of such small personal property as belonged to it
under communism. The man remained, though in name only, the head of
the polyandrous family.
I seemed to see in this curious fact another proof of the ancient
kinship between the first men of my own race and the prehistoric
grandfathers of Malicious Gossip and Haabunai. My savage friends,
with their clear features, their large straight eyes and olive skins,
showed still the traces of their Caucasian blood. Their forefathers
and mine may have hunted the great winged lizards together through
primeval wildernesses, until, driven by who knows what urge of
wanderlust or necessity, certain tribes set out in that drive
through Europe and Asia toward America that ended at last, when a
continent sunk beneath their feet, on these islands in the southern
seas.
It was a far flight for fancy to take, from my _paepae_ in the
jungle at the foot of Temetiu, but looking at the beauty and grace
of Malicious Gossip as she sat on my mats in her crimson _pareu_, I
liked to think that it was so.
"We are cousins," I said to her, handing her a freshly-opened
cocoanut which Exploding Eggs brought.
"You are a great chief, but we love you as a blood-brother," she
answered gravely, and lifted the shell bowl to her lips.