Rupert Brooke and I discuss Tahiti--We go to a wedding feast--How the
cloth was spread--What we ate and drank--A Gargantuan feeder--Songs
and dances of passion--The royal feast at Tetuanui's--I leave for
Vairao--Butscher and the Lermontoffs.
At Mataiea weeks passed without incident other than those of the
peaceful, pleasant round of walking, swimming, fishing, thinking,
and refreshing slumber. My mind dismissed the cares of the mainland,
and the interests thrust upon me there--business, convention, the
happenings throughout the world. I achieved to a degree the state in
which body and spirit were pliant instruments for the simple needs and
indulgences of my being, and my mind, relieved of the cark of custom
in advanced communities, considered, and clarified as never before,
the values of life. It was as if one who had been confined indoors
for years at a task supervised by critical guardians was moved to
a beautiful garden with only laughing children for playmates and a
kindly nature alone for contemplation and guide.
Brooke, who was busied an hour or two a day at poems and letters, and
was physically active most of the time, spoke of this with me. There
were few whites in Tahiti outside Papeete except in the suburbs. The
French in the time of Louis le Debonnaire and of all that period
thought nature unbeautiful. The nation has ever been afraid of it, but
let natural thoughts be freely spoken and written, and natural acts be
less censured than elsewhere. Even in late years their conception of
nature has been that of the painter Corot, delicate, tender, and sad;
not free and primitive. They had possessed Tahiti scores of years,
and yet one hardly saw a Frenchman, and never a Frenchwoman, in the
districts. The French seldom ever ventured in the sea or the stream or
to the reef. Other Europeans and Americans found those interesting,
at least, a little. Brooke and I swam every day off the wharf of the
çhefferie. The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the
vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant blond, gleamed
in the violet radiancy like a dream figure of ivory. We dived into
schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet
below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours
floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the
sun. We laughed at his native name, Pupure, which means fair, and at
the titles given Tahiti by visitors: the New Cytherea by Bougainville,
a russet Ireland by McBirney, my fellow voyager on the Noa-Noa and
Aph-Rhodesia by a South-African who had fought the Boers and loved
the Tahitian girls and who now idled with us. Brooke, as we paddled
over the dimpled lagoon, quoted the Greek for an apt description, the
innumerable laughter of the waves. Brooke had been in Samoa, and was
about to leave for England after several months in Tahiti. He wrote
home that he had found the most ideal place in the world to work and
live in. On the wide veranda he composed three poems of merit, "The
Great Lover," "Tiare Tahiti," and "Retrospect." He could understand
the Polynesian, and he loved the race, and hated the necessity of
a near departure. Their communism in work he praised daily, their
singing at their tasks, and their wearing of flowers. We had in common
admiration of those qualities and a fervor for the sun. For his Greek
I gave him St. Francis's canticle, which begins:
Laudate sie, mi signore, cum tuote le tue creature,
Spetialmente messer lo frate sole.
Praised be my Lord, with all his creatures, and especially our brother
the Sun, our sister the Moon, our brother the Wind, our sister Water,
who is very serviceable unto us and humble and chaste and clean; our
brother Fire, our mother Earth, and last of all for our sister Death.
We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians
never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their
nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede
to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education
when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about
without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men
retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they
wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to
propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits in scales. Man
originated on the seashore, and many of the most primitive habits of
humans, as well as their bodily differences from the apes, came from
their early life there. Man pushed back from the salt water slowly.
The official affairs of the çhefferie, beyond the repair of roads and
bridges, were few. Crime among Tahitians being almost unknown, the
chief's duties as magistrate were negligible, and the family uttered
many aues when I related to them the conditions of our countries,
with murders, assaults, burglaries and rapine as daily news. The
French law required a civil ritual for marriage, and Tetuanui tied the
legal knots in his district. I was at the çhefferie when a union was
performed. The bride and groom were of the middle class of prosperous
landholders. They arrived in an automobile wonderfully adorned with
flowers, with great bouquets of roses and ferns on the lamps. They
were accompanied by cars and carriages filled with their families and
friends. The bride was in a white-lace dress from Paris, with veil and
orange-blossoms, and the groom in a heavy black frock-coat over white
drill trousers with lemon-colored, tight shoes; both looking very ill
at ease and hot. The father of the groom must have us to the church
and to the wedding feast, so Brooke and I rode in a cart, I on the
mother's lap, and the poet on the knees of the father. The jollity of
the arearea was already apparent, and the father vainly whipped his
horse to outspeed the automobile. All the vehicles raced along the
road and into the yard of the Protestant church of Mataiea at top gait.
It was the season of assemblage of the manu patia, the wasps brought
from abroad, and quite ten thousand were clustered on the church
ceiling, while thousands more patrolled the air just over our heads,
courting and quarreling, buzzing and alighting on our heads and
necks. The preacher in a knee-length Prince Albert of black wool,
opened so that I saw he had nothing but an undershirt beneath,
recited the ceremony and addressed the couple. He took a ring from
his trousers-pocket, unwrapping and opening its box. A bridesmaid in a
rose-colored satin gown had taken off the bride's glove, and the pastor
put the ring upon her finger. A number of young men acted as aids
and witnesses, and all who stood were pounced upon by the wasps. They
betrayed no evidence of nervousness, but at the installation of the
ring, the groom, with a desperate motion, tore off his stiff collar
and bared his robust neck. He did not replace it that day. The bride's
mother wept upon my shoulder throughout the quarter of an hour. Not
a trace was indicated of the old wedding customs of the Tahitians,
as Christianity had effaced them rigorously, and though the Tahitians
had had plenty of ceremonies for all public acts, as had the Greeks
and Romans, many had been forgotten under the scourge of orthodoxy
before any white wrote freely of the island. They are lost to record
with the old language.
After the rite, all made a dash for their equipages, and raced for the
bride's home, where, as customary, the fête champêtre was given. Again
on mama's lap, and Brooke on papa's, both ample, we hurried,
the bon père not averse to taking a wheel off the bridal party's
motor-car. With cries of delight we drove into a great cocoanut-grove,
and a thousand feet back from the Broom Road emerged into a sunlit,
but shady, clearing. Huro! the banquet was already being spread. From
different parts of the plantation men came bearing huge platters of
roasted pig, chicken, taro, breadfruit, and feis, with bamboo tubes
of the taiaro sauce like the reeds of a great pipe-organ. Caldrons
of shrimp, crabs, prawns, and lobsters bubbled, and monstrous heaps
of tiny oysters were being opened. Fresh fruit was in rich hoards:
bananas, oranges, custard-apples, papayas, pomegranates, mangoes,
and guavas.
A magnificent bower a hundred feet long, broad and high, had been
erected of bamboo and gigantic leaves. It was similar to a temple
builded by the ardent worshipers of Dionysus to celebrate the
vine-god's feast. The roof of green thatch was supported on a score
of the slender pillars of the ohe, the golden bamboo, and there
were neither sides nor doors. The pillars were wreathed with ferns
and orchids from the forest near by, and on the sward between them
were spread a series of yellow mats woven in the Paumotu atolls. They
carpeted the green floor of the temple, and upon them, in the center,
the graceful leaves of the cocoanut stretched to mark the division
of the vis-à-vis.
From these long leaves rose graduated alabaster columns, the inner
stalks of the banana-plants, and on them were fastened flowers
and ornaments, fanciful creations of the hands of Tahitian women,
fashioned of brilliant leaves and of bamboo-fiber and the glossy white
arrowroot-fiber. From the top of each column floated the silken film of
the snowy reva-reva, the exquisite component of the interior of young
cocoa-palm-leaves, a gossamer substance the extraction of which is as
difficult as the blowing of glass goblets. Varos, marvelously spiced,
prawns, and crayfish, garlanded the bases of these sylvan shafts,
all highly decorative, and within reach of their admirers.
The stiff hand of the white which had garbed the wedding party in
the ungraceful clothing of the European mode had failed to pose the
natural attitude of the Tahitian toward good cheer.
A pile of breadfruit-leaves were laid before each feaster's space in
lieu of plates, and four half-cocoanut-shells, containing drinking
water, cocoanut-milk, grated ripe cocoanut, and sea-water. The last
two were to be mixed to sauce the dishes, and the empty one filled
with fresh water for a finger-bowl.
The bride and groom sat at the head of the leafy board, their intimates
about them, and the pastor, who had joined them, stood a few moments
with bowed head and closed eyes to invoke the blessing of God upon the
revel, as did the orero, the pagan priest of Tahiti a few generations
ago. The pastor and I, with the owner of the Atimaona plantation and
a Mr. Davey, had had an appetizer a moment before.
We all sat on the mats according to bodily habit, the lithe natives on
their heels, the grosser ones and we whites with legs crossed, and with
the minister's raising of his head we fell to, with ease of position,
and no artificial instruments to embarrass our hands. We transferred
each to his own breadfruit-leaves what he desired from the stores
in the center, meat and vegetables and fruit, and seasoned it as we
pleased. New leaves brought by boys and girls constantly replaced
used ones, and the shells of salt and fresh water were refilled.
Barrels of white and red wine had been decanted into bottles, and with
American and German beer stood in phalanges beside the milky banana
columns, and from these all replenished their polished beakers of
the dark nuts.
The oysters, of a flavor equaling any of America or Europe, were
minute and of a greenish-copper hue, and we removed them with our
tongues, draining the ambrosial juice with each morsel, and ate twenty
or thirty each. The fish was steeped in lime-juice, not cooked, and
flavored with the cocoanut sauce and wild chillies. The crayfish were
curried with the curry plant of the mountains, the shrimp were eaten
raw or boiled, and the goldfish were baked.
The sucking pig and fowl had been baked in a native umu, or oven,
on hot stones, and the taro and yams steamed with them. Taro tops
were served with cocoanut cream. One was not compelled by any absurd
etiquette to choose these dishes in any sequence. My left-hand neighbor
was indifferent in choice, and ate everything nearest to him first, and
without order, taking feis or bananas or a goldfish, dozens of shrimps,
a few prawns, a crayfish, and several varos, but informing me, with a
caress of his rounded stomach, that he was saving most of his hunger
for the chicken, pig, and poi. He was a Tahitian of middle age, with a
beaming face, and happy that I spoke his tongue. When the pig and poi
were set before us, he devoured large quantities of them. The poi was
in calabashes, and was made of ripe breadfruit pounded until dough with
a stone pestle in a wooden trough, then baked in leaves in the ground,
and, when cooked, mixed with water and beaten and stirred until a mass
of the consistency of a glutinous custard. He and I shared a calabash,
and his adroitness contrasted with my inexperience in taking the poi
to our mouths. He dipped his forefinger into the poi, and withdrew it
covered with the paste, twirled it three times and gave it a fillip,
which left no remnant to dangle when the index was neatly cleaned
between his lips. Custom was to lave the finger in the fresh-water
shell before resuming relations with the poi.
My handsome neighbor ate four times as much as I, and I was hungry. His
appetite was not unusual among these South Sea giants. I noticed that
he ate more than three pounds of pig and a quart of poi after all his
previous devastation of shellfish, feis, chicken, and taro, besides
two fish as big as both my hands. My right-hand neighbor was Mr. Davey,
an urbane and unreserved American, who informed me in a breath that he
was a dentist, a graduate of Harvard University, seventy-two years old,
and had been in Tahiti forty-two years. He called his granddaughter
of eighteen to meet me, and she brought her infant. Only he of his
tribe could speak English, but she talked gaily in French.
He practised his profession, he said, but with some difficulty, as
the eminent Acting-Consul Williams had by law a monopoly of dentistry
in the French possessions in the South Seas. The monopoly had been
certified to by the courts after a controversy between them, but his
Honor Willi did not enforce the prohibition except as to Papeete,
and besides was very rich, and had more patients than he could
possibly attend.
At the lower end of the mats the bachelors sat,--there were only
three whites at the feast,--and merriment had its home there. After
the first onslaught, the vintages of Bordeaux and of the Rhineland,
and the brews of Munich and Milwaukee shared attention with the
viands. The head of the mats had a sedate atmosphere, because of
the several preachers there, and those Tahitians ambitious to shine
in a diaconal way talked seriously of the problems of the church,
of future himenes, and the waywardness of those who "knew not the
fear of Ietu-Kirito." Their indications of grief at the hardness
of the heathens' hearts grew more lively as they sipped the wine,
thinking perhaps of that day when the Master and the disciples did
the same at another wedding feast.
Soon their voices were drowned by the low notes of an accordion and the
chanting by the bachelors of an ancient love-song of Tahiti. Miri and
Caroline and Maraa, being of Mataiea, had returned for this arearea,
and were seated with the young men. The Tahitians are charitable in
their regard of very open peccadilloes, especially those animated by
passion or a desire for amusement, thinking probably that were stones
to be thrown only by the guiltless, there would be none to lift one;
certainly no white in Tahiti. The dithyramb of a bacchanal sounded,
and the outlaw dentist was reminded of his former intimate friend,
King Pomaré the Fifth.
"I was a bosom chum of the king," he said confidentially as he
poured me a shell of Burgundy. "He was much maligned. He drank too
much for his health, but so do almost all kings, from what I've read
and seen. Lord! what a man he was! He'd sit around all night while
the hula boomed, applauding this or that dancer, and seeing that the
booze circulated. He was a fish, that's a fact. He never had enough,
and he could stow away a cask. Good-hearted! When he would go to the
districts he always sent word when he had laid out his course, and
after a few days in each place he would go on with his crowd. He paid
for everything except, of course, gifts of fruit and fish. Every night
there would be a big time, dancing and drinking. Jiminy! But times were
different then. Look at me! I've lived freely all my life, and I am
over forty years here, but you wouldn't know I was past seventy. It's
the climate and not worrying or being worried about clothes or sin."
The bride had long since left the table, removed her shoes, and put
on a Mother Hubbard gown. She and her mother I saw having a bite
together in private comfort.
There were many speeches by Tahitians, most of them long, and
some referring to the happy couple and their progeny in the quaint
way of the medieval French in the chamber scenes after marriage,
as related in story and drama. The pastors depressed their mouths,
the deacons filled theirs with food to stifle their laughter, and the
groom was the subject of flattering raillery. The women did not sit
down, because mostly occupied in the service; but the hetairæ, Miri,
Caroline, and Maraa, entertained the bachelors without criticism or
competition. The Tahitian women had no jealousy of these wantons, or,
at least, no condemnation of them. They have always had the place in
Polynesia that certain ancient nations gave them, half admired and
half tolerated. They had official note once a year when the most
skilful of them received the government cachet for excellence in
dances before the governor and his cabinet celebrating the fall of
the Bastile. They became quite as well known in their country by their
performance on those festal days as our greatest dancers or actresses.
When the mats became deserted, and the pastors had taken their carts
for their homes, a little elated but still quoting holy writ, the
nymphs and a dozen other girls of seething mirth took possession of the
temple with a score of young men, and sang their love-songs and set
the words to gesture and somatic harmony. Brooke and I lay and mused
as we listened and gazed. When a youth crowned with ferns began to play
a series of flageolets with his nose, the poet put his foot on mine.
"We are on Mount Parnassus," he whispered. "The women in faun
skins will enter in a moment, swinging the thyrsus and beating the
cymbals. Pan peeps from behind that palm. Those are his pipes, as
sure as Linus went to the dogs."
I met others of the royal family than the former queen, Marao, and her
daughters, the Princesses Tekau and Boots, at an amuraa maa given at
the mansion of Tetuanui. The preparations occupied several days, and
we all assisted in the hunt for the oysters, shrimp, crabs, mao, and
fish, going by twos and threes to the lagoon, the reef, the stream, and
the hills for their rarest titbits. The pigs and fowl were out of the
earth by the day of the feast, and Haamoura and Tatini set the table,
a real one on legs. The veranda was elegantly decorated with palms,
but the table was below stairs in the cooler, darker, unwalled rooms,
on the black pebbles brought from a far-away beach. The pillars of
the house were hung with banana-leaves and ferns, but the atmosphere
was not vividly gay because of the high estate and age of Tetuanui
and his visitors.
The company arrived in automobiles, conspicuous among them Hinoe
Pomaré, the big hobbledehoy son of Prince Hinoe, and, next to his
father, heir to the throne. With him was his sister, Tetuanui, who was
departing for Raratonga, and her husband. He was a brother of Cowan,
the prize-fighter, and in their honor was the luncheon. Introduced to
all by the chief of Mataiea, I was asked to sit with them. The group
was extraordinarily interesting, for besides the prince's heir and
his sister, Chief Tetuanui, and his brother-in-law Charlie Ling, was
Paraita, son of a German schooner captain, who was adopted by Pomaré
V, and Tinau, another adopted son of the late king, who owned, and
ran for hire, a motor-car. There were other men, but among the women,
all of whom sat below the humblest man, myself, was the Princesse de
Joinville of Moorea, mother of Prince Hinoe, and grandmother of the
youth at the head of the table, and of the boy, Ariipae, who attended
to the chief's garden.
This grandmother, known as Vahinetua Roriarii, was one of the very
last survivors among the notable figures of the kingdom. She had a
cigarette in the corner of her sunken mouth, but she tossed it away
when she and Haamoura, the chief's wife, kissed each other on both
cheeks in the French way. The Princesse de Joinville was tottering,
but with something in her face, a disdain, a trace of power, that
attracted me before I knew her rank or history. Her once raven hair was
streaked with gray, she trembled, and her step was feeble; but all her
weaknesses and blemishes impressed me as the disfigurement by age and
abrasion of a beautiful and noble statue. She was more savage-looking
than any modern Tahitian woman, more aboriginal, and yet more subtle. I
once contemplated in the jungle of Johore an old tigress just trapped,
but marked and wounded by the pit and the blows of her captors. She
looked at me coolly, but with a glint in her eye that meant, I thought,
contempt for all that had occurred since her last hour of freedom.
In the curious network of lines all over the worn face of the princess
there were suggestions of the sensual lure that had made her the
mistress of the court; a gentle but pitiful droop to the mouth that I
had noticed persisting in the roués and sirens of Asia after senility
had struck away all charm. The princess refused a third glass of wine
at the table, but smoked incessantly, and listened absent-mindedly
to the music and the songs. Her thoughts may have been of those mad
nights of orgy which Davey, the dentist, and Brault, the composer, had
described. Her cigarettes were of native tobacco wrapped in pandanus
leaf, as the South American wraps his in corn husk. They were short;
merely a few puffs.
Afa, the tane of the lovely Evoa of the Annexe, brought to the luncheon
Annabelle Lee, the buxom wife of Lovaina's negro chauffeur. She was
a quadroon, a belle of dark Kentucky, with more than a touch of the
tar-brush in her skin and hair, and her gaudy clothes and friendly
manner had won the Tahitians completely. She was receiving much
attention wherever she went in Tahiti, for she had the fashion and
language and manners of the whites, as they knew them, and yet was
plainly of the colored races. The chauffeur himself, a self-respecting
negro, had sat at table with Lovaina many times. There was in Tahiti no
color-line. In America a man with a drop of colored blood in his veins
is classed as a colored man; in Cuba a drop of white blood makes him
a white man. The whites honor their own pigment in all South America,
but in the United States count the negro blood as more important. In
Tahiti all were color-blind.
The amuraa maa was over in a few hours. There were no speeches, but
much laughter, and much singing of the himene written by the king,
"E maururu a vau!"
The tune was an old English hymn, but those were all the words of
the song, and they meant, "I am so happy!" They were verses worthy
of monarchy anywhere, and equaled the favorite of great political
gatherings in America, "We're here because we're here!"
"When I was made chief of Mataiea," said Tetuanui, reminiscently to
me as we sang, "I went, as was the custom, to Papeete to drink with
the king. He had just fallen down a stairway while drunk, and injured
himself severely, so that our official drinking was limited. He hated
stairs, anyhow, but his trouble was that he mixed his drinks. That is
suicidal. He would empty into a very large punch-bowl champagne, beer,
absinthe, claret, whisky and any other boissons, and drink the compound
from a goblet. He could hold gallons. He was dead in two weeks after
I had my chiefly toasts with him. His body was like an old calabash
in which you have kept liquor for a quarter of a century. We had no
alcohol until the whites brought it." Tetuanui ended with a line of
Brault's song about Pomaré: "Puisqu'il est mort ... N'en parlons plus!"
Mataiea was the farthest point on Tahiti from Papeete I had reached,
and wishing to see more of the island, I set out on foot with Tatini,
my handmaid. We bade good-bye to Tetuanui and Haamoura and all the
family after the dawn breakfast. Mama Tetuanui cried a few moments
from the pangs of separation, and the chief wrung my hand sorrowfully,
though I was to be back in a few days.
From the reef at Mataiea I had glimpsed the south-west of Tahiti, the
lower edge of the handle of the fan-shaped double isle, mountainous and
abrupt in form, and called commonly the presqu'ile de Taiarapu. The
chief said that at the isthmus of Taravao, the junction of the fan
and handle, there was the Maison des Varos, a famous roadhouse, kept
by M. Butscher, where one might have the best food in Tahiti if one
notified the host in advance.
"One must wake him up," said Tetuanui. "He is asleep most of the time."
I wrote him a letter, and on the day appointed, Tatini and I,
barefooted, started. We went through Tetuanui's breadfruit-grove,
and there, as wherever were choice growths, I stopped to examine and
admire. No other tree except the cocoa equals the maori in usefulness
and beauty. The cocoa will grow almost in the sea and in any soil,
but the breadfruit demands humus and a slight attention. The cocoas
flourish on hundreds of atolls where man never sees them, but the
maoris ask a clearing of the jungle about their feet. The timber
of the breadfruit is excellent for canoes and for lumber, and its
leaves, thick and glossy, and eighteen inches long by a foot broad,
are of account for many purposes, including thatch and plates. There
are half a hundred varieties, and each tree furnishes three or four
crops a year, hundreds of fruits as big and round as plum-puddings,
green or yellow on the tree, pitted regularly like a golf-ball,
in lozenge-shaped patterns. The bark of the young branches was used
for making a tough tapa, native cloth, and resin furnishes a glue
for calking watercraft. The tree bears in the second or third year,
is hardy, but yields its life to a fungus, for which there is no
remedy except, according to the natives, a lovely lily that grows in
the forest. Transplanted, at the roots of the maori, the lily heals
its disease and drives away the parasite. The missionaries cited
this as a parable of Christianity, which would save from damnation
the convert no matter how fungusy he was with sin. In tribal wars the
enemy laid a sea-slug at the heart of the maori, and, its foe unseen,
the tree perished from the corruption of the hideous trepang.
Papeari, the next district west of Mataiea, was well watered, as its
name signified, and we passed cows and sheep and horses grazing under
the trees or in pastures of lush grass. Swamps had been ditched and
drained, and there was evidence of unusual energy in agriculture. The
country gained in tropical aspect as we approached the narrow strip of
land which is the nexus of Tahiti-nui and Tahiti-iti, of the blade and
the handle of the fan. Tahitian mythology does not agree with geology,
any more than does the catechism; for though the scientists aver that
these separate isles were not united until ages after their formation,
a legend ran that at one time the union was complete, but that a
sea-god conceived a hatred for the inhabitants of the Presqu'ile of
Taiarapu, the fearless clans of the Teva-i-tai and the Te-Ahupo.
One very dark night when the moon was in the ocean cavern of this
evil Atua, he began his horrid labors to sever the tie. He smote the
rocks from the foundations, and the people heard in terror throughout
the night the thunders of his blows. He had almost achieved his task
when the goodly sun-god appeared over the mountains far in advance
of his usual time, and blinded the Titan so that he sought safety
beneath the ocean. Tatini showed me the fearful signs of the demon's
fury. Monstrous masses of rock were in the sea, and the isthmus
was reduced to a mere mile of width, an extensive bay filling the
demolished area. The deep inlet of Port Phaëton swept in there like
the Gulf of Corinth in Greece. All this peninsula of Taiarapu was
ceded to Captain Cook. He called it Tiaraboo in his journal, but he
never took possession of his principality, realizing that the cession
was in the fashion of the Spaniard who says, "All I have is yours,"
but would think you unmannerly to carry away anything of value.
Port Phaëton is famed in the annals of the early French conquerors, for
in it they anchored their warships, and the Paris chauvinists dreamed
of a navy-yard and a large settlement there. On the plateau of Taravao,
a hilltop raised fifty feet, is an old fort of the French, a solid
construction against the stubborn Tahitians whom they insisted, with
cannon and musket, must receive Christianity through the French clergy
of the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus instead of through English
dissenters. From the plateau we could see the immense extent of the
forests, which rose almost from the water to the tops of the mountains.
A dozen magnificent kinds of trees were all about us. The earth wore
a verdant coat of grass, ferns, and vines, so profuse and bright that
by contrast a remembrance of the barren parts of America crossed my
mind, with the fulsome praise of them by the pious thieves of that
region who sell them. It would be impossible and cruel, I reflected,
to convey to those extravagants in adjectives the richness of herbage
and the brilliancy of scene about the isthmus. The vegetation was
ampler than anywhere else in Tahiti.
The tamanu-, the hotu-, and the mape-trees were in abundance. The
tamanu yields tacamac, a yellow, resinous substance with a strong
odor and a bitter, aromatic taste, that is used as incense and in
ointments. The Tahitians call the tamanu the healing-tree. It grows
just above high water on any kind of shore, embowering, with dark
foliage, and peculiarly easeful in midday on the hot sands. I have
had a tamanu-leaf soaked in fresh water laid upon my eye inflamed by
too long a vigil in the sun on the reef. The small gray ball within
its round green fruit affords a greenish oil that is a liniment of
wizardry for bruises, stiffness, rheumatism, and fevers. In every
house was a gourd stored with it.
The mape, the Tahitian chestnut, grew farther from the water, a
powerful, commanding figure, with flowers of sublimated sweetness, and
with it the tiairi, or tutui-tree, covered with blossoms, like white
lilac, and bearing nuts with oily kernels. It is the candlenut-tree,
which has furnished lights for Tahitians since they wandered to
these latitudes. The nuts are baked to make brittle their shell,
and the kernels of walnut size easily extracted and pierced. Strung
on the midrib of a palm-leaf, the combination makes wax and wick,
and has lighted many a council and many a dance in Polynesia.
The pandanus likes the coral sand, and is in appearance a tree out of a
dream. It grows twenty feet high and stands on aërial roots resembling
inclined stilts. The leaves are in tufts at the tips of the branches,
set like a screw, twisting around the stem in graceful curves, and
marking the stem with a spiral pattern from the root upward. The
leaves are edged with spines. The wood is close, hard, and hollow,
and full of oil. From the pandanus are made posts five or six inches
through. The leaves, four or five feet long, are torn into strips
for making hats, thatch, mats, and canoe sails. They are steeped in
sea-water, and beaten with a mallet to remove the green outer skin,
the residue being white, silken fiber. This is dyed to weave hats and
belts. The aërial roots are crushed to make a tougher fiber for ropes,
baskets, and mats. The fruit is something like a coarse pineapple, and
the blossoms are very fragrant. The ripe fruit is crimson, and strings
like beads into favorite necklaces. The fruit separates into cones,
and one chews the inner end like licorice, while, when dried, the
kernels can be ground into a brown, sweet flour for cakes, a wholesome,
nourishing food, but esteemed only in more barren islands, where fish
and cocoanuts are the principal diet. From the fruit is distilled a
fiery liquor that the early whalers taught the line islanders to drink.
At the isthmus was the only crossing of the belt or, Broom Road, about
Tahiti. One had to choose the left or the right, and we wound to the
right to reach the Maison des Varos. To the left we could have gone to
Tautira, famous as the last stand of the god Oro against the cross,
and still under the chieftaincy of Ori-a-Ori, with whom R.L.S. and
his family lived several months.
The road was a fairy-tale brightly illuminated by plantation,
jungle, and garden, by reef and eyot. The sea lapped gently on sand
as white as the fleecy clouds. Carts of Chinese and Tahitians passed,
carrying their owners and produce. The Chinese said, "Yulanna!" for
"Ia ora na!" and the natives called to us to eat with them in their
near-by homes. But we walked on, saying, "Ua maururu!" "Much obliged!"
M. Butscher had a good-sized, rambling house, with verandas for dining,
and bedrooms for sleep. We found him on his largest table, lying flat
on his back, and contemplating, in the eternal and perplexing way of
the Polynesians. The Daibutsu, the great Buddha of Kamakura, had no
more peaceful, meditative aspect than had the Taravao taverner. He
was long and meager, as dry as a cocoanut from the copra oven, as if
all the juices of his body and soul had been expressed in his years
of cooking the sea-centipedes for which he was celebrated. Tatini
addressed him slowly: "Bocshair, ia ora na!"
He sat up stiffly, and regarded us with indifference. He was cast
for an old and withered Mephistopheles, his lines all downward, his
few teeth fangs, and his smile a threatening leer, as if he thought
of a joke he could not tell to decent visitors, but which almost
choked him to withhold. His clothes were rags, and his naked feet
like the flippers of seals. He opened his mouth, yawned, and said,
"Iiii," a word which means, "I slept with my eyes open."
He settled back upon the table, and became immersed again in
reverie. On the floor by the kitchen was a Tahitian woman with a
baby and a pandanus-basket of varos. They squirmed and wriggled,
contorted and crackled like giant thousand-legs, and almost excited
in me a repulsion.
The vahiné laughed at me.
"I fished for them with a dozen grapnels," she said. "It was good
fishing to-day. I put a piece of fish on each group of hooks. You know
those holes are very small at the top and under two or three feet of
water. Not many know how to find them. I set a grapnel in each hole,
and then returned to the first to pull out the varo. I have more than
twenty here."
Butscher rose, and sluggishly began to prepare the breakfast. He
wrapped the varos in hotu-leaves, and put them in the umu to steam on
the red-hot stones, and began to open oysters and fry fish in brown
butter, as Tatini and I hastened to the beach for a bath. The sea
was studded with coral growth, and sponges by the thousand, and we
sat on these soft cushions under the surface, and watched the little
fishes' antics, and chatted. Tatini had gathered half a dozen nono,
a fruit that has a smooth skin and no stone, and she threw them at me.
"Do you know about the nono?" she asked merrily. "It was in our
courtship. When a crowd of young men were gathered to bathe in the
pools or to lie on the banks under the shade of the trees, suddenly a
missile struck one of them on the shoulder. The others began to shout
at him and to sing, for it was a sign that a vahiné had chosen him. He
jumped to his feet and ran in the direction of the hidden thrower, and
she ran, too, but no farther than away from the eyes of the others."
"Tatini," I said, "the nono was the Tahitian arrow of a little fat
god we have called Cupid."
"Aue!" she replied. "It was not always oaoa for him, because it might
be an old woman, or some one he did not like, but who loved him. The
Arii, the aristocratic ladies, no matter how old, threw nono at the
youngest and handsomest youth, and they had to pursue them, because
of good manners. You know, Maru, that an illegitimate child is called
to-day taoranono, and taora means to throw."
"When I was in Hawaii," I told her, "the old natives used to talk of a
game there which, under King Kalakaua, their next to last sovereign,
was played at night in Iolani palace or in the garden, but a ball
of twine took the place of the nono, and all stood about, men and
women, in a circle, to speed and receive the token of passion. The
missionaries severely condemned the game."
At the Maison des varos I breakfasted alone, for Tatini was too shy
to break the taboo that separated the sexes at meals. Butscher waited
on me, bringing one plate of ambrosia after another--oysters, shrimp,
varos, and fish. I warmed his frigid blood with a cup or two of Pol
Roger, 1905, a bottle of which he dragged from a cave.
"I am born in Papenoo," he volunteered, "fifty-three years ago. My
father came from Alsace seventy-five years ago, when Tahiti had not
many white people. I am a tinsmith, but I gave up that business many
years ago to keep this maison. I was a catechist in the Catholic
church here nine years, teaching the ignorant. I gave it up; it
didn't pay. I got nothing out of it. I worked about the church,
read the prayers, and led the service when the priest was not there,
and I never made a penny. Everything for me was the future life. Vous
savez, monsieur, toute à l'avenir! Sacré! what a fool I was! Mais,
one day when I was lying on that table as you found me, I was iiii,
and I dreamed that there was no hell and that I was a fool. I turned
over a new leaf that moment. Now I never go near the church, and the
future can take care of itself. That's my son-in-law going by in the
cart. He's the richest young man in Taravao. Ah, oui! he'll spend a
hundred francs here with me in a week for drinks. That's their baby."
Butscher's leathern, yellow visage contracted in an appalling grin.
"They have been married long?" I remarked politely.
"Mais, they are not married yet," replied the father-in-law. "There
is no hurry."
Leaving Tatini to her own pleasures, I rented a horse and cart
of Mephistopheles and drove into the district of Vairao. From the
outset I realized the iniquitous character of the Atua who had tried
to destroy or set adrift the people of the presqu'ile of Taiarapu,
for they were handsomer and, if possible, more hospitable than those
of Tahiti-nui. The road was closer to the water of the lagoon,
and the reef and coral banks were nearer. I allowed the horse to
go his own gait, and we jogged slowly, stopping to browse and to
consider the landscape. The beach was covered with seeds and pods,
the square-shaped seeds of the Barringtonia in their outer case of
fiber, tutui-nuts, cocoanuts, flowers and bits of wood, and objects
that would cause a naturalist to weep for lack of time. Our beaches
of the temperate zones are wastes compared with these, for not only
were the sands strewn with a vast débris of forest and jungle, but
animal life abounded. The hermits toddled about, carrying their
stolen shells, some as small as watch charms, and the land-crabs
fed on the purauand hibiscus-leaves. They are the scavengers of the
shore, eating everything, and thus acting as conservators of health,
as do the lank pigs of the Philippines. They were in myriads, rushing
about seemingly without purpose, and diving into their holes beneath
the palm-roots. Their legs, unshelled, are as excellent food as the
crabs of the Atlantic. In the water a foot or two away moved exquisite
creatures, darting fish, and sailing craft--Portuguese men-of-war,
and other almost intangible shapes of pearly hue.
The village of Vaieri is opposite the pass of Tapuaeraha. Far from the
capital, and from the distractions of tourists and bureaucracy, this
tiny group of homes along the beach was less touched by the altering
hand of the white than Mataica, its setting and atmosphere affectingly
unspoiled. There was a mildness, a reticence, a privacy surrounding
the commune that bespoke a gentle people, living to themselves. It
was almost at the end of the belt road, which virtually terminated
at Puforatiai. Gigantic precipices, high cliffs, and rugged mountains
forbade travel, and from a boat only could one see the extreme southern
end of Tahiti-nui Marearea, Great Tahiti the Golden, as it was called
by its once proud race.
Vaieri was environed by all the plants of this clime. They ran
along the road and embosomed the houses. Guavas and oranges were
tangled with bananas, roses, reeds, papayas, and wild coffee. The
blue duranta and the white oleander, the cool gray-green hibiscus
with lemon-colored blossoms, the yellow allamanda, the trumpet lily,
acacias, lilac ipomaea, tree ferns, and huge bird's-nest ferns mingled
with white convolvulus, and over all lifted groves of cocoas and the
symmetrical breadfruit.
In this surrounding was a wooden house, built partly over the water,
so that a seaward veranda extended into the lagoon, high on posts, and
commanded a view of the sea and the mountain. I saw on this veranda a
more arresting figure of a white man than I had before come upon in
Tahiti. His body, clothed only in a pareu, was very brown, but his
light beard and blue eyes proved his Nordic strain. He was of medium
size, powerful, with muscles rounded, but evident, under his satin
skin, and with large hands and feet. He was reading a book, and as
I ambled by, he raised his head and looked at me with a serious smile.
I checked the horse, and tied him to a candlenut-tree. I felt that
I had arrived at the end of my journey.
I spent the remainder of the day and the night there. The man and his
wife were as stars on a black night, as music to a blind bard. His name
was Nicolai Lermontoff, born in Moscow, and his wife was an American,
Alaska her place of birth, and of residence most of her life. They
were each about forty years old, and of extraordinary ease of manner
and felicity of expression.
"Muy simpatica," had said the old Gipsy at the Generalife in Granada
when I had spoken bolee with him. Lermontoff shook hands with me. His
was as hard as leather, calloused as a sailor's or a miner's, and so
contradicted his balanced head, intellectual face, and general air
of knowledge and world experience that I said:
"You have the horniest palm in Tahiti."
"I am a planter," he replied. "We have been here a few years, and after
buying the ground I had to clear it, because it had been permitted
to go to bush. There were a few hundred cocoanut-trees, but nothing
else worth while. I began at the highest point and worked to the sea."
I drew from him that he had bought eighteen acres of land for twelve
hundred dollars, and had spent most of a year in preparing it for
vanilla, cocoanuts, a few breadfruit, a small area of coffee and taro,
and a vegetable patch.
"We have very little money," he explained, "and live largely on catches
in the sea and stream, and fruit and vegetables, with a dozen chickens
for eggs. I pull at the net with the village. Actually, we figure
that fifteen dollars a month covers our expenditures. This house cost
five hundred and eight dollars, but, of course, I did a lot of work
on it. The chief items for us are books, reviews, and postage."
Three walls of the house were covered with books, and the fourth
stopped at the floor to make the wide veranda over the lagoon.
Mrs. Lermontoff had on the peignoir of the natives, and was
barefooted within the house, but wore sandals outside. She sat before
a sewing-machine.
"I am making a gown or two for a neighbor who is sick," she said. "I
do not give many hours to sewing. I like better the piano."
She knew all the Russian composers well, had studied at a conservatory
in the German capital, and she also played Grieg for me with much
feeling and a strong, yet delicate, touch. For dinner we had a broiled
fish, which I myself cooked on stones outside the house, and tuparo,
mountain feis steamed and mashed into a golden pulp, with cocoanut
cream. With these we ate boiled green papaya, which tasted like
vegetable marrow; and for dessert sweet oranges with grated fresh
cocoanut, and for drink, the wine of the nut.
After the food we sat and looked at the reef, the purple sea, and the
stars, and talked. These two were weary of life in the big countries
of the world, and would rest in Tahiti. If they made enough money,
they would like to go to America and work for the revolution they
hoped for. They did not believe in bringing it about by violence,
but by acting on the Christ principle, as they interpreted it. Yet
they were not religionists.
"Of course one is not sure of the aims and end of life," said
Lermontoff. "I have no greater certainty than the kaisers and czars
or your great men, Morgan and Rockefeller; but, at least, theirs are
not worth while for the race of man. I hold that man is the greatest
product of life so far, and not government or trade. That the whirling
spheres are made for man I disbelieve, but on this planet, and in
our ken, he is the object we most prize, and rightfully. Therefore to
build him in health and character, in talent and happiness, is all of
existence. The life after death we are not sure of, but beauty is on
earth, and to know it and worship it in nature, and in man and his
thoughts and deeds are our ends. The individual man gains only by
sacrifice for his fellows. He must give freely all he has. This is
his only way out of the shadow that may be inherent in our growth,
but in any event has been made certain by machinery and business
control of world ethics."
They were believers in the doctrines of Leo Tolstoi, and especially in
non-resistance, and the possessing little or no property to encumber
their free souls. In the village they had become the guides of the
Tahitians in the devious path of enforced civilization.
Mrs. Lermontoff, in lamenting the Tahitian's degradation, physical
and spiritual, said that she was reminded always of the Innuit,
the Eskimo, among whom she and her husband had passed several years.
"They are the most ethical, the most moral, the most communal people
I know of," she commented. "They have a quality of soul higher than
that of any other race, a quality reached by their slow development and
constant struggle. I imagine they went through a terrible ordeal in the
more temperate zones farther south before they consented to be pushed
into the frozen lands of Canada, and then, following the caribou in
the summer, to mush to the Arctic sea. There, while they had to change
their habits, clothing and food, to learn to live on the seal and the
bear and the caribou in the midst of ice and snow, they were spared
for thousands of years the diseases and complexes of civilization,
and reached a culture which is more worth while than ours."
I was skeptical, but she quoted several eminent anthropologists to
support her statement that the Eskimo were better developed mentally
than other people, and that in simplicity of life, honesty, generosity,
provision for the young and the old, in absence of brutality,
murder and wars, they had a higher system of philosophy than ours,
which admits hells, prisons, asylums, poor houses, bagnios, famines
and wars, and fails even in the recurrent periods of hard times to
provide for those stricken by their lash.
"But," said Lermontoff, "the Innuit, too, is corrupting under the
influence of trade, of alcohol, and the savage lust of the white
adventurer. He attained through many centuries, perhaps thousands
of years, of separation from other peoples, and without any of the
softening teachings of Christianity, a Jesus-like code and practice,
which the custodians of Christianity have utterly failed to impress
on the millions of their normal adherents."
I looked out upon the reef where the waves gleamed faintly, upon the
scintillating nearer waters of the lagoon, and upon us, barefooted,
and clothed but for decency, and I had to jolt my brain to do justice
to the furred and booted Eskimo in his igloo of ice. The difference
in surroundings was so opposite that I could barely picture his
atmosphere climatological and moral. I led the conversation back to
their situation in Vaieri.
He had planted his vanilla-vines on coffee-bushes, the vanilla being an
orchid, a parasite, that creeps over the upstanding plants, coffee,
or the vermillion-tree. Lermontoff said that it was a precarious
crop, a world luxury, the price of which fluctuated alarmingly. Yet
it was the most profitable in Tahiti, which produced half of all the
vanilla-beans in the world.
This man and woman made a deep impression upon me. They had seen
cities everywhere, had had position and fashion, and were, for their
advanced kind, at peace.
"We have no nerves here," said Mrs. Lermontoff. "Our neighbors are all
fishermen, and we are friends. We drink no wine, we want no tobacco. We
have health and nature; books and music supply our interests. Life
is placid, even sweet."
When I bade them good-by it was with regret. They had found a refuge,
and they had love, and yet they wanted to aid in the revolution they
believed in. I restrained myself from pointing out that Tolstoi,
at the last, forsook even his family to seek solitude and die.