At breakfast the next morning I was waited on by Atupu, the beauty. Her face was tear-stained, and a deep weariness was upon her. She regarded me with a glance of mixed anger and hurt.
“Vous etes fache avec moi?” she inquired accusingly.
“I angry with you?” I repeated. “Why what have I done to show it?”
And then she told me of her visit and vigil. Seeing me alone in Tahiti, and kind-hearted, she said, she had thought to tell me of the Tahitian heart and the old ways of the land. She had robed, perfumed, and adorned herself, and entered my sleeping-place, as she said was the wont of Tahitian girls. I had certainly heard her enter, and seen her kneel to await my greeting, and if not then, I had seen her plainly when I lifted the lamp, for the light had streamed full upon her. She had remained there upon the floor half an hour until my audible breathing had compelled her to believe against her will that I was asleep. Then she had fled and wept the night in humiliation. Never in her young life had such a horror afflicted her.
I was stunned, and could only reiterate that I had not known of her presence, and with a trinket from my pocket I dried her tears.
Rupert Brooke in a letter to a friend in England drew a little etching of our lodging:
I am in a hovel at the back of my hotel, and contemplate the yard. The extraordinary life of the place flows round and near my room–for here no one, man or woman, scruples to come through one’s room at any moment, if it happens to be a shortcut. By day nothing much happens in the yard–except when a horse tried to eat a hen, the other afternoon. But by night, after ten, it is filled with flitting figures of girls, with wreaths of white flowers, keeping assignations…. It is all–all Papeete–like a Renaissance Italy with the venom taken out, No, simpler, light-come and light-go, passionate and forgetful, like children, and all the time South Pacific, that is to say unmalicious and good-tempered.
When a steamship was in port the Tiare was a hurly-burly. Perhaps forty or even a hundred extra patrons came for meals or drinks. It was amusing to hear their uncomprehending anger at their failure to obtain quick service or even a smile by their accustomed manner toward dark peoples. The British, who were the majority of the travelers, have a cold, autocratic attitude toward all who wait upon them, but especially toward those of the colored races. In Tahiti they suffered utter dismay, because Tahitians know no servitude and pay no attention to sharp words.
I saw a red-faced woman giving an order for aperitifs to To Sen, the Chinese waiter.
“Two old-fashioned gin cocktails,” she iterated. “You savee, gin and bitters? Be sure it’s Angostura, and lemon and soda, and two Manhattans with rye whisky. Hurry along now! Old-fashioned, remember!”
In ten minutes Temanu came for the order. To Sen knew no English, and Temanu only, “Yais, ma darleeng,” and “Whatnahell?”
“Spik Furanche?” she begged.
“Oui, oui!” said the red-faced lady. “Dooze cocktail! Vous savez cocktail, a la mode des ancients? Gin, oon dash bittair, lem’ et soda!”
“Mais, madame, douze cocktail!” and the half-caste Chinese girl held up all her fingers and added two more. “Vous n’etes que quatre ici! Quatre cocktails, n’est-ce pas?”
“Dooze gin, dooze Manhattan? My heavens! They ought to understand my French in this out-of-the-way place when they do in Paris. Listen! Dooze is two in French,” and she held up two pudgy fingers. But Temanu was gone and returned with four cocktails made after her own liking.
All the girls, Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Maru, Tetua, and Mme. Rose and Mama-Maru, helped in the service, some beginning with shoes and stockings, but soon slipping them off as the crowd grew and their feet became weary. Lovaina herself moved happily about the salle-a-manger telling her friends that she was a grandmother. A letter had given the information that her daughter had a child. She was a doting parent, and we all must toast the newborn. Two grave professors of the University of California, ichthyologists or entomologists, sat entranced at the unconventionality of the scene, drinking vin ordinaire and gazing at the Tahitian girls, or eating breadfruit, raw fish, and taro, as if they were on Mars and did not know how they got there.
I saw an entry in Lovaina’s day-book on the table:
“Germani to Fany 3 feathers.”
This was a charge made by Atupu against a Dane for three cocktails. He took his meals at Mme. Klopfer’s restaurant. Her first name is Fanny, and Atupu thinks all men not English, French, or Americans, are Germans; so she identified the Dane as the German who went to Fanny’s for his meals.
Lovaina said to me:
“I hear you look one house that maybe you rent. You don’t get wise if you rent from that French woman. I don’t say nothing about her, but you know her tongue? So sharp jus’ like knife. All time she have trouble. Can’t rent her house so sharp. Some artist he rent; she take box, peep over see what he do jus’ because he have some girl. Nobody talk her down. No, I take back. Jus’ one French woman who know to swear turribil. This swear woman she call her turribil name and say, ‘Everybody don’t know you was convict in Noumea for killing one man for money.’ That turribil talk, and she jus’ fell down. Good for her, I think.”
Lovaina seldom rode in her automobile, which she kept primarily for renting to guests for country tours. She had had for years a carriage, a surrey, drawn by one horse, which had grown old and rickety with the vehicle. The driver was a mute, Vava, his name meaning dumb in Tahitian, and the English and Americans called him the Dummy. He was attached to Lovaina as a child to his mother–a wayward, jealous, cloudy-minded child, who almost daily broke into fits of anger over incidents misunderstood by his groping mentality, and because of his incommunicable feelings. The hotel was in a fearsome uproar when Vava fell into a tantrum, women patrons afraid of his possible actions and men threatening to club him into a mild frame of mind. I doubt if any one there could have subdued him physically, for he was a thick-bodied man in his thirties, with a stamina and a strength incredibly developed. I had seen him once lift over a fence a barrel of flour, two hundred pounds in weight, and without full effort. His skin was very dark, his facial expression one of ire and frustration, but of conscious superiority to all about him. He had had no aids to overcome his natal infirmity of deafness and consequent dumbness, none of the educational assistance modern science lends these unfortunates, no finger alphabet, or even another inarticulate for sympathy. He was like the mutes of history, of courts and romances, condemned to suffer in silence the humor and contempt of all about him, though he felt himself better than they in body and in the understanding of things, which he could not make them know. This repression made him often like a wild beast, though mostly he was half-clown and half-infant in his conduct. He had a gift of mimicry incomparably finer than any professional’s I knew of. This, with his gestures, stood him instead of speech. A certain haughty English woman whose elaborate hats in an island where women were hatless, or wore simple, native weaves, were noted atrocities, and whose chin was almost nil, kept the carriage and me waiting for breakfast while she primped in her lodging. The Dummy uttered one of his abortive sounds, much like that of an angry puma, contorted his face, and put his hand above his head, so that I had a very vivid suggestion of the lady, her sloping chin and her hat, at which all Papeete laughed. Vava’s gesticulations and grimaces were unerring cartoons without paper or ink. If one could have seen him draw one-self, one’s pride would have tumbled. He saw the most ridiculous aspect of one. His indication of Lovaina’s figure made one shriek, and the governor would have sentenced him for lese-majesty had he seen himself taken off. The sounds he made in which he greeted any one he liked, or in anger, were terrible, dismaying. They; must have been those made by our ancestors, the first primates, when they began the struggle toward intelligent language. Vava’s sounds were as the muttering of an ape, deep in his throat, or, when he was roused, high and shrill, like the cry of a rabbit when the hound seizes it. He could make Lovaina know anything he wanted to, and she could direct him to do anything she wished. In that house of mirth, brightness, and laughter, he was as a cunning and, at times, hateful jester, feared by the Tahitians, and, indeed, to whites a shadowy skeleton at the feast, a thing of indescribable possibilities. I knew him, he liked me, and I drew from him by motions and expressions some measure of his feelings and sufferings. But I, too, occasionally, shuddered at the animal cries and frightful grimaces wrung from him in beating down his soul bent on murder.
Lovaina was a spendthrift, giving money liberally to relatives, lending it to improvident borrowers, and dispensing it with open hands when she had it, though always herself in debt. Yet she liked to make money, and to have her hotel filled with tourists who patronized her little bar or drank at meals other wines than the excellent Bordeaux, white or red, which was free with food. Most she loved the appearance of prosperity, the crowding of casual voyagers on steamer-days, the visit of war-ships, the sound of music in her parlor, the rustling of dancers, and the laughter and excitement when the maids were busied carrying champagne and cheaper drinks to the verandas.
I saw her at her best when El Presidente Sarmiento, an Argentine training-ship, came to port with a hundred cadets. A madness then possessed the girls of Tahiti.
Forsaking their old loves or those of the moment, they threw themselves into the arms of the visitors, determined on conquest. The quays where the launches of the Sarmiento landed their passengers, and the streets about the saloons, restaurants, and theaters, were thronged with the fairest and gayest girls of the island. They poured in from the country to share in the lovemaking. The cafes were filled with dancing and singing crowds, the volatile Argentineans matching the Tahitians in abandon and ardor.
Accordions, violins, guitars, and mandolins were played everywhere. The scores of public automobiles were engaged by joyous parties who sallied to the rural resorts, each Juan with his vahine. Mostly unable to exchange a word, they were kissing and embracing in their seats. The ship had been there a year before, and many of the men were hunting former sweethearts. They found that very difficult, as they had not accurate descriptions.
“A beauty named Atupu,” or “A black-eyed girl?” They had no aid among the girls they interrogated.
“Why bother with some one who may be dead when we are here?” they asked. And Juan listened to the sirens and rested content.
At Lovaina’s there were seventy to dinner. Captain and officers were cheek by jowl with gunners and plain sailors. The veranda was jammed with tables, corks hitting the ceiling, glasses clinking, and Spanish, French, English, and Tahitian confused in the chatter and the shouts of To Sen, Hon Son, the maids, and a dozen friends of the hostess who always came at such times to share the glory of the service.
Lovaina was at the serving-table with volunteers cutting cakes and taking the money. The parlor, with its red and blue plush chairs, was filled with Argentineans playing the piano and singing songs of their country. Suddenly Lovaina discovered that some one had stolen the album of portraits from the piano-top. These were of her family, and of notable visitors who had written grateful notes after their return home, and sent their pictures to her. Professor Hart, teacher of English aboard the Sarmiento, was asked to find the thief, and he promised that he would have the ship searched.
Lovaina lamented her loss, but counted her sovereigns. The Argentineans had English gold, and Lovaina passed the shining, new pieces from one hand to the other, enjoying their glitter and sound. She liked to play with coins, and often amused herself as did the king in the blackbird-pie melody.
“My God!” said Lovaina, as she pulled me down to her bench and rubbed my back, “that Argentina is good country! Forty dollars lime squash by himself.” She opened her purse, and poured out more gold. With it fell a cloth medallion, red letters on white flannel, “The Apostleship of Prayer in League with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
“I find that on the floor two day’ ‘go,” said Lovaina, “and I put it in purse to see if good luck. What you think? Argentinas come in nex’ day. I don’ know, but that thing is good to me. See those bottle’ champagne goin’ in?”
Perhaps I shall carry longer than any other memory of Tahiti that of the endearing nature, the honest heart, and the laughing, starry eyes of Lovaina, with a tiare-blossom over her ear, or a chaplet of those flowers upon her head, as she sat on her throne behind the serving-table, and I on the camphor-wood chest.
Chapter V
The Parc de Bougainville–Ivan Stroganoff–He tells me the history of Tahiti–He berates the Tahitians–Wants me to start a newspaper.
In the parc de Bougainville I sat down on a bench on which was an old European. He was reading a tattered number of “Simplicissimus,” and held the paper close to his watery eyes. I said, “Good morning” and he replied in fluent though accented English.
His appearance was eccentric. He was stout, and with a rough, white beard all over his face and neck, and even on his chest. He wore a frock coat and a large cow-boy hat of white felt. His sockless feet were in old base-ball shoes of “eelskin,” which were of the exact color of his coat, a dull green, like moldy, dried peas. Apparently the coat was his only garment; but it was capacious, and came almost to his knobby knees. Missing buttons down its front were replaced by bits of cord or rope. The pockets were stuffed with papers, mangos, and a hunk of bread. A stump of lead-pencil was behind his ear. His hair, a dusty white, met the frayed collar of the coat, and through the temporary gaps which he made in its length to cool his body, I saw it like a gnarled and mossy tree. His hands were grimy and his nails black-edged, but there was intellect in his eye, and a broken force in his huddled, loosed attitude. He was not decrepit, or with a trace of humility, but had the ease of the philosopher and also his detachment. It was plain he did the best he could with his garb, and was entirely undisturbed, and perhaps even unmindful, of its ludicrousness. He was as serene as Diogenes must have been when he crawled naked from his tub into the sun.
We talked first of the horses in the lagoon a dozen yards from us, their grooms or their owners submerging them, and squatting on the ground to chat as the horses wallowed willingly in five feet of salt water. We agreed that the Tahitians were as bad drivers as the Chinese, and that they were, wittingly or unwittingly, cruel to their beasts of burden. This led to a discussion of native traits, and he was caustic in his castigation of the Tahitians. He asked me my name and what brought me to Tahiti; and when, wanting to be as honest-spoken as he, I said, “Romance, adventure,” he burst out that I was crazy.
“I have been here seventeen years,” he said bitterly–“me, Ivan Stroganoff, who was once happy as secretary to the governor of Irkutsk! I was better off when I was on the Merrimac fighting the Monitor, or with Mosby, the guerilla, than I am in this accursed island. I think a man is mad who can leave Tahiti and stays here. I wish I could go away. I would like to die elsewhere. I am eighty years old, I starve here, and I sleep in a chicken-coop in the suburbs.”
“You are lodged exactly as was Charlie Stoddard, who wrote ‘South Sea Idylls,'” I interposed.
“They have lied always, those writers about Tahiti,” said Ivan Stroganoff. “Melville, Loti, Moerenhout, Pallander, your Stevenson,–I don’t know that Stoddard,–all are meretricious, with their pomp of words and no truth. I have comparisons to make with other nations. I am more than sixty years a traveler, and I am here seventeen years without cessation, in hell all the time.”
“You Russians always like the French. How about their achievements here?” I questioned, hoping to lift his shade of melancholy.
“The French?” he repeated. “They are brigands and weak governors. They have been in Tahiti four generations. Do you want to know how they got hold here? A monarchy, a foolish Louis, sent a marine savant and soldier named Dumont D’Urville to the South Seas with the casual orders:
“‘D’apprivoiser les hommes, et de rendre les femmes un peu plus sauvages;’ to tame the men and make the women a little more savage. The French did both, and took all of this part of the world they could find unseized by Europe, and tamable, at not too great a shedding of French blood. They said that it was their duty to restore Temoana his kingdom in the Marquesas Islands, eight hundred miles from here, northward, Temoana had been a singer of psalms at the Protestant mission in his valley of Tai-o-hae, in the island of Nukahiva, a victim of shanghaiers, a cook on a whaler, a tattooed man in English penny shows, a repatriate, a protege of the Catholic archbishop of the Marquesans, and finally, through the influence of the Roman church, a king. He worked damned hard for the French flag and the church, and the generous colonial bureau of France paid his widow a pension of ten dollars a month until she died of melancholy among the nuns. I knew her and I knew men who knew him. He was given a gorgeous uniform of gold lace by his promoters, which I think killed him, though when he sweated, he would strip to his handsomely marked skin and sit naked in the breeze. The queen never wore more than a diaper or a gown.
“With the Marquesas Islands taken, the French warships came to Tahiti. French Catholic priests had been deported from here because the Protestants were already in possession, and objected to competition, saying that the priests were children of Beelzebub, and taught false doctrines and morals. The Queen of Tahiti, whose dynasty the Protestant missionaries had created, advised the pope’s men to seek a heathen people not already worshiping the true God. The zealous priests who had come with explicit commands to found a mission in Tahiti, launched the curse of Rome upon the king, the Protestant ministers, and especially upon Mr. Pritchard, the British consul and the queen’s physician and spiritual adviser.
“Pritchard had the interests of England and the Lord at heart, and his whispers in the queen’s ear sent the earnest priests aboard a ship bound for a distant port. They complained, and the French admiral then arrived and pointed his guns at the palace and the Protestant mission, and demanded thirty thousand dollars for the insult to the French flag; and for the jibe at the pope, the matching of every Protestant church in the islands, by a Catholic edifice. The queen had a panic and fled to Moorea in a canoe. The admiral then put Consul Pritchard in jail for ten days, and after chastening his mood, put him on an English ship at sea homeward bound. France and England were showing their teeth at each other over more important differences, which ended in a revolution in Paris and a change of kings, so that the admiral had his way. The queen came back, the priests established their mission and their churches, and the Tahitians with any blood in them went to war again. The French built forts about the island, and killed off with their guns all the natives they could get sight of. Then they took all the other islands around here that England didn’t have, declared Tahiti had to be a protectorate in 1843, and in 1880 gave King Pomare Fifth twelve thousand dollars a year to let them annex his kingdom. You see, after all, his crown was made by the British puritans, and taken from him by the French or Romish Church.”
The aged Russian laughed in his huge whiskers. He fished in the rear of his frock and produced the stump of a cigar, for which I yielded a match.
“I found that on the steps of the Roman Catholic bishop’s carriage, which was standing near here an hour ago,” he said. “They’ll tell you that you will burn in hell; but they smoke here, and good Havana tobacco.”
“I think it’s a pity the Tahitians weren’t left alone,” I asserted.
He gave me a look such as Diogenes might have given the man who stood in his sunlight. He lit his cigar-end, puffed it diligently for a minute, and then said arbitrarily:
“The Tahitian is, first, a coward, afraid to fight the white; but if he can, in a group or by secret, kill or hurt you, he will. He is treacherous, and the more he pretends to be your friend, the more he connives to cheat you. I should have said first of all that he is lazy, but that is not to be disputed. He was corrupt to begin with, and religion accentuates every evil passion in him. He is a profound hypocrite, and yet a puritan for observance of the ceremonies and interdictions of his faith. He has more guile than a Japanese guide, and in land deals can skin a Moscow Jew. He will sell you land and get the money, and later prove that his father or brother is the real owner, and that relation will do the same, and you will pay several times for the same land. In the Paumotus, where the missionaries are like a swarm of gnats, this deception is threefold as bad.”
“But the Tahitians are at least generous,” I broke in.
Stroganoff combed his whiskers with a twig of the flamboyant tree under which we sat. He glared at me.
“Generous! If you have money they will overwhelm you with presents, looking for a double return; but if you are poor, they will treat you as dirt under their feet. I know, for I am poor, and I live among them. They are like those mina birds here, which will steal the button off your coat if you do not guard it.”
“Does not Christianity improve them?”
“No. The combats between Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons ended all hope of that. They are never sincere except when they become fanatics, and even then they never lose their native superstitions. Beliefs in the ghosts of Tahiti, the tupapau, ihoiho, and varua ino, are common to all of them.”
“My dear Mr. Stroganoff,” I expostulated, “your czars believed in icons. My grandmother believed in werewolves and banshees, and we burned blessed candles and sprinkled holy water in our houses on All Souls’ night to keep away demons. I have seen a clergyman, educated in Paris and Louvain, exorcising devils with bell, book, and candle in Maryland, in one of the oldest and proudest cities of the United States. I have seen the American Governor-General of the Philippines carrying a candle in a procession in honor of a mannikin from a shrine at Antipolo, near Manila. Why, I could tell you–“
“Please, please, let me talk,” Ivan Stroganoff interrupted. “What I say is true, nevertheless. The Tahitian has not one good quality. He is not to be compared with the American negro for any desirable trait.”
“Do you know the negro?” I asked.
The old man grunted. He relit his cigar, now only an inch long, and said:
“I was on the Merrimac when she fought the Monitor in two engagements. I was a sailor on other Confederate men-of-war. I was one of Colonel Mosby’s guerillas, and was wounded with them. I have lived thirteen years in the United States. I know the coon well. I fought to keep him a slave.”
“You are not an American?”
“I am a Russian, an anarchist once, and now I am for Root and Lodge, the stand-pats. I lived in Russia in its darkest days, under several czars, when your life was the forfeit of a wink. I was a lawyer there, a politician, an intrigant. I knew Bebel and Jaures and the men before them. I lived in Germany many years, in France, in England, anywhere, everywhere. I first came to New York from Siberia. I was broke. The Civil War was on. There were agents of Lee and Jeff Davis in New York seeking sailors. They offered lots of money,–thousands,–and I went along, smuggled into the South by an underground road.”
Stroganoff threw away the shreds of tobacco, now a mere fiery wafer that threatened his mouth’s seine of silver strands. He put his hand in his Prince Albert and scratched his stomach.
“Mr. Stroganoff,” I queried, with a moral tide rising, “how could you join in a life-and-death issue like that of the Civil War, and kill men without hatred of their cause in your heart?”
He patted my shoulder.
“My dear young American,” he replied, “you join anything, even a sheriff’s posse, into which you are dragged, and have a bullet from the other side slit your ear, or a round shot bang against your deck, and you’ll soon convince yourself that you are in the right, or, anyway, that your adversary is a scoundrel. I handled a gun on the Merrimac in Hampton Roads when that cheese-box of a Monitor rattled her solid shot on our slippery sides. I was two years in that damned un-Civil War, and as I started on the Southern side, I stayed on it. I left the navy to go with John Mosby and burn houses. When the war was over, and I recovered from my wound, I went to ‘Frisco and crossed to Siberia, and thus back to Moscow. No, I never was an exile in Siberia or in a Russian prison. I knew and worked for the leaders of the old Nihilists. I was with them till I knew them, and then I saw they were selfish and fakers. I knew the socialist chiefs in France and Germany, the fathers of the present movement there. I was red-hot for the cause until I knew them, and I quit.”
He sat meditatively for a few moments.
“I’m all but eighty years old,” the raider of the ’60’s continued sorrowfully. “I work now for Chinese, preparing their mail, their custom-house papers, and orders. I scrape along like a watch-dog in a sausage factory, getting sufficient to eat, but fearful all the time that the job will kill me. Most of the time I live a few kilometers from Papeete, toward Fa’a, and come in to town about steamer-time. I sleep in the chicken-coop or anywhere. I make about forty francs a month.” He stamped upon the grass. “I take it you are a journalist, and, do you know, what is needed here most is publicity. Graft permeates the whole scheme. Mind you, there are no secrets. You could not whisper anything to a cocoanut-tree but that the entire island would know it to-morrow. But there is no open publicity. Start a newspaper!”
“In what language?” I demanded, interested.
“Huh? That’s it. If in French, only the French would read it; and if in Tahitian, the French won’t touch it; and English is known only by the Chinese and the few British and Americans here. I hate that Tahitian. I don’t know a word of it after seventeen years. Say what you will, Roosevelt made them stand around. I liked him for many things; but, after all, the old order must stand, and Root is the boy for me. This fellow Wilson is a regular pedagogue.”
“But they have newspapers here?” I asked.
“Newspapers? They call them that.”
He stood up and searched in the pockets of his voluminous coat, which he opened. I saw that the lining was of silk, but now worn and torn. He brought out a roll of papers.
“Here is ‘La Tribune de Tahiti,'” he said. “It is edited by Jean Delpit, the lawyer whose offices are next to the Bellevue Restaurant. It’s a monthly, published in San Francisco, and has a brief summary of world events, besides articles on the administrative affairs of Tahiti. It’s against the Government. Then there’s ‘Le Liberal,’ a socialist journal, with Eugene Brunschwig editor, which pours hot shot into the Government. Look at his announcement! Do you understand that? He is fierce. He is an anarchist and wants to be bought up. Of course he is attacking from outside Tahiti.
“There is no newspaper printed here except the ‘Journal Officiel’ which, of course, is not a newspaper, but a gazette of governmental notices, etc. The Government has its own printing-office, but if these other, the ‘Tribune’ and the ‘Liberal,’ had establishments here, they would be raided and closed, for they would hardly be allowed to criticize the Government as harshly as they do. The ‘Tribune’ is in French and Tahitian, the ‘Liberal’ and the ‘Journal Officiel’ in French. One time it was recommended that the official paper might be more popular if it had some fiction for the natives, so they printed a translation of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ but everybody laughed, so it was dropped.
“The Mormons have the best paper here. It is a monthly, too. There is plenty need here for a fearless newspaper. The faults, weaknesses, and venality of the Government call for publicity, but I’m afraid the journalist might soon find himself in prison. You can do nothing. The fault is in this damned climate–la fievre du corail. Paul Deschanel, senator of France, who wrote a book on this island without ever leaving his chair in Paris, says:
“In presence of the apparent facts one is forced to ask himself if there is not in the climate of this enchanted Tahiti, in the soft air that one breathes, a force sweet but invincible which at length penetrates the soul, enervates the will and enfeebles all sense of usefulness or right, or the least energy necessary to make them triumph.
“It is this spirit, without any harmony, bereft of all real cordiality between neighbors, of family and family, which one must find in the ambient air and which is called the coral fever.”
“It torments these French, former sailors or petty officials gone into trade or speculation, with delusions and ambitions of grandeur. There is no remedy. The King of Apamama said it all when he divided the whites into three classes, ‘First, him cheat a litty; second, him cheat plenty; and third, him cheat too much.'”
Stroganoff got on his feet, rubbed his knees to limber them, and began to move off slowly toward Fa’a, his place of abode.
“But, Mr. Stroganoff,” I called to him, “you said all that about the Tahitians, also.”
The Russian octogenarian drew an over-ripe mango from his skirt, and bit into it, with dire results to his whiskers and coat,–it should be eaten only in a bathtub,–and replied wearily:
“I except nobody here.”
Chapter VI
The Cercle Bougainville–Officialdom in Tahiti–My first visit to the Bougainville–Skippers and merchants–A song and a drink–The flavor of the South Seas–Rumors of war.
In Papeete there were two social clubs, the Cercle Bougainville and the Cercle Militaire. Even in Papeete, which has not half as many people as work in a certain building in New York, there is a bureaucracy, and the Cercle Militaire, in a park near the executive mansion on the rue de Rivoli, is its arcanum. Only members of the Government may belong, and a few others whose proposals must be stamped by the political powers. There is a garden, with a small library, but not many read in this climate, and the atmosphere of the Cercle Militaire was tedious. The governor himself and the black procureur de la Republique, born in Martinique, the secretary-general, naval officers, and the file of the upper office-holders frequent the shade of the mangos and the palms, but themselves confessed it deadly dull there. Bureaucracy is ever mediocre, ever jealous, and in Papeete the feuds among the whites were as bitter as in a monastery or convent. Every man crouched to leap over his fellow, if not by position, at least by acclaim. None dared to discuss political affairs openly, but nothing else was talked of. It was a round of whispered charges and recriminations and audible compliments. A few jolly chaps, doctors or naval lieutenants, passed the bottle and laughed at the others.
Every now and then a new governor supplanted the incumbent, who returned to France, and a few of the chiefer officials were changed; but the most of them were Tahitian French by birth or long residence. Republics are wretched managers of colonies, and monarchies brutal exploiters of subject peoples. Politics controlled in the South Seas, as in the Philippines, India, and Egypt. Precedence at public gatherings often caused hatreds. The procureur was second in rank here, the governor, of course, first, the secretary-general third, and the attorney-general fourth. When the secretary-general was not at functions, the wife of the governor must be handed in to dinner and dances by the negro procureur. This angered the British and American consuls and merchants, and the French inferior to him in social status, although the Martinique statesman was better educated and more cultivated in manners than they.
The indolence of mind and body that few escape in this soft, delicious air, the autocracy of the governing at such a distance from France, and the calls of Paris for the humble taxes of the Tahitians, robbed the island of any but the most pressing melioration. The business of government in these archipelagoes was bizarre comedy-drama, with Tartarins at the front of the stage, and a cursing or slumbrous audience.
Count Polonsky, a Russian-born Frenchman, appeared in court to answer to the charge of letting his automobile engine run when no one was in the car. He was fined a franc, which he would take from his pocket then and there, but must wait many days to pay, until circumlocution had its round, six weeks after the engine had been at fault. I was assessed two sous duty on a tooth-brush. I reached for the coins.
“Mais, non” said the prepose de le douane, “pas maintenant. No hurry. We will inform you by post.”
These officials had pleasing manners, as do almost all Frenchmen, and though they uttered many sacres against the home Government and that of these islands, they were fiercely chauvinistic toward foreigners, as are all nationals abroad where jingoism partakes of self-aggrandizement. The American consul, a new appointee, addressed the customs clerk in his only tongue, Iowan, and received no response. I spoke to him in French, and the prepose replied in mixed French and English, out of compliment to me. The consul was enraged, considering himself and the American eagle affronted. I interposed, but the customs-man answered coldly in English:
“This is a French possession, and French is the language, or Tahitian. I speak both. Why don’t you? You are supposedly an educated man.”
The Stars and Stripes were unfolded in a breeze of hot words that betrayed the consul’s belief in the prepose’s sinister ancestry and in eternal punishment. No entente cordiale could ever be cemented after that lingual blast.
The consuls all had honorary memberships in the Cercle Militaire, and none of them entered the Cercle Bougainville, it not being de rigueur. I had a carte d’invite personelle to that club, and there I went with roused curiosity to hear the other sides of questions already settled for me by the amiable officials and officers on the rue de Rivoli. I had been warned against the Cercle Bougainville by staid pensioners as being the resort of commoners and worse, of British and American ruffians, of French vulgarians, and of Chinese smugglers. This advice made a seductive advertisement of the club to me, anxious to know everything real and unveiled about the life here, and to find a contrast to the ennui of the official temple.
A consul said to me: “Look out for some of those gamblers in that Bougainville joint! They’ll skin you alive. They drink like conger-eels.”
M. Leboucher, my fellow-passenger on the Noa-Noa, sent me the card to the Jacobin resort, and I got in the habit of going there just before the meat breakfast and before dinner. I found that the warning of the aristocratic bureaucrats was of a piece with their philosophy and manners, hollow, hypocritical, and calculated to deny me the only real human companionship I could endure. From about eleven to one o’clock and from five until seven, and in the evenings, the Cercle Bougainville held more interesting and merry white skins than the remainder of Tahiti. Merchants and managers of enterprises and shops, skippers of the schooners that comb the Dangerous Archipelago and the dark Marquesas for pearl and shell and copra, vanilla- and pearl-buyers, planters, and lesser bureaucrats, idlers or retired adventurers living in Tahiti, and tourists made the club for a few hours a day a polyglot exchange of current topics between man and man, a place of initiation and of judgment of business deals, a precious refuge against smug bores and a sanctuary for refreshment of body and soul with cooling drinks. Naturally, every one played cards, dominoes, or dice for the honor of signing the chits, and it goes without saying that one might roar out an oath against the Government and go unscathed. Even in the Bougainville lines were drawn; only heads of commercial affairs were admitted. It was bourgeois absolutely, but bosses could not imbibe and play freely in the presence of their employees whom they might have to reprimand severely for bad habits, nor scold them for inattention to trade when their employers spent precious hours at ecarte or razzle-dazzle.
The club was within fifty feet of the lagoon, close to the steamship quay, its broad verandas overlooking the fulgent reef and the quiet waters within it. In odd hours one might find Joseph, the steward, angling on the coral wall for the black and gold fish, and a shout from the balcony would bring him to the swift succor of a thirsty member. During the four hours before the late dejeuner and dinner, he had incessant work to answer the continuous calls.
When Joseph became overwhelmed with orders he summoned his family from secret quarters in the rear, and father, mother, and children squeezed, shook, and poured for the impatient crowd.
When the monthly mail between America and Australasia was in, few packs of cards were sold, for every one was busied with letters and orders for goods. But only three or four days a month were so disturbed, and for nearly four weeks of the month Papeete lolled at ease, with endless time for games and stimulants. Leisure, the most valuable coin of humanity in the tropics, was spent by white or brown in pleasure or idleness with a prodigality that would have made Samuel Smiles weep.
The entrance to the Cercle Bougainville was very plain, with no name-plate, as had the Militaire,–a mere hole in the front wall of Leboucher’s large furniture shop. One could be going along the street in full view of important and respectable people, and suddenly disappear. A few steep stairs, a quick turn, and one was on the broad balcony, with easy-chairs and firm tables, and bells to hand for Joseph’s ear.
In a room off the balcony there was a billiard-table, the cloth patched or missing in many spots, and with cues whose tips had long since succumbed to perpetual moisture. A few old French books were on a shelf, and a naughty review or two of Paris on a dusty table. Undoubtedly, this club had begun as a mariner’s association, and there was yet a decided flavor of the sea about it. Indeed, all Tahiti was of the sea, and all but the mass of natives who stayed in their little homes were at times sailors, and all whites passengers on long voyages. Everything paid tribute to the vast ocean, and all these men had an air of ships and the dangers of the waves.
Nautical almanacs, charts, and a barometer were conspicuous, and often were laid beside the social glasses for proof in hot arguments. Occasionally an old Chinese or two, financiers, pearl-dealers, labor bosses, or merchants, drained a glass of eau de vie and smoked a cigarette there. One sensed an atmosphere of mystery, of secret arrangements between traders, or hard endeavors for circumvention of competitors in the business of the dispersed islands of French Oceania.
A delightful incident enlivened my first visit, and gave me an acquaintance with a group of habitues, When I reached the balcony I saw a group of Frenchmen at a table who were singing at the top of their voices. I sat down at the farthest table and ordered a Dr. Funk.
I did not look at them, for I felt de trop; but suddenly I heard them humming the air of “John Brown’s Body,” and singing fugitive words.
“Grory, grory, harreruah!” came to my ears, and later, “Wayd’ ‘un S’ut’ in le land de cottin.”
They were making fun of me I thought, and turned my head away. It would not do to get angry with half a dozen jovial Frenchmen.
“All Coons Look alike to Me,” I recognized, though they sang but fragments of the text.
Through a corner of my eye I saw them all anxiously staring at me; then one of the merrymakers came over to me. I had a fleeting thought of a row before he bowed low and said in English:
“If you please, we make good time, we sing your songs, and must be happy to drink with you.”
He announced himself as M. Edmond Brault, chief clerk of the office of the secretary-general, fresh-faced, glowing and with a soul for music and for joy. He was so smiling, so ingenuous, that to refuse him would have been rank discourtesy. I joined the group.
“I am twenty-eight times married this day,” said M. Brault, “and my friends and I make very happy.”
The good husband was rejoicing on his wedding anniversary, and I could but accept the champagne he ordered. “I am great satisfaction to drink you,” he said. “My friends drink my wife and me.”
We toasted his admirable wife, we toasted the two republics; Lafayette, Rochambeau, and Chateaubriand.
“Ah, le biftek!” said M. Leboucher.
We toasted Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and then we sang for an hour. M. Brault was the leading composer of Tahiti. He was the creator of Tahitian melodies, as Kappelmeister Berger was of Hawaiian. For our delectation Brault sang ten of his songs between toasts. I liked best “Le Bon Roi Pomare,” the words of one of the many stanzas being:
Il etait un excellent roi
Dont on ne dit rien dans l’histoire, Qui ne connaissait qu’une Loi:
Celle de chanter, rire, et boire. Fervent disciple de Bacchus
Il glorifiait sa puissance,
Puis, sacrifiait a Venus
Les loisirs de son existence.
REFRAIN:
Toujours joyeux, d’humeur gauloise, Et parfois meme un peu grivoise
Le genereux Roi Pomare
Par son peuple est fort regrette. S’il avait eu de l’eloquence
Il aurait gouverne la France!
Mais nos regrets sont superflus;
Puisqu’il est mort, n’en parlons plus!
“Ah, he was a chic type, that last King of Tahiti,” said M. Brault, who had written so many praiseful, merry verses about him. “He would have a hula about him all the time. He loved the national dance. He would sit or lie and drink all day and night. He loved to see young people drink and enjoy themselves. Ah, those were gay times! Dancing the nights away. Every one crowned with flowers, and rum and champagne like the falls of Fautaua. The good king Pomare would keep up the upaupa, the hula dance, for a a week at a time, until they were nearly all dead from drink and fatigue. Mon dieu! La vie est triste maintenant.”
Before we parted we sang the “Marseillaise” and the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Nobody knew the words, I least of any; so we la-la-la’d through it, and when we parted for luncheon, we went down the crooked stairway arm in arm, still giving forth snatches of “Le Bon Roi Pomare” in honor of our host:
Mais, s’il aimait tant les plaisirs, Les chants joyeux, la vie en rose,
Le plus ardent de ses desirs,
Pour lui la plus heureuse chose,
Fut toujours que l’humanite
Regnat au sein de son Royaume;
De meme que l’Egalite
Sous son modeste toit de chaume.
Hallman, with whom I journeyed on the Noa-Noa, dropped into the Cercle Bougainville occasionally, but he was ordinarily too much occupied with his schemes of trade. Besides, he had only one absorbing vice other than business, and with merely wine and song to be found at the club, Hallman went there but seldom, and only to talk about pearl-shell, copra, and the profits of schooner voyages. However, through him I met another group who spoke English, and who were not of Latin blood. They were Llewellyn, an islander–Welsh and Tahitian; Landers, a New Zealander; Pincher, an Englishman; David, McHenry, and Brown, Americans; Count Polonsky, the Russo-Frenchman who was fined a franc; and several captains of vessels who sailed between Tahiti and the Pacific coast of the United States or in these latitudes.
The Noa-Noa was overdue from New Zealand, by way of Raratonga, and her tardiness was the chief subject of conversation at our first meeting. A hundred times a day was the semaphore on the hill spied at for the signal of the Noa-Noa’s sighting. High up on the expansive green slope which rises a few hundred feet behind the Tiare Hotel is a white pole, and on this are hung various objects which tell the people of Papeete that a vessel is within view of the ancient sentinel of the mount. An elaborate code in the houses of all persons of importance, and in all stores and clubs, interprets these symbols. The merchants depended to a considerable extent upon this monthly liner between San Francisco and Wellington and way ports, and all were interested in the mail and food supplies expected by the Noa-Noa. Cablegrams sent from any part of the world to New Zealand or San Francisco were forwarded by mail on these steamships. Tahiti was entirely cut off from the great continents except by vessel. There was no cable, and no wireless, on this island, nor even at the British island of Raratonga, two days’ steaming from Papeete. The steamships had wireless systems, and kept in communication with San Francisco or with New Zealand ports for a few days after departure.
There were many guesses at the cause of the delay.
“Nothing but war!” said the French post-office clerk who sat at another table, with his glass of Pernoud. “Germany and England have come to blows. Now that accursed nation of beer-swillers will get their lesson.”
The subject was seriously discussed, the armaments of the two powers quoted, and the certainty of Germany’s defeat predicted, the Frenchman asserting vehemently that France would aid England if necessary, or to get back Alsace-Lorraine. There were gatherings all over Papeete, the war rumor having been made an alleged certainty by some inexplicable communication to an unnamed merchant.
The natives hoped fervently that the war was between France and Germany, and that France would be defeated. After generations of rule by France, the vanquished still felt an aversion to their conquerors here, as in the Holy Land when Herod ruled.
“I hope France get his,” said a chief, aside, to me.
The mail’s delay upset all business. Letters closed on the day the liner was expected were reopened. For three days the girls at Lovaina’s had worn their best peignoirs, and several times donned shoes and stockings to go to the quay. Passengers for San Francisco who had packed their trunks had unpacked them. The air of expectancy which Papeete wore for a day or two before steamer-day had been so heated by postponement that nerves came to the surface.
Tahiti was a place of no exact knowledge. Few residents knew the names of the streets. Some of the larger business houses had no signs to indicate the firms’ names or what they sold. Hardly any one knew the names of the trees or the flowers or fishes or shells.
A story once told, even facts thoroughly well known, changed with each repetition. A month after an occurrence one might search in vain for the actuality. It was more difficult to learn truthful details than anywhere I had been. The French are niggardly of publications concerning Tahiti. An almanac once a year contained a few figures and facts of interest, but with no newspapers within thousands of miles, every person was his own journal, and prejudices and interest dictated all oral records.
McHenry hushed war reports to talk about Brown, an American merchant who had left the club a moment before, after a Bourbon straight alone at the bar. McHenry was a trader, mariner, adventurer, gambler, and boaster. Rough and ready, witty, profane, and obscene, he bubbled over with tales of reef and sea, of women and men he had met, of lawless tricks on natives, of storm and starvation, and of his claimed illicit loves. Loud-mouthed, bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped by a hundred sordid deeds, he must get the center of attention by any hazard.
“Brown’s purty stuck up now,” he said acridly. “I remember the time when he didn’t have a pot to cook in. He had thirty Chile dollars a month wages. We come on the beach the same day in the same ship. His shoes were busted out, and he was crazy to get money for a new girl he had. There was a Chink had eighteen tins of vanilla-beans worth about two hundred American dollars each. He got the Chink to believe he could handle the vanilla for him, and got hold of it, and then out by the vegetable garden Brown hit the poor devil of a Chink over the nut with a club.”
McHenry got up from the table, and with Llewellyn’s walking-stick showed exactly how the blow was struck. He brought down the cane so viciously against the edge of the table that he spilled our rum punches.
“Mac,” exclaimed Llewellyn, testily, as he shot him a hot glance from the melancholy eyes under his black thatch of brows, “behave yourself! You know you’re lying.”
McHenry laughed sourly, and went on:
“I was chums with Brown then, and when I caught up to him,–I was walkin’ behind them,–he asked me to see if the Chink was dead. I went back to where he had tumbled him. He was layin’ on his back in a kind o’ ditch, and he was white instead o’ yeller. He was white as Lyin’ Bill’s schooner. How would you ‘a’ done? Well, to protect that dirty pup Brown, I covered him over with leaves from head to foot–big bread-fruit and cocoanut-leaves. He never showed up again, and Brown had the vanilla. That’s how he got his start, and, so help me God! I never got a franc from the business.”
There was venom in McHenry’s tone, and he looked at me, the newcomer, to see what impression he had made. The others said not a word of comment, and it may have been an often-told tale by him. He had emptied his glass of the potent Martinique rum four or five times.
“Was the Chinaman sure dead when you put the leaves over him?” I asked, influenced by his staring eyes.
McHenry grinned foully.
“Aye, man, you want too much,” he replied. “I say his face was white, and he was on his back in the marsh. If he was alive, the leaves didn’t finish him, and if he was croaked, it didn’t matter. I was obligin’ a friend. You’d have done as much.” He took up his glass and muttered dramatically, “A few leaves for a friend.”
I shuddered, but Landers leaned over the table and said to me, sotto voce:
“McHenry’s tellin’ his usual bloody lie. Brown got the vanilla all right, but what he did was to have the bloomin’ Chink consign it to him proper’, and not give him a receipt. Then he denied all knowledge of it, and it bein’ all the bleedin’ Chinaman had, he died of a broken heart–with maybe too many pipes of opium to help him on a bit. McHenry and Pincher are terrible liars. They call Pincher ‘Lyin’ Bill,’ though I ‘d take his word in trade or about schooners any day.”
I had been introduced to a Doctor Funk by Count Polonsky, who told me it was made of a portion of absinthe, a dash of grenadine,–a syrup of the pomegranate fruit,–the juice of two limes, and half a pint of siphon water. Dr. Funk of Samoa, who had been a physician to Robert Louis Stevenson, had left the receipt for the concoction when he was a guest of the club. One paid half a franc for it, and it would restore self-respect and interest in one’s surroundings when even Tahiti rum failed.
“Zat was ze drink I mix for Paul Gauguin, ze peintre sauvage, here before he go to die in les isles Marquises,” remarked Levy, the millionaire pearl-buyer, as he stood by the table to be introduced to me.
“Absinthe seul he general’ take,” said Joseph, the steward.
“I bid fifty thousand francs for one of Gauguin’s paintings in Paris last year,” Count Polonsky said as he claimed his game of ecarte against Tati, the chief of Papara district. “I failed to get it, too. I bought many here for a few thousand francs each before that.”
“Blow me!” cried Pincher, the skipper of the Morning Star. “‘E was a bleedin’ ijit. I fetched ‘im absinthe many a time in Atuona. ‘E said Dr. Funk was a bloomin’ ass for inventin’ a drink that spoiled good Pernoud with water. ‘E was a rare un. ‘E was like Stevenson ‘at wrote ‘Treasure Island.’ Comes into my pub in Taiohae in the Marquesas Islands did Stevenson off’n his little Casco, and says he, ”Ave ye any whisky,’ ‘e says, ”at ‘asn’t been watered? These South Seas appear to ‘ave flooded every bloomin’ gallon,’ ‘e says. This painter Gauguin wasn’t such good company as Stevenson, because ‘e parleyvoud, but ‘e was a bloody worker with ‘is brushes at Atuona. ‘E was cuttin’ wood or paintin’ all the time.”
“He was a damn’ fool,” said Hallman, who had come in to the Cercle to take away Captain Pincher. “I lived close to him at Atuona all the time he was there till he died. He was bughouse. I don’t know much about painting, but if you call that crazy stuff of Gauguin’s proper painting, then I’m a furbelowed clam.”
“Eh bien,” Count Polonsky said, with a smile of the man of superior knowledge, “he is the greatest painter of this period, and his pictures are bringing high prices now, and will bring the highest pretty soon. I have bought every one I could to hold for a raise.”
Polonsky was a study in sheeny hues. He was twenty-seven, his black and naturally curled hair was very thin, there were eight or nine teeth that answered no call from his meat, and he wore in his right eyesocket a round glass, with no rim or string, held by a puckering of cheek and brow, giving him a quizzical, stage-like stare, and twisting his nose into a ripple of tiny wrinkles. He weighed, say, one hundred pounds or less, was bent, but with a fresh complexion and active step. I saw him rise naked from his cot one morning, and the first thing he put on was the rimless monocle. The natives, who name every one, called him “Matatitiahoe,” “the one-windowed man.” He had journeyed about the world, poked into some queer places, and in Japan had himself tattooed. On his narrow chest he had a terrible legendary god of Nippon, and on his arms a cock and a skeleton, the latter with a fan and a lantern. On his belly was limned a nude woman. He had certain other decorations the fame of which had been bruited wide so that a keen curiosity existed to see them, and they were discussed in whispers by white femininity and with many “Aucs!” of astonishment by the brown. They were Pompeiian friezes in their unconventionality of subject and treatment.
Llewellyn, McHenry, David, and I accompanied the count to his residence on the outskirts of Papeete to taste a vintage of Burgundy he had sent him from Beaune. Like most modern houses in Tahiti, his was solely utilitarian, and was built by a former American consul. It exactly ministered to the comforts of a demanding European exquisite. The house was framed in wide verandas, and was in a magnificent grove of cocoanut-trees affording beauty and shade, with extensive fields of sugar-cane on the other side of the road, and a glimpse of the beach and lagoon a little distance away. A singing brook ran past the door. The bedrooms were large and open to every breeze, and the tables for dining and amusement mostly set upon the verandas.
Polonsky’s toilet-table was covered with gold boxes and bottles and brushes; scents and powders and pastes. If he moved out, Gaby de Lys might have moved in and lacked nothing. He was a boulevardier, his clothes from Paris, conforming not at all to the sartorial customs of Tahiti, and his varnished boots and alpine hat, with his saffron automobile, marked him as a person. In that he resembled Higby, an Englishman in Papeete, who wore the evening dress of London whenever a steamship came in, though it might be noon, and on the king’s birthday and other British feasts put it on when he awoke. He was the only man who went to dinner at the Tiare in the funeral garb of society. He said he was setting up a proper standard in Tahiti. It was suspected really that he was short of clothes, with perhaps only one or two cotton suits, and that when those were soiled he had to resort to full dress during the laundering.
While David and I inspected the house and grounds, McHenry and Llewellyn sat at the wine. Polonsky had a curious and wisely chosen household. His butler was a Javanese, his chef a Quan-tung Chinese, his valet a Japanese, his chambermaid a Martinique negress, and his chauffeur an American expert. These had nothing in common and could not ally themselves to cheat him, he said.
As I came back to the front veranda McHenry and Llewellyn were talking excitedly.
“I’ve had my old lady nineteen years,” said McHenry, boastfully, “and she wouldn’t speak to me if she met me on the streets of Papeete. She wouldn’t dare to in public until I gave her the high sign. You’re a bloody fool makin’ equals of the natives, and throwin’ away money on those cinema girls the way you do.”
This incensed Llewellyn, who was of chiefly Tahitian blood, and who claimed kings of Wales as his ancestors. Although extremely aristocratic in his attitude toward strangers, his native strain made him resent McHenry’s rascally arrogance as a reflection upon his mother’s race.
“Shut up, Mac!” he half shouted. “You talk too much. If it hadn’t been for that same old lady of yours, you’d have died of delirium-tremens or fallen into the sea long ago.”
“Aye,” said the trader, meditatively, “that vahine has saved my life, but I’m not goin’ to sacrifice my dignity as a white man. If ye let go everything, the damn’ natives’ll walk over ye, and ye’ll make nothin’ out o’ them.”
Lovaina had occasionally called me Dixey, and had explained that I was the “perfec’ im’ge” of a man of that name, and that he owned a little cutter which traded to Raiaroa, on which atoll he lived. I walked like him, was of the same size, and had the “same kin’ funny face.”
She piqued my curiosity, and so when I found him at the round table of the Polonsky-Llewellyn group at the Cercle Bougainville, I looked him over narrowly. His name was Dixon,–Lovaina never got a name right,–an Englishman, a wanderer, with an Eton schooling, short, solidly built, with a bluff jaw and a keen, blue eye. He was not good-looking. He had learned the nickname given me, and was in such a happy frame of mind that he ordered drinks for the club.
“I’m lucky to be here at all,” he said seriously. “I have a seven-ton cutter, and left the Paumotus four days ago for Papeete. We had eight tons of copra in the hold, filling it up within a foot of the hatch. Eight miles off Point Venus the night before last, at eleven o’clock, we hoped for a bit of wind to reach port by morning. It was calm, and we were all asleep but the man at the wheel, when a waterspout came right out of the clear sky,–so the steersman said,–and struck us hard. We were swamped in a minute. The water fell on us like your Niagara. Christ! We gave up for gone, all of us, the other five all kanakas. We heeled over until the deck was under water,–of course we’ve got no freeboard at all,–and suddenly a gale sprung up. We pulled in the canvas, but to no purpose. Under a bare pole we seemed every minute to be going under completely. We have no cabin, and all we could do was to lay flat on the deck in the water, and hold on to anything we could grab. The natives prayed, by God! They ‘re Catholics, and they remembered it then. The mate wanted to throw the copra overboard. I was willing, but I said, ‘What for? We’re dead men, and it’ll do no good. She can’t stand up even empty.’ We stayed swamped that way all night, expecting to be drowned any minute, and I myself said to the Lord–I was a chorister once–that if I had done anything wrong in my life, I was sorry–“
“But you knew you had?” I interposed.
“Of course I did, but I wasn’t going to rub it in on myself in that fix. I knew He knew all about me. My father was a curate in Devon. Well, we pulled through all right, because here I am, and the copra’s on the dock. What do you think–the wind died away completely, and we had to sweep in to Papeete.”
I touched his glass with mine. He was very ingenuous, a four-square man.
“Did the prayers have anything to do with your pulling through and saving the copra?” I questioned, curious.
“I don’t know. I didn’t make any fixed promises. I was bloody well scared, and I meant what I said about being sorry. But that’s all gone. Let’s drink this up and have another. Joseph!”
Helas! the waterspout did not harm my twin half so much as the rum-spout, which soon had him three sheets in the wind and his rudder unmanageable. When I went down the rue de Rivoli that night to the Cercle Militaire, he had drifted into the Cocoanut House, and was sitting on a fallen tree telling of the storm to a woman in a scarlet gown with a hibiscus-blossom in her hair. I got him by the arm, and with an expressed desire to know more of the details of the escape, steered him to the Annexe, where he had a room.
A good sort was Dixon. He had in the Paumotus a little store, a dark mother-girl of Raiaroa who waited for him, and a new baby. He had been only a year in the group. He referred to “my family” with honest pride.
The captains of the Lurline and the O. M. Kellogg were at the club. The Lurline was twenty-seven years old, and the Kellogg, too, high up in her teens, if not twenties. Their skippers were Americans, the Kellogg’s master as dark as a negro, burned by thirty years of tropical sun.
“I used to live in Hawaii in the eighties,” he said. “I used to pass the pipe there in those days. There’d be only one pipe among a dozen kanakas, and each had a draw or so in turn. They have that custom in the Marquesas, too, and so had the American Indians.”
I walked with the Kellogg’s skipper to his vessel, moored close to the quay in front of the club. He gave an order to the mate, who told him to go to sheol. The mate had been ashore.
“Come aboard,” cried the mate, “and I will knock your block off.”
The whole waterfront heard the challenge. Stores were deserted to witness the imminent fight.
The dark-faced captain ascended the gang-plank, and walked to the forecastle head, where the mate was directing the making taut a line.
“Now,” said the skipper, a foot from the mate, “knock!”
The mate hesitated. That would be a crime; he would go to jail and the captain would be delighted.
The master taunted him:
“Knock my block off! Touch my block, and I’ll whip you so your mother wouldn’t know you, you dirty, drunken, son of a sea-cook!”
The mate looked at him angrily, but uncertainly. He heard the laughter and the cheers of the bystanders on the quay and in the embowered street. He looked down at the deck, and he caught sight of a capstan-bar, which he gazed at longingly. Any blow would send him to prison, but why not for a sheep instead of a lamb?
He hesitated, and lifted his eyes to the black brow of the skipper, lowering within touch.
“Make fast your line about that cannon!” said the master, sharply.
The sailors waited joyfully for the fray, and the Raratonga stevedores on other vessels stopped their work. But nothing happened.
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the mate, and shouted the order to the men ashore. The captain regarded him balefully, muttered a few words, and returned to the club for a Dr. Funk. That medical man ranked here above Colonel Rickey, who invented the gin-rickey in America.
Herr Funk was better known in the Cercle Bougainville than Charcot or Lister or Darwin. The doctor part of the drink’s name made it seem almost like a prescription, and often, when amateurs sought to evade a second or third, the old-timers laughed at their fears of ill results, and said:
“That old Doctor Funk knew what he was about. Why, he kept people alive on that mixture. It’s like mother’s milk.”
Chapter VII
The Noa-Noa comes to port–Papeete en fete–Rare scene at the Tiare Hotel–The New Year celebrated–Excitement at the wharf–Battle of the Limes and Coal.
The Noa-Noa came in after many days of suspense, during which rumors and reports of war grew into circumstantial statements of engagements at sea and battles on land. A mysterious vessel was said to have slipped in at night with despatches for the governor. All was sensation and canard, on dit and oui dire, and all was proved false when the liner came through the passage in the reef. Nothing had happened to disturb the peace of nations, but a dock strike in Auckland had tied up the ship. The relief of mind of the people of Papeete caused a wave of joy to pass over them. Business men and officials, tourists who expected to leave for America and the outside world on the Noa-Noa, overflowed with evidence of their delight. The consuls of the powers met at the Cercle Militaire the governor, and laughed hectically at the absurd balloon of tittle-tattle which had been pricked by the Noa-Noa’s facts. There had been absolutely nothing to the rumors but the fears or the antipathies of nationals in Tahiti.
It was the holiday season, the New Year at hand, and, moreover, there was added cause for rejoicing in the safety of the Saint Michel, a French-owned inter-island steamship which had been missing six weeks. She had left one of the Paumotu atolls and failed to reach her next port, thirty miles away. Rumor had sent her to the bottom. She was a crank vessel, with a perpetual list, and a roll of twenty-five degrees in the quietest sea; the dread of all compelled by affairs to take passage on her.
“She’s sunk; rolled over too much, and turned turtle,” was the verdict at the Cercle Bougainville. Her agents had sent the Cholita, a small power schooner, to go over the Saint Michel’s course, and find trace of her, if possible. Imagine the excitement along the waterfront when, almost coincident with the sighting of the Noa-Noa, the Saint Michel appeared, pulled by the Cholita. Familiar faces of passengers appeared on her deck as she made fast to the quay, holding cigarettes as if they had waked up after a night in their own beds. The Cholita had found the Saint Michel at the Marquesas Islands, whither she had drifted after losing her rudder on a rock. After a month lying inert at the Marquesas, the Cholita had taken hold and dragged the crippled Saint back to Papeete.
The joy and surprise of the families and friends of the passengers and the crew must have the vent usual here, and what with the Noa-Noa’s crew of amateur sailors, firemen, and yachtsman, and six licensed captains, taking the places of the strikers, the town was filled with pleasure-seekers. A high mass of thanksgiving at the cathedral was followed by a day of explanations, anathemas upon the owners of the Saint Michel, and the striking labor-unions, and of music, dancing, and toasts.
New Year’s eve, two picture shows, hulas, and the festivities of the wedding of Cowan, the prize-fighter, brought in a throng from the districts to add to the Papeete population and the voyagers.
The streets were a blaze of colored gowns and flower-crowned girls and women. The quays were lined with singing and playing country folk. Small boats and canoes were arriving every few minutes during the afternoon with natives who preferred the water route to the Broom Road. Cowan was a favorite boxer, and shortly to face the noted Christchurch Kid, of Christchurch, New Zealand, whose fist was described on the bill-boards as “a rock thrown by a mighty slinger.” Cowan, a half-Polynesian, was beloved for his island blood, and was marrying into a Tahitian family of note and means. The nuptials at the church were preceded by a triumphal procession of the bride and groom in an automobile, with a score of other cars following, the entire party gorgeously adorned with wreaths,–hei in Tahitian,–and the vehicles lavishly decorated with sugar-cane and bamboo tassels. The band of the cinema led the entourage, and played a free choice of appropriate music, “Lohengrin” before the governor’s palace, and “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night” as they passed Lovaina’s. The company sang lustily, and toasts to the embracing couple were drunk generously from spouting champagne-bottles as the cortege circled the principal streets.
There was rare life at Lovaina’s, for besides all the diners in ordinary and extraordinary in the salle-a-manger, Stevens, the London stockbroker, had a retired table set for the American, British, and German consuls, and their wives. The highest two officials of France in this group, Messieurs, l’Inspecteurs des Colonies, were there, eating solemnly alone, as demanded by their exalted rank, and their mission of criticism. They glanced down often at their broad bosoms to see that their many orders were on straight, to note the admiration of lesser officialdom, and to make eyes at the women. Their long and profuse black beards were hidden by their napkins, which all Frenchmen of parts hereabouts tuck in their collars, and draw up to their mouths, a precaution which, when omitted, is seen to have been founded on an etiquette utilitarian and esthetic.
The company was complex. At a table opposite me sat the juge inferieur and the daughter of the Chinese cook at the Hotel Central, a smart, slender woman with burning eyes, and with them, in full uniform, were two French civil officials, who wore, as customary, clothes like soldiers. One unfamiliar with their regalia might mistake, as I did, a pharmacist for an admiral. Mary, the cook’s half-Tahitian daughter, was in elaborate European dress, with a gilded barret of baroque pearls in her copious, ebon tresses, and with red kid shoes buckled in silver and blister pearls.
The son of Prince Hinoe, who would have been the King of Tahiti had the dynasty continued to reign, had a dozen chums at a table, oafs from seventeen to twenty, and with the fish course they began to chant. The captain of the Saint Michel was with Woronick, the pearl-buyer, who had made the fearful trip to the Marquesas with him. There was Heezonorweelee, as the natives call the Honorable Walter Williams, the most famous dentist within five thousand miles, and the most distinguished white man of Tahiti; Landers; Polonsky; David; McHenry; Schlyter, the Swedish tailor; Jones and Mrs. Jones, the husband, head of a book company in Los Angeles; a Barbary Coast singer and her man; a demirep of Chicago and her loved one; three Tahitian youths with wreaths; the post-office manager, and with him the surgeon of the hospital; a notary’s clerk, the governor’s private secretary; the administrateur of the Marquesas Islands, Margaret, Lurline and Mathilde, Lena, and Lucy, lovely part-Tahitian girls who clerked in stores; the Otoman, chauffeur for Polonsky; English tourists; Nance, the California capitalist; and others.
Curses upon Saint Michel, threats of damage suits for fright and delay, laughable stories of the mistakes of the volunteer crew of the Noa-Noa; discussions of the price of copra, mingled with the chants of the native feasters and ribald tales. The Tiare girls, all color and sparkle, exchanged quips with the male diners, patted their shoulders, and gigglingly fought when they tried to take them into their laps.
In the open porch, Lovaina, gaily adorned, her feet bare, but a wreath of ferns on her head, sped the dishes and the wine. She kept the desserts before her and cut portions to suit the quality of her liking for each patron.
“Taporo e taata au ahu” said Atupu.
“The lime and the tailor,” that means, and identified Landers and Schlyter. Landers was the “lime” because a former partner of his establishment exported limes, and Landers succeeded to his nickname. Landers and Schlyter were good customers, so they got larger slices of dried-apple pie.
Chappe-Hall, being bidden farewell on his leaving for Auckland, was apostrophizing Tahiti in verse, all the stanzas ending in “And the glory of her eyes over all.” There were bumpers and more, and “Bottoms up,” until a slat-like American woman bounced off the veranda with her sixth course uneaten to complain to Lovaina that her hotel was no place for a Christian or a lady. Lovaina almost wept with astonishment and grief, but kept the champagne moving toward the Chappe-Hall table as fast as it could be cooled, meanwhile assuring the scandalized guest that nothing undecorous ever happened in the Tiare Hotel, but that it were better it did than that young men should go to evil resorts for their outbursts.
“My place respectable,” Lovaina said dignifiedly. “I don’ ‘low no monkey bizeness. Drinkin’ wine custom of Tahiti. Make little fun, no harm. If they go that Cocoanut House, get in bad.”
Lovaina told me all about it. She was quite hurt at the aspersions upon her home, and entered the dining-room in a breathing spell to sit at my table, a rather unusual honor I deeply felt. I pledged my love for her in Pol Roger, but she would have nothing but water.
“I no drink these times,” she explained. “Maybe some day I do again. Make fat people too much bigger. That flat woman from ‘Nited States, ain’t she funny? I think missionary.”
From the screened area in which the consuls dined with the broker one heard:
“Here’s to the king, God bless him!” “Hoch der Kaiser!” “Vive la Republique!” “The Stars and Stripes!” as the glasses were emptied by the consuls and their wives and host.
Lovaina had taken up the rug in the parlor, and a graphophone ground out the music for dancing. Ragtime records brought out the Otoman, a San Franciscan, bald and coatless. He took the floor with Mathilde, a chic, petite, and graceful half-caste, and they danced the maxixe. David glided with Margaret, Landers led out Lucy, and soon the room was filled with whirling couples. A score looked on and sipped champagne, the serving girls trying to fill the orders and lose no moment from flirtation. On the camphor-wood chest four were seated in two’s space.
When midnight tolled from the cathedral tower, there was an uncalled-for speech from a venerable traveler who apparently was not sure of the date or the exact nature of the fete:
“Fellow-exiles and natives bujus Teetee. We are gathered together this Fourth of July–“
Cries of “Altai” “Ce n’est-pas vrai!” “Shove in your high! It’s New Year!”
“–to cel’brate the annivers’ry of the death of that great man–“
Yells of “Sit down!” “Olalala!” “Aita maitai!” and the venerable orator took his seat. He was once a governor of a territory under President Harrison, and now lived off his pension, shaky, sans teeth, sans hair, but never sans speech.
The Englishmen and Americans clattered glasses and said “Happy New Year!” and the Tahitians: “Rupe-rupe tatou iti! I teienei matahiti api!” “Hurrah for all of us! Good cheer for the New Year!”
Monsieur Lontane, second in command of the police, arrived just in time to drink the bonne annee. He executed a pas seul. He mimicked a great one of France. He drank champagne from a bottle, a clear four inches between its neck and his, and not a drop spilled.
Lovaina sat on her bench in the porch and marked down the debits:
Fat face…………3 Roederer………. New Doctor……….5 champag……….. Hair on nose……..2 champ…………. Willi……………4 pol…………..
The electric lights went out. There was a dreadful flutter among the girls. Some one went to the piano and began to play, “Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot,” and the Americans and English sang, the French humming the air. The wine flattened in the glasses and open bottles, but no one cared. They gathered in the garden, where the perfume of the tiare scented the night, and the stars were a million lamps sublime in the sky. Song followed song, English and French, and when the lazy current pulsated again, the ball was over.
We walked to the beach, Nance and I.
“It’s hell how this place gets hold of you,” said Nance, who had shot pythons in Paraguay and had a yacht in Los Angeles harbor. “I dunno, it must be the cocoanuts or the breadfruit.”
Walking back alone through a by-path, I saw the old folks sitting on their verandas and the younger at dalliance in the many groves. Voices of girls called me:
“Haere me ne!” “Come to us!” “Hoere mai u nei ite po ia u nei!”
The Himene tatou Arearea of our Moorea expedition came from many windows, the accordions sweet and low, and the subdued chant in sympathy with the mellow hour. “The soft lasceevious stars leered from these velvet skies.”
Lovaina had gone to bed, but, with the lights on again, patrons of the prize-fight had dropped in. The Christchurch Kid had beaten Teaea, a native, the match being a preliminary clearing of the ground before the signal encounter with the bridegroom.
The glass doors of the salle-a-manger were broken in a playful scuffle between the whiskered doctor of the hospital, and Afa, the majordomo of the Tiare. The medical man ordered five bottles of champagne, and, putting them in his immense pockets, returned to his table and opened them all at once. He had them spouting about him while their fizz lasted, and then drank most of their contents. He then threw all the crockery of his table to the roadway, and Afa wrestled him into a better state, during which process the doors were smashed. When the bombilation became too fearful, Lovaina called out from her bed:
“Make smaller noise! Nobody is asleep!”
At two in the morning the gendarmes advised the last revelers to retire, and the Tiare became quiet. But Atupu slept in a little alcove by the bar, and any one in her favor had but to enter her chamber and pull her shapely leg to be served in case of dire need.
The incidents of the departure of the Noa-Noa that day for San Francisco will live in the annals of Papeete. Its calamitous happenings are “in the archives.” I have the word of the secretary-general of the Etablissments Francais de l’Oceanie for that, and in the saloons and coffee-houses they talked loudly of the “bataille entre les cochons Anglais et les heros les Francais et les Tahitiens.”
It was a battle that would have rejoiced the heart of Don Quixote, and that redoubtable knight had his prototype here in the van of it, the second in command of the police of Papeete, M. Lontane, the mimic of the Tiare celebration.
The Noa-Noa’s amateur crew of wretched beach-combers, farm laborers, and impossible firemen, stokers, and stewards, a pitiable set, were about the waterfront all day, dirty, dressed in hot woolen clothes, bedraggled and as drunk as their money would allow. The ship was down to leave at three-thirty o’clock, but it was four when the last bag of copra was aboard. There were few passengers, and those who booked here were dismayed at the condition of the passageways, the cabins, and the decks. The crowd of “scabs,” untrained white sailors, and coal passers was supplemented by Raratonga natives, lounging about the gangway and sitting on the rails. On the wharf hundreds of people had gathered as usual to see the liner off. Lovaina was there in a pink lace dress, seated in her carriage, with Vava at the horse’s head. Prince Hinoe had gathered about him a group of pretty girls, to whom he was promising a feast in the country. All the tourists, the loafers, the merchants, and the schooner crews were there, too, and the iron-roofed shed in which it is forbidden to smoke was filled with them. The Noa-Noa blew and blew her whistle, but still she did not go. The lines to the wharf were loosened, the captain was on the bridge, the last farewells were being called and waved, but there was delay. Word was spread that some of the crew were missing, and as at the best the vessel was short-handed, it had to tarry.
At last came three of the missing men. They, too, had welcomed the New Year, and their gait was as at sea when the ship rises and falls on the huge waves. They wheeled in a barrow a mate whose mispoise made self-locomotion impossible. The trio danced on the wharf, sang a chantey about “whisky being the life of man,” and declared they would stay all their lives in Tahiti; that the “bloody hooker could bleedin’ well” go without them. They were ordered on board by M. Lontane, with two strapping Tahitian gendarmes at his back.
If there are any foreigners the average British roustabout hates it is French gendarmes, and the ruffians were of a mind to “beat them up.” They raised their fists in attitudes of combat, and suddenly what had been a joyous row became a troublesome incident.
Sacre bleu! those scoundrels of English to menace the uniformed patriots of the French republic! The second in command drew a revolver, and pointing at the hairy breast of the leader of the Noa-Noans, shouted: “Au le vapeur! Diable! What, you whisky-filled pigs, you will resist the law?”
He took off his helmet and handed it to one of the native policemen while he unlimbered the revolver more firmly in the direction of the seamen. The sailor shrank back in bewilderment. Guns were unknown in shore squabbles.
“I’ll ‘ave the British Gov’ment after ye,” roared the leader. “I’ll write to the Sydney papers. Ye’ve pulled a gun in me face.”
Steadily and with some good nature the Tahitian officers pushed the trio toward the gangway and up it. Once aboard, the gangway was hoisted, the pilot clambered up the side, and it seemed as if the liner was away. But no; the three recalcitrants jumped on the bulwarks, and joined by a dozen others, yelled defiance at the authorities. As the Noa-Noa gradually drew out these cries became more definite, and the honor of France and of all Frenchmen was assailed in the most ancient English Billingsgate. Gestures of frightful significance added to the insults, and these not producing retorts in kind from the second in command and the populace, a shower of limes began to fall upon them.
Sacks of potatoes, lettuce-heads, yams, and even pineapples, deck cargo, were broken open by the infuriated crew to hurl at the police. The crowd on the wharf rushed for shelter behind posts and carriages, the horses pranced and snorted, and M. Lontane leaped to the fore. He advanced to the edge of the quay, and in desperate French, of which his adversaries understood not a word, threatened to have them dragged from their perches and sent to New Caledonia.
A well-aimed lime squashed on his cheek, and with a “Sapristi!” he fled behind a stack of boxes. The riot became general, the roustabouts heaving iron bars, pieces of wood, and anything they could find. No officer of the Noa-Noa said a word to stop them, evidently fearing a general strike of the crew, and when the missiles cut open the head of a native stevedore and fell even among the laughing girls, the courtesies began to be returned. Coal, iron nuts, stones, and other serious projectiles were thrown with a hearty good-will, and soon the crew and the passengers of the Noa-Noa were scuttling for safety.
The storm of French and Tahitian adjectives was now a cyclone, Tahitian girls, their gowns stained by the fruity and leguminous shot of the Australasians, seized lumps of coal or coral, and took the van of the shore legions. Atupu struck the leader of the Noa-Noa snipers in the nose with a rock, and her success brought a paean of praise from all of us.
The entente cordiale with Britain was sundered in a minute. The melee grew into a fierce battle, and only the increasing distance of the vessel from shore stopped the firing, the last shots falling into the lagoon.
The second in command had been reinforced by the first in command, and now, summoned by courier, appeared the secretary-general of the Etablissements Francaises de l’Oceanie, bearded and helmeted, white-faced and nervous, throwing his arms into the air and shrieking, “Qu’ est-que ce que ca? Is this war? Are we human, or are these savages?”
Lovaina, in the rear of whose carriage I had taken refuge, exclaimed:
“They say Tahiti people is savage! Why this crazy people must be finished. Is this business go on?”
“Non, non!” replied the secretary-general, with patriotic anger, “We French are long suffering, but c’est assez maintenant.”
He spoke to the first in command, and an order was shouted to M. Wilms, the pilot, to leave the Noa-Noa. That official descended into his boat and returned to the quay, while the liner hovered a hundred yards away, the captain afraid to come nearer, fearful of leaving port without expert guidance, and more so that the crew might renew the combat.
The secretary-general conferred with the private secretary of the governor, the first and second in command, and several old residents. They would apply to the British consul for warrants for the arrest of the ruffianly marksmen, they would wrench them from the rails, and sentence them to long imprisonments.
So for an hour more the steamship puffed and exhausted her steam, while the high officials paced the wharf shaking their fists at the besotted stokers, who shook theirs back.
The stores, closing at five o’clock, sent their quota of clerks to swell the mob at the quay, and the “rubberneck wagon,” alert to earn fares, took the news of the fray into the country, and hauled in scores of excited provincials, who had vague ideas that la guerre was on. The wedding party, only six motor-cars full on the second day, all in wreaths of tuberoses and wild-cherry rind, the bride still in her point-lace veil, and the groom and all the guests cheered with the champagne they had drunk, drove under the shed from the suburbs and honked their horns, to the horror of the secretary-general and the others.
The situation was now both disciplinary and diplomatic.
“C’est tres serieux,” whispered the secretary to the governor’s private secretary, a dapper little man whose flirting had made his wife a Niobe and alarmed the husbands and fathers of many French dames et filles.
“Serious, monsieur?” said the private secretary, twisting his black wisp of a mustache, “it is more than serious now; it is no longer the French Establishments of Oceania. It is between Great Britain and France.”
A peremptory order was given to drive every one off the quay, and though the crowd chaffed the police, the sweep of wharf was left free for the marchings and counter-marchings of the big men.
“What would be the result? Would the entire British population of the ship resist the taking away of any of the crew? Oh, if the paltry French administration at Paris had not removed the companies of soldiers who until recently had been the pride of Papeete! And crown of misfortune, the gun-boat, sole guardian of French honor in these seas, was in Australia for repairs. Eh bien, n’importe! Every Frenchman was a soldier. Did not Napoleon say that? Nom de pipe!”
Wilfrid Baillon, a cow-boy from British Columbia, was standing near me with his arms folded on his breast and a look of stern determination on his sunburned face.
“We must look sharp,” he said to me. “We may all have to stand together, we whites, against these French frog-eaters.”
The tension was extreme. The warrants had not come from the British consul, and there seemed no disposition on the Noa-Noa to save the face of la belle republique, for the blackened and blackguardly stokers still dangled their legs over the rail and made motions which caused the officials to shudder and the ladies to shut their eyes.
The agent of the vessel in Papeete, an American, appeared. He talked long and earnestly with the secretary-general and the first and second, and to lend even a darker color to the scene, the procureur-general, the Martinique black, tall, protuberant, mopping his bald head, took the center of the conclave. Noses were lowered and brought together, feet were stamped, hands were wiggled behind backs, and right along the American, the agent, talked and talked.
They demurred, they spat on the boards, they lifted their hands aloft–and then they ordered the pilot to return to the Noa-Noa, and that vessel, whistling long and relievedly, pointed her nose toward the opening in the reef.
Mon Dieu! the suspense was over. The people melted toward their homes and the restaurants, for it was nearly seven o’clock. I drifted into the knot about the officials.
“It is in the archives,” said the secretary-general. “It will go down in history. That is enough.”
The delightful M. Lontane, in khaki riding breeches,–he, as all police, ride bicycles–his khaki helmet tipped rakishly over his cigarette, blew a ringlet.
“C’est comme ca. We would not press our victory,” he said gallantly. “We French are generous. We have hearts.”
The secretary-general, the procureur-general, the first in command and the private secretary, sighted the carriage of the governor, who had not appeared until the Noa-Noa was out of the lagoon, and they went to tell him of the great affair.
The agent of the line, grim and unsmiling, climbed to the wide veranda of the Cercle Bougainville, and ordered a Scotch and siphon.
“There she goes,” he said to me, and pointed to the steamer streaking through the reef gate. “There she goes, and I’m bloody well satisfied.”
At tea the next afternoon the British consul cast a new light on the international incident. He was playing bridge with the governor and others when the demand for the warrants was brought.
“The blighters interrupted our rubber,” said the consul, “and the governor was exceedingly put out. I told them the Noa-Noa couldn’t proceed without the stokers, and as it carries the French mail, they patched it up to arrest them when they return. We quite lost track of the game for a few minutes.”
But the cruel war would not down. There was not a good feeling between the English and French in Tahiti. A slight opposition cropped out often in criticism expressed to Americans or to Tahitians, or to each other’s own people. New Zealand governs the Cook group, of which Raratonga is the principal island. Comparisons of sanitation, order, neatness, and businesslike management of these islands, with the happy-go-lucky administration of the Society, Paumotus, Marquesas, and Austral archipelagoes, owned by the French, were frequent by the English. The French shrugged their shoulders.
“The Tahitians are happy, and we send millions of francs to aid France,” they said. “The English talk always of neatness and golf links and cricket-grounds. Eh bien! There are other and better things. And as for drink, oh, la, la! Our sour wines could not fight one round of the English boxe with whisky and gin and that awful ale.”
The French residents protested at the missiles of the crew and the laissez-faire of the Noa-Noa officers, and the British consul received a letter from the governor in which the affair of the riot was revived in an absurd manner.
One might understand M. Lontane, second in command of the police forces,–six men and himself,–magnifying the row between the tipsy stokers and his battalions, but to have the governor, who was a first-rate hand at bridge, and even knew the difference between a straight and a flush, putting down in black and white, sealed with the seal of the Republique Francaise, and signed with his own hand, that “France had been insulted by the actions of the savages of the Noa-Noa,” was worthy only of the knight of La Mancha.
So thought the consul, but he was a diplomat, his adroitness gained not only in the consular ranks, but also in Persia as a secretary of legation, and in many a fever-stricken and robber-ridden port of the Near and Far East. He pinned upon his most obstreperous uniform the medal won by merit, straddled a dangling sword, helmeted his head, and with an interpreter, that the interview might lack nothing of formality, called upon the governor at his palace.
He told him that the letter of complaint had roused his wonderment, for, said his British Majesty’s representative, “There can be no serious result, diplomatically or locally, of this Donnybrook Fair incident. In a hundred ports of the world where war-ships and merchant ships go, their crews for scores of years have fought with the police. Besides, I am informed that Monsieur Lontane put a revolver against the stomach of one of the stokers, and that provoked the nastiness. Until then it had been uncouth mirth caused by the vile liquor sold by the saloons licensed by the Government, and against the Papeete regulations that no more intoxicants shall be sold to a man already drunk. But when this British citizen, scum of Sydney or Glasgow as he might be, saw the deadly weapon, he felt aggrieved. This revolver practice is all too common on the part of Monsieur Lontane. Six such complaints I have had in as many months. As to that part of your letter that the crew of the Noa-Noa not be allowed to land here on its return to Papeete, I agree with you, but it will be for you to enforce this prohibition.”
It was agreed that on the day the Noa-Noa arrived on her return trip, all gendarmes and available guard be summoned from the country to preserve order, and that, as asked in the letter, the consul demand that the captain of the steamship punish the rioters.
And all this being done through an interpreter, and the consul having unlimbered his falchion and removed his helmet, he and the governor had an absinthe frappe and made a date for a bridge game.
“Te tamai i te taporo i te arahu i te umaru,” the natives termed the skirmish. “The conflict of the limes, the coal, and the potatoes.” A new himene was improvised about it, and I heard the girls of the Maison des Cocotiers chanting it as I went to Lovaina’s to dinner.
It was something like this in English:
“Oh, the British men they drank all day And threw the limes and iron.
The French in fear they ran away. The brave Tahitians alone stood firm.”
And there were many more verses.
Chapter VIII
Gossip in Papeete–Moorea, a near-by island–A two-days’ excursion there–Magnificent scenery from the sea–Island of fairy folk–Landing and preparation for the feast–The First Christian mission–A canoe on the lagoon–Beauties of the sea-garden.
My acquaintances of the Cercle Bougainville, Landers, Polonsky, McHenry, Llewellyn, David, and Lying Bill, were at this season bent on pleasure. Landers, the head of a considerable business in Australasia, with a Papeete branch, had time heavy on his hands. Lying Bill and McHenry were seamen-traders ashore until their schooner sailed for another swing about the French groups of islands. Llewellyn and David were associates in planting, curing, and shipping vanilla-beans, but were roisterers at heart, and ever ready to desert their office and warehouse for feasting or gaming. Polonsky was a speculator in exchange and an investor in lands, and was reputed to be very rich. He, too, would leave his strong box unlocked in his hurry if cards or wassail called. These same white men were sib to all their fellows in the South Seas except a few sour men whom avarice, satiety, or a broken constitution made fearful of the future and thus heedful of the decalogue.
These merry men attended to business affairs for a few hours of mornings, unless the night before had been devoted too arduously to Bacchus, and the remainder of the day they surrendered to clinking glasses, converse, Rabelasian tales, and flirting with the gay Tahitian women in the cinemas or at dances. There was a tolerance, almost a standard, of such actions among the men of Tahiti, though of course consuls, high officials, a banker or two of the Banque de l’Indo-Chine, and a few lawyers or speculators sacrificed their flesh to their ambitions or hid their peccadillos.
A chorus of wives and widows–there were no old maids in Tahiti–condemned scathingly the conduct of the voluptuaries, and the preachers of the gospel lashed them in conversation or sermon now and then. But on the whole there was not in Tahiti any of the spirit of American towns and villages, which wrote scarlet letters, ostracized offenders against moral codes, and made Philistinism a creed. Gossip was constant, and while sometimes caustic, more often it partook of curiosity and mere trading of information or salacious prattle.
Tahitian women concealed nothing. If they won the favors of a white man, they announced it proudly, and held nothing sacred of the details. One’s peculiarities, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies, physical or spiritual blemishes, all became delectable morsels in the mouths of one’s intimates and their acquaintances. One’s passions, actions, and whisperings were as naked to the world as the horns on a cow. Every one knew the import of Polonsky’s dorsal tattooings, that Pastor —- had a case of gin in his house, and that the governor, after a bottle or two of champagne, had squeezed so tightly the waist of an English lady with whom he waltzed that she had cried out in pain. Though bavardage accounted for much of the general knowledge of every one’s affairs, there was an uncanny mystery in the speed at which a particular secret spread. One spoke of the bamboo telegraph.
It was proposed at the Cercle Bougainville that we have a series of jaunts to points some distance away. I was promised that I would see fully the way my acquaintances enjoyed themselves in the open. Llewellyn was given charge of the first excursion. It was to Moorea, an island a dozen miles or so to the northwest from Papeete, and which, with Tetiaria and Mehetia and Tahiti, constitute les iles de Vent, or Windward Islands of the Society archipelago.
In clear weather one cannot look out to sea from Papeete, to the north or west, without Moorea’s weird grandeur confronting one. The island of fairy-folk with golden hair, it was called in ancient days by the people of other islands. A third of the size of Tahiti, it was, until the white man came, the abode of a romantic and gallant clan. Eimeo, it was called by the first whites, but the name of Moorea clings to it now. Over it and behind it sets the sun of Papeete, and it is associated with the tribal conflicts, the religion, and the journeys of the Tahitians. Now it is tributary to this island in every way, and small boats run to and from with passengers and freight almost daily.
We met at seven o’clock of a Saturday morning at the point on the coral embankment where the Potii Moorea was made fast, the gasolene-propelled cargo-boat which we had rented for the voyage. A hundred were gathered about a band of musicians in full swing when I appeared at the rendezvous on the prick of the hour. The bandsmen, all natives but one, wore garlands of purau, the scarlet hibiscus, and there was an atmosphere of abandonment to pleasure about them and the party.
A schooner swung at her moorings near by, under a glowing, flamboyant tree, and her crew was aboard in expectation of sailing at any hour. Another small craft, a sloop, was preparing to sail for Moorea, also. She was crowded with passengers and cargo, and all about the rail hung huge bunches of feis, the mountain bananas. Most of the people aboard had come from the market-place with fruit and fish and vegetables to cook when they arrived at home. A strange habit of the Tahitians under their changed condition is to take the line of least resistance in food, eating in Chinese stores, or buying bits in the market, whereas, when they governed themselves, they had an exact and elaborate formula of food preparation, and a certain ceremoniousness in despatching it. Only feasts bring a resumption nowadays of the ancient ways.
The crews of the schooner and of the other Moorea boat besides our own had a swarm of friends awaiting the casting off. Even a journey of a few hours meant a farewell ceremony of many minutes. They embrace one another and are often moved to tears at a separation of a few days. When one of them goes aboard a steamship for America or Australasia, the family and friends enact harrowing scenes at the quay. They are sincerely moved at the thought of their loved ones putting a long distance between them, and I saw a score of young and old sobbing bitterly when the Noa-Noa left for San Francisco though they stormed the stokers lustily when aroused. Their life is so simple in these beloved islands that the dangers of the mainland are exaggerated in their minds, and to the old the civilization of a big city appears as a specter of horrible mien. The electric cars, the crowds, the murders they read of and are told of, the bandits in the picture-shows, the fearful stranglers of Paris, the lynchers, the police, who in the films are always beating the poor, as in real life, the pickpockets, and the hospitals where willy-nilly they render one unconscious and remove one’s vermiform appendix–all these are nightmares to the aborigines whose relations are departing.
When heads were counted, Landers’s was missing, and jumping into Llewellyn’s carriage, an old-fashioned phaeton, I drove to Lovaina’s, where he occupied the room next to mine in the detached house in the animal-yard. He was sound asleep, having played poker and drunk until an hour before; but when I awoke him I could not but admire the serenity of the man. His body was in the posture in which he had lain down, and his breathing was as a child’s.
“Landers, get up!” I shouted from the doorway. He opened his eyes, regarded me intently, and without a word went to the shower-bath by the camphor-wood chest, returned quickly, and dressed himself. I fancied him a man who would have answered his summons before a firing-squad as calmly. He had a perfection of ease in his movements; not fast, for he was very big, but with never an unnecessary gesture nor word. He was one of the finest animals I had ever seen, and fascinating to men and women of all kinds.
The Potii Morea had taken on her passengers when we returned, and we put off from the sea-wall at once, with two barrels of bottled beer, and half a dozen demi-johns of wine prominent on the small deck. Often the sea between Tahiti and Moorea is rough in the daytime, and passage is made at night to avoid accident, but we were given a smooth way, and could enjoy the music. We sat or lay on the after-deck while the bandsmen on the low rail or hatch maintained a continuous concert.
During the several days between our first planning the trip and the going, a song had been written in honor of the junketing, and this they played scores of times before we set foot again in Papeete. It was entitled: “Himene Tatou Arcarea,” which meant, “Our Festal Song.”
One easily guessed the meaning of the word himene. The Polynesians’ first singing was the hymns of the missionaries, and these they termed himenes; so that any song is a himene, and there is no other word for vocal music in common use. The words of the first stanza of the “Himene Tatou Arearea” and the refrain were:
I teie nei mahana
Te tere no oe e Hati
Na te moana
Ohipa paahiahia
No te au
Tei tupi i Moorea
tamau a
Tera te au
Ei no te au
Tamua a–aue
Ei reo no oe tau here
I te pii raa mai
Aue oe Tamarii Tahiti te aroha e
A inu i te pia arote faarari
Faararirari ta oe Tamarii Tahiti
La, Li.
Llewellyn put the words into approximate meaning in English, saying it was as difficult to translate these intimate and slang phrases as it would be to put “Yankee Doodle” into French or German. His translation, as he wrote it on a scrap of paper, was:
Let us sing joyful to-day
The journey over the sea!
It is a wonderful and agreeable thing to happen in Moorea, Hold on to it! That is just it;
And because it is just it,
Why hold on to it!
Your voice, O, Love, calls to us.
O Tahitian children,
Love to you!
Let us all drink beer,
And wet our throats!