We sat down in chairs on the turf a foot from the jetty boulders, and watched the inrush of the breakers. A light breeze outside had stirred the water, and the combers were white and high.

"Every sea is really three seas," said McHenry, pipe in hand, as he sipped his Martini. "We fellows who have to risk our cargoes and lives in landing in the Paumotus and Marquesas, study the accursed surf to find out its rules. There are rules, too, and the ninth wave is the one we come in on. That is the last of the third group, the biggest, and the one that will bring your boat near enough to shore to let all hands leap out and run her up away from the undertow."

Lights were placed in the new house. It was elegantly made, of small bamboos up and down, with a floor of matched boards, the roof of cocoanut-leaves, and hung with blossoms of many kinds. The table had been spread, and there was a glitter of silver and glass, with all the accoutrements of fashion. We sat down, eight, the chief making nine, and ate and drank until ten o'clock. The piece de resistance was the sucking pig, with taro and feis, but roasted in an oven, and not in native style; and there was a delicious young turkey from New Zealand, a ham from Virginia, truffles, a salad of lettuce and tomatoes, and a plum pudding from London. The claret was 1900 and 1904, a vintage obtained by Polonsky in Paris. The champagne, also, was of a year, and frapped. Tahitian coffee, with brown sugar from the chief's plantation, ended the banquet.

There was no conversation of any interest. The Parisian count was far removed in experience and culture from the others, and probably only the necessity of companionship in revelry and cards brought them together. Europe, and all the earth, was his playground, and doubtless he had lavished a fortune in pleasure in the capitals of the Continent. Llewellyn had an education in the universities of England and Germany, but since young manhood had been in his birthplace, and the others were the rough and ready stuff of business or seafaring.

The table for the gambling was moved to the sward by the shingle, and lamps hung upon bamboos planted at each end. It was balmy, and we sat in our shirts, the bosoms open for the breeze, the count with his gorgeous Japanese god shining upon his ivory breast, and the round glass in his eye. The tattooed skeleton upon his forearm was uncanny in the flickering light, the black shadows of the eyes seeming to open and close as the rays fell upon it.

Landers, though he had drunk with all, was appreciative of every nicety of the game, and won fifteen hundred francs. He alone was cool, watching the faces of the players at every crisis, quick to detect a weakness, to interpret rightly a gesture or counting of losses and gains, remorselessly hammering home his victories, and always suave and generous in action.

Llewellyn would withdraw his attention to listen to the himene of the musicians thirty feet away, which consisted mostly of familiar American airs, interpolated with bizarre staves and dissonances. One caught a beloved strain, and then it wandered away queerly as if the musician had forgotten the score and had done his best otherwise. I never heard in Tahiti one air of Europe or America played through as composed, without variation or omission, except the national anthem of France.

"They are happy, those boys," mused Llewellyn. "They get more out of life than we do. Why should we fool with these cards here when we might sing?"

Llewellyn was only a quarter Tahitian, but at times the island blood was the only pulse he felt. One noticed it especially during the himenes, when he seemed to wander far from the business in hand. That business being poker, and Landers all attention to the cards and the psychology of his antagonists, every time Llewellyn harked to the himene he lost a little, and when he became entangled in a jackpot of size, and drew too many cards on account of his abstraction, he was mulcted of fifty francs and failed of winning the two hundred he might have won.

"Unlucky at cards, lucky in something else," said he, self-consolingly.

"Ye want to drop that other thing when ye're playing cards," McHenry advised as he scooped in the pot. "The cards are all queens to you."

Chief Teriieroo a Teriieroterai sat ten feet removed from the players, but kept his eyes on the money. They played with notes, five francs being the smallest, and the others twenties and hundreds. The chief smiled whenever Count Polonsky drew in a heap of these, and when one fell on the floor, he scrambled under the table to prevent it being blown on the rocks. The Javanese served the drinks, and a crowd of natives watched curiously the shifting vantages from a respectful distance.

It was three o'clock when the scores were settled, and, the chief leading with a lantern, we tramped through the great cocoanut-grove to his residence.

Landers and I each took a bed, I being warned to be forehanded by my experience in Moorea, where I slept on the floor. The chief retired, and Polonsky went off with his arm about his inamorata's waist, she having apparently awaited his return. When Llewellyn and McHenry appeared half an hour later, having emptied a bottle reminiscent to McHenry of his father's liking for Auld Reekie, they were discomfited by the beds being all occupied, the other two having been early claimed by two men who ate and drank and immediately slept.

When I awoke, the sun was up half an hour, and Landers and I went for a bath in the brook. We found a pool famed in the legends of the natives. In the olden days the kings and chiefs would have made it tabu to themselves.

Landers had on a pareu only, his two hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle a refreshing sight, and his eyes as bright as if he had had the prescribed eight hours. They looked at him, sighingly, the young women of the village, even at this hour busied cooking breadfruit or fish and coffee; and Landers flirted with each one and in Tahitian called out words which made them laugh, and sometimes hide their heads coquettishly.

"I dated them all," he said to me when we were under the water. We threw off our garments at the edge of the pool and plunged in. The water was as soft as milk and as clear as crystal, cool and invigorating. I drank my fill of it as I swam.

Breakfast we had in the chief's house, the remains of the amuraa rahi of the night before. The chief drank coffee with us, and when we had gone to sit on the veranda, his eight children and wife took the board. I talked with Teriieroo a Teriieroterai for half an hour in French. He was thirty-eight years old, very engaging, and had several grandchildren.

"Eh bien," he said to my question, "I will tell you. I was married first at sixteen years of age and this is my third wife." He pointed over his shoulder to a tow-headed German for all I could see, and who certainly showed no sign of the native except in her dress and manners and avoirdupois.

"My first wife died," continued the arii, contemplatively. "I divorced the second, and the third is just now eating the first dejeuner in that room. I have eight children, and will have twenty, and I am the chief of the Papenoo district, but this is not the place of my ancienne famille. I was appointed here by the French Governor three years ago to administer the district, which needed a strong hand. I like it, and have bought land and built this house. I will stay my days here. There is the farehau, the administration building where I meet the people and we have conferences."

He pointed to a wooden cottage near by, with what looked like a dancing-pavilion attached. There the people come to squat upon the floor and relate their grievances. Most of the disputes before minor and major courts were over land and water rights.

It was half past seven o'clock when we inspanned for the trek to Papeete, a balmy, brilliant morning. The banks and cliffs were masses of ferns, the living imposed upon the dead, and hibiscus and gardenias and clumps of bamboo in a dissolving pageant mingled with plots of taro and yams, pineapples and bananas. The majestic bread trees and the spreading mangoes, the latter with their fruit verging from gold to russet, were surflnounted by the soaring cocoanuts, the monarchs of the tropics, whose banners fly from every atoll, and fall only before the most terrible might of the King of Storms.

A cocoanut-palm bears at eight years and when about twenty-five feet high. It rises seventy or eighty feet, and has a hundred curves. It is the wily creature of the winds, but outwits them in all but their worst moods. To the tropical man the cocoa-palm is life and luxury. He drinks the milk and eats the meat, or sells it dried for making soaps and emollients and other things; the oil he lights his house with and rubs upon his body to assuage pain; he builds his houses and wharves of it, and thatches his home with the husks, which also serve for fuel, fiber for lines and dresses and hats, leaves for canoe-sails and the shell of the nut for his goblet. Its roots he fashions into household utensils. The cocoa grows where other edibles perish. It dips its bole in the salt tide, and will not thrive removed from its beloved sea.

To me there is an inexpressible sentiment in the presence of these cocoa-palms. They are the symbol of the simplicity and singleness of the eternal summer of the tropics; the staff and gonfalons of the dominion of the sun. My heart leaps at their sight when long away. They are the dearest result of seed and earth. I drink their wine and esteem dwelling in their sight a rare communion with the best of nature.

They joked Count Polonsky about his girl, and he began to explain.

"I was here a year before I found one that suited me," he said as he rode beside the wagon. "I don't love her, nor she me, but I pay her well, and ask only physical fidelity for my physical safety. Her father is practical and influential, and will help me with my plans for development of the Papenoo valley, which I have bought."

Three tall and robust natives in pareus of red and yellow, and carrying long spears, went by, accompanied by a dozen dogs. We stopped them, and they said they were from the Papara district on their way to hunt pig in the Papenoo Mountains for Count Polonsky. The latter remembered he had ordered such a hunt, and explained through Llewellyn that he was their employer.

They faced him, and seldom was greater contrast. Magnificent semi-savages, clothed in only a rag, their powerful muscles responsive to every demand of their minds, and health glowing in their laughing countenances: Polonsky, slight, bent, baldish, arrayed in Paris fashions, a figure from the Bois de Boulogne, his glass screwed in his weak eye, the other myopic, teeth missing, and face pale. But at his command they hunted, for he had that which they craved, the money of civilization, to buy its toys and poisons. Polonsky had a reputation for generous dealing.

A bent native man repairing the road near Faaripoo had his face swathed in bandages. He greeted us with the courteous, "Ia ora na!" but did not lift his head.

"He is a leper," said Llewellyn. "I have seen him for years on this road. He may not be here many more days, because they are segregating the lepers. The Government has built a lazaretto for them up that road."

We saw a group of little houses a short distance removed from the road. They were fenced in and had an institutional look.

"There's hundreds of lepers in Tahiti," remarked McHenry.

"Mac, you're a damned liar," replied Llewellyn. He was an overlord in manner when with natives, but his quarter aboriginal blood caused the least aspersion on them by others to touch him on the raw.

"Well, there's a bloody lot o'them," broke in Lying Bill.

"Eighty only," stated Llewellyn, conclusively. "The Government has taken a census, and they 're all to be brought here. Did you hear that Tissot left for Raiatea when he heard of the census? He's a leper and a white man. They seized young Briand yesterday."

I was astonished, because the latter had lived opposite the Tiare Hotel, and I had met him often at the barber's. I had been "next" to him at Marechal's shop a week before.

"He did not know he was a leper until they examined him," Llewellyn went on. "He does not know how he contracted the disease. I don't mind it. I am not afraid. You get used to it. I tell you, the only leper I ever knew that made me cry was a kid. I used to see on the porch of a house on the road to Papara from Papeete a big doll. A little leper girl owned it, and she was ashamed to be seen outside her home, so she put on the veranda the doll she loved best to greet her friends. She made out that the doll was really herself, and she loved to listen when those who might have been playmates talked to the doll and fondled it. She lived for and in the doll, and those who cherished the little girl saw that each Christmas the doll was exchanged secretly for a bigger one, keeping pace with the growth of the child. I have caressed it and sung to it, and guessed that the child was peeping and listening inside. She herself never touched it, for it would be like picking up one's own self. Each Christmas she saw herself born again, for the old dolls were burned without her knowledge. And all the time her own little body was falling to pieces. Last Christmas she was carried to the door to see the new doll. I bought it for her, and I had in it a speaking-box, to say 'Bonjour!' I sent to Paris for it. She's dead now, poor little devil, or they'd have shut her up in the lazaretto."

Bemis bought cocoanuts for shipment for food purposes. His firm sold them all over America to fruitdealers for eating raw by children, and shredded and prepared them for confectioners and grocers. He was the only buyer in Tahiti of fresh nuts, as all others purchased them as copra, split and dried, for the oil. Bemis had been here years ago, he said.

"I'm married now," he told me, "but in those days I was a damn fool about the Tahitian girls. I put in six months here before I was married."

He became thoughtful, and asked me to accompany him to the soiree of the Alliance Francaise, in the Palais cinema-hall. The Alliance was for encouraging the study and use of the French language. A few decades ago Admiral Serre, the governor, had forbidden the teaching of French to girls in the country districts as hurtful to their moral weal. It was feared that they would seek to air their learning in Papeete, and, as said Admiral Serre, be corrupted. A new regime reckoned a knowledge of French a requisite of patriotism.

At the Palais the scene was brilliant. Two large banana-trees were apparently growing at the sides of the stage, and the pillars of the roof were wreathed in palm-leaves. Scores of French flags draped the walls. Pupils of the government schools occupied many seats, and their families, friends, and officials the others. The galleries were filled with native children. Marao, the former queen, and her daughters, the Princesses Boots and Tekau, with a party of English acquaintances, were in front, and the general audience consisted of French and every caste of Tahitian, from half to a sixteenth. The men were in white evening suits, and the women and girls in decollete gowns, white and colored.

It was eight o'clock when the governor entered on the arm of the president of the Alliance, Dr. Cassiou. He was in a white drill uniform, with deep cuffs of gold bullion, and a blazing row of orders on his breast. The republique outdoes many monarchies in decorating with these baubles its heroes of politics. The governor, a wholesome-looking diplomat, was the image of the famous host of the Old Poodle Dog restaurant in San Francisco, who himself would have had a hundred ribbons in a just democracy.

The band of native musicians played "The Marseillaise," but nobody stood. With all their embellishments, the French would not incommode themselves at the whim of a baton-wielder, who in America had only to wave his stick in "The Star-Spangled Banner," and any one who did not humor his whim by getting on his feet was beaten by his neighbors, who would not suffer without him.

With the governor were the inspecteurs colonials, the bearded napkin-wearers of Lovaina's. They, too, had a line of gay ribbon from nipple to nipple. These three and the boulevardier, the gay secretary, sat upon the stage beside a stack of gilded red books. The band played "La Croix d'Honneur," and the good Dr. Cassiou read from a manuscript his annual address in a low voice becoming a ministrant at sick-beds. Another piece by the band, and the books were distributed to the pupils, who went tremulously upon the stage to receive them from the governor's hand. This was a lengthy process, but each child had a claque, which communicated enthusiasm to the others of the audience, and there was continuous clapping.

"Les Cadets de Russie" by the band preceded the allocution by the governor. He also spoke sotto voce, as if to himself, and as no one heard his words, the fans of native straw and Chinese turkey feathers were plied incessantly. The heat was oppressive. A sigh of relief came with the entr'acte, when all the grown folk flocked to the attached saloon. I joined the queen's group for a few moments, and drank champagne with her and her daughters, and I was called over to have a glass of Perrier Jouet with the governor's party. Most of the natives drank bottled lemonade from the glacerie at five sous a bottle. The queen wore a rose in her hair. She was very large, with almost a man's face, shrewd, heavy, determined, and yet lively, and without a shade of pretense. Her walk was singularly majestic, and was often commented upon.

The Princess Tekau was beautiful, quite like a Spanish senorita in color and feature, her ivory skin gleaming against a pale-blue bodice, and her blue-black hair piled high. We talked French or English, with many Tahitian words thrown in, according to the mood or need of the moment. Every one was laughing. After all, Tahiti was very simple, and even officialdom could not import aristocracy or stiffness into a climate where starch melted before one could impress a spectator.

The inspecteurs and others of the suite had smiles and quips for humbler girls than princesses. I saw one of the awesome whiskerandos from Paris, haughty and secretive toward the French, lighting the cigarette of a blanchisseuse at the Pool of Psyche, his arm about her, and his black bristles nearer than necessary to her ripe mouth. A merchant dining away from home slapped caressingly the hips of the girls who waited upon him, nor concealed his gestures. Hypocrisy had lost her shield in Tahiti, because, except among a few aged persons, and the pastors, she was not a virtue, as in America and England, but a hateful vice.

Back again in the Palais, cooled and made receptive to music by the joyous quarter of an hour in the buffet, we heard Mme. Gautier sing "Le Cid," by Massenet, and the Princess Tekau accompany her effectively on the piano. A solo de piston, a violin, a flute, all played by Tahitians, entertained us, and then came the fun. M. X—— was down for a monologue. Who could it be? He bounced on the stage in a Prince-Albert coat and a Derby hat, rollicking, truculent, plainly exhilarated. Why, it was M. Lontane in disguise, the second in command of the police, the hero of the battle of the limes, the coal, and the potatoes. He gave a side-splitting burlesque of the conflict. He acted the drunken stoker, the man who would write to "The Times" when M. Lontane placed his pistol at his stomach, and he made us see the fruit and coal flying. It was all good natured, and his dialogue (monologue) amusing. We saw how we Anglo-Saxons appeared to the French, and learned how the hoarse growl of the British sailor sounded.

The governor was delighted, the inspecteurs also. The officials took their cue, the entire audience laughed, and the galleries of children, not understanding at all, but convulsed at the antics of the head policeman, yelled encore. The British consul grinned, and the governor turned and winked at him. The entente cordiale was cemented again. The second in command, who provoked the sundering of the tie, had reunited it by his comicality. Ire dissolved in glee.

A play followed, in which several of the players were in the audience, and in which my barber, M. Bontet, shone, and moving-pictures followed. The babies were long asleep, and we yawning when we were dismissed at half past twelve.

Bemis, the cocoanut-buyer, sat through the entr'acte, not accompanying me to the buffet. He received a shock during the handing out of the premiums and was silent afterward. Bemis was a striking man, because the very regular features of his young face were set off by a mass of white hair. He was placid, without a disturbing intellect, and interested solely in the price and condition of fresh cocoanuts for shipment. I had seen him start when a little girl of distinctive expression was called to the stage to receive her book. She sat with her mother and putative father, and their other children. When I first saw her, I pulled his arm.

"Bemis," I said, "for heaven's sake, look at that girl!"

He looked, and his face tensed, growing ashen white. "She's the image of you, Bemis," I pursued.

"For God's sake, talk low!" he cautioned. "People are rubbering at me now. She is mine, I'm sure. I was here six months a dozen years ago and had an affair with her mother, who sits there. What can I do? I have my own at home in Oakland. I could not tell. I never knew about that girl until a week ago. She doesn't know me. I saw her on the Broom Road, so I came to-night to have a good look at her. I was afraid to come alone. It would do no good for me to tell her. She's taken care of. She's lovely, isn't she? I'd like to take her in my arms once."

We walked to the Annexe.

"I'll tell you," he resumed. "I can't blame myself. I was like any young fellow who comes down here,—I wasn't more than twenty-five,—but I feel like hell. That child's face is almost identical, except for color, with my baby of eight or nine at home. I'm afraid I'll see it at night when I go back."

On the trees, which carry all the public announcements, appeared a notice of a concert by the local band:

Fanfare de Papeete Le public est informe la Fanfare donnera son Concert sur la Place du Gouvernement Mardi Soir a 8 heures.

RETRAITE

aux Flambeaux!

All day it rained, but at seven a myriad of stars were in the sky. The Place du Gouvernement is a large lawn between the group of buildings devoted to administrative affairs, with seats for several score, but not for the hundreds who attended the band concert. The notice about the flambeaux drew even the few boys and youths who might not have come for the music.

In the center of the lawn was a kiosk, and on the four sides the rue de Rivoli, the garden of the Cercle Militaire, the grounds of the former palace of the Pomares, now the executive offices, and the pavilion of the Revues.

I went early when the lights were being turned on. Only the sellers of wreaths had arrived, and they seated themselves along the square, their ferns and flowers on the ground beside them. Then came the venders of sweets, ice-cream, and peanuts, and soon the band and the throng.

An allegro broke upon the air, and stilled for a moment the chatter. Most of the people stood or strolled in twos or dozens. They bought wreaths and placed them on their bare heads, while the few who wore hats encircled them with the brilliant greens and blossoms. Bevies of handsome girls and women in their prettiest tunics, many wearing Chinese silk shawls of blue or pink, their hair tied with bright ribbons, sat on the benches or grouped about the confectionery-stands. Many carriages and automobiles were parked in the shadows, holding the more reserved citizens—the governor, the royal family, the bishop, the clergy, and dignified matrons of girth.

The bachelors and male coquets of the Tahitians and French, with a sprinkling of all the foreigners in Papeete, the officers and crews of the war-ship Zelee and sailing vessels, smoked and endeavored to segregate vahines who appealed to them. The dark procureur general from Martinique had an eye for beauty, and the private secretary of the governor was in his most gallant mood, a rakish cloth hat with a feather, a silver-headed stick, a suit of tight-fitting black, and a tiare Tahiti over his ear, marking him among the other Lotharios.

The band was led by a tall, impressive native who both beat and hummed the airs to guide the others. A tune ended, the bandsmen hurried to mix with the audience, to smoke and flirt. The shading acacia-trees lining the avenues permitted privacy for embraces, kisses, for making engagements, and for the singing of chansons and himenes of scandalous import. Better than the Latin, the Tahitian likes direct words and candor in song.

French naval officers and sailors passed and repassed, or sought the obscurity of the mangoes or the acacias. One heard the sibilance of kisses, the laughter, and the banter, the half-serious blows and scoldings of the vahines who repelled over-bold sailors. In an hour the sedate and the older took leave; the governor and the procureur turned into the Cercle Militaire for whist or ecarte and a glass of wine, the carriages withdrew, and the band's airs and manner of playing took on a new freedom and abandon. A polka was begun, and couples danced upon the grass, the ladies in their peignoirs, their black hair floating, and their lips chanting, their wreaths and flowers nodding to their motions.

In retired nooks where the lamp-lights did not penetrate ardent ones threw themselves into the postures and agitations of the upaupa, the hula.

Boys now began to light the flambeaux for the retraite. These were large bundles of cocoanut-husks and candlenuts soaked in oil, and they gave a generous flare. Suddenly, we heard the mairie-bell tolling. The band-leader climbed upon the roof of the kiosk, descended, and gave a vigorous beat upon the air for "the Marseillaise," which ends all concerts.

It was quickly over, and seizing the flambeaux, all rushed from the Place du Gouvernement, lighting the way of the retraite, now more furious even than planned. The band struck up, "There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night," the drum and bugle made warlike notes, and down the rue de Rivoli we went madly toward the conflagration sighted by the leader. After the band and the flambeaux-bearers danced the jolly commoners, with here and there a more important pair of legs, an English clerk, a tourist, or an official, all excited by the music, the torches, and the running to the fire. The flambeaux reeled to and fro with the skipping and leaping of their carriers, the multitude sang loudly, and the music became broken as the leader lost control of his men. They came to the house of the hose-cart, and transformed themselves into firemen, laying down their instruments and harnessing themselves to the lines. Away we went again, now at top speed. Other carts with apparatus dashed into the Broom Road from side streets and caught up with us.

The pullers yelled warnings in Tahitian to those who might impede their way or be run over. The stir was tremendous, for fires were rare and greatly feared. The regulations of the possession and storage of combustibles were severe, even a wagon or handcart containing as little as one can of kerosene being compelled to fly a red flag.

After a mile we came to the fire, a Chinese restaurant beside a little creek and in a cocoanut-grove. The roof had fallen in and there were reports that a woman and two children had been killed. Two men with quart cans threw water from the stream on the edge of the blaze.

The little hose-carts, with a small ladder, arrived with eclat, native gendarmes clearing the road, and Frenchmen and natives shouting the danger of death by these formidable engines. They were of no purpose, the water-taps which were conspicuous in the main streets being absent here, and no water under pressure was available. They knew this, of course, but the hose was unreeled, and a dozen people tripped up by its snakelike movements, the while bandsmen and gendarmes roared out manoeuvers. By now a thousand were there. I counted roughly several hundred bicycles and two public automobiles, holding thirty persons each, came from the center of town, the enterprising owners canvassing the coffee-shops and saloons for passengers. These carryalls drew up by the stream within forty feet of the blaze, forcing the pedestrians and cyclists to retreat.

Lovaina appeared, puffing furiously. Vava was roused to a high pitch. He told me by signs how he had seen the fire and given the alarm to the mairie, or city hall, the bell of which tolled for an hour.

There was no wind, and the flames rose straight up, scorching the cocoanut-leaves, but unharming other houses within twenty-five feet. The crowd lingered until the last timber had fallen. After seeing that there was small danger to the adjoining buildings, and learning that the loss fell upon Chinese only, that no one had been hurt, and that a can of kerosene had exploded, interest in the conflagration dropped, and friends and acquaintances who had met chatted amiably on other subjects. The proximity of the fire and the marshy condition of the ground made it proper for the ladies with well-turned legs to raise their gowns high, displaying garterless stockings held up by the "native twist" above the calf. Accordions and mouth-organs enlivened the talk, and not until only charred boards remained did we leave.

Besides the occasional concerts of the band, boxing and moving-pictures made up the public night life of Papeete. Attached to the theaters were bars, as at the Palais, and these were the foci of those who hunted distraction, and the trysting-places of the amorous. One found in them or flitting about them all the Tahitian or part Tahitian girls in Papeete who were not kept from them by higher ambition or by a strict family rule. From Moorea, Raiatea, Bora-Bora, and other islands, and from the rural districts of Tahiti, drifted the fairest who pursued pleasure, and to these cafes went the male tourists, the gayer traders, the sailors, and the Tahitian men of city ways, the chauffeurs, clerks, and officials.

Boxing and cinemas were novelties in Tahiti, and though the bars were only adjuncts of the shows, they had become the scenes of a hectic life quite different from former days. The groves, the beach, and the homes were less frequented for merrymaking, the white having brought his own comparatively new customs of men and women drinking together in public houses. And there had crept in on a small scale an exploitation of beauty by those who profited by the receipts at the prize-fights, the cinemas, and the bars. The French or part castes who owned these attractions were copying the cruder methods of the Chinese.

Llewellyn, David, and McHenry were habitues of these resorts, and I not an infrequent visitor. We went together to a prize-fight, which had been well advertised. A small boy with a gong handed me a bill on the rue du Four, which read:

Casino de Tahiti Ce Soir Vendredi

Pour le championnat des Etablissements francais de l'Oceanie

Grand Match de Boxe Entre MM. Great Boxing Match Between MM. Moto Raa rahi i rotopu ia

Opeta (Raratonga) & Teaea (Mataiea)

10 Rounds

Moni parahiraa 1re 2f. 50 2me 2f. 3me 1f. 50

The bill said further in French and Tahitian that this was to be the climax of all ring battles in the South Seas between natives, the Christchurch Kid and Cowan, the bridegroom, being hors concours.

Every seat was reserved by noon. All day the automobile stages ran into the country districts to bring natives, and from Moorea came boat-loads of spectators. On the streets native youths emulated the combatants, and at every corner boys were at fisticuffs. The Casino de Tahiti was on the rue de Rivoli, a large wooden shed painted in polychromatic tints, and with a gallery open to the air for the band, which played an hour before all events to summon patrons. Groups were in the street by eight o'clock, many having been unable to buy seats, and others there merely to hear the music and to laugh. Many were Chinese, queueless, smartly dressed in conventional white suits and American straw hats. The storekeepers had come in from the country. The men heatedly discussed the merits of the boxers. Opeta of Raratonga was mentioned as the champion of the world—this part of it.

Smoking was not allowed inside, so not until the last moment did the men file in. Hundreds of women were long in their places, some white, many part white, and others Tahitians. They were in their best gowns, flirting, eating fruit and nuts, laughing, and talking. Every girl of the Tiare Hotel was there, and all the guests. I was wedged in between Lovaina and Atupu, and the latter stroked my leg often, as one does a cat or dog, affectionately, but without much thought about it. Lovaina, too, rubbed my back from time to time.

A picture preceded the fight. It was of cow-boys, robbers, and the Wild West, with much shooting. A half-caste explained it, and his wit was considerable, tickling the ears as the scenes tickled the eyes. The natives applauded or execrated the films as the Parisians do at the opera. They encouraged the heroes and cursed the villains. Lovaina was interested, but said:

"Those robber in picshur make all boy bad. The governor he say that maybe he stop that Bill 'Art kind of picshur. Some Tahiti boy steal horse and throw rope on other boy for lassoo."

When the screen was removed, a roped enclosure, a square "ring," was disclosed. The announcer spoke in Tahitian of the signal achievements of the two fighters, of their determination to do their best then and there. The women cheered these declarations. Seated just below me was a red-headed French girl, with perhaps a slight infusion of Polynesian blood, who had a baby in a perambulator. Her strawberry plaits dangled temptingly as she cooed to the baby. She was for Opeta, the foreign competitor.

A white-haired Australian woman, with a strong accent, favored Teaea, and when the Raratonga youth was winning, shouted to Teaea:

"'It 'im 'arder, Ol' Peet! 'E's outa wind! Knock 'is shell hoff!"

The Casino de Tahiti had two galleries, and in the topmost, at a franc, five sous each, sat the little gods, as with us. Others were perched on doors, on projections of cornices, and in every nook.

The fighters were naked except for breech-clouts. They were barefooted. They wore their hair longish, and it appeared like rough, black caps, which now and again fell over their faces and was flung back by a toss of their heads. They were handsome men, framed symmetrically, lithe, and healthy-looking. Their bodies soon shone with the sweat. Their eyes, as soft as velvet to begin, grew fiery as they punished each other. In truth, this punishment was not severe from American prize-ring standards. The islander was unused to blows, and the gloves were of the biggest size, such as those worn by business men in gymnasiums.

Opeta had as seconds American beach-combers; and Teaea, natives. They had all the pugilistic appurtenances of towels, bottles, etcetera, and fanned and rubbed their men between rounds as if they were matched for a fortune.

Teaea had a green ribbon in his loin-cloth. He was taller and heavier than Opeta, but showed his inferiority quickly. They danced about and fiddled for an opening, sparred for wind, and did all the fancy footwork of the fifth-class fighter, but they seldom came together except in clinches. The referee, the Christchurch Kid, was the martyr, for he had to pull them apart every minute. The rounds were of two minutes' duration, and the rests one minute. After seven very tame rounds, the spectators became angered, and in the eighth Teaea went down, and took the count of ten on his hands and feet, warily watching his opponent. In the ninth, Opeta, excited by the demands of the gallery, slugged him in the head. Teaea sought the boards again, and the counting of ten by the referee began.

The Mataiea boxer was on his back, but his glazing eyes stared reproachfully at Opeta. The latter, now clearly the victor, glanced at the red-headed girl, who was dancing on the floor beside her perambulator and waving her congratulations. The house was on its feet yelling wildly to Teaea to rise. Those who had bet on him were calling him a knave and a coward, while Opeta's backers were imploring him to kill Teaea if he stood up. The Raratonga champion became excited, confused and when Teaea, at the call of eight, cautiously turned over and lifted his head, he struck him lightly.

The inhabitants of the country districts vociferated in one voice:

"Uahani! Uahani!"

"Faufau! Faufau!" cried the gods.

"Foul! Foul! 'E 'it' im, 'hand' e's hon 'is 'ands hand kneeses," exclaimed the Australian woman.

The audience took up the chorus in French, Tahitian, and English. Though Opeta had won them all by his ability and fairness and was plainly the better man, the sentiment was for the rules. The Christchurch Kid thought a moment, and conferred with the announcer, who talked with all the seconds. The spectators were insistent, and though loath to end the show, the Kid held up the gloved hand of the Mataiean.

The announcer declared him the "champignon" of Papeete, but naively declared that Opeta was still full of fight, and challenged the universe. The Raratonga man was dumfounded at the result of his forgetfulness, and gazed coldly and accusingly at the red plaits. The people, too, now regretted their enthusiasm for the right, which had shortened their program of rounds, and demanded that the battle go on. But the band had left, the lights were dimmed, and gradually the crowd departed.

The Australian waited to shake the hand of her knight, to whom she said:

"I bloomin' well knew you 'd do 'im hup! 'E's got nothin' hin 'is right. 'E's a runaw'y, 'e is."

David and I went into the buffet of the cinema after the fight to hear the arguments over it, and he to collect bets. He had chosen the winner by the toss of a coin. The French Governor of the Paumotus was there, gaily bantering half a dozen girls for whom he bought drinks. We joined him with Miri and Caroline and Maraa and others, the best-known sirens of Papeete. They were handsome, though savage-looking, and they had lost their soft voices. Alcohol and a thousand upaupahuras had made them shrill. They smoked endless cigarettes. Some wore shoes and stockings, and some were barefooted. Their dresses were red or blue, with insertions of lace and ribbons, and they were crowned with flowers in token of their mood of gaiety.

David insisted on a bowl of velvet, three quarts of champagne, and three of English porter mixed in a great urn. The champagne bubbled in the heavier porter, and the brew was a dark, brilliant color, soft and smooth. It was delicious, and seemed as safe as cocoanut milk. I drank my share of it in the cinema cafe, and after that was conscious only vaguely of going to the Cocoanut House garden, where Miri and Caroline and Maraa danced nude under the trees by the light of the full moon.

Then came blankness until I awoke several hours after midnight. I was sitting on the curbing of the Pool of Psyche, and some one was holding my hand. I thought it must be Atupu or Lovaina, and groped for a moment before I could pull my senses together. I looked up, and saw a wreathed and bearded native, and then down and saw his attire, mixed man's and woman's, and knew he was one of the mahus who loafed about the queen's grounds. I drew away my hand as from a serpent's jaws, and clasped my head, which rocked in anguish. A horrid chuckle or dismal throaty sound caused me to see the Dummy standing in the gateway, looking contemptuously at me, and witheringly at my companion. I had a second's thought of myself as a son of Laocooen.

The mahu got up and hastened away, and Vava put his hand on my shoulder and lifted me as a child to the road. He pointed toward the Annexe, and as I went haltingly with him, he now and again uttered unearthly cackles and bawls as if enjoying a farce I could not see. He, like the mahu, was one of those mishaps of nature assigned to play an absurd and sorry part in the tragicomedy of life in which all must act the roles assigned by the great author-manager until death puts us out of the cast. In that scene I myself was the buffoon of fate.



Chapter XVI

A journey to Mataiea—I abandon city life—Interesting sights on the route—The Grotto of Maraa—Papara and the Chief Tati—The plantation of Atimaono—My host, the Chevalier Tetuanui.

Life in the country made me laugh at myself for having so long stayed in the capital. The fever of Papeete had long since cooled in my veins. A city man myself, I might have known that all capitals are noxious. Great cities are the wens on the body of civilization. They are aggregations of sick people, who die out in the third generation. Greed builds them. Crowded populations increase property values and buy more manufactured luxuries. The country sends its best to perish in these huddlements. In America, where money interests boom cities and proudly boast their corruption in numbers, half the people are already in these webs in which the spider of commerce eats its victims, but ultimately may perish for lack of food. Brick and steel grow nothing.

I had made excursions from Papeete, but always carrying the poisons of the town with me. At last my playmates deserted me. Lying Bill and McHenry sailed on their schooner for the Paumotu and the Marquesas islands, Landers left for Auckland, and Count Polonsky for a flying visit to America. Llewellyn, though an interesting study, learned in native ways, and with comparisons of Europe and America, was too atrabilious, and, besides, had with his young partner, David, abandoned himself to the night life, the cinema bars, with their hilarious girls and men, the prize-fights, and the dancing on the beach in the starlight. Schlyter, the tailor, an occasional companion, was busied cutting and sewing a hundred uniforms for a war-ship's crew.

I bethought me of the letter Princess Noanoa Tiare had given me to the chief of Mataiea, and with a bag I departed for that village at daybreak, after taofe tau for four sous at Shin Bung Lung's Fare Tamaaraa. The diligence was open at the sides and roofed with an awning, and was drawn by two mules, with bells on their collars.

On the stage I paid twenty centimes a kilometre, or six and a half cents a mile. It carried the mail, passengers, and freight. In every district there was a mailbox on the fence of the chefferie, the chief's office, and on the trees alongside the road at regular intervals, and the driver took mails from people who hailed him. Arriving at a chefferie, the stage halted, the district mutoi, or native policeman-postman, appeared leisurely, opened the locked box on the diligence, looked at ease over the contents, took out what he liked, and put back the remainder, with the postings of the chefferie.

A glance at the map of Tahiti shows it shaped like a Samoan fan, or, roughly, like a lady's hand mirror. It is really two islands, joined by the mile-wide isthmus of Taravao. The larger island is Poroiunu or Tahiti-nui (big Tahiti), and the smaller Taiarapu, or Tahiti-iti (little Tahiti). Tahiti-nui is almost round; and Tahitiiti, oval. Both are volcanic, distinct in formation. They are united by a sedimentary piece of land long after they were raised from the ocean's bed.

Mataiea is twenty-seven miles from Papeete, and well on toward the isthmus.

Most of our passengers were Chinese, and I realized the Asiaticizing of Tahiti. They were store-keepers, small farmers, or laborers. The Broom Road lay most of the way along the beach, back of the fringe of cocoanut and pandanus-trees, and between the homes and plantations of Tahitians and foreigners. I saw all the fruits of the islands in matchless profusion, intermingled with magnificent ferns, the dazzling bougainvillea, the brilliant flamboyant-tree, and a thousand creepers and plants. Every few minutes the road rushed to the water's-edge, and the glowing main, with its flashing reef, and the shadowy outlines of Moorea, a score of miles away, appeared and fled. Past villages, churches, schools, and villas, the shops of the Chinese merchants, the sheds for drying copra, rows of vanilla-vines, beaches with canoes drawn up and nets drying on sticks, men and women lolling on mats upon the eternal green carpet of the earth, girls waving hands to us, superb men, naked save for pareus, with torsos, brown, satiny, and muscled like Greek gladiators, women bathing in streams, their forms glistening, their breasts bare; and constant to the scene, dominating it, the lofty, snakelike cocoanuts and their brothers of less height and greater girth.

At Fa'a a postwoman appeared. Before opening the mail-box she tarried to light a cigarette and to chat with the driver about the new picture at the cinema in Papeete. She commented laughingly on the writers and addressees of the letters, and flirted with a passenger. The former himene-house, which had been the dance-hall of Kelly, the leader of the fish-strike, was vacant, but I heard in imagination the strains of his pagan accordion, and the himene which will never be forgotten by the Tahitians, "Hallelujah! I'm a bum!" Kelly had gone over the water to the jails of the United States, where life is hard for minstrels who sing such droll songs.

In Punaauia, the next district to Fa'a, was a schoolhouse and on it a sign: 2 x 2 = 4.

M. Souvy, a government printer of Tahiti, had given the site out of his humble savings. By the sign, in his blunt way, he struck at education which does not teach the simple necessity of progress—common sense.

"Cela saute aux yeux," he had said.

He was long dead, but his symbol provoked a question from every new-comer, and kept alive his name and philosophy. I never saw it but I thought of an article I had once written that led to the overturning of the educational system of a country. How all guide-posts point to oneself! Near the school-house, a dozen yards from the salt water, was a native house with a straw roof, a mere old shell, untenanted.

M. Edmond Brault, the government employee and musical composer, a passenger on the diligence, had with him his violin, intending to spend the day in company with it in a grove. He remarked the tumbledown condition of the house, and said:

"I have sat under that toil de chaume, that straw roof, and talked with and played for a painter who was living there quite apart from the world. He was Monsieur Paul Gauguin, and he had a very distingue establishment. The walls of his atelier were covered with his canvases, and in front of the house he had a number of sculptures in wood. That was about 1895, I think. I can see the maitre now. He wore a pareu of red muslin and an undershirt of netting. He said that he adored this corner of the world and would never leave it. He had returned from Paris more than ever convinced that he was not fitted to live in Europe. Yet, mon ami, he ran away from here, and went to the savage Marquesas Islands, where he died in a few years. He loved the third etude of Chopin, and the andante of Beethoven's twenty-third sonata. You know music says things we would be almost afraid to put in words, if we could. If Flaubert might have written 'Madame Bovary' or 'Salambo' in musical notes, he would not have been prosecuted by the censor. We musicians have that advantage."

"In America," I replied, "we have never yet censored musical compositions, and many works are played freely because the censors and the reform societies' detectives cannot understand them. But if our inquisitors take up music, they may yet reach them. For instance, the prelude of 'Tristan and Isolde,' and Strauss' 'Salome.'"

"No," returned the Frenchman, quickly; "music would make them liberals."

A little farther on, in the valley of Punaruu, the amiable violinist and pianist showed me the ruins of defense works thrown up by the French to withstand the attacks of the great chieftain, Oropaa of Punaauia, who with his warriors had here disputed foot by foot the advance of the invaders. These Tahitians were without artillery, mostly without guns of any sort, but they utilized the old strategy of the intertribal wars, and rolled huge rocks down upon the French troops in narrow defiles.

We saw from our seats through the shadows of the gorge of Punaruu two of the horns of Maiao, the Diadem. In the far recesses of those mountains were almost inaccessible caves in which the natives laid their dead, and where one found still their moldering skeletons. M. Brault touched my shoulder.

"Rumor has it that the body of Pomare the Fifth is there," he said; "that it was taken secretly from the tomb you have seen near Papeete, and carried here at night. There are photographs of those old skeletons taken in that grotto of the tupapaus, as the natives call the dead and their ghosts. The natives will not discuss that place."

It was from Punaauia that Teriieroo a Teriierooterai had gone to Papenoo to be chief. This was the seat of his ancienne famille. Here he had been a deacon of the church, as he was in Papenoo, because it meant social rank, and was possible insurance against an unknown future. The church edifice was the gathering-place, as once had been the marae, the native temple. This was Sunday, and I passed a church every few miles, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant vying. They had matched each other in number since the French admiral had exiled the British missionary-consul, and compelled the queen to erect a papal church for every bethel.

Along the road and in the churchyards the preachers and deacons were in black cloth, sweating as they walked, their faces beatudinized as in America.

Many carried large Bibles, and frowned on the merry, singing crew who went by on foot, in carriages and automobiles. Everywhere, in all countries, the long, black coat and white or black cravat are the uniforms of evangelism. In Tahiti I saw ministers of the gospel, white and brown, appareled like circuit-riders in Missouri; hot, dusty, and their collars wilted, but their souls serene and sure in their mission. They associated God and black, as night and darkness.

The sound of sermons echoed from chapels as we progressed, the voices raised in the same tone one heard in a Methodist camp-meeting in Kansas, and the singing, when in French, having much the same effect, a whining, droning fashion; without spirituality or art.

But why look for a moment at these unfortunates or listen to their dull chants when marvels of nature unfolded at every step! There was never such luxuriant vegetation, never such a riot of color and richness of growth as on every side. The wealth of the bougainvillea's masses of lustrous magenta was matched by the dazzling flamboyant, trees forty feet high, and their foliage a hundred in circumference, a sheen of crimson. Clumps of bamboo as big as a city lot and towering to the sky, with the yellow allamanda framing the bungalows, and a tangle of bananas, lantana, tafeie, cocoas, and a hundred other fruits, flowers and creepers, made the whole journey through a paradise.

Around many cocoanut-palms were bands of tin or zinc ten or twenty feet from the earth. These were to foil the rats or crabs which climb the trees and steal (can a creature steal from nature?) the nuts. Every available piece of thin metal was used for this. The sheets were often flattened kerosene- and gasoline-cans and were drawn taut and smooth. These are impasses for the wily climbers.

"Ils ne passeront pas," said the French; "Aita haere!" the Tahitians.

The road was good, but narrow, in few places room for two to pass except by turning out, skirting the beach at the water's-edge, crossing causeways over inlets, and in admirable curves clinging to the hillsides, which bathed in the sea. Moving over a small levee we came to the pointe de Maraa, where was the Grotto of Maraa, a gigantic recess worn in the solid wall of rock, a dark mysterious interior, which gave me a momentary surge of my childhood dread and love of caves and secret entrances to pirates' lairs. The diligence halted at the request of M. Brault, and he and I jumped out and ran to the grotto. In it was a lake with black waters, and down the face of the cliff, which rose hundreds of feet straight, dripped a million drops of the waters of the hills, so that the ground about was in puddles. The inside walls and arched ceiling were covered with a solid texture of verdant foliage, wet and fragrant. We found a little canoe fastened to a stone, and adventured on the quiet surface of the pond until at about eighty yards of penetration we came to a blind curtain of stone.

"This grot," said M. Brault, "was for centuries the retreat of those conquered in war, sacred to gods, and a sanctuary never violated, like those cities of refuge among the Hebrews and Greeks. Now it is a picnic rendezvous, very dear to Papeete whites and to tourists. C'est la vie."

Tahitian women passengers were adorning their heads with wreaths of maiden-hair and rare ferns from the cavern. Great lianas hung down the walls, and these they climbed to reach the exquisite draperies of the chamber. The farther we left behind the capital, the more smiling were the faces, the less conventional the actions and gestures of the people.

Papara was at hand, the richest and most famous of all the districts of Tahiti. The village was a few Chinese stores, a Catholic and a Protestant church, a graveyard, and a scattered collection of homes. I bade au revoir to my delightful companion, Edmond Brault, having determined to walk the remaining kilometers, and to send on my inconsiderable bag of clothing.

Lovaina had given me a note to the chief of Papara, Tati, whose father was Salmon, an English Jew, and whose sister was Marao, the relict of the late king, and known as the queen. His father was the first white to marry formally a Tahitian noblewoman. Pomare IV had generously granted permission for the high chiefess of Papara to ally herself with the shrewd descendant of the House of David, and their progeny had included the queen, Tati, and others celebrated in Tahitian life.

Tati welcomed me with the heartiness of the English gentleman and the courtesy of the Tahitian chief. He was a man of large parts himself, limited in his hospitality only by his means, he, like all natives, having thrown away most of his patrimony in his youth. He was the best-known Tahitian next to Prince Hinoe, but much abler than he. He knew the Tahitian history and legends, the interwoven tribal relations, the descents and alliances of the families, better than any one else. Such knowledge was highly esteemed by the natives, for whom chiefly rank still bore significance. The Tatis had been chiefs of Papara for generations, and had entertained Captain Cook.

He lived in a bungalow near the beach, handsome, spreading, and with a mixed European and indigenous arrangement and furnishing that was very attractive. I met his sons and daughters, and had luncheon with them. Tati, of course, spoke English fluently, yet with the soft intonation of the Tahitian. Some of the dishes and knives and forks had belonged to Robert Louis Stevenson, who, said Tati, had given them to him when he was departing from Tahiti. Tati's sister, a widow, was of the party, and together we went to the Protestant churchyard to her husband's tomb. It was imposing and costly, and the inscription read:

In Memory of Dorence Atwater, beloved husband of arii inoore Moetia Salmon. Born at Terryville, Conn., Feb. 3, 1845. Died at San Francisco, Cal., November 28, 1910. As a last tribute to his name there was erected in his native state a monument with this inscription:

This memorial is dedicated to our fellow townsman, Dorence Atwater, for his patriotism in preserving to this nation the names of 13,000 soldiers who died while prisoners at Andersonville, Ga.

He builded better than he knew; some day, perchance, in surprise he may wake to learn:

He builded a monument more enduring than brass.

Tupuataroa.

The name given Atwater when he married Moetia Salmon was Tupuataroa, which means a wise man. Mrs. Atwater was rich and melancholy. She mourned her dead. Atwater had come to Tahiti as American consul, and had piled franc on franc in trade and speculation, with great dignity and success. He had been the leading American of his generation in the South Seas, and had left no children.

Tati said that when the church was dedicated—it was a box-like structure of wood and coral, whitewashed and red-roofed—three thousand Tahitians had feasted in a thatched house erected for the arearea. The himene-chorus was made up of singers from every district in Tahiti and Moorea. Tati had presided.

"We ate for three days," he related to me. "More than two hundred and fifty swine, fifteen hundred chickens, and enough fish to equal the miraculous draft on the shores of Galilee. We Polynesians were always that way, Gargantuan eaters at times, but able to go fifty miles at top speed on a cocoanut in war."

Tati would have me stay indefinitely his guest, but I had written to Mataiea of my intended arrival there, and though there were insistent cries that I return soon, I said farewell.

Tati himself walked with me to the bridge over the Taharuu River, one of the hundred and fifty streams I crossed in a circuit of Tahiti.

"My ancestor, the old chief Tati," he told me, "cut down the sacred trees of our clan marae near by, the aitos, tamanus, and miros. He had become a Christian, as was fashionable, and at the instigation of the English missionaries destroyed many beautiful and ancient trees, statues, carvings, and buildings. The Tahitians who mourned his iconoclasm had a chant which said that the Taharuu River ran blood when their gods were dishonored."

From the stream the vast domain of the plantation of Atimaono stretched to Mataiea. It had been planted in the sixties, when British demands for cotton, and the blockade and laying waste of the South in the American Civil War caused a thousand such speculations all over the world.

It was for this plantation, the most celebrated in Tahiti, that Chinese were imported, and a thousand had their shanties where now is brush. Those were the times that the Marquesas had their cotton boom, and lapsed, too. Upon a hill of this plantation the English manager, a former cavalry officer, had built himself a palatial mansion, and lived like a feudal lord, the most powerful resident of Tahiti. Travelers from all the world were his guests. Fair ladies danced the night away upon his broad verandas and drank the choicest wines of France. Scandal wove a dozen strange stories of intrigues, of a high official who sold his wife to him, of Arioian orgies, and all the associations of semi-regal rule and accountability to none. Cotton prices declined, the bubble burst in bankruptcy, the miserable death of the aristocrat, and the fury of cheated English investors.

The plantation was now owned by a storekeeper of Tahiti, prosy and disliked, who had fattened by ability to outwit the natives; but the glory had departed, and the place languished, ruins and jungle, the prey of guava and lantana. The neighborhood was known as Ati-Maono, "The Clan of Maon."

The lines between village and country were not rigid, and often the hamlet straggled along the road for much of the district. Every kilometer there was a stone marking the distance from Papeete. One knew the villages more by the Chinese stores than by any other feature.

"You will find the Papara country full of oranges," Fragrance of the Jasmine had said.

The fruit was as sweet and delicious as any I had eaten, and the trees larger than their parents of Sydney, Australia. I strolled along the road eating, speaking all who passed or were in sight within their gardens, and came to Mataiea, where I was to live months and to learn the Tahitian mind and language.

Ariioehau Amerocarao, commonly known as Tetuanui Tavana, or Monsieur le Chef de Mataiea, Tetuanui, and his wife, Haamoura, were the salt of the earth. The chief was a large man, molded on a great frame, and very corpulent, as are most Polynesians of more than thirty years. He was about sixty, strong and sweet by nature, brave and simple. His vahine was very stout, half blind from cataracts, but ever busied about her household and her guests. As chief and roadmaster of his district, Tetuanui received a small compensation, but not enough for the wants of his dependents, so a few paying white guests were sent to him by Lovaina. The house was set back from the Broom Road in a clearing of a wood of cocoanuts, breadfruits, badamiers, and vi-apples. The father of Haamoura had given the land to his daughter, and they had built on it a residence of two high stories, with wide verandas.

The chief and his wife had no children, but had adopted twenty-five. They had brought most of these to manhood and womanhood, and many were married. Perhaps their care, dots for the daughters, and estates for the sons, had made the parents poor. One was the blood son of Prince Hinoe, and was now a youth, and worked about the plantation of the chief. His christened name was Ariipaea Temanutuanuu Teariitinorua Tetuanui a Oropaa Pomare. He was a prince and very handsome and gentle, but he gathered the leaves from the volunteer lawn for the horses. There was an atmosphere of affection and happiness about the home I have not sensed more keenly anywhere else.

The Duke of Abruzzi's photograph and one of the Italian war-ship Liguria, were on a wall in the drawing-room, with others of notable people whom the chief had entertained. He himself wore the cross of the Legion of Honor, which had been presented to him in Paris when he visited there many years before.

The house was raised ten feet from the earth, and the ground below was neatly covered with black pebbles from the shore. Shaded by the veranda-floors, which formed the ceilings of their open rooms, the family sat on mats, and made hats, sewed, sang, and chatted. They laughed all day. A dozen children played on the sward where horses, ducks, geese, chickens, and turkeys fed and led their life. When rice or corn was thrown to them, the mina-birds flocked to share it. These impudent thieves pounced on the best grains, and though the chickens fought them, they appeared to be afraid only of the ducks. These hated the minas, and pursued them angrily. But the minas can fly, and, when threatened, lazily lifted themselves a few feet out of reach of the bills, and returned when danger was over.

The chief's plantation extended from the sea to the mountain, altogether about ten acres, which in Tahiti is a good-sized single holding. Cocoanuts, breadfruit, limes, oranges, badamiers, mangoes, and other trees made a dense forest, and a hectare or more was planted with vanilla-vines that grew on the false coffee of which hedges were usually made. A hundred yards away a stream meandered toward the sea, and there women of the household sat and washed clothes.

They had no taro planted, though there was much about. Taro, the staple food of Hawaiians, either simply boiled or fermented as poi, was not a decided favorite in Tahiti. The natives thought it tasteless compared with the fei, so rich in color and flavor. The taro is a lily (Arum), and its great bulbs are the edible part, though the tops of small taro-plants are delicious, surpassing spinach, and we had them often on our table.

Our customary meals at eleven and at six were of raw oysters, shrimp, crabs, craw-fish, or lobsters; fish of many kinds, chicken, breadfruit, vi-apples stewed, bananas, oranges, feis, cocoanuts, and sucking pigs. The family ate sitting or squatting on the ground, but I had a table and silver, glass and linen. It is the way of the Tahitian. The big house, well furnished, was not inhabited by the chief's family. It was their monument of success. They slept in one of several houses they had near by, and their elegant dishes were unused except for white guests.

On the beach at the river's mouth the heron sat or stalked solemnly, and the tern flew about the reef. The white iitae lived about the cocoanut-trees.

From the broad veranda in front was a view of the sea, and all day and night the breakers beat upon the reef a mile away, now as soft as the summer wind in the lime-trees of Seville, and again loud as winter in the giant pine forests of Michigan. The fleecy surf gleamed and shimmered in the sun as it rolled over the coral dam, and when the sea was strong, there was another sound, the lapping of the waves on the sand a hundred yards from me. A little wharf had been built there by the Government, and a schooner arrived and departed every few days, with people and produce.

I ate alone mostly, at a table on the veranda in front of my chamber, waited on by Tatini, a very lovely and shy maiden of fourteen years. To her I talked Tahitian, as with all the family, in an effort to perfect myself in that tongue.

I was happy that I had pulled up anchor in Papeete, and as contrast is, after all, comparative, I felt like a New-Yorker who finds himself in Arcadia, though I had thought Papeete, on first sight, the garden of Allah. In Mataiea I realized the wonder of the Polynesian people, and found my months with the whites of the city a fit background for study of and ardent delight in the brown islanders I was to know so well.



Chapter XVII

My life in the house of Tetuanui—Whence came the Polynesians—A migration from Malaysia—Their legends of the past—Condition of Tahiti when the white came—The great navigator, Cook—Tetuanui tells of old Tahiti.

Happiness in civilization consists in seeing life other than it really is. At Mataiea the simple truth of existence was joy. In the house of the chief, Tetuanui, I knew a peace of mind and body as novel to me as my surroundings. For the first time since unconcerned childhood I felt my heart leap in my bosom when the dawn awoke me, and was glad merely that I could see the sun rise or the rain fall. All of us have had that feeling on certain mornings; but was it not interwoven with the affairs of the day—a picnic, a rendezvous, our wedding, a first morning of the vacation encampment? In Mataiea it was spontaneous, the harking back to a beneficent mood of nature; the very sense of being stirring the blood in delight, and girding up the loins instantly to pleasurable movement.

I slept without clothing, and in a bound was at the door, with my pareu about me. Already the family had begun the leisurely tasks of the day. The fowls were on the sward under the breadfruit and papaya-trees, and the mina-birds were swooping down on the grass near them to profit by their uncovering of food. Those discriminating birds are like the Japanese, seldom pioneering in wild places, but settling on developed lands to gain by the slower industry of other peoples. "Birds that live on cows," the Tahitians call the minas, because where there are enough ruminants each bird selects one, and spends the day upon its back, eating the insects that infest its skin.

The sun at six barely lit the beach and revealed the lagoon, into which a stream from the mountains poured within Tetuanui's confines. I threw off my garment and plunged into a pool under a clump of pandanus-trees. It was cool enough at that hour to give the surface nerves the slight shock I craved, but warmed as I lay in the limpid water and watched the light sweeping past the reef in the swift way of the tropics.

I danced upon the beach and pursued the land crabs to their burrows. I hoped to see one wrench off a leg to prove what I had been told—that if one in its movement to the salt water through the tall grass beyond the sand, touched any filth, it clawed off the polluted leg, and that a crab had been seen thus to deprive itself of all its eight limbs, and after a bath to hobble back to its hole with the aid of its claws, to remain until it had grown a complement of supports. I wondered why it did not content itself with washing instead of mutilation. To the biblical expounder it was an apt illustration of "cutting off an offending member," as recommended in the Book.

At the house the family were preparing their first meal, and I shared it with them—oranges, bananas, coffee, and rolls. The last, with the New Zealand tinned butter, came from the Chinese store. We sat on mats, and we drank from small bowls. The coffee was sweetened with their own brown sugar, and the juice of nearly ripe cocoanuts, grated and pressed, made a delicious substitute for cream. Over the breakfast we talked, Tetuanui and Haamoura answering my questions and taking me along the path of my inquiry into far fields of former customs and ancient lore. They were, as their forefathers, gifted in oral tradition, with retentive memories for their own past and for the facts and legends of the racial history. We who have for thousands of years put in writing our records cannot grasp the fullness of the system by which the old Polynesian chiefs and priests, totally without letters, or even ideographs, except in Easter Island, kept the archives of the tribe and nation by frequent repetition of memorized annals. So we got Homer's Odyssey, and the Song of Solomon.

What Tahiti was like before the white? That was to me a subject of intense interest, now that I was fully aware of the situation after a hundred and fifty years of exploitation, seventy-five years of French domination, and thirty years of colonialism. The nature of the people was little changed. The Tahitian was still naif, hospitable, gentle, indolent except as to needs, valuing friendship above all things, accepting the evangelism of many warring Christian sects as a tumult among jealous gods and priests, and counting sex manifestations free expressions of affection, and of an appetite not more sacred nor more shameful than hunger or thirst.

These were the qualities and rules of conduct ascribed to the Tahitians by the first discoverers, especially by those who were not narrowed in judgment by inexperience and religious fanaticism, as were the British and French missionaries of early days, peasants and apprentices who had forsaken the fields and workshops for the higher sphere of devoteeism and freedom from manual labor. These clerics, though often self-sacrificing and yearning for martyrdom, attributed all differences from their standards or preachments to inherent wickedness or diabolism.

One of the ablest of them had regretted sorrowfully his having to inform the Tahitians that all their ancestors were in hell. Some clerics had made wearing bonnets the test of decency, and all had taught that God hated any open ardor of attraction for the opposite sex. Yet it was almost entirely to them that the far-away student had to turn to learn any of the details of native life undefiled. The mariners had stayed too brief a time to enter into these, and could not speak Tahitian.

I knew that Tahitian life, political and economic, social and religious, had been utterly changed, but I longed for an understanding of what had been; a panorama of it before my eyes. I set out to obtain this by constant interrogations of every one I thought might have even a scrap of enlightenment for me.

On rainy days, when Chief Tetuanui did not oversee the making or repair of roads in his district, and always when we were both at leisure, I sat with him, and the elders of the neighborhood, and queried them, or repeated for correction and comment my notes upon their antiquities—notes founded on reading and my observation.

Whence had come these Polynesians or Maoris who peopled the ocean islands from Hawaii to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to the eastern Fijis? A race set apart by its isolation for thousands of years from all the rest of the world, distinguished in all its habitats— Hawaii, Samoa, the Marquesas, Tonga, the Paumotus, and the Society archipelago, and New Zealand—by beauty of form, tint and uniformity of color, height, and soft expression—an expression they vainly sought to make terrible by tattooing?

The legends and chants of the race unfolded much of the mystery; its language's relation to others, more. These Tahitians and all their kind were ancient Aryans who in the dim past were in India, and afterward in the Indian archipelago. They were in Sumatra, in Java, in the Philippines long before the Malays. Certainly their blood brothers, changed by millenniums of a different environment, remain in Malaysia, known there as the aborigines (Orang-Benoa), by the majority races. D'Urville said the Harfouras of Celebes were identical physically with the Polynesians. At some unfixed date the first of the Polynesians pushed out in their insecure craft for this sea, driven away by the Malay-Hindu invasion or by interracial feuds.

The pioneer, according to the legend, was Hawaii-uli-kai-oo, Hawaii and the Dotted Sea, a great fisherman and navigator. He sailed toward the Pleiades from his unknown home in the far West, and arrived at eastern islands. So pleased was he with them, that he returned to his western birthplace for his family, and brought them to Polynesia.

Other Polynesians left the Asiatic archipelago about the end of the first century, and went to many islands. Finally they reached the Samoan, Tongan, Marquesan, Paumotuan, and Society groups, and Easter Island and New Zealand. In pushing eastward they skirted Papua, but were unable to stay, because the Papuans, whom the Polynesians had long ago driven out of the Asiatic archipelago, were stronger than the emigrants. They next tried Fiji, and tarried there longest, leaving those powerful imprints on the Papuans in appearance and language that make Fiji the anomaly of Melanesia. But the Fiji-Papuans at last drove them out, and they left with blood in their eyes. When the whites found the Marquesans in the sixteenth century, they were building at Vaitahu great war-canoes to "attack the black people who used bows and arrows." No living Marquesan had ever seen them nor could they have attained Fiji in any strength, yet the historical hate persisted.

The Marquesans of the north said their race came from Hawaii, and those of the south from Vavao. Seventeen places they had stopped at in their great migration eastward, they said.

Pu te metani me Vevau A anu te tai o Hawa-ii! Pu atu te metani me Hawa-ii A anu te ao e Vevau!

Blow winds from Vavao And cool the sea of Hawaii! Blow back, winds from Hawaii, And cool the air of Vavao!

That was the Marquesan legendary chant, the primal command of their God after creation. Vevau and Hawaii were placed in their former abode toward India (Hawaii being undoubtedly Java; and Vevau being Vavao, in Malagasy); but they had brought the names with them, and when they reached the present American territory, of which Honolulu is the capital, they called it Hawaii, as they had an island of the Samoan group, Sawaii. It was in the fifth century they peopled the now American Hawaii, and they remained unknown there until the eleventh, when Marquesans, Tahitians, and Samoans began to pour in on them, and continued to do so for a few generations. Then the present Hawaiians were isolated and forgotten for twenty-one generations until rediscovery by Captain Cook in 1778.

They gave the old names to Polynesia that they knew in Asia, as all over the world emigrants carry their home names, not only Hawaii, or Savaii, for Java, but Moorea, a Javan place, to the island near Tahiti; Bora-Bora from Sumatra to a Society island; Puna of Borneo to places in Tahiti, Kauai, and Hawaii; Ouahou of Borneo to Oahu, on which Honolulu is; and Molokai, from the Moluccas, to another island of Hawaii. One might cite hundreds of examples, all going to prove their far-away origin, as Florida, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, New England, New York, and Albany, indicate theirs.

That there were any inhabitants in the South Sea islands occupied by the Polynesians is improbable but a race of mighty stone-carvers had swept through that ocean, perhaps many thousands of years before, and had left in the Ladrones and in Easter Islands monuments and statues now existing which are a profound mystery to the ethnologist, the archaeologist, and the engineer. If the Polynesians came upon any of the stone builders, they had killed or absorbed them.

The interpretation of the curious ideographs carved on wood in Easter Island by some of the Polynesians there half a century ago would denote there had been intercourse with the people who had made them, and who were not the Polynesians.

Once in Samoa, and finally at home there, after their Fiji disaster, they had gone adventuring, or the canoe drift of unfortunates caught by wind and tide had brought populations to all the other Polynesian islands, and principally to Tahiti. This island in the center of Polynesia, and especially favored by nature, had been a source of growth and distribution of the race, the Paumotus, New Zealand, and probably the Marquesas, and Hawaii having been stocked from it, the language developing furthest in it, and customs, refinements, and leisure reaching their highest pitch in the marvelous culture, savage though it was, which astounded the Europeans. Yet all these people remained curious as to what might be beyond the distance, and a hundred years ago were fitting out exploring expeditions to search for Utupu, a Utopia from which the god Tao introduced the cocoanut-tree. They looked to the westward for the mystic land of their forefathers, as from Ireland to India the happy isles of the west was a myth. The mariners of Erin had long seen the Tir-n'an-Oge just beyond the horizon.

The Tahitians had a legend of the god Maui, that "he brought the earth up from the depths of the ocean, and when mankind suffered from the prolonged absence of the sun and lived mournfully in obscurity, with no ripening fruits, Maui stopped the sun and regulated its course, so as to make day and night equal, as they are in Tahiti."

Does not this hark back to a clime where the inequality of day and night was greater than in the tropics?

Lieutenant Bovis of the French navy, who seventy years ago, after ten years of study in Tahiti, wrote his conclusions, said that after him it would be useless to hunt in the memories of the living for anything of the past, for the old men were dead or dying, and those now in middle age did not even speak or understand the old language in which the records were told. He had, he said, arrived in Tahiti when the real Tahiti, the Tahiti of the true native, the Tahiti unspoiled by European civilization, was only a memory, but by years of labor he had taken from the lips of the venerable their recollections of conditions in their childhood and early manhood, and what their fathers had told them, and by comparison he had been able to write intelligently of former times.

If Bovis found the real Tahiti no longer existent seventy years ago, what must I look for when two generations or three had died since, and swift steamships coursed where only the clipper had sailed? Yet Tahiti was the least spoiled of islands on liner routes, because France being so far from it, and the French such poor business men, they had not exploited the natives except in the way of taxes. The bureaucracy lived on the imposts, but they had not reformed the people by laws and punishments, and made them see the wisdom of acquiescence in a scheme of regular work, as had the British missionary government in Tahiti and the American missionary government in Hawaii, in the name of an avenging and critical Lord. No people believed in the dignity of labor more than the Tahitians, because they refused to do any more than was requisite for health, cleanliness, comfort, and pleasure, and saw no more dignity or greater indignity in helping me on with my boots or bringing me my dinner or massaging my body than in listening to a sermon or catching fish.

They thought absurd and artificial the ideas foisted by politicians, merchants, and lawyers that it was dignified to sit in an office, to sell goods, or to draw up agreements, or undignified to disembowel a pig, make a net, or dig an oven. They saw governors and bankers spend all day chasing a boar or angling for a fish which they did not eat when they possessed it. They thought them queer, and that their own regimen of work and play was more sensible.

"What land is this?" asked Cook, and understanding him, the Tahitians answered, "Otaiti oia" or, "This is Tahiti."

Cook put it down as Otaheite, pronounced by him Otahytee. It was Cook's carpenter who was building a house for a chief, a friend of Cook's, and lost all his tools during the visit of the high priest of the god Hiro and his acolytes. Hiro was the first king in their myths, and, until Christianity came, the god of business. When Cook sailed away, the tools were taken to the marae, or temple of Hiro, where the priest said he would cause the prized tools to reproduce their kind, like fruit. He planted them in a field near by and watched for results. The lack of any result except rust was an able argument for the Christian missionaries, when they came, to destroy his cult by laughing at the foolishness of his ideas and the weakness of his god.

The discoverers reported that the Tahitians and all other Polynesians were thieves and liars, for the reason that they often seized pieces of iron, tools, and firearms that they saw on the ships or ashore in the houses occupied by the first whites, and then lied about their actions. The whites killed scores for these crimes, one of the initial murders of Cook's crew being the shooting of Chief Kapupuu as he departed in his canoe from their ship with some bits of metal he had taken. Malo, the native historian, who heard the account from eye-witnesses, explained the incident as follows, first mentioning the sighting of Cook's vessels and the wonder of the natives:

One said to another, "What is that great thing with branches?" Others said, "It is a forest that has slid down into the sea," and the gabble and noise was great. Then the chiefs ordered some natives to go in a canoe and observe and examine well that wonderful thing. They went, and when they came to the ship, they saw the iron that was attached to the outside of the ship, and they were greatly rejoiced at the quantity of iron.

Because the iron was known before that time from wood with iron [in or on it] that had formerly drifted ashore, but it was in small quantity, and here was plenty. And they entered on board, and they saw the people with white foreheads, bright eyes, loose garments, corner-shaped heads, and unintelligible speech.

Then they thought that the people [on board] were all women, because their heads were so like the women's heads of that period. They observed the quantity of iron on board of the ship, and they were filled with wonder and delight.

Then they returned and told the chiefs what they had seen, and how great a quantity of iron. On hearing this, one of the warriors of the chief said, "I will go and take forcible possession of this booty, for to plunder is my business and means of living."

The chiefs consented. Then this warrior went on board of the ship and took away some of the iron on board, and he was shot at and was killed. His name was Kapupuu. The canoes [around the ship] fled away and reported that Kapupuu had been killed by a ball from a squirt-gun.

And that same night guns were fired and rockets were thrown up. They [the natives] thought it was a god, and they called his name Lonomakua, and they thought there would be war.

Then the chiefess named Kamakahelei, mother of Kaumualii, said, "Let us not fight against our god; let us please him that he may be favorable to us." Then Kamakahelei gave her own daughter as a woman to Lono. Lelemahoalani was her name; she was older sister of Kaumualii. And Lono [Captain Cook] slept with that woman, and the Kauai women prostituted themselves to the foreigners for iron.

Cook was one of the best of the navigators of the South Seas, a devout churchman, and a believer in the decalogue of Moses. He thought stealing or lying odious before the Lord and men. But the Polynesians did not so think. Most of their possessions were in common, and telling the truth was unimportant. If one asked them about anything they had no interest in, they might tell the truth or might not. If they had interests, these were served by their replies. This is as in diplomacy to-day, when the interests of one's country allows prevarication, and even in Christian ethics both patriotism and self-preservation, as well as hospitality, permit flat falsehood. Our own spies are honest heroes, and the man who would not deceive a man who sought to kill him or burn his house would be considered a fool and not worth saving.

"There is plenty more in the kitchen," we say to guests out of hospitality and pride, though the kitchen is as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard. She could not lie to the dog.

Now, to the native who saw all around him on the ship huge masses of the material most precious to him in the world, it was as if an American in Yucatan saw in a native hut heaps of gold and diamonds not valued by the savage. Suppose the savage left the American alone with the treasure!

But the Tahitians did not murder for blood lust, had no assassination, and virtually no theft. Our own Anglo-Saxon law laid down the maxim, "Caveat emptor!" "Let the buyer beware!" which meant that the truth notwithstanding, the buyer must not let the seller of anything cheat him by failure to state the exact facts or faults, and expect the law to remedy his stupidity.

Chief Tetuanui's word was his bond because he had learned that square-dealing brought him peace of mind, but other natives had found out that to cheat the white man first was the only possible way of keeping even with him. The maxim of the king of Apamama, quoted by Ivan Stroganoff, was pertinent. Hospitality was as sacred to the Tahitians as to the old Irish. It was shameful not to give a guest anything he desired.

"Es su casa, senor!" said the Spaniard, and did not mean it; but the Tahitians literally did mean that the visitor was welcome to all his valuables, and did not reserve his family, as did the don.

The chevalier of the Legion of Honor upon whose mat I sat was emphatic as to the respect of the old Tahitians for their chiefs.

"It was the whole code," said he, "and when the French broke it down they destroyed us. There is Teriieroo a Teriierooterai, whose family were chiefs of Punaauia for generations, shifted to Papenoo. Each governor or admiral made these transfers here, as in the Marquesas and all the islands, with the primary object of lessening native cohesion, of Frenchifying us. They ruined our highest aspirations and our manners."

I had seen something of the same sweeping away of a code and the resultant evils and degradation in Japan. When Bushido imposed itself on all above the herd, they had a sense of honor not surpassed by the people of any nation; but commerce, the destruction of the castes of samurai, heimin, and eta, the plunging of a military people into business and competition with Western cunning, and the lacquer of Christianity which had done little more than Occidentalize to a considerable degree a few thousands, without giving them the practice of the golden rule, or an appreciation of the Sermon on the Mount, had robbed the Japanese of an ancient code of morality and honor, and replaced it with nothing worth while—an insatiable ambition to equal Occidental peoples and to conquer Oriental ones, and a thousand factories which killed women and children.