He walked on before me to the fare, and, opening the door, bade me welcome. The house differed from the aboriginal in a wooden floor and three walls of wire screen above four feet of wainscot. The roof was lofty, of plaited pandanus-leaves, with large spaces under the eaves for the circulation of air; but the immediate suggestion was of an aviary, a cage thirty feet square. Attached to this room was a lean-to kitchen, and near by, hidden behind the cage, was another native house for sleeping. The aviary was the living- and dining-quarters, protected from all insect pests, and an arbor covered with vines led to the water.

Many canvases were about, on an easel an unfinished group of three Tahitian boys, and a case of books against the one solid wall.

Half a dozen Tahitian youths were lolling outside in the shade, and one, at the request of the host, led up the horse and the boy who guarded it. The child skirted the circumference of the monkey's swing, and then, a few feet away, squatted to regard the animal with intense surprise and interest.

"Uritaata," he said; "I never saw one before, but I have read in my school-book that they have those dogmen in French colonies."

Uri means dog and taata man, and the compound name was that which sprang to the lips of the Tahitians on seeing a monkey, just as they called the horse puaa horo fenua, the pig that runs on the earth, and the goat, horo niho, the pig with horns. The pig and the dog were the only land mammals they knew before the white arrived. The race-track near Papeete was puaa horo fenua faa titi auraa. If a pig could talk, he would say that man was a wickeder and stronger pig. Jehovah has whiskers like a Rabbi. The Rabbis made him like themselves. Man has no other ideal.

The Tahitian youth addressed the Greek god as T'yonni, which was an effort to say John, and I adopted it instanter, as he did my own Maru. T'yonni said that Uritaata was the bane of his existence at Tautira. After building his fare he had been called to America, and had danced in Chinatown the night before his steamship departed for his return to Papeete. He remembered obscurely drinking grappo with a deep-sea sailor, and had awakened in his berth, the vessel already at sea, and Uritaata asleep at his feet. Many Tahitians, he said, had never seen such a fabulous brute, and T'yonni had stirred in them a mood of dissatisfaction by telling that their forefathers had descended from similar beings.

"How about Atamu and Eva?" they had asked the pastors.

Those conservatists had replied emphatically that Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, were created by God, which agreed thoroughly with the Tahitian legends, and after that T'yonni's generosity was ranked higher than his knowledge. He laughed over the stories as we sat at breakfast with my coachman in the kitchen. T'yonni said that the deacon of the Protestant church expressed a belief that the Paumotuans or even the French might have followed the Darwinian course of descent, but that Tahitians could not swallow a doctrine that linked them in relationship with Uritaata. The Tongans, Polynesians like themselves, had a tradition that God made the Tongan first, then the pig, and lastly the white man.

"He quoted the Tongan with compassion for me," said T'yonni. "And now about a place where you can live. Choti, a painter, whose pictures you see around here, lives with the school-teacher up the road, and he might find you a place. He's an American, as I am, and I suppose you, too."

I raised my glass to our native land, and finding that the boy of Taravao had eaten his fill of fei and fish, I said ariana to T'yonni, and drove to Choti's. The painter was on the veranda of a cottage, finishing the late breakfast. He received me with enthusiasm. Tall, very spare, and his skin pale despite his wearing only a pareu and never a hat, Choti's black eyes shone under long, black hair, and over a Montmartre whisker that covered his boyish face from his chiseled nose.

"Hello!" he said. "Come and have dejeuner?"

The manner of both T'yonni and Choti, while hospitable, and their glances at my bags, showed a probable wonderment of my intentions.

Was I an average tourist or loafer come to put an unknown quantity in their smoothly working problem of a pleasant life in this Eden? The artist must have looked me over for indications of familiarity with brush and palette.

I replied to Choti that I had breakfasted with T'yonni, and he smiled at my knowledge of his friend's Tautira name.

"How about getting an apartment or a suite of rooms?" I inquired.

Choti sucked the last particle of poi from his forefinger, dipped it into a shell of water, shook hands, and against my pleadings, accompanied me to the house of Ori-a-Ori, the chief of the district. The chief, an excessively tall man, quite six and a half feet and big all over, but not fat, like many natives, was very dark and slightly grizzled. He had a singular solemnity of address, a benignity and detachment which were the externals of a thoughtful, simple, generous nature, no longer interested deeply in trifles. His house was toward the farther end of the main street, and set upon a spacious lawn a hundred feet from the street, which, by the same token, was also a lawn, for there was no sign of the unadorned earth. So little wheeled traffic was there that bare feet walked on a matting of grass and plants as soft as seaweed on the beach. The street was bordered with cocoanuts and pandanus, and the chief's dwelling had about it breadfruit, papayas, and cocoanuts. The grounds were divided from neighbors' parks by hedges of tiare Tahiti, gardenias, roses, and red and white oleanders. I drew in their perfume as Ori-a-Ori said, "Ia ora na!" and took and held my hand a moment, while his grave eyes studied my face in all kindliness.

Choti put him the question of my habitation, and he instantly offered me either a room in his own house or a small, native building on the opposite side of the road and nearer the beach. We walked over, and found it unoccupied. It was a bird-cage, all one room, with a thatch of pandanus and a floor of dried grass covered with mats. The walls were of split bamboo, like reeds, and the sun and air penetrated it through and through; but hanging mats were arranged, one as a door, and others to keep out the rain. It was exactly suited for sleeping and lounging purposes, and the chief said that I could cook in a convenient hut. I brought in my belongings, which included bedding, and in half an hour was enough at home to dismiss the coachman and his equipage, and to lie down, as was my wont during the heat of the day. I put my bed in the doorway, and before I fell into my first sleep at Tautira, filled my eyes with the blue of the shimmering lagoon and the hoary line of the reef. I sank into dreams, with the slumbrous roar upon the coral barrier like the thunder of a sea god's rolling drum.



Chapter XXIII

My life at Tautira—The way I cook my food—Ancient Tahitian sports—Swimming and fishing—A night hunt for shrimp and eels.

T'yonni and Choti were the only aliens except myself in all Tautira, nor did others come during my stay. The steamships, spending only twenty-four hours in Papeete port every four or five weeks, sent no trippers, and the bureaucrats, traders, and sojourners in Papeete apparently were not aware of the enchantment at our end of the island. T'yonni had found Tautira only after four or five voyages to Tahiti, and Choti had first come as his guest. T'yonni had no art but that of living, while Choti had studied in Paris, and was bent on finding in these scenes something strong and uncommon in painting, as Gauguin, now dead, had found. They lived separately, T'yonni studying the language and the people,—he had been a master at a boys' school in the East,—and the artist painting many hours a day. But we three joined with the villagers in pleasure, and in pulling at the nets in the lagoon.

The routine of my day was to awake about six o'clock and see the sun swinging slowly up out of the sea and hesitating a moment on the level of the horizon, the foliage brightened with his beams. I sprang from my bed, washed my hands and face, and hastened to the fare umu, the kitchen in a grove of pandanus trees, a few steps away. There from a pile of cocoanut husks and bits of jetsam I selected fuel, which I placed between a group of coral rocks on which were several iron bars. I lit the fire, and put into a pot three tablespoonfuls of finely ground coffee and two cups of fresh water. The pot was a percolator, and beside it I placed a frying-pan, and in it sliced bananas and a lump of tinned butter from New Zealand. Leaving these inanimate things to react under the dissolving effect of the blaze, I ran to the beach, where I watched the sunrise. There recurred to me the mornings and evenings in the Orient when I had seen the Parsees, the fire-worshippers of India, offer their devotions, standing or kneeling on their rugs on the seashore. I, too, raised my hands in silent admiration of the mother of all life. Then I observed about me the hurry and scurry of the dwellers on the sands and in the water. Small hermit-crabs in shells many sizes too big for them toddled about, land-crabs rushed frantically and awkwardly for their holes, and Portuguese men-of-war sailed by the coast, luffing to avoid casting up on the beach. A brief period of observation, and I dashed back to the fare umu, and trimmed the fire. When cooked, I brought my food to my house, where I had a low table like a Japanese zen, and with rolls from the Chinese store I made my first meal, adding oranges, papayas and pineapple.

From the doorway, for all I encompassed in my view, I might have been the sole human on this island. I could look to the reef and far across the lagoon to Hitiaa or down the beach, but from that spot no other house was in sight. If I went around the house, I was almost on the Broadway of Tautira, the home of Ori-a-Ori before me, and a coral church close to it, with other buildings and groves toward the mango copse of T'yonni. On the bushes huge nets were drying, and canoes were drawn up into the purau and pandanus clumps. As the day advanced, the artless incidents of the settlement aroused my interest. I saw about me scenes and affairs which had caused a famous poet after a week or two in this very lieu to write:

Here found I all I had forecast: The long roll of the sapphire sea That keeps the land's virginity; The stalwart giants of the wood Laden with toys and flowers and food; The precious forest pouring out To compass the whole town about; The town itself with streets of lawn, Loved of the moon, blessed by the dawn, Where the brown children all the day Keep up a ceaseless noise of play, Play in the sun, play in the rain, Nor ever quarrel or complain; And late at night in the woods of fruit, Hark! do you hear the passing flute?

The school-house was near to the master's home where Choti lived, and often I heard the children learning by singsong, the way I myself had been taught the arithmetical tables. The teacher was Alfred, a Tahitian, who, being a scholar, must have a French name, and wear clothes and shoes when in his classes, but who very sensibly sat with Choti upon his veranda in only his pareu. Much of the time the pupils played in the grounds, hopscotch and wrestling on stilts being favorite games. Alfred regretted that the ancient Tahitian games which his grandfather played were out of style. Among these was a variation of golf, with curved sticks, and a ball made of strips of native cloth; and foot-ball with a ball of banana-leaves tightly rolled. Grown-ups in those Tahitian times were experts in all these sports, women excelling at foot-ball, with thirty on each side, and captains, backs, and guards, or similar participants, and with hard struggles for the ball, which, as the games were played on the beach, often had to be fought for in the sea. The spectators, thousands, did not view the contest from seats, but literally followed it as it surged up and down within the space of a mile.

Wrestling was the most notable amusement, and boxing was fashionable for women, some of whom were skilled in fistic combats. The wrestlers, as their Greek prototypes, first invoked the favor of the gods, and offered sacrifices when victorious. The palestra was on a lawn by the sea, and in formal contests district champions met those of other districts, and islands competed for supremacy with other islands. The maona wore a breech-clout and a coat of cocoanut oil freshly laid on, but not sand, as in the Olympiads. When one was thrown, the victor's friends shouted in triumph and sang and danced about him to the music of tom-toms, while the backers of the loser met the demonstrations with ridicule. This was much like the organized yelling on our gridirons; and when the wrestling began again there was instant silence. It was all good-humored, as was the boxing.

Spear-throwing and stone-slinging at targets were both fun and preparation for war, for in the battles the slingers took the van. The stones were here, as in the Marquesas, as big as hens' eggs, and rounded by the action of the streams in which they were found. Braided cocoanut-fiber formed the sling, or flax was used, and looped about the wrist the sling was flung down the back, whirled about the head, and the missile shot with deadly force and accuracy.

Archery was associated with religion in Tahiti, as in Japan, between which countries there are many strange similarities of custom. The costumes of the bowmen and their weapons were housed in the temple, and kept by devotees, and were removed and returned with ceremonies. The bows, less than six feet, the arrows, half that long, were never used in war or for striking a mark, but merely for distance shooting, and the experts were credited with reaching a thousand feet.

Tatini had pointed out to me, when we walked the peninsula of Taravao, a projecting rock, marked with deep-worn grooves, from which the Tahitians once flew very large kites. These were tied to the rocks, and the ropes of cocoanut sennit in the course of hundreds of years had worn the stones away. Often when the wind was favorable, they intrusted themselves to their kites, and slipping the ropes, flew to the opposite side of the bay, forerunners in the air of a certain Lyonnais of 1783, and contemporaneous with the Siamese who centuries ago indulged their levitative dreams by leaping with parachutes.

Alfred had registered all these obsolete things in his memory, while most Tahitians had no detailed knowledge of them, being crammed with the lore of theology, of saints, of automobiles, and moving pictures, and prize-fights for money. Matatini Afaraauia, son of Faaruia, of chiefly descent, a boy of seven, and of a guileless, bewitching disposition, made me his intimate friend, and through his sharp eyes I discovered phenomena that might have escaped my untutored mind. He lifted a stone, and beneath it was a spider larger than a tarantula. It was tabu to Tahitians, harmless, and a voracious eater of insects. Spiders are larger in these tropics than elsewhere, and here, too, the male was smaller than the female. Being seized and slain and devoured by his lady love even in the very transports of husbandly affection, it had been bitten in on his subconscious sensibilities that diminutiveness was life-saving, and natural selection had made him inferior in size to his cannibal mate. He had a very shrinking attitude in her presence, as Socrates must have affected about Xantippe.

At eleven o'clock of the forenoon I, with Matatini and Raiere, a youth of twenty, strolled down the grassy street to the garden of Alfred, where Choti might be painting under the trees, and if a halloo did not bring him bounding to us, we went on to T'yonni's, where he would surely be, either under the mango trees or in the salon. Choti had many canvases completed, some six feet long, and he also did excellent silver-point heads of the villagers. Tahitians were indifferent models, as they were not much interested in pictures, not seeing objects, as we do, and found posing irksome. Only Choti's friendship for them, his bonhomie, and many merry jokes in their tongue could keep them still for his purposes.

T'yonni's house was half a mile from my own. A quarter of a mile farther, and the same distance from the junction of lagoon and river, we had our swimming-place. On an acre or two of grass and moss, removed from any habitation, grew a score of lofty cocoas, and under these we threw off our pareus or trousers and shirts. The bank of the stream was a fathom from the water which was brackish at high tide and sweet at low. With a short run and a curving leap we plunged into the flowing water. It was refreshing at the hottest hour. The Tahitians seldom dived head first, as we did, but jumped feet foremost, and the women in a sitting posture, which made a great splash, but prevented their gowns from rising. As I remarked before, we three Americans bathed stark when with men, but the modest Tahitian men never for a moment uncovered themselves, but wore their pareus. Captain Cook said that in their houses he had not seen a single instance of immodesty, though families slept in one room. Choti avowed that he had to make love to his girl models to induce them to pose in the altogether, for money would not make them adopt the garb of Venus.

The Tahitians did not enter the sea for pleasure. The rivers and brooks were their bathing- and resting-places. They attributed sicknesses to the too frequent touch of salt water. They had not the habitude of swimming within the lagoons, as at Hawaii; it was not with them an exercise or luxury, but a part of their every-day activities in fishing and canoeing. A farmer after his day's work does not run foot-races. Yet in gatherings these people often vied for supremacy in every sort of sea sport, and beforetime, in bays free of coral, developed an astonishing skill in surf-riding on boards, in canoes, and without artificial support. Such skill was ranked on a par with or perhaps the same as proficiency in the pastimes of war, as did the Greeks, who addressed Diagoras, after he and his two sons had been crowned in the arena: "Die, for thou hast nothing short of divinity to desire." These ambitions had been ended in Tahiti by the frowns of the missionaries, to whom athletics were a species of diabolical possession, unworthy souls destined for hell or heaven, with but a brief span to avert their birthright of damnation in sackcloth and ashes.

We entered the river regularly at eleven and four, but Choti, T'yonni, and I also swam in the lagoon at the mouth of the river, and never suffered bad consequences unless we cut or scraped ourselves on coral. About noon I prepared my dejeuner a la fourchette, and had a wide choice of shrimp, eels, fish, taro, chicken, breadfruit, yams, and all the other fruits. The solicitude of the homesick missionaries had added to those indigenous, oranges, limes, shaddocks, citrons, tamarinds, guavas, custard apples, peaches, figs, grapes, pineapples, watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers and cabbages. They had grown these foreign flora many years before they made sprout a single shoot of Christianity.

I invented a stove from a five-gallon oil tin. With a can-opener I cut a strip out on opposite sides ten inches from the bottom, and laid two iron bars across, and under them, inside the receptacle, built a fire. Upon this I cooked my coffee in the percolator, while upon the earth and hot stones other delicious dishes boiled, stewed, and fried. If I baked, I used the native oven in the ground, with earth and leaves inclosing.

I passed hours on the reef with Raiere and Matatini or in canoes, drawing the nets and catching shrimp and eels. In the lagoon we usually secured a plentiful draft of fish, brilliant creatures of silver and crimson, as they leaped from the sea into the nets, and were later tumbled into canoes or on the beach. The orare, aturi, and paaihere were like the gleaming mesh purses worn by the women of our cities, but the ihi was as red as the beard of the Greek god T'yonni. These fish we kept in tubs of sea water, alive and even moderately happy until cooked.

Saturday's parties went far into the woods to gather a choice kind of fei, and the oranges and limes of the foot-hills. Raiere, Matatini, and another boy, Tahitua, hunted the shrimp and eel. After our suppers, about seven or eight o'clock, when it was quite dark, we equipped ourselves for the chase, each with a torch and two or three lances, all but Tahitua, who carried a bag.

We followed the grand chemin, as Alfred called it, along the lagoon and past the clump of trees in which lived Uritaata, whom we saw sleeping peacefully a dozen feet from the earth in the branches of a mango. He lay on his back, with his arms above his little head, and one foot grasping a leaf, and did not arouse to notice our passing. The Tahitians gave him wide avoidance, with a mutter of exorcism. We descended the bank, and entered the stream at a point just below the last hut of the village.

Raiere cast a glow upon the water with his torch, and we saw the shrimp resting upon the bottom or leaping into the air in foot-wide bounds. He poised his smallest lance and thrust it with a very quick, but exact, motion, so that almost every time he impaled a shrimp upon its prongs. The oura was instantly withdrawn, and Tahitua received it in his bag. All but he then began in earnest the quest of the bonnes bouches. We separated a hundred feet or so, and treading slowly the pebbled or bouldered and often slippery floor of the river, keeping to the shallow places, we lighted the rippling waters with our torches, and sought to spear the agile and fearful prey. The oura lances were five feet long, not thicker than a fat finger, and fitted with three slender prongs of iron—nails filed upon the basalt rock. One saw the faintest glimpse of a shrimp on the bottom, or a red shadow as the animal darted past, and only the swiftest coordination of mind and body won the prize. Whereas Raiere and even Matatini secured most of those they struck at, I made many laughable failures. I missed the still body through the deceptive shadows of the water, or failed to strike home because of the lightning-like movements of the alarmed shrimp.

The sport was fascinating. The water was as warm as fresh milk, transparent, and with here a gentle and there a rapid current. A million stars glittered in a sky that was very near, and the trees and vegetation were in mysterious shadows. Only when our torches lit the darkness did we perceive the actual forms of the cocoanuts, mango- and purau-trees which bordered the banks and climbed the hills into the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling over a stone or buried branch, and I looked often to reassure myself that Raiere's gigantic figure loomed in the farther gloom. There was no danger save in me; the scene was peaceful, but for our own disturbance of the night and the river, and not even a breeze fluttered the dark leaves of the trees. The mountain rose steeply at our backs, and constellations appeared to rest upon its shadowy crest.

At last we came to a place where a tiny natural dam caused the stream to break in glints of white on a crooked line of rocks, and pausing there, Raiere suddenly bent over. He called peremptorily to Tahitua to bring him the big lance, which the little boy carried along with the bag.

"Puhi! Haere mai!" he said in a low, but urgent, voice.

Tahitua flew through the ripples, and we all hurried to see the new adventure.

"Puhi! Puhi!" again said Raiere, and pointed to the rocks. We cautiously stepped that way, and saw, apparently asleep at the foot of the stones, a tangle of huge eels. Their black and gray slate-colored bodies lay inert in folds, as if they had gathered for a night's good slumber, and not until Raiere, with unerring aim thrust the great spear, with its half-dozen points of iron, into one of them, did the others scatter in a mad swim for safety. The mere transfixing of the eel did not always mean his securing, but another of us must put a lance in the contorting curves and with quick and dexterous motion lift him to the bank where his struggles might be ended with knife or rock. The release of him for a second might permit him to wriggle to the river and escape.

With the finding of the first eel, began an hour's search for his fellows. We had struck their haunt, but they did not yield us half a dozen of their kind without diligent, though pleasant, work. We splashed to places when one sang out that an eel was in sight, and pursued them in their divagations through the river, trusting to drive them into eddies or under the fringe of plants hanging from the banks where we hunted them out.

In a couple of hours we found ourselves with a full creel of eels and oura, and I a trifle dismayed at facing the march home. Raiere relieved Tahitua of the burden, and a song shortened the way. I gave them the ditty of the New-Zealand Maori, who metaphorically toasted his enemy:

O, the saltiness of my mouth In drinking the liquid brains of Nuku Whence welled up his wrath! His ears which heard the deliberations! Mine enemy shall go headlong Into the stomach of Hinewai! My teeth shall devour Kaukau! The three hundred and forty of my enemy Shall be huddled in a heap in my trough; Te Hika and his multitudes Shall boil in my pot! The whole tribe shall be My sweet morsel to finish with! E!



Chapter XXIV

In the days of Captain Cook—The first Spanish missionaries—Difficulties of converting the heathens—Wars over Christianity—Ori-a-Ori, the chief, friend of Stevenson—We read the Bible together—The church and the himene.

Captain Cook barely escaped shipwreck here. The Bay of Tautira is marked on the French map, "Mouillage de Cook," the anchorage of Cook. That indomitable mariner risked his vessels in many dangerous roadsteads to explore and to procure fresh supplies for his crews. When he had exhausted the surplus of pigs, cocoanuts, fowls, and green stuff at one port, he sailed for another. Scurvy, the relentless familiar of the sailor on the deep sea, made no peril or labor too severe. At night Cook's ships approached Oati-piha, or Ohetepeha, Bay, as his log-writers termed this lagoon, from the Vaitapiha River, flowing into it, and the dawn found them in a calm a mile and a half from the reef.

They put down boats and tried to tow off their ships, but the tide set them in more and more toward the rocks. For many hours they despaired of saving the vessels, though they used "warping-machines," anchors, and kedges. From my cook-house I saw where they had struggled for their lives with breaker, current, and chartless bottom. A light breeze off the land saved them, and in another day they returned to "obtain cocoanuts, plantains, bananas, apples, yams and other roots, which were exchanged for nails and beads." From the very pool into which I dived Cook's hearties filled their casks with fresh water, after shooting "two muskets and a great gun along the shore to intimidate the Indians who were obstinate."

Cook, on his third voyage to Tahiti, found here a large wooden cross on which was inscribed in Latin:

Christ conquered Charles the Third Emperor 1774

It was plain that Spaniards had erected the cross, for Charles III was King of Spain. These English tars hated the dons, with whom they had but recently been embattled. When they were convinced that a Spanish ship had been at Tautira twice since they had departed, and that the builders of the cross had earned the respect and affection of the natives, the Britons, in their old way of fair and assertive dealing, left the cross standing after carving on the reverse in good Latin as a claim of prediscovery:

George III King 1767, 1769, 1773, 1774, 1777.

Two Spanish priests, they learned, had lived in the village between the arrival and return of the Spanish ships from Peru. They left no imprint of their Catholic religion except the cross and a memory of kindness; and why they resigned their mission to Tahiti is not known. The British missionaries did not come until 1797, on the Duff. They planted gardens and worked diligently and prayed. They had vast patience, and confidence in their all-powerful and avenging God, and a rapt devotion to his son, who forgave the sins of those who adopted His faith. Their ideals were as fixed as the stars, and their courage superior to the daily discouragements of their lives and continuous hardships of separation from home. But they could not break the strength of the superstitions of the pagans. A dozen years these English ecclesiastics delved in their gardens, built their houses, and begged Jehovah and Jesus to give them victory. Five years they mourned without message or aid from England. Their clothes were in tatters, and as covering their whole bodies with European garments from feet to scalp, except face and hands, was a rigid prescription of their own morals' and an example to the almost nude Tahitians, they suffered keenly from shame. When, after half a decade, a brig arrived, its supplies were found ruined by salt water and mold. The poor clerics, in an earthly paradise, but hostile atmosphere, with little to report to an unheeding England save the depths of the untilled field of heathenry and depravity, might not have been blamed if they, too, had given up their mission. The fruits of twelve years of gardening and horticulture were destroyed in a day by ravaging parties. The fact that their lives were spared and their persons not attacked, except in a rare instance of an individual piece of villainy, is proof of the mild dispositions of the infidels. The Tahitians worshiped their gods with a superstitious awe not exceeded anywhere, and the outlandish white men proclaimed openly that these gods were dirty lumps of wood and stone and fiber, and to be despised in comparison with the Christian Gods, Father and Son, which they implored them under pain of eternal punishment to adopt. Imagine the fate of strangers who settled in New England or Spain a hundred and twenty years ago and who announced daily year in and year out that all the ancestors of the people there were in hell, that their God and their angels, saints, priests, and images were demons, or doing the work of demons, and that only by acknowledging their belief in a deity unheard-of before, by having water sprinkled on their heads, and ceasing the customs and thoughts taught as most moral and divine by their own revered priests, could they escape eternal misery as a consequence of a mistake made by a man and a woman named Atamu and Ivi six thousand years earlier! In Spain at that date the king whose name had been coupled with Christ's on the cross near my house at Tautira was expelling the Jesuits from his kingdom, and the Holy Office recorded its thirtieth thousand human being burned at the stake in that country in the name of Jesus Christ.

The incredulous Tahitians tolerated the queer white men who wore long, black coats and who had learned their language, and who, except as to religion, spoke gently to them, healed their wounds, patted their children on the head, and taught them how to use iron and wood in unknown fashions. They saw that these men drank intoxicants in great moderation, lived in amity, and did not advantage themselves in trade or with the native women, as did all the other white men. And they wondered.

But they were convinced of the truth of their own religion. Their chiefs and priests replied:

"If your first man and woman took the lizard's word and ate fruit from the tabu tree, they should have been punished, and if their children killed the son of your God, they should have been punished; but why worry us about it? We have not killed you, and our first man and woman respected all tabu trees."

They disdained the cruel message that their forefathers were in the perpetually burning umu, the oven, as did that Frisian king, Radbod, who with one leg in the baptismal font, bethought him to ask where were his dead progenitors, and was answered by the militant bishop, Wolfran, "In hell, with all unbelievers."

"Then will I rather feast with them in the halls of Woden than dwell with your little, starveling Christians in heaven" said the pagan, and withdrew his sanctified limb to walk to an unblessed grave in proud pantheism.

Otu, the son of King Pomare, had a revelation that the god Oro wished to be removed to Tautira from Atehuru. The chiefs of that district protested, and Otu's followers seized the idol, and went to sea with him. They landed as soon as it was safe, and mollified the god by a sacrifice; and having no victim, they killed one of Pomare's servants. The island then divided into hateful camps, and Moorea joined the fray. The mission sided with the king, and the crews of two English vessels fortified the mission, and with their modern weapons helped the royal party to whip the other faction. Wars followed, the mission was again invaded, the houses burned, and the missionaries, not desiring martyrdom, fled to Australia, thousands of miles away. But two remained, and kept at their preaching, and finally the genius of the Clapham clerics triumphed. Pomare ate the tabu turtle of the temple, and a Christian nucleus was formed, headed by the sovereign. For years a bloody warfare over Christianity distracted the islands, comparable in intensity of feeling to that between Catholics and Huguenots in France. The Christian converts were slaughtered by the hundreds, and the pagans drove all the survivors to Moorea. After a season the conquerors grew lonesome, and invited them to return and abjure their false god, Ietu Kirito, whom they had defeated, and who by the Christians' own statement had been hanged on a tree by the Ati-Iuda, the tribe of Jews. Pomare and eight hundred men landed from Moorea, and with the missionaries began a song service on the beach, and "Come, let us join our friends above," and "Blow ye the trumpets, blow!" echoed from the hills.

Couriers carried all over Tahiti word of the outrage to the gods, and the incensed heathens rose in immense numbers and attacked the hymners. Fortunately, says the missionary chronicle, the Christians had their arms with them, and after prayers and exhortations by the clergy, Pomare led his cohorts, men and women; and by the grace of God and the whites, with a few muskets, they smote the devil-worshipers hip and thigh, and chased them to the distant valleys.

Pomare, directed by the now militant missionaries, sent a body of gunmen to Tautira to capture the god Oro, whose principal temple was very near where stood my kitchen. The iconoclasts, with the zeal of neophytes, destroyed every vestige of the magnificent marae, and, unwinding the many coverings of Oro, carried to the king the huge log which had been the national god for ages. The king first used it in his cook-house as a shelf, and finally for firewood.

From then on the cross hecame the symhol of the new religion, and those who had been most faithful to the old were the strongest disciples. Until the French expelled the missionary-consul of England, Pritchard, the missionaries virtually governed Tahiti; but with the conflict of sects and the growing claims of trade, piety languished, until now church-going was become a social pastime, and of small influence upon the conduct of the Tahitians. The pastors were no longer of the type of the pioneers, and with the fast decrease of the race, the Tahitians were left largely to their own devices. Half a dozen religions supported ministers from America and Europe in Papeete; but there was no longer a fire of proselytizing, as all were nominally Christians. In Tautira everybody went to the Protestant or the Catholic church, the latter having a fifth as many attendants as the former. A reason for this may have been that there was no French priest resident at Tautira, and no Tahitian priests, whereas Tahitian preachers abound. Also the chiefs were Protestants, and their influence notable.

Ori-a-Ori, though busied in his official duties, and by nature a silent man, assumed of me a care, and in time gave me a friendship beyond my possible return to him. I sent to Papeete for a variety of edibles from the stores of the New-Zealand and German merchants, and spread a gay table, to which I often invited Choti and T'yonni, who were my hosts as frequently. Ori-a-Ori every evening sat with me, and numbers of times we read the Bible, I, first, reciting the verse in French, and he following in Tahitian. His greatest liking was for the chapters in which the Saviour's life on the seaside with the fishermen was described, but the beatitudes brought out to the fullest his deep, melancholy voice, as by the light of the lamp upon the low table the chief intoned the thrilling gospel of humility and unselfishness.

Never before had I appreciated so well the divine character of Jesus or conjectured so clearly the scenes of his teaching upon the shores of the Lake of Galilee. Excepting the tropical plants and the eternal accent of the reef, the old Tahitian and I might have been in Palestine with Peter and the sons of Zebedee and the disciples. They were people of slender worldly knowledge, the carpenter's son knew nothing of history, and ate with his fingers, as did Ori-a-Ori; but their open eyes, unclouded by sophistication and complex interests, looked at the universe and saw God. They lived mostly under the open sky in touch with nature, dependent on its manifestations immediately about them for their sustenance, and with its gifts and curses for their concerns and symbols.

Occidentals, who seldom muse, to whom contemplation is waste of time, do not enjoy the oneness with nature shared by these Polynesians with the sacred Commoner whose beatitudes were to bring anarchy upon the Roman world, and destroy the effects of the philosophies of the ablest minds of Greece. The fishermen of Samaria were gay and somber by turn, as were the Tahitians, doing little work, but much thinking, and innocent and ignorant of the perplexing problems and offensive indecencies of striving and luxury. The air and light nurtured them, and they confidently leaned upon the hand of God to guide and preserve.

Thoreau's "Cry of the Human" echoed in the dark as the chief and I chanted the idealistic desires of the friend of man:

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our salons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling and shortlived blaze of candles.

One evening when we had walked down to the beach to gaze at the heavens and to speculate on the inhabitants of the planets, we sat on our haunches, our feet lapped by the warm tide, and for the first time I drew our conversation to a man who in a brief friendship had won the deep affection of this noble islander.

"Ori-a-Ori," I began, "in America, in the city where I lived, my house was near a small aua, a park in which was a tii, a monument, to a great writer, a teller of tales on paper. On a tall block of stone is a ship of gold, with the sails spread; so she seems to be sailing over the ocean. The friends of the teller of tales built this in in his honor after he died. Now that writer was once here in Tautira—"

Ori-a-Ori leaned toward me, and in a voice laden with memories, a voice that harked back over a quarter of a century, said slowly and meditatively, but with surety:

"Rui? Is the ship the Tatto?"

I had awakened in his mind recollections, doubtless often stirred, but very vague, perhaps, almost mythical to him, after so long a time in which nothing like the same experience had come to him. Yet that they were dear to him was evident. They were concerned with his vigorous manhood, though he was a youthful grandfather when the Casco brought Robert Louis Stevenson to Tahiti to live in the house of Ori. I reminded him of their exchanging names in blood brothership, so that Stevenson was Teriitera, and Ori was Rui. Rui was his pronunciation of Louis, as all his family in Tautira called the Scotch author. Ori-a-Ori had known them all, his mother, his wife, and his loved stepson, Lloyd Osborne. Nine weeks they had stayed in his house, which the Princess Moe, Pomare's sister-in-law, had asked Ori to vacate for the visitors before he knew them, but which he was glad he had done when they became friends. Ori and his family had retained only one room for their intimate effects, and had slept in a native house on the site of my own. On the wild lawn across the road, before his home, Rui had given his generous feast, costing him eighty dollars at a time when he was most uncertain of funds, and gaining him the reputation of the richest man known to the Tautirans, the owner of the Silver Ship, as the Casco was called by the Paumotuans, and by Stevenson afterward. There were four or five Tahitians I knew here who remembered the amuraa maa of the sick man, who had his own schooner, his pahi tira piti; but only Ori retained the deep, though misty, impression made by a meeting of hearts in warmest kinship.

"Rui gave me knives and forks and dishes from the schooner to remember him by," said the chief, abstractedly. "Tati, my relation, has them. I have not those presents Rui handed me. Tati said that I ate with my fingers, and that he was the head of the Teva clan; so I gave them to him. Many papaa visit Tati at Papara. He is rich. Aue! I have not the presents Rui put down on my table."

I said over for him what Rui had written:

I love the Polynesian; this civilization of ours is a dingy, ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much of that the very beauty of the poor beast ... if you could live, the only white folk, in a Polynesian village, and drink that warm, light vin du pays of human affection, and enjoy that simple dignity of all about you....

Paiere, the adopted son of Ori, who was a boy when the Casco was at Tautira, claimed a vivid remembrance of many incidents. He especially had been impressed by the numbers of corks that flew in the house and on the green; and when I invited him to a bottle of champagne, he made hissing sounds and a plop to indicate that Rui had a penchant for that kind of wine.

"I used to fetch him oranges and mangoes, and climb for drinking nuts, of which Rui was fond," said Paiere.

Paiere was a deacon or functionary of the Protestant church, as was Ori-a-Ori, and I went with the entire family to the Sunday evening service. For weeks preparations and rehearsals for a himene nui, a mammoth song service, had been agitating the village. Under my trees the children gathered of late afternoons and imitated the grown-up folk in their melodies. From the verandas and from the church at night issued the peculiar strain of the himene, somehow bringing to me, lying on my mat under the stars, a sense of fitness to the prospect—the clear heavens, the purple lagoon, the wind in the groves, and the low rumble of the surf.

On the Sunday of the himene nui, I met the French priest as he tied his horse by the door of the Catholic church. He was in a dark cassock or gown, his long, black beard and a flat, half-melon shaped hat giving him a distinctive appearance in the simple settlement. He was old, and weary from his hot ride, but courteous as world-wide travelers are, and at his request I dropped in on his service before the other. He sat by the middle door, and the twenty or thirty of the congregation on the floor at one end. They sang a himene, and he followed and corrected them from a book, so that their method was formal. Congregational singing not being customary in Catholic churches, it was probable that in Tahiti they had had to meet the competition of the Protestants, who from their beginnings in Polynesia had made a master stroke by developing this form of worship in extraordinary consonance with the native mind.

The Protestant temple held a hundred and fifty people. It was a plain hall, with doors opposite each other in the middle, and at one end a slightly raised platform on which sat the pastor and half a dozen deacons. The pastor was delivering his sermon as I entered, he and all his entourage in black Prince-Albert coats. He had a white shirt and collar and tie, but others masked a pareu under the wool, and were barelegged. All wore solemn faces of a jury bringing in a death-verdict. Paiere nodded to a volunteer janitor, who insisted upon my occupying a chair he brought.

Every one else was on the floor on mats, in two squares or separate divisions. Babies lay at their mothers' extended feet, and others ran about the room in silence. The pastor's sermon was about Ioba and his tefa pua, which he scraped with poa, the shells of the beach. He pictured the man of patience as if in Tautira, with his three faithless friends, Elifazi, Bilidadi, and Tofari, urging him to deny God and to sin; and the speaker struck the railing with his fist when he enumerated the possessions taken from Ioba by God, but returned a hundredfold. After he had finished, wiping the sweat from his brow with a colored kerchief, the himene began.

The only advance we have made since the Greeks is, in music. Possibly in painting we have better mediums; but in philosophy, poetry, sculpture, decency, beauty, we have not risen. We cure diseases more skilfully, but we have more; in health we are crippled by our cities and our customs. Our violins and pianos, our orchestras, and symphonies, are our great achievements; but in these South Seas, where they do not count, the people had evolved a mass utterance of canticles more thrilling and, more enjoyable than the oratorios of Europe. In these himenes one may see transfigured for moments the soul of the Polynesian ascending above the dust of the west, which smothers his articulation.

A woman in the center of a row suddenly struck a high note, beginning a few words from a hymn, or an improvisation. She sang through a phrase, and then others joined in, singly or in pairs or in tens, without any apparent rule except close harmony. These voices burst in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some high, some low, some singing words, and others merely humming resonantly, a deep, booming bass. The surf beating on the reef, the wind in the cocoanut-trees, entered into the volume of sound, and were mingled in the emmeleia, a resulting magnificence of accord that reminded me curiously of a great pipe-organ.

The himene was the offspring of the original efforts of the Polynesians to adapt the songs of the sailormen, the national airs of the adventurers of many countries, the rollicking obscenities and drinking doggerel of the navies, and the religious hymns drilled into their ears by the missionaries, English and French. Now the words and the meanings were inextricably confused. A leader might begin with, "I am washed in the blood of the Lamb," or, "The Son of Man goes forth to war, a golden crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams afar—who follows in his train?" But those striking in might prefer such a phrase as, "The old white pig ran into the sea," or, "Johnny Brown, I love your daughter," or something not possible to write down. It was mostly in the old Tahitian language, almost forgotten, and thus unknown to the foreign preachers. Sex and religion were as mingled here as in America.

The airs were as wild as they were melodious; here a rippling torrent of ra, ra, ra-ra-ra, and la, la, la-la-la breaking in on the sustained verses of the leaders; falsetto notes, high and strident, savage and shrilling, piercing the thrumming diapason of the men; long, droning tones like bagpipes, bubbling sounds like water flowing; and all in perfect time. The clear, fascinating false soprano of the woman leader had a cadence of ecstasy, and I marked her under a lamp. Her head was thrown back, her eyes were closed, and her features set as in a trance. Her throat and mouth moved, and her nostrils quivered, her countenance glorified by her visions which had transported her to the bosom of Abraham.

The atmosphere rang as with the chimes of a cathedral, the echoes—there were none in reality—returning from roof and tree, and I had the feeling of the air being made up of voices, and of whirling in this magic ether. The woman I observed would seem about to stop, her voice falling away almost to no sound, and the prolonged drone of the chorus dying out, when, as if she had come to life again, she sang out at the top of her lungs, and the ranks again took up their tones. I could almost trace the imposition of the religious strain upon the savage, the Christian upon the heathen, like the negro spirituals of Georgia, and I sat back in my chair, and forgot the scene in the thoughts induced by the himene.

The souls of the Tahitians were not much changed by all their outward transformation. Superficial, indeed, are the accomplishments of missionaries, merchants, and masters among these Maoris. The old guard dies, but never surrenders; the boast of Napoleon's soldiers might be paraphrased by the voice of the Maori spirit. Our philosophy, our catechisms, and our rules have not uprooted the convictions and thought methods of centuries. Bewildered by our ambitions, fashions, and inventions, they emulate us feebly, but in their heart of hearts think us mad. Old chiefs and chiefesses I have had confess to me that they were stunned by the novelties, commands, and demands of the papaa (foreigner), but that their confusion was not liking or belief. In his youth, in the midst of these bustling whites, the Tahitian imitates them and feels sometimes humiliated that he is not one of them. But in sober middle age all these new desires begin to leave him, and he becomes a Maori again. The older he grows, the less attractive seem the white man's ways and ambitions, though pride, habit, and perhaps an acquired fear of the hell painted by priests and preachers from the distant lands keep him church-going. Gods may differ, but devils never.

Choti and T'yonni and I spent an hour at my house before they walked home to bed, and Choti read as a soporific, with a few bottles of Munich beer, the "Sermon to the Fishes" of St. Antonius. As he read, we heard the joyous stridence of an accordion in a hula harmony. The upaupahura was beginning in the grove where Uritaata lived. The austere St. Antonius had lectured long to the eels on the folly of wiggling, to the pikes on the immorality of stealing, and to the crabs and turtles on the danger of sloth. But:

"The sermon now ended, Each turned and descended; The pikes went on stealing, The eels went on eeling; Much edified were they, But preferred the old way.



"The crabs are back-sliders, The stock-fish thick-siders, The carps are sharp-set, All the sermon forget; Much delighted were they, But preferred the old way."



Chapter XXV

I meet a sorcerer—Power over fire—The mystery of the fiery furnace—The scene in the forest—Walking over the white hot stones—Origin of the rite.

Walking to the neighboring district of Pueu with Raiere to see the beauties of the shore, we met a cart coming toward Tautira, and one of the two natives in it attracted my interest. He was very tall and broad and proud of carriage, old, but still unbroken in form or feature, and with a look of unconformity that marked him for a rebel. Against what? I wondered. Walt Whitman had that look, and so had Lincoln; and Thomas Paine, who more than any Englishman aided the American Revolution. Mysticism was in this man's eyes, which did not gaze at the things about him, but were blinds to a secret soul.

Raiere exchanged a few words with the driver of the cart, and as they continued on toward Tautira, he said to me in a very serious voice:

"He is a tahua, a sorcerer, who will enact the Umuti, the walking over the fiery oven. He is from Raiatea and very noted. Ten years ago, Papa Ita of Raiatea was here, but there has been no Umuti since."

"What brings him here now?" I asked. "Who pays him?"

Raiere answered quickly:

"Aue! he does not ask for money, but he must live, and we all will give a little. It is good to see the Umuti again."

"But, Raiere, my friend," I protested, "you are a Christian, and only a day ago ate the breadfruit at the communion service. Fire-walking is etene; it is a heathen rite."

"Aita!" replied the youth. "No, it is in the Bible, and was taught by Te Atua, the great God. The three boys in Babulonia were saved from death by Atua teaching them the way of the Umuti."

"Where will the Umuti be?" I inquired. "I must see it."

"By the old tii up the Aataroa valley, on Saturday night."

That was five days off, and it could not come soon enough for me. I was eager for this strangest, most inexplicable survival of ancient magic, the apparent only failure of the natural law that fire will burn human flesh. I had seen it in Hawaii and in other countries, and had not reached any satisfying explanation of its seeming reversal of all other experience. I knew that fire-walking as a part of the racial or national worship of a god of fire, had existed and persisted in many far separated parts of the world.

Babylon, Egypt, India, Malaysia, North America, Japan, and scattered Maoris from Hawaii to New Zealand all had religious ceremonies in which the gaining and showing of power over fire was a miracle seen and believed in by priests and laity. Modern saints and quasi-scientists had claims to similar achievements. Dr. Dozous said he saw Bernadette, the seeress of Lourdes, hold her hands in a flame for fifteen minutes without pain or mark, he timing the incident exactly by his watch. Daniel Dunglas Home, the famous Scottish spiritist, was certified by Sir William Crookes and Andrew Lang to handle red-hot coals in his hands, and could convey to others the same immunity. Lang tells of a friend of his, a clergyman, whose hand was badly blistered by a coal Home put in his palm, Home attributing the accident to the churchman's unbelieving state of mind. Crookes, the distinguished physicist, took into his laboratory handkerchiefs in which Home had wrapped live coals, and found them "unburned, unscorched, and not prepared to resist fire."

The scene of the Umuti was an hour's walk up the glen of Aataroa, which began at our swimming-place. On Thursday Choti, T'yonni, and I accompanied Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations for the sorcery were beginning. We went through a continuous forest of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing coppice, in which all the riches of the Tahitian earth were mingled with growths from abroad. Oranges and lemons, which had sprung decades before from seeds strewn carelessly, had become giant trees of their kinds; and the lianas and parasites, guava, lantana, and a hundred species of ferns and orchids, with myriad mosses, covered every foot of soil, or stretched upon the trunks and limbs, so that exquisite tapestries garlanded the trees and hung like green and gold draperies between them. Mape-trees prevailed, immense, weirdly shaped, often appalling in their curious buttresses, their limbs writhing as if in torture, suggestive of the old fetishism that had endowed them with spirits which suffered and spoke. Utterly uninhabited or forsaken, there was a bare trail through this wood, which, led by Raiere, we followed, wading the Aataroa River twice, and I arriving with my mind deeply impressed by the esoteric suggestiveness of the scene.

On a level spot, under five ponderous mape-trees, eight or ten men of Tautira and of Pueu and Afaahiti were completing the oven. They had dug a pit twenty-five feet long, eighteen wide, and five deep, with straight sides. It had been done with exactitude at the direction of the tahua, who was staying alone in a hut near by. The earth from the pit formed a rampart about it, but was leveled to not more than a foot's height. At the bottom of the umu had been laid fagots of purau- and guava-wood, and on them huge trunks of the tropical chestnut, the mape. On the trunks were laid basaltic rocks, or lumps of lava, boulders, and the stones about, as big as a man's head. The oven was completed for the lighting.

To the north stood a giant phallus of stone, buried in the earth, but protruding six feet, and inclined toward the north. It was a foot in diameter, and was carved au naturel as the Maori lingam and yoni throughout Polynesia, and in India, where doubtless the cult originated. Before the break-down of their culture, this stone had been sprinkled with water, or anointed with cocoanut-oil, and covered with a black cloth, as in Hawaii. The Greeks called their similar god, Priapus, the Black-Cloaked.

A trench had been made on the west side of the pit from which to ignite the fuel, a torch lit by fire struck from wood by friction. I did not see the lighting, which occurred Friday morning, thirty-six hours before the ceremony. The ordinance was set for eight o'clock. I swam in the river at five on Saturday, and lay down in my bird cage to be thoroughly rested for the night. It was not easy to fall asleep. There was a thicket of pandanus near my house, the many legs of the curious trees set in the sand of the upper beach, and these trees were favorite resort of the mina birds, which were as familiar with me as children of a family, and in many cases impudent beyond belief. They were the size of crows, and had bronzed wings, lined with white; but their most conspicuous color was a flaring yellow, which dyed their feet and their beaks and encircled their bold eyes like canary-colored rims of spectacles. Their usual voice was a hoarse croak that a raven might disavow, but they also emitted a disturbing rattle and a whistle, according to their moods. They were thieves, as I have said, but one was more audacious than the others. He would come into my open house at daybreak, and perch on my body, and awaken me pecking at imaginary ticks. He picked up a small compass by its chain and flew away with it.

This particular wretch had learned to speak a little, and would say, "Ia ora na oe!" sharply, but with a decided grackle accent. Despite the irritating cacophony of the mina, I must have slept more than an hour; for when I was suddenly awakened, the sun was almost lost behind the hills. The talking mina was dancing on my bare stomach and calling out his human vocabulary.

I sprang up, my tormentor uttering a raucous screech as I tossed him away. While I hastily cooked my supper, the colors of the hiding sun spread over the sky in entrancing variety. I could not see the west, but to the northeast were rifts of blood-red clouds edged with gold over a lake of pearly hue, and to the right of it a bank of smoke. Against this was a single cocoa on the edge of the promontory, a banner my eye always sought as the day ended. Rising a hundred feet or more, the curving staff upheld a dozen dark fronds, which nodded in the evening breeze.

There was the slightest chill in the air, unusual there, so that I put on shirt and trousers of thin silk and tennis shoes for my walk, and with a lantern set out for the tii. Along the road were my neighbors, the whole village streaming toward the goblin wood. Mahine and Maraa, two girls of my acquaintance, unmarried and the merriest in Tautira, joined me. They adorned me with a wreath of ferns and luminous, flower-shaped fungus from the trees, living plants, the taria iore, or rat's-ear, which shone like haloes above our faces. The girls wore pink gowns, which they pulled to their waists as we forded the streams. Mahine had a mouth-organ on which she played. We sang and danced, and the tossing torches stirred the shadows of the black wold, and brought out in shifting glimpses the ominous shapes of the monstrous trees. With all our gaiety, I had only to utter a loud "Aue!" and the natives rushed together for protection against the unseen; not of the physical, but of the dark abode of Po. In this lonely wilderness they thought that tupapaus, the ghosts of the departed, must have their assembly, and deep in their hearts was a deadly fear of these revenants.

When we approached the umu, I felt the heat fifty feet away. The pit was a mass of glowing stones, and half a dozen men whom I knew were spreading them as evenly as possible, turning them with long poles. Each, as it was moved, disclosed its lower surface crimson red and turning white. The flames leaped up from the wood between the stones.

About the oven, forty feet away, the people of the villages who had gathered, stood or squatted, and solemnly awaited the ritual. The tahua, Tufetufetu, was still in a tiny hut that had been erected for him, and at prayer. A deacon of the church went to him, and informed him that the umu was ready, and he came slowly toward us. He wore a white pareu of the ancient tapa, and a white tiputa, a poncho of the same beaten-bark fabrics. His head was crowned with ti-leaves, and in his hand he had a wand of the same. He was in the dim light a vision of the necromancer of medieval books.

He halted three steps from the fiery furnace, and chanted in Tahitian:

O spirits who put fire in the oven, slack the fire! O worm of black earth, O worm of bright earth, fresh water, sea water, heat of the oven, red of the oven, support the feet of the walkers, and fan away the fire! O Cold Beings, let us pass over the middle of the oven! O Great Woman, who puts the fire in the heavens, hold still the leaf that fans the fire! Let thy children go on the oven for a little while! Mother of the first footstep! Mother of the second footstep! Mother of the third footstep! Mother of the fourth footstep! Mother of the fifth footstep! Mother of the sixth footstep! Mother of the seventh footstep! Mother of the eighth footstep! Mother of the ninth footstep! Mother of the tenth footstep! O Great Woman, who puts the fire in the heavens, all is hidden!

Then, his body erect, his eyes toward the stars, augustly, and without hesitation or choice of footprints, the tahu walked upon the umu. His body was naked except for the tapa, which extended from his shoulders to his knees. The heat radiated from the stones, and sitting on the ground I saw the quivering of the beams just above the oven.

Tufetufetu traversed the entire length of the umu with no single flinching of his muscles or flutter of his eyelids to betray pain or fear. He raised his wand when he reached the end, and, turning slowly, retraced his steps.

The spectators, who had held their breaths, heaved deep sighs, but no word was spoken as the tahua signed all to follow him in another journey over the white-hot rocks. All but a few, their number obscured in the darkness, ranged themselves in a line behind him, and with masses of ti-leaves in their hands, and some with girdles hastily made, barefooted they marched over the path he took again. When the cortege had passed once, the priest said, "Fariu! Return!" and, their eyes fixed on vacancy, six times the throng were led by him forward and back over the umu. A woman who looked down and stumbled, left the ranks, and cried out that her leg was burned. She had an injury that was weeks in curing.

At a sign from Tufetufetu, the people left the proximity of the pit, and while he retired to his hut, several men threw split trunks of banana-trees on the stones. A dense column of white smoke arose, and its acrid odor closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, my friends of our village were placing the prepared carcasses of pigs on the banana-trunks, with yams, ti-roots and taro. All these were covered with hibiscus and breadfruit leaves and the earth of the rampart, which was heaped on to retain the heat, and steam the meat and vegetables.

I examined the feet and legs of Raiere and the two girls I had come with, and even the delicate hairs of their calves had not been singed by their fiery promenade.

Meanwhile all disposed themselves at ease. The solemnity of the Umuti fell from them. Accordions, mouth-organs, and jews'-harps began to play, and fragments of chants and himenes to sound. Laughter and banter filled the forest as they squatted or lay down to wait for the feast. I did not stay. The Umuti had put me out of humor for fun and food. I lit my flambeau and plodded through the mape-wood in a brown study, in my ears the fading strains of the arearea, and in my brain a feeling of oneness with the eerie presences of the silent wilderness. I was with Meshack, Shadrach, and Abednego in their glorious trial in Nebuchadnezzar's barbaric court. I was among the tepees of the Red Indians of North America when they leaped unscathed through the roaring blaze of the sacred fire, and trod the burning stones and embers in their dances before the Great Spirit.

The Umuti was not all new to me. Long ago, when I lived in Hawaii, Papa Ita had come there from Tahiti. His umu was in the devastated area of Chinatown, a district of Honolulu destroyed by a conflagration purposely begun to erase two blocks of houses in which bubonic plague recurred, and which, unchecked, caused a loss of millions of dollars.

The pit was elliptical, nine feet deep, and about twenty-four feet long. Wood was piled in it, and rocks from the dismantled Kaumakapili church. The fire burned until the stones became red and then white, and they, too, were turned with long poles to make the heat even. I inspected the heating process several times. At the hour advertised in the American and native papers, in an enclosure built for the occasion, with seats about the pit, the mystery was enacted. The setting was superb, the flaming furnace of heathenism in the shadow of the lonely ruin of the Christian edifice. Papa Ita appeared garbed in white tapa, with a wonderful head-dress of the sacred ti-leaves and a belt of the same. The spectators were of all nations, including many Hawaiians. The deposed queen, Liliuokalani, was a most interested witness.

Papa Ita looked neither to the right nor left, but striking the ground thrice with a wand of ti, he raised his voice in invocation and walked upon the stones. He reached the other end, paused and returned. Several times he did this and when photographers rushed to make a picture, he posed calmly in the center of the pit, and then, with all the air of a priest who has celebrated a rite of approved merit, he retired with dignity. As he departed from the inclosure, the natives crowded about him, fearfully, as viewed the Israelites the safety of Daniel emerging from the lions' den. Did I not see the former queen lift the hem of his tapa and bow over it? It was night, the lights sputtered, and I was awed by the success of the incantation. A minute after Papa Ita had gone, I threw a newspaper upon the path he had trod, and it withered into ashes. The heat seared my face. The doctors, five or six of them, Americans and English, resident in Honolulu, shrugged their shoulders. They had examined Papa Ita's feet before the ceremony and afterward. The flesh was not burned, but, well—What? I confess I do not know. A thermometer held over the umu of Papa Ita at a height of six feet registered 282 degrees Fahrenheit.

There could be no negation of the extreme heat of the oven of Tufetufetu. I had tested it for myself. No precaution was taken by the walkers. I knew most of them intimately. There was no fraud, no ointment or oil or other application to the feet, and all had not the same thickness of sole. At Raratonga, near Tahiti, the British resident, Colonel Gudgeon, and three other Englishmen had followed the tahua as my neighbors had here. The official said that though his feet were tender, his own sensations were of light electric shocks at the moment and afterward. Dr. William Craig, who disobeyed the tahua and looked behind, was badly burned, and was an invalid for a long time, though Dr. George Craig and Mr. Goodwin met with no harm. The resident half an hour after his passage tossed a branch on the stones, and it caught fire. In Fiji, Lady Thurston with a long stick laid her handkerchief on the shoulder of one of the walkers, and when withdrawn in a few seconds it was scorched through. A cloth thrown on the stones was burned before the last man had gone by.

What was the secret of the miracle I had witnessed? How was it that in all the Orient, and formerly in America, this power over fire was known and practised, and that it was interwoven with the strongest and oldest emotions of the races? That from the Chaldea of millenniums ago to the Tautira of to-day, the ceremonial was virtually the same? Our own boys and girls who in the fall leaped over the bonfire of burning leaves were unpremeditatedly imitating in a playful manner and with risk what their forefathers had done religiously.

In Raiatea, the chief Tetuanui informed me, the membership of the Protestant church of Uturoa walked on the umu, and embarrassed the missionaries, who had taught them, as the Tautirans were taught, that the Umuti was a pagan sacrament.

In some islands it was called vilavilairevo, and in Fiji the oven was lovu. According to legend, the people of Sawau, Fiji, were drawn together to hear their history chanted by the orero, when he demanded presents from all. Each, in the brave way of Viti, tried to outdo the other in generosity, and Tui N'Kualita promised an eel that he had seen at Na Moliwai. Dredre, the orero, said he was satisfied, and began his tale. It was midnight when he finished. He looked for his present at an early hour next morning.

Tui N'Kualita had gone to Na Moliwai to hunt for the eel, and there, as he sank his arms in the eel's hole, he found it a piece of tapa that he knew to be the dress of a child. Tui N'Kualita shouted:

"Ah! Ah! this must be the cave of children. But that doesn't matter to me. Child, god, or new kind of man, I'll make you my gift."

He kept on angling with his hand in the hole, and caught hold of a man's hand. The man leaped back and broke his grasp, and cried:

"Tui N'Kualita, spare my life and I will be your wargod. My name is Tui Namoliwai."

Tui N'Kualita answered him:

"I am of a valiant people, and I vanquish all my enemies. I have no need of you."

The man in the eel's hole called out to him again:

"Let me be your god of property."

"No," said Tui N'Kualita; "the tapa I got from the god Kadavu is good enough."

"Well, then, let me be your god of navigation."

"I'm a farmer. Breadfruit is enough for me."

"Let me be your god of love, and you will enjoy all the women of Bega."

"No, I've got enough women. I'm not a big chief. I'll tell you: you be my gift to the orero."

"Very well; and let me have another word. When you have a lot of ti at Sawau, we will go to cook it, and will appear safe and sound."

Next morning Tui N'Kualita built a big oven. Tui Namoliwai appeared and signed to him to follow.

"Maybe you are fooling me, and will kill me," said Tui N'Kualita.

"What? Am I going to give you death in exchange for my life? Come!"

Tui N'Kualita obeyed, and walked on the lovu. The stones were cool under his feet. He told Tui Namoliwai then that he was free to go, and the latter promised him that he and his descendants should always march upon the lovu with impunity.

When I returned to my bird cage at Tautira, I sat down and considered at length all these facts and fancies. I believed in an all inclusive nature; that the Will or Rule of God which made a star hundreds of millions of times larger than the planet I had my body on, that took care of billions of suns, worlds, planets, comets, and the beings upon them, was not concerned in tricks of spiritism or materializations at the whim of mediums or tahuas. But I had in my travels in many countries seen inscrutable facts, and to me this was one. Nobody knew what was the cause of the inaction of the fire in the lovu or umu. It was not a secret held by anybody, or a deception.

One might believe that the stones arrive at a condition of heat which the experienced sorcerers know to be harmless. One might conceive that the emotion of the walkers produces a perspiration sufficient to prevent injury during the brief time of exposure; or that the sweat and oily secretions of the skin aided by dust picked up during the journey on the oven was a shield; or that the walkers were hypnotized by the tahua, or exalted by their daring experiment, so that they did not feel the heat. Even this theory might not account for the failure to find the faintest burn or scorch upon those who fulfilled the injunction of the sorcerers.

The people of Tautira, from Ori-a-Ori to Matatini, had the fullest confidence that Tufetufetu had shown them a miracle, and that it was not evil; but to the American and European missionaries the Umuti was deviltry, the magic of Simon Magus and his successors, This was shown clearly in the statement of Deacon Taumihau of Raiatea, which I give in Tahitian and English:

E parau teie te umu a Tupua.

Teie te huru a taua ohipa ra.

Tapuhia te vahie e toru etaeta i te aano. E fatahia taua umu ra i te mahana matamua e faautahia i te ofai inia iho i taua umu ra, eiaha ra te ofai no pia iho i te marae, no te mea te marae ra te faaea raa no te varua ino oia te arii no te po.

E i te po matamua no taua umu ra e haere te mau tahua ora no te ao nei oia Tupua e te mau pipi i Pihaiho i taua umu r ae hio te mau varua taata no te po e haere ratou inia iho taavari ai; ia ore i puai te auahi.

E ei taua po ra, e haere ai hoe taata e hio i te rau Ti, ia i te oia i te rau Ti i te hauti raa mai te hauti ie te matai rahi ra, te o reira te raoere Ti e ofati mai, e tau mau rauti ra te afai hia i te mahana e haere ai te taata na roto i taua umu ra e i te hora maha i te popoi na e tutui hia'i taua umu ra.

Ia ama taua umu ra, e ia puai roa te ama raa ei reira te tahua parau.

Atu ai i te taata pihei te umu, ia oti taua umu ra i te pihei, haere aturaa tupua i te hiti o te umu a parau tana a haere ai i reira.

Teie tana parau: E na taata e tia i te hiti ote umu nei, pirae uri e pirae tea. E tu'u atu i te nu'u Atua ia haere i te umu.

Ei reira Tupua parau ai: E te pape e a haere! E te miti e a haere!

Tairi hia'tura te rauti i te hiti o te umu raparau faahou, atura te tahua. Te Vahine tahura'i e po'ia te tu'u raa ia o te avae iroto i te umu, ei reira toa te mau taata i hinaaro i te haere na roto i te umu ra e haere. Ai na muri iho eiaha ra te hoe taata e fariu imuri; te taata hopea ra te tuo i te tahua e fariu; na fariu ia, mai te mea e tuo te taata i ropu e fariu, tau roa te taata i ropu e fariu, pau roa te taata i te auahi; na reira toa ia haere no te aano o te umu.

Te i te huru o taua ohipa ra, e ohipa tiaporo te tumu ia i taua ohipa a Tupua ra.

E vahine varua ino teie tona ioa o te Vahine tahura'i. O pirae uri, o pirae tea, i ore ratou ia parau hia.

Aita e faufaa i taua ohipa ra. Eiaha Roa'tu orua a rave i taua ohipa ra i te fenua Papa'a na e ama te taata i te anahi, no te mea e ere i te ohipa mau, e ohipa varua ino no te po te reira te huru o taua ohipa a Tupua ra.

Tereira te mau havi rii i roa'a mai ia'u no tau a ohipa ra. Tirara.

Taumihau tane.

This is the word of the oven of Tupua.

This is the way he did that thing. He cut three fathoms of wood. The oven was three fathoms long and three wide. Heap up the wood the first day, and carry by sea the stones for the oven.

Do not take the stones of the marae, for the marae receives the evil spirits, the spirit of the god of the night.

The first night of the ceremony, the sorcerers of Raiatea, Tupua and his kind, march around the oven. They seek the spirits of the men of the night, and they go about the oven, but they do not light the fire.

That same night one goes to find the sacred leaves of the ti. He takes the leaves that float in the wind; those called raoere ti, and which are used as medicine. He gathers the leaves and carries them to the oven.

The fire is lighted at four of the morning. When the fire is burning brightly, and the oven is very hot, the sorcerer gives his assistants charge of the fire, and instructs them as to their duties.

When the flames are down, Tupua approached the oven, and before walking upon it, he pronounced the following prayer.

"O men about the oven! Piraeuri and Piraetea! Let us join the army of the gods in the furnace!"

Then, said Tupua:

"O water, go in the fire! O sea water, go in the fire!"

Waving the ti leaves on the border of the oven, Tupua said:

"O Woman who puts the fire in the heaven and in the clouds, permit us to go on foot over the oven!"

Then those who wish to, pass onto the oven, one after another. If but one falls all will be burned. The last must watch the sorcerer, to return when he makes the sign.

That is the way this deed, the deed of the devil, is done by Tupua.

The woman called Vahine tahura'i is an evil spirit.

Concerning Piraeuri and Piritea, Tupua would better not have spoken, as it was a useless prayer.

Do not introduce the sorcery in the land of the whites!

Do not carry there this custom of lighting the oven!

It is the work of an evil spirit of the night; this act of Tupua.

For that reason I have said little of him in my story. I have spoken.

—Taumihau, The Man.



Chapter XXVI

Farewell to Tautira—My good-bye feast—Back at the Tiare—A talk with Lovaina—The Cercle Bougainville—Death of David—My visit to the cemetery—Off for the Marquesas.

The smell of the burning wood of the Umuti was hardly out of my nostrils before my day of leaving Tautira came. I had long wanted to visit the Marquesas Islands, and the first communication I had from Papeete in nearly three months was from the owners of the schooner Fetia Taiao, notifying me that that vessel, commanded by Captain William Pincher, would sail for the archipelago in a few days, "crew and weather willing." I was eager for the adventure, to voyage to the valley of Typee, where Herman Melville had lived with Fayaway and Kori-Kori, where Captain Porter had erected the American flag a century before, and where cannibalism and tattooing had reached their most artistic development. But to sever the tie with Tautira was saddening. Mataiea and the tribe of Tetuanui had won my affections, but at Tautira I had become a Tahitian. I had lived in every way as if bred in the island, and had fallen so in love with the people and the mode of life, the peace and simplicity of the place, that only the already formed resolution to visit all the seas about stirred me to depart.

The village united to say good-by to me at a feast which was spread in the greenwood of the Greek god along the shore of the lagoon. T'yonni and Choti, the student and the painter, were foremost in the preparations of the amuraa ma, and many houses supplied the extensive, soft mats which were put on the sward for the table, while the ladies laid the cloth of banana leaves down their center, and adorned it with flowers.

Ori-a-Ori sat at the head and I beside him. His venerable countenance bore a smile of delight in being in such jovial company, and he answered the quips and drank the toasts as if a youth. I was leaving early in the afternoon, and the banquet was begun before midday. We had hardly reached the dessert when the accordions burst into the allegro airs of the adapted songs of America and Europe. Between them speeches of friendship were addressed to me by the chief and others, and I sorrowfully replied. Choti gave the key-note to our mutual regrets at my leaving by quoting the letter in Tahitian written by Ori-a-Ori to Rui at Honolulu long ago:

I make you to know my great affection. At the hour when you left us, I was filled with tears; my wife, Rui Telime, also, and all of my household. When you embarked I felt a great sorrow. It is for this that I went up on the road, and you looked from that ship, and I looked at you on the ship with great grief until you had raised the anchor and hoisted the sails. When the ship started I ran along the beach to see you still; and when you were on the open sea I cried out to you, "Farewell, Louis"; and when I was coming back to my house I seemed to hear your voice crying, "Rui, farewell." Afterwards I watched the ship as long as I could until the night fell; and when it was dark I said to myself, "If I had wings I should fly to the ship to meet you, and to sleep amongst you, so that I might be able to come back to shore and to tell to Rui Telime, 'I have slept upon the ship of Teriitera.'" After that we passed that night in the impatience of grief. Towards eight o'clock I seemed to hear your voice, "Teriitera—Rui—here is the hour for putter and tiro (cheese and syrup)." I did not sleep that night, thinking continually of you, my very dear friend, until the morning; being then still awake, I went to see Tapina Tutu on her bed, and alas, she was not there. Afterwards I looked into your rooms; they did not please me as they used to do. I did not hear your voice saying, "Hail, Rui"; I thought then that you had gone, and that you had left me. Rising up, I went to the beach to see your ship, and I could not see it. I wept, then, until the night, telling myself continually, "Teriitera returns into his own country and leaves his dear Rui in grief, so that I suffer for him, and weep for him." I will not forget you in my memory. Here is the thought: I desire to meet you again. It is my dear Teriitera makes the only riches I desire in this world. It is your eyes that I desire to see again. It must be that your body and my body shall eat together at one table: there is what would make my heart content. But now we are separated. May God be with you all. May His word and His mercy go with you, so that you may be well and we also, according to the words of Paul.

The chief listened throughout the message with his eyes empty of us, conjuring a vision of the Rui who so far back had won his heart; and when Choti had concluded, Ori-a-Ori lifted his glass, and said, "Rui e Maru!" coupling me in his affection with the dim figure of his sweet guest of the late eighties.

The last toast was to my return.

"You have eaten the fei in Tahiti nei, and you will come back," they chanted.

Raiere drove me in his cart to Taravao, where I had arranged for an automobile to meet me. At Mataiea I was clasped to the bosom of Haamoura, and spent a few minutes with the Chevalier Tetuanui. They could not understand us cold-blooded whites, who go long distances from loved ones. My contemplated journey to the Marquesas Islands was to them a foolish and dangerous labor for no good reason.

The trip to Papeete from Mataiea by motor-car took only an hour and a half, and I was in another world, on the camphorwood chest at the Tiare hotel, by five o'clock.

"Mais, Brien, you long time go district!" exclaimed Lovaina. "What you do so long no see you? I think may be you love one country vahine!"

She rubbed my back, and said that Lying Bill, who had been at the Tiare for luncheon, hoped to sail in two days. McHenry was to go with us as a passenger on the schooner. Everybody knew everybody's business. Lovaina suddenly bethought herself of a richer morsel of gossip. She struck her forehead.

"My God! how long you been? You not meet that rich uncle of David from America? You not hear about that turribil thing?"

She was on the point of beginning her narrative when the telephone rang, and she was called away. I knew I would catch the before-dinner groups at the Cercle Bougainville, and walked there, waving my hand or speaking to a dozen acquaintances on the route. I climbed the steep stairs, and at the first table saw Fung Wah, a Chinese immigrant importer and pearl merchant, with Lying Bill, McHenry, Hallman, and Landers, the latter only recently back from Auckland. I was immediately aware of the sad contrast with Tautira. The club-room looked mean and tawdry after so many weeks among the cocoas and breadfruits; the floor, tables, and chairs ugly compared with the grass, the puraus, the roses, and the gardenias, the endearing environment of that lovely village. The white men before me had as hard, unsympathetic faces as the Asiatic, who was reputed to deal in opium as well as men and women and jewels.

Yet their welcoming shout of fellowship was pleasant, despite a note of derision for my staying so long away from the fleshpots of Papeete. Pincher and McHenry were themselves lately arrived, but evidently had learned of my absence from Lovaina.

"What did you do? Buy a vanilla plantation?" asked McHenry.

"Vanilla, hell!" said Hallman, whose harp had one string, "he's been having his pick of country produce."

Lying Bill said:

"Well, you'd better pack your chest for the northern islands to-morrow if you're goin' with the Fetia Taiao. We'11 be off for Atuona and Hallman's tribe of cannibals nex' mornin'."

I sat down and quaffed a Doctor Funk, and then inquired idly:

"Where's David?"

"David!" said Hallman. "For God's sake! don't dig into any graves!"

"'E's a proper ghoul, 'e is," Lying Bill said sarcastically. "'E thinks you're a mejum!"

They all stared at me as if I were crazy, and I felt myself in an atmosphere of mystery, in which I had broached a distasteful subject. I wondered what it could be, but determined to know at all hazards, reckoning on no fine feelings to hurt.

"What is the secret?" I asked. "I've been away a few months, and haven't heard the news. Has David run off with Miri or Caroline?"

Was this what Lovaina was bursting with?

They all remained quiet, until McHenry, with an oath, blurted out:

"What the hell's the good of all this bloody silence? He's been away and don't know." Then turning to me, he slapped me on the shoulder and bawled:

"We'll have a drink on you, O'Brien! David blew his brains out on Llewellyn's doorstep just after we left for the Marquesas. Joseph, bring one all around!"

As if at his word Llewellyn came up the stairs. His countenance was blacker than usual, his eyes more than half closed under their clouds of brows. His shoulders drooped, and he thumped his stick on the floor of the club as he came toward us. I felt certain that he detected something in the air—a sudden cessation of talk or a strained attitude on our part. He drooped heavily into a chair, and banged his stick on his chair-leg.

"Joseph," he called, "give me a Doctor Funk. Quick! No, make it straight absinthe."

Our own drinks were coming by now, and as the steward stirred about, Llewellyn for the first time saw me.

"Hello! Where did you come from? I thought you had gone back to the States."

"I've been past the isthmus," I replied, "and I haven't seen a soul or heard a word in that time. What's this terrible thing about young David?"

Llewellyn's arm jerked convulsively toward his body and knocked his glass from the table.

"Joseph, for God's sake, bring me a drink! Bring me a double absinthe!"

Joseph fetched the drink hurriedly, and stopped to pick up the broken glass.

"Mon dieu!" snapped Llewellyn, "you can do that afterward. Clear out!"

Then he turned to me, and his eyes contracted into mere black gleams as he asked:

"Are you like all these others? By God! I was passing the opium den here a few minutes ago, and I heard Hip Sing say something like that: What have I to do with David? Was I responsible for his death? Any man can come to your front door and kill himself. He was a friend of mine. I didn't see much of him before he died; I was busy with the vanilla."

Llewellyn swept us with an inclusive glance.

"Now you fellows have got to stop bringing up this David matter when I come in here, or I'll quit this club."

Hallman answered him, spitefully:

"For Heaven's sake, Llewellyn, I never heard a living soul mention David before, except at first, when there was so much curiosity. You're bughouse."

Fung Wah sat there, his small, astute eyes, in a saffron face, fixed alternately upon the speakers, with an appraising grimace but half-veiled. And as he sipped his grenadine syrup and soda water, he admired his three-inch thumbnail, the token of his rise from the estate of a half-naked coolie in Quan-tung to equality with these Taipans, the whites of Tahiti. He may or may not have known what rumors there were, but wanting the good-will of all influential residents in his widening scheme for money-making, he tried to soften the asperities of the interchange:

"Wa'ss mallah, Mis' Le'llyn?" he asked. "Ev'ybody fliend fo' you. Nobody makee tlouble fo' you 'bout Davie. My think 'm dlinkee too muchee, too muchee vahine, maybe play cart, losee too muchee flanc. He thlinkee mo' bettah finish."

The words of Fung Wah were poison in the ears of Llewellyn. He leaned forward and, raising his forefinger, pointed it at the Chinese.

"Aue! You hold your damned yellow mouth!" he said huskily. "I'll get out of the islands if you people keep up this any longer. I'm sick of it all. That old liar Morton has made my good name black in Tahiti. Everybody knows the Llewellyns. God damn him! I ought to have killed him when he threatened me in the Tiare!"

He took my untouched glass of Dr. Funk, and gulped the mixture, nervously. Then he stood up unsteadily.

"I don't get any sleep," he said, as if to himself, wearily. "I'm going to my shop and lie down."

He moved heavily down the stairs, and we breathed relief.

"Too muchee Pernoud!" Fung Wah commented.

"No, Fung Wah, you've sized 'im wrong," answered Lying Bill. "'E's seein' things. 'E's put enough absint' down his throat, but 'he's proper used to that. Let's take the matter up, an' consider it like ol' Raoul, the lawyer, did when Murray killed the gendarme at Areu. David's a young kid, an' wild, an' without any good home like you an 'me 've got, an' runnin' round the Barbary Coast in Frisco, with those bloody vampires there. 'Is uncle, Morton, is afraid 'e'll get the 'abit, and wants to sen' 'im pretty far. Well, 'e remembers 'e was in Tahiti forty years before, an' 'e been dealin' in a way in vanilla with ol' Llewellyn's 'ouse 'ere. So 'e makes arrangements to put ten thousan' dollars in with our friend that 's jus' gone out, and buy the kid a interest in the business. Down comes David, and Llewellyn takes a shine to 'im, an' soon they're thick as thieves. I see it all between voyages. It's the cinema, the prize-fight, the upaupa, the women, an' the bloody booze, day an' night. The vanilla business goes to hell or to Fung Wah or some other Chink. David blows in all 'is bleedin' capital, 'e busts in 'is 'ealth, an' may be, 'e's afraid o' somepin' worse. 'E gets a bloody funk, an' goes to Llewellyn's desk an' gets the gun. Then 'e writes a letter to 'is uncle in Frisco, an' goin' out on the step, 'e blows out 'is brains. I'm on the schooner, so I can't get any blame."

Captain Pincher lit his pipe, and the glasses were refilled.

McHenry attempted to pick up the thread of the tragedy, and began:

"Me, too, I'm with Bill drivin' the Fetia for Nuka-Hiva when David croaks himself. I drank as much as he did ashore, and I 'm no slouch with the vahines; but I can hold my booze, I can."

Lying Bill, with his drink down, and his pipe smoking, resumed, with no attention to McHenry, and a withering glance at Fung Wah, who was bored and walked over to the wall to glance at the barometer.

"Well, there's David dead on the doorstep,—'e probably shot 'imself about midnight,—and Llewellyn comes rollin' in a couple o' hours later, an' stumbles over 'is bloody corpse. 'E's tired, but 'e gets a lantern, an' sees the kid there, like a bleedin' wreck on the reef. It fair knocks 'im out, an' 'e sits down on the same step, an' when the kanaka comes in the mornin' to sweep up, 'e fin's the two o' them."

Landers broke in:

"Blow me! I'd 'a' hated to been that poor kanaka! But Doctor Cassiou, the coroner, said it was suicide all right. Llewellyn's in the clear."

"Of course, 'e 's in the clear, an' proper right," said Pincher, irritatedly. "But when the letter's mailed to ol' Morton in Frisco, 'e comes down on the nex' steamer, an' carries a gun to kill Llewellyn, an' tells everybody 'at Llewellyn dragged his nephew to 'ell, an' M'seer Lontane takes 'is gun away when Llewellyn meets 'im in Lovaina's porch, an' 'e pulls the gun, an' the Dummy stops 'im, and Llewellyn grabs a knife off the table. Why, there's some reason for 'im comin' in 'ere like a bloody queer un an' abusin' us."

"Hell! that's all over!" said Hallman. "I'll tell you, Llewellyn's always been sour. That's what that dam' German university highfalutin' education does for you. It takes the guts out of you. I know. I never had any of it. I'm a business man, by God! and I'm not crammed full of Dago and other rot. All the Davids in the world could croak on my doorstep, and if the police couldn't get me for it, I'd worry. I—"

"Belay there!" Lying Bill shouted at Hallman. "You don't know Llewellyn like I do. How about the tupapau, the bloody ghosts? You forget that Llewellyn's a quarter Kanaka, an' born 'ere. All that German university stuff ain't no good against the tupapau. Suppose you were part Kanaka, an' the kid 'ad done what 'e did? I've seen some things myself in these waters. That's what's eatin' Llewellyn, an', believe me, it's goin' to kill 'im if he don't bloody well drink 'imself dead, first. I've seen too many Kanakas go that way when the tahua got the tupapau after them. Llewellyn remembers what Lovaina said ol' man Morton hollered when M'seer Lontane took the gun away from him at the Tiare. 'All right!' hollered the uncle. 'All right! I'll leave it to God!' The ol' boy loved that kid. 'E told Lovaina 'at 'is whole bloody family was drowned when the Rio Janeiro went down off Mile Rock in Frisco bay. The kid was 'is sister's only child, an' 'is uncle left a thousand francs with the American consul for a proper tombstone on 'is grave in the cemetery. The ol' gent worshipped that kid."

Our session was over, the dinner hour having come; but Hallman had his final say:

"If Llewellyn 's got the tupapau horrors, for God's sake! let him stay away from the club. It's got so I hate to see him come in here, looking like a death's head. He spoils my drink. I'd rather be in the Marquesas with old Hemeury Francois, who is dyin' by inches of the spell Mohuto 's put on him. They're alike, these Kanakas; they're afraid of God and the devil, their own and the dam' missionary outfit, too. They've got them coming and going. No wonder they're getting so scarce you can't get any work done."