Four of the long arms had been severed at the ends when suddenly the octopus came out of his den to fight for his life. He was a reddish-purple globe of horrid flesh, horned all over, with a head not unlike an elephant's, but with large, demoniacal eyes, bitter, hating eyes that roved from one to another of us as if selecting his prey. Eight arms, some shorn of their suckers, stretched out ten feet toward us.

The Marquesans retreated precipitately, and I led them, laughing nervously, but not joyously. The son of Ugh! stopped first.

"Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta!" he cried. "Are we afraid of that ugly beast? I have killed many. Pakeka! We will eat him, too!"

He turned with the others and advanced toward the feke, shouting scornful names at him, threatening him with death and being eaten, warning him that the sooner he gave up, the quicker ended his agony. But the devilfish was not afraid. His courage shamed mine. I was behind the barrier of the boatsmen, but once in the throes of the fight a slimy arm passed between two of them and wound itself around my leg. I screamed out, for it was icy cold and sent a sickening weakness all through me, so that I could not have swum a dozen feet with it upon me. One of the natives cut it off, and still it clung to my bloodless skin until I plucked it away.

The son of Ugh! had two of the great arms about him at one time, but his companions hacked at them until he was free. Then, regardless of the struggles of the maimed devil, they closed in on him and stabbed his head and body until he died. During these last moments I was amazed and sickened to hear the octopus growling and moaning in its fury and suffering. His voice had a curious timbre. I once heard a man dying of hydrophobia make such sounds, half animal, half human.

"That feke would have killed and eaten any one of us," said the son of Ugh! "Not many are so big as he, but here in Hana Hevane, where seldom any one fished, they are the biggest in the world. They lie in these holes in the rocks and catch fish and crabs as they swim by. My cousin was taken by one while fishing, and was dragged down into the hidden caverns. He was last seen standing on a ledge, and the next day his bones were found picked clean. A shark is easier to fight than such a devil who has so many arms."

The boatsmen gathered up the remnants of the foe and brought them to the beach, where the elder Ugh! was tending the fire. Crabs were broiling upon it, and the pieces of the feke were flung beside them and the smaller octopi.

When they were cooked, a trough of popoi and one of feikai, or roasted breadfruit mixed with a cocoanut-milk sauce, were placed on the sand, and all squatted to dine. For a quarter of an hour the only sounds were the plup of fingers withdrawn from mouths filled with popoi, and the faint creaming of waves on the beach. Marquesans feel that eating is serious business. The devil-fish and crabs were the delicacies, and served as dessert. Blackened by the fire, squid and crustacean were eaten without condiment, the tentacles being devoured as one eats celery. I was soon satisfied, and while they lingered over their food and smoked I strolled up the valley a little way, still feeling the pressure of that severed arm.

Hana Hevane had its people one time. They vanished as from a hundred other valleys, before the march of progress. The kindly green of the jungle had hidden the marks of human habitations, where once they had lived and loved and died.

Only the bones of La Corse, the schooner Jerome Capriata had sailed many years, lay rotting under a grotesque and dark banian, never more to feel the foot of man upon the deck or to toss upon the sea. A consoling wave lapped the empty pintles and gave the decaying craft a caress by the element whose mistress she so long had been. Her mast was still stepped, but a hundred centipedes crawled over the hull.

When I returned to the fire, the boatmen were talking. Ugh! Dried-up Stream! his stomach full and smoke in his mouth, bethought himself of a tale, an incident of this very spot. In a sardonic manner he began:

"The men of this island, Tahuata, in the old days descended on Fatu-hiva to hunt the man-meat. After the battle, they brought their captives to Hana Hevane to rest, to build a fire and to eat one of their catch. This they did, and departed again. But when they were in their canoes, they found they had forgotten a girl whom they had thrown on the sand, and they returned for her. The sea was rough, and they had to stay here on the beach for the night.

"As was the custom, they erected a gibbet, two posts and a horizontal bar, and on the bar they hung the living prisoners, with a cord of parau bark passed through the scalp and tied around the hair. Their arms were tied behind them, and they swung in the breeze.

"In the night, when the Tahuata men slept from their gluttony, one of them arose silently and unbound a prisoner who was his friend, and told him to run to the mountains. He then lay down and slept, and in the darkness this man who had been freed returned stealthily in the darkness, and unloosed a girl, the same who had been forgotten on the sand. In the morning the other captives were dead, but those who escaped were months in the fastness of the heights, living on roots and on birds they snared. In the end they went to Motopu. They were well received, for the Tahuata warriors thought a god had aided them, and they and their children lived long there."

Ugh! smiled reminiscently as if his thoughts were returning from pleasant things, and clapped his hands as a signal for reembarking.

The bowls of food remaining were tied in baskets of leaves and hung in the banian tree to await the boatsmen's return for the night, the steersman was carried to his place, and the boat pushed through the surf.

A gaunt shark swam close to the reefs as we rowed out, a hungry, ill-looking monster. One of the bottles of rum the oarsmen had drunk on the way to Hana Hevane, the other was stored for their return, and to gain a third the son of Ugh! offered to go overboard and tie a rope to the shark's tail, which is the way natives often catch them. A shark was not worth a liter of rum, I said, being in no mind to risk the limbs of a man in such a sport. Besides, I had no more to give away. I could imagine the rage of Seventh Man Who Wallows should he learn of my wasting in such foolishness what would keep us both warm if it rained.

As we caught the wind a flock of koio came close to us in their search for fish. The black birds were like a cloud; there must have been fifty thousand of them, and flying over us they completely cut off the sunlight, like a dark storm. If they had taken a fancy to settle on us they must have smothered us under a feathered avalanche. Ugh! was startled and amazed that the birds should come so close, and all raised an uproar of voices and waved arms and oars in the air, to frighten them off. They passed, the sun shone upon us again, and in a sparkling sea we made our way past Iva Iva Iti and Iva Iva Nui, rounding a high green shore into the bay of Vait-hua.

The mountains above the valley loomed like castellated summits of Italy, so like huge stone fortresses that one might mistake them for such from the sea. The tiny settlement reaching from the beach half a mile up the glen was screened by its many trees.

The whaleboat slid up to a rocky ledge, and my luggage and I were put ashore. Exploding Eggs, who had insisted on accompanying me, took it into his charge, and with it balanced on his shoulders we sauntered along the road to the village where the French gendarme had lost his nose to the mad namu-drinker.



CHAPTER VII

Idyllic valley of Vait-hua; the beauty of Vanquished Often; bathing on the beach; an unexpected proposal of marriage.

The beach followed the semi-circle of the small bay, and was hemmed in on both sides by massive black rocks, above which rose steep mountains covered with verdure. The narrow valley itself sloped upward on either hand to a sheer wall of cliffs. In the couple of miles from the water's edge to the jungle tangle of the high hills were thousands upon thousands of cocoanut-palms, breadfruit-, mango-, banana-, and lime-trees, all speaking of the throng of people that formerly inhabited this lovely spot, now so deserted. The tiny settlement remaining, with its scattered few habitations, was beautiful beyond comparison. A score or so of houses, small, but neat and comfortable, wreathed with morning-glory vines and shaded by trees, clustered along the bank of a limpid stream crossed at intervals by white stepping-stones. Naked children, whose heads were wreathed with flowers, splashed in sheltered pools, or fled like moving brown shadows into the sun-flecked depths of the glade as we approached.

We were met beneath a giant banian-tree by the chief, who greeted us with simple dignity and led us at once to his house. The most pretentious in the village, it consisted of two rooms, built of redwood boards from California, white-washed, clean, and bare, opening through wide doors upon the broad paepae. This house, the chief insisted, was to be my home while I remained his guest in Vait-hua. My polite protestations he waved away with a courtly gesture and an obdurate smile. I was an American, and his guest.

My visit was obviously a great event in the eyes of Mrs. Seventh Man Who Is So Angry He Wallows In The Mire. A laughing Juno of thirty years, large and rounded as a breadfruit-tree, more than six feet in height, with a mass of blue-black hair and teeth that flashed white as a fresh-opened cocoanut, she rose from her mat on the paepae and rubbed my nose ceremoniously with hers. Clothed in a necklace of false pearls and a brilliantly scarlet loincloth, she was truly a barbaric figure, yet in her eye I beheld that instant preoccupation with household matters that greets the unexpected guest the world over.

While the chief and I reclined upon mats and Exploding Eggs sat vigilant at my side, she vanished into the house, and shortly returned to set before us a bowl of popoi and several cocoanuts. These we ate while Neo discoursed sadly upon the evil times that had befallen his reign.

"Me very busy when prenty ship come," he mourned. "Me fix for wood; get seven dollar load. Me fix for girl for captain and mate. Me stay ship, eat hard-tackee, salt horsee, chew tobacco, drink rum. Good time he all dead."

The repast ended, we set out to view the depleted village with its few inhabitants, the remainder after Europe had subtracted native habits and native health.

The gorge that parted the valley was wide and deep for the silver stream that sang its way to the bay. When the rain fell in cascades the channel hardly contained the mad torrent that raced from the heights, a torrent that had destroyed the road built years before when whaler's ships by the dozens came each year. Now the natives made their way as of old, up and down rocky trails and over the stepping-stones.

Near the beach we came upon a group of tumbledown shanties, remnants of the seat of government. Only a thatched schoolhouse and a tiny cabin for the teacher were habitable. Here the single artist of the islands, Monsieur Charles Le Moine, had taught the three "R's" to Vait-hua's adolescents for years. He was away now, Neo said, but we found his cabin open and littered with canvases, sketches, paint-tubes, and worn household articles.

"He got litt'ee broomee, an' sweep paint out litt'ee pipe on thing make ship's sails," Neo explained. Surely a description of a broad modern style.

On the wall or leaning against it on the floor were a dozen drawings and oils of a young girl of startling beauty. Laughing, clear-eyed, she seemed almost to speak from the canvas, filling the room with charm. Here she leaned against a palm-trunk, her bare brown body warm against its gray; there she stood on a white beach, a crimson pareu about her loins and hibiscus flowers in her hair.

"That Hinatini," said Seventh Man Who Wallows, speaking always in what he supposed to be English. "She some pumkin, eh? Le Moine like more better make tiki like this than say book. She my niece."

The rich colors of the pictures sang like bugle-notes among the shabby odds and ends of the studio. A cot, a broken chair or two, a table smeared with paints, an old shoe, a pipe, and a sketch of the Seine, gave me La Moine in his European birthright, but the absence of any European comforts, the lack even of dishes and a lamp, told me that Montmartre would not know him again. The eyes of the girl who lived on the canvases said that Le Moine was claimed by the Land of the War Fleet.

Turning from the dingy interior of his cabin, I saw in the sunlight beyond the door his model in the life. Le Moine had not the brush to do her justice. Vanquished Often, as Hinatini means, was perhaps thirteen years old, with a grace of carriage, a beauty and perfection of features, a rich coloring no canvas could depict. Her skin was of warm olive hue, with tinges of red in the cheeks and the lips cherry-ripe. Her eyes were dark brown, large, melting, childishly introspective. Her hands were shapely, and her little bare feet, arched, rosy-nailed, were like flowers on the sand. She wore the thinnest of sheer white cotton tunics, and there were flamboyant flowers in the shining dark hair that tumbled to her waist.

She greeted me with the eager artlessness of the child that she was. She was on her way to the vai puna, the spring by the beach, she said. Would I accompany her thither? And would I tell her of the women of my people in the strange islands of the Memke? They were very far away, were they not, those islands? Farther even than Tahiti? How deep beneath the sea could their women dive?

I answered these, and other questions, while we walked down the beach, and I marveled at the unconscious grace of her movements. The chief wonder of all these Marquesans is the beauty and erectness of their standing and walking postures. Their chests are broad and deep, their bosoms, even in girls of Vanquished Often's age, rounded, superb, and their limbs have an ease of motion, an animal-like litheness unknown to our clothed and dress-bound women.

Vanquished Often was the most perfect type of all these physical perfections, a survival of those wondrous Marquesan women who addled the wits of the whites a century ago. There was no blemish on her, nor any feature one would alter.

Half a dozen of her comrades were lounging upon the sand when we reached the via puna. Here an iron pipe in the mountain-side tapped subterranean waters, and a hollowed cocoanut-tree gave them exit upon the sand where salt waves flowed up to meet them. Long lean curving cocoanuts arched above, and beneath their ribbons of shade lay an old canoe, upon which sat those who waited their turn to bathe, to fill calabashes, or merely to gossip.

For all time, they said, this had been the center of life in Vait-hua. Old wives' tales had been told here for generations. The whalers filled their casks at this spring, working every hour of the twenty-four because the flow was small. Famous harpooners, steersmen who winked no eye when the wounded whale drew their boat through a smother of foam, shanghaied gentlemen, sweepings of harbors, Nantucket deacons, pirates, and the whole breed of sailors and fighting fellows, congregated here to bathe and to fill their water-casks. Near this crystal rivulet they slashed each other in their quarrels over Vait-hua's fairest, and exchanged their slop-chest luxuries and grog for the favors of the island chiefs.

It was Standard Oil, sending around the world its tipoti, or tin cans, filled with illuminating fluid cheaper than that of the whale, that ended the days of the ships in Vait-hua, and they sailed away for the last time, leaving an island so depopulated that its few remaining people could slip back into the life of the days before the whites came.

"Alice Snow las' whaleship come Vait-hua six years before," said the Seventh Man Who Wallows. "Before that, one ship, California name, Captain Andrew Hicks. Charlie, he sailmaker, run away from Andrew Hicks. One Vait-hua girl look good to him. She hide him in hills till captain make finish chase him. That him children."

Indeed, most of the faces turned toward me from the group about the spring were European, either by recent heredity or tribal nature. I could see the Saxon, the Latin, and the Viking, and one girl was all Japanese, a reference to which caused her to weep. "Iapona" was to her pretty ears the meanest word in Vait-hua's vocabulary, and her playmates held it in reserve for important disagreements.

Vanquished Often, slipping from her white tunic, stepped beneath the stream of crystal water and laughed at the cool delight of it on her smooth skin. It was a picture of which artist's dream, the naked girl laughing in the torrents of transparent water, the wet crimson blossoms washing from her drowned hair, and beneath the striped shade of the palm-trunks her simple, savage companions waiting their turn, squatting on the sand or crowded on the canoe, their loins wrapped in crimson and blue and yellow pareus. Behind them all the mountains rose steeply, a mass of brilliant green jungle growth, and before them, across the rim of shining white sand, spread the wide blue sea.

Courtesy suggested that I should be next to feel the refreshing torrent. We let slip the garment of timorous covering very easily when nudity is commonplace. Vait-hua was to teach me to be modest without pother, to chat with those about me during my ablutions without concern for the false vanities of screens or even the shelter of rocks as in the river in Atuona. In such scenes one perceives that immodesty is in the false shame that makes one cling to clothes, rather than in the simple virtues that walk naked and unashamed.

Tacitus recites that chastity was a controlling virtue among the Teutons, ranking among women as bravery among men, yet all Teutons bathed in the streams together. In Japan both sexes bathe in public in natural hot pools, and that without diffidence. The Japanese, though a people of many clothes, regard nudity with indifference, but use garments to conceal the contour of the human form, while we are horrified by nakedness and yet use dress to enhance the form, especially to emphasize the difference between sexes. Our women's accentuated hips and waistlines shock the Japanese, whose loose clothing is the same for men and women, the broader belt and double fold upon the small of the back, the obi, being the only differentiation.

Mohammedan women surprised in bathing cover their faces first; the Chinese, the feet. Good Erasmus, that Dutch theologian, said that "angels abhor nakedness." Devout Europeans of his day never saw their own bodies; if they bathed, they wore a garment covering them from head to feet. Thus standards of clothing vary from age to age and from country to country.

Missionaries bewilder the savage mind by imposing their own standards of the moment and calling them modesty. The African negro, struggling to harmonize these two ideas, wore a tall silk hat and a pair of slippers as his only garments when he obeyed Livingstone's exhortations to clothe himself in the presence of white women.

Vait-hua was all savage; whatever bewilderments the missionaries had brought had faded when dwindling population left the isle to its own people. In the minds of my happy companions at the vai puna, modesty had no more to do with clothing than, among us, it had to do with food. The standards of the individual are everywhere formed by the mass-opinion of those about him; I came from my bath, replaced my garments, and felt myself Marquesan.

The sensation was false. Savage peoples can never understand our philosophy, our complex springs of action. They may ape our manners, wear our ornaments, and seek our company, but their souls remain indifferent. They laugh when we are stolid. They weep when we are unmoved. Their gods and devils are not ours.

From our side, too, the abyss is impassable. Civilization with its refinements and complexities has stripped us of the power of complete surrender to simple impulses. The white who would become like a natural savage succeeds only in becoming a beast. "Plus sauvage que les kanakas," is a proverb in the islands. Its implications I had occasion to heed ere the evening was ended.

Wrapped only in a gorgeous red pareu, I sat on the paepae of the chief's house, now become mine. I was the especial care of Mrs. Seventh Man Who Wallows, who all afternoon long had sat on her haunches over a cocoanut husk fire stirring savory foods for me. Fish, chickens, pigs, eggs, and native delicacies of all kinds she had cooked and sauced so appetizingly that I conferred on her the title of "Chefess" de Cuisine, and voiced my suspicions that some deserting cook from a flagship had traded his lore for her kisses. Her laughter was spiced with pride, and the chief himself smilingly nodded and gestured to assure me that I had guessed right.

Now in the quiet of the evening, empty bowls removed, pandanus-leaf cigarettes lighted, and pipe passing from hand to hand, we sat rejoicing in the sweet odors of the forest, the murmur of the stream, and the ease of contentment. Many elders of the village had come to meet the stranger, to discuss the world and its wonders, and to marvel at the ways of the whites. The glow of the pipe lighted shriveled yet still handsome countenances scrolled with tattooing, and caught gleams from rolling eyes or sparkles from necklace and earring. Above the mountains a full moon rose, flooding the valley with light and fading the brilliant colors of leaf and flower to pale pastel tints.

Vanquished Often sat beside me, her dark hair falling over my knee, and listened respectfully to the conversation of her elders, who discussed the gods of the stranger.

They wondered what curious motive had impelled the Jews, the Aati-Ietu, to kill Ieto Kirito the Savior of the world. They discussed the strange madness that had possessed Iuda Iskalota, that he had first bought land with his forty pieces of silver and then hanged himself to a purau tree. Was it cocoanut land? they asked. Was it not good land?

Often across the worn stones of the paepae stole a vei, a centipede, upon which a bare foot quickly stamped. The chief said casually, "If he bite you, you no die; you have hell of a time." They were not natives of the Marquesas originally, he said; they came in the coal of ships. His patriotism outran his knowledge, for the first discoverers bitterly berated these poisonous creatures, though no more warmly than Neo, who drew heavily upon his stock of English curses to tell his opinion of them.

When the time came for saying apae kaoha my kindly hosts sought to confer upon me the last proof of their friendliness. They proposed that I marry Vanquished Often.

My refusal was incomprehensible to them, and Vanquished Often's happy smile in the moonlight quickly faded to a look of pain and humiliation. They had offered me their highest and most revered expression of hospitality. To refuse it was as uncustomary and as rude as to refuse the Alaskan miner who offers a drink at a public bar.

"Menike," pleaded the chief, "that Hinatini more better marry white man, friend of Teddy, from number one island. She some punkins for be good wife. Suppose may be you like Vait-hua you stay long time; suppose you go soon, make never mind!"

The fair chieftess shook her earrings and smiled archly. "Bonne filly pooh voo, Menike," she urged in her Marquesan French. "Good wife for you. It is my pleasure that you are happy. She is beautiful and good. You will be the son of our people while you are here."

Vanquished Often, who had a vague notion of the greatness of her uncle's Menike friends, Teddy and Gotali, and of the desirability of an alliance with one of their tribe, approached me softly and rubbed my back in a circle the while she crooned a broken song of the whaling days, concerning the "rolling Mississippi" and the "Black Ball line." Seventh Man Who Wallows in the Mire himself began to make concentric circles on my breast with his heavy hand, so that I was beset fore and aft by the most tender and friendly advances of the Marquesan race. Never was hapless guest in more unfortunate plight.

She was but a child, I said; Americans did not mate with children. They smiled as at a pleasantry, and again extolled her charms. Desperately I harked back to the ten commandments in an endeavor to support my refusal by other reasons than distaste or discourtesy, but laughter met my text. "White man does not follow white man's tapus," said my hostess, gently placing my hand in that of Vanquished Often. The slender fingers clung timorously to mine. Unhappy Hinatini feared that she was about to be disgraced before her people by the white man's scorn of her beauty.

I was fain to invent a romance upon the spot. I was madly enamoured of an Atuona belle, I said. She waited for me upon my own paepae; she was a mighty woman and swift to anger. She would wreak vengeance upon me, and upon Vanquished Often. I would adopt Vanquished Often as my sister. In token of this I pressed my lips upon her forehead and kissed her hands. She smiled bewitchingly, pleased by the novel honor.

My hosts and their friends departed with her, half pleased, half puzzled at this latest whimsy of the strange white, and I lay down upon the mats of the chief's house, with Exploding Eggs lying across the doorway at my feet.

The night brought fitful dreams, and in the darkest hour I woke to feel a frightening thing upon my leg. By the light of the dimly burning lantern I saw a thousand-leg, reddish brown and ten inches long, halting perhaps for breath midway between my knee and waist. It seemed indeed to have a thousand legs, and each separate foot made impresses of terror on my mind, while each toe and claw clutched my bare flesh with threatening touch.

The brave man of the tale who saves himself from cobra or rattler by letting the serpent crawl its slow way over his perfectly controlled body might have withheld even a quiver of the flesh, but I am no Spartan. At my convulsive shudder each horrid claw gripped a death-hold. In one swift motion I seized a corkscrew that lay nearby, pried loose with a quick jerk every single pede and threw the odious thing a dozen yards. A trail of red, inflamed spots rose where it had stood and remained painful and swollen for days.



Whether it was because this experience became mixed with my first dreams in beautiful Vait-hua, or whether my Celtic blood sees portents where they do not exist, certain it is that as the stealthy charm of that idyllic place grew upon me through the days something within me resisted it. I was ever aware that its beauty concealed a menace deadly to the white man who listened too long to the rustle of its palms and the murmur of its stream.



CHAPTER VIII

Communal life; sport in the waves; fight of the sharks and the mother whale; a day in the mountains; death of Le Capitaine Halley; return to Atuona.

Life in Vait-hua was idyllic. The whites, having desolated and depopulated this once thronged valley, had gone, leaving the remnant of its people to return to their native virtue and quietude. Here, perhaps more than in any other spot in all the isles, the Marquesan lived as his forefathers had before the whites came.

Doing nothing sweetly was an art in Vait-hua. Pleasure is nature's sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. The people of this quiet valley did not crave excitement. The bustle and nervous energy of the white wearied them excessively. Time was never wasted, to their minds, for leisure was the measure of its value.

Domestic details, the preparation of food, the care of children, the nursing of the sick, were the tasks of all the household. Husband and wife, or the mates unmarried, labored together in delightful unity. Often the woman accompanied her man into the forests, assisting in the gathering of nuts and breadfruit, in the fishing and the building. When these duties did not occupy them, or when they were not together bathing in the river or at the via puna, they sat side by side on their paepaes in meditation. They might discuss the events of the day, they might receive the visits of others, or go abroad for conversation; but for hours they often were wrapped in their thoughts, in a silence broken only by the rolling of their pandanus cigarettes or the lighting of the mutual pipe.

"Of what are you thinking?" I said often to my neighbors when breaking in upon their meditation.

"Of the world. Of those stars," they replied.

They would sympathize with that Chinese traveler who, visiting America and being hurried from carriage to train, smiled at our idea of catching the fleeting moment.

"We save ten minutes by catching this train," said his guide, enthusiastically.

"And what will you do with that ten minutes?" demanded the Chinese.

To be busy about anything not necessary to living is, in Marquesan wisdom, to be idle.

Swimming in the surf, lolling at the via puna, angling from rock or canoe or fishing with line and spear outside the bay, searching for shell-fish, and riding or walking over the hills to other valleys, filled their peaceful, pleasant days. A dream-like, care-free life, lived by a people sweet to know, handsome and generous and loving.

That he never saw or heard of the slightest quarrel between individuals was the statement a century ago of Captain Porter, the American. Then as now the most perfect harmony prevailed among them. They lived like affectionate brothers of one family, he said, the authority of the chiefs being only that of fathers among children. They had no mode of punishment for there were no offenders. Theft was unknown, and all property was left unguarded. So Porter, who, with his ship's company, killed so many Marquesans, was fully aware of their civic virtues, their kindness, gentleness and generosity.

It is so to-day, in Vait-hua where the whites are not. I have had my trousers lifted from my second-story room in a Manila hotel by the eyed and fingered bamboo of the Tagalog ladron, while I washed my face, and stood aghast at the mystery of their disappearance with door locked, until looking from my lofty window I beheld them moving rapidly down an estero in a banca. I have given over my watch to a gendarme in Cairo to forfend arrest for having beaten an Arab who tripped me to pick my pocket, and I have surrendered to the rapacity of a major-general-uniformed official in Italy, who would incarcerate me for not having a tail-light lit. In San Francisco, when robbed upon the public street, I have listened while the police suggested that I offer a fee to the "king of the dips" and a reward to certain saloonkeepers to intercede with the unknown-to-me highwaymen for the return of an heirloom.

Yet through the darkest nights in Vait-hua I slept serenely, surrounded by all the possessions so desirable in the eyes of my neighbors, in a house the doors of which were never fastened. There was not a lock in all the village, or anything that answered the purpose of one. The people of this isolated valley, forgetting their brief encounter with the European idea of money and of the accumulation of property, had reverted to the ways of their fathers.

Before interference with their natural customs the Marquesans were communists to a large degree. Their only private property consisted of houses, weapons, ornaments, and clothing, for the personal use of the owner himself. All large works, such as the erection of houses, the building of large canoes, and, in ancient days, the raising of paepaes and temples, were done by mutual cooperation; though each family provided its own food and made provision for the future by storing breadfruit in the popoi pits. Neo, like the long line of chiefs before him, had gathered a little more of the good things of life than had the majority, but he was in no sense a dictator, except as personality won obedience. In the old days a chief was often relegated to the ranks for failure in war, and always for an overbearing attitude toward the commoners. Such arrogant fellows were kicked out of the seat of power unceremoniously.

"Our pure republican policy approaches so near their own," said the American naval captain, Porter, a hundred years ago.

Men were honored for their artistry, highest place being given to the tattooers, the carvers, the designers, and builders of canoes, the architects, doctors, and warriors. Men and women rose to influence and chiefly rank only by deeds that won popular admiration. These people were hero-worshippers, and in the bloodiest of the old days those of fine soul who had a message of entertainment or instruction were tapu to all tribes, so that they could travel anywhere in safety and were welcome guests in all homes.

It is true that in Hawaii and Tonga conquerors made themselves kings, but not there or in Samoa, Tahiti, or the Marquesas were kings supreme rulers until the whites established them for their own trade purposes and sold them firearms by which to maintain their power.

That day of the whites had passed in Vait-hua. The chief now maintained his authority by the fondness of his people alone. Generous he was, and gentle, yet I minded that he had bitten off the nose of Severin, the French gendarme, when the namu had made him mad. Now whether guided by pride in his discipline or by memory of evil-doing repented, he was strict in his enforcement of the prohibition of cocoanut toddy, and sobriety made the days and nights peaceful.

Early in the mornings I called "Kaoha!" from my paepae to Mrs. Seventh Man, who came each day from her bath in the via puna attired in her earrings only.

Sauntering along the bank of the brook still dripping from the spring, her wet black hair clinging to her shapely back and her tawny skin glistening in flickering light and shade, she was for all the world my conception of Mother Eve before even leaves were modesty. Her nudity was a custom only at this time, for when she reappeared to aid Exploding Eggs in preparing my breakfast she always wore a scarlet pareu and her hair was done like Bernhardt's.

Vanquished Often appeared with her aunt, carefully dressed in spotless, diaphanous tunic, fresh flowers in her hair, a treasured pink silk garter clasping her rounded arm. "Big White Brother," she called me with pride, though often I saw a sad wonder in her great eyes as she squatted near, silently watching me. Her possessive ways were pretty to see as she walked close by my side on the trail from my cabin to the beach, while Exploding Eggs regarded her jealously, insisting on his prerogative as Tueni Oki Kiki, Keeper of the Golden Bed, the glittering magnificence of which he described minutely to her.

We arrived at a merry scene upon the beach. Women and children were in the surf, or on rocks under the cliffs, fishing for popo, the young of uua. With bamboo poles twenty feet long and lines of even greater length, we stood up to our necks in the sea and threw out the hook baited with a morsel of shrimp. The breakers tumbled us about, the lines became tangled, amid gales of laughter and a medley of joyous shouts. Tiring of fishing, Vanquished Often and I would breast the creaming waves side by side, to turn far out and dash in on the breakers, overturning all but the wary. Or a group of us, climbing high on the cliffs, would fling ourselves again and again into the sea, turning in mid-air, life and delight quickening every muscle.

Wearying of this sport, we embarked in canoes, fishing or sailing, and many small adventures we had, for the younger and more daring spirits delighted in scaring me into expostulation or the silence of the condemned and then saving my life by a hair's-breadth.

We had gone one morning about the southern cape, and were harpooning swordfish and the gigantic sunfish when a commotion a thousand feet away brought shouts of warning from my companions. We saw two whales, one with a baby at her breast. The other we took to be the father whale. Huge black beasts they were. Upon this mated pair a band of sharks had flung themselves to seize the infant.

There were at least twenty-five sharks in the mad mob, great white monsters thirty feet in length, man-eaters by blood-taste, tigers in disposition. Though they could not compare with their prey in size or power, they had heads as large as barrels, and mouths that would drag a man through their terrible gaps. That their hunger was past all bounds was evident, for the whale is not often attacked by such inferior-sized fish. Storms had raged on the sea for days, and maybe had cheated the sharks of their usual food.

They swam around and around the mountainous pair, darting in and out, evidently with some plan of drawing off the male. Both the whales struck out incessantly with their mammoth flukes; their great tails, crashing upon the sea-surface, lashed it to mountains of foam. Our boats tossed as in a gale.

Carried away by the pity and terror of the scene, we shouted threats and curses at the monsters, calling down on them in Marquesan the wrath of the sea-gods. Frenziedly handling tiller and sails, we circled the battle, impotent to aid the poor woman-beast and her baby. The sharks harried them as hounds a fox. Desperately the parents fought, more than one shark sank wounded to the depths and one, turning its white belly to the sun, floated dead upon the waves. Another was flung high in air by a blow of the mother's tail. But it was an uneven contest. At last we saw the nursling drawn from her breast, and the mother herself sank, still struggling. She may have risen, of course, far away, but she seemed disabled.

We did not wait about that bloody spot when the sharks had fallen upon their prey, for our canoe was low in the water, and with such a sight to warn us, we did not doubt that the loathly monsters would attack us.

From such a sight it was a relief to turn to the mountains. Along the steep trails I roamed far with Vanquished Often and Exploding Eggs. We played at being alone with nature, foregoing in living all that the white man had brought. I left the house of the chief naked save for a loin-cloth of native make, and I wore no shoes or hat. Vanquished Often and my valet were attired as I, and thus we shouted "Kaoha!" to the chieftess and started toward adventure.

Seventh Man was dubious about my setting off without some prepared food, popoi or canned fish or biscuits, and without sleeping-mats. "You ketchee hungery by an' soon," he protested. "No got Gold Bed in mountains."

Vanquished Often laughed merrily, and the chief looked like a father whose child has thrown a stone at the bogie-man. I rubbed his nose with mine in farewell, and we began our journey, barehanded as Crusoe, yet more fortunate than he since we were in the best of company and I had the comforting knowledge that Marquesan youth would not go hungry or permit me to do so.

Our way led up heights of marvelous beauty, along the edges of deep defiles that opened below our feet like valleys of Paradise. The candlenut, the ama, with its lilac bloom, the hibiscus and pandanus, green and glossy, the petavii, a kind of banana the curving fronds of which spread high in air, the snake-plant, makomako, a yellow-flowered shrub, and many others none of us could name, carpeted the farther mountain-sides with brilliant colors. Everywhere were cocoanuts, guavas, and mangos. In the tree-tops over our heads the bindweed shook its feathery seed-pods, the parasite kouna dripped its deeply serrated leaves and crimson umbels, and thousands of orchids hung like butterflies.

"It is beautiful in your islands, is it not?" Vanquished Often said wistfully. "Tell us more of the marvels there! Are the girls of your valleys very lovely, and do they all sleep in golden beds?"

All daughters of chiefs slept in golden beds, I told her. Often they wore golden slippers on their feet. When they wished to go over the mountains they did not walk, or ride on donkeys, but went in seats covered with velvet, a kind of cloth more soft than the silk ribbon of her pink garter-armlet, and these seats were drawn at incredible speed by a snorting thing made of iron, not living, but stronger than a hundred donkeys.

"How do they make that cloth?" said Vanquished Often, eagerly. They did not make it, I explained. It was made for them by girls who were not daughters of chiefs, and therefore had no golden beds.

Her eyes clouded with bewilderment, but Exploding Eggs listened breathlessly, and demanded more tales. I told them of wireless telegraphy. This they believed as they believed the tales of magic told by old sorcerers, but they scoffed at my description of an elevator, perceiving that I was loosing the reins of my fancy and soaring to impossibilities.

"The girls in your island must always be happy," said Vanquished Often, sighing. All daughters of chiefs were happy, I said. "What is the manner of their fishing?" asked Exploding Eggs.

In such conversation we proceeded, walking for miles through a fairyland in which we were the only living creatures, save for the small scurrying things that slipped across the trail, and the bright-colored birds that fluttered through the tree-tops.

At noon we paused for luncheon. Vanquished Often disappeared in the forest, to return shortly with her gathered-up tunic filled with mangos and guavas, four cocoanuts slung in a neatly plaited basket of leaves on her bare shoulders. Exploding Eggs, cutting two sticks of dry wood from the underbrush, whirled them upon each other with such speed and dexterity that soon a small fire, fed by shreds of cocoanut fiber, blazed on a rock, with plantains heaped about it to roast.

While we rested after the feast Vanquished Often, squatted by my side, made for my comfort a wide-brimmed hat of thick leaves pinned together with thorns, a shelter from the sun's rays that was grateful to my tender scalp. Resuming our way, we met upon the trail a handsome small wild donkey, fearful of our kind, yet longing for company.

"Pureekee!" said Exploding Eggs, meaning bourrique, the French for donkey. And Vanquished Often related that once hundreds of these beasts roamed through the jungle, descendants of a pair of asses escaped from a ship decades before, but that most of them had starved to death in dry periods, or been eaten by hungry natives.

Farther on we passed acres of the sensitive plant, called by the Marquesans teita hakaina, the Modest Herb. A wide glade in a curve of the mountains was filled with a sea of it, and my companions delighted in dashing through its curiously nervous leafage, that shuddered and folded its feathery sprays together at their touch. If shocked further it opened its leaflets as if to say, "What's the use? I'm shy, but I can't stay under cover forever."

In such artless amusements the day passed, a day that remains forever an idyl of simple loveliness to me, such as any man is the richer for having known. When darkness overtook us, we made for ourselves the softest of ferny beds, and slept serenely, untroubled by anything, under the light of the stars.

As we returned next day to the village in the valley, we found upon a hill far from the beach the tombs of the sailors who first raised the standard of France in these islands. The eternal jungle had so housed in their monuments that we had hot work to break through the jealous lantana and pandanus to see the stones. Neither Vanquished Often nor Exploding Eggs had ever cast eyes on them, and neither had but a legendary memory of how these men of the conquering race had met their death.

A great slab of native basalt eroded by seventy years of sun and rain bore the barely discernible epitaph:

"Ci Git Edouard Michel Halley Capitaine de Corvette Officier de la Legion d'honneur Fondateur de la colonie de Vait-hua Mort au champ d'honneur Le 17 ——bre, 1842"

I read it to my friends. They pressed their hands to their brows to conjure up a vision of this dead man whom their grandfathers had fought and slain, as I told them the story of his death in the jungle at our feet.

It was at Vait-hua that the French first took possession of the Marquesas. Here already were missionaries and beach-combers of many nationalities, ardent spirits all, fighting each other for the souls of the natives; gin and the commandments at odds, ritual and exploitation contending. Unable to subdue the forces that threatened the peace of his people, Iotete, Vait-hua's chief, sent a message asking the help of the French admiral. It came at once; a garrison was established on the beach, and the tricolor rose.

Whatever the cause, it had been upraised barely two months when chief and people in a body deserted their homes and fled to the hills. Commander Halley, having vainly exhorted and commanded them to return, declared war on them in punishment for their disobedience, and marshaling his forces in three columns set out to seek them.

Ladebat led the van, armed with a fowling-piece. Halley himself walked at the head of the middle column, a youthful, debonair Frenchman, carrying only a cane, which he swung jauntily as he followed the jungle trail. When the soldiers arrived at a few feet from the main body of the natives, Iotete advanced and cried out, "Tapu!"

Ladebat instantly fired his shot-gun at the chief, and instantly two balls from native guns pierced his brain.

"Halley," runs the old chronicle, "advanced from the shelter of a cocoanut-tree to give orders to his men, but fell on his knees as if in prayer, embracing the tree, three paces from the corpse of Ladebat. Five of his men dropped mortally wounded beside him. Third Officer Laferriere had the retreat sounded."

Here, but a few feet from the spot where the gay young Frenchman fell, the jungle had covered his tomb. Fifty thousand Marquesans have died to bring peace to the soul of that corvette commander who so jauntily flourished his cane in the faces of the wondering savages. Iotete would better have endured the pranks of brutal sea-adventurers, perhaps. This mausoleum was the seal of French occupancy.

Farther down the hill we came upon the first church built in the Marquesas. It was a small wooden edifice bearing a weatherbeaten sign in French, "The Church of the Mother of God." Above the shattered doors were two carven hearts, a red dagger through one and a red flame issuing from the other. A black cross was fixed above these symbols, which Vanquished Often and Exploding Eggs regarded with respect. To the Marquesan these are all tiki, or charms, which have superseded their own.

Beside the decaying church stood a refectory far gone in ruin, that once had housed a dozen friars. Breadfruit-, mango- and orange-trees grew in the tangled tall grass, and the garden where the priests had read their breviaries was a wilderness of tiger-lilies. Among them we found empty bottles of a "Medical Discovery," a patent medicine dispensed from Boston, favored in these islands where liquor is tabooed by government.

Seventh Man, coming up the trail to meet us, found us looking at them. He lifted one and sniffed it regretfully.

"Prenty strong," he said. "Make drunkee. Call him Kennedee. He cost much. Drinkee two piece you sick three day." He smiled reminiscently, and once more I thought of that day when the unfortunate gendarme had surprised the orgiasts in the forest and lost his nose. The chief accompanied us down the trail.

"My brother of grandfather have first gun in Marquesas," he said with meaning when I spoke of the days of Halley. "One chief Iotete have prenty trouble Menike whaleman. He send for French admiral help him. Captiane Halley come with sailor. Frenchman he never go 'way." Again his teeth gleamed in a smile. "My brother of grandfather have gun long time in hills," he added cryptically.

Too soon the time came when I must return to my own paepae in Atuona. Vanquished Often wept at my decision, and Mrs. Seventh Man rubbed my nose long with hers as she entreated me to remain in the home she had given over to me. The chief, finding remonstrance useless, volunteered to accompany me on my return, and one midnight woke me to be ready when the wind was right.

We went down the trail through wind and darkness, the chief blowing a conch-shell for the crew. In the straw shanty where my hosts had spread their mats that I might have the full occupancy of their comfortable home, we found Mrs. Seventh Man making tea for me. Vanquished Often sat apart in the shadow, her face averted, but when my cocoanut-shell was filled with the streaming brew she sprang forward passionately and would let no hand but hers present it to me.

All day it had been raining, and the downpour rushed from the eaves with a melancholy sound as we sat in the lantern-lighted dimness drinking from the shells. The crew came in one by one, their naked bodies running water, their eyes eager for a draught of the tea, into which I put a little rum, the last of the two litres. Squall followed squall, shaking the hut. At half-past two, in a little lull which Neo guessed might last, we went out to the rain-soaked beach, launched the canoe, and paddled away.

My last sight of Vait-hua was the dim line of surf on the sand, and beyond it the slender figure of Vanquished Often holding aloft a lantern whose rays faintly illumined against the darkness her windblown white tunic and blurred face.

The storm had lured us by, a brief cessation. We had hardly left the beach before the heavens opened and deluged us with rain. Water sluiced our bare backs and ran in streams down the brawny arms bending to the oars. We paddled an hour before the wind was favorable, and a dreary hour it was. The canoe had an out-rigger, but was so narrow that none could sit except on the sharp side. I fell asleep even upon it, and woke in the sea, with the chief, who had flung himself to my rescue, clutching my hair.

Morning found our canoe close to the rocky coast of Hiva-oa. As is their custom, instead of making a beeline for our destination or sailing to it close-hauled as the winds permitted, the Marquesans had steered for the nearest shore, following along it to port. This method is attended with danger, for off the threatening cliffs a heavy sea was running, great waves dashing on the rocks, and we were perforce in the trough as we skirted the land.



We quit the sail for oars, and it took every ounce of strength and skill on the part of the rowers and Seventh Man to avoid shipwreck. Each breaker as it passed tossed the frail craft skyward, and we fell into the abysses as a rock into a bottomless pit. Every instant it seemed that we must capsize. While we fought thus, in a frenzied effort to keep off the rocks, the sun rose, and every curl of water turned to clearest emerald, while the hollows of the leaping waves were purple as dark amethysts.

Suddenly, as we slid breathlessly downward, a great wall of water rose beside us, higher and higher until it seemed to touch the sky, clear and solid-looking as a sheet of green glass, a sight so stupendous that amazement took the place of fear. For an instant it remained poised above us, then crashed down with the shock of an earthquake.

Stunned, I emerged from a smother of water to find our canoe completely under the waves, kept afloat solely by grace of the outrigger. All hands were overside, clinging to the edge of the submerged craft, while Exploding Eggs and I bailed for our lives. Strong swimmers, they held us off-shore until we had so lowered the water that they could resume the oars.

For two hours we tossed about, while the chief held the steering-oar and his men paddled through a welter of jeweled color that threatened momentarily to toss us on the rocks. If we smashed on them we were dead men, for even had we been able to climb them the high tide would have drowned us against the wall of the cliffs. No man showed the slightest fear, though they pulled like giants and obeyed instantly each order of the chief.

Battling in this fashion, we rounded at last Point Teaehoa and won the protection of the Bay of Traitors. I, at least, felt immeasurable relief, that quickly turned to exhilaration as we hoisted sail and drove at a glorious speed straight through the breakers to the welcoming beach of Atuona.



CHAPTER IX

The Marquesans at ten o'clock mass; a remarkable conversation about religions and Joan of Arc in which Great Fern gives his idea of the devil.

I was surprised to note that the few natives within view when we landed were dressed in the stiff and awkward clothes of the European; some fete must have been arranged during my absence, I thought. Then with a shock I realized that the day was Sunday. In the lovely, timeless valley of Vait-hua the calendar had dropped below the horizon of memory as my native land had dropped below the rim of the sea. Here in Atuona, whose life was colored by the presence of whites, the days must take up their constricted regular march again.

Already through the crystal air of a morning after rain the mission bells were ringing clear, and Chief Neo, forgetting the night of toil and danger past, was eager to accompany me to church. It would be an honor befitting his chiefly rank to sit with the distinguished white man in the house of worship, and I, remembering his perfect hospitality, was glad to do him honor in my own valley.

We hastened to my cabin, Exploding Eggs running before us up the trail with my luggage balanced on his shoulders. Cocoanuts and popoi, coffee and tinned biscuits, were waiting when we arrived. We ate hastily and then donned proper garments, Exploding Eggs rejoicing in a stiff collar and a worn sailor-hat once mine. They sat oddly upon him, being several sizes too large, but he bore himself with pride as we set out toward the church.

In the avenue of bananas leading to the mission I lingered to observe the beauty of the flakes upon the ground. They are the outside layers of the pendulum of that graceful plant, the purple flower-cone that hangs at the end of the fruit cluster with its volute and royal-hued stem. The banana-plants, which we call trees, lined the road and stood twenty feet high, their long slender leaves blowing in the light wind like banners from a castle wall.

The flakes that had dropped upon the ground were lovely. Large as a lady's veil, ribbed satin, rose and purple, pink and scarlet, the filmy edges curled delicately, they hinted the elegance and luxury of a pretty woman's boudoir. And, like all such dainty trifles, the charming flower that hangs like a colored lamp in the green chapel of the banana-grove it is useless after it has served its brief purpose. The fruit grows better when it is cut off.

Opposite the spacious mission grounds the worshippers were gathering beneath two gnarled banian-trees, giant-like in height and spread. Behind them a long hedge of bananas bordered the cocoanut plantation of the church, and across the narrow road rose the chapel, the priests' residence and the nuns' house, with several school buildings now empty because of the French anti-clerical law.

Exploding Eggs in his new finery and the visiting chief from Vait-hua found welcome among the waiting natives, while Titihuti of the tattooed legs took her seat beside me. She had combed her Titian tresses and anointed them with oil till they shone like the kelp beds of Monterey. Her tunic was of scarlet calico, and she carried in her hand a straw hat with a red ribbon, to put on when she entered the church. "Kaoha!" I said to her, and she smiled, displaying her even, white teeth.

Suddenly, looking past her at the church, my eye caught a sight that transfixed me. In the misty light I saw the Christ upon the cross as on Calvary. The sublime figure was in the agony of expiration, and at the foot of the cross stood the ever faithful mother and the loving John in attitudes of amazement and grief. The reality was startling; for the moment I forgot all about me.

But Titihuti coughed, and I saw her tattooed legs and felt the rough roots of the banian under me, and I was back in the courtyard. The spectacle of the Crucifixion was raised on a basalt platform fully twenty feet long. The figures were of golden bronze, and the cross was painted white. Over it hung the branches of a lofty breadfruit-tree, a congruous canopy for such a group. The Bread of Life, in truth.

A tablet on the cross bore the inscription:

"1900 Le Christ Dieu Homme Vit Regne Commande Christo Redemptori Jubile 1901 Atuona."

"The tiki of the true god," said Titihuti, observing my gaze, and crossed herself with the fervor of the believer in a new charm.

On the roof a score of doves were cooing as we filed into the church. There were bas-reliefs of cherubim and seraphim over the doorway, fat, distorted bodies with wings a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation to attack the Christian fathers.

Inside the doorway a French nun in blue robes tugged at a rope depending from the belfry, and above us the bells rang out from two tiny towers. She looked curiously at me and my savage companion, her pale peasant's face hard, homely, unhealthy; then she kicked at a big dog who was trying to drink the holy water from the clam-shell beside the door. "Allez, Satan!" she said.

The benetier, large enough to immerse an infant, was fixed to a board, a fascinating, blackened old bracket, carved with the instruments of torture, the nails, the spear, the scourge, and thorns. Ivory and pearl, stained by a century or more, were inlaid. As I dipped my hand in the shell a huge lizard that made his nest in the hollow of the bracket ran across my knuckles.

Within, there were seats with kneeling-planks, hewed out of hard wood and still bearing the marks of the adze. Upon them the congregation soon assembled, the women on one side, the men on the other. The women wore hats, native weaves in semi-sailor style, decorated with Chinese silk shawls or bright-colored handkerchiefs. All were barefooted except the pale and sickly daughters of Baufre, who wore clumsy and painful shoes. Many Daughters, the little, lovely leper, came with Flower, of the red-gold hair, the Weaver of Mats, who had her names tattooed on her arm. They dipped in the font and genuflected, then bowed in prayer.

Many familiar faces I recognized. Ah Yu, the Chinaman who owned the little store beyond the banian-tree and had murder upon his soul; Lam Kai Oo, my erstwhile landlord; Flag, the gendarme; Water, in all the glory of European trousers; Kake, with my small namesake on her arm. The old women were tattooed on the ears and neck in scrolls, and their lips were marked in faint stripes. The old men, their eyes ringed with tattooing, wore earrings and necklaces of whale's teeth.

The church was painted white inside, with frescoes and dados of gaudy hues, and windows of brilliantly colored glass. The altar, as also the statues of Joseph and Mary, had a reredos handsomely carved. Outside the railing was a charming Child in the Manger, lying on real straw, surrounded by the Virgin, Joseph, the Magi, the shepherds, and the kings, all in bright-hued robes, and pleasant-looking cows and asses with red eyes and green tails.

The singing began before the priest came from the sacristy. The men sang alone and the women followed, in an alternating chant that at times rose into a wail and again had the nasal sound of a bag-pipe. The Catholic chants sung thus in Marquesan took on a wild, barbaric rhythm that thrilled the blood and made the hair tingle on the scalp.

Bishop David le Cadre appeared in elegant vestments, his eyes grave above a foot-long beard, and the mass began. The acolyte was very agile in a short red cassock, below which his naked legs, and bare feet showed. The people responded often through the mass, rising, sitting down, and kneeling obediently. Baufre sat on a chair in the vestibule and added accounts.

Ah Kee Au was the sole communicant at the rail. No cloth was spread, but the bell announced the mystery of transubstantiation, and all bowed their heads while Ah Kee Au reverently offered his communion to the welfare of Napoleon, his grandson who had accidentally shot himself.

The service over, the people poured from the church into the brilliant sunshine of the road, and Ah Kee Au said to me, "You savee thlat communio' blead b'long my place. My son makee for pliest." Lam Kai Oo, pressing forward, offered the communicant a draught of fiery rum he had obtained by the governor's permission. He had been told that to give a glass of water to a communicant, who must of course have fasted and abstained from any liquid since midnight according to the law of the Church, was a holy act which brought the giver a blessing, and so the subtle Chinese thought to make his blessing greater by offering a drink better than water.

Ah Kee Au drank with fervor. "My makee holee thliss morn'," he said gladly. "Makee Napoleon more happy." Sincerity is not a matter of broken English or a drink of rum; the poor old grandfather of the Little Corporal's namesake believed earnestly that Napoleon would improve by his sacramental offering. He, like most Marquesans, took the white man's religion with little understanding. It is new magic to them, a comfort, an occupation, and an entertainment. But who knows the human heart, or understands the soul?

That afternoon while Neo and I lay on my paepae awaiting the favoring wind which should carry him back to his own isle, my neighbors gathered from far and near to lounge the sunny hours away in conversation. Squatted on the mats, they engaged in serious discussion of the puzzles of religion, appealing to me often to settle vexing questions which they had long wearied of asking their better-informed instructors in religious mysteries.

Their native tongue has no word for religion. Bishop Dordillon had been obliged to translate it, "Te mea e hakatika me te mea e hana mea koaha toitoi i te Etua" which might be rendered, "Belief in the works and love of a just God." Etua, often spelled Atua, was the name of divinity among all Maori peoples, but religion was so associated with natural things, the phenomena of nature, of living things, and of the heavens and sea, that it was part of daily life and needed no word to distinguish it.

Never were people less able to comprehend the creeds and formulas in which the religious beliefs of the white men are clothed. Marquesans are not deep thinkers. In fact, they have a word, tahoa, which means, "a headache from thinking." Ten years of ardent and nobly self-sacrificing work by missionaries left the islands still without a single soul converted. It was not until the chiefs began to set the seal of their approval on the new outlandish faiths that the people flocked to the standard of the cross. And when they did begin to meditate the doctrines preached to them as necessary beliefs in order to win salvation, their heads ached indeed.

Even after years of faithful church-going many of my friends still struggled with their doubts, and when these were propounded to me I was fain to wrinkle my own brow and ponder deeply.

The burning question as to the color of Adam and Eve had long been settled. Adam and Eve were brown, like themselves. But if, as the priests said was most probable, Adam and Eve had received pardon and were in heaven, why had their guilt stained all mankind?

Also, would Satan have been able to tempt Eve if God had not made the tree of knowledge tapu? Was not knowledge a good thing? What motive had led the Maker and Knower of all things to do this deed?

What made the angels fall? Pride, said the priests. Then how did it get into heaven? demanded the perplexed.

The resurrection of the body at the last judgment horrified them. This fact, said the husband of Kake, had led to the abandonment of the old manner of burying corpses in a sitting posture, with the face between the knees and the hands under the thighs, the whole bound round with cords. Obviously, a man buried in such a position would rise deformed. Their dead in the cemetery on the heights slept now in long coffins of wood, their limbs at ease. But other and less premeditated interments still befell the unwary islander.

What would God do in cases where sharks had eaten a Marquesan? And what, when the same shark had been killed and eaten by other Marquesans? And in the case of the early Christian forefathers, who were eaten by men of other tribes, and afterward the cannibals eaten in retaliation, and then the last feaster eaten by sharks? Aue! There was a headache query!

At this point in the discussion an aged stranger from the valley of Taaoa, a withered man whose whole naked chest was covered with intricate tattooing, laid down his pipe and artlessly revealed his idea of the communion service. It was, he thought, a religious cannibalism, no more. And he was puzzled that his people should be told that it was wrong to feed on the flesh of a fellow human creature when they were urged to "eat the body and drink the blood" of Ietu Kirito himself.

It was long afterward, in that far-away America so incomprehensible to my simple savage friends, that I read beneath the light of an electric lamp a paragraph in "Folkways," by William Graham Summer, of Yale:

"Language used in communion about eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ refers to nothing in our mores and appeals to nothing in our experience. It comes down from very remote ages; very probably from cannibalism."

The printed page vanished, and before my eyes rose a vision of my paepae among the breadfruit- and cocoanut-trees, the ring of squatting dusky figures in flickering sunlit leaf-shade, Kake in her red tunic with the babe at her breast, Exploding Eggs standing by with a half-eaten cocoanut, and the many dark eyes in their circles of ink fixed upon the shriveled face of the reformed cannibal whose head ached with the mysteries of the white man's religion.

None too soon for me, the talk turned about history, the tales of which were confused in my guests' minds with those of the saints. Great Fern insisted that if the English roasted Joan of Arc they ate her, because no man would apply live coals, which pain exceedingly, to any living person, and fire was never placed upon a human body save to cook it for consumption. This theory seemed reasonable to most of the listeners, for since such cruelty as the Marquesans practiced in their native state was thoughtless and never intentional, the idea of torture was incomprehensible to their simple minds.

Malicious Gossip, a comely savage of twenty-five with false-coffee leaves in her hair, declared, however, that the governor had told her the English roasted Joan alive because she was a heretic. The statement was received with startled protests by those present who had themselves incurred that charge when they deserted Catholicism for Protestantism some time earlier.

"Exploding Eggs," said I hastily, "make tea for all." Every shade vanished from shining eyes when I produced the bottle of rum and added a spoonful of flavor to each brimming shellful. All perplexing questions were forgotten, and simple social pleasure reigned again on my paepae, while Great Fern explained to all his idea of the Christian devil.

The Marquesan deity of darkness was Po, a vague and elemental spirit. But the kuhane anera maaa of the new religion had definite and fearful attributes explained by the priests. So Great Fern conceived him as a kind of cross between a man and a boar, with a tail like that of a shark, running through the forests with a bunch of lighted candlenuts and setting fire to the houses of the wicked.

And the wicked? Morals as we know them had nothing to do with their sin in his mind. The wicked were the unkind, those who were cruel to children, wives who made bad popoi, and whites with rum privileges who forgot hospitality.

Non-Christians may grin at the efforts of missionaries among heathens. But the missionaries are the only influence for good in the islands, the only white men seeking to mitigate the misery and ruin brought by the white man's system of trade. The extension of civilized commerce has crushed every natural impulse of brotherliness, kindness, and generosity, destroyed every good and clean custom of these children of nature. Traders and sailors, whalers and soldiers, have been their enemies.

Whatever the errors of the men of God, they have given their lives day by day in unremitting, self-sacrificing toil, suffering much to share with these despoiled people the light of their own faith in a better world hereafter. In so far as they have failed, they have failed because they have lacked what proselytizing religion has always lacked—a joy in life that seeks to make this mundane existence more endurable, a grace of humor, and a broad simplicity.

Polynesians have always been respecters of authority. Under their own rule, where priest and king equally rose to rank because of admired deeds, the tapus of the priests had the same force as those of chiefs, and life was conducted by few and simple rules. Now, when sect fights sect; when priests assure the people that France is a Catholic nation and the Governor says the statement is false; where the Protestant pastor teaches that Sunday is a day of solemnity and prayer, and the Frenchmen make it a day of merriment as in France; where salvation depends on many beliefs bewildering and incompatible, the puzzled Marquesan scratches his head and swings from creed to creed, while his secret heart clings to the old gods.

The Marquesan had a joyful religion, full of humor and abandon, dances and chants, and exaltation of nature, of the greatness of their tribe or race, a worship that was, despite its ghastly rites of human sacrifice, a stimulus to life.

The efforts of missionaries have killed the joy of living as they have crushed out the old barbarities, uprooting together everything, good and bad, that religion meant to the native. They have given him instead rites that mystify him, dogmas he can only dimly understand, and a little comfort in the miseries brought upon him by trade.

I have seen a leper alone on his paepae, deep in the Scriptures, and when I asked him if he got comfort from them I was answered, "They are strong words for a weak man, and better than pig." But only a St. Francis Xavier or a Livingstone, a great moral force, could lift the people now from the slough of despond in which they expire.

Upon this people, sparkingly alive, spirited as wild horses, not depressed as were their conquerors by a heritage of thousands of years of metes and bounds, religion as forced upon them has been not only a narcotic, but a death potion.



CHAPTER X

The marriage of Malicious Gossip; matrimonial customs of the simple natives; the domestic difficulties of Haabuani.

Mouth of God and his wife, Malicious Gossip, soon became intimates of my paepae. Coming first to see the marvelous Golden Bed and to listen to the click-click of the Iron Fingers That Make Words, they remained to talk, and I found them both charming.

Both were in their early twenties, ingenuous, generous, clever, and devoted to each other and to their friends. Malicious Gossip was beautiful, with soft dark eyes, clear-cut features, and a grace and lovely line of figure that in New York would make all heads whirl. She was all Marquesan, but her husband, Mouth of God, had white blood in him. Whose it was, he did not know, for his mother's consort had been an islander. His mother, a large, stern, and Calvinistic cannibal, believed in predestination, and spent her days in fear that she would be among the lost. Her Bible was ever near, and often, passing their house, I saw her climb with it into a breadfruit-tree and read a chapter in the high branches where she could avoid distraction.

They lived in a spacious house set in three acres of breadfruit and cocoanuts, an ancient grove long in their family. Often I squatted on their mats, dipping a gingerly finger in their popoi bowl and drinking the sweet wine of the half-ripe cocoanut, the while Mouth of God's mother spoke long and earnestly on the abode of the damned and the necessity for seeking salvation. In return, Malicious Gossip spent hours on my paepae telling me of the customs of her people new and old.

"When I was thirteen," she said, "the whalers still came to Vait-hua, my valley. There came a young Menike man, straight and bright-eyed, a passenger on a whaling-ship seeking adventure. I sighed the first time in my life when I looked on him. He was handsome, and not like other men on your ships.

"The kiss you white men give he taught me to like. He was generous and gentle and good. Months we dwelt together in a house by the stream in the valley. When he sailed away at last, as all white men do who are worth wanting to stay, he tore out my heart. My milk turned to poison and killed our little child.

"I met long after with Mouth of God. He took me to his house in the breadfruit-grove. He was good and gentle, but I was long in learning to love him. It was the governor who made me know that I was his woman. It came about in this manner:

"That governor was one whom all hated for his coldness and cruelty. Mouth of God worked for him in the house where medicines are made, having learned to mix the medicines in a bowl and to wrap cloths about the wounds of those who were sick. One day, according to the custom of white men who rule, the governor said to Mouth of God that he must send me to the palace that night.

"When he came home to the house where we lived together, Mouth of God gave me his word. He said: 'Go to the river and bathe. Put on your crimson tunic and flowers in your hair and go to the palace. The governor gives a feast to-night, and you are to dance and to sleep in the governor's bed.'"

Malicious Gossip shuddered, and rocked herself to and fro upon the mats. "Then I would have killed him! I cried out to him and said: 'I will not go to the governor! He is a devil. My heart hates him. I am a Marquesan. What have I to do with a man I hate?'"

"'Go!' said Mouth of God, and his eyes were hard as the black stones of the High Place. 'The governor asks for you. He is the government. Since when have Marquesan women said no to the command of the adminstrateur?'

"I wept, but I took my brightest kahu ropa from the sandalwood chest my Menike man had given me, and I went down the path to the stream. As I went I wept, but my heart was black, and I thought to take a keen-edged knife beneath my tunic when I went to the palace. But my feet were not yet wet in the edge of the water when Mouth of God called to me.

"'Do not go,' he said.

"I answered: 'I will go. You told me to go. I am on my way.' My tears were salt in my mouth.

"'No!' said Mouth of God. He ran, and he came to me in the pool where I had flung myself. There in the water he held me, and his arms crushed the breath from my ribs. 'You will not go!' he said. 'I spoke those words to know if you would go to the governor. If you had gone quickly, if you had not wept, I would kill you. You are my woman. No other shall have you.'

"Then I knew that I was his woman, and I forgot my Menike lover.

"You see," she said to me after a pause, "I would have gone to the palace. But I would never have come back to the house of Mouth of God. That was the beginning of our love. He would yield me to nobody. He told the governor that I would not come, and he waited to kill the governor if he must. But the governor laughed, and said there were many others. Mouth of God and I were married then by Monsieur Vernier, in the church of his mother.

"That was the manner of my marriage. The same as that of the girls in your own island, is it not?"

It was much the same, I said. It differed only in some slight matters of custom. She listened fascinated while I described to her our complicated conventions of courtship, our calling upon young ladies for months and even years, our gifts, our entertainments, our giving of rings, our setting of the marriage months far in the future, our orange wreaths and veils and bridesmaids. She found these things almost incredible.

"Marriage here," she said, "may come to a young man when he does not seek or even expect it. No Marquesan can marry without the consent of his mother, and often she marries him to a girl without his even thinking of such a thing.

"A young man may bring home a girl he does not know, perhaps a girl he has seen on the beach in the moonlight, to stay with him that night in his mother's house. It may be that her beauty and charm will so please his mother that she will call a family council after the two have gone to bed. If the family thinks as the mother does, they determine to marry the young man to that girl, and they do so after this fashion:

"Early in the morning, just at dawn, before the young couple awake, all the women of the household arouse them with shrieks. They beat their breasts, cut themselves with shells, crying loudly, Aue! Aue! Neighbors rush in to see who has died. The youth and the girl run forth in terror. Then the mother, the grandmother and all other women of the house chant the praises of the girl, singing her beauty, and wailing that they cannot let her go. They demand with anger that the son shall not let her go. All the neighbors cry with them, Aue! Aue! and beat their breasts, until the son, covered with shame, asks the girl to stay.

"Then her parents are sent the word, and if they do not object, the girl remains in his house. That is often the manner of Marquesan marriage."

Yet often, of course, she explained, marriage was not the outcome of a night's wooing. The young Marquesan frequently brought home a girl who did not instantly win his mother's affection. In that case she went her way next morning after breakfast, and that was all. Our regard for chastity was incomprehensible to Malicious Gossip, instructed though she was in all the codes of the church. It was to her a creed preached to others by the whites, like wearing shoes or making the Sabbath a day of gloom, and though she had been told that violation of this code meant roasting forever as in a cannibal pit whose fires were never extinguished, her mind could perceive no reason for it. She could attach no blame to an act that seemed to her an innocent, natural, and harmless amusement.

The truth is that no value was, or is, attached to maidenhood in all Polynesia, the young woman being left to her own whims without blame or care. Only deep and sincere attachment holds her at last to the man she has chosen, and she then follows his wishes in matters of fidelity, though still to a large extent remaining mistress of herself.

The Marquesan woman, however, often denies her husband the freedom she herself openly enjoys. This custom persists as a striking survival of polyandry, in which fidelity under pain of dismissal from the roof-tree was imposed by the wife on all who shared her affections.

This was exactly the status of a household not far from my cabin. Haabuani, master of ceremonies at the dances, the best carver and drum-beater of all Atuona, who was of pure Marquesan blood, but spoke French fluently and earnestly defended the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility,—even coming to actual blows with a defiant Protestant upon my very paepae—explained his attitude.

"If I have a friend and he temporarily desires my wife, Toho, I am glad if she is willing. But my enemy shall not have that privilege with my consent. I would be glad to have you look upon her with favor. You are kind to me. You have treated me as a chief and you have bought my kava bowl. But, ecoutez, Monsieur, Toho does what she pleases, yet if I toss but a pebble in another pool she is furious. See, I have the bruises still of her beating."

With a tearful whine he showed the black-and-blue imprints of Toho's anger, and made it known to us that the three piastres he had of me for the kava bowl had been traced by his wife to the till of Le Brunnec's store, where Flower, the daughter of Lam Kai Oo, had spent them for ribbons. Toho in her fury had beaten him so that for a day and a night he lay groaning upon the mats.

"That is as it should be," said Malicious Gossip, sternly, while her curving lips set in straight lines. Sex morality means conformity to sex tapus, the world over.

Free polyandry still exists in many countries I have seen, and in others its dying out leaves these fragmentary survivals. I have visited the tribe of Subanos, in the west and north of the island of Mindanao in the Philippine archipelago, where the rich men are polygamists, and the poor still submit to polyandry. Economic conditions there bring about the same relations, under a different guise, as in Europe or America, where wealthy rakes keep up several establishments, and many wage-earners support but one prostitute.

Polyandry is found almost exclusively in poor countries, where there is always a scarcity of females. Thus we have polyandry founded on a surplus of males caused by poverty of sustenance. The female is, in fact, supposed to be the result of a surplus of nutrition; more boys than girls are born in the country districts because the city diet is richer, especially in meat and sugar. It is notable that the families of the pioneers of western America bore a surprising majority of males.

In the Marquesas, where living was always difficult and the diet poor, there were always more men than women despite the frequent wars in which men were victims. Another reason was that male children were saved often when females were killed in the practice of infanticide, also forced by famine. The overplus of men made them amenable to the commands of the women, who often dominated in permanent alliances, demanding lavishment of wealth and attention from their husbands.

Yet—and this is a most significant fact—the father-right in the child remained the basis of the social system.

Throughout all Australia, Melanesia, and Papuasis on the east, and America on the west, the mother-right prevailed among primitive peoples. Children followed the mother, took their name from her, and inherited property through her. I have known a Hawaiian nobleman who, commenting on this fact, said that the system had merit in that no child could be called a bastard, and that the woman, who suffered most, was rewarded by pride of posterity. He himself, he said, was the son of a chieftess, but his father, a king, was the son of a negro cobbler.

The father-right, so familiar to our minds that it seems to-day almost the only natural or existing social system, was in fact developed very lately among all races except the Caucasian and some tribes of the Mongols. Yet in the Marquesas, these islands cut off from all other peoples through ages of history, the father-right prevailed in spite of all the difficulties that attended its survival in polyandry.

Each woman had many husbands, whom she ruled. The true paternity of her children it was impossible to ascertain. Yet so tenaciously did the Marquesans cling to the father-right in the child, that even this fact could not break it down. One husband was legally the father of all her children, ostensibly at least the owner of the household and of such small personal property as belonged to it under communism. The man remained, though in name only, the head of the polyandrous family.

I seemed to see in this curious fact another proof of the ancient kinship between the first men of my own race and the prehistoric grandfathers of Malicious Gossip and Haabunai. My savage friends, with their clear features, their large straight eyes and olive skins, showed still the traces of their Caucasian blood. Their forefathers and mine may have hunted the great winged lizards together through primeval wildernesses, until, driven by who knows what urge of wanderlust or necessity, certain tribes set out in that drive through Europe and Asia toward America that ended at last, when a continent sunk beneath their feet, on these islands in the southern seas.

It was a far flight for fancy to take, from my paepae in the jungle at the foot of Temetiu, but looking at the beauty and grace of Malicious Gossip as she sat on my mats in her crimson pareu, I liked to think that it was so.

"We are cousins," I said to her, handing her a freshly-opened cocoanut which Exploding Eggs brought.

"You are a great chief, but we love you as a blood-brother," she answered gravely, and lifted the shell bowl to her lips.



CHAPTER XI

Filling the popoi pits in the season of the breadfruit; legend of the mei; the secret festival in a hidden valley.

On the road to the beach one morning I came upon Great Fern, my landlord. Garbed in brilliant yellow pareu, he bore on his shoulders an immense kooka, or basket of cocoanut fiber, filled with quite two hundred pounds of breadfruit. The superb muscles stood out on his perfect body, wet with perspiration as though he had come from the river.

"Kaoha, Great Fern!" I said. "Where do you go with the mei?"

"It is Meinui, the season of the breadfruit," he replied. "We fill the popoi pit beside my house."

There is a word on the Marquesan tongue vividly picturing the terrors of famine. It means, "one who is burned to drive away a drought." In these islands cut off from the world the very life of the people depends on the grace of rain. Though the skies had been kind for several years, not a day passing without a gentle downpour, there had been in the past dry periods when even the hardiest vegetation all but perished. So it came about that the Marquesan was obliged to improvise a method of keeping breadfruit for a long time, and becoming habituated to sour food he learned to like it, as many Americans relish ill-smelling cheese and fish and meat, or drink with pleasure absinthe, bitters, and other gagging beverages.

In this season of plenteous breadfruit, therefore, Great Fern had opened his popoi pit, and was replenishing its supply. A half-dozen who ate from it were helping him. Only the enthusiasm of the traveler for a strange sight held me within radius of its odor.

It was sunk in the earth, four feet deep and perhaps five in diameter, and was only a dozen years old, which made it a comparatively small and recently acquired household possession in the eyes of my savage friends. Mouth of God and Malicious Gossip owned a popoi pit dug by his grandfather, who was eaten by the men of Taaoa, and near the house of Vaikehu, a descendant of the only Marquesan queen, there was a uuama tehito, or ancient hole, the origin of which was lost in the dimness of centuries. It was fifty feet long and said to be even deeper, though no living Marquesan had ever tasted its stores, or never would unless dire famine compelled. It was tapu to the memory of the dead.

All over the valley the filling of the pits for reserve against need was in progress. Up and down the trails the men were hastening, bearing the kookas filled with the ripe fruit, large as Edam cheeses and pitted on the surface like a golf-ball. A breadfruit weighs from two to eight pounds, and giants like Great Fern or Haabuani carried in the kookas two or three hundred pounds for miles on the steep and rocky trails.