In the banana-groves or among thickets of ti the women were gathering leaves for lining and covering the pits, while around the center of interest naked children ran about, hindering and thinking they were helping, after the manner of children in all lands when future feasts are in preparation.

There was a time when each grove of breadfruit had its owners, who guarded it for their own use, and even each tree had its allotted proprietor, or perhaps several. Density of population everywhere causes each mouthful of food to be counted. I have known in Ceylon an English judge who was called upon to decide the legal ownership of one 2520th part of ten cocoanut-trees. But my friends who were filling the popoi pits now might gather from any tree they pleased. There was plenty of breadfruit now that there were few people.

Great Fern was culling from a grove on the mountain-side above my house. Taking his stand beneath one of the stately trees whose freakish branches and large, glossy, dark-green leaves spread perhaps ninety feet above his head, he reached the nearer boughs with an omei, a very long stick with a forked end to which was attached a small net of cocoanut fiber. Deftly twisting a fruit from its stem by a dexterous jerk of the cleft tip, he caught it in the net, and lowered it to the kooka on the ground by his side.

When the best of the fruit within reach was gathered, he climbed the tree, carrying the omei. Each brown toe clasped the boughs like a finger, nimble and independent of its fellows through long use in grasping limbs and rocks. This is remarkable of the Marquesans; each toe in the old and industrious is often separated a half inch from the others, and I have seen the big toe opposed from the other four like a thumb. My neighbors picked up small things easily with their toes, and bent them back out of sight, like a fist, when squatting.

Gripping a branch firmly with these hand-like feet, Great Fern wielded the omei, bringing down other breadfruit one by one, taking great care not to bruise them. The cocoanut one may throw eighty feet, with a twisting motion that lands it upon one end so that it does not break. But the mei is delicate, and spoils if roughly handled.

Working in this fashion, Great Fern and his neighbors carried down to the popoi pit perhaps four hundred breadfruit daily, piling them there to be prepared by the women. Apporo and her companions busied themselves in piercing each fruit with a sharp stick and spreading them on the ground to ferment over night.

In the morning, squatted on their haunches and chanting as they worked, the women scraped the rind from the fermented mei with cowry shells, and grated the fruit into the pit which they had lined with banana leaves. From time to time they stood in the pit and tramped down the mass of pulp, or thumped it with wooden clubs.

For two weeks or more the work continued. In the ancient days much ceremoniousness attended this provision against future famine, but to-day in Atuona only one rule was observed, that forbidding sexual intercourse by those engaged in filling the pits.

"To break that tapu," said Great Fern, "would mean sickness and disaster. Any one who ate such popoi would vomit. The forbidden food cannot be retained by the stomach."

To vomit during the fortnight occupied in the task of conserving the breadfruit brought grave suspicion that the unfortunate had broken the tapu. When their own savage laws governed them, that unhappy person often died from fear of discovery and the wrath of the gods. To guard against such a fate those who were not strong and well took no part in the task.

This curious connection between sex and the preparation of food applied in many other cases. A woman making oil from dried cocoanuts was tapu as to sexual relations for four or five days, and believed that if did she sin, her labor would produce no oil. A man cooking in an oven at night obeyed the same tapu. I do not know, and was unable to discover, the origin of these prohibitions. Like many of our own customs, it has been lost in the mist of ages.

A Tahitian legend of the origin of the breadfruit recounts that in ancient times the people subsisted on araea, red earth. A couple had a sickly son, their only child, who day by day slowly grew weaker on the diet of earth, until the father begged the gods to accept him as an offering and let him become food for the boy. From the darkness of the temple the gods at last spoke to him, granting his prayer. He returned to his wife and prepared for death, instructing her to bury his head, heart and stomach at different spots in the forest.

"When you shall hear in the night a sound like that of a leaf, then of a flower, afterward of an unripe fruit, and then of a ripe, round fruit falling on the ground, know that it is I who am become food for our son," he said, and died.

She obeyed him, and on the second night she heard the sounds. In the morning she and her son found a huge and wonderful tree where the stomach had been buried. The Tahitians believe that the cocoanut, chestnut, and yam miraculously grew from other parts of a man's corpse.

Breadfruit, according to Percy Smith, was brought into these islands from Java by the ancestors of the Polynesians, who left India several centuries before Christ. They had come to Indonesia rice-eaters, but there found the breadfruit, "which they took with them in their great migration into these Pacific islands two centuries and more after the beginning of this era."

Smith finds in the Tahitian legend proof of this contention. In the Polynesian language araea, the "red earth" of the tale, is the same as vari, and in Indonesia there were the words fare or pare, in Malay padi or peri, and in Malagasy vari, all meaning rice. A Rarotongan legend relates that in Hawaiki two new fruits were found, and the vari discarded. These fruits were the breadfruit and the horse-chestnut, neither of which is a native of Polynesia.

I related these stories of the mei to Great Fern, who replied: "Aue! It may be. The old gods were great, and all the world is a wonder. As for me, I am a Christian. The breadfruit ripens, and I fill the popoi pit."

Great Fern was my friend, and, as he said, a Christian, yet I fear that he did not tell me all he knew of the ancient customs. There was an innocence too innocent in his manner when he spoke of them, like that of a child who would like one to believe that the cat ate the jam. And on the night when the popoi pits were filled, pressed down and running over, when they had been covered with banana leaves and weighed with heavy stones, and the season's task was finished, something occurred that filled my mind with many vague surmises.

I had been awakened at midnight by the crashing fall of a cocoanut on the iron roof above my head. Often during the rainy nights I was startled by this sound of the incessantly falling nuts, that banged and rattled like round shot over my head. But on this night, as I composed myself to slumber again, my drowsy ears were uneasy with another thing, less a sound than an almost noiseless, thrumming vibration, faint, but disturbing.

I sat up in my Golden Bed, and listened. Exploding Eggs was gone from his mat. The little house was silent and empty. Straining my ears I heard it unmistakably through the rustling noises of the forest and the dripping of rain from the eaves. It was the far, dim, almost inaudible beating of a drum.

Old tales stirred my hair as I stood on my paepae listening to it. At times I thought it a fancy, again I heard it and knew that I heard it. At last, wrapping a pareu about me, I went down my trail to the valley road. The sound was drowned here by the splashing chuckle of the stream, but as I stood undecided in the pool of darkness beneath a dripping banana I saw a dark figure slip silently past me, going up toward the High Place. It was followed by another, moving through the night like a denser shadow. I went back to my cabin, scouted my urgent desire to shut and barricade the door, and went to bed. After a long time I slept.

When I awoke next morning Exploding Eggs was preparing my breakfast as usual, the sunlight streamed over breadfruit and palm, and the night seemed a dream. But there were rumors in the village of a strange dance held by the inhabitants of Nuka-hiva, on another island, in celebration of the harvest of the mei. Weird observances were hinted, rites participated in only by men who danced stark naked, praising the old gods.

This was a custom of the old days, said Great Fern, with those too-innocent eyes opened artlessly upon me. It has ever been the ceremony of Thanks-giving to the ancient gods, for a bountiful harvest, a propitiation, and a begging of their continued favor. As for him, he was a Christian. Such rites were held no more in Atuona.

I asked no more questions. Thanks-giving to an omnipotent ruler for the fruits of the harvest season is almost universal. We have put in a proclamation and in church services and the slaughter of turkeys what these children do in dancing, as did Saul of old.

The season's task completed, Great Fern and Apporo sat back well content, having provided excellently for the future. Certain of their neighbors, however, filled with ambition and spurred on by the fact that there was plenty of mei for all with no suspicion of greediness incurred by excessive possessions, continued to work until they had filled three pits. These men were regarded with admiration and some envy, having gained great honor. "He has three popoi pits," they said, as we would speak of a man who owned a superb jewel or a Velasquez.



The grated breadfruit in the holes was called ma, and bore the same relation to popoi as dough bears to bread. When the ma was sufficiently soured Apporo opened the pit each morning and took out enough for the day's provision, replacing the stones on the banana leaves afterward. The intrusion of insects and lizards was not considered to injure the flavor.

I often sat on her paepae and watched her prepare the day's dinner. Putting the rancid mass of ma into a long wooden trough hollowed out from a tree-trunk, she added water and mixed it into a paste of the consistency of custard. This paste she wrapped in purua leaves and set to bake in a native oven of rocks that stood near the pit.

Apporo smoked cigarettes while it baked, perhaps to measure the time. Marquesans mark off the minutes by cigarettes, saying, "I will do so-and-so in three cigarettes," or, "It is two cigarettes from my house to his."

When the cigarettes were consumed, or when her housewifely instinct told Apporo that the dish was properly cooked, back it went into the trough again, and was mashed with the keatukipopoi, the Phallic pounder of stone known to all primitive peoples. A pahake, or wooden bowl about eighteen inches in diameter, received it next, and the last step of the process followed.

Taking a fistful of the mass, Apporo placed it in another pahake, and kneaded it for a long time with her fingers, using oil from crushed cocoanuts as a lubricant. And at last, proudly smiling, she set before me a dish of popoi kaoi, the very best popoi that can possibly be made.

It is a dish to set before a sorcerer. I would as lief eat bill-poster's paste a year old. It tastes like a sour, acid custard. Yet white men learn to eat it, even to yearn for it. Captain Capriata, of the schooner Roberta, which occasionally made port in Atuona Bay, could digest little else. Give him a bowl of popoi and a stewed or roasted cat, and his Corsican heart warmed to the giver.

As bread or meat are to us, so was popoi to my tawny friends. They ate it every day, sometimes three or four times a day, and consumed enormous quantities at a squatting. As the peasant of certain districts of Europe depends on black bread and cheese, the poor Irish on potatoes or stirabout, the Scotch on oatmeal, so the Marquesan satisfies himself with popoi, and likes it really better than anything else.

Many times, when unable to evade the hospitality of my neighbors, I squatted with them about the brimming pahake set on their paepae, and dipped a finger with them, though they marveled at my lack of appetite. In the silence considered proper to the serious business of eating, each dipped index and second finger into the bowl, and neatly conveyed a portion of the sticky mass to his mouth, returning the fingers to the bowl cleansed of the last particle. Little children, beginning to eat popoi ere they were fairly weaned, put their whole hands into the dish, and often the lean and mangy curs that dragged out a wretched dog's existence about the paepaes were not deprived of their turn.

If one accept the germ theory, one may find in the popoi bowl a cause for the rapid spread of epidemics since the whites brought disease to the islands.



CHAPTER XII

A walk in the jungle; the old woman in the breadfruit tree; a night in a native hut on the mountain.

Atuona Valley was dozing, as was its wont in the afternoons, when the governor, accompanied by the guardian of the palace, each carrying a shot-gun, invited me to go up the mountain to shoot kukus for dinner. The kuku is a small green turtle-dove, very common in the islands, and called also u'u and kukupa. Under any of these names the green-feathered morsel is excellent eating when broiled or fried.

I did not take a gun, as, unless hunger demands it, I do not like to kill. We started out together, climbing the trail in single file, but the enthusiasm of the chase soon led my companions into the deeper brush where the little doves lured them, and only the sharp crack of an occasional shot wakening the echoes of the cliffs disturbed my solitude.

The dark stillness of the deep valley, where the shadows of the mountains fell upon groves of cocoanuts and miles of tangled bush, recalled to me a canon in New York City, in the center of the world of finance, gloomy even at noon, the sky-touching buildings darkening the street and the spirits of the dwellers like mountains. There, when at an unsual moment I had come from the artificially-lighted cage of a thousand slaves to money-getting, and found the street for a second deserted, no figure of animal or human in its sombre sweep, I had the same sensation of solitude and awe as in this jungle. Suddenly a multitude of people had debouched from many points, and shattered the impression.

But here, in Atuona Valley, the hoot of the owl, the kouku, which in Malay is the ghost-bird, the burong-hantu, seemed to deepen the silence. Does not that word hantu, meaning in Malay an evil spirit, have some obscure connection with our American negro "hant," a goblin or ghost? Certainly the bird's long and dismal "Hoo-oo-oo" wailing through the shuddering forest evoked dim and chilling memories of tales told by candlelight when I was a child in Maryland.

Here on the lower levels I was still among the cocoanut-groves. The trail passed through acres of them, their tall gray columns rising like cathedral arches eighty feet above a green mat of creeping vines. Again it dipped into the woods, where one or two palms struggled upward from a clutching jungle. Everywhere I saw the nuts tied by their natural stems in clumps of forty or fifty and fastened to limbs which had been cut and lashed between trees. These had been gathered by climbers and left thus to be collected for drying into copra.

Constantly the ripe nuts not yet gathered fell about me. These heavy missiles, many six or seven pounds in weight, fell from heights of fifty to one hundred feet and struck the earth with a dull sound. The roads and trails were littered with them. They fall every hour of the day in the tropics, yet I have never seen any one hurt by them. Narrow escapes I had myself, and I have heard of one or two who were severely injured or even killed by them, but the accidents are entirely out of proportion to the shots fired by the trees. One becomes an expert at dodging, and an instinct draws one's eyes to the branch about to shed a mei, or the palm intending to launch a cocoanut.

As I made my way up the trail, pausing now and then to look about me, I came upon an old woman leaning feebly on a tall staff. Although it was the hour of afternoon sleep, she was abroad for some reason, and I stopped to say "Kaoha," to her. A figure of wretchedness she was, bent almost double, her withered, decrepit limbs clad in a ragged pareu and her lean arms clutching the stick that bore her weight. She was so aged that she appeared unable to hear my greeting, and replied only mutteringly, while her bleary eyes gleamed up at me between fallen lids.

Such miserable age appealed to pity, but as she appeared to wish no aid, I left her leaning on her staff, and moved farther along the trail, stopping again to gaze at the shadowed valley below while I mused on the centuries it had seen and the brief moment of a man's life. Standing thus, I was like to lose my own, for suddenly I heard a whirr like that of a shrapnel shell on its murderous errand, and at my feet fell a projectile.

I saw that it was a breadfruit and that I was under the greatest tree of that variety I had ever seen, a hundred feet high and spreading like a giant oak. In the topmost branches was the tottering beldame I had saluted, and in both her hands the staff, a dozen feet long. She was threshing the fruit from the tree with astounding energy and agility, her scanty rags blown by the wind, and her emaciated, naked figure in its arboreal surroundings like that of an aged ape.

How she held on was a mystery, for she seemed to lean out from a limb at a right angle, yet she had but a toe-hold upon it. No part of her body but her feet touched the branch, nor had she any other support but that, yet she banged the staff about actively and sent more six-pounders down, so that I fled without further reflection.

The score of houses strung along the upper reaches of Atuona Valley were silent at this hour, and everywhere native houses were decaying, their falling walls and sunken roofs remembering the thousands who once had their homes here. Occasionally in our own country we see houses untenanted and falling to ruin, bearing unmistakable evidences of death or desertion, and I have followed armies that devastated a countryside and slew its people or hunted them to the hills, but the first is a solitary case, and the second, though full of horror, has at least the element of activity, of moving and struggling life. The rotting homes of the Marquesan people speak more eloquently of death than do sunken graves.

In these vales, which each held a thousand or several thousand when the blight of the white man came, the abandoned paepaes are solemn and shrouded witnesses of the death of a race. The jungle runs over them, and only remnants remain of the houses that sat upon them. Their owners have died, leaving no posterity to inhabit their homes; neighbors have removed their few chattels, and the wilderness has claimed its own. In every valley these dark monuments to the benefits of civilization hide themselves in the thickets.

None treads the stones that held the houses of the dead. They are tapu; about them flit the veinahae, the matiahae, and the etuahae, dread vampires and ghosts that have charge of the corpse and wait to seize the living. Well have these ghoulish phantoms feasted; whole islands are theirs, and soon they will sit upon the paepae of the last Marquesan.

I reached the top of the gulch and paused to gaze at its extent. The great hills rose sheer and rugged a mile away; the cocoanuts ceased at a lower level, and where I stood the precipices were a mass of wild trees, bushes, and creepers. From black to lightest green the colors ran, from smoky crests and gloomy ravines to the stream singing its way a hundred feet below the trail.

A hundred varieties of flowers poured forth their perfume upon the lonely scene. The frangipani, the red jasmine of delicious odor, and tropical gardenias, weighted the warm air with their heavy scents.

Beside the trail grew the hutu-tree with crimson-tasseled flowers among broad leaves, and fruit prickly and pear-shaped. It is a fruit not to be eaten by man, but immemorally used by lazy fishermen to insure miraculous draughts. Streams are dammed up and the pears thrown in. Soon the fish become stupified and float upon the surface to the gaping nets of the poisoners. They are not hurt in flavor or edibility.

The keoho, a thorny shrub, caught at my clothes as I left the trail. Its weapons of defence serve often as pins for the native, who in the forest improvises for himself a hat or umbrella of leaves. Beside me, too, was the putara, a broad-leaved bush and the lemon hibiscus, with its big, yellow flower, black-centered, was twisted through these shrubs and wound about the trunk of the giant aea, in whose branches the kuku murmured to its mate. Often the flowering vine stopped my progress. I struggled to free myself from its clutch as I fought through the mass of vegetation, and pausing perforce to let my panting lungs gulp the air, I saw around me ever new and stranger growths—orchids, giant creepers, the noni enata, a small bush with crimson pears upon it, the toa, or ironwood, which gave deadly clubs in war-time, but now spread its boughs peacefully amidst the prodigal foliage of its neighbors.

The umbrella fern, mana-mana-hine, was all about. The ama, the candlenut-tree, shed its oily nuts on the earth. The puu-epu, the paper mulberry, with yellow blossoms and cottony, round leaves, jostled pandanus and hibiscus; the ena-vao, a wild ginger with edible, but spicy, cones, and the lacebark-tree, the faufee, which furnishes cordage from its bark, contested for footing in the rich earth and fought for the sun that even on the brightest day never reached their roots.

I staggered through the bush, falling over rotten trees and struggling in the mass of shrubs and tangled vines.

Away up here, hidden in the depths of the forest, there were three or four houses; not the blue-painted or whitewashed cabins of the settlement, but half-open native cots, with smoke rising from the fire made in a circle of stones on the paepaes. The hour of sleep had passed, and squatted before the troughs men and women mashed the ma for the popoi, or idled on the platform in red and yellow pareus, watching the roasting breadfruit. There must be poverty-stricken folk indeed, for I saw that the houses showed no sign whatever of the ugliness that the Marquesan has aped from the whites. Yet neither were they the wretched huts of straw and thatch which I had seen in the valley and supposed to be the only remnants of the native architecture.

As I drew nearer, I saw that I had stumbled upon such a house as the Marquesan had known in the days of his strength, when pride of artistry had created wonderful and beautiful structures of native wood adorned in elegant and curious patterns.

It was erected upon a paepae about ten feet high, reached by a broad and smooth stairway of similar massive black rocks. The house, long and narrow, covered all of the paepae but a veranda in front, the edge of which was fenced with bamboo ingeniously formed into patterns of squares. A friendly call of "Kaoha!" in response to mine, summoned me to the family meeting-place, and I mounted the steps with eagerness.

I was met by a stalwart and handsome savage, in earrings and necklace and scarlet pareu, who rubbed my nose with his and smelled me ceremoniously, welcoming me as an honored guest. Several women followed his example, while naked children ran forward curiously to look at the stranger.

Learning the interest and admiration I felt for his house, my host displayed it with ill-concealed pride. Its frame was of the largest-sized bamboos standing upright, and faced with hibiscus strips, all lashed handsomely and strongly with faufee cordage. Upon this framework were set the walls, constructed of canes arranged in a delicate pattern, the fastenings being of purau or other rattan-like creepers, all tied neatly and regularly. As the residence was only about a dozen feet deep, through three times that length, these walls were not only attractive but eminently serviceable, the canes shading the interior, and the interstices between them admitting ample light and air.

We entered through a low opening and found the one long chamber spacious, cool, and perfumed with the forest odors. There were no furnishings save two large and brilliantly polished cocoanut-tree trunks running the whole length of the interior, and between them piles of mats of many designs and of every bright hue that roots and herbs will yield.

While I admired these, noting their rich colors and soft, yet firm, texture, a murmurous rustle on the palm-thatched roof announced the coming of the rain. It was unthinkable to my host that a stranger should leave his house at nightfall, and in a downpour that might become a deluge before morning. To have refused his invitation had been to leave a pained and bewildered household.

Popoi bowls and wooden platters of the roasted breadfruit were brought within shelter, and while the hissing rain put out the fires on the paepae the candlenuts were lighted and all squatted for the evening meal. Breadfruit and yams, with a draught of cocoanut milk, satisfied the hunger created by my arduous climb. Then the women carried away the empty bowls while my host and I lay upon the mats and smoked, watching the gray slant of the rain through the darkening twilight.

Few houses like his remained on Hiva-Oe, he said in reply to my compliments. The people loved the ways of the whites and longed for homes of redwood planks and roofs of iron. For himself, he loved the ways of his fathers, and though yielding as he must to the payments of taxes and the authority of new laws, he would not toil in the copra-groves or work on traders' ships. His father had been a warrior of renown. The u'u was wielded no more, being replaced by the guns of the whites. The old songs were forgotten. But he, who had traveled far, who had seen the capital of the world, Tahiti, and had learned much of the ways of the foreigner, would have none of them. He would live as his fathers had lived, and die as they had died.

"It is not long. We vanish like the small fish before the hunger of the mako. The High Places are broken, and the pahue covers our paepaes. It does not matter. E tupu te fau; e toro to farero, e mou te taata. The hibiscus shall grow, the coral shall spread, and man shall cease. There is sleep on your eyelids, and the mats are ready."

His hospitality would give me the place of honor, despite my protests, and soon I found myself lying between my host and his wife, while the other members of the household lay in serried rank beyond her on the mats that filled the hollow between the palm-trunks. All slept with the backs of their heads upon one timber, and the backs of their knees over the other, but I found comfort on the soft pile between them. My companions slumbered peacefully, as I have remarked that men do in all countries where the people live near, and much in, the sea. There was no snoring or groaning, no convulsive movement of arms or legs, no grimaces or frowns such as mark the fitful sleep of most city dwellers and of all of us who worry or burn the candle at both ends.

I lay listening for some time to their quiet breathing and the sound of rain drumming on the thatch, but at last my eyes closed, and only the dawn awoke me.



CHAPTER XIII

The household of Lam Kai Oo; copra making; marvels of the cocoanut-groves; the sagacity of pigs; and a crab that knows the laws of gravitation.

Next morning, after bidding farewell to my hosts, I set out down the mountain in the early freshness of a sunny, rain-washed morning. I followed a trail new to me, a path steep as a stairway, walled in by the water-jeweled jungle pressing so close upon me that at times I saw the sky only through the interlacing fronds of the tree-ferns above my head.

I had gone perhaps a mile without seeing any sign of human habitation, hearing only the conversation of the birds and the multitudinous murmuring of leaves, when a heavy shower began to fall. Pressing on, hampered by my clinging garments and slipping in the path that had instantly become a miniature torrent, I came upon a little clearing in which stood a dirty, dark shanty, like a hovel in the outskirts of Canton, not raised on a paepae but squat in an acre of mud and the filth of years.

Two children, three or four years old, played naked in the muck, and Flower, of the red-gold hair, reputed the wickedest woman in the Marquesas, ironed her gowns on the floor of the porch. Raising her head, she called to me to come in.

This was the house of Lam Kai Oo, the adopted father of Flower. Seventy-one years old, Lam Kai Oo had made this his home since he left the employ of Captain Hart, the unfortunate American cotton planter, and here he had buried three native wives. His fourth, a woman of twenty years, sat in the shelter of a copra shed nursing a six-months' infant. Her breasts were dark blue, almost black, a characteristic of nursing mothers here.

Both the mother and Flower argued with me that I should make Many Daughters my wife during my stay in Atuona, and if not the leper lass, then another friend they had chosen for me. Flower herself had done me the honor of proposing a temporary alliance, but I had persuaded her that I was not worthy of her beauty and talents. Any plea that it was not according to my code, of even that it was un-Christian, provoked peals of laughter from all who heard it; sooth to say, the whites laughed loudest.

Beneath a thatch of palm-leaves Lam Kai Oo was drying cocoanuts. His withered yellow body straddled a kind of bench, to which was fixed a sharp-pointed stick of iron-wood. Seizing each nut in his claw-like hands, he pushed it against this point, turning and twisting it as he ripped off the thick and fibrous husk. Then he cracked each nut in half with a well-directed blow of a heavy knife. For the best copra-making, the half-nuts should be placed in the sun, concave side up. As the meats begin to dry, they shrink away from the shell and are readily removed, being then copra, the foundation of the many toilet preparations, soaps and creams, that are made from cocoa-oil.

As it rains much in the Marquesas, the drying is often done in ovens, though sun-dried copra commands a higher price. Lam Kai Oo was operating such an oven, a simple affair of stones cemented with mud, over which had been erected a shed of palm-trunks and thatch. The halved cocoanuts were placed in cups made of mud and laid on wooden racks above the oven. With the doors closed, a fire was built in the stone furnace and fed from the outside with cocoa-husks and brush. Such an oven does not dry the nuts uniformly. The smoke turns them dark, and oil made from them contains undesirable creosote. Hot-water pipes are the best source of heat, except the sun, but Lam Kai Oo was paying again for his poverty, as the poor man must do the world over.

Forty-four years earlier he had left California, after having given seven years of his life to building American railways. The smoke of the Civil War had hardly cleared away when Captain Hart had persuaded him, Ah Yu and other California Chinese to come to Hiva-oa, and put their labor into his cotton plantations. Cannibalism was common at that date. I asked the old man if he had witnessed it.

"My see plenty fella eatee," he replied. "Kanaka no likee Chineeman. Him speak bad meatee."

He told me how on one occasion the Lord had saved him from drowning. With a lay brother of the Catholic Mission, he had been en route to Vait-hua in a canoe with many natives. There was to be a church feast, and Lam Kai Oo was carrying six hundred Chile piastres to back his skill against the natives in gambling; Lam, of course, to operate the wheel of supposed chance.

The boat capsized in deep water. The lay brother could not swim, but was lifted to the keel of the upturned boat, while the others clung to its edges. He prayed for hours, while the others, lifting their faces above the storming waves, cried hearty amens to his supplications. Finally the waves washed them into shallow water. The brother gave earnest thanks for deliverance, but Lam thought that the same magic should give him back the six hundred pieces of silver that had gone into the sea.

"My savee plenty Lord helpee you," said he. "Allee samee, him hell to live when poor. Him Lord catchee Chile money, my givee fitty dolla churchee."

He sighed despairingly, and fed more cocoa-husks to his make-shift oven. The shower had passed, moving in a gray curtain down the valley, and picking my way through the mire of the yard, I followed it in the sunshine.

My way led now through the cocoanut-groves that day and night make the island murmurous with their rustling. They are good company, these lofty, graceful palms, and I had grown to feel a real affection for them, such as a man has for his dog. Like myself, they can not live and flourish long unless they see the ocean. Their habit has more tangible reason than mine; they are dependent on air and water for life. The greater the column of water that flows daily up their stems and evaporates from the leaves, the greater the growth and productivity.

Evaporation being in large measure dependent on free circulation of air, the best sites for cocoanut plantations are on the seashore, exposed to the winds. They love the sea and will grow with their boles dipped at high tide in the salt water.

These trunks, three feet in diameter at the base and tapering smoothly and perfectly to perhaps twelve inches at the top, are in reality no more than pipes for conveying the water to the thirsty fronds. Cut them open, and one finds a vast number of hollow reeds, held together by a resinous pitch and guarded by a bark both thick and exceedingly hard. There is no branch or leaf except at the very tip of the trunk, where a symmetrical and gigantic bouquet of leaves appears, having plumes a dozen feet long or more, that nod with every zephyr and in storms sway and lash the tree as if they were living things.

I used to wonder why these great leaves, the sport of the idlest breeze as well as the fiercest gale, were not torn from the tree, but when I learned to know the cocoanut palm as a dear friend I found that nature had provided for its survival on the wind-swept beaches with the same exquisite attention to individual need that is shown in the electric batteries and lights of certain fishes, or in the caprification of the fig. A very fine, but strong, matting, attached to the bark beneath the stalk, fastened half way around the tree and reaching three feet up the leaf, fixes it firmly to the trunk but gives it ample freedom to move. It is a natural brace, pliable and elastic.

There is scarcely a need of the islander not supplied by these amiable trees. Their wood makes the best spars, furnishes rafters and pillars for native houses, the knee- and head-rests of their beds, rollers for the big canoes or whale-boats, fences against wild pig, and fuel. The leaves make screens and roofs of dwellings, baskets, and coverings, and in the pagan temples of Tahiti were the rosaries or prayer-counters, while on their stiff stalks the candlenuts are strung to give light for feasts or for feasting. When the tree is young the network that holds the leaves is a beautiful silver, as fine as India paper and glossy; narrow strips of it are used as hair ornaments and contrast charmingly with the black and shining locks of the girls. When older, this matting has every appearance of coarse cotton cloth, and is used to wrap food, or is made into bags and even rough garments, specially for fishermen.

The white flowers are small and grow along a branching stalk, protected by a sheath, and just above the commencement of the leaf. From them is made the cocoanut-brandy that enables the native to forget his sorrows. Flowers and nuts in every stage of development are on the same tree, a year elapsing between the first blossom and the ripe nut. Long before it is ripe, but after full size has been attained, the nut contains a pint or even a quart of delicious juice, called milk, water, or wine, in different languages. It is clear as spring water, of a delicate acidity, yet sweet, and no idea of its taste can be formed from the half-rancid fluid in the ripe nuts sold in Europe or America. It must be drunk soon after being taken from the tree to know its full delights, and must have been gathered at the stage of growth called koie, when there is no pulp within the shell.

Not long after this time the pulp, white as snow, of the consistency and appearance of the white of a soft-boiled egg, forms in a thin layer about the walls of the nut. This is a delicious food, and from it are made many dishes, puddings, and cakes. It is no more like the shredded cocoanut of commerce than the peach plucked from the tree is like the tinned fruit.

The pulp hardens and thickens as time goes on, and finally is an inch in thickness. Occasionally the meat when hard and ripe is broiled and eaten. I like it fairly well served in this fashion.

If left on the tree, the nut will in time fall, and in due course there begins in it a marvelous process of germination. A sweet, whitish sponge forms in the interior, starting from the inner end of the seed enclosed in the kernel, opposite one of the three eyes in the smaller end of the nut. This sponge drinks up all the liquid, and, filling the inside, melts the hard meat, absorbs it, and turns it into a cellular substance, while a white bud, hard and powerful, pushes its way through one of the eyes of the shell, bores through several inches of husk, and reaches the air and light.

This bud now unfolds green leaves, and at the same period two other buds, beginning at the same point, find their way to the two other eyes and pierce them, turning down instead of up, and forcing their way through the former husk outside the shell, enter the ground. Though no knife could cut the shell, the life within bursts it open, and husk and shell decay and fertilize the soil beside the new roots, which, within five or six years, have raised a tree eight or nine feet high, itself bearing nuts to reproduce their kind again.

All about me on the fertile soil, among decaying leaves and luxuriant vines, I saw these nuts, carrying on their mysterious and powerful life in the unheeded forest depths. Here and there a half-domestic pig was harrying one with thrusting snout. These pigs, which we think stupid, know well that the sun will the sooner cause a sprouting nut to break open, and they roll the fallen nut into the sunlight to hasten their stomachs' gratification, though with sufficient labor they can get to the meat with their teeth.

There is a crab here, too, that could teach even the wisest, sun-employing pig some tricks in economics. He is the last word in adaptation to environment, with an uncanny knowledge that makes the uninformed look askance at the tale-teller. These crabs climb cocoanut-trees to procure their favorite food. They dote on cocoanuts, the ripe, full-meated sort. They are able to enjoy them by various endeavors demanding strength, cleverness, an apparent understanding of the effect of striking an object against a harder one, and of the velocity caused by gravity. Nuts that resist their attempts to open them, they carry to great heights, to drop them and thus break their shells.

These crabs are called by the scientists Birgos latro, by the Marquesans tupa, by the Paumotans kaveu, and by the Tahitians, ua vahi haari. It was a never-failing entertainment on my walks in the Paumotas to observe these great creatures, light-brown or reddish in color, more than two feet in length, stalking about with their bodies a foot from the ground, supported by two pairs of central legs. They can exist at least twenty-four hours without visiting the water, of which they carry a supply in reservoirs on both sides of the cephalothorax, keeping their gills moist.



They live in large deep burrows in the cocoanut-groves, which they fill with husks, so that the natives often rob them to procure a quick supply of fuel. These dens are contrived for speedy entry when pursued. Terrifying as they appear when surprised on land, they scuttle for safety either to a hole or to the sea, with an agility astounding in a creature so awkward in appearance. Though they may be seen about at all hours of the day, they make forays upon the cocoanuts only at night.

Darwin first saw these creatures in the Indian Ocean, and said that they seek the sea every night to moisten their branchiae. The young are hatched and live for some time on the sea-coast, venturing far from water only as they grow older. Darwin said that their feat in entering the cocoanut "is as curious a case of instinct as was ever heard of, and likewise of adaptation in structure between two objects apparently so remote from each other in the scheme of nature, as a crab and a cocoanut-tree."

When darkness descends and all is quiet, the robber crab ascends the tree by gripping the bark with his claws. The rays of my electric flash-light have often caught him high over my head against the gray palm. Height does not daunt him. He will go up till he reaches the nuts, if it be a hundred feet. With his powerful nippers he severs the stem, choosing always a nut that is big and ripe. Descending the palm, he tears off the fibrous husk, which, at first thought, it would seem impossible for him to do. He tears it fiber by fiber, and always from that end under which the three eye-holes are situated. With these exposed, he begins hammering on one of them until he has enlarged the opening so that he can insert one of the sharp points of his claw into it. By turning his claw backward and forward he scoops out the meat and regales himself luxuriously.

This is his simplest method, along the line of least resistance, but let the nut be refractory, and he seizes it by the point of a claw and beats it against a rock until he smashes it. This plan failing, he will carry the stubborn nut to the top of the tree again and hurl it to the earth to crack it. And if at first he does not succeed, he will make other trips aloft with the husked nut, dropping it again and again until at last it is shattered and lies open to his claws.

It is said that if a drop of oil be placed on the long and delicate antennae of these crabs they die almost instantly. We have a somewhat similar rumor with respect to salt and a bird's tail. Seldom does a robber crab linger to be oiled, and so other means of destroying him, or, at least, of guarding against his depredations, are sought. With the rat, who bites the flower and gnaws the young nuts, this crab is the principal enemy of the planter. The tree owner who can afford it, nails sheets of tin or zinc around the tree a dozen feet from the earth. Neither rat nor crab can pass this slippery band, which gives no claw-hold. Thousands of trees are thus protected, but usually these are in possession of white men, for tin is costly and the native is poor.

The ingenious native, however, employs another means of saving the fruit of his groves. He climbs the palm-trunk in the daytime, and forty feet above the ground encircles it with dirt and leaves. On his mat for the night's slumber, he smiles to think of the revenge he shall have. For the crab ascends and passes the puny barrier to select and fell his nuts, but when in his backward way he descends, he forgets the curious bunker he went over and, striking it again, thinks he has reached the ground. He lets go, and smashes on the rocks his crafty foe has piled below.



CHAPTER XIV

Visit of Le Moine; the story of Paul Gauguin; his house, and a search for his grave beneath the white cross of Calvary.

I rose one morning from my Golden Bed to find a stranger quietly smoking a cigarette on my paepae. Against the jungle background he was a strangely incongruous figure; a Frenchman, small, thin, meticulously neat in garments of faded blue denim and shining high boots. His blue eyes twinkled above a carefully trimmed beard, and as he rose to meet me, I observed that the fingers on the cigarette were long, slender, and nervous.

This was Monsieur Charles le Moine, the painter from Vait-hua, whose studio I had invaded in his absence from that delightful isle. We sat long over breakfast coffee and cigarettes, I, charmed by his conversation, he, eager to hear news of the world he had forsaken. He had studied in Paris, been governor of the Gambier Islands, and at last had made his final home among the palms and orchids of these forgotten isles. His life had narrowed to his canvases, on which he sought to interpret Marquesan atmosphere and character, its beauty and savage lure.

I said to him that it was a pity many great painters did not come here to put on canvas the fading glamor and charm of the Marquesas.

"Our craft is too poor," he replied with a sigh. "A society built on money does not give its artists and singers the freedom they had in the old days in these islands, my friend. We are bound to a wheel that turns relentlessly. Who can come from France and live here without money? Me, I must work as gendarme and school-teacher to be able to paint even here. One great painter did live in this valley, and died here—Paul Gauguin. He was a master, my friend!"

"Paul Gauguin lived here?" I exclaimed. I had known, of course, that the great modernist had died in the Marquesas, but I had never heard in which valley, and no one in Atuona had spoken of him. In Florence I had met an artist who possessed two glass doors taken from Madame Charbonnier's house and said to have been painted by Gauguin in payment for rent. I had been in Paris when all artistic France was shuddering or going into ecstacies over Gauguin's blazing tropic work, when his massive, crude figures done in violent tones, filled with sinister power, had been the conversation of galleries and saloons.

Strindberg wrote of Gauguin's first exhibition and expressed dislike for the artist's prepossession with form, and for the savage models he chose. Gauguin's reply was:

"Your civilization is your disease; my barbarism is my restoration to health. I am a savage. Every human work is a revelation of the individual. All I have learned from others has been an impediment to me. I know little, but what I do know is my own."

Now I learned from the lips of Le Moine that this man had lived and died in my own valley of Atuona, had perhaps sat on this paepae where we were breakfasting. Imagination kindled at the thought. "I will take you to his house," said Le Moine.

We walked down the road past the governor's palace until opposite Baufre's depressing abode, where, several hundred yards back from a stone wall, sunk in the mire of the swamp, had for ten years been Gauguin's home and studio. Nothing remained of it but a few faint traces rapidly disappearing beneath the jungle growth.

While we stood in the shade of a cocoanut-palm, gazing at these, we were joined by Baufre, the shaggy and drink-ruined Frenchman, in his torn and dirty overalls.

"This weather is devilish," said Baufre, with a curse. "It is not as it used to be. The world goes to the devil. There were seven hundred people in Atuona when I came here. They are all dead but two hundred, and there is nobody to help me in my plantation. If I pay three francs a day, they will not work. If I pay five francs, they will not work. Suppose I give them rum? They will work hard for that, for it means forgetting, but when they drink rum they cannot work at all."

"But you are a philosopher, and absinthe or rum will cure you," said Le Moine.

"Mon dieu! I am not a philosopher!" retorted Baufre. "Of what good is that? Gauguin was a philosopher, and he is dead and buried on Calvary. You know how he suffered? His feet and legs were very bad. Every day he had to tie them up. He could not wear shoes, but he painted, and drank absinthe, and injected the morphine into his belly, and painted.

"Sapristi! He was a brave one! Am I not here over thirty years, and have I met a man like Gauguin? He never worried. He painted. The dealer in Paris sent him five hundred francs a month, and he gave away everything. He cared only for paint. And now he is gone. Regardez, here is where his house stood."

We walked through the matted grass that sketched upon the fertile soil the shape of that house where Gauguin had painted.

It had been raised from the marsh six feet on trunks of trees, and was about forty-five feet long and twenty wide. The floor was of planks, and one climbed a stairway to reach the veranda. The frame of the house was of wood, but the sides all of split bamboo, with a row of windows of glass and a roof of cocoanut thatch. The light entered from the north, and except for a small chamber for sleeping and a closet for provisions, the entire house was a studio, a lofty, breeze-swept hall, the windows high up admitting light, but not the hot sunshine, and the expanse of bamboo filtering the winds in their eternal drift from south to north and north to south.

Below the floor, on the ground, was a room for work in sculpture, in which medium Gauguin took much interest, using clay and wood, the latter both for bas-relief and full relief, Gauguin being hampered, Baufre said, by lack of plasticity in the native clay. Next to this workroom was a shelter for the horse and cart, for Gauguin had the only wheeled vehicle in the Marquesas.

Baufre exhausted all his rhetoric and used four sheets of foolscap in his endeavor to make me see these surroundings of the artist, whom he evidently considered a great man.

"Five hundred francs a month, mon ami, whether he painted or not! But he was a worker. Drunk or sober, he would paint. Oui, I have seen him with a bottle of absinthe in him, and still he would paint. Early in the morning he was at work at his easel in the studio or under the trees, and every day he painted till the light was gone. His only use for the cart was to carry him and his easel and chair to scenes he would paint. He would shoot that accursed morphine into his belly when the pain was too bad, and he would drink wine and talk and paint.

"He had no wife or woman, but he took one in the way of the white man here now and then. He lived alone, save for a half-Chinese boy who cooked and cleaned for him. He never said he was sick. There was no doctor on this island, for the government was then at Nuka-hiva, and he had no time to go there. He suffered terribly, but he never complained. 'Life is short,' he would say, 'and there is not long to paint.'

"He would not talk politics, but after the light was gone he would sit at the organ in his studio and make one cry with his music. When at home he wore only a pareu, but he would put on trousers when he went out. He worked and drank and injected his morphine, and one morning when the boy came he found him dead, and he was smiling.

"The government hated him because he cursed it for not letting the natives keep their customs. The church hated him because he ridiculed it. Still, they buried him in the Catholic cemetery. I went with the body, and four Marquesans carried it up the trail.

"The government sold his house to Gedge, and Gedge sold it to a native, who tore it down for the materials. It was of no use to any one, for it was built for an artist.

"Vous savez; mon garcon, I am not acquainted with pictures, and have never seen any but his, but I felt that they were good. They made one feel the sun. There was in them the soul of these islands. And you know that Polonaise, with the one eye-glass, that lives in Papeite, that Krajewsky? Eh bien! he was here to buy these stone images of gods, and he said that in Paris they were paying tens of thousands of francs for those things of Gauguin's he would have given me for the asking. Ah well! he had the head and he was a philosopher, but he lies up there in Calvary."

"Perhaps," said Le Moine.

"Mon ami," said the shaggy man, "I go to church, and you and I and Gauguin are the same kind of Catholic. We don't do what we pray for. That man was smarter than you or me, and the good God will forgive him whatever he did. He paid everybody, and Chassognal of Papeite found seven hundred francs in a book where he had carelessly laid it. If he drank, he shared it, and he paid his women."

"He was an atheist," persisted Le Moine.

"Atheist!" echoed Baufre. "He believed in making beautiful pictures, and he was not afraid of God or of the mission. How do you know what God likes? Mathieu Scallamera built the church here and the mission houses, and he is dead, and all his family are lepers. Did God do that? Non! Non! You and I know nothing about that. You like to drink. Your woman is tattooed, and we are both men and bad. Come and have a drink?"

We left him beside the road and walked slowly beneath the arch of trees toward the mountain whose summit was crowned by the white cross of Calvary graveyard.

"He drank too much, he took morphine, he was mortally ill, and yet he painted. Those chaps who have to have leisure and sandal-wood censors might learn from that man," said Le Moine. "He was a pagan and he saw nature with the eyes of a pagan god, and he painted it as he saw it."

I reminded him of James Huneker's words about Gauguin: "He is yet for the majority, though he may be the Paint God of the Twentieth century. Paint was his passion. With all his realism, he was a symbolist, a master of decoration."

Past the governor's mansion, we turned sharply up the hill. Apart from all other dwellings, on a knoll, stood a Marquesan house. As we followed the steep trail past it, I called, "Kaoha!"

"I hea?" said a woman, "Karavario? Where do you go? To Calvary?"

There was a sad astonishment in her tone, that we should make the arduous climb to the cemetery where no dead of ours lay interred.

A fairly broad trail wound about the hill, the trail over which the dead and the mourners go, and the way was through a vast cocoanut-orchard, the trees planted with absolute regularity lifting their waving fronds seventy or eighty feet above the earth. There was no underbrush between the tall gray columns of the palms, only a twisted vegetation covered the ground, and the red volcanic soil of the trail, cutting through the green, was like a smear of blood.

The road was long and hot. Halting near the summit, we looked upward, and I was struck with emotion as when in the courtyard I saw the group of the crucifixion. A cross forty feet high, with a Christ nailed upon it, all snow-white, stood up against the deep blue sky. It was like a note of organ music in the great gray cathedral of the palms.

Another forty minutes climbing brought us to the foot of the white symbol. A half-acre within white-washed palings, like any country graveyard, lay on the summit of the mountain.

To find Gauguin's grave we began at the entrance and searched row by row. The graves were those of natives, mounds marked by small stones along the sides, with crosses of rusted iron filigree showing skulls and other symbols of death, and a name painted in white, mildewing away. Farther on were tombs of stone and cement, primitive and massive, defying the elements. Upon one was graven, "Ci Git Daniel Vaimai, Kata-Kita, 1867-1907. R.I.P." The grave of a catechist, a native assistant to the priests. Beneath another lay "August Jorss," he who had ordered the Golden Bed in which I slept. Most conspicuous of all was a mausoleum surrounded by a high, black, iron railing brought from France. On this I climbed to read while perched on the points:

"Ici repose Mg. Illustrissime et Reverendissime Rog. Jh. Martin," and much more in Latin and French. It was the imposing grave of the Bishop of Uranopolis, vicar-apostolic to the Marquesas, predecessor to Bishop le Cadre, who had no pride and whom all called plain Father David.

Suddenly rain poured down upon us, and looking about to find a shelter we saw a straw penthouse over a new and empty grave lined with stones. We huddled beneath it, our faces toward the sea, and while the heavy rain splashed above our heads and water rushed down the slope, we gazed in silence at the magnificent panorama below.

We were directly above the Bay of Traitors, that arm of the sea which curved into the little bays of Taka-Uka and Atuona. At one side, a mere pinnacle through the vapor about his throat, rose the rugged head of Temetiu, and ranged below him the black fastnesses of the valleys he commands. In the foreground the cocoas, from the rocky headlands to the gate of Calvary, stood like an army bearing palms of victory. In rows and circles, plats and masses, the gray trunks followed one another from sea to mountain, yielding themselves to the storm, swaying gently, and by some trick of wind and rain seeming to march toward the cross-crowned summit.

The flimsy thatch under which we crouched, put up only to keep the sun from the grave-digger, bent to north and south, and threatened to wing away. But suddenly the shower ran away in a minute, as if it had an engagement elsewhere, and the sun shone more brightly in the rain-washed air.

We continued our search, but uselessly. Hohine and Mupui had advertisement of their last mortal residence, but not Gauguin. We found an earring on one little tomb where a mother had laid her child, and on several those couronnes des perles, stiff, ugly wreaths brought from France, with "Sincere Regrets" in raised beads, speaking pityfully of the longing of the simple islanders to do honor to the memory of their loved ones. But the grave of Gauguin, the great painter, was unmarked. If a board had been placed at its head when he was buried, it had rotted away, and nothing was left to indicate where he was lying.

The hibiscus was blood-red on the sunken graves, and cocoanuts sprouted in the tangled grass. Palms shut out from the half-acre had dropped their nuts within it, and the soil, rich in the ashes of man, was endeavoring to bring forth fairer fruit than headstones and iron crosses. The pahue, a lovely, long, creeping vine that wanders on the beaches to the edge of the tides, had crawled over many graves, and its flowers, like morning-glories, hung their purple bells on the humbler spots that no hand sought to clear.

Perhaps under these is the dust of the painter who, more than any other man, made the Marquesas known to the world of Europe.



CHAPTER XV

Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the death of a race.

On the paepae of a poor cabin near my own lived two women, Aumia and Taipi, in the last stages of consumption. Aumia had been, only a few months earlier, the beauty of the island.

"She was one of the gayest," said Haabunai, "but the pokoko has taken her."

She was pitifully thin when I first saw her, lying all day on a heap of mats, with Taipi beside her, both coughing, coughing. An epidemic of colds had seized Atuona, brought, most probably, by the schooner Papeite, for no other had arrived since the Morning Star. Aumia coughed at night, her neighbor took it up, and then, like laughter in a school, it became impossible to resist, and down to the beach and up to the heights the valley echoed with the distressing sounds. So, a breadfruit season ago, had Aumia coughed for the first time, and the way she was going would be followed by many of my neighbors.

I stopped every day to chat a moment with Aumia, and to bring her the jam or marmalade she liked, and was too poor to buy from the trader's store. She asked me this day if I had seen her grave. She had heard I had visited the cemetery, and I must describe it to her. It was the grave over which Le Moine and I had crouched from the storm.

Aumia's husband and Haabunai, with Great Fern, had dug it and paved it a couple of days ago, and her husband had given the others a pig for their work, slaughtering it on the tomb of the Bishop of Uranopolis. No thought of profanation had entered their minds; it was convenient to lay the pig over the imposing monument, with a man on either side holding the beast and the butcher free-handed. The carcass had been denuded of hair in a pail of hot water and buried underground with fire below and above him. When the meat was well done, I had a portion of it, and Sister Serapoline, who had come in her black nun's habit to console Aumia with the promises of the church, ate with us, and accepted a haunch for the nun's house.

"Aumia is able to eat pig, and yet they have made her grave," I said.

"Oh, c'est ca!" replied the nun, holding the haunch carefully. "That is the custom. Always they used to dig them near the house, so that the sick person might see the grave, and in its digging the sick had much to say, and enjoyed it. Now, grace a dieu! if Catholics, they are buried in consecrated ground where the body may rest serene until the trumpet sounds the final judgment. Death is terrible, but these Marquesans make no more of it than of a journey to another island, and much less than of a voyage to Tahiti. They die as peacefully as a good Catholic who is sure of his crown in Heaven. And as they are children, only children, the wisest or the worst of them, the Good God will know how to count their sins. It is those who scandalize them who shall pay dear, those wicked whites who have forsaken God, or who worship him in false temples."

The coffin of Aumia was then beside the house, turned over so that rain might not make it unpresentable. She had asked for it weeks before. To the Marquesan his coffin is as important as, to us, the house the newly-married pair are to live in. These people know that almost every foot of their land holds the bones or dust of a corpse, and this remnant of a race, overwhelmed by tragedy, can look on death only as a relief from the oppression of alien and unsympathetic white men. They go to the land of the tupapaus as calmly as to sleep.

"I have never seen a Marquesan afraid to die," said Sister Serapoline. "I have been at the side of many in their last moments. It is a terrible thing to die, but they have no fear at all."

The husband of Aumia, a jolly fellow of thirty, was practising on a drum for the entertainment of his wife. He said that the corpse of his grandfather, a chief, had been oiled and kept about the house until it became mummified. This, he said, had been quite the custom. The body was washed very thoroughly, and rubbed with cocoanut-oil. It was laid in the sun, and members of the family appointed to turn it many times a day, so that all parts might be subjected to an even heat. The anointing with oil was repeated several times daily. Weeks or months of this process reduced the corpse to a mummified condition, and if it were the body of a chief it was then put in his canoe and kept for years in a ceremonial way. But no mark was ever placed to show where the dead were buried, and there were no funeral ceremonies. Better that none knew where the body was laid and that the chosen friends who carried it to the sepulchre forgot the spot.

In the very old days the Marquesans interred the dead secretly in the night at the foot of great trees. Or they carried the bodies to the mountains and in a rocky hole shaded by trees covered them over and made the grave as much as possible like the surrounding soil. The secret of the burial-place was kept inviolate. Aumia's husband related an instance of a man who in the darkest night climbed a supposedly inaccessible precipice carrying the body of his young wife lashed to his back, to place it carefully on a lofty shelf and descend safely.

These precautions came probably from a fear of profanation of the dead, perhaps of their being eaten by a victorious enemy. To devastate the cemeteries and temples of the foe was an aim of every invading tribe. It was considered that mutilating a corpse injured the soul that had fled from it.

Afraid of no living enemy nor of the sea, meeting the shark in his own element and worsting him, fearlessly enduring the thrust of the fatal spear when an accident of battle left him defenseless, the Marquesan warrior, as much as the youngest child, had an unutterable horror of their own dead and of burial-places, as of the demons who hovered about them.

Christianity has made no change in this, for it, too, is encumbered with such fears. Who of us but dreads to pass a graveyard at night, though even to ourselves we deny the fear? Banshees, werwolves and devils, the blessed candles lit to keep away the Evil One, or even to guard against wandering souls on certain feasts of the dead, were all part of my childhood. So to the Marquesan are the goblins that cause him to refuse to go into silent places alone at night, and often make him cower in fear on his own mats, a pareu over his head, in terror of the unknown.

But death when it comes to him now is nothing, or it is a going to sleep at the end of a sad day. Aumia, eating her burial meats and looking with pleasure at her coffin, carefully and beautifully built by her husband's hands, smiled at me as serenely as a child. But the melancholy sound of her coughing followed me up the trail to the House of the Golden Bed.

It was barely daylight next morning when I awoke, a soft, delicious air stirring the breadfruit leaves. I plunged into the river, and returning to my house was about to dress—that is, to put on my pareu—when a shriek arose from the forest. It was sudden, sharp, and agonizing.

"Aumia mate i havaii" said Exploding Eggs, approaching to build the fire. Literally he said, "Aumia is dead and gone below," for the Marquesans locate the spirit world below the earth's surface, as they do the soul below the belt.

The wailing was accompanied shortly by a sound of hammering on boards.

"The corpse goes into the coffin," said Exploding Eggs. The first nail had been driven but a moment after Aumia's last breath.

All day the neighborhood was melancholy with the cries from the house. All the lamentations were in a certain tone, as if struck from the same instrument by the hand of sorrow. Each visitor to the house shrieked in the same manner, and all present accompanied her, so that for ten minutes after each new mourner arrived a chorus of loud wails and moans assailed my ears. I had never known such a heart-rending exhibition of grief.

But the sorrow of these friends of Aumia was not genuine. It could not be; it was too dramatic. When they left the house the mourners laughed and lit cigarettes and pipes. If no new visitor came they fell to chatting and smoking, but the sight of a fresh and unharrowed person started them off again in their mechanical, though nerve-racking, cry.

I had known Aumia well, and at noon, desiring to observe the proprieties, I stepped upon the paepae of her home.

"She loved the Menike!" shouted the old women in chorus, and they threw themselves upon me and smelt me and made as if I had been one of the dead's husbands. The followed me up the trail to my cabin and sat on my paepae wailing and shrieking. It was some time before I realized that their poignant sorrow should force consolation from me. There was not a moan as the rum went round.

I had puzzled at the exact repetition of their plaint. Harrowing as it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet. A woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the "Ue haaneinei" That, literally, is "to make a weeping on the side." The etiquette of it was intricate and precise. Each vowel was memorized with exactness. It ran, as my adopted aunt repeated it over her shell of consolation, thus:

"Ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke! A a a a a a a a a a a a a a! E e e e e e e e e e e e e e e! I i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i! O o o o o o o o o o o o o o o! U u u u u u u u u u u u u u u!"

To omit a vowel, to say too many, or to mix their order, would be disrespect to the spirit of the dead, and a reflection on the mourner. Nine times the "ke," fourteen "a's," fifteen "e's," eighteen "i's" and fifteen "o's" and "u's."

Aumia was carried to Calvary in the afternoon and put in the grave for which the pig had been paid. So strongly did the old feeling still prevail that only three or four of her friends could be persuaded by the nuns to accompany the coffin up the trail.

Exploding Egg's consignment of Aumia to Havaii, the underworld, spoke strongly of the clinging of his people to their old beliefs in the destiny of the spirit after death. They share with the Ainos of Japan—a people to which they have many likenesses, being of the same division of man—a faith in a subterranean future.

Does not Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often speak of "going to the world below," where he hopes to find real wisdom?

Havaii or Havaiki is, of course, the fabled place whence came the Polynesians, as it is also the name of that underworld to which their spirits return after death. One might read into this fact a dim groping of the Marquesan mind toward "From dust he came, to dust returneth," or, more likely, a longing of the exiled people for the old home they had abandoned. Ethnologists believe that the name refers to Java, the tarrying-point of the great migration of Caucasians from South Asia toward Polynesia and New Zealand, or to Savaii, a Samoan island whence the emigrants later dispersed.

Whatever the origin of the word, to-day it conveys to the Marquesan mind only that vague region where the dead go. In it there is no suffering, either for good or bad souls. It is simply the place where the dead go. It is ruled by Po, the Darkness.

There is, however, a paradise in an island in the clouds, where beautiful girls and great bowls of kava, with pigs roasted to a turn, await the good and brave. The old priests claimed to be able to help one from Po to this happy abode, but the living relatives of the departed spirit had to pay a heavy price for their services. The Christianized Marquesan fancies that he finds these old beliefs revived when Pere David tells him of purgatory, from which prayers and certain good acts help one's friends, or may be laid up in advance against the day when one must himself descend to that middle state of souls.

All Marquesans live in the shadow of that day. They see it without fear, but with a melancholy so tragic and deep that the sorrow of it is indescribable.

"I have seen many go as Aumia has gone," said Father David to me. "All these lovable races are dying. All Polynesia is passing. Some day the whites here will be left alone amid the ruins of plantations and houses, unless they bring in an alien race to take the places of the dead."

A hundred years ago there were a hundred and sixty thousand Marquesans in these islands. Twenty years ago there were four thousand. To-day I am convinced that there remain not twenty-one hundred.

A century ago an American naval captain reckoned nineteen thousand fighting men on the island of Nuka-hiva alone. In a valley where three thousand warriors opposed him, there are to-day four adults. I visited Hanamate, an hour from Atuona, where fifty years ago hundreds of natives lived. Not one survived to greet me.

Consumption came first to Hanavave, on the island of Fatu-hiva. One of the tribe of merciless American whaling captains having sent ashore a sailor dying of tuberculosis, the tattooed cannibals received him in a Christ-like manner, soothed his last hours, and breathed the germs that have carried off more than four-fifths of their race, and to-day are killing the remnant.

The white man brought the Chinese, and with them leprosy. The Chinese were imported to aid the white in stealing the native land of the Marquesan, and to keep the Chinese contented, opium was brought with him. Finding it eagerly craved by the ignorant native, the foolish white fastened this vice also upon his other desired slave. The French Government, for forty thousand francs, licensed an opium farmer to sell the drug still faster, and not until alarmed by the results and shamed by the outcry in Europe, did it forbid the devastating narcotic. Too late!

Smallpox came with a Peruvian slave-ship that stole thousands of the islanders and carried them off to work out their lives for the white in his own country. This ship left another more dread disease, which raged in the islands as a virulent epidemic, instead of running the slow chronic course it does nowadays when all the world has been poisoned by it.

The healthy Marquesans had no anti-toxins in their pure blood to overcome the diseases which with us, hardened Europeans and descendants of Europeans, are not deadly. Here they raged and destroyed hundreds in a few days or weeks.

The survivors of these pestilences, seeing their homes and villages desolated, their friends dying, their people perishing, supposed that these curses were inflicted upon them by the God of the foreigners and by the missionaries, who said that they were his servant. In their misery, they not only refused to listen to the gospels, but accused the missionaries in prayer before their own god, begging to be saved from them. Often when the missionaries appeared to speak to the people, the deformed and dying were brought out and laid in rows before them, as evidences of the evilness and cruelty of their white god.

But after one has advanced all tangible reasons and causes for the depopulation of the Marquesas, there remains another, mysterious, intangible, but it may be, more potent than the others. The coming of the white has been deadly to all copper-colored races everywhere in the world. The black, the yellow, the Malay, the Asiatic and the negro flourish beside the white; the Polynesian and the red races of America perished or are going fast. The numbers of those dead from war and epidemics leave still lacking the full explanation of the fearful facts. Seek as far as you will, pile up figures and causes and prove them correct; there still remains to take into account the shadow of the white on the red.

Prescott says:

The American Indian has something peculiarly sensitive in his nature. He shrinks instinctively from the rude touch of a foreign hand. Even when this foreign influence comes in the form of civilization, he seems to sink and pine under it. It has been so with the Mexicans. Under the Spanish domination their numbers have silently melted away. Their energies are broken. They live under a better system of laws, a more assured tranquillity, a purer faith. But all does not avail. Their civilization was of the hardy character that belongs to the wilderness. Their hardy virtues were all their own. They refused to submit to European culture—to be engrafted on a foreign stock.

Free! Understand that well, it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free. Freedom is the one purpose, wisely aimed at or unwisely, of all man's struggles, toilings, and sufferings, in this earth.

I am persuaded that the Polynesians, from Hawaii to Tahiti, are dying because of the suppression of the play-instinct, an instinct that had its expression in most of their customs and occupations. Their dancing, their tattooing, their chanting, their religious rites, and even their warfare, had very visible elements of humor and joyousness. They were essentially a happy people, full of dramatic feeling, emotional, and with a keen sense of the ridiculous. The rule of the trader crushed all these native feelings.

To this restraint was added the burden of the effort to live. With the entire Marquesan economic and social system disrupted, food was not so easily procurable, and they were driven to work by commands, taxes, fines, and the novel and killing incentives of rum and opium. The whites taught the men to sell their lives, and the women to sell their charms.

Happiness and health were destroyed because the white man came here only to gratify his cupidity. The priests could bring no inspiration sufficient to overcome the degradation caused by the traders. The Marquesan saw that Jesus had small influence over their rulers. Civilization lost its opportunity because it gave precept, but no example.

Even to-day, one white man in a valley sets the standard of sobriety, of kindness, and honor. Jensen, the frank and handsome Dane who works for the Germans at Taka-Uka who was in the breadline in New York and swears he will never return to civilization, told me that when he kept a store in Hanamenu, near Atuona, to serve the bare handful of unexterminated tribesmen there, the people imitated him in everything, his clothes, his gestures, his least-studied actions.

"I was the only white. I planted a fern in a box. Every one came to my store and, feigning other reasons, asked for boxes. Soon every paepae had its box of ferns. I asked a man to snare four or five goats for me in the hills. They were the first goats tethered or enclosed in the valley. Within a week the mountains were harried for goats, and the village was noisy with their bleating. I ate my goats; they ate theirs. Not one was left. When I forsook Hanamenu, the whole population moved with me. Sure, I was decent to them, that was all.

"I never want to see the white man's country again. I have starved in the big cities, and worked like a dog for the banana trust in the West Indies. I have begged a cup of coffee in San Francisco, and been fanned by a cop's club. Here I make almost nothing, I have many friends and no superiors, and I am happy."

Had these lovable savages had a few fine souls to lead them, to shield them from the dregs of civilization heaped on them for a century, they might have developed into a wonder race to set a pace in beauty, courage, and natural power that would have surprised and helped Europe.

They needed no physical regeneration. They were better born into health and purity—bloody as were some of their customs—than most of us. Their bodies had not become a burden on the soul, but, light and strong and unrestrained, were a part of it. They did not know that they had bodies; they only leaped, danced, flung themselves in and out of the sea, part of a large, happy, and harmonious universe.

If to that superb, almost perfect, physical base that nature had given these Marquesans, to that sweetness simplicity, generosity, and trust acknowledged by all who know them, there could have been added a knowledge of the things we have learned; if by example and kindness they could have been given rounded and informed intelligence, what living there would have been in these islands!

All they needed was a brother who walked in the sunlight and showed the way.



CHAPTER XVI

A savage dance, a drama of the sea, of danger and feasting; the rape of the lettuce.

Drums were beating all the morning, thrilling the valley and mountain-sides with their barbaric boom-boom. The savage beat of them quickened the blood, stirring memories older than mankind, waking wild and primitive instincts. Toho's eyes gleamed, and her toes curled and uncurled like those of a cat, while she told me that the afternoon would see an old dance, a drama of the sea, of war, and feasting such as the islands had known before the whites came.

The air thrummed with the resonance of the drums. All morning I sat alone on my paepae, hearing them beat. The sound carried one back to the days when men first tied the skins of animals about hollow tree-trunks and thumped them to call the naked tribes together under the oaks of England. Those great drums beaten by the hands of Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale made one want to be a savage, to throw a spear, to dance in the moonlight.

Erase thirty years, and hear it in Atuona when the "long pig that speaks" was being carried through the jungle to the dark High Place! Then it was the thunder of the heavens, the voice of the old gods hungry for the flesh of their enemies.

We who have become refined and diverse in our musical expression, using a dozen or scores of instruments to interpret our subtle emotions, cannot know the primitive and savage exaltation that surges through the veins when the war-drum beats. To the Marquesans it has ever been a summons to action, an inspiration to daring and bloody deeds, the call of the war-gods, the frenzy of the dance. Born of the thunder, speaking with the voice of the storm and the cataract, it rouses in man the beast with quivering nostrils and lashing tail who was part of the forest and the night.

Music is ever an expression of the moods and morals of its time. The bugle and the fife share with the drum the rousing of martial spirit in our armies to-day, but to our savage ancestors the drum was supreme. Primitive man expressed his harmony with nature by imitating its sounds. He struck his own body or a hollow log covered with skin. Uncivilized peoples crack their fingers, snap their thighs, or strike the ground with their feet to furnish music for impromptu dancing. In Tonga they crack their fingers; in Tahiti they pound the earth with the soles of their feet; here in Atuona they clap hands. The Marquesans have, too, bamboo drums, long sections of the hollow reed, slit, and beaten with sticks. For calling boats and for signaling they use the conch-shell, the same that sounded when "the Tritons blew their wreathed horn." They also have the jew's-harp, an instrument common to all Polynesia; sometimes a strip of bark held between the teeth, sometimes a bow of wood strung with gut.



Civilization is a process of making life more complex and subtle. We have the piano, the violin, the orchestra. Yet we also have rag-time, which is a reaction from the nervous tension of American commercial life, a swinging back to the old days when man, though a brute, was free. There is release and exhilaration in the barbaric, syncopated songs and in the animal-like motions of the jazz dances with their wild and passionate attitudes, their unrestrained rhythms, and their direct appeal to sex. These rag-time melodies, coming straight from the jungles of Africa through the negro, call to impulses in man that are stifled in big cities, in factory and slum and the nerve-wearing struggle of business.

So in the dance my Marquesan neighbors returned to the old ways and expressed emotions dying under the rule of an alien people. With the making light of their reverenced tapus, the proving that their gods were powerless, and the ending of their tribal life, the dance degraded. They did not care to dance now that their joy in life was gone. But the new and jolly governor, craving amusement, sought to revive it for his pleasure. So the drums were beating on the palace lawn, and afternoon found the trails gay with pareus and brilliant shawls as the natives came down from their paepaes to the seat of government.

Chief Kekela Avaua, adopted son of the old Kekela, and head man of the Paamau district, called for me. He was a dignified and important man of forty-five years, with handsome patterns in tattooing on his legs, and Dundreary whiskers. He was quite modishly dressed in brown linen, beneath which showed his bare, prehensile-toed feet.

Kirio Patuhamane, a marvelous specimen of scrolled ink-marks from head to foot, who sported Burnside whiskers, an English cricket cap, and a scarlet loin-cloth, accompanied us down the road.

A hundred natives were squatting in the garden of the palace, and rum and wine were being handed out when we arrived. Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale, the man under sentence for making palm brandy, were once more the distributors, and took a glass often. The people had thawed since the dance at the governor's inauguration. As Kirio Patuhamane explained, they had waited to observe the disposition of their new ruler, the last having been severe, dispensing no rum save for his own selfish gain, and having a wife who despised them.

My tawny feminine friends resented keenly white women's airs of superiority, and many were the cold glances cast by Malicious Gossip, Apporo, and Flower at the stiffly gowned Madame Bapp, who sat on the veranda drinking absinthe. They scorned her, because she beat her husband if he but looked at one of them, though he owned a store and desired their custom. Poor Madame Bapp! She thought her little man very attractive, and she lived in misery because of the openly-displayed charms of his customers. She loved him, and when jealous she sought the absinthe bottle and soon was busy with whip and broom on the miserable Bapp, who sought to flee. It was useless; she had looked to doors and windows, and he must take a painful punishment, the while the crockery smashed and all Atuona Valley listened on its paepaes, laughing and well knowing that the little man had given no cause for jealousy.

She greeted me with cold politeness when I mounted to the veranda, and the governor dispensed glasses of "Dr. Funk," a drink known to all the South Seas. Its secret is merely the mixing of a stiff drink of absinthe with lemonade or limeade. The learned man who added this death-dealing potion to the pleasures of the thirsty was Stevenson's friend, and attended him in his last illness. I do not know whether Dr. Funk ever mixed his favorite drink for R.L.S., but his own fame has spread, not as a healer, but as a dram-decocter, from Samoa to Tahiti. "Dr. Funk!" one hears in every club and bar. Its particular merits are claimed by experts to be a stiffening of the spine when one is all in; an imparting of courage to live to men worn out by doing nothing.

The governor in gala attire was again the urban host, assisted by Andre Bauda, now his close friend and confidant. Bauda himself had been in the island only a few months, and knew no more Marquesan speech than the governor. Both these officials were truly hospitable, embarrassingly so, considering my inability to keep up with them in their toasts.