"'Plenty kaikai. Big pig come by and by,' they said.

"So he stood waiting while they dug, and no pig came. Then he said, 'Where is the pig?' And at that moment the u'u crashed upon his skull, so that he fell without life and lay in the oven. Wood was piled about him, and he was baked, and there was feasting in Hanamenu.

"In the twilight Tahia came over the hills, weary and hungry, and asked for her white man. 'He has gone to the beach,' they said.

"He will return soon, therefore sit and eat, my daughter," said her father, and gave her the meat wrapped in leaves. So she ate heartily, and waited for her husband. And all the feasters laughed at her, so that little by little she learned the truth. She said nothing, but went away in the darkness.

"And it is written, Haabunai, that searchers for the mei came upon her next day in the upper valley, and she was hanging from a tall palm-tree with a rope of purau about her neck."

"That may be a true story," said Haabunai. "Though it is the custom here to eat the eva when one is made sick by life. And very few white men were ever eaten in the islands, because they knew too much and were claimed by some woman of power." He paused for a moment to puff his cigarette.

"Now there was a sailor whom my grandfather ate, and he was white. But there was ample cause for that, for never was a man so provoking.

"He was a harpooner on a whale-ship, a man who made much money, but he liked rum, and when his ship left he stayed behind. They sent two boats ashore and searched for him, but my grandfather sent my father with him into the hills, and after three days the captain thought he had been drowned, and sailed away without him.

"My grandfather gave him my father's sister to wife, and like that man of whom you told, he was much loved by her, though he would do nothing but make namu enata and drink it and dance and sleep. Grandfather said that he could dance strange dances of the sailor that made them all laugh until their ribs were sore.

"This man, whose name was Honi—"

"Honi?" said I. "I do not know that word."

"Nor I. It is not Marquesan. It was his name, that he bore on the ship."

"Honi?" I repeated incredulously, and then light broke. "You mean Jones?"

"It may be. I do not know. Honi was his name, as my grandfather said it. And this Honi had brought from the whale-ship a gun and a harpoon. This harpoon had a head of iron and was fixed on a spear, with a long rope tied to the head, so that when it was thrust into the whale he was fastened to the boat that pursued him through the water. There was no weapon like it on the island, and it was much admired.

"Honi fought with us when our tribe, the Papuaei, went to war with the Tiu of Taaoa. He used his gun, and with it he won many battles, until he had killed so many of the enemy that they asked for peace. Honi was praised by our tribe, and a fine house was built for him near the river, in the place where eels and shrimp were best.

"In this large house he drank more than in the other smaller one. He used his gun to kill pigs and even birds. My grandfather reproved him for wasting the powder, when pigs could easily be killed with spears. But Honi would not listen, and he continued to kill until he had no more powder. Then he quarreled with my grandfather, and one day, being drunk, he tried to kill him, and then fled to the Kau-i-te-oho, the tribe of redheaded people at Hanahupe.

"Learning that Honi was no longer with us, the Tiu tribe of Taaoa declared war again, and the red-headed tribe had an alliance with them through their chief's families intermarrying, so that Honi fought with them. His gun being without powder, he took his harpoon, and he came with the Tui and the Kau-i-te-oho to the dividing-line between the valleys where we used to fight.

"Where the precipices reared their middle points between the valleys, the tribes met and reviled one another.

"'You people with hair like cooked shrimp! Are you ready for the ovens of our valley?' cried my grandfather's warriors.

"'You little men, who run so fast, we have now your white warrior with us, and you shall die by the hundreds!' yelled our enemies."

This picture of the scene at the line was characteristic of Polynesian warfare. It is almost exactly like the meeting of armies long ago in Palestine and Syria, and before the walls of Troy. Goliath slanged David grossly, threatening to give his body to the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and David retorted in kind. So, when Ulysses launched his spear at Soccus, he cried:

"Ah, wretch, no father shall they corpse compose, Thy dying eye no tender mother close; But hungry birds shall tear those balls away, And hungry vultures scream around their prey."

"For a quarter of an hour," said Haabunai, "my grandfather's people and the warriors of the enemy called thus to each other upon the top of the cliffs, and then Honi and the brother of my grandfather, head men of either side, advanced to battle.

"The first time Honi threw his harpoon, he hooked my great-uncle. He hooked him through the middle, and before he could be saved, a half dozen of the Tiu men pulled on the rope and dragged him over the line to be killed and eaten.

"Two more of our tribe Honi snared with this devilish spear, and it was not so much death as being pulled over to them and roasted that galled us. All day the battle raged, except when both sides stopped by agreement to eat popoi and rest, but late in the afternoon a strange thing happened.

"Honi had thrown his harpoon, and by bad aim it entered a tree. The end of the line he had about his left arm, and as he tried to pull out the spear-head from the wood, his legs became entangled in the rope, and my grandfather, who was very strong, seized the rope near the tree, dragged the white man over the line, and killed him with a rock.

"The enemy ran away then, and that night our people ate Honi. Grandfather said his flesh was so tough they had to boil it. There were no tipoti (Standard-oil cans) in those days, but our people took banana leaves and formed a big cup that would hold a couple of quarts of water, and into these they put red-hot stones, and the water boiled. Grandfather said they cut Honi into small pieces and boiled him in many of these cups. Still he was tough, but nevertheless they ate him.

"Honi was tattooed. Not like Marquesans, but like some white sailors, he had certain marks on him. Grandfather saved these marks, and wore them as a tiki, or amulet, until he died, when he gave it to me. He had preserved the skin so that it did not spoil."

Haabunai yawned and said his mouth was parched from much talking, but when a shell of rum was set before him and he had drunk, he fetched from his house the tiki. It was as large as my hand, dark and withered, but with a magnifying glass I could see a rude cross and three letters, I H S in blue.

"Grandfather became a Christian and was no longer an enata Ttaikaia, an eater of men, but he kept the tiki always about his neck, because he thought it gave him strength," said my guest.

I handed him back the gruesome relic, though he began advances to make it my property. For the full demijohn he would have parted with the tiki that had been his grandfather's, but I had no fancy for it. One can buy in Paris purses of human skin for not much more than one of alligator hide.

"Honi must have been very tough," I said.

"He must have been," Haabunai said regretfully. "Grandfather had his teeth to the last. He would never eat a child. Like all warriors he preferred for vengeance's sake the meat of another fighter."

He had not yet sprung the grim jest of almost all cannibalistic narratives. I did not ask if Honi's wife had eaten of him, as had Tahia of her white man. It is probable that she did, and that they deceived her. It was the practical joke of those days.

I had seen Apporo, my landlady, staggering homeward a few days earlier in a pitiful state of intoxication. Some one had given her a glass of mixed absinthe, vermuth, and rum, and with confidence in the giver she had tossed it down. That is the kind of joke that in other days would have been the deluding of some one into partaking of the flesh of a lover or friend.

Reasoning from our standpoint, it is easy to assume that cannibalism is a form of depravity practised by few peoples, but this error is dispelled by the researches of ethnologists, who inform us that it was one of the most ancient customs of man and began when he was close brother to the ape. Livingstone, when he came upon it on the Dark continent, concluded that the negroes came to that horrible desire from their liking for the meat of gorillas, which so nearly approach man in appearance. Herodatus, writing twenty-five hundred years ago, mentions the Massagetae who boiled the flesh of their old folks with that of cattle, both killed for the occasion. Cannibalism marked the life of all peoples in days of savagery.

Plutarch says that Cataline's associates gave proof of their loyalty to that agitator and to one another by sacrificing and eating a man. Achilles expressed his wish that he might devour Hector. The Kafirs ate their own children in the famine of 1857, and the Germans ate one another when starvation maddened them, long after Maryland and Massachusetts had become thriving settlements in the New World. There is a historic instance of a party of American pioneers lost in the mountains of California in the nineteenth century, who in their last extremity of hunger ate several of the party.

To devour dead relatives, to kill and eat the elders, to feast upon slaves and captives, even for mothers to eat their children, were religious and tribal rites for many tens of thousands of years. We have records of these customs spread over the widest areas of the world.

Undoubtedly cannibalism began as a question of food supply. In early times when man, emerging from the purely animal stage, was without agricultural skill, and lived in caves or trees, his fellow was his easiest prey. The great beasts were too fierce and powerful for his feeble weapons except when luck favored him, and the clan or family, or even the single brave hunter, sought the man-meat by stealth or combat, or in tunes of stress ate those nearest and dearest.

Specially among peoples whose principal diet is heavy, starchy food, such as the breadfruit, the demand for meat is keen. I saw Marquesan women eating insects, worms, and other repellant bits of flesh out of sheer instinct and stomachic need. When salt is not to be had, the desire for meat is most intense. In these valleys the upper tribes, whose enemies shut them off from the sea with its salt and fish, were the most persistent cannibals, and the same condition exists in Africa to-day, where the interior tribes eat any corpse, while none of the coast tribes are guilty.

As the passion for cannibalistic feasts grew,—and it became a passion akin to the opium habit in some,—the supply of other meat had little to do with its continuance. In New Britain human bodies were sold in the shops; in the Solomon Islands victims were fattened like cattle, and on the upper Congo an organized traffic is carried on in these empty tenements of the human soul.

Although cannibalism originated in a bodily need, man soon gave it an emotional and spiritual meaning, as he has given them to all customs that have their root in his physical being. Two forms of cannibalism seem to have existed among the first historic peoples. One was concerned with the eating of relatives and intimates, for friendship's sake or to gain some good quality they possessed. Thus when babies died, the Chavante mothers, on the Uruguay, ate them to regain their souls. Russians ate their fathers, and the Irish, if Strabo is to be credited, thought it good to eat both deceased parents. The Lhopa of Sikkim, in Tibet, eat the bride's mother at the wedding feast.

But Maori cannibalism, with its best exposition in the Marquesas, was due to a desire for revenge, cooking and eating being the greatest of insults. It was an expression of jingoism, a hatred for all outside the tribe or valley, and it made the feud between valleys almost incessant.

It was in no way immoral, for morals are the best traditions and ways of each race, and here the eating of enemies was authorized by every teaching of priest and leader, by time-honored custom and the strongest dictates of nature.

White men and Chinese, in fact, all foreigners, were seldom eaten here. There were exceptions when vengeance impelled, such at that of Honi or Jones, whom Haabunai's grandfather ate, but as a rule they were spared and indeed cherished, as strange visitors who might teach the people useful things. Only their own depravity brought them to the oven.

At such times, the feast was even a disagreeable rite. It is a fact that the Marquesan disliked the flesh of a white man. They said he was too salty. Hundreds of years ago the Aztecs, according to Bernal Diaz, who was there, complained that "the flesh of the Spaniards failed to afford even nourishment, since it was intolerably bitter." This, though the Indians were dying of starvation by hundreds of thousands in the merciless siege of Mexico City.

Standards of barbarity vary. Horrible and revolting as the very mention of cannibalism is to us, it should be remembered that it rested upon an attitude toward the foreigner and the slave that in some degree still persists everywhere in the world. Outside the tribe, the savage recognized no kindred humanity. Members of every clan save his own were regarded as strange and contemptible beings, outlandish and barbarous in manners and customs, not to be regarded as sharers of a common birthright. This attitude toward the stranger did not at all prevent the cannibal from being, within his own tribe, a gentle, merry, and kindly individual.

Even toward the stranger the Marquesan was never guilty of torture of any kind. Though they slew and ate, they had none of the refinements of cruelty of the Romans, not even scalping enemies as did the Scythians, Visigoths, Franks, and Anglo-Saxons. In their most bloody wars they often paused in battle to give the enemy time to eat and to rest, and there is no record of their ever ringing a valley about with armed warriors and starving to death the women and children within. Victims for the gods were struck down without warning, so that they might not suffer even the pangs of anticipation. The thumb-screw and rack of Christendom struck with horror those of my cannibal friends to whom I mentioned them.



CHAPTER XXII

The memorable game for the matches in the cocoanut-grove of Lam Kai Oo.

Parables are commonly found in books. In a few words on a printed page one sees a universal problem made small and clear, freed from those large uncertainties and whimsies of chance that make life in the whole so confusing to the vision. It was my fortune to see, in the valley of Atuona on Hiva-oa, a series of incidents which were at the time a whirl of unbelievable merriment, yet which slowly clarified themselves into a parable, while I sat later considering them on the leaf-shaded paepae of the House of the Golden Bed.

They began one afternoon when I dropped down to the palace to have a smoke with M. L'Hermier des Plantes, the governor. As I mounted the steps I beheld on the veranda the governor, stern, though perspiring, in his white ducks, confronting a yellowish stranger on crutches who pleaded in every tone of anguish for some boon denied him.

"Non! No! Ned!" said the governor, poly-linguistically emphatic. "It cannot be done!" He dropped into a chair and poured himself an inch of Pernod, as the defeated suitor turned to me in despair.

He was short and of a jaundiced hue, his soft brown eyes set slightly aslant. Although lame, he had an alertness and poise unusual in the sea's spawn of these beaches. In Tahitian, Marquesan, and French, with now and then an English word, he explained that he, a Tahitian marooned on Hiva-oa from a schooner because of a broken leg, wished to pass the tedium of his exile in an innocent game of cards.

"I desire a mere permission to buy two packs of cards at the Chinaman's," he begged. "I would teach my neighbors here the jeu de pokaree. I have learned it on a voyage to San Francisco. It is Americaine. It is like life, not altogether luck. One must think well to play it. I doubt not that you know that game."

Now gambling is forbidden in these isles. It is told that throughout the southern oceans such a madness possessed the people to play the white men's games of chance that in order to prevent constant bloodshed in quarrels a strict interdiction was made by the conquerors. Of course whites here are always excepted from such sin-stopping rules, and merchants keep a small stock of cards for their indulgence.

"But why two packs?" I asked the agitated Tahitian.

"Mais, Monsieur, that is the way I was taught. We played with ten or fourteen in the circle, and as it is merely pour passer le temps, more of my poor brother Kanakas can enjoy it with two packs."

He was positively abased, for no Tahitian says "Kanaka" of himself. It is a term of contempt. He might call his fellow so, but only as an American negro says "nigger."

I looked at him closely. Some gesture, the suggested slant of his brows, the thin lips, reminded me of a certain "son of Ah Cum" who guided me into disaster in Canton, saying, "Mis'r Rud Kippeling he go one time befo'."

"Your name?" I asked in hope of confirmation.

"O Lalala," he replied, while the smile that started in his eyes was killed by his tightening lips. "I am French, for my grandfather was of Annam under the tri-color, and my mother of Tahiti-iti."

Now fourteen-handed poker, with O Lalala as instructor to those ignorant of the game, the code of which was written by a United States diplomat, appealed to me as more than a passing of the time. It would be an episode in the valley. My patriotism was stimulated. I called the governor aside.

"This poker," I said, "is not like ecarte or baccarat. It is a study of character, a matching of minds, a thing we call bluff, we Americans. These poor Marquesans must have some fun. Let him do it! No harm can come of it. It is far to Paris, where the laws are made."

The governor turned to O Lalala.

"No stakes!" he said.

"Mais, non! Not a sou!" the lame man promised. "We will use only matches for counters. Merci, merci, Monsieur l'Administrateur! You are very good. Please, will you give me now the note to Ah You?"

As he limped away with it, the governor poured me an inch of absinthe.

"Sapristi!" he exclaimed. "O Lalala! O, la, la, la!" He burst into laughter. "He will play ze bloff?"

I spent that evening with Kriech, the German trader of Taka-Uka. Over our Hellaby beef and Munich beer we talked of copra and the beautiful girls of Buda-Pesth, of the contemplated effort of the French government to monopolize the island trade by subsidizing a corporation, and of the incident of the afternoon.

"The Herr Doktor is new," said Kriech, with a wag of his head. "That O Lalala! I have heard that that poker iss very dansherous. That Prince Hanoi of Papeite lose his tam headt to a Chinaman. Something comes of this foolishnesses!"

At midnight I had again gained the House of the Golden Bed and had lain down to sleep when on the breeze from up the valley there came a strangely familiar sound to my upper ear. I sat up, listening. In the dark silence, with no wind to rustle the breadfruit and cocoanut-trees, and only the brook faintly murmuring below, I heard a low babble of voices. No word was distinguishable, not even the language, yet curiously the sound had a rhythm that I knew.

I have heard from a distance preaching in many languages. Though only the cadences, the pauses, and rhythm reached me, I had no difficulty in knowing their origin and meaning. Thought casts the mold of all speech. Now my drowsy mind harked back to American days, to scenes in homes and clubs.

I rose, and wrapping the loin-cloth about me, set out with a lantern in search of that sound. It led me down the trail, across the brook, and up the slope into the dense green growth of the mountain-side. Beyond I saw lights in the cocoanut-grove of Lam Kai Oo.

My bare feet made no noise, and through the undergrowth I peered upon as odd a sight as ever pleased a lover of the bizarre. A blaze of torches lighted a cleared space among the tall palm columns, and in the flickering red glow a score of naked, tattooed figures crouched about a shining mat of sugar-cane. About them great piles of yellow-boxed Swedish matches caught the light, and on the cane mat shone the red and white and black of the cards.

O Lalala sat facing me, absorbed in the game. At his back the yellow boxes were piled high, his crutch propped against them, and continually he speeded the play by calling out, "Passy, calley or makum bigger!" "Comely center!" or, "Ante uppy!"

These were the sounds that had swept my memory back to civilization and drawn me from my Golden Bed. O Lalala had all the slang of poker—the poker of the waterfronts of San Francisco and of Shanghai—and evidently he had already taught his eager pupils that patois.

They crouched about the mat, bent forward in their eagerness, and the flickering light caught twisting mouths and eyes ringed with tattooing. Over their heads the torches flared, held by breathless onlookers. The candlenuts, threaded on long spines of cocoanut-leaves, blazed only a few seconds, but each dying one lit the one beneath as it sputtered out, and the scores of strings shed a continuous though wavering light upon the shining mat and the cards.

The midnight darkness of the enclosing grove and the vague columns of the palms, upholding the rustling canopy that hid the sky, hinted at some monstrous cathedral where heathen rites were celebrated.

I pushed through the fringe of onlookers, none of whom heeded me, and found Apporo and Exploding Eggs holding torches. The madness of play was upon them. The sad placidity of every day was gone; as in the throes of the dance they kept their gleaming eyes upon the fluctuations of fortune before them. Twice I spoke sharply before they heard me, and then in a frenzy of supplication Apporo threw herself upon me.

Would I not give her matches—the packets of matches that were under the Golden Bed? She and her husband, Great Fern, had spent but an hour in the magic circle ere they were denuded of their every match. Couriers were even now scouring the valley for more matches. Quick, hasten! Even now it might be that the packets under the Golden Bed were gone!

"Surely, then, come," I said, struck by an incredible possibility. Could it be that the crafty O Lalala—absurd! But Apporo, hurrying before me down the lantern-lighted trail, confirmed my suspicions.

O Lalala had stated and put into effect the prohibition of any other stakes other than the innocent matches—mere counters—which he had mentioned to the governor. But swift messengers had heralded throughout the valley that there would be gambling—authorized par gouvernement—in Lam Kai Go's plantation, and already the cards had been shuffled for seven or eight hours. Throughout all Atuona matches had been given an extraordinary and superlative value. To the farthest huts on the rim of the valley the cry was "Matches!" And as fast as they arrived, O Lalala won them.

We hastened into my cabin, and Apporo was beneath the Golden Bed ere the rays of my lantern fell upon the floor. The packets had disappeared.

"Exploding Eggs!" cried Apporo, her dark eyes tolling in rage.

"But—he is honest," I objected.

In such a crisis, she muttered, all standards were naught. Exploding Eggs had been one of the first squatters at the sugar-cane mat. "The Bishop himself would trade the holy-water fonts for matches, were he as thirsty to play as I am!"

There were no more matches in the valleys of Atuona or Taka-Uka, she said. Every dealer had sold out. Every house had been invaded. The losers had begged, borrowed, or given articles of great value for matches. The accursed Tahitian had them all but a few now being waged. Defeated players were even now racing over the mountains in the darkness, ransacking each hut for more.

The reputation of Hiva-oa, of the island itself, was at stake. A foreigner had dishonored their people, or would if they did not win back what he had gained from them. She was half Chinese; her father's soul was concerned. He had died in this very room. To save his face in death she would give back even her interest in the Golden Bed, she would pledge all that Great Fern possessed, if I would give her only a few matches.

Her pleas could only be hopeless. There was not a match in the cabin.

Together we returned to the cocoanut-grove. O Lalala still sat calmly winning the matches, the supply of which was from time to time replenished by panting newcomers. He swept the mat clean at every valuable pot.

His only apparent advantage was that he made the rules whenever questions arose. He was patient in all disputes, yielding in small matters, but he was as the granite rocks of the mountain above him when many matches were at stake. With solemnity he invoked the name of Hoy-lee, the mysterious person who had fixed immutably the tapus of pokaree. He made an occult sign with his thumb against his nose, and that settled it. If any one persisted in challenging this tiki he added his other thumb to the little finger of his first symbol, and said, "Got-am-to-hellee!" As a last recourse, he would raise his crutch and with public opinion supporting him would threaten to invoke the law against gambling and stop the game if disputation did not cease.

Steadily the pile of Swedish toendstikkers grew behind him. All through the night the game raged beneath the light of the candlenuts, in a silence broken only by the hoarse breathing of the crouching brown men, the sandy-sounding rustle of the palm-fronds overhead, and cries of "Ante uppy!" or "Comely center!" When dawn came grayly through the aisles of the grove, they halted briefly to eat a bowl of popoi and to drink the milk of freshly gathered nuts. O Lalala, relaxing against the heap of his winnings, lifted a shell to his lips and over its rim gave me one enigmatic look.

Whistling softly, I went down to the House of the Golden Bed, breakfasted there without the aid of Exploding Eggs, and then sought the governor. He had gone by the whale-boat of Special Agent Bauda to an adjoining deserted island to shoot kuku. Hiva-oa was without a government.

All day the madness raged in the cocoanut-grove. In the afternoon the vicar apostolic of the Roman Catholic Church, supported by the faithful Deacon Fariuu, himself toiled up the slope to stop the game. The bishop was received in sullen silence by regular communicants. A catechist whom he had found squat before the mat paid no attention to his objurgations, save to ask the bishop not to stand behind him, as O Lalala had said that was bad luck. The churchmen retired in a haughty silence that was unheeded by the absorbed players.

Later the deacon returned, bringing with him the very matches that had been kept in the church to light the lamps at night service. These he stacked on the sugarcane mat. The vicar bishop followed him to call down the anathema maranatha of high heaven upon this renegade who had robbed the cathedral and the priests' house of every toendstikker they had held, and when he had again retired, the deacon, dropping his last box on the woven table, elevated his hands toward the skies and fervently asked the Giver of All Good Things to aid his draw. But he received a third ace, only to see O Lalala put down four of the damnable bits of paper with three spots on each one.

At three o'clock next morning the game lapsed because the Tahitian had all the counters. These he sent to his house, where they were guarded by a friend. For a day he sat waiting by the sugar-cane mat, and the Monte Carlo was not deserted. O Lalala would not budge to the demands of a hundred losers that he sell back packages of matches for cocoanuts or French francs or any other currency. Pigs, fish, canned goods, and all the contents of the stores he spurned as breaking faith with the kindly governor, who would recognize that while matches were not gambling stakes, all other commodities were.

On the fourth day the canoes that had paddled and sailed to every other island of the archipelago began to return. Some brought fifty packets, some less. Dealers had tossed their prices sky-ward when asked to sell their entire stocks.



Now the game began again with the fierceness of the typhoon after the center has passed. Men and women stood in line for the chance to redeem their fortunes, to slake their rage, to gain applause. Once they thought they had conquered the Tahitian. He began to lose, and before his streak of trouble ended, he had sent more than thirty packages from his hut to the grove. But this was the merest breath of misfortune; his star rose again, and the contents of the canoes were his.

On the fifth day it became known that the Shan-Shan syndicate of Cantonese had a remaining case of toendstikkers. They claimed that until now they had overlooked this case. It held a hundred packages, or twelve hundred boxes. It was priceless as the sole possible barrier against the absolute ending of the game.

The Shan-Shan people were without heart. They demanded for the case five francs a packet. Many of the younger Marquesans counselled giving the Cantonese a taste of the ancient u'u, the war-club of a previous generation. Desperate as was the plight of the older gamesters, they dared not consent. The governor would return, the law would take its course, and they would go to Noumea to work out their lives for crime. No, they would buy the case for francs, but they would not risk dividing it among many, who would be devoured piecemeal by the diabolical O Lalala.

"Kivi, the Vagabond, the Drinker of kava, is the chief to lead our cause," said Great Fern. "He has never gone to the Christian church. He believes still in the old gods of the High Place, and he is tattooed with the shark."

Kivi was the one man who had not played. He cared nothing for the pleasures of the Farani, the foolish whites. After palaver, his neighbors waited on him in a body. They reasoned with him, they begged him. He consented to their plan only after they had wept at their humbling. Then they began to instruct him.

They told him of the different kinds of combinations, of straights and of flushes, and of a certain occasional period when the Tahitian would introduce a mad novelty by which the cards with one fruit on them would "runnee wil'ee." They warned him against times when without reason the demon would put many matches on the mat, and after frightening out every one would in the end show that he had no cards of merit.

Immediately after sunset, when the popoi and fish had been eaten, and all had bathed in the brook, when the women had perfumed their bodies and put the scarlet hibiscus in their hair, and after Kivi had drunk thrice of kava, the game began. The valley was deserted, the paepaes empty. No fires twinkled from the mountainsides. Only in the cocoanut-grove the candlenuts were lit as the stars peeped through the roof of the world.

A throng surrounded the pair of combatants. The worn cards had been oiled and dried, and though the ominous faces of the tiki upon them shone bravely, doubtless they were weary of strife. The pipe was made to smoke; Kivi puffed it and so did all who had joined in the purchase of the case from the thieves of Cantonese. Then the cards were dealt by Kivi, who had won the cut.

O Lalala and he eyed each other like Japanese wrestlers before the grapple. Their eyes were slits as they put up the ante of five packets each. O Lalala opened the pot for five packets and Kivi, nudged by his backers, feverishly balanced them. He took three cards, O Lalala but one. Standing behind the Tahitian, I saw that he had no cards of value, but coolly he threw thirty packets upon the mat. The others shuddered, for Kivi had drawn deuces to a pair of kings. They made the pipe glow again. They puffed it; they spat; they put their heads together, and he threw down his cards.

Then calmly the Tahitian laid down his own, and they saw that they could have beaten him. They shouted in dismay, and withdrew Kivi, who after some palaver went away with them into the darkness.

One or two candlenut torches dimly illumined the figures of the squatting women who remained. Upon the sugar-cane mat O Lalala stretched himself at ease, closing his eyes. A silence broken only by the stealthy noises of the forest closed upon us. Teata, her dark eyes wide, looked fearfully over her shoulder and crept close to me. In a low voice she said that the absent players had thrown earth over their shoulders, stamped, and called upon Po, the Marquesan deity of darkness, yet it had not availed them. Now they went to make magic to those at whose very mention she shuddered, not naming them.

We waited, while the torches sputtered lower, and a dank breath of the forest crept between the trees. O Lalala appeared to sleep, though when Apporo attempted to withdraw a card he pinned it with his crutch.

It was half an hour before the players returned. Kivi crouched to his place without a word, and the others arranged themselves behind him in fixed array, as though they had a cabalistic number-formation in mind.

Fresh torches were made, and many disputed the privilege of holding them, as they controlled one's view of the mat. O Lalala sat imperturbable, waiting. At last all was ready. The light fell upon the giant limbs and huge torsos of the men, picking out arabesques of tattooing and catching ruddy gleams from red pareus. The women, in crimson gowns caught up to the waist, their luxuriant hair adorned with flowers and phosphorescent fungus, their necks hung with the pink peppers of Chile, squatted in a close ring about the players.

The lame man took up the pack, shuffled it, and handed it to Kivi to cut. Then Kivi solemnly stacked before him the eighty-five packets of matches, all that remained in the islands. Five packs went upon the mat for ante, and Kivi very slowly picked up his cards.

He surveyed them, and a grim smile of incredulity and delight spread over his ink-decorated countenance. He opened for ten packets. O Lalala quickly put down as many, and thirty more.

Kivi chuckled as one who has his enemy in his hand, but stifles his feelings to hide his triumph. He then carefully counted his remaining wealth, and with a gesture of invitation slid the entire seventy packets about his knees. They were a great bulk, quite 840 boxes of matches, and they almost obscured the curving palms of blue tattooed on his mighty thighs.

Again he chuckled and this time put his knuckles over his mouth. "Patty!" said Great Fern for him, and made a gesture disdaining more cards.

O Lalala scrutinized his face as the sailor the heavens in a storm, and then studied the visages of all his backers. He closed his eyes a moment. Then, "My cally!" he said, as he pushed a great heap of toendstikkers onto the cane mat. The kava-drinkers grew black with excitement.

Kivi hesitated, and then, amid the most frightful curses of his company, laid down only a pair of kings, a six, a nine, and a jack. O Lalala, without a smile, disclosed a pair of aces and three meaningless companions.

The game was over. The men of Hiva-oa had thrown their last spear. Magic had been unavailing; the demon foreigner could read through the cards. Kivi fell back helpless, grief and kava prostrating him. The torches died down as the winner picked up his spoils and prepared to retire.

At this moment a man dashed madly through the grove, displaying two boxes and a handful of separate matches. O Lalala at first refused to play for this trifling stake, but in a storm of menacing cries consented to cut the pack for double or nothing, and in a twinkling extinguished the last hope.

The last comer had looted the governor's palace. The ultimate match in the Marquesas had been lost to the Tahitian. He now had the absolute monopoly of light and of cooking.

Soberly the rest of the valley dwellers went home to unlighted huts.

Next morning, after a cold breakfast, I was early afoot in the valley. On the way to the trader's store I beheld the complacent winner in his cabin. Through the open door I saw that every inch of the walls was covered with stacked boxes of matches, yellow fronts exposed. On his mat in the middle of this golden treasury O Lalala reclined, smoking at his leisure, and smiling the happy smile of Midas. Outside a cold wind swept down from Calvary Peak, and a gray sky hid the sun.

I paused in the reek of those innumerable matches, which tainted the air a hundred feet away, and exchanged morning greetings with their owner, inquiring about his plans. He said that he would make a three days' vigil of thanks, and upon the fourth day he would sell matches at a franc a small box. I bade him farewell, and passed on.

The valley people were coming and going about their affairs, but sadly and even morosely. There was no match to light the fire for roasting breadfruit, or to kindle the solacing tobacco. O Lalala would not give one away, or sell one at any price. Neither would he let a light be taken from his own fire or pipe.

The next schooner was not expected for two months, as the last was but a fortnight gone. Le Brunnec had not a match, nor Kriech. The governor had not returned. The only alternatives were to go lightless and smokeless or to assault the heartless oppressor. Many dark threats were muttered on the cheerless paepaes and in the dark huts, but in variety of councils there was no unity, and none dared assault alone the yellow-walled hut in which O Lalala smiled among his gains.

On the second day there was a growing tension in the atmosphere of the valley. I observed that there were no young men to be seen on the beach or at the traders' stores. There were rumors, hints hardly spoken, of a meeting in the hills. The traders looked to their guns, whistling thoughtfully. There was not a spark of fire set in all Atuona, save by O Lalala, and that for himself alone.

So matters stood until the second night. Then old Kahuiti, that handsomest of cannibals, who lived in the valley of Taaoa, strolled into Atuona and made it known that he would hold a meeting in the High Place where of old many of his tribe had been eaten by Atuona men.

Exploding Eggs, Malicious Gossip, and I climbed the mountain early. The population of the valley, eager for counsel, was gathered on the old stone benches where half a century earlier their sorcerers had sat. In the twilight Kahuiti stood before us, his long white beard tied in a Psyche knot on his broad, tattooed chest. His voice was stern.

We were fools, he said, to be denied food and smoke by the foreigner. What of matches before the French came? Had he known matches in his youth? Aue! The peoples of the islands must return to the ways of their fathers!

He leaped from the top of the Pekia, and seizing his long knife, he cut a five-foot piece of parua-wood and shaped it to four inches in width. With our fascinated gaze upon him, he whittled sharp a foot-long piece of the same wood, and straddled the longer stick. Holding it firmly between his two bare knees he rubbed the shorter, pointed piece swiftly up and down a space of six inches upon his mount. Gradually a groove formed, in which the dust collected at one end.

Soon the wood was smoking hot, and then the old man's hands moved so rapidly that for several moments I could not follow them with the eye. The smoke became thicker, and suddenly a gleam of flame arose, caught the dust, and was fed with twigs and cocoanut-husks by scores of trembling brown hands. In a few minutes a roaring fire was blazing on the sward.

Pipes sprang from loin-cloths or from behind ears, and the incense of tobacco lifted on the still air of the evening. Brands were improvised and hurried home to light the fires for breadfruit-roasting, while Kahuiti laughed scornfully.

"A hundred of this tribe I have eaten, and no wonder!" he said as he strode away toward Taaoa.

The monopoly of O Lalala was no more. Atuona Valley had turned back the clock of time a hundred years, to destroy the perfect world in which he sat alone. He heard the news with amazement and consternation. For a day he sat disconsolate, unable to credit the disaster that had befallen his carefully made plans. Then he offered the matches at usual traders' prices, and the people mocked him. All over the island the fire-ploughs, oldest of fire-making tools in the world, were being driven to heat the stones for the mei. Atuona had no need of matches.

The governor on his return heard the roars of derision, gathered the story from a score of mirthful tongues, seized and sold the matches, and appropriated the funds for a barrel of Bordeaux. And for many weeks the unhappy O Lalala sat mournfully on the beach, gazing at the empty sea and longing for a schooner to carry him away.



CHAPTER XXIII

Mademoiselle N——.

The Jeanne d'Arc, a beautiful, long, curving craft manned by twelve oarsmen, came like a white bird over the blue waters of the Bay of Traitors one Saturday afternoon, bringing Pere Victorien to Atuona. He was from Hatiheu, on the island of Nuka-hiva, seventy miles to the north. A day and a night he had spent on the open sea, making a slow voyage by wind and oar, but like all these priests he made nothing of the hardships. They come to the islands to stay until they die, and death means a crown the brighter for martyrdom.

He looked a tortured man in his heavy and smothering vestments when I met him before the mission walls next morning. His face and hands were covered with pustules as if from smallpox.

"The nonos (sand-flies) are so furious the last month," he said with a patient smile. "I have not slept but an hour at a time. I was afraid I would go mad."

News of his coming brought all the valley Catholics to eight o'clock mass. The banana-shaded road and the roots of the old banian were crowded with worshippers in all their finery, and when they poured into the mission the few rude benches were well filled. I found a chair in the rear, next to that of Baufre, the shaggy drunkard, and as the chanting began, I observed an empty prie-dieu, specially prepared and placed for some person of importance.

"Mademoiselle N——" said Baufre, noticing the direction of my glance. "She is the richest woman in all the Marquesas."

At the Gospel she came in, walking slowly down the aisle and taking her place as though unaware of the hundred covert glances that followed her. Wealth is comparative, and Mademoiselle N——, with perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars in cash and cocoanut-grove, stood to the island people as Rockefeller to us. Money and lands were not all her possessions, for though she had never traveled from her birthplace, she was very different in carriage and costume from the girls about her.

She wore a black lace gown, clinging, and becoming her slender figure and delicately charming face. Her features were exquisite, her eyes lustrous black pools of passion, her mouth a scarlet line of pride and disdain. A large leghorn hat of fine black straw, with chiffon, was on her graceful head, and her tiny feet were in silk stockings and patent leather. She held a gold and ivory prayer-book in gloved hands, and a jeweled watch hung upon her breast.

She might have passed for a Creole or for one of those beautiful Filipino mestizas, daughters of Spanish fathers and Filipino mothers. I suppose coquetry in woman was born with the fig-leaf. This dainty, fetching heiress, born of a French father and a savage mother, had all the airs and graces of a ballroom belle. Where had she gained these fashions and desires of the women of cities, of Europe?

I had but to look over the church to feel her loneliness. Teata, Many Daughters, Weaver of Mats, and Flower, savagely handsome, gaudily dressed, were the only companions of her own age. Flower, of the red-gold hair, was striking in a scarlet gown of sateen, a wreath of pink peppers, and a necklace of brass. She had been ornamented by the oarsmen of the Jeanne d'Arc, fortunately without Pere Victorien's knowledge. Teata, in her tight gown with its insertions of fishnet revealing her smooth, tawny skin, a red scarf about her waist, straw hat trimmed with a bright blue Chinese shawl perched on her high-piled hair, was still a picture of primitive and savage grace. They were handsome, these girls, but they were wild flowers. Mlle. N—— had the poise and delicacy of the hothouse blossom.

Her father had spent thirty years on Hiva-oa, laboring to wring a fortune from the toil of the natives, and dying, he had left it all to this daughter, who, with her laces and jewels, her elegant, slim form and haughty manner, was in this wild abode of barefooted, half-naked people like a pearl in a gutter. She was free now to do what she liked with herself and her fortune. What would she do?

It was the question on every tongue and in every eye when, after mass, she passed down the lane respectfully widened for her in the throng on the steps and with a black-garbed sister at her side, walked to the nuns' house.

"If only she had a religious vocation," sighed Sister Serapoline. "That would solve all difficulties, and save her soul and happiness."

Vainly the nuns and priests had tried during the dozen years of her tutelage in their hands to direct her aspirations toward this goal, but one had only to look into her burning eyes or see the supple movement of her body, to know that she sought her joy on earth.

Liha-Liha, the natives called her father, which means corporal, and that they had hated and yet feared him when Hiva-oa was still given over to cannibalism outlined his character. He had lived and died in his house near the Stinking Springs on the road to Taaoa. The sole white man in that valley, he had lorded it over the natives more sternly than had their old chiefs. He had fought down the wilderness, planted great cocoanut-plantations, forced the unwilling islanders to work for him, and dollar by dollar, with an iron will, he had wrung from their labor the fortune now left in the dainty hands of his half-savage daughter.

Song of the Nightingale, the convict cook of the governor, gave me light on the man.

"I loved his woman, Piiheana (Climber of Trees Who Was Killed and Eaten), who was the mother of Mademoiselle N——," said Song of the Nightingale. "One night he found me with her on his paepae. He shot me; then he had me condemned as a robber, and I spent five years in the prison at Tai-o-hae."

"And Climber of Trees Who Was Killed and Eaten?"

"He beat her till her bones were broken, and sent her from him. Then he took Daughter of a Piece of Tattooing, to whom he left in his will thirty-five thousand francs. It was she who brought up Mademoiselle."

Mademoiselle herself walked daintily down to the road, where her horse was tied, and I was presented to her. She gave me her hand with the air of a princess, her scarlet lips quivering into a faint smile and her smouldering, unsatisfied eyes sweeping my face. With a, conciliating, yet imperious, air, she suggested that I ride over the hills with her.

Picking up her lace skirt and frilled petticoat, she vaulted into the man's saddle without more ado, and took the heavy reins in her small gloved hands. Her horse was scrubby, but she rode well, as do all Marquesans, her supple body following his least movement and her slim, silk-stockinged legs clinging as though she were riding bareback. When the swollen river threatened to wet her varnished slippers, she perched herself on the saddle, feet and all, and made a dry ford.

Over the hills she led the way at a gallop, despite wretched trail and tripping bushes. Down we went through the jungle, walled in by a hundred kinds of trees and ferns and vines. Now and then we came into a cleared space, a native plantation, a hut surrounded by breadfruit-, mango- and cocoanut-, orange- and lime-trees. No one called "Kaoho!" and Mademoiselle N—— did not slacken her pace. We swept into the jungle again without a word, my horse following her mount's flying feet, and I ducking and dodging branches and noose-like vines.

In a marshy place, where patches of taro spread its magnificent leaves over the earth, we slowed to a walk. The jungle tangle was all about us; a thousand bright flowers, scarlet, yellow, purple, crimson, splashed with color the masses of green; tall ferns uncurled their fronds; giant creepers coiled like snakes through the boughs, and the sluggish air was heavy with innumerable delicious scents. I said to Mademoiselle N—— that the beauty of the islands was like that of a fantastic dream, an Arabian Night's tale.

"Yes?" she said, with a note of weariness and irony. The feet of the horses made a sucking sound on the oozy ground. "I am half white," she said after a moment, and as the horses' hoofs struck the rocky trail again, she whipped up her mount and we galloped up the slope.

After a time the trail widened into a road and I saw before us a queer enclosure. At first sight I thought it a wild-animal park. There were small houses like cages and a big, box-like structure in the center, all enclosed in a wire fence, a couple of acres in all. Drawing nearer, I saw that the houses were cabins painted in gaudy colors, and that the white box was a marble tomb of great size. Each slab of marble was rimmed with scarlet cement, and the top of the tomb, under a corrugated iron roof, was covered with those abominable bead-wreaths from Paris.

Like the humbler Marquesans who have their coffins made and graves dug before their passing, Mademoiselle N——'s father had seen to it that this last resting-place was prepared while he lived, and he had placed it here in the center of his plantation, before the house that had been his home for thirty years. With something of his own crude strength and barbaric taste, it stood there, the grim reminder of her white father to the girl in whose veins his own blood mingled with that of the savage.

She looked at it without emotion, and after I had surveyed it, we dismounted and she led me into her house. It was a neat and showily-furnished cottage, whose Nottingham-lace curtains, varnished golden-oak chairs and ingrain carpet spoke of attempts at mail-order beautification. Sitting on a horse-hair sofa, hard and slippery, I drank wine and ate mangoes, while opposite me Mademoiselle N——'s mother sat in stiff misery on a chair. She was a withered Marquesan woman, barefooted and ugly, dressed in a red cotton garment of the hideous night-gown pattern introduced by the missionaries, and her eyes were tragedies of bewilderment and suffering, while her toothless mouth essayed a smile and she struggled with a few words of bad French.

Though Mademoiselle N—— was most hospitable, she was not at ease, and I knew it was because of the appearance of her mother, this woman whom her father had discarded years before, but to whom the daughter had shown kindness since his death. The mother appeared more at ease with her successor, a somewhat younger Marquesan woman, who waited on us as a servant, and seemed contented enough. Doubtless the two who had endured the moods of Liha-Liha had many confidences now that he was gone.

I had to describe America to Mademoiselle N——, and the inventions and social customs of which she had read. She would not want to live in such a big country, she said, but Tahiti seemed to combine comfort with the atmosphere of her birthplace. Perhaps she might go to Tahiti to live.

As I took my hat to leave, she said:

"I have been told that they are separating the lepers in Tahiti and confining them outside Papeite in a kind of prison. Is that so?"

"Not a prison," I replied. "The government has built cottages for them in a little valley. Don't you think it wise to segregate them?"

She did not reply, and I rode away.

A week later I met her one evening at Otupoto, that dividing place between the valleys of Taaoa and Atuona, where Kahuiti and his fellow warriors had trapped the human meat. I had walked there to sit on the edge of the precipice and watch the sun set in the sea. She came on horseback from her home toward the village, to spend Sunday with the nuns. She got off her horse when she saw me, and lit a cigarette.

"What do you do here all alone?" she asked in French. She never used a word of Marquesan to me. I replied that I was trying to imagine myself there fifty years earlier, when the meddlesome white sang very low in the concert of the island powers.

"The people were happier then, I suppose," she said meditatively, as she handed me her burning cigarette in the courteous way of her mother's people. "But it does not attract me. I would like to see the world I read of."

She sat beside me on the rock, her delicately-modeled chin on her pink palm, and gazed at the colors fading from vivid gold and rose to yellow and mauve on the sky and the sea. The quietness of the scene, the gathering twilight, perhaps, too, something in the fact that I was a white man and a stranger, broke down her reserve.

"But with whom can I see that world?" she said with sudden passion. "Money—I have it. I don't want it. I want to be loved. I want a man. What shall I do? I cannot marry a native, for they do not think as I do. I—I dread to marry a Frenchman. You know le droit du mari? A French wife has no freedom."

I cited Madame Bapp, who chastised her spouse.

"He is no man, that criquet!" she said scornfully.

"I would be better off not to marry, if I had a real man who loved me, and who would take me across the sea! What am I saying? The nuns would be shocked. I do not know—oh, I do not know what it is that tears at me! But I want to see the world, and I want a man to love me."

"Your islands here are more beautiful than any of the developed countries," I said. "There are many thieves there, too, to take your money."

"I have read that," she answered, "and I am not afraid. I am afraid of nothing. I want to know a different life than here. I will at least go to Tahiti. I am tired of the convent. The nuns talk always of religion, and I am young, and I am half French. We die young, most of us, and I have had no pleasure."

I saw her black eyes, as she puffed her cigarette, shining with her vision. Some man would put tears in them soon, I thought, if she chose that path.

Would she be happy in Tahiti? If she could find one of her own kind, a half-caste, a paragon of kindness and fidelity, she might be. With the white she would know only torture. There is but one American that I know who has made a native girl happy. Lovina, who keeps the Tiare Hotel in Papeite and who knows the gossip of all the South Seas, told me the story one day after he had come to the hotel to fetch two dinners to his home. He had a handsome motor-car, and the man himself was so clean-looking, so precise in every word and motion, that I spoke of the contrast to the skippers, officials, and tourists who lounged about Lovina's bar.

"He is a strange one, that man," said Lovina. "Two years ago I have nice girl here, wait on bar, look sweet, and I make her jus' so my daughter. I go America for visit, and when I come back that girl ruin'. That American take her 'way, and he come tell me straight he couldn't help it. He jus' love her—mad. He build her fine house, get automobile. She never work. Every day he come here get meals take home."

That tall, straight chap, his hair prematurely gray, his face sad, had made the barmaid the jewel of a golden setting. He devoted himself and his income solely to her. Stranger still, he had made her his legal wife.

But she is an exception rare as rain in Aden. These native girls of mixed blood, living tragedies sprung from the uncaring selfishness of the whites, struggle desperately to lift themselves above the mire in which the native is sinking. They throw themselves away on worthless adventurers, who waste their little patrimony, break their hearts, and either desert them after the first flush of passion passes, or themselves sink into a life of lazy slovenliness worse than that of the native.

All these things I pondered when Mlle. N—— spoke of her hope of finding happiness in Tahiti. I was sure that, with her wealth, she would have many suitors,—but what of a tender heart?

"It is love I want," she said. "Love and freedom. We women are used to having our own way. I know the nuns would be horrified, but I shall bind myself to no man."

The last colors of the sunset faded slowly on the sea, and the world was a soft gray filled with the radiance of the rising moon. I rose and when Mile. N—— had mounted I strolled ahead of her horse in the moonlight. I was wearing a tuberose over my ear, and she remarked it.

"You know what that signifies? If a man seeks a woman, he wears a white flower over his ear, and if his love grows ardent, he wears a red rose or hibiscus. But if he tires, he puts some green thing in their place. Bon dieu! That is the depth of ignominy for the woman scorned. I remember one girl who was made light of that way in church. She stayed a day hidden in the hills weeping, and then she threw herself from a cliff."

There was in her manner a melancholy and a longing.

"Tahitians wear flowers all the day," I said. "They are gay, and life is pleasant upon their island. There are automobiles by the score, cinemas, singing, and dancing every evening, and many Europeans and Americans. With money you could have everything."

"It is not singing and dancing I desire!" she exclaimed. "Pas de tout! I must know more people, and not people like priests and these copra dealers. I have read in novels of men who are like gods, who are bold and strong, but who make their women happy. Do you know an officer of the Zelee, with hair like a ripe banana? He is tall and plays the banjo. I saw him one time long ago when the warship was here. He was on the governor's veranda. Oh, that was long ago, but such a young man would be the man that I want."

Her Marquesan blood was speaking in that cry of the heart, unrestrained and passionate. They are not the cold, chaste women of other climes, these women of the Marquesas; with blood at fever heat and hearts beating like wild things against bars, they listen when love or its counterfeit pours into their ears those soft words with nothing in them that make a song. They have no barriers of reserve or haughtiness; they make no bargains; they go where the heart goes, careless of certified vows.

"Mon dieu!" Mademoiselle N—— exclaimed and put her tiny hand to her red lips. "What if the good sisters heard me? I am bad. I know. Eh bien! I am Marquesan after all."

We were about to cross the stream by my cabin, and I mounted the horse behind her to save a wetting. She turned impulsively and looked at me, her lovely face close to mine, her dark eyes burning, and her hot breath on my cheek.

"Write to me when you are in Tahiti, and tell me if you think I would be happy there?" she said imploringly. "I have no friends here, except the nuns. I need so much to go away. I am dying here."

Coming up my trail a few days later, I found on my paepae a shabbily dressed little bag-of-bones of a white man, with a dirty gray beard and a harsh voice like that of Baufre. He had a note to me from Le Brunnec, introducing M. Lemoal, born in Brest, a naturalized American. The note was sealed, and I put it carefully away before turning to my visitor. It read:

"CHER CITOYEN:

"I send you a specimen of the Marquesan beaches, so that you can have a little fun. This fellow have a very tremendous life. He is an old sailor, pirate, gold-miner, Chinese-hanger, thief, robber, honest-man, baker, trader; in a word, an interesting type. With the aid of several glasses of wine I have put him in the mood to talk delightfully."

A low-browed man was Lemoal, sapped and ruthless, but certainly he had adventured.

Was the Bella Union Theater still there in Frisco? Did they still fight in Bottle Meyers, and was his friend Tasset on the police force yet? His memories of San Francisco ante-dated mine. He had been a hoodlum there, and had helped to hang Chinese. He had gone to Tahiti in 1870 and made a hundred thousand francs keeping a bakery. That fortune had lasted him during two years' tour of the world.

"Now I'm bust," he said bitterly. "Now I got no woman, no children, no friends, and I don't want none. I am by myself and damn everybody!"

I soothed his misanthropy with two fingers of rum, and he mellowed into advice.

"I saw you with that daughter of Liha-Liha," he said, using the native name of the dead millionaire. "You be careful. One time I baked bread in Taaoa. My oven was near his plantation. I saw that girl come into the woods and take off her dress. She had a mirror to see her back, and I looked, and the sun shone bright. What she saw, I saw—a patch of white. She is a leper, that rich girl."

His eyes were full of hate.

"You don't like her," I said. "Why?"

"Why? Why?" he screamed. "Because her father was an accursed villian. He was always kissing the dirty hands of the priests. He used to give his workmen opium to make them work faster, and then he would go to church. He made his money, yes. He was damn hypocrite. And now his daughter, with all that rotten money, is a leper. I tell everybody what I saw. Everybody here knows it but you. Everybody will know it in Tahiti if she goes there."

The man was like a snake to me. I threw away the glass he had drunk from. And yet—was it idle curiosity, or was it fear of being shut away in the valley outside Papeite by the quarantine officers, that made her ask me that question about the segregation of lepers?

Liha-Liha had spent thirty years making money. He had coined the sweat and blood and lives of a thousand Marquesans into a golden fortune, and he had left behind him that fortune, a marble tomb, and Mlle. N——.



CHAPTER XXIV

A journey to Nuka-hiva; story of the celebration of the fete of Joan of Arc, and the miracles of the white horse and the girl.

Pere Victorien said that I must not leave the Marquesas before I visited the island of Nuka-hiva seventy miles to the northward and saw there in Tai-o-hae, the capital of the northern group of islands, a real saint.

"A wonderful servant of Christ," he said, "Pere Simeon Delmas. He is very old, and has been there since the days of strife. He has not been away from the islands for fifty years, but God preserves him for His honor and service. Pere Simeon would be one of the first in our order were he in Europe, but he is a martyr and wishes to earn his crown in these islands and die among his charges. He is a saint, as truly as the blessed ones of old.

"It was he who planned the magnificent celebration of the feast of Joan of Arc some years ago, and as to miracles, I truly believe that the keeping safe of the white horse during the terrible storm and perhaps even the preservation of a maiden worthy to appear in the armor of the Maid, are miracles as veritable as the apparition at Lourdes. Pour moi, I am convinced that Joan is one of the most glorious saints in heaven, and that Pere Simeon himself is of the band of blessed martyrs."

"Ah, Pere Victorien, I would like nothing better than to meet that good man," I said, "but I am at a loss to get to Tai-o-hae. The Roberta, Capriata's steamer, will not be here for many weeks, and there is no other in the archipelago just now."

"You shall return with me in the Jeanne d'Arc," he replied quickly. "It may be an arduous voyage for you, but you will be well repaid."

A fortnight later his steersman came running to my cabin to tell me to be ready at one o'clock in the morning.

The night was a myriad of stars on a vast ebon canopy. One could see only shadows in denser shadows, and the serene sure movements of the men as they lifted the whale-boat from Bauda's shed and carried it lightly to the water were mysterious to me. Their eyes saw where mine were blind. Pere Victorien and I were seated in the boat, and they shoved off, breast-deep in the turmoil of the breakers, running alongside the bobbing craft until it was in the welter of foam and, then with a chorus, in unison, lifting themselves over the sides and seizing the oars before the boat could turn broadside to the shore.

"He-ee Nuka-hiva!" they sang in a soft monotone, while they pulled hard for the mouth of the bay. The priest and I were fairly comfortable in the stern, the steersman perched behind us on the very edge of the combing, balancing himself to the rise and fall of the boat as an acrobat on a rope. I laid my head on my bag and fell asleep before the sea had been reached. The last sound in my ears was the voice of Pere Victorien reciting his rosary.

I awoke to find a breeze careening our sail and the Jeanne d'Arc rushing through a pale blue world—pale blue water, pale blue sky, and, it seemed, pale blue air. No single solid thing but the boat was to be seen in the indefinite immensity. Sprawling on its bottom in every attitude of limp relaxation, the oarsmen lay asleep; only Pere Victorien was awake, his hands on the tiller and his eyes gazing toward the east.

"Bonjour!" said he. "You have slept well. Your angel guardian thinks well of you. The dawn comes."

I asked him if I might relieve him of tiller and sheet, and he, with an injunction to keep the sail full and far, unpocketed his breviary, and was instantly absorbed in its contents.

Our tack was toward the eastern distance, and no glimpse of land or cloud made us aught but solitary travelers in illimitable space. The sun was beneath the deep, but in the hush of the pale light one felt the awe of its coming. Slowly a faint glow began to gild a line that circled the farthest east. Gold it was at first, like a segment of a marriage ring, then a bolt of copper shot from the level waters to the zenith and a thousand vivid colors were emptied upon the sky and the sea. Roses were strewn on the glowing waste, rose and gold and purple curtained the horizon, and suddenly, without warning, abrupt as lightning, the sun beamed hot above the edge of the world.

The Marquesans stirred, their bodies stretched and their lungs expanded in the throes of returning consciousness. Then one sat up and called loudly, "A titahi a atu! Another day!" The others rose, and immediately began to uncover the popoi bowl. They had canned fish and bread, too, and ate steadily, without a word, for ten minutes. The steersman, who had joined them, returned to the helm, and the priest and I enjoyed the bananas and canned beef with water from the jug, and cigarettes.

All day the Jeanne d'Arc held steadily on the several tacks we steered, and all day no living thing but bird or fish disturbed the loneliness of the great empty sea. Pere Victorien read his breviary or told his beads in abstracted contemplation, and I, lying on the bottom of the boat with my hat shielding my eyes from the beating rays of the sun, pondered on what I knew of Tai-o-hae, the port on the island of Nuka-hiva, to which we were bound.

For two hundred years after the discovery of the southern group—the islands we had left behind us—the northern group was still unknown to the world. Captain Ingraham, of Boston, found Nuka-hiva in 1791, and called the seven small islets the Washington Islands. Twenty years later, during the war of 1812, Porter refitted his ships there to prey upon the British, and but for the perfidy,—or, from another view, the patriotism,—of an Englishman in his command, Porter might have succeeded in making the Marquesas American possessions.

Tai-o-hae became the seat of power of the whites in the islands; it waxed in importance, saw admirals, governors, and bishops sitting in state on the broad verandas of government buildings, witnessed that new thing, the making of a king and queen, knew the stolid march of convicts, white and brown, images of saints carried in processions, and schools opened to regenerate the race of idol-worshippers.

Tai-o-hae saw all the plans of grandeur wane, saw saloons and opium, vice and disease, fastened upon the natives, and saw the converted, the old gods overthrown, the new God reigning, cut down like trees when the fire runs wild in the forest.

The dream of minting the strength and happiness of the giant men of the islands into gold for the white labor-kings dissolved into a nightmare as the giants perished. It was hard to make the free peoples toil as slaves for foreign masters, so the foreign masters brought opium. To get this "Cause of Wonder Sleep," of more delight than kava, the Marquesan was taught to hoe and garner cotton, to gather copra and even to become the servant of the white man. The hopes of the invaders were rosy. They faded quickly. The Marquesans faded faster. The saloons of Tai-o-hae were gutters of drunkenness. The paepaes were wailing-places for the dead. No government arrested vice or stopped the traffic in death-dealing drugs until too late. Then, with no people left to exploit, the colonial ministers in Paris forgot the Marquesas.

In the lifetime of a man, Tai-o-hae swelled from a simple native village with thousands of healthy, happy people, to the capital of an archipelago, with warships, troops, prisons, churches, schools, and plantations, and reverted to a deserted, melancholy beach, with decaying, uninhabited buildings testifying to catastrophe. Since Kahuiti, my man-eating friend of Taaoa, was born, the cycle had been completed.

I was on my way now to see, in Tai-o-hae, a man who was giving his life to bring the white man's religion to the few dying natives who remained.

At dusk the wind died, and we put out the oars. Hour after hour the rowers pulled, chanting at times ancient lays of the war-canoes, of the fierce fights of their fathers when hundreds fed the sharks after the destruction of their vessels by the conquerors, and of the old gods who had reigned before the white men came. Pere Victorien listened musingly.

"They should be singing of the Blessed Mother or of Joan," he said with sorrow. "But when they pull so well I cannot deny them a thread of that old pagan warp. Those devils whom they once worshipped wait about incessantly for a word of praise. They hate the idea that we are hurrying to the mission, and they would like well to delay us."

Whatever the desires of those devils, they were balked, for the wind came fair during the second night, and when the second dawning came we were in the bay of Tai-o-hae.

It was a basin of motionless green water, held in the curve of a shore shaped like a horseshoe, with two huge headlands of rock for the calks. The beach was a rim of white between the azure of the water and the dark green of the hills that rose steeply from it. Above them the clouds hung in varying shapes, here lit by the sun to snowy fleece, there black and lowering. On the lower slopes a few houses peeped from the embowering parau trees, and on a small hill, near the dismantled fort, the flag of France drooped above the gendarme's cabin.

By eight o'clock in the morning, when we reached the shore, the beach was shimmering in the sunlight, the sand gleaming under the intense rays as if reflecting the beams of gigantic mirrors. Heat-waves quivered in the moist air.

This was the beach that had witnessed the strange career of John Howard, a Yankee sailor who had fled a Yankee ship fifty years before and made his bed for good and all in the Marquesas. Lying Bill Pincher had told me the story. Howard, known to the natives as T'yonny, had been welcomed by them in their generous way, and the tahuna had decorated him from head to foot in the very highest style of the period. In a few years, what with this tattooing and with sunburn, one would have sworn him to be a Polynesian. He was ambitious, and by alliances acquired an entire valley, which he left to his son, T'yonny Junior. Mr. Howard, senior, garbed himself like the natives and was like them in many ways, but he retained a deep love for his country and its flag, and when he saw an American man-of-war entering the harbor, he went aboard with his many tawny relatives-in-law.

The captain was amazed to hear him talking with the sailors.

"'E was blooming well knocked off 'is pins," said Lying Bill. "'Blow me!' 'e sez, 'if that blooming cannibal don't talk the King's English as if 'e was born in New York!' 'E 'ad 'im down in the cabin to 'ave a drink, thinking 'e was a big chief. 'Oward took a cigar and smoked it and drank 'is whiskey with a gulp and a wry face like all Americans.

"'I must say,' sez the captain, 'you're the most intelligent 'eathen I've seen in the 'ole blooming run.'

"'Eathen?' sez 'Oward. 'Me a 'eathen! I was born in Iowa, and I'm a blooming good American.'"

"'What, you an American citizen?' sez the captain. 'Born in my own state, and painted up like Sitting Bull on the warpath? Get off this ship,' sez 'e, wild, 'get off this ship, or I'll put you in irons and take you back to the blooming jail you escaped from!'

"'Oward leaped over the side and swum ashore."

An avenue ran the length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. Man had almost ceased to be a figure in the scene he had dominated for untold centuries.

Crossing the stepping-stones of the brook we met a darkish, stout man in overalls.

"Good morn'," he said pleasantly. I looked at him and guessed his name at once.

"Good-morning," I answered. "You are the son of T'yonny."

"My father, Mist' Howard, dead," he said. "You Menike like him?"

Before I could answer something entered my ear and something my nose. These somethings buzzed and bit fearsomely. I coughed and sputtered. An old woman on the bank was sitting in the smudge of a fire of cocoanut husks. She was scratching her arms and legs, covered with angry red blotches.

"The nonos never stop biting," she said in French. These nonos are the dread sand-flies that Pere Victorien had run from to get some sleep in Atuona. They are a kind of gadfly, red-hot needles on wings.

We sauntered along the road, tormented by the buzzing pests at which we constantly slapped and, crossing a tiny bridge over the brook, approached the Mission of Tai-o-hae, that once pompous and powerful center of the diffusion of the faith throughout the Marquesas. The road was lined with guavas, mangos, cocoanuts, and tamarinds, all planted with precision and care. The ambitious fathers who had begun these plantings scores of years before had provided the choicest fruits for their table. All over the world the members of the great religious orders of Europe have carried the seeds of the best varieties of fruits and flowers, of trees and shrubs and vegetables; more than organized science they deserve the credit for introducing non-native species into all climes.

About the mission grounds was a stone wall, stout and fairly high, which had assured protection when orgies of indulgence in rum had made the natives brutal. The clergy must survive if souls are to be saved. Within the wall stood the church, the school, and a rambling rectory, all made beautiful by age and the artistry of tropical nature. Mosses and lichens, mosaics of many shades of green, faint touches of red and yellow mould, covered the old walls which were fast decaying and falling to pieces.

By the half-unhinged door stood an old man of venerable figure, his long beard still dark, though his hair was quite white. He wore a soiled soutane down to the ankles of his rusty shoes, a sweaty, stained, smothering gown of black broadcloth, which rose and fell with his hurried respiration. His eyes of deepest brown, large and lustrous, were the eyes of an old child, shining with simple enthusiasms and lit with a hundred memories of worthy accomplishments or efforts.



Pere Victorien presented me, saying that I was a lover of the Marquesas, and specially interested in Joan of Arc. Pere Simeon seized me by the hand and, drawing me toward him, gave me the accolade as if I were a reunited brother. Then he presented me to a Marquesan man at his side, "Le chef de l'isle de Huapu," who was waiting to escort him to that island that he might say mass and hear confession. The chief was for leaving at once, and Pere Simeon lamented that he had no time in which to talk to me.

I said I had heard it bruited in my island of Hiva-oa that the celebration of the fete of Joan of Arc had been marked by extraordinary events indicating a special appreciation by the heavenly hosts.

Tears came into the eyes of the old priest. He dismissed the chief at once, and after saying farewell to Pere Victorien, who was embarking immediately for his own island of Haitheu, Pere Simeon and I entered his study, a pitifully shabby room where rickety furniture, quaking floor, tattered wall-coverings, and cracked plates and goblets spelled the story of the passing of an institution once possessing grandeur and force. Seated in the only two sound chairs, with wine and cigarettes before us, we took up the subject so dear to Pere Simeon's heart.

"I am glad if you cannot be a Frenchman that at least you are not an Englishman," he said fervently. "God has punished England for the murder of Jeanne d'Arc. That day at Rouen when they burned my beloved patroness ended England. Now the English are but merchants, and they have a heretical church.

"You should have seen the honors we paid the Maid here. Mais, Monsieur, she has done much for these islands. The natives love her. She is a saint. She should be canonized. But the opposition will not down. There is reason to believe that the devil, Satan himself, or at least important aides of his, are laboring against the doing of justice to the Maid. She is powerful now, and doubtless has great influence with the Holy Virgin in Heaven, but as a true saint she would be invincible." The old priest's eyes shone with his faith.

"You do not doubt her miraculous intercession?" I asked.

Pere Simeon lit another cigarette, watered his wine, and lifted from a shelf a sheaf of pamphlets. They were hectographed, not printed from type, for he is the human printing-press of all this region, and all were in his clear and exquisite writing. He held them and referred to them as he went on.

"She was born five hundred years ago on the day of the procession in Tai-o-hae. That itself is a marvel. Such an anniversary occurs but twice in a millennium. After all my humble services in these islands that I should be permitted to be here on such a wonderful day proves to me the everlasting mercy of God. Here is the account I have written in Marquesan of her life, and here the record of the fete upon the anniversary."

As he showed me the brochures written beautifully in purple and red inks, recording the history of the Maid of Orleans, with many canticles in her praise, learned dissertations upon her career and holiness, maps showing her march and starred at Oleane, Kopiegne, and Rua to indicate that great things had occurred at Orleans, Compiegne, and Rouen, Pere Simeon pointed out to me that it was of supreme importance that the Marquesan people should be given a proper understanding of the historical and geographical conditions of England and France in Joan's time.

He had spent months, even years, in preparing for the celebration of her fete-day.

"And Monsieur, by the blessed grace of Joan, only the whites got drunk. Not a Marquesan was far gone in liquor throughout the three days of the feast. There was temptation in plenty, for though I gave only the chiefs and a few intimates any wine, several of the Europeans in their enthusiasm for our dear patroness distributed absinthe and rum to those who had the price. There was a moment when it seemed touch and go between the devil and Joan. But, oh, how she came to our rescue! I reproached the whites, locked up the rum, and Joan did the rest. It was a three-days' feast of innocence."

"But there are not many whites here?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "There are one hundred and twenty people in Tai-o-hae now, and but a few are whites. Alas, mon ami, they do not set a good example. They mean well; they are brave men, but they do not keep the commandments. Here is a chart I drew showing the rise of the church since Peter. It is divided into twenty periods, and I have allotted the fifteenth to Joan. She well merits a period."

My mind continually harked back to the prompting of Pere Victorien concerning the horse and the girl of the jubilee.

"There were signs at the commemoration?" I interposed.

Pere Simeon glanced at me eagerly. His naivete was not of ignorance of men and their motives. He had confessed royalty, cannibals, pirates, and nuns. The souls of men were naked under his scrutiny. But his faith burned like a lambent flame, and to win to the standard of the Maid of Orleans one who would listen was a duty owed her, and a rare chance to aid a fellow mortal.

He rose and brushed the cigarette ashes down the front of his frayed cassock as an old native woman responded to his call and brought another bottle of Bordeaux. The nonos were incessantly active. I slapped at them constantly and sucked at the wounds they made. But he paid no attention to them at all except when they attacked him under his soutane; then he struck convulsively at the spot.

"God sends us such trials to brighten our crown," he said comfortingly. "I have seen white men dead from the nonos. They were not here in the old days, but since the jungle has overrun us because of depopulation, they are frightful. During the mass, when the priest cannot defend himself, they are worst, as if sent by the devil who hates the holy sacrifice. But, mon vieux, you were asking about those signs. Alors, I will give the facts to you, and you can judge."

He poured me a goblet of the wine; I removed my cotton coat, covered my hands with it, against the gadflies, and prepared to listen.

"Seven years before the great anniversary," said Pere Simeon, sipping his wine, "I thought out my plan. There would be masses, vespers, benedictions, litanies, and choirs. But my mind was set upon a representation of the Maid as she rode into Rheims to crown the king after her victories. She was, you will remember, clothed all in white armor and rode a white horse, both the emblems of purity. That was the note I would sound, for I believe too much had been made of Joan the warrior, Joan the heroine, and not enough of Joan the saint. Oh, Monsieur, there have been evil forces at work there!"

He clasped his thigh with both hands and groaned, and I knew that though a nono had bitten him there, his anguish was more of soul than body. I lighted his cigarette, as he proceeded:

"Two things were needful above all; a handsome white horse and a Marquesan girl of virtue. Three years before the jubilee I was enabled, through a gift inspired by Joan, to buy a horse of that kind in Hiva-oa. I had this mare pastured on that island until the time came for bringing her here.

"Now as to the girl, I found in the nun's school a child who was beautiful, strong, and good. Her father was the captain of a foreign vessel and had dwelt here for a time; he was of your country. Of the mother I will not speak. The girl was everything to be desired. But this was seven years before the day of the fete. That was a difficulty.

"I stressed to the good sisters the absolute necessity of bringing up the child in the perfect path of sanctity. I had her dedicated to Joan, and special prayers were said by me and by the nuns that the evil one would not trap her into the sins of other Marquesan girls. Also she was observed diligently. For seven years we watched and prayed, and Monsieur, we succeeded. I will not say that it was a miracle, but it was a very striking triumph for Joan.

"That for the human; now for the beast. A month before the fete I commissioned Captain Capriata to bring the mare to Tai-o-hae in his schooner. The animal came safely to the harbor. She was still on deck when a storm arose, and Capriata thought it best for him to lift his anchor and go to the open sea. The wind was driving hard toward the shore, and there was danger of shipwreck."

The old priest stood up and, leading me to a window, pointed to the extreme end of the horseshoe circle of the bay.

"See that point," he said. "Right there, just as Capriata swung his vessel to head for the sea, the mare broke loose from her halter, and in a bound reached the rail of the schooner and leaped into the waves. Capriata could do nothing. The schooner was in peril, and he, with his hand upon the wheel and his men at the sails, could only utter an oath. He confesses he did that, and you will find no man more convinced of the miracle than he."

The aged missionary paused, his eyes glowing. The nonos that settled in a swarm on his swollen, poisoned hands were nothing to him in the rapture of that memory.

"This happened at night. Throughout the darkness the schooner stayed outside the bay, returning only at daylight. Immediately after anchoring, the captain hastened to inform me of the misfortune, and found me saying mass. It was one of the few times he had ever been in the sacred edifice."

Pere Simeon smiled, and held up one finger to emphasize my attention. "As soon as mass was finished, Capriata told me of what had happened, and his certainty that the mare was drowned. I fell on my knees and said a despairing prayer to Joan. That instant we heard a neigh outside, and rushing out of the church, we saw, cropping the grass in the mission enclosure, the white mare that was destined to bear the figure of Joan in the celebration of her fete."