Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 25

M. Lontane took full credit for the discovery of what he termed "A complot that would rival the Dreyfus case."

He struck his chest, and asked me sternly if I knew of M. LeCoq, the great detective, of Emile Gaboriau.

Kelly was arrested in the midst of his dancing soiree at Fa'a. He was put in the calaboose, and when he frankly said that he had come to Tahiti to preach the gospel of I. W. W.-ism and that he believed the fishermen had all the right on their side, he was sentenced as "a foreigner without visible means of support, a vagrant, miscreant, vagabond, and dangerous alien," to a month on the roads, and then to be deported to the United States, whence he had come.

The strike or walk-out was broken. With the cessation of the direction of Kelly and his heartening song, the fishermen gradually went back to their routine, and their women folk to the market. The scales were in operation, but the himene, "Hahrayrooyah! I'm a boom! Hahrayrooyah! Boomagay!" was sung from one end of Tahiti to another, and "Ai dobbebelly dobbebelly" was made at the Cercle Bougainville a pa.s.sword to some very old rum said to have belonged to the bishop who wrote the Tahitian dictionary.

Chapter XV

A drive to Papenoo--The chief of Papenoo--A dinner and poker on the beach--Incidents of the game--Breakfast the next morning--The chief tells his story--The journey back--The leper child and her doll--The Alliance Francaise--Bemis and his daughter--The band concert and the fire--The prize-fight--My bowl of velvet.

We had another picnic; this time at Papenoo. Polonsky owned thirty thousand acres of land in the Great Valley of Papenoo, the largest of all the valleys of Tahiti. He had bought it from the Catholic mission, which, following the monastic orders of the church in other countries for a thousand years, had early adopted a policy of acquiring land. But there were too few laborers in Tahiti now. Christianity had not worked the miracle of preserving them from civilization. The priests were glad to sell their extensive holdings at Papenoo, and the energetic Russo-French count said that he would bring Slav families from Europe to populate and develop it. He would plant the vast acreage in cocoanut-trees, vanilla vines, and sugar-cane, and build up a white community in the South Seas. He had n.o.ble plans for a novel experiment.

We started from the Cercle Bougainville in the afternoon in carriages pulled by California bronchos. The dour Llewellyn, the handsome Landers, the boastful McHenry, Lying Bill, David, the young American vanilla-shipper, Bemis, an American cocoanut-buyer, the half-castes of the orchestra, and servants, filled three roomy carryalls. The ideal mode of travel in Tahiti in the cool of the day would be a donkey, a slow, patient beast, who might himself take an interest in the scenery, or at least the shrubbery. But the white must ever go at top speed, and we dashed through the streets of Papeete, the accordions playing "Revive us again!" the "Himene Tatou Arearea," and other tunes, and we singing, "Hallelujah! I'm a b.u.m!" and "Faararirari ta oe Tamarii Tahiti! La, li!" One never makes merry privately in the South Seas.

Through Papeete we went along the eastern Broom Road, our train attracting much attention. We stopped at the glacerie for ice, and Polonsky insisted that we make a detour to his residence to drink a stirrup-cup of champagne. He donned riding-breeches and took a horse from his well-appointed stable.

Against the road on each side were close hedges of acalypha, or false coffee, called in Tahitian tafeie, a small tree which grows quickly, and the leaves of which are red or bronze or green, handsome and admirably suited for fencing. Through these hedges and the broad entrances I saw the houses and gardens, the residents and family life of the people. Everywhere was a small prosperity, with gladness; pigs and sheep cropping the gra.s.s and herbs, which were a mat of green, rising so fast with the daily showers that only flocks could keep it shorn. On the verandas and on the turf idle men and women were gazing at the sky, talking, humming the newest air, plaiting hats, or napping. No one was reading. There was no book-store in Tahiti. I had not read a line since I came. I had not stepped up to the genial dentist's to see an American journal. After years of the newspaper habit, reading and writing them, it had fallen away in Tahiti as the p.r.i.c.kly heat after a week at sea. Of what interest was it that the divorce record was growing longer in New York, that Hinky d.i.n.k had been reelected in Chicago, and that Los Angeles had doubled in population. A dawn on the beach, a swim in the lagoon, the end of the fish strike, were vastly more entertaining.

We pa.s.sed the gorge of Fautaua, where Fragrance of the Jasmine and I had had a charmed day. The pinnacles of the Diadem were black against the eastern sky. Aorai, the tallest peak in sight, more than a mile high, hid its head in a ma.s.s of snowy clouds.

Not far away was the mausoleum of the last king of the Society Islands, Pomare the Fifth, with whose wide-awake widow, the queen, I had smoked a cigarette a day ago. It was a pyramid of coral, a red funeral-urn on top, and a red P on the facade. Pillars and roof were of the same color, and a chain surrounded it. The tomb was rococo, glaring, typical of the monuments in the South Seas where the aboriginal structures of beauty or interest were destroyed by the missionaries to please their Clapham Seminary G.o.d. Pomare, who had been the victim of French political chicane, enjoyed now but one privilege. If his spirit had senses, it heard the lapping of the waves upon the beach of the lagoon across which his ancestor, the first Pomare, had come from Moorea to be a king.

We left the Broom Road for Point Venus to see the monument to Captain James Cook, the great mariner of these seas. The only lighthouse on Tahiti is there. On that spot Cook and his astronomers had observed the transit of Venus in 1769, and it was there the first English missionaries landed from the ship Duff to convert the pagan Tahitians. Cook has a pillar, with a plate of commemoration, in a grove of purau-trees, cocoanuts, panda.n.u.s, and the red oleander; Cook who is an immortal, and was loved by a queen here.

We left behind Paintua, Taunoa, Arahim, Arue and Haapape, and came to a sh.o.r.e where no reef checked the waves in a yeasty line a mile or less from the beach. The breakers roared and beat upon a black sh.o.r.e, strangely different from the Tahitian strand that I had seen. For miles a hundred feet of sable rocks, pebbles, some small and others as big as a man's hand, lay between the receded tide and the road, and all along huge islets of somber stone defended themselves as best they could against the attack of the surf. Signs of surrender showed in some, caverns and arches cut by the constant hammer of swell and billow.

Sugar-cane, vanilla, pineapples, coffee, bananas, plantation after plantation, with the country houses of Papeete's merchants, officials, lawyers, and doctors, moved past our vehicle, and, as we increased the distance from the capital, the beautiful native homes appeared.

Simple they were, with no windows or doors, mere shelters, but cool and cheap, with no division of rooms, and no furniture but the sleeping mats and a utensil or two. Natives were seen cooking their simple meal of fish and breadfruit, or only the latter. The fire was in the ground or under a grill of iron on stones. They would not go hungry, for mango-trees lined the road, and bananas, feis, and pineapples were to be had for the taking.

We drove through Aapahi and Faaripoo and saw a funeral. In the grounds of the dead man sat two large groups of people, the men and the women separate. They talked of his dying and his property, and his children, while those who liked to do so made him ready for the grave. A hundred yards away, in a school-yard, twoscore men, women, boys, and girls played football. The males were in pareus, naked except about the waist, and they kicked the heavy leather sphere with their bare feet.

Pare, Arue, and Mahina districts behind us, we were in Papenoo, a straggling village of a few hundred people along the road, the houses, all but the half-dozen stores of the Chinese, set back a hundred yards, and the domestic animals and carts in the front.

With a flourish we drove into the inclosure of the largest, newest, and most pretentious house, and were greeted by Teriieroo, the Tahitian chief, all native, but speaking French easily and musically. Count Polonsky shook hands with him, as did we all, but when a daughter appeared, neither Polonsky nor we paid her any attention. Yet she was Polonsky's "girl," as they say here, and he kept her in good style in a house near her father's, sending his yellow automobile for her when he wanted her at his villa near Papeete.

The chief's house had four bedrooms, each with an European bed, three-quarter size, and with a mattress two feet high, stuffed with kapok, the silky cotton which grows on trees all over Tahiti, These mattresses were beveled, and one must lie in their middle not to slip off. The coverlets were red and blue in stamped patterns.

It was dark when we touched the earth after two hours' driving, and leaving the coachman to care for the horses, we went with the chief, each of us carrying a siphon of seltzer or a bottle of champagne or claret. Our way was through an old and dark cocoanut grove, a bare trail, winding among the trees, and ending at the beach.

Polonsky had had built a pavilion for the revel. Fifty feet away was a kitchen in which the dinner was cooking, its odors adding appet.i.te to that whetted by the several c.o.c.ktails which Polonsky had mixed when the ice was brought in a wheelbarrow from the wagon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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