White Shadows in the South Seas Part 14

[Ill.u.s.tration: Isle of Barking Dogs]

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

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

When darkness descends and all is quiet, the robber crab ascends the tree by gripping the bark with his claws. The rays of my electric flash-light have often caught him high over my head against the gray palm. Height does not daunt him. He will go up till he reaches the nuts, if it be a hundred feet. With his powerful nippers he severs the stem, choosing always a nut that is big and ripe. Descending the palm, he tears off the fibrous husk, which, at first thought, it would seem impossible for him to do. He tears it fiber by fiber, and always from that end under which the three eye-holes are situated.

With these exposed, he begins hammering on one of them until he has enlarged the opening so that he can insert one of the sharp points of his claw into it. By turning his claw backward and forward he scoops out the meat and regales himself luxuriously.

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

It is said that if a drop of oil be placed on the long and delicate antennae of these crabs they die almost instantly. We have a somewhat similar rumor with respect to salt and a bird's tail.

Seldom does a robber crab linger to be oiled, and so other means of destroying him, or, at least, of guarding against his depredations, are sought. With the rat, who bites the flower and gnaws the young nuts, this crab is the princ.i.p.al enemy of the planter. The tree owner who can afford it, nails sheets of tin or zinc around the tree a dozen feet from the earth. Neither rat nor crab can pa.s.s this slippery band, which gives no claw-hold. Thousands of trees are thus protected, but usually these are in possession of white men, for tin is costly and the native is poor.

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

CHAPTER XIV

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

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

This was Monsieur Charles le Moine, the painter from Vait-hua, whose studio I had invaded in his absence from that delightful isle. We sat long over breakfast coffee and cigarettes, I, charmed by his conversation, he, eager to hear news of the world he had forsaken.

He had studied in Paris, been governor of the Gambier Islands, and at last had made his final home among the palms and orchids of these forgotten isles. His life had narrowed to his canvases, on which he sought to interpret Marquesan atmosphere and character, its beauty and savage lure.

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

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

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

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

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

Now I learned from the lips of Le Moine that this man had lived and died in my own valley of Atuona, had perhaps sat on this _paepae_ where we were breakfasting. Imagination kindled at the thought.

"I will take you to his house," said Le Moine.

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

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

"This weather is devilish," said Baufre, with a curse. "It is not as it used to be. The world goes to the devil. There were seven hundred people in Atuona when I came here. They are all dead but two hundred, and there is n.o.body to help me in my plantation. If I pay three francs a day, they will not work. If I pay five francs, they will not work. Suppose I give them rum? They will work hard for that, for it means forgetting, but when they drink rum they cannot work at all."

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

"_Mon dieu!_ I am not a philosopher!" retorted Baufre. "Of what good is that? Gauguin was a philosopher, and he is dead and buried on Calvary. You know how he suffered? His feet and legs were very bad.

Every day he had to tie them up. He could not wear shoes, but he painted, and drank absinthe, and injected the morphine into his belly, and painted.

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

_Regardez_, here is where his house stood."

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

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

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

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

"Five hundred francs a month, _mon ami_, whether he painted or not!

But he was a worker. Drunk or sober, he would paint. _Oui_, I have seen him with a bottle of absinthe in him, and still he would paint.

Early in the morning he was at work at his easel in the studio or under the trees, and every day he painted till the light was gone.

His only use for the cart was to carry him and his easel and chair to scenes he would paint. He would shoot that accursed morphine into his belly when the pain was too bad, and he would drink wine and talk and paint.

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

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

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

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

"_Vous savez; mon garcon_, I am not acquainted with pictures, and have never seen any but his, but I felt that they were good. They made one feel the sun. There was in them the soul of these islands.

And you know that Polonaise, with the one eye-gla.s.s, that lives in Papeite, that Krajewsky? _Eh bien!_ he was here to buy these stone images of G.o.ds, and he said that in Paris they were paying tens of thousands of francs for those things of Gauguin's he would have given me for the asking. Ah well! he had the head and he was a philosopher, but he lies up there in Calvary."

"Perhaps," said Le Moine.

"_Mon ami_," said the s.h.a.ggy man, "I go to church, and you and I and Gauguin are the same kind of Catholic. We don't do what we pray for.

That man was smarter than you or me, and the good G.o.d will forgive him whatever he did. He paid everybody, and Cha.s.sognal of Papeite found seven hundred francs in a book where he had carelessly laid it.

If he drank, he shared it, and he paid his women."

"He was an atheist," persisted Le Moine.

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

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

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

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

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

"_I hea?_" said a woman, "_Karavario?_ Where do you go? To Calvary?"