White Shadows in the South Seas Part 17

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

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

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

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

Soon the demijohn of rum had been emptied into the gla.s.ses pa.s.sing from hand to hand in the garden; Haabunai and Song of the Nightingale again evoked the thrumming beat of the great drums, and the dance began. This was a tragedy of the sea, a pantomine of danger and conflict and celebration. For centuries past the ancestors of these dancers had played it on the Forbidden Height.

Even the language in which they chanted was archaic to this generation, its words and their meanings forgotten.

The women sat upon the gra.s.s in a row, and first, in dumb show, they lifted and carried from its house to the beach a long canoe. The straining muscles of their arms, the sway of their bodies, imitated the raising of the great boat, and the walking with its weight, the launching, the waiting for the breakers and the undertow that would enable them to pa.s.s the surf line, and then the paddling in rough water.

Meantime at a distance the men chanted in chorus, giving rhythmic time to the motions of the dancers and telling in the long-disused words the story of the drama. And the drums beat till their rolling thunder resounded far up the valley.

After the canoe was moving swiftly through the water the women rested.

It seemed to me that the low continued chant of the men expressed a longing for freedom, for a return to nature, and a melancholy comment on the days of power and liberty gone forever. Though no person present understood the ancient language of the song, there was no need of words to interpret the exact meaning of the dance. Though no word had been uttered, the motions of the women would have clearly told the tale.

When they began again, the sea grew more agitated. Now the wail of the men reproduced the sound of waves beating on the canoe, and the whistling of the wind. The canoe was tossed high by the pounding sea; it slid dizzily down into the troughs of waves and rocked as the oarsmen fought to hold it steady. The squall had grown into a gale, roaring upon them while they tried to hold it steady. The canoe began to fill with water, it sank deeper and deeper, and in another moment the boatsmen were flung into the ocean. There they struggled with the great seas; they swam; they regained the canoe; they righted it, climbed into it. The storm subsided, the seas went down.

Again the women rested, their arms and bodies shining with perspiration. All this time they had remained immobile from the waist downward; their naked legs folded under them like those of statues. The chant of the men was quieter now, expressing a memory of the old gaiety now crushed by the inhibitions of the whites, by ridicule of island legends, and by the stern denunciations of priests and preachers. Yet it was full of suggestion of days gone by and the people who had once sailed the seas among these islands.

Again the dancers raised their arms, and the canoe sailed over sunny waters. At length it touched at an isle, it was carried through the breakers to a resting place on the sand. Its oarsmen rejoiced, they danced a dance of thanksgiving to their G.o.ds, and wreathed the _ti_ leaves in their hair.

At this moment Haabunai, master of ceremonies, gave a cry of dismay and ceased to beat his drum. With an anguished glance at the a.s.sembled spectators, he dashed around the corner of the house, to reappear in an instant with his hands full of green leaves.

"_Mon dieu!_" cried the governor. "_Mon salade! Mon salade!_"

Haabunai, busied with his duties, had forgotten to provide the real and sacred _ti_. In despair at the last moment he had raided and utterly destroyed the governor's prized lettuce bed, the sole provision for salad-making in Atuona. He hastily divided the precious leaves among the dancers, and with wilting lettuce enwreathed in their tresses the oarsmen launched the canoe once more in the waves and returned to their own isle, praising the G.o.ds.

All relaxed now, to receive the praises of the governor and the br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.ses once more offered by the diligent Haabunai and Song, aided by the gendarme.

A gruesome cannibal chant followed, accompanied by the booming of the drums, and then, warmed by the liquor that fired their brains, the dancers began the _haka_, the s.e.xual dance. Inflamed by the rum, they flung themselves into it with such abandon as I have never seen, and I saw a _kamaaina_ in Hawaii and have seen Caroline, Miri, and Mamoe, most skilled dancers of the Hawaiian Islands. With the continued pa.s.sing of the cup, the _hurahura_ soon became general. The men and women who had begun dancing in rows, in an organized way, now broke ranks and danced freely all over the lawn. Men sought out the women they liked, and women the men, challenging each other in frenzied and startling exposition of the ancient ways.

The ceaseless booming of the drums added incitement to the frenzy; the grounds of the governor's palace were a chaos of twisting brown bodies and agitated _pareus_, while from all sides rose cries, shouts, hysterical laughter, and the sound of clapping hands and thumping feet. Here and there dancers fell exhausted, until by elimination the dance resolved itself into a duet, all yielding the turf to Many Daughters, the little, lovely leper, and Kekela Avaua, chief of Paumau. These left the lawn and advanced to the veranda, where so contagious had become the enthusiasm that the governor was doing the _hurahura_ opposite Bauda, and Ah Yu danced with Apporo, while Song, the prisoner, and Flag, the gendarme, madly emulated the star performers.

Kekela, who led the rout, was a figure at which to marvel. A very big man, perhaps six feet four inches in height, and all muscle, his contortions and the frenzied movements of his muscles exceeded all anatomical laws. Many Daughters, her big eyes shining, her red lips parted, followed and matched his every motion. Her entire trunk seemed to revolve on the pivot of her waist, her hips twisting in almost a spiral, and her arms akimbo accentuating and balancing her lascivious mobility.

The governor and the commissionaire, Ah Yu and Apporo, Monsieur Bapp with Song of the Nightingale and Flag, made the palace tremble while the _thrum_ of the great drums maddened their blood.

Exhausted at last, they lay panting on the boards. Song was telling me that the liquor of the governor's giving surpa.s.sed all his illicit make, and that when his sentence expired he would remain at the palace as cook. Ah Yu, in broken English, sang a ditty he had heard forty years earlier in California, "Shoo-fle-fly-doan-bodder-me."

Apporo, overcome by the rum and the dance, was lying among the rose-bushes. Many others were flung on the sward, and more rose again to the dance, singing and shouting and demanding more rum. The girls came forward to be kissed, as was the custom, and Madame Bapp drove them away with sharp words.

Soon the hullabaloo became too great for the dignity of the governor.

He gave orders to clear the grounds, and Bauda issued commands from the veranda while Song and Flag lugged away the drums and drove the excited mob out of the garden and across the bridge. All in all, this Sunday was typical of Atuona under the new regime.

After a quiet bath in the pool below my cabin I got my own dinner, una.s.sisted by Exploding Eggs, and went early to bed to forestall visitors. The crash of a falling cocoanut awakened me at midnight, and I saw on my _paepae_ Apporo, Flower, Water, and Chief Kekela Avaua, asleep. The chief had hung his trousers over the railing, and was in his _pareu_, his pictured legs showing, while the others lay naked on my mats. There was no need to disturb them, for it is the good and honored custom of these hospitable islands to sleep wherever slumber overtakes one.

The night was fine, the stars looked down through the breadfruit-trees, and Temetiu, the giant mountain, was dark and handsome in the blue and gold sky. Two sheep were huddled together by my trail window, the horses were lying down in the brush, and a nightingale lilted a gay love song in the cocoanut-palms above the House of the Golden Bed.

Next morning all Atuona had a tight handkerchief bound over its forehead. I met twenty men and women with this sign of repentance upon their brows. Watercress, the chief of Atuona, who guards the governor's house, was by the roadside.

"You have drunk too much," I remarked, as I spied the rag about his head.

"Not too much, but a great deal," he rejoined.

"_Faufau_," I said further, which means that it is a bad thing.

"_Hana paopao_" he said sadly. "It is disagreeable to work. One likes to forget many things."

There was bitterness and sorrow in his tone. His father was a warrior, under the protection of Toatahu, the G.o.d of the chiefs, and led many a victorious foray when Watercress was a child. The son remembers the old days and feels deeply the degradation and ruin brought by the whites upon his people. A distinguished-looking man, dignified and haughty, he was one of half a dozen who were working out taxes by repairing the roads, and he was one of the few who worked steadily, saying little and seldom smiling.

CHAPTER XVII

A walk to the Forbidden Place; Hot Tears, the hunchback; the story of Behold the Servant of the Priest, told by Malicious Gossip in the cave of Enamoa.

It was a drowsy afternoon, and coming up the jungle trail to my cabin I saw Le Brunnec, the trader, accompanied by Mouth of G.o.d and Tahiapii, half-sister to Malicious Gossip.

Le Brunnec, a Breton, intelligent, honest, and light-hearted, owned the store below the governor's palace on the road to Atuona beach.

He lived above it, alone save for a boy who cooked for him, and all the Marquesans were his friends. He had come this afternoon to take me for a walk up Atuona valley, and on the main road below my house Le Moine, Jimmy Kekela, Hot Tears, the hunchback, and Malicious Gossip awaited us.

We waded the river and found a trail that wandered along it crossed it now and then and hung in places on the high banks above it. The trail had been washed by freshets often and was rough and stony, overhung with trees and vines. Along it, a hundred feet or so from the river, were houses spa.r.s.ely scattered in the almost continuous forest of cocoanut and breadfruit. Oranges and bananas, mangoes and limes, surrounded the cabins, most of which were built of rough planks and roofed with iron. Here and there I saw a native house of straw matting thatched with palm leaves, a sign of a poverty that could not reach the hideous, but admired, standard of the whites.

Many people sitting on their _paepaes_ called to us, and one woman pointed to me and said that she wished to take my name and give me her own. This is their custom with one to whom they are attracted, but I affected not to understand. I did not want, so early in my residence in Atuona, to lose a name that had served me well for many years, and besides, if I took another I would have to abide by whatever it might be and be known by it. It would be pleasant to be called "Blue Sky" or "Killer of Sharks," but how about "Drowned in the Sea" or "Noise Inside"?

"Keep your name to yourself, _mon ami_," said Le Moine. "They expect much from you if you give them yours. They will give you heaps of useless presents, but you alone have the right to buy rum."

Following a curve in the stream, we came upon Teata (Miss Theater), the acknowledged beauty of Atuona, waist-deep in a pool, washing her gowns. She was a vision of loveliness, large-eyed, tawny, her hair a dark cascade about her fair face and bare shoulders, the crystal water lapping her slender thighs and curling into ripples about her, the heavy jungle growth on the banks making an emerald background to her beauty.

"They are like the ancient Greeks," said Le Moine, "with the grace of accustomed nudity and the poise of the barefooted. You must not judge them by the present standards of Europe, but by the statues of Greece or Egypt. M'a'mselle Theater there in the brook would have been renowned in the Golden Age of Pericles. I must paint her before she is older. They are good models, for they have no nerves and will sit all day in a pose, though they dislike standing, and must have their pipe or cigarette. You have seen Vanquished Often, in my own valley of Vait-hua, whom I have painted so much. Ah, there is beauty!

One will not find her like in all the world. Paris knows nothing like her."

Teata waved her hand at us from the brook, and flung her heavy hair backward over her shoulder as she went on with her task. Looking back at her before the trail wound again into the forest, I saw that her features in repose were hard and semi-savage, the lines still beautiful, but cast in a severe and forbidding mold.

We climbed steadily, jumping from rock to rock and clinging to the bushes. A mile up the valley we came suddenly upon a plateau, and saw before us the remains of an ancient _Pekia_, or High Place, a grim and grisly monument of the days of evil G.o.ds and man-eating.

This, in the old days, was the _paepae tapu_, or Forbidden Height, the abode of dark and terrible spirits. Upon it once stood the temple and about it in the depths of night were enacted the rites of mystery, when the priests and elders fed on the "long pig that speaks,"

when the drums beat till dawn and wild dances maddened the blood.

When it was built, no man can say. Centuries have looked upon these black stones, grim as the ruins of Karnak, created by a mysterious genius, consecrated to something now gone out of the world forever.

For ages hidden in the gloom of the forest, it was swept and polished by hands long since dust; it was held in reverence and dread.

It was _tapu_, devoted to terrible deities, and none but the priests or the chiefs might approach it except on nights of ghastly feasting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The old cannibal of Taipi Valley]