White Shadows in the South Seas Part 27

"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 Sat.u.r.day 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 ma.s.s. 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 s.h.a.ggy 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 l.u.s.trous black pools of pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sed 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 bra.s.s. 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 ma.s.s, she pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sing, 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 pa.s.sion.

"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."