White Shadows in the South Seas Part 28

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 pa.s.sion pa.s.ses, 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 G.o.ds, 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 pa.s.sionate. 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 gla.s.ses 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 Ta.s.set 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 d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.n 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 sh.o.r.e.

"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 att.i.tude 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."