White Shadows in the South Seas Part 45

"I was young and strong, and loved too many women. How could I know the devil behind her eyes when she came wooing me again? I had left her. She was with child, and ugly. I loved beautiful women. But she was beautiful again when the child was dead. I was with another.

What was her name? I have forgotten her name. Is there no more rum?

I remember when I have rum.

"So I went again to Mohuto. The devil from h.e.l.l! There was poison in her embraces. Why does she not die? She knew too much. She was too wise. It was I who died. No, I did not die. I became old before my time, but I am living yet. The Catholic mission gave me this land. I planted bananas. I have never been away. How long ago? _Je ne sais pas._ Twenty years? Forty? I do not see any one. But I know that Mohuto sits on the path below and waits. I will live long yet."

He was like a two-days' old corpse. He rose to his feet, staggered, and lay down on the heap of soggy leaves. The mosquitos circled in swarms above him. They were devouring us, but the hermit they never lighted on. Le Vergose and I fled from the hut and the grove.

"He is an example like those in Balzac or the religious books," said the Breton, crossing himself. "I have been here many years, and never before did I come here, and again. _Jamais de la vie!_ I must begin to go to church again."

We said nothing more as we slid and slipped downward on the wet trail, but when we came again to the straw hut hidden in the trees Mohuto was still on the _paepae_, watching us, and I paused to speak to her.

"You knew Hemeury Francois when he was young?"

She put her hand over her eyes, and spat.

"He was my first lover. I had a child by him. He was handsome once."

Her eyes, full of malevolence, turned to the dark grove. "He dies very slowly."

The memory of her face was with me when at midnight I went alone to my valley. On my pillows I heard again the cracked voice of the hermit, and saw the blue-white skin upon his shaking bones. He could not believe in Po, the Marquesan G.o.d of Darkness, or in the _Veinehae_, the Ghost-Woman who watches the dying; nor did I believe in them or in Satan, but about me in my Golden Bed until midnight was long past the spirits that hate the light moaned and creaked the hut.

CHAPTER x.x.xVIII

Last days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's letter from her son.

Exploding Eggs was building my fire of cocoanut-husks as usual in the morning to cook my coffee and eggs, when a whistle split the sultry air. Far from the bay it came, shrill and demanding; my call to civilization.

Long expected, the first liner was in the Isles of the Cannibals.

France had begun to make good her promise to expand her trade in Oceania, and the isolation of the dying Marquesans and empty valleys was ended. The steams.h.i.+p _Saint Francois_, from Bordeaux by way of Tahiti, had come to visit this group and pick up cargo for Papeite and French ports.

Strange was the sight of her in Taha-Uka Bay where never her like had been, but stranger still, two aboard her, the only two not French, were known to me. Here thousands of miles from where I had seen them, unconnected in any way with each other, were a pair of human beings I had known, one in China, and the other in the United States, both American citizens, and sent by fate to replace me as objects of interest to the natives.

They came up from the beach together, one a small black man, the other tall and golden brown, led by Malicious Gossip to see the American who lived in these far-away islands. The black lingered to talk at a distance, but the golden-brown one advanced.

His figure was the bulky one of the trained athlete, stocky and tremendously powerful, his hide that of an extreme blond burned by months of a tropic sun upon salt water. His hair was an aureole, yellow as a sunflower, a bush of it on a bullet-head. And, incredible almost--as if made of putty by a joker--his nose stuck out like the first joint of a thumb, the oddest nose ever on a man. His little eyes were blue and bright. Barefooted, bare-headed, in the sleeveless s.h.i.+rt and short trousers of a life-guard, with an embroidered V on the front of the upper garment, he was radiantly healthy and happy, a civilized being returned to nature's ways.

Though he did not recognize me, I knew him instantly for a trainer and beach-patrol of Southern California, a diver for planted sh.e.l.ls at Catalina Island, whom I had first seen plunging from the rafters of a swimming-tank, and I remembered that he had flattened his nose by striking the bottom, and that a skilful surgeon had saved him its remnant.

He had with him a bundle in a towel, and setting it down on my _paepae_, introduced himself nonchalantly as Broken Bronck, "Late manager of the stable of native fighters of the Count de M---- of the island of Tahaa, near Tahiti."

"I'm here to stay," he said carelessly. "I have a few francs, and I hear they're pretty hospitable in the Markeesies. I came on the deck of the _Saint Francois_, and I've brung my things ash.o.r.e."

He undid the towel, and there rolled out another bathing-suit and a set of boxing gloves. These were his sole possessions, he said.

"I hear they're nutty on prizefighting like in Tahiti, and I'll teach 'em boxing," he explained.

The Marquesan ladies who speedily a.s.sembled could not take their eyes from him. They asked me a score of questions about him, and were not surprised that I knew him, or even that I called the negro by name when he sauntered up. We must all be from the same valley, or at least from the same island, they thought, for were we not all Americans?

I kept Broken Bronck to luncheon, and gave him what few household furnis.h.i.+ngs I had not promised to Exploding Eggs or to Apporo, who with the promise of the Golden Bed about to be realized--for I announced my going--camped upon it, hardly believing that at last she was to own the coveted marvel. Some keepsakes I gave to Malicious Gossip, Mouth of G.o.d, Many Daughters, Water, t.i.tihuti, and others, and drank a last sh.e.l.l of _namu_ with these friends.

News of my packing reached far and wide. I had not estimated so optimistically the esteem in which they held me, these companions of many months, but they trooped from the farthest hills to say farewell.

Good-byes even to the sons and daughters of cannibals are sorrowful.

I had come to think much of these simple, savage neighbors. Some of them I shall never forget.

Mauitetai, a middle-aged woman with a kindly face, was long on my _paepae_. Her name would be in English My Darling Hope, and it well fitted her mood, for she was all aglow with wonder and joy at receiving a letter from her son, who three years before had gone upon a s.h.i.+p and disappeared from her ken. The letter had come upon the _Saint Francois_, and it brought My Darling Hope into intimate relations with me, for I uncovered to her that her wandering boy had become a resident of my own country, and revealed some of the mysteries of our polity.

The letter was in Marquesan, which I translate into English, seeking to keep the flavor of the original, though poorly succeeding:

"I write to you, me, Pahorai Calizte, and put on this paper greetings to you, my mother, Mauitetai, who are in Atuona.

"_Kaoha nui tuu kui_, Mauitetai, mother of me. Great love to you.

"I have found in Philadelphia work for me; good work.

"I have found a woman for me. She is Jeanette, an artist, a maker of tattooings on cloth. I am very happy. I have found a house to live in.

I am happy I have this woman. She is rich. I am poor. It is for that I write to you, to make it known to you that she is rich, and I am poor. By this paper you will know that I have pledged my word to this woman. I found her and I won her by my work and by my strength and my endeavor.

"She is _moi kanahau_; as beautiful as the flowers of the _hutu_ in my own beloved valley of Atuona. She is not of America. She is of Chile. She has paid many piasters for the coming here. She has paid forty piasters. She has been at home in Las Palmas, in the islands of small golden birds.

"I will write you more in this paper. I seek your permission to marry Jeanette. She asks it, as I do. Send me your word by the government that carries words on paper.

"It is three years since I have known of you. That is long.

"Give me that word I ask for this woman. I cannot go to marry in Atuona. That is what my heart wants, but it is far and the money is great. The woman would pay and would come with me. I say no. I am proud. I have shame. I am a Marquesan.

"I live with that woman now. I am not married. It is forbidden. The American _mutoi_ (policeman) may take hold of me. Five months I am with this woman of mine. The _mutoi_ has a war-club that is hard as stone.

"Give me quickly the paper to marry her. I await your word.

"My word is done. I am at Philadelphia, New York Hotel. A.P.A. Dieu.

Coot pae, mama."

Mauitetai had read the letter many times. It was wonderful to hear from her son after three years and pleasant to know he had found a woman. She must be a _haoe_, a white woman. Were the women of that island, Chile, white?

I said that they ran the color scale, from blond to brown, from European to Indian, but that this Jeanette who was a tattooer, a maker of pictures on canvas, no doubt an artist of merit, must be pale as a moonbeam. Those red peppers that were hot on the tongue came from Chile, I said, and there were heaps of gold there in the mountains.

My Darling Hope would know what kind of a valley was Philadelphia.

It was the Valley of Brotherly Love. It was a very big valley, with two streams, and a bay. No, it was not near Tahiti. It was a breadfruit season away from Atuona, at the very least.

What could a hotel be? The New York hotel in which her poor son lived?

I did not know that hotel, I told her, but a hotel was a house in which many persons paid to live, and some hotels had more rooms than there were houses in all the Marquesas.

What! In one house, under one roof? By my tribe, it was true.