White Shadows in the South Seas Part 15

There was a sad astonishment in her tone, that we should make the arduous climb to the cemetery where no dead of ours lay interred.

A fairly broad trail wound about the hill, the trail over which the dead and the mourners go, and the way was through a vast cocoanut-orchard, the trees planted with absolute regularity lifting their waving fronds seventy or eighty feet above the earth. There was no underbrush between the tall gray columns of the palms, only a twisted vegetation covered the ground, and the red volcanic soil of the trail, cutting through the green, was like a smear of blood.

The road was long and hot. Halting near the summit, we looked upward, and I was struck with emotion as when in the courtyard I saw the group of the crucifixion. A cross forty feet high, with a Christ nailed upon it, all snow-white, stood up against the deep blue sky.

It was like a note of organ music in the great gray cathedral of the palms.

Another forty minutes climbing brought us to the foot of the white symbol. A half-acre within white-washed palings, like any country graveyard, lay on the summit of the mountain.

To find Gauguin's grave we began at the entrance and searched row by row. The graves were those of natives, mounds marked by small stones along the sides, with crosses of rusted iron filigree showing skulls and other symbols of death, and a name painted in white, mildewing away. Farther on were tombs of stone and cement, primitive and ma.s.sive, defying the elements. Upon one was graven, "_Ci Git Daniel Vaimai, Kata-Kita_, 1867-1907. R.I.P." The grave of a catechist, a native a.s.sistant to the priests. Beneath another lay "August Jorss,"

he who had ordered the Golden Bed in which I slept. Most conspicuous of all was a mausoleum surrounded by a high, black, iron railing brought from France. On this I climbed to read while perched on the points:

"_Ici repose Mg. Ill.u.s.trissime et Reverendissime_ Rog. Jh. Martin,"

and much more in Latin and French. It was the imposing grave of the Bishop of Uranopolis, vicar-apostolic to the Marquesas, predecessor to Bishop le Cadre, who had no pride and whom all called plain Father David.

Suddenly rain poured down upon us, and looking about to find a shelter we saw a straw penthouse over a new and empty grave lined with stones. We huddled beneath it, our faces toward the sea, and while the heavy rain splashed above our heads and water rushed down the slope, we gazed in silence at the magnificent panorama below.

We were directly above the Bay of Traitors, that arm of the sea which curved into the little bays of Taka-Uka and Atuona. At one side, a mere pinnacle through the vapor about his throat, rose the rugged head of Temetiu, and ranged below him the black fastnesses of the valleys he commands. In the foreground the cocoas, from the rocky headlands to the gate of Calvary, stood like an army bearing palms of victory. In rows and circles, plats and ma.s.ses, the gray trunks followed one another from sea to mountain, yielding themselves to the storm, swaying gently, and by some trick of wind and rain seeming to march toward the cross-crowned summit.

The flimsy thatch under which we crouched, put up only to keep the sun from the grave-digger, bent to north and south, and threatened to wing away. But suddenly the shower ran away in a minute, as if it had an engagement elsewhere, and the sun shone more brightly in the rain-washed air.

We continued our search, but uselessly. Hohine and Mupui had advertis.e.m.e.nt of their last mortal residence, but not Gauguin. We found an earring on one little tomb where a mother had laid her child, and on several those _couronnes des perles_, stiff, ugly wreaths brought from France, with "Sincere Regrets" in raised beads, speaking pityfully of the longing of the simple islanders to do honor to the memory of their loved ones. But the grave of Gauguin, the great painter, was unmarked. If a board had been placed at its head when he was buried, it had rotted away, and nothing was left to indicate where he was lying.

The hibiscus was blood-red on the sunken graves, and cocoanuts sprouted in the tangled gra.s.s. Palms shut out from the half-acre had dropped their nuts within it, and the soil, rich in the ashes of man, was endeavoring to bring forth fairer fruit than headstones and iron crosses. The _pahue_, a lovely, long, creeping vine that wanders on the beaches to the edge of the tides, had crawled over many graves, and its flowers, like morning-glories, hung their purple bells on the humbler spots that no hand sought to clear.

Perhaps under these is the dust of the painter who, more than any other man, made the Marquesas known to the world of Europe.

CHAPTER XV

Death of Aumia; funeral chant and burial customs; causes for the death of a race.

On the _paepae_ of a poor cabin near my own lived two women, Aumia and Taipi, in the last stages of consumption. Aumia had been, only a few months earlier, the beauty of the island.

"She was one of the gayest," said Haabunai, "but the _pokoko_ has taken her."

She was pitifully thin when I first saw her, lying all day on a heap of mats, with Taipi beside her, both coughing, coughing. An epidemic of colds had seized Atuona, brought, most probably, by the schooner _Papeite_, for no other had arrived since the _Morning Star_.

Aumia coughed at night, her neighbor took it up, and then, like laughter in a school, it became impossible to resist, and down to the beach and up to the heights the valley echoed with the distressing sounds. So, a breadfruit season ago, had Aumia coughed for the first time, and the way she was going would be followed by many of my neighbors.

I stopped every day to chat a moment with Aumia, and to bring her the jam or marmalade she liked, and was too poor to buy from the trader's store. She asked me this day if I had seen her grave. She had heard I had visited the cemetery, and I must describe it to her.

It was the grave over which Le Moine and I had crouched from the storm.

Aumia's husband and Haabunai, with Great Fern, had dug it and paved it a couple of days ago, and her husband had given the others a pig for their work, slaughtering it on the tomb of the Bishop of Uranopolis. No thought of profanation had entered their minds; it was convenient to lay the pig over the imposing monument, with a man on either side holding the beast and the butcher free-handed. The carca.s.s had been denuded of hair in a pail of hot water and buried underground with fire below and above him. When the meat was well done, I had a portion of it, and Sister Serapoline, who had come in her black nun's habit to console Aumia with the promises of the church, ate with us, and accepted a haunch for the nun's house.

"Aumia is able to eat pig, and yet they have made her grave," I said.

"Oh, _c'est ca!_" replied the nun, holding the haunch carefully.

"That is the custom. Always they used to dig them near the house, so that the sick person might see the grave, and in its digging the sick had much to say, and enjoyed it. Now, _grace a dieu!_ if Catholics, they are buried in consecrated ground where the body may rest serene until the trumpet sounds the final judgment. Death is terrible, but these Marquesans make no more of it than of a journey to another island, and much less than of a voyage to Tahiti. They die as peacefully as a good Catholic who is sure of his crown in Heaven. And as they are children, only children, the wisest or the worst of them, the Good G.o.d will know how to count their sins. It is those who scandalize them who shall pay dear, those wicked whites who have forsaken G.o.d, or who wors.h.i.+p him in false temples."

The coffin of Aumia was then beside the house, turned over so that rain might not make it unpresentable. She had asked for it weeks before. To the Marquesan his coffin is as important as, to us, the house the newly-married pair are to live in. These people know that almost every foot of their land holds the bones or dust of a corpse, and this remnant of a race, overwhelmed by tragedy, can look on death only as a relief from the oppression of alien and unsympathetic white men. They go to the land of the _tupapaus_ as calmly as to sleep.

"I have never seen a Marquesan afraid to die," said Sister Serapoline.

"I have been at the side of many in their last moments. It is a terrible thing to die, but they have no fear at all."

The husband of Aumia, a jolly fellow of thirty, was practising on a drum for the entertainment of his wife. He said that the corpse of his grandfather, a chief, had been oiled and kept about the house until it became mummified. This, he said, had been quite the custom.

The body was washed very thoroughly, and rubbed with cocoanut-oil.

It was laid in the sun, and members of the family appointed to turn it many times a day, so that all parts might be subjected to an even heat. The anointing with oil was repeated several times daily. Weeks or months of this process reduced the corpse to a mummified condition, and if it were the body of a chief it was then put in his canoe and kept for years in a ceremonial way. But no mark was ever placed to show where the dead were buried, and there were no funeral ceremonies.

Better that none knew where the body was laid and that the chosen friends who carried it to the sepulchre forgot the spot.

In the very old days the Marquesans interred the dead secretly in the night at the foot of great trees. Or they carried the bodies to the mountains and in a rocky hole shaded by trees covered them over and made the grave as much as possible like the surrounding soil.

The secret of the burial-place was kept inviolate. Aumia's husband related an instance of a man who in the darkest night climbed a supposedly inaccessible precipice carrying the body of his young wife lashed to his back, to place it carefully on a lofty shelf and descend safely.

These precautions came probably from a fear of profanation of the dead, perhaps of their being eaten by a victorious enemy. To devastate the cemeteries and temples of the foe was an aim of every invading tribe. It was considered that mutilating a corpse injured the soul that had fled from it.

Afraid of no living enemy nor of the sea, meeting the shark in his own element and worsting him, fearlessly enduring the thrust of the fatal spear when an accident of battle left him defenseless, the Marquesan warrior, as much as the youngest child, had an unutterable horror of their own dead and of burial-places, as of the demons who hovered about them.

Christianity has made no change in this, for it, too, is enc.u.mbered with such fears. Who of us but dreads to pa.s.s a graveyard at night, though even to ourselves we deny the fear? Banshees, werwolves and devils, the blessed candles lit to keep away the Evil One, or even to guard against wandering souls on certain feasts of the dead, were all part of my childhood. So to the Marquesan are the goblins that cause him to refuse to go into silent places alone at night, and often make him cower in fear on his own mats, a _pareu_ over his head, in terror of the unknown.

But death when it comes to him now is nothing, or it is a going to sleep at the end of a sad day. Aumia, eating her burial meats and looking with pleasure at her coffin, carefully and beautifully built by her husband's hands, smiled at me as serenely as a child. But the melancholy sound of her coughing followed me up the trail to the House of the Golden Bed.

It was barely daylight next morning when I awoke, a soft, delicious air stirring the breadfruit leaves. I plunged into the river, and returning to my house was about to dress--that is, to put on my _pareu_--when a shriek arose from the forest. It was sudden, sharp, and agonizing.

"_Aumia mate i havaii_" said Exploding Eggs, approaching to build the fire. Literally he said, "Aumia is dead and gone below," for the Marquesans locate the spirit world below the earth's surface, as they do the soul below the belt.

The wailing was accompanied shortly by a sound of hammering on boards.

"The corpse goes into the coffin," said Exploding Eggs. The first nail had been driven but a moment after Aumia's last breath.

All day the neighborhood was melancholy with the cries from the house.

All the lamentations were in a certain tone, as if struck from the same instrument by the hand of sorrow. Each visitor to the house shrieked in the same manner, and all present accompanied her, so that for ten minutes after each new mourner arrived a chorus of loud wails and moans a.s.sailed my ears. I had never known such a heart-rending exhibition of grief.

But the sorrow of these friends of Aumia was not genuine. It could not be; it was too dramatic. When they left the house the mourners laughed and lit cigarettes and pipes. If no new visitor came they fell to chatting and smoking, but the sight of a fresh and unharrowed person started them off again in their mechanical, though nerve-racking, cry.

I had known Aumia well, and at noon, desiring to observe the proprieties, I stepped upon the _paepae_ of her home.

"She loved the _Menike!_" shouted the old women in chorus, and they threw themselves upon me and smelt me and made as if I had been one of the dead's husbands. The followed me up the trail to my cabin and sat on my _paepae_ wailing and shrieking. It was some time before I realized that their poignant sorrow should force consolation from me.

There was not a moan as the rum went round.

I had puzzled at the exact repet.i.tion of their plaint. Harrowing as it was, the sounds were almost like a recitation of the alphabet. A woman who had adopted me as her nephew said they called it the "_Ue haaneinei_" That, literally, is "to make a weeping on the side."

The etiquette of it was intricate and precise. Each vowel was memorized with exactness. It ran, as my adopted aunt repeated it over her sh.e.l.l of consolation, thus:

"Ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke ke!

A a a a a a a a a a a a a a!

E e e e e e e e e e e e e e e!

I i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i!

O o o o o o o o o o o o o o o!

U u u u u u u u u u u u u u u!"