Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 12

The musicians had drunk much wine and rum, and now wanted only beer. That was the order of their carouse. Beer was expensive at two francs a bottle, and so a conscientious native had been delegated to give it out slowly. He had the barrel containing the quartbottles between his legs while he sat at the table, and each was doled out only after earnest supplications and much music.

"Horoa mai te pia!" "More beer!" they implored.

"Himene" said the inexorable master of the brew.

Up came the bra.s.s and the accordion, and forth went the inebriated strains.

Between their draughts of beer--they drank always from the bottles--the Tahitians often recurred to the song of Kelly. Having no g, l, or s among the thirteen letters of their missionary-made alphabet, they p.r.o.nounced the refrain as follows:

Hahrayrooyah! I'm a boom! Hahrayrooyah! Boomagay!

Hahrayrooyah! Hizzandow! To tave ut fruh tin!

Landers being very big physically, they admired him greatly, and his company having been two generations in Tahiti, they knew his history. They now and again called him by his name among Tahitians, "Taporo-Tane," ("The Lime-Man"), and sang:

E aue Tau tiare ate e!

Ua parari te afata e!

I te Pahi no Taporo-Toue e!

Alas! my dear, some one let slip A box of limes on the lime-man's s.h.i.+p, And busted it so the juice did drip.

The song was a quarter of a century old and recorded an accident of loading a schooner. Landers's father's partner was first named Taporo-Tane because he exported limes in large quant.i.ties from Tahiti to New Zealand. The stevedores and roustabouts of the waterfront made ballads of happenings as their forefathers had chants of the fierce adventures of their constant warfare. They were like the negroes, who from their first transplantation from Africa to America had put their plaints and mystification in strange and affecting threnodies and runes.

All through the incessant himenes a crowd of natives kept moving about a hundred feet away, dancing or listening with delight. They would not obtrude on the feast, but must hear the music intimately.

The others of our party, having breakfasted until well after two, sought a house where Llewellyn was known. McHenry and I followed the road which circles the island by the lagoon and sea-beach. In that twelve leagues there are a succession of dales, ravines, falls precipices, and brooks, as picturesque as the landscape of a dream. We walked only as far as Urufara, a mile or two, and stopped there at the camp of a Scotsman who offered accommodation of board and lodging.

His sketchy hotel and outhouses were dilapidated, but they were in the most beautiful surrounding conceivable, a sheltered cove of the lagoon where the swaying palms dipped their boles in the ultramarine, and bulky banana-plants and splendid breadfruit-trees formed a temple of shadow and coolth whence one might look straight up the lowering mountain-side to the ghostly domes, or across the radiant water to the white thread of reef.

We met McTavish, the host of the hotel, an aging planter, who kept his public house as an adjunct of his farm, and more for sociability than gain. He was in a depressed and angry mood, for one of his eyes was closed, and the other battered about the rim and beginning to turn black and blue.

He knew McHenry, for both had been in these seas half their lives.

"In all my sixty years," he said, "I have not been a.s.saulted quite so viciously. I asked him for what he owed me, and the next I knew he was shutting out the light with his fists. I will go to the gendarme for a contravention against that villain. And right now I will fix him in my book."

"Why, who hit you, and what did you do?" asked McHenry.

"That d.a.m.ned Londoner, Hobson," said McTavish. "He was my guest here several years ago, and ate and drank well for a month or two when he hadn't a sou marquis. I needed a little money to-day, and meeting him up the road, I demanded my account. He is thirty years younger than me, and I would have kept my eyes, but he leaped at me like a wild dog, and knocked me down and pounded me in the dirt."

I sympathized with McTavish, though McHenry snickered. The Scot went into an inner room and brought back a dirty book, a tattered register of his guests. He turned a number of pages--there were only a few guests to a twelvemonth--and, finding his a.s.sailant's name, wrote in capital letters against it, "THIEF."

"There," he said with a magnificent gesture. "Let the whole world read and know the truth!"

He set out a bottle of rum and several gla.s.ses, and we toasted him while I looked over the register. Hardly any one had neglected to write beside his name tributes to the charm of the place and the kind heart of McTavish.

Charmian and Jack London's signatures were there, with a hearty word for the host, and "This is the most beautiful spot in the universe,"

for Moorea and Urufara.

There were scores of poems, one in Latin and many in French. Americans seem to have been contented to quote Kipling, the "Lotus Eaters," or Omar, but Englishmen had written their own. English university men are generous poetasters. I have read their verses in inns and outhouses of many countries. Usually they season with a sprig from Horace or Vergil.

"I'm goin' to the west'ard," said McTavish. "There are too many low whites comin' here. When Moorea had only sail from Tahiti, the blackguards did not come, but now the dirty gasolene boat brings them. I must be off to the west'ard, to Aitutaki or Penrhyn."

Poor Mac! he never made his westward until he went west in soldier parlance.

McHenry, on our way back to Faatoai, said:

"McTavish is a b.l.o.o.d.y fool. He gives credit to the bleedin'

beach-combers. If I meet that dirty Hobson, I'll beat him to a pulp."

From under the thatched roof of our bower came the sounds of:

Faararirari to oe Tamarii Tahiti La Li.

The himene was in its hundredth encore. The other barrel of bottled beer had been securely locked against the needs of the morrow, and the bandsmen's inspiration was only claret or sauterne, well watered.

We sat down for dinner. The dejeuner was repeated, and eggs added for variety. We had risen from breakfast four hours before, yet there was no lack of appet.i.te. The drink appeared only to make their gastric juices flow freely. I hid my surfeit. The harmonies had by now drawn the girls and young women from other districts, word having been carried by natives pa.s.sing in carts that a parcel of papaa (non-Tahitians) were faarearea (making merry).

These new-comers had adorned themselves for the taupiti, the public fete, as they considered it, and as they came along the road had plucked ferns and flowers for wreaths. Without such sweet treasures upon them they have no festal spirit. There were a dozen of these Moorea girls and visitors from Tahiti, one or two from the Tiare Hotel, whose homes were perhaps on this island.

The dinner being finished, the bandsmen laid down their instruments and the girls were invited to drink. Tahitian females have no thirst for alcohol. They, as most of their men, prefer fruit juices or cool water except at times of feasting. They had no intoxicants when the whites came, not in all Polynesia. It was the humor of the explorers, the first adventurers, and all succeeding ones, to teach them to like alcohol, and to hold their liquor like Englishmen or Americans. Kings and queens, chiefs and chiefesses, priests and warriors, were sent ash.o.r.e c.r.a.pulous in many a jolly-boat, or paddled their own canoes, after areareas on war-s.h.i.+ps and merchantmen. Some learned to like liquor, and French saloons in Papeete and throughout Tahiti and Moorea encouraged the taste. Profits, as ever under the business rule of the world overweighed morals or health.

These girls in our bower drank sparingly of wine, but needed no artificial spirits to spur their own. Music runs like fire through their veins.

Iromea of the Tiare Hotel--perhaps some of Lovaina's maidens knew our plans and came over on the packet--took the accordion from Kelly. She began to play, and two of the Moorea men joined her, one with a pair of tablespoons and the other with an empty gasolene-can. The holder of the spoons jingled them in perfect harmony with the accordion, and the can-operator tapped and thumped the tin, so that the three made a singular and tingling music. It had a timbre that got under one's skin and pulsated one's nerves, arousing dormant desires. I felt like leaping into the arena and showing them my mettle on alternate feet, but a Moorea beauty antic.i.p.ated me.

She placed herself before the proud Llewellyn, half of her own blood, and began an upaupahura. She postured before him in an att.i.tude of love, and commenced an improvisation in song about him. She praised his descent from his mother, his strength, his capacity for rum, and especially his power over women. He was own brother to the great ones of the Bible, Tolomoni and Nebutodontori, who had a thousand wives. He drew all women to him.

The dance was a gambol of pa.s.sion. It was a free expression of uninhibited s.e.x feeling. The Hawaiian hula, the nautch, and minstrelsy combined. So rapid was the movement, so fast the music, so strenuous the singing, and so actual the vision of the dancer, that she exhausted herself in a few minutes, and another took the turf.

A thousand years the Tahitians had had these upaupahuras. Their national ballads, the achievements of the warrior, the fisherman, the woodsman, the canoe-builder, and the artist, had been orally recorded and impressed in this manner in the conclaves of the Arioi. Dancing is for prose gesture what song is for the instinctive exclamation of feeling, and among primitive peoples they are usually separated; but those cultured Tahitians from time immemorial had these highly developed displays of both methods of manifesting acute sensations. The Kamchadales of the Arctic--curious the similarities of language and custom between these far Northerners and these far Southerners--danced like these Tahitians, so that every muscle quivered at every moment.

The dancing in the bower was at intervals, as the desire moved the performers and bodily force allowed. The himene went on continuously, varying with the inspiration of the dancer or the whim of the accordion-player. They s.n.a.t.c.hed this instrument from one another's hands as the mood struck them, and among the natives, men and women alike had facility in its playing. Pepe of Papara, and Tehau of Papeari, their eyes flas.h.i.+ng, their bosoms rising and falling tumultuously, and their voices and bodies alternating in their expressions of pa.s.sion, were joined by Temanu of Lovaina's, the oblique-eyed girl whom they called a half-Chinese, but whose ancestral tree, she said, showed no celestial branch. Temanu was tall, slender, serpent-like, her body flexuous and undulatory, responding to every quaver of the music. Her uncorseted figure, with only a thin silken gown upon it, wreathed harmoniously in tortile oscillations, her long, black hair flying about her flushed face, and her soul afire with her thoughts and simulations.

Now entered the bower Mamoe of Moorea, a big girl of eighteen. She was of the ancient chiefess type, as large as a man, perfectly modeled, a tawny Juno. Her hair was in two plaits, wound with red peppers, and on her head a crown of tuberoses. She wore a single garment, which outlined her figure, and her feet were bare. She surveyed the company, and her glance fell on Landers.

She began to dance. Her face, distinctly Semitic, as is not seldom the case in Polynesia, was fixed a little sternly at first; but as she continued, it began to glow. She did not sing. Her dance was the upaupa, the national dance of Tahiti, the same movement generally as that of Temanu, but without voice and more skilled. One saw at once that she was the premiere danseuse of this isle, for all took their seats. Her rhythmical swaying and muscular movements were of a perfection unexcelled, and soon infected the bandsmen, now with all discipline unleashed. One sprang from the table and took his position before her. Together they danced, moving in unison, or the man answering the woman's motions when her agitation lulled. The spectators were absorbed in the hula. They clapped hands and played, and when the first man wearied, another took his place.

Mamoe stopped, and drank a goblet of rum. Her eyes wandered toward our end of the table, and she came to us. She put her hand on Landers. The big trader, who was dressed in white linen, accepted the challenge. He pushed back the bench and stood up.

Landers in looks was out of a novel. If Henry Dixey, the handsome actor, whose legs made his fame before he might attest his head's capacity, were expanded to the proportions of Muldoon, the wrestler, he might have been Landers. Apparently about thirtythree, really past forty, he was as big as the young "David" of the Buonarroti, of the most powerful and graceful physique, with curling brown hair, and almost perfect features; a giant of a man, as cool as an igloo, with a melodious Australasian voice pitched low, and a manner with men and women that was irresistible.

He faced Mamoe, and Temanu seized the accordion and broke into a mad upaupa. An arm's-length from Mamoe Landers simulated every pulsation of her quaking body. He was an expert, it was plain, and his handsome face, generally calm and unexpressive, was aglow with excitement. Mamoe recognized her gyratory equal in this giant, and often their bodies met in the ecstasy of their curveting. Landers, towering above her, and bigger in bone and muscle than she in sheer flesh, was like a figure from a Saturnalia. The call of the isles was ringing in his ears, and one had only to glance at him to hear Pan among the reeds, to be back in the glades where fauns and nymphs were at play.

I saw Landers a care-free animal for the moment, rejoicing in his strength and skill, answering the appeal of s.e.x in the dance. When he sat down the animal was still in him, but care again had clouded his brow. I think our early ancestors must have been much like Landers in this dance, strong, and merry for the time, seeking the woman in pleasures, fiery in movement for the nonce, and relapsing into stolidity. I can see why Landers, who takes what he will of womankind in these islands, still dominates in the trading, and bends most people his way. The animal way is the way here. The way of the city, of mere subtlety, of avoidance of issues, of intellectual control, is not the way of Polynesia. Bulk and sinew and no fear of G.o.d or man are the rules of the game south of the line, as "north of 53."