Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 19

I knew a moment of squeamishness, echo of the immorality of my catechism and my race conventions. I felt almost aghast at finding myself alone with that magnificent creature in such a paradisiacal spot. I wondered what thoughts might come to me. I had danced with her, I had talked with her under the stars, but what might she expect me not to do? And what was an Occidental, a city man, before her? She retired behind a bird's-nest fern, on the long, lanceolate leaves of which were the sh.e.l.ls of the mountain snail. At her feet was the b.a.s.t.a.r.d canna, the pungent root of which makes Chinese curry.

When she emerged, she was an amazing and enchanting personage. She had removed her gown, and wore a pareu of muslin, with huge scarlet leaves upon white. She was tall and voluptuously formed, but she had made the loin-cloth, two yards long and a yard wide, cover her in a manner that was modest, though revealing. It was the art of her ancestors, for this was the shape of their common garment of tapa, a native cloth. With a knot or two she arranged the pareu so that it was like a chemise, coming to a foot above her knees and covering her bosom.

Her black, glossy hair was loose and hung below her waist, and upon it she had placed a wreath she had quickly made of small ferns. That was their general custom, to adorn themselves when happy and at the bath. The eyes of Fragrance of the Jasmine were very large, deep brown, her skin a coppery-cinnamon, with a touch of red in the cheeks, and her nose and mouth were large and well formed. Her teeth were as the meat of the cocoanut, brilliant and strong. Her limbs were rounded, soft, the flesh glowing with health and power. She was of that line of Tahitian women who sent back the first European navigators, the English, to rave about an island of Junos, the French to call Tahiti La Nouvelle Cythere, the new isle of Venus.

I had but to tie up my own pareu of red calico with white leaves in the manner Lovaina had shown me to have an imitation of our usual swimming-trunks.

"Allons!" cried the princess, and running toward the waterfall, she climbed up the cliff to a height of a dozen feet, and threw herself, wreathed as she was, with a loud "Aue!" into the pool.

I followed her, and she dived and swam, brought up bottom, treaded water, and led me in a dozen exercises and tricks of the expert swimmer. The water was very cool, and ten minutes in it, with our sharpening hunger, were enough delight. Fragrance of the Jasmine, as she came dripping from water and lingered a few moments on the brink, was a rapturous object. With unconscious grace she flung back her head many times to shake the moisture from her thick hair, and ran her fingers through it until the strands were fairly separated. The pareu disclosed the rounded contour of her figure as if it were painted upon her. She was one of those ancient Greek statues, those semi-nudes on which the artists painted in vivid tints the blush of youth, the hue of hair, and a shadow of a garment. She entranced me, and I called out to her, "Nehenehe!" "Beautiful!"

She ran to her boudoir behind the bird's-nest fern, and soon returned in her tunic, still barefoot, and with her pareu in her hand for drying on a rock. She brought two wreaths now and put one upon me. We resumed our couches upon the green sward, and the princess laid the basket of fruit between us.

"Maintenant pour le dejeuner!" she said.

We ate the bananas first, and then the pineapple, which we cut with a sliver of basalt,--we were in the stone age, as her tribe was when the whites came,--and last the oranges. She made cups of leaves and filled them with water, and into them we squeezed the limes for a toast.

"Inu i te ota no te!" she said and lifted her cup. "A health to you! He who eats the fei pa.s.ses under a spell; he must return again to the islands. Have you eaten the fei?"

"Not yet, Princess," I replied.

"There they are in abundance on the hillside," she said. "Look! If we had fire, I would roast one for you, but to-morrow will be another day."

The fei, the mountain banana, the staple of the Tahitian, was there aplenty. The plant or stalk was that of the banana, but very dark at the base, and the leaves thicker. The fruit was two or three times as large, and red, and a striking difference was that it was placed on the bunches erect, while bananas hang down from the stem.

I drank to her increasing charm, and I told her how much the beauty and natural grace of the Tahitians appealed to me; how I intended to leave Papeete and go to the end of the island to be among the natives only; that I had remained thus long in the city to learn first the ways of the white in the tropics, and then to gain the contrast by seeking the Tahitian as nearly as possible in his original habitat.

Noanoa Tiare took the orange-peel and rubbed it upon her hair.

"Noanoa!" she said. "Mon ami americain, I will give you a note to Aruoehau a Moeroa, the tava, or chief of Mataiea district, and you can stay with him. You will know him as Tetuanui. He will gladly receive you, and he is wise in our history and our old customs. Do not expect too much! We ate in the old day the simple things at hand, fish and breadfruit, feis and cocoanut milk, mangoes and bananas and oranges. Now we eat the dirty and prepared food of the Tinito, the Chinaman, and we depend on coffee and rum and beer for strength. The thin wheat bread has no nourishment compared with the breadfruit and the fei, the yam and the taro. And clothes! The fools taught us that the pareu, which left the body exposed to the air, clean and refreshed by the sun and the winds, was immodest. We exchanged it for unders.h.i.+rts and trousers and dresses and shoes and stockings and coats, and got disease and death and degeneration.

"You are late, my friend," the princess went on, with a note of pity in her soft voice. "My mother remembered the days Loti depicted in 'Rarahu.' My grandmother knew little Tarahu of Bora-Bora of whom he wrote. Viaud was then a mids.h.i.+pman. We did not call him Loti, but Roti, our coined word for a rose, because he had rosy cheeks. But he could not call himself Roti in his novel, for in French, his language, that meant roasted, and one might think of boeuf a la roti. We have no L in Tahitian. We also called him Mata Reva or the Deep-Eyed One. Tarahu was not born on Bora-Bora, but right here in Mataiea."

She lay at full length, her uptilted face in her hands, and her perfect feet raised now and then in unaware accentuation of her words.

"What Tahitian women there were then! Read the old French writers! None was a pigmy. When they stood under the waterfall the water ran off their skins as off a marble table. Not a drop stayed on. They were as smooth as gla.s.s."

Fragrance of the Jasmine sighed.

"Aue! Helas!"

I had it in my mouth to say that she was as beautiful and as smooth-skinned as any of her forebears. She was as enticing as imaginable, her languorous eyes alight as she spoke, and her bare limbs moving in the vigor of her thoughts. But I could not think of anything in French or English not ba.n.a.l, and my Tahitian was yet too limited to permit me to tutoyer her. She was an islander, but she had seen the Midnight Follies and the Bal Bullier, the carnival in Nice, and once, New Year's Eve in San Francisco. An Italian and a Scandinavian prince had wooed her.

I spoke of Loti again, and of other writers' comments upon the att.i.tude of women in Tahiti toward man.

The princess sat up and adjusted her hei of ferns. She studied a minute, and then she said:

"I have long wanted to talk with an intelligent American on that subject; with some one who knew Europe and his own country and these islands. There is a vast hypocrisy in the writing and the talking about it. Now, Maru (I already had been given my native name), the woman of Tahiti exercises the same s.e.xual freedom as the average white man does in your country and in England or France. She pursues the man she wants, as he does the woman. Your women pursue, too, but they do it by cunning, by little lies, by coquetry, by displaying their persons, by flattery, and by feeding you.

"The Tahitian woman makes the first advances in friends.h.i.+p openly, if she chooses. She arranges time and place for amours as your women do. She does not take from the Tahitian man or from the foreigner his right to choose, but she chooses herself, too. I feel sure that often an American woman would give hours of pain to know well a certain man, but makes no honest effort to draw him toward her. They have told me so!"

I got up, and standing beside her, I quoted:

"s.h.i.+ps that pa.s.s in the night and speak each other in pa.s.sing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pa.s.s and speak one another, Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and silence."

"Mais, c'est vrai!" she said, musingly. "The Tahitian woman will not endure that. She is on a par with the man in seeking. Without fear and without shame, and, attendez, Maru, without any more monogamy than you men. I have told some of those suffrage ladies of London and of Was.h.i.+ngton that we are in advance of their most determined feminism. They will come to it. More women than men in Europe will bring it there."

Her long, black lashes touched her cheeks.

"We are a little sleepy, n'est-ce pas?" she asked. "B'en, we will have a taoto."

She made herself a pillow of leaves with her pareu, and arranging her hair in two braids, she stretched herself out, with her face toward the sky, and a cool banana-leaf laid over it. I copied her action, and lulled by the falling water, the rippling of the pool, and the drowsy rustling of the trees, I fell fast asleep, and dreamed of Eve and the lotus-eaters.

When I awoke, the princess was refres.h.i.+ng her face and hands in the water.

"A hio! Look!" she said eagerly. "O tane and O vahine!"

In the mist above the pool at the foot of the cascade a double rainbow gleamed brilliantly. O tane is the man, which the Tahitians call the real arch, and O vahine, the woman, the reflected bow. They appeared and disappeared with the movement of the tiny, fleecy clouds about the sun. The air, as dewy as early morn in the braes o' Maxwelton, was deliciously cool.

"If you have courage and strength left," the princess said excitedly, "we will go to the fort of Fautaua, and I will show you where the last of my people perished fighting to drive out the French invader, and where the French officials fled with the treasure-box when they feared war with England not very long ago."

She pointed up to the brim of the precipice, where the river launched itself into the air, to drop six hundred feet before it fed the stream below. Sheer and menacing the black walls of the creva.s.se loomed, as if forbidding approach, but through a network of vines and bushes, over a path seldom used, we climbed, and after half a mile more of steeps, reached the fort. Rugged was the way, and we aided each other more than once, but rejoiced at our effort when we surmounted the summit.

The view was indescribably grand. One felt upon the roof of the island, though the farther heights of the valley culminated in a gigantic crag-wall, a saddle only a yard across, and wooded to the apex, and above that even towered Orohena, nearly a mile and a half high, and never reached by man despite many efforts. Tropic birds, the bo's'ns of the sailor, their bodies whitish gray, with their two long tail-feathers, had their haunt there, and piped above the trees. The river was a fierce torrent, and leaped into a water-hewn lava basin, where it swirled and foamed before it rushed, singing, through a stone funnel to the border of the chasm, and sprang with a dull roar into the ether.

There was a chorus of sounds from the cataract, the river, the wind, the trees, and the birds, a mighty music of elements of the earth and of life, rising and falling rhythmically, and inspiring, but nerve-racking. Fragrance of the Jasmine seized my hand and held it.

"Let us go to a more peaceful spot, where I can tell you the story,"

she said in my ear. We pa.s.sed the rough fort, broken-down and mossy, and moving carefully along the trail, clambering over rocks and tearing away twigs and broad leaves, we reached a dismantled and crumbling chalet.

We sat down upon its steps, and I removed my coat and was naked to my pareu in the afternoon zephyr.

"That fort," said the princess, "was built by the French in the forties, when they were stealing my country. From it they could command the gorge of Fautaua and that and other valleys. This place was the last stronghold of the Tahitian warriors before the enemy overcame them, and erected the ramparts and the fort. The last man to die fell by the river basin. The band of heroes would have held out longer, but were betrayed by a Tahitian. He led the French troops by night and by secret paths to a hill overlooking them, so that they were shot down from above. The traitor lived to wear the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor and to spend pleasantly the gold the French Government gave him. C'est la vie."

We cast our eyes over the scene. There was a forest of wild ginger, ferns, and dracasna all about. Thousands of roses perfumed the air, and other flowers and strawberries, and feis, green or ripe-red, wondrous cl.u.s.ters of fruit, awaited man's culling. The stream purled about worn rocks, and we came to two gloomy pools, black from the reflection of their bowls, the water bubbling and surging from springs beneath. It was deliciously cold, and we drank it from leaf cups.

"How about the time the French came here with the treasure?" I inquired. "Have we time for that history?"

"Mais, oui!" said Noanoa Tiare. "That is too good for you not to know. You know that the French are excitable, n'est-ce pas? B'en, a French officer, Major Marchand, put up the tricolor in some place called Fashoda in Africa, and the English objected. There was some parleying between the two nations, and the information arrived in Tahiti that England was going to make war on France. The French papers or the American papers said so, and every one was alarmed.

"'The treacherous Anglais might strike at any moment,' said the French, and they were afraid. Then one night some one rode in from near Point Venus and reported to the Governor that two British frigates had been sighted. Mon dieu! what to do? There was only a French transport at Papeete, worth nothing for defense. They tore the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs from that vessel and prepared to scuttle her. The guns were rushed to Faere Hill for a last, desperate stand against odds. They could die like Frenchmen! All lights were ordered extinguished, and even the beacon of Point Venus was dark. The enlisted natives were sent to watch on every headland, a cabinet meeting was held,--the apothecary, and the governor, and the secretaries, and the doctor,--and it was determined to save the money of the city and the archives of the Government. The valuables and the papers were put in strong boxes and the governor and all of them made a mad race for this fort."

The princess covered her mouth with her hand to still her laughter.

"Was it not funny? They arrived here at daybreak, and buried the boxes. They were still at it when an officer of marines came hurrying to notify them that the frigates were French schooners from the Paumotus. The whole population had hidden itself away in the meantime. Well, they had many jokes about it and many songs, but the governor built this house on the steps of which we sit as a permanent depository for archives in case of war, and here he used to come for picnics until a few years ago. There was a post-office, with a guard of sailors, here. They planted the garden, the flowers, and strawberries that now run wild. You know our chiefs were always being secretly warned that England, which owns most of the islands in these seas, wanted to seize our island."

Over the Diadem the dark shadows were lengthening. The daring pinnacles of Maiauo were thrust up like the mangled fingers of a black hand against the blue sky.