Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 21

"I am going to have the diplomat repair the roads of Tahiti for two months, and then s.h.i.+p him third-cla.s.s to New Zealand, where he has to go to carry out his blasted fate," the consul declared, and ordered all gla.s.ses filled.

We discussed the sudden and abnormal appearance of boot-blacks. One had set up an ornate stand on the rue de Rivoli. He was an American, Tom Wilkins, and the first ever known to practise his profession in the South Seas. He had come like a non-periodic comet, and suddenly flashed his bra.s.s-tagged platform and arm-chair upon the gaping natives. Most of them being barefooted, one would have thought his customers not many; but the novelty of a white man doing anything for them was irresistible to all who had shoes. He did not lower himself in their estimation. It is noteworthy that the Tahitian does not distinguish between what we call menial labor and other work. Nor did we until recently. The kings and n.o.bles of Europe were actually served by the lords of the bedchamber and the maids in waiting. The American boot-black was really a boot-white, as all wore white canvas shoes except preachers and sailors.

The boot-white called out, "s.h.i.+ne!" and the word, unp.r.o.nounceable by the native, entered a himene as tina. Within a week he had his Tahitian consort doing the s.h.i.+ning most of the time while he loafed in the Paris saloon. He lived at the Annexe, and told me that he was not really a boot-cleaner, but was going around the world on a wager of twenty thousand dollars, "without a cent." He, too, had a credulous circle, who paid him often five francs for a s.h.i.+ne to help him win his bet by arriving at the New York City Hall on a fixed date with a certain sum of money earned by his hands. He raised the American flag over his stand, and referred to Uncle Sam as if he were a blood relation to whom he could appeal for anything at any time.

All the foregoing was brought out in our conversation at the British consul's. Willi, temporarily conducting American affairs in French Oceanie, gave a denouement.

"The s.h.i.+ne isn't a bad fellow," he said, "but he's serious about the twenty thousand dollars. His statement was doubted to-day by an English sailor, who called him 'a blarsted Hamerican liar,' and the s.h.i.+ne took off his own rubber leg, and knocked the sailor down. He could move faster on his one leg than the other on two, and Monsieur Lontane had to summon two a.s.sistants to take him to the calaboose. He wouldn't resume his rubber leg. I saw him being led and pulled by my office, calling out, 'Tell the 'Merican consul a good American is in the grip of the frogs.'"

Within a month of the rubber-legged s.h.i.+ner's debut, there were two other boot-blacks on the streets. A madness possessed the people, Tahitians and French, who all their lives had cleaned their own shoes, to sit on the throne-like chairs, and women and girls waited their turns. John Conroy and a negro from Mississippi were the additions to the profession, and during the incarceration of the premier artist, his sweetheart, a former hula danseuse, remained faithful to his brushes. When a shoeless man or woman regarded the new-fangled importations interestedly, the proprietors offered to beautify their naked feet, and, ridiculous as it may seem, attempted it.

Although I heard odd tales at the consulate, it was at the parc de Bougainville that I met the gentleman of the beach intimately.

There I often sat and talked with whomever loafed. Natives frequented the parc hardly ever, but beach-combers, tourists, and sailors, or casual residents in from the districts, awaited there the opening of the stores or the post-office, or idled. The little park, or wooded strip of green, named after the admiral, and containing his monument, skirted the quay, and was between the establishment of Emile Levy, the pearl-trader, and the artificial pool of fresh water where the native women and sailors off the s.h.i.+ps washed their clothes. From one's bench one had a view of all the harbor and of the pa.s.sers-by on the Broom Road.

In the morning the pool was thronged with the laundresses, and one heard their paddles chunking as they beat the clothes. The French wars.h.i.+p, the Zelee, was moored close by, and often the linen of its crew hung upon lines in the parc, and the French sailors came and went upon their duties, or sat on the coral wall and smoked and sang chansons. In the afternoon horses were brought down to bathe, and guests of the Annexe swam in the lagoon. People afoot, driving carts or carriages, on bicycles and in automobiles, went by on the thoroughfare about the island, the Frenchmen always talking as if excited over cosmic affairs, and the natives laughing or calling to one another.

If there happened to be a shoal of fish near the quays, I was sure to see Joseph, to whom the wise Dr. Funk had confided his precious concoction. He would desert the Cercle Bougainville, but still within hail of a stentorious skipper whose coppers were dry, and with a dozen other native men and women, boys and girls, lure the fish with hooks baited with bits of salted shrimp. Joseph was as skilful with his rod as with a shaker, and he would catch twenty ature, four or five inches long, in half an hour.

The water, about fifteen feet deep near the made embankment, was alive with the tiny fish, squirming in a ma.s.s as they were pursued by larger fish. The son of Prince Hinoe, a round-shouldered lout, very tall, awkward, and merry, held a bamboo pole. His white suit was soiled and ragged, and he whistled "All c.o.o.ns Look alike to Me!" The peanut-vender had brought a rod, and was fis.h.i.+ng with difficulty and mostly by feel. He could keep one eye open only, as one hand was occupied, but he pulled in many ature.

The parc was the occasional a.s.sembling-place for the drifting whites made thoughtful by trolling the jolly, brown bowl, and by those to whom lack of francs denied the trolling. It was there I first met Ivan Stroganoff, the aged Russian philosopher, and it was from there I took Wilfrid Baillon to the hospital. Baillon was a very handsome cow-boy from British Columbia, and was housed in Papeete with a giant Scandinavian who owned a cattle ranch in South America. He was generally called the Great Dane, and was the person meant in the charge for three c.o.c.ktails at Lovaina's: "Germani to Fany, 3 feathers."

The cow-boy became ill. I prescribed castor-oil, and Mme. f.a.n.n.y, half a tumbler of Martinique rum, with the juice of a lime in it. She was famous for this remedy for all internal troubles, and I took one with the cowboy as a prophylactic, as I might have been exposed to the same germs. He did not improve, though he followed f.a.n.n.y's regimen exactly. He was sitting dejectedly in the parc, looking pale and thin, when I broached the subject.

"As the f.a.n.n.y physic fails to straighten you out," I said to him, "why not try the hospital?"

He recoiled.

"Have you ever lamped it?" he asked. "It looks like a calaboose."

"It ain't so bad," said Kelly, the I.W.W., who was proselyting as usual among the flotsam and jetsam of the waterfront. "I 've been in worse joints in the United States."

The cow-boy yielding, I escorted him to the inst.i.tution, carrying his bag, as what with his disease and his antidote he was weak. The hospital was a block away from the lagoon. It was surrounded by a high stone wall, and as it was built by the military, it was ugly and had the ridiculous effrontery of the army and all its lack of common sense. The iron gate was shut, and a sign said, "Sonnez s'il vous plait!" A toothless French portiere of thirty years let us in. All the doctors of Tahiti had left the island for a few days on an excursion, and the gay scientist who opened the champagne in his pockets at the Tiare Hotel New Year's eve was in command. He sat in an arm-chair in a littered office and was smoking a pipe. His beard had a diameter of a foot, and obviated any need of collar or s.h.i.+rt-band, for it grew from his shoulder-blades up, so that his forehead, eyes, nose, and lips were white islands in a black sea, and even his nose was not bare, for he had been debited by Lovaina for his champagne as "Hair on nose."

He was reading a novel, and asked gruffly what we were there for. I told him, and Baillon was a.s.signed a room at twelve francs a day, and was required to pay for ten days in advance.

The next morning I visited him. He could speak no French, so I questioned Blackbeard in his office, where we had an aperitif. He was voluble.

"He has amoeban dysentery," said he. "It is contagious and infectious, specifically, and it is fortunate your friend is attended by me. I have had that disease and know what's what."

I, too, had had it in the Philippine Islands, and I was amazed that it was infectious. How could he have got it?

"Alors," replied the physician, "where has he taken meals?"

"Lovaina's, f.a.n.n.y's, and some with the Chinese."

The Frenchman threw his arms around the door in mock horror. He gagged and spat, exciting the cowboy into a fever.

"Oh! la! la!" he shouted. "Les Chinois! Certainement, he is ill. He has eaten dog. Amoeban dysentery! Mais, monsieur, it is a dispensation of the bon dieu that he has not hydrophobia or the leprosy. Les Chinois! Sacre nom de chien!"

Lovaina had often accused her rivals, the Chinese restaurateurs, of serving dog meat for beef or lamb. Perhaps it was so, for in China more than five millions of dogs are sold for food in the market every year, and in Tahiti I knew that the Chinese ate the larvae of wasps, and M. Martin had mountain rats caught for his table.

The cow-boy's room was bare and cheerless, but two Tahitian girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age were in it. One was sitting on his bed, holding his hand, and the other was in a rocking-chair. They were very pretty and were dressed in their fete gowns. The girl on the bed was almost white, but her sister fairly brown. Probably they had different fathers. They told me that they had seen Baillon on the streets, had fallen in love with him, and though they had never spoken to him, wanted to comfort him now that he was sick. Jealousy did not rankle in their hearts, apparently. That absence often shocked non-Polynesians. Brothers shared wives, and sisters shared husbands all over old Polynesia.

This pair of love-lorn maidens had never exchanged a word with Baillon, for he spoke only English. The whiter girl wore a delicate satin gown, a red ribbon, and fine pearls in her hair. The cow-boy lay quietly, while she sat with her bare feet curled under her on the counterpane, looking actually unutterable pa.s.sion.

"Shucks!" said he to me, safe in their ignorance of his tongue, "this is getting serious. They mean business, and I was foolin'. I got a little girl in the good ol' United States that would skin her alive if she saw her sittin' like that on my sheets. A man's takin'

chances here that bats his eye at one o' these T'itian fairies. Do you know, their mother came here with them this morning?"

"They mean to have you in their family," I said. "That mother may have had a white husband or lover, and aids in the pursuit of you for auld lang syne."

Wilfrid Baillon was out of the hospital in just ten days. His release, as cured by the doctor, coincided curiously with his payment in advance. I saw him off for New Zealand by the steams.h.i.+p leaving the next day.

"Those people were awful good to me," he said in farewell. "It hurts me to treat those girls this way, but I'm scairt o' them. They're too strong in their feelings."

He ran away from a mess of love pottage that many men would have gone across seas to gain.

Ormsby, an Englishman in his early twenties, good-looking and courteous, with an air of accustomedness to luxury, but of being roughened by his environment, was sitting on a bench one morning with a girl. He called me over to meet her.

"You are an old-timer here now," he began, "and I've got to go away on the schooner to the Paumotus to-morrow. Drop in at Tahia's shack once in a while and cheer her up. She lives back of the Catholic mission, and she's pretty sick."

Tahia was desperately ill, I thought. She was thin, the color of the yellow wax candles of the high altar, and her straight nose, with expanded nostrils, and hard, almost savage mouth, features carved as with the stone chisel of her ancient tribe, conjured up the profile of Nenehofra, an Egyptian princess whose mummy I had seen. She was stern, silent, resigned to her fate, as are these races who know the inexorable will of the G.o.ds.

"Is she your girl?" I asked Ormsby.

He colored slightly.

"I suppose so, and the baby will be mine if it's ever born. At any rate, I'm going to stick to her while she's in this fix. I'll tell you on the square, I'm not gone on her; but she had a lover, an Australian I knew, and he was good to her, but he got the consumption and couldn't work. Maybe he came here with it. They hadn't a s.h.i.+lling, and Tahia built a hut in the hills up there near where the nature men live, and put him in it, and she fed and cared for him. She went to the mountains for feis she came down here to the reef to fish, and she found eggs and breadfruit in other people's gardens. She kept him alive, the Lord knows how, until he could secure money from Sydney to go home and die. Now, she's got the con from him, I suppose, and it would be a shabby trick to leave her when she's dying and will be a mother in two months, according to Doctor Ca.s.siou!"

He made a wry face and lit his pipe. The girl could not understand a word and sat immovable.

"She's Marquesan," he went on. "Her mother has written through a trader in Atuona, on Hiva-Oa, to send her to her own valley, but she's quit. She sits and broods all day. I 'd like to go back to my own home in Warwicks.h.i.+re. I know I'm changing for the bad here. I live like a dam' beach-comber. I only get a screw of three hundred francs a month, and that all goes for us two, with medicines and doctors. She'd go to Atuona if I'd go; but I can't make a living there, and I'm rotten enough now without living off her people in the cannibal group. She's skin and bones and coughs all night."

Ormsby puffed his pipe as Tahia put her hand in his. Her action was that of a small dog who puts his paw on his master's sleeve, hesitating, hopeful, but uncertain. She regarded me with slightly veiled hostility. I was a white who might be taking him away to foreign things.

"She's heard us talking about Atuona and Hiva-Oa, and she thinks maybe I 've concluded to go. I can't do it, O'Brien. If I go there, I'll go native forever. I've got a streak of some dam' savage in me. Listen! I've got to go on the Etoile to Kaukura tojmorrow. Now, the natives are always kind to any one, but sickness they are not interested in. You go and see her, won't you? She's about all in, and it won't hurt you."

Ormsby went to the Dangerous Isles on the Etoile, and did not return for three weeks. He did not find Tahia in her shack on the hill. She was in the cemetery,--in the plot reserved for the natives of other islands,--and her babe unborn. She had died alone. I think she made up her mind to relieve the Englishman of her care, and willed to die at once. Dr. Ca.s.siou, with whom I visited her, said:

"She ought to have lasted several months. Mais, c'est curieux. I have treated these Polynesians for many years, and I never found one I could keep alive when he wanted to die. She had already sent away her spirit, the ame, or essence vitale, or whatever it is, and then the body simply grows cold."

Ormsby and I talked it all over in the parc. He was deeply affected, and he uncovered his own soul, as men seldom do.

"I 'm dam' glad she's dead," he said, with intense feeling. "I might have failed, and she died before I did fail. I'm going back to Warwick now at first chance, and whatever I do or don't do, I've got that exception to my credit. It's one, too, to the credit of the whites that have cursed these poor islanders."

He had chalked it down on a record he thought quite black, but which I believe was better than our average. He and I went to the cemetery and had a wooden slab put up: