Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 22

Tahia a Atuona Tamau te maitai.

Tahia of Atuona She held fast.

The Christchurch Kid and I were friendly, and he allowed me once a day during his training periods to put on the gloves with him for a mild four rounds. He was an open-hearted fellow, with a cauliflower ear and a nose a trifle awry from "a couple of years with the pork-and-beaners in California," as he explained, but with a magnificent body. He also lived at the Annexe, and did his training in the garden under Afa's clever hands. The Dummy must have admired him, for he would watch him exercising and boxing for hours, and make farcical sounds and grotesque gestures to indicate his understanding of the motions and blows.

The Kid asked me if I knew Ernest Darling, "the nature man," and identified the too naked wearer of toga and sandals on the San Francisco wharf as Darling.

"'E looked like Christ," said the boxer. "'E was a queer un. How'd you like to chyse up there to his roost in the 'ills?"

The next morning at five--it was not daybreak until six--we met at Wing Luey's for coffee and bread, which cost four cents. Prince Hinoe was there as usual, and asked us whither away. He laughed when we told him, and said the nature men were maamaa, crazy. The Kid was of the same mind.

We went up the rue de Sainte Amelie to the end of the road, and continued on up the valley. We could see far above us a small structure, which was the Eden that Darling had made for the Adamic colony he had established.

The climb was a stiff one on a mere wild pig-trail.

"The nyture man would 'ike up 'ere several times a day, after the frogs closed his road," said the New Zealander. "There was less brush than now, though, because 'e cut it aw'y to carry lum'ber and things up and to bring back the things 'e grew for market. 'E and 'is gang believed in nykedness, vegetables, socialism, no religion, and no drugs. The nytives think they're bug-'ouse, like Prince Hinoe, and I don't think they 're all there, but you couldn't cheat him. 'E'd myke a Glasgow peddler look sharp in buyin' or sellin'."

The Christchurch Kid was himself strictly conventional, and had been genuinely shocked by Darling's practices, and especially by his striking resemblance to the Master as portrayed by the early painters, and by Munkacsy in Christ Before Pilate.

"'E was all right," he explained to me as we climbed, "but 'e ought to been careful of 'is looks. I was 'ard up 'ere in Papeete once, and was sleepin' in an ole ware'ouse along with others. Darling slept on a window-sill, and 'e used to talk about enjoyin' the full sweep o'

the tradewind. We doubted that, an' so one night we crept upstairs and surprised him. 'E was stretched out on a couple o' sacks, and a reg'ler gale was blowin' on him. 'E bathed a couple o' times a day in the lagoon or in fresh water, but 'e believed in rubbin' oil on his skin, and when a bloke is all greasy and nyked, 'e looks dirty. 'Is whiskers were too flossy in the tropics."

It took all my wind to reach the Eden, a couple of miles from our starting-point, and we were on all fours part of the way.

"'E could run up here like an animal," declared the fighter. "Once when a crowd of us went to visit 'im, 'e ran up this tr'il a'ead of us, and when we arrived all winded, blow me up a bloomin' gum-tree if 'e 'ad n't a mess of feis and breadfruit cooked for us."

We came to a sign on the trail. "Tapu," it said, which means taboo, or keep away; and farther on a notice in French that the owner forbade any one to enter upon his land.

"'E's a cryzy Frenchman with long whiskers," said the Kid. "'E 'as a grudge against any one who speaks English and also against the world. They s'y that 'is American wife ran aw'y from 'im, or an American took 'is nytive wife aw'y. 'E packs a revolver."

Everywhere the mountain-side was terraced, and planted in cocoanuts, breadfruits, bananas, flowers, and other plants, more than two thousand growths. Darling's toil had been great, and my heart bled at the memory of his standing on the piling as we steamed away. He had intended to have a colony, with bare nature-wors.h.i.+pers from all over the world. He had written articles in magazines, and tourists and authors had celebrated him in their stories. A score of needy health-seekers had arrived in Papeete and joined him, but could not survive his rigid diet and work. He had talked much of Eves, white, in the Eden, but none had offered.

On a platform fifteen hundred feet above the sea Darling had built a frame of beams, boards, and branches, with bunks and seats, much like a woodcutter's temporary shelter in the mountains, a mere lean-to. The view was stupendous, with the sea, the harbor, Moorea, and Papeete hardly seen in the foliage. He had thought his work in life to be peopling these hills with big families of nature children and the spread of socialism and reformed spelling.

His dream was transient. He had been treated with contempt, and had been driven from his garden, as had his first father, and without an Eve or a serpent. The whiskered Frenchman had bought Eden for a song, and had made it taboo to all.

We shouted in vain for the Frenchman, so we searched the premises. The boxer was afraid that after we left he might roll a rock down our trail because of our breaking his taboo. We found the spring from which he drank, and a pool dug by Darling for bathing, now only a ma.s.s of vegetation. Evidently the present tenant was not an ablutionist.

"There's a beastly German down on that next level," remarked the Christchurch Kid. "'E 'ates this Frenchman. Now they don't speak, but they sent warnin' to each other o' trouble. The frog carries the revolver for the sauer-kraut. Some day they'll kill each other right 'ere. They're both 'ermits, and 'ermits are terrible when they get excited."

It was almost a straight drop to the German's, a small promontory, with an acre of land, a platform raised eight feet on poles for a roof, and under it a berth. A chest held his belongings. He lived on the fruit he raised and the fish he caught in the sea, to which he went every day. He tried to keep chickens, but the mountain rats, of which Darling had trapped more than five thousand, ate most of them. The German, too, was away from his simple home. Both these men sought in life only peace and plain living, yet were consumed with hate. One day the upper dweller had accidentally caused a small stone to roll down upon the other's roof. The German had shouted something to the Frenchman, hot words had pa.s.sed, and now they carried revolvers to intimidate or shoot each other. Their days and nights were spent on plans to insult or injure. And because of their feud they hated the whole world.

Once again in Papeete, we met the Swiss of the Noa-Noa who had intended to eat raw foods in the Marquesas. He was to return to America on the next steamer.

"De wegetables in Tahiti have no wim in dem," he said. "In California I ead nudds und raisins mit shtrent' in dem. I go back."

The fighter pointed out the "cryzy" Frenchman of Eden. He was the customs employee who had provoked the American consul by refusing to understand English.

I asked M. Lontane, the second in command of the police, why Darling had gone.

The hero of the battle of the limes, coal, and potatoes, looked at me fiercely.

"Is the French republic to permit here in its colony the whites who enjoy its hospitality to shame the nation before the Tahitians by their nakedness? That sacree bete wore a pareu in town because the law compelled him to, but, monsieur, on the road, in his aerial resort, he and all his disciples were as naked as--"

"I have seen artistes at the music-halls of Paris," I finished.

"Exactement," he spluttered. "Are we to let Tahiti rival Paris?"

Ivan Stroganoff I met two or three times a month. He stayed in his chicken-coop except when the opportunities came for gaining a few francs, at steamer-time, and when sheer boredom drove him to Papeete for converse. With his dislike for the natives and his disdainful att.i.tude toward the French, he had to seek other nationals in town, for there were none at Fa'a except a Chinese storekeeper. Stroganoff at eighty was as keen for interesting things as a young man, but his philosophy was fatal to his enjoyment. He saw the flaw in the diamond the sunbeam made of the drop of water on the leaf. He had lived too long and was too wise in disappointments. He was generous in his poverty, for he brought me a tin of guava-jelly he had made and a box of dried bananas. These had had their skins removed, and were black and not desirable-looking, but they were delicious and rare. In turn, not wis.h.i.+ng to exaggerate the difference between our means, I gave him a box of cigars I had brought from America. I visited him at Fa'a, and found his coop had been a poultry shelter, and was humble, indeed; but I had slept a hundred nights in many countries in worse. He had a box for a table for eating and writing, and a rude cot. A few dishes and implements, and a roost of books and reviews in Russian, English, French, German, and other languages, completed his equipment.

He had several times reiterated his earnest wish to leave Tahiti, and his longing rested heavily on my heart. Upon lying down at night I had felt my own illiberality in not making it possible for him to realize his desire. A hundred dollars would send him there, with enough left over for a fortnight's keep. But my apology for not buying him a ticket was the real fear of his unhappiness. What could a friendless man of eighty do to exist in the United States other than become the inmate of a poorhouse? The best he could hope for would be to be taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor, who house a few old men. They were, doubtless, kind, but probably insistent on neatness and religiosity.

The cold, the brutal policemen and guards, the venial justice, the crystallized charity in the name of a statistical Christ, arrested my hand. I had known it all at first hand, asking no favor. I believed that he would be worse off than in his chicken-coop. He could wear anything or nearly nothing in Tahiti, and his old Prince Albert comforted him; but he would have to conform to dress rules in a stricter civilization. Nature was a loving mother here and a shrewish hag there, at least toward the poor. And yet I was uneasy at my own argument.

For a month or two he had led the talk between us and any others in the parc to new discoveries in medicine. From his Fa'a seclusion he followed these very closely through European publications, for which his slender funds went. He had a curiously opposed nature, quoting with enthusiasm the idealistic philosophers, and descending into such abject materialism as haunting the bishop's palace for the cigar-stubs.

He would say that the purest joy in life is that which lifts us out of our daily existence and transforms us into disinterested spectators of it.

"This divine release from the common ways of men can be found only through art," Stroganoff would apostrophize. "The final and only true solution of life is to be found in the life of the saint. True morality pa.s.ses through virtue, which is rooted in sympathy into asceticism. Renunciation only offers a complete release from the evils and terrors of existence."

Kelly was on the bench one day when the Russian uttered this rule of the cen.o.bite school. They were good friends, but differed. They agreed that the world was sick and needed a radical medicine. Kelly was for a complete cure by ending private business through the workers seizing it when the time was ripe, which he believed would be soon. Stroganoff was for an empery of wise men, of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who would kick out the statesmen and politicians, and manage things by enlightened pragmatism. For the individual man who sought happiness his formula was as above--retirement to an aery.

When Kelly was gone to practise on his accordion,--he had opened a dancing academy at Fa'a,--the octogenarian asked me if I had read of the recent achievements of the scientists who were making the old young. He elaborated on the discoveries and experiments of Professor Leonard Huxley in England with thyroid gland injections, of Voronoff in France with the grafting of interst.i.tial glands of monkeys, and of Eugen Steinach in Austria and Roux in Germany, with germ glands and X-rays. Steinach, especially, he discoursed on, and drew a magazine picture of him from his Prince Albert. The Vienna savant had a cordon of whiskers that made him resemble Stroganoff, and his eyes in the photograph peered through all one's disguises.

"That is what grates me," said Stroganoff. "I am far from all these worth-while things, these men of brain. I knew Ilya Ilich Metchnikoff before he became director of the Pasteur Inst.i.tute. Here I am a rotting hulk. In the Caucasus I had kephir, and I used to carry kephir grains, and in America I, at least, could have k.u.miss or Ilya Ilich's lait caille. Look! I came here as Ponce de Leon to Florida to find youth, or to keep from growing older; in a word to escape anno Domini."

I turned and looked at him. He was a venerable figure, but there was no sign of eighty years in him. Rid of that white, hirsute mask, so a.s.sociated with age, Stroganoff might have been twenty years younger. I said so, but it did not allay his yearning.

"I am well enough," he said, "because I have not dissipated for thirty years. I turned a leaf, as did Leo Nikolaievitch, after 'War and Peace.' Now I feel myself slipping into the grave."

He gazed ruminantly away from the lagoon to the pool of Psyche, where the Tahitian women squatted on their shapely haunches and thumped their clothes.

"See," he said earnestly. "I am old and useless. Why should not Steinach or the others make the grand experiment on me? If they succeed, very good; if they fail, there is no loss. They say those glands make a man over, no matter what his age. I offer myself freely. I am not afraid of death. Me, I am a philosopher."

He spoke excitedly. His eyes were fixed on distance, and I followed them.

Auro, the Golden One, as her name meant, had been was.h.i.+ng her muslin slips in the pool of Psyche, and now stood in the entrance to it. She was for a fleeting second in her pareu only, her tunic raised above her head to pull on, and her enravis.h.i.+ng form disclosed from her waist to her piquant face, over which tumbled her opulent locks.

It flashed on me that, wise and old as he was, the spectrum of the philosopher's soul had all the colors of the ignorant and the young. I looked from the nymphs of the pool to his darkening eyes, and I had a revelation of the persistence of common humanity in the most learned and the most philosophical. My castigation of myself for not buying his steams.h.i.+p ticket ceased in a moment, though not the less did I continue to enjoy his fount of learning and experience.

Chapter XIV

The market in Papeete--Coffee at s.h.i.+n Bung Lung's with a prince--Fish the chief item--Description of them--The vegetables and fruits--The fish strike--Rumors of an uprising--Kelly and the I. W. W.--The mysterious session at Fa'a--Halellujah! I'm a b.u.m!--The strike is broken.

The market in Papeete, the only one in Tahiti, has an air all its own. It is different in its amateur atmosphere and roseate color, in its isothermal romance and sheer good humor, from all others I have seen--Port of Spain, Peking, Kandy, or Jolo. It is more fascinating in its sensuous, tropical setting, its strange foods, and its laughing, lazy crowds of handsome people, than any other public mart I know. There is no financial exchange in Tahiti. Stocks and bonds take the shape of cocoanuts, vanilla-beans, fish, and other comforts. The brokers are merry women. The market is spot, and buyers must take delivery immediately, as usually not a single security is left at the end of the day's trading.