Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 35

The road was a fairy-tale brightly illuminated by plantation, jungle, and garden, by reef and eyot. The sea lapped gently on sand as white as the fleecy clouds. Carts of Chinese and Tahitians pa.s.sed, carrying their owners and produce. The Chinese said, "Yulanna!" for "Ia ora na!" and the natives called to us to eat with them in their near-by homes. But we walked on, saying, "Ua maururu!" "Much obliged!"

M. Butscher had a good-sized, rambling house, with verandas for dining, and bedrooms for sleep. We found him on his largest table, lying flat on his back, and contemplating, in the eternal and perplexing way of the Polynesians. The Daibutsu, the great Buddha of Kamakura, had no more peaceful, meditative aspect than had the Taravao taverner. He was long and meager, as dry as a cocoanut from the copra oven, as if all the juices of his body and soul had been expressed in his years of cooking the sea-centipedes for which he was celebrated. Tatini addressed him slowly: "Bocshair, ia ora na!"

He sat up stiffly, and regarded us with indifference. He was cast for an old and withered Mephistopheles, his lines all downward, his few teeth fangs, and his smile a threatening leer, as if he thought of a joke he could not tell to decent visitors, but which almost choked him to withhold. His clothes were rags, and his naked feet like the flippers of seals. He opened his mouth, yawned, and said, "Iiii," a word which means, "I slept with my eyes open."

He settled back upon the table, and became immersed again in reverie. On the floor by the kitchen was a Tahitian woman with a baby and a panda.n.u.s-basket of varos. They squirmed and wriggled, contorted and crackled like giant thousand-legs, and almost excited in me a repulsion.

The vahine laughed at me.

"I fished for them with a dozen grapnels," she said. "It was good fis.h.i.+ng to-day. I put a piece of fish on each group of hooks. You know those holes are very small at the top and under two or three feet of water. Not many know how to find them. I set a grapnel in each hole, and then returned to the first to pull out the varo. I have more than twenty here."

Butscher rose, and sluggishly began to prepare the breakfast. He wrapped the varos in hotu-leaves, and put them in the umu to steam on the red-hot stones, and began to open oysters and fry fish in brown b.u.t.ter, as Tatini and I hastened to the beach for a bath. The sea was studded with coral growth, and sponges by the thousand, and we sat on these soft cus.h.i.+ons under the surface, and watched the little fishes' antics, and chatted. Tatini had gathered half a dozen nono, a fruit that has a smooth skin and no stone, and she threw them at me.

"Do you know about the nono?" she asked merrily. "It was in our courts.h.i.+p. When a crowd of young men were gathered to bathe in the pools or to lie on the banks under the shade of the trees, suddenly a missile struck one of them on the shoulder. The others began to shout at him and to sing, for it was a sign that a vahine had chosen him. He jumped to his feet and ran in the direction of the hidden thrower, and she ran, too, but no farther than away from the eyes of the others."

"Tatini," I said, "the nono was the Tahitian arrow of a little fat G.o.d we have called Cupid."

"Aue!" she replied. "It was not always oaoa for him, because it might be an old woman, or some one he did not like, but who loved him. The Arii, the aristocratic ladies, no matter how old, threw nono at the youngest and handsomest youth, and they had to pursue them, because of good manners. You know, Maru, that an illegitimate child is called to-day taoranono, and taora means to throw."

"When I was in Hawaii," I told her, "the old natives used to talk of a game there which, under King Kalakaua, their next to last sovereign, was played at night in Iolani palace or in the garden, but a ball of twine took the place of the nono, and all stood about, men and women, in a circle, to speed and receive the token of pa.s.sion. The missionaries severely condemned the game."

At the Maison des varos I breakfasted alone, for Tatini was too shy to break the taboo that separated the s.e.xes at meals. Butscher waited on me, bringing one plate of ambrosia after another--oysters, shrimp, varos, and fish. I warmed his frigid blood with a cup or two of Pol Roger, 1905, a bottle of which he dragged from a cave.

"I am born in Papenoo," he volunteered, "fifty-three years ago. My father came from Alsace seventy-five years ago, when Tahiti had not many white people. I am a tinsmith, but I gave up that business many years ago to keep this maison. I was a catechist in the Catholic church here nine years, teaching the ignorant. I gave it up; it didn't pay. I got nothing out of it. I worked about the church, read the prayers, and led the service when the priest was not there, and I never made a penny. Everything for me was the future life. Vous savez, monsieur, toute a l'avenir! Sacre! what a fool I was! Mais, one day when I was lying on that table as you found me, I was iiii, and I dreamed that there was no h.e.l.l and that I was a fool. I turned over a new leaf that moment. Now I never go near the church, and the future can take care of itself. That's my son-in-law going by in the cart. He's the richest young man in Taravao. Ah, oui! he'll spend a hundred francs here with me in a week for drinks. That's their baby."

Butscher's leathern, yellow visage contracted in an appalling grin.

"They have been married long?" I remarked politely.

"Mais, they are not married yet," replied the father-in-law. "There is no hurry."

Leaving Tatini to her own pleasures, I rented a horse and cart of Mephistopheles and drove into the district of Vairao. From the outset I realized the iniquitous character of the Atua who had tried to destroy or set adrift the people of the presqu'ile of Taiarapu, for they were handsomer and, if possible, more hospitable than those of Tahiti-nui. The road was closer to the water of the lagoon, and the reef and coral banks were nearer. I allowed the horse to go his own gait, and we jogged slowly, stopping to browse and to consider the landscape. The beach was covered with seeds and pods, the square-shaped seeds of the Barringtonia in their outer case of fiber, tutui-nuts, cocoanuts, flowers and bits of wood, and objects that would cause a naturalist to weep for lack of time. Our beaches of the temperate zones are wastes compared with these, for not only were the sands strewn with a vast debris of forest and jungle, but animal life abounded. The hermits toddled about, carrying their stolen sh.e.l.ls, some as small as watch charms, and the land-crabs fed on the purauand hibiscus-leaves. They are the scavengers of the sh.o.r.e, eating everything, and thus acting as conservators of health, as do the lank pigs of the Philippines. They were in myriads, rus.h.i.+ng about seemingly without purpose, and diving into their holes beneath the palm-roots. Their legs, unsh.e.l.led, are as excellent food as the crabs of the Atlantic. In the water a foot or two away moved exquisite creatures, darting fish, and sailing craft--Portuguese men-of-war, and other almost intangible shapes of pearly hue.

The village of Vaieri is opposite the pa.s.s of Tapuaeraha. Far from the capital, and from the distractions of tourists and bureaucracy, this tiny group of homes along the beach was less touched by the altering hand of the white than Mataica, its setting and atmosphere affectingly unspoiled. There was a mildness, a reticence, a privacy surrounding the commune that bespoke a gentle people, living to themselves. It was almost at the end of the belt road, which virtually terminated at Puforatiai. Gigantic precipices, high cliffs, and rugged mountains forbade travel, and from a boat only could one see the extreme southern end of Tahiti-nui Marearea, Great Tahiti the Golden, as it was called by its once proud race.

Vaieri was environed by all the plants of this clime. They ran along the road and embosomed the houses. Guavas and oranges were tangled with bananas, roses, reeds, papayas, and wild coffee. The blue duranta and the white oleander, the cool gray-green hibiscus with lemon-colored blossoms, the yellow allamanda, the trumpet lily, acacias, lilac ipomaea, tree ferns, and huge bird's-nest ferns mingled with white convolvulus, and over all lifted groves of cocoas and the symmetrical breadfruit.

In this surrounding was a wooden house, built partly over the water, so that a seaward veranda extended into the lagoon, high on posts, and commanded a view of the sea and the mountain. I saw on this veranda a more arresting figure of a white man than I had before come upon in Tahiti. His body, clothed only in a pareu, was very brown, but his light beard and blue eyes proved his Nordic strain. He was of medium size, powerful, with muscles rounded, but evident, under his satin skin, and with large hands and feet. He was reading a book, and as I ambled by, he raised his head and looked at me with a serious smile.

I checked the horse, and tied him to a candlenut-tree. I felt that I had arrived at the end of my journey.

I spent the remainder of the day and the night there. The man and his wife were as stars on a black night, as music to a blind bard. His name was Nicolai Lermontoff, born in Moscow, and his wife was an American, Alaska her place of birth, and of residence most of her life. They were each about forty years old, and of extraordinary ease of manner and felicity of expression.

"Muy simpatica," had said the old Gipsy at the Generalife in Granada when I had spoken bolee with him. Lermontoff shook hands with me. His was as hard as leather, calloused as a sailor's or a miner's, and so contradicted his balanced head, intellectual face, and general air of knowledge and world experience that I said:

"You have the h.o.r.n.i.e.s.t palm in Tahiti."

"I am a planter," he replied. "We have been here a few years, and after buying the ground I had to clear it, because it had been permitted to go to bush. There were a few hundred cocoanut-trees, but nothing else worth while. I began at the highest point and worked to the sea."

I drew from him that he had bought eighteen acres of land for twelve hundred dollars, and had spent most of a year in preparing it for vanilla, cocoanuts, a few breadfruit, a small area of coffee and taro, and a vegetable patch.

"We have very little money," he explained, "and live largely on catches in the sea and stream, and fruit and vegetables, with a dozen chickens for eggs. I pull at the net with the village. Actually, we figure that fifteen dollars a month covers our expenditures. This house cost five hundred and eight dollars, but, of course, I did a lot of work on it. The chief items for us are books, reviews, and postage."

Three walls of the house were covered with books, and the fourth stopped at the floor to make the wide veranda over the lagoon.

Mrs. Lermontoff had on the peignoir of the natives, and was barefooted within the house, but wore sandals outside. She sat before a sewing-machine.

"I am making a gown or two for a neighbor who is sick," she said. "I do not give many hours to sewing. I like better the piano."

She knew all the Russian composers well, had studied at a conservatory in the German capital, and she also played Grieg for me with much feeling and a strong, yet delicate, touch. For dinner we had a broiled fish, which I myself cooked on stones outside the house, and tuparo, mountain feis steamed and mashed into a golden pulp, with cocoanut cream. With these we ate boiled green papaya, which tasted like vegetable marrow; and for dessert sweet oranges with grated fresh cocoanut, and for drink, the wine of the nut.

After the food we sat and looked at the reef, the purple sea, and the stars, and talked. These two were weary of life in the big countries of the world, and would rest in Tahiti. If they made enough money, they would like to go to America and work for the revolution they hoped for. They did not believe in bringing it about by violence, but by acting on the Christ principle, as they interpreted it. Yet they were not religionists.

"Of course one is not sure of the aims and end of life," said Lermontoff. "I have no greater certainty than the kaisers and czars or your great men, Morgan and Rockefeller; but, at least, theirs are not worth while for the race of man. I hold that man is the greatest product of life so far, and not government or trade. That the whirling spheres are made for man I disbelieve, but on this planet, and in our ken, he is the object we most prize, and rightfully. Therefore to build him in health and character, in talent and happiness, is all of existence. The life after death we are not sure of, but beauty is on earth, and to know it and wors.h.i.+p it in nature, and in man and his thoughts and deeds are our ends. The individual man gains only by sacrifice for his fellows. He must give freely all he has. This is his only way out of the shadow that may be inherent in our growth, but in any event has been made certain by machinery and business control of world ethics."

They were believers in the doctrines of Leo Tolstoi, and especially in non-resistance, and the possessing little or no property to enc.u.mber their free souls. In the village they had become the guides of the Tahitians in the devious path of enforced civilization.

Mrs. Lermontoff, in lamenting the Tahitian's degradation, physical and spiritual, said that she was reminded always of the Innuit, the Eskimo, among whom she and her husband had pa.s.sed several years.

"They are the most ethical, the most moral, the most communal people I know of," she commented. "They have a quality of soul higher than that of any other race, a quality reached by their slow development and constant struggle. I imagine they went through a terrible ordeal in the more temperate zones farther south before they consented to be pushed into the frozen lands of Canada, and then, following the caribou in the summer, to mush to the Arctic sea. There, while they had to change their habits, clothing and food, to learn to live on the seal and the bear and the caribou in the midst of ice and snow, they were spared for thousands of years the diseases and complexes of civilization, and reached a culture which is more worth while than ours."

I was skeptical, but she quoted several eminent anthropologists to support her statement that the Eskimo were better developed mentally than other people, and that in simplicity of life, honesty, generosity, provision for the young and the old, in absence of brutality, murder and wars, they had a higher system of philosophy than ours, which admits h.e.l.ls, prisons, asylums, poor houses, bagnios, famines and wars, and fails even in the recurrent periods of hard times to provide for those stricken by their lash.

"But," said Lermontoff, "the Innuit, too, is corrupting under the influence of trade, of alcohol, and the savage l.u.s.t of the white adventurer. He attained through many centuries, perhaps thousands of years, of separation from other peoples, and without any of the softening teachings of Christianity, a Jesus-like code and practice, which the custodians of Christianity have utterly failed to impress on the millions of their normal adherents."

I looked out upon the reef where the waves gleamed faintly, upon the scintillating nearer waters of the lagoon, and upon us, barefooted, and clothed but for decency, and I had to jolt my brain to do justice to the furred and booted Eskimo in his igloo of ice. The difference in surroundings was so opposite that I could barely picture his atmosphere climatological and moral. I led the conversation back to their situation in Vaieri.

He had planted his vanilla-vines on coffee-bushes, the vanilla being an orchid, a parasite, that creeps over the upstanding plants, coffee, or the vermillion-tree. Lermontoff said that it was a precarious crop, a world luxury, the price of which fluctuated alarmingly. Yet it was the most profitable in Tahiti, which produced half of all the vanilla-beans in the world.

This man and woman made a deep impression upon me. They had seen cities everywhere, had had position and fas.h.i.+on, and were, for their advanced kind, at peace.

"We have no nerves here," said Mrs. Lermontoff. "Our neighbors are all fishermen, and we are friends. We drink no wine, we want no tobacco. We have health and nature; books and music supply our interests. Life is placid, even sweet."

When I bade them good-by it was with regret. They had found a refuge, and they had love, and yet they wanted to aid in the revolution they believed in. I restrained myself from pointing out that Tolstoi, at the last, forsook even his family to seek solitude and die.

Chapter XXI

A heathen temple--The great Marae of Oberea--I visit it with Rupert Brooke and Chief Tetuanui--The Tahitian religion of old--The wisdom of folly.

Reading one day from Captain Cook's Voyages about a heathen temple not far from Mataiea which Cook had visited, I suggested to Brooke that we go to it. None of the Tetuanui younger folk had seen it, but Haamoura directed us to return toward Papara as far as the thirty-ninth kilometer-stone, and to strike from that point towards the beach. Cook had had a sincere friends.h.i.+p, if not a sweeter sentiment, for Oberea, the high chiefess of the clan of Tevas at Papara, and whom at first he thought queen of Tahiti. He described her as "forty years of age, her figure large and tall, her skin white, and her eyes with great expression." That handsome lady had led him a merry chase, her complacent husband, Oamo, abetting her in the manner of Polynesia, where women must have their fling. The temple Cook and his officers inspected was the tribal church of the n.o.ble pair. The Voyages say:

The morai consisted of an enormous pile of stone work, raised in the form of a pyramid with a flight of steps on each side, and was nearly two hundred and seventy feet long, about one-third as wide, and between forty and fifty feet high. As the Indians were totally dest.i.tute of iron utensils to shape their stones, as well as mortar to cement them when they had made them fit for use, a structure of such height and magnitude must have been a work of infinite labor and fatigue. In the center of the summit was the representation of a bird, carved in wood; close to this was the figure of a fish which was in stone. This pyramid made part of one side of a wide court or square, the sides of which were nearly equal; the whole was walled in, and paved with flat stones.

When we reached the thirty-ninth kilometer-stone we met my host, Tetuanui, in his one-horse vehicle, inspecting the road. He agreed, though a little reluctantly, to take us to the marae (p.r.o.nounced mah-rye). We turned down a road across a private, neglected property, and for almost a mile urged the horse through brambles and brush that had overgrown the way. We were going toward the sea along a promontory, "the point" upon which Cook's mariners saw the etoa-trees a century and a half ago, about the time that Americans were seeking separation from England, before Napoleon had risen to power, and when gentlemen drank three bottles of port after dinner and took their places under the table.

"Tooti was in love with Oberea," said the chief. "She was hinaaro puai."