Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 37

We got into difficulties from the start. The sh.o.r.es were very different from those of Mataiea, Papeari, and Vairao, the three districts I had come through from the house of Tetuanui. The alluvial strip of land which in them stretched from a quarter of a mile to a mile from the lagoon to the slopes of the hills, here was cramped to the barest strip. The huts of the indigenes, few and far apart outside of Puforatoai, seemed to be set in terraces cut at the foot of the mountains which rose almost straight from the streak of golden sand to the skies. In every shade of green, as run by the overhead sun upon the altering facets of precipice and shelf, of fei and cocoa, candlenut and purau, giant ferns and convolvulus, tier upon tier, was a riot of richest vegetation. But everywhere in the lagoon were bristling and hiding dangers from hummocks of coral and sunken banks.

Our canoe was twenty feet long, and with a very strong outrigger, but though all four of us paddled, Teta, the chief man of Puforatoai, in the stern, steering, the vaa labored heavily. Tatini was adept in canoeing, and with a quartet of hoe we would have ordinarily sent the vaa spinning through the water; but we were nearing the southernmost extremity of the Presqu'ile, and the wind and current from the northeast swept about the broken coast in a confusion of puffs and blasts, choppy waves and roaring breakers, and made our progress slow and hazardous. The breeze caught up the foam and formed sheets of vapor which whipped our faces and blinded us, while an occasional roller broke on our prow, and soon gave Tatini continuous work in bailing with a handled scoop.

Opposite the pa.s.s of Tutataroa our greatest peril came. The ocean swept through this narrow channel like a mill-race. The first swell tossed us up ten feet, and we rode on it fifty before Teta could disengage us from its clasp, and, without capsizing, divert our course westward instead of toward the parlous sh.o.r.e. One such jeopardy succeeded another. We were in a quarter of an hour directly under black and frowning heights from which a score of cascades and rills leaped into the air, their ma.s.ses of water, carried by the gusts, falling upon us in showers and clouds, aiding the flying scud in s.h.i.+elding the distance ahead from our view.

"Aita e ravea," shouted Teta to me. "It is impossible to go on."

We were all as wet as if in the sea, our faces and bodies stung by the spindrift, and we were barely able to glimpse a dark and heaving panorama of surf, rock, and bluff in the mists that now and again were penetrated by the hot sun.

"Maitai! Hohoi!" I replied above the clangor, and raised my paddle.

Carefully and in a wide circle the vaa crept around to head back toward our port, and it was after sunset before we were in Teta's house in Puforatoai. The villagers met us with torches and incredulous aues and we walked up the road singing the song of the "Ai Dobbebelly Dobbebelly," which was known wherever a fisher for market dwelt in all Tahiti. The farther from Papeete and more and more as time pa.s.sed, the words lost resemblance to English, and became mere native sounds without any exact meaning, but with a never-forgotten sentiment of rebellion against government and of gild alliance.

"Give us a hand-out!" had changed from "hizzandow" in Papeete, to "Hitia o te ra!" which meant that the sun was rising. Within a year or two the entire text would doubtless merge into Tahitian with only the martial air of "Revive us again!" and the dimming memory of the fish-strike to recall its origin. I had known a native who, whenever he approached me, sang in a faltering tone, "Feery feery!"

I asked him after many weeks what he meant, and he said that that was a himene, which a young American had sung at his potations in his village in the Marquesas Islands. I had him repeat "Feery feery!" dozens of times, and finally s.n.a.t.c.hed at an old glee which ran through my mind: "Shoo Fly, don't bother me!" and when I sang it,

"I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel like a morning star!"

he struck his thigh, and said, "Ea! That is the very thing!" And to be fair to all races, one has only to listen to an American a.s.semblage singing "The Starspangled Banner" to learn that after the first few lines most patriots decline into "ah-ah-la-la-ha-la-ah-la-la."

Before our supper of fish and fei, Teta, who was a deacon in the Protestant church, but of superior knowledge of his own tongue and legends, asked a blessing of G.o.d, and afterward recited for me the Tahitian chant of creation, the source of which was in the very beginnings of his race, perhaps even previous to the migration from Malaysia. He intoned it, solemnly, as might have an ancient prophet in Israel, as we sat in the starlit night, with the profound notes of the reef in unison with his deep cadence:

He abides--Taaroa by name-- In the immensity of s.p.a.ce.

There was no earth, there was no heaven, There was no sea, there was no mankind.

Taaroa calls on high; He changes himself fully.

Taaroa is the root; The rocks (or foundation); Taaroa is the sands; Taaroa stretches out the branches (is wide-spreading).

Taaroa is the light; Taaroa is within; Taaroa is, ---- Taaroa is below; Taaroa is enduring; Taaroa is wise; He created the land of Hawaii; Hawaii great and sacred, As a crust (or sh.e.l.l) for Taaroa.

The earth is dancing (moving).

O foundations, O rocks, Oh sands! here, here.

Brought hither, pressed together the earth; Press, press again!

They do not ------ Stretch out the seven heavens; let ignorance cease.

Create the heavens, let darkness cease.

Let anxiety cease within; Let immobility cease; Let the period of messengers cease; It is the time of the speaker.

Fill up the foundation, Fill up the rocks, Fill up the sands.

The heavens are inclosing.

And hung up are the heavens In the depths.

Finished he the world of Hawaii.

E pau fenua no Hawaii.

The cart at my request had been driven back to Taravao; so in the morning Tatini and I walked back to the isthmus. We drank coffee at five, and at three we had covered the twelve miles in the sauntering gait of the Tahitian girl, stopping to make wreaths, and to bathe in several streams. Butscher was on his table in his after-breakfast lethargy, and I regretted disturbing his iiii to ask him to serve us. Again Tatini refused to sit at table with me. Evidently, she feared the scowls of Butscher, who had none of the white's ideas of the equality of females with males at the board. Butscher added many francs to my bill by pouring me another bottle of Pol Roger, 1905, which after several days of cocoanut juice took on added delight. I made up my mind to tarry with Butscher a day, while Tatini returned to the Tetuanui mansion by diligence, and despatched my bags to me by the same carrier. I sent with her my love to the Tetuanui clan, and some delicacies from the Maison des Varos for the half-blind Haamoura. The diligence did not run farther than Taravao, and the next day, with my impedimenta in the cart, and with a boy to drive it, I turned my back on the road to Papeete, and began the jog trot to the famous, but hardly ever visited, district of Tautira.

I counted it the third stage in my pilgrimage in Tahiti. The first had been in and about the capital, mingling mostly with white men, and living in a public inn; the second at Mataiea had taken me far from those rookeries, and had introduced me to the real Tahitians, to their language, their customs, and their hearts; but still I had been a guest, and a cared-for and guarded white among aborigines. Now I wanted to cut off entirely from the main road, to sequester myself in a faraway spot, and to live as close to the native as was possible for me. My time was drawing near for departure. I must see all of the Etabliss.e.m.e.nts Francais de l'Oceanie, the blazing Paumotu atolls, and the savage Marquesas, and I must make the most of the several months yet remaining for me in Tahiti.

The highway along the eastern portion of the Presqu'ile was much like that between Taravao and Puforatoai, tortuous, constricted, and often forced to hang upon a shelf carved out of the precipice which hemmed it. The route hugged the sea, but at every turn I saw inland the laughing, green valleys, deserted of inhabitants, climbing slowly between ma.s.sive walls of rock to which clung great tree ferns, with magnificent vert parasols, enormous clumps of feis, with huge, emerald or yellow upstanding bunches of fruit; candlenut- and ironwood-trees. Uncounted, delicious odors filled the air, distilled from the wild flowers, the vanilla, orchids, and the forests of oranges, which, though not of Tahiti, were already venerable in their many decades of residence. Not a single path struck off from the belt road, except that as we came toward the centers of Afaahiti and Pueu districts the inevitable store or two of the Chinese appeared, the cheferie, a church or two, and the roofs of the Tahitians. These were always near the beach, set back a few hundred feet from the road in rare instances, but mostly only a few steps from it. The Tahitian never lived in hamlets, as the Marquesan and the Samoan, but each family dwelt in its wood of cocoanuts and breadfruit, or a few families cl.u.s.tered their inhabitants for intimacy and mutual aid. The whites, missionaries, conquerors, and traders found this system not conducive to their ends. Churches demand for prosperity a flock about the ministrant, business wants customers close to the store, and government is more powerful where it can harangue and proclaim, parade before and spy upon its subjects. Individualistic and segregated domestic circles give rise to tax evasions, feuds, and moons.h.i.+ning, plots and the growth of strong men. The city is the corral where humans mill like cattle in a panic, are more easily ridden down en ma.s.se, and become habitual buyers of unnecessary things.

The French, after their bold seizure of the island in the name of liberty for the earnest friars, and sealing their brave conquest in the blood of the obstinate Polynesian who had hated to learn a new liturgy and to unlearn his old Protestant songs, feared that the dispersion of the people upon their little plantations, to which they were greatly attached, would make their Frenchifying a long task. So, about sixty years ago, a governor, who, ten thousand miles from his superiors, with an exchange of letters taking many months, was an autocrat, decided that all the people of the same region must be huddled in a village. His name was Gaultier de la Richerie. His office was s.n.a.t.c.hed from him by another politician before he could carry out his plan, and only one village exemplified it. In all the districts I had pa.s.sed through from Papeete, while in each was the knot of chefferie, churches, stores, and perhaps a house or two, the other residences stretched along the entire length of the political divisions, from six to eight miles.

I was approaching the exception, Tautira, which, though farthest of all from the palace of the governor, had been chosen for the first experiment, and which had adapted its life to the paternal will of M. de la Richerie, now long since laid in the bosom of Pere Lachaise.

The estimable troubadour, Brault, had advised me of the history of Tautira. It was seldom visited by white tourists, as even the post brought by the diligence ended at Taravao, and letters for farther on were carried afoot by the mutoi, or postman-policeman of the adjoining district, who handed on to his contiguous confrere those for more distant confines. But for centuries Tautira was known as a focus of the wise, of priests, sorcerers, and doctors, and, said the knowing Brault, especially of the dancers, and those who, he explained, under the banner of Venus.

Ont vu maintes batailles Et recu nombre d'entailles Depuis les pieds jusqu'au front.

The little boy and I chatted as the horse ambled at will, occasionally urged to a trot by a shaking of the reins. The country as we progressed became far more beautiful than that behind. A new wildness, not fierce and rugged as between Vaiere and Puforatoai, but gentler and more inviting, preluded the exquisite setting of the village. We had to ford a stream three or four feet deep, the Vaitapiha, and the struggle through it was a rare pleasure, the child on the back of the animal, and I with the reins and a purau twig directing and commanding in vain. We had to leap into the water and remove a boulder or two that stymied the wheels. When we had pulled through to the opposite sh.o.r.e, I was reduced to a dry pareu, and in it alone, barefooted, I reached the rustic paradise, the loveliness of which was to content me more than any spot except the strangely fascinating valley of Atuona in the sad isle of Hiva-Oa.

In a delta formed by the Vaitapiha the settlement lay among tents of verdure. For a mile it sprawled around a small point of land which thrust out into the sea, and which was guarded by the most wonderful of walls, a reef of madrepore, as solid as granite and sixty feet wide. The road was arched by splendid trees of many kinds, and facing it, every several hundred feet, was a home. Many of these were cottages in modern style, but a dozen or so were the true Tahitian fare, of bamboo and thatch. All were covered with flowering vines, and surrounded by many fruiting trees.

"Tautira nei!" announced my coachman. "Tautira is here!"

He pulled up the horse. I had not given any thought to my lodging, and I jumped out and looked around. The brook curved about a mango grove, and under its high trees was a new native house, a replica of the commodious dwellings of old days. I walked into the grove, and was admiring the careful, but charming, arrangements of ferns and orchids, which, though brought from the forests, had been fitted into the scene to simulate a natural environment. All of a sudden a something I could not see hurled itself from a limb upon my head, and two affrighting paws seized my right ear and my hair, grown long at Mataiea, and tried to tear them out by the roots, while at the same time many fierce teeth closed, though without much effect, on my tough and weathered shoulder. In horror at the attack, I covered yards in two bounds, and my a.s.sailant was torn from its hold upon me.

I then turned and saw that it was a monkey tied to a rope fastened to the limb of the tree. He stood upright on the ground, his jaws agape, and a look of devilish glee upon his uncannily manlike face. At the same moment a white man ran from the house and called in English:

"You d.a.m.ned little scoundrel! How often have I whipped you for that same trick! I would better have left you in the slums in San Francisco."

And then apologetically to me:

"I ought to kill him for that. He's a devil, that monkey. He has bitten all the children around here, has killed all my chickens, and raised more h.e.l.l in this village than the whole population put together. I swear, I believe he just enjoys being mean. Come in and have a snifter after that greeting! Did he hurt you?"

My would-be host was himself a very striking somebody. He wore only a pareu, as I, of scarlet muslin, with the William Morris design, but he had wound his about so that it was a mere ornamental triangle upon his tall, powerful, statuesque body. His chest and back had a growth of red-gold hair, which, with his bronzed skin, his red-gold beard, dark curls over a high forehead, handsome nose, and blue eyes, made him all of the same color scheme. He was without doubt as near to a Greek deity in life, a Dionysus, as one could imagine. He had two flaming hibiscus blossoms over his ears, and he looked in his late twenties. Accustomed as I was to semi-nudity and to white men's return to nature, I had never seen a man who so well fitted into the landscape as the owner of the ape. He was the faun to the curling locks and the pointed ears, with not a trace of the satyr; all youth and grace and radiance.

He walked on before me to the fare, and, opening the door, bade me welcome. The house differed from the aboriginal in a wooden floor and three walls of wire screen above four feet of wainscot. The roof was lofty, of plaited panda.n.u.s-leaves, with large s.p.a.ces under the eaves for the circulation of air; but the immediate suggestion was of an aviary, a cage thirty feet square. Attached to this room was a lean-to kitchen, and near by, hidden behind the cage, was another native house for sleeping. The aviary was the living- and dining-quarters, protected from all insect pests, and an arbor covered with vines led to the water.

Many canvases were about, on an easel an unfinished group of three Tahitian boys, and a case of books against the one solid wall.

Half a dozen Tahitian youths were lolling outside in the shade, and one, at the request of the host, led up the horse and the boy who guarded it. The child skirted the circ.u.mference of the monkey's swing, and then, a few feet away, squatted to regard the animal with intense surprise and interest.

"Uritaata," he said; "I never saw one before, but I have read in my school-book that they have those dogmen in French colonies."

Uri means dog and taata man, and the compound name was that which sprang to the lips of the Tahitians on seeing a monkey, just as they called the horse puaa horo fenua, the pig that runs on the earth, and the goat, horo niho, the pig with horns. The pig and the dog were the only land mammals they knew before the white arrived. The race-track near Papeete was puaa horo fenua faa t.i.ti auraa. If a pig could talk, he would say that man was a wickeder and stronger pig. Jehovah has whiskers like a Rabbi. The Rabbis made him like themselves. Man has no other ideal.

The Tahitian youth addressed the Greek G.o.d as T'yonni, which was an effort to say John, and I adopted it instanter, as he did my own Maru. T'yonni said that Uritaata was the bane of his existence at Tautira. After building his fare he had been called to America, and had danced in Chinatown the night before his steams.h.i.+p departed for his return to Papeete. He remembered obscurely drinking grappo with a deep-sea sailor, and had awakened in his berth, the vessel already at sea, and Uritaata asleep at his feet. Many Tahitians, he said, had never seen such a fabulous brute, and T'yonni had stirred in them a mood of dissatisfaction by telling that their forefathers had descended from similar beings.

"How about Atamu and Eva?" they had asked the pastors.

Those conservatists had replied emphatically that Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, were created by G.o.d, which agreed thoroughly with the Tahitian legends, and after that T'yonni's generosity was ranked higher than his knowledge. He laughed over the stories as we sat at breakfast with my coachman in the kitchen. T'yonni said that the deacon of the Protestant church expressed a belief that the Paumotuans or even the French might have followed the Darwinian course of descent, but that Tahitians could not swallow a doctrine that linked them in relations.h.i.+p with Uritaata. The Tongans, Polynesians like themselves, had a tradition that G.o.d made the Tongan first, then the pig, and lastly the white man.

"He quoted the Tongan with compa.s.sion for me," said T'yonni. "And now about a place where you can live. Choti, a painter, whose pictures you see around here, lives with the school-teacher up the road, and he might find you a place. He's an American, as I am, and I suppose you, too."

I raised my gla.s.s to our native land, and finding that the boy of Taravao had eaten his fill of fei and fish, I said ariana to T'yonni, and drove to Choti's. The painter was on the veranda of a cottage, finis.h.i.+ng the late breakfast. He received me with enthusiasm. Tall, very spare, and his skin pale despite his wearing only a pareu and never a hat, Choti's black eyes shone under long, black hair, and over a Montmartre whisker that covered his boyish face from his chiseled nose.

"h.e.l.lo!" he said. "Come and have dejeuner?"