Mystic Isles of the South Seas Part 4

With only one mail a month to disturb the monotony, and but trifling interest in anything north of the equator except prices of their commodities, these unrepressed rebels against the conventions and even the laws of the Occident must have their fling. On that camphor-wood chest had sat many a church-going woman and dignified man of Europe or America, resident for a month or longer in Tahiti, and shuddered at what they heard--shuddered and listened, eager to hear those curious incidents and astonis.h.i.+ng opinions about life and affairs, and to mark the difference between this and their own countries. It was without even comment that people who at home or among the conventions would be shocked at the subjects or their treatment, in these islands listened thrilled or chucklingly to stories as naked as the children. Double entendre is caviar to the average man and woman of Tahiti, who call the unshrouded spade by its aboriginal name. The Tahitians were ever thus, and the French have not sought to correct their ways. I heard Atupu, one of the girls of the hotel, in a Rabelaisian pa.s.sage of wit the while she opened Seattle beer for thirsty Britishers, old residents, traders, and planters. One could not publish the phrases if one could translate them.

Lovaina, in her bed just off the porch, was laughing at the retorts of Atupu, who by her native knowledge of the tongue was discomfiting the roisterers, who spoke it haltingly. I heard an apt interjection on the part of the proprietress which set them all roaring, and so lowered their self-esteem that they left summarily.

One day when I was hurrying off to swim in the lagoon, I asked Lovaina to guard a considerable sum of money in bank-notes. She a.s.sented readily, but when several days later I mentioned the money she struck her head in alarm. She thought and thought, but could not remember in what safe place she had hidden the paper francs.

"My G.o.d! Brien," she said in desperation, "all time I jus' like that crazee way. One time one engineer big steams.h.i.+p come here, he ask me keep two thousan' dollar for him. I busy jus' like always, an'

I throw behin' that couch I sit on. My G.o.d! he come back I fore-get where I put. One day we look hard. I suffer turribil, but the nex'

day I move couch and find money. Was n't that funny?"

I suggested we try the couch again, but though we turned up a number of lost odds and ends, it was not the cache of my funds. By way of cheering her, I ordered a rum punch, and when she went to crack the ice, a gleam of remembrance came to her, and, lo! my money was found in the reserve b.u.t.ter supply in the refrigerator, where she had artfully placed it out of harm's way. It was quite greasy, but intact.

The first breakfast at the Tiare began at 6:30, but lingered for several hours. It was of fruit and coffee and bread; papayas, bananas, oranges, pineapples, and alligator-pears, which latter the French call avocats, the Mexicans ahuacatl, and were brought here from the West Indies. To this breakfast male guests dropped in from the bath in pajamas, but the dejeuner a la fourchette, or second breakfast at eleven, was more formal, and of four courses, fish, bacon and eggs, curry and rice, tongues and sounds, beefsteak and potatoes, feis, roast beef or mutton, sucking pig, and cabbage or sauer-kraut. For dessert there was sponge- or cocoanut-cake. All business in Papeete opened at seven o'clock and closed at eleven, to reopen from one until five. Dinner at half-past six o'clock was a repet.i.tion of the late breakfast except that a vegetable or cabbage soup was also served.

Two Chinese youths, To Sen and Hon Son, were the regular waiters, but were supplemented by Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Akura, Tetua, Maru, and Juillet, all Tahitian girls or young women who had a mixed status of domestics, friends, kinfolk, visitors, and hetairae, the latter largely in the sense of entertainers. I doubt if they were paid more than a trifle, and they were from the country districts or near-by islands, moths drawn by the flame of the town to soar in its feverish heat, to singe their wings, and to grow old before their time, or to grasp the opportunity to satiate their thirst for foreign luxuries by semi-permanent alliances with whites.

Lovaina's girls! How their memory must survive with the guests of the Tiare Hotel! One read of them in every book of travel encompa.s.sing Tahiti. One heard of them from every man who had dropped upon this beach. Once in Mukden, Manchuria, I sat up half the night while the American consul and a globe-trotter painted for me the portraits of Lovaina's girls.

I was atop a disorderly camel named Mark Twain nosing about the Sphinx when my companion remarked that that stony-faced lady looked a good deal like Temanu of Lovaina's. Then I had to have the whole story of Lovaina and her household. I have heard it away from Tahiti a dozen times and always different.

Doubtless, in the dozen years the gentle Lovaina ministered to the needs of travelers and residents, many girls came and went in her house. Some have married, and some have gone away without a ring, but all have been made much of by those they served, and have lived gayly and by the way.

Lovaina, herself, said to me:

"You know those girl', they go ruin. That girl you see here few minutes ago I bring her up just like Christian; be good, be true, do her prayers, make her soul all right. Then I go San Francisco. What you think? When I come back she ruin. 'Most break my heart. That man he come to me, he say: 'Lovaina, I take good care that girl. I love her.' That girl with him now. She happy, got plenty dress, plenty best to eat, and nice buggy. I tell you, I give up trying save those girl'. I think they like ruin best. I turn my back--they ruin."

Iromea was the st.u.r.dy veteran of the corps. Tall, handsome, straight, mother of four children, obliging, wise in the way of the white, herself all native.

"And the babies?" I inquired.

"They all scatter. Some in country; some different place," answered Iromea, who ran from English to French to Tahitian, but of course not with the ease of Lovaina, for that great heart knew many of the cities of her father's land, was educated in needlework style, and with a little dab of Yankee culture, now fast disappearing as she grew older. One marked that tendency to reversion to the native type and ways among many islanders who had been superficially coated with civilization, but whom environment and heredity claim inexorably.

Iromea was thirty years old. She had been loved by many white men, men of distinction here; sea-rovers, merchants, and lotus-eaters, writers, painters, and wastrels.

Juillet, whose native name was Tiurai, helped old Madame Rose to care for the rooms at the Tiare. She was thirteen years old, willowy, with a beautiful, smiling face, and two long, black plaits. Though innocent, almost artless, in appearance, she was an arch coquette, and flirted with old and young. One day a turkey that shared the back yard with two automobiles, a horse, three carriages, several dogs, ten cats, and forty chickens, disappeared. Juillet was sent to find the turkey. She was gone four days, and came back with a brilliant new gown. She brought with her the turkey, which she said she had been trying to drive back all the four days.

Juillet was named for the month of July. Her mother was the cook of a governor when she was born on the fourteenth of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile, and the governor named her for the month. She was also named Nohorae, and noho means to be naked and rae forehead. Juillet had a high forehead.

Lovaina pointed out to me the man who had taken away her favorite helper. He was about forty years old, tall, angular, sharp-nosed, with gold eyegla.s.ses. I would have expected to meet him in the vestry of a church or to have been asked by him at a mission if I were saved, but in Tahiti he had gone the way of all flesh. His voice had the timbre of the preacher. He had come to the hotel in an expensive, new automobile to fetch cooked food for himself and Ruine.

"Seven or eight leper that man support," said Lovaina to me. "They die for him, he so good to them. He help everybodee. He give them leper the Bible, and sometime he go read them."

It would be the Song of Solomon he would read to Ruine. She had red hair, red black or black red, a not unusual color in Tahiti, and her eyes had a glint of red in their brown. She was exquisite in her silken peignoir, a wreath of scarlet hibiscus-flowers on her head, and a string of gorgeous baroque pearls about her rounded neck.

My room at the Tiare was in the upper story of an old house that sat alone in the back garden, among the domestics, automobiles, carriages, horses, pigs, and fowls. The house had wide verandas all about it, and the stairway outside. A few nights after I had arrived in Tahiti I was writing letters on the piazza, the length of the room away from the stairs. I had a lamp on my table, and the noise of my type-writer hushed the sounds of any one entering the apartment. It was about ten o'clock, and between sentences I looked at the night. The stars were in coruscating ma.s.ses, the riches of the heavens disclosed as only at such a cloudless hour in this southern hemisphere, the Milky Way showing ten thousand gleaming members of the galaxy that are hidden in our skies. I thought of those happy mariners who first sailed their small, wooden s.h.i.+ps into these mysterious seas, and first of our race, saw this strangely brilliant macrocosm, and appreciated it for its marvels and its differences from their own bleaker, Western vault.

There were no doors in the openings into my room from the verandas, but hangings of gorgeous scarlet calico, pareus, kept out the blazing sun, and lent a little privacy at night. All the furniture was a chair, a dressing-table, and two large beds, canopied with mosquito-nets, evidently provided for a double lodging if needed.

As I finished my letters twenty feet away, a Tahitian girl parted the farther curtain nearest the stairway, and slipped into the room with the silence of the accustomed barefooted. Imagine her in her gayest gown of rose color, a garland of hinano-flowers on her glossy head, her tawny hair in two plaits to her unconfined waist, and her eyes s.h.i.+ning with the spirit of her quest!

She looked through the room to where I sat in the semi-obscurity, and then knelt down by the first bed, and waited. I gazed again at the starry heavens, and, stepping over the threshold, entered the chamber, lamp in hand. I undressed leisurely, and putting about me the pareu Lovaina had given me, I threw the light upon the two beds to make my nightly choice. I surveyed them both critically, but the one nearest to me having the netting arranged for entrance, I selected it, and setting the lamp upon the dresser, extinguished it, groped to the bed in darkness, and lay down upon the coverless sheet. A few minutes I stayed awake going over the happenings of the day, and fell asleep in joyful mood that I was in the island I had sought so long in desire and dream. I knew nothing of my visitor, for she had made no audible sound, and the shadows had hidden her.

At breakfast the next morning I was waited on by Atupu, the beauty. Her face was tear-stained, and a deep weariness was upon her. She regarded me with a glance of mixed anger and hurt.

"Vous etes fache avec moi?" she inquired accusingly.

"I angry with you?" I repeated. "Why what have I done to show it?"

And then she told me of her visit and vigil. Seeing me alone in Tahiti, and kind-hearted, she said, she had thought to tell me of the Tahitian heart and the old ways of the land. She had robed, perfumed, and adorned herself, and entered my sleeping-place, as she said was the wont of Tahitian girls. I had certainly heard her enter, and seen her kneel to await my greeting, and if not then, I had seen her plainly when I lifted the lamp, for the light had streamed full upon her. She had remained there upon the floor half an hour until my audible breathing had compelled her to believe against her will that I was asleep. Then she had fled and wept the night in humiliation. Never in her young life had such a horror afflicted her.

I was stunned, and could only reiterate that I had not known of her presence, and with a trinket from my pocket I dried her tears.

Rupert Brooke in a letter to a friend in England drew a little etching of our lodging:

I am in a hovel at the back of my hotel, and contemplate the yard. The extraordinary life of the place flows round and near my room--for here no one, man or woman, scruples to come through one's room at any moment, if it happens to be a shortcut. By day nothing much happens in the yard--except when a horse tried to eat a hen, the other afternoon. But by night, after ten, it is filled with flitting figures of girls, with wreaths of white flowers, keeping a.s.signations.... It is all--all Papeete--like a Renaissance Italy with the venom taken out, No, simpler, light-come and light-go, pa.s.sionate and forgetful, like children, and all the time South Pacific, that is to say unmalicious and good-tempered.

When a steams.h.i.+p was in port the Tiare was a hurly-burly. Perhaps forty or even a hundred extra patrons came for meals or drinks. It was amusing to hear their uncomprehending anger at their failure to obtain quick service or even a smile by their accustomed manner toward dark peoples. The British, who were the majority of the travelers, have a cold, autocratic att.i.tude toward all who wait upon them, but especially toward those of the colored races. In Tahiti they suffered utter dismay, because Tahitians know no servitude and pay no attention to sharp words.

I saw a red-faced woman giving an order for aperitifs to To Sen, the Chinese waiter.

"Two old-fas.h.i.+oned gin c.o.c.ktails," she iterated. "You savee, gin and bitters? Be sure it's Angostura, and lemon and soda, and two Manhattans with rye whisky. Hurry along now! Old-fas.h.i.+oned, remember!"

In ten minutes Temanu came for the order. To Sen knew no English, and Temanu only, "Yais, ma darleeng," and "Whatnah.e.l.l?"

"Spik Furanche?" she begged.

"Oui, oui!" said the red-faced lady. "Dooze c.o.c.ktail! Vous savez c.o.c.ktail, a la mode des ancients? Gin, oon dash bittair, lem' et soda!"

"Mais, madame, douze c.o.c.ktail!" and the half-caste Chinese girl held up all her fingers and added two more. "Vous n'etes que quatre ici! Quatre c.o.c.ktails, n'est-ce pas?"

"Dooze gin, dooze Manhattan? My heavens! They ought to understand my French in this out-of-the-way place when they do in Paris. Listen! Dooze is two in French," and she held up two pudgy fingers. But Temanu was gone and returned with four c.o.c.ktails made after her own liking.

All the girls, Atupu, Iromea, Pepe, Maru, Tetua, and Mme. Rose and Mama-Maru, helped in the service, some beginning with shoes and stockings, but soon slipping them off as the crowd grew and their feet became weary. Lovaina herself moved happily about the salle-a-manger telling her friends that she was a grandmother. A letter had given the information that her daughter had a child. She was a doting parent, and we all must toast the newborn. Two grave professors of the University of California, ichthyologists or entomologists, sat entranced at the unconventionality of the scene, drinking vin ordinaire and gazing at the Tahitian girls, or eating breadfruit, raw fish, and taro, as if they were on Mars and did not know how they got there.

I saw an entry in Lovaina's day-book on the table:

"Germani to Fany 3 feathers."

This was a charge made by Atupu against a Dane for three c.o.c.ktails. He took his meals at Mme. Klopfer's restaurant. Her first name is f.a.n.n.y, and Atupu thinks all men not English, French, or Americans, are Germans; so she identified the Dane as the German who went to f.a.n.n.y's for his meals.

Lovaina said to me:

"I hear you look one house that maybe you rent. You don't get wise if you rent from that French woman. I don't say nothing about her, but you know her tongue? So sharp jus' like knife. All time she have trouble. Can't rent her house so sharp. Some artist he rent; she take box, peep over see what he do jus' because he have some girl. n.o.body talk her down. No, I take back. Jus' one French woman who know to swear turribil. This swear woman she call her turribil name and say, 'Everybody don't know you was convict in Noumea for killing one man for money.' That turribil talk, and she jus' fell down. Good for her, I think."

Lovaina seldom rode in her automobile, which she kept primarily for renting to guests for country tours. She had had for years a carriage, a surrey, drawn by one horse, which had grown old and rickety with the vehicle. The driver was a mute, Vava, his name meaning dumb in Tahitian, and the English and Americans called him the Dummy. He was attached to Lovaina as a child to his mother--a wayward, jealous, cloudy-minded child, who almost daily broke into fits of anger over incidents misunderstood by his groping mentality, and because of his incommunicable feelings. The hotel was in a fearsome uproar when Vava fell into a tantrum, women patrons afraid of his possible actions and men threatening to club him into a mild frame of mind. I doubt if any one there could have subdued him physically, for he was a thick-bodied man in his thirties, with a stamina and a strength incredibly developed. I had seen him once lift over a fence a barrel of flour, two hundred pounds in weight, and without full effort. His skin was very dark, his facial expression one of ire and frustration, but of conscious superiority to all about him. He had had no aids to overcome his natal infirmity of deafness and consequent dumbness, none of the educational a.s.sistance modern science lends these unfortunates, no finger alphabet, or even another inarticulate for sympathy. He was like the mutes of history, of courts and romances, condemned to suffer in silence the humor and contempt of all about him, though he felt himself better than they in body and in the understanding of things, which he could not make them know. This repression made him often like a wild beast, though mostly he was half-clown and half-infant in his conduct. He had a gift of mimicry incomparably finer than any professional's I knew of. This, with his gestures, stood him instead of speech. A certain haughty English woman whose elaborate hats in an island where women were hatless, or wore simple, native weaves, were noted atrocities, and whose chin was almost nil, kept the carriage and me waiting for breakfast while she primped in her lodging. The Dummy uttered one of his abortive sounds, much like that of an angry puma, contorted his face, and put his hand above his head, so that I had a very vivid suggestion of the lady, her sloping chin and her hat, at which all Papeete laughed. Vava's gesticulations and grimaces were unerring cartoons without paper or ink. If one could have seen him draw one-self, one's pride would have tumbled. He saw the most ridiculous aspect of one. His indication of Lovaina's figure made one shriek, and the governor would have sentenced him for lese-majesty had he seen himself taken off. The sounds he made in which he greeted any one he liked, or in anger, were terrible, dismaying. They; must have been those made by our ancestors, the first primates, when they began the struggle toward intelligent language. Vava's sounds were as the muttering of an ape, deep in his throat, or, when he was roused, high and shrill, like the cry of a rabbit when the hound seizes it. He could make Lovaina know anything he wanted to, and she could direct him to do anything she wished. In that house of mirth, brightness, and laughter, he was as a cunning and, at times, hateful jester, feared by the Tahitians, and, indeed, to whites a shadowy skeleton at the feast, a thing of indescribable possibilities. I knew him, he liked me, and I drew from him by motions and expressions some measure of his feelings and sufferings. But I, too, occasionally, shuddered at the animal cries and frightful grimaces wrung from him in beating down his soul bent on murder.

Lovaina was a spendthrift, giving money liberally to relatives, lending it to improvident borrowers, and dispensing it with open hands when she had it, though always herself in debt. Yet she liked to make money, and to have her hotel filled with tourists who patronized her little bar or drank at meals other wines than the excellent Bordeaux, white or red, which was free with food. Most she loved the appearance of prosperity, the crowding of casual voyagers on steamer-days, the visit of war-s.h.i.+ps, the sound of music in her parlor, the rustling of dancers, and the laughter and excitement when the maids were busied carrying champagne and cheaper drinks to the verandas.

I saw her at her best when El Presidente Sarmiento, an Argentine training-s.h.i.+p, came to port with a hundred cadets. A madness then possessed the girls of Tahiti.