Chapter XX
Rupert Brooke and I discuss Tahiti—We go to a wedding feast—How the cloth was spread—What we ate and drank—A Gargantuan feeder—Songs and dances of passion—The royal feast at Tetuanui’s—I leave for Vairao—Butscher and the Lermontoffs.
At Mataiea weeks passed without incident other than those of the peaceful, pleasant round of walking, swimming, fishing, thinking, and refreshing slumber. My mind dismissed the cares of the mainland, and the interests thrust upon me there—business, convention, the happenings throughout the world. I achieved to a degree the state in which body and spirit were pliant instruments for the simple needs and indulgences of my being, and my mind, relieved of the cark of custom in advanced communities, considered, and clarified as never before, the values of life. It was as if one who had been confined indoors for years at a task supervised by critical guardians was moved to a beautiful garden with only laughing children for playmates and a kindly nature alone for contemplation and guide.
Brooke, who was busied an hour or two a day at poems and letters, and was physically active most of the time, spoke of this with me. There were few whites in Tahiti outside Papeete except in the suburbs. The French in the time of Louis le Debonnaire and of all that period thought nature unbeautiful. The nation has ever been afraid of it, but let natural thoughts be freely spoken and written, and natural acts be less censured than elsewhere. Even in late years their conception of nature has been that of the painter Corot, delicate, tender, and sad; not free and primitive. They had possessed Tahiti scores of years, and yet one hardly saw a Frenchman, and never a Frenchwoman, in the districts. The French seldom ever ventured in the sea or the stream or to the reef. Other Europeans and Americans found those interesting, at least, a little. Brooke and I swam every day off the wharf of the çhefferie. The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant blond, gleamed in the violet radiancy like a dream figure of ivory. We dived into schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the sun. We laughed at his native name, Pupure, which means fair, and at the titles given Tahiti by visitors: the New Cytherea by Bougainville, a russet Ireland by McBirney, my fellow voyager on the Noa-Noa and Aph-Rhodesia by a South-African who had fought the Boers and loved the Tahitian girls and who now idled with us. Brooke, as we paddled over the dimpled lagoon, quoted the Greek for an apt description, the innumerable laughter of the waves. Brooke had been in Samoa, and was about to leave for England after several months in Tahiti. He wrote home that he had found the most ideal place in the world to work and live in. On the wide veranda he composed three poems of merit, “The Great Lover,” “Tiare Tahiti,” and “Retrospect.” He could understand the Polynesian, and he loved the race, and hated the necessity of a near departure. Their communism in work he praised daily, their singing at their tasks, and their wearing of flowers. We had in common admiration of those qualities and a fervor for the sun. For his Greek I gave him St. Francis’s canticle, which begins: