CHAPTER IX
South Sea Helen of Troy—A Barbarian Queen’s Lovers—Grimes and I pay Obeisance to the Reformed Queen—The Old Heathen Amphitheatre and the end of Impassioned Hearts—Descendants of Blue Blood—The Calaboose—“Time, Gentleman, please!”—A Race that is Dead—Marquesan Mythology—Holy Birds of the Gods—Thakombau, the Bluebeard of the South Seas—I practise the Cornet in the Mountains to the Delight of the Natives—Waylao believes in Fortune-telling
AT that time Queen Vaekehu was living not far from Tai-o-hae. She was known to the French officials as “La Grande Chiefesse,” and I think she received a grant from the French Government. She lived in a quiet style, but still retained some of the distinctive elements of past majesty. It was no easy matter to get into her presence. I suppose she had been haunted by a good many curious tourists, and so felt shy of the white men. When one did gain access to her presence, it was hard to believe that she had once been the Helen of Troy and Cleopatra of the South Seas rolled into one.
But there she was, no myth; nor did rumour lie overmuch.
In the days of her amorous prime and splendid queen-ship fleets of canoes had arrived off Tai-o-hae, coming from isles a thousand leagues distant, crammed with tattooed warriors, headed by some redoubtable Ulysses or Paris, whose soul, fired by rumour of the queen’s beauty, was filled with one intense desire, one wild ambition—to win her sparkling glance and impassioned embrace.
Majestic old chiefs for miles round vied with each other in their reminiscences of the time when they successfully mounted her throne and were each in turn the envied object of the queen’s “one” grande passion.
One knew not how much truth existed in the eloquent flow of all that they narrated. No sense of shame possessed those tawny warriors as they stood erect, and, with their bronze throats and shoulders thrown back—like some Roman orator of the Forum—completely lost their heads as they waxed impassionately eloquent: reclasped in memory that queenly form, fell gracefully on one knee, impulsively kissed the imaginary queenly hand and vividly described, in unguarded detail, those things that made the grog shanty re-echo with roars of hysterical laughter—and Mrs Ranjo hasten into the saloon bar to blush.
I have seen the wife of an old chief press her beloved’s hand with the pride and admiration she felt as he told of his amorous youth, of that day when he, too, had mounted that throne in the glorious pride of conquest; telling her of incidents which one would have thought would have made her want to shoot him at sight, instead of listening with pride.
An unforgettable privilege was mine. I performed violin solos before Queen Vaekehu on the celebration of her birthday, and was greatly impressed by the demure demeanour of the great ex-savage queen, after all that I had heard. I quite expected to see some eagle-eyed, bronzed, Elizabethan-like queen, something that at least hinted of those mighty, amorous times, those terrific cannibalistic and heathen orgies at the Marea Temples and arenas of death. Those surrounding hills had echoed and re-echoed the booming calls of the death-drums as they beat the sunset down and the stars in—and the last hour of what anguish-stricken maid or youth, the prison-bound victims who were doomed to that last dubious honour of being clubbed on the altar of the sacrificial rites! Much of the first-hand terrors of those heathen times I have given in full detail in my reminiscences of the old-time beachcomber, Mendos, the most wonderful character, surely, who ever roamed those Southern Seas.
To see that majestic relic of royalty pirouette daintily, on tripping feet, to the Parisian waltz made it hard to believe that she had been such an exciting character in her golden days. “Queen Bess of the South,” she was called by the French. There was a brooding expression on her oval-shaped face. Her eyes were piercing, yet at times softened, and looked earnest and reflective. Even in age the lips retained their somewhat sensual curves. The beautiful tattoo revealed on her wrists, below the sleeves of her modern attire, and just peeping up beneath the tawny-hued throat’s fulness, was all that remained visible to the sight of men of her past abandonment, of her renowned tattooed beauty, and of the impassioned moonlit nights of long ago.