South-Sea Idyls

by Charles Warren Stoddard

He was known as Hua Manu, or Bird's Egg. Every native in the South Sea gets named by accident. I knew a fellow whose name was "Cock-eye"; he was a standing advertisement of his physical deformity. A fellow that knew me rejoiced in the singular cognomen of "Thrown from a horse." Fortunately he doesn't spell it with so many letters in his tongue. His christening happened in this wise: A bosom friend of his mother was thrown from a horse and killed the day of his birth. Therefore the bereaved mother reared that child, an animated memorial, who in after years clove to me, and was as jolly as though his earthly mission wasn't simply to keep green the memory of his mother's bosom friend sailing through the air with a dislocated neck.

I turned to my new-found friend. "Hua Manu," said I, "for my sake you have made a bird's-nest of your back hair. You have freely given me your young affection and your eggs. Receive the sincere thanks of yours truly, together with these fish-hooks, these tenpenny nails, this key-ring." Hua Manu smiled and accepted, burying the fish-hooks in his matted forelock, and inserting a tenpenny nail and a key-ring in either ear, thereby making himself the envy of the entire population of Motu Hilo, and feeling himself as grand as the best chief in the archipelago.

So we sat together on the deck of the Great Western, quite dry for a wonder, exchanging sheep's-eyes and confidences, mutually happy in each other's society. Meanwhile the captain was arranging his plans for an immediate purchase of such pearls as he might find in possession of the natives, and for a fresh search for pearl oysters at the earliest possible hour. There were no pearls on hand. What are pearls to a man who has as many wives, children, and cocoa-nuts as he can dispose of? Pearls are small and colorless. Give them a handful of gorgeous glass beads, a stick of sealing-wax, or some spotted beans, and keep your pale sea-tears, milky and frozen and apt to grow sickly yellow and die if they are not cared for.

Motu Hilo is independent. No man has squatted there to levy tax or toll. We were each one of us privileged to hunt for pearls and keep our stores separate. I said to Hua Manu, "Let's invest in a canoe, explore the lagoon for fresh oyster-beds, and fill innumerable cocoa-nut shells with these little white seeds. It will be both pleasant and profitable, particularly for me." We were scarcely five minutes bargaining for our outfit, and we embarked at once, having agreed to return in a couple of days for news concerning the success of the Great Western and her probable date of sailing.

Seizing a paddle, Hua Manu propelled our canoe with incredible rapidity out of the noisy fleet in the centre of the lake, toward a green point that bounded it, one of the horns of the crescent. He knew a spot where the oyster yawned in profusion, a secret cave for shelter, a forest garden of fruits, a never-failing spring, etc. Thither we would fly and domesticate ourselves. The long, curved point of land soon hid the inner waters from view. We rose and sank on the swell between the great reef and the outer rim of the island, while the sun glowed fiercely overhead and the reef howled in our ears. Still on we skimmed, the water hissing along the smooth sides of the canoe, that trembled at every fierce stroke of Hua Manu's industrious paddle. No chart, no compass, no rudder, no exchange of references, no letter of introduction, yet I trusted that wild Hercules who was hurrying me away, I knew not whither, with an earnestness that forced the sweat from his naked body in living streams.

At last we turned our prow and shot through a low arch in a cliff, so low we both ducked our heads instinctively, letting the vines and parasites trail over our shoulders and down our backs.

It was a dark passage into an inner cave lit from below,—a cave filled with an eternal and sunless twilight that was very soothing to our eyes as we came in from the glare of sea and sky.

"Look!" said Hua Manu. Overhead rose a compressed dome of earth, a thick matting of roots, coil within coil. At the side innumerable ledges, shelves and seams lined with nests, and never a nest without its egg, often two or more together. Below us, in two fathoms of crystal, sunlit and luminous bowers of coral, and many an oyster asleep with its mouth open, and many a prismatic fish poising itself with palpitating gills, and gauzy fins fanning the water incessantly.

"Hua Manu!" I exclaimed in rapture, "permit me to congratulate you. In you I behold a regular South Sea Monte Christo, and no less magnificent title can do you justice." Thereat Hua Manu laughed immoderately, which laugh having run out we both sat in our canoe and silently sucked eggs for some moments.

A canoe-length from where we floated, a clear rill stole noiselessly from above, mingling its sweet waters with the sea; on the roof of our cavern fruits flourished, and we were wholly satisfied. After such a lunch as ours it behooved us to cease idling and dive for pearls. So Hua Manu knotted his long hair tightly about his forehead, cautiously transferred himself from the canoe to the water, floated a moment, inhaling a wonderfully long breath, and plunged under. How he struggled to get down to the gaping oysters, literally climbing down head-first! I saw his dark form wrestling with the elements that strove to force him back to the surface, crowding him out into the air again. He seized one of the shells, but it shut immediately, and he tugged and jerked and wrenched at it like a young demon till it gave way, when he struck out and up for air. All this seemed an age to me. I took full twenty breaths while he was down. Reaching the canoe, he dropped the great, ugly-looking thing into it, and hung over the outrigger gasping for breath like a man half hanged. He was pale about the mouth, his eyes were suffused with blood, blood oozed from his ears and nostrils; his limbs, gashed with the sharp corals, bled also. The veins of his forehead looked ready to burst, and as he tightened the cords of hair across them it seemed his only salvation.