South-Sea Idyls

by Charles Warren Stoddard

Who was the gayest of the gay, and the most lawless of the unlawful? My boy, Kahéle, in whom I had placed my trust, and whom, until this hour at least, I had regarded as a most promising specimen of the reorganized barbarians.

Perhaps it was all right; perhaps I had been counting his steps with too much confidence; they might have been simply a creditable performance, the result of careful training on the part of his tutors. I am inclined to think they were! At any rate, Kahéle went clean back to barbarism that night, and seemed to take to it amazingly. I said nothing; I thought it wiser to seem to hold the reins, though I held them loosely, than to try to check the career of my half-tamed domestic, and to find him beyond my control; therefore I sat on one side taking notes, and found it rather jolly on the whole.

The river looked like an inky flood with a broken silver crust; canoes floated upon its sluggish tide like long feathers; swimmers plied up and down it, now and then "blowing," whale-fashion, but slipping through the water as noiselessly as trout. I could scarcely tell which was the more attractive,—Nature, so fragrant and so voluptuous, or man, who had become a part of Nature for the hour, and was very unlike man as I had been taught to accept him.

Not till dawn did the dance or the song cease; not till everybody was gray and fagged, and tongues had stopped wagging from sheer exhaustion. I returned to my mats long ere that, to revolve in my mind plans for the following day.

It was evident that Kahéle must at once quit the place, or go back to barbarism and stick there. I didn't care to take the responsibility of his return to first principles, and so ordered the animals saddled by sunrise. At that delicious moment, the youngster lay like one of the Seven Sleepers, whom nothing could awaken. Everybody in the village seemed to be making up his lost sleep, and I was forced to await the return of life before pressing my claims any further.

The scorching noon drew on; a few of the sleepers awoke, bathed, ate of their cold repast, and slept again. Kahéle followed suit; in the midst of his refreshment, I suggested the advisability of instant departure; he hesitated. I enlarged upon the topic, and drew an enticing picture of the home-stretch, with all the endearing associations clustering about its farther end; he agreed to everything with a sweet and passive grace that seemed to compensate me for the vexations of the morning.

I went to the river to bathe while the beasts were being saddled, and returned anon to find Kahéle sound asleep, and as persistent in his slumbers as ever. The afternoon waned; I began to see the fitness of the name that had at first seemed to me inappropriate to the valley: everybody slept or lazed during the hot hours of the day, and a census-taker might easily have imagined the place a solitude. At sunset, there was more fishing and more surf-swimming. It seemed to me the fish smelt stronger, and the swimmers swam less skilfully than on the evening previous; possibly it was quite as pretty a spectacle as the one that first charmed me, but blessings are bores when they come out of season.

Night drew on apace; the moon rose, and the inhabitants pretended to rest, but were shortly magnetized out of their houses, where they danced till daybreak. The sweets of that sort of thing began to cloy, and I resolved upon immediate action. Kahéle was taken by the ears at the very next sunrise, and ordered to get up the mules at once. He was gone nearly all day, and came in at last with a pitiful air of disappointment that quite unmanned me; his voice, too, was sympathetic, and there was something like a tear in his eye when he assured me that the creatures had gone astray, but might be found shortly,—perhaps even then they were approaching; and the young scamp rose to reconnoitre, glad, no doubt, of an excuse for escaping from my natural but ludicrous discomfiture. It is likely that my boy Kahéle would have danced till doomsday, had I not shown spleen. It is as likely, also, that the chief and all his people would have helped him out in it, had I not offered such reward as I thought sufficient to tempt their greed; but, thank Heaven, there is an end to everything!

On the morning of the fourth day, two travellers might have been seen struggling up the face of the great cliff that walls in the valley of Méha to the south. The one a pale-face, paler than usual, urging on the other, a dark-face, darker than was its wont. Never did animals so puzzle their wits to know whether they were indeed desired to hasten forward, or to turn back at the very next crook in the trail. We were at big odds, Kahéle and I; for another idol of mine had suddenly turned to clay, and, though I am used to that sort of thing, I am never able to bear it with decent composure. On we journeyed, working at cross-purposes, and getting nearer to the sky all the while, and finally losing sight of the bewitching valley that had demoralized and so nearly divorced us; getting wet in the damp grasses on the highlands, and sometimes losing ourselves for a moment in the clouds that lie late on the mountains; seeing lovely, narrow, and profound vales, wherein the rain fell with a roar like hail; where the streams swelled suddenly like veins, and where often there was no living creature discernible, not even a bird; where silence brooded, and the world seemed empty.

A very long day's journey brought us out of the green and fertile land that lies with its face to the trade-wind; there the clouds gather and shed their rains; but all of the earth lying in the lee of the great central peak of the island is as dust and ashes,—unwatered, unfruitful, and uninteresting, save as a picture of deep and dreadful desolation. No wonder that Kahéle longed to tarry in the small Eden of Méha, knowing that we were about to journey into the deserts that lie beyond it. No wonder that the shining shores of the valley beguiled him, when he knew that henceforth the sea would break upon long reaches of black lava, as unpicturesque as a coal-heap, the path along which was pain, and the waysides anguish of spirit; where fruit was scarce, and water brackish, and every edible dried and deceitful.