Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

CHAPTER XIII

Story of the wondrous pearls planted in the lagoon of Pukapuka—Tepeva a Tepeva, the crippled diver, tells it—How a European scientist improved on nature—Tragedy of Patasy and Mauraii—The robbed coral bank—Death under the sea.

THE palace of the governor was within half a mile of my abode in the vale of Atuona, on the island of Hiva-Oa, the capital of the Marquesan Archipelago. It was a broad and deep valley, “the most beautiful, and by far the most ominous and gloomy, spot on earth,” said Stevenson. Umbrageous and silent, it was watered by a stream, which, born in the distant hills, descended in falls and rills and finally a chattering brook to the bay. Magnificent forests of many kinds of trees, a hundred vines and flowers, with rarest orchids, and a tangled mass of grasses and creepers, lined the banks of the little river, and filled the rising confines of the dell, which, as it climbed, grew narrower and darker, and more melancholy of aspect, the poignant melancholy of a sad loveliness past telling or analyzing. A huge fortress of rocks rose almost sheer above my cottage, lowering in shadow and terrible in storm, the highest point in the Marquesas. In sunshine it was the brilliant rampart of the world-god’s battlement, reflecting his flashing rays, and throwing a sheen of luminosity upon the depths of the strath. This lofty peak of Temetiu, nearly a mile in the sky, was the tower of a vast structure of broken hills, gigantic columns, pinnacles, tilted and vertical rocks, ruins of titanic battles of fire and water in ages gone. I had but to lift my eyes and lower them to know that man here as in the Paumotus had but triflingly affected his environment. From the castellated summits to the beach where I had landed, the dwellings of humans seemed lost in the dense foliage dominated by the lofty cocoanuts and the spreading breadfruits.

The palace of the young French administrator was in a garden in which grew exotic flowers brought by predecessors who sought to assuage their nostalgia by familiar charms. The palace had large verandas, and they were most of it, as in all tropical countries where mosquitoes are not too menacing. The reading and lounging, the eating and drinking, took place there, and generally a delicious breeze cooled the humid air and drove away any insects that might annoy. Almost daily I was the guest of the governor at a meal, or in the evening after dinner, for a merry hour or two. We might be alone, or with André Bauda, the tax collector, postmaster, and chief of police, or not seldom with one or more of the fairest of the Marquesan girls of the island of Hiva-Oa. For the governor was host not only to the beauties of our valley of Atuona, but sent Flag, the native mutoi, or policeman, of the capital, to other villages over the mountains, to invite those whom Flag thought would lessen his ennui. Far from his beloved Midi, the governor retained a Gallic and gallant attitude toward young women, and never tired of their prattle, their insatiable thirst for the beverages of France, and their light laughter when lifted out of their habitual gravity by these. Determined to learn their tongue as quickly as possible, being no longer resident than I in the Marquesas, he kept about him a lively lexicon or two to furnish him words and practice. Midnight often came with the rest of the village already hours upon their sleeping-mats, but on the palace porches a gabble of conversation, the lilt of a chant, or perhaps the patter of a hula dance of bare feet upon the boards. The Protestant and Catholic missionaries, though opposed to each other upon doctrinal and disciplinary subjects, united in condemnation of the conduct of the high representative of sovereignty. But, like the governor of the Paumotus, he replied: “La vie est triste; vive la bagatalle.” Life is sad; let joy be unconfined.

The governor’s ménage had only one attendant, Song of the Nightingale, and he served only because he was a prisoner, and preferred the domestic duties to repairing trails or sitting all day in the calaboose by the beach. There was no servant in the Marquesas. Whatever civilization had done to them,—and it had undone them almost entirely,—it had not made them menials. There was never a slave. Here death was preferable. In Tahiti one might procure native domestics with extreme difficulty through their momentary craving for gauds, or through affection, but one bought no subservience. The silent, painstaking European or American or Asiatic, the humble, sir-ring butler and footman, could not be matched in the South Seas. If they liked one, these indolent people would work for one now and then, but must be allowed to have their own way and say, and, if reproved, it must be in the tone one used to a child or a relative. The governor himself was compelled to endure Song of the Nightingale’s lapses and familiarities, because he was the only procurable cook in the islands. He could not buy or persuade one of his lovely guests, clothed as they were but in a single garment, to wash a plate or shake a mat. I, it was true, was assisted by Exploding Eggs, a boy of fourteen years, but I made him an honored companion and neophyte whom I initiated into the mysteries of coffee-making and sweeping, and he, too, often wandered away for a day or two without warning.

The table was spread on the veranda when at seven o’clock I opened the garden gate of the palace. Flag had delivered to me an enveloped card with studious ceremony, the governor sometimes observing the extreme niceties of official hospitality, and again throwing them to the winds, especially in very hot weather. Flag, barelegged and barefooted as always, wore the red-striped jacket of the mutoi and a loin-cloth, and carried a capacious leather pouch from which he had extracted the made-in-Paris carte d’invitation. To him it was a mysterious summons to a Lucullan feast which he might not even look upon. The governor was dressing when I mounted the porch, and I was received by Song of the Nightingale. He was a middle-aged desperado, with a leering face, given a Mephistophelian cast by a black whisker extending from ear to ear, and by heavy lines of blue tattooing upon his forehead. He had white blood in him, I felt sure, for he had a cunning wickedness of aspect that lacked the simplicity of the Marquesan. He had been a prisoner many years for various offenses, but mostly for theft or moonshining, at which he was adept, and he was the one Marquesan I would not trust; he had been too much with whites. One wondered at times whether one’s life was not the pawn of a mood of such a villain, but the French had hammered their dominion upon these sons of man-eaters with lead and steel in the early days, though they were easy and negligent rulers over the feeble remnant.

The handsome governor came from his boudoir as Vehine-hae and Tahia-veo said “Kaoha!” Vehine-hae and Tahia-veo were their names in Marquesan, which translated exactly Ghost Girl and Miss Tail. The latter was a petite, engaging girl of seventeen, a brunette in color, and modest and sweet in disposition. Ghost Girl was the enigma of her sex there, nineteen or twenty, living alone in a detached hut, and singularly beautiful. She was as dark as a Nubian, with a voluptuous figure, small hands and feet, and baggage eyes of melting sepia that promised devotion unutterable. Her nose was straight and perfect, and her sensual mouth filled with shining teeth. Of all the Marquesan girls she wore a travesty of European dress. They in public wore a tight-fitting peignoir or tunic, and in private a pareu, but Ghost Girl had on a silk bodice open to disclose her ripe symmetry, and a lace petticoat about which she wore a silk kerchief. In her ebon heap of hair she wore the phosphorescent flowers of the Rat’s Ear. Her mind was that of a child of ten, inquisitive and acquisitive, exhibitive and demanding.

The governor seated us, the ladies opposite each other, and the dinner began with appetizers of vermouth. The aromatic wine, highly fortified as it was, burned the throat of Miss Tail, but Ghost Girl drank hers with zest, and said, “Motaki! That’s fine!” Neither of the girls spoke more than a few sentences of French, though they had both been in the nuns’ school, but we were able with our knowledge of Marquesan and Song’s fragmentary French to carry on a lively interchange of words, if not of thought.

The governor had shot a few brace of kuku, the green doves of the forest, and Song had spitted them over a purau wood fire. With the haunch of a wild goat from the hills we had excellent fare, with claret and white wine from Sauterne. We two palefaces wielded forks, but as no Polynesians use such very modern inventions the ladies lifted their meat to their months without artificial aid. Ghost Girl, as befitting her European attire, tried to use a fork, but shrieked with pain when she succeeded in putting only the tines into her tongue. We hardly realize the pains our mothers were at to teach us table-manners, nor that gentlemen of Europe ate with their fingers at a period when chop-sticks were in common use in China and Japan, except in time of mourning.

Song of the Nightingale, who, doubtless, had indulged his convict hankering for alcohol in the secret recesses of the kitchen, laughed loudly at Ghost Girl’s pain, and when he placed a platter of the kuku on the cloth, and she refused to accept one of the grilled birds his snigger became derisive. He took up the carving-fork and stuck it deep into a kuku’s breast and put it on her plate. She shuddered and started back, with her hands covering her long-lashed eyes. The governor demanded in a slightly angry tone to know what Song had done to frighten her. The cook explained that Ghost Girl was of Hanavave, on the island of Fatuhiva, a day’s journey distant, and that the bon dieu or god—he said pony-too—of Fatuhiva was the kuku. She had been appalled at his suggestion that she should eat the symbolic tenement of her mother’s deity, though she herself ate the transubstantiated host at communion in the Catholic church at Atuona. Not content with his insult to her ancestral god, and, taking his cue from the governor’s roar of laughter at his French or his explanation, the cruel Song said a bitter thing to Ghost Girl.