“Eat the kuku!” he said. “It will taste better than your grandmother did.”
“Tuitui! Shut your mouth!” retorted Vehine-hae. “There were no thieves in our tribe.”
That was a hot shot at Song’s crimes and penal record, and so animated became their repartee that the governor had to call a halt and demand mutual apologies. The chef informed him that his father in a foray upon Hanavave had taken as a prize of war the grandmother of Ghost Girl, and had eaten her, or at least, whatever tidbit he had liked. It was history that she had been eaten in Taaoa, Song’s home, in the next valley to Atuona. No more vindictive remark than this, nor more hateful action than his offering the kuku to Ghost Girl, could be imagined in the rigid etiquette of Marquesas society. The tears were in the soft eyes of Vehine-hae, and the alarmed governor dismissed Song from further service that evening and took the weeping Fatuhivan in his arms to console her.
“Tapu! Tapu!” sobbed Ghost Girl. The kuku was tapu to her teeth, as the American flag would be to the feet of a patriot. Song was without other belief than in the delight of drink, but Ghost Girl was a woman, the support of every new cult and the prop of every old one. Superstition the world over will die last in the breast of the female. She survives subjugated races, and conserves the past, because her instincts are stronger and her faculties less active than man’s, and her need of worship overwhelming.
That word tapu was still one to conjure with in the Marquesas. Flag, the policeman, and sole deputy of Commissaire Bauda on the island of Hiva-Oa, had invoked it a few days before, after an untoward incident. Bauda and I had returned on horseback from a journey to the other side of the island, and, at the post-tax-police office near the beach where Bauda lived, encountered Flag, drunk. Son of a famous dead chief, and himself an amiable, bright man of thirty, he had not resisted the temptation of Bauda’s being gone for a day, to abstract a bottle of absinthe from a closet and consume the quart. Bauda upbraided him and ordered him to his house, but Flag seized a loaded rifle and sounded an ancient battle-cry. It had the blood-curdling quality of an Indian whoop.
Neither Bauda nor I was armed, and I was for shelter behind a cocoanut-tree. That would not do for Bauda, nor for discipline.
“Me with six campaigns in Africa! Moi qui parle!” exclaimed the former officer of the Foreign Legion, as he tapped his breast and voiced his astonishment at Flag’s temerity. He strode toward the staggering mutoi, and, with utter disregard of the rifle, reached his side. He wrenched the weapon from him, and with a series of kicks drove him into the calaboose and locked the door on him.
Photo from L. Gauthier
Ghost girl
