TUAMOTU ARCHIPELAGO
(PACIFIC OCEAN)
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The cabin was one room, stuffy and hot, and malodorous of decades of cargo. A small table in the center for dining was alone free from shelves and boxes holding merchandise, which was displayed as in a country store. Besides all kinds of articles salable to a primitive people, there were foods in barrels, boxes, tins, and glass, for whites and for educated native palates.
Jean Moet, the commander of the Marara, was of the type of French sailor encountered in the Mediterranean, and especially about Marseilles and Spanish ports. He had a slight person, with hair and moustache black as the stones of Papenoo beach—nervous, excitable, moving incessantly, gesturing with every word. Twenty-eight of his forty years had been passed in ships. He had visited the Ile du Diable, and had seen Dreyfus there; he chattered of New York, Senegal, Yokohama, Cayenne, was full of French ocean oaths, breaking into English or Spanish to enlighten me or press a point, singing a Parisian music-hall chansonette, or a Spanish cancioncita. His language was a curious hodge-podge bespeaking the wanderings of the man and his intensely mercurial temperament.
His wife, who sailed with him on all voyages since their marriage five years before, was his opposite—large-boned and heavy, like a Millet peasant, looking at her brilliant husband as a wistful cow at her master, but not fearing to caution him against extravagance in stimulant or money. Her life had begun in Tahiti, and she had always been there until the dashing son of the Midi had lifted her from the house of her father—a petty official—to the deck of the Flying Fish. She was a housekeeper and accountant.
She paid especial attention to the shelves of pain-killers, cough cures, perunas, bitters and medical discoveries from America, which, in islands where all alcoholic liquors were forbidden to the aborigines, sold readily to all who sickened for them. Moet was affectionate but stern toward Virginie, the wife, and talked to her as does a kind but wise master to a trained seal.
For breakfast, the captain, Madame Moet, McHenry, and I had canned sardines, canned hash from Chicago, California olives, canned pineapple from Hawaii, and red wine from Bordeaux.
Virginie explained in Tahitian French that Jean had forgotten to get aboard stores of fresh food. He had been at the Cercle Bougainville until we had gone aboard, she said caustically. Jean put his arm about her fat waist.
“Mais, dar-leeng,” he said, soothingly, “tais-toi!” And then to me, “We are camarades, ma femme y mi, compañeros buenos. Ma wife she wash ze linge. That good, eh? Amerique ze woman got boss hand now. Diable! C’est rottan! Hombre, ze wife ees for ze cuisine, and ze babee.”
He pressed her middle, and advised her to clear up the table while we went on deck for a smoke.