CHAPTER XV
The dismal abode of the Peyrals—Stark-white daughter of Peyral—Only white maiden in the Marquesas—I hunt wild bulls—Peyral’s friendliness—I visit his house—He strikes me and threatens to kill me—I go armed—Explanation of the bizarre tragic comedy.
AS I walked up from the beach of Atuona, where I had touched the shore of the Marquesas for the first time, I had remarked a European dwelling, squalid, forbidding and peculiarly desolate. Painted black originally, the heat and storms of years had worn and defaced it, the sun had shrunk the boards from one another, and posts and beams had gone awry. It was set in a cocoanut-grove, the trees so close together that their huge fronds joined and roofed out sky and light. The narrow road along the grove had been raised later, and formed a dike so that with the heavy rains of the season the land all about was a gloomy marsh to which the sun seldom penetrated. The dingy gallery of the house fronting the road had a broken rail and dilapidated stairs, and in the shallow swamp and about the entrance were cast-off articles of household and plantation. A dismaying mingling of decayed European inventions with native bareness framed a dismal and foreboding scene, contrasting with the brilliancy of nature in the open.
I had felt a sudden fear of the possibilities of degradation, as if the dreary house were a symbol of the white man’s deterioration in these wild places. A sense of physical and spiritual abandonment to alien environment, without fitness of soul or habit, depressed me.
As we passed, I saw on the veranda a girl of sixteen or seventeen, with a white face and light blue eyes. Her long yellow hair was slightly confined by a piece of ribbon, but hung down loose on her rounded shoulders. She wore a blue cotton gown, becoming and not in keeping with her soiled and frayed surroundings. She seemed not to notice us until we were opposite her, when she raised her head and glanced at us a moment. Those off the schooner she must have known, for she fixed her eyes on me the fleeting instant of her gaze. They had the innocence and appeal of a fawn and the melancholy and detachment of a cloistered nun. There was no curiosity in them, though we were the only white visitors in months, and had come with the new governor, who had landed but the day before. A second or two her eyes met mine and conveyed an unconscious message of youth and sorrow, of budding womanhood that had had no guidance or companionship, and only sad dreams.
From the room opening on the gallery a man came and shouted to us “Bon jour!” in a raven-like croak. He was in soiled overalls, barefooted, and reeling drunk. His brown hair and beard had not been cut for months or years, and rudely margined his bloated, grievous face, of rugged strength, in which grim despair contended with fierce pride.
“That is Peyral,” said Ducat, the second mate of the Fetia Taiao. He is always half-seas over, except when he sews. He is the village tailor, and makes the priest’s gowns and clothes for any one who will buy them. That daughter of his is the only white girl in the Marquesas. She is all white, and he keeps her chained in that dark house as if he was afraid some one would eat her.”
“You know bloody well why ’e keeps ’er there,” said Lying Bill. “’E knows you an’ me and ’Allman and ’earty bucks like us is not to be trusted; ’at’s why! I knew ’er mother and ’er grandparents. ’E was a British calvary officer ’oo ’ad served in Injia, an’ come ’ere with ’is wife, an Irish lady, to take charge of the store an’ plantation now owned by the Germans at Tahaaku. They ’ad one daughter. Peyral was a non-com. on a French war-ship that come ’ere to shoot up the natives, an’ ’e was purty good to look at then. ’E could do anything, an’ when ’e got ’is papers from the French navy ’e went to work for the plantation, courted the girl, an’, when ’er parents weren’t lookin’, married ’er. They died, an’ ’e set up a proper ’ouse ’ere, an’ was bloomin’ prosp’rous till ’is wife died o’ the pokoko, this gallopin’ consumption that takes off the natives. Then he give in, and went to ’ell. ’E ’as three girls, two little ones, an’ ‘ow they live I don’t know. When ’is wife died ’e painted that ’ouse black, an’ ’e ain’t touched it since. ’E gathers ’is copra, an’ makes a few clo’s now an’ ’en, an’ spends all the money on absinthe. The girl looks after ’er sisters, but ’e guards ’er like a bleedin’ dragon. She never goes off the veranda there now except to church on Sundays and ’olidays. I don’t know what’ll ’e do with ’er, but ’e’ll kill any one that goes too near ’er like Ducat ’ere or meself.”
When I was settled in the House of the Golden Bed, as the Marquesans called the cabin I had rented from Apporo, the wife of Great Fern, in exchange for my brass bed at my departure, I went almost every day with Exploding Eggs to the beach to fish or swim or to ride the surf on a board. The road wended from my house past the garden of the palace and thence to the sea. Between the governor’s and the beach was only Peyral’s noisome residence, and twice a day I passed it within a few feet. Sometimes he was at his sewing-machine on the veranda, or gathering the cocoanuts that had fallen and drying them in the sun, but generally the shaggy Breton was in a stupor or murmurously intoxicated, sitting on a bench or lying on the ground, and talking to himself in the way of morose, unsocial men when inebriated. His daughter was usually on the veranda sewing by hand, or apparently wrapt in thoughts which obscured her consciousness and painted despondence on her countenance. I tried not to stare at her, but when I made sure that she was oblivious of me, or intentionally not seeing, I observed her narrowly.