Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“Across his eyes upon the lids, and from ear to ear, I made a line as wide as two of your teeth, and I crossed lines as wide from the corners of his forehead to the corners of his chin. As he was to be admitted to the Lodge of Tattooers, I put upon his brow the sacred shark as big as Titihuti’s hand. I was four moons in all that, and all the time he must lie within his hut, never leaving it or speaking. I handed him food and nursed him between my work. Upon our darker skin the black candlenut ink is, as you know, as blue as the deep waters of the sea, but on him it was black as night, for his flesh was white.

“He was handsome as ever god of war in the High Place, that foreigner, and terrible to behold. His eyes of blue in their black frames were as threatening as the thunders of the ocean, and above the black shark glistened his hair, as yellow as the sands of the shore. A breadfruit season had passed when we descended the mountain, and he was received into the tribe of Hanavave. We called him Tohiki for his splendor, though his name was Villee, as we could say it.”

There is a curious quibble in the recital of the Polynesian. He arrives at a crisis of his tale, and avoids it for a piece of wit or an idle remark. Perhaps it is to pique the listener’s interest, to deepen his attention, or it is but the etiquette of the bard.

“Titihuti?” I interposed.

“Tuitui!” he ejaculated. “You put weeds in my mouth. That girl, that Titihuti, had left her paepae and vanished. Some said she dwelt with a lover in another valley. Others that she had been captured at night by the men of Oi Valley. It was always our effort to seize the women of other tribes. They made the race stronger. But Titihuti was not in Oi or with a lover. Her love was her beauty, and soon we learned that she was gone into the hills herself to be tattooed. You, American, have seen her legs, and know the full year she gave to those. They are even to-day the hana metai oko, the loveliest and most perfect of all living things.”

“And Willie, the splendid Tokihi, what said he?”

“Aue! He dashed up and down the valleys seeking her. He offered gifts for her return. He cried and he drank. But the tattooing is tabu, and it would have been death to have entered the hut where she was against the wish of the artist. Then he turned on me and cursed me, and often he sat and looked at himself in the pool in the brook by his own paepae. That foreigner lost his good heart. No longer was he kind and gentle. It was he who led us against the valley of Oomoa, and with his gun wrought great harm to those people. It was he who was ready to fight at but the drop of a cocoanut upon his roof. He took no women, and he became the fiercest man of Hanavave. When the year had gone, and Titihuti came back, he would not see her in the dance, though in it she showed her decorative legs for the first time. He cursed her, too, and said she was a sister of the feki, the devilfish. He dwelt among us for several years as one who leads the tribe, but is not of it. Often he but missed death by the breadth of a grain of sand, for he flung himself on the spears, he fought the sea when it was angered, and he drank each night of the namu, the wine of the cocoanut flower grown old, until he reeled to his mat as a canoe tossing at the fishing.

“Then one day came a canoe from Taiohae, with words on paper for him from his own people. A ship from his island was there and had sent on the paper. That was a day to remember. There were with the paper tiki, those faces of people you make on paper. Villee seized those things, and, running to his paepae, he sat him down and began to look them over. He eyed the words, and he put the tiki to his lips. Then he lay down upon his mat and wept. For much time he was like a child. He rolled about as if he had been struck in the body by a war-club, and at last he called me. I went to him with a shell of namu.

“‘Drink!’ I said. ‘It will lift you up.’

“He knocked the shell from my hand.