Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Not even the pitiful plight of the bone-white daughter of the drunkard, Peyral, appealed to me as did the conspiracy of life and ungenerous men against the happiness of this singular creature, Mademoiselle Narbonne.

From the painting by Oscar F. Schmidt
Nakohu, Exploding Eggs

From the painting by Oscar F. Schmidt
Haabuani, the sole sculptor of Hiva-Oa

I recall the impression the first sight of her made upon me. I was by the door of the Catholic Church, the service half over, when she came in, and knelt at a prie-dieu especially placed for her. Wealth had its privilege in the house of God here as in the temple of Solomon. But Mademoiselle Narbonne had another claim to distinction though it did not win favor with the church. She was exotically beautiful, a distracting and fascinating contrast with the almost savage girls who knelt in the pews in their cotton tunics of red or white or pink. She had the grace of a hothouse flower among these blossoms of half-savage nature. She was an orchid among wild roses.

Peyral was then in process of winning me into his family, and both communicative and monitory.

“She is old Narbonne’s daughter,” he croaked. “The richest person in the Marquesas, now that her father is dead, but I wouldn’t be her with all her money. Me, I value my skin!”

My whole attention was upon her, and the possible sinister meaning of his comment escaped me. Whites blackguarded other whites so commonly in the South Seas that one discounted or denied every judgment. I was to understand his implication later. Mademoiselle Narbonne had no part in the life of our valley of Atuona, nor did she come to it other times than when she attended the services at the Catholic church or visited the nuns with whom she had been from childhood until the death of her father a few months before. Upon inheriting his vast cocoanut-groves and considerable money she had said good-bye to her ascetic guardians and left the convent walls to take possession of her dead parent’s house and estate. These were in the adjoining valley of Taaoa, and with her in the ugly European home built by him lived the stepmother she had known, and the mother whom he had driven away with blows, years before, when he caught her in a tryst with Song of the Nightingale.

I met her towards sunset a week later. During that time, I had often wondered what her temperament might be, and what the future would spin for her. Many Daughters, Ghost Girl, and other all Marquesan girls were striking in their aboriginal, hatched-carved beauty, but seemed at opposite poles to Mademoiselle Narbonne in sophistication and elegance. And yet at times I caught in her a glimpse of savagery, of wilful passion and abandonment to her senses beyond that upon the faces of these daughters of cannibals. The key to that occasional shift into barbarity I found in her home. Her father had been a driving, sober, and fierce Frenchman, a native of Cayenne, in Guiana, where the French in three hundred years have achieved only a devil’s island for convicts with cruelty and foulness festering under the tricolor. Narbonne in the Marquesas had risen from a discharged corporal of marines to manager of the Catholic mission properties, and, by hook and crook, owner of countless cocoanut-trees. This child of his thirty years of banishment from his own deadly natal land was the one treasure he had cherished besides property. He had endured dangers in his early career here, fought and subdued swaggering chief and tropical nature, to erect a massive tomb of concrete, and to leave this daughter. She was already apathetic to his memory, and disregardful of the advice he had given always with mingled caresses and cuffs.