Her mother, Climber of Trees Who Was Killed and Eaten, who had been banished from his house for her unfaithfulness, had returned after his death to share it with Daughter of a Piece of Tattooing, who had replaced her. Between the two women was no jealousy, both enjoying the ease their hard years of serving the Cayennais had earned them. In Climber of Trees I traced the source of those pagan moods which now and then swept from the face of Barbe Narbonne the least vestige of the mask the nuns had taught her to wear, and let be read the undammed passion and wind-free will of the real Marquesan woman.
“I will not be a sœur,” she said to me. “The nuns are dear to me, and they want me to come into the convent, or to go to France for training to return here. I am waiting to know life. I am not satisfied with the love of the saints and of the Blessed Virgin.”
“You are able to go where you please,” I answered. “You do not have to go to France as a Religious. Paris would welcome you. Board the next schooner for Tahiti, and you are on the way to the wide world.”
Mademoiselle Narbonne made a gesture of fear. Few Marquesans had ever gone abroad; there were terrors in the thought. It had been tapu to leave their island home, and, though, as far as Christianity might work the miracle, she had in the convent been purged of most of her mother’s superstitions, she had not rid herself of this one.
“I would not care to go that great distance,” she said, dreamingly, “but I would like to go to Tahiti, to see the cinema, and perhaps the celebration of the fourteenth of July. I have for years sent to Paris for my clothes. I have read many novels despite the sisters forbid it. I have one here that I wish you might talk to me about. Many nights I have sat up to read it.”
She handed me a yellow paper-covered book, “Jean et Louise,” by Antonin Dusserre, a story of pastoral and village life in Auvergne, and the unfortunate loves of a simple peasant youth and maid. Its atmosphere was of the clean earth, the herds, and the harvests in a lost corner of France. Its action did not cover ten miles, yet the hate and injustice, the desires and defeats of its little world were drawn with such skill that they became universal. The author, himself a man in sabots, had breathed into his model of common clay the life of all humanity. I had read the book, and I was eager to hear her opinion of it; of an existence, artless as it was, still as alien to her knowledge as ancient Greece.
“What do you think about it?” I asked. She spoke French vividly, though with many Marquesan insets.
“Jean and Louise loved each other,” she replied, “and, because she was poor and had no money to give a husband, his father separated them; and Jean allowed it. Already, Monsieur Frederick, the girl had shown her true love for him by spending the night with him in the hills with their sheep, and everybody knew she would have a child. That Jean was an assassin and a coward. Me, I would kill such a man if I loved him, but I could not love that kind.”
Barbe Narbonne’s black eyes flashed with her feeling.
“I am frank with you, Monsieur, because you are a stranger. You are not French nor Marquesan. I am both, and I hate and love both. I hate the French for what they have done to my mother’s race, and I hate the Marquesans for not preferring to die than to be conquered. I have not had a lover. I cannot find one here that can satisfy me. If I did, he might have all my money and land. I would want a man who could read books, who was honest and strong, but who knew and liked this island of Hiva-Oa, who could ride and fight. He must love me as”—she paused to weigh her comparison—“as nuns love Christ, for whom they leave their homes in France.”