Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

I had seen but a glimpse of the “old woman” that evening. She had not appeared openly, perhaps because of the rigid rule of Lutz, or perhaps from pique. On the road, though, I had said good day to her, a huge sack of a middle-aged creature, long past comeliness, but with an engaging and strong personality. The words of Père David and of Bauda recurred to me before I slept. The “old woman” had been here fourteen years, and her sudden repatriation coincided with Mademoiselle Narbonne’s coming into her fortune, and her restlessness for a white husband.

I sensed a conflict. Tahitian women, as well as all these Polynesians, were seldom afflicted by sexual jealousy, the soul-ravaging curse of culture, yet they had a pride, an overwhelming dignity of personal relations, which often brought the same dire results. The rejected one many times had eaten the eva, the poisonous fruit, or leaped to death from a cliff, though she would have shared the house mats with her rival as a friend. That was because they ranked mere physical alliance as but a part of friendship between men and women, often an unimportant beginning, in the natural way of propertyless races.

“Lutz will not get rid of Maná so easily.” François Grelet, the shrewd Swiss, of Oomoa, on the island of Fatuhiva, whom I had visited following my evening with Lutz, had remarked to me: “She has as much strength of will as he has. Her father was the chief of Papenoo, in Tahiti, and Lutz had to steal her away to bring her here. I remember her then because the schooner, on which they were, made port in Oomoa for a few days. Lutz was in his twenties, with a year in Tahiti to learn the business before his firm sent him to the Marquesas. Now, you know, for Maná to leave her folks and her island meant a very unusual courage and will, and she has stuck with Lutz all this time. He is heavy-handed, too, when vexed over waste. I don’t think it will be a matter of settling with her as to support; they all have a living at home. Also, the Tahitians do not love the Marquesans. You will see!”

I had returned from my visit to Grelet, when, arriving at night in a canoe to the stone steps at the Tahauku landing, Tetuahunahuna, the steersman, pointed out to me the dark bulk of a schooner swinging at anchor.

“Fetia Taiao,” he said. It was the schooner on which Lutz’s old woman was to depart from her long-time abode.

In the weeks that had elapsed during my stay with Grelet, the affair of Mademoiselle Narbonne and Herr Lutz had actually become the gossip of Atuona. The church, the French nation, the masculinity of all the other whites, were concerned. The suitor was said to pay almost daily visits to the Narbonne house in Taaoa, and I saw him galloping past my house in the afternoons, and heard sometimes in the night, his shod horse’s hoofs on the pebbly road.

“It is terrible,” Sister Serapoline said to me, when I took her a catch of popo to the convent. “That German is a heathen, and has been living in sin with a good woman for years. Now he will drag down to hell the soul of our dear Barbe. We are offering a novena to Joan of Arc to bring her to us. She has not been in the church or convent for a month. She would make a wonderful sister, for she has a good heart and a true devotion to Joan of Arc. And, to tell the truth, her money would be put to a divine purpose instead of going into his business here or being wasted in Germany.”

“What about Maná?” I asked. “Is she satisfied to go away?”

“That I doubt, but Maná, too, has not been inside the church for a long time. Monsieur, I have heard that she has fallen from the true religion, and is dealing with sorcery. The devil is astir in Atuona now.”

Song of the Nightingale was of Taaoa, the valley of Mademoiselle Narbonne, and, as I said, had once been the lover of her mother. Through serving a term of imprisonment for making intoxicants of oranges and of the juice of the flower of the cocoanut-tree, his servitude spent as cook for the Governor allowed him leisure for a few stolen hours with his tribe. Song was a very evil man; of that perverse disposition which afflicts great murderers like Gilles de Raiz or the Marquis de Sade, and also cowardly ones who do in mean words and accursed inuendoes what the arch villains do in deeds. He hated because he was thwarted. Before the white régime he would have set valley against valley, and island against island for mad spleen. I had seen his vileness in a ludicrous light when he had put Ghost Girl’s god, the kuku, before her as food, and had reviled her grandmother eaten by his clan. He often made fun of the governor to me, and of me, doubtless, to many.