Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Song stopped at my house one night late. He was returning from Taaoa, and had drunk deeply of the illicit namu enata, the cocoanut brandy. He begged me for a drink of rum, and I could ill refuse him as he had filled my glass so frequently at the palace. He tossed off a shell of the ardent liquor, and filled his pipe from my tin. Then he began to talk loosely and boastfully as was his habit. He ridiculed the churches, and their teachings, and spoke of Gauguin, and his carven caricature of the bishop. Gauguin was a “chick tippee,” he said again, and not any more afraid of the sacrament than was he.

“They cannot hurt you if you are tapu as I am,” he went on. “The priest talks of Satan and his red-hot fork, and calls the taua, our one remaining priest, a child of Satan. I have been to see that taua. He is of my family, and, though he is very old, he does not believe in the Christian magic, but in our own. He can do anything he wants to a Marquesan. He can make them sick or well.”

“How about a white?” I asked, negligently.

“I don’t say that. The taua might work his sorcery with some, but he does not try. Do you know whom I saw in his hut to-night? Maná, the woman of Lutz, the Heremani. What did she there? Why do you go to the mission? To get the bon Dieu to help you. Maná went to Taaoa to ask the Marquesan Po, the god of night, to help her. The Taua did not inform me, but Maná said to me that if she sailed on the Fetia Taiao to Tahiti, Ma’m’selle would never marry Lutz. The taua would make her tapu to the Heremani, who would be afraid to take her to his bed.”

Song of the Nightingale poured himself another drink, and, muttering an incantation in his own language, slunk out toward the palace to hoodwink the governor. My heart misgave me, for I had a sincere admiration for Mademoiselle Narbonne, and I could not help a kindly feeling for the Heremani, Lutz, who had heaped favors on me. When my money had run out, he had trusted me for months, though he had my bare word that I expected a draft from America. My sympathies were divided odiously. Lutz seemed to be mercenary in his pursuit of Narbonne’s daughter, and yet might not love move him? He had been faithful to Maná for fourteen years, according to everybody, which was a marvel for a white man. Maná was to be pitied, and her endeavor to circumvent her competitor not to be despised. I could not sneer at the sorcery of the taua. In Hawaii, I had seen a charming half-English girl, educated and living in a cultured home, yield to a belief in the necromancy of a Hawaiian kahuna, and die. Her strength “ran out like water.” With everything to live for, she faded into the grave at twenty.

How was taua to aid Maná to keep the affections of Lutz? The philter that Julia sought on the slopes of Vesuvius to win the love of Glaucus came to mind, but the tauas, I remembered, used no physical means to work their spells. They depended entirely on the mind. They studied its every intricacy, and the power of suggestion was, I reasoned, their weapon and medicine as it was with Charcot, Freud, or Coué, the modern tauas of Europe. In my travels and residence of a dozen years in Asia and the South Seas, I had been confronted often with phenomena inexplicable except through control of others’ minds by the thaumaturgist. Nevertheless, I had so frequently had such an opinion shattered by a more artful and cunning material explanation that at each instance I wavered as to the method of the mage.

The schooner Morning Star, the Fetia Taiao, swung about the Marquesan group, from Tahauku to Taiohae, Oomoa, and Vaitahu, and after a month dropped anchor again near the stone steps of Lutz’s magazin. Lying Bill I met at the governor’s, and heard him say that he had as passenger for Papeete the “old woman of the Dutchman.”

“I’ll sail with the first ‘an’ful o’ wind after we load our copra,” he said. “That’ll be in three days. Maná is bloomin’ well angry at Lutz. I’m wonderin’ if she won’t go over to Taaoa and ’ook out those purty eyes o’ Ma’m’selle. ’E oughta ’ave Mc’Enry’s woman to deal with. She’d take a war-club to im.”

Lutz had me to dinner again the night before the schooner left, and at table were, besides Jensen and the Hamburg apprentice, Captain Pincher and Ducat, his mate. I did not get a glimpse of Maná, though Lutz appeared uneasy, and occasionally went out into the kitchen and once into the garden. The good Patzenhofer beer was plentifully served by the Tongan, and, un-iced as it was, we drank several cases of it with “Hochs!” from Lutz and the Hamburger, “Skoals!” from Jensen, and “‘Ere’s yer bloody ’ealths!” from Lying Bill.

McHenry, I learned, was keeping a store on the atoll of Takaroa. The rahui at Takaroa was finished, and the divers dispersed. No great pearl had been brought up, though Mapuhi and his tribe had had a bountiful season. Our party broke up about midnight, and, after the seafarers had gone down the basalt stairs to their boat, and his clerks were in bed, Lutz and I sat a few minutes. He, perhaps, wanted to avow his intentions regarding Barbe Narbonne, to justify himself about Maná, and to gain from me the comfort of my concurrence in his ethics and ambitions, but his stiff Prussian bringing-up forbade him. Instead, he spoke of his childhood at Frankfort, his education, and his failure to go to a University on account of poverty. At seventeen, he had been put to work in an exporting house in Hamburg, and had passed seven years as an underling with small pay. His chance had come when debts due the company in Tahiti called for an experienced man in goods and finance to go to Papeete and wring a settlement from the debtor. He had been able to please his firm, and to buy out the failing concern by Hamburg backing. In the fourteen years since, he had been exiled in Tahauku, and despite his grinding efforts and many voluntary privations, had not amassed much. His mother and father in Germany were dependent on him, and he had not been able once to visit them because of the expense.