“Tahiatauani, my wife, my wife!” he cried out. The Marquesan weeps with facility. Hour after hour this stalwart fellow let fall tears, lying on the ground in agony. Then he rose and said no more about it.
Easter Sunday went out in a blaze of riotous glory. I saw Ah Suey after nightfall inquiring anxiously and angrily for his daughter. The nuns had reported to him that she had failed to appear for vespers. That night in the breadfruit-grove by the High Place they enacted the old orgies of pre-Christian days. Thirty men and women, mostly young, sang the ancient songs and danced by the lights of lanterns, of candlenuts and fagots, and to the sound of the booming drums.
I sat at wine the next day with Father David in the mission-house. It was bare and ugly as all convents, having the scant, ascetic, uncomfortable atmosphere that monks and nuns dwell in all over the world—no ornaments, no good pictures, no ease. Stark walls, stiff chairs, and the staring, rude crucifix over the door. The apostolic vicar censured the Government severely. He plucked his long, black beard nervously, and spoke his feelings in the imperious manner of a mortal who holds the keys of the kingdom of heaven, castigating fools who wouldn’t even learn there was a door. There was no trace of personal pride.
“The government here and in France is unjust to the church. We suffer from the impiety and wickedness of French officials. The people of France are right at heart, but the politicians are Antichrists. The Protestants are bad enough, but the French are Catholics, or should be. This young governor here is a veritable heathen, and has shown the people the road to hell again, when they had hardly trod the via trita, via tuta. He and Bauda are godless men. Monsieur, rum is forbidden to be given to a Marquesan, yet the valley floats in rum. I know that to get copra made one must stretch the strict rod of the law a trifle, but not to drunkenness, nor to dances of the devil, dances, that, frowned upon, might be forgotten.”
The governor, Commissaire Bauda, and I dined that night on the palace veranda, and afterward we had an animated discussion. I wrote it down verbatim:
Governor. What was it Père David said to you, mon ami?
I. He said that the Catholic church was badly treated by the officials here.
Governor. Yes, he wants another great slice of land. Oh, that church is insatiable! One of my predecessors, Grosfillez, fought them. Here is his report in the archives: He says that, contrary to their claims that they have caused the republic to be loved here, that they have taught the Franch language, and have raised the natives from savagery, from immorality and evil manners, the facts are that they have not changed a particle the morals of the Marquesans, that they taught in their schools a trifling smattering of French, and that they did not make France loved and respected, but sought the domination of their order, the Picpus Congregation, at the expense of the Government. This domination they forced in the early days at the point of the bayonet, to the sacrifice of the lives of French officers and soldiers.
Bauda. That is true here and everywhere we French have gone. We have died to spread the power of the church. Nom d’un chien! Six campaigns in Africa, me! Et pire alors! Did not General La Grande pin this decoration on me?
Governor. Here is the very letter of Grosfillez to the authorities. He says that he visited the school at Taiohae, and that when he spoke to the pupils, many of them three or four years in the school, the good sister asked permission to translate his simple words into canaque so they could understand. Sapristi! Is that teaching French? Is not the calendar of the church here filled with foolishness, and almost all in canaque? Hein? Read this: