Kahuiti had one, and dear to the heart of that remarkable anthropophagus. It was a striking figure of an old god, and a couple of feet square, and in the painter’s most characteristic style.
When I asked him to sell it to me, he opened wide those large brown eyes which had looked a hundred times at the advancing spear, and had watched the cooking of his slain enemy. He said nothing but the words, “Tiki hoa pii! An image by my dear friend!”
I smoked a pipe with him, and went back to Atuona thoughtful.
Gauguin made many enemies, but he kept his friends even in death.
“Toujours tout a vous de cœur,” he had signed his letters to his one or two friends, with rare sincerity.
Gauguin had deserted Tahiti because of his frequent quarrels with the representatives of the Government there, and with the church. He precipitated a similar situation in Atuona almost immediately. In his “Intimate Journals,” he tells of it:
The first news that reached me on my arrival at Atuona was that there was no land to be bought or sold, except at the mission.... Even so, as the bishop was away, I should have to wait a month. My trunks and a shipment of building lumber waited on the beach. During this month, as you can well imagine, I went to mass every Sunday, forced as I was to play the rôle of a good Catholic and a railer against the Protestants. My reputation was made, and His reverence, without suspecting my hypocrisy, was quite willing (since it was I) to sell me a small plot of ground filled with pebbles and underbrush for 650 francs. I set to work courageously, and, thanks once more to some men recommended by the bishop, I was soon settled.
Hypocrisy has its good points. When my hut was finished, I no longer thought of making war on the Protestant pastor, who was a well-brought-up young man with a liberal mind besides; nor did I think any longer of going to church. A chicken had come along, and war had begun again. When I say a chicken I am modest, for all the chickens had arrived, and without any invitation. His Reverence is a regular goat, while I am a tough old cock and fairly well-seasoned. If I said the goat began it, I should be telling the truth. To want to condemn me to a vow of chastity! That’s a little too much; nothing like that, Lizette!
To cut two superb pieces of rose-wood and carve them after the Marquesan fashion was child’s play for me. One of them represented a horned devil (the bishop), the other a charming woman with flowers in her hair. It was enough to name her Thérèse for every one without exception, even the school-children, to see in it an allusion to this celebrated love affair. Even if this is all a myth, still it was not I who started it.
Pastor Vernier told me of his acquaintance with Gauguin and of his last days. Vernier acknowledged that he had never been his friend. I would have known that, for to Gauguin, professors of theology were as absurd and abhorrent as he to them.