Emile Gauguin.
CHAPTER XXII
Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Etablissements Français de l’Océanie—How the School House was Inspected—I Receive My Congé—The Runaway Pigs—Mademoiselle Narbonne goes with Lutz to Papeete to be Married—Père Siméon, about whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote.
ONE must admit that the processes of government in my islands were simple. Since only a couple of thousand Marquesans, of an original myriad, were alive, after three score years of colonialism, officialdom had lessened according to the mortuary statistics. Sovereignty was evidenced by the tricolor that Song of the Nightingale occasionally raised in the palace garden, while Commissaire Bauda and two gendarmes aided the merry governor in exercising a lazy authority. There was no hospital, nor school to distract the people from copra making, and, excepting for the court sessions of Saturdays, to hear moonshine cases, or a claim against Chinese rapacity, we might have thought ourselves living in an ideal state of anarchy.
One morning we awoke to the reality of empire and the solicitude of Paris. Flag, the mutoi, peered through the windowless aperture of my cabin, shortly after dawn, and announced, with the pompousness of a bumbailiff, that the French gunboat Zélée was at Tahauku, and would shortly land Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Etablissements Français de l’Océanie. Flag called the visitor ’Sieu Ranisepatu, and in pantomime indicated his rank and power. The Zélée sent him ashore at the stone steps of Lutz’s store, and departed for Vaitahu, ostensibly for a fresh water-supply, but, as Painter Le Moine said with an oath, the commander had gone to Le Moine’s adopted village, Vaitahu, to make love to Vanquished Often, the artist’s model.
The inspector of colonies occupied the spare room at the palace and our pleasant parties were suspended. He was a gross, corpulent man, in a colonel’s gilded uniform. One could not see his collar, front or back, for the rolls of his fat neck and his spacious beard. The tapis was full of troublesome affairs. The governor and Bauda had fallen out. Rum was responsible. The governor had given Taiao Koe, Flatulent Fish, one of my tattooed neighbors, a permit to buy a gallon of rum for Lutz. Flatulent Fish lightened his jug too much. Commissaire Bauda met him wobbling from port to starboard on his horse, and took the jug. That for Bauda, censor of morals! But the same day, during the difficult work of repairing Bauda’s arm-chair, Bauda cheered the natives with rum, and two, made utterly reckless, invaded the palace garden in search of more. The inspector was stupefied, and the governor drove them away with threats of prison and indignant exclamations that such a thing had never happened before. Of course, Bauda had to let the inspector know of his action in saving Flatulent Fish from a more wobbly state, and he did so in ignorance of his chair-repairers having betrayed to the inspector his own liberality. The governor did not fancy Flatulent Fish’s permit for rum being brought before the inspector’s notice. So the great man had to decide whether the Governor or the Commissaire was supreme in rum matters, rum, of course, being absolutely forbidden to the natives.
After two days, this matter was settled. The inspector became restless. Every day he said, “I must see the schoolhouse. It is necessary that I see that important building.”
He meant a tumbledown, unoccupied cabin up the valley, a dirty, cheap, wooden building, bare planks and an iron roof.
Rain did not permit the inspector to go at once, for he did not stir out of the Governor’s house while it was wet; but after three days of fair weather he said very firmly, “I will visit the schoolhouse. It is my duty and I wish to report on that.”