I moved to where I could survey the spot. There was a group of natives, half the village, at least, and in the center of the chattering crowd was Brunneck, naked to the waist, boxing with Jimmy Kekela, the Hawaiian. The yellow hair of the American gleamed against his sun-burnt skin, as he toyed with the amateur. Ghost girl, an absorbed spectator, held the wreath of the American. Mouth of God, Haabuani, and Great Fern were dancing about the circle in glee. Exploding Eggs, who had accompanied me, left me without a word, and ran to the ring. I stood fifty feet away, unnoticed. A new god had been thrown up by the sea. I returned to the Saint François more content to leave.
When I awoke from a siesta, in the late afternoon, I found preparations for immediate departure. The anchors were being hauled short, the hatches battened down, and the cargo booms uphoisted. We waited only the final accounts from Lutz. He brought them himself in the last boat, in which were also Mademoiselle Narbonne and two nuns. She was again in black, and greeted me in a distraught manner with “Kaoha!” the native salutation, as if in her hour of departure from her own island she clung to its language. She went below to the cabins with the sisters, and only after the screw had revolved and we turned head for the sea did the three come on deck.
Tears suffused her eyes as we passed the opening of Atuona Bay. When Exploding Eggs and others, including Song of the Nightingale, shouted “Kaoha” to us from their canoes, she put her head upon the breast of Sister Serapoline and wept passionately. The night drew on as, after many bursts of her sad emotion, she leaned exhausted on the bosom so long her shelter. In the flooding moonlight, she slept, while the nun placidly counted her rosary.
The Saint François, steering in a smooth sea for Taiohae, on the island of Nuku-hiva, the captain, Lutz, and I gathered about the table for supper and wine. The vessel had narrowly escaped shipwreck in the Paumotus, and had lain for six days on a reef while the barrels of cement, intended for some improvement at Atuona, were thrown overboard to lighten her.
Lutz did not seek any moment of intimacy with me, and said nothing to explain Mademoiselle Narbonne’s presence aboard. Conforming to strict native etiquette, he paid no attention to her, and a stranger would have thought he hardly knew her. Lutz said that he had business affairs in Tahiti and had jumped at the chance of a quick passage in the steamship.
At dawn, we were off the island of Nuku-hiva; high up on a green mountain-side, we saw a silver thread which we knew to be the waterfall of Typee Valley, the valley in which Hermann Melville had lived in captivity and happiness. We rounded Cape Martens, and, as the sun lit the rocky forelands guarding the bay of Taiohae, the morning breeze brought from Typee the delicious odor of the wild flowers, the hinano, the tiare, and the frangipani. This beach of Taiohae, months before, I had visited in a whale-boat from Atuona. I hoped to see again my friend, the good priest, Père Siméon Delmas, who had held the citadel of God here for half a century.
In the first boat ashore went the captain and Lutz, and, when after breakfast I asked the mate to be put on land, Mademoiselle Narbonne, seeing me descending the ladder, joined me.
“Where do you go?” she asked, when we set foot on the sand.
“I have a message for Prince Stanislao from Le Brunnec,” I answered.
“I must be back before the nuns miss me, but I will go with you,” she said.