Leaving the settlement, we were soon on a trail with which I was familiar and reached a little wood. She took me by the sleeve.
“Attendez,” she half whispered. “I am going to be married to Monsieur Lutz in Papeete. He is a foreigner, and the priest could not marry us. At Papeete the judge can do it. The nuns are going with me to make sure. They oppose, but I am determined. It is my one chance. Tell me, American, do I make a mistake?”
“Do you love him?”
“Love him?” she said hesitatingly. “I do not know what love is. The nuns have not taught me. Always it has been Joan of Arc, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I want love and freedom, but I am afraid of staying there at Taaoa alone with those two old women. They are true Canaques, and would make me like them, and I am afraid of the convent. Mon dieu! I am puzzled by life!”
“Come!” I said, “you will have an hour of light-heartedness with Stanislao. I am puzzled, too.”
Hardly more than a youth, Stanislao was the last of the blood royal of the family that had ruled the Marquesas. Temoana had been the only king. The Marquesans were communists, with chiefs, and had not the corroding egocentrism of nationality until the French crowned Temoana. He had been one of the few travelers from here. Kidnapped, a dime-museum man in foreign seaports, he returned on a whaler to find favor with the bishop and to be set on a Catholic throne. Prince Stanislao was not even chief of Taiohae, for a half-Hawaiian, of the Kekela tribe, had that office, and did the French policeman’s chores.
We entered the house of Stanislao and met, besides him, Antoinette, an odalisque, most beautiful of dancers, who, like Ghost Girl, flitted from island to island by the grace of her charms. I had known her in the Cocoanut House in Papeete and her sister, Caroline. Neither she nor Stanislao accepted the gospel of Christianity. Her warm blood had in it an admixture of French and Italian, giving an archness and spice to her manner and a coquetry to her eyes—black and dancing—that maddened many. In the days about the fourteenth of July, when the French at Tahiti celebrated the Fall of the Bastille, she was a prize exhibit, for then governors and bankers, deacons and acolytes, lost the grace of God.
These three, Barbe, Antoinette, and Stanislao, were extraordinary in their unity with the teeming vivid life here, the ferns and orchids and flowers on the sward, the palms and breadfruit in the grove. By the alchemy of the brilliant morning and the company of this pair of youthful lovers, Barbe’s mood was suddenly transmuted into joyousness. I took an accordion off a shelf, and played the upaupahura of Tahiti. Without a moment’s hesitation, and with no sense of consciousness, the three danced on the grass.
Carlyle praises that countryman who, matching the boast of a doctor that “his system was in high order,” answered that, for his part, “he had no system.”
Few mortals, it is to be feared, are permanently blessed with that felicity of “having no system”; nevertheless, most of us, looking backward on young years, may remember seasons of a light aerial translucency and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the prison-house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew not that we had limbs, we only lifted, hurled and leapt; through eye and ear and all avenues of sense came clear, unimpeded tidings from without, and from within issued clear victorious forces. We stood as in the center of Nature, giving and receiving in harmony with it all; unlike Virgil’s husbandman, “too happy because we did not know our blessedness.”