McHenry exposed his own vulturous desires, and not the feelings of the tribe of Mapuhi. To them the passing of Mapuhi was as to the Jews that of their leader by Nebo’s lonely mountain. The great man had expired the night before, and preparations were being made to bury him. In this climate the body hastens to rejoin the elements. The chief was not to lie in the common charnel in a grove on another motu of Takaroa. As suitable to his rank and wealth and his generosity to the Mormon church, he had retained for himself a piece of ground beside the temple. A coral wall inclosed the small necropolis. Within a hundred feet of the sea, in the brilliant coral sand, rugged and bare, it was fit anchoring ground for this ship among canoes. One tombstone leaned against the wall, a plain slab of marble, inscribed:
Punau Mapuhi tei pohe ite 30 Me 1899
Punau was the wife he had clung to under Mormonism, and who had borne him the son and daughter I knew. Many years he had survived her, and had not married another. The religion of polygamy had made of the old barbarian an ascetic, who had been a Grand Turk under Protestantism and Catholicism, between which he had wavered according to the novelty offered.
The body of Mapuhi was laid out in the principal room of his house, the room in which I had met him and the American elders on my first landing. Nohea and others had worked through the night to build a coffin. They had used the strong planks the dead man had gathered from the deck or cabin of the County of Roxburgh, and had polished them with cocoanut-oil, so that they shone. The coffin was lined with the sleeping-mat of Mapuhi, and in it he reposed, dressed in his churchly clothes, a black frock coat, white trousers, and a stiff white shirt. No collar cumbered his neck, nor were shoes upon the ample feet that had walked on the floor of the sea. Most of the people of Takaroa took a last look at him, but some did not, for fear. I gazed a few minutes at his face. More than in life, the likeness to a mutilated Greek statue struck me; perhaps the head of a Goth seen in the Vatican Gallery. Strength, repose, and mystery were in the powerful mold of it, the broad, low forehead, the rounded chin, and wide-open eyes. I had seen many so-called important men in death, when as a reporter I wrote obsequies at a penny a line. This Paumotuan chief’s corpse had more majesty and peace than any of them—a nearer relation to my conception of an old and wise child of the eternal unity, glad to be freed from the illusion of life.
In the village, the huts were still closed. No fisherman put off in a canoe, and none sat making or mending nets. McHenry and I paddled out to the Morning Star. The skipper was on deck with Ducat, the mate. Some native had hurried to them with the amusing gossip of McHenry’s vahine beating him, and he had to bear a storm of ridicule. Lying Bill rehearsed his boasts about her inferiority, and Ducat, who had humiliated him before me long ago, taunted him with his submission to her.
“I didn’t want to kill her,” was all McHenry could retort. McHenry had a story of Chocolat which was distracting. Captain Moét of the Flying Fish had come into Takaroa a month or two before with Chocolat, a fair-sized dog. The tricks Chocolat did when I was on Moét’s schooner were incomparable with his later education.
“The bloomin’ pup would stand on his hind legs and dance to a tune Moét whistled,” said McHenry. “He could count up to five with cards, and could pick all the aces out of a piquet pack. He would let Moét throw him overboard in port, and catch a rope’s end with his teeth and hold on while he was pulled up. He was a reg’lar circus performer. You know Moét and I ain’t very close. He done me a dirty turn once. I knew if I could ever get Chocolat to Papeete, an’ on the steamer from San Francisco, I could sell him to a bloody American tourist for a thousand francs. Moét watched me like a gull does the cook when he empties his pail overside. Now, you know me; I ain’t nobody to say to you can’t do this or that. I laid for that pup, and, when I went aboard the schooner just before she sailed, I took a little opium I got from the Chink pearl-buyer here; and I put a pill of it in a piece of fresh pork, and took it aboard in my pocket. Just before I was goin’ into my boat, after a drink or two with Jean, I’d been watchin’ Chocolat stretched out nappin’ on the deck. I put the meat alongside of his mouth, and he ate it like a shark does a chunk o’ salt horse. Soon I saw he was knocked out, an’ I asked Moét to go down into the trade-room an’ get me a piece o’ tobacco. He’d no sooner ducked than I grabbed the bloody pup by the scruff an’ stuffed him into my trousers’ front. He was like dead. I was in the boat in a second with no one seein’ him, and reached up to get the tobacco from Moét’s hand.
“Of course the purp never let out a bloomin’ whimper, an’ I got away and to shore with no proof that I had snared the bow-wow. Moét had trained Chocolat to let out a hell of a yell if any one as much as took him toward the rail, and so he would have to think that the cur had fallen overboard on his own hook. I took him to my store unbeknown to any one, and tied him to a chair. He never come to for three hours, an’ was sluggery for a day or two. I was waitin’ for Moét to sail, but the next day he comes ashore an’ makes a bee-line for my joint. I saw his boat puttin’ off, an’ I give Chocolat to my Penrhyn boy who tied him in a canoe, an’ hiked out in the lagoon with him. Moét looks me up an’ down, curses his sacres an’ his Spanish diablos an’ ’Sus-Marias, an’ crawled through my place from top to bottom, shoutin’, ‘Chocolat! Chocolat! Pettee sheen!’ an’ half cryin’. He had to trip his anchor the next day, and I had the sheen all right.
“I was goin’ to smuggle him on board Lyin’ Bill’s cockroach tub an’ to Papeete, when one day I come back from Mapuhi’s and found him gone, an’ his string chewed through. He had skinned out, an’, though I asked everybody on this island about him, everybody knew nothin’. After three days I give the beast up. I know the Kanaka, an’ I knew that no fat little dogs are let run loose very long. About two weeks later, I went to another motu to buy some copra, an’ the first native I run into was wearin’ Chocolat’s collar on his arm. He was a Mormon churchman, too, but he swore he found the collar in a canoe.”
Poor little brown Chocolat! He had entertained me often on the Flying Fish with his antics, and Jean Moét had such dreams of his future! A kindly fate may have bestowed on him the favor of a quick death by hotpotting rather than the ignominy of circus one-night stands or the pampered kennel of a millionaire. He had had his year at sea, and died in the full flush of doghood.