“Momuni! Momuni!” they called after him with scornful laughter, and beckoned me to leave him and join them.
“Haere mai!” they said, sweetly to me. Come to us!
My guide did not like either the name they gave him or their efforts to alienate us. He retorted with an impolite gesticulation, and cried, “Popay! Popay!” Momuni, though, was plainly nervous, and afraid that I might be won over by the opposition. He plucked me by my wet sleeve and directed me to a shanty of old boards set upon a platform of coral rocks four feet from the bed of the atoll. In its single room on a white bedspread were a dozen loaves of bread, crisp and white, and smelling appetizingly. He lifted one, squeezed it to show its sponginess, and put it to my nose. He sniffed, and said, “She the greata coo-ooka.”
I guessed that he referred to himself as the baker. He pointed out toward the schooner and made me understand that this baking was a present to me. I was embarrassed, and with many flourishes explained that the Tahitian cook of the Marara could not be compared with him as a bread-maker, but that he was of a jealous disposition and might resent bitterly the gift. My companion was cast down for a moment, but brightened with another idea. Through a hundred yards more of coral bones we plowed to his oven, a huge, coral stove like a lime-kiln, with a roof, and bags of Victor flour from the Pacific Coast beside it. Pridefully he made me note everything, as an artist might his studio.
Momuni then touched my arm, and said, “Haere! We can do.”
We walked along the beach of the lagoon and found a road that paralleled the one we had come. It was lower than the other and the rain had flooded it. The water was brown and stagnant, even red in pools, like blood. Uncanny things shot past my feet or crawled upon them, and once something that had not the feel of anything I knew of climbed the calf of my leg, and when I turned and saw it dimly I leaped into the air and kicked it off. I heard it plop into the dark water.
Down this marsh we plodded and paddled, floundered and splashed for half a mile. The cocoanut-palms arched across it, but there was not a person nor a habitation in view. I wondered why “she the great cook” had led me into this morass. Momuni looked at me mysteriously several times, and his lips moved as if he had been about to speak.
He studied my countenance attentively, and several times he patted and rubbed my back affectionately and said, “You damafina.” Then, slimy and sloppy as I was, covered with the foul water up to my waist, when we were in the darkest spot Momuni halted and drew me under a palm.
He would either seek to borrow money or to cut my throat, I thought hastily. Again he scanned me closely, and I, to soften his heart and avert the evil, tried to appear firm and unafraid. To my astonishment he took from his pocket five five-franc notes, those ugly, red-inked bills which are current in all the Etablissements Français de l’Oceanie, and held them under my nose. He smiled and then made the motion of pulling a cork, and of a bottle’s contents gurgling through his loose mouth and down his long neck.
I shuddered at my thoughts. Could it be that in this dry atoll, with intoxicants forbidden, and prison the penalty of selling or giving them to a native, this hospitable Niauan had offered me his bread and shown me his oven, and the glories of the isle, and was displaying those five red notes to seduce me into breaking the law, into smuggling ashore a bottle of rum or wine?