CHAPTER VII
Breakfast with elders—The great Mapuhi enters—He tells of San Francisco—Of prizefighters and Police gazettes—I reside with Nohea—Robber crabs—The cats that warred and caught fish.
TIMES in my life a bath had been a guerdon after days of denial in desert and at sea, but seldom so grateful as that in the stony garden of Mapuhi under the tropical sun. My wounds were healing, but the new skin forming in a score of places bound me like patches of plaster. Not many houses in the Paumotus were constructed to impound rain, even for drinking purposes. The cocoanut furnished the liquid for quenching thirst, or the brackish rain-water retained in holes dug five or six feet in the coral was drunk by the natives. The Europeans of any permanent residence gathered the rain in barrels or cisterns, and sometimes made ample reservoirs, while in a few atolls were little fresh lakes fed by rains, the bottoms of which were formed by a coral limestone impervious to water. Such lakes were very precious.
When I went up the steps to the house, I found the Mormon elders fully dressed and preparing breakfast for three. A can of California peaches, a small broiled fish, and pilot biscuits were all the meal, but the grace was worthy of a feast. They bowed their heads, closed their eyes, and implored God to bless their fare, to make it strengthen them for the affairs of this world only as they conduced to His greater honor and glory. And they put in a word for me, “Our brother who has come among us all unannounced, but doubtless for some good purpose known to Him who directs the sparrow’s fall, and the sphere’s movements.”
“We have to economize dreadfully,” said De Kalb, apologetically. “We are spending our savings. Canned goods are dear. But we are saving souls right along. There is to be a service in the temple in half an hour, and we would like you to attend. We are going to pray for a successful rahui, the diving season, and for the safety of the divers. You know they never know when they’re going to come up dying or dead from the bottom of the lagoon.”
As he spoke there was framed in the doorway a native whom I knew instinctively to be the monarch of this cluster of atolls. He wore only a dark-blue pareu stamped with white flowers, but some men have an air which makes you know at first sight that they are masters of those about them. So was this Mapuhi, who, of all Paumotuans in a hundred years, had become distinguished among whites. Mapuhi was a giant in stature, a man solidly planted on spreading bare feet of which each toe was articulated as the fingers of a master pianist’s hand. His legs were rounded columns, the muscles hidden under the pad of flesh, his chest a great barrel, and below it a mighty belly, the abdomen of a Japanese or Chinese god of plenty. He was almost black from a life upon and in the salt water.
His head was huge, a mass of grizzled hair low upon his forehead. His eyes, very large and luminous, gentle but piercing, gave an impression of absolute fearlessness, of breadth of mind, and of devotion to his idea, be it ideal or indulgence. His chin was round and powerful, but not prognathous. His mouth was well-formed, big and sensual under the short gray mustache, and not lacking in humor or a trace of irony. His nose was all but missing, for once when building a schooner an adz had slipped and cut it off. His face was thus flattened, with a slight suggestion of a fragment of a Greek gladiator’s head; but it was not so disfigured as one might think, and preserved a mien of dignity and reserve force, of moral grandeur and superiority which one might call kingly were kings as of old. But it was in his eyes I read the reasons for his rise from the ruck of his race to lordship over it, and to the admiration of the white traders and mariners whom he bested in all their own ways—navigation, ship-building, and even trade.
When Mapuhi saw me, he looked inquiringly at the elders, and then smiled. I saw two rows of teeth, large as my thumb nail, and as brilliant as the pearl-shell from which he had wrung his vast fortune. He stood upright, straight as a mast, solid as a tree, and commanding in every sense. More than seventy years of wrestling with the devils of the sea and lagoon, and the outcasts of Europe and America, had failed to bow him an inch or to take from him apparently a single attribute of his vigorous manhood except that across his broad face ran a score of wrinkles, which criss-crossed his forehead into diamond panes, and made one know he had learned the secrets of man and wind and water by fearful experience.
Thus was Mapuhi who had made the winds and currents his sport, who in the dark of night ran the foaming passes that the white mariner shunned even in daylight, and who had made the trees and lagoons of his isles pay him princely toll. This was the man who alone had outwitted the white trader who came to take much and give little.