“Oh! la! la!” he shouted. “Les Chinois! Certainement, he is ill. He has eaten dog. Amoeban dysentery! Mais, monsieur, it is a dispensation of the bon dieu that he has not hydrophobia or the leprosy. Les Chinois! Sacré nom de chien!”
Lovaina had often accused her rivals, the Chinese restaurateurs, of serving dog meat for beef or lamb. Perhaps it was so, for in China more than five millions of dogs are sold for food in the market every year, and in Tahiti I knew that the Chinese ate the larvae of wasps, and M. Martin had mountain rats caught for his table.
The cow-boy’s room was bare and cheerless, but two Tahitian girls of fourteen or fifteen years of age were in it. One was sitting on his bed, holding his hand, and the other was in a rocking-chair. They were very pretty and were dressed in their fête gowns. The girl on the bed was almost white, but her sister fairly brown. Probably they had different fathers. They told me that they had seen Baillon on the streets, had fallen in love with him, and though they had never spoken to him, wanted to comfort him now that he was sick. Jealousy did not rankle in their hearts, apparently. That absence often shocked non-Polynesians. Brothers shared wives, and sisters shared husbands all over old Polynesia.
This pair of love-lorn maidens had never exchanged a word with Baillon, for he spoke only English. The whiter girl wore a delicate satin gown, a red ribbon, and fine pearls in her hair. The cow-boy lay quietly, while she sat with her bare feet curled under her on the counterpane, looking actually unutterable passion.
“Shucks!” said he to me, safe in their ignorance of his tongue, “this is getting serious. They mean business, and I was foolin’. I got a little girl in the good ol’ United States that would skin her alive if she saw her sittin’ like that on my sheets. A man’s takin’ chances here that bats his eye at one o’ these T’itian fairies. Do you know, their mother came here with them this morning?”
“They mean to have you in their family,” I said. “That mother may have had a white husband or lover, and aids in the pursuit of you for auld lang syne.”
Wilfrid Baillon was out of the hospital in just ten days. His release, as cured by the doctor, coincided curiously with his payment in advance. I saw him off for New Zealand by the steamship leaving the next day.
“Those people were awful good to me,” he said in farewell. “It hurts me to treat those girls this way, but I’m scairt o’ them. They’re too strong in their feelings.”
He ran away from a mess of love pottage that many men would have gone across seas to gain.
Ormsby, an Englishman in his early twenties, good-looking and courteous, with an air of accustomedness to luxury, but of being roughened by his environment, was sitting on a bench one morning with a girl. He called me over to meet her.