M. Souvy, a government printer of Tahiti, had given the site out of his humble savings. By the sign, in his blunt way, he struck at education which does not teach the simple necessity of progress—common sense.
“Cela saute aux yeux,” he had said.
He was long dead, but his symbol provoked a question from every new-comer, and kept alive his name and philosophy. I never saw it but I thought of an article I had once written that led to the overturning of the educational system of a country. How all guide-posts point to oneself! Near the school-house, a dozen yards from the salt water, was a native house with a straw roof, a mere old shell, untenanted.
M. Edmond Brault, the government employee and musical composer, a passenger on the diligence, had with him his violin, intending to spend the day in company with it in a grove. He remarked the tumbledown condition of the house, and said:
“I have sat under that toil de chaume, that straw roof, and talked with and played for a painter who was living there quite apart from the world. He was Monsieur Paul Gauguin, and he had a very distingué establishment. The walls of his atelier were covered with his canvases, and in front of the house he had a number of sculptures in wood. That was about 1895, I think. I can see the maitre now. He wore a pareu of red muslin and an undershirt of netting. He said that he adored this corner of the world and would never leave it. He had returned from Paris more than ever convinced that he was not fitted to live in Europe. Yet, mon ami, he ran away from here, and went to the savage Marquesas Islands, where he died in a few years. He loved the third étude of Chopin, and the andante of Beethoven’s twenty-third sonata. You know music says things we would be almost afraid to put in words, if we could. If Flaubert might have written ‘Madame Bovary’ or ‘Salambô’ in musical notes, he would not have been prosecuted by the censor. We musicians have that advantage.”
“In America,” I replied, “we have never yet censored musical compositions, and many works are played freely because the censors and the reform societies’ detectives cannot understand them. But if our inquisitors take up music, they may yet reach them. For instance, the prelude of ‘Tristan and Isolde,’ and Strauss’ ‘Salome.’ ”
“No,” returned the Frenchman, quickly; “music would make them liberals.”
A little farther on, in the valley of Punaruu, the amiable violinist and pianist showed me the ruins of defense works thrown up by the French to withstand the attacks of the great chieftain, Oropaa of Punaauia, who with his warriors had here disputed foot by foot the advance of the invaders. These Tahitians were without artillery, mostly without guns of any sort, but they utilized the old strategy of the intertribal wars, and rolled huge rocks down upon the French troops in narrow defiles.
We saw from our seats through the shadows of the gorge of Punaruu two of the horns of Maiao, the Diadem. In the far recesses of those mountains were almost inaccessible caves in which the natives laid their dead, and where one found still their moldering skeletons. M. Brault touched my shoulder.
“Rumor has it that the body of Pomaré the Fifth is there,” he said; “that it was taken secretly from the tomb you have seen near Papeete, and carried here at night. There are photographs of those old skeletons taken in that grotto of the tupapaus, as the natives call the dead and their ghosts. The natives will not discuss that place.”