The sun was now climbing high, and we began the descent, moving at a fast pace, leaping, slipping and sliding, with the use of the rope, and arriving at the Chefferie a little after noon.
The long draft of a cocoanut, a full quart of delicious, cooling refreshment, and we were ready for the oysters and the fish and taro.
Chapter XIX
The Arioi, minstrels of the tropics—Lovaina tells of the infanticide—Theories of depopulation—Methods of the Arioi—Destroyed by missionaries.
Lovaina came out to Mataiea with the news and gossip of the capital. A wretched tragedy had shocked the community. Pepe, the woman of Tuatini, had buried her new-born infant alive in the garden of the house opposite the Tiare Hotel. Lovaina was full of the horror of it, but with a just appreciation of the crime as a happening worth telling. The chefferie was filled with aues.
“Aue!” cried Haamoura, the chief’s wife.
“Aue!” said the chief, and Rupert Brooke, with whom I had been swimming.
“Aue!” exclaimed O’Laughlin Considine, the Irish poet of New Zealand, stout, bearded, crowned with a chaplet of sweet gardenias, and quoting verses in Maori, Gaelic, and English.
There were laments in Tahitian by all about, sorrow that the mother had so little loved her babe, that she had not brought it to Mataiea, where Tetuanui and Haamoura or any of us would have adopted it. And Lovaina said, in English for Considine, whom she had brought to Mataiea, and for Brooke:
“She had five children by that Tuatini. He is custom-officer at Makatea, phosphate island, near T’ytee. He been gone one year, an’ she get very fat, but she don’ say one thing. Then she get letter speakin’ he come back nex’ week. One ol’ T’ytee woman she work for her to keep all chil’ren clean, an’ eat, an’ she notice two day ago one mornin’ she more thin. She ask her, ‘Where that babee?’ She say the varua, a bad devil, take it. The ol’ woman remember she hear little cry in night, an’ when a girl live my hotel tell her she saw Pepe diggin’ in garden, she talk and talk, an’ by ’n’ by police come, an’ fin’ babee under rose-bush. It dead, but Cassiou, he say, been breathe when bury, because have air in lung. Then gendarme take hol’ Pepe, and she tell right out she ’fraid for her husban’, an’ when babee born she go in night an’ dig hole an’ plant her babee under rosebush. Now, maybe white people say that Pepe jus’ like all T’ytee woman.”