Mystic Isles of the South Seas.

by Frederick O'Brien

Mrs. Lermontoff had on the peignoir of the natives, and was barefooted within the house, but wore sandals outside. She sat before a sewing-machine.

“I am making a gown or two for a neighbor who is sick,” she said. “I do not give many hours to sewing. I like better the piano.”

She knew all the Russian composers well, had studied at a conservatory in the German capital, and she also played Grieg for me with much feeling and a strong, yet delicate, touch. For dinner we had a broiled fish, which I myself cooked on stones outside the house, and tuparo, mountain feis steamed and mashed into a golden pulp, with cocoanut cream. With these we ate boiled green papaya, which tasted like vegetable marrow; and for dessert sweet oranges with grated fresh cocoanut, and for drink, the wine of the nut.

After the food we sat and looked at the reef, the purple sea, and the stars, and talked. These two were weary of life in the big countries of the world, and would rest in Tahiti. If they made enough money, they would like to go to America and work for the revolution they hoped for. They did not believe in bringing it about by violence, but by acting on the Christ principle, as they interpreted it. Yet they were not religionists.

“Of course one is not sure of the aims and end of life,” said Lermontoff. “I have no greater certainty than the kaisers and czars or your great men, Morgan and Rockefeller; but, at least, theirs are not worth while for the race of man. I hold that man is the greatest product of life so far, and not government or trade. That the whirling spheres are made for man I disbelieve, but on this planet, and in our ken, he is the object we most prize, and rightfully. Therefore to build him in health and character, in talent and happiness, is all of existence. The life after death we are not sure of, but beauty is on earth, and to know it and worship it in nature, and in man and his thoughts and deeds are our ends. The individual man gains only by sacrifice for his fellows. He must give freely all he has. This is his only way out of the shadow that may be inherent in our growth, but in any event has been made certain by machinery and business control of world ethics.”

They were believers in the doctrines of Leo Tolstoi, and especially in non-resistance, and the possessing little or no property to encumber their free souls. In the village they had become the guides of the Tahitians in the devious path of enforced civilization.

Mrs. Lermontoff, in lamenting the Tahitian’s degradation, physical and spiritual, said that she was reminded always of the Innuit, the Eskimo, among whom she and her husband had passed several years.

“They are the most ethical, the most moral, the most communal people I know of,” she commented. “They have a quality of soul higher than that of any other race, a quality reached by their slow development and constant struggle. I imagine they went through a terrible ordeal in the more temperate zones farther south before they consented to be pushed into the frozen lands of Canada, and then, following the caribou in the summer, to mush to the Arctic sea. There, while they had to change their habits, clothing and food, to learn to live on the seal and the bear and the caribou in the midst of ice and snow, they were spared for thousands of years the diseases and complexes of civilization, and reached a culture which is more worth while than ours.”

I was skeptical, but she quoted several eminent anthropologists to support her statement that the Eskimo were better developed mentally than other people, and that in simplicity of life, honesty, generosity, provision for the young and the old, in absence of brutality, murder and wars, they had a higher system of philosophy than ours, which admits hells, prisons, asylums, poor houses, bagnios, famines and wars, and fails even in the recurrent periods of hard times to provide for those stricken by their lash.

“But,” said Lermontoff, “the Innuit, too, is corrupting under the influence of trade, of alcohol, and the savage lust of the white adventurer. He attained through many centuries, perhaps thousands of years, of separation from other peoples, and without any of the softening teachings of Christianity, a Jesus-like code and practice, which the custodians of Christianity have utterly failed to impress on the millions of their normal adherents.”