And then apologetically to me:
“I ought to kill him for that. He’s a devil, that monkey. He has bitten all the children around here, has killed all my chickens, and raised more hell in this village than the whole population put together. I swear, I believe he just enjoys being mean. Come in and have a snifter after that greeting! Did he hurt you?”
My would-be host was himself a very striking somebody. He wore only a pareu, as I, of scarlet muslin, with the William Morris design, but he had wound his about so that it was a mere ornamental triangle upon his tall, powerful, statuesque body. His chest and back had a growth of red-gold hair, which, with his bronzed skin, his red-gold beard, dark curls over a high forehead, handsome nose, and blue eyes, made him all of the same color scheme. He was without doubt as near to a Greek deity in life, a Dionysus, as one could imagine. He had two flaming hibiscus blossoms over his ears, and he looked in his late twenties. Accustomed as I was to semi-nudity and to white men’s return to nature, I had never seen a man who so well fitted into the landscape as the owner of the ape. He was the faun to the curling locks and the pointed ears, with not a trace of the satyr; all youth and grace and radiance.
He walked on before me to the faré, and, opening the door, bade me welcome. The house differed from the aboriginal in a wooden floor and three walls of wire screen above four feet of wainscot. The roof was lofty, of plaited pandanus-leaves, with large spaces under the eaves for the circulation of air; but the immediate suggestion was of an aviary, a cage thirty feet square. Attached to this room was a lean-to kitchen, and near by, hidden behind the cage, was another native house for sleeping. The aviary was the living- and dining-quarters, protected from all insect pests, and an arbor covered with vines led to the water.
Many canvases were about, on an easel an unfinished group of three Tahitian boys, and a case of books against the one solid wall.
Half a dozen Tahitian youths were lolling outside in the shade, and one, at the request of the host, led up the horse and the boy who guarded it. The child skirted the circumference of the monkey’s swing, and then, a few feet away, squatted to regard the animal with intense surprise and interest.
“Uritaata,” he said; “I never saw one before, but I have read in my school-book that they have those dogmen in French colonies.”
Uri means dog and taata man, and the compound name was that which sprang to the lips of the Tahitians on seeing a monkey, just as they called the horse puaa horo fenua, the pig that runs on the earth, and the goat, horo niho, the pig with horns. The pig and the dog were the only land mammals they knew before the white arrived. The race-track near Papeete was puaa horo fenua faa titi auraa. If a pig could talk, he would say that man was a wickeder and stronger pig. Jehovah has whiskers like a Rabbi. The Rabbis made him like themselves. Man has no other ideal.
The Tahitian youth addressed the Greek god as T’yonni, which was an effort to say John, and I adopted it instanter, as he did my own Maru. T’yonni said that Uritaata was the bane of his existence at Tautira. After building his faré he had been called to America, and had danced in Chinatown the night before his steamship departed for his return to Papeete. He remembered obscurely drinking grappo with a deep-sea sailor, and had awakened in his berth, the vessel already at sea, and Uritaata asleep at his feet. Many Tahitians, he said, had never seen such a fabulous brute, and T’yonni had stirred in them a mood of dissatisfaction by telling that their forefathers had descended from similar beings.
“How about Atamu and Eva?” they had asked the pastors.