Paiere, the adopted son of Ori, who was a boy when the Casco was at Tautira, claimed a vivid remembrance of many incidents. He especially had been impressed by the numbers of corks that flew in the house and on the green; and when I invited him to a bottle of champagne, he made hissing sounds and a plop to indicate that Rui had a penchant for that kind of wine.
“I used to fetch him oranges and mangoes, and climb for drinking nuts, of which Rui was fond,” said Paiere.
Paiere was a deacon or functionary of the Protestant church, as was Ori-a-Ori, and I went with the entire family to the Sunday evening service. For weeks preparations and rehearsals for a himene nui, a mammoth song service, had been agitating the village. Under my trees the children gathered of late afternoons and imitated the grown-up folk in their melodies. From the verandas and from the church at night issued the peculiar strain of the himene, somehow bringing to me, lying on my mat under the stars, a sense of fitness to the prospect—the clear heavens, the purple lagoon, the wind in the groves, and the low rumble of the surf.
On the Sunday of the himene nui, I met the French priest as he tied his horse by the door of the Catholic church. He was in a dark cassock or gown, his long, black beard and a flat, half-melon shaped hat giving him a distinctive appearance in the simple settlement. He was old, and weary from his hot ride, but courteous as world-wide travelers are, and at his request I dropped in on his service before the other. He sat by the middle door, and the twenty or thirty of the congregation on the floor at one end. They sang a himene, and he followed and corrected them from a book, so that their method was formal. Congregational singing not being customary in Catholic churches, it was probable that in Tahiti they had had to meet the competition of the Protestants, who from their beginnings in Polynesia had made a master stroke by developing this form of worship in extraordinary consonance with the native mind.
The Protestant temple held a hundred and fifty people. It was a plain hall, with doors opposite each other in the middle, and at one end a slightly raised platform on which sat the pastor and half a dozen deacons. The pastor was delivering his sermon as I entered, he and all his entourage in black Prince-Albert coats. He had a white shirt and collar and tie, but others masked a pareu under the wool, and were barelegged. All wore solemn faces of a jury bringing in a death-verdict. Paiere nodded to a volunteer janitor, who insisted upon my occupying a chair he brought.
Every one else was on the floor on mats, in two squares or separate divisions. Babies lay at their mothers’ extended feet, and others ran about the room in silence. The pastor’s sermon was about Ioba and his tefa pua, which he scraped with poa, the shells of the beach. He pictured the man of patience as if in Tautira, with his three faithless friends, Elifazi, Bilidadi, and Tofari, urging him to deny God and to sin; and the speaker struck the railing with his fist when he enumerated the possessions taken from Ioba by God, but returned a hundredfold. After he had finished, wiping the sweat from his brow with a colored kerchief, the himene began.
The only advance we have made since the Greeks is, in music. Possibly in painting we have better mediums; but in philosophy, poetry, sculpture, decency, beauty, we have not risen. We cure diseases more skilfully, but we have more; in health we are crippled by our cities and our customs. Our violins and pianos, our orchestras, and symphonies, are our great achievements; but in these South Seas, where they do not count, the people had evolved a mass utterance of canticles more thrilling and, more enjoyable than the oratorios of Europe. In these himenes one may see transfigured for moments the soul of the Polynesian ascending above the dust of the west, which smothers his articulation.
A woman in the center of a row suddenly struck a high note, beginning a few words from a hymn, or an improvisation. She sang through a phrase, and then others joined in, singly or in pairs or in tens, without any apparent rule except close harmony. These voices burst in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some high, some low, some singing words, and others merely humming resonantly, a deep, booming bass. The surf beating on the reef, the wind in the cocoanut-trees, entered into the volume of sound, and were mingled in the emmeleia, a resulting magnificence of accord that reminded me curiously of a great pipe-organ.
The himene was the offspring of the original efforts of the Polynesians to adapt the songs of the sailormen, the national airs of the adventurers of many countries, the rollicking obscenities and drinking doggerel of the navies, and the religious hymns drilled into their ears by the missionaries, English and French. Now the words and the meanings were inextricably confused. A leader might begin with, “I am washed in the blood of the Lamb,” or, “The Son of Man goes forth to war, a golden crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams afar—who follows in his train?” But those striking in might prefer such a phrase as, “The old white pig ran into the sea,” or, “Johnny Brown, I love your daughter,” or something not possible to write down. It was mostly in the old Tahitian language, almost forgotten, and thus unknown to the foreign preachers. Sex and religion were as mingled here as in America.
The airs were as wild as they were melodious; here a rippling torrent of ra, ra, ra-ra-ra, and la, la, la-la-la breaking in on the sustained verses of the leaders; falsetto notes, high and strident, savage and shrilling, piercing the thrumming diapason of the men; long, droning tones like bagpipes, bubbling sounds like water flowing; and all in perfect time. The clear, fascinating false soprano of the woman leader had a cadence of ecstasy, and I marked her under a lamp. Her head was thrown back, her eyes were closed, and her features set as in a trance. Her throat and mouth moved, and her nostrils quivered, her countenance glorified by her visions which had transported her to the bosom of Abraham.