Noanoa Tiare took the orange-peel and rubbed it upon her hair.
“Noanoa!” she said. “Mon ami américain, I will give you a note to Aruoehau a Moeroa, the tava, or chief of Mataiea district, and you can stay with him. You will know him as Tetuanui. He will gladly receive you, and he is wise in our history and our old customs. Do not expect too much! We ate in the old day the simple things at hand, fish and breadfruit, feis and cocoanut milk, mangoes and bananas and oranges. Now we eat the dirty and prepared food of the Tinito, the Chinaman, and we depend on coffee and rum and beer for strength. The thin wheat bread has no nourishment compared with the breadfruit and the fei, the yam and the taro. And clothes! The fools taught us that the pareu, which left the body exposed to the air, clean and refreshed by the sun and the winds, was immodest. We exchanged it for undershirts and trousers and dresses and shoes and stockings and coats, and got disease and death and degeneration.
“You are late, my friend,” the princess went on, with a note of pity in her soft voice. “My mother remembered the days Loti depicted in ‘Rarahu.’ My grandmother knew little Tarahu of Bora-Bora of whom he wrote. Viaud was then a midshipman. We did not call him Loti, but Roti, our coined word for a rose, because he had rosy cheeks. But he could not call himself Roti in his novel, for in French, his language, that meant roasted, and one might think of boeuf à la rôti. We have no L in Tahitian. We also called him Mata Reva or the Deep-Eyed One. Tarahu was not born on Bora-Bora, but right here in Mataiea.”
She lay at full length, her uptilted face in her hands, and her perfect feet raised now and then in unaware accentuation of her words.
“What Tahitian women there were then! Read the old French writers! None was a pigmy. When they stood under the waterfall the water ran off their skins as off a marble table. Not a drop stayed on. They were as smooth as glass.”
Fragrance of the Jasmine sighed.
“Aue! Hélas!”
I had it in my mouth to say that she was as beautiful and as smooth-skinned as any of her forebears. She was as enticing as imaginable, her languorous eyes alight as she spoke, and her bare limbs moving in the vigor of her thoughts. But I could not think of anything in French or English not banal, and my Tahitian was yet too limited to permit me to tutoyer her. She was an islander, but she had seen the Midnight Follies and the Bal Bullier, the carnival in Nice, and once, New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. An Italian and a Scandinavian prince had wooed her.
I spoke of Loti again, and of other writers’ comments upon the attitude of women in Tahiti toward man.
The princess sat up and adjusted her hei of ferns. She studied a minute, and then she said: