Cows and goats browsed about the garden, but Grelet banned pigs to a secluded valley to run wild. One of the cows was twenty-two years old, but daily gave brimming buckets of milk for our refreshment. Beef and fish, breadfruit and taro, good bread from American flour, rum, and wine both red and white, with bowls of milk and green cocoanuts, were always on the table, a box of cigars, packages of the veritable Scaferlati Supérieur tobacco, and the Job papers, and a dozen pipes. No king could fare more royally than this Swiss, who during twenty years had never left the forgotten little island of Fatu-hiva.
His house, set in this bower of greenery, of flowers and perfumes, was airy and neat, whitewashed both inside and out, with a broad veranda painted black. Two bedrooms, a storeroom in which he sold his merchandise, and a workroom, sufficed for all his needs. The veranda was living-room and dining-room; raised ten feet from the earth on breadfruit-tree pillars placed on stone, it provided a roof for his forge, for his saddle-and-bridle room, and for the small kitchen.
The ceilings in the house were of wood, but on the veranda he had cleverly hung a canvas a foot below the roof. The air circulated above it, bellying it out like a sail and making the atmosphere cool. Under this was his dining-table, near a very handsome buffet, both made by Grelet of the false ebony, for he was a good carpenter as he was a crack boatsman, farmer, cowboy, and hunter. Here we sat over pipe and cigarette after dinner, wine at our elbows, the garden before us, and discussed many things.
Grelet had innumerable books in French and German, all the great authors old and modern; he took the important reviews of Germany and France, and several newspapers. He knew much more than I of history past and present, of the happenings in the great world, art and music and invention, finances and politics. He could name the cabinets of Europe, the characters and records of their members, or discuss the quality of Caruso's voice as compared with Jean de Reszke's, though he had heard neither. Twenty-two years ago he had left everything called civilization, he had never been out of the Marquesas since that time; he lived in a lonely valley in which there was no other man of his tastes and education, and he was content.
“I have everything I want; I grow it or I make it. My horses and cattle roam the hills; if I want meat, beef or goat or pig, I go or I send a man to kill an animal and bring it to me. Fish are in the river and the bay; there is honey in the hives; fruit and vegetables in the garden, wood for my furniture, bark for the tanning of hides. I cure the leather for saddles or chair-seats with the bark of the rose-wood. Do you know why it is called rose-wood? I will show you. Its bark has the odor of roses when freshly cut. Yes, I have all that I want. What do I need from the great cities?”
He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe and puffed it meditatively.
“A man lives only a little while, hein? He should ask himself what he wants from life. He should look at the world as it is. These traders want money, buying and selling and cheating to get it. What is money compared to life? Their life goes in buying and selling and cheating. Life is made to be lived pleasantly. Me, I do what I want to do with mine, and I do it in a pleasant place.”
His pipe went out while he gazed at the garden murmurous in the twilight. He knocked out the dottle, refilled the bowl and lighted the tobacco.
“You should have seen this island when I came. These natives die too fast. Ah, if I could only get labor, I could make this valley produce enough for ten thousand people. I could load the ships with copra and cotton and coffee.”
He was twenty-two years and many thousands of miles from the great cities of Europe, but he voiced the wail of the successful man the world over. If he could get labor, he could turn it into building his dreams to reality, into filling his ships with his goods for his profit. But he had not the labor, for the fruits of a commercial civilization had killed the islanders who had had their own dreams, their own ships, and their own pleasures and profits in life.