Though scarcely a twelve-month old, the baby swam like a frog in the clear water of the river, gurgling at intervals scraps of what must have been Marquesan baby-talk, unintelligible to me, but showing plainly her enjoyment. Something of European caution, however, still remained with me and, perhaps unnecessarily, I picked up the dripping little body and carried her up the garden path to the house when I returned for breakfast. Pae received her with no concern, and gave her a piece of cocoanut to suck. I saw the infant, clutching it in one hand, toddling and stumbling river-ward again when after breakfast I set out for a walk up Oomoa Valley.
Oomoa was far wilder than Atuona, more lonely, with hundreds of vacant paepaes. Miles of land, once cultivated, had been taken again by the jungle, as estates lapsed to nature after thousands of years of man. Still, even far from the houses, delicate trees had preserved themselves in some mysterious way, and oranges and limes offered themselves to me in the thickets.
The river that emptied into the bay below Grelet's plantation flowed down the valley from the heights, and beside it ran the trail, a road for half a mile, then a track growing fainter with every mile, hardly distinguishable from the tangle of trees and bushes on either side. Here and there I saw a native house built of bamboo and matting, very simple shelters with an open space for a doorway, but wholesome, clean, and, to me, beautiful. I met no one, and most of the huts were on the other side of the river, but from one nearer the track a voice called to me, “Kaoha! Manihii, a tata mai! Greeting, stranger, come to us!”
The hut, which, by measurement, was ten feet by six, held six women and girls, all lying at ease on piles of mats. It was a rendezvous of gossips, a place for siestas and scandal. One had seen and hailed me, and when I came to their paepae, they all filed out and surrounded me, gently and politely, but curiously. Obviously they had seen few whites.
The six were from thirteen to twenty years of age, four of them strikingly beautiful, with the grace of wild animals and the bright, soft eyes of children. Smiling and eager to be better acquainted with me, they examined my puttees of spiral wool, my pongee shirt, and khaki riding-breeches, the heavy seams of which they felt and discussed. They discovered a tiny rip, and the eldest insisted that I take off the breeches while she sewed it.
As this was my one chance to prevent the rip growing into a gulf that would ultimately swallow the trousers, I permitted the stitch in time, and having nothing in my pockets for reward, I danced a jig. I cannot dance a step or sing a note correctly, but in this archipelago I had won inter-island fame as a dancer of strange and amusing measures, and a singer of the queer songs of the whites.
Recalling the cake-walks, sand-sifting, pigeon-winging, and Juba-patting of the south, the sailor's hornpipe, the sword-dance of the Scotch, and the metropolitan version of the tango, I did my best, while the thrilled air of Oomoa Valley echoed these words, yelled to my fullest lung capacity:
“There was an old soldier and he had a wooden leg, And he had no tobacco, so tobacco did he beg. Said the soldier to the sailor, ‘Will you give me a chew?’ Said the sailor to the soldier, ‘I'll be damned if I do! Keep your mind on your number and your finger on your rocks, And you'll always have tobacco in your old tobacco box.’”
Dancing and singing thus on the flat stones of the paepae of the six Fatu-hiva ladies, I gave back a thousand-fold their aid to my disordered trousers. They laughed till they fell back on the rocks, they lifted the ends of their pareus to wipe their eyes, and they demanded an encore, which I obligingly gave them in a song I had kept in mind since boyhood. It was about a young man who took his girl to a fancy ball, and afterward to a restaurant, and though he had but fifty cents and she said she was not hungry, she ate the menu from raw oysters to pousse-café, and turned it over for more.
It went with a Kerry jig that my grandfather used to do, and if grandfather, with his rare ability, ever drew more uproarious applause than I, it must have been a red-letter day for him, even in Ireland. My hearers screamed in an agony of delight, and others dwelling far away, or passing laden with breadfruit and bananas, gathered while I chortled and leaped, and made the mountain-side ring with Marquesan bravos.