The efforts of missionaries have killed the joy of living as they have crushed out the old barbarities, uprooting together everything, good and bad, that religion meant to the native. They have given him instead rites that mystify him, dogmas he can only dimly understand, and a little comfort in the miseries brought upon him by trade.
I have seen a leper alone on his paepae, deep in the Scriptures, and when I asked him if he got comfort from them I was answered, “They are strong words for a weak man, and better than pig.” But only a St. Francis Xavier or a Livingstone, a great moral force, could lift the people now from the slough of despond in which they expire.
Upon this people, sparkingly alive, spirited as wild horses, not depressed as were their conquerors by a heritage of thousands of years of metes and bounds, religion as forced upon them has been not only a narcotic, but a death potion.
CHAPTER X
The marriage of Malicious Gossip; matrimonial customs of the simple natives; the domestic difficulties of Haabuani.
Mouth of God and his wife, Malicious Gossip, soon became intimates of my paepae. Coming first to see the marvelous Golden Bed and to listen to the click-click of the Iron Fingers That Make Words, they remained to talk, and I found them both charming.
Both were in their early twenties, ingenuous, generous, clever, and devoted to each other and to their friends. Malicious Gossip was beautiful, with soft dark eyes, clear-cut features, and a grace and lovely line of figure that in New York would make all heads whirl. She was all Marquesan, but her husband, Mouth of God, had white blood in him. Whose it was, he did not know, for his mother's consort had been an islander. His mother, a large, stern, and Calvinistic cannibal, believed in predestination, and spent her days in fear that she would be among the lost. Her Bible was ever near, and often, passing their house, I saw her climb with it into a breadfruit-tree and read a chapter in the high branches where she could avoid distraction.
They lived in a spacious house set in three acres of breadfruit and cocoanuts, an ancient grove long in their family. Often I squatted on their mats, dipping a gingerly finger in their popoi bowl and drinking the sweet wine of the half-ripe cocoanut, the while Mouth of God's mother spoke long and earnestly on the abode of the damned and the necessity for seeking salvation. In return, Malicious Gossip spent hours on my paepae telling me of the customs of her people new and old.
“When I was thirteen,” she said, “the whalers still came to Vait-hua, my valley. There came a young Menike man, straight and bright-eyed, a passenger on a whaling-ship seeking adventure. I sighed the first time in my life when I looked on him. He was handsome, and not like other men on your ships.
“The kiss you white men give he taught me to like. He was generous and gentle and good. Months we dwelt together in a house by the stream in the valley. When he sailed away at last, as all white men do who are worth wanting to stay, he tore out my heart. My milk turned to poison and killed our little child.