Each woman had many husbands, whom she ruled. The true paternity of her children it was impossible to ascertain. Yet so tenaciously did the Marquesans cling to the father-right in the child, that even this fact could not break it down. One husband was legally the father of all her children, ostensibly at least the owner of the household and of such small personal property as belonged to it under communism. The man remained, though in name only, the head of the polyandrous family.
I seemed to see in this curious fact another proof of the ancient kinship between the first men of my own race and the prehistoric grandfathers of Malicious Gossip and Haabunai. My savage friends, with their clear features, their large straight eyes and olive skins, showed still the traces of their Caucasian blood. Their forefathers and mine may have hunted the great winged lizards together through primeval wildernesses, until, driven by who knows what urge of wanderlust or necessity, certain tribes set out in that drive through Europe and Asia toward America that ended at last, when a continent sunk beneath their feet, on these islands in the southern seas.
It was a far flight for fancy to take, from my paepae in the jungle at the foot of Temetiu, but looking at the beauty and grace of Malicious Gossip as she sat on my mats in her crimson pareu, I liked to think that it was so.
“We are cousins,” I said to her, handing her a freshly-opened cocoanut which Exploding Eggs brought.
“You are a great chief, but we love you as a blood-brother,” she answered gravely, and lifted the shell bowl to her lips.
CHAPTER XI
Filling the popoi pits in the season of the breadfruit; legend of the mei; the secret festival in a hidden valley.
On the road to the beach one morning I came upon Great Fern, my landlord. Garbed in brilliant yellow pareu, he bore on his shoulders an immense kooka, or basket of cocoanut fiber, filled with quite two hundred pounds of breadfruit. The superb muscles stood out on his perfect body, wet with perspiration as though he had come from the river.
“Kaoha, Great Fern!” I said. “Where do you go with the mei?”
“It is Meinui, the season of the breadfruit,” he replied. “We fill the popoi pit beside my house.”