White Shadows in the South Seas

by Frederick O'Brien

It had been raised from the marsh six feet on trunks of trees, and was about forty-five feet long and twenty wide. The floor was of planks, and one climbed a stairway to reach the veranda. The frame of the house was of wood, but the sides all of split bamboo, with a row of windows of glass and a roof of cocoanut thatch. The light entered from the north, and except for a small chamber for sleeping and a closet for provisions, the entire house was a studio, a lofty, breeze-swept hall, the windows high up admitting light, but not the hot sunshine, and the expanse of bamboo filtering the winds in their eternal drift from south to north and north to south.

Below the floor, on the ground, was a room for work in sculpture, in which medium Gauguin took much interest, using clay and wood, the latter both for bas-relief and full relief, Gauguin being hampered, Baufré said, by lack of plasticity in the native clay. Next to this workroom was a shelter for the horse and cart, for Gauguin had the only wheeled vehicle in the Marquesas.

Baufré exhausted all his rhetoric and used four sheets of foolscap in his endeavor to make me see these surroundings of the artist, whom he evidently considered a great man.

“Five hundred francs a month, mon ami, whether he painted or not! But he was a worker. Drunk or sober, he would paint. Oui, I have seen him with a bottle of absinthe in him, and still he would paint. Early in the morning he was at work at his easel in the studio or under the trees, and every day he painted till the light was gone. His only use for the cart was to carry him and his easel and chair to scenes he would paint. He would shoot that accursed morphine into his belly when the pain was too bad, and he would drink wine and talk and paint.

“He had no wife or woman, but he took one in the way of the white man here now and then. He lived alone, save for a half-Chinese boy who cooked and cleaned for him. He never said he was sick. There was no doctor on this island, for the government was then at Nuka-hiva, and he had no time to go there. He suffered terribly, but he never complained. ‘Life is short,’ he would say, ‘and there is not long to paint.’

“He would not talk politics, but after the light was gone he would sit at the organ in his studio and make one cry with his music. When at home he wore only a pareu, but he would put on trousers when he went out. He worked and drank and injected his morphine, and one morning when the boy came he found him dead, and he was smiling.

“The government hated him because he cursed it for not letting the natives keep their customs. The church hated him because he ridiculed it. Still, they buried him in the Catholic cemetery. I went with the body, and four Marquesans carried it up the trail.

“The government sold his house to Gedge, and Gedge sold it to a native, who tore it down for the materials. It was of no use to any one, for it was built for an artist.

“Vous savez; mon garçon, I am not acquainted with pictures, and have never seen any but his, but I felt that they were good. They made one feel the sun. There was in them the soul of these islands. And you know that Polonaise, with the one eye-glass, that lives in Papeite, that Krajewsky? Eh bien! he was here to buy these stone images of gods, and he said that in Paris they were paying tens of thousands of francs for those things of Gauguin's he would have given me for the asking. Ah well! he had the head and he was a philosopher, but he lies up there in Calvary.”

“Perhaps,” said Le Moine.