During the week of the Play, both on and off the stage, Lurau is quiet, dignified and a general paragon of virtue in every particular; afterwards—he is just like all the rest of his brothers and sisters of the Marquesas, prone to excesses. Lurau's post-Passion Play spree is listed with the hurricane season as one of the regular annual disturbances in those latitudes.
The second scene of the Play is that of the "Redemption of the Magdalen." The latter, dressed in a bright red holakau or wrapper—the symbol of her sinfulness—comes strolling in from the upstream side and discovers Christ resting on a niche of the rock which forms the back wall. Her repentance and forgiveness follow, after which Christ presents her with a pure white holakau which he chances to have tucked under his arm. She receives a blessing, trips off down stream, changes holakaus in the wink of an eye behind the friendly trunk of a bread-fruit tree, and the "curtain" follows her disappearance upstream in the trailing robe of white.
The Magdalen has been played by a different person almost every year. The one who took that part in the last presentation was, so Bruce Manners assured us, far better in the "red holakau" than in the "white holakau" part of her rôle, her work as a repentant sinner having been decidedly marred through a persistent tendency to ogle a group of young trading schooner officers who occupied a proscenium banyan.
For the "Supper" scene, no endeavour is made to reproduce a tableau patterned on the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci. Historic truthfulness is not attempted even to the extent of a table. A bountiful repast of bread-fruit, plantains, yams and coconuts is spread out upon a cover of banana leaves, and everybody sits down cross-legged and eats for fully ten minutes before a word is spoken. Supper over, the remnants are gathered up and thrown into the convenient Ta-roo-la, the waters of which carry them away in a jiffy. Then follows the washing of the feet of the disciples. Lurau wades over into the stream, seats himself on a convenient boulder, and as each of the disciples comes out in turn, gives both of the latter's feet a vigorous scrubbing with a brush of coco husk and a piece of soap. After receiving a blessing, the disciple heads for the bank, and as each lifts the skirt of his robe to clear the stream a well-defined "high-water mark," running in graceful undulations around his lower calf, is usually disclosed to the eyes of the audience.
The scene of "Christ Healing the Lepers" as presented at Uahuka is, perhaps, the most realistic tableau, in one particular at least, that is staged in any of the Passion Plays. Real lepers appear on the stage. In the early days of the Play these parts were taken by entirely whole and healthy people, but the missionaries were never able to persuade the natives that, with so many real lepers ready to hand, any make-believe in this particular need be indulged in. Finally several of the lepers themselves—Christian converts—came to the Fathers and asked what was the use of curing a lot of well people in the Play when there were so many sick ones about that really needed curing. This was hard to answer—to the satisfaction of the questioners—and the upshot of the matter was that a half dozen of the cases least liable to spread the dread disease were allowed upon the stage at the next performance. Following the week of the Play it is said that a very marked improvement was evident for several months in the condition of every one of the unfortunates that appeared during its continuance. Since that occasion the good missionaries have not had the heart to refuse the prayers of any of those who have come to them at Eastertide, until now it is necessary to divide them off into squads of a score or so each, and allow a different squad to appear each night. The government doctor at Uahuka claims that there has been a marked decrease in the leper mortality of the island since this strange practice has been inaugurated, and that no serious consequences have followed the extraordinary mixing of the sick and the well at this season. No unnecessary chances are taken, however, and the good Lurau who, in his rôle of Christ, is more exposed than any of the others, receives special attention after each performance in the shape of a formaldehyde fumigation at the hands of the doctor.
One of the most interesting characters in the Play is Judas. From the first it has been the aim of the Fathers to impress the natives as strongly as possible with the real goodness or badness of the various characters, and to this end, in the case of Judas, the natives who have played the rôle have been repeatedly taken, on a temporary reprieve, from the convict settlement. Judas has always been a bad man, actually as well as artistically, and it is recorded that no less than half a dozen of him have endeavoured to steal the thirty pieces of silver—in this case Mexican or Chilean dollars, which pass current in the island—with which he has been bribed. Of late years the thoughtful Fathers have removed this temptation by binding the bargain with a tinkling bagful of broken crockery.
The Judas of five or six years ago—one John Bascard, the half-caste son of an Australian trader and a native wife, who was serving a term for robbing a pearler—turned out almost as badly as his notorious original, for he looted the mission on the second night of the Play, rowed off with the Magdalen to a trading cutter anchored in the bay, surprised the solitary watchman, threw him overboard, and sailed the little boat off single-handed for the Paumotos, leaving the Play to limp on to a finish with half-trained understudies in two of the leading parts.
The part of Pontius Pilate has been played for nearly twenty years by an old chief—a quondam cannibal—named Rauga. His costume is a frogged military coat and a silk hat, the idea of the Fathers being to effect a combination that will make the deepest impression on the natives as symbolical of constituted power. The missionary and the French soldier are the two most august personages which their simple minds can conceive of, and the two most striking features of the costume of each, united upon one person, make an impression incomparably more profound than would a Roman toga topped off with an eagle-crowned helmet, or any of the other combinations that are worn by Pilate in the more pretentious Passion Plays. Rauga is inordinately proud of his part, and the honour of appearing in it has held him steadfastly Catholic in the face of active efforts by the Protestants to swing him, temporarily at least, over to their side.
The costume of John the Baptist is, as might be expected, that of a native novitiate—a black robe and a shovel hat. If Manners is to be believed, the unfortunate individual who was cast for that part a half dozen years back made a transient appearance in a somewhat modified garb. This was a "Brand-from-the-Burning" called Ma-woo, who had been converted a few months previously when the Fathers secured his parole from prison, where he had been serving a five-year sentence for illicit pearling. His most salient characteristic was an inordinate fondness for coco toddy, a circumstance which was taken advantage of by a couple of local traders to play a practical joke upon the missionaries, with whom their kind, in the Marquesas as elsewhere, have always been at open warfare. The present of a calabash of toddy to Ma-woo, with the promise of another later, putting him in a cheerfully obliging mood, he was rigged out in a ribbon-wide breech-clout, an old dress coat and a battered silk hat, and with a bulky volume of Sailing Directions under his arm was quietly conducted to the "stage entrance" of the banyan theatre just in time to respond to his "cue" in the John the Baptist tableau.
Manners gave me a photograph of unlucky Ma-woo, taken by one of the traders before they "sent him on his mission," and if it is really true, as is claimed, that John the Baptist appeared thus accoutred in his tableau in the Passion Play, one can easily believe our friend's assertion that two of the sisters fainted and that the Fathers caused the culprit to be thrown back into prison to serve the remainder of his sentence.