My opportunities for studying the hula in Nukahiva, which was once famous as the home of the greatest dancers in the South Pacific, were so limited that it would be presumptuous of me to dogmatise. I might record the impression, however, that it is a spirited and soul-stirring performance, and has this in common with modern "ragging" and "jazzing" and "shimmy-ing," that it leaves nothing to the imagination on the points to which it is endeavouring to give expression. For this reason, if for no other, it may be worth preserving against the time when the Pampas, the Sahara and the Barbary Coast of California are incapable longer of giving a wriggle or a "writhe" sufficiently suggestive to stir the jaded soul of Society. Pulses that have long refused to throb a beat faster in the tangle of the "tango," may yet have the life to quicken in the sensuous abandon of the Marquesan hula. And in fancy cannot one hear it all over again? "The 'Hatiheu Hug' and the 'Taio-haie Throttle'—who says they're disgusting? If one wants to dance them disgustingly, of course—" How long will it be, I wonder?
Queen Mareu and her retinue, Her Highness in a flowing habit of print and tapa and sitting an imported French side-saddle, accompanied us back to Taio-haie, and on the evening preceding our departure came off to the yacht for dinner and fireworks. Queen Taone of Anaho, who chanced to be visiting in Taio-haie, was another of the distinguished guests on this occasion. Besides royalty, invitations had been sent to every one of foreign blood on the island, and all, with the exception of John Hilyard, the tattooed man, had responded. French officialdom, brave in gold lace and with straggles of orders across its breasts, was out en masse; three of the genial Fathers from the Catholic mission, one of whom entertained us with several selections from "Faust," "Carmen" and "Trovatore," sung in a magnificent tenor, also honoured us with their presence, as did four officers from trading schooners in the harbour, two of whom were in pajamas and barefooted. Cramer, the German trader, was choking till his eyes bulged in the uniform of an officer of a Prussian cavalry regiment which he had worn as a slender youth, ten years before. McGrath put us all to shame by appearing in a dress suit, the fine cut of which puzzled me not a little until, later in the evening when he had thrown it aside in my cabin, I noticed a tab with "Poole" upon it on the inside of the collar.
Entertaining royalty is ordinarily a thing not lightly to be courted, but one has to get used to it in the South Pacific and after a while comes to take it quite as a matter of course. The principal accessories required are a phonograph or a music box, a cabin-ful of plate glass mirrors, plenty of cool drinks, a few cases of fireworks, unlimited bolts of print and an inexhaustible supply of barrels of salt beef and boxes of canned salmon. These items, properly used, will insure social success to the veriest tyro. In those calid latitudes, where everything else appears more or less en deshabille, court etiquette is also stripped of its surplus frills and, save for occasional disconcerting surprises, contains little to baffle the uninitiated.
Queen Mareu had dined with foreigners many times before and her manners were impeccable. Her Highness, Teona, had enjoyed fewer advantages than her sister sovereign of Hatiheu, but even she—except for a little bad luck in inhaling some champagne which she was endeavouring to make run down her throat and thereby inducing coughing fits which nothing but rolling on the carpet seemed to have any efficacy in checking—deported herself most creditably. She was, to be sure, irresistibly attracted by the agreeable salty taste of a long lock of her foretop which got into the soup in the opening round, so that she returned to it in all of the intervals between the courses which followed, and the careless informality of her action in emptying the contents of the bowl of lump sugar into the bosom of her holakau might have been greeted with raised eyebrows at Newport, or Cowes, or Cannes, but the quiet, unconscious dignity of it all proved that she was at least "to the manor born" in the South Pacific and quite disarmed criticism.
Dinner over, Queen Mareu retired to a reclining chair by the taffrail and sat apart, moody and distrait, all of the evening, not any too pleased, apparently, to have her handsome "Lord Chamberlain" so much monopolized by the visitors. Queen Teona, on the other hand, glad of the chance to become the centre of interest, was all smiles and animation. Seated at ease on the rail of the cockpit, with one dainty brown foot thrust through the spokes of the wheel and the other polishing the brass binnacle, she related—through Cramer as interpreter—stories which she had heard from her grandfather of the time when Nukahiva was the rendezvous of the Pacific whaling fleet, tales only less terrible than those of the days when the buccaneers held high revel in the old cannibal feast ground at Hatiheu; recitals, in fact, which I rather fancy the shrewd Teuton toned down considerably in translation.
At little tables on the quarter deck the French officers mixed cool green drinks from specially-provided bottles of absinthe, and in the cabin, bowed over a chart, the trading captains gave the Commodore careful directions for threading the passages of the treacherous Paumotos. On the forward deck Their Highnesses' retinues fraternized with the Lurline's crew over a case of Yankee beer, now the sailors raising their voices in a chantey, now the natives in a himine, and now both together in indiscriminate "chantey-himines" and "himine-chanteys."
In the whole cruise's necklace of tropical nights that one shines forth with a sparkle all its own. As the afterglow faded above the opaque mass of cliffs behind the village, the trade-wind shifted slightly and came to us across the blossom-clothed spurs to the southeast, suffusing, as with a draught of incense from the open door of an Eastern temple, the whole hollow of the bay in the drowsy perfume of the yellow cassi. As the purple shadows banked deeper on the ebony water and night crept out from the black valleys of the mountains lights began twinkling here and there in the bush, and presently the lines of the verandas of the official residence were picked out in rows of coloured lanterns. The surf broke uproariously along the shore in bursts of phosphorescent flame, and in its pauses the barbaric cadences of himines and hulas floated out to us across the star-paved surface of the bay. On this, though they seemed to tickle the royal fancies, the fireworks broke somewhat in the nature of an anti-climax.
To the good Teona's passion for "seeing the wheels go round" was due the fact that the fireworks tickled something besides her royal fancy. She had been permitted to pull the lanyard of the signal gun for half a dozen salutes, to put the match to several kicking rockets, and had just touched off her second fistful of Roman candles when the trouble occurred. The paper tubes were popping forth their multi-coloured contents in blazing showers when Her Highness, her face ashine with perspiration and pleasure, reversed them in an ill-advised attempt to see where the bright little balls came from.
In an instant a good half dozen or more of the purple pellets had popped into the neck of the unlucky queen's voluminous holakau, seeking extinguishment somewhere in the oil-glistening reaches of Her Highness' plump shoulders. That the sufferer raked, as with a gatling gun, the rest of the party with her sputtering candles in the pain and consternation of the first touch of the burning balls of calcium is hardly to be wondered at under the circumstances; and it only made the more admirable the manner in which she pulled herself together and tossed the spitting fire-sticks overboard before dignifiedly retiring down the gangway to bathe her burns in salt water. Later in the evening she rose to another trying emergency with equal aplomb in seizing an erupting ginger ale bottle from one of her befuddled hand-maidens and smothering it in the latter's flowered pareo in order to save the dignity and the gold-laced uniform of the Residente who, being corpulent, had become temporarily wedged in his deck chair and was unable to dodge the sizzling amber jet. This, I may mention, was only the forerunner of many trying experiences that were in store for us as the result of the violent unrest that enters into the contents of a bottle of champagne or mineral water that is carried in imperfectly protected lockers on tropical seas.