Ori's resources of entertainment, by a strange coincidence, came to an end at the same time as did our big sack of Chilean pesos, and we returned by the smooth, well-metalled leeward road to Papeete, where we were planning two or three affairs on the yacht in an endeavour to make a small return of the hospitality we had enjoyed from the day of our arrival. We still had something to learn about "Society in the Societies," however, and we were on our way to the initiation.
[CHAPTER VIII]
SOCIETY IN THE SOCIETIES
The Society Islands took their name from the Royal Geographical Society, which sent an expedition there in 1868 to observe the transit of Venus, not, as might be supposed, from any predilection of the early or latter-day inhabitants to afternoon teas, dinners, dances, masques, routs and the like. There were, to be sure, functions which might freely be classed under some of these heads, but as the foreign visitor who was bidden usually finished up much after the fashion of the lady who went out to ride on the tiger, except in the literal interpretation of a social gathering as a "polite intermixing of people," they could hardly be called social from his standpoint. Yet today, socially, Papeete—at least so far as red tape and ceremony go—is the most finished capital of the South Pacific. These things are, in fact, rather overdone for so remote a tropical outpost, and the intricate system of precedence set up by French officialdom, and the constant danger incident to the inadvertent bringing together of those within and without the pale, made one long at times for the bluff informality of Apia and the whole-hearted hospitality of Suva or Honolulu.
There is no lack of kindness on Tahiti's part to the stranger within her gates; if any complaint is to be made on that score, in fact, it is that there is too much of it. The trouble lies in the fact that there are, as elsewhere in the South Pacific, two broadly defined cliques—the missionary and trader—between which there is war to the knife. French officialdom constitutes a third clique which, while keeping itself pretty well aloof from the other two, still complicates their relations considerably. This alignment does not seem so impossible on the face of it, for there are cliques in all climes, and a world of unsegregated human elements would be unthinkable. You will choose your friends from the best in both camps, you may tell yourself, but how soon do you find that in the Guelph-and-Ghibelline warfare of the missionary and trader no sort of "run-with-the-hare-and-hunt-with-the-hounds" position is possible. If you are going to stay in the island you may just as well enlist under the banner of one force or the other at the outset, for there is no such thing as a recognized noncombatant and you are just as likely to go down between the contending forces in trying to keep out of the combat as in fighting in their ranks.
But under which banner will you enlist? There, indeed, comes the rub. You think it will be easy to decide, do you? Perhaps so; but suppose you take a few days to hear what the contenders have to say for themselves. You will find some very plausible chaps on both sides.
"Upon what meat has this our missionary fed?" paraphrases one of your trader acquaintances, who claims to have been a university man before his "pater" paid his debts and cut him off without a farthing. He always comes out with Shakespeare after about the fourth glass of rum, you learn shortly, and as inevitably lapses into the vernacular of the "beach" with something of the nature of "Why, blyme me, them swaller-tailed blokes would have been butchered an' eaten a hundred years ago if it wasn't fer us traders an' our shootin' irons to hold down the blacks."