It isn't the custom to go sight-seeing with the sailors of one's friend's yacht in Tahiti any more than elsewhere, but I told myself that the role of patron would excuse it in this instance. And who in his first year in "The Islands" ever failed to rise for the "real thing" bait under any circumstances? W——, who joined me for the evening, was a British ornithologist of considerable reputation, and himself an earnest searcher after the fabled native of pristine purity.
We found the place without difficulty by locating it approximately and then running down the bang of a beaten oil can and the whine of an accordion. It is quite possible that the sailors had been taken to the bosoms of some native families, as they claimed; it is even possible that there may have been a right merry breakdown of a sort going on before we came. But certain it is that it was nothing bordering on that elusive will-o'-the-wisp, the "real thing," and more certain still that our coming—perhaps through suspicions aroused by the official cut of W——'s ducks—came pretty near to putting an end to even such activity as had been in progress up to that moment.
The double line of capering vahines broke for the unlighted corners and in a trice had hidden their graceful flower-wreathed limbs under flowing holakaus. They were a likely enough looking lot of girls, but not even the dozen bottles of claret which we had brought as good-will offering served to stir them to further action. In vain the chagrined sailors implored and swore and pushed and pulled; the distrustful nymphs only hung their flower-crowned heads and shrunk deeper into the dark corners. There was only one of the lot that did not seem paralysed with bashfulness, and this one, a long, rangy rack of bones with close-cropped hair—the only uncomely member of the party—started a lively whirling-dervish sort of a dance that threatened to break through the rickety floor.
"Not an orthodox hula, but quite the best bit of quick stepping I've seen in Tahiti," cried W—— enthusiastically. "Go it, girl! Vite! Vite!"
Thus encouraged, the lengthy dancer let out another link and at the same time lowered her song from a high falsetto humming to a booming of chesty bass notes.
"My word!" gasped W——, "she's a man!"
And a man "she" proved to be, a light-stepping young Kanaka, called in at the last moment to take the place of a girl who had fallen ill.
"Let's take a flash of that bunch of icebergs and get out of here," suggested W—— wearily; "I've had about enough of your 'real thing' for one evening."
So while W—— and the sailors chivvied the reluctant dancers together and grouped them in frozen poses, I set up my camera and put out the flashlight powder. A sufficient quantity of the latter was poured from a two-ounce tin box into its cover and set on a rickety table, the mate being directed to light it at the click of my opening shutter. He lit the powder at the proper moment, but confused the order to the extent of putting his match to the contents of the nearly full box instead of the small portion in its cover. There came an explosive "whish," a blinding flash, and under a dense smoke-cloud the mate, his eyelashes gone and his drooping Norwegian moustache burned to a few singed stubs, was writhing on the floor and groaning with agony. An instant later the light bamboo wall behind the table was observed to be afire, and forthwith bedlam broke loose on all sides.
The sailors bellowed for water and W—— shouted for a quilt, while the natives screamed back to the effect that, as the house was deserted and isolated, neither could be had. There seemed nothing to do but to get out and let the old shack burn, and through my mind flashed pictures of an interminable series of complications incident to the red-tape of the inevitable French official investigations. W—— and a sailor, with the apparently stone-blind mate between them, were making for the door and I was endeavouring to save the trampled fragments of my photographic apparatus, when my eye caught a flash of red in one corner, and my ear the twice or thrice repeated crash of breaking glass. In a quarter of a minute more a vigorously swished wet rag had whipped out the darting flame-tongues just before they reached the pendant frizzles of the pandanus thatch.