Floundering and snapping his teeth in a manner that would have done credit to a monster of twice his size, and roaring as no shark of any size ever roared, the gamy leviathan was no sooner laid alongside than, with a vigorous swish of his tail (both feet planted squarely in the pit of the stomach of the trim vahine who chanced to be representing the adjacent piece of taffrail) he stove a gaping hole in the schooner's hull. An instant later his "triple row of barbéd teeth" had closed on the arm of the slender miss who, sitting on the shoulders of a lengthy Kanaka, was dancing the part of the mainmast, and brought her crashing to the deck, squealing like a roped pig. The "cutting up" of the shark, owing to this obstreperousness, must have been a bit more realistic than usual, for he still bore marks of it when I encountered him in Papeete a week later.
After being "careened" for repairs the schooner, her hold bulging with pearls, got up sail again and started for home, only to encounter the inevitable hurricane and go to pieces on the rocks to the same unleashed fury of wind and waves and thunder that had uprooted the coconuts. For some minutes spars, planks and other bits of wreckage, imploring help at the tops of their lungs, eddied and swirled about the greensward; then a resistless current bore them relentlessly toward the wine calabashes in the "green room" and the "Pearling Schooner Dance" was over.
In the good doctor's original plan of the evening's entertainment several more dances of the nature of those just described were called for, but the carelessness of the commissariat in dealing out the orange wine too rapidly ordained otherwise. The sounds of revelry from the "green room" were keying higher every moment, and our host's apprehensiveness showed in the quick glowings and palings of his nervously puffed cigarette. When, instead of the sober himine which opens up the burlesque "Missionary Dance," there sounded the wail of accordions, the roll of shark-hide drums and the clear, deep-throated voices of the girls in the preliminary strains of the "Nuptial Hula," he sprang to his feet to explode into excited Anglo-German-Tahitian with "Nein! Nein! Das ist nichts was I tells them. Hare! Hare! Go back mit you, you teufels!" But he might as well have tried to stem the tide of the Pacific as that swirling onrush from the "green room."
By this time the shaft of lunar calcium, broadening slightly as the moon rose, had moved across the dancing floor till its outer side was just beginning to encroach upon our mat-covered dais, so that instead of "back row, left," as at first, our seats now occupied approximately the position of "First row, Orchestra, centre." We were in the "bald-headed row" with a vengeance, and just at the right time.
Like a pack of hungry wolves charging down upon a fold of lambs, the Bacchic throng swarmed out of the shadows into the spot-light about our dais, and threw itself with the reckless abandon born of three hours of steady tippling at the wine calabashes into the sinuous writhing of a dance rarely performed in the past except at the wedding feasts of royalty, and now, as it is strictly against the French law, almost never under any circumstances.
To a spectator watching from a distance some suggestion of rhythm and unity might have been apparent in the movement of the dance; from our advanced position, as to a man in the thick of a battle, the general action was lost sight of in the wealth of local interest. There was nothing to do but to fix your attention on the nearest dancer and hope, as at a multi-ringed circus, that nothing of greater interest was going on anywhere else. Once your attention was fixed it was not likely to go wandering far afield in search of a new centre of interest.
As an exhibition of eccentric muscular action alone, this dance is worth making a journey to the South Pacific to see. In the slow opening movements, to a seductive half-crooning, half-chirping air, it is as though every square inch of the oil-glistening form before you is trying to move in a different direction. There is something of the suggestion of a coiling and uncoiling snake in it; something of that of the twisting green stream of water where it shoots between two mid-stream boulders; something of that of the whirling columns of the "dust-devils" of the desert.
But what comparison can you find for the wild thing that springs into life as the music quickens and the intoxication of the sensuous dance enters into the blood of the dancers? There is still a suggestion of the former undulating sinuousity of motion, but at a trip-hammer speed which defies the eye to follow it; a double-action, reciprocating, triple-expansion shiver, beginning at the plume-tips and ending at the toes, that would make a Newfoundland dog shaking himself after a bath look like a stuffed museum specimen in comparison.
For a minute, or two, or three—one loses count of time when elemental forces like these are loosed—this rapid-fire action continues; then they all sink into quivering heaps on the grass, with just enough breath left to raise feeble cries for the wine calabashes, a circumstance which led W—— to remark that their enthusiasm for the dance had probably been due to the fact that they were "shaking for the drinks."