Larrieau nodded. “Tamea’s mother, Moorea, could walk! You, my young friend, have never seen a woman walk; it is a lost art; our women mince or hop or strut. Moorea was a beautiful woman in point of features. Her hair was a wonderful seal-brown and her skin—well, her skin——”
“Was Tamea’s,” the doctor interrupted.
Gaston of the Beard smiled and nodded. “She was regal of bearing and regal of soul—and the missionaries called her a heathen. For years I kept them out of Riva, with their mummery of morals and religion. Why, there was no sin in Riva until I came—and then it wasn’t recognized until the missionaries gave it a name. Monsieur Doctor, behold a man who dwelt in Eden until the serpents drove him out.”
The doctor chuckled quietly.
“Tamea’s mother,” the sailor resumed, “had features as fine and regular as any white woman. But then, why should she not? Her blood was pure, because it was a chief’s blood. The dark skin, the flat nose and the crinkly hair are souvenirs, in the Polynesian race, of their sojourn in the Fijis before they resumed their age-old hegira that started in Asia Minor. In the common people we find evidences of Papuan blood, and that is negroid, Monsieur Doctor. But the pure-bred Polynesian is not a nigger, as ignorant and stupid people might have you believe. They are a lost fragment of the Caucasian race, and any ethnologist who has studied them carefully and sympathetically knows this. Monsieur Doctor, they are not of Malayan origin, but Cushite, and the Cushites were an Aryan people, as doubtless you know.”
“My knowledge of ethnology is very meager, Captain Larrieau,” said the doctor.
“Mine is not. Gaston of the Beard they call me down under the Line, but I have a head to hold up my beard. How do you account for the fact that the Polynesian priesthood in Hawaii was possessed of the story of the Hebrew Genesis as early as the sixth century, and that, in many respects, this version is more complete than the Jewish?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” the doctor protested. He had the feeling that to argue with Larrieau was to argue with an encyclopedia.
“Well, they acquired the story while drifting eastward from the land of their origin and establishing contact with the Israelites, although on the other hand it may be an independent and original version of legends common to the Semite and Aryan tribes of the remote past and handed down to posterity quite as accurately as the Jewish version before the latter became a part of the literature of that race.”
The doctor glanced at his watch. “Captain, it would be most delightful to linger and receive instruction in so interesting a subject, but we have a Japanese liner to clear before noon, so I must be off.”