The night grew. The torches were consumed, the "place" deserted. Somewhere the amazing voyagers had taken themselves to rest. A half moon mutilated the island—long stripes of palms, shadow scars of defiles, mottles of bushes. It was like a sleeping animal, a tiger of deep blue and blue-white, an enormous leopard.
We sat on the veranda at the Residence, the trader and I. By and by, soft-footed, Signet was there, occupying the lowermost step.
The Dutchman talked. Like the able administrator he was, he had already all the data to be procured. Into his ears had poured the whispered trickles of a score of informants.
"You are right, my dear sir. Marquesan. You have been there?"
"No."
"She is called in Polynesian, 'Queen Daughter.' My people, who know nothing as a rule, of course—but they tell me the woman is in actuality the daughter of a queen. But what is a Kanaka queen? After all, Signet, my dear sir, down there, what is one queen, out here?"
The trader was obviously in a good humor. He had not been excited for years. The man was alive. I've said he was like a Spaniard in that he could be diabolical without getting red in the face. Diabolically devious and strategic! Before he resumed he blew three mouthfuls of cigar smoke out into the moonlight, where they burst from the shadow under the roof like mute cannon shots, round and silvery. Beneath them, from the step, Signet's eyes were fixed upon the trader's face, dry, rapt, glazed with some imperious preoccupation.
"But they tell me this woman has danced in a great many islands. She will go from here to another island to dance. The three men are her husbands. But she is no wife. A maid, that woman! They have the hardihood to tell me that. Ha-ha-ha! But, then, she is daughter to a queen. With those 'husbands' she crosses a hundred leagues of sea in her sailing canoe. That royal canoe! To dance at another island.—"
As the Dutchman talked, blowing his smoke bursts into the moonlight, the vision of that Marquesan woman came again before me. I perceived her, under the heavy procession of his words, a figure of astounding romance, an adventuress incomparable, a Polynesian bacchante. No, I saw her as the missionary of a strange thing, crossing oceans, daring thirst and gale and teeth of sharks, harrying deeper and deeper into the outseas of mystery that small, devoted, polyandrous company of husbands, at once her paddlers, cooks, flunkies, watchdogs, music makers. "Queen Daughter!" Royal and self-anointed priestess of that unheard-of dance, the tribal dance, no doubt, of some tiny principality rearing a cone in the empty hugeness of the sea.—I couldn't get away from my time and race. I found myself wondering what she got out of it—in some jungle-bowered, torch-lit "high place," to feel again the toppling of ten thousand years? Was it something to feel the voluptuous and abominable beauty of that rhythm going out of her flesh, beat by beat, and entering into the flesh of those astounded and half-hostile watchers? Perhaps.—
"They tell me that she has also danced at Papeete—before the white men of the steamships," the Dutchman was informing us.