CHAPTER XIII

Story of the wondrous pearls planted in the lagoon of Pukapuka—Tepeva a Tepeva, the crippled diver, tells it—How a European scientist improved on nature—Tragedy of Patasy and Mauraii—The robbed coral bank—Death under the sea.

THE palace of the governor was within half a mile of my abode in the vale of Atuona, on the island of Hiva-Oa, the capital of the Marquesan Archipelago. It was a broad and deep valley, “the most beautiful, and by far the most ominous and gloomy, spot on earth,” said Stevenson. Umbrageous and silent, it was watered by a stream, which, born in the distant hills, descended in falls and rills and finally a chattering brook to the bay. Magnificent forests of many kinds of trees, a hundred vines and flowers, with rarest orchids, and a tangled mass of grasses and creepers, lined the banks of the little river, and filled the rising confines of the dell, which, as it climbed, grew narrower and darker, and more melancholy of aspect, the poignant melancholy of a sad loveliness past telling or analyzing. A huge fortress of rocks rose almost sheer above my cottage, lowering in shadow and terrible in storm, the highest point in the Marquesas. In sunshine it was the brilliant rampart of the world-god’s battlement, reflecting his flashing rays, and throwing a sheen of luminosity upon the depths of the strath. This lofty peak of Temetiu, nearly a mile in the sky, was the tower of a vast structure of broken hills, gigantic columns, pinnacles,tilted and vertical rocks, ruins of titanic battles of fire and water in ages gone. I had but to lift my eyes and lower them to know that man here as in the Paumotus had but triflingly affected his environment. From the castellated summits to the beach where I had landed, the dwellings of humans seemed lost in the dense foliage dominated by the lofty cocoanuts and the spreading breadfruits.

The palace of the young French administrator was in a garden in which grew exotic flowers brought by predecessors who sought to assuage their nostalgia by familiar charms. The palace had large verandas, and they were most of it, as in all tropical countries where mosquitoes are not too menacing. The reading and lounging, the eating and drinking, took place there, and generally a delicious breeze cooled the humid air and drove away any insects that might annoy. Almost daily I was the guest of the governor at a meal, or in the evening after dinner, for a merry hour or two. We might be alone, or with André Bauda, the tax collector, postmaster, and chief of police, or not seldom with one or more of the fairest of the Marquesan girls of the island of Hiva-Oa. For the governor was host not only to the beauties of our valley of Atuona, but sent Flag, the nativemutoi, or policeman, of the capital, to other villages over the mountains, to invite those whom Flag thought would lessen hisennui. Far from his beloved Midi, the governor retained a Gallic and gallant attitude toward young women, and never tired of their prattle, their insatiable thirst for the beverages of France, and their light laughter when lifted out of their habitual gravity by these. Determined to learn their tongue as quicklyas possible, being no longer resident than I in the Marquesas, he kept about him a lively lexicon or two to furnish him words and practice. Midnight often came with the rest of the village already hours upon their sleeping-mats, but on the palace porches a gabble of conversation, the lilt of a chant, or perhaps the patter of a hula dance of bare feet upon the boards. The Protestant and Catholic missionaries, though opposed to each other upon doctrinal and disciplinary subjects, united in condemnation of the conduct of the high representative of sovereignty. But, like the governor of the Paumotus, he replied: “La vie est triste; vive la bagatalle.” Life is sad; let joy be unconfined.

The governor’sménagehad only one attendant, Song of the Nightingale, and he served only because he was a prisoner, and preferred the domestic duties to repairing trails or sitting all day in the calaboose by the beach. There was no servant in the Marquesas. Whatever civilization had done to them,—and it had undone them almost entirely,—it had not made them menials. There was never a slave. Here death was preferable. In Tahiti one might procure native domestics with extreme difficulty through their momentary craving for gauds, or through affection, but one bought no subservience. The silent, painstaking European or American or Asiatic, the humble, sir-ring butler and footman, could not be matched in the South Seas. If they liked one, these indolent people would work for one now and then, but must be allowed to have their own way and say, and, if reproved, it must be in the tone one used to a child or a relative. The governor himself was compelled to endure Song of the Nightingale’s lapses and familiarities,because he was the only procurable cook in the islands. He could not buy or persuade one of his lovely guests, clothed as they were but in a single garment, to wash a plate or shake a mat. I, it was true, was assisted by Exploding Eggs, a boy of fourteen years, but I made him an honored companion and neophyte whom I initiated into the mysteries of coffee-making and sweeping, and he, too, often wandered away for a day or two without warning.

The table was spread on the veranda when at seven o’clock I opened the garden gate of the palace. Flag had delivered to me an enveloped card with studious ceremony, the governor sometimes observing the extreme niceties of official hospitality, and again throwing them to the winds, especially in very hot weather. Flag, barelegged and barefooted as always, wore the red-striped jacket of themutoiand a loin-cloth, and carried a capacious leather pouch from which he had extracted the made-in-Pariscarte d’invitation. To him it was a mysterious summons to a Lucullan feast which he might not even look upon. The governor was dressing when I mounted the porch, and I was received by Song of the Nightingale. He was a middle-aged desperado, with a leering face, given a Mephistophelian cast by a black whisker extending from ear to ear, and by heavy lines of blue tattooing upon his forehead. He had white blood in him, I felt sure, for he had a cunning wickedness of aspect that lacked the simplicity of the Marquesan. He had been a prisoner many years for various offenses, but mostly for theft or moonshining, at which he was adept, and he was the one Marquesan I would not trust; he had been too much with whites. One wonderedat times whether one’s life was not the pawn of a mood of such a villain, but the French had hammered their dominion upon these sons of man-eaters with lead and steel in the early days, though they were easy and negligent rulers over the feeble remnant.

The handsome governor came from his boudoir as Vehine-hae and Tahia-veo said “Kaoha!” Vehine-hae and Tahia-veo were their names in Marquesan, which translated exactly Ghost Girl and Miss Tail. The latter was apetite, engaging girl of seventeen, a brunette in color, and modest and sweet in disposition. Ghost Girl was the enigma of her sex there, nineteen or twenty, living alone in a detached hut, and singularly beautiful. She was as dark as a Nubian, with a voluptuous figure, small hands and feet, and baggage eyes of melting sepia that promised devotion unutterable. Her nose was straight and perfect, and her sensual mouth filled with shining teeth. Of all the Marquesan girls she wore a travesty of European dress. They in public wore a tight-fittingpeignoiror tunic, and in private apareu, but Ghost Girl had on a silk bodice open to disclose her ripe symmetry, and a lace petticoat about which she wore a silk kerchief. In her ebon heap of hair she wore the phosphorescent flowers of the Rat’s Ear. Her mind was that of a child of ten, inquisitive and acquisitive, exhibitive and demanding.

The governor seated us, the ladies opposite each other, and the dinner began with appetizers of vermouth. The aromatic wine, highly fortified as it was, burned the throat of Miss Tail, but Ghost Girl drank hers with zest, and said, “Motaki!That’s fine!” Neither of the girls spoke more than a few sentences of French, thoughthey had both been in the nuns’ school, but we were able with our knowledge of Marquesan and Song’s fragmentary French to carry on a lively interchange of words, if not of thought.

The governor had shot a few brace ofkuku, the green doves of the forest, and Song had spitted them over apurauwood fire. With the haunch of a wild goat from the hills we had excellent fare, with claret and white wine from Sauterne. We two palefaces wielded forks, but as no Polynesians use such very modern inventions the ladies lifted their meat to their months without artificial aid. Ghost Girl, as befitting her European attire, tried to use a fork, but shrieked with pain when she succeeded in putting only the tines into her tongue. We hardly realize the pains our mothers were at to teach us table-manners, nor that gentlemen of Europe ate with their fingers at a period when chop-sticks were in common use in China and Japan, except in time of mourning.

Song of the Nightingale, who, doubtless, had indulged his convict hankering for alcohol in the secret recesses of the kitchen, laughed loudly at Ghost Girl’s pain, and when he placed a platter of thekukuon the cloth, and she refused to accept one of the grilled birds his snigger became derisive. He took up the carving-fork and stuck it deep into akuku’sbreast and put it on her plate. She shuddered and started back, with her hands covering her long-lashed eyes. The governor demanded in a slightly angry tone to know what Song had done to frighten her. The cook explained that Ghost Girl was of Hanavave, on the island of Fatuhiva, a day’s journey distant, and that thebon dieuorgod—he saidpony-too—of Fatuhiva was thekuku. She had been appalled at his suggestion that she should eat the symbolic tenement of her mother’s deity, though she herself ate the transubstantiated host at communion in the Catholic church at Atuona. Not content with his insult to her ancestral god, and, taking his cue from the governor’s roar of laughter at his French or his explanation, the cruel Song said a bitter thing to Ghost Girl.

“Eat thekuku!” he said. “It will taste better than your grandmother did.”

“Tuitui!Shut your mouth!” retorted Vehine-hae. “There were no thieves in our tribe.”

That was a hot shot at Song’s crimes and penal record, and so animated became their repartee that the governor had to call a halt and demand mutual apologies. Thechefinformed him that his father in a foray upon Hanavave had taken as a prize of war the grandmother of Ghost Girl, and had eaten her, or at least, whatever tidbit he had liked. It was history that she had been eaten in Taaoa, Song’s home, in the next valley to Atuona. No more vindictive remark than this, nor more hateful action than his offering thekukuto Ghost Girl, could be imagined in the rigid etiquette of Marquesas society. The tears were in the soft eyes of Vehine-hae, and the alarmed governor dismissed Song from further service that evening and took the weeping Fatuhivan in his arms to console her.

“Tapu!Tapu!” sobbed Ghost Girl. Thekukuwastaputo her teeth, as the American flag would be to the feet of a patriot. Song was without other belief than in the delight of drink, but Ghost Girl was a woman,the support of every new cult and the prop of every old one. Superstition the world over will die last in the breast of the female. She survives subjugated races, and conserves the past, because her instincts are stronger and her faculties less active than man’s, and her need of worship overwhelming.

That wordtapuwas still one to conjure with in the Marquesas. Flag, the policeman, and sole deputy ofCommissaireBauda on the island of Hiva-Oa, had invoked it a few days before, after an untoward incident. Bauda and I had returned on horseback from a journey to the other side of the island, and, at the post-tax-police office near the beach where Bauda lived, encountered Flag, drunk. Son of a famous dead chief, and himself an amiable, bright man of thirty, he had not resisted the temptation of Bauda’s being gone for a day, to abstract a bottle of absinthe from a closet and consume the quart. Bauda upbraided him and ordered him to his house, but Flag seized a loaded rifle and sounded an ancient battle-cry. It had the blood-curdling quality of an Indian whoop.

Neither Bauda nor I was armed, and I was for shelter behind a cocoanut-tree. That would not do for Bauda, nor for discipline.

“Me with six campaigns in Africa!Moi qui parle!” exclaimed the former officer of the Foreign Legion, as he tapped his breast and voiced his astonishment at Flag’s temerity. He strode toward the staggeringmutoi, and, with utter disregard of the rifle, reached his side. He wrenched the weapon from him, and with a series of kicks drove him into the calaboose and locked the door on him.

Photo from L. GauthierGhost girl

A double canoe

“That means ten years in Noumea for him,” said thecommissaire, savagely. But after dinner, which I got, when he had meditated upon Flag’s willingness as a cook and his ability to collect taxes, he lessened the sentence to a year at hard labor. I was not surprised to meet Flag at noon the next day with his accustomed white jacket with its red stripe upon the arm. Man cannot live without cooks, and perhaps I had aided leniency by burning a bird.

Flag explained to me, though sheepishly, that, overcome by thelitreof absinthe as he was, he would not have injured a hair of Bauda’s head.

“Bauda istapu. I would meet an evil fate did I touch him,” said Flag, when sober and sorry.

I stumbled ontapusdaily. Vai Etienne, my neighbor, gave me a feast one day, and half a dozen of us, all men, sat at table. Vai Etienne, having lived several years in Tahiti had Frenchified ways. His mother, the magnificent Titihuti, who was splendidly tattooed from toe to waist, and who was my adopted mother, waited upon us. Offering her a glass of wine, and begging her to sit with us, I discovered that the glass her son drank from and the chair a man sat in weretaputo her. She took her wine from a shell, but would not sit at table with us. Of course, she never sat in chairs, anyhow, nor did Vai Etienne, but he had provided these for the whites.

The subject of thetapusof the South Seas was endless. The custom,tabuorkapuin Hawaiian, andtambuin Fijian, was ill expressed in our “taboo,” which means the pressure of public sentiment, or family or group feeling.Tapushere were the conventions ofprimitive people made awe-inspiring for enforcement because of the very willfulness of these primitives. The custom here and throughout society dated from the beginning of legend. Laws began with the rules laid down by the old man of the family and made dread in the tribe or sept by the hocus-pocus of the medicine man.Tapusmay have been the foundation of all penal laws and etiquette. The Jews had a hundred niceties of religious, sanitary, and socialtapus. Warriors weretapuin Homer’s day, and land and fish weretaputo Grecian warriors, according to Plato. Confucius in the “Li Ki,” ordained men and women not to sit on the same mat, nor have the same clothes-rack, towel, or comb, nor to let their hands touch in giving and receiving, nor to do a score of other trivial things. The old Irish had manytapusand totems, and many legends of harm wrought by their breaking, a famous one being “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel.”

In the Marquesastapuswere the most important part of life, as ceremony was at the court of the kings of France. They governed almost every action of the people, as the rules of a prison do convicts, or the precepts of a monastery monks. Death followed the disobedience of many, and others preserved one from the hands of enemies. There being no organized government in Polynesia,tapustook the place of laws and edicts. They were, in fact, spiritual laws, superstition being the force instead of a penal code. They imposed honesty, for if a man had any dear possession, he had the priesttapuit and felt secure.Tapusprotected betrothed girls and married women from rakes.

A young woman who worked at the convent inAtuona, near me, was madetapuagainst all work. She was never allowed to touch food until it had been prepared for her. If she broke thetaputhe food was thrown away. From infancy, when atauahad laid the prohibition upon her, she lived in disagreeable idleness, afraid to break the law of the priest. Only in recent years did the nuns laugh away her fears, and set her to helping in their kitchen. She told me that she could not explain the reason for her having beentapufrom effort, as thetauahad died who chained her, without informing her.

If a child crawled under a house in the building, the house was burned. If I were building a boat, and, for dislike of me, some one named aloud the boat after my father, I destroyed the boat. Blue wastaputo women in Nuku-Hiva, and red, too. They could not eat bonito,squid,popii, andkoehi. They might not eat bananas, cocoanuts, fresh breadfruit, pigs of brown color, goats, fowls and other edibles.

Females were forbidden to climb upon the sacredpaepaes, to enter the men’s club-houses (thistapuwas enforced in America until the last few years), to eat with men, to smoke inside the house, to carry mats on their heads, and, saddest of all, to weep. Children might not carry one another pickaback. Thekuavenafish wastaputo fishermen, as alsopeata, a kind of shark.

To throw human hair upon the ground was strictly prohibited. It might be trodden on, and bring mischief upon the former wearer. So the chiefs would never walk under anything that might be trodden on, and aboard ships never went below deck, for that reason.Perhaps our superstition as to walking under ladders is derived from such atapu. To stretch one’s hand or an object over the head of any one wastapu. There were a hundred thingstaputo one sex. Men had the advantage in these rules, for they were made by men.

The earthly punishments for breakingtapusran from a small fine to death, and from spoliation to ostracism and banishment. Though there were many arbitrarytapus, the whims and fantasies of chiefs, or the wiles of priests, the majority of them had their beginning in some real or fancied necessity or desirability. Doubtless they were distorted, but, like circumcision and the Mosaic barring of pork to the Jews, here was health or safety of soul or body concerned. One might cite the Ten Commandments as very oldtapus.

The utter disregard for thetapusof the Marquesans shown by the whites eventually had caused them to fall into general disrepute. They degenerated as manners decayed under the influx of barbarians into Rome, as Greek art fell before the corruption of the people. The Catholic, who bowed his head and struck his breast at the exaltation of the host, could understand the veneration the Marquesans had for their chieftapus, and their horror at the conduct of the rude sailors and soldiers who contemned them. But when they saw that no gods revenged themselves upon the whites, that no devil devoured their vitals when they atetapubreadfruit or fish or kicked the high priest from the temple, the gentle savages made up their minds that the magic had lost its potency. So, gradually, though to some peopletapuswere yet very sacred, the fabric built up by thousands of years of an increasingly elaborate system oflaws and rites, melted away under the breath of scorn. The god of the white man was evidently greater than theirs. Titihuti, a constant attendent of the Catholic church, yet treasured a score oftapus, and associated with them these others, the dipping of holy water from thebénitier, the crossing herself, the kneeling and standing at mass, the telling of her beads, and the kissing of the cross.

The abandonment oftapusunder the ridicule and profanation of the whites relaxed the whole intricate but sustaining Marquesan economy. Combined with the ending of the power of chiefs of hereditary caste, the doing away withtapusas laws set the natives hopelessly adrift on an uncharted sea. Right and wrong were no longer right or wrong.

This fetish system was very aptly called a plague of sacredness.

“Whoever was sacred infested everything he touched with consecration to the gods, and whatever had thus the microbe of divinity communicated to it could communicate it to other things and persons, and render them incapable of common use or approach. Not till the priest had removed the divine element by ceremonies and incantations could the thing or person become common or fit for human use or approach again.”

The Marquesan priests strove with might and main to extend thetapus, for they meant power and gain. Wise and strong chiefs generally had private conferences with the priests and looked to it thattapusdid not injure them.

Allied withtapuismwas what is called in Hawaiikahunaism, that is the witchcraft of the priests, theold wizards, who combined with the imposing and lifting of the bans, the curing or killing of people by enchantment. Sorcery or spells were at the basis of most primitive medicine. At its best it was hypnotism, mesmerism, or mind power. After coming through thousands of years of groping in physic and surgery, we are adopting to a considerable degree the methods of the ancient priests, the theurgy, laying on of hands, or invoking the force of mind over matter, or stated Christly methods of curing the sick. In Africa witchcraft or voodooism attains more powers than ever here, but even in Polynesia the test of a priest’s powers was his ability to kill by willing it. In the New Zealand witchcraft schools no man was graduated until he could make some one die who was pointed out as his subject. A belief in this murderous magic is shared by many whites who have lived long in Polynesia or New Zealand. It was still practised here, and held many in deadly fear. The victims died under it as if their strength ran out like water.

The most resented exclusion against women in the Marquesas, and one of the last to be broken, was from canoes. Lying Bill, as the first seaman who sailed their ships here, had met shoals of women swimming out miles to the vessel as it made for port. In his youth they did not dare enter a canoe in Hiva-Oa. They tied theirpareuson their heads and swam out, clambered aboard the ships miles from land with thepareusstill dry.

“They’d jump up on the bulwarks,” said Lying Bill, “an’ make their twilight before touchin’ the deck. The men would come out in canoes an’ find the women had all the bloomin’ plunder.”

Thistapu, most important to the men, was maintained until a Pankhurst sprang from the ranks of complaining but inactive women. There being many more men, women had always had a singular sex liberty, but, as I have said, the artful men had invoked rigidtapusto keep them from all water-craft. The females might have three or four husbands, might outshine an Aspasia in spell of pulchritude and collected tribute, and the portioned men must submit for passion’s sake, but when economics had concern, the pagan priests brought orders directly from deity.

The dread gods of the High Place, the demons of thePaepae Tapu, had centuries before sealed canoes against women. In canoes women might wander; they might visit other bays and valleys, even other islands, and learn of the men of other tribes. They might go about and fall victims to the enemies of the race. They might assume to enter the Fae Enata, the House of Council, which was on a detached islet.

And they certainly would catch other fish than those they now snared from rocks or hooked, as both swam in the sea. Fish are much the diet of the Marquesans, and were propitiations to maid and wife—the current coin of the food market. To withhold fish was to cause hunger. The men alone assumed the hazard of the tossing canoe, the storms, the hot eye of the vertical sun, and the devils of the deep who grappled with the fisher; and theirs was the reward, and theirs the weapons of control.

But there were always women who grumbled, women who even laughed at such sacred things, and women who persisted. Finally the very altar of the ForbiddenHeight was shaken by their madness. How and what came of it were told me by an old priest or sorcerer, as we sat in the shade of the great banyan on the beach and waited for canoes to come from the fishing.

The sorcerer and I passed the ceremonial pipe, and his words were slow, as becoming age and a severe outlook on life.

“There were willful women who would destroy thetapuagainst entering canoes?” I asked, to urge his speech.

“E, it was so!” he said.

“Me imui?What happened?” I queried further.

“A long time this went on. My grandfather told me of a woman who talked against thattapuwhen he was a boy.”

“And she—?”

“She enraged the gods. She corrupted even men. A council was held of the wise old men, and the words went forth from it. She was made to keep within her house, and atapuagainst her made it forbidden to listen to her wildness. In each period another woman arose to do the same, and more were corrupted. Some women stole canoes and were drowned. The sharks even hated them for their wickedness. We pointed out what fate had befallen them, but other women returned boasting. We slew some of these. But still it went on. You know, foreigner, how thepokokoenters a valley. One coughs and then another, and from the sea to the peak of Temetiu, many are made sick by the evil. It was so with us, and that revolt against religion.”

He sighed and rubbed his stomach.

“Is it not time they came?” he asked.

“Epo, by and by,” I answered. “Why did you men not yield? After all, what did it really matter?”

“O te Etua e!The gods of the High Place forbade, for the women’s own sake!” he said indignantly, and muttered further.

To break down every sacred relation of centuries! To shatter the tradition of ages! To unsex their beloved mothers, wives, and sisters by the license of canoe riding! The dangers and the hardships of the carven tree were to be spared the consolers of men’s labor and perils.

“Did the gods speak out plainly and severely?”

Thetaualooked at me quizzically. Foreigners mock holy things of nature. The bishop here had kicked the graven image of the deity of the cocoanut-tree.

“Ea!Po, the god of night, who rules the hereafter, spoke. The priest, the high priest, received the message. You know that grove by the Dark Cave. He heard the voice from the black recesses.Tapu haa, it said. A doubletapuagainst any woman even lifting a paddle, or putting one toe, or her heel, or her shadow within a canoe. All the women were not wicked. Many believed their place was in thehuaa, the home. These refused to join the brazen hussies, the deserters of thepopoipit. But the dance was dull, and there was strife. Thehuona, the artists, the women who rejoice men when they are merry, the women with three or more husbands, they all seemed to have the madness. They gained some of the younger men to their side, and they built that long house by those breadfruit-trees. They held their palaver there, and they refused to lie under their ownfaa, their roofs of pandanus. They would not dance by the light of the blazing candlenuts the madhura-hura, nor let those bravers of the sea share their mats on thepaepaeof the valley. Many husbands fought one another when their wife did not return. The tribe grew apart.”

He sighed and took a shark’s tooth from his loin-cloth, with which he scraped our pipe.

I went and lay where the curling sea caressed my naked feet. I was within easy distance of thetaua’svoice. One must not hurry even in speech in these Isles of Leisure. The old man blew through the bowl and then the stem, and, taking pieces of tobacco from hispareu, he packed the pipe and lit it. He drew a long whiff first, as one pours wine first in one’s own glass, and handed it to me.

He responded when I put the pipe again between his trembling fingers.

“The gods grew weary. Messages but few came from them. Priests’ wives even ceased to cook the breadfruit on the hot stones, and went to live in that accursedhaa ite.”

“We esteem such a long house, and call it a club,” I interposed in subconscious defense of my own habits.

“Oti! Maybe. Your island forgot wisdom early. You even cook your fish. We will make the fire now.”

I rose and shook off the warm salt water from my body. Mypareuof blue with white stars was on a descending branch of the banyan. I put it about my thighs and folded it for holding. Then arm in arm we walked to our own house on the raisedpaepaeof great basalt stones.

I heaped the dried cocoanut fiber in a hollow of arock, and about it set the polished coral of our kitchen. A spark from the pipe set it afire, and, heaped with more fiber and wood of the hibiscus, before long the stones blushed with the heat, and, growing redder yet, were ready for their service.

The priest of old had withdrawn to make a sauce of limes and sea-water, which he brought out within the half-hour from the penthouse in which we stored our simple goods. It was in atanoaformerly used forkava, a trencher of the false ebony, black in life, but turned by the years of decoction of the mysterious narcotic to a marvelous green. It was like an ancient bronze in the open. Here we were both ready for our delayed food, I, beside the glowing coral stones, the bones of once living organisms, and the old man, with his bowl of sauce. But the food tarried.

He fluttered about thepaepaeand chewed a bit of the hibiscus wood to stay his hunger. In the breadfruit-grove thekomako, the Marquesan nightingale, deceived by a lowering cloud or perhaps impelled by a sudden passion, was early pouring his soul into the shadowy air. I tended my fire and wondered at man’s small relation to most of creation.

“Go, my son,” said thetauaimpatiently, “to the opening of the forest, and see if they do not come over the waves!”

I strolled to where the beach met the jungle. An outrigger canoe was coming through the surf. A faint shout from it reached me. I ran back to him where he still chewed an inedible splinter.

“Epo,” I said, and made the fire fiercer. He stirred hismitiaroa, the sauce, and watered his lips.

“How was thetapubroken finally?” I asked, casually.

“They are long away,” he observed with his eyes on the break in the trees.

“They are just now beaching the canoe,” I said soothingly. “We will eat in a moment. Buttaua, you leave me hungry for that last word.

“The women of Oomoa tried to break down yourtapuof time immemorial against their entering canoes, and there was trouble. The gods were against them, and yet to-day—”

“The gods got tired,” he interrupted me. “The chiefs became afraid of the continuoushakapahi i te faufau, the excitement and turmoil. You know the chiefs and priests decided all things. Now the women cried out for avavaotina, for each one of the tribe to lay a candlenut in one of twopopoitroughs. One was assent to thetapu, and the other against it.”

There was argument first, said thetaua. After the priests had called down the curse of Po and other gods of might on all who would invoke a popular judgment of a sacred and time-webbed commandment, the chiefs pictured the dangers to women and to canoes, to the tribe and the valley, if women broke loose from the centuried bonds that forbade canoeing. Older women and some younger beauties, the latter fearing hurt to their prestige by less luxurious belles, urged the inviolability of thetapu.

The women of the Long House, the rebels, merely demanded instant casting of theamanuts into thehoana. He himself, thetauasaid, then made the great error of his life. He swiftly counted in his mind thosefor and against, and, convinced that he had a huge majority for the prevailing law and order, shouted out that thevavaotina, though long disused, was just and truly Marquesan.

The troughs were brought from a near-by house to the beach, and the trial was staged.

“At that moment,” said the old priest, “a canoe which had been cunningly making its way to the shore, as if by a prearranged signal, suddenly took the breakers and came careening upon the sand. Out of it stepped Taipi, a woman of that red-headed tribe of Tahuata, arranged her kilt oftapa, and advanced. She was like an apparition, but fatal to my count. She was amoi kanahau, beautiful and strong, and the first woman who had ever come except as a prisoner from that fierce island. But she was stronger in her desires than any man. She was unbelieving and unafraid of sacred things. A hundred men sprang forward to greet Taipi. American, she was as the red jasmine, as the fire of the oven, odorous and lovely, but hot to the touch and scorching to know. That woman laughed at the men, and, as if word had been sent her, took her place among the women. She seized a candlenut and threw it exactly into the unholyhoana.

“‘O men of Oomoa,’ she cried, ‘so you fear that women may paddle faster and better than you!Haametau hae!You are cowards. Look, I have come a night and a day alone, and no shark god has injured me and I am not weary.’

“There followed a shower of candlenuts into the demon trough, as the stones from the slings in battle. We were beaten, as youth ever defeats age when newgods are powerful. Our day and the power of alltapuswaned and ended soon. Once in the canoes those women made us release thetapuagainst their eating bananas and, later, pig. In a thousand years no Marquesan woman had tasted a banana or eaten pig. They were for the men and there were good reasons known to the gods. But let woman leave ever so little way the narrow path of obedience and of doing without things that are evil for her, and she knows no limits. She is without thekoekoe, the spirit that is in man. The race has fallen on sorrow.”

He sat down on his powerful haunches and chanted an improvisation about the lost splendor. Low and mournful, the psalm of a Jeremiah, his deep voice rumbled as he fixed his dark eyes on the great globes of the breadfruit hanging by the plaited roof of the hut.

And through an opening of the forest came the two women of his household, Very White and Eyes of the Great Stars, heavily laden with their morning’s catch of fish. They came tripping over the green carpet of the forest, laughing at some incident of their fishing, and threw down beside him the strung circles of shiningika, large and brilliantbonito, the mackerel of brilliancy, and themaoo, the gay and gaudy flying-fish.

“Oh, ho! sorcerer,” said I. “Did ever men match with the cunning of these scaly ones with greater luck? The stones are ready for their broiling.”

Thetauamade a wry face and stirred his sauce. He dipped apopointo it and ate it greedily, bones and all.

“E, e!” he said and spat out the words. “Piau!The women catch their own fish now.”

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