Part 21

It was early afternoon when we laid down our burdens in the cook house and stripped for a swim. The others were awakening from their siesta; a flock of brown children, all vaguely related to the family of Airima, followed us to the river, carrying miniature surf boards. Next moment they were in the water, splashing and shouting as they paddled downstream toward where the surf broke on the bar. Tehinatu, the pretty sister of Maruae, passed us with a rush and leaped feet first from the high bank. She rose to the surface thirty yards away, shouting a challenge to catch her before she could reach the opposite shore. Her brother and I dove together, raced across the river, and had nearly overtaken the girl when she went under like a grebe. I was no match for her at this game; under water she could swim as fast as I, and was a hundred times more at home. I gave up the pursuit and landed for a sunning among the warm rocks of the point.

Out where the seas reared for the landward rush the black heads of children appeared and disappeared; I could hear the joyous screams of others, flattened on their boards and racing toward me, buried in flying spray. The old woman I had seen helping herself to fish was coming down the river, paddling an incredibly small canoe, laden with an enormous bunch of bananas and four kerosene tins of water. She lived a mile down the coast and, like many of her neighbors, braved the surf daily to supply her house with fresh water from the river. The gunwale of her canoe seemed to clear the water by no more than a couple of inches; I watched with some anxiety, thinking of the feelings of an American grandmother in the same situation.

She ceased to paddle at the river mouth and watched her chance, while the frail dugout rose and fell in the wash of half a dozen big seas. Then in a momentary lull she dug her paddle into the water. I sat up to watch; a boy standing in the shallows near by shouted encouragement. At first I thought that she had chosen her moment well. The canoe passed the white water, topped a little wave without swamping, and was seemingly out of danger; but suddenly a treacherous sea sprang up from nowhere, rearing a tossing crest. It was too late to retreat--certain disaster lay ahead. Stoically, without a sign of dismay, the paddler held her craft bow on; the canoe rose wildly against the foaming wall, seemed to hang for an instant almost vertically, and then canoe, cargo, and old woman disappeared in the froth. The boy screamed in ecstasy as he galloped through the shallows to lend a hand. The other children ceased their play and soon the canoe and its recovered cargo were brought ashore. They emptied the dugout and filled the tins with fresh water; I heard the old woman laugh shrilly as she wrung her clothes on the beach. Presently, coached by a dozen amused spectators, she made a second attempt, and passed the surf without a wetting; when I saw her last she was paddling off steadily to the west.

I was dozing among the rocks when a ringing whistle startled me and I looked up to see a bird like a large sandpiper alight on the beach and begin to feed, running briskly after the receding waves or springing into the air for a short flight when threatened by a rush of water. It was a wandering tattler, and no bird was ever better named. Solitary in its habits, except in the breeding season, when it resorts to northern lands so remote that its nest and eggs are still (I believe) unknown, it travels south at the approach of winter, making lonely passages across some of the widest stretches of ocean in the world ... to Hawaii, to the Galapagos, to the Marquesas, and probably to the remote southern islands of Polynesia. What obscure sense enables the migrating bird to follow its course far out of sight of land? In France, I have flown side by side with wild geese, heading steadily southward above a sea of clouds. It seemed to me that--like the pilot of an airplane--they might guide themselves, in a general way, by the sun, the stars, or the look of the land below--an idea borne out by the fact that geese become lost and confused in a fog. But in considering a bird like the carrier pigeon or the tattler, all such theorizing comes to an end. No general sense of north and south could guide the tattler to the lonely landfalls of the South Pacific; his wanderings--like the migration of the golden plover, or the instinct of the shearwater, which sends him unerringly, on the darkest night of storm, to his individual burrow in the cliff's--must be classed among the inexplicable mysteries of nature.

On the road which passes close to the house of Airima I found Tehinatu in conversation with the driver of a Chinese cart. She was bargaining for a watermelon; the Chinaman stood out for three francs--she offered two. "Enough of talking," she said, firmly; "the melon is the best you have, but it is green. I will give two francs."

"_A toru toata_," muttered the proprietor of the melon, indifferently. ("_Toata_" means a franc, but is obviously a corruption of quarter, for the dollar passed current here long before the money of France.)

"Look at my clothes," pleaded the deceitful girl, changing her tactics suddenly. "I am a poor woman who cannot afford to pay the prices you expect from the chief. Come, dear _Tinito_, give me the melon for two francs."

The Chinaman shrugged his shoulders and glanced at me. The glint in his narrow eye might have meant, "Ah, these women--what's the use!" He sighed; for a moment, while Tehinatu looked at him pleadingly, he was silent.

"Take the melon," he said, "and give me two francs; I must be on my way. But do not think you have deceived me, cunning woman; I know that you are not poor, for only yesterday your brother sold the copra from your land."

Without a sign of embarrassment the girl opened her hand and held up a hundred-franc note. "Ah, you are rich," remarked the Chinaman, as he undid an oilcloth wallet and stripped the change from a substantial roll of bills. "I knew it. Are you not ashamed to practice such deceit?" But Tehinatu only tucked the melon under her arm with a triumphant smile.

It is a curious study to watch the contact of Chinese and Polynesian, races separated by the most profound of gulfs, yet possessing the meeting ground of a common love of bargaining. All through the French islands you will find Chinamen, scattered singly or in little groups--through the windward and leeward Societies; the Marquesas; among the distant atolls of the Paumotu; in the remote Gambiers; in Tupuai, Rurutu, and lonely Rimatara. They are keepers of small stores, for the most part, where you may see them interrupted at their eternal task of copra making to exchange a box of matches for a single coconut or to haggle for a quarter of an hour over a matter of five sous. Patient, painstaking, and unobtrusive--existing in inconceivable squalor, without the common pleasures which enable most of us to tolerate our lives--they seem to be impelled by motives far more profound than the longing for material gam, by a species of idealism equally incomprehensible to the native and to the visitor of European race. It is not beyond possibility that in the course of a few more generations it will be the native islander who lingers here and there, isolated in communities principally Chinese; for the islanders, superb physically, are the least prolific of men, while the weedy little _Tinito_, who brings his own women with him, or succeeds, with his own peculiar knack, in obtaining women from a population which regards him with amused contempt, surrounds himself with children in as short a time as nature allows. I have sometimes thought that the secret of the Chinaman's dogged and self-denying labors might lie here--traceable to his cult of ancestor worship: to become a revered ancestor one must have children, and in order to bring up properly a large family of children one must spend one's life in unceasing toil.

I doubt that Europeans in large numbers will ever be tempted to make the islands their home; the life is too alien, the change too great. As things are, the relation of Polynesian and Chinese amounts to a subtle contest for the land--a struggle of which both parties are aware. The native, incapable of abstract thought, feels and resents it vaguely; to the Chinaman, whose days are spent in meditation undisturbed by the automatic labors of his body, the issue is no doubt clear cut. The native is by far the more attractive of the two--clean, kindly, selfish, jolly, childish, well bred, and pleasing to the eye; but the Chinaman possesses the less attractive qualities which make for the survival of a race--the industry, the unselfishness, the capacity to live for an idea--and in the end, if only by force of numbers, he will win. Looking into the future, one can see the Eastern islands populated by Chinese, as our own islands of Hawaii have been peopled with immigrants from Japan. "They are dying, anyway, and they won't work," the commercial gentleman will tell you; "here is rich cane land, needing only labor to produce bountifully--and the world needs sugar." Perhaps this view is correct--for myself, I feel that the question is debatable. There are certain parts of the world--like our American mountains, deserts, and lonely stretches of coast--which seem planned for the spiritual refreshment of mankind; places from which one carries away a new serenity and the sense of a yearning for beauty satisfied. Ever since the days of Cook the islands of the South Sea have charmed the white man--explorers, naturalists, traders, and the rough crews of whaling vessels; the strange beauty of these little lands, insignificant so far as commercial exploitation is concerned, seems worthy of preservation. And the native, paddling his outlandish canoe or lounging in picturesque attitudes before his house, is indispensable to the scene. If the day comes when his canoe lies rotting on the beach and his house is tenanted by industrious Chinese--though the same jagged peaks rise against the sky and the same sea thunders lazily along the reef--when the anchor drops and the call comes to go ashore, I, for one, shall hesitate.

In the Cook group, six hundred miles west of Tahiti, the prospect is less depressing, for the British have adopted a policy of exclusion and made it impossible for the native to sell his land. The Cook-Islander, reinforced here and there with a dash of white blood, and undiscouraged by a competition he is not fitted to meet, seems to be holding his own. The reason is clear--the native has been little tampered with, left in possession of his land, and protected rigidly against epidemics like the influenza of 1918, which ravaged the island populations wherever infected vessels were permitted to touch. Imported disease, exploitation of the land, and coolie immigration--these are the destroying forces from which the native must be preserved if a shadow of the old charm is to linger for the enjoyment of future generations of travelers.

Following Tehinatu toward the house, I thought to myself how wonderfully the island charm had been preserved here on the peninsula of Taiarapu. We were within fifty miles of Papeete, where business is carried on, and steamers call, and perspiring tourists walk briskly about the streets; yet here, in this lonely settlement by the lagoon, civilization seemed half a world away. When I walked abroad the sight of a white man brought the people to their doors, and bands of children followed me, staring and bright eyed, with interest.

On the veranda children surrounded us while the girl cut and distributed thin slices of her melon. There is a fascination in watching these youngsters, brought up without clothes and without restraint, in an environment nearly as friendly as that of the original human pair. Once they are weaned from their mothers' breasts--which often does not occur until they have reached an age of two and a half or three--the children of the islands are left practically to shift for themselves; there is food in the house, a place to sleep, and a scrap of clothing if the weather be cool--that is the extent of parental responsibility. The child eats when it pleases, sleeps when and where it will, amuses itself with no other resources than its own. As it grows older certain light duties are expected of it--gathering fruit, lending a hand with fishing, cleaning the ground about the house--but the command to work is casually given and as casually obeyed. Punishment is scarcely known; yet under a system which would ruin forever an American or English child the brown youngster flourishes with astonishingly little friction--sweet tempered, cheerful, never bored, and seldom quarrelsome. The small boy tugs at the net or gathers bait for the fishermen, seemingly without a thought of drudgery; the small girl tends her smaller sister in the spirit of playing with a doll. Perhaps the restless and aggressive spirit which makes discipline necessary in bringing up our own children is the very quality that has made the white race master of the world; perhaps the more hostile surroundings of civilization have made necessary the enforcement of prohibitory laws.

I filled my pipe and lay smoking on a mat, with an eye on the youngsters at their play. For the time being, a little girl, at the most attractive period of childhood, was the center of interest. One of her front teeth was loose; she had tied a bit of bark to it and was summoning up courage for a determined pull. A boy stole up behind her, reached over her shoulder, and gave the merciful jerk; next moment he was dancing around her, waving the strip of bark to which the tooth was still attached. The owner of the tooth began to sob, holding a hand over her mouth, but her lamentations ceased when a larger boy shouted, seriously, "Give her the tooth and let her speak to the rat!" The small girl trotted to the edge of the bush, where I heard her repeat a brief invocation before she flung the tooth into a thicket of hibiscus. I knew what she was saying, for I had made inquiries concerning this children's custom--probably as old as it is quaint. It is a sort of exchange; the baby tooth is thrown among the bushes and the rat is invoked to replace it with one as white and durable as his own. The child says:

"Thy tooth, thy tooth, O rat, give to the man; The tooth, the tooth of the man, I give to the rat."

No doubt the games of children everywhere are very much the same; in the islands, at any rate, an American child would soon find itself at home. The boys walk on stilts, play tag, blindman's buff, prisoner's base, and a game called _Pere Pana_, like what we called Pewee when I was a youngster in California--almost exactly as these things are done at home. The girls play cat's cradle, hopscotch, jackstones, and jackstraws--often joining in the rougher games of their brothers. One curious game, evidently modern, and perhaps originated by the children of missionaries, is called _Pere Puaa Taehae_ (the Game of the Wild Beast). The boys and girls, who pretend to be sheep, stand in line one behind the other, clinging together under the protection of the mother ewe at the head of the line. Presently the wild beast appears, demanding a victim to eat. "You are the wild beast?" the sheep ask. "Yes," he replies, "and I want a male sheep." He then waits while the sheep--in whispers inaudible to him--decide on which boy (for the beast has his choice of sexes) shall be sacrificed. When the decision is made the mother at the head of the line says, "You want a male sheep?" At that, all the others chant in unison, "Then take off your hat, and take off your clothes, and strike the hot iron." The last word is the signal for the victim to make a dash for safety; if he can get behind the mother before the wild beast catches him the performance is repeated until the beast succeeds in catching another boy or girl, who then becomes the _Puaa Taehae_.

The twelve-year-old daughter of Maruae--for Airima was a great-grandmother, not an uncommon thing in this land of rapid generations--had been talking for several days of piercing her ears in order to install a pair of earrings to which she had fallen heir. This evening she had finally mustered courage for the ordeal; I watched her hesitating approach and saw her hand Tehinatu the necessary instruments--a cork, a pair of scissors, and a brace of sharp orange thorns from which the green bark had been carefully stripped. Whatever her color, woman's endurance in the name of vanity is proverbial; the child made no outcry as the thorn passed through the lobe of her ear, sank into the cork, and was snipped off, inside and out, close to the skin--the remaining section to be removed a fortnight later, when the small wound had healed. As Tehinatu smiled at me and flourished the scissors, to which clung a drop of blood, I heard a shrill call from the cook house, "_Haere mai tamaa!_" It was supper time.

Some of the children, in answer to the call, straggled toward where Airima squatted beside her oven; others, already stuffed with odds and ends of fruit, went on with their play. Maruae beckoned to me as he passed. The meal was a casual affair; one helped oneself without ceremony, squatting to exchange conversation between bites, or walked away, food in hand. There were pork, cold fish, baked taro, and sections of cream-colored breadfruit, ripe and delicately cooked.

The sun had set when we finished, and as the sky gave promise of a clear night I spread a mat on the river bank. Bedtime in these places comes when drowsiness sets in; as I fell asleep the clouds veiling the highlands of Tahiti Nui were still luminous in the afterglow.

It was midnight when I awoke. In the house, faintly illuminated by the light of a turned-down lamp, the family of Airima slept. The air was warm and scented with the perfume of exotic flowers. The river was like a dark mirror reflecting the stars; even the Pacific seemed to sleep, breathing gently in the sigh of little waves, dallying with the bar. Presently I became aware of subdued voices--Airima and Tinomana, the chief's mother, were seated on the rocks below me, fishing with long rods of bamboo for the _faia_ which runs in with the night tide. They were recalling the past, as old ladies will.

"The women of Tahiti," remarked Tinomana, "are not what they were when I was young; nowadays you may travel from morning till night without seeing a really beautiful girl."

"Those are true words," said Airima; "_Aue_, if you had seen my eldest daughter, who died when she was fifteen! She was lovely as the _itatae_, the white tern which hovers above the tree tops. Her eyes were brown and laughing, her hair fell in ringlets to her knees, her teeth were small white pearls, and her laughter like the sound of cool water running in a shady place. Alas, my Vahinetua! She was our first-born; my husband loved her as he loved none of the others. A strange, dreamy child.... I used to watch her when she thought herself alone. Sometimes, I know not why, the tears came to my eyes as I saw her gazing into the sky while she chanted under her breath the little old song the children sing to the tern:

"O Itatae, sailing above the still forest, where shall you fly to-night? Downwind across the sea to Tetiaroa, the low island ...

"As she grew older a wasting illness fell on her; the doctors could do nothing to stop her coughing; my husband even took her to the white doctor in Papeete--it was on his recommendation that we took her to sea. We were in Mangareva, far off in the Gambier Islands, when I saw that the end was near. My husband was not blind--he headed back for Tahiti at once, giving up the rest of his trip. Vahinetua was never more beautiful than on the last morning of her life--cheeks flushed and eyes shining soft and clear as the first star of evening. We were nearly home--off Maitea, the little island which lies between Tahiti and Anaa; she died in my arms and I covered her with the bright patchwork _tifaefae_ her own hands had sewn. 'Our child is dead,' I told the captain, her father, as I came on deck. He said nothing, but put a hand on my shoulder and pointed toward the masthead, where I saw a small white tern hovering above us. I cannot tell you how, but I knew at once the soul of my daughter was in that pretty bird. It flew with us all day, and at evening, as we entered the harbor of Papeete, it turned back and disappeared in the night. For many years thereafter, each time my husband passed Maitea homeward bound, the white bird was waiting for him at the place where my daughter had died...."

The voices of the old women murmured on, recalling the joys and sorrows of other days. Suddenly, in a mango tree behind the house, a rooster crowed, answered far and near by others of his kind. As the last drawn-out cry died in the silence of the night I yielded to an overpowering drowsiness and fell asleep.

*CHAPTER XV*

*Tahitian Tales*

The evening was very warm and still. The sea rumbled faintly on the reef, half a mile offshore, and behind us--above the vague heights of the interior--a full moon was rising. The palms were asleep after their daily tussle with the trade--fronds drooping and motionless in silhouette against the sky. We had spread mats on the grass close to the beach; Tehinatu lay beside me, chin propped in her hands--she had been bathing, and her dark hair, still damp, hung in a cloud about her face. Her grandmother, Airima--the woman of Maupiti--sat facing us, cross-legged in the position of her people. Now and then a fish leaped in the lagoon; once, far down the beach, a ripe nut thudded to the earth.

"If you two like," said old Airima, "I will tell you the story of my ancestor, the Lizard Woman."

The girl smiled and raised her head in the little gesture which corresponds to our nod. "That is a good tale," she declared, "and true, for I am named after that Lizard Woman who died so many years ago."

The woman of Maupiti lit a match to dry a leaf of black tobacco over the flame; when she had twisted it in a strip of pandanus and inhaled deeply of the smoke, she spoke once more. Her voice was flexible and soft with a sweet huskiness--an instrument to render the music of the old island tongue--its cadences measured or rapid, falling or rising with the ebb and flow of the tale.

"In the old days," Airima began, "so long ago that his name is now forgotten, there was a king of Papenoo, a just man, successful in war and beloved by his people. His wife was a daughter of Bora Bora--the most beautiful woman of that island; she was the delight of his heart, and they had many children. When she fell ill and died, a great sadness came over the king; he could do nothing but brood over his loneliness. In his dreams he saw the face of his wife; life was hateful to him; even his children, shouting and playing about the house, grew hateful in his eyes. A day came at last when he could endure the sight of them no longer, and a plan to be rid of them took form in his mind.