Part 22

She would then occasionally be seen; and it was considered a proper and justifiable extravagance for even a lesser person to have a _paipai_, or stone exterior foundation to his house, upon which his fair child could be seen. And at certain intervals she would take her bath in public with others, and her physical charms be fairly judged. Nor must we think that all this is brutal--no more than with us to-day.

The girl was also judged by her manners, her courtesy and her modesty; for she thought no more of showing her legs than do our young women of showing their necks and bosoms and backs; and she had the same notion that they have that there are strict limits--even though hers might not be ours. You will remember, perhaps, in early accounts, the pretty description of women playing on the shore or in the water, at games of ball, as did Nausicaa in the days of Ulysses.

Many times have I heard allusions to the habit of keeping in one house a number of the girls together, beauties of the place. And if I remember right, it was to such a residence that the celebrated Turi contrived to pass, notwithstanding the difficulties put in his way--difficulties all the more interesting as mere delays; for the young women had heard of his exploits and expected as much of him. But then, if I remember also, he lived in those days when people, especially the heroes of tales, could be gifted with the power of changing their forms at will. And who could have guessed in the decrepit or leprous old man, pitied for his sorrows by the tender women, the gay Lothario heard of through all islands. Still less could he be discovered in the fish that was caught by the old women who supplied the women’s house with food. He it was who dug the great tunnel through the mountain, in order to approach his love without detection--her who was Ahupu Vahine of Taiarapu, of whom Stevenson, in the notes of his Ballads, says that he has not yet been able to find out who she was. Why! there is a whole “Chronique Scandaleuse” of that period of earliest history.

Oro then belonged to the younger Vaiari, and seized the power of the older branch.

Let us take up the story as he pursues his enemy into the territory of Teriitua, Chief of Hitiaa, who checked his advance, disputing, most naturally, the limits that were being conquered. So that they left the decision to the Gods, as I understand, upon Oro’s proposal.[14]

Upon a day appointed they met for the invocation; but Oro had determined to help himself that he might be helped; as many pious men have done and will do again. A friend of his, whom tradition names Aia, was concealed carefully in a hole or hollow place, near the disputed boundary. Teriitua’s call upon his gods, being met only by the silence of the woods, Oro called out, pointing out, I suppose, what he wished, “Is it here?” And his friend answered, “It is here.”

The cause of Oro won; a little, perhaps, because according to all tradition, he was a doughty warrior who intended to have his way.

We now belong to both the “Inner” and “Outer” Teva: Te Teva Iuta and Te Teva Itai, the whole eight, whose clans reached all down this side of the island, and into the next; for we have been adopted twice, both at Tautira, and here--into the two divisions.

The place has now for us an increased charm; a still more subtle influence envelops me when I think that this is the home of Amo and Oberea, who first met Wallis and Cook; and as I look from the violet beds of one of the princesses to the solemn hills of dark green crowned with cloud, I wonder if somewhere there may be the hidden tomb of Oberea, now my ancestress, the quiet familiar surroundings became solemn with this great reminder of the mountains and the ocean that faces them.

I listen now, with a curiously new interest, to the explanations of the meanings of landmarks and to their names full of associations for the Teva line. We have it explained to us that each chief had a _marae_, a temple associated with the sacredness of his name; and many rules concerning its foundation; and the places within it reserved to chiefs through heredity and heredity alone.

Each chief had also a _moua_ or mountain; an _Otu_ or cape or point of land; a Tahua or gathering-place, from which he ruled. Every point, says the island proverb, has a chief.

For the Teva the oldest _marae_ was Farepua in Vaiari, from which, by taking a stone from it, Manutunu, the husband of the fair Hototu, mother of the first Teva, founded the _marae_ of Punaauia for his son. (He called it so because of his uncle, who dead was rolled up like a fish--_iia_.)

From these two _maraes_, many _maraes_ along the coast, and in Moorea took their origin and proved the family descent. The Moua of Papara was Tamaiti; its Outu was Monomano; its Tahua, Poreho; its _marae_, Tooarai. Our adopted mother’s name is Teriitere Itooarai, which you will remember is the name of the son of Oberea and Amo.

Taputuarai in the small district of Amo was the original _marae_ of Papara, and from that Amo took the stones to build the _marae_ of Tooarai on the point of Mahaiatea.

A poem traditional in the family gives expression to the value of these points--to the attachment to and desire to be near them again, in the mind of an exile, one of the Papara family. The family seems to have been represented by the Aromaiterai and the Teriterai, one of whom ruled in the absence of the other.

How far back this was composed, nor exactly how it happened that one brother, Aromaiterai, was banished, I do not know. One or other branch seems to have been always jealous of the other; but in this case one Aromaiterai was banished and forbidden to make himself known. He was sent into the peninsula to Mataoa, from which place he could see across the water the land of Papara and its hills and cape. The poem which he composed, and which is dear to the Tevas, revealed his identity:

LAMENT OF AROMAITERAI

From Mataoa I took to my own land Tianina, my mount Tearatapu, my valley Temaite, my “drove of pigs” on the Nioarahi.[15]

The dews have fallen on the mountain and they have spread my cloak.[16]Rains, clear away, that I may look at my home! _Aue! Aue!_ the wall of my dear land! The two thrones of Mataoa[17] open their arms to me Temarii (or Amo).

No one will ever know how my heart yearns for my mount of Tamaiti.[18]

Could anything be finer than the rallying cry of the Tevas:

“Teva the wind and the rain!”

For a line running back to origins confused with the brute forces of the world; originating with divine creatures half animal--with the princes of double bodies, half fish, half man, what more poetic reminder of the intimacy with parental nature.

I sometimes think of our chiefess as being able to feel with Phaedra, that the encompassing world is full of her ancestry.[19]

And here the heroic line brought down through ages to the present day, brings back to my mind the tradition that the lines of the fabulous Homeric heroes were carried into the new Christian world as far as the days of St. Jerome. Nor was the suggestion of the thought of Phaedra, claiming kinship with the universe, so far from the echo of the name of Queen Marau, whose further name is Taaroa, the great first god whose relation to the world is given in the verses:

“He was; Taaroa was his name. He rested in the void. No land, no sky, No sea, no man, And he alone existing took the shape of the universe.

“The pivots are Taaroa: The rocks, The smallest sands are Taaroa. Thus he called himself.

“Taaroa is the light, He is the germ. He is the base, The strong who created the world: The great and holy world The shell of Taaroa. He moves it, he makes harmony.”

The records of the past are all in words handed down; and the absence of any outer form to antiquity makes me seek it all the more in the nature which surrounds me, in the imaginary presence of the people who lived within it.

One great disappointment awaited me: I had hoped to find some form in the great _marae_ or temple built by Oberea, in her pride of place, which Cook speaks of as the principal building of the island, and describes as an imposing monument. We found it only a vast mass of loose coral stones, treacherous to the foot and retaining but a vague and unimpressive outline. Still it was upon the shore, by the beautiful sea, and the funereal _aito_ or ironwood trees sacred to temples still grew upon it. Stewart, the planter who for a term of years was able to keep up a great estate, at the head of a company behind him, planned on a grand scale, and who then failed, was allowed to use the stones of the _marae_ as a quarry for his roads and walls. Even before that time neglect and the destruction brought about by the enmities to the old paganism must have changed its shape and destroyed its outline. To-day it is impossible to recognize the form described by Cook. It was made, he says, of a series of steps rising in pyramid way, to a top layer ridged like a roof; and its long sides, which hollowed in slightly, were some two hundred and thirty feet in length. Now it is a sad ruin, shapeless and barbarous.

As I left it I remembered that Moerenhout, visiting here some sixty years ago, says that few natives except the great Chief Tati saw without superstitious fear the cutting down of the majestic trees which had witnessed for centuries the ceremonies of the forbidden worship, and had survived the decadence of the temples which they adorned. When he adds, the great trees had been cut down which shaded the _marae_ further inland, specially sacred to the chiefs of Papara, which had been that of Tati himself and of his children, a rumour spread about the country that the water of the little river, the river that ran through our ancestral domain of Amo, had reddened, and blood had trickled from the trunks of the prostrate trees.

Last month, at Tautira, the absence of all vestiges of the great _marae_ of the God Oro, was more impressive than the formless mass of stone associated with the name of Oberea. It is always a disappointment to notice how little this race has turned to the arts of form. I mean this race as I have seen it, in Samoa and in Tahiti. Elsewhere it may have done something, but here the form of music only has been reached--the earliest mode of expression. And though the Polynesian still shows good taste in colour and choice in arrangement, he seems to have taken but the very first steps in the adornment of surfaces or the arrangement of masses. It is possible that there is something strenuous and needing sustained effort in the plastic arts which these sensuous races, urged by no contrarieties to find some escape out of the present, were too indolent and contented to achieve.

* * * * *

I have made many notes that I shall string together as I best can; but I am ineffably lazy, and this is the place for me in the house of Tati. I sleep in the rooms where his great-uncle Tati, the great Chief, died: he who ruled here at the beginning of the new dispensation, who was a child in the days of the first discoverers, and who lived well into the fifties. He was saved from the massacre of the Papara family when a child, through some recognition of the behaviour of Manea the high priest when he saved the pride of Tetuanui in her contest with the pride of Oberea.

So that the revenge of Tetuanui spared this boy, who became an important man representing the great Teva house. But that was only after the son of Amo and Oberea had died by accident, leaving to the Pomaré Chief no equal rival; and after Tati’s brother Opufara had died in battle bravely defending the Pagan side against the Pomaré, helped by the rifles of the Christians.

Tati had apparently refused to avail himself of the offer of Pomaré, before his death, to appoint him regent, nor did he consent to our chiefess being made queen: for he seems in many ways to have asked for the best interests of his nation, and always with higher motives. There are interesting descriptions of his influence and of his dramatic eloquence, which Moerenhout compares to the action of Talma, the greatest of French actors. I read about him in Moerenhout’s volumes; I make sketches during the day, and talk to the Tati of this moment, enjoying the sound of his voice and his laugh, and the freedom of the children, and the movement of the servants.

There is one who is always hard at work doing everything, who is really Marau’s, a girl of good family, a sort of relation of mine now, and who is called Pupuri (if I catch it right), “Blonde”; and she is blond; her hair is absolutely gold, and when she has her back turned and her hair down you would suppose some foreign visitor from northernmost Europe. She is fair, a little red, like an Irish woman, with whitish lashes, and eyes that do not stand the light well.

Madame sits at one end of the piazza; the ladies flit in and out of their rooms and sometimes talk to us.

Next to our house, where some women have beds and others mats for sleeping, there are other houses for cooking, and for

[Illustration: YOUNG TAHITIAN GIRL]

servants who are in reality dependents. Sometimes members of the family eat there, in native fashion, of native cooking, instead of coming to the table at which we sit on one end of the verandah. Near by is a little garden growing on what was once the enclosure of a house; and the little river runs rapidly a few yards off, hidden in part by trees; at which women go down to wash, and which men and boys cross to bathe, and in which splash the horses when they are washed in the morning. It is all delightful and rustic.

We are arranging with Tati about going to Moorea, the island opposite Tahiti, where we can be in the mountains that come right down to the water.

As the island makes a perfect triangle, the clustering together of its mountain peaks, seen from Papeete, used to look like some background of early Venetian pictures, inspired by the Dolomites that Titian knew when a boy. Tati has a plantation and house there to which we shall go; and the family are strong in the island, having antique rights and inheritances in different districts.

We shall stay only a few days here, and then sail or row across to the fantastic island that has made a distance of blue and gold to our days in Papeete, and behind which the sunsets used to sink in every variety of indescribable splendour or delicacy.

Papeete, May 22, 1891.

We did not leave by the steamer; by some curious chance unknown before, it was filled with passengers. It is true that it does not take a large number to fill it. We feared discomfort, and hurrying back from Moorea, we nevertheless lazily let it get away from the point on the coast to which it had gone for its cargo of oranges. Whether or no Tauraatua had already presented to his mind the alternative that opened to us I do not know, but we turned at once to a longer sea trip and a less probable one: to taking a little schooner that had just come from Raiatea, and getting its captain to carry us to Fiji. Thus we should also now be able to call at the leeward islands, Raiatea, Huahine, and Bora Bora, and leave, as it were, our cards. For it seems sad enough to give up the Marquesas; especially as every day we hear something in detail about them. Captain Hart tells us too that there is one _Typee_ perhaps still alive; and gives me something of the story of a savage whose photograph is on the bookcase of his office--a gentleman whom Stevenson met, and a lover of human flesh. Indeed, the story goes, that once upon a time he had had thoughts of dining upon the captain--after a previous murder, of course. Now, to know a cannibal and perhaps to become his brother--for that would be a natural result of his acquaintance, as our relationship is just now in

[Illustration: PEAK OF MAUA ROA, ISLAND OF MOOREA, SOCIETY ISLANDS, TAHITI]

demand through these latitudes--is an awful temptation. Were there anything more to it--were there anything said that might lead one to believe that he or any other such might really become known and understood--perhaps might one think that the two weeks’ sail against the wind would not be too much sea to travel over for a result. But I can make out no such probability from any cross-questioning that I have been able to conduct; and the portrait of the _indigène_ in question suggests a heavy, sullen brutality not at all romantic. I should not care to use him as a model for any picture of _Typee_, where the eating of man was apparently something like a duty or a necessity, not a mere _gourmet_ liking for a certain richness of taste. No; we need, after all, more inducement than that one.

The portrait of the Queen is more of an invitation: there is something in her face and the impression we receive from “Prince” Stanislas Moanatini that warrants that we shall be well treated.

Still we are trying to get away in this other direction; that way at least the winds are in our favour, and two weeks’ sailing would see us in Fiji or near it; and then in a few weeks more we might be on our return homeward. For all considered, we must make up our minds either to let this thing go on, and drift about the South Seas, taking up the island groups one by one, as chance will have it, or we must make a stern choice and hold to that. And that choice points more and more to our saying good-bye to these eastern islands, and to determining that we have really seen Brown Polynesia, even if it be only in these three groups, and that the rest is a matter of detail. But it may not be so easy to leave by that little schooner or by any other.

There is a demand for small schooners--that is to say, they have to go around to the groups to pick up cargoes; and the one German firm whose boat runs near enough would like to put the screws on to the uttermost. _More Germanico_, even money is not enough--there must be no equality--and the last alternative so far has been the offer of a passage in a little boat, with other passengers, native women, and a full cargo; which means every available space filled (so that we would merely have our berths to lie in); and that passage to certain places first, and then afterward, when the schooner has discharged its cargo at leisure, to take us from the last point to Fiji. For these discomforts we should have to pay $2,700, within $300 of the value of the schooner. The other passengers would pay $15, which would be the average value. We offered $3,000 for the use of another schooner, having ascertained that she was unprofitable to the same owner; to which he answered by sending her off; and told us that upon conditions of a like nature we might have her by and by. The place develops curious sides of what is called business; and this may be an example. Fancy anywhere else a person offered the full value of a bit of non-productive property for a few weeks’ rent, and hesitating so as to couple difficult conditions with his leave. But I think our German will come short of his enormous profit: the steamer that brings cattle here from Auckland and carries back fruit will probably be our choice; it is only waiting three weeks more, and economizing several hundred dollars a week--never a cruel thing to endure.

And our stay is such an easy thing; it is only because neither of us has the future before him, but on the contrary, a considerable past filled with the habit of work, that we make the slightest effort to resist our contentment. The weather is such as people might travel far to seek: an equable warmth, a little coolness at night and in the morning, an evenness that makes a couple of degrees count for a great deal, plenty of moving air, a beautiful sea, a beautiful sky, and a beautiful distance at all hours of the day and even of the moonlit nights.

The Moorea lies in front of us, on half of the horizon; the little shipping blocks up part of the space; grass-covered quays are before us, shaded with trees under which pass groups of natives or straggling French soldiers and sailors, or the few residents that live this way. At times all is silent and solitary; at others carts roll noisily; horses, ridden wildly by native boys, canter past, or some schooner comes in and unloads almost in front of us. Great excitement comes upon us with these arrivals, far greater than with the arrival or departure of the war steamer that serves to carry about the Governor or officials on tours of inspection, and whose presence brings the sunset gun, saluted by the customary refrain of the clarion, and the eight o’clock gun with another blast, as if reporting that the discharge had struck.

Lately too we have been interested in the arrival of Narii Salmon in his boat from the Pomotus, bringing other members of the family. This impending arrival has brought several times to our verandah the two younger ladies of the family, to scan the distance with our glasses. Since the night when Narii ran in, passing the reef in the twilight, our beautiful new sisters have been less frequent. It was a pretty event, the arrival of the little boat, for which others had daily been mistaken; the settling of its identity by its marks; the recognition of its owner by its sailing bravely in through the pass in the dark; then the calls from the shore to know if it were he for sure, and who was on board; and the boats hurrying out and coming back, all in a silence so great that the slightest rustle of sail or cordage or steps on deck could be distinctly heard.