Chapter V: Part 5

Returning from my walk, I found the village street deserted and all of the people assembled back of Moy Ling's shop. He was mixing bread at a table while one of the sons of his strange family piled fresh fuel on the fire under a long brick oven. It was a great event, the bread making, after the long months of dearth, and of interest to everyone. Mats were spread within the circle of the firelight. Puarei was there, with his wife--a mountain of a woman--seated at his side. She was dressed in a red-calico wrapper, and her long black hair fell in a pool of shadow on the mat behind her. She was a fit wife for a chief, in size, in energy, in the fire and spirit living in the huge bulk of flesh. Her laughter came in a clear stream which it was a delight to hear. There was no undertone of foreboding or bitter remembrance, and the flow of it, as light-hearted as a child's, heightened the merrymaking mood of the others. There was a babble of talk, bursts of song, impromptu dancing to the accompaniment of an accordion and the clapping of hands. As I looked on I was minded of an account I had read of the Paumotuans in which they were described as "a dour people, silent, brooding, and religious." Religious some of them assuredly are, despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary, and they are often silent in the dreamy way of remote island people whose moods are drawn from the sea, whose minds lie fallow to the peace and the beauty of it. But "dour and brooding" is very far from the truth.

I took a place among them as quietly as possible, for I knew by repeated experience how curious they are about strangers, and first meetings were usually embarrassing. Without long training as a freak with a circus, it would try any man's courage to sit for an hour among a group of Paumotuans while he was being discussed item by item. There is nothing consciously brutal or callous in the manner of it, but, rather an unreflecting frankness like that of children in the presence of something strange to their experience. I knew little of the language, although I caught a word here and there which indicated the trend of the comment. It was not general, fortunately, but confined to those on either side of me. Two old grandmothers started a speculation as to whether or not I had any children, and from this a discussion rose as to which of the girls of Rutiaro would be best suited as a wife for me. I was growing desperate when Chance, the godfather of all wanderers, intervened again in my favor.

Moy Ling's fire was burning brightly and it occurred to several of the youngsters to resume their marble playing. I saw Puarei's face light with pleasure, and he was on his feet at once with his stake in the ring. Others followed, and soon all those who had marbles were in the sport. I understood clearly then how helpless Tino had been. I could easily picture him rushing from group to group, furious at the thought of his interests being neglected through such childish folly. Those marbles were more desirable than his flour and canned goods, which he stood ready to exchange for copra. The explanation of this astounding fact may have been that no one thought he would go off as he did, and to-morrow would do just as well for getting down to business. Since he had gone, there was an end of that. It was futile to worry about the lost food. Certainly it was forgotten during the great tournament which took place that evening. Moy Ling worked at his bread making unnoticed. His fire died down to a heap of coals, but another was built and the play went on. Puarei was a splendid shot, in marble playing as in other respects, the best man of the village; but there was a slip of a girl who was even better. During the evening she accumulated nearly half of the entire marble supply, and at length these two met for a test of skill. It was a long-drawn-out game. I had never seen anything to equal the interest of both players and spectators; not even at Brown's lumber yard when the stakes were a boy's most precious possessions, cornelian stone taws. No one thought of sleep except a few of the old men and women, who dozed off at intervals with their heads between their knees.

The lateness of the hour--the bizarre setting for a game so linked with memories of boyhood, combined to give me an impression of unreality. I had the feeling that the island and all the people on it might vanish at any moment, and the roar of the surf resolve itself into the rumble of street traffic in some gray city. And, though it were the very city where marbles are made, where in the length or breadth of it could there be found anyone who knew the use of them, with either the time or the inclination to play? I might search it, street by street, to the soot-stained suburbs; I might go on to the green country, perhaps; visit all the old-time marble-playing rendezvous from one coast to the other, with no better success. And, though I passed through a thousand villages of the size of Rutiaro, could an evening's amusement be provided in any one of them, for men, women, and children, at an outlay of four dollars, American? The possibility would not be worth considering. People at home live too fast in these days, and they want too much. I could imagine Tino, in a sober mood, giving a grudging assent to this. "But, man!" he would have added, "I wish they had more of their marble-making enthusiasm at Rutiaro. I would put in here three times a year and fill the _Winship_ with copra to within an inch of the main boom every trip."

Moy Ling had enough of it for the whole island, it seemed to me. His ovens were opened as the tournament came to an end, and for half an hour he was kept busy passing out crisp brown loaves and jotting down the list of creditors in his account book. It must have been nearly midnight. The crowd began to disperse. Puarei joined me, smiling ruefully, holding out empty hands. He had lost all of his marbles to a mite of a girl whom he could have put in his vest pocket had he owned one. His wife teased him about it on the way home, laughed heartily at his explanations and excuses. They discussed the events of the day long after the other members of the household had retired to their mats on the veranda. At last I heard their quiet breathing, and a strip of light from the last quarter moon revealed them asleep, two massive heads on the same pillow. I lay awake for a much longer time, thinking of one thing and another--of my friend Crichton at Tanao, the loneliest atoll in the world I should say; of the _Winship_ far out to sea, homeward bound with one hundred and forty tons of copra in her hold; of Tino with his fits of temper, and his passion for trade which blinded him to so much of the beauty and the joy of life. But, after all, I thought, it is men like Tino who keep wheels turning and boats traveling the seas. If he were to die, his loss would be felt; there would be an eddy in the current of life around him. But men like Crichton or myself--we should go down in our time, and the broad stream would flow over our heads without a ripple to show where we had been, without a bubble rising to the surface to carry with it for a moment the memory of our lives. It was not a comforting thought, and I tried to evade it; but I realized that my New England conscience was playing a part in these reflections and was not to be soothed in any such childish manner. "How much copra have you ever produced or carried to market?" it appeared to say. I admitted that the amount was negligible. "How do you mean to justify your presence here?" was the next question, and before I could think of a satisfactory answer, "What good will come of this experience, either to yourself or to anyone else?" That was a puzzler until I happened to think of Findlay's _South Pacific Directory_. I remembered that his information about Rutiaro was very scant, the general remarks confined, as I have already said, to a single sentence, "A lonely atoll, numbering a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants." As a sop to my conscience, it occurred to me that I might write to the publishers of that learned work, suggesting that, in the light of recent investigations, they add to that description, "Fond of playing marbles."

*CHAPTER VII*

*A Debtor of Moy Ling*

Puarei's house stood halfway down the village street at Rutiaro, facing a broad indentation from the lagoon. The Catholic church adjoined it on one side, the Protestant church on the other. Neither of them was an imposing structure, but they towered above the small frame dwelling of the chief with an air of protection, of jealous watchfulness. On sunny days they shaded his roof in turn; and, when it rained, poured over it streams of water, through lead pipes projecting from their own ampler roofs--a purely utilitarian function, since the drainage from the three buildings furnished the fresh-water supply of the settlement. If the showers were light the overflow from the largess of the rival churches, plashing on the sheets of corrugated iron, filled the house with a monotonous murmur, like the drowsy argument of two soft-voiced missionaries; but during a heavy downpour the senses were stunned by the incessant thunder, as though one were inclosed in an immense drum, beaten with nonsectarian vigor by all the Salvation Armies in the world.

It was during such a deluge, one day in early spring, that I lay on the guest bed in Puarei's one-room house, watching Poura, his wife, who had washed my linen with her own hands and was then ironing it. It was not, strictly speaking, linen. The articles were three--a sleeveless gauze singlet, a cotton handkerchief, and a faded khaki shirt. A pair of khaki trousers, a pair of canvas tennis shoes, and a pandanus hat completed my wardrobe. Since I needed the whole of it when going abroad about the island, it was necessary to go to bed on washing day, and to wait there until the laundering was finished, and such repairs made as constant wear had caused and further wear demanded. How to replenish it and to meet other simple urgent needs gave me cause for some concern, and I was going over the problem as I lay on Puarei's guest bed. It was toward the end of my second week at Rutiaro, and already I was beginning to look decidedly shabby. My shoes were rotted out with sea water, and both shirt and trousers, which were far from new at the time of my arrival, gave evidence of early dissolution. Poura had washed, sewed on buttons, drawn seams together, but the garments were chronically ailing, as hopeless of effective repair as an old man far gone in senile decay. Poura was becoming discouraged about them, and I knew that she must be wondering why I didn't buy some fresh ones. I had a very good reason for not doing so--I had no money. I had been left at Rutiaro without so much as a twenty-five-centime piece, and the Banque de l'Indo-Chine was six hundred miles away.

It would not occur to either Puarei or his wife that I was in need of funds. Theirs was one of the more primitive atolls of the Low Archipelago, where all white men are regarded as mysteriously affluent. If, instead of being marooned at Rutiaro through Tino's fit of temper, I had been discovered a mile outside the reef, making toward the land clad only in a pair of swimming trunks, upon reaching it my rescuers would have expected me, as a matter of course, to take a bulky parcel of thousand-franc notes from beneath that garment. I had, in fact, made a secret inventory of my wealth after the sudden departure of the _Caleb Winship_, hoping there might be a forgotten bank note in one of my trousers pockets. What I found was a cotton handkerchief, a picture post card of the Woolworth Building, and a small musical instrument called an _ocharina_, or, more commonly, a sweet-potato whistle. The handkerchief I needed; the post card seemed of no practical use as a means of barter; and, while I might have given up the _ocharina_, it had but a slight monetary value, and Moy Ling, the Chinese storekeeper of the village, was not interested in it. I didn't offer it to him outright. Instead, I played on it, in front of his shop, "The March of the Black Watch," which I could render with some skill. Thereafter every youngster on the island coveted the instrument, but Moy Ling made no offers and the prospect of a wardrobe was as far away as ever.

His supply of European clothing was limited, but ample to supply my wants. He found for me three undershirts, size forty-four, two gingham outer shirts of less ample proportions, a pair of dungaree overalls, and a pair of rope-sole shoes. I asked him to put these articles aside and went off to reflect upon ways and means of opening a credit account with the canny Chinaman. There was one possible method open to me; I might adopt the _pareu_ as a costume. I could buy three of them for the price of one undershirt, and I believed that Moy Ling would trust me to that extent. Nearly all of the natives wore _pareus_. They had put aside their trousers and shirts and gingham dresses now that I was no longer a stranger to them, and were much more comfortable in their simple, knee-length garments, those of the men reaching from the waist, those of the women twisted tightly under the arms. Simple and convenient though it was, I felt that it would be absurd for me to assume that style of dress, since I was not accustomed to it. Furthermore, I remembered the ridiculous appearance of Americans and Europeans I had seen at Tahiti--queer people from all sorts of queer places, who come and go through the capital of French Oceania. They rushed into _pareus_ the moment of their arrival at Papeete, and before a week had passed were more primitive in a sophisticated way than the Tahitians themselves. I had no desire to join the ranks of the amateur cannibals, even though there was some excuse for it at Rutiaro; and I knew that the Paumotuans would have more respect for me if I dressed after the manner of my own race.

But how obtain clothing without money--without divulging to anyone that I had no money? The question dinned through my brain with annoying persistence, like the thunder of falling water on Puarei's iron roof. Would it, after all, be best to confide in the chief? I could tell him of my bank account at Papeete, and he knew, of course, that the _Caleb Winship_ had left me without a word of warning, taking my sea chest with her. I was tempted to make a confession of my predicament, but pride or a kind of childish vanity prevented me.

"No, by Jove!" I said. "I'll be hanged if I do! Puarei, his wife--all the rest of them--expect me to live up to their traditional conceptions of white men. I am supposed to be mysteriously affluent, and I owe it to them to preserve that myth in all its romantic glamour."

I had no feeling of guilt in making this decision; rather, a sense of virtue, like that of an indulgent father upon assuring his children that there is a Santa Claus. I decided to be not only mysteriously, but incredibly, affluent. Therefore, when the rain had passed I put on my mended garments and went to Moy Ling's shop.

I found him splitting coconuts in front of his copra shed, and beckoned to him in a careless way. He came forward, smiling pleasantly as usual, but there was a shrewd glitter in his eyes which said, quite as plainly as words, "Honorable sir, I bow before you, but I expect an adequate monetary return for the service." I was not intimidated, however, and when he brought forth the articles I had selected earlier I waved them aside--all of them excepting the rope-sole shoes, the only male footgear of any kind on the island. I explained that I had not before seen the bolt of white drill--the most expensive cloth in his shop--and that I wanted enough of it to make four suits. I saw at once that I had risen in his estimation about 75 per cent, and, thus encouraged, I went on buying lavishly--white-cotton cloth for underwear and shirts; some pencils and his entire supply of notebooks for my voluminous observations on the life and character of the Paumotuans; a Night-King flash lamp; a dozen silk handkerchiefs of Chinese manufacture; a dozen pairs of earrings and four lockets and chains; ten kilos of flour and two of coffee; three bottles of perfume in fancy boxes; four large bolts of ribbon--enough to reach from one end of the village to the other; side and back combs for women, superbly ornamented with bits of colored glass; a bolt of mosquito netting; a monkey wrench; two Beacon lanterns; a pandanus mat; and one bow tie already made up, the kind sold at home in "gents' furnishings" shops.

At the beginning I had no thought of going in so recklessly. But as I went from article to article the conviction grew upon me that the deeper I plunged the greater the impression I should make upon Moy Ling, and it was essential that I should convince him that my mythical wealth was real. He became more and more deferential as my heap of purchases increased in size. I made no inquiry as to the price of anything, believing that to be in keeping with the mysteriously affluent tradition. At my back I heard a hum of excited conversation. The shop was filled with people. I felt the crush behind me, but took no notice of it and went on with my passionless orgy of spending: two bolts of women's dress goods; four pocketknives; a can of green paint and another of white--but details are tiresome. It is enough to say that I bought lavishly, and selected odds and ends of things because Moy's shop contained nothing else. He had a large supply of food, but in other respects his stock was low, and when I had finished, some of his shelves were almost bare. On one there remained only a box of chewing gum. An inscription printed on the side of it read: "Chew on, MacDuff! You can't chew out the original mint-leaf flavor" of somebody's pepsin gum--words to that effect. That product of American epicureanism is to be found, strangely enough, at nearly every Chinaman's store in the Low Archipelago. I bought twenty packages of it, since there were no other confections to be had, and distributed them among the children. The youthful MacDuffs chewed on for some thirty seconds and then swallowed, believing, in their unenlightened way, that gum is a sort of food. I had read of monkeys dying in zoos because of the same practice; but, in so far as I know, there were no ill effects from it at Rutiaro, either then or later.

I succeeded very well in impressing Puarei. He was astonished at the number of my purchases; and Poura said, "Au-e!" shooed out the mint-breathed porters who carried them to the house, and sat down in the doorway, her enormous body completely blocking the entrance. On the veranda the conversation crackled and sparkled with conjecture. I could hear above the others the voice of Paki, wife of the constable, enumerating the things I had bought. It sounded odd in Paumotuan--a high-pitched recitative of strange words, most of them adapted from the English since all of the articles were unknown to the natives before the coming of the traders--_faraoa_ (flour), _ripine_ (ribbon), _peni_ (pencil or pen), _taofe_ (coffee), etc.

I myself was wondering what use I could make of some of my wealth. The flour I would give to Puarei, and his ten-ton cutter was badly in need of paint. Poura would be glad to have the dress goods for herself and her girls, for the Rutiaroans put aside their _pareus_ on Sunday and dressed in European costume. I could also give her the mosquito netting as a drapery for the guest bed. I had, in fact, bought it with that end in mind, for on windless nights, particularly after a rain, the mosquitoes were a fearful nuisance. Puarei's household was used to them, but I tossed and tumbled, and at last would have to paddle out on the lagoon and stay there till morning. The coffee, likewise, was for my own use, Puarei believing that the drinking of either tea or coffee was forbidden by his variety of the Christian religion. Tobacco, too, was a product of evil, and the use of it made broad the way to hell. It is impossible to believe that any missionary would wander so far to preach such theology. What had happened, very likely, was that one of the more austere churchmen who visit Rutiaro at rare intervals had condemned those white man's comforts as injurious to health. He must have been severe in his denunciation, for Puarei had got the idea that abstinence from the enjoyment of them was exacted in a sort of amendment to the Ten Commandments. I did my best to corrupt him, for breakfast at his house was to me a cheerless meal. His faith was not to be shaken, however, although he admitted that coffee drinking might not damn me, since I had been taught to believe that it would not.

I was thinking with pleasure of his tolerance and of the comforting beverage I should have the following morning when I remembered that mine was green Tahiti coffee which must be taken to Moy Ling for roasting. His shop was deserted. I could see it at the end of the sunlit street, steaming with moisture after the rain. The open doorway was a square of black shadow. It lightened with a misty glimmer as I watched, and suddenly Moy flashed into view. He ran quickly down the steps, halted irresolutely, and stood for a moment, shading his eyes with his hand, looking in the direction of Puarei's house. Then he turned, mounted the steps again, and vanished slowly in the gloom. I was uneasy, knowing what he was thinking; but an island less than three miles long, with an average width of four hundred yards, offers a poor refuge for a faint-hearted debtor. And so, having stowed my other purchases under the guest bed, I took the bag of coffee and returned to Moy's store, hoping that I might quiet his fears by increasing my obligation to him.

When one is without them, clothing, coffee, tobacco, and other such necessities assume a place of exaggerated importance, which is the reason why the memories of the earlier part of my stay at Rutiaro are tinged with the thought of them. But I had not come to the Low Islands to spend all of my time and energy in the mere fight for a comfortable existence. I could have done that quite as well at home, with greater results in the development of a more or less Crusoe-like resourcefulness. At Rutiaro the life was strange and new to me, and I found the days too short for observing it and the nights for reflecting upon it. My first interest, of course, was Puarei's household--the chief, his wife, two sons, and three daughters all housed in that one-room frame building. The room was commodious, however, about twenty-five feet by fifteen, and on the lagoon side there was a broad veranda where Poura and her daughters did much of their work and passed their hours of leisure. Behind the house was a large cistern, built of blocks of cemented coral, and a small outkitchen made of the odds and ends of packing cases and roofed with thatch.

I wondered at Puarei's preference for a board box covered with corrugated iron, to the seemly houses of the other Rutiaroans. He thought it a palace, and, being a chief, the richest man of the atoll, it was in keeping with the later Paumotuan tradition that he should have a white man's kind of dwelling. Unsightly though it was without, the economy of furnishing gave the interior an air of pleasant spaciousness, like that of the island itself with its scarcity of plant life and of trees other than the coconut. There was no European furniture with the exception of a sewing machine and the guest bed, an old-fashioned, slatted affair which looked strange in that environment. On it was a mattress of _kspok_ and two immense pillows filled with the same material. The linen was immaculate, and the outer coverlet decorated with hibiscus flowers worked in silk. I had no hesitation in accepting the bed, for it would not have held Puarei and his wife. The slats would have given away at once under their weight, and Poura assured me that the children preferred sleeping on their mats on the veranda. The rest of the furnishings were like those of the other houses--two or three chests for clothing; pandanus mats for the floor; paddles, fishing spears, and water glasses stacked in a corner or lying across the rafters. An open cabinet of native manufacture held the toilet articles of the women--a hand mirror, a few combs, and a bottle of unscented coconut oil, the one cosmetic of the Low Islands, which was used by all members of the family. There were also several articles of jewelry such as the traders sell, some fishing hooks of pearl shell, and, on a lower shelf, a Tahitian Bible. The walls were hung with branches of curiously formed coral, hat wreaths and necklaces of shell wrought in beautiful and intricate designs. There were no pictures other than the open windows looking out on the lagoon in one direction, and in the other, across the level, shaded floor of the island toward the sea.

We spent but little time indoors. All of the cooking was done in the open, and we had our food there, sitting cross-legged around a cloth of green fronds. The trees around us furnished the dishes. I had not used my tin spoon and the two-pronged fork since the evening of my arrival, and learned to suck the _miti_ sauce from my fingers with as loud a zest as any of them. Usually we had two meals a day at Rutiaro, but there was no regularity about the time of serving them. We ate when we were hungry and food was to be had, sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, and as late as ten in the evening. That is one reason why I remember so well the feasts prepared by Poura and her daughters, and served by them, for they never sat down to their own food until we had finished. Feasts of a simple kind, but, by Jove! how good everything tasted after a day of fishing and swimming in the lagoon or out at sea. I didn't tire of coconuts as quickly as I had feared I should; and the fish were prepared in a variety of ways--boiled, roasted over hot stones, grilled on the coals, or we ate them raw with a savor of _miti_ sauce. Puarei's dog, one of the best fishers of the island, was the only member of the family discriminating in his requirements. He often came up while we were at dinner, with a live fish in his mouth, which he would lay at Poura's feet, looking at her appealingly until she cooked it for him. Sometimes, to tease him, she threw it away, but he would bring it back, and, no matter how hungry he might be, refuse to eat it raw.

The sea furnished occasional variety of diet in the way of turtles and devilfish; and I contributed rice, tinned meat, and other preserved food which I bought of Moy Ling whenever I imagined his confidence in me was beginning to falter. That was a risky procedure, only to be undertaken on the days when I was so filled with animal spirits that I more than half believed in my wealth, in my power to draw money or anything else I wanted out of the clear, dry air of Rutiaro.

One thing I had wanted from the first, above all others--a house. The idea of imposing indefinitely upon Puarei's hospitality was distasteful, and no boats were expected within five or six months. I had not, in years, lived for so long a period at any one place. Here was an opportunity I had often dreamed of for having a home of my own. I should have to ask the chief for it, and at first thought the request seemed a large one. Then, too, how could I say to him with any show of logic: "Puarei, I am not willing to bother you longer by occupying the guest bed in your house. Therefore, will you please give me a house to myself?" He might think I had peculiar ideas of delicacy. But further reflection convinced me that, while I could not ask him for a pair of trousers--not even for so trifling a thing as a shirt button, since he would have to purchase it at Moy Ling's store--I might legitimately suggest the gift of a house. It would cost only the labor of making it, and that was not great. At Rutiaro houses were built in less time than was needed to sail across the lagoon and back. The inhabitants might reasonably have adopted the early Chinese method of roasting pig by putting the carcasses in their dwellings and setting fire to the thatch. It would have been a sensible procedure, employed at times when the old thatch needed renewal. Nothing permanent would have been destroyed except the framework of poles, and that could be replaced as easily as firewood could be cut for a Maori oven.

The upshot of the matter was that I was given not only a house, but an island of my own to set it on--I who had lived much of my life up four or five flights of stairs, in furnished rooms looking out on chimney pots and brick courts filled with odors and family washings. The site was a small _motu_ lying at the entrance to the lagoon, four miles from the village island. It had a name which meant, "The place where the souls were eaten." Once, a man, his wife, and two children went there to fish on the reef near the pass. All of them were taken ill of some mysterious disease, and died on the same day. As their souls left their bodies they were seized and eaten by some vindictive human spirits in the form of sea birds. The legend was evidently a very ancient one, and the events which it described had happened so long ago that fear of the place had largely vanished. Nevertheless, the chief tried to persuade me to choose another site; and Poura, when she learned that I wanted to live on the Soul-Eaters' Island, was deeply concerned. Neither of them could understand why I should want to live away from the village island. I wince, even now, when I think of the appalling tactlessness of that request; but the fact is that the Paumotuans themselves, by their example, had got me into the vicious habit of truth-telling in such matters. There is no word in their language for tact. They believe that a man has adequate, although sometimes hidden, reasons for doing what he wants to do, and they understand that it explains seemingly uncourtly behavior.

I had accepted, almost unconsciously, their own point of view, so that it didn't occur to me to invent any polite falsehoods. But my knowledge of Paumotuan was more limited than Paurei's knowledge of French, and how was I to explain my desire for so lonely a place as the Soul-Eaters' Island? The Paumotuans, from their scarcity of numbers, the isolation of their fragments of land, the dangers of the sea around them, are drawn together naturally, inevitably. How make clear to them the unnatural gregariousness of life in great cities? Suddenly I thought of my picture post card of the Woolworth Building. I told them that in America many people, thousands of them, were cooped together in houses of that sort. I had been compelled to spend several years in one and had got such a horror of the life that I had come all the way to the Cloud of Islands, searching for a place where I might be occasionally alone.

While the post card was passing from hand to hand, Huirai, the constable, loyal friend in every emergency, gave color to my explanation by describing--for the thousand and first time, I suppose--his adventures in San Francisco. Dusk deepened, the last ghostly light faded from the clouds along the northern horizon, and still he talked on; and the idlers on the chief's veranda listened with as keen interest as though they had never heard the story before. Poura, who was at work on my new wardrobe, lit a lamp and placed it on the floor beside her, shading it from her eyes with a piece of matting. The light ran smoothly over her brown hands, and the mountain of shadow behind her blotted out the forms of the trees. Now and then she put down her work and gazed intently in Huirai's direction. His voice rose and fell, thrilled with excitement, died away to a deep whisper of awe as he told of the wonders he had seen, the street cars, the lofty buildings, the elevators which rose to an immense height as swiftly as a coconut would fall, the trains, the motors, the ships, the pictures which were alive. He imitated sounds with amazing fidelity, and his gestures, vaguely seen in the gloom, were vividly pictorial of the marvels he had met with in his travels.

The story ended abruptly and Huirai sat down, conscious of the effect he had produced. No one spoke for a long while. Then the chief, who was sitting beside me, broke the silence with that strange Polynesian exclamation of wonder too great for words, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!" uttered with distinct, rapid precision, like the staccato of machine-gun fire. He laid his hand on my knee affectionately, with an air of possessorship; and at the contact a feeling of pride rose in me, as though I were the planner of the cities, the magician whose brain had given birth to the marvels Huirai had described. But conceit of that kind may be measurably reduced by a moment of reflection, and I remembered that the extent of my contribution to my native land was that I had left it. Small cause for vanity there. However, I had no mind for another tussle with my conscience. I had been the indirect cause of eloquence in Huirai and of enjoyment in his auditors. That was enough for one evening on the credit side. On the other side, to Puarei, to Poura, to his children, and to all the kindly, hospitable people of Rutiaro I was under an obligation which I could never hope to cancel. But they didn't expect me to cancel it. I was not even under the necessity of showing appreciation. Just as there is no word in their language for "tact," there is none approaching our word "gratitude" in meaning. To a man in my position, owner of Soul-Eaters' Island, and of a house to be built there the following day, that was something to be grateful for.

The Chinese language is richer, I believe, in terms implying obligation. I was reminded, less pleasantly, of another account on the debit side, by the flare of a match which lit up for a moment the pensive, cadaverous face of Moy Ling.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*An Adventure in Solitude*

I awoke sometime during the latter part of the night with the bemused presentiment that a longed-for event was approaching or in the process of happening. Hands had passed lightly over my face--either that or I had dreamed it--and I heard a faint shout coming from the borderland between sleeping and waking. Puarei's guest bed, with its billowy mattress of kapok, seemed strangely hard, which led to the discovery that I was not lying on a bed, but on a mat in the corner of an empty room. The floor was covered with crushed krora shell which made a faint radiance in the gloom, and a roof of green thatch was alight with the reflections of moving water. I was trying to puzzle out whose house this could be when I heard the shout again, clearly this time, in a pause of silence between deafening claps of thunder. From nearer at hand came the sound of subdued laughter. Something elfish, light-hearted in the quality of it, stirred a dim memory and there flashed into mind the lines of an old poem:

Come, dear children, come out and play.
The moon is shining as bright as day,
Up the ladder and over the wall--

Raising my head quickly, I saw through the open doorway their perfect illustration. The wall was the smooth wall of the sea, with a waning moon rising just clear of it, sending a path of light to the strip of white beach in front of the house. The palm trees bordering the shore swarmed with children who were throwing down nuts. One ancient tree, its stem a fantastic curve, held its foliage far out over the water at a point where the floor of the narrow outer lagoon shelved steeply toward the reef some fifty yards distant. Both boys and girls were shinning up the trunk, one after the other, diving from the plumed top, dropping feet foremost, jumping with their hands clasped around their knees into the foaming water--the wreckage of huge combers which broke on the reef pouring across it into the inner shallows. A second group had gathered in the moonlit area just before the doorway. Several youngsters were peering intently in my direction. Others were playing a sort of handclapping game to the accompaniment of an odd little singsong. A small girl, with a baby riding astride her hip, walked past, and I saw another, of ten or twelve, standing at the edge of the track of shimmering light, holding a coconut to her lips with both hands. Her head was bent far back and her hair hung free from her shoulders as she drained the cool liquid to the last drop.

Imagine coming out of the depths of sleep to the consciousness of such a scene! I was hardly more sure of the reality of it than I had been of the shout, the touch of hands. It was like a picture out of a book of fairy tales, but one quick with life, the figures coming and going against a background of empty sea where the long swell broke in lines of white fire on a ledge of coral. I remembered where I was, of course: in my own house, which stood on the ocean side of a small motu known in the Paumotuan legend as "The island where the souls were eaten." The house had been built for me only the day before by the order of Puarei, chief of the atoll of Rutiaro; and the motu was one of a dozen uninhabited islands which lay on the thirty-mile circumference to the lagoons.

It was ordered--by chance, which took me there, perhaps--that I was never to see the place in the clear light of usual experience, but rather through a glamour like that of remembered dreams--a long succession of dreams in which, night after night, events shape themselves according to the heart's desire, or even more fantastically, with an airy disregard for any semblance to reality. So it was, waking from sleep on the first night which I spent under my own roof. I was almost ready to believe that my presence there was not the result of chance. Waywardness of fancy is one of the most godlike of the attributes of that divinity, but the display of it is as likely as not to be unfriendly. Here there seemed to be reasoned kindly action. "Providence," I said to myself--"Providence without a doubt; a little repentant, perhaps, because of questionable gifts in the past." A whimsical Providence, too, which delighted in shocking my sense of probability. What could those children be doing on Soul-Eaters' Island in the middle of the night? I, myself, had left the village island, four miles distant, only a few hours earlier, and at that time everyone was asleep. There was not a sound of human activity in the settlement; not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere excepting in Moy Ling's, the Chinaman's, shop, and on the surface of the lagoon where lay the misty reflections of the stars. "Perhaps," I thought, "these are not earthly children. Maybe they are the ghosts of those whose souls were eaten here so many years ago." I was more than half serious in thinking of that possibility. Stranger things had happened on islands not so far removed from the world of men.

I dressed very quietly and went to the door, taking care to keep well in the shadow so that I might look on for a moment without being seen. My doubts vanished at once. Not only the children had come out to play; fathers and mothers, as well. Tamitanga was there and Rikitia and Nahea and Pohu and Tahere and Hunga; Nui-Tane and Nui-Vahine, Tamataha, Manono, Havaiki; and I saw old Rangituki, who was at least seventy and a grandmother several times over, clapping her hands with others of her generation and swaying from side to side in time to the music of Kaupia's accordion. All the older people were grouped around Puarei, who was seated in an old deck chair, a sort of throne which was carried about for him wherever he went. Poura, his wife, lay on a mat beside him, her chin propped on her hands. Both greeted me cordially, but offered no explanation for the reason of the midnight visit. I was glad that they didn't. I liked the casualness of it, which was quite in keeping with habits of life at Rutiaro. But I couldn't help smiling, remembering my reflections earlier in the evening. I believed then that I was crossing the threshold of what was to be an adventure in solitude, and was in a mood of absurdly youthful elation at the prospect. "I was to delve deeply, for the first time, into my own resources against loneliness. I had known the solitude of cities, but there one has the comfortable sense of nearness to others; the refuge of books, pictures, music--all the distractions which prevent any very searching examination of one's capacity for a life of retirement. At Soul-Eaters' Island I would have no books, no pictures, excepting a colored post card of the Woolworth Building which had won me this opportunity; and for music I was limited to what I could make for myself with my _ocharina_, my sweet-potato whistle which had a range of one octave. Thus scantly provided with diversions, I was to learn how far my own thoughts would serve to make a solitary life not only endurable, but pleasant."

So I had dreamed as I paddled down the lagoon, with my island taking form against the starlit sky to the eastward. It was one of those places which set one to dreaming, which seem fashioned by nature for the enjoyment of a definite kind of experience. Seeing it, whether by day or by night, the most gregarious of men, I am sure, would have become suddenly enamored of his own companionship and the most prosaic would have discovered a second, meditative self which pleads for indulgence with gentle obstinacy. But, alas! my own unsocial nature gained but a barren victory, being robbed, at the outset, of the fruits of it, by the seventy-five convivial inhabitants of Rutiaro. Here within six hours was half the village at my door, and Puarei told me that the rest of it, or as many as were provided with canoes, was following. Evidently he had suggested the invasion. My new house needed warming--or the Paumotuan equivalent to that festival--so they had come to warm it.

Preparations were being made on an elaborate scale. The children were gathering green nuts for drinking and fronds for the cloth at the feast. Women and girls were grating the meat of ripe nuts, pressing out the milk for the _miti haari_; cleaning fish; preparing shells for dishes. Some of the men and the older boys were building native ovens--eight of them, each one large enough for roasting a pig. All of this work was being carried out under Puarei's direction and to the accompaniment of Kaupia's accordion. I wish that I might in some way make real to others the unreal loveliness of the scene. It must be remembered that it took place on one of the loneliest of a lonely cloud of islands which lay in the midmost solitude of an empty ocean. The moonlight must be remembered, too, and how it lay in splinters of silver on the motionless fronds of the palms as though it were of the very texture of their polished surfaces. And you must hear Kaupia's accordion, and the shouts of the children as they dove into the pool of silvered foam. The older ones, out of respect to me, I think, wore wisps of parou cloth about their loins, but the babies were as naked as on the day they were born. Tereki was standing among these five-and-six-year-olders, who were too small for the climb to the diving place, taking them up, sometimes two at once, and tossing them into the pool among the others, where they were as much at home as so many minnows. Watching them, I thought with regret of my own lost opportunities as a child. I felt a deep pity for all the children of civilization who must wear clothing and who never know the joy of playing at midnight, and by moonlight too. Mothers' clubs and child-welfare organizations would do well to consider the advisability of repealing the old "to bed at seven" law, the bugbear of all children. Its only merits, if it may be so called, is that it fosters in children, a certain melancholy intellectual enjoyment in such poems as, "Up the ladder and over the wall," where the forbidden pleasures are held out to them as though they were natural ones--which most of them are, of course--and quite possible of attainment.

I was sorry that Tino, supercargo of the _Caleb S. Winship_, could not be present to see how blithely the work went forward. He had called the people of Rutiaro a lazy lot, and he was right--they were lazy, according to the standards of temperate climates. But when they worked toward an end which pleased them their industry was astonishing. Tino's belief was that man was made to labor, whether joyfully or not, in order that he might increase his wealth, whether he needed it or not, and that of the world at large. I remember meeting somewhat the same point of view in reading the lives and memoirs of some of the old missionaries to the islands. It seems to have irked them terribly, finding a people who had never heard that doleful hymn, "Work, for the Night Is Coming." They, too, believed that the needs of the Polynesians should be increased, but for ethical reasons, in order that they should be compelled to cultivate regular habits of industry in order to satisfy them. Although I didn't agree with it, Tino's seemed to me the sounder conviction. The missionaries might have argued as reasonably for a general distribution of Job-like boils, in order that the virtues of patience and fortitude might have wider dissemination. But neither trade nor religion had altered to any noticeable extent the habits of life at Rutiaro. The people worked, as they had always done, under the press of necessity. Their simple needs being satisfied, their inertia was a thing to marvel at. I have often seen them sitting for hours at a time, moving only with the shadows which sheltered them. There was something awe-inspiring in their immobility, in their attitude of profound reverie. I felt at times that I was living in a land under a perpetual enchantment of silence and sleep. These periods of calm--or, as Tino would say, laziness--were usually brought to an end by Puarei. It was a fascinating thing to watch him throwing off the enchantment, so gradual the process was and so strange the contrast when he was thoroughly awakened and had roused the village from its long sleep. Then would follow a period of activity--fishing, copra making, canoe building, whatever there was to do would be done, not speedily, perhaps, but smoothly, and fasts would be broken--in the case of many of the villagers for the first time in two or three days. My house was built during such a period. I was still living with Puarei on the village island, wondering when, if ever, I was to have the promised dwelling. Then one afternoon, while I was absent on a shell-gathering expedition, the village set out _en masse_ for Soul-Eaters' Island, cut the timbers, branded the fronds, erected, swept, and garnished my house, and were at the settlement again before I myself had returned. That task finished, here they were back for the warming festival, and the energy spent in preparing for it would have more than loaded Tino's schooner with copra. I couldn't flatter myself that all of this was done solely to give me pleasure. They found pleasure in it too, and, furthermore, I knew that an unusually long interval of fasting called for compensation in the way of feasting.

Puarei was in a gay mood. Religion sat rather heavily upon him sometimes--by virtue of his Papeete schooling, he was the chief elder of his church; but once he sloughed off his air of Latter Day Saintliness he made a splendid master of revels; and he threw it aside the moment the drums began to beat, and led a dozen of the younger men in a dance which I had not seen before. It was very much like modern Swedish drill set to music, except that the movements were as intricate and graceful as they were exhausting. Three kinds of drums were used--one, an empty gasoline tin, upon which the drummer kept up a steady roll while the dance was in progress. The rhythm for the movements was indicated by three others, two of them beating hollowed cylinders of wood, while a third was provided with an old French army drum of the Napoleonic period. The syncopation was extraordinary. Measures were divided in an amazing variety of ways, and often when the opportunity seemed lost the fragments joined perfectly just as the next one was at hand. The music was a kaleidoscope in sound, made up of unique and startling variations in tempo, as the dance moved from one figure to the next.

At the close of it Kaupia took up her accordion again, and dancing by some of the women followed. At length, Rangituki, grandmother though she was, could resist the music no longer. The others gave way to her, and in a moment she was dancing alone, proudly, with a sort of wistful abandon, as though she were remembering her youth, throwing a last defiance in the teeth of Time. Kaupia sang as she played to an air which had but four changes in it. The verse was five words long and repeated endlessly.

Tu fra to potta mi,
Tu fra to potta mi.