For some reason chickens, like wine, refuse to age properly in the South Pacific. It may be the heat, it may be the humidity; at any rate a chicken of greater age than two months, however cooked, makes a piece de resistance in a most painfully literal sense. Luckily, the Tahitian pig, cooked in island fashion, is as much above the average porker of temperate latitudes as the Tahitian broiler falls below the standard in his class. Any kind of a cut from a six-months-old coconut-fed pig, cooked on hot stones and served with the inimitable miti-hari sauce, will awaken an ecstasy in the palate the memory of which cannot be eradicated by a lifetime of gastronomic experience with the most vaunted viands of other climes. The recipe for preparing this incomparable delicacy would be about as follows:
Dig a hole in the ground big enough comfortably to bury a pig in and fill it with smooth, round river-bottom stones. Collect half a cord or so of dry wood and start a fire on the stones. Leaving a boy to stoke the fire, take the eight or ten hours in which the stones are coming to a dull cherry red to find just the right sort of a pig. From three to six months is the best age, and, if possible, get an animal that has been penned and fed upon nothing but young coconuts. If there has been a few odd bread-fruits, bananas, mangoes, papayas, avocados, star-apples and the like thrown in to him occasionally it will not make much difference, but avoid the young porker that has rustled for himself about the copra shacks and along the beach.
Kill the pig and dress in the usual manner, but without cutting off the head and feet or removing the skin. Wrap the body several inches deep in banana or plantain leaves and plaster the whole thickly with sticky mud. Then, if the stones are red, remove them with a pole, throw in the wrapped pig and push them back again. Best to let a native watch the progress of the cooking, as a great deal depends upon taking out the pig at the right time, and a lifetime of experience is required to forecast the precise condition to which it is roasted from a whiff of the steam.
You might try your hand with miti-hari before leaving the rest of the feast for the natives to prepare. This is the sauce par excellence of the South Pacific, and, as far as my own experience goes, quite without a peer in any other part of the world. Send for a quart of grated coconut meat (most of the native houses keep it on hand), and after soaking it for a few minutes in sea water, pour out on a square of stout muslin, twist the corners of the latter together and bring all the pressure possible to bear on the contents. The result is a cupful of thick, rich milk which, on the addition of the juice of a couple of limes and a red pepper or two, becomes the marvellous and transmutative miti-hari.
I recall hearing in Papeete a story concerning the amazing things that tourists have eaten under the gastronomic intoxication incident to tasting the wonderful miti sauce with which they—the things—were dressed. I believe a piece of rubber blanket was on the list. I don't exactly recall what else, though I do remember hearing Claribel say that a dash of miti-hari on the story itself might make it easier to swallow. But Claribel, unduly proud of her own salad dressings, was somewhat prejudiced against the incomparable Tahitian sauce.
The Tahitian "native" feast does not differ in any salient particulars from the often-described Hawaiian luau. The guests sit on the ground and eat the various "dishes," which are spread before them on banana leaves, from their fingers. In addition to pig, chicken and the inevitable breadfruit, the menu always includes a liberal supply of fish, both cooked in ti leaves and pickled raw in lime juice; taro, boiled and mashed; bananas and plantain of a dozen different varieties; fillet of squid, very exquisite prawns and your choice of a score of varieties of strange and delicious tropical fruits with unwritable names.
If the feast is given you by a person of wealth and importance, or if you are paying a chief like the canny Ori a sum sufficient to make it an inducement, you may get a taste of coconut sprout salad. The raw fish is far from unpalatable and the prawns are exquisite, but the coco sprout salad is the only dish of the lot worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with the miti-hari-ed pig. Unfortunately, as every tiny sprout in the salad means the death of a young coco palm, the dish is more often discussed than digested. A substitute made of the tender fronds of young ferns is itself pretty near a high-water mark until you have tasted that from coco sprouts. As for the coco-fed pig and the miti-hari dressing, if it doesn't prepare your face for a look of distant superiority whenever again you hear men extolling this or that culinary achievement as worthy of place on the top-most pinnacle of gastronomic excellence, it is because you are suffering from atrophy of the palate.
Kava, so popular in the Samoas and Fiji, was not—Byron to the contrary notwithstanding—and is not, drunk in Tahiti. Feasting with natives outside of missionary circles, you will probably have a chance to "experience" orange wine. This is a harmless-looking beverage of insinuating ways, in the lucent depths of the first three or four coco shell cups of which lurks no hint of the devil who is curled up in the bottom of the fifth or sixth, and all thereafter. The proverbial ungentlemanliness of the onslaught of a "battleship" punch upon a débutante at her first dance on board is nothing to the "assault from ambush" of orange wine upon the unwary stranger who dallies overlong above its cup.
Coco wine—not the coco toddy that figured in my Marquesan pig hunt, which is a baser concoction—fermented from a juice drawn from the heart of the trunk of that palm, is expensive and hard to obtain at any cost. It is a gentleman's drink, however, and scorns to practise any of the "behind-the-back" tactics of the soft-footed orange thunderbolt. It romps down the throat like a torch-light procession and promptly starts a conflagration that spreads like wild-fire from the head to the heels. An American Indian after a couple of epus of coco wine would commence murdering his fellows, as he does under the influence of the fiery mescal; the gentle Tahitian in like instance, though quite as much uplifted, both mentally and physically, as the redskin, is content to murder sleep—his own and every one's else. He enters upon a period of song and dance which lasts as long as the supply of wine, and there is no peace within a quarter-mile radius of the centre of disturbance.
In America or Europe a man showing the same symptoms as does a Kanaka under the influence of coco wine would be gagged, strait-jacketed and thrust into a padded cell. In Tahiti the smiling policeman, if the offender becomes too boisterously obstreperous, accomplishes a similar result by pitching him into the sea. At first blush this strikes one as being a somewhat drastic proceeding, but the Tahitian, being amphibious, rarely comes to harm in the water. Indeed, I have the assurance of a prominent merchant of Papeete that "you would be surprised how few of these ducked natives are really drowned!" I will return to the Tahitian in his "lighter moments" in another chapter.
Ori's resources of entertainment, by a strange coincidence, came to an end at the same time as did our big sack of Chilean pesos, and we returned by the smooth, well-metalled leeward road to Papeete, where we were planning two or three affairs on the yacht in an endeavour to make a small return of the hospitality we had enjoyed from the day of our arrival. We still had something to learn about "Society in the Societies," however, and we were on our way to the initiation.
CHAPTER VIII
SOCIETY IN THE SOCIETIES
The Society Islands took their name from the Royal Geographical Society, which sent an expedition there in 1868 to observe the transit of Venus, not, as might be supposed, from any predilection of the early or latter-day inhabitants to afternoon teas, dinners, dances, masques, routs and the like. There were, to be sure, functions which might freely be classed under some of these heads, but as the foreign visitor who was bidden usually finished up much after the fashion of the lady who went out to ride on the tiger, except in the literal interpretation of a social gathering as a "polite intermixing of people," they could hardly be called social from his standpoint. Yet today, socially, Papeete—at least so far as red tape and ceremony go—is the most finished capital of the South Pacific. These things are, in fact, rather overdone for so remote a tropical outpost, and the intricate system of precedence set up by French officialdom, and the constant danger incident to the inadvertent bringing together of those within and without the pale, made one long at times for the bluff informality of Apia and the whole-hearted hospitality of Suva or Honolulu.
There is no lack of kindness on Tahiti's part to the stranger within her gates; if any complaint is to be made on that score, in fact, it is that there is too much of it. The trouble lies in the fact that there are, as elsewhere in the South Pacific, two broadly defined cliques—the missionary and trader—between which there is war to the knife. French officialdom constitutes a third clique which, while keeping itself pretty well aloof from the other two, still complicates their relations considerably. This alignment does not seem so impossible on the face of it, for there are cliques in all climes, and a world of unsegregated human elements would be unthinkable. You will choose your friends from the best in both camps, you may tell yourself, but how soon do you find that in the Guelph-and-Ghibelline warfare of the missionary and trader no sort of "run-with-the-hare-and-hunt-with-the-hounds" position is possible. If you are going to stay in the island you may just as well enlist under the banner of one force or the other at the outset, for there is no such thing as a recognized noncombatant and you are just as likely to go down between the contending forces in trying to keep out of the combat as in fighting in their ranks.
But under which banner will you enlist? There, indeed, comes the rub. You think it will be easy to decide, do you? Perhaps so; but suppose you take a few days to hear what the contenders have to say for themselves. You will find some very plausible chaps on both sides.
"Upon what meat has this our missionary fed?" paraphrases one of your trader acquaintances, who claims to have been a university man before his "pater" paid his debts and cut him off without a farthing. He always comes out with Shakespeare after about the fourth glass of rum, you learn shortly, and as inevitably lapses into the vernacular of the "beach" with something of the nature of "Why, blyme me, them swaller-tailed blokes would have been butchered an' eaten a hundred years ago if it wasn't fer us traders an' our shootin' irons to hold down the blacks."
After an evening of this you feel that the traders are a much misunderstood lot until, in the missionary's Sunday sermon, you hear them sorrowfully referred to as "our sinful brethren whose very existence here would have been impossible had not our teachings shown the savage the error of his blood-thirsty ways." Then you realize that it is the trader who, after all, is in the wrong, until, on the following day, you drop in at a copra shack on the Broom Road for a drink of coco water, and learn that it was missionary denunciation that was responsible for the massacre of Boyle and Wells at Rangaroa in 1891, and that the captain of the missionary schooner, Croix de Sud, was severely censured by the governor for abandoning the trader, Wilkes, to his fate during an uprising in the Tongas in 1903.
At heart, of course, you are in sympathy with the missionaries, so that it is with a secret satisfaction that you hear the ascetic, frock-coated gentleman, whom you fall in with a couple of miles farther along, nail these last stories as "unmitigated and devil-inspired lies," and go on to cite "unimpeachable authorities" to prove that traders instigated the "cutting out" of the missionary schooner, Morning Star, in the Hervey Group in 1899, and that traders were guilty of having incited the natives who killed Chalmers in New Guinea a year or two later. In spite of your sympathies, however, your confidence in the missionaries is badly shaken when, in the pauses of the hula which has been arranged for your especial benefit, you get "the real straight of it" from "Kangaroo Pete" the same evening, but how ashamed you are of your doubts when you meet the "Board of Conversion of the Affiliated Missionary Societies of the South Pacific at the Consulate" the following afternoon and hear the members "lay bare the mainspring of every action" of its representatives since the days of the "blessed John Williams."
Vacillating between the Scylla and Charybdis of "Missionarydom" and "Traderdom," and torn by the conflicting currents of doubt and belief, you end by soundly rating yourself as an invertebrate weakling incapable of forming a fixed opinion on any subject, and decide to take the advice of a sagacious Australian traveller who said that he had found the best course to pursue in the South Pacific was to "trade with the traders and 'mish' with the missionaries." But, as I have already pointed out, that you are quite as likely to come to grief as a non-combatant as in carrying a pike, the experience of our party in endeavouring to discharge its social indebtedness in Tahiti goes to prove.
The best characterization I have heard of social Papeete was that of a visiting Englishman who applied to it what some other Englishman once said about Hammersmith—"A lot of variegated grievances, each unit of which believes himself a little tin Providence on wheels."
The truth of this astute observation will hardly be brought home to the run of visitors to Tahiti who, stopping over but the few days between boats, have more opportunity to receive than to dispense entertainment. By us of the Lurline it was never suspected until, in a devil-inspired moment, we decided to wipe out our accumulated obligations in a single day by giving a tea and a sail in the afternoon and a buffet deck supper, with fireworks, in the evening. What an excellent idea, that of the two functions, we told ourselves—one for the "earth-earthy" set and the other for the "church-churchy" set. How lucky it was that the line of cleavage between them was so clearly demarked!
We called in the suave, diplomatic young consul, with his intricate knowledge of the most recondite of the cogs of the wheels within the wheels of the machine of Tahitian society, and started on the list for the afternoon affair, to which the "missionary set" was to be invited.
"Father Le P——," we began.
"Yes," acquiesced the Consul.
"The Reverend D—— and family."
"Ye-es."
"The Reverend B—— and wife."
"Um-well, hardly. He's Anglican, you know, and there's been some trouble with Father Le P—— over converts. Better not put them down."
"The R——'s, who had us to tea when we drove around the island. They're of the missionary set, aren't they?"
"Yes, but they're Presbyterians. They have a suit on now for some of the Catholic land which adjoins them; so they wouldn't do with Father Le P——. But they're friends of the B——'s, though. You might put the B——'s down and scratch Father Le P—— off."
The next two families mentioned were at odds with both of the sub-factions, the lines of which we were plotting, and so were not put down at all for the moment. Then came three that were friendly to Father Le P——, which resulted in his name being added again, while those of the B——'s and the R——'s were scratched off. And so it went on for a couple of hours. The missionary set ultimately resolved itself into five irreconcilable factions, and to these we discharged our obligations separately with the two teas and a dinner on board and a tea and a dinner at the hotel.
The list of the trader and official set was more complicated still. His Excellency, the Governor, we started with, of course. Monsieur le Secretaire was also passed, but Captaine G—— could not be included because he had recently come to blows with the Secretary over cards at the Cercle Militaire. The dashing Major L—— was passed, but not Lieutenant P——, of the gunboat, who was in the black books of Government House because he had once violated official etiquette by bringing a jag to dinner instead of acquiring it during the evening. Le Compte de R—— it was also necessary to leave off from our Number One list because he and the truculent Secretary had recently quarrelled over the question of precedence at an official reception.
Without a "trial balance" we quickly came to the conclusion that the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans—except the Consuls—would not do with the French; so an evening of green drinks was planned for the latter by themselves. The Anglo-Saxon list was the hardest task of the lot, and before it was completed we learned that A—— had another wife living in Auckland and that the children of the two families visited back and forth; that the present Mrs. B—— was the first Mrs. C——, and before that was a barmaid in D——'s saloon; that the E——'s, F——'s, G——'s and H——'s were involved in a four-cornered lawsuit and were not on speaking terms; that the Misses I—— travelled to Sydney and back unchaperoned and carried on something scandalous; that J——'s son eloped with K——'s daughter and deserted her in San Francisco for a vaudeville actress; that—but these samples will, perhaps, prove sufficient to give an idea of the nature of the tasks which confronted us.
Even under the coaching of the sympathetic and almost omniscient Consul, feuds which had smouldered unsuspected or differences which had cropped up over night supervened to cast palls of frigidity over even the gayest of our gatherings, and the most fervently thankful moment we knew in the course of the whole cruise was the one in which the last boatload of the guests from the last of our half score or more of "duty" parties cleared the gangway and we told ourselves that all was over without a single shooting affray, fist fight or even a hair-pulling.
How much simpler entertaining had been in the Marquesas, where the common run of social feuds were along the line of that of "Chewer-of-Thumbs," who was reluctant about coming aboard with "Masticator-of-Boys'-Ears" on the ground that the latter's grandfather had eaten his—the "Chewer's"—grandmother, and afterwards was said to have complained of indigestion. "Fancy—indigestion from one of the 'Chewer-of-Thumbs' lineage!" And all we had to say was that the idea was so preposterous that it must have been meant as a joke; upon which they both swarmed gleefully aboard the yacht, where the reconciliation was completed and made permanent by "Masticator's" magnanimous action in smuggling one of our cases of canned salmon into "Chewer's" canoe and helping him get away with it.
Tahitian—I mean "missionary" Tahitian—ideas of modesty were amusingly illustrated by a warning we received from a well educated and intentioned young half-caste, zealous in the enthusiasm of recent conversion, to the effect that our bathing costumes—regulation American bathing suits—were the occasion of no small amount of unfavourable comment among the "better class of Papeetans."
"But what's the matter of our bathing suits?" asked the Commodore in the amazement of perfect innocence. "Oh—perhaps the sailors have been a little informal in the costumes they have worn for their morning plunges."
"No, it isn't the sailors," was the reply. "The people are saying that the gentlemen's suits have no sleeves and legs and that—that the skirts of the ladies come only to their knees, and—"
"Of course," cut in the Commodore impatiently; "what's wrong with that? Women wear trains on ball gowns, not on bathing suits. Besides, the yacht is a good cable's length off shore, and it takes keen eyes to tell a bathing suit from pajamas at that distance."
"I know, sir," was the naïve reply; "but you would be surprised, sir, to learn how many of the better class of people living along the beach have telescopes."
"Oh!" we chorused—and again "Oh!"
Before showing our solicitous young friend to his canoe, we were at pains to enquire what was the orthodox bathing costume worn by the ladies of the "better class"—brown and white—calling his attention first to some girls from the public wash-house who, not far up the beach, were disporting themselves in the shallows in nothing but their pareos, short pieces of gaudy print which fell from the waist to the knees. He replied that the "real ladies," white and brown, never entered the water in public unless modestly draped from neck to heel.
This turned out to be the truth. A couple of days later, in the course of a ride, I came upon some mission girls about to take a dip in one of the big pools of the Faa-tua. For ten centimes one of them allowed me to take her photograph in the "orthodox" costume before entering the water. When the bath was over it cost me two francs to get her to come out into the sunshine and stand for another snap. I paid it willingly, however, rightly judging that the second photograph would be worth double the price asked in bolstering up the faltering confidence of the Mater and Claribel in the comparative propriety of their American bathing suits. I submit the two photographs without comment.
Native woman washing on the beach, Tahiti
A Mission bathing suit. Before the bath—and after
CHAPTER IX
THE SONG AND DANCE IN TAHITI
The Tahitian word for song, himine, is a Kanakazation of the English word hymn. Before the days of the missions there must have been some other term, for singing was quite as prominent an occupation of the native then as now, but it was discarded as a superfluity long ago. The South Sea Islander does not cumber his memory with more than one name at a time for any given thing, and when new words were forced upon him, as was inevitable with the coming of the whites, the old ones quickly disappeared through disuse.
Thus himine was at first applied to nothing but the hymns which the missionaries taught. Then the term expanded to include the rowing and working chanteys of the natives, and finally to the folk and dance songs. Today a Tahitian will speak of the himine to which a hula is danced. Shades of John Williams and James Chalmers! A hula to a himine! A native danse du ventre to a missionary hymn!
"You sinful hussies are as full of airs as a music box," said a missionary to the bevy of frolicksome vahines who had replied with a rollicking himine to his invitation to come inside of the church and listen to his Sunday sermon.
"That may be," answered one of the flower-crowned damsels, "but we can't be turned by a crank, at any rate."
They tell you this story at the club in Papeete, and you, politely, laugh—just as you did when you heard the original of that variation ten years before in America. However, the local adaptation is a good one—a Tahitian nymph is indeed as full of airs as a music box, and a vast deal easier to start up and keep going.
The Tahitian is received into the world with a song, he is sped forth from it with a song, and the only time in the interval when there is not a song issuing from his lips is when he is asleep. The beat of the sea is in his blood and a sense of time and an ear for tone are instincts with him. It is as natural for him to hold a tune as it is to walk, and it would be as remarkable for him to sing flat as to fall flat. In fact, be it orange wine or coco toddy, sugar cane rum or simple fatigue that starts his senses or his body reeling, he will commence falling flat long before he starts to sing flat. As often as not he dies with a song on his lips, and even his parting gasp is pretty sure to be in the right key.
In the beginning the South Seas had no musical instruments beyond the hollow-tree drum and the conch. The eukelele, so often spoken of as the native Hawaiian guitar, was originally an importation from Portugal, though it is now made in the islands; the concertina, mouth-organ and jew's harp of the rest of the mid-Pacific latitudes bear their foreign marks upon them. The Kanaka makes music on any one of them the first time he takes it up; but so also does he with two sticks and a coal oil can, or a piece of rolled-up floor mat—he cannot help it.
But the Tahitian's heart is in his singing, not his playing, and in choral rather than solo expression. He sings for the same reason that the rational drinker drinks—sociability. He is, to be sure, usually singing when he is on the road or working alone, but only because there is no one else to sing with him. A native who sings alone by preference is looked upon by his fellows much as we regard a man who is known to be a solitary drinker.
I have never heard the point brought up, but it has struck me on more than one occasion that much of the phenomenal success of the early missionaries in the South Pacific was due to their rare judgment in turning their first meetings into big song-fests. Even a meeting of today is three quarters himine, and in the short intervals of prayer and preaching the congregation is in a continual fidget in its eagerness for the opening notes of the next song. Many a one slips down from his seat, reclines at length on the floor and lights a banana-leaf cigarette. The children run about, not over quietly, and amuse themselves with pranks upon their elders. But at the first long-drawn note of the himine leader—the trumpet call to action—all leap to the seats, throw away their cigarettes and sit at stiff attention, and from then on to the end of the song have no eyes or ears for anything but the business in hand.
All of the missionary hymns, and especially those which have come down from the early days, are translations of old songs of the camp meeting and revival order, and every one of them has the beat and swing of a sailor's chantey. These lively new tunes tickled the natives' fancy as soon as they were introduced, and the fact that the first meetings consisted of even more singing and less preaching than those of today must have done much toward winning the missionary tolerance and even popularity, where the trader and the planter were ever suspended by hair-fine threads above the cooking pots. The natives, won and held through their love of hearing themselves sing, have thereby also been rendered more plastic for spiritual moulding. What could not have been done with them if their passion for dancing could have been similarly played upon?
The two dominant sounds of island life, the boom of the breakers and the hum of the wind in the trees, may be traced through all of the native music, and, through improvisation, in much that one hears in the churches. The sonorous chesty notes of the men's lower registers echo faithfully the thunder of the sea upon the reef, and a high, closed-mouth humming of the women is admirably imitative of the rise and fall of the wind, the rubbing of branches and the lisp of split palm fronds. The resonant over-tones of the bass in a men's chorus is not unsuggestive of the dying rumble of a big hollow-log drum. "The swing and entrain of the whole performance are intoxicating," writes an English woman who made a study of the island music; "the chorus, be it ten or a thousand voices, sweeps onward as resistlessly as a cataract, and the beat of the measure is like the pulse of Father Time himself. There are several parts as a rule, but they wander in and out of one another at will, and every now and then a single voice will break away and embroider a little improvisation of its own upon the melody that is like a sudden scatter of spray from the crest of a rolling breaker. Then the chorus takes it up and answers it, and the whole mass of the voices hurls itself upon the tune like the breaker falling and bursting upon the shore."
Dancing is the natural concomitant of singing in all of the South Sea islands, and the only occasion on which one is enjoyed without the other is at church service. As for dancing, singing is a sine qua non. Not only can a native not dance without a singing accompaniment, but his own voice must also be a part of that accompaniment. To bind a Tahitian's dancer's mouth is equivalent to tying his feet quite as much as tying a Latin's hands is tantamount to binding his mouth.
The first Tahitian dancers of whom there is any authentic record were the members of the "Areo," a secret intertribal organization of the old days, which would undoubtedly be credited to Bacchic inspiration were there any way of tracing a possible connection. The "Areos" were a roystering lot of madcaps, hardly comparable to anything else in history, but partaking something of the character of a modern choral society, a fancy dancing class and a band of brigands, with the avowed encouragement of human sacrifice, murder, cannibalism and general immorality thrown in.
The "Areo" was made up of the elite of each tribe, and the members were carefully tutored in the fine points of singing and dancing, much after the fashion of the geishas of Japan and the nautch girls of India. They travelled from valley to valley and village to village like a college glee-club, and the fact that their shows were open to all-comers free of charge brought them unbounded popularity and made them welcome guests in the palace of the king at the capital, or in the huts of the meanest fishing hamlet on the island. What they desired they took, and so powerful and popular were they that there was none to gainsay them. What wonder that the budding youth of Tahiti centred his ambition on growing up to become an "Areo" with an intensity that the American youth, tossed on the horns of the inevitable pirate-captain-or-president dilemma, can never know?
And then came the missionary ("Before the missionary came," in the mouth of an old Tahitian, is fraught with all the wildness of regret of "Before the Gringo came" on the lips of an old Spanish Don of California) and the "Areo" grew less and less and finally was no more. What of its legacies? We have seen how the missionaries adopted and turned the song to their own good ends. Has the dance also had the vitality to survive without the patronage of the real arbiters of island destiny? Hardly in its pristine purity—or impurity. The hula in Tahiti today is in about the same state as "The Harp that Once Through Tara's Halls"; the only evidence of its existence is when some overstrung string of vahines breaks (out) to show that still it lives. If the "breaking" is in public you will probably see the frayed ends of the string being chivvied down to the city bastile by a couple of motherly gendarmes.
And yet the ancient dance is not quite dead; there are a few strings that will yet give back a responsive chord if one knows how to twang them. But don't think it will be you, Mr. Tourist. I never heard of but one man who chanced to strike the "Lost Chord," and his fingers had been wandering over the worn strings for a year or more before they twanged the right combination. I will write of how this befell presently.
The usual hula that is arranged for those of the "personally-conducted-limited-to-fifty-all-expenses-paid" party who are in search of something deliciously naughty is about as devilish as a quadrille at a Sunday school picnic—a squad of portly vahines marching soberly through a half dozen simple figures to the music of a couple of accordions and an old drum. But at every one of these performances a darkly mysterious Kanaka is sure to slip quietly around among the men of the party and hint vaguely of the "real thing" that has been arranged for that very evening, and to which admission may be gained for, say, ten Chilean pesos apiece. Like half-starved trout to the first grasshopper of the season they rise, and, with felicitous mutterings of "A chance of a lifetime to see a hula—last one ever to be pulled off; fancy it occurring during our visit"—a party of a dozen or more, leaving its distractedly envious ladies behind, is steered off from the hotel into the scented twilight.
The "subscriptions" are collected en route to a deserted shack on the outskirts of the town, where, by the light of a couple of battered ship side-lamps, the searchers for local colour see a dozen anaemic frailties from the "beach"—dull-eyed, sad-looking vahines, flotsam and jetsam from half the island groups of the South Pacific, with strong hints of elephantiasis in their heavy ankles and blotchy skin—writhe and wriggle for half an hour in action more suggestive of the popular vaudeville imitation of a portly dame trying to make the hooks of her evening gown meet than a terpsichorean performance. The girls are a shameless lot of hussies of the class—you met them what times you whiled away the tedium of your steamer stop in Singapore, Colombo and Port Said with those swift but illuminating studies of "native life"—that dextrously appropriates your scarf pin under pretence of putting a flower in your button hole, and when you discover the loss boldly challenges you to tell the police.
And yet—what an indescribable lure there is in the "real thing" bait any time after you have been bitten by the "search-for-local colour" bug! It would hardly be fair for me to hold the glass on the researches of other Tahitian visitors without confessing that I, also, was once an eager follower of the "real thing" will-o'-the wisp, and under circumstances particularly aggravating. So here's for a clean breast of it.
I had noticed with increasing curiosity as our Tahitian visit wore on that the sailors from the yacht had been returning for several days from shore leave with new hats and new neckties, and with wreaths of flowers about their shoulders—sure signs that they were basking in female favour in some part of the island capital—so that when the mate came to me with a story of how he and his fellows had been adopted (a not unusual Kanaka custom) by families of an outlying Papeetan suburb, I accepted the truth of the yarn without question.
"As a special favour, sir, a lot of the vahines are going to give us the 'real thing' in the way of a hula tomorrow night," he confided to me, "and we thought that as you was saying that you didn't think much of them tourist hulas they get up for the steamer people that you might like to see the genuine article."
"Thanks, Victor," I said eagerly. "Write down the directions for reaching the place and I will pick up W—— and be there."
It isn't the custom to go sight-seeing with the sailors of one's friend's yacht in Tahiti any more than elsewhere, but I told myself that the role of patron would excuse it in this instance. And who in his first year in "The Islands" ever failed to rise for the "real thing" bait under any circumstances? W——, who joined me for the evening, was a British ornithologist of considerable reputation, and himself an earnest searcher after the fabled native of pristine purity.
We found the place without difficulty by locating it approximately and then running down the bang of a beaten oil can and the whine of an accordion. It is quite possible that the sailors had been taken to the bosoms of some native families, as they claimed; it is even possible that there may have been a right merry breakdown of a sort going on before we came. But certain it is that it was nothing bordering on that elusive will-o'-the-wisp, the "real thing," and more certain still that our coming—perhaps through suspicions aroused by the official cut of W——'s ducks—came pretty near to putting an end to even such activity as had been in progress up to that moment.
The double line of capering vahines broke for the unlighted corners and in a trice had hidden their graceful flower-wreathed limbs under flowing holakaus. They were a likely enough looking lot of girls, but not even the dozen bottles of claret which we had brought as good-will offering served to stir them to further action. In vain the chagrined sailors implored and swore and pushed and pulled; the distrustful nymphs only hung their flower-crowned heads and shrunk deeper into the dark corners. There was only one of the lot that did not seem paralysed with bashfulness, and this one, a long, rangy rack of bones with close-cropped hair—the only uncomely member of the party—started a lively whirling-dervish sort of a dance that threatened to break through the rickety floor.
"Not an orthodox hula, but quite the best bit of quick stepping I've seen in Tahiti," cried W—— enthusiastically. "Go it, girl! Vite! Vite!"
Thus encouraged, the lengthy dancer let out another link and at the same time lowered her song from a high falsetto humming to a booming of chesty bass notes.
"My word!" gasped W——, "she's a man!"
And a man "she" proved to be, a light-stepping young Kanaka, called in at the last moment to take the place of a girl who had fallen ill.
"Let's take a flash of that bunch of icebergs and get out of here," suggested W—— wearily; "I've had about enough of your 'real thing' for one evening."
So while W—— and the sailors chivvied the reluctant dancers together and grouped them in frozen poses, I set up my camera and put out the flashlight powder. A sufficient quantity of the latter was poured from a two-ounce tin box into its cover and set on a rickety table, the mate being directed to light it at the click of my opening shutter. He lit the powder at the proper moment, but confused the order to the extent of putting his match to the contents of the nearly full box instead of the small portion in its cover. There came an explosive "whish," a blinding flash, and under a dense smoke-cloud the mate, his eyelashes gone and his drooping Norwegian moustache burned to a few singed stubs, was writhing on the floor and groaning with agony. An instant later the light bamboo wall behind the table was observed to be afire, and forthwith bedlam broke loose on all sides.
The sailors bellowed for water and W—— shouted for a quilt, while the natives screamed back to the effect that, as the house was deserted and isolated, neither could be had. There seemed nothing to do but to get out and let the old shack burn, and through my mind flashed pictures of an interminable series of complications incident to the red-tape of the inevitable French official investigations. W—— and a sailor, with the apparently stone-blind mate between them, were making for the door and I was endeavouring to save the trampled fragments of my photographic apparatus, when my eye caught a flash of red in one corner, and my ear the twice or thrice repeated crash of breaking glass. In a quarter of a minute more a vigorously swished wet rag had whipped out the darting flame-tongues just before they reached the pendant frizzles of the pandanus thatch.
A resourceful vahine, while all the rest of us were wasting our breaths calling for water and quilts, and bewailing the absence of hand grenades and chemical engines, had calmly whisked off her pareo, broken all of the unopened claret bottles over it and slapped out the fire.
Wasn't it Moll Pitcher who won the day and a monument by swabbing out the cannon with some of her surplus lingerie? They don't erect monuments to heroic fire-lassies in Tahiti, so W—— and I did the best thing possible under the circumstances in subscribing the price of a dozen new pareos.
It was a week or so after the incident just sketched had taken place that W—— and I were at luncheon at the Cercle Militaire with a distinguished German ethnologist who had spent many years in the study of the fascinating problem of a prehistoric Polynesian civilization. W——, after amusingly narrating several of the experiences incident to his own study of native life in the South Seas, made the statement that a genuine Tahitas hula could not be seen on the island for "love or money," an assertion in which I stoutly supported him. The learned Teuton listened indulgently.
"Dat's a priddy zweeping stadement, chentlemen," he ventured. "You haf tried money, no doubt, but haf you der oder alternative, der gindness tried?"
We were compelled to admit that nothing systematic in the way of kindness had been attempted, upon which the doctor launched into an extended dissertation on the futility of trying to do anything with South Sea natives on a "buy-and-sell" basis. Early in his sojourn in Tahiti, he said, he had come to a realization of the banality of anything not freely given by the islanders. Accordingly, he had taken up his residence in Hiteaea, the least "civilized" village of the island, and first by judicious presents, later by incessant intercourse with them in the affairs of their daily life, succeeded in winning the confidence and affection of the simple inhabitants. As a consequence many privileges which other foreigners had vainly endeavoured to win by purchase had been extended to him as a brother, among them being attendance at the village's not infrequent festivals at its semi-secret "sing-sing" grounds in an extinct crater far in the interior. An evening of singing and dancing was scheduled for the following week, at the full of the moon, and to this the good doctor, conditional on the consent of his native friends, invited us to come.
The invitation was seconded in good time, and on the appointed day we pushed through on horseback to Hiteaea—twenty-five miles down the rough windward side of the island—reaching there in time for a light mid-afternoon lunch which the doctor had waiting for us. The beautiful hamlet was nearly deserted, the villagers having gone on earlier in the day to enjoy a twilight feast before the dance. Our horses carried us four or five miles back into the interior where, at an elevation of 3000 feet, the roughness and steepness of the trail and the thickness of the creepers overhead made it necessary to abandon them and do the rest of the climb through the sweat-box of the jungle on foot. We arrived at our destination in time for a plunge in a hyacinth-fringed pool of the coolest water we had known for months, a change of clothes and the enjoyment of a number of thoughtfully saved dainties from the feast. The latter had evidently been a jolly and somewhat convivial affair, but nothing of an orgy. The dancers, with laughter and snatches of song, were assisting each other with their toilets in the shelter of a wing of rustling feis.
The "sing-sing" ground (this is a term of the "beach" vernacular used in all parts of the South Pacific to designate a native ceremonial meeting place) had once been a tiny blow-hole of the great parent volcano, Orohena, and in its present condition it is not unlike the "Punch Bowl" at Honolulu with a ten-degree segment cut cleanly out of one side. The smooth floor is half rock, half turf, and the towering sides of lava, curtained thickly with an impenetrable tangle of giant fern, lantana and guava scrub and woven together with miles of endless creepers.
By a strange chance the slice of the crater's side which, undermined by the river below, fell away to the valley, left a clean-cut chasm of great depth and scant width opening toward the east-southeast. Through this chasm the full moon, from the moment it shows its glowing disc above a saddle in the rocks to the east, throws a sharp beam across the flower-strewn sward which, in its brilliant contrast to the almost solid blackness of the unlighted sides, shines as clearly as a shaft of calcium. In this lunar spot-light, in air almost sentiently sweet with the perfumes of gardenia and fern, the magic of these Terpsichorean necromancers is practised.
Stretched at our ease on a patch of mat-carpeted greensward in the depths of the shadow, we puffed lazily at our native cigarettes, sipped tiny epus of fiery coco wine and waited for the dance to commence. The chatter in the depths of the plantain-screened dressing room had ceased, and only the liquid tinkle of the drip from the surrounding walls, the distant mutter of the surf along the shore and the throaty calls of waking wood pigeons broke the stillness. Overhead the stars were blurring and blotting and twinkling again, as the disordered ranks of the Trade-clouds shuffled on in their endless flight before the scourges of the southeast wind; but to the east, where the flickering silhouettes of flying-foxes showed with increasing brightness against the moon-glow, the sky was clear.
The leap of the moon to its seat in the saddle of the eastern hills was as startling in its suddenness as that of its glass bulb stage-property prototype to the gauze heaven above the Grand Canal. As the shadow-mottled shaft of light impinged upon the crater floor a single drum note boomed out suddenly on the stillness and a blur of motion was faintly distinguishable about the "green room" entrances. Presently, as the shadows dissolved in the strengthening light, scores of prone figures, motionless save for a gentle waving of the riva-riva plumes of the heads, could be dimly guessed, and the doctor whispered that the opening number was evidently to be the "Dance of the Coconuts."
The plumes continued to nod for a few moments and then, representing the sprouting and growth of the young trees, the prostrate dancers, to the accompaniment of a low chanting, rose inch by inch to their full heights. Now the Trade-wind was blowing through their tops, and they bowed and swayed and bent and recovered, while the muffled nasal chanting rose and fell undulatingly like the gusty southeast breeze. Now it was harvest time, and new figures wove in and out among the swaying trees gathering the ripe fruit, and chesty "boom-booms" in the bass told of the cast-down nuts striking the ground underneath.
After a few minutes of indistinguishable pantomime which had to do with the husking and drying of the nuts for copra, a change came over the spirit of the quiet mimetic dance. The hum of the wind rose to a shrill whistle, the low monotone of the surf on the reef changed to the deep-mouthed roars of crashing combers as hard-smitten drum-logs sent forth throbbing peals of heavy thunder. A hurricane was bursting upon the coconut grove. No longer the trees bent to the caressing touch of the gentle Trade. Torn by conflicting gusts, they jerked now this way and now that, thrashing limbs striking each other in the pantomime of bare arms and hands banging with resounding thwacks upon bare backs and breasts. The wind and surf and thunder blend in a raucous roar as the storm grows more furious, and now the trees are snapping and falling before the terrific onslaught. Down they go, now falling alone, now striking others and going to the earth together. In a few moments all but two firmly rooted giants in the heart of the grove are tossing on the ground, and these—represented by two magnificently muscled men—lean together for support and defy the hurricane for a brief space longer. Then they, too, give way, falling to the ground interlocked, and the "Dance of the Coconuts" is over.
"My word!" gasped W——, as the roar of the storm gave way to laughter and chatter, "what wouldn't it be worth to the man who could put that on at Covent Garden or the Hippodrome?"
"Himmel!" snorted the doctor impatiently. "You'd haf der whole island to London to move also und der ferdamte British glimate would right away der whole thing kill."
While the dancers rested and slaked their thirsts with orange wine, our host gave us a graphic description of the "Volcano Dance," which is performed in the dark of the moon by the light of a huge bonfire. An imitation crater of long creepers is built at a point where there is a smooth grass chute of thirty or forty yards in length ending in the jungle below. On the side opposite the spectators the dancers, swathed in wreaths of red hibiscus, enter the crater through a small opening, leap high in the air like erupting lava and go rolling off down the chute to the thunder of drums and the subterranean growls of the male chorus. From the lower end of the chute a back trail leads up to the "stage-entrance" of the artificial crater, so that fifty or more dancers, with a sufficiency of orange wine on tap at the crater door, have no difficulty in keeping up a continuous eruption.
W—— asked how long the red hibiscus trimmings stood the rolling down part of the eruption, but before the doctor could reply the opening drum-beat of the next dance sounded and this weighty question was never answered.
With short, sharp yells, a compact body of girls came charging out of the "green room" like a "flying wedge" in the good old days of mass play in football, and went scurrying straight across into the shadows of the opposite side of the crater. This was the "launching of the ship" for the "Pearling Schooner Dance." Directly canoefuls of stout paddlers came towing her back into the moonlight with liana hawsers, and all in an instant, as each of the dancers threw aloft a square of white tapa, she was under sail and off to sea. Now she threaded, in short tacks, the passage through the reef, and now, to low, sweet crooning like a lullaby, she bowed and curtesied and pitched and rolled in the swift-running ocean swells.
Presently she threaded another passage, anchored and took in her sails in a still lagoon. Here, with the barely perceptible motion of the schooner showing in the rhythmic rocking of the dancers, divers went over the side and brought up pearl shell. One lusty diver lent colour to his pantomime by bringing up a huge coconut, the incalculable value of so sizable a "pearl" being told with a facility of gesture that would have put to shame a moving picture "heavy."
But the comedy hit of this dance was the hooking and landing of a shark on a strand of liana. Baited with the coconut pearl, the creeper line was thrown over the rail, to attract the instant attention of a school of glistening man-eaters, which, with crooked-elbow dorsals, went wriggling about the grass under the schooner's bows. After an amazingly clever bit of "shark-play" about the bait, one of the "monsters" rolled over on his back and "swallowed" it, the crew promptly "tailing on" to the liana to bring it aboard.
The "shark," as was explained to us afterwards, had drunk considerably more orange wine than should have fallen to his share, and the fight he put up before being landed and "cut to pieces" came pretty near to sinking the graceful pearler then and there.
Floundering and snapping his teeth in a manner that would have done credit to a monster of twice his size, and roaring as no shark of any size ever roared, the gamy leviathan was no sooner laid alongside than, with a vigorous swish of his tail (both feet planted squarely in the pit of the stomach of the trim vahine who chanced to be representing the adjacent piece of taffrail) he stove a gaping hole in the schooner's hull. An instant later his "triple row of barbéd teeth" had closed on the arm of the slender miss who, sitting on the shoulders of a lengthy Kanaka, was dancing the part of the mainmast, and brought her crashing to the deck, squealing like a roped pig. The "cutting up" of the shark, owing to this obstreperousness, must have been a bit more realistic than usual, for he still bore marks of it when I encountered him in Papeete a week later.
After being "careened" for repairs the schooner, her hold bulging with pearls, got up sail again and started for home, only to encounter the inevitable hurricane and go to pieces on the rocks to the same unleashed fury of wind and waves and thunder that had uprooted the coconuts. For some minutes spars, planks and other bits of wreckage, imploring help at the tops of their lungs, eddied and swirled about the greensward; then a resistless current bore them relentlessly toward the wine calabashes in the "green room" and the "Pearling Schooner Dance" was over.
In the good doctor's original plan of the evening's entertainment several more dances of the nature of those just described were called for, but the carelessness of the commissariat in dealing out the orange wine too rapidly ordained otherwise. The sounds of revelry from the "green room" were keying higher every moment, and our host's apprehensiveness showed in the quick glowings and palings of his nervously puffed cigarette. When, instead of the sober himine which opens up the burlesque "Missionary Dance," there sounded the wail of accordions, the roll of shark-hide drums and the clear, deep-throated voices of the girls in the preliminary strains of the "Nuptial Hula," he sprang to his feet to explode into excited Anglo-German-Tahitian with "Nein! Nein! Das ist nichts was I tells them. Hare! Hare! Go back mit you, you teufels!" But he might as well have tried to stem the tide of the Pacific as that swirling onrush from the "green room."
By this time the shaft of lunar calcium, broadening slightly as the moon rose, had moved across the dancing floor till its outer side was just beginning to encroach upon our mat-covered dais, so that instead of "back row, left," as at first, our seats now occupied approximately the position of "First row, Orchestra, centre." We were in the "bald-headed row" with a vengeance, and just at the right time.
Like a pack of hungry wolves charging down upon a fold of lambs, the Bacchic throng swarmed out of the shadows into the spot-light about our dais, and threw itself with the reckless abandon born of three hours of steady tippling at the wine calabashes into the sinuous writhing of a dance rarely performed in the past except at the wedding feasts of royalty, and now, as it is strictly against the French law, almost never under any circumstances.
To a spectator watching from a distance some suggestion of rhythm and unity might have been apparent in the movement of the dance; from our advanced position, as to a man in the thick of a battle, the general action was lost sight of in the wealth of local interest. There was nothing to do but to fix your attention on the nearest dancer and hope, as at a multi-ringed circus, that nothing of greater interest was going on anywhere else. Once your attention was fixed it was not likely to go wandering far afield in search of a new centre of interest.
As an exhibition of eccentric muscular action alone, this dance is worth making a journey to the South Pacific to see. In the slow opening movements, to a seductive half-crooning, half-chirping air, it is as though every square inch of the oil-glistening form before you is trying to move in a different direction. There is something of the suggestion of a coiling and uncoiling snake in it; something of that of the twisting green stream of water where it shoots between two mid-stream boulders; something of that of the whirling columns of the "dust-devils" of the desert.
But what comparison can you find for the wild thing that springs into life as the music quickens and the intoxication of the sensuous dance enters into the blood of the dancers? There is still a suggestion of the former undulating sinuousity of motion, but at a trip-hammer speed which defies the eye to follow it; a double-action, reciprocating, triple-expansion shiver, beginning at the plume-tips and ending at the toes, that would make a Newfoundland dog shaking himself after a bath look like a stuffed museum specimen in comparison.
For a minute, or two, or three—one loses count of time when elemental forces like these are loosed—this rapid-fire action continues; then they all sink into quivering heaps on the grass, with just enough breath left to raise feeble cries for the wine calabashes, a circumstance which led W—— to remark that their enthusiasm for the dance had probably been due to the fact that they were "shaking for the drinks."
That which was just finished was the first of the three climacteric "movements" of the "Nuptial Hula," explained the doctor in the short rest interval. He had not expected that it would be danced, but now that it was started it would be an unpardonable breach of etiquette to try to stop it. "Bezides," he added, chuckling, "you chentlemen haf bewail der decadence of der hula in Tahiti, und said der white man can not der 'real thing' see. In one leetle minute you der 'real thing' shall see, yes."
And we did! But my most earnest efforts would fall so far short of doing it justice that I have thought it best not to court certain failure by attempting description.
CHAPTER X
BY THE ABSINTHE ROUTE
The French islands of the South Pacific perform satisfactorily the regulation duty of all the other of that republic's tropical colonies—that of furnishing a retreat for a governor, secretary, judge and three or four other high officials during such time as they may require to accumulate fortunes sufficient to permit them to return to Paris and ease for a good portion, if not all the rest, of their lives; also for a small army of minor officials who have no chance to accumulate enough to take them to Paris. These latter young gentlemen work—or rather sit at desks—six hours a day, drink absinthe six hours, and dream absinthe dreams the remainder of the twenty-four.
Besides a regiment of soldiers and a gunboat or two, it takes something over half a thousand officials to administer the affairs of dreamy Tahiti. Departments which in India, Java or even the Philippines would be handled by two or three men, with enough time over for morning horseback rides and tennis or cricket in the evenings, are here in the hands of a substantial mob. There are about a half dozen cases of petty larceny, and the same number of battery, a year, but the bench is occupied by close to half a score of august judges. The annual value of the shipping of all the 150—more or less—French islands in the Southeastern Pacific—the Marquesas, Paumotos and Societies—is not equal to a season's output of a single large Hawaiian sugar mill, yet the financial and commercial officials are numbered in three figures.
What do they all do? Probably no one really knows; but come into the gentlest of contacts with the government, even as a passing tourist, and you will begin to get an inkling. You are not likely soon to forget those two days in which you cooled your heels in fourteen different corners of Pomare's old palace in endeavouring to make your honour white in the matter of that box of Havanas you forgot to declare when you landed. That cost you forty francs in all, didn't it? And then there was that day and a half that you and the Consul spent in trying to find out to whom you should apologize because your boatmen tied up for ten minutes to the butt of an old cannon that was sacred to the mooring lines of that majestic gunboat, Zelee. You conferred with twenty-one underlings and eight overlings—most of them through interpreters—before you found that it was the Capitaine de Gendarmes you must tell you were sorry. And then there was that mess you got into the time you inadvertently strolled down the path to a leper's gardenia-wreathed doorway and asked for a drink of coconut water. You were perfectly willing to go and take a formaldehyde shower-bath, but was it really necessary to be marched about by a squad of gendarmes to eight different departments in order to have that auspicious event officially recorded?
Yes, while Tahiti continues to harbour law-breaking visitors like yourself there is going to be ample work for all of those five hundred officials. But at your worst, you are only going to be able to claim their attention during six hours of the day, leaving them eighteen hours for their own affairs. What is it occupies them in their "lighter hours"? Men are more readily judged at play than at work. You have seen them at work; now let us watch them at play. The Cercle Colonial, it is said, will show us what we want to see.
The Cercle is a low, rambling structure of aching white, cooled by green trees, green blinds and green drinks. You have seen in the great republic's tropical outposts these little clubs which have not been shaded by green trees; one or two may even be recalled which have not had the green blinds; but a Cercle Colonial—or Militaire—without the green drinks—never.
"Where flaps the tri-colour, there flows the absinthe."
You are not certain who first enunciated this great truth, nor where you first heard it; sufficient that it has become a law as inflexible as that of gravity. Haul down the one, and the other will cease to flow. Stop the flow of the other, and the one will cease to flap. Certain French patriots who are strangers to the French tropics may indignantly question the truth of the latter statement; these you may respectfully request to cite you a single instance where those respective symbols of their republic are flapping and flowing independently.
Certain of the best paid Tahitian officials straggle home to France every other year or so by Suez or America, others send intermittent letters to their loved ones by the irregular post; but when all is said and done the only really well established line of communication between the island paradise and Paris is the "absinthe route."
"I'd envy these poor devils their nocturnal trips from 'hell to home,'" one of the foreign consuls in Papeete is quoted as saying, "if it wasn't for the fact that they are always doomed to sail with return tickets. Coming out of any old kind of a dream is more or less of a shock; but coming out of the Mussulman paradise of an absinthe dream is staggering. Just about one a month of these young chaps decides that twelve hours is too long to wait for the inauguration of another dream, and in the pale of the dawn launches himself off on the journey for which no return ticket can be foisted onto him. The suicide rate in Noumea, the prison colony, is higher than here, and, I am told, Saigon, Martinique, Guadeloupe and Cayenne are worse still. Funny thing, too, they all do it at the same time—sunrise—probably because it's the hour when the dream shapes begin to grow thin and intangible, and day, with its galling grind of realities, looms blankly in pitiless imminence."
"A poor lot," you say. Perhaps. But before judging let us watch them for awhile at the Cercle Colonial. It is there that they are to be seen embarking, and in transit on, and returning by, "the absinthe route."
It is four o'clock of a May afternoon in Papeete, and the stream of the Southeast Trade, clogged and obstructed by the suffocating puffs of humid air that have rolled in since morning from the oily sea which stretches in unheaving indolence to the equator, has ceased to flow. The glaring coral streets throw back the blazing sunlight like rivers of molten tin; the distended blossoms of hau and hibiscus fall heavily in the puddly air, to break and scatter like glass on striking the ground. Everything of the earth glows, everything of the air gasps in the swimming waves of the clinging heat.
The shaded walls of the Cercle Colonial hold still a modicum of last night's coolness, and the closely-drawn green blinds of the lounging room check the onrush of the calid flood from without. The man with the gold lace on his ripped-open collar, sitting on the corner toward the silent billiard room, is an officer from the barracks; he with the tanned face and the imperial in the opposite corner is the commander of the gunboat in the harbour; the youth with the opera bouffé moustache and the eyes of a roué at the table by the palm is the disgraced son of a rich Marseilles merchant, whose quarterly remittances are payable only in Papeete. They all know each other, but by an unspoken mutual understanding have separated as widely as possible. Men do not drink for sociability on a day like this, for he who lives in the tropics realizes what the inhabitant of cooler latitudes knows but hazily, that the mental consciousness of human propinquity, even without the effort of conversation, raises temperature.
The government offices across the way have just brought their short day of perfunctory work to a close, and such of the officials as have membership in the Cercle Colonial come hurrying—the first unlistless movement they have made since morning—up the blossom-strewn walk. They slip through the green spring doors like thieves in jealous efforts to shut out the furnace-like blast which pursues them into the tepid interior, and a low growl of disapproval from all sides greets the man who is so thoughtless as to enter leisurely. Each goes to a separate table, and when there are no unoccupied tables left the newcomer drags his chair to a window ledge or up to the encircling wall-shelf at the top of the wainscoting.
The waiters work noiselessly and expeditiously. There are no orders taken. Each man is noted by the watchful garçon, and to him is instantly brought a large glass of cracked ice and a green bottle. After that, except for occasional replenishings of the ice, he needs no attention.
Before long a change comes over the spirit of the place, a revivification like that which comes to a field of drought-parched wild flowers at the first touch of long-awaited raindrops. Watch it working in that yellow-skinned youth by the darkened window. Plainly a "transfer" from the prison colony at Noumea, he, with the dregs of the pernicious New Caledonian fever still clogging his blood. By the ink on his forefinger you put him down as in some kind of a departmental billet. He slipped through the door but a moment ago and the garçon had his glass of ice and bottle ready on the window ledge almost before he was seated. He spilled the absinthe over the sides of the glass in his eagerness to fill it, and in spite of the cracked ice it still must have been far from the delectable frappé of the conoisseur when he gulped it down. A second pouring of the warm liqueur took up the remaining ice and he has called for more.
But now note him as he waits for his glass to be replenished. Has a spirit hand passed across his brow and smoothed out those lines of weariness and ill-health? Perhaps not, but they are gone nevertheless, and a tinge of colour is creeping into the sallow cheeks. Now he gathers his relaxed muscles and pulls his slender frame together. The thin shoulders are thrown back, the sunken chest expanded, and with open mouth and distended nostrils, like a man who comes from a hot, stuffy hall out into the cool air of the open street, he takes several deep, quick breaths.
You, who know the futility of drinking anything alcoholic or narcotic in endeavouring to keep cool and have, therefore, only sipped your glass of lime juice and soda, can swear that the air of the place, far from growing fresher, is getting closer and hotter every moment. But don't waste your time trying to convince the young man by the window to that effect. It's cooler air to him—yes, and to every one else in the room but yourself with your foolish lime juice and soda. See them sitting up and inhaling it all around you.
You have seen the stolid Britisher thaw out and wax sociable after his first or second brandy-and-soda, and perhaps you expect something of the kind is going to happen here. But no—the brandy-and-soda and the absinthe routes start from the same place, but their directions are diametrically opposite. The brandy-and-soda addictee expands externally, the absinthe drinker expands internally; the one drink strikes out, the other strikes in. The Britisher cannot forget himself until he has had a couple of brandy-and-sodas; with two glasses of absinthe the Frenchman only commences to realize himself. Don't look for any flow of the soul to accompany the flow of the bowl, then; these exiles are only going the absinthe route; they are off for home.
Turn your attention again to the youth by the darkened window. A fresh glass of cracked ice is before him and he is pouring himself another drink. Ah! there is your real absinthe artist now. See with how steady a hand he pours that unvarying thread of a trickle; not faster than that must it go, not slower. See him turn the glass to the light to mark the progress of the green stain in the white body of the cracked ice. As it touches the bottom the pouring stops, the glass is twirled once or twice and then lifted to the lips and drained. Just as much water as a thread-sized trickle of warm absinthe will melt from the ice in finding its way to the bottom of the glass and back to the rim; offer it to him any other way, after those first mad gulps, and he would probably refuse it. Thus absinthe à la Cercle Colonial de Papeete.
At five or half past, an army officer looks at his watch, stretches himself, yawns, pours a final hasty glass and picks his reluctant way to the door and out into the still, stifling air. Two officers of the gunboat follow suit, and from then on till seven o'clock dinner-time, by occasional twos and threes, but for the most part singly, a half, perhaps, of the strange company—at the call of family, military or social duties—takes its departure. The residue—unmarried officers, departmental officials and a few unclassified—is made up of the regular voyageurs; you will find them still in their places when you look in again after dinner.