The dismal abode of the Peyrals—Stark-white daughter of Peyral—Only white maiden in the Marquesas—I hunt wild bulls—Peyral’s friendliness—I visit his house—He strikes me and threatens to kill me—I go armed—Explanation of the bizarre tragic comedy.

AS I walked up from the beach of Atuona, where I had touched the shore of the Marquesas for the first time, I had remarked a European dwelling, squalid, forbidding and peculiarly desolate. Painted black originally, the heat and storms of years had worn and defaced it, the sun had shrunk the boards from one another, and posts and beams had gone awry. It was set in a cocoanut-grove, the trees so close together that their huge fronds joined and roofed out sky and light. The narrow road along the grove had been raised later, and formed a dike so that with the heavy rains of the season the land all about was a gloomy marsh to which the sun seldom penetrated. The dingy gallery of the house fronting the road had a broken rail and dilapidated stairs, and in the shallow swamp and about the entrance were cast-off articles of household and plantation. A dismaying mingling of decayed European inventions with native bareness framed a dismal and foreboding scene, contrasting with the brilliancy of nature in the open.

I had felt a sudden fear of the possibilities of degradation, as if the dreary house were a symbol of the white man’s deterioration in these wild places. A sense of physical and spiritual abandonment to alien environment, without fitness of soul or habit, depressed me.

As we passed, I saw on the veranda a girl of sixteen or seventeen, with a white face and light blue eyes. Her long yellow hair was slightly confined by a piece of ribbon, but hung down loose on her rounded shoulders. She wore a blue cotton gown, becoming and not in keeping with her soiled and frayed surroundings. She seemed not to notice us until we were opposite her, when she raised her head and glanced at us a moment. Those off the schooner she must have known, for she fixed her eyes on me the fleeting instant of her gaze. They had the innocence and appeal of a fawn and the melancholy and detachment of a cloistered nun. There was no curiosity in them, though we were the only white visitors in months, and had come with the new governor, who had landed but the day before. A second or two her eyes met mine and conveyed an unconscious message of youth and sorrow, of budding womanhood that had had no guidance or companionship, and only sad dreams.

From the room opening on the gallery a man came and shouted to us “Bon jour!” in a raven-like croak. He was in soiled overalls, barefooted, and reeling drunk. His brown hair and beard had not been cut for months or years, and rudely margined his bloated, grievous face, of rugged strength, in which grim despair contended with fierce pride.

“That is Peyral,” said Ducat, the second mate of the Fetia Taiao. He is always half-seas over, except when he sews. He is the village tailor, and makes the priest’s gowns and clothes for any one who will buy them. That daughter of his is the only white girl in the Marquesas. She is all white, and he keeps her chained in that dark house as if he was afraid some one would eat her.”

“You know bloody well why ’e keeps ’er there,” said Lying Bill. “’E knows you an’ me and ’Allman and ’earty bucks like us is not to be trusted; ’at’s why! I knew ’er mother and ’er grandparents. ’E was a British calvary officer ’oo ’ad served in Injia, an’ come ’ere with ’is wife, an Irish lady, to take charge of the store an’ plantation now owned by the Germans at Tahaaku. They ’ad one daughter. Peyral was a non-com. on a French war-ship that come ’ere to shoot up the natives, an’ ’e was purty good to look at then. ’E could do anything, an’ when ’e got ’is papers from the French navy ’e went to work for the plantation, courted the girl, an’, when ’er parents weren’t lookin’, married ’er. They died, an’ ’e set up a proper ’ouse ’ere, an’ was bloomin’ prosp’rous till ’is wife died o’ the pokoko, this gallopin’ consumption that takes off the natives. Then he give in, and went to ’ell. ’E ’as three girls, two little ones, an’ ‘ow they live I don’t know. When ’is wife died ’e painted that ’ouse black, an’ ’e ain’t touched it since. ’E gathers ’is copra, an’ makes a few clo’s now an’ ’en, an’ spends all the money on absinthe. The girl looks after ’er sisters, but ’e guards ’er like a bleedin’ dragon. She never goes off the veranda there now except to church on Sundays and ’olidays. I don’t know what’ll ’e do with ’er, but ’e’ll kill any one that goes too near ’er like Ducat ’ere or meself.”

When I was settled in the House of the Golden Bed, as the Marquesans called the cabin I had rented from Apporo, the wife of Great Fern, in exchange for my brass bed at my departure, I went almost every day with Exploding Eggs to the beach to fish or swim or to ride the surf on a board. The road wended from my house past the garden of the palace and thence to the sea. Between the governor’s and the beach was only Peyral’s noisome residence, and twice a day I passed it within a few feet. Sometimes he was at his sewing-machine on the veranda, or gathering the cocoanuts that had fallen and drying them in the sun, but generally the shaggy Breton was in a stupor or murmurously intoxicated, sitting on a bench or lying on the ground, and talking to himself in the way of morose, unsocial men when inebriated. His daughter was usually on the veranda sewing by hand, or apparently wrapt in thoughts which obscured her consciousness and painted despondence on her countenance. I tried not to stare at her, but when I made sure that she was oblivious of me, or intentionally not seeing, I observed her narrowly.

How could she have preserved that miraculous blondness in these islands? It was amazing. Her skin was like the inside of a cocoanut, smooth as satin. The years in that shadowy house had bleached her white flesh until it was pearl-like in transparency, the blue veins as in fine marble. Though hardly seventeen her figure was the luxuriant one of these latitudes, rounded as the breadfruit, curving in opulency under her single garment, a diaphanous tunic. Her hair that I had judged yellow at first sight was silver-gold, almost as white as her flesh, but with glints of topaz and amber. Silky, glistening, as fine as the filament of a web, it did not hide her shapely ears and fell in profusion almost to her waist. I never saw her smile. Her azure eyes had wept until their fountains were dried. She was numb, mute, never having seen aught in sleep but ghosts. She was, in this voluptuous atmosphere, herself voluptuous in contour and color, but frozen. A thousand brutal words from Peyral must have made her so. In drunkenness he was harsh, and in less violent hours sullen and suspicious. The children feared him as Nancy had Bill Sykes, but there was a powerful attachment between them. He must have described to her horrible things that he guarded her against, and have threatened unspeakable punishments if she disobeyed him.

Daughter of Europeans, granddaughter of Celt and Anglo-Saxon, this girl did not know her father’s or mother’s language but feebly, and had no more knowledge of or contact with the world of her forefathers than if she were all Marquesan. I fancied her spirit infinitely confused by her blood and her surroundings, vague aspirations perhaps stirring her to desire for other things than the savage and stupid ones about her. In the church she must have had some respite. I watched her there a number of times, bowed over her Marquesan book of the ritual, reciting the prayers, and beating her sweet breast at the mea culpa as might the most repentant sinner or worst hypocrite.

No one called on Peyral save a very occasional buyer of copra or an infrequent customer for clothes. These, prevalently, met him on the trail or at church, and dealt with him there. Either his jealous solitude was respected, or disagreeable experiences had caused the villagers to shun his dwelling. He himself infrequently dropped in at the store of Le Brunnec, or the German’s establishment at Tahaaku where he had wooed the daughter of the English officer and the Irish exile. At the Catholic church only was he a regular attendant, sitting in the rear by the pahua shell holy-water font, and mumbling the responses. The children were in the pews, the sexes separated, and I, the few times I was there, at the door where the breeze was freshest and I might go out unseen. One Sunday he spoke to me. I was as astonished as if Father David had begun a hula at the altar.

“You are American,” he said in French, his voice hoarse and broken.

I said I was and that I had come to the islands to stay an uncertain length of time. We exchanged the day’s greetings after that, and when Painter Le Moine and I were examining the remains of the studio of Paul Gauguin, who had died here ten years before, it was Peyral who showed us how everything had been and who told me of his daily intercourse with the famous symbolist. Thus we struck up a real acquaintance, if not friendship, and he would tarry a quarter of an hour on my paepae to drink a shell of rum and to talk about copra and the coming and going of schooners. He drew me out about my plans, whether I was going to settle in the Marquesas or return to my own country, and evinced a flattering interest in my future. And I was flattered, as I am easily by the friendliness of unfriendly people, and did not question his genuine liking for me.

Ah Suey, the Chinese baker and storekeeper, who had been tried for the murder of an American, and who spoke English he had learned at Los Angeles and at sea, might have enlightened me, but that I was beyond doubt. I was at Ah Suey’s to dance a jig and to sing “The Good Old Summertime” to amuse him. The saturnine Chinese, after a drink of rum, said:

“Peylalee all time come you housee takee dlinkee. He no good. More better you tell him poponihoÓ go hellee! Makee tlubble for you his daughtah.”

Ah Suey puzzled me, but I do not like advice or warning, and I shunted the subject.

Peyral was a hunter. He would wander, always alone, in the upper valleys, to shoot kuku, or along the beach for salt-water birds, walking slowly and not alertly; but he was a crack shot and hardly ever failed to bring back a bag of game. He had learned marksmanship at sea, or perhaps in his native Brittany, and his cartridges went far. He was not contented with birds, but also tramped to the mountains to kill goats or even the wild bulls that were growing scarce there under a promiscuous use of firearms. Le Brunnec, the trader, an amiable and intelligent Breton, and I met him there, fortunately, at a critical moment for me. We had, Le Brunnec and I, climbed on horses in the late afternoon to a plateau high up in the hills and camped there the night. In that altitude it was cool after the sun had set, and we sat about a fire of twigs and branches until we were sleepy. We were considerably past the line of cocoanut-palms, and in a rich and varied flora. Magnificent chestnut, ironwood, rose-apple, and other tropical trees formed dark groups about us, and masses of huetu or mountain plantains lined the slopes. We had washed down our dinner with a bottle of Moselle, and had a mellow and philosophical hour before sleep.

Far above us we could see a pair of ducks, a kind of non-migratory mallard. They lived only in the lonely valleys or woods, and nested on the tops of distant ridges where they laid a half dozen eggs. The ducklings must be carried by their parents to the feeding grounds hundreds of feet below.

We talked about the decimation of the Marquesans—Le Brunnec in ten years had seen them depopulated almost 50 per cent.

“They are unhappy and soul-sick,” he said. “They are animals, and, when they had freedom under their own rule, prospered enormously. Now there are a couple of thousand instead of the hundred thousand the whites found. They are in the cage of civilization and cannot stand the bars. We are adaptable because we are an admixture of many races, and have had to exist in changing environments or die. Millions must have died from the same thing that destroys the Marquesans, but there were enough to keep on and build up again. The quality of adaptability, of making the best of it, is wonderful. One time in Tahiti I was at the Annexe lodging-house of Lovaina when a Frenchman arrived by steamer from Martinique. He had with him his four children. The mother, a native of that island, was dead, and the oldest child was a girl of thirteen, a child-woman, naive but clever, and very charming. For four years she had been mother to the other three, since she was nine, and they were as neat as a gunboat. She was tiny and undeveloped physically, but necessity had adapted her perfectly to her task. The father was looking for work, and, not finding it in Tahiti, was off to Dacca, in Africa, leaving the babies in her care. Mon Dieu! It was brave to see her bathing them, brushing their hair, reproving them, and feeding them. If she had been five years older I would have tried to marry her, and the whole flock. Now, you see, she could keep on because she was continuing the white race customs and ideals, and understood them, hard as it was; but these poor people have been told to do something they don’t understand, and that is not their ideal. Now take that girl of old Peyral! Her mother spoke English, and her father is French, and she went to the nuns’ school here for four or five years. Yet she can hardly speak anything but Marquesan, and in that tongue she replies to her father, and talks to her sisters. She is almost a Marquesan, and as they are unhappy in their prison so is she. She is the only white woman here, and she has no companions, and her father won’t let her be a native. Pauvre enfant! Now, her I wouldn’t marry for all the cocoanuts on this island. There is one other, Mademoiselle Narbonne, who is the richest person in the Marquesas, for she, too, is fit neither for native life nor for white. The nuns have spoiled her, as her mother spoiled the Peyral girl.”

And so to bed on the grass with a blanket about us.

In the morning we were up at daybreak, and, after coffee and hardtack, we rode toward the sea. There was a faint trail, but Le Brunnec was a skilled tracker and picked up the spoor in a few minutes. After half an hour we saw fresher traces of our prey, and began to make plans for the attack. We felt sure we were the only ones on the plateau, and so were safe, for Marquesans are reckless with guns, and when we heard a horse coming toward us we halted and waited. It was Peyral. We could see his frowsy head a quarter of a mile away as it bobbed in the trot.

“Eh bien!” said Le Brunnec, philosophically. “He is not so bad here. It is curious that when Peyral has been drunk for a month, and reforms so as not to die, he goes to the mountains for a week and shoots an animal.”

We said bon jour, and he joined us. Le Brunnec proposed that we try to kill two bulls, share the labor of carrying the meat to Atuona, and divide it there. Peyral gruffly assented, and, as he was the more skillful chasseur, gave us our stations. We were to start up one or more taureaux sauvages and to endeavor to refrain from firing at them until they were as near as possible to the cliff. We were successful and had felled one, when another appeared.

“Prennez garde!” shouted Le Brunnec. “That hakiuka has blood in his eye.”

“Go around to the left and drive him toward me,” commanded Peyral.

I was riding fast about his flank when my horse put his foot in a rat’s hole. I had my rifle on my right arm and I must have used it as a vaulting-pole unwittingly, for I struck the earth about ten feet from my mount. I was struggling to my feet when I became aware that the hakiuka was approaching with malice in his snortings. My horse had got up but too late to bear me to security, and my rifle was choked with mud. I rushed for a tree but could see none with low branches. I had a big knife in my belt, a kind of Bowie, and, as I felt the hot breath of the animal on me and saw his horns magnified to elephant’s tusks, I drew the weapon. The beast was within five feet of me when he dropped. Peyral had put a Winchester bullet in his heart. His head was at my feet as he gave it a mighty toss, and laid it on the sward of maidenhair ferns in submission to man’s invention.

When I had made sure of the poor hakiuka’s being absolutely dead, and had shaken myself together, finding no injuries, I thanked Peyral, whom Le Brunnec was already extolling for marksmanship and quickness of thought.

“Rien! It is nothing!” replied the shaggy man. “I like to kill.”

We put ropes over the horns of the victims, and forced our horses to drag them to a certain spot at the edge of the cliff. Below was a wide shelf of rocks at water-level. We pushed the stiffening bodies over the edge and let them fall. Then we rode back to Atuona, and in a big canoe with three Marquesans, Great Fern, Mouth of God, and Exploding Eggs, went for the carcasses. To retrieve them into the craft was a difficult task.

The sea surged against the rocks so that we could not tie up close to them, but several of us jumped on them while others remained in the canoe, with a line ashore and a kedge-anchor aft. The Marquesans cut up the bulls into quarters, and each we tied to a rope and dragged through the water into the canoe. Over our heads a cloud of heron and sea-gulls shrieked for their share, and when we had left the rocks these birds screamed and fought for the entrails. They had been attracted when the bulls were killed, and for hours had peeked vainly at the carcasses. The dragging them over the land and hurling them to the ledge, and their hours of lying there, had drawn an immense concourse of the sea-birds. There were many thousands before we got away, and so rapacious were they that they circled over our heads and snatched at the bloody meat in the canoe. We had to wave our shirts at them to frighten them away. Sharks smelling the blood swam about the canoe, and we were not a little afraid. We had brought no guns in the canoe, and we were forced to strike at them with paddles, and shout imprecations at them. They did not enter the breakers, which we ran to the sand. At the beach near Commissaire Bauda’s residence and offices, we turned over to Peyral his third, and, taking the remainder into the village, Great Fern with saw and knife provided every household, including the Catholic and Protestant clergy and the nuns, with ample for a meal or two. Peyral threw his part over his horse’s back and left us, muttering that he would salt it down for the uncertain future.

Peyral became increasingly friendly, and a number of times stopped me on my way to and from the shore to invite me to drink with him. Le Brunnec said that this was something new for Peyral, and that he must be “going crazy.” But, like Ah Suey, Le Brunnec hid his real thought from me when I defended Peyral and said that he was sinned against overmuch. Peyral’s daughter—I hardly ever caught sight of the younger two—would desert the veranda if I came upon it, but once he called her, and when she did not respond immediately added a “sacrÉ” to his order for her to come and be presented to me.

“She is a fine girl, but shy,” he said, and patted her clumsily.

Mademoiselle Peyral trembled under his heavy caress, and with merely a slight, awkward bow to me hurried into the sombre chamber.

“She is shy,” he repeated as he drank his absinthe with mouthing and grimacing. “She needs a man to train her right, a husband, eh, a gentleman, mon garÇon. Is not that right?”

Peyral’s voice was almost gentle, but his mood changed in a breath. He struck the board hard with his shell, and yelled, “Do you understand, American, I said a gentleman. Her mother was aristocrat. Do you get that into your noddle?”

Exploding Eggs, who had waited for me on the road with my towels, laughed as we ran toward the surf.

“Peyral paeÁ,” he said. “Too much drink, too much fight.”

I did not stop after that when he bade me have a goutte with him, for I was sensible of a deep pity for the girl and an ardent desire to save her embarrassment, the deadly unreasoning shame or perplexity that overwhelmed her at her father’s gross attitude and my presence. After a few weeks, Peyral did not sing out to me any more, and I was conscious of a coldness, of a return of his first relation to me, and then of fits and starts of friendship. I felt oppressed by his changing tempers, and attributed them to his varying degrees of inebriety.

I split my rain-coat one day, and, after making a bad job of repairing it, thought of Peyral and his skill as a tailor. With the coat on my arm I climbed the stairs to his porch, and, finding no one there, called out Peyral’s name. My voice echoed through the house, and, with the intention of scribbling a note and leaving the coat, I entered the nearest room. Mademoiselle Peyral was sitting near the machine but was not sewing. She trembled as I approached her, and looked frightened. I am timid with women, and her nervousness communicated itself to me. I wished I was not there. She was half uncovered, having on only a chemise, and her dishabille added to my confusion, though that very morning I had bathed in the river nude with Titihuti and others.

“Please give your father this coat, and ask him to repair it,” I said, and put it down. Her downcast eyes and heaving bosom, her evident extreme timidity, and her pitiable situation overcame me. She was of my own race, and she was so white and so fair. Before I could restrain myself, I said in English, “Don’t be afraid of me! I am very sorry for you,” and I patted her shoulder as I might have a child’s.

She shrank from me in apparent horror, and ran from the room into a farther one, screaming in Marquesan. I started to follow her to explain or to appease her, but reconsidered.

Though I was conscious of no wrong, the familiar incidents in newspapers and gossip of misinterpreted gestures and of false allegations rose to my mind as her cries resounded through the black and tristful house. I moved toward the porch to leave, and deliberated, and awaited some one’s coming. Better to tell the fact and make a stand there and then, said common sense. But no one answered her alarm, and after a few minutes I left, with the coat, and returned to my own cabin. For half an hour my mind was actively going over the affair to find out what might be at the bottom of it, and, of course, to make certain of my clearance of the least onus of guilt.

Perhaps I was the first man other than her father who had put his hand on her, and I had done that, no matter how innocently! The nuns had overbalanced her standard of modesty, and her father’s brutal admonitions had made her hysterical! I tried myself and, having found myself not guilty of even forwardness or discourtesy, I cooked my dinner, poured myself a shell of Munich beer that had been cooled in the river, and dismissed the trifle.

The next afternoon as I passed the governor’s garden on the road to the beach, I saw Peyral on the veranda with the official. I thought of the rent in my rain-coat, and entered the grounds to speak to him about it. As I approached the steps I heard the tailor speaking loudly and vehemently to Monsieur l’Hermier, and spilling the absinthe in the glass in his hand.

“Kaoha!” I said, and Peyral turned and saw me. His face purpled, and he shouted in French something I did not understand, and appealed to the governor for corroboration. A twinge of privity with his emotion swept over me, and I am sure I flushed and looked the culprit. I hadn’t much time for analysis, for Peyral stood up and flung his glass at my head. It went wide. I took a step toward him and asked:

“What’s the matter with him, Monsieur l’Administrateur? Is he drunker than usual?”

“Je ne sais pas,” replied the governor, with a shrug of his shoulder. “He has come here to lodge a complaint against you of maltreating his daughter. He wants you tried and sent to prison, and he wants to institute a suit against you for damages. I have told him to return when he is sober. He is bitter, Monsieur, and he is, after all, a Frenchman.”

Peyral got up from his chair, unsteadily. The governor discreetly left the veranda and entered his study. I sat down in sheer weariness, when suddenly the frenzied drunkard confronted me.

“SacrÉ Americain!” he yelled. “You will insult the daughter of a French patriot. Cochon! I will show you what I do to such people as you!”

He flung himself upon me and struck me in the face. Peyral was fifty pounds heavier than I, but he was very drunk. I drove my fist into his chin, and, following the blow with another, sent him sprawling. I regretted my violence as I saw the poor devil staggering to his feet unsteadily, but when, with the most blasphemous profanity and the basest epithets in the dialect of Brest, he lurched at me again with his two hundred pounds of rank bulk, charity fled from my panting heart, and I realized that I must fight or retreat. Years of addiction to alcohol had not made my assailant anything but tough and strong physically, and I was no match for him if he was not reeling. He plunged toward me as a drunken elephant might go to combat. I decided not to run, because I wanted to continue to live in Atuona underided, and so I sprang to meet him, and hitting him full tilt in the chin and chest, carried him hard down to the boards, where we grappled and exchanged powerless blows.

We had knocked over table, bottle, glasses, and chairs, and the uproar was immense. Song of the Nightingale, Exploding Eggs, Ghost Girl and Many Daughters, the little leper lass, had come scurrying from the kitchen. Maybe the governor had a plan, or his dignity was offended, for, without appearing, he gave an order to Song, and the quartet of natives threw themselves on us, and disentangled us. Song, who later confessed to me that he had a grudge against the tailor, took the opportunity in the hurly-burly to deal him vicious blows, and then drove the cursing, struggling Breton through the garden and out the gateway. Peyral’s last words were a threat to kill me the next time we met. The village had gathered, and Apporo, my landlady, Mouth of God, Malicious Gossip, his wife, and a dozen others were running toward the palace. Song dismissed them with a grandiloquent gesture, and his obscene badinage dissolved their curiosity in gales of laughter.

With the disturbance abated, the governor joined me, his ordinary merry self again, and we drank a libation to Mars. My clothes were torn, my jaw ached, and my body was bruised from the clutches of the tailor.

“Do not molest yourself!” said the executive. “I do not entertain any evil of you. When the allegation is formally made, I, as magistrate, will hear the evidence. According to his own statement, no one was there but his daughter and you. I believe you a man of honor. And women? Mon vieux, I have known and loved many of them. I am a doctor, and a student of life. They are incomprehensible. But we must take precautions. He has said he will kill you, so you must be on guard. You have no pistol? Eh bien! I will lend you my Browning automatic I had in Senegal. It is loaded. Defend yourself, but do not step on his property. Nous verrons!”

The governor was dramatic, not to say melodramatic, and, to my nervous conception, he took too lightly the crime upon my person. I was the one to bring a charge, not Peyral. Assaulted in the palace, at the throne of justice, in the presence of the judge, I was handed a deadly firearm by the arbiter, and told to protect myself. It was like the Wild West, or a stage farce. But I had come a thousand miles with him on a small vessel, and knew his delight in the least diversion that would relieve his ennui in a monotonous period of service. This was but a scherzo in a slow program. However, I thanked him and, with the heavy pistol, went to the House of the Golden Bed. The girl was uppermost in my unstable reflections.

What had possessed her to lie so? She must have distorted my ingenuous action damnably to cause her father to beset me before the governor, and to swear to kill me! I pictured her as I had last seen her, and try as I would I could not hate her. I lay down with the Browning beside me, and dreamed that she was testifying against me at the seat of judgment, and that an austere God pointed downward. Exploding Eggs was cooking a rasher of bacon on my improvised stove on the paepae the next morning, when Flag, the mutoi, brought a note, he acting as general messenger of the island. It was in a strange hand and on dirty paper. I could not make out the language except a few French words, and the signature not at all, and so after breakfast I took it to Le Brunnec at his store.

Le Brunnec glanced over it and looked puzzled. Then he spoke low, in French, so that the natives in the room might not glean a word.

“Mais,” he said, “it is from Peyral, and it is written in Breton and absinthe. I translate it for you into your English:

“‘Monsieur: You cannot Éviter’—what you say?—‘escape—from your insult to ma fille. You have insulted and struck me, too. I will not seek the tribunal to make your apology. The governor has told me you are Irishman, and so you are of the same blood like the grandparent of my child. In France what you have done must be paid for in blood or by marriage. Even if you make intention to return to your own country no matter. You must marry my daughter or you will be buried in Calvaire cimetiÈre—what you say—graveyard?—It is necessary that you send me word by to-morrow or I will make justice on you.’ He says he is yours respectful. Well, by gar, it is a situation, my friend, but I say to you one thing: do not be afraid. He slip back already. You have a revolver? Yes? Keep it in the hand or the pants.”

The merchant took up his sugar scoop to begin business. My wholeness or health seemed not to interest him seriously. I sauntered up the path in meditation. My feet took me into the mission churchyard, and I sat on the roots of a gigantic banian-tree near the colossal crucifix brought from France by the priests for the jubilee of 1900. The mad note of Peyral had stunned me, and, instead of thinking hard and clearly upon my situation, I fell into fatuous reverie.

A gentle and lovely savage she was, and unspoiled by civilization. What a singular and perhaps entrancing task to teach her only the best in it, to unfold through English or French the music and literature of the world, to take her perhaps to the great cities? Or if I myself was done with civilization, as I sometimes persuaded myself I was, what more delightful companion than this simple virgin of Atuona? To fish, to swim, to roam the plateaus; to have a library and to get the reviews and the new books by the schooners, to create a living idyll! Love would undoubtedly be the response of kindness, of sympathy, of tenderness, of love itself. But could I love her? There would be children. And they would grow up here. I remembered her own white feet in the mud of this village. Their mother! And with Peyral’s blood in them! Peyral! Damn him! What had I done to make him attack me, to say he would kill me? To spoil my peace? I would wear the Browning about my waist, and if he winked an eyelash I would shoot first. He had brought it on himself. She had lied to him. I had no liking to be in Calvary with Gauguin. My grave would be forgotten like his. A man here was a bubble in the breeze. It burst and was nothing.

All these ideas rushed through my head as I returned to my house. I had concluded not to pass Peyral’s house unarmed, so I tied a string about my middle over my pareu and fastened the revolver to it. With one pull the knot undid and the gun came loose into my hand. I wore a light linen coat over my bare body, and no one was the wiser.

Thus ready for my would-be murderer or father-in-law, I whistled to Exploding Eggs the next forenoon, and, he with towels in hand, we walked toward the sands. There was no one on the veranda of the palace. Except for the residence of the lepers by the cemetery there was no other house toward the beach but that of my enemy.

Obscure under the heavy-leaved palms, I could not be sure that Peyral was not ensconced on his gallery with a bottle of absinthe and a shot-gun or rifle waiting to pot-shot me. He knew my habit of bathing every day, and maybe was chuckling over scaring me from the spot. I walked boldly and briskly past his house. There was no figure on the porch but that of a girl. I glimpsed her only, for an emotion of shame—inexplicable shame—directed my eyes away from her. I continued on to the water, and, hiding my revolver in the trailing pahue with its morning-glory blossoms, I took up my surfboard and forgot Peyral in that most exhilarating of sports.

Exploding Eggs dragged his tiny canoe from the bushes, and we launched it and pushed it through the surf. With rare dexterity he paddled it seaward, I with my board on my knees, a calm admirer of his marvelous control of the little craft: he and it the first Marquesan and the first canoe I had seen in this archipelago. When we were out half a mile or so we lay still for the right breaker. He watched and after a few minutes began to paddle with intense energy until the wave caught him. We swung to its crest and clung there as we dashed in at a fast pace without motion on our part. But, when half-way, Exploding Eggs took my board from me, and, handing me the paddle, he suddenly plunged with it from the canoe and, extended full on the board in rhythm with the billow I rode, accompanied me to shore.

The sun was dropping down the western sky when we dressed to leave the beach, Exploding Eggs in his loin-cloth and I in mine, with my coat over the Browning. The hours in the salt water with the exercise and the laughter had cleared the cobwebs of blame from my brain. My innocent blood would be on the guilty head of Peyral did he kill me. That was comforting. However, I made sure that the knot slipped easily, and with my valet beside me I made the start.

I had gained half-way when I saw Peyral coming toward me, a thousand feet away, with a shot-gun over his shoulder. He was silhouetted against the setting sun and could not be mistaken. His burly form, his beard, his general shagginess made him unmistakable, as was also the outline of the weapon.

There was no stopping. The swamp was on either side of the ten-foot road, the beach behind me. Fleeing was out of the question. I might have taken a side road had there been one, but just such conditions as presented themselves then must be met daily. I kept on, and, as we came nearer, our eyes joined and remained steadily fixed. I do not know how Peyral felt, but I was as fascinated as the proverbial bird by the snake. I moved as if by magnetic power toward my probable slayer, and he toward me. Neither of us made a movement except that of our legs and stiff bodies.

There came a second when we were about four feet apart, each hugging the edge of the road. Our eyes were held straight ahead, and mine remained so. We appeared to hesitate as if we might whirl and seize each other or draw our weapons. The shot-gun was on his shoulder but in the flash of an eye might be brought down to the level of my vitals. But the eye did not flash. The gun swayed only with his footfalls, and we continued our mechanical advance away from each other.

Prudence whispered to me to turn and protect myself from a rear attack, but the message did not affect my legs. I winced momentarily for the expected load of shot in my back, but I walked stiffly as if a great ray of light were penetrating my cerebellum. Exploding Eggs, who knew only about our fight upon the palace balcony and nothing of my having the Browning, was chanting about the god of night, Po, and paid no attention to Peyral, except to say quite audibly, “PeyralÉ aoe metai! Peyral is no good!” That did not add to my surety, and the imagined missile or missiles from behind did not become less vivid until I was beyond shooting distance. Just as I calculated with incredible relief that the crisis was past, Peyral’s gun roared out.

My muscles squirmed, my heart leaped, my knees bent, and my chin touched my bosom. Exploding Eggs laughed.

“PeyralÉ puhi kuku,” he said regretfully; “Peyral has shot a kuku”—as if I should have shot it. I laughed heartily with him. The joke was on me, but I enjoyed it to the echo. I recalled that often of an evening my enemy replenished his larder with an expenditure of Number Four shot. It was funny, and when I reached the palace I was trembling with the reverberations of the absurd climax to my fears.

L’Hermier des Plantes was dancing opposite Many Daughters a hura-hura, and Song of the Nightingale was fetching cold water from the brook to water the wine, in the temperate French way.

“Hola!” called out the governor. “Come in, mon ami! Sit down and have a goutte de Pernod. You are jolly. What? You met Peyral, and he shot not you but a kuku? O lalala! You give me back the Browning? All right. You could not have done much harm with it. See, the cartridges are blanks for firing a salute on the Fall of the Bastille fÊte. O sapristi! It is droll! I will die!”

He held his stomach while he laughed and laughed. I grinned with fury.

“What the devil is the drÔlerie?” I questioned, earnestly.

The governor wiped his eyes, and emptied his glass.

“Attendez!” he answered. You were not in any great danger or I would have come to your rescue. You know I have here a dossier of every one in these islands who has been complained against, or has complained. The first week I was here Peyral declared that Commissaire Bauda had insulted his daughter, and that he must marry her or he would kill him. Bauda denied the charge, and Peyral did nothing. Then I opened his dossier, and in two years he had made three such charges, one against a professor who was here a month, and one against Le Brunnec. C’est curieux. The man is mad with alcohol, but more so with a determination to marry that stark daughter of his to a white man who might take her away. Others have been eliminated after such foolishness as this. See, there was no one but you. Lutz is after higher game, and besides he is a German, and Peyral hates him. VoilÀ, mon garÇon. You were the parti inevitable. It is strange the way he goes about getting a son-in-law. One might expect a dot, or a little hospitality, but no, he runs true to type, and he is not a chic type. But, c’est fini. He has tried and failed. You have met him, and knocked him down, and now you know his gun is for kuku. Well, we will drink to the health of the pauvre diable, and a good husband for the girl. But not you, eh?”

I drank with as much grace as I could, but when I walked in the upper valley at dusk, and was alone by the paepae tapu, the shattered and grown-over temple of the old Marquesan gods, I could have cried for pity for that girl.