Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Etablissements FranÇais de l’OcÉanie—How the School House was Inspected—I Receive My CongÉ—The Runaway Pigs—Mademoiselle Narbonne goes with Lutz to Papeete to be Married—PÈre SimÉon, about whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote.

ONE must admit that the processes of government in my islands were simple. Since only a couple of thousand Marquesans, of an original myriad, were alive, after three score years of colonialism, officialdom had lessened according to the mortuary statistics. Sovereignty was evidenced by the tricolor that Song of the Nightingale occasionally raised in the palace garden, while Commissaire Bauda and two gendarmes aided the merry governor in exercising a lazy authority. There was no hospital, nor school to distract the people from copra making, and, excepting for the court sessions of Saturdays, to hear moonshine cases, or a claim against Chinese rapacity, we might have thought ourselves living in an ideal state of anarchy.

One morning we awoke to the reality of empire and the solicitude of Paris. Flag, the mutoi, peered through the windowless aperture of my cabin, shortly after dawn, and announced, with the pompousness of a bumbailiff, that the French gunboat ZÉlÉe was at Tahauku, and would shortly land Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Etablissements FranÇais de l’OcÉanie. Flag called the visitor ’Sieu Ranisepatu, and in pantomime indicated his rank and power. The ZÉlÉe sent him ashore at the stone steps of Lutz’s store, and departed for Vaitahu, ostensibly for a fresh water-supply, but, as Painter Le Moine said with an oath, the commander had gone to Le Moine’s adopted village, Vaitahu, to make love to Vanquished Often, the artist’s model.

The inspector of colonies occupied the spare room at the palace and our pleasant parties were suspended. He was a gross, corpulent man, in a colonel’s gilded uniform. One could not see his collar, front or back, for the rolls of his fat neck and his spacious beard. The tapis was full of troublesome affairs. The governor and Bauda had fallen out. Rum was responsible. The governor had given Taiao Koe, Flatulent Fish, one of my tattooed neighbors, a permit to buy a gallon of rum for Lutz. Flatulent Fish lightened his jug too much. Commissaire Bauda met him wobbling from port to starboard on his horse, and took the jug. That for Bauda, censor of morals! But the same day, during the difficult work of repairing Bauda’s arm-chair, Bauda cheered the natives with rum, and two, made utterly reckless, invaded the palace garden in search of more. The inspector was stupefied, and the governor drove them away with threats of prison and indignant exclamations that such a thing had never happened before. Of course, Bauda had to let the inspector know of his action in saving Flatulent Fish from a more wobbly state, and he did so in ignorance of his chair-repairers having betrayed to the inspector his own liberality. The governor did not fancy Flatulent Fish’s permit for rum being brought before the inspector’s notice. So the great man had to decide whether the Governor or the Commissaire was supreme in rum matters, rum, of course, being absolutely forbidden to the natives.

After two days, this matter was settled. The inspector became restless. Every day he said, “I must see the schoolhouse. It is necessary that I see that important building.”

He meant a tumbledown, unoccupied cabin up the valley, a dirty, cheap, wooden building, bare planks and an iron roof.

Rain did not permit the inspector to go at once, for he did not stir out of the Governor’s house while it was wet; but after three days of fair weather he said very firmly, “I will visit the schoolhouse. It is my duty and I wish to report on that.”

So, with the governor, he advanced up the broken road to the river, which must be crossed to go up the valley. The river was two feet deep. There were crossing-stones placed for him, but he was stout and they were three feet apart. One must jump from one stone to the other. The governor, in boots, plunged into the purling rill. The inspector cried to the governor, “Mais, mon brave, prenez garde aux accidents!”

“It is not dangerous,” said the governor, who in five strides had reached the other bank.

“But I may get my shoes wet,” said the inspector.

“It is better to take them off,” advised the governor.

“Yes, that is true. Naturally one removes one’s shoes when one crosses a river on foot. And, in such a case as this, one must take chances. It is imperative that I inspect the schoolhouse. Mais, nom d’un chien! Where shall I sit to take off my shoes?”

The governor suggested a certain boulder, but it was too low; another was too high. But, after inspecting many boulders, one was found that suited the embonpoint of the big man. He bent over, then looked at the river, and sat up straight.

“It is a wooden schoolhouse?” he queried.

“Yes, plain wood,” said the executive.

“And, par consÉquence, it has a roof and a floor and sides, and maybe some wooden desks for the scholars. Steps to enter, n’est-ce pas? And a tableau noir, to write the alphabet on. As a matter of fact, there is little difference between schoolhouses. You have seen that schoolhouse, mon ami?

“Oui, Monsieur l’Inspecteur, I have seen it. It is exactly as you describe it. TrÈs simple, and the blackboard is there, but a trifle disfigured.”

“Ah, the blackboard is in bad condition! Bien, we must remedy that. I am well satisfied. I will return to your house. These stones are very hot.”

The bon homme marched back, puffing, combing his fan-like whiskers with his fingers, with that quietly exultant air of one who has done his duty despite all risks.

The ZÉlÉe returning, and this being the total of his inspection, he ordered it to speed forthwith to Tahiti, where, doubtless, as in Paris, he recited the dangers and difficulties of life in the cannibal islands. He forgot to have the blackboard repaired. I learned by letter from Malicious Gossip, two years after his notation, of its deplorable state. The ingratitude of colonies toward their foster-mothers is proverbial. Our own fat men, secretaries of war, senators, and congressmen, make as cursory examinations of our American vassals in the Pacific and Atlantic, and with as little help to them.

The inspector’s congÉ was almost synchronous with mine. The Saint FranÇois of Bordeaux, the first merchant steamship in the Marquesas, arrived from Tahiti, to swing about the ports of my archipelago and return to Papeete. My heart ached at leaving; the tendrils of the purple-blossomed pahue-vine were about it. How could I forsake forever my loved friends of Atuona and Vaitahu, Malicious Gossip, Mouth of God, Vanquished Often, Seventh Man Who Is So Angry, Great Fern, Ghost Girl, and the little leper lass, Many Daughters? I must make my choice, and swiftly. If I stayed much longer, I would never live again in America; the jungle would creep over me and I should lie, some day, on Calvary’s hill near the lost remains of Paul Gauguin. There was Le Brunnec, the best of the whites, but he was a Breton peasant, born to the sun and simplicity and nature’s riches; I was of the shade and artificiality, of pavements and libraries. Nor could I show an unabraded surface to these savage tropics as did Lutz. His Prussianism, his Lutheranism, preserved him cold, and ready to escape at fortune’s opening. My Irish forebears and American generations gave me no such buckler, nor ambition.

The one passenger of the Saint FranÇois who came ashore on our beach weighted the balance for America. He was Brunneck, an American swimmer, diver, and boxer, whom I had seen Sarah Bernhardt kiss when at Catalina Island he rose through the clear waters of Avalon Bay to her glass-bottomed boat and presented her with an abalone shell. I traded him my coffee-pot and utensils for the memory of Sarah’s moment of abandon, and Brunneck tipped the scales for me toward the America he had deserted. He was an atavist in a grass skirt and a crown of ferns, hatless, purseless, a set of boxing-gloves his only impedimenta. I could not equal his serenity, that of a civilized being again in harmony with the earth. I hurried aboard the steamship in Tahauku roadstead to decide my vacillation.

By dark, the Tahauku River, into which some weary cloud had emptied, sent a menacing current down the roadstead. The steamship rolled and swung wildly. As madder grew the fresh torrent, the anchors dragged, and the vessel drifted broadside toward the rocky cliff. Steam was down and the engines would not turn. The captain yelling from the bridge, the Breton sailors in noisy sabots, prancing alarmedly about the decks, a search-light playing upon the rocks, and lighting the groups of natives watching from the headlands, the shouting and swearing in French and Breton with a word or two for my benefit in English, all made a dramatic incident with a spice of danger.

The Saint FranÇois swung until the rail on which I stood was four feet from the jagged wall. A wild chant rose from the Marquesans on shore in the moment of most peril. I made ready to leap, but soon heard the hum of the screw as it began fighting the current. We gained little by little, and, once clear of the rocks, pointed the prow for the Bordelaise Channel and comparative safety. The cargo boats had not been hoisted aboard, and they banged to pieces as, urged by the rushing river, we drove through the door of the bay and out to sea.

I lay down on a bench, and when I awoke at dawn we were heading back for Tahauku to finish loading. Exploding Eggs was beside me. I had not known he was aboard. The adventures of the night, the fires, the engines, the electric lights, and the danger had delighted him.

“SacrÉ!” muttered the red-faced captain at breakfast. “These Marquesas are as bad as the Paumotus.”

No lighthouses, charts inaccurate, shore-guides lacking, treacherous tides, winds, currents, reefs, and passages. Lying Bill said it took “bloody near a gen’us to escape with his life after thirty years of navigation in these waters.”

The Polynesians believed that souls animate flowers and plants, that these are organized beings. For pigs, they had a special heaven, Ofetuna. Each pig had a distinct and arbitrary name, which was never changed, though men changed their names often.

On the deck of the Saint FranÇois were half a dozen slender pigs that had once played about my paepae and were now engaged in resisting the monopolistic tendencies of Alphonse, a ram bought from the trader. By uniting, they made his habitat painful, and his outcries brought the steward, who attempted to correct the ram, but was butted into profanity and flight.

“You’re no lam’ o’ goodness! You’ll be chops mighty soon!” the negro shouted, and threw a pan at him. The ram bolted, knocked open a swinging port, and, followed by the pork, dived into the bay. He may have sensed the threat of the steward.

“A la chasse! A la chasse!” ordered the captain from the bridge. “Tonnerre de Dieu! Our meat is going ashore.”

If a boat coming to the Saint FranÇois had not intercepted the bold deserters, they would have succeeded in their break for liberty, and probably have taken to the wilds. The recovering them was no easy task, but, diverted from the rocks, they were run down, after half an hour of fierce commands through a megaphone from the captain. They were fast swimmers, being encumbered by no fat. Their adventure dispelled for me the myth that pigs cannot swim. The story ran that in swimming pigs cut their throats with their hoofs.

I had recognized in the English-African accent of the steward the lingo of the West-India negro, and oddly, I remembered having seen the man himself at Kowloon, in China, where he had been bartender at the Kowloon Hotel. With no word of French, and ten days aboard from Tahiti, the black man was bursting with conversation. Serving me with a bottle of Bordeaux beer, he spoke of his hardships, and of familiar figures of his happier days at Kowloon:

“Yes, sir, men can stand more than animiles,” he said. “They can, sir, work or play. You remember that goriller that Osborne had in the Kowloon Hotel grounds? He perished, sir, from his drinking habits. He took his reg’lar with the soldiers and tourists, and his favoryte tonoc was gin and whiskey mixed, but after he was started, he would ‘bibe near anything ’toxicating. You remember how big he was? Big as Sikh, that goriller was. He was a African ape like the white perfesser says he is descended from.

“Week before Chrismus, that infantry regiment in barricks, in Kowloon, kept him late every night, and I seen him climb to his house in that tree hardly able to hold onto the limbs. Chrismus eve he let nothing slip his paws. He began with the punch—you remember, sir, the punch I used to make? and he overdone it, though he had a stummick like a India major’s. He drank with the officers and he drank with the Tommies. When I opened the bar, Chrismus morning, he was dead on the ground. He hadn’t never been able to reach his home. Osborne gave him a Christian berrial under the comquat trees, but as sure as you’re born every officer and soldier turned up for more drink that night. Men can stand more than animiles, sir.”

All morning I sat on the deck and took my fill of the scenes on either shore, while copra was hoisted aboard from canoes and boats. Exploding Eggs was examining minutely the wonders of the steamship, reporting to me occasionally some astounding discovery. Until then I had refused to consider taking him away from his people, but, in a moment of selfishness, I drew a plat of America, to attract his thirteen years,—the lofty buildings, motor-cars, telephones, ice and ice-cream, snow and sleighs, roller-skates and moving pictures. He had seen none of these, nor read of them, but, nevertheless, the fear of homesickness caused him, after a few minutes to say:

“Aoe metai, Nakohu mata!” which meant, “No good; Exploding Eggs would die!”

Characteristic of all primitive peoples was this nostalgia, and, far from being sentiment easily smothered, it was more often than physical ailment the predisposing, or even actual, cause of death when they were separated from their homes. The Pitcairn youth who died in California and the Easter Islanders who could not endure even their exile in Tahiti were examples. The Maori Napoleon, Te Rauparaha, gazed upon his old home, Kawhia, and wept in farewell. His legendary song says:

Before noon, I was overcome by a longing to see Atuona again. The voices of the friends who had chanted their grief were in my ears. I landed at Tahauku in one of the copra boats which were coming and going, and walked along the cliffs until I came within sight of the beach where, so often, I had ridden the surf. I went at a fast pace down the hill, hoping for a familiar face. At a point overlooking the cove, that very spot Stevenson thought the most beautiful on earth, I heard shouts and merry laughter.

I moved to where I could survey the spot. There was a group of natives, half the village, at least, and in the center of the chattering crowd was Brunneck, naked to the waist, boxing with Jimmy Kekela, the Hawaiian. The yellow hair of the American gleamed against his sun-burnt skin, as he toyed with the amateur. Ghost girl, an absorbed spectator, held the wreath of the American. Mouth of God, Haabuani, and Great Fern were dancing about the circle in glee. Exploding Eggs, who had accompanied me, left me without a word, and ran to the ring. I stood fifty feet away, unnoticed. A new god had been thrown up by the sea. I returned to the Saint FranÇois more content to leave.

When I awoke from a siesta, in the late afternoon, I found preparations for immediate departure. The anchors were being hauled short, the hatches battened down, and the cargo booms uphoisted. We waited only the final accounts from Lutz. He brought them himself in the last boat, in which were also Mademoiselle Narbonne and two nuns. She was again in black, and greeted me in a distraught manner with “Kaoha!” the native salutation, as if in her hour of departure from her own island she clung to its language. She went below to the cabins with the sisters, and only after the screw had revolved and we turned head for the sea did the three come on deck.

Tears suffused her eyes as we passed the opening of Atuona Bay. When Exploding Eggs and others, including Song of the Nightingale, shouted “Kaoha” to us from their canoes, she put her head upon the breast of Sister Serapoline and wept passionately. The night drew on as, after many bursts of her sad emotion, she leaned exhausted on the bosom so long her shelter. In the flooding moonlight, she slept, while the nun placidly counted her rosary.

The Saint FranÇois, steering in a smooth sea for Taiohae, on the island of Nuku-hiva, the captain, Lutz, and I gathered about the table for supper and wine. The vessel had narrowly escaped shipwreck in the Paumotus, and had lain for six days on a reef while the barrels of cement, intended for some improvement at Atuona, were thrown overboard to lighten her.

Lutz did not seek any moment of intimacy with me, and said nothing to explain Mademoiselle Narbonne’s presence aboard. Conforming to strict native etiquette, he paid no attention to her, and a stranger would have thought he hardly knew her. Lutz said that he had business affairs in Tahiti and had jumped at the chance of a quick passage in the steamship.

At dawn, we were off the island of Nuku-hiva; high up on a green mountain-side, we saw a silver thread which we knew to be the waterfall of Typee Valley, the valley in which Hermann Melville had lived in captivity and happiness. We rounded Cape Martens, and, as the sun lit the rocky forelands guarding the bay of Taiohae, the morning breeze brought from Typee the delicious odor of the wild flowers, the hinano, the tiare, and the frangipani. This beach of Taiohae, months before, I had visited in a whale-boat from Atuona. I hoped to see again my friend, the good priest, PÈre SimÉon Delmas, who had held the citadel of God here for half a century.

In the first boat ashore went the captain and Lutz, and, when after breakfast I asked the mate to be put on land, Mademoiselle Narbonne, seeing me descending the ladder, joined me.

“Where do you go?” she asked, when we set foot on the sand.

“I have a message for Prince Stanislao from Le Brunnec,” I answered.

“I must be back before the nuns miss me, but I will go with you,” she said.

Leaving the settlement, we were soon on a trail with which I was familiar and reached a little wood. She took me by the sleeve.

“Attendez,” she half whispered. “I am going to be married to Monsieur Lutz in Papeete. He is a foreigner, and the priest could not marry us. At Papeete the judge can do it. The nuns are going with me to make sure. They oppose, but I am determined. It is my one chance. Tell me, American, do I make a mistake?”

“Do you love him?”

“Love him?” she said hesitatingly. “I do not know what love is. The nuns have not taught me. Always it has been Joan of Arc, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I want love and freedom, but I am afraid of staying there at Taaoa alone with those two old women. They are true Canaques, and would make me like them, and I am afraid of the convent. Mon dieu! I am puzzled by life!”

“Come!” I said, “you will have an hour of light-heartedness with Stanislao. I am puzzled, too.”

Hardly more than a youth, Stanislao was the last of the blood royal of the family that had ruled the Marquesas. Temoana had been the only king. The Marquesans were communists, with chiefs, and had not the corroding egocentrism of nationality until the French crowned Temoana. He had been one of the few travelers from here. Kidnapped, a dime-museum man in foreign seaports, he returned on a whaler to find favor with the bishop and to be set on a Catholic throne. Prince Stanislao was not even chief of Taiohae, for a half-Hawaiian, of the Kekela tribe, had that office, and did the French policeman’s chores.

We entered the house of Stanislao and met, besides him, Antoinette, an odalisque, most beautiful of dancers, who, like Ghost Girl, flitted from island to island by the grace of her charms. I had known her in the Cocoanut House in Papeete and her sister, Caroline. Neither she nor Stanislao accepted the gospel of Christianity. Her warm blood had in it an admixture of French and Italian, giving an archness and spice to her manner and a coquetry to her eyes—black and dancing—that maddened many. In the days about the fourteenth of July, when the French at Tahiti celebrated the Fall of the Bastille, she was a prize exhibit, for then governors and bankers, deacons and acolytes, lost the grace of God.

These three, Barbe, Antoinette, and Stanislao, were extraordinary in their unity with the teeming vivid life here, the ferns and orchids and flowers on the sward, the palms and breadfruit in the grove. By the alchemy of the brilliant morning and the company of this pair of youthful lovers, Barbe’s mood was suddenly transmuted into joyousness. I took an accordion off a shelf, and played the upaupahura of Tahiti. Without a moment’s hesitation, and with no sense of consciousness, the three danced on the grass.

Carlyle praises that countryman who, matching the boast of a doctor that “his system was in high order,” answered that, for his part, “he had no system.”

Few mortals, it is to be feared, are permanently blessed with that felicity of “having no system”; nevertheless, most of us, looking backward on young years, may remember seasons of a light aerial translucency and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the prison-house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew not that we had limbs, we only lifted, hurled and leapt; through eye and ear and all avenues of sense came clear, unimpeded tidings from without, and from within issued clear victorious forces. We stood as in the center of Nature, giving and receiving in harmony with it all; unlike Virgil’s husbandman, “too happy because we did not know our blessedness.”

Stanislao seized the instrument and I danced. We four were the spirits of a rare and vital esthetic, a harmony with being that denied all knowledge but that of our acute and delicately-poised senses of warmth, delicious odors, fresh colors of the plants, and mutual attraction. The ship, Lutz, the nuns, heaven and hell, the Taua and the Tapus were forgotten by me and by Barbe in the glowing hour of dance and play.

Tired we threw ourselves on the grass and drank from the cocoanuts which Stanislao climbed a tree to bring us. The prince told us, with solemnity in which Marquesans speak of olden things, an incident related to him by his uncle:

“A French governor here forbade the girls to go to the war-ships in the bay. They ruined discipline, he said. Nevertheless, three daughters of a powerful chief swam out to a war vessel. The commander, discovering them in the morning, sent them ashore to the governor, who put them in prison for three days.

“Their father’s rage was terrible. It had ever been the custom for the young women to visit the ships, he said, and that his daughters should be the victims of a governor’s whim, abetted by French sailors themselves, was a deadly insult.

“He sent a message to the governor: ‘I am a chief who has eaten my enemies all my life. I will wash the hands of my daughters in French blood.’

“The sailors were forbidden by their officers to leave the beach. They had been going up the river to bathe in shady spots, but they were warned of danger and a line was drawn beyond which they were not to go. A guard was stationed a little higher up the stream, and for weeks the barrier was not crossed. But sailors know no authority when woman beckons,”—it has been so since Jason sought the Golden Fleece,—“and, when, through the glade, they saw the alluring forms of the three sisters, the governor’s orders were damned as tyranny. They outwitted the guard and climbed the trail to the paepae of their inamoratas. The chief and his warriors trapped six of them after a struggle. One sailor, a man famed for strength, killed several with his hands. They were outnumbered and were brought, some wounded and some dead, to an altar up the valley, and there the daughters, at the command of their father, bathed their hands in the men’s blood, as he had sworn. Parts of the bodies were eaten and the remains fed to the pigs.

“The governor had troops brought ashore to pursue the chief. For a year he evaded them, but then Vaekehu, the widow of Temoana, sent him word to come to Taiohae and be shot. He obeyed, of course, and met death near the hill of the fort.

“That was the palace of Queen Vaekehu,” said the prince, pointing up the hill. It was by a pool, under a gigantic banyan, a lonely site, a palisade of cocoanuts and tamarinds not availing to soften the gloomy impression. Long before she died the queen forsook her royal residence for the shelter of the convent, where all day she told her beads, or sat in silent contemplation.

Bishop Dordillon who had written my dictionary, had given the queen a Trinity, a Mother of God, and a band of saints to dwell upon, and more, a bottomless pit of fire, with writhing sufferers and devils from it ever at her ear to whisper distraction and temptation.

Mademoiselle Narbonne, hearing a warning whistle of the Saint FranÇois, bethought her of her strange position, of the sisters and of Lutz. She trembled, turned pale, and begged to be excused as she started running to the beach to catch a boat about to shove off. I also bade good-by to the two, with a sigh for their fleeting felicity, and strolled to the Catholic mission.

PÈre SimÉon was seated at a table under an umbrageous hao tree, writing. He was in a frayed and soiled cassock of black. His hair was white, and his beard grizzled, both long and uncut and flowing over his religious gown. His face was broad and rubicund, and his remarkable eyes—a deep, shining brown, eyes of childish faith—proclaimed him poet and artist. Aged, he had yet the strength and heartiness of middle age, and when I greeted him he rose and kissed me with warmth.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, “Monsieur O’Brien, you have returned to hear more of Jeanne d’Arc, is not that so? You have been too long in Atuona. You should stay in Taiohae, and see what we have here. We go along well. Joan of Arc looks after us.”

We entered the sitting-room of the mission, and were soon with a bottle of wine, and cigarettes, in a discussion of affairs.

I asked to see any recent poems he had written, and, blushingly, he handed me the paper over which he had been bending.

“There has been an excess of drinking recently,” he said ruefully, as he took a sip of his mild claret. I read his stanzas aloud:

Now I have no skill in rime, but, inspired by his ready gift, I took his paper and wrote what might be called a free translation. I read it to him as follows:

“HÉlas!” commented the priest, “I cannot understand one word of it. Doubtless it surpasses my poor lines in excellence. “I will multiply copies of this poem on my hectograph,” said PÈre SimÉon, “and I will distribute them where they will do most good.”

“Captain Capriata will receive one?” I ventured, recalling that in the procession in honor of Joan of Arc’s anniversary the old Corsican skipper had fallen with the banner of the Maid of Orleans.

PÈre SimÉon’s face glowed with zeal.

“I will name no names,” he said, “but Capriata is a good man and comes often to church now.”

For months, I had desired to ask a question of PÈre SimÉon, since Lutz had told me that Robert Louis Stevenson had written about him. The trader had shown me his copy of “In the South Seas,” and had pointed out the error of the printer, who had made Stevenson’s “Father Simeon Delmas” “Father Simeon Delwar.”

“PÈre SimÉon,” I said, “a writer about the islands mentions you in his book. He was here a long time ago in a little yacht, the Casco, and he says that he went with you from Hatiheu, to a native High Place, and that you named the trees and plants for him. You had a portfolio, he said, from which you read.”

The missionary stopped a moment, and plucked his beard, inquiringly.

“There have been many come here, in fifty years,” he said slowly, “yachtsmen and students. I do not recall the name Stevenson.”

Something pricked his recollection, and he took me into the rectory and produced his portfolio.

“Here is the list; I must have read that author,” he said.

“You gave an abstract of the virtues of the trees and plants, Stevenson says in his volume.”

“Le voilÀ” replied the priest. “Stevenson? Do you mean perhaps Louis, who was a consumptive?”

He made a rapid movement of the hand to his face, and drew upon the air a mustache and imperial, a slender figure with a slight stoop—in a word, the very shadow of the master of romance.

“He was much with Stanislao, the king’s son. He was trÈs distinguÉ. He was here but a little time. However, I remember him well, because he was very sympathique, and a gentleman.

“I will tell you why he impressed me particularly. He was not French, but he spoke it as I do, and he was curious about the cannibalism which was then practically eradicated. There was another priest with me who was then very ill. He died in my arms. I remember the evening he told Stevenson of how he had saved the life of a foolish French governor. There had been rumors of a cannibal feast at Hatiheu, and the governor was incensed. He feared that the incident might be reported to Paris and injure his prestige. He blamed the chief, and sent him word that if it were proved he would personally blow out his brains.

“Soon word came that the Hatiheu people—I was pastor there for a quarter of a century—had killed several of their enemies, and were eating them and drinking namu enata. The governor started off in haste from Taiohae, for Hatiheu and the priest went with him, as also several gendarmes.

“Hundreds of natives were grouped in the public place, chanting, dancing, and drinking.

“‘Where is the chief?’ demanded the governor.

“‘I am here,’ said a voice, stern and menacing, and the chief broke from the throng and advanced toward the governor.

“The latter drew his revolver. ‘You have permitted this breaking of the law, after I sent you word that I would kill you if you ate human flesh?’

“‘E!’ replied the chief in a high voice. ‘I am the master in Hatiheu. Do you wish to be eaten?’

“The war-drums sounded and the grim warriors began to surround the party. My friend, who was, for safety, an adopted son of the chief, and thus taboo, seized the governor and led him to the boat. They got away by sheer courage on the priest’s part. He described this to Louis, who wrote it down. I recall it clearly, because the poor martyr died the next week. Did Louis write of the Marquesas much?”

I said that he had. I should have liked to stay and gain from PÈre SimÉon all I could of his memories of the poet, but a boy came running up the road to say that the Saint FranÇois was to leave very soon.

I embraced PÈre SimÉon. He kissed me on both cheeks, and gave me his blessing. It had been worth a voyage to know him.

Jerome Capriata, the eater of cats, was outside his house. He invited me in to meet his wife, a barefooted Frenchwoman who sat in a scantily-furnished room, musing over a bottle of absinthe. I could stay only a minute, as the Saint FranÇois whistled insistently. His wife set out the bottle and glasses before us, and we drank the farewell goutte.

On the way to the beach I met Mrs. Fisher, whom Bishop Dordillon, my dictionary writer, had as adopted mother, when he was old enough to be her grandfather. That was because Queen Vaekehu had adopted him as a grandson, and Mrs. Fisher as a daughter, and the bishop had observed the pseudo-relationship strictly.

“Mrs. Stevenson gave me a shawl,” said Mrs. Fisher. “I have shown that to many people. Madame Jack London wore it when she was here with her husband on the Snark. They lived with Lutz, the German, who was then here. Pauvre Stevenson! He had to die young, and here I am, after all these years!”

I waded through the surf to the boat, and reached the Saint FranÇois to find all the others aboard. We shipped the buoy and were away in a trice. The last sight I had of the shore was of the promontory where Captain Porter raised the American flag a hundred years before. I was never to see the Marquesas Islands again. The fresh breath of nature was too foul with the worst of civilization.