McHenry gets a caning—The fear of the dead—A visit to the grave of Mapuhi—En voyage.

IMAGINE my delight when the captain of the Saint FranÇois set our course for Takaroa, the atoll of Mapuhi, Nohea, and the crippled diver who had possessed the great pearl of Pukapuka! The Marquesas Islands are only eight hundred miles from the Society Islands, of which Tahiti is one, and between the Marquesas and the Society Islands lie the strewn eighty atolls of the Iles Dangereuses or Paumotu group. With steam we ran the half-thousand miles or so from Taiohae in two nights and two days, and at daybreak of the second day were due to see the familiar, lonely figure of the wrecked County of Roxburgh on an uninhabited motu of Takaroa. It was this startling sight that informed the Londons in the Snark that they were out of their course and in danger, and it was Takaroa the Stevensons in the Casco looked for, only to fetch up at Tikei, thirty miles to windward. I had no confidence in our Breton captain, to whom these waters were as unknown as the Indies to Columbus. I breathed a sigh of relief when the lofty iron masts of the dismantled vessel loomed on the horizon.

After so many months in the frowning islands of the war fleet, with their thunderous headlands, gleaming streams, and green and black valleys, the spectacle of the slender ring of white sand and coral, the verdant banners of this first of the Low Islands lying flat upon the jeweled waters, aroused in me again sensations of wonder at the ineffable variety of creation; the myriad-mindedness of the Creator. The crash of the surf upon the outer reef, the waving of the breeze-stirred cocoanuts, the flight of a solitary bird, contrasted with the marvelous fabrication of man, the metal ship, thrown by a toss of the sea and a puff of the wind among these evidences of a beautiful yet deadly design.

The Saint FranÇois crept along the coast of the atoll and anchored opposite the pass, a good mile from the breakers. Everybody was on deck, the black-gowned nuns with Mademoiselle Narbonne—she also in a tunic of religious hue. Since we had left Nuku-hiva they had not appeared. The contrary currents and confused trade-winds among these Pernicious Islands had kept them in their cabin. The six-hundred-ton hull of the Saint had see-sawed through the two hundred leagues of the tropic of Capricorn, and only hardened trenchermen like the ship’s officers and myself could find appetite for food. Lutz, too, had raised a mournful face to the deck but seldom. A few hundred sacks of copra awaited us at Takaroa, and we put off a life-boat to bring it aboard. Lutz and I accompanied the second officer with a command from the captain to stay no longer than the cargo’s loading. Lying Bill’s schooner, the Morning Star, was in the lagoon, and, seeing it there, I wondered if Mapuhi, the great sailor of these atolls, had steered it through the narrow pass. About the landing, despite the uniqueness of the steamship’s arrival, was an unusual quietude, a hush that moved me to fear, as a presage of evil. A cholera-stricken village in the Philippines had that same dismal aura. A few natives were upon the coral mole, and the Mutoi came forward to examine our papers.

“Let us go to the house of Mapuhi,” I said to Lutz.

“Ja wohl,” he replied; “I have not met him in many years.”

We left the mate and walked along the path past the traders’ stores. The thousand feet that trod the coral road and had gone in and out the dozen shops of the dealers and pearl-buyers during my stay on Takaroa were missing, but more than the stir and hum of the rahui was absent. A depressing torpor possessed the little village. Mapuhi’s store was closed tightly, and from no house or hut did a head show or a greeting come.

We saw that the door of one shop was ajar, and, going in, happened on a pleasant and illuminating scene. Angry words in Tahitian we heard as we mounted the steps, and smothered exclamations of a profane sort in English which had a familiar note. Back of the counter was a very large Tahitian woman who, with a heavy fishing-rod of bamboo, was thrashing a white man. She was, between blows, telling him that if he got drunk or spoke rudely to her again, she would “treat him as a Chinaman did his horse in Tahiti,” which is a synonym for roughness. He was evading the strokes of the bamboo by wriggling, and guarding with his arms, and was cursing in return, but was plainly afraid of her. He was McHenry, my ofttime companion of revels at the Cercle Bougainville in Papeete, who had come on the Flying Fish with me from Tahiti, and had remained in Takaroa.

Many times he had boasted of his contempt for native women.

“I’ve had my old lady nineteen years,” he said once, “and she wouldn’t speak to me if she met me on the streets of this town. She wouldn’t dare to in public until I recognized her.”

Lutz and I did not utter a sound, but quickly descended the steps.

“I never before saw a native wife beating her husband,” he commented caustically. “That McHenry deserves it. Lying Bill often said McHenry’s vahine took a stick to him. Tahitian women will not be whipped themselves.”

Lutz should know. He had had fourteen years with a Tahitian mistress, a wife in her own eyes as much as if wedded in a cathedral. Would he not have to face her in Papeete when he should be married to Mademoiselle Narbonne? Perhaps she had a stronger weapon than a rod! The taua’s sorcery might stretch over the ocean, and be potent in Tahiti.

Lutz and I were almost at Mapuhi’s residence when we met Nohea, my host of the fishing and diving. Nohea was in a black cloth coat and a blue pareu, and his countenance was distressed.

“Ia ora na, Nohea!” I called to him. “Is Mapuhi a Mapuhi at home?”

“Mapuhi?” he repeated and shuddered. “Mapuhi mÁte!”

Mapuhi dead! It did not seem possible; the giant I had known so recently!

Nohea began to weep and left us. Outside the inclosure of Mapuhi’s house were a dozen men, and among them Hiram Mervin, the Paumotu-American who had described to me the cyclone of Hikueru. We shook hands, and I asked of what Mapuhi had died. Surely not of disease. The reef must have beaten him at last. I could not think of that super-man yielding to a clot or a kidney. He, who had made the wind and currents his sport, who in the dark of night had sailed through foaming passes the white mariner shunned in broad daylight, who had given largesse to his people for decades, and who had made the shells and nuts of his isles pay him princely toll, despite the cunning of the white, the papaa, who came to take much and give little.

“He was eighty,” said Hiram Mervin. “He took sick on Reitoru, that tiny island near here. He was brought here. Some one wanted to give him medicine.

“‘No,’ he said, ‘my time has come. I will not live by things. I die content. I have been a good Mormon since I accepted the Word. What I did before was in darkness, when I was a gentile.’

“He passed away peacefully. We lost a bulwark of the church, but he will reign with Christ.”

Lutz and I did not wish to intrude upon the kin of Mapuhi, nor to remain longer within the sound of the wailing that now issued from the house at the news that I, the American, had come back on the steamship. This extemporized burst of lamentation was a special honor to me and to the decedent, an expression of a tie between us, and, though it swelled suddenly at my arrival, was not the crying of hired mourners but the lacrymation of sincere grief. In wakes among the Irish I had found exactly the same spirit—an increase or instant renewal of the keening or shrieking when one who had been dear to the dead person appeared.

We two walked away, and encountered McHenry, who had learned of our presence. McHenry was shaken by the castigation given him by his wife, and assumed an air of brazen indecency and bluster to hide his condition.

“One bottle of booze and I’ll make ’em all quit their catabawlin’ an’ dance a hula,” he said. “Much they care for except the bloomin’ francs the ol’ boy left ’em!”

McHenry exposed his own vulturous desires, and not the feelings of the tribe of Mapuhi. To them the passing of Mapuhi was as to the Jews that of their leader by Nebo’s lonely mountain. The great man had expired the night before, and preparations were being made to bury him. In this climate the body hastens to rejoin the elements. The chief was not to lie in the common charnel in a grove on another motu of Takaroa. As suitable to his rank and wealth and his generosity to the Mormon church, he had retained for himself a piece of ground beside the temple. A coral wall inclosed the small necropolis. Within a hundred feet of the sea, in the brilliant coral sand, rugged and bare, it was fit anchoring ground for this ship among canoes. One tombstone leaned against the wall, a plain slab of marble, inscribed:

Punau was the wife he had clung to under Mormonism, and who had borne him the son and daughter I knew. Many years he had survived her, and had not married another. The religion of polygamy had made of the old barbarian an ascetic, who had been a Grand Turk under Protestantism and Catholicism, between which he had wavered according to the novelty offered.

The body of Mapuhi was laid out in the principal room of his house, the room in which I had met him and the American elders on my first landing. Nohea and others had worked through the night to build a coffin. They had used the strong planks the dead man had gathered from the deck or cabin of the County of Roxburgh, and had polished them with cocoanut-oil, so that they shone. The coffin was lined with the sleeping-mat of Mapuhi, and in it he reposed, dressed in his churchly clothes, a black frock coat, white trousers, and a stiff white shirt. No collar cumbered his neck, nor were shoes upon the ample feet that had walked on the floor of the sea. Most of the people of Takaroa took a last look at him, but some did not, for fear. I gazed a few minutes at his face. More than in life, the likeness to a mutilated Greek statue struck me; perhaps the head of a Goth seen in the Vatican Gallery. Strength, repose, and mystery were in the powerful mold of it, the broad, low forehead, the rounded chin, and wide-open eyes. I had seen many so-called important men in death, when as a reporter I wrote obsequies at a penny a line. This Paumotuan chief’s corpse had more majesty and peace than any of them—a nearer relation to my conception of an old and wise child of the eternal unity, glad to be freed from the illusion of life.

In the village, the huts were still closed. No fisherman put off in a canoe, and none sat making or mending nets. McHenry and I paddled out to the Morning Star. The skipper was on deck with Ducat, the mate. Some native had hurried to them with the amusing gossip of McHenry’s vahine beating him, and he had to bear a storm of ridicule. Lying Bill rehearsed his boasts about her inferiority, and Ducat, who had humiliated him before me long ago, taunted him with his submission to her.

“I didn’t want to kill her,” was all McHenry could retort. McHenry had a story of Chocolat which was distracting. Captain MoÉt of the Flying Fish had come into Takaroa a month or two before with Chocolat, a fair-sized dog. The tricks Chocolat did when I was on MoÉt’s schooner were incomparable with his later education.

“The bloomin’ pup would stand on his hind legs and dance to a tune MoÉt whistled,” said McHenry. “He could count up to five with cards, and could pick all the aces out of a piquet pack. He would let MoÉt throw him overboard in port, and catch a rope’s end with his teeth and hold on while he was pulled up. He was a reg’lar circus performer. You know MoÉt and I ain’t very close. He done me a dirty turn once. I knew if I could ever get Chocolat to Papeete, an’ on the steamer from San Francisco, I could sell him to a bloody American tourist for a thousand francs. MoÉt watched me like a gull does the cook when he empties his pail overside. Now, you know me; I ain’t nobody to say to you can’t do this or that. I laid for that pup, and, when I went aboard the schooner just before she sailed, I took a little opium I got from the Chink pearl-buyer here; and I put a pill of it in a piece of fresh pork, and took it aboard in my pocket. Just before I was goin’ into my boat, after a drink or two with Jean, I’d been watchin’ Chocolat stretched out nappin’ on the deck. I put the meat alongside of his mouth, and he ate it like a shark does a chunk o’ salt horse. Soon I saw he was knocked out, an’ I asked MoÉt to go down into the trade-room an’ get me a piece o’ tobacco. He’d no sooner ducked than I grabbed the bloody pup by the scruff an’ stuffed him into my trousers’ front. He was like dead. I was in the boat in a second with no one seein’ him, and reached up to get the tobacco from MoÉt’s hand.

“Of course the purp never let out a bloomin’ whimper, an’ I got away and to shore with no proof that I had snared the bow-wow. MoÉt had trained Chocolat to let out a hell of a yell if any one as much as took him toward the rail, and so he would have to think that the cur had fallen overboard on his own hook. I took him to my store unbeknown to any one, and tied him to a chair. He never come to for three hours, an’ was sluggery for a day or two. I was waitin’ for MoÉt to sail, but the next day he comes ashore an’ makes a bee-line for my joint. I saw his boat puttin’ off, an’ I give Chocolat to my Penrhyn boy who tied him in a canoe, an’ hiked out in the lagoon with him. MoÉt looks me up an’ down, curses his sacres an’ his Spanish diablos an’ ’Sus-Marias, an’ crawled through my place from top to bottom, shoutin’, ‘Chocolat! Chocolat! Pettee sheen!’ an’ half cryin’. He had to trip his anchor the next day, and I had the sheen all right.

“I was goin’ to smuggle him on board Lyin’ Bill’s cockroach tub an’ to Papeete, when one day I come back from Mapuhi’s and found him gone, an’ his string chewed through. He had skinned out, an’, though I asked everybody on this island about him, everybody knew nothin’. After three days I give the beast up. I know the Kanaka, an’ I knew that no fat little dogs are let run loose very long. About two weeks later, I went to another motu to buy some copra, an’ the first native I run into was wearin’ Chocolat’s collar on his arm. He was a Mormon churchman, too, but he swore he found the collar in a canoe.”

Poor little brown Chocolat! He had entertained me often on the Flying Fish with his antics, and Jean MoÉt had such dreams of his future! A kindly fate may have bestowed on him the favor of a quick death by hotpotting rather than the ignominy of circus one-night stands or the pampered kennel of a millionaire. He had had his year at sea, and died in the full flush of doghood.

The news that Lutz was a passenger on the Saint FranÇois with Mademoiselle Narbonne brought a prolonged whistle from Ducat, and an exclamation from Lying Bill:

“Well, ’e’ll bloody well get ’is! ManÁ won’t take a club to ’im because the ’usban’ does the beatin’ when ’e’s a Dutchman, but she’s not lettin’ ’im walk over ’er so easy. I ’ad a long palaver with ’er on the voyage up. She says everybody in Taaoa knows Barbe is a leper, an’ she’s preparin’ to ’ave the bleedin’ Frog doctors cage ’er up out there by Papenoo, if she goes to Tahiti.”

“I never heard before that she had leprosy,” said Ducat. “I think that ManÁ is spreading that report to scare Lutz.”

“I feel sure that it has not reached him,” I said. “Nobody in Atuona would mention it to him.”

Abruptly there occurred to me the cryptic assertion of Peyral at my first sight of Barbe in the mission church.

“I wouldn’t be her with all her money,” he had said. “Me, I value my skin.”

That was weeks or months before Lemoal had come to me, or I had known of the taua, or of Lutz’s courtship. If there had been a plot against her happiness, it must have been laid early, or what did Peyral mean?

McHenry broke in on my train of reasoning.

“I’ll see that the German sausage learns about it damn soon,” he said spitefully. “He’s doin’ too good a business in both copra an’ women.”

The whistle of the Saint FranÇois blew the recall of boats and crew.

“Why don’t you stay, an’ go to Papeet’ with me,” asked Captain Pincher. “We’ll ’ead out in a day or two when the wind is right. You’re in no ‘’urry. You want to see ’em lay ol’ Mapuhi in the grave.”

I agreed, and paddled to shore with McHenry. Natives were taking the last load of copra out to the steamship, and I rode on the bags with McHenry. On the deck of the Saint FranÇois I passed Barbe and the nuns on my way below to get my trifling belongings. McHenry stayed above, and, when I had bidden good-by to the captain and the first officer, I sought the three women, with my canvas bag in hand. The sisters were my friends, and I shook their hands. I was about to say au revoir to Barbe when she walked with me a few yards to the gangway. I explained my intention not to continue on the steamship.

“What shall I do?” she implored, as she squeezed my hand nervously. “I am afraid of everything—”

The whistle sounded again.

Lutz, who was talking with McHenry, approached me, and drew from me my reason for carrying my assets with me. I thought he appeared relieved at my leaving, and that his hopes to see me in Papeete were shammed. In the boat I glanced up to see Mademoiselle Narbonne leaning over the rail, her black cloud of hair framing her pale face with its look of sadness and perplexity, and her eyes still demanding of me the answer to her question.

“I bloody well put a roach in Lutz’s ear,” said McHenry, as we rowed back.

That he had even mentioned Barbe’s name I did not believe. Lutz would have taken him by the throat, and thrown him overboard. On the strand at the atoll again, I saw the smoke streaming from the steamship’s funnel as she set out for Papeete; and I sent an unspoken message of good will to the groping ill-matched pair whom I could not call lovers, and yet both of whom were searching for the satisfaction of heart and ambition I too sought.

Mapuhi was interred that afternoon an hour before sunset. In these atolls where there is no soil, and where water lies close under the coral surface, even burial is difficult. Cyclones as in Hikueru have torn the coral coverings off the graves, and swept the coffins, corpses, and bones into the lagoon and the maws of the sharks and the voracious barracuda. For Mapuhi a marble cenotaph would be ordered in Tahiti, and cover him when made in a few weeks.

Nohea and two elders dug the grave. About four feet deep, it was wide enough to rest the huge body in the glistening coffin. This was borne on the shoulders of six young men, nephews of Mapuhi, and in the cortÈge were all of the Takaroans of age. Solemnly and silently they marched down the road. All who owned black garments wore them, and others were in white trousers, some with and others without shirts, but all treading ceremoniously with bowed heads and serious faces. Nohea was the leader, carrying the large Book of Mormon from the temple, and at the grave he read from it verses about the resurrection, the near approach of the coming of Christ, and Mapuhi’s being quiet in the grave until the trumpet rang for the assembling of the just, the unjust on opposite sides for judgment.

“Mapuhi a Mapuhi will sit very close to Brigham Young in the judgment and afterward will be among the great on earth when the rejected are cast into the terrible pit of fire, and the elect live in plenty and happiness here.”

The heavy ivory sand rattled on the wood, and the remains of Mapuhi, last link between the healthy savagery and the present semi-civilization of the Paumotuan race, were one with the mysterious beach he had so long dwelt upon. He had been born before the white man ruled it, and his life had spanned the rise of the imperial industrialism which had destroyed the Polynesian.

After the funeral I took my bag to the hut of Nohea, to live the few days until the Morning Star left for Papeete. Our frugal meal was soon eaten, and the old diver and I sat outside his door in the cool of the sunset glow. We talked of Mapuhi.

“We had the same father but different mothers,” said Nohea. “Mapuhi was twenty years older than I. For many years he was as my father to me.”

“Where is Mapuhi now?” I asked, to discover his beliefs about the soul. Nohea trembled, and looked about him.

“Is he not in the hole in the coral?” he said, with alarm.

“Oh, yes, Nohea,” I replied, “the body of Mapuhi is in the coral, but where is that part that knew how to dive, to steer the schooner, to grow rich, and to pray? Where is that varua or spirit which loved you?”

Nohea responded quickly: “That is with the gods, with Adam, Christ, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young. Mapuhi is with them making souls for the bodies of Mormon babies on earth. When Israel gathers by and by, I will see him again, for we will all live in America and be happy.”

“But Nohea,” I protested, “you will not be happy away from Takaroa. Your canoe and your fishing-nets and spears will be left behind.”

Nohea was confused, but his faith was strong.

“The elders have explained that in America, where all the saved people shall live after the judgment, we shall have everything we want. The fish will jump on the hook, the canoe will paddle itself, and the cocoanuts will be always ready for eating or cool for drinking.”

I tried to draw our conversation around to Mapuhi again, but Nohea, as the darkness grew thicker, busied himself in making a fire of cocoanut husks and leaves, and evaded any reference to the dead.

Only after the moon began to come up, he said, “I must now go to keep watch at the grave of Mapuhi. It is my duty, and I must go.”

He brought from his hut a crazy-quilt, and wrapped it about him, and with extreme hesitancy walked away through the obscurity to carry out the obligation of friendship.

Hardly can we guess at the horror he had to overcome to do this. The remnant of fear of the dead that our slight inheritance of ancestral delusions causes to linger in some of us is the merest shadow of the all-pervading terror that weakens the Paumotuan at thought of the ghost of the defunct which stays near the corpse to threaten and perhaps to seize and eat the living. Associated, maybe, with the former cannibalism, when the living consumed the dead, Nohea, though earnest Mormon, believed that the tupapau hovered over the grave or in the tree-tops, to accomplish this ghastly purpose. Had Punau, the widow of Mapuhi, been living, she would have had to spend her nights for several weeks by his sepulcher. Being a chief, there were many to perform this devoir, and before I entered the hut to sleep I saw several small fires burning about the spot where the watchers cowered and whispered through the night. Of the dangers of this office of friendship or widowhood, every atoll in the Paumotus had a hundred tales, and Tahiti and the Marquesas more. In Tahiti, the tupapau, the disembodied and malign ego of the dead, entered the room where the remains were laid out.

A frightening noise was heard in the room or in that part of the house, followed by sounds and movements of a struggle, and in the morning gouts of blood were on the walls. In Moorea, near Tahiti, I met an educated Englishman, there twenty-five years, who said that on analysis the blood proved to be human. A cynic in most things, he would not deny that he believed the circumstance supernatural.

The tupapau had many manifestations: knocks at doors and on thatched roofs, cries of sorrow and of hate. White it was in the night, and often hovering over the house or the grave. It might be that the Ghost Bird, the burong-hantu, a reality which is white, and whose wings make little or no noise when flying, was the foundation of this phantom.

In the meanwhile the schooner Morning Star had gone to Tikei for cargo. Lying Bill was to anchor off the pass of Takaroa in a few days on his voyage to Tahiti and to send ashore a boat for me. For nine nights the vigil was kept by the grave of Mapuhi. About four o’clock each morning the ward by the grave was abandoned, and Nohea threw himself wearily on his mat near me. Only one time, on the last evening, I questioned him about the tupapau, and then realized my discourtesy; it was for him to initiate this subject.

“Have you heard or seen anything rima atua nianatura? Anything by the hand of the spirit?”

Nohea wrapped himself more tightly in his quilt, and his answer came from under it:

“This morning I heard a scratching. This is our last night, thank the gods. I think it was the tupapau saying farewell. We never look at the grave.”

About two the next morning Nohea shook me.

“The Fetia Taiao is off the passage,” he said.

He had heard in the still air the faint slap of her canvas as she jibed, I thought, but that could not have been, as she was too far away. His awareness was not of the ear or eyes, but something different—the keenness of the conscious and unconscious, which had preserved the Paumotuan race in an environment which had meant starvation and death to any other people.

I had my possessions already on the schooner, and, forbidding Nohea to wait with me at the mole, I embraced him and left him. A wish to look at the grave took hold of me, and I walked along the path to it. The sun, though below the horizon, was lessening the sombrous color of the small hours, and I could discern vaguely the outline of the walled burial-ground. The splash of oars in the water and the rattle of rowlocks warned me of the approach of the boat for me, but I still had five minutes.

I sat down on the wall at the farthest end away from the grave. Soon I would be in my own country, among the commonplace scenes of cities and countryside. I would resume the habits and conventions of my nation, and enter into the struggle for survival and for repute. Those goals shrunk in importance on this strip of coral. Never would I be able to express in myself the joy and heat of life, and the conquest of nature at its zenith of mystery, as had the man whose tenement of clay was so near. Love had been his animating emotion. In all the welter of low passions, of conflicting religions, and commercial standards imported to his island by the whites, he had remained a son of the atoll, brother and father of his tribe, disdainful of the inventions and luxuries offered him for his wealth, but shaping his course adroitly for his race’s happiness.

Deep in this strain of reflection, I was recalled to actuality by a grating sound, a queer crunching and creaking. It came from about the tomb, and was like a hundred rats dragging objects on a stone floor—slithering discordant, offensive. If I could have fainted it would have been relief, for I was seized with mortal terror. I could not reason. The boat from the schooner was nearing fast, and would be at the mole in a minute or two. I must go, but I could not move. Then suddenly a bar of light flung up from the sea, the first of the dawn, and by its feeble glimmer I saw a swarm of creatures about the barrow. They were the robber-crabs who had come out from the groves, and they were pulling the pieces of coral off the burial heap, and digging to pierce the coffin. Scores of the grisly vampires were working with their huge claws at the pile, and, as they rushed to and fro on their tall, obscene legs, they were the very like of ghouls in animal form. This was the “scratching” Nohea had heard when with their back to the grave he and his fellow-watchers dared not turn to see them.

I should have thrown rocks at the foul monsters, have scattered them with kicks and curses, but my deliverance from the supernatural was so comforting I could only burst into nervous laughter and run down the road to the mole. I leaped into the boat, and gave the order to shove off. In half an hour I was aboard the Morning Star and our sails spread for Tahiti and California.