The reader may think I have forgot the sea.  The two beaches do
certainly abound in life, and they are strangely different.  In the
lagoon the water shallows slowly on a bottom of the fine slimy
sand, dotted with clumps of growing coral.  Then comes a strip of
tidal beach on which the ripples lap.  In the coral clumps the
great holy-water clam (Tridacna) grows plentifully; a little deeper
lie the beds of the pearl-oyster and sail the resplendent fish that
charmed us at our entrance; and these are all more or less
vigorously coloured.  But the other shells are white like lime, or
faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible display;
many of them dead besides, and badly rolled.  On the ocean side, on
the mounds of the steep beach, over all the width of the reef right
out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny, under every
scattered fragment of the coral, an incredible plenty of marine
life displays the most wonderful variety and brilliancy of hues.
The reef itself has no passage of colour but is imitated by some
shell.  Purple and red and white, and green and yellow, pied and
striped and clouded, the living shells wear in every combination
the livery of the dead reef--if the reef be dead--so that the eye
is continually baffled and the collector continually deceived.  I
have taken shells for stones and stones for shells, the one as
often as the other.  A prevailing character of the coral is to be
dotted with small spots of red, and it is wonderful how many
varieties of shell have adopted the same fashion and donned the
disguise of the red spot.  A shell I had found in plenty in the
Marquesas I found here also unchanged in all things else, but there
were the red spots.  A lively little crab wore the same markings.
The case of the hermit or soldier crab was more conclusive, being
the result of conscious choice.  This nasty little wrecker,
scavenger, and squatter has learned the value of a spotted house;
so it be of the right colour he will choose the smallest shard,
tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and go about the
world half naked; but I never found him in this imperfect armour
unless it was marked with the red spot.

Some two hundred yards distant is the beach of the lagoon.  Collect
the shells from each, set them side by side, and you would suppose
they came from different hemispheres; the one so pale, the other so
brilliant; the one prevalently white, the other of a score of hues,
and infected with the scarlet spot like a disease.  This seems the
more strange, since the hermit crabs pass and repass the island,
and I have met them by the Residency well, which is about central,
journeying either way.  Without doubt many of the shells in the
lagoon are dead.  But why are they dead?  Without doubt the living
shells have a very different background set for imitation.  But why
are these so different?  We are only on the threshold of the
mysteries.

Either beach, I have said, abounds with life.  On the sea-side and
in certain atolls this profusion of vitality is even shocking:  the
rock under foot is mined with it.  I have broken off--notably in
Funafuti and Arorai--great lumps of ancient weathered rock that
rang under my blows like iron, and the fracture has been full of
pendent worms as long as my hand, as thick as a child's finger, of
a slightly pinkish white, and set as close as three or even four to
the square inch.  Even in the lagoon, where certain shell-fish seem
to sicken, others (it is notorious) prosper exceedingly and make
the riches of these islands.  Fish, too, abound; the lagoon is a
closed fish-pond, such as might rejoice the fancy of an abbot;
sharks swarm there, and chiefly round the passages, to feast upon
this plenty, and you would suppose that man had only to prepare his
angle.  Alas! it is not so.  Of these painted fish that came in
hordes about the entering Casco, some bore poisonous spines, and
others were poisonous if eaten.  The stranger must refrain, or take
his chance of painful and dangerous sickness.  The native, on his
own isle, is a safe guide; transplant him to the next, and he is
helpless as yourself.  For it is a question both of time and place.
A fish caught in a lagoon may be deadly; the same fish caught the
same day at sea, and only a few hundred yards without the passage,
will be wholesome eating:  in a neighbouring isle perhaps the case
will be reversed; and perhaps a fortnight later you shall be able
to eat of them indifferently from within and from without.
According to the natives, these bewildering vicissitudes are ruled
by the movement of the heavenly bodies.  The beautiful planet Venus
plays a great part in all island tales and customs; and among other
functions, some of them more awful, she regulates the season of
good fish.  With Venus in one phase, as we had her, certain fish
were poisonous in the lagoon:  with Venus in another, the same fish
was harmless and a valued article of diet.  White men explain these
changes by the phases of the coral.

It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious
annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of
honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the
clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn
boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust venomous as an
apothecary's drugs.



CHAPTER III--A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND



Never populous, it was yet by a chapter of accidents that I found
the island so deserted that no sound of human life diversified the
hours; that we walked in that trim public garden of a town, among
closed houses, without even a lodging-bill in a window to prove
some tenancy in the back quarters; and, when we visited the
Government bungalow, that Mr. Donat, acting Vice-Resident, greeted
us alone, and entertained us with cocoa-nut punches in the Sessions
Hall and seat of judgment of that widespread archipelago, our
glasses standing arrayed with summonses and census returns.  The
unpopularity of a late Vice-Resident had begun the movement of
exodus, his native employes resigning court appointments and
retiring each to his own coco-patch in the remoter districts of the
isle.  Upon the back of that, the Governor in Papeete issued a
decree:  All land in the Paumotus must be defined and registered by
a certain date.  Now, the folk of the archipelago are half nomadic;
a man can scarce be said to belong to a particular atoll; he
belongs to several, perhaps holds a stake and counts cousinship in
half a score; and the inhabitants of Rotoava in particular, man,
woman, and child, and from the gendarme to the Mormon prophet and
the schoolmaster, owned--I was going to say land--owned at least
coral blocks and growing coco-palms in some adjacent isle.
Thither--from the gendarme to the babe in arms, the pastor followed
by his flock, the schoolmaster carrying along with him his
scholars, and the scholars with their books and slates--they had
taken ship some two days previous to our arrival, and were all now
engaged disputing boundaries.  Fancy overhears the shrillness of
their disputation mingle with the surf and scatter sea-fowl.  It
was admirable to observe the completeness of their flight, like
that of hibernating birds; nothing left but empty houses, like old
nests to be reoccupied in spring; and even the harmless necessary
dominie borne with them in their transmigration.  Fifty odd set
out, and only seven, I was informed, remained.  But when I made a
feast on board the Casco, more than seven, and nearer seven times
seven, appeared to be my guests.  Whence they appeared, how they
were summoned, whither they vanished when the feast was eaten, I
have no guess.  In view of Low Island tales, and that awful
frequentation which makes men avoid the seaward beaches of an
atoll, some two score of those that ate with us may have returned,
for the occasion, from the kingdom of the dead.

It was this solitude that put it in our minds to hire a house, and
become, for the time being, indwellers of the isle--a practice I
have ever since, when it was possible, adhered to.  Mr. Donat
placed us, with that intent, under the convoy of one Taniera
Mahinui, who combined the incongruous characters of catechist and
convict.  The reader may smile, but I affirm he was well qualified
for either part.  For that of convict, first of all, by a good
substantial felony, such as in all lands casts the perpetrator in
chains and dungeons.  Taniera was a man of birth--the chief a while
ago, as he loved to tell, of a district in Anaa of 800 souls.  In
an evil hour it occurred to the authorities in Papeete to charge
the chiefs with the collection of the taxes.  It is a question if
much were collected; it is certain that nothing was handed on; and
Taniera, who had distinguished himself by a visit to Papeete and
some high living in restaurants, was chosen for the scapegoat.  The
reader must understand that not Taniera but the authorities in
Papeete were first in fault.  The charge imposed was
disproportioned.  I have not yet heard of any Polynesian capable of
such a burden; honest and upright Hawaiians--one in particular, who
was admired even by the whites as an inflexible magistrate--have
stumbled in the narrow path of the trustee.  And Taniera, when the
pinch came, scorned to denounce accomplices; others had shared the
spoil, he bore the penalty alone.  He was condemned in five years.
The period, when I had the pleasure of his friendship, was not yet
expired; he still drew prison rations, the sole and not unwelcome
reminder of his chains, and, I believe, looked forward to the date
of his enfranchisement with mere alarm.  For he had no sense of
shame in the position; complained of nothing but the defective
table of his place of exile; regretted nothing but the fowls and
eggs and fish of his own more favoured island.  And as for his
parishioners, they did not think one hair the less of him.  A
schoolboy, mulcted in ten thousand lines of Greek and dwelling
sequestered in the dormitories, enjoys unabated consideration from
his fellows.  So with Taniera:  a marked man, not a dishonoured;
having fallen under the lash of the unthinkable gods; a Job,
perhaps, or say a Taniera in the den of lions.  Songs are likely
made and sung about this saintly Robin Hood.  On the other hand, he
was even highly qualified for his office in the Church; being by
nature a grave, considerate, and kindly man; his face rugged and
serious, his smile bright; the master of several trades, a builder
both of boats and houses; endowed with a fine pulpit voice; endowed
besides with such a gift of eloquence that at the grave of the late
chief of Fakarava he set all the assistants weeping.  I never met a
man of a mind more ecclesiastical; he loved to dispute and to
inform himself of doctrine and the history of sects; and when I
showed him the cuts in a volume of Chambers's Encyclopaedia--except
for one of an ape--reserved his whole enthusiasm for cardinals'
hats, censers, candlesticks, and cathedrals.  Methought when he
looked upon the cardinal's hat a voice said low in his ear:  'Your
foot is on the ladder.'

Under the guidance of Taniera we were soon installed in what I
believe to have been the best-appointed private house in Fakarava.
It stood just beyond the church in an oblong patch of cultivation.
More than three hundred sacks of soil were imported from Tahiti for
the Residency garden; and this must shortly be renewed, for the
earth blows away, sinks in crevices of the coral, and is sought for
at last in vain.  I know not how much earth had gone to the garden
of my villa; some at least, for an alley of prosperous bananas ran
to the gate, and over the rest of the enclosure, which was covered
with the usual clinker-like fragments of smashed coral, not only
coco-palms and mikis but also fig-trees flourished, all of a
delicious greenness.  Of course there was no blade of grass.  In
front a picket fence divided us from the white road, the palm-
fringed margin of the lagoon, and the lagoon itself, reflecting
clouds by day and stars by night.  At the back, a bulwark of
uncemented coral enclosed us from the narrow belt of bush and the
nigh ocean beach where the seas thundered, the roar and wash of
them still humming in the chambers of the house.

This itself was of one story, verandahed front and back.  It
contained three rooms, three sewing-machines, three sea-chests,
chairs, tables, a pair of beds, a cradle, a double-barrelled gun, a
pair of enlarged coloured photographs, a pair of coloured prints
after Wilkie and Mulready, and a French lithograph with the legend:
'Le brigade du General Lepasset brulant son drapeau devant Metz.'
Under the stilts of the house a stove was rusting, till we drew it
forth and put it in commission.  Not far off was the burrow in the
coral whence we supplied ourselves with brackish water.  There was
live stock, besides, on the estate--cocks and hens and a brace of
ill-regulated cats, whom Taniera came every morning with the sun to
feed on grated cocoa-nut.  His voice was our regular reveille,
ringing pleasantly about the garden:  'Pooty--pooty--poo--poo--
poo!'

Far as we were from the public offices, the nearness of the chapel
made our situation what is called eligible in advertisements, and
gave us a side look on some native life.  Every morning, as soon as
he had fed the fowls, Taniera set the bell agoing in the small
belfry; and the faithful, who were not very numerous, gathered to
prayers.  I was once present:  it was the Lord's day, and seven
females and eight males composed the congregation.  A woman played
precentor, starting with a longish note; the catechist joined in
upon the second bar; and then the faithful in a body.  Some had
printed hymn-books which they followed; some of the rest filled up
with 'eh--eh--eh,' the Paumotuan tol-de-rol.  After the hymn, we
had an antiphonal prayer or two; and then Taniera rose from the
front bench, where he had been sitting in his catechist's robes,
passed within the altar-rails, opened his Tahitian Bible, and began
to preach from notes.  I understood one word--the name of God; but
the preacher managed his voice with taste, used rare and expressive
gestures, and made a strong impression of sincerity.  The plain
service, the vernacular Bible, the hymn-tunes mostly on an English
pattern--'God save the Queen,' I was informed, a special
favourite,--all, save some paper flowers upon the altar, seemed not
merely but austerely Protestant.  It is thus the Catholics have met
their low island proselytes half-way.

Taniera had the keys of our house; it was with him I made my
bargain, if that could be called a bargain in which all was
remitted to my generosity; it was he who fed the cats and poultry,
he who came to call and pick a meal with us like an acknowledged
friend; and we long fondly supposed he was our landlord.  This
belief was not to bear the test of experience; and, as my chapter
has to relate, no certainty succeeded it.

We passed some days of airless quiet and great heat; shell-
gatherers were warned from the ocean beach, where sunstroke waited
them from ten till four; the highest palm hung motionless, there
was no voice audible but that of the sea on the far side.  At last,
about four of a certain afternoon, long cat's-paws flawed the face
of the lagoon; and presently in the tree-tops there awoke the
grateful bustle of the trades, and all the houses and alleys of the
island were fanned out.  To more than one enchanted ship, that had
lain long becalmed in view of the green shore, the wind brought
deliverance; and by daylight on the morrow a schooner and two
cutters lay moored in the port of Rotoava.  Not only in the outer
sea, but in the lagoon itself, a certain traffic woke with the
reviving breeze; and among the rest one Francois, a half-blood, set
sail with the first light in his own half-decked cutter.  He had
held before a court appointment; being, I believe, the Residency
sweeper-out.  Trouble arising with the unpopular Vice-Resident, he
had thrown his honours down, and fled to the far parts of the atoll
to plant cabbages--or at least coco-palms.  Thence he was now
driven by such need as even a Cincinnatus must acknowledge, and
fared for the capital city, the seat of his late functions, to
exchange half a ton of copra for necessary flour.  And here, for a
while, the story leaves to tell of his voyaging.

It must tell, instead, of our house, where, toward seven at night,
the catechist came suddenly in with his pleased air of being
welcome; armed besides with a considerable bunch of keys.  These he
proceeded to try on the sea-chests, drawing each in turn from its
place against the wall.  Heads of strangers appeared in the doorway
and volunteered suggestions.  All in vain.  Either they were the
wrong keys or the wrong boxes, or the wrong man was trying them.
For a little Taniera fumed and fretted; then had recourse to the
more summary method of the hatchet; one of the chests was broken
open, and an armful of clothing, male and female, baled out and
handed to the strangers on the verandah.

These were Francois, his wife, and their child.  About eight a.m.,
in the midst of the lagoon, their cutter had capsized in jibbing.
They got her righted, and though she was still full of water put
the child on board.  The mainsail had been carried away, but the
jib still drew her sluggishly along, and Francois and the woman
swam astern and worked the rudder with their hands.  The cold was
cruel; the fatigue, as time went on, became excessive; and in that
preserve of sharks, fear hunted them.  Again and again, Francois,
the half-breed, would have desisted and gone down; but the woman,
whole blood of an amphibious race, still supported him with
cheerful words.  I am reminded of a woman of Hawaii who swam with
her husband, I dare not say how many miles, in a high sea, and came
ashore at last with his dead body in her arms.  It was about five
in the evening, after nine hours' swimming, that Francois and his
wife reached land at Rotoava.  The gallant fight was won, and
instantly the more childish side of native character appears.  They
had supped, and told and retold their story, dripping as they came;
the flesh of the woman, whom Mrs. Stevenson helped to shift, was
cold as stone; and Francois, having changed to a dry cotton shirt
and trousers, passed the remainder of the evening on my floor and
between open doorways, in a thorough draught.  Yet Francois, the
son of a French father, speaks excellent French himself and seems
intelligent.

It was our first idea that the catechist, true to his evangelical
vocation, was clothing the naked from his superfluity.  Then it
came out that Francois was but dealing with his own.  The clothes
were his, so was the chest, so was the house.  Francois was in fact
the landlord.  Yet you observe he had hung back on the verandah
while Taniera tried his 'prentice hand upon the locks:  and even
now, when his true character appeared, the only use he made of the
estate was to leave the clothes of his family drying on the fence.
Taniera was still the friend of the house, still fed the poultry,
still came about us on his daily visits, Francois, during the
remainder of his stay, holding bashfully aloof.  And there was
stranger matter.  Since Francois had lost the whole load of his
cutter, the half ton of copra, an axe, bowls, knives, and clothes--
since he had in a manner to begin the world again, and his
necessary flour was not yet bought or paid for--I proposed to
advance him what he needed on the rent.  To my enduring amazement
he refused, and the reason he gave--if that can be called a reason
which but darkens counsel--was that Taniera was his friend.  His
friend, you observe; not his creditor.  I inquired into that, and
was assured that Taniera, an exile in a strange isle, might
possibly be in debt himself, but certainly was no man's creditor.

Very early one morning we were awakened by a bustling presence in
the yard, and found our camp had been surprised by a tall, lean old
native lady, dressed in what were obviously widow's weeds.  You
could see at a glance she was a notable woman, a housewife, sternly
practical, alive with energy, and with fine possibilities of
temper.  Indeed, there was nothing native about her but the skin;
and the type abounds, and is everywhere respected, nearer home.  It
did us good to see her scour the grounds, examining the plants and
chickens; watering, feeding, trimming them; taking angry, purpose-
like possession.  When she neared the house our sympathy abated;
when she came to the broken chest I wished I were elsewhere.  We
had scarce a word in common; but her whole lean body spoke for her
with indignant eloquence.  'My chest!' it cried, with a stress on
the possessive.  'My chest--broken open!  This is a fine state of
things!'  I hastened to lay the blame where it belonged--on
Francois and his wife--and found I had made things worse instead of
better.  She repeated the names at first with incredulity, then
with despair.  A while she seemed stunned, next fell to
disembowelling the box, piling the goods on the floor, and visibly
computing the extent of Francois's ravages; and presently after she
was observed in high speech with Taniera, who seemed to hang an ear
like one reproved.

Here, then, by all known marks, should be my land-lady at last;
here was every character of the proprietor fully developed.  Should
I not approach her on the still depending question of my rent?  I
carried the point to an adviser.  'Nonsense!' he cried.  'That's
the old woman, the mother.  It doesn't belong to her.  I believe
that's the man the house belongs to,' and he pointed to one of the
coloured photographs on the wall.  On this I gave up all desire of
understanding; and when the time came for me to leave, in the
judgment-hall of the archipelago, and with the awful countenance of
the acting Governor, I duly paid my rent to Taniera.  He was
satisfied, and so was I.  But what had he to do with it?  Mr.
Donat, acting magistrate and a man of kindred blood, could throw no
light upon the mystery; a plain private person, with a taste for
letters, cannot be expected to do more.



CHAPTER IV--TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS



The most careless reader must have remarked a change of air since
the Marquesas.  The house, crowded with effects, the bustling
housewife counting her possessions, the serious, indoctrinated
island pastor, the long fight for life in the lagoon:  here are
traits of a new world.  I read in a pamphlet (I will not give the
author's name) that the Marquesan especially resembles the
Paumotuan.  I should take the two races, though so near in
neighbourhood, to be extremes of Polynesian diversity.  The
Marquesan is certainly the most beautiful of human races, and one
of the tallest--the Paumotuan averaging a good inch shorter, and
not even handsome; the Marquesan open-handed, inert, insensible to
religion, childishly self-indulgent--the Paumotuan greedy, hardy,
enterprising, a religious disputant, and with a trace of the
ascetic character.

Yet a few years ago, and the people of the archipelago were crafty
savages.  Their isles might be called sirens' isles, not merely
from the attraction they exerted on the passing mariner, but from
the perils that awaited him on shore.  Even to this day, in certain
outlying islands, danger lingers; and the civilized Paumotuan
dreads to land and hesitates to accost his backward brother.  But,
except in these, to-day the peril is a memory.  When our generation
were yet in the cradle and playroom it was still a living fact.
Between 1830 and 1840, Hao, for instance, was a place of the most
dangerous approach, where ships were seized and crews kidnapped.
As late as 1856, the schooner Sarah Ann sailed from Papeete and was
seen no more.  She had women on board, and children, the captain's
wife, a nursemaid, a baby, and the two young sons of a Captain
Steven on their way to the mainland for schooling.  All were
supposed to have perished in a squall.  A year later, the captain
of the Julia, coasting along the island variously called Bligh,
Lagoon, and Tematangi saw armed natives follow the course of his
schooner, clad in many-coloured stuffs.  Suspicion was at once
aroused; the mother of the lost children was profuse of money; and
one expedition having found the place deserted, and returned
content with firing a few shots, she raised and herself accompanied
another.  None appeared to greet or to oppose them; they roamed a
while among abandoned huts and empty thickets; then formed two
parties and set forth to beat, from end to end, the pandanus jungle
of the island.  One man remained alone by the landing-place--Teina,
a chief of Anaa, leader of the armed natives who made the strength
of the expedition.  Now that his comrades were departed this way
and that, on their laborious exploration, the silence fell
profound; and this silence was the ruin of the islanders.  A sound
of stones rattling caught the ear of Teina.  He looked, thinking to
perceive a crab, and saw instead the brown hand of a human being
issue from a fissure in the ground.  A shout recalled the search
parties and announced their doom to the buried caitiffs.  In the
cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human bones and
singular and horrid curiosities.  One was a head of golden hair,
supposed to be a relic of the captain's wife; another was half of
the body of a European child, sun-dried and stuck upon a stick,
doubtless with some design of wizardry.

The Paumotuan is eager to be rich.  He saves, grudges, buries
money, fears not work.  For a dollar each, two natives passed the
hours of daylight cleaning our ship's copper.  It was strange to
see them so indefatigable and so much at ease in the water--working
at times with their pipes lighted, the smoker at times submerged
and only the glowing bowl above the surface; it was stranger still
to think they were next congeners to the incapable Marquesan.  But
the Paumotuan not only saves, grudges, and works, he steals
besides; or, to be more precise, he swindles.  He will never deny a
debt, he only flees his creditor.  He is always keen for an
advance; so soon as he has fingered it he disappears.  He knows
your ship; so soon as it nears one island, he is off to another.
You may think you know his name; he has already changed it.
Pursuit in that infinity of isles were fruitless.  The result can
be given in a nutshell.  It has been actually proposed in a
Government report to secure debts by taking a photograph of the
debtor; and the other day in Papeete credits on the Paumotus to the
amount of sixteen thousand pounds were sold for less than forty--
quatre cent mille francs pour moins de mille francs.  Even so, the
purchase was thought hazardous; and only the man who made it and
who had special opportunities could have dared to give so much.

The Paumotuan is sincerely attached to those of his own blood and
household.  A touching affection sometimes unites wife and husband.
Their children, while they are alive, completely rule them; after
they are dead, their bones or their mummies are often jealously
preserved and carried from atoll to atoll in the wanderings of the
family.  I was told there were many houses in Fakarava with the
mummy of a child locked in a sea-chest; after I heard it, I would
glance a little jealously at those by my own bed; in that cupboard,
also, it was possible there was a tiny skeleton.

The race seems in a fair way to survive.  From fifteen islands,
whose rolls I had occasion to consult, I found a proportion of 59
births to 47 deaths for 1887.  Dropping three out of the fifteen,
there remained for the other twelve the comfortable ratio of 50
births to 32 deaths.  Long habits of hardship and activity
doubtless explain the contrast with Marquesan figures.  But the
Paumotuan displays, besides, a certain concern for health and the
rudiments of a sanitary discipline.  Public talk with these free-
spoken people plays the part of the Contagious Diseases Act; in-
comers to fresh islands anxiously inquire if all be well; and
syphilis, when contracted, is successfully treated with indigenous
herbs.  Like their neighbours of Tahiti, from whom they have
perhaps imbibed the error, they regard leprosy with comparative
indifference, elephantiasis with disproportionate fear.  But,
unlike indeed to the Tahitian, their alarm puts on the guise of
self-defence.  Any one stricken with this painful and ugly malady
is confined to the ends of villages, denied the use of paths and
highways, and condemned to transport himself between his house and
coco-patch by water only, his very footprint being held infectious.
Fe'efe'e, being a creature of marshes and the sequel of malarial
fever, is not original in atolls.  On the single isle of Makatea,
where the lagoon is now a marsh, the disease has made a home.  Many
suffer; they are excluded (if Mr. Wilmot be right) from much of the
comfort of society; and it is believed they take a secret
vengeance.  The defections of the sick are considered highly
poisonous.  Early in the morning, it is narrated, aged and
malicious persons creep into the sleeping village, and stealthily
make water at the doors of the houses of young men.  Thus they
propagate disease; thus they breathe on and obliterate comeliness
and health, the objects of their envy.  Whether horrid fact or more
abominable legend, it equally depicts that something bitter and
energetic which distinguishes Paumotuan man.

The archipelago is divided between two main religions, Catholic and
Mormon.  They front each other proudly with a false air of
permanence; yet are but shapes, their membership in a perpetual
flux.  The Mormon attends mass with devotion:  the Catholic sits
attentive at a Mormon sermon, and to-morrow each may have
transferred allegiance.  One man had been a pillar of the Church of
Rome for fifteen years; his wife dying, he decided that must be a
poor religion that could not save a man his wife, and turned
Mormon.  According to one informant, Catholicism was the more
fashionable in health, but on the approach of sickness it was
judged prudent to secede.  As a Mormon, there were five chances out
of six you might recover; as a Catholic, your hopes were small; and
this opinion is perhaps founded on the comfortable rite of unction.

We all know what Catholics are, whether in the Paumotus or at home.
But the Paumotuan Mormon seemed a phenomenon apart.  He marries but
the one wife, uses the Protestant Bible, observes Protestant forms
of worship, forbids the use of liquor and tobacco, practises adult
baptism by immersion, and after every public sin, rechristens the
backslider.  I advised with Mahinui, whom I found well informed in
the history of the American Mormons, and he declared against the
least connection.  'Pour moi,' said he, with a fine charity, 'les
Mormons ici un petit Catholiques.'  Some months later I had an
opportunity to consult an orthodox fellow-countryman, an old
dissenting Highlander, long settled in Tahiti, but still breathing
of the heather of Tiree.  'Why do they call themselves Mormons?' I
asked.  'My dear, and that is my question!' he exclaimed.  'For by
all that I can hear of their doctrine, I have nothing to say
against it, and their life, it is above reproach.'  And for all
that, Mormons they are, but of the earlier sowing:  the so-called
Josephites, the followers of Joseph Smith, the opponents of Brigham
Young.

Grant, then, the Mormons to be Mormons.  Fresh points at once
arise:  What are the Israelites? and what the Kanitus?  For a long
while back the sect had been divided into Mormons proper and so-
called Israelites, I never could hear why.  A few years since there
came a visiting missionary of the name of Williams, who made an
excellent collection, and retired, leaving fresh disruption
imminent.  Something irregular (as I was told) in his way of
'opening the service' had raised partisans and enemies; the church
was once more rent asunder; and a new sect, the Kanitu, issued from
the division.  Since then Kanitus and Israelites, like the
Cameronians and the United Presbyterians, have made common cause;
and the ecclesiastical history of the Paumotus is, for the moment,
uneventful.  There will be more doing before long, and these isles
bid fair to be the Scotland of the South.  Two things I could never
learn.  The nature of the innovations of the Rev. Mr. Williams none
would tell me, and of the meaning of the name Kanitu none had a
guess.  It was not Tahitian, it was not Marquesan; it formed no
part of that ancient speech of the Paumotus, now passing swiftly
into obsolescence.  One man, a priest, God bless him! said it was
the Latin for a little dog.  I have found it since as the name of a
god in New Guinea; it must be a bolder man than I who should hint
at a connection.  Here, then, is a singular thing:  a brand-new
sect, arising by popular acclamation, and a nonsense word invented
for its name.

The design of mystery seems obvious, and according to a very
intelligent observer, Mr. Magee of Mangareva, this element of the
mysterious is a chief attraction of the Mormon Church.  It enjoys
some of the status of Freemasonry at home, and there is for the
convert some of the exhilaration of adventure.  Other attractions
are certainly conjoined.  Perpetual rebaptism, leading to a
succession of baptismal feasts, is found, both from the social and
the spiritual side, a pleasing feature.  More important is the fact
that all the faithful enjoy office; perhaps more important still,
the strictness of the discipline.  'The veto on liquor,' said Mr.
Magee, 'brings them plenty members.'  There is no doubt these
islanders are fond of drink, and no doubt they refrain from the
indulgence; a bout on a feast-day, for instance, may be followed by
a week or a month of rigorous sobriety.  Mr. Wilmot attributes this
to Paumotuan frugality and the love of hoarding; it goes far
deeper.  I have mentioned that I made a feast on board the Casco.
To wash down ship's bread and jam, each guest was given the choice
of rum or syrup, and out of the whole number only one man voted--in
a defiant tone, and amid shouts of mirth--for 'Trum'!  This was in
public.  I had the meanness to repeat the experiment, whenever I
had a chance, within the four walls of my house; and three at
least, who had refused at the festival, greedily drank rum behind a
door.  But there were others thoroughly consistent.  I said the
virtues of the race were bourgeois and puritan; and how bourgeois
is this! how puritanic! how Scottish! and how Yankee!--the
temptation, the resistance, the public hypocritical conformity, the
Pharisees, the Holy Willies, and the true disciples.  With such a
people the popularity of an ascetic Church appears legitimate; in
these strict rules, in this perpetual supervision, the weak find
their advantage, the strong a certain pleasure; and the doctrine of
rebaptism, a clean bill and a fresh start, will comfort many
staggering professors.

There is yet another sect, or what is called a sect--no doubt
improperly--that of the Whistlers.  Duncan Cameron, so clear in
favour of the Mormons, was no less loud in condemnation of the
Whistlers.  Yet I do not know; I still fancy there is some
connection, perhaps fortuitous, probably disavowed.  Here at least
are some doings in the house of an Israelite clergyman (or prophet)
in the island of Anaa, of which I am equally sure that Duncan would
disclaim and the Whistlers hail them for an imitation of their own.
My informant, a Tahitian and a Catholic, occupied one part of the
house; the prophet and his family lived in the other.  Night after
night the Mormons, in the one end, held their evening sacrifice of
song; night after night, in the other, the wife of the Tahitian lay
awake and listened to their singing with amazement.  At length she
could contain herself no longer, woke her husband, and asked him
what he heard.  'I hear several persons singing hymns,' said he.
'Yes,' she returned, 'but listen again!  Do you not hear something
supernatural?'  His attention thus directed, he was aware of a
strange buzzing voice--and yet he declared it was beautiful--which
justly accompanied the singers.  The next day he made inquiries.
'It is a spirit,' said the prophet, with entire simplicity, 'which
has lately made a practice of joining us at family worship.'  It
did not appear the thing was visible, and like other spirits raised
nearer home in these degenerate days, it was rudely ignorant, at
first could only buzz, and had only learned of late to bear a part
correctly in the music.

The performances of the Whistlers are more business-like.  Their
meetings are held publicly with open doors, all being 'cordially
invited to attend.'  The faithful sit about the room--according to
one informant, singing hymns; according to another, now singing and
now whistling; the leader, the wizard--let me rather say, the
medium--sits in the midst, enveloped in a sheet and silent; and
presently, from just above his head, or sometimes from the midst of
the roof, an aerial whistling proceeds, appalling to the
inexperienced.  This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its
purport is taken down progressively by one of the experts, writing,
I was told, 'as fast as a telegraph operator'; and the
communications are at last made public.  They are of the baldest
triviality; a schooner is, perhaps, announced, some idle gossip
reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to
consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested.  One
of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to
the patient.  The whole business is very dreary, very silly, and
very European; it has none of the picturesque qualities of similar
conjurations in New Zealand; it seems to possess no kernel of
possible sense, like some that I shall describe among the Gilbert
islanders.  Yet I was told that many hardy, intelligent natives
were inveterate Whistlers.  'Like Mahinui?' I asked, willing to
have a standard; and I was told 'Yes.'  Why should I wonder?  Men
more enlightened than my convict-catechist sit down at home to
follies equally sterile and dull.

The medium is sometimes female.  It was a woman, for instance, who
introduced these practices on the north coast of Taiarapu, to the
scandal of her own connections, her brother-in-law in particular
declaring she was drunk.  But what shocked Tahiti might seem fit
enough in the Paumotus, the more so as certain women there possess,
by the gift of nature, singular and useful powers.  They say they
are honest, well-intentioned ladies, some of them embarrassed by
their weird inheritance.  And indeed the trouble caused by this
endowment is so great, and the protection afforded so
infinitesimally small, that I hesitate whether to call it a gift or
a hereditary curse.  You may rob this lady's coco-patch, steal her
canoes, burn down her house, and slay her family scatheless; but
one thing you must not do:  you must not lay a hand upon her
sleeping-mat, or your belly will swell, and you can only be cured
by the lady or her husband.  Here is the report of an eye-witness,
Tasmanian born, educated, a man who has made money--certainly no
fool.  In 1886 he was present in a house on Makatea, where two lads
began to skylark on the mats, and were (I think) ejected.
Instantly after, their bellies began to swell; pains took hold on
them; all manner of island remedies were exhibited in vain, and
rubbing only magnified their sufferings.  The man of the house was
called, explained the nature of the visitation, and prepared the
cure.  A cocoa-nut was husked, filled with herbs, and with all the
ceremonies of a launch, and the utterance of spells in the
Paumotuan language, committed to the sea.  From that moment the
pains began to grow more easy and the swelling to subside.  The
reader may stare.  I can assure him, if he moved much among old
residents of the archipelago, he would be driven to admit one thing
of two--either that there is something in the swollen bellies or
nothing in the evidence of man.

I have not met these gifted ladies; but I had an experience of my
own, for I have played, for one night only, the part of the
whistling spirit.  It had been blowing wearily all day, but with
the fall of night the wind abated, and the moon, which was then
full, rolled in a clear sky.  We went southward down the island on
the side of the lagoon, walking through long-drawn forest aisles of
palm, and on a floor of snowy sand.  No life was abroad, nor sound
of life; till in a clear part of the isle we spied the embers of a
fire, and not far off, in a dark house, heard natives talking
softly.  To sit without a light, even in company, and under cover,
is for a Paumotuan a somewhat hazardous extreme.  The whole scene--
the strong moonlight and crude shadows on the sand, the scattered
coals, the sound of the low voices from the house, and the lap of
the lagoon along the beach--put me (I know not how) on thoughts of
superstition.  I was barefoot, I observed my steps were noiseless,
and drawing near to the dark house, but keeping well in shadow,
began to whistle.  'The Heaving of the Lead' was my air--no very
tragic piece.  With the first note the conversation and all
movement ceased; silence accompanied me while I continued; and when
I passed that way on my return I found the lamp was lighted in the
house, but the tongues were still mute.  All night, as I now think,
the wretches shivered and were silent.  For indeed, I had no guess
at the time at the nature and magnitude of the terrors I inflicted,
or with what grisly images the notes of that old song had peopled
the dark house.



CHAPTER V--A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL



No, I had no guess of these men's terrors.  Yet I had received ere
that a hint, if I had understood; and the occasion was a funeral.

A little apart in the main avenue of Rotoava, in a low hut of
leaves that opened on a small enclosure, like a pigsty on a pen, an
old man dwelt solitary with his aged wife.  Perhaps they were too
old to migrate with the others; perhaps they were too poor, and had
no possessions to dispute.  At least they had remained behind; and
it thus befell that they were invited to my feast.  I dare say it
was quite a piece of politics in the pigsty whether to come or not
to come, and the husband long swithered between curiosity and age,
till curiosity conquered, and they came, and in the midst of that
last merrymaking death tapped him on the shoulder.  For some days,
when the sky was bright and the wind cool, his mat would be spread
in the main highway of the village, and he was to be seen lying
there inert, a mere handful of a man, his wife inertly seated by
his head.  They seemed to have outgrown alike our needs and
faculties; they neither spoke nor listened; they suffered us to
pass without a glance; the wife did not fan, she seemed not to
attend upon her husband, and the two poor antiques sat juxtaposed
under the high canopy of palms, the human tragedy reduced to its
bare elements, a sight beyond pathos, stirring a thrill of
curiosity.  And yet there was one touch of the pathetic haunted me:
that so much youth and expectation should have run in these starved
veins, and the man should have squandered all his lees of life on a
pleasure party.

On the morning of 17th September the sufferer died, and, time
pressing, he was buried the same day at four.  The cemetery lies to
seaward behind Government House; broken coral, like so much road-
metal, forms the surface; a few wooden crosses, a few
inconsiderable upright stones, designate graves; a mortared wall,
high enough to lean on, rings it about; a clustering shrub
surrounds it with pale leaves.  Here was the grave dug that
morning, doubtless by uneasy diggers, to the sound of the nigh sea
and the cries of sea-birds; meanwhile the dead man waited in his
house, and the widow and another aged woman leaned on the fence
before the door, no speech upon their lips, no speculation in their
eyes.

Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped
in white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind--not many,
for not many remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these
were poor; the men in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or
the gorgeous parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women,
with a few exceptions, brightly habited.  Far in the rear came the
widow, painfully carrying the dead man's mat; a creature aged
beyond humanity, to the likeness of some missing link.

The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone
with the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and
a layman took his office.  Standing at the head of the open grave,
in a white coat and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and
one eye bound with a red handkerchief, he read solemnly that
chapter in Job which has been read and heard over the bones of so
many of our fathers, and with a good voice offered up two prayers.
The wind and the surf bore a burthen.  By the cemetery gate a
mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue.  In the midst
the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the coffin-
stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned her
back to the grave and was playing with a leaf.  Did she understand?
God knows.  The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered
and threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral.
Dust to dust:  but the grains of this dust were gross like
cherries, and the true dust that was to follow sat near by, still
cohering (as by a miracle) in the tragic semblance of a female ape.

So far, Mormon or not, it was a Christian funeral.  The well-known
passage had been read from Job, the prayers had been rehearsed, the
grave was filled, the mourners straggled homeward.  With a little
coarser grain of covering earth, a little nearer outcry of the sea,
a stronger glare of sunlight on the rude enclosure, and some
incongruous colours of attire, the well-remembered form had been
observed.

By rights it should have been otherwise.  The mat should have been
buried with its owner; but, the family being poor, it was thriftily
reserved for a fresh service.  The widow should have flung herself
upon the grave and raised the voice of official grief, the
neighbours have chimed in, and the narrow isle rung for a space
with lamentation.  But the widow was old; perhaps she had
forgotten, perhaps never understood, and she played like a child
with leaves and coffin-stretchers.  In all ways my guest was buried
with maimed rites.  Strange to think that his last conscious
pleasure was the Casco and my feast; strange to think that he had
limped there, an old child, looking for some new good.  And the
good thing, rest, had been allotted him.

But though the widow had neglected much, there was one part she
must not utterly neglect.  She came away with the dispersing
funeral; but the dead man's mat was left behind upon the grave, and
I learned that by set of sun she must return to sleep there.  This
vigil is imperative.  From sundown till the rising of the morning
star the Paumotuan must hold his watch above the ashes of his
kindred.  Many friends, if the dead have been a man of mark, will
keep the watchers company; they will be well supplied with
coverings against the weather; I believe they bring food, and the
rite is persevered in for two weeks.  Our poor survivor, if,
indeed, she properly survived, had little to cover, and few to sit
with her; on the night of the funeral a strong squall chased her
from her place of watch; for days the weather held uncertain and
outrageous; and ere seven nights were up she had desisted, and
returned to sleep in her low roof.  That she should be at the pains
of returning for so short a visit to a solitary house, that this
borderer of the grave should fear a little wind and a wet blanket,
filled me at the time with musings.  I could not say she was
indifferent; she was so far beyond me in experience that the court
of my criticism waived jurisdiction; but I forged excuses, telling
myself she had perhaps little to lament, perhaps suffered much,
perhaps understood nothing.  And lo! in the whole affair there was
no question whether of tenderness or piety, and the sturdy return
of this old remnant was a mark either of uncommon sense or of
uncommon fortitude.

Yet one thing had occurred that partly set me on the trail.  I have
said the funeral passed much as at home.  But when all was over,
when we were trooping in decent silence from the graveyard gate and
down the path to the settlement, a sudden inbreak of a different
spirit startled and perhaps dismayed us.  Two people walked not far
apart in our procession:  my friend Mr. Donat--Donat-Rimarau:
'Donat the much-handed'--acting Vice-Resident, present ruler of the
archipelago, by far the man of chief importance on the scene, but
known besides for one of an unshakable good temper; and a certain
comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the comeliest on the isle,
not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite.  Of a sudden, ere
yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she made a leap at
the Resident, with pointed finger, shrieked a few words, and fell
back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth.  'What did she say
to you?' I asked.  'She did not speak to ME,' said Donat, a shade
perturbed; 'she spoke to the ghost of the dead man.'  And the
purport of her speech was this:  'See there!  Donat will be a fine
feast for you to-night.'

'M. Donat called it a jest,' I wrote at the time in my diary.  'It
seemed to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as
though she would divert the ghost's attention from herself.  A
cannibal race may well have cannibal phantoms.'  The guesses of the
traveller appear foredoomed to be erroneous; yet in these I was
precisely right.  The woman had stood by in terror at the funeral,
being then in a dread spot, the graveyard.  She looked on in terror
to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit, loosed upon the
isle.  And the words she had cried in Donat's face were indeed a
terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to dedicate
another in her stead.  One thing is to be said in her excuse.
Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great
good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-
caste.  For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of
talisman against the powers of hell.  In no other way can they
explain the unpunished recklessness of Europeans.