CHAPTER IX

The Marquesans at ten o'clock mass; a remarkable conversation about religions and Joan of Arc in which Great Fern gives his idea of the devil.

I was surprised to note that the few natives within view when we landed were dressed in the stiff and awkward clothes of the European; some fête must have been arranged during my absence, I thought. Then with a shock I realized that the day was Sunday. In the lovely, timeless valley of Vait-hua the calendar had dropped below the horizon of memory as my native land had dropped below the rim of the sea. Here in Atuona, whose life was colored by the presence of whites, the days must take up their constricted regular march again.

Already through the crystal air of a morning after rain the mission bells were ringing clear, and Chief Neo, forgetting the night of toil and danger past, was eager to accompany me to church. It would be an honor befitting his chiefly rank to sit with the distinguished white man in the house of worship, and I, remembering his perfect hospitality, was glad to do him honor in my own valley.

We hastened to my cabin, Exploding Eggs running before us up the trail with my luggage balanced on his shoulders. Cocoanuts and popoi, coffee and tinned biscuits, were waiting when we arrived. We ate hastily and then donned proper garments, Exploding Eggs rejoicing in a stiff collar and a worn sailor-hat once mine. They sat oddly upon him, being several sizes too large, but he bore himself with pride as we set out toward the church.

In the avenue of bananas leading to the mission I lingered to observe the beauty of the flakes upon the ground. They are the outside layers of the pendulum of that graceful plant, the purple flower-cone that hangs at the end of the fruit cluster with its volute and royal-hued stem. The banana-plants, which we call trees, lined the road and stood twenty feet high, their long slender leaves blowing in the light wind like banners from a castle wall.

The flakes that had dropped upon the ground were lovely. Large as a lady's veil, ribbed satin, rose and purple, pink and scarlet, the filmy edges curled delicately, they hinted the elegance and luxury of a pretty woman's boudoir. And, like all such dainty trifles, the charming flower that hangs like a colored lamp in the green chapel of the banana-grove it is useless after it has served its brief purpose. The fruit grows better when it is cut off.

Opposite the spacious mission grounds the worshippers were gathering beneath two gnarled banian-trees, giant-like in height and spread. Behind them a long hedge of bananas bordered the cocoanut plantation of the church, and across the narrow road rose the chapel, the priests' residence and the nuns' house, with several school buildings now empty because of the French anti-clerical law.

Exploding Eggs in his new finery and the visiting chief from Vait-hua found welcome among the waiting natives, while Titihuti of the tattooed legs took her seat beside me. She had combed her Titian tresses and anointed them with oil till they shone like the kelp beds of Monterey. Her tunic was of scarlet calico, and she carried in her hand a straw hat with a red ribbon, to put on when she entered the church. "Kaoha!" I said to her, and she smiled, displaying her even, white teeth.

Suddenly, looking past her at the church, my eye caught a sight that transfixed me. In the misty light I saw the Christ upon the cross as on Calvary. The sublime figure was in the agony of expiration, and at the foot of the cross stood the ever faithful mother and the loving John in attitudes of amazement and grief. The reality was startling; for the moment I forgot all about me.

But Titihuti coughed, and I saw her tattooed legs and felt the rough roots of the banian under me, and I was back in the courtyard. The spectacle of the Crucifixion was raised on a basalt platform fully twenty feet long. The figures were of golden bronze, and the cross was painted white. Over it hung the branches of a lofty breadfruit-tree, a congruous canopy for such a group. The Bread of Life, in truth.

A tablet on the cross bore the inscription:

"1900 Le Christ Dieu Homme Vit Regne Commande Christo Redemptori Jubilé 1901 Atuona."

"The tiki of the true god," said Titihuti, observing my gaze, and crossed herself with the fervor of the believer in a new charm.

On the roof a score of doves were cooing as we filed into the church. There were bas-reliefs of cherubim and seraphim over the doorway, fat, distorted bodies with wings a-wry, yet with a celestial vision showing through the crude workmanship. A loop-holed buttress on either side of the facade spoke of the days when the forethought of the builders planned for defence in case a reaction of paganism caused the congregation to attack the Christian fathers.

Inside the doorway a French nun in blue robes tugged at a rope depending from the belfry, and above us the bells rang out from two tiny towers. She looked curiously at me and my savage companion, her pale peasant's face hard, homely, unhealthy; then she kicked at a big dog who was trying to drink the holy water from the clam-shell beside the door. "Allez, Satan!" she said.

The benetier, large enough to immerse an infant, was fixed to a board, a fascinating, blackened old bracket, carved with the instruments of torture, the nails, the spear, the scourge, and thorns. Ivory and pearl, stained by a century or more, were inlaid. As I dipped my hand in the shell a huge lizard that made his nest in the hollow of the bracket ran across my knuckles.

Within, there were seats with kneeling-planks, hewed out of hard wood and still bearing the marks of the adze. Upon them the congregation soon assembled, the women on one side, the men on the other. The women wore hats, native weaves in semi-sailor style, decorated with Chinese silk shawls or bright-colored handkerchiefs. All were barefooted except the pale and sickly daughters of Baufré, who wore clumsy and painful shoes. Many Daughters, the little, lovely leper, came with Flower, of the red-gold hair, the Weaver of Mats, who had her names tattooed on her arm. They dipped in the font and genuflected, then bowed in prayer.

Many familiar faces I recognized. Ah Yu, the Chinaman who owned the little store beyond the banian-tree and had murder upon his soul; Lam Kai Oo, my erstwhile landlord; Flag, the gendarme; Water, in all the glory of European trousers; Kake, with my small namesake on her arm. The old women were tattooed on the ears and neck in scrolls, and their lips were marked in faint stripes. The old men, their eyes ringed with tattooing, wore earrings and necklaces of whale's teeth.

The church was painted white inside, with frescoes and dados of gaudy hues, and windows of brilliantly colored glass. The altar, as also the statues of Joseph and Mary, had a reredos handsomely carved. Outside the railing was a charming Child in the Manger, lying on real straw, surrounded by the Virgin, Joseph, the Magi, the shepherds, and the kings, all in bright-hued robes, and pleasant-looking cows and asses with red eyes and green tails.

The singing began before the priest came from the sacristy. The men sang alone and the women followed, in an alternating chant that at times rose into a wail and again had the nasal sound of a bag-pipe. The Catholic chants sung thus in Marquesan took on a wild, barbaric rhythm that thrilled the blood and made the hair tingle on the scalp.

Bishop David le Cadre appeared in elegant vestments, his eyes grave above a foot-long beard, and the mass began. The acolyte was very agile in a short red cassock, below which his naked legs, and bare feet showed. The people responded often through the mass, rising, sitting down, and kneeling obediently. Baufré sat on a chair in the vestibule and added accounts.

Ah Kee Au was the sole communicant at the rail. No cloth was spread, but the bell announced the mystery of transubstantiation, and all bowed their heads while Ah Kee Au reverently offered his communion to the welfare of Napoleon, his grandson who had accidentally shot himself.

The service over, the people poured from the church into the brilliant sunshine of the road, and Ah Kee Au said to me, "You savee thlat communio' blead b'long my place. My son makee for pliest." Lam Kai Oo, pressing forward, offered the communicant a draught of fiery rum he had obtained by the governor's permission. He had been told that to give a glass of water to a communicant, who must of course have fasted and abstained from any liquid since midnight according to the law of the Church, was a holy act which brought the giver a blessing, and so the subtle Chinese thought to make his blessing greater by offering a drink better than water.

Ah Kee Au drank with fervor. "My makee holee thliss morn'," he said gladly. "Makee Napoleon more happy." Sincerity is not a matter of broken English or a drink of rum; the poor old grandfather of the Little Corporal's namesake believed earnestly that Napoleon would improve by his sacramental offering. He, like most Marquesans, took the white man's religion with little understanding. It is new magic to them, a comfort, an occupation, and an entertainment. But who knows the human heart, or understands the soul?

That afternoon while Neo and I lay on my paepae awaiting the favoring wind which should carry him back to his own isle, my neighbors gathered from far and near to lounge the sunny hours away in conversation. Squatted on the mats, they engaged in serious discussion of the puzzles of religion, appealing to me often to settle vexing questions which they had long wearied of asking their better-informed instructors in religious mysteries.

Their native tongue has no word for religion. Bishop Dordillon had been obliged to translate it, "Te mea e hakatika me te mea e hana mea koaha toitoi i te Etua" which might be rendered, "Belief in the works and love of a just God." Etua, often spelled Atua, was the name of divinity among all Maori peoples, but religion was so associated with natural things, the phenomena of nature, of living things, and of the heavens and sea, that it was part of daily life and needed no word to distinguish it.

Never were people less able to comprehend the creeds and formulas in which the religious beliefs of the white men are clothed. Marquesans are not deep thinkers. In fact, they have a word, tahoa, which means, "a headache from thinking." Ten years of ardent and nobly self-sacrificing work by missionaries left the islands still without a single soul converted. It was not until the chiefs began to set the seal of their approval on the new outlandish faiths that the people flocked to the standard of the cross. And when they did begin to meditate the doctrines preached to them as necessary beliefs in order to win salvation, their heads ached indeed.

Even after years of faithful church-going many of my friends still struggled with their doubts, and when these were propounded to me I was fain to wrinkle my own brow and ponder deeply.

The burning question as to the color of Adam and Eve had long been settled. Adam and Eve were brown, like themselves. But if, as the priests said was most probable, Adam and Eve had received pardon and were in heaven, why had their guilt stained all mankind?

Also, would Satan have been able to tempt Eve if God had not made the tree of knowledge tapu? Was not knowledge a good thing? What motive had led the Maker and Knower of all things to do this deed?

What made the angels fall? Pride, said the priests. Then how did it get into heaven? demanded the perplexed.

The resurrection of the body at the last judgment horrified them. This fact, said the husband of Kake, had led to the abandonment of the old manner of burying corpses in a sitting posture, with the face between the knees and the hands under the thighs, the whole bound round with cords. Obviously, a man buried in such a position would rise deformed. Their dead in the cemetery on the heights slept now in long coffins of wood, their limbs at ease. But other and less premeditated interments still befell the unwary islander.

What would God do in cases where sharks had eaten a Marquesan? And what, when the same shark had been killed and eaten by other Marquesans? And in the case of the early Christian forefathers, who were eaten by men of other tribes, and afterward the cannibals eaten in retaliation, and then the last feaster eaten by sharks? Aue! There was a headache query!

At this point in the discussion an aged stranger from the valley of Taaoa, a withered man whose whole naked chest was covered with intricate tattooing, laid down his pipe and artlessly revealed his idea of the communion service. It was, he thought, a religious cannibalism, no more. And he was puzzled that his people should be told that it was wrong to feed on the flesh of a fellow human creature when they were urged to "eat the body and drink the blood" of Ietu Kirito himself.

It was long afterward, in that far-away America so incomprehensible to my simple savage friends, that I read beneath the light of an electric lamp a paragraph in "Folkways," by William Graham Summer, of Yale:

"Language used in communion about eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ refers to nothing in our mores and appeals to nothing in our experience. It comes down from very remote ages; very probably from cannibalism."

The printed page vanished, and before my eyes rose a vision of my paepae among the breadfruit- and cocoanut-trees, the ring of squatting dusky figures in flickering sunlit leaf-shade, Kake in her red tunic with the babe at her breast, Exploding Eggs standing by with a half-eaten cocoanut, and the many dark eyes in their circles of ink fixed upon the shriveled face of the reformed cannibal whose head ached with the mysteries of the white man's religion.

None too soon for me, the talk turned about history, the tales of which were confused in my guests' minds with those of the saints. Great Fern insisted that if the English roasted Joan of Arc they ate her, because no man would apply live coals, which pain exceedingly, to any living person, and fire was never placed upon a human body save to cook it for consumption. This theory seemed reasonable to most of the listeners, for since such cruelty as the Marquesans practiced in their native state was thoughtless and never intentional, the idea of torture was incomprehensible to their simple minds.

Malicious Gossip, a comely savage of twenty-five with false-coffee leaves in her hair, declared, however, that the governor had told her the English roasted Joan alive because she was a heretic. The statement was received with startled protests by those present who had themselves incurred that charge when they deserted Catholicism for Protestantism some time earlier.

"Exploding Eggs," said I hastily, "make tea for all." Every shade vanished from shining eyes when I produced the bottle of rum and added a spoonful of flavor to each brimming shellful. All perplexing questions were forgotten, and simple social pleasure reigned again on my paepae, while Great Fern explained to all his idea of the Christian devil.

The Marquesan deity of darkness was Po, a vague and elemental spirit. But the kuhane anera maaa of the new religion had definite and fearful attributes explained by the priests. So Great Fern conceived him as a kind of cross between a man and a boar, with a tail like that of a shark, running through the forests with a bunch of lighted candlenuts and setting fire to the houses of the wicked.

And the wicked? Morals as we know them had nothing to do with their sin in his mind. The wicked were the unkind, those who were cruel to children, wives who made bad popoi, and whites with rum privileges who forgot hospitality.

Non-Christians may grin at the efforts of missionaries among heathens. But the missionaries are the only influence for good in the islands, the only white men seeking to mitigate the misery and ruin brought by the white man's system of trade. The extension of civilized commerce has crushed every natural impulse of brotherliness, kindness, and generosity, destroyed every good and clean custom of these children of nature. Traders and sailors, whalers and soldiers, have been their enemies.

Whatever the errors of the men of God, they have given their lives day by day in unremitting, self-sacrificing toil, suffering much to share with these despoiled people the light of their own faith in a better world hereafter. In so far as they have failed, they have failed because they have lacked what proselytizing religion has always lacked--a joy in life that seeks to make this mundane existence more endurable, a grace of humor, and a broad simplicity.

Polynesians have always been respecters of authority. Under their own rule, where priest and king equally rose to rank because of admired deeds, the tapus of the priests had the same force as those of chiefs, and life was conducted by few and simple rules. Now, when sect fights sect; when priests assure the people that France is a Catholic nation and the Governor says the statement is false; where the Protestant pastor teaches that Sunday is a day of solemnity and prayer, and the Frenchmen make it a day of merriment as in France; where salvation depends on many beliefs bewildering and incompatible, the puzzled Marquesan scratches his head and swings from creed to creed, while his secret heart clings to the old gods.

The Marquesan had a joyful religion, full of humor and abandon, dances and chants, and exaltation of nature, of the greatness of their tribe or race, a worship that was, despite its ghastly rites of human sacrifice, a stimulus to life.

The efforts of missionaries have killed the joy of living as they have crushed out the old barbarities, uprooting together everything, good and bad, that religion meant to the native. They have given him instead rites that mystify him, dogmas he can only dimly understand, and a little comfort in the miseries brought upon him by trade.

I have seen a leper alone on his paepae, deep in the Scriptures, and when I asked him if he got comfort from them I was answered, "They are strong words for a weak man, and better than pig." But only a St. Francis Xavier or a Livingstone, a great moral force, could lift the people now from the slough of despond in which they expire.

Upon this people, sparkingly alive, spirited as wild horses, not depressed as were their conquerors by a heritage of thousands of years of metes and bounds, religion as forced upon them has been not only a narcotic, but a death potion.