CHAPTER X

The marriage of Malicious Gossip; matrimonial customs of the simple natives; the domestic difficulties of Haabuani.

Mouth of God and his wife, Malicious Gossip, soon became intimates of my paepae. Coming first to see the marvelous Golden Bed and to listen to the click-click of the Iron Fingers That Make Words, they remained to talk, and I found them both charming.

Both were in their early twenties, ingenuous, generous, clever, and devoted to each other and to their friends. Malicious Gossip was beautiful, with soft dark eyes, clear-cut features, and a grace and lovely line of figure that in New York would make all heads whirl. She was all Marquesan, but her husband, Mouth of God, had white blood in him. Whose it was, he did not know, for his mother's consort had been an islander. His mother, a large, stern, and Calvinistic cannibal, believed in predestination, and spent her days in fear that she would be among the lost. Her Bible was ever near, and often, passing their house, I saw her climb with it into a breadfruit-tree and read a chapter in the high branches where she could avoid distraction.

They lived in a spacious house set in three acres of breadfruit and cocoanuts, an ancient grove long in their family. Often I squatted on their mats, dipping a gingerly finger in their popoi bowl and drinking the sweet wine of the half-ripe cocoanut, the while Mouth of God's mother spoke long and earnestly on the abode of the damned and the necessity for seeking salvation. In return, Malicious Gossip spent hours on my paepae telling me of the customs of her people new and old.

"When I was thirteen," she said, "the whalers still came to Vait-hua, my valley. There came a young Menike man, straight and bright-eyed, a passenger on a whaling-ship seeking adventure. I sighed the first time in my life when I looked on him. He was handsome, and not like other men on your ships.

"The kiss you white men give he taught me to like. He was generous and gentle and good. Months we dwelt together in a house by the stream in the valley. When he sailed away at last, as all white men do who are worth wanting to stay, he tore out my heart. My milk turned to poison and killed our little child.

"I met long after with Mouth of God. He took me to his house in the breadfruit-grove. He was good and gentle, but I was long in learning to love him. It was the governor who made me know that I was his woman. It came about in this manner:

"That governor was one whom all hated for his coldness and cruelty. Mouth of God worked for him in the house where medicines are made, having learned to mix the medicines in a bowl and to wrap cloths about the wounds of those who were sick. One day, according to the custom of white men who rule, the governor said to Mouth of God that he must send me to the palace that night.

"When he came home to the house where we lived together, Mouth of God gave me his word. He said: 'Go to the river and bathe. Put on your crimson tunic and flowers in your hair and go to the palace. The governor gives a feast to-night, and you are to dance and to sleep in the governor's bed.'"

Malicious Gossip shuddered, and rocked herself to and fro upon the mats. "Then I would have killed him! I cried out to him and said: 'I will not go to the governor! He is a devil. My heart hates him. I am a Marquesan. What have I to do with a man I hate?'"

"'Go!' said Mouth of God, and his eyes were hard as the black stones of the High Place. 'The governor asks for you. He is the government. Since when have Marquesan women said no to the command of the adminstrateur?'

"I wept, but I took my brightest kahu ropa from the sandalwood chest my Menike man had given me, and I went down the path to the stream. As I went I wept, but my heart was black, and I thought to take a keen-edged knife beneath my tunic when I went to the palace. But my feet were not yet wet in the edge of the water when Mouth of God called to me.

"'Do not go,' he said.

"I answered: 'I will go. You told me to go. I am on my way.' My tears were salt in my mouth.

"'No!' said Mouth of God. He ran, and he came to me in the pool where I had flung myself. There in the water he held me, and his arms crushed the breath from my ribs. 'You will not go!' he said. 'I spoke those words to know if you would go to the governor. If you had gone quickly, if you had not wept, I would kill you. You are my woman. No other shall have you.'

"Then I knew that I was his woman, and I forgot my Menike lover.

"You see," she said to me after a pause, "I would have gone to the palace. But I would never have come back to the house of Mouth of God. That was the beginning of our love. He would yield me to nobody. He told the governor that I would not come, and he waited to kill the governor if he must. But the governor laughed, and said there were many others. Mouth of God and I were married then by Monsieur Vernier, in the church of his mother.

"That was the manner of my marriage. The same as that of the girls in your own island, is it not?"

It was much the same, I said. It differed only in some slight matters of custom. She listened fascinated while I described to her our complicated conventions of courtship, our calling upon young ladies for months and even years, our gifts, our entertainments, our giving of rings, our setting of the marriage months far in the future, our orange wreaths and veils and bridesmaids. She found these things almost incredible.

"Marriage here," she said, "may come to a young man when he does not seek or even expect it. No Marquesan can marry without the consent of his mother, and often she marries him to a girl without his even thinking of such a thing.

"A young man may bring home a girl he does not know, perhaps a girl he has seen on the beach in the moonlight, to stay with him that night in his mother's house. It may be that her beauty and charm will so please his mother that she will call a family council after the two have gone to bed. If the family thinks as the mother does, they determine to marry the young man to that girl, and they do so after this fashion:

"Early in the morning, just at dawn, before the young couple awake, all the women of the household arouse them with shrieks. They beat their breasts, cut themselves with shells, crying loudly, Aue! Aue! Neighbors rush in to see who has died. The youth and the girl run forth in terror. Then the mother, the grandmother and all other women of the house chant the praises of the girl, singing her beauty, and wailing that they cannot let her go. They demand with anger that the son shall not let her go. All the neighbors cry with them, Aue! Aue! and beat their breasts, until the son, covered with shame, asks the girl to stay.

"Then her parents are sent the word, and if they do not object, the girl remains in his house. That is often the manner of Marquesan marriage."

Yet often, of course, she explained, marriage was not the outcome of a night's wooing. The young Marquesan frequently brought home a girl who did not instantly win his mother's affection. In that case she went her way next morning after breakfast, and that was all. Our regard for chastity was incomprehensible to Malicious Gossip, instructed though she was in all the codes of the church. It was to her a creed preached to others by the whites, like wearing shoes or making the Sabbath a day of gloom, and though she had been told that violation of this code meant roasting forever as in a cannibal pit whose fires were never extinguished, her mind could perceive no reason for it. She could attach no blame to an act that seemed to her an innocent, natural, and harmless amusement.

The truth is that no value was, or is, attached to maidenhood in all Polynesia, the young woman being left to her own whims without blame or care. Only deep and sincere attachment holds her at last to the man she has chosen, and she then follows his wishes in matters of fidelity, though still to a large extent remaining mistress of herself.

The Marquesan woman, however, often denies her husband the freedom she herself openly enjoys. This custom persists as a striking survival of polyandry, in which fidelity under pain of dismissal from the roof-tree was imposed by the wife on all who shared her affections.

This was exactly the status of a household not far from my cabin. Haabuani, master of ceremonies at the dances, the best carver and drum-beater of all Atuona, who was of pure Marquesan blood, but spoke French fluently and earnestly defended the doctrine of the Pope's infallibility,--even coming to actual blows with a defiant Protestant upon my very paepae--explained his attitude.

"If I have a friend and he temporarily desires my wife, Toho, I am glad if she is willing. But my enemy shall not have that privilege with my consent. I would be glad to have you look upon her with favor. You are kind to me. You have treated me as a chief and you have bought my kava bowl. But, écoutez, Monsieur, Toho does what she pleases, yet if I toss but a pebble in another pool she is furious. See, I have the bruises still of her beating."

With a tearful whine he showed the black-and-blue imprints of Toho's anger, and made it known to us that the three piastres he had of me for the kava bowl had been traced by his wife to the till of Le Brunnec's store, where Flower, the daughter of Lam Kai Oo, had spent them for ribbons. Toho in her fury had beaten him so that for a day and a night he lay groaning upon the mats.

"That is as it should be," said Malicious Gossip, sternly, while her curving lips set in straight lines. Sex morality means conformity to sex tapus, the world over.

Free polyandry still exists in many countries I have seen, and in others its dying out leaves these fragmentary survivals. I have visited the tribe of Subanos, in the west and north of the island of Mindanao in the Philippine archipelago, where the rich men are polygamists, and the poor still submit to polyandry. Economic conditions there bring about the same relations, under a different guise, as in Europe or America, where wealthy rakes keep up several establishments, and many wage-earners support but one prostitute.

Polyandry is found almost exclusively in poor countries, where there is always a scarcity of females. Thus we have polyandry founded on a surplus of males caused by poverty of sustenance. The female is, in fact, supposed to be the result of a surplus of nutrition; more boys than girls are born in the country districts because the city diet is richer, especially in meat and sugar. It is notable that the families of the pioneers of western America bore a surprising majority of males.

In the Marquesas, where living was always difficult and the diet poor, there were always more men than women despite the frequent wars in which men were victims. Another reason was that male children were saved often when females were killed in the practice of infanticide, also forced by famine. The overplus of men made them amenable to the commands of the women, who often dominated in permanent alliances, demanding lavishment of wealth and attention from their husbands.

Yet--and this is a most significant fact--the father-right in the child remained the basis of the social system.

Throughout all Australia, Melanesia, and Papuasis on the east, and America on the west, the mother-right prevailed among primitive peoples. Children followed the mother, took their name from her, and inherited property through her. I have known a Hawaiian nobleman who, commenting on this fact, said that the system had merit in that no child could be called a bastard, and that the woman, who suffered most, was rewarded by pride of posterity. He himself, he said, was the son of a chieftess, but his father, a king, was the son of a negro cobbler.

The father-right, so familiar to our minds that it seems to-day almost the only natural or existing social system, was in fact developed very lately among all races except the Caucasian and some tribes of the Mongols. Yet in the Marquesas, these islands cut off from all other peoples through ages of history, the father-right prevailed in spite of all the difficulties that attended its survival in polyandry.

Each woman had many husbands, whom she ruled. The true paternity of her children it was impossible to ascertain. Yet so tenaciously did the Marquesans cling to the father-right in the child, that even this fact could not break it down. One husband was legally the father of all her children, ostensibly at least the owner of the household and of such small personal property as belonged to it under communism. The man remained, though in name only, the head of the polyandrous family.

I seemed to see in this curious fact another proof of the ancient kinship between the first men of my own race and the prehistoric grandfathers of Malicious Gossip and Haabunai. My savage friends, with their clear features, their large straight eyes and olive skins, showed still the traces of their Caucasian blood. Their forefathers and mine may have hunted the great winged lizards together through primeval wildernesses, until, driven by who knows what urge of wanderlust or necessity, certain tribes set out in that drive through Europe and Asia toward America that ended at last, when a continent sunk beneath their feet, on these islands in the southern seas.

It was a far flight for fancy to take, from my paepae in the jungle at the foot of Temetiu, but looking at the beauty and grace of Malicious Gossip as she sat on my mats in her crimson pareu, I liked to think that it was so.

"We are cousins," I said to her, handing her a freshly-opened cocoanut which Exploding Eggs brought.

"You are a great chief, but we love you as a blood-brother," she answered gravely, and lifted the shell bowl to her lips.