CHAPTER XXIII. Mademoiselle N----.

Mademoiselle N----.

The Jeanne d'Arc, a beautiful, long, curving craft manned by twelve oarsmen, came like a white bird over the blue waters of the Bay of Traitors one Saturday afternoon, bringing Père Victorien to Atuona. He was from Hatiheu, on the island of Nuka-hiva, seventy miles to the north. A day and a night he had spent on the open sea, making a slow voyage by wind and oar, but like all these priests he made nothing of the hardships. They come to the islands to stay until they die, and death means a crown the brighter for martyrdom.

He looked a tortured man in his heavy and smothering vestments when I met him before the mission walls next morning. His face and hands were covered with pustules as if from smallpox.

"The nonos (sand-flies) are so furious the last month," he said with a patient smile. "I have not slept but an hour at a time. I was afraid I would go mad."

News of his coming brought all the valley Catholics to eight o'clock mass. The banana-shaded road and the roots of the old banian were crowded with worshippers in all their finery, and when they poured into the mission the few rude benches were well filled. I found a chair in the rear, next to that of Baufré, the shaggy drunkard, and as the chanting began, I observed an empty prie-dieu, specially prepared and placed for some person of importance.

"Mademoiselle N----" said Baufré, noticing the direction of my glance. "She is the richest woman in all the Marquesas."

At the Gospel she came in, walking slowly down the aisle and taking her place as though unaware of the hundred covert glances that followed her. Wealth is comparative, and Mademoiselle N----, with perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars in cash and cocoanut-grove, stood to the island people as Rockefeller to us. Money and lands were not all her possessions, for though she had never traveled from her birthplace, she was very different in carriage and costume from the girls about her.

She wore a black lace gown, clinging, and becoming her slender figure and delicately charming face. Her features were exquisite, her eyes lustrous black pools of passion, her mouth a scarlet line of pride and disdain. A large leghorn hat of fine black straw, with chiffon, was on her graceful head, and her tiny feet were in silk stockings and patent leather. She held a gold and ivory prayer-book in gloved hands, and a jeweled watch hung upon her breast.

She might have passed for a Creole or for one of those beautiful Filipino mestizas, daughters of Spanish fathers and Filipino mothers. I suppose coquetry in woman was born with the fig-leaf. This dainty, fetching heiress, born of a French father and a savage mother, had all the airs and graces of a ballroom belle. Where had she gained these fashions and desires of the women of cities, of Europe?

I had but to look over the church to feel her loneliness. Teata, Many Daughters, Weaver of Mats, and Flower, savagely handsome, gaudily dressed, were the only companions of her own age. Flower, of the red-gold hair, was striking in a scarlet gown of sateen, a wreath of pink peppers, and a necklace of brass. She had been ornamented by the oarsmen of the Jeanne d'Arc, fortunately without Père Victorien's knowledge. Teata, in her tight gown with its insertions of fishnet revealing her smooth, tawny skin, a red scarf about her waist, straw hat trimmed with a bright blue Chinese shawl perched on her high-piled hair, was still a picture of primitive and savage grace. They were handsome, these girls, but they were wild flowers. Mlle. N---- had the poise and delicacy of the hothouse blossom.

Her father had spent thirty years on Hiva-oa, laboring to wring a fortune from the toil of the natives, and dying, he had left it all to this daughter, who, with her laces and jewels, her elegant, slim form and haughty manner, was in this wild abode of barefooted, half-naked people like a pearl in a gutter. She was free now to do what she liked with herself and her fortune. What would she do?

It was the question on every tongue and in every eye when, after mass, she passed down the lane respectfully widened for her in the throng on the steps and with a black-garbed sister at her side, walked to the nuns' house.

"If only she had a religious vocation," sighed Sister Serapoline. "That would solve all difficulties, and save her soul and happiness."

Vainly the nuns and priests had tried during the dozen years of her tutelage in their hands to direct her aspirations toward this goal, but one had only to look into her burning eyes or see the supple movement of her body, to know that she sought her joy on earth.

Liha-Liha, the natives called her father, which means corporal, and that they had hated and yet feared him when Hiva-oa was still given over to cannibalism outlined his character. He had lived and died in his house near the Stinking Springs on the road to Taaoa. The sole white man in that valley, he had lorded it over the natives more sternly than had their old chiefs. He had fought down the wilderness, planted great cocoanut-plantations, forced the unwilling islanders to work for him, and dollar by dollar, with an iron will, he had wrung from their labor the fortune now left in the dainty hands of his half-savage daughter.

Song of the Nightingale, the convict cook of the governor, gave me light on the man.

"I loved his woman, Piiheana (Climber of Trees Who Was Killed and Eaten), who was the mother of Mademoiselle N----," said Song of the Nightingale. "One night he found me with her on his paepae. He shot me; then he had me condemned as a robber, and I spent five years in the prison at Tai-o-hae."

"And Climber of Trees Who Was Killed and Eaten?"

"He beat her till her bones were broken, and sent her from him. Then he took Daughter of a Piece of Tattooing, to whom he left in his will thirty-five thousand francs. It was she who brought up Mademoiselle."

Mademoiselle herself walked daintily down to the road, where her horse was tied, and I was presented to her. She gave me her hand with the air of a princess, her scarlet lips quivering into a faint smile and her smouldering, unsatisfied eyes sweeping my face. With a, conciliating, yet imperious, air, she suggested that I ride over the hills with her.

Picking up her lace skirt and frilled petticoat, she vaulted into the man's saddle without more ado, and took the heavy reins in her small gloved hands. Her horse was scrubby, but she rode well, as do all Marquesans, her supple body following his least movement and her slim, silk-stockinged legs clinging as though she were riding bareback. When the swollen river threatened to wet her varnished slippers, she perched herself on the saddle, feet and all, and made a dry ford.

Over the hills she led the way at a gallop, despite wretched trail and tripping bushes. Down we went through the jungle, walled in by a hundred kinds of trees and ferns and vines. Now and then we came into a cleared space, a native plantation, a hut surrounded by breadfruit-, mango- and cocoanut-, orange- and lime-trees. No one called "Kaoho!" and Mademoiselle N---- did not slacken her pace. We swept into the jungle again without a word, my horse following her mount's flying feet, and I ducking and dodging branches and noose-like vines.

In a marshy place, where patches of taro spread its magnificent leaves over the earth, we slowed to a walk. The jungle tangle was all about us; a thousand bright flowers, scarlet, yellow, purple, crimson, splashed with color the masses of green; tall ferns uncurled their fronds; giant creepers coiled like snakes through the boughs, and the sluggish air was heavy with innumerable delicious scents. I said to Mademoiselle N---- that the beauty of the islands was like that of a fantastic dream, an Arabian Night's tale.

"Yes?" she said, with a note of weariness and irony. The feet of the horses made a sucking sound on the oozy ground. "I am half white," she said after a moment, and as the horses' hoofs struck the rocky trail again, she whipped up her mount and we galloped up the slope.

After a time the trail widened into a road and I saw before us a queer enclosure. At first sight I thought it a wild-animal park. There were small houses like cages and a big, box-like structure in the center, all enclosed in a wire fence, a couple of acres in all. Drawing nearer, I saw that the houses were cabins painted in gaudy colors, and that the white box was a marble tomb of great size. Each slab of marble was rimmed with scarlet cement, and the top of the tomb, under a corrugated iron roof, was covered with those abominable bead-wreaths from Paris.

Like the humbler Marquesans who have their coffins made and graves dug before their passing, Mademoiselle N----'s father had seen to it that this last resting-place was prepared while he lived, and he had placed it here in the center of his plantation, before the house that had been his home for thirty years. With something of his own crude strength and barbaric taste, it stood there, the grim reminder of her white father to the girl in whose veins his own blood mingled with that of the savage.

She looked at it without emotion, and after I had surveyed it, we dismounted and she led me into her house. It was a neat and showily-furnished cottage, whose Nottingham-lace curtains, varnished golden-oak chairs and ingrain carpet spoke of attempts at mail-order beautification. Sitting on a horse-hair sofa, hard and slippery, I drank wine and ate mangoes, while opposite me Mademoiselle N----'s mother sat in stiff misery on a chair. She was a withered Marquesan woman, barefooted and ugly, dressed in a red cotton garment of the hideous night-gown pattern introduced by the missionaries, and her eyes were tragedies of bewilderment and suffering, while her toothless mouth essayed a smile and she struggled with a few words of bad French.

Though Mademoiselle N---- was most hospitable, she was not at ease, and I knew it was because of the appearance of her mother, this woman whom her father had discarded years before, but to whom the daughter had shown kindness since his death. The mother appeared more at ease with her successor, a somewhat younger Marquesan woman, who waited on us as a servant, and seemed contented enough. Doubtless the two who had endured the moods of Liha-Liha had many confidences now that he was gone.

I had to describe America to Mademoiselle N----, and the inventions and social customs of which she had read. She would not want to live in such a big country, she said, but Tahiti seemed to combine comfort with the atmosphere of her birthplace. Perhaps she might go to Tahiti to live.

As I took my hat to leave, she said:

"I have been told that they are separating the lepers in Tahiti and confining them outside Papeite in a kind of prison. Is that so?"

"Not a prison," I replied. "The government has built cottages for them in a little valley. Don't you think it wise to segregate them?"

She did not reply, and I rode away.

A week later I met her one evening at Otupoto, that dividing place between the valleys of Taaoa and Atuona, where Kahuiti and his fellow warriors had trapped the human meat. I had walked there to sit on the edge of the precipice and watch the sun set in the sea. She came on horseback from her home toward the village, to spend Sunday with the nuns. She got off her horse when she saw me, and lit a cigarette.

"What do you do here all alone?" she asked in French. She never used a word of Marquesan to me. I replied that I was trying to imagine myself there fifty years earlier, when the meddlesome white sang very low in the concert of the island powers.

"The people were happier then, I suppose," she said meditatively, as she handed me her burning cigarette in the courteous way of her mother's people. "But it does not attract me. I would like to see the world I read of."

She sat beside me on the rock, her delicately-modeled chin on her pink palm, and gazed at the colors fading from vivid gold and rose to yellow and mauve on the sky and the sea. The quietness of the scene, the gathering twilight, perhaps, too, something in the fact that I was a white man and a stranger, broke down her reserve.

"But with whom can I see that world?" she said with sudden passion. "Money--I have it. I don't want it. I want to be loved. I want a man. What shall I do? I cannot marry a native, for they do not think as I do. I--I dread to marry a Frenchman. You know le droit du mari? A French wife has no freedom."

I cited Madame Bapp, who chastised her spouse.

"He is no man, that criquet!" she said scornfully.

"I would be better off not to marry, if I had a real man who loved me, and who would take me across the sea! What am I saying? The nuns would be shocked. I do not know--oh, I do not know what it is that tears at me! But I want to see the world, and I want a man to love me."

"Your islands here are more beautiful than any of the developed countries," I said. "There are many thieves there, too, to take your money."

"I have read that," she answered, "and I am not afraid. I am afraid of nothing. I want to know a different life than here. I will at least go to Tahiti. I am tired of the convent. The nuns talk always of religion, and I am young, and I am half French. We die young, most of us, and I have had no pleasure."

I saw her black eyes, as she puffed her cigarette, shining with her vision. Some man would put tears in them soon, I thought, if she chose that path.

Would she be happy in Tahiti? If she could find one of her own kind, a half-caste, a paragon of kindness and fidelity, she might be. With the white she would know only torture. There is but one American that I know who has made a native girl happy. Lovina, who keeps the Tiare Hotel in Papeite and who knows the gossip of all the South Seas, told me the story one day after he had come to the hotel to fetch two dinners to his home. He had a handsome motor-car, and the man himself was so clean-looking, so precise in every word and motion, that I spoke of the contrast to the skippers, officials, and tourists who lounged about Lovina's bar.

"He is a strange one, that man," said Lovina. "Two years ago I have nice girl here, wait on bar, look sweet, and I make her jus' so my daughter. I go America for visit, and when I come back that girl ruin'. That American take her 'way, and he come tell me straight he couldn't help it. He jus' love her--mad. He build her fine house, get automobile. She never work. Every day he come here get meals take home."

That tall, straight chap, his hair prematurely gray, his face sad, had made the barmaid the jewel of a golden setting. He devoted himself and his income solely to her. Stranger still, he had made her his legal wife.

But she is an exception rare as rain in Aden. These native girls of mixed blood, living tragedies sprung from the uncaring selfishness of the whites, struggle desperately to lift themselves above the mire in which the native is sinking. They throw themselves away on worthless adventurers, who waste their little patrimony, break their hearts, and either desert them after the first flush of passion passes, or themselves sink into a life of lazy slovenliness worse than that of the native.

All these things I pondered when Mlle. N---- spoke of her hope of finding happiness in Tahiti. I was sure that, with her wealth, she would have many suitors,--but what of a tender heart?

"It is love I want," she said. "Love and freedom. We women are used to having our own way. I know the nuns would be horrified, but I shall bind myself to no man."

The last colors of the sunset faded slowly on the sea, and the world was a soft gray filled with the radiance of the rising moon. I rose and when Mile. N---- had mounted I strolled ahead of her horse in the moonlight. I was wearing a tuberose over my ear, and she remarked it.

"You know what that signifies? If a man seeks a woman, he wears a white flower over his ear, and if his love grows ardent, he wears a red rose or hibiscus. But if he tires, he puts some green thing in their place. Bon dieu! That is the depth of ignominy for the woman scorned. I remember one girl who was made light of that way in church. She stayed a day hidden in the hills weeping, and then she threw herself from a cliff."

There was in her manner a melancholy and a longing.

"Tahitians wear flowers all the day," I said. "They are gay, and life is pleasant upon their island. There are automobiles by the score, cinemas, singing, and dancing every evening, and many Europeans and Americans. With money you could have everything."

"It is not singing and dancing I desire!" she exclaimed. "Pas de tout! I must know more people, and not people like priests and these copra dealers. I have read in novels of men who are like gods, who are bold and strong, but who make their women happy. Do you know an officer of the Zelee, with hair like a ripe banana? He is tall and plays the banjo. I saw him one time long ago when the warship was here. He was on the governor's veranda. Oh, that was long ago, but such a young man would be the man that I want."

Her Marquesan blood was speaking in that cry of the heart, unrestrained and passionate. They are not the cold, chaste women of other climes, these women of the Marquesas; with blood at fever heat and hearts beating like wild things against bars, they listen when love or its counterfeit pours into their ears those soft words with nothing in them that make a song. They have no barriers of reserve or haughtiness; they make no bargains; they go where the heart goes, careless of certified vows.

"Mon dieu!" Mademoiselle N---- exclaimed and put her tiny hand to her red lips. "What if the good sisters heard me? I am bad. I know. Eh bien! I am Marquesan after all."

We were about to cross the stream by my cabin, and I mounted the horse behind her to save a wetting. She turned impulsively and looked at me, her lovely face close to mine, her dark eyes burning, and her hot breath on my cheek.

"Write to me when you are in Tahiti, and tell me if you think I would be happy there?" she said imploringly. "I have no friends here, except the nuns. I need so much to go away. I am dying here."

Coming up my trail a few days later, I found on my paepae a shabbily dressed little bag-of-bones of a white man, with a dirty gray beard and a harsh voice like that of Baufré. He had a note to me from Le Brunnec, introducing M. Lemoal, born in Brest, a naturalized American. The note was sealed, and I put it carefully away before turning to my visitor. It read:

"CHER CITOYEN:

"I send you a specimen of the Marquesan beaches, so that you can have a little fun. This fellow have a very tremendous life. He is an old sailor, pirate, gold-miner, Chinese-hanger, thief, robber, honest-man, baker, trader; in a word, an interesting type. With the aid of several glasses of wine I have put him in the mood to talk delightfully."

A low-browed man was Lemoal, sapped and ruthless, but certainly he had adventured.

Was the Bella Union Theater still there in Frisco? Did they still fight in Bottle Meyers, and was his friend Tasset on the police force yet? His memories of San Francisco ante-dated mine. He had been a hoodlum there, and had helped to hang Chinese. He had gone to Tahiti in 1870 and made a hundred thousand francs keeping a bakery. That fortune had lasted him during two years' tour of the world.

"Now I'm bust," he said bitterly. "Now I got no woman, no children, no friends, and I don't want none. I am by myself and damn everybody!"

I soothed his misanthropy with two fingers of rum, and he mellowed into advice.

"I saw you with that daughter of Liha-Liha," he said, using the native name of the dead millionaire. "You be careful. One time I baked bread in Taaoa. My oven was near his plantation. I saw that girl come into the woods and take off her dress. She had a mirror to see her back, and I looked, and the sun shone bright. What she saw, I saw--a patch of white. She is a leper, that rich girl."

His eyes were full of hate.

"You don't like her," I said. "Why?"

"Why? Why?" he screamed. "Because her father was an accursed villian. He was always kissing the dirty hands of the priests. He used to give his workmen opium to make them work faster, and then he would go to church. He made his money, yes. He was damn hypocrite. And now his daughter, with all that rotten money, is a leper. I tell everybody what I saw. Everybody here knows it but you. Everybody will know it in Tahiti if she goes there."

The man was like a snake to me. I threw away the glass he had drunk from. And yet--was it idle curiosity, or was it fear of being shut away in the valley outside Papeite by the quarantine officers, that made her ask me that question about the segregation of lepers?

Liha-Liha had spent thirty years making money. He had coined the sweat and blood and lives of a thousand Marquesans into a golden fortune, and he had left behind him that fortune, a marble tomb, and Mlle. N----.