CHAPTER XXIV

A journey to Nuka-hiva; story of the celebration of the fête of Joan of Arc, and the miracles of the white horse and the girl.

Père Victorien said that I must not leave the Marquesas before I visited the island of Nuka-hiva seventy miles to the northward and saw there in Tai-o-hae, the capital of the northern group of islands, a real saint.

"A wonderful servant of Christ," he said, "Père Simeon Delmas. He is very old, and has been there since the days of strife. He has not been away from the islands for fifty years, but God preserves him for His honor and service. Père Simeon would be one of the first in our order were he in Europe, but he is a martyr and wishes to earn his crown in these islands and die among his charges. He is a saint, as truly as the blessed ones of old.

"It was he who planned the magnificent celebration of the feast of Joan of Arc some years ago, and as to miracles, I truly believe that the keeping safe of the white horse during the terrible storm and perhaps even the preservation of a maiden worthy to appear in the armor of the Maid, are miracles as veritable as the apparition at Lourdes. Pour moi, I am convinced that Joan is one of the most glorious saints in heaven, and that Père Simeon himself is of the band of blessed martyrs."

"Ah, Père Victorien, I would like nothing better than to meet that good man," I said, "but I am at a loss to get to Tai-o-hae. The Roberta, Capriata's steamer, will not be here for many weeks, and there is no other in the archipelago just now."

"You shall return with me in the Jeanne d'Arc," he replied quickly. "It may be an arduous voyage for you, but you will be well repaid."

A fortnight later his steersman came running to my cabin to tell me to be ready at one o'clock in the morning.

The night was a myriad of stars on a vast ebon canopy. One could see only shadows in denser shadows, and the serene sure movements of the men as they lifted the whale-boat from Bauda's shed and carried it lightly to the water were mysterious to me. Their eyes saw where mine were blind. Père Victorien and I were seated in the boat, and they shoved off, breast-deep in the turmoil of the breakers, running alongside the bobbing craft until it was in the welter of foam and, then with a chorus, in unison, lifting themselves over the sides and seizing the oars before the boat could turn broadside to the shore.

"He-ee Nuka-hiva!" they sang in a soft monotone, while they pulled hard for the mouth of the bay. The priest and I were fairly comfortable in the stern, the steersman perched behind us on the very edge of the combing, balancing himself to the rise and fall of the boat as an acrobat on a rope. I laid my head on my bag and fell asleep before the sea had been reached. The last sound in my ears was the voice of Père Victorien reciting his rosary.

I awoke to find a breeze careening our sail and the Jeanne d'Arc rushing through a pale blue world--pale blue water, pale blue sky, and, it seemed, pale blue air. No single solid thing but the boat was to be seen in the indefinite immensity. Sprawling on its bottom in every attitude of limp relaxation, the oarsmen lay asleep; only Père Victorien was awake, his hands on the tiller and his eyes gazing toward the east.

"Bonjour!" said he. "You have slept well. Your angel guardian thinks well of you. The dawn comes."

I asked him if I might relieve him of tiller and sheet, and he, with an injunction to keep the sail full and far, unpocketed his breviary, and was instantly absorbed in its contents.

Our tack was toward the eastern distance, and no glimpse of land or cloud made us aught but solitary travelers in illimitable space. The sun was beneath the deep, but in the hush of the pale light one felt the awe of its coming. Slowly a faint glow began to gild a line that circled the farthest east. Gold it was at first, like a segment of a marriage ring, then a bolt of copper shot from the level waters to the zenith and a thousand vivid colors were emptied upon the sky and the sea. Roses were strewn on the glowing waste, rose and gold and purple curtained the horizon, and suddenly, without warning, abrupt as lightning, the sun beamed hot above the edge of the world.

The Marquesans stirred, their bodies stretched and their lungs expanded in the throes of returning consciousness. Then one sat up and called loudly, "A titahi a atu! Another day!" The others rose, and immediately began to uncover the popoi bowl. They had canned fish and bread, too, and ate steadily, without a word, for ten minutes. The steersman, who had joined them, returned to the helm, and the priest and I enjoyed the bananas and canned beef with water from the jug, and cigarettes.

All day the Jeanne d'Arc held steadily on the several tacks we steered, and all day no living thing but bird or fish disturbed the loneliness of the great empty sea. Père Victorien read his breviary or told his beads in abstracted contemplation, and I, lying on the bottom of the boat with my hat shielding my eyes from the beating rays of the sun, pondered on what I knew of Tai-o-hae, the port on the island of Nuka-hiva, to which we were bound.

For two hundred years after the discovery of the southern group--the islands we had left behind us--the northern group was still unknown to the world. Captain Ingraham, of Boston, found Nuka-hiva in 1791, and called the seven small islets the Washington Islands. Twenty years later, during the war of 1812, Porter refitted his ships there to prey upon the British, and but for the perfidy,--or, from another view, the patriotism,--of an Englishman in his command, Porter might have succeeded in making the Marquesas American possessions.

Tai-o-hae became the seat of power of the whites in the islands; it waxed in importance, saw admirals, governors, and bishops sitting in state on the broad verandas of government buildings, witnessed that new thing, the making of a king and queen, knew the stolid march of convicts, white and brown, images of saints carried in processions, and schools opened to regenerate the race of idol-worshippers.

Tai-o-hae saw all the plans of grandeur wane, saw saloons and opium, vice and disease, fastened upon the natives, and saw the converted, the old gods overthrown, the new God reigning, cut down like trees when the fire runs wild in the forest.

The dream of minting the strength and happiness of the giant men of the islands into gold for the white labor-kings dissolved into a nightmare as the giants perished. It was hard to make the free peoples toil as slaves for foreign masters, so the foreign masters brought opium. To get this "Cause of Wonder Sleep," of more delight than kava, the Marquesan was taught to hoe and garner cotton, to gather copra and even to become the servant of the white man. The hopes of the invaders were rosy. They faded quickly. The Marquesans faded faster. The saloons of Tai-o-hae were gutters of drunkenness. The paepaes were wailing-places for the dead. No government arrested vice or stopped the traffic in death-dealing drugs until too late. Then, with no people left to exploit, the colonial ministers in Paris forgot the Marquesas.

In the lifetime of a man, Tai-o-hae swelled from a simple native village with thousands of healthy, happy people, to the capital of an archipelago, with warships, troops, prisons, churches, schools, and plantations, and reverted to a deserted, melancholy beach, with decaying, uninhabited buildings testifying to catastrophe. Since Kahuiti, my man-eating friend of Taaoa, was born, the cycle had been completed.

I was on my way now to see, in Tai-o-hae, a man who was giving his life to bring the white man's religion to the few dying natives who remained.

At dusk the wind died, and we put out the oars. Hour after hour the rowers pulled, chanting at times ancient lays of the war-canoes, of the fierce fights of their fathers when hundreds fed the sharks after the destruction of their vessels by the conquerors, and of the old gods who had reigned before the white men came. Père Victorien listened musingly.

"They should be singing of the Blessed Mother or of Joan," he said with sorrow. "But when they pull so well I cannot deny them a thread of that old pagan warp. Those devils whom they once worshipped wait about incessantly for a word of praise. They hate the idea that we are hurrying to the mission, and they would like well to delay us."

Whatever the desires of those devils, they were balked, for the wind came fair during the second night, and when the second dawning came we were in the bay of Tai-o-hae.

It was a basin of motionless green water, held in the curve of a shore shaped like a horseshoe, with two huge headlands of rock for the calks. The beach was a rim of white between the azure of the water and the dark green of the hills that rose steeply from it. Above them the clouds hung in varying shapes, here lit by the sun to snowy fleece, there black and lowering. On the lower slopes a few houses peeped from the embowering parau trees, and on a small hill, near the dismantled fort, the flag of France drooped above the gendarme's cabin.

By eight o'clock in the morning, when we reached the shore, the beach was shimmering in the sunlight, the sand gleaming under the intense rays as if reflecting the beams of gigantic mirrors. Heat-waves quivered in the moist air.

This was the beach that had witnessed the strange career of John Howard, a Yankee sailor who had fled a Yankee ship fifty years before and made his bed for good and all in the Marquesas. Lying Bill Pincher had told me the story. Howard, known to the natives as T'yonny, had been welcomed by them in their generous way, and the tahuna had decorated him from head to foot in the very highest style of the period. In a few years, what with this tattooing and with sunburn, one would have sworn him to be a Polynesian. He was ambitious, and by alliances acquired an entire valley, which he left to his son, T'yonny Junior. Mr. Howard, senior, garbed himself like the natives and was like them in many ways, but he retained a deep love for his country and its flag, and when he saw an American man-of-war entering the harbor, he went aboard with his many tawny relatives-in-law.

The captain was amazed to hear him talking with the sailors.

"'E was blooming well knocked off 'is pins," said Lying Bill. "'Blow me!' 'e sez, 'if that blooming cannibal don't talk the King's English as if 'e was born in New York!' 'E 'ad 'im down in the cabin to 'ave a drink, thinking 'e was a big chief. 'Oward took a cigar and smoked it and drank 'is whiskey with a gulp and a wry face like all Americans.

"'I must say,' sez the captain, 'you're the most intelligent 'eathen I've seen in the 'ole blooming run.'

"'Eathen?' sez 'Oward. 'Me a 'eathen! I was born in Iowa, and I'm a blooming good American.'"

"'What, you an American citizen?' sez the captain. 'Born in my own state, and painted up like Sitting Bull on the warpath? Get off this ship,' sez 'e, wild, 'get off this ship, or I'll put you in irons and take you back to the blooming jail you escaped from!'

"'Oward leaped over the side and swum ashore."

An avenue ran the length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees--this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. Man had almost ceased to be a figure in the scene he had dominated for untold centuries.

Crossing the stepping-stones of the brook we met a darkish, stout man in overalls.

"Good morn'," he said pleasantly. I looked at him and guessed his name at once.

"Good-morning," I answered. "You are the son of T'yonny."

"My father, Mist' Howard, dead," he said. "You Menike like him?"

Before I could answer something entered my ear and something my nose. These somethings buzzed and bit fearsomely. I coughed and sputtered. An old woman on the bank was sitting in the smudge of a fire of cocoanut husks. She was scratching her arms and legs, covered with angry red blotches.

"The nonos never stop biting," she said in French. These nonos are the dread sand-flies that Père Victorien had run from to get some sleep in Atuona. They are a kind of gadfly, red-hot needles on wings.

We sauntered along the road, tormented by the buzzing pests at which we constantly slapped and, crossing a tiny bridge over the brook, approached the Mission of Tai-o-hae, that once pompous and powerful center of the diffusion of the faith throughout the Marquesas. The road was lined with guavas, mangos, cocoanuts, and tamarinds, all planted with precision and care. The ambitious fathers who had begun these plantings scores of years before had provided the choicest fruits for their table. All over the world the members of the great religious orders of Europe have carried the seeds of the best varieties of fruits and flowers, of trees and shrubs and vegetables; more than organized science they deserve the credit for introducing non-native species into all climes.

About the mission grounds was a stone wall, stout and fairly high, which had assured protection when orgies of indulgence in rum had made the natives brutal. The clergy must survive if souls are to be saved. Within the wall stood the church, the school, and a rambling rectory, all made beautiful by age and the artistry of tropical nature. Mosses and lichens, mosaics of many shades of green, faint touches of red and yellow mould, covered the old walls which were fast decaying and falling to pieces.

By the half-unhinged door stood an old man of venerable figure, his long beard still dark, though his hair was quite white. He wore a soiled soutane down to the ankles of his rusty shoes, a sweaty, stained, smothering gown of black broadcloth, which rose and fell with his hurried respiration. His eyes of deepest brown, large and lustrous, were the eyes of an old child, shining with simple enthusiasms and lit with a hundred memories of worthy accomplishments or efforts.

Père Victorien presented me, saying that I was a lover of the Marquesas, and specially interested in Joan of Arc. Père Simeon seized me by the hand and, drawing me toward him, gave me the accolade as if I were a reunited brother. Then he presented me to a Marquesan man at his side, "Le chef de l'isle de Huapu," who was waiting to escort him to that island that he might say mass and hear confession. The chief was for leaving at once, and Père Simeon lamented that he had no time in which to talk to me.

I said I had heard it bruited in my island of Hiva-oa that the celebration of the fete of Joan of Arc had been marked by extraordinary events indicating a special appreciation by the heavenly hosts.

Tears came into the eyes of the old priest. He dismissed the chief at once, and after saying farewell to Père Victorien, who was embarking immediately for his own island of Haitheu, Père Simeon and I entered his study, a pitifully shabby room where rickety furniture, quaking floor, tattered wall-coverings, and cracked plates and goblets spelled the story of the passing of an institution once possessing grandeur and force. Seated in the only two sound chairs, with wine and cigarettes before us, we took up the subject so dear to Père Simeon's heart.

"I am glad if you cannot be a Frenchman that at least you are not an Englishman," he said fervently. "God has punished England for the murder of Jeanne d'Arc. That day at Rouen when they burned my beloved patroness ended England. Now the English are but merchants, and they have a heretical church.

"You should have seen the honors we paid the Maid here. Mais, Monsieur, she has done much for these islands. The natives love her. She is a saint. She should be canonized. But the opposition will not down. There is reason to believe that the devil, Satan himself, or at least important aides of his, are laboring against the doing of justice to the Maid. She is powerful now, and doubtless has great influence with the Holy Virgin in Heaven, but as a true saint she would be invincible." The old priest's eyes shone with his faith.

"You do not doubt her miraculous intercession?" I asked.

Père Simeon lit another cigarette, watered his wine, and lifted from a shelf a sheaf of pamphlets. They were hectographed, not printed from type, for he is the human printing-press of all this region, and all were in his clear and exquisite writing. He held them and referred to them as he went on.

"She was born five hundred years ago on the day of the procession in Tai-o-hae. That itself is a marvel. Such an anniversary occurs but twice in a millennium. After all my humble services in these islands that I should be permitted to be here on such a wonderful day proves to me the everlasting mercy of God. Here is the account I have written in Marquesan of her life, and here the record of the fête upon the anniversary."

As he showed me the brochures written beautifully in purple and red inks, recording the history of the Maid of Orleans, with many canticles in her praise, learned dissertations upon her career and holiness, maps showing her march and starred at Oleane, Kopiegne, and Rua to indicate that great things had occurred at Orleans, Compiègne, and Rouen, Père Simeon pointed out to me that it was of supreme importance that the Marquesan people should be given a proper understanding of the historical and geographical conditions of England and France in Joan's time.

He had spent months, even years, in preparing for the celebration of her fête-day.

"And Monsieur, by the blessed grace of Joan, only the whites got drunk. Not a Marquesan was far gone in liquor throughout the three days of the feast. There was temptation in plenty, for though I gave only the chiefs and a few intimates any wine, several of the Europeans in their enthusiasm for our dear patroness distributed absinthe and rum to those who had the price. There was a moment when it seemed touch and go between the devil and Joan. But, oh, how she came to our rescue! I reproached the whites, locked up the rum, and Joan did the rest. It was a three-days' feast of innocence."

"But there are not many whites here?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "There are one hundred and twenty people in Tai-o-hae now, and but a few are whites. Alas, mon ami, they do not set a good example. They mean well; they are brave men, but they do not keep the commandments. Here is a chart I drew showing the rise of the church since Peter. It is divided into twenty periods, and I have allotted the fifteenth to Joan. She well merits a period."

My mind continually harked back to the prompting of Père Victorien concerning the horse and the girl of the jubilee.

"There were signs at the commemoration?" I interposed.

Père Simeon glanced at me eagerly. His naivete was not of ignorance of men and their motives. He had confessed royalty, cannibals, pirates, and nuns. The souls of men were naked under his scrutiny. But his faith burned like a lambent flame, and to win to the standard of the Maid of Orleans one who would listen was a duty owed her, and a rare chance to aid a fellow mortal.

He rose and brushed the cigarette ashes down the front of his frayed cassock as an old native woman responded to his call and brought another bottle of Bordeaux. The nonos were incessantly active. I slapped at them constantly and sucked at the wounds they made. But he paid no attention to them at all except when they attacked him under his soutane; then he struck convulsively at the spot.

"God sends us such trials to brighten our crown," he said comfortingly. "I have seen white men dead from the nonos. They were not here in the old days, but since the jungle has overrun us because of depopulation, they are frightful. During the mass, when the priest cannot defend himself, they are worst, as if sent by the devil who hates the holy sacrifice. But, mon vieux, you were asking about those signs. Alors, I will give the facts to you, and you can judge."

He poured me a goblet of the wine; I removed my cotton coat, covered my hands with it, against the gadflies, and prepared to listen.

"Seven years before the great anniversary," said Père Simeon, sipping his wine, "I thought out my plan. There would be masses, vespers, benedictions, litanies, and choirs. But my mind was set upon a representation of the Maid as she rode into Rheims to crown the king after her victories. She was, you will remember, clothed all in white armor and rode a white horse, both the emblems of purity. That was the note I would sound, for I believe too much had been made of Joan the warrior, Joan the heroine, and not enough of Joan the saint. Oh, Monsieur, there have been evil forces at work there!"

He clasped his thigh with both hands and groaned, and I knew that though a nono had bitten him there, his anguish was more of soul than body. I lighted his cigarette, as he proceeded:

"Two things were needful above all; a handsome white horse and a Marquesan girl of virtue. Three years before the jubilee I was enabled, through a gift inspired by Joan, to buy a horse of that kind in Hiva-oa. I had this mare pastured on that island until the time came for bringing her here.

"Now as to the girl, I found in the nun's school a child who was beautiful, strong, and good. Her father was the captain of a foreign vessel and had dwelt here for a time; he was of your country. Of the mother I will not speak. The girl was everything to be desired. But this was seven years before the day of the fête. That was a difficulty.

"I stressed to the good sisters the absolute necessity of bringing up the child in the perfect path of sanctity. I had her dedicated to Joan, and special prayers were said by me and by the nuns that the evil one would not trap her into the sins of other Marquesan girls. Also she was observed diligently. For seven years we watched and prayed, and Monsieur, we succeeded. I will not say that it was a miracle, but it was a very striking triumph for Joan.

"That for the human; now for the beast. A month before the fête I commissioned Captain Capriata to bring the mare to Tai-o-hae in his schooner. The animal came safely to the harbor. She was still on deck when a storm arose, and Capriata thought it best for him to lift his anchor and go to the open sea. The wind was driving hard toward the shore, and there was danger of shipwreck."

The old priest stood up and, leading me to a window, pointed to the extreme end of the horseshoe circle of the bay.

"See that point," he said. "Right there, just as Capriata swung his vessel to head for the sea, the mare broke loose from her halter, and in a bound reached the rail of the schooner and leaped into the waves. Capriata could do nothing. The schooner was in peril, and he, with his hand upon the wheel and his men at the sails, could only utter an oath. He confesses he did that, and you will find no man more convinced of the miracle than he."

The aged missionary paused, his eyes glowing. The nonos that settled in a swarm on his swollen, poisoned hands were nothing to him in the rapture of that memory.

"This happened at night. Throughout the darkness the schooner stayed outside the bay, returning only at daylight. Immediately after anchoring, the captain hastened to inform me of the misfortune, and found me saying mass. It was one of the few times he had ever been in the sacred edifice."

Père Simeon smiled, and held up one finger to emphasize my attention. "As soon as mass was finished, Capriata told me of what had happened, and his certainty that the mare was drowned. I fell on my knees and said a despairing prayer to Joan. That instant we heard a neigh outside, and rushing out of the church, we saw, cropping the grass in the mission enclosure, the white mare that was destined to bear the figure of Joan in the celebration of her fete."

I could not restrain an exclamation of amazement. "Vraiment?"

"Absolument," answered Père Simeon. "Unbelievers might explain that waves swept the mare ashore, and that through some instinct she found her way along the beach or over the hills. But that she should come to the mission grounds, to the very spot where her home was to be, though she had never seen the islands before--no, my friend, not even the materialist could explain that as less than supernatural. I have sent the proofs to our order in Belgium. They will form part of the evidence that will one day be offered to bring about the canonization of Joan."

"And the procession, was it successful?" I inquired.

"Mais oui! It was magnificent. When it started there was a grand fanfare of trumpets, drums, fireworks, and guns. Never was there such a noise here since the days of battle between the whites and the natives. There were four choirs of fifty voices each, the natives from all these nearby islands, each with a common chant in French and particular himines in Marquesan. I walked first with the Blessed Sacrament; then came Captain Capriata with the banner of the mission, and then, proceeded by a choir, came the virgin on the white horse.

"She was all in silver armor, as was the mare. Two years before I had sent to France for the pasteboard and the silver paper, and had made the armor. The helmet was the pièce de résistance. The girl wore it as the Maid herself, and sat the horse without faltering, despite the nonos and the heat. It was a wonderful day for Joan and for the Marquesas."

He sat for a moment lost in the vision.

"So it was all as you had planned?"

"Mon ami, it was not I, but Joan herself, to whom all honor belongs. There was a moment--Captain Capriata had taken absinthe with his morning popoi, and was unsteady. He stumbled. I called to him to breathe a prayer to his patron saint--he is of Ajaccio in Corsica--and to call upon Joan for aid. He straightened up at once, after one fall, and bore the white banner of the Maid in good style from the mission to the deserted inn by the leper-house.

"We had three superb feasts, one on each day of the fête. We had speeches and songs, three masses a day to accommodate all, four first communicants, and two marriages. I will tell you, though it may be denied by the commercial missionaries, that five protestants attended and recanted."

Père Simeon's eyes flashed as he recalled those memorable days. He fell into a reverie, scratching his legs after the nonos and letting his cigarette go out.

I arose to depart. He must go to Huapu with the chief, who was again at the door,

"And did the fête help the parish?" I asked with that bromidic zeal to please that so often discloses the fly just when the ointment's smell is sweetest.

"Alas!" he replied, with a sorrowful shake of his beard. "Even the girl who had worn the white armor leaped from the mast of a ship to escape infamy and was drowned. Yet there was grandeur of sacrifice in that. But for the others, they die fast, too. Some day the priest will be alone here without a flock."

He picked up a garment or two, placed the Holy Sacrament with pious care in his breast, and we walked together through the mournful and decaying village, passing a few melancholy natives.

I said to Père Simeon as he stepped into the canoe, "You are like a shepherd who pursues his sheep wherever they may wander, to gather them into the fold at last."

"C'est vrai," he smiled sadly. "The bishop himself had to go to Hiva-oa from here, because there were really not enough people left alive for the seat of his bishopric. At least, there will be some here when I die, for I am old. Ah, thirty years ago, when I came here, there were souls to be saved! Thousands of them. But I love the last one. There are still a hundred left on Huapu. There is work yet, for the devil grows more active yearly."