CHAPTER XXXVIII. Last Days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's Letter From Her Son.

Last days in Atuona; My Darling Hope's letter from her son.

Exploding Eggs was building my fire of cocoanut-husks as usual in the morning to cook my coffee and eggs, when a whistle split the sultry air. Far from the bay it came, shrill and demanding; my call to civilization.

Long expected, the first liner was in the Isles of the Cannibals. France had begun to make good her promise to expand her trade in Oceania, and the isolation of the dying Marquesans and empty valleys was ended. The steamship Saint François, from Bordeaux by way of Tahiti, had come to visit this group and pick up cargo for Papeite and French ports.

Strange was the sight of her in Taha-Uka Bay where never her like had been, but stranger still, two aboard her, the only two not French, were known to me. Here thousands of miles from where I had seen them, unconnected in any way with each other, were a pair of human beings I had known, one in China, and the other in the United States, both American citizens, and sent by fate to replace me as objects of interest to the natives.

They came up from the beach together, one a small black man, the other tall and golden brown, led by Malicious Gossip to see the American who lived in these far-away islands. The black lingered to talk at a distance, but the golden-brown one advanced.

His figure was the bulky one of the trained athlete, stocky and tremendously powerful, his hide that of an extreme blond burned by months of a tropic sun upon salt water. His hair was an aureole, yellow as a sunflower, a bush of it on a bullet-head. And, incredible almost--as if made of putty by a joker--his nose stuck out like the first joint of a thumb, the oddest nose ever on a man. His little eyes were blue and bright. Barefooted, bare-headed, in the sleeveless shirt and short trousers of a life-guard, with an embroidered V on the front of the upper garment, he was radiantly healthy and happy, a civilized being returned to nature's ways.

Though he did not recognize me, I knew him instantly for a trainer and beach-patrol of Southern California, a diver for planted shells at Catalina Island, whom I had first seen plunging from the rafters of a swimming-tank, and I remembered that he had flattened his nose by striking the bottom, and that a skilful surgeon had saved him its remnant.

He had with him a bundle in a towel, and setting it down on my paepae, introduced himself nonchalantly as Broken Bronck, "Late manager of the stable of native fighters of the Count de M---- of the island of Tahaa, near Tahiti."

"I'm here to stay," he said carelessly. "I have a few francs, and I hear they're pretty hospitable in the Markeesies. I came on the deck of the Saint François, and I've brung my things ashore."

He undid the towel, and there rolled out another bathing-suit and a set of boxing gloves. These were his sole possessions, he said.

"I hear they're nutty on prizefighting like in Tahiti, and I'll teach 'em boxing," he explained.

The Marquesan ladies who speedily assembled could not take their eyes from him. They asked me a score of questions about him, and were not surprised that I knew him, or even that I called the negro by name when he sauntered up. We must all be from the same valley, or at least from the same island, they thought, for were we not all Americans?

I kept Broken Bronck to luncheon, and gave him what few household furnishings I had not promised to Exploding Eggs or to Apporo, who with the promise of the Golden Bed about to be realized--for I announced my going--camped upon it, hardly believing that at last she was to own the coveted marvel. Some keepsakes I gave to Malicious Gossip, Mouth of God, Many Daughters, Water, Titihuti, and others, and drank a last shell of namu with these friends.

News of my packing reached far and wide. I had not estimated so optimistically the esteem in which they held me, these companions of many months, but they trooped from the farthest hills to say farewell. Good-byes even to the sons and daughters of cannibals are sorrowful. I had come to think much of these simple, savage neighbors. Some of them I shall never forget.

Mauitetai, a middle-aged woman with a kindly face, was long on my paepae. Her name would be in English My Darling Hope, and it well fitted her mood, for she was all aglow with wonder and joy at receiving a letter from her son, who three years before had gone upon a ship and disappeared from her ken. The letter had come upon the Saint François, and it brought My Darling Hope into intimate relations with me, for I uncovered to her that her wandering boy had become a resident of my own country, and revealed some of the mysteries of our polity.

The letter was in Marquesan, which I translate into English, seeking to keep the flavor of the original, though poorly succeeding:

"I write to you, me, Pahorai Calizte, and put on this paper greetings to you, my mother, Mauitetai, who are in Atuona.

"Kaoha nui tuu kui, Mauitetai, mother of me. Great love to you.

"I have found in Philadelphia work for me; good work.

"I have found a woman for me. She is Jeanette, an artist, a maker of tattooings on cloth. I am very happy. I have found a house to live in. I am happy I have this woman. She is rich. I am poor. It is for that I write to you, to make it known to you that she is rich, and I am poor. By this paper you will know that I have pledged my word to this woman. I found her and I won her by my work and by my strength and my endeavor.

"She is moi kanahau; as beautiful as the flowers of the hutu in my own beloved valley of Atuona. She is not of America. She is of Chile. She has paid many piasters for the coming here. She has paid forty piasters. She has been at home in Las Palmas, in the islands of small golden birds.

"I will write you more in this paper. I seek your permission to marry Jeanette. She asks it, as I do. Send me your word by the government that carries words on paper.

"It is three years since I have known of you. That is long.

"Give me that word I ask for this woman. I cannot go to marry in Atuona. That is what my heart wants, but it is far and the money is great. The woman would pay and would come with me. I say no. I am proud. I have shame. I am a Marquesan.

"I live with that woman now. I am not married. It is forbidden. The American mutoi (policeman) may take hold of me. Five months I am with this woman of mine. The mutoi has a war-club that is hard as stone.

"Give me quickly the paper to marry her. I await your word.

"My word is done. I am at Philadelphia, New York Hotel. A.P.A. Dieu. Coot pae, mama."

Mauitetai had read the letter many times. It was wonderful to hear from her son after three years and pleasant to know he had found a woman. She must be a haoe, a white woman. Were the women of that island, Chile, white?

I said that they ran the color scale, from blond to brown, from European to Indian, but that this Jeanette who was a tattooer, a maker of pictures on canvas, no doubt an artist of merit, must be pale as a moonbeam. Those red peppers that were hot on the tongue came from Chile, I said, and there were heaps of gold there in the mountains.

My Darling Hope would know what kind of a valley was Philadelphia.

It was the Valley of Brotherly Love. It was a very big valley, with two streams, and a bay. No, it was not near Tahiti. It was a breadfruit season away from Atuona, at the very least.

What could a hotel be? The New York hotel in which her poor son lived?

I did not know that hotel, I told her, but a hotel was a house in which many persons paid to live, and some hotels had more rooms than there were houses in all the Marquesas.

What! In one house, under one roof? By my tribe, it was true.

Did I know this woman? I was from that island and I had been in that valley. I must have seen her.

I replied that I knew a Jeanette who answered the description beautiful, but that she was not from Chile.

Now, My Darling Hope knit her brow. Why would the mutoi take hold of her son, as he feared?

I soothed her anxiety. The mutoi walked up and down in front of the hotel, but he would not bother her son as long as her son could get a few piasters now and then to hand to him. The woman was rich, and would not miss a trifling sum, five or ten piasters a month for the mutoi.

But why was it forbidden for her son to live with Jeanette, being not married to her?

That was our law, but it was seldom enforced. The mutois were fat men who carried war-clubs and struck the poor with them, but her son was tapu because of Jeanette's money.

She was at ease now, she said. Her son could not marry without her permission. No Marquesan had ever done so. She would send the word by the next schooner, or I might take it with me to my own island and hand it to her son. He could then marry.

I had done her a great kindness, but one thing more. Neither she nor Titihuti nor Water could make out what Pahorai Calizte meant by "Coot Pae, Mama." "A.P.A. Dieu." was his commendation of her to God, but Coot Pae was not Marquesan, neither was it French. She pronounced the words in the Marquesan way, and I knew at once. Coot pae is pronounced Coot Pye, and Coot Pye was Pahorai Calizte's way of imitating the American for Apae Kaoha. "Good-by, mama," was his quite Philadelphia closing of his letter to his mother.

I addressed an envelop to her son with The Iron Fingers That Make Words, and gave it to My Darling Hope. A tear came in her eye. She rubbed my bare back affectionately and caressed my nose with hers as she smelled me solemnly. Then she went up the valley to enlighten the hill people.