Imatges de pàgina
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increasingly evident that I had been indiscreet. I thought again of the doctor's words, and I recalled - not without uneasiness a passage in an old missionary chronicle of life in these same islands: 'Many of their applications, however, were powerful. . . . A preparation, in which milk from the pulp of the cocoanut formed a principal ingredient, was sometimes followed by almost instant death. Mr. Barff once took this preparation, at the earnest recommendation of the people; but it nearly cost him his life, although he had not drunk more than half the quantity prepared.'

A sinister thought, especially since I had swallowed the whole dose, one half of which had nearly caused the death of the acquiescent Mr. Barff! Toward evening, when I was long past the stage of being able to smile at my predicament, I fell asleep if sinking unpleasantly into a loss of consciousness may be described in words so peaceful. I awoke at dawn, weak and giddy, but better than I had been for several days. Perhaps the raau cured me. I only know that my curiosity is satisfied - I shall never dabble in native remedies again.

'You are probably right,' remarked my friend, smiling at the announcement of this decision; 'the last of the old-fashioned native doctors who really knew something is dead. His name was Tiurai; I met him when I visited Tahiti before the war, and one cannot doubt that he did, at times, accomplish remarkable results. There is so much humbug involved in all native medicine that it is difficult to distinguish genuine skill from quackery; but while old Tiurai used all the frills of his art, he certainly possessed a considerable knowledge of anatomy and an acquaintance with the virtues of many kinds of herbs. He never took a fee. During the last decade of his life he was too busy to travel about; people came

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to him from all parts of Tahiti, from Moorea and the Leeward group, and even from distant islands of the Paumotu. Some of his cures were too absurdly simple to seem real. I ran across an Englishman, when I was here before, who had suffered for months from an abscess of the leg-one of those hateful things which seem to heal from time to time, only to break out again, deeper and more malignant than before. When the sufferer had reached the point of arranging a trip to New Zealand, someone persuaded him to let Tiurai have a go at it. Skeptical, but ready to try anything in his extremity, the Englishman drove out to the district where the native doctor lived. A dozen carts were drawn up before the house, and groups of people, with the solemn air of mourners at a death-bed, sat under the trees awaiting their interviews. When the abscess was shown to Tiurai, he gave it only a casual glance and said that he would send medicine the next day.

'In the morning a boy appeared with the remedy: a small bottle of what seemed to be ordinary monoi-cocoanut-oil, scented with the blossoms of the Tahitian gardenia. The patient was instructed to obtain the scarlet tailfeather of a tropic bird, dip it in the oil, and draw a circle around the abscess at sunrise, at noon, and at sunset. This sounds ridiculous enough, but for some reason the bad leg began to improve at once and was healed within a few days.

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with his curious system of massage, which seemed to rob child-birth of nearly all its suffering. The fact that no others sprang up to take his place proves that Tiurai possessed unusual powers. There is a doctor practising at Paea and another at Haapape, but the natives have little confidence in them and consult them only in trifling cases. This does not apply, of course, to the professional exorcists, who form a distinct class. You will find them in nearly every village the trusted exponents of an ancient art.'

III

The modern exorcists, to whom my host alluded, are descendants of the heathen Faatere, employed in the old days by friends of the demon-ridden, to drive out the evil spirit invoked by a sorcerer. European witnesses of the agony and death of those upon whom the destroying spirits preyed were forced to confess that powers beyond their comprehension were at work. Even the hard-headed missionaries admitted this. One of the most distinguished of them, writing of Tahiti nearly a century ago, observed: 'It is not necessary now to inquire whether satanic agency affects the bodies of men. We know this was the fact at the time our Saviour appeared on earth. Many of the natives of these islands are firmly persuaded that, while they were idolaters, their bodies were subject to most excruciating sufferings from the direct operation of satanic power. . . and ... some of the early missionaries are disposed to think this was the fact.'

There are still on Tahiti one or two old men considered capable of dire necromancy, but the belief is dying fast, and nowadays it is the spirit of an ancestor naturally malicious, or offended by some misdeed which harries the human victim. I saw a case of this

sort only a few weeks ago. In the house where I was stopping there was a young girl who did the family washing and ironing-a gentle, good-natured youngster of sixteen. I was reading on the verandah, one evening after dinner, and noticed this girl near-by, gazing out over the sea in the detached and dreamy manner of her race. Suddenly I heard her give a low cry, and, glancing up from my book, I saw that she was cowering with an air of fear, arms raised and bent as if to ward off invisible blows. When I reached her, a moment later, she had collapsed in a faint; I remember the awkwardness of carrying her limp. body to a couch. I felt her pulse, and it seemed to me that her heart was barely stirring. Then, screaming terribly, and with a suddenness that was uncanny, she sat up. I had noticed that she was a rather pretty girl, with tender lips and soft dark eyes; now her lips were distorted in a snarl and flecked with a light froth, while her eyes, fixed and open to the fullest extent, shone with a dull red glare. She sprang to her feet with an air of horrid desperation. The next moment three of us seized her. While we took good care to do her no harm, she was not in the least afraid of hurting us, and flung us about as if we were children; it seemed to me that there was something monstrous in the strength and ferocity of her struggles.

In the midst of the scuffle, an elderly man appeared on the verandah — a spirit-doctor of some local reputation, who took in the situation at a glance.

"Tell me quickly,' he said, 'where I can find a bottle of perfume-strong perfume.'

I told him there was cologne on the dressing-table in my room, and in an instant he had a towel soaked in the stuff, waving it about the frantic girl's head. Perhaps the fit had run its course; for she ceased at once to struggle, and sank down on the floor, quiet and limp.

Someone had run to fetch the European doctor, and when he arrived the girl had recovered consciousness. He sat down beside her, to ask questions in a low voice. By the troubled look in her eyes I could see that she understood; but though she seemed to make an effort to speak, no sound came from her lips. Presently he rose. 'It is a sort of epilepsy,' he informed us; though from what you say the attack must have been more than usually violent. Pauvre enfant - there is no cure.'

When he had gone the girl spoke. Her story may have been pure imagination, or the memory of a singular and vivid dream; in the eyes of the natives, of course, it was terrifying, but neither incredible nor strange.

'I was resting after my work,' she said, 'watching the little clouds above the sea. All at once I saw an old woman standing before me. She carried a staff of black wood in her hand; her gray hair hung tangled about her shoulders; she gazed at me without smiling, and I was greatly afraid. I knew her at once for my grandmother, who died when I was a child. Then she raised her staff and began to beat me, and I put up my arms to ward off the blows. After that, I felt myself dying. When I awoke on the couch, she was standing beside me, and as I opened my eyes I saw her raise her club. Of the rest I know nothing, except that, when the doctor questioned me, I could not answer, for the hand of that woman was on my lips.'

"The tupapau,' remarked Mahine, the spirit-doctor, when the girl had been put to bed, 'cannot abide perfume; it will drive off the most dangerous of them. But though she pretends innocence, I know that girl has done an ill thing, to incur the anger of her grandmother.'

In justice to the spirit-world, I must add that Mahine was not mistaken. It was discovered afterward that the

girl had acquired a lover and was concealing from her family the fact of an impending motherhood.

There is a good deal of misapprehension in regard to the native code of morality, which most white men dismiss with the statement that no such thing exists. In reality, the discovery that this child was involved in an intrigue was something of a shock to the native mind, for she was supposedly one of the chaste girls of whom every village possesses a few carefully guarded, and objects of considerable local pride. Chastity is, I believe, and always has been, in Polynesia, a virtue as highly prized as it is rare, though we are apt to lose sight of the fact, because the woman who cannot boast of it is neither shunned nor scorned.

Native morals or rather the lack of them are responsible for the advent of a regrettably large proportion of visitors to the islands. This is simple truth. The credulous and shoddy voluptuary in England, America, or France

chances on one of the South Sea books in vogue, to feast his mind on a text spiced with innuendo, and his eyes on portraits of brown ladies whose charms are trammeled only by the sketchiest of attire. After that, if circumstances permit, he is not unlikely to board a steamer for the islands; but a month or two later you will find him even more eager to return, for the reality of his tawdry dream does not exist the women within his reach are, if possible, less interesting than their sisters of Leicester Square, or Sixth Avenue, or the Butte.

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he likes the island and its people, is a perpetual aggravation to gossip. And he minds his own business here, as elsewhere, an unpardonable sin.

Gossip the occupation of the provincial and the dull - makes no allowance for variations from type; yet one must remember that the European who does not run to type is the only one fitted to make a success of life in the islands far out of the white man's natural range. Consider again, for a moment, the case of my friend. He has an income, and his doctoring gives him an occupation; the first is a help, the second an indispensable accessory to content. He has eyes for the beautiful and imagination for the strange; in order to live as he chooses, he is willing to sacrifice what most of us would never in the world give up. Like the cobbler in quest of happiness on Rapa Iti, he is one of the very rare men who possess resources within themselves, who are able to get enjoyment from their own minds, and are not dependent on others for diversion from dull and paltry thoughts. The only white man in a remote native community, he lives with the Polynesian on such terms of intimacy as few Europeans could endure. Their confidence is his reward; and be cause they are always welcome at his house, where there is a phonograph and an inexhaustible supply of cigarettes, the natives do many things for himfavors he accepts as gracefully as they are tendered. Breadfruit, bananas, and taro are brought to his door in greater quantities than he can use; when the men of the village return from the reef, to divide their fish, his portion is not forgotten. The fame of his idyllic life has spread abroad, and I wonder some times if, in the end, he will not be forced to seek tranquillity in places even more remote.

On one occasion a little band of wanderers, elderly and unattached

white women from the basin of the Mississippi,- devout readers of Gauguin and White Shadows in the South Seas, journeyed happily to his retreat and gave him an anxious week. 'Poor fellow,' they said, 'living out there all alone; he must be nice - everyone says he is so kind to the dear natives. We can just as well stop there as in Papeete, and the sight of a white face will do him good.'

They were counting apparently, on a visit of indefinite duration, and he put in some agonizing days before his goodnature gave way at last.

'If you will reflect,' he suggested to his uninvited guests, 'it will become evident that I did not leave New York because I felt lonely there. As for white faces, I can always go to Papeete if I want to gaze at them a need I have not felt so far.'

To most of us, in the same circumstances, the sight of white faces would be welcome - even the forbiddingly earnest countenances of æsthetic females: thin-lipped, leathery, and garnished with black-rimmed goggles. We do not vary from the type and the type is better off at home. A good many men and women who come from the lands of the white man to seek an elusive dolce far niente in Polynesia are discovering this profound truth for themselves.

The South Seas are no less blue than when the ships of Cook traversed them, and the people of the islands, though dying fast, are perhaps not greatly changed. The palms still rustle soothingly as in the days of Melville's enchanted vision; the same trade-wind blows, and lonely lagoons still ripple under the stars. But the islands are not for people of our race - I say it, though I set at naught an old illusion. They may be places to visit once; but these are lands in which few white men linger, and to which fewer still return.

FRIENDLY NEIGHBORS

BY ANNIE W. NOEL

'MRS. SCOTT is dead.'

Mrs. Anderson was shocked. She laid down her garden-shears and looked at Mrs. Hoxie, who was telling her.

For Mrs. Anderson had been planning to call; and she turned involuntarily toward Mrs. Scott's house just in back of her. Mrs. Scott had bought that house just six years ago. She had planted the most wonderful red peonies they were blooming now if she

was dead

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Mrs. Anderson turned rather indignantly on Mrs. Hoxie. How should she know? She lived a whole block away 'Mrs. Wilson saw the hearse at the door.'

A hearse!

Mrs. Anderson gazed at the silent house just behind. She had been planning to call.

'Mrs. Wilson was shocked,' Mrs. Hoxie went on. 'She said she felt she ought to have known it before the hearse came, living only four houses away. A hearse is a shock, of course. Mrs. Wilson is a lovely woman.'

That certainly was no way to speak of the dead. Mrs. Anderson looked after Mrs. Hoxie with resentment. Then her own remorse deepened. She had been planning to call, and the red peonies blooming so heartlessly in Mrs. Scott's own yard disturbed her. It was not right to let them stand that way if Mrs. Scott was dead. With a deep pang she wished she had called.

She went into Mrs. Lewis's next door, to see if Mrs. Lewis knew.

it in the New York Tribune. The New York Tribune still lay on the floor where it had fallen.

Tears were in Mrs. Lewis's eyes. It seemed so wrong, now, that they had lived so long almost back to back and had never spoken. 'I have met her on the street too,' said Mrs. Lewis, with profound regret.

Going back to her garden, Mrs. Anderson looked at Mrs. Scott's sightless windows. She had often wondered if Mrs. Scott was looking. Now she knew there was no one behind those windows. It was dreadful certainty.

She wished she had called.

She saw Mrs. Allen, next door on the other side, and wondered if she knew. She stepped to the hedge, irresistibly impelled.

'I don't believe it,' replied Mrs. Allen, with the utmost firmness.

Mrs. Anderson was aroused. Why a tone like that? Toward the dead? But she replied gently. The hearse had been seen at the door. And Mrs. Lewis had read it in the Tribune.

'Oh!' replied Mrs. Allen, unrelenting; 'the Tribune.'

She had n't known her personally, Mrs. Allen went on, seeming to think some explanation was due. All she knew of her was that, the day after they had moved in, a voice had called Mr. Allen on the 'phone, and asked if they were sure they had a buildingpermit to put up exactly that type of ready-cut garage.

Mrs. Anderson's eyes drooped as she Mrs. Lewis knew. She had just read looked at the garage. And again she

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