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Title: The Island of Desire (The Story of a South Sea Trader) Author: Robert Dean Frisbie (1895-1948) * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0100261.txt Language: English Date first posted: November 2001 Date most recently updated: November 2001 This eBook was produced by: Cate Bourke cbourke@halenet.com.au Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au ----------------------------------------------------------------- Title: The Island of Desire (The Story of a South Sea Trader) Author: Robert Dean Frisbie (1895-1948) A number of years ago Robert Dean Frisbie set up a trading station on Danger Island, a lonely paradise four hundred miles northeast of Samoa. This autobiographical story relates how the author fell in love with a charming Polynesian girl, how he became part of the life of the island, how he eventually survived a man-sized South Sea hurricane. When Frisbie went to meet Desire under the magnolia trees, the islanders laughed about it, thinking they were having an affair. Constable Benny even arrested Desire on a charge of loitering after curfew. But when the American built a house and gave a house party for such friends as Parson Sea Foam, Vicar Araipu, Heathen William, and Desire's many sisters, they saw that he was really in love. During the feast Frisbie and Desire were officially married. The next six years were wonderfully happy ones for both of them. Desire gave birth first to Johnny (a girl), then Jakey, Elaine, and Nga. The charm of their lives is spread before the reader with the miraculous color and texture of a Gauguin painting. Frisbie's deep love for Desire, his portrayal of the glamorous South Seas, his bursts of affectionate humor, and his pride in his half-Polynesian "cowboys" play a part in this remarkable story. CONTENTS PART I DANGER ISLAND PART II THE HURRICANE CHARACTERS OF THIS BOOK PART I ARAIPU: the vicar and storekeeper AUGUSTUS, HORATIO: the native resident agent AUGUSTUS, SUSANNA: his sanctimonious wife BENNY: constable of Central Village BONES: the satyr, father of Poaza and Strange-Eyes BOSUN-WOMAN: the village undertaker BRIBERY, DEACON: the crooked-legged tobacco addict BRIBERY, JR.: son of Deacon Bribery DESIRE: wife of Ropati EARS: constable of Leeward Village ELIHU: the supercargo FIRST-BORN: son of Parson Sea Foam JOHNNY (FLORENCE NGATOKORUAIMATAUEA) the author's first child LETTER: a bloodthirsty deaf-mute LITTLE SEA: wife of a deacon LULUIA: the youth who insults the losers MALOKU: Desire's half sister MAMA: Ropati's cook, wife of William MISS LEGS: who sleeps in a house with loose floor boards MISS MEMORY: Desire's fraternity name MISS TERN: The village Jezebel MISS WHITE TERN: Tangi's fraternity name MR. BREADFRUIT: poker-playing councilman of Leeward Village MR. HORSE: one of Pio's fraternity names MR. MANOWAR HAWK: another of Pio's fraternity names MR. MOONLIGHT: Ropati's fraternity name MR. SCRATCH: the old gentleman who doesn't savvy much MRS. SCRATCH: wobbling wife of Mr. Scratch PATI: one of Desire's sisters PILALA-WOMAN--a shriveled old termagant PIO: Tanges wonder-boy of the cocolele RACHEL: daughter of Maloku ROPATI--the trader and author SEA FOAM: parson of Danger Island STRANGE-EYES: daughter of Bones TALA: mother of Desire TANGI: one of Desire's sisters TIBBITTS--the politician who visited Danger Island TILI: Desire's youngest sister VAEVAE: one of Desire's sisters WILLIAM THE HEATHEN: blasphemer, whalerman, reprobate PART II ELAINE: Ropati's third child JAKEY: Ropati's only son, another cowboy JOHNNY: Ropati's oldest child, one of the four "cowboys" NGA: Ropati's youngest daughter, aged four OLI-OLI: cook aboard the Hurry Home POWELL, RONALD: of Palmerston Island, Pratt's companion aboard the Vagus PRATT, JOHN: Englishman, owner of the Vagus PROSPECT, CAPTAIN: owner and navigator of the Hurry Home TAGI, FIRST MATE: second-in-command of the Hurry Home TAKATAKA, SECOND MATE: third member of the Hurry Home crew PART I DANGER ISLAND Chapter I In a past inconceivably remote it must have been the peak of a volcano, jutting from the midst of a sea whose solitude was broken only by flocks of migrating birds, a pod of sperm whales lumbering down from the Austral ice fields, or the intangible things of the mythic world; the spirits of Storm, Fair Weather, Night, Day, and Dawn. Coral polyps attached themselves to the steep walls of the volcano to build their submarine gardens a mile or more to sea, surrounding the island with a reef and shallow lagoon; then erosion, the battering of the Pacific combers, and subsidence, until finally the volcano had disappeared, leaving a blue lagoon shimmering in the sunlight, a barrier reef threaded with islets and sand cays; Danger Island, or Puka-Puka--Land of Little Hills. So it was called by the first Polynesians who came here, centuries ago. It appears now much as it did then: a tiny place compared with the vastness of the sea surrounding it. The low hills, scarcely twenty feet high, are shaded by cordia and hernandia trees, groves of coconut palms, thickets of magnolia bushes; and between the hills lie patches of level land where taro is grown in diked swamps and where the thatched houses are half obscured by clumps of bananas, gardenia bushes, and the gawky-limbed pandanus. There are three islets on the roughly triangular reef: Ko to the southeast; Frigate Bird to the southwest; and the main islet of Wale to the north. Ko and Frigate Bird are uninhabited eight months of the year, while on the crescent-shaped bay of Wale, facing southward toward the lagoon, are the three villages: Ngake, Roto, and Yato--or Windward, Central, and Leeward. The trading station is in Central Village. I, Ropati, live in its upstairs rooms, while the two downstairs rooms have been vacant since the station was closed. The building is glaringly white, shaped like a packing case, has an asbestos-cement roof, balconies in front and back, and, leading from the balconies to the living quarters, doorways just high enough so I can crack my head against the lintels. Across the village road from the station stands the schoolhouse, another boxlike coral building, but with a thatch roof, pleasing to the eye. The great glaringly ugly church, with its red iron roof, stands to one side of the schoolhouse, while elsewhere, to east and west, lagoonward and inland, are the Central Village houses, all save Araipu's native store, attractively built of wattle and thatch. The rumbling sound that rises and falls fitfully is not caused so much by the surf on the outer reef as it is by the snores of my six hundred and fifty neighbors. All are asleep, for it is midday and they must be refreshed for the night's toil ahead. There is old Mr. Scratch, Deacon Bribery, and Bones piping off the watches under a coconut tree. There is William the Heathen folded on my woodbox, his head between his bony knees. There is pretty Miss Strange-Eyes, daughter of Bones, without any clothes at all, fast asleep in a canoe, while a rooster on one of the crossbeams stares at her perplexed. And there is Constable Benny, growling like Cerberus as he guards the village in his dreams. I walk on tiptoe to the lagoon beach lest I waken the toil-exhausted neighbors; but even here there are scores of toddlers, aged one to ten, fast asleep in the shady places. The beach of the big crescent-shaped bay is not very attractive. The sand is scarcely white, and there is plenty of rubbish strewn about; but the bay itself and the lagoon beyond are clean, blue, sparkling, enticing. Almost daily I explore its submarine mountain ranges and chase the grotesquely beautiful fish among its crevices and caverns. Today I follow the beach, first eastward, then gradually to the south. The great piles of plaited fronds are coverings for canoes; the dash of red is the iron roof of Araipu's store; Miss Legs sleeps over yonder, in the little house with unnailed floor boards that can be pushed up from below if one is lonely and wants to talk to Miss Legs. Following the curved beach, I leave Central Village, then turn inland to stop at an excavation ten feet deep and one hundred yards across. It is green with taro leaves that undulate under the puffs of wind; along its border are gardenia bushes. The Windward Village girls stop here, on moonlight nights, to gather flowers for their hair before proceeding to the Place of Love. After skirting the taro bed and walking a little farther through the groves I come to the southeast point of the main islet--the Point of Utupoa. Here the coconut trees give place to pandanus, then to magnolia and pemphis bushes, then to pure-white sand with an occasional greasy-leaved tournefortia bush; and finally the sand spills out in the shallows. Southward from the Point of Utupoa, at low tide, there is a brick-red highway, a quarter of a mile wide and four miles long, leading to a similar point on the far islet of Ko. On the east side of this highway the reef combers form an azure-tinted wall that rises and subsides and roars unceasingly; on the other side is the lagoon, while a half mile across the lagoon is another highway, or shallows, this one leading from the southwest point of the main islet to Frigate Bird Islet. It is here at Utupoa that the children come to fly their kites; it is under the big tournefortia bush that I spend many an afternoon with M. Michel de Montaigne; it is in the deep pool in the shallows that the village girls duck and turn somersaults, that the wild youth cool their heated bodies, that the Seventh-Day Adventist missionary once a year baptizes his converts; it is here at Utupoa that the Windward Village youths and maidens come on moonlight nights to dance and sing--in a word, this is one of the many places of love. The sunlight reflected from the sand hurts my eyes. I leave the point to walk along the east side of the islet, at the edge of the pandanus trees, where it is shady; and presently I pass Windward Village, which stretches from the outer beach across an arm of the islet to the lagoon beach. The houses are not very interesting and the place is not very tidy, but I make a little detour inland so as to steal a wistful glance at Desire, the prettiest Mongolian-eyed girl in the South Seas. She sits in her cookhouse, clothed only in a strip of cloth around her waist; and she does not try to cover herself when I approach, for she is an innocent virgin, bless her! If I ever marry, I hope it will be to a girl like Desire. After telling her this I move back to the beach to pass the stronghold of Christian puritanism: the residence of Horatio and Susanna Augustus, the native resident agent et ux. The Augustuses are high-island natives, missionary educated, too sanctimonious for my taste, living evidence of the disastrous result of attempting to civilize primitive people. They speak a little English and, as schoolteachers, try to teach it to the children. So far--seven years--they have taught only a few of the brighter scholars that good morning differs from good-by. A couple of days ago on the causeway I met a boy of sixteen who solemnly took off his hat, bowed stiffly, and in perfect seriousness greeted me with "Oh . . . yes!" spoken slowly, with a longish pause between the words. However, the Augustuses believe they are doing a noble work in teaching English. They treat me with respect though they are convinced that their government position elevates them above a mere epicurean beachcomber. When I visit them they make a pretense of European culture, such as serving weak tea and remarkable scones flavored with banana extract, but at other times they are simply a native family living in a wattle-and-thatch house on the outer beach. I am, as formerly, the only white man on the island. Ahead of me, now, is a mile of straight, high beach, unbroken save for a group of huts used by Central Village when the island reserves are opened for the copra makers. A stretch of brick-red coral, one hundred yards wide, lies between the beach and the barrier reef, which last, now that I am on the windward side of the island, blusters, shakes its white mane, roars mightily. Beyond is the sea, and the horizon clouds, and the fluffy little balls of cotton wool separating themselves from the eastern rack to scud cockily overhead. Note how the coconut fronds and the pandanus leaves are flung out horizontally in the wind. Note the misty wraiths of reef spray drifting up the beach and into the jungle. Fill your lungs with the clean salty smell of the sea! Would you exchange this for U.S.H.A., Unit 168-b, or even for the flashiest apartment in Metropolis? The white pebble beach is hurting my eyes, for there is no shade, and at the edge of the trees the beach is covered with lumps of coral too jagged for my bare feet. So through the magnolia bushes I follow a path laid with steppingstones and enter the refreshingly cool shade of the atoll jungle to come to a path leading parallel to the outer beach. Now and then I pass a deserted hut, and taro beds bordered by banana plants and gardenia bushes. I pick blossoms to put behind my ears. No one is in sight; the place seems to have been deserted for months. Inland, doves coo in a note of infinite sadness, and sometimes one flaps noisily among the hernandia trees. Lizards and mice scurry over the fallen fronds; land crabs wave their claws at the passer-by; ghost terris flutter like butterflies in the shadows--but there is no human being save myself. Just now the inland groves and taro beds are closed. Central Village has put a tapu on them so the people will not steal the nuts or kill the nesting birds. Only a white man dares violate this tapu; if a native did so, the Goddess Taira would cause him to fall when he climbs a coconut tree or would cause death by a tumor in the armpit. I pick from the ground a young coconut the size of a crab apple; then, tearing a leaf from an overhanging frond, with my fingernail I cut away the tough but pliant midrib and jab the thick end of it into the immature coconut. It is my intention to take it home for some village child to play with, but the temptation to play myself is too great, so, swinging it round my head, I let it fly into the air--as children catapult crab apples with a willow stick. It soars over the highest coconut trees to land in the shore bush. I grin, delighted, and start breaking my way through the bush to retrieve my toy. Do I look silly with a gardenia blossom behind my ear, flinging immature coconuts into the air? Well, we get that way on the atolls; many of the inhibitions of our civilized training are happily lost. Here is the toy, and here is a wide avenue leading to the Point of Smoking Seas. I walk down the avenue, for the gloomy groves are uncanny and the loneliness preys on my spirits. Beyond the shore bush the wind, the roar of crashing seas, the smell of the ocean break suddenly on my senses. The trading station is now due south; I am halfway round the islet. Here the barrier reef is close to the beach, forming a point sharper than a right angle. Beyond the point, over a shoal stretch of sea bottom, the current meets the Pacific rollers and they pile up in a furious maelstrom. The sight sometimes frightens me. Staring at the rearing, plunging patch of sea, I recall how Satyr Bones swam into it to rescue his womarm, who had been washed over the reef. Somehow he lived, but the woman was dead when, like a hairy sea beast, he dragged her out of the breakers. Beyond the Point of Smoking Seas I pass another group of copra makers' huts, then walk doggedly along the beach, which curves gradually to the west and south. Though my eyes pain me, I grin and bear it, for there is no parallel path inland; and the sand seems less glaringly white when I recall that here, on moonlight nights, is pagan loveliness; here is where the youths and maidens of Central and Leeward villages come for their nightlong dances, their singing, and their love-making. Alas! now under the disillusioning sunlight I can see only little paths leading into the magnolia bushes-- leading to the love nests of the young unmarried. At the edge of the shallows is a conglomerate of sand and shells that has somehow caked into a limestone-like rock so that the wild youth can carve their names for posterity to read: Mr. Horse, Mr. Coconut, Jack Dempsey, Eagle-wing, Mr. Banana, Messrs. Achilles and Ajax, Mr. Casanova; Princess X, Miss White Tern, Miss Flower, Miss Love, Miss Mermaid, Miss Memory-- fraternity names that the young people take when they enter the House of Youth or the House of Young Women--between puberty and marriage. A little farther along the outer beach and I come suddenly to Yato-Leeward Village. I have nearly finished the circuit of the main islet. Yato Point is on the west side of the crescent-shaped bay. A half mile away is the Point of Utupoa, where I stood a couple of hours ago; and here is the wide reef highway leading to Frigate Bird Islet, flooded now, for the tide is coming in; and there, on the outer edge of the reef, is the beacon of the boat passage, while beyond it, at sea, is the offing where the trading schooners lie. Far out at sea, to the southwest, breakers are sometimes visible; they are on Te Arai Reef, which stretches four miles due west from Frigate Bird and ends in a barren sand cay. Leeward Village is spotlessly clean. About half the houses are built of chipped coral blocks; the rest are of wattle and thatch, with one red iron roof where an Aitutaki carpenter lives. This prominent citizen came here to remove the only beautiful feature from our church, the thatch roof, and put a galvanized iron one in its place. During the four years of exhausting toil required to complete this great innovation, the carpenter fell in love with a Leeward Village maiden. Now she has claimed him: he is happily lost forever. All day long he sweats in his iron-roofed house, and, judging by the husky and wanton appearance of his wife, all night long too. On the east side of Yato Point I stop to glance at my house site and for the thousandth time visualize the wattle-and-thatch palace I have always planned to build here. I feel the cool trade wind blowing on me from across the bay; I hear the wind singing in the palm fronds, and the thundery combers far away on the Point of Smoking Seas; I gaze across the lagoon toward Frigate Bird Islet, Ko Islet, the eastern reef, Utupoa Point, the cloud mountains of the sky, the entire littoral of the bay, the villages, the causeway, and the fishpond beyond it. This is indeed an Ogygian place for a renegade Ulysses to forget the world, and eat lotus, and love a South Sea Calypso. The causeway is six feet high, six wide, and about three hundred yards long. Made of coral blocks gray with age, it stretches across an arm of the bay from Leeward to Central Village, and thus it fences off a fishpond belonging to Leeward Village and full of milk mullet and young turtles. When a trading schooner is in the offing and the hard-doers of the South Seas are drinking deeply they habitually fall from the causeway into the fishpond. In fact groups of natives often camp at one end of the causeway solely to observe South Sea traders falling into the fishpond, when, the natives having had their money's worth, they become a rescue gang. Safely across the causeway, I enter the walled compound of Parson Sea Foam. I smile at his pretty daughters, examine his huge coral-lime parsonage with its silly little four-foot verandas in front and in back, and shake hands and yarn for a little space with the parson himself. He is partially bald, has pendulous cheeks, several chins, and elephantiasis. Presently he swings an elephantiac leg through the doorway, follows it, then reappears with an ancient tin of beans. He gives it to me, with a suitable text--for he is always giving me perished provisions, which in turn I bury quickly, before they explode. Finally I pass the hut of that terrible loudmouthed creature, Pilala-woman; then the house of First-Born, son of Sea Foam; and at last I enter my own cookhouse at the lagoon side of the trading station, where old Mama has the teakettle boiling and greets me with an interrogative smile. To me several features of this walk have seemed remarkable. There has been an appearance and a feeling of cleanness. I have been aware of the sea as an enclosing presence, both sheltering and dangerous. But, most important, I have noticed that the atoll belongs to the organic world; it is a living island. Some stretches of beach have appeared to be fine yellow sand, but if I had examined it closely I should have found that each grain was a minute shell or the skeleton of a coral polyp. Think of the untold billions of creatures that have lived and died for ages to build up a coral atoll! And think of the untold billions of creatures that are laboring even now, as I close my journal, so that Danger Island may grow slowly upward at precisely the same rate that the sea bottom subsides! Here is a land becoming rather than one become, a land functioning in Time rather than in Space! The other morning Araipu, who is both the storekeeper and vicar of Puka-Puka Atoll, came to the cookhouse while I was having coffee. I asked him to join me, which he did; but before he had tasted his coffee he started talking about Abraham. "This Abraham," he said, "worshiped the sun. He was a heathen like William. He would get up in the morning at dawn"--here Araipu pointed to the sun rising over the coconut trees of Windward Village--"and would pray to the sun! He thought the sun was a god! He was a foolish heathen like that old fellow William!" "I don't recall anything about Abraham worshiping the sun," I broke in. "It isn't in the Bible, is it?" "No," Araipu replied; "I read it in a book Parson Sea Foam brought from Tahiti. The book says that Abraham would kneel facing the east, and bow down to the sun, like this," and here the vicar bowed. "Araipti, let's go for a picnic. I'm fed up with sanctimonious resident agents, village smells, noise, heat. Let's go bird hunting on Frigate Bird Islet." "He had a son called Isaac," Araipu went on, paying me not the slightest attention; "and when Abraham was an old man, and had learned how foolish it was to worship the sun, he agreed to sacrifice Isaac to Jehovah. Then the Lord was very pleased, and gave Abraham great power. Abraham could command the east wind, 'Blow from the north!' and the east wind would switch round to the north. Or Abraham could command the hurricane, 'Stop blowing!' or 'Blow easy!' and the hurricane would stop blowing or blow easy. You see, he got all his power because he stopped worshiping the sun and started worshiping the True God instead." A hundred yards from the station Bone's daughter Strange-Eyes was bathing at the back of her house without any clothes or shelter. So naturally I stared at her. Pretty soon Araipu found he had lost my attention. Turning his head, he saw Strange-Eyes in a lather of soapsuds. "Hm!" the vicar muttered, and shook his head meditatively for a little time; then, brightening, "David was of the seed of Abraham," he said. Tentatively I mentioned that David had seen a beautiful maiden bathing. "Yes, of course," Araipu interrupted quickly; "that was Bath-sheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite." Then he started telling how David had sent Uriah into the front of battle so he should be killed; but again I interrupted, this time to suggest our immediate departure for Frigate Bird. Araipu vaguely consented, as though he would of course go with me to the islet, but the sail four miles across the lagoon would be only incidental to a flowing comment on the seed of Abraham, which apparently he would talk about for the next few days, oblivious betimes to all else in the physical world. I told my old cook Mama I was going. Then we launched Araipu's canoe and brought it round to the trading station. We stepped the mast and took aboard a basket of provisions as well as a pound of twist tobacco for the Leeward villagers, who were temporarily living on the islet. When our sail was set and we had moved a few yards from the beach there was a great screaming ashore. We saw old Bosun-woman dashing down the beach, a basket of taro on her head, a bundle of clothes in her hands. We dug our paddles in the sandy bottom to hold back the canoe and waited for her to wade out. "The taro is for Pilala-woman!" she screamed, her lips within an inch of my ear. "The clothes are for Bones!" "Better come along with us," I suggested ironically. "Whee-ee!" she screamed--the Puka-Pukan ejaculation. "Me go to Frigate Bird! I've never been there once!" Think of it! A woman living on this island for some seventy years and never visited Frigate Bird Islet, four miles across the lagoon! It reminds me of a pair of darling old maids who lived near our ranch in the foothills of California. They were in their forties, alone on a farm only a few miles from Fresno, the lights of which place they could see, on a clear night, from a hill beyond their house--yet they had never been to Fresno nor to any city! Once I tried to take them, and I remember that one old dear couldn't go because she had a hen setting and her sister was "no hand at poultries"; the other one couldn't go because she was afraid to leave her sister alone--"something might happen." So it is with lots of Puka-Pukans. We have only three islets on this reef, yet many of the neighbors have set foot on only one. Well, it must be otherwise with the coming generation, for while Bosun-woman was screaming at us a half-dozen urchins, aged three to seven, came charging down the beach, splashed out to our canoe, and, naked and without luggage, tumbled aboard. God knows whose children they were. "Where are you going?" I asked like a silly white man. "I dunno," a squint-eyed Tartar replied. "Where you going?" "We are going to Frigate Bird Islet." "That suits me," said the hoyden, and apparently the others concurred, for they didn't even discuss the matter. Picking up paddles or using their hands, they sent the canoe scudding out of the lee of the land. Lucky we were to have those extra hands, for presently we saw coming down the beach the rest of the gang, about fifty strong--and their noise was like the yelping of a pack of coyotes, I pulled in the sheet, we dug our paddles in the water, and escaped by the skin of our teeth. Dozens of the urchins plunged in the bay and tried to overtake us, but, what with our half-dozen wild man-eating sailors, we managed to escape. That's the way with the Puka-Pukan toddlers. They run over this island like a vandal horde controlled, I'll swear, by a sort of group impulse. Perhaps a few of the women know to whom certain toddlers belong; it is even possible that fathers can isolate their own brats and name them. Araipu was pretty certain of the names of two of our sailors, but he admitted that he was better versed in the seed of Abraham than in the seed of his neighbors. Soon the wind took hold of our sail; we dodged about the coral beads, scudded through a crooked passage leading to the lagoon, and drove like a racing yacht--faster than a racing yacht--toward Frigate Bird Islet, the urchins whooping so loudly that Araipu didn't have half a chance to get a word in edgewise about Abraham. Within thirty minutes we had nosed the canoe's bow into the beach of the far islet. Four and a half seconds before the canoe touched the shore six naked toddlers described six graceless parabolas in six different directions. Some landed like spiders--all arms and legs--in the water; one or two landed on the beach; but, wheresoever they landed, within another four and a half seconds not a single one was in sight. For a little space we could hear them yelling as they plundered land crabs, coconuts, mummy apples--or as they flung stones at fledglings, terns, boobies. Presently they would be breaking the law by broiling young birds and gorging themselves with burnt flesh and coconuts. Constable Ears, who alone met us, eyed with displeasure the streaks of brown skin cutting across the beach and into the bush. "They should not have come to our islet," he said severely; then he scowled, raised his eyebrows in a manner almost sanctimonious, and approached to shake hands with Araipu and me. The constable is tall, long-faced, very very serious in all things, and given to long silences before replying to the simplest questions. If one asks him, "When do we eat?" or "Will it rain?" or "What do you think of the universe" Ears will knit his brow, gaze meditatively nowhere, cock his head to one side, and, after a full moment of silence, reply gravely: "Now," or "Perhaps," or "I think it is a good thing." Not another soul was in sight. This annoyed me, for usually when I go to Frigate Bird Islet the young men run into the shoal water, pick up my canoe with me in it, and carry it ashore. Being accustomed to this kind of a welcome, I was peeved when only the constable met us; in fact I was on the point of stepping the mast in the other end of the canoe and returning to the main islet. I said as much to Araipu; but Ears, overhearing me, assured me that the inhabitants would be overjoyed at my coming, but just now they were playing cricket, so of course they could not welcome me with songs, dances, wreaths of gardenias, and welcoming orations. I should have understood this at once, but for some reason my pride was hurt. In a huff I walked through the deserted copra makers' village, following the sound of whoops, groans, and guffaws; and presently, in a little clearing, I came upon the hundred and fifty people of Leeward Village, playing or watching a studied game of cricket. Two or three men glanced at me in a vaguely preoccupied way, then jerked their heads around to watch the game. Happy-go-lucky old Tapipi, his eyes shifting between me and the players, explained hurriedly that for six hours they had been playing to decide which half of the village should gather coconuts tomorrow for the other half. I then realized that if the British Navy were target practicing in the offing no one would leave the game. Like children that can play for two hours but cannot work for two minutes, these atoll people can play cricket all day to determine who shall work an hour tomorrow. I mentioned as much to Tapipi. He knitted his brow, pondered my words, and finally opined that it would be hard work gathering coconuts tomorrow, for the people would be stiff and tired from the cricket game. Presently I went to the parson's house, and there I found Araipu telling Ears about the seed of Abraham, while betimes the constable scowled and nodded his head gravely. "You see those coconut trees," the vicar was saying, pointing through the open side of the house to where straight rows of young trees stretched seaward. "All those trees to the right are bearing nuts, and all the trees to the left are barren." "Maybe it would be a good idea to drive some spikes in the barren ones," I suggested. "The rusty iron sometimes makes them bear." Araipu eyed me severely and mumbled something about driving spikes into Sarah; then I divined that I had broken into a carefully planned metaphor, so I held my peace. "Yes, they are barren," the constable said. "And yet the fruitful trees and the barren trees were planted at the same time. They are twenty-four years old." "It may be many years before they bear," the vicar said. "They may not bear until they are ninety years old. . . . You needn't snicker, Ropati. If you read your Bible you would know that Sarah laughed when the Lord told her she would have a child in her old age--but she had one just the same. That was Isaac, the half brother of Ishmael. He married Rebekah and had two sons by her, Esau and Jacob . . ." "The game's finished!" Ears exclaimed suddenly, jumping to his feet. "My half of the village has won!", "How do you know?" "Can't you hear them?" "I can hear only a noise like a massacre of the seed of Abraham," I replied; then, as Araipu beamed on me, I watched the constable dash toward the cricket ground, his long legs and arms swinging, his head thrust forward. A moment later the vicar and I followed with the leisurely dignity befitting strangers. We arrived just in time to see the grand ceremony of "insulting the losers." At the far side of the clearing stood the winners in attitudes of Roman conquerors, while under the trees, in groups hushed and expectant, sat the entire remaining population, including, of course, the losers. First-Born moved to the front of the winning team, squatted on the ground, and rattled off a dance rhythm with a pair of sticks on his homemade cricket bat; then the important young man, Luluia, walked mincingly, affecting timidity, to the center of the glade. The dance tempo became more rapid, and Luluia, flinging out his arms, seemed with the same gesture to fling away his timidity. With brazen effrontery he went through contortions that I shall call "dancing" for lack of a better word. It was utterly obscene and insulting--and was enjoyed by winners and losers alike. After the first "dance" Luluia walked back and forth between the wickets, shouting, "Aha! . . . I? . . . Who am I?" He paused to laugh in a way that reminded me of a villain in a cheap melodrama. "I? . . . Who am I? . . . Ask the losers . . . Ask the winners . . . Ask the frigate birds that roost in the hernandia trees . . . Ask the fish in the sea! Who am I? . . . I am Lu-lu-i-a!" Here he made an awful noise, something between a bellow and a shriek, then continued: "I am Lu-lu-i-a! I am the man that made the most runs today! I am the man that blackened the faces of the losers! I am Lu-lu-i-a! . . . Yip! . . . Wow! . . . Whoop!" and with that the cricket-bat drum sounded again, while the champion--oh well, he "danced." Presently the people returned to their village, two hundred paces away, but Araipu held me back. "Give them time," he whispered. "They will want to greet us in a becoming manner, like the sons of Jacob were greeted by Joseph the second time they went into Egypt." "We'll walk this way and come up to the village from the lagoon beach." And so we did, Araipu betimes giving me some further details concerning Joseph's brethren. We found every last villager awaiting us, and every one of them in an awkward, expectant attitude. They stood in groups, as though they had casually met, were passing the time of day, and had not the foggiest idea that Ropati himself had arrived with no less a person than the vicar. When we were close to them they glanced up suddenly, as though at a prearranged signal, and, "Hello!" they exclaimed. "It is Ropati! It is Araipu!" Their faces wreathed in smiles, they rushed forward, relieved from the anticipatory waiting, hands outstretched. "When the King of Israel visited the Pharaoh of Egypt," the vicar cried, "he sent his spokesman before him, bearing presents for Pharaoh--jars of honey, spices, gems, frankincense, and myrrh. Thus he softened the heart of Pharaoh. . . . Now Ropati has come to your islet to hunt sea birds with the young men of your village, and he has sent me, his spokesman, before him, bearing this pound of Lord Beaconsfield Twist Tobacco so that your hearts may be softened toward him." Araipu then handed the package of twist to the "supercargo" of Leeward Village, and Immediately we turned to hurry away. As we left the village we could hear the supercargo shouting: "Gather by the House of Youth! The old men! The first-born! The deacons! The fathers! The youths! the naked ones! Gather by the House of Youth! We are dividing a pound of Lord Beaconsfield Twist Tobacco presented by the King of Israel to the Pharaoh of Egypt!" There were whoops of laughter, and bellows of delight from tobacco-hungry old men; then the atoll jungle deadened the sound. We moved inland, following a crooked path; the branches of cordia and hernandia trees met overhead, and above them interlaced the fronds of coconut palms; below was an undergrowth of bird's-nest ferns, magnolia bushes, pipturus, and pandanus, walling us in. Presently we entered the clearing where Leeward Village's lime tree grows, then moved on to the outer beach and followed it to Pilato the androgyne's Place of Love. The Place was deserted; it seemed almost drab in the afternoon sunlight; it would waken to life and beauty when the moonlight slanted across the magnolia bushes, gleamed on the white coral sand, and the dancers were there. Leaving the Place, we walked around the islet's west point and returned by an inland path. It was night by then, but the moon lighted our way. Araipu left me, to follow the lagoon beach to the parson's house, while I wandered among the houses, wondering if I could escape the vicar and spend the night in the House of Youth. I decided I couldn't, so I turned toward the community house, in the center of the village, and, crawling in, stretched out on a heap of logs used as seats by the Village Fathers. I could see the copra makers' huts lit up fitfully by tiny fires. Each open-sided hut had a sleeping platform raised a foot or two off the ground. They looked like the counters in a shooting gallery or a hoopla concession. No; they were platforms in the cages of a zoo. Over yonder sat gorilla-like Bones, staring sullenly out of the open side of his house, firelight from coconut shells flashing on his huge and hairy face. And there was lion-maned King-of-the-Sky, recumbent on his platform, a veritable Lion of Lucerne. And there was old Mr. Scratch, a baboon if ever there was one. The hippopotamuslike Sacred Maid moved sluggishly about the Great House of King Toka, while shrew-like, Pilala-woman, in her cage to seaward, screamed at the passers-by; and close to the community house, in the House of Youth, a dozen monkey boys chattered and laughed and ogled the monkey girls in the adjoining House of Young Women. One of the youths left the house to dive into the community house and alight beside me, on hands and knees, his face within a few inches of mine. "Come to the House of Youth tomorrow night,' Ropati," he whispered. "After the bird hunting, when the south reef is dry, the girls of Ko Islet will come to our Place of Love!" Then he was gone, a shadow blown through the fitful night. I thought of little auburn-haired Desire and wondered if she would be among those who crossed the south reef at low tide. Then I felt incapable of thinking of anything, even of Desire, for I was at peace with the whole world. Everything was good: the lions and monkeys, the sound of surf beating on the outer reef, the smell of grilling fish. The light puffs of wind were just cool enough to add to my feeling of well-being. There were no mosquitoes. The voices of the villagers did not come in the usual undisciplined screams, or, if they did, I did not mind it. My nerves were asleep. When I rolled a cigarette and smoked it slowly the tobacco tasted fragrant, mellow, delicious. The flashing fires, which usually hurt my eyes, now had a lulling effect. The hard logs beneath me, pressing into my back, my head, my legs, only added to my sensuous enjoyment. A little girl of about four years came toddling along the road, crawled into the community house, stared at me for a little space, and then cuddled close beside me. She seemed as happy as I. She did not find it necessary to speak; she simply lay by me, communing with me in spirit. Then the toddler snuggled closer; then she threw her little body across me and almost instantly fell asleep. Now that I could not courteously or conveniently rise and leave, I should have felt ill at ease; but through some rational quirk of the brain I continued to feel at peace with the world. I appreciated the pretty confidence of this child. I felt her to be an old friend who had come to me for security and sleep. I was nearly asleep myself when Constable Ears stalked past the Great House and, stopping by the House of Youth, asked my whereabouts. Having been told, he came to the community house and called my name. "Yes." Ears cleared his throat, nodded thoughtfully for a full minute, then told me that a feast had been prepared and was awaiting me in the parson's house. "All right," I replied. "I will come when I can find someplace to put this child." "Child, you said? What child? Whose child?" "Take her to her mama," I added. "She is lying on top of me." With a good deal of diffidence Ears crawled under the eaves. When he was close I grasped his hand and laid it on the toddler. "Oh!" he muttered. "It's a baby!" Then gruffly, affecting anger, he shouted: "Here's a child! Here's somebody's brat annoying Ropati! Whose brat is this? Has anybody lost a child?" "Bring it to the fire!" Pilala-woman screamed. Ears carried the child to the shrew's fire and leaned over so the light was on the child's face. Then he straightened up, and, in an apologetic tone, "Oh! I see it's mine!" he muttered. "Hey! Woman! Come here, woman! Take away the brat!" "I hope you're not annoyed," I said when the constable had returned. "Oh no," he muttered in an absent-minded way. "But I came here to tell you something, and now I've forgotten it." "Food?" I queried. "Ah yes, that's it! You are to feast at the parson's house." Araipu and I had expected to rough it in the South Seas, but the villagers had thought differently. When we had left to watch the insulting of the losers the house had been empty, for the parson himself was on the main islet. Now it was furnished. Mats covered the coral-gravel floor; there were pillows whose slips were embroidered with all the flowers of the field and the flags of the nations; there were patchwork quilts; a lantern swung, flickered, and smoked from one of the tirbeams, and spread under the eaves was a picnic for a gourmand. The villagers were aware that they had served us well. They told us about it. The dancer Luluia gave a before-dinner speech in which he modestly omitted mentioning himself but spoke instead of the generosity of his village. "When the King of Israel visited the Pharoah of Egypt," Luluia shouted, "Pharaoh set before him all the choice delicacies of his realm! Here is food for the King of Israel and his spokesman the Vicar Araipu! Here is coconut sauce! Here are drinking nuts! Here are grilled sea birds, lobsters, and fish! Here are taros, bananas, utos, mummy apples! Here is a basin of water, and smell soap, and a towel! When you have feasted you can wash your hands, then lie back on our mats, with our lantern lighting your house; and you can smoke and gossip until our maidens come to sing you to sleep!" There being a vicar among us, Luluia then gave a few short and snappy texts. Araipu replied with some appropriate remarks about manna in the wilderness, and we fell to. The people left while we were picnicking. When we had eaten our fill we gathered the remnants in frond food mats and hung them to the tic beams; then we lay down to cigarettes and sleep. Some toddlers came to the house during the night to sleep here, there, or most anyplace--or, better, they went to sleep here, rolled about the house from here to there, and woke up in the morning most anyplace. A strong wind came up; the coconut trees beat their wings against the sky; but in the morning Araipu woke me with a cheerful, "The sun is up, Ropati! Did I tell you that the sun was the God of Abraham?" and then he kept doggedly on the ancient Hebrew genealogies until we had finished our breakfast and I had escaped from him. "The young men! The tree climbers! The bird hunters! Gather at the Point of Hernandia Trees tonight! The King of Israel and the Pharaoh of Egypt will go a-hunting tonight! Gather at the Point of Hernandia Trees! The young men! The tree climbers! The bird hunters!" At sundown thirty of us walked from the copra makers' village to the western point, where for a little space we lay on the beach between the wall of hernandia trees and the shallows. The great combers rolling across the barrier reef, a hundred yards away, thundered mightily, but they did not drown the lonely cries of the thousands of boobies, terns, and frigate birds circling over us, flock above flock, until they were lost in the confused cloud masses that streaked and blotched the sky. "The birds are roosting," someone said; then, later: "Look--the tops of the trees are black with them!" They were a strange sight, belonging to the world of demonology. Lying on the beach, with my binocular to my eyes, I could see on the topmost branches of the hernandia trees crowds of boobies, frigate birds, and terns. The frigate birds were seizing the places of honor. Often one would flap down to a twig where a booby was roosting and make a great to-do until he had frightened the booby away and taken the perch for himself. Black, long-beaked, evil-eyed, the frigate birds stared this way and that, stretched their necks and spread their wings as though to straighten out the kinks. Above the roosting birds thousands of others circled and squawked in a note both lonely and petulant. Seeing them roost so high, I wondered how the men could climb to them. I turned my eyes from the birds to see, in the now dim evening light, a dozen naked boys squatting on the sand. They had come from nowhere, without sound; they had been materialized out of the spirit of this desolate place. With mouths open slightly, bodies motionless, they stared fixedly at the roosting birds. I fancied them mischievous idols squatting on the sand, and when I turned my eyes back to the wall of hernandia trees I fancied the birds were malevolent pagan idols perching in the trees. A mosquito buzzed in my ear. I slapped. "What's that?" came First-Born's voice from behind me. "Mosquitoes." "Mosquitoes!" First-Born cried in a note of indignation. "That's impossible. There are no mosquitoes on Frigate Bird Islet!" The last words had been said dogmatically, brooking no contradiction; but I replied nevertheless that one had buzzed in my ear and that now I could feel one biting my ankle. First-Born laughed sardonically. "Oh," he muttered, "perhaps just now, at dusk, with a moon, on the beach," and then, raising his voice, "but there are no mosquitoes on Frigate Bird Islet!" "Mosquitoes?" Constable Ears called from the group of bird hunters. "Hm! Mosquitoes, you said?" "Ropati says there are mosquitoes on Frigate Bird Islet!" Everyone had a good laugh over that, for one of their pet delusions, actuated by village patriotism, is that there are no mosquitoes on Frigate Bird Islet--though the other (and inferior) islets are swarming with them. If you swat a mosquito and hold its carcass before their eyes the villagers will dismiss the evidence with contempt. "Oh, one or two, perhaps, just at this time, with the moon nearly full," they will admit, "but there are no mosquitoes on Frigate Bird Islet." "It will be another hour before the moon is high enough to light the bird hunters," someone said presently. "The moon is under the ridgepole of the sky," First-Bom said. "Where's Araipu? You pray for us, Araipu." When we had gathered close to the vicar and lowered our heads he told his Creator all about the hunting party, mentioning that we were good Christians, had paid our church dues, and never missed a service. He asked that no youths fall from the trees and kill themselves like the heathen youths had done in days gone by, and he asked that enough "quails be sent" to support our bodies in the wilderness. He prayed for a long time, and though the prayer turned out to be more of a sermon about Moses and the Exodus than a supplication, had he not raised his voice to Heaven for at least ten minutes no one of the hunters would have dared climb the trees. We rose. First-Bom grasped my arm while the ape-man Poaza walked a few paces ahead and the others straggled up the beach to disappear instantly in the deep black of the hernandia grove. Despite the moon it was very dark indeed in the grove. We could scarcely see a man standing an arm's length away; and the air, heavy with the miasma of bird droppings and decayed vegetation, seemed to quiver when great seas pounded along the barrier reef. We separated in eight or ten groups without my knowing we had separated, for the natives moved through the grove as silently as shadows. Presently I heard First-Born's voice: "There goes Poaza!" "Where?" First-Bom grasped my arm, pulled me close to him, and pointed upward. By stooping a little and pressing my cheek against his shoulder I could glance along his outstretched arm and see, high up against the background of checkered leaves and sky, something moving. Then I fixed my binocular on the object and guessed, if not saw, that it was a man. He must have been one hundred feet above us. I lost sight of him when he crawled into a mass of foliage, but later I saw him again, always higher and higher up. "No money in the world could make me climb one of these trees at night," I said to First-Born. "The Puka-Pukan youths are cowboys!" "That's right; they are cowboys," First-Born agreed, cowboy being a local appellation for a bold and reckless fellow. "I myself am probably the best bird hunter on this island--but tonight I have a sore foot, so I can't climb." "How do they get up the straight, slippery trees? The trunks must be ten feet around, and there's not a limb till you get fifty feet up." First-Bom did not reply, for just then there was a great squawking high over our heads: "Naw-ah! Ngaw-ah!" choked off suddenly. Then we heard the crackling sound of a bird falling through foliage and a loud thud as it struck the ground. First-Born groped forward to hunt for the bird but told me to stay where I was. Throughout the grove boobies were squawking and dead bodies thumping to the ground. Sometimes a matchlight would pierce a red hole in the umbra; whispered voices moved like ghostly presences about me; and once I heard Araipu intoning, startlingly loud, seemingly from nowhere: "'And there went forth a wind from the Lord, and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp . . .' Numbers II: 31." In a half hour the rain of birds had lessened. I found First-Born close to me again. "Would you dare walk here alone at night?" I asked. "I should die of fear." "Why?" "Ghosts, Ropati, ghosts." "Have you ever seen a ghost?" "No, and I never want to." "If you had seen one you might not be so frightened. They are harmless." "Ropati, have you ever seen a ghost?" "Many times," I replied. "I saw one in this grove, some years ago, when I was walking round the islet on the lookout for turtles." First-Bom edged away from me as though frightened of a man who had seen a ghost; then he moved still farther away, to pick up another bird; but soon he hurried back, more afraid of ghosts than of a man who had seen a ghost. "I wish you would talk about something else," he said crossly. "It's dangerous to talk about such things out here at night in the hernandia grove. Ghosts often come snooping around when you are talking about them-- and Poaza might hear you! If he gets thinking about ghosts all the strength will go out of him and he will fall out of the tree!" But presently Poaza himself appeared. We felt our way to the edge of the grove, then walked a little way down the beach to where the rest of the bird hunters were gathered. We had seven boobies; the entire catch numbered sixty-one, which was exceptionally good. It represented a feast for the entire village, wing feathers enough to decorate all the hats, wing bones enough to make popguns for all the children, and, most important of all, enough birds to make the Central and Windward villages green with envy. "I shall preach about it next Sunday," Araipu said as we trod the gleaming sand back to the copra makers' village; and then, his head thrown back, he shouted to the moon: "'He spread a cloud for a covering; and fire to give light in the night. "'The people asked, and he brought quails, and satisfied them with the bread of heaven. "'He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out; they ran in the dry places like a river. "'For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant.' Psalm 105: 39, 40, 41, 42." At the copra makers' village I left Araipu and entered the House of Youth. Chapter II I climbed to one of the sleeping platforms that extend across the tie beams at either gable end of the House of Youth and stretched out beside the young men of Leeward Village. I breathed deeply of the heavy, satisfying smell of human bodies mingled with the fragrance of flower-scented coconut oil, the slightly dank yet appetizing smell of newly opened native ovens, smoke impregnated with the odor of damp thatch, all of which combined to suggest a sense of security, shelter, sustenance. And at times, when a gust of wind swooped down from the treetops to pass through the House of Youth and eddy above the sleeping platform, the fragrance of jungle flowers, reef mist, and the sea would envelop me. Coconut-shell fires flashed here and there in the village, and a fire of coconut spathes burned between the Great House of King Toka and that of the gorilla Bones. Their vagrant gleams moved across the thatching in the House of Youth and were diffused onto the sleeping platform. Slung to the ridgepole above me I could see a bundle of fish poles with their lines of pipturus bark and their gleaming pearl-shell hooks. Water containers made from whole coconuts, in nets of sennit, with stoppers of wood in their eyes, hung like gourds from the rafters; and stuck into the thatch or tied to the rafters by strips of bark were coconut-meat scrapers, rolls of sennit, great wooden ruvettus hooks a handsbreadth from barb to bend, many faded wreaths of fern leaves--memory presents from the girls of Windward Village. Next to me lay crooked-legged little Bribery, Jr., only son of crooked-leggged Deacon Bribery. Beyond was the big youth Eagle-wing, the bosom friends Messrs. Achilles and Ajax, and the small but active Mr. Horse. The six of us fitted snugly on the narrow platform, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. On the other gable-end platform lay another group of youths, while below us, on the ground floor of thick, roughhewn planks, were a dozen others--Mr. Boston, Mr. Coconut, Jack Dempsey, Mr. Casanova. These fraternity names are never used in the unromantic daylight, when among their elders. Though it was nearly midnight the village was awake. Women gossiped as they cleaned and broiled the night's catch of birds; a group of old men shouted advice and encouragement to King Toka and Bones, who were playing a disk-tossing game by the light of a spathe fire; children screamed as they splashed in the lagoon; from near by in the village I heard the cracked voice of old Mr. Scratch intoning a Christian prayer before stretching out to sleep; there was singing and laughter from the House of Young Women, but this last sounded to me insincere. I wondered if they knew and resented that the girls of Ko were to cross the reef tonight. "What a contrast in cultures!" I thought. "These people do not know whether they are pagan or Christian. Here in the House of Youth I am virtually in ancient Puka-Puka; but over on the main islet, or even on this islet in the daytime, I am in Christianized Danger Island. The people seem to slip back to pagan times with the setting of the sun . . . I wish it were always night." "Tst!" came suddenly from little Bribery, and at the same instant, from a house across the road, a woman started screaming. There was the sound of running footsteps. "Wake up, Pilala-woman!" someone cried. "Why are you screaming?" "She has had a bad dream!" "The spirits of the underworld are tormenting her!" "No; it is her old husband! He comes from his grave every night to haunt her!" For some time the screaming continued, unsuppressed, in a note of panic terror; then Pilala-woman's voice: "It was a devil from the underworld! He was raping me! Oh! his thing was as hot as a firebrand!" Then another voice: "That might be a good dream! Perhaps you are pregnant!" "No; it foretells death!" a quavering old voice declared. "It was a bad dream!" wailed Pilala-woman. "I know I have conceived a devil-baby! It will kill me when it drops! Aue-ue! I shall die. I shall make my grave-skirt! I shall die!" Mr. Horse, in the House of Youth, laughed aloud. "Who laughed?" screamed Pilala-woman. "May Satan eat his ears! It was one of those fledglings in the House of Youth! May his thing hang like a wilted leaf!" And then, gradually, the village was quiet again. "We must leave soon," Eagle-wing said. "The tide is out; the south reef is dry." "Desire will come tonight. She was made into a woman yesterday. She will lead the dance." "Ropati will take Desire." "If only I could!" "Oh, she loves you, for you have a chest full of smell soap and talcum powder and firecrackers and hair oil . . . and you can pay her fine every time the resident agent arrests her." "Why does Horatio Augustus put us in jail? Is it sinful to love our girls? Why does he do it?" "Because he is a fool!" "Come! Pilato will be waiting for us. Bring your cocolele, Mr. Horse: the little mice squeal when they hear it." "Perhaps the little mice are at our Place of Love now!" "They will laugh at us if we keep them waiting!" "They will say our women kept us in the village!" We lowered ourselves from the sleeping platform and moved to the road. Mr. Horse struck some chords on his cocolele, and one of the Village Fathers, hearing him, shouted, "Where are you going, wild youths?" And we replied: "We go to our women in the Place of Love!" "Go; and may luck go with you!" Pilato's Place of Love stands in a clearing by the outer beach. It is no more than an open-sided hut where the young unmarried take shelter from the rain; but it is said that the sandy beach stretching from the Place to the shallows had been cleared in pagan days by Goddess Taua for the dances of the youths and maidens; the densely leaved magnolia bushes lining the beach as far as the Point of Hernandia Trees had been planted by the goddess so that lovers should have privacy; and the deep pool between the beach and the reef had been scooped out by Taua so that hot bodies could be cooled in the foam-mottled, constantly renewed water. Tonight we from the House of Youth, standing back in the shadows, saw Pilato move mincingly from his hut, his wide, feminine hips swinging under their bushy grass skirt, a song on his lips. For a little while he stared down the beach and along the moonlit coral highway to Ko; then, seeing a group of figures, "Tangi!" he called. "Aye!" came the laughing voice of Desire's elder sister. She stepped into the clearing, followed by pretty little auburn-haired Desire and a score of girls from Ko Islet. In one hand she carried a smoldering segment of coconut husk, in the other hand a frond basket. "I have brought you some periwinkles," she said to Pilato. "Desire will cook them." With that she put the smoldering husk and the basket on the sand near the hut. Desire laid a coconut spathe on the husk and blew it to a blaze, then piled coconut shells on top of it. In a few moments the shells had burned to a bed of coal, and on this she laid the periwinkles. When the juice sizzled in the shells she picked them from the coals and shook out their meat on a food mat of frond leaves. "You will lead the dance tonight," Pilato told Desire when he had squatted by her and was eating the periwinkles. "And now that you are a woman you can choose any boy you wish." Then he laughed spontaneously, threw back his head, joggled his shoulders, and sang: "The back of the rat goes up and down! Toko toi toi, toko toko to! Toko toi toi, toko toko to!" "Mr. Horse will be the little rat!" one of the girls cried. "No; it will be Mr. Achilles or his friend Mr. Ajax. How they stare at her when she works in the taro bed!" Desire shrugged her shoulders in a contemptuous way. "I shall have a cowboy for my husband!" she said. "Te witoki [The impudence]!" screamed a chorus of voices. Then we from the House of Youth moved into the glade. Pilato brought out his huge wooden gong and, squatting by it, beat out a rapid tattoo, and then, with the high-pitched voice of a woman, he called the first movement of the dance. Now moonlight glistened on the white coral sand, cast moving lights and shadows among the metallic-green fronds. The magnolia leaves became tarnished silver, gleaming dully. Combers rumbled over the barrier reef, and across the shallows parallel ridges of water, their crests foaming, raced hissing shoreward, where they broke and surged up the beach, jangling the coral gravel. Louder than the thunder of breakers and the jangle of coral gravel came the tattoo of Pilato's gong. He squatted by his gong to beat it in a kind of frenzy. His body was never at rest, his eyes sparkled; there were laughter, shouts of encouragement, and snatches of song from his lips. In the clearing before him the girls of Ko danced, formed in a double line, their arms and their hips moving in a manner that suggested physical love. We from the House of Youth stood here and there close to the dancers; but now and again one of us would leap forward, shouting in a spontaneous burst of excitement, and dance between the lines of girls, arms outstretched, knees knocking together, shoulders swaying. There would be screams from the girls, a shriek of laughter from Pilato, and hoarse shouts from the youths. The moonlight played on the naked brown skins; it seemed to caress the shimmering black hair, the firm young breasts half hidden under wreaths of flowers; it played wantonly in the grass skirts and then moved on to project a nether dance, elongated and fantastic, across the sand until it was lost in the shadows. The moonlight was an actor in this scene of pagan loveliness, as was the wind with its tantalizing smell of hot bodies, of the night breath of wilting flowers. Desire led the dance, as was her right, for she had been declared mature on the day before, and this was her night of glory. There were wreaths of cordia and pandanus blossoms around her head, flowers in her hair and behind her ears. Her grass skirt had been made by Tangi from the whitest of bleached fiscus bark; it was so bushy that it accentuated the width of her hips and their movement in the dance. Her breasts were bare, to me they were soft, round, inviting. With her mind on the movements of the dance, a little scowl puckering her brow and the bridge of her nose, she danced as though she were a priestess officiating in her temple--as perhaps she was. Dawn was at hand when the dancing had ended. We strolled southward along the beach, and I so managed it that I was close to Desire and soon had my arm over her shoulders. "I am coming for you, Desire," I said when we had reached the place where our friends must turn onto the reef highway. "Wait for me when the moon is full." Then I felt her arm slip around my waist and her hand press me gently, and then she was gone. For a little while we watched our friends move in single file along the reef, and we could hear the plash of their bare feet, for the tide was coming in. They were lost when the moon sank behind a bank of horizon clouds. Suddenly tired to exhaustion we walked back to the copra makers' village. At sundown I sent for Pio--the Mr. Horse of the House of Youth. I fed him bully beef and biscuits to make him strong at the paddle; and at deep dusk, after expressing the proper excuses to Araipu (and borrowing his canoe), we set off. It was night by the time we had paddled the mile to Matauea Point, on the westward side of Ko Islet. From there we skirted far out in the big horseshoe bay, so as to be safe from prying eyes, and paddled noiselessly. There was a full moon. Soon I laid my paddle in the canoe and, sitting in the bow, stared into the water. In the shallow places the white sand bottom was of the light blue of a clear summer sky, with here and there growths of coral, shadowy fish moving among the coral forests. Elsewhere the water changed to deeper shades, to violet and purple and blue-black. Then presently we came to where the sand gave way to coral mountains as weird, as gloomy, as mysterious as the mountains in a book of fairy tales. "Sh!" came suddenly from Pio. He backed water silently. "There's a malau fisherman!" I soon made him out. Leaning low, we turned the canoe and paddled farther out in the bay, but only to find ourselves in a maze of reefs, scarcely awash, over some of which we had to drag the canoe. And the farther we paddled the closer the malau fisherman seemed to be. We soon guessed that he was following us so he could have a sauce of scandal to serve with his malau. And sure enough, when we were wedged in a great mass of reefs, each one of which was so thickly covered with spiny coral that we could not pull the canoe over it, the fisherman managed to come within recognizing distance. "Ha, ha! Ropati and Pio!" the cur whooped. Everyone knows how sound carries over calm water. Though the head of the bay was nearly a mile away, the villagers could hear every word the fisherman shouted. "Oh, it's you, Bribery," I snarled, recognizing the crooked-legged deacon. "We're going to the main islet. Show us the way out of this mess." "Aye, little Ropati; presently, Ropati dear!" the creature whined. "But how is it that you, who have lived on Puka-Puka all these years, do not know the way to the main islet? And has Pio forgotten the way? And do you always use such nice-smelling hair oil when you are paddling to the islet?" "Be still, you old fool! If you breathe another word you'll never get any more tobacco from me!" "Aye; the old man will be silent as the moon, little Ropati," Bribery whooped. "Just give the old man a pinch of tobacco for his pipe, and he will be silent as the moon and show you the way out of these reefs." I gave him some tobacco; but instead of thanking me by speaking softly, he shrieked: "So Ropati and Pio are not going to the main islet at all! So they are out hunting little mice to play with tonight. . Oh, when I was a wild youth all the little mice--" "Be still! No one cares about what happened when you were a wild youth! Show us the way out of here!" Bribery's reply was a cackling laugh that rent the still night air. I fancied scores of villagers poking their heads under the eaves of their houses, cocking their ears, glancing and nodding meaningfully at one another. Perhaps even Desire had heard us and was laughing at us! But presently, when the deacon had had his laugh and had shouted a number of other not very witty things, he noisily led us out of the maze. We paddled to Matautu Point, which is directly across the bay from Matauea. There we hid our canoe under some pemphis bushes that hung over the shallow water, had a smoke, and, happy again, started toward the copra makers' village of Ko. It was then that I began really to enjoy myself. I followed Pio, through the shadowy jungle, under long-leaved pandanus trees, through the gloom of hernandia groves. I listened as though for the first time to the distant thunder of combers on the barrier reef, the mournful cooing of island doves, the squawking of noddy terns a-roost in the coconut trees. The night noises were primitive music, and I was a primitive man out hunting for his woman. Once we slipped inland to crouch behind a clump of bird's-nest ferns, roll cigarettes, and light them where the flame of the match would not be seen in the village. Then we moved on again, cautiously now, till presently we saw a fire burning before the first village house. It was Mama Tala's place, where Desire was staying. When we were within a hundred paces of the house Pio grasped my arm, pointed, and whispered: "There she is! She is sitting close to the fire, with her back to a coconut tree. She and Tangi and her mother are eating coconut crabs . . . . Listen! Can't you hear the old lady cracking the claws with her teeth?" "I can see only a red glow in the darkness and hear only the terns squawking in the treetops." "Wait here," Pio whispered. "I will slip through the shadows, and creep up behind her, and tell her you have come for her. Mama Tala must not know that I am here, for it is tapu for the Leeward villagers to come to Ko." I was about to tell him that Bribery would carry the news to the villagers if they did not know it now, but by then Pio was gone. I moved a few paces to the lagoon beach and sat there in the shadow of a cordia tree. Across the narrow stretch of water at the head of the bay, I could see a score of fires creating out of darkness pictures of village life; a group of half-naked figures squatting round a cooking fire; an old man sitting with his back to a house post, oblivious to the present world as he dreamed of the past; children playing in firelit glades; the red glow on domes of foliage shaken fitfully in the breeze. There was the steady rhythm of a gong from some place of love on the outer beach, merging and sometimes lost in the thunder of reef combers, the screams of children, the sustained murmur of the coconut fronds. There was the smell of broiling fish from a cookhouse near by in the village, the heavy odor of seaweed cast along the shore, and once a vagrant waft of scented coconut oil, and with it, in my mind's eye but seemingly as tangible as living flesh, the face of Desire. I drank in these sights, sounds, smells, and I felt myself a part of this world far away. The night birds were flying seaward now. I could hear them squeak petulantly as they winged overhead. Terns soared down from their perches to wheel over the water before flying to the shallows; curlews piped their cry of panic loneliness. I could feel a lizard moving across my leg, and I knew the great lobsterlike coconut crabs were coming forth from their holes and hollow logs to climb the palms for their nightly plunder. "Ropati!" Pio whispered in my ear. "Why are you sitting here as though in a dream? Desire will meet you on the Point of Teauma. Tangi will be with her, for she is going to be my girl tonight. Give me your flashlight. I will lead them to the point. Come to us when you see the light." Then Pio slipped away again, and a moment later I was picking my way inland through the groves and jungle. Coming to a trail that I recognized, I followed it to the outer beach and then walked along the hard sand by the edge of the shallows to the south point--the Point of Teauma. Close by a clump of magnolia bushes I found a place to wait for Pio and Desire. The coral gravel was small enough to lie on comfortably, and I had a good view of the stretch of beach on either side and of the jungle barrier behind me. It was a lonely place indeed--a lonely place to meet Desire! The wind had sprung up; now it blew over me caressingly. The magnolia bushes spread their gnarled and twisted branches over my head, rustled faintly and sibilantly like the distant buzz of night insects. A few paces away the ripples marched across the shallows to jingle the coral gravel with a tintinnabulation of tiny bells; there was not a human sound to jar on my ears. Across the shallows, in the sky above the eastern reef, a somber cloud had risen. It reminded me of a sitting Buddha. The full moon cast a dim shadow across it. It seemed to me that I was worshiping in an ancient temple where a candle burned before the idol of a pagan god. Then the beam of a flashlight played on me, and an instant later Pio and Desire were at my side. Back in the shadows I saw another figure and guessed it was Tangi. I cannot tell a great deal of that night with Desire, for it was an experience of the spirit more than of the flesh. Though she was clothed only in a grass skirt, when she lay flung out by the magnolia bushes, the moonlight full upon her, I sat by her and stared at her, marveling that such a lovely creature should exist, that she should come to me in this lonely place, and that I might have her for the asking. "Why did you come so stealthily?" Desire asked when she was lying close to me and Pio and Tangi had slipped away to some love nest of their own. "I heard you out in the lagoon. I knew you were coming for me, and I told my mother so." "What did she say?" "She was willing. I have been a woman a whole week now, so my mother would not stop me going to the outer beach with you. Why didn't you come openly and take me from my mother's house?" "I do not belong to your village. It is tapu for the Leeward villagers to come here." "Nothing is tapu for you: you are a white man." "Well, anyway, little one, it was fun meeting you this way." "Yes, I understand," Desire said thoughtfully. "That is why I told Pio I would meet you on this point. I knew you wanted to creep through the jungle like a cowboy and meet me in the loneliest place in the world." Then she moved closer to me and laid her head on my arm. "You are one of the wild youths now," she said. "Why don't you take a new name, like the boys in the House of Youth--a name like Mr. Horse or Eagle-wing?" "You think of one for me, Desire." "I have done it already. You told me you would come for me when the moon was full, and now you are with me alone for the first time, with the moonlight shining on us, so I am going to call you Mr. Moonlight." "That's a nice name--and what is your name in the House of Young Women?" "I am Miss Memory." "What a pretty name! Do you know what it means?" "No, but I saw the word in a white man's book, and when I spoke the word it sounded nice--memory!" "I love you, Miss Memory." "And I love you, Mr. Moonlight . . . Am I to be your woman now--forever?" "That you are. When the villagers return to the main islet you must come each morning to the trading station. We will call you a housemaid so the resident agent will not arrest us; but old Mama will do the work while you stay close to me where I can see you and be happy." Then I leaned over her to kiss her in the white man's way, and then to rub my nose in her hair like the natives do; and then we lay back, arm in arm, under the magnolia bush, to talk of the things lovers talk about, which talk is nothing at all unless the lovers are there, and the feel of each other, and the moonlight, and the fragrance, and the sound of soft voices. So I shall leave myself under the magnolia bush with Memory until the dawn quickens, for it was then that I led her back to Mama Tala's house, and, in broad daylight, caring not a whit who saw me, paddled back to Frigate Bird Islet with Pio. Chapter III I have been back on the main islet for nearly a month, and I am writing in the Danger Island trading station. If anyone should find these scribbled pages among my worldly effects, when I have passed happily into the pagan underworld, and should wonder why I now speak of my atoll as Danger Island instead of Puka-Puka, let him understand that, to me, the modern name better fits the main islet with its three churches, its native store, its resident agent (a native of the Lower Islands), and its villagers clothed in ragged European clothes. The main islet is only four miles from Frigate Bird, yet in time I seem to leap from a primitive age to a mockery of civilization-- from Puka-Puka to Danger Island. Here in the station the empty shelves are about me, with their ghosts of cheap print, butterfly scent, pipe knives, smell soap, marbles, lollipops, firecrackers; a few books are on the counter where formerly flowered muslin was cut in three-yard lengths, where Lord Beaconsfield Twist Tobacco was traded for coconuts, where beaudful maidens leaned their elbows as they smiled at the Yankee trader. And it is the same counter where I piped off many a watch while drawing pay as a trader, and where William the Heathen and I discussed many a bottle of brew. I might call it a storied counter, and I might tell of the storied bar of the Line Islands Trading Company, the wreck of which is still in the other downstairs room. Sometimes I fancy I can smell the stale beer. Desire comes to the trading station every day except Sundays to help Mama in the cookhouse, tidy the station, or simply be with me; but she returns in the evening to her mother's house in Windward Village, directly across the bay from the station. On Sundays I spend much of my time on the back balcony, watching her move from her house to the cookhouse or to the village road and thence to church; and in the latter eventuality I will hurry down to the trade room and wait for her, for she often calls before crossing the road to the great white mausoleum of the missionary society. Or I will watch her sitting with her sister Tangi under the cordia tree, by the beach, where she knows I can see her. Also, though we have all day to make dates, we have worked out a system of signals to add variety to our language of love. Thus a white cloth hung on the balcony railing means: "Tonight, when Constable Benny beats the curfew gong, I shall come for you." I find that it adds zest to the adventure if I breathe not a word of it during the day but wait till she has left in the evening, then hang the cloth from the railing, knowing she will not see it until she leaves the road in Windward Village and turns lagoonward toward her mother's house; and I am on the balcony to watch her through my binocular--watch her appear from behind Uka's house, raise her head, hesitate a moment as she stares at the signal cloth, then turn her head away demurely and hurry into her mother's house, her heart beating fast--or is it my heart? When Benny beats the curfew gong I go to First-Born's house, where the deaf-mute Letter is waiting for me. Because he is blind at night I lead him to my canoe, place him in its bow, and put a paddle in his hands. When I thump the side of the canoe he paddles, while I steer, slowly and silently across the bay to a coral head near Windward Village beach. With the bow of the canoe on the coral I wait until a mass of wavy auburn hair seems to float across the calm water toward me. A brown hand reaches up to grasp the canoe's crossboom, Miss Memory boards us and whispers that the villagers are asleep and nighttime was made for us. I am becoming rankly sentimental. Perhaps my head is still drunk with the adventure of last night. The time was moonrise, the place the lee of a magnolia bush on the outer beach, the company was Miss Memory, and of further company there was none. In a frond basket I carried two thick albacore steaks, two drinking nuts, and some raw peeled taro. Memory carried balanced on her head a basket of coconut shells and a pair of food tongs made from an eighteen-inch piece of frond midrib. We needed nothing else--no salt, paper, lunch kit, thermos bottle, sweet pickles or sour--though in my pockets were matches, tobacco, a pipe, and a knife. On the way to the outer beach I took my arm from Memory's shoulders long enough to pick up a couple of coconut spathes and to fray their ends so they would light readily. She stopped at a guettarda tree to pick a score of leaves and lay them on her basket of shells. When we had decided on our magnolia bush I lighted the spathes and piled the coconut shells on top of them. The shells would burn with a white sputtering flame, and they would leave a bed of coals that smoldered for a half hour or more . . . But I was not concerned. After kindling the fire I crawled under the magnolia bush, lighted my pipe, and watched my atoll girl as she laid the fish, the taro, the coconuts on the coals. Puffing away at the old pipe, grunting occasionally in the Puka-Pukan manner just to show that I was happy, I watched her turn the fish and the taro with her midrib tongs; I noted how charmingly her hair fell about her bare shoulders, how the glowing coals lent their spirit to play in her tresses. And now, mingled with my tobacco smoke, came the savory odor of fat that had oozed from the fish and was sputtering on the coals. My mouth watered so freely that soon a gurgling sound came from my pipe, so I knocked out the remnant of tobacco, blew the moisture out of the stem, and filled her up again. My atoll girl laid out the leaves in a nice little circle close beside me so I could eat in the old Roman manner, accumbent; and I had scarcely finished my second pipe when she picked the fish and the taro from the coals with her tongs and laid them on the leaves. Then, protecting her hands with a mat of leaves, she opened the coconuts by tapping them with a lump of coral, added them to the feast, then crawled under the bush to cuddle beside me. What a feast it was! In a European dining room it would have been a sorry mess; but here, with the silken trade wind, the thundery barrier reef, the moonlight dodging between the magnolia leaves--here, with my atoll girl at my side, equally willing to nibble the broiled albacore or my shoulder . . . sons of Adam! And yet I have journeyed away from Puka-Puka solely to taste again the insipid, the indigestible, the artificial cuisine of civilization served by chaste and hard-faced waitresses! Yesterday afternoon I lay on the counter in Araipu's store and daydreamed of the fleshpots of civilization, while betimes Araipu squatted on the floor, splitting matches lengthwise so as to double the number in each box. The tightwad! He does not have to do this, for he has bags and bags of money; but the rest of the neighbors have a good excuse for splitting their matches: that is, they have only enough money to afford two or three boxes a year. Araipu laid each match circumspectly on a block of wood; then he fixed his razorsharp pipe knife along the edge of it and pressed down. Sometimes, when the matchwood ran diagonally, the split pieces would break off close to the head, but they were kept nevertheless, and each one would light a lamp or kindle a fire though it burned the stingy storekeeper's fingers in the bargain. Splitting matches is not the end of our thrift. Seldom does a man light his pipe with even the shortest sliver of a broken match. When a light is needed he sends a child to beg fire from house to house or even village to village, and his pipe waits until the child has returned with a burning spathe or a smoldering husk. If the child can find no fire, the man grudgingly takes a split match and, sheltered from the wind, lights a coconut husk with which he kindles a fire, finally to light his pipe with a live coal. However, I have left myself lying on Araipu's counter, my head pillowed on a bolt of unbleached calico. I believe it was at the time my thoughts had turned to Aunt Adelina and the salt-rising bread she used to make, and how tasty it was with homemade butter and strawberry jam, that William the Heathen came tramping and blustering into the store. William the Heathen, the reprobate, the ex-whaler, the beer guzzler, the blasphemer! He is ageless. When I first met him I judged he was close to eighty; but today he appears neither a day older nor a day younger--unless it is when he is drinking bush beer, for at such times he seems to shuffle off a score of years, his eyes brighten, his tongue wags more profanely than usual; and often enough, leaping to his feet, he will move with the limberness of youth through one of the obscene dances of pagan times. William is the lone heathen of Danger Island, frequently in trouble with both secular and religious authorities, who know little of the man's cultural background. They consider William no more than a worthless Kanaka with a thirst for the poisonous coconut-husk beer that he brews secretly in his little hut by the taro bed of Kawa. He has a keen sense of the degradation that has fallen on his people since the coming of the white man. He corresponds, in Polynesia, to some old Indian chief, the descendant of warriors, in the Americas, who cannot and will not adapt himself to the modern conditions of life; to whom existence is alone made endurable by means of the liquor that enables him from time to time to forget. I have called him a heathen. True, from his youth to his eightieth-odd year he had been the sole heathen on this otherwise Christian island; but a few months ago the galvanizing report was cried through the villages that he had joined the Seventh-Day Adventist Chapel! At first it was thought that the heathen intended to break up the chapel, to do some scandalous thing during meetings--smoke his greasy old pipe while the pastor was praying or rise to tell improper anecdotes from his life as a whaler. But William did none of these things. His deep-dyed strategy was discovered later. When it was learned that he had been put in charge of the chapel's moneybag, and when he started going to Araipu's store with pennies, threepenny bits, and sixpences (with which to buy Adventist-proscribed tobacco), it became quite evident why he had become a Christian. At the present moment it is rumored that William is about to leave the chapel; collections are too small to warrant his splendid hypocrisy. "Gimme sixpence niggerhead!" the heathen growled today, moving to the counter to strike it with his fist. Having been a whaler in his youth, William affects a sort of sailor English. To him tobacco is either niggerhead or bonded jackey. Araipu sighed and picked up a split match to eye it critically, while the heathen stood glowering and muttering curses at both of us. "You got some money, oh yes?" I asked, mimicking his way of speech. "Money? Sure t'ing! All the same bloody cowboy millionaires, too much money all the time!" Bang! and his hand came down to slap a sixpence on the counter. "There must have been a big collection last Sabbath in the Adventist Chapel," I muttered. William ignored the thrust with the fine contempt of a hardened thief, so I went on: "Let's take a walk behind the church. I want to find a place to build a henhouse. I plan to get married soon, so I want to get my establishment in order: have some chickens, and pigs, and ducks, and things for--for the girl I marry." "I'll come too," Araipu said, fitting the last of the split matches into their box. "I want to look at my duck." Then he sold William a stick and a half of twist, untied his moneybag, circumspectly put the sixpence in, tied the bag again, put it in his chest, locked the chest, and grinned in a manner that informed us the day's business was done. William took charge of the expedition. He led us to the big grove of hernandia trees behind the church, and there he stopped to peer searchingly along the paths leading inland, across the cemetery to westward, and toward the village houses. But presently he nodded his head as though with complete satisfaction and muttered that it would be a number-one place to build a henhouse, all right, all right. "It's rather too damp and shady, isn't it?" I objected. "Too shady?" William queried, accenting the first word. "Plenty shade, that's good. When you get married your wife no see you when you feed the hens. Plenty trees, plenty dark. You come 'long this path, walk 'round behind church. Miss Legs come 'long that path, walk 'round behind school. Then you both go in bush by taro bed of Kawa. Oh yes," he muttered, nodding his head thoughtfully, "I t'ink this number-one place for build henhouse." "I don't see that a man has to sneak out here if he wants to meet Miss Legs." For a moment the heathen eyed me ironically, then suddenly he threw back his hoary old head to roar with laughter, while Araipu, only half understanding, stared at us bewildered. "Oh, bloody hell!" William guffawed. "You too much savvy, all right, all right! You been poking up floor boards in Miss Legs' house and crawling in at night, I t'ink, oh yes, Goddam! Go ta hell! I tell everybody 'bout it soon as I get home!" "What a depraved old heathen you are," I growled, "talking that way to a man who is about to be married! Come on, Araipu; I'm going to build my henhouse in the middle of the village road. Let's have a look at your duck." We moved toward the duck pen, but we had gone only a few steps when we came to Constable Benny's pig, so we stopped, of course, to observe it and pass a few sarcastic remarks. Benny was formerly my store boy, but when the station was closed he changed his profession from cornmerce to law, put on weight, became opinionated and much too overbearing with the neighbors. Formerly he was an ideal store boy, and, more important, an expert brewer, but that was before he had become a deacon, a councilman, and a constable. Think of all these titles crowning the head of a single Danger Islander! How can one blame him for having grandiose delusions concerning himself? Only a few nights ago he arrested five boys and five girls for loitering on the beach after curfew. There was a great to-do about it. Horatio Augustus lectured them on the sin of cohabitation and fined each one five pounds. The amount of the fine was of no consequence, for fines are never paid, and anyway, five pounds means about as much to a Danger Islander as an astronomical light-year means to me--it is beyond their grasp. The songsters had a withering revenge. One dark and rainy night they sneaked into the grove of hernandia trees where Benny keeps his pig and they cut off its tail! Not a soul saw them; but Benny, on a hunch, hauled them to court again, whereupon they were each fined another five pounds. Benny, however, is now the laughing-stock of the entire island. The Central villagers have composed a song about the curtailment, which they will sing at the New Year's festival: Alas! Where is the tail of the constable's pig Alas! Alas! Alas! the song goes. It makes Benny mad as a hornet to hear the villagers rehearsing it. We observed and discussed his pig from all angles and aspects. After satisfying ourselves that the stump of its tail would not grow again and its general appearance was one of humiliation and anxiety, we proceeded to Araipu's duck. She was in a pen, taking life easy during her period of ovulation. We observed her for a long time, not saying anything in particular or thinking anything in particular: just observing so we would not have to do anything more strenuous; then: "I see she is laying," I remarked. "Yes," Araipu confirmed; "six eggs." "There's no drake. The eggs won't be fertile." "A drake mounted her last month, before I put her in the pen." "Will one time be enough? Don't they have to go through the ordeal for each egg?" Araipu scowled, then glanced at me in an annoyed way--but I could not decide if he were disheartened at the thought of having to catch a drake and put him in the pen or was merely perplexed over the biological problem. "Ke [I don't know]!" was all he replied. But William knew all about it. "Sure t'ing!" he bellowed. "Half a dozen times for each egg--all same womans! You t'ink maybe--so womans catch baby after one time? Hell no! You mount her two, t'ree hun'erd time and she catch baby! You ask Ropati: he too much savvy. He gonna get married pretty soon, and he all the time poke up floor boards in Miss Legs' house, and Miss Legs no catch no baby yet! Hell and damn! I laugh too much now!" And thereupon the heathen laughed--or rather guffawed. After this burst of erudition we dropped the subject, none of us being very good on biology. We decided, in Danger Island fashion, to wait and observe, and learn. Desire has been arrested by strong and fearless Constable Benny, charged with loitering at night after curfew--not with "cohabitation," as they quaintly call the crime in these islands, prudishly omitting any adjective such as "lascivious" that might explain what they mean. But in court it was more than broadly hinted that of course a girl would not be walking alone at night toward the trading station for any honest purpose. I listened to the trial from an adjoining room, mad as a hornet as I glared at Mrs. Susanna Augustus, who stood near me, spying through the wattle partition, visibly excited. I heard His Worship Horatio Augustus preach on the sin of fornication, sputter texts, wax eloquent, and probably become turnescent as he wallowed in a sadistic spree. And presently I heard him shout: "Are you guilty?" and then Desire, by now convinced that she was being charged with cohabitation, gasp in a thin, terrified voice, "No!" "All right!" Horatio shouted. "Don't do it again! [sic!] You are sentenced to ten days in jail!" I knew the sentence was a slap on my own face. Horatio does not dare bring me to court, so he humiliates me indirectly by punishing my friends. On this day it would have done me good to have walked into the courtroom and slapped the sanctimonious hypocrite's face; but I recalled in time that I was a foreigner, and, as an official once pointed out, was privileged to leave the island at any time that the administration became obnoxious. Moreover, it would have only made things worse for Desire. In practice Desire's sentence means that she must work every day from 8 A.M. to noon for Mrs. Susanna Augustus--who, incidentally, humiliates her with the peculiar viciousness of the sexually repressed prude. The sentence is no less than terrible for poor little Desire. She is no longer her bright, laughing, innocent self; she finds it necessary to defend herself behind a sullen and unnaturally aggressive exterior. One afternoon, during her period of correction, I saw her sprawled face downward on the leaning bole of a coconut tree, in an immodest posture, her legs gripping the bole. She was dressed in the vilest of old rags; her hair had not been combed for days; her face was dirty. Without a doubt she was having her fill of self-humiliation. She stared at me sullenly when I approached. "Hello, Miss Memory," I said, putting my arm around her. "Don't glare at me as though I were the resident agent. You know I love you." Then I said some other things, which there is no need to repeat. When I left she was smiling, we had made a date, and she had given me a kiss. Desire's trouble has led me to think lately of the sex tapu and its influence over both civilized and primitive man. We make profound changes in the economic life of the South Sea Islanders, but their sex tapu remains unaltered. Christianity adds only sex hypocrisy. I say this advisedly: Christianity has made no substantial change in the sex tapu of the Polynesians, but it has taught the island people to conceive as sinful that which they formerly looked on as a natural and felicitous function of life. The rank and file of the missionaries--not the leaders--have been unable to understand that the sex hypocrisy which they insinuate into native life is a far greater evil than the promiscuity which they so one-mindedly, and futilely, try to suppress. We must not get the erroneous notion that people like the Danger Islanders live in a state of sexual saturnalia. Their sexual lives are no more active than those of the Londoners or the New Yorkers; it is rather that they approach the subject with more realism and that there are fewer inhibitions. When the youth go to the places of love they do not grab girls indiscriminately and drag them into the bushes to violate them. Many a night there may be no sexual relations; on other nights two or three pairs of lovers may slip away from the groups. The youth are at the places of love primarily to sing and dance and tell stories, to be away from their elders, to feel momentarily the intoxication of a youth-governed society. College boys have their fraternities for the same purpose. Moreover, primitive boys are like civilized boys in that they fall in love. Often enough a lad will cleave to his first girl and marry her; it is exceptional for a lad to go through all available women before he chooses his mate. The girls are far more promiscuous than the boys; they seem less inclined to fix their affections on a single man. Perhaps they know intuitively, from some atavistic source, that this is their only period of complete freedom; after marriage they must settle down to household duties and nursing babies. Therefore they live (as Horatio Augustus puts it) as active "social lives" as their men will grant them. If my life in the South Seas has taught me anything, it is this: Do not meddle with the sex tapu of primitive people; your own sex tapu may have less virtue than theirs. Let me return to Desire. In another country her sentence might have wrecked her life, but on Danger Island she can restore her self-respect in the arms of a lover--mine, in this case. The effect of the Augustuses' sex hypocrisy is not so harmful as might be expected, for the people do not take a court sentence seriously. There are cases, like Desire's, where a sentence wounds deeply and may turn the course of life for the worse; but most of the neighbors have too lively a sense of humor and too nice a sense of values to be humiliated or even distressed by our remarkable form of jurisprudence. Of course no good can come from such stupid meddling; whatever effect it has is bad. It is like mumps, a baneful disease which can be borne, which often causes amusement, but which may occasionally leave scars for life. The young people have always led free sexual lives; now they are often obliged to do so surreptitiously--and this, of course, adds excitement to the adventure. The Augustuses increase promiscuity by making it a fruit particularly delicious because it is forbidden. Man has always made this error in psychology, perhaps because his prototype, Jehovah, made it in the year 4004 B.C., as is written. Desire will be able to restore her integrity in the arms of her lover; and if she takes the advice I gave her she will do it tonight, for I have told her I would wait for her on our coral-head trysting place. But if Desire had no established lover the procedure would be different, for the girls on this island lure the men to chase them, even as birds and beasts and society women do. They walk the road at night, and when the boys chase them they run shrieking into the bush. On being caught they make a pretense of struggle, but in a moment they admit defeat, put their arms around their captor, give him a kiss, and go with him to the Place of Love, or, which is more likely, return to the road to play the game again. This game is called tango-tango; it only occasionally results in a sexual act. The sexually repressed puritan, observing a big game of tango-tango, would declare that every girl on Danger Island is violated scores of times every night; but many a virgin plays tango-tango with her father's consent and is not violated until she wants it to happen. Probably all deeply enamored couples, who have no inclination toward promiscuity, play tango-tango for the fun of the thing, the same as we play tag or hide-and-seek. Any girl who wishes to preserve her chastity--and there are many--is safe an the loneliest trail at any hour of night. If one asks a wild youth: "How about that girl?" one will be told: "Oh, she is tapu," or, "She is our meat." But when the young people join the church they play tango-tango no more; it is forbidden. Now they change their tactics to Ulu'u, which invariably ends in a sexual act. In Ulu'u, you worm on your belly into the house of a deacon and tickle the toes of his daughter (praying betimes like a good Christian that you are not tickling the toes of the deacon) until she wakens, when you crawl with her into the cookhouse and talk shop. On this Aegean isle the Calypsos are much more wanton than the Odysseans-- incomparably more wanton. On a Sunday night, after a day spent in puritan hypocrisy, with only slight titillation from listening to the "sex religion" of Parson Sea Foam, the girls and the unmarried women comb the island for men. How often, on a Sunday night, do we see a company of girls marching past the station, each one wearing a wide-brimmed pandanus hat! They march four abreast, in three lines, and they turn their heads neither to right nor left though they know we are watching them from the shadows of the balcony. Then, "Where are you going?" we shout. "Why the hats?" "You mustn't speak to us," one of them replies snobbishly, and we recognize the voice of Strange-Eyes. "We are white women strolling through the native village. We are observing the primitive island." And then, from Miss Legs, with a half-suppressed whoop: "We are hunting lovers for the night!" Suddenly the group shrieks like a banshee; the group explodes like a shrapnel! Here come the cowboys of Danger Island! A white dress describes a parabola over the churchyard wall; a yellow dress hurtles down the road; a green dress shoots behind First-Born's house; a red dress rockets up in the air to disappear in the neighborhood of Betelgeuse! Here come the barbarians! Shouts, screams, billy-goat noises, silence! In three seconds the village road is deserted. There is not a soul in sight. We fancy this fantastic rape of the Sabines was something we had read about long ago in a naughty fairy tale. Then we hear Mr. Horse strumming his cocolele, the giggling of a dancing girl; we hear a man whooping someplace out in the lagoon--whooping simply because he feels like whooping, not necessarily because he has caught a fish or a meteor has struck his head. Laughter, the tramp of feet! Here comes the parade again, hats and all! They have not been raped after all: they are only playing tango-tango! When they are tired of the game they will go after men in earnest. . . . For in the quiet hours of night, while lying on our sleeping mat, only vaguely conscious of the snores of the Watch and Ward out woman-chasing in their dreams--while longing once again to drink tea and read Browning with Penelope--while pondering chastity, purity in thought and deed, suppression of the bestial cravings of the lower man--how often do we hear the crunch of coral gravel under bare feet, a soft incontinent laugh, husky girl voices whispering! The stairs creak; the folds of the mosquito net ripple; the odor of scented coconut oil insinuates itself into our thoughts as welcomely as the fingers, the lips, the breasts of an atoll Calypso hungry for love. Chapter IV Now the schooner is in, and once again I am a South Sea trader; the days of epicurean beachcombing are at an end--and a good thing, too, with marriage imminent. For the past few days I have been busy brightening up the trade room with smell soap, Lord Beaconsfield Twist Tobacco, Derby Honey Dew Cut Plug, lollipops, print, muslin, dungaree, unbleached calico, some hanks of fishline, bright red firecrackers and shiny mouth organs, bush knives and pipe knives, striped singlets and squeaking shoes--the same shoddy junk that I sold back in the 1920's. There is displayed on the shelves at the present moment an assortment of fine matting, stick-to-the-chests, and stick-to-the-legs. You no savvy? How dense! Fine matting is cloth, and the stick-things are undershirts and pants. Also there is a whole gross of cero-kingfish, sometimes known as pipe knives because of the tobacco pipes the makers stamp on each blade as a trade mark, but which we call cero-kingfish because the tooth of that fish was our knife in the old days. Also there is a case of doctor soap, which is known as carbolic soap in other countries. Our name demonstrates that modern advertising has reached even the loneliest isles of the South Seas. It is easy enough to imagine that all the remnants from the old station had been stored for the past eight years, now to be once again offered for sale. In my books the trade goods are worth 1115/6/4! I caught my breath when I noted this sum jotted boldly against the store, and then turned my eyes to glance at the moldy, faded, and perished goods on my shelves! The smell has long since vanished from the smell soap, which is discouraging, for it is the only quality my customers will look for--or, rather, smell for. But conversely there is scarcely anything left but the squeak in the squeaking shoes, which is encouraging, for my customers will want nothing else. Also, I find the company has sent me a gross of ladies' bloomers and a gross of jew's-harps. Now how does the damned company expect me to sell ladies' bloomers and jew's-harps? However, there they are: two-and-sixpence each, and take your choice. Thank God that's done! For six solid days I have been sweating over the counter, but now the bulk of the 25O pounds that the company paid for our copra is in my camphorwood chest. The few shillings that are left with the villagers will dribble into Araipu's store during the next six months, principally in tobacco, match, and fishhook sales. That's the way it is here; just like old times. When the people get a few shillings they have a spending spree. They can no more keep their money than can a child; and, most remarkable of all, it makes little difference whether the trade goods are new or old, of some conceivable use or worthless: the fun of spending is the principal thing. Thus my ladies' bloomers and my jew's-harps were snapped up in half an hour, as I shall explain later. I entered the trading post by the back doorway. By being quick and ruthless I managed to slam the door behind me before any of the jostling crowd had forced their way in. Only a few fingers and toes got jammed. Then I opened the front door and vaulted behind the counter, when instantly the place was packed with a solid mob of yelling savages! I do not exaggerate. All that day and the next day and the next day the place was a solid mass of sweating, yelling, writhing human flesh. Over their closely fitted heads, through the upper part of the doorway, as far as the schoolhouse I could see an undulating field of unkempt hair; in the window on my left was a mass of faces, solidly fitted cheek to cheek and chin to crown, with scores of arms stuck through the interstices between the chins and necks, with scores of hands gripping shillings and florins, scores of voices yelling: "Ropati! Ropati! Hi, Ropati! Tobacco! Hair oil! Doctor soap!" I have said that the company sent me a gross of ladies' bloomers and a gross of jew's-harps. Well, Saturday afternoon I found Miss Tern loitering about the station, so I called her in, showed her a pair of bloomers, and asked her to be a customer on Monday morning, This she agreed to do when I had given her the two-and-sixpence needed to buy the bloomers. Incidentally, Miss Tern is goodlooking and is a singularly successful man-hunter. For this reason the women are jealous of her, and for the same reason I picked her as the ideal customer to start the bloomer sale. Monday morning I saw her working her way into the mob. It required strength of mind and body. She had virtually to climb over deacons and crawl between the legs of councilmen--but she got to the counter at about noon. For a moment she let her great Semitic eyes move from the painkiller to the Dolly dyes; then, fixing them on the pair of bloomers hanging immodestly from a tie beam, she raised her lovely arms, pointed upward, and, as per instruction, started yelling with a sort of frenzied jubilation: "Bloomers! Bloomers!" And when I pretended not to hear her she went on: "Quick, Ropati, gimme the bloomers before some silly Leeward Village girl buys them!" "That's all right, Miss Tern," I said casually. "I have three or four pairs under the counter." "They'll be sold out!" Miss Tern screamed, reaching up as though she would pull the pair from the tie beam. "Oh, please, quick, Ropati, the bloomers!" When I had handed them to her and unblushingly taken the two shillings and sixpence she shrieked with delight, waved them over her head, and, despite the press, did a wild hula-hula, bumping her hips against Mrs. First-Born on her left and Mrs. Scratch on her right. If there had been a helluva hullabaloo a moment before there was a helluva helluva hullabaloo now. Men, women, and children started buying bloomers as fast as I could hand them out. Bloomers were passed out the window; bloomers were passed out the back doorway; bloomers were passed over the heads of the customers to people in the road. Old grandpapas bought them; children bought them; even Desire bought a pair. Within three minutes the whole stock had been sold out; then they started on the jew's-harps, the sales stimulation having been arranged for, through the person of my friend Mr. Horse, in the same manner as the bloomer sale. Thus the crack trader handles such little matters as selling unsalable goods. Had there been a gross of medieval helmets they would have been snapped up just as quickly. The thought: "It's a bargain," or, "If I don't buy now they'll be sold out," blocks the ability to estimate the article's utility. Thank God it is over with! It was in some ways a pleasant break in atoll life, but I've had enough of it for six months. From now on Araipu will handle the tobacco and match sales and weigh my copra, while I pursue the affair of my heart. I am not cheating the company in doing this. I am doing all that is expected of me. So long as I have weighed in the copra and taken in all the money there is on the island my employer will be satisfied. If there is any village business, such as costumes for the Christmas celebrations, then I will open the station for a few hours; but otherwise I will open it only to sell wholesale to Araipu or get out a few things for Horatio and myself. Hory, I fancy, will be a big customer in hair oil, perfume, back combs, talcum powder, and such incidentals to one's "social life." Yes, despite his sadistic sprees in the courtroom, His Worship is one of our most successful woman-chasers. Greasy, crafty, dishonest, conceited Eliu, the supercargo of Windward Village, came through the back doorway on tiptoe, his eyes furtively darting this way and that, under the counter and behind packing cases, as though he were hunting for spies or eggs or murderers or pins. It was a long time before he could trust himself to speak, and then his communication came in fragmentary hints: "There is talk, Ropati--wind-talk," he whispered, somehow giving me the impression, as usual, that his mouth was full of mutton fat. "Wind-talk, Ropati. Wind-talk from Ko; wind-talk from Frigate Bird . . . It is said that things are not as they should be in the trading station--the wind-talk says so, Ropati-the wind-talk from Ko and Frigate Bird . . . Prices, Ropati, prices . . . The windtalk says that you raise the prices!" "Well, what about it?" "Prices, Ropati! . . . The wind-talk says that you buy your goods cheap--and raise the prices! . . . Of course I know you wouldn't do such a dishonest thing; but then there is wind-talk, Ropati, windtalk . . . You wouldn't buy tobacco for eight shillings a pound and sell it for sixteen! You wouldn't do such a dishonest thing, would you, Ropati?" "Sure I would--and I reckon I know where the wind-talk comes from: Horatio Augustus, eh?" Eliu became more furtive than ever. His words were scarcely audible when he whispered: "You know, Ropati, that I am going to open a store . . . Can I do it? . . . Can I raise the prices like you do--like the wind-talk says you do?" "Of course you can; it's easy. You buy a hundred pounds worth of goods and sell them for two hundred pounds. That's all there is to it." Eliu pressed his lips together and squinted his eyes. His breath came quick and his words more pinguid than ever. "I'll do it!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "How wise the white men are! . . . Buy, one hundred pounds . . . Sell, two hundred pounds! . . . Whee-ee! . . . So that's how the white men make their millions! . . . I'll open a store tomorrow! . . . Today! . . . You give me one hundred pounds of goods on credit, and I'll sell them for two hundred pounds. Then I'll pay you a hundred pounds and keep the other hundred pounds!" "I won't give you any credit." Eliu scowled blackly; the mutton fat turned acrid in his mouth. He tiptoed to the doorway to scan the yard and beach; then, returning to the counter, "You'd better give me the goods!" he hissed. "You'd better, Ropati . . . because . . . if you don't . . . I'll tell everybody you're a crooked trader . . . You raise the prices!" Horatio Augustus' personal goods from the schooner, amounting to nearly a ton, were landed with my goods and stored in the station. We had no time or inclination to sort them out while the schooner was here or during the business rush; but this afternoon Hory came to the station, to interrupt Desire and me in a game of marbles, and demanded his goods. We rolled up our sleeves and went to work; and when Hory's gear was stacked in front of the counter he told me, in an offhand manner, to have it delivered at once to the government residency; so I stepped on the front porch and called: "A stick of Lord Beaconsfield Twist Tobacco for each strong young man that helps carry His Worship's gear to the government shack!" There was a stampede. Old gentlemen and young, they came leaping to the station, yelling: "Ropati! Me! Tobacco! Me!" Deacon Bribery shouldered a forty-pound tin of biscuits, and the sea-monkey Poaza a fifty-pound bag of flour, and Mr. Horse a case of tomatoes, and First-Born a bag of rice. Twenty-five porters shouldered Horatio's gear, as I knew, for I had bought a pound of twist--twenty-six sticks--and I had one stick left when the twentyfifth man staggered into the road--and there was one seventy-pound bag of sugar left to go. I glanced up and down the road. Not a soul was in sight except the porters and hefty old Mrs. Scratch, squint-eyed and grinning as usual. She wobbled from the road to the porch, through the doorway, snatching en route the last stick of tobacco from my hand; then she shouldered the seventy-pound bag of sugar as effortlessly as would a stevedore and, wobbling more alarmingly than before, followed a few steps in the wake of the cheerful porters. Horatio followed in the wake of Mrs. Scratch. His cork helmet being at precisely the correct angle, and his twenty-six porters being visible at once as they filed through Central Village, Hory's ego was, I fancy, exalted above the highest coconut trees. He smirked a little, believing himself smiling charmingly, when he saw the lovely Kura standing by Constable Benny's house, grinning equivocally as she watched her important lover hoofing it along like a colonial Englishman among the coolies. Desire and I, standing in the doorway, also grinned. Sight gives you only a coldly detached vision of the familiar spirit of place. When you hear him snore and feel his hairy chest you are casually acquainted, but when you smell and taste the little devil you know him to the marrow of his bones. That is one reason why I must tell you something about what we eat and drink; another reason is that, the Christmas holidays being but a few days past, the time is fitting for a dissertation on food. On every island one finds a different way of making the native oven. This is our method: we dig a shallow pit, nine inches deep and four feet square, and wall it with upright blocks of coral or pandanus logs. If we are lucky we have fifty pounds or so of volcanic stones for our oven; if not, there is a hard coral that serves the purpose but soon crumbles under the heat. A fire is kindled in the pit and the stones are laid on it. When the fire has died down the hot stones are leveled by prodding them with the butt end of a frond, and the food, wrapped in leaves or in coconut-shell containers, is laid on the stones. Then the food is covered with sections of green coconut husk and pieces of old matting. Enough steam is formed in the green husks to keep the food moist. That's all there is to it, unless I add that it is a good idea to weigh down the outer edges of the matting so the neighbors' pigs and cats do not nab your dinner. The coconut-shell container that I have mentioned is a large drinking nut from which the meat has been scraped out and a section from which about two inches in diameter has been cut off the eye end. Chopped taro with coconut cream is cooked in this container; also clams, fish fillets, and turtle, the last being one of the choicest foods on earth--a little fat, a little lean, a few fetal eggs, some chopped onion, and salt to taste. Bake at least two hours, with the top of the container covered with green leaves, and you have a meal for a king, his queen, and all the little royalties in the bargain. Our fish we bake wrapped in green leaves, grill on coconut-shell coals, or boil with coconut cream. We seldom eat raw fish, but we eat raw lobster whenever we can get the wherewithal. When a man begs or steals a few limes from Frigate Bird Islet he hides them in the cookhouse thatch, then goes surreptitiously to the reef and dives through the breakers to swim down to his private lobster hole. Now, the position of a lobster hole, where whole colonies live and breed, is a closely guarded secret passed down from father to son; so the fisherman scans the reef and lagoon before he dives, and if anyone is in sight he abandons the expedition for the time being. But if the coast is clear he dives to his hole, reaches in, and pulls out a pair of lobsters. It sounds easy, but try it. I shall carry for life the scars of coral cuts that I have gotten trying to pull lobsters from their holes. I have filled my hands with sea-urchin spines; I have been bitten by eels, pinched by crabs, clutched by octopods, but never have I pulled a lobster from his hole. Home again, the fisherman flings the forward end of each creature to the women and brats; then he removes the shell from the tail end, chops the white meat into small cubes, and squeezes lime juice on it. In a few hours he drains off most of the lime juice, then adds a cupful of sour coconut sauce and, if he has it, some chopped onion. Finally he chases everybody away, lets out his belt, smacks his lips, and feeds like the king of a South Sea isle, washing down the luscious meat with mangaro beer. I slip the beer recipe to you entre nous because Honorable Horatio frowns on brewing, while Lady Susanna classifies as drunkards all men who so much as sip wine with their meals. Anyway, with a weather eye peeled for the police, bake ten green mangaro nuts (the variety with sweet edible husks), split them lengthways, pour their water in your beer tub, beat the husks with a heavy stick and squeeze the water from them into your tub; then, when the liquid is cool, add enough coconut water to make five gallons. If you wish to speed up the brewing, add the water from a quarter pound of boiled hops, and if you wish a strong brew, add three or four pounds of brown sugar. In four days it is ready. Very intoxicating and perhaps slightly narcotic. Only optimists try to cross the causeway singing "A Wee Doch-an-Dorris" after the third glass. When I tell you that we atoll people live principally on coconuts and fish you probably fancy us with a mature coconut in one hand and a live fish in the other, biting into them alternately. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mature coconuts, such as one buys in a civilized country, are eaten only occasionally. They are used for making coconut cream, as follows: Split a ripe coconut in two by tapping it gently with a bushknife midway between the eye end and the base, grate the meat, place the resultant flakes in a mat of hibiscus bark, coconut fiber, or a piece of strong cloth, and squeeze. Result: your cream. It sours in a few hours when, with the addition of two thirds of its quantity of sea water and a few chili peppers, some garlic, or onion, it becomes sour coconut sauce. When dining, one pours a bowlful of the sauce, then crushes the food in it and eats with one's fingers, head bent close to the bowl, fingers raised quickly to the mouth so the sauce will not drip back, and taken with a hearty, noisy intake of breath so as to intensify the flavor by oxidization . . . . My chemistry may be faulty-- I'll not swear by it--but I know that coconut sauce taken noiselessly, urbanely, with a spoon is insipid stuff. That is virtually our only use for the mature coconut; the green one is the one eaten. It is cracked in two; about half the water is poured in a bowl, and the meat is scraped out and added to the water. The scraper is made of pearl shell or iron, two inches by ten, with one end spoon-shaped and the other end serrated. To the meat and water baked uto is often added; uto is the pulpy, absorbing organ that forms in a sprouting coconut. It looks like a puffball but is more oily and palpable. To obtain the best utos the sprouting coconuts are husked and the sprouts and roots are cut off at about an inch from the eyes. The coconuts are then laid in the sun for a few hours so the ends of severed sprouts will sere; then they are buried. In two or three months the utos absorb most of the coconut meat and, the sprouts having been cut off they retain the absorbed matter, become rich, crisp, and very good eating, raw or baked. During the Christmas holidays, with no flour or biscuits on the island, my household nibbled raw uto with their coffee. Our diet, consisting of coconuts and fish with an occasional dish of taro, may sound monotonous, but it is not so in practice--any more than the Englishman's diet of roast beef and potatoes is monotonous. Now and then there is a scrawny atoll chicken, sea birds, a bunch of bananas once in a blue moon, and perhaps a mummy apple on the Fourth of July and St. Patrick's Day. None of these is a regular article of diet. The Danger Islanders do not drink tea or coffee, eat bread, ship's biscuits, or any other European food except bully-beef and rice, which last they may indulge in once or twice a year. Yet their diet contains all the ingredients necessary to build a strong people and keep them healthy. I have eaten it for so many years that I can assimilate little else. The vegetables and fruits that, I am told, are "absolutely indispensable" make me ill; and when on Danger Island I feel a trifle off color I eat a bowl of raw tridacna clams soaked in sour coconut sauce, or I chew the sweet husk of a green mangaro nut, and in a few hours I am in the pink of health. Even taro disagrees with me, and I tire of fish . . . but a coconut! Ah, a coconut contains everything necessary to support a man from the cradle to the grave. From where I sit in my thatched house on Matauea Point, on the islet of Ko, I have a fine view of the horseshoe bay and the four miles of reef stretching to the main islet. Across the bay, to eastward, is Matautu Point, where Pio and I beached our canoe the night we went woman-hunting; and at the head of the bay is the copra makers' village, where we found Desire and her mother eating coconut crabs by the light of a tiny fire; and behind me, two miles to westward, but visible if I lean over and look under the low eaves, is Frigate Bird Islet. Desire is in the cookhouse with her mother, for Honorable Horatio Augustus has condescended to allow her to live with me as a servant; and Desire's sisters, Tangi, Vaevae, Pati, and Tili, are diving from the little wharf I have built into the lagoon. Three native boys are with them, but they seem unaware that they are swimming and playing with four naked maidens. When I was their age such a sight would have shocked me beyond measure. Even now I cannot look at them, without an impulse to snort and paw the earth; the native boys look at them with clean unconsciousness of sex. Howbeit, if I am to tell of the Christmas holidays I must turn my eyes from the lovely and (to me) exciting scene on the wharf. At Danger Island Christmas is the time for exchange of gifts, not the time for altruism. If we accept this fact gracefully as a custom in the land of our adoption we lose none of our respect for the people and we go through the Christmas ordeal with little pain. Several days before Christmas the people started coming with their presents. Old Mr. Scratch brought me a conch shell because he wanted a stick of tobacco-bless him! he told me so--may his lumbago be easier this coming year. Moonfaced Deacon Tane and his moonfaced wife came with their arms full of mats and hats, shell wreaths, and a nicely carved cordia-wood box to keep knickknacks in. They sat in the house for an hour or more, scarcely saying a word but eying with disfavor the other neighbors who brought gifts: Mr. Horse with a roll of sermit, Mama Tala with a pandanus mat, Tangi with a plaited basket, Araipu with a ruvettus hook, Desire with a beautiful white hat she had made herself. The presents piled up, seventy-two of them; and on Christmas Eve I made the rounds of the three villages, figged out in white drill, with suitable speeches on the end of my tongue, and with my pockets and arms full of cartons of matches, sticks of twist tobacco, bars of soap, packages of firecrackers, and a few lengths of dress goods for particular friends. I turned in at midnight, but rose bright and early to join the grand parade. This was the woman's year, when the men were supposed to stay at home and cook the food; but I joined the parade nevertheless, being an important person who is not obliged to abide by all the customs. With sharkskin drums a-booming and wooden gongs a-rat-a-tatting, the women of Central Village crossed the causeway to Leeward Village, and there they danced for an hour or more, while now and again the youths of Leeward Village leaped forward to knock their knees together, swing their arms, and in other ways give vent to their libidos. The older men laid out a mighty feast which was done justice to in a mighty way, slim maidens gormandizing as much pork as could a stevedore. But all the pork and fish and taro were joggled down when the women recrossed the causeway, passed silently through their own village, and entered noisily Windward Village; for there they danced for another hour or two, and ate more great hunks of pork, which same would be joggled down during the final dance in Central Village. Meanwhile the Windward and Leeward village women were having an equally grand time in the other villages. At dusk they joined forces before Constable Benny's house; drums boomed and gongs rattled, hips swayed, knees, knocked together, eyes flashed, everybody yelled for all he was worth, the last of the fat pork was joggled down, and, in a word, a marvelous time was had by all. The rest of the week, save for Sunday, was devoted to the noble game of cricket, fifty players to a side, and if the ball gets lodged in a coconut tree it counts six runs.