 CHAPTER VI. Chance began to move of set purpose and pepity on the day I was to sail with the one hundred and ten-ton schooner, Caleb, S. Wenthip, for the cloud of islands. I was on my way to the waterfront and, having plenty of time, walked leisurely, thinking of the long journey so nearly at hand, of the strange and lonely islands I was to see, and wondering as an Anglo-Saxon must when presented with a piece of good fortune what I had done to merit it. Oro the cabin-boy of the Winship was following with my luggage. He kept at some distance a mark of respect as I thought, until I saw him sublet his contract to a smaller boy. Then he retired to spend the unearned increment in watermelon and a variety of cakes sold at the Chinese stalls along the street, not wanting him to think that I begrudged him his last little fling on shore. I became interested, of a sudden, in the contents of a shop window, and there I saw a box full of marbles. In a moment Oro was forgotten. Pappity, faded from view and the warm air fragrant with the odours of vanilla and roasting coffee, became more bracing. There was a tang in it, like that of early April in Iowa, for example at the beginning of the marble-playing season. Fifteen years dropped lightly from my shoulders, and I was back at the old rendezvous in the imagination, almost as really as I had ever been in the flesh. The lumberyard of S. M. Brown and Sun lay on the right hand and the Rock Island railroad tracks on the left. Between on a stretch of smooth cinder right away a dozen games were in full swing. There were cries of picks and vents, bunchers, sneakers, knucks down, the sharp crack of expert shots, the crunch of cinders under bare and yet tender feet. Metal arcs were singing in a nearby pasture, and from afar I heard the deep whistle of the Rocky Mountain Limited, as it came down the Mitchfield grade. I bought the marbles, the whole box of them. They cost fifty francs, about four dollars American, as the exchange was then, but I considered the investment a good one. I knew that no matter where I might be, to lift the lid of my box was to make an immediate and inexpensive journey back to one of the pleasantest periods of malayhood. Oral was awaiting me at the quay and carried my small sea-chest on board, with an air of spurious fatigue. I gave him my purchase and told him to stow it away for me in the cabin, which he did with such care that I did not find it again until we were within view of Routariel. The Caleb S. Winship was homeward bound then. From Tano, where we had left Critchton, the English planter, Routariel lying on our course, it was decided to put in there, in the hope that we might be able to replace our lost deck calligro of Copra, washed overboard in a squall a few days previously. Neither Finley's South Pacific Directory nor the British Admiralty's sailing directions had much to say about the atoll. Both agreed that the lagoon is nine miles long by five broad, and that on June 29, 1887 the French surveying vessel Saint-Étienne found the tide running through a narrow pass at two knots per hour. The flood as swift as the ebb. It was further stated that in 1889 Her Majesty's ship, Prince Edward, anchored in eight fathoms, three hundred yards from shore, in front of the village which is situated on the most westerly island, and from that a few pigs and chickens were purchased at a nominal price from the inhabitants. With this information I had to be content in so far as my reading was concerned. There was nothing of a later date in either volume, and the impression I had was that the atoll, having been charted and briefly described, had remained unvisited almost forgotten for a period of thirty-one years. This, of course, was not the case. Ten beef and kerosene oil had followed the flag there as elsewhere in the world. Religion, in fact, had preceded it, leaving a broad wake of Bibles and black mother-hubbards still in evidence among the older generation. But skippers of small trading schooners are rarely correspondents of the hydrographic associations, and the reports from the field of itinerant missionaries are buried in the dusty files of the religious journals, so that Rotario is as little known to the world at large as it has always been. Finley's general remarks about it were confined to a single sentence, a lonely atoll, numbering in a population of between seventy-five and one hundred inhabitants. It certainly looked lonely enough on the chart, far out on the westerly fringe of the archipelago. More than six hundred miles from the nearest steamship route, and that one infrequently traveled. I sought further information from Tino Atino, the supercargo, a three-quarters American despite his Tahitian name. He had been trading in the low islands for twenty years, and during that time had created a voluminous literature with reference to their inhabitants. But it was all of an occupational nature and confined to the ledgers of the inter-island trading company. I found him at his usual task in the cabin, where he gave me some specimen compositions for criticism. We should look them over, he said. These copra-bugs drive a man wild. They get in your eyes, in your liquor, in your mouth. Lord, what a life! The cabin was filled with unsacked copra to the level of the upper tier of bunks. One had to crawl on hands and knees. The copra-bugs were something of a nuisance, and the smell and heat oppressive. I had traveled on more comfortable vessels with tennis courts on the boat decks and Roman swing baths below, but they didn't touch at Rotario. I went through his accounts verifying long list of items such as The work of checking up finished. We went out for breath of air. The atoll lay a beam and still far distant, a faint bluish haze, lifted a bare eighth of an inch above the circle of the horizon. Behind us rain fell in a straight wall of water from a single black cloud which cast a deep shadow over the path we had come. Elsewhere the sky was clear in the sea the incredible blue of the tropics. Dino broke a long silence. Look here he said, What is it that interests you in these islands? I have never known anyone to visit them for pleasure before. Is it the women or what? Under pressure I admitted that nature seemed to have spent her best effort among the Pomotians in fashioning the men. You're right, said Dino. The women are healthy enough, of course, but they don't set your heart beating a hundred to a minute. They have fine hands and white teeth and you won't find such black hair in all the world as you will find in these atolls. But that's the size of it. You can't praise them any further for looks. Maybe you haven't noticed their ears because they always cover them up with their hair, but they're large, and their feet and ankles tough as sole leather and all scarred over with coral cuts. That is well enough for the men, but with the women it's different. Makes you lose your enthusiasm, don't it? I had seen a good many striking exceptions in our wanderings, but I had agreed in the main what he said was true. Well, if it ain't the women, what else is there to be interested in? Not the island themselves, Lord. When you've seen one you've seen a lot. Living on one of them is like living aboard ship, not room to stretch your legs. They're solid enough and they don't sink. But in a hurricane I'd a heap rather take my chances out to sea with the windship than to be lashed to the stoutest coconut tree in the whole group. Now you take herterio. It was washed over seventeen years ago, and all but twenty of the people killed. They are back to seventy-five now, but wait till the next bad blow down the way. They'll drown like rats, just as they did before. Well, we don't have to stop long, he added, grouchily. I'll take what coper they have and get out. It's a god-forsaken whole. They only make about twenty-five tons a year. The island could produce three times that amount under decent management. They're a lazy independent lot, and rotero. You can't get them to stir themselves. I ask them what they had to gain by stirring themselves. Gain, he said? They have everything to gain. There are two frame houses on the place. The rest of them are miserable little shelters of coconut thatch. I haven't sold them enough corrugated iron in ten years to cover this cockpit. You remember Tecura, Anayu, and Fakunomiya? Well, there's my idea of islands. Nice European furniture, iron beds, center tables, photographs, bicycles. A further catalog of the comforts and conveniences of civilization which the inhabitants of rotero might have and didn't convinced me that this was the atoll I had been looking for, and I regretted that our stay here was to be so brief. I did not begrudge the inhabitants of richer atolls, their photographs and bicycles. They got an incredible amount of amusement out of them. Listened with delight to the strange music, and spent entire evenings taking turns with the bicycles, riding them back and forth from the lagoon beach to the ocean shore. But the frame houses were blots on the landscape, crude barn-like structures, most of them which offended the eye like factory chimneys in a green valley. Rotario had none of these things, and having no interest in it from the commercial point of view, I awaited impatiently our arrival there. At ten o'clock we were three miles to the windward of the village island. It lay at the narrower end of the lagoon, the inner shoreline curving around a broad indentation where the village was. The land narrowed in one direction to a ledge of reef. At the further end, there was a small motu, not more than three hundred yards in length by one hundred broad, separated from the main island by a strip of shallow water. Seen from aloft, the two islands resembled roughly in outline an old-fashioned high-pooped vessel with a small boat in tow. I could see the whole of the tow from the main massed cross-trees, the lagoon shimmering into green over the shoals, darkening to an intense blue over unlit valleys of ocean floor, a solitude of sunlit water, placid as a lake buried in the depths of inaccessible mountains. I followed the shoreline with my glasses. The land islands, ledges of barren reef, leaped forward with an effective magic, as though our atom of a vessel, the only sail which relieved the emptiness of the sea, had been swept in an instant to within a few yards of the surf. Great Comer's green and ominous looking in the sunlight broke at one rapidly advancing point, toppled and fell in segments filling the inner shadows with a smother of foam. Beyond it lay the broad fringe of white deserted beach, the narrow forest of shrubs and palm, the empty lagoon, a border of misty islands on the further side. I had seen the same sort of a picture twenty times before, always with the same keen sense of his desolate beauty. It's a lurmant, it's romantic loveliness. Do you know what said? When you've seen one you've seen them all, and an old skipper once told me that the atolls are as much alike as the reef points on that sail. It is true. They are as monotonous as the sea itself, and as fresh with varying interest. The village was hidden among the trees, but I saw the French flag flying near a break in the reef which marked the landing-place for small boats. Further back a little knot of people were gathered, some of them sitting in the full glare of the sun, others in the deep shade, leaning against the trees in attitudes of dreamy meditation. Three girls were combing their hair, talking and laughing in an animated way. They were dressed in all their European finery, gowns of flowered muslin, pulled up around their bare legs to prevent soillure. A matronly woman in a red wrapper had thrown the upper covering aside and sat naked to the waist nursing a baby. I put down my glasses, feeling rather ashamed of my scrutiny, as though I had been peeping through a window at some intimate domestic scene. The island leaped into the distance. The broad circle of foam and jagged reef narrowed to a thread of white and the Calabas wind-ship crept landward again under a light breeze, an atom of a ship on a vast and empty sea. Eight bells struck, a tinkling sound, dead and scarcely audible in the wide air. I heard Tino's voice as though coming from an immense distance. Hello up there! Carrie Khan's ready, I said. All right, I'm coming. And was surprised at the loudness of my own shout. But I waited for a moment to indulge myself in a last reflection. It is thirty-one years since the Prince Edward put in here. Accepting a few traitors and missionaries, there isn't probably one man in one hundred thousand who has ever heard of this at all. Not one in a million who has ever seen it, or ever will see it. What a piece of luck for me. Then I saw Oral at the galley door with a huge platter of boiled beef and sweet potatoes. The sight of it reminded me that I was very hungry. As I climbed down to the deck, I was conscious of the fact that a healthy appetite and a good digestion were a piece of luck too, and that as long as one could hold it, the lure of islands would remain and one's love of living burned with a clear flame. Jack the Monkey seemed to divine my thought to agree with it. As Oral, the food-bearer, passed him, he reached down from his perch in the rigging, seized the largest sweet potato on the platter, and clambered out of reach. Assured of his safety, he fell to greedily looking up, wistfully toward the island. The pass was at the further end of the lagoon, and in order to save time in getting the work ashore underway, the supercargo and I, with three of the sailors, put off in the whaleboat to land on the ocean side of the village. Half a dozen men rushed into the surf, seized and held a boat as the backwash poured down the stern incline at the edge of the reef. Among them was the chief, a man of huge frame, six foot, two or three in height. Like the others who assisted at the landing, he was clad only in the Peru, but he lost none of his dignity through his nakedness. He was fifty-five years old as I have to word learned, and as he stood bidding us welcome, I thought of the strange appearance certain of the chief men in America or France or England would make under similar circumstances, deprived of the kindly concealment of clothing. What a revelation it would be of skinniness or pudginess! What an exhibition of scrawny necks, fat stomachs, flat chest, flabby arms! To be strictly accurate, I had seen some fat stomachs among elderly palmoyudans, but they were exceptions, and always remarkable for that reason. And those who carried them had sturdy legs. They did not give one the uneasy feeling common at home at the sight of the great punches of sedentary men toppling unsteadily along a strip of crimson carpet from curb to curb doorway. Wherever one goes in Polynesia, one is reminded by contrast of the cost physically to men of our own race of our sheltered way of living. There on every hand are men well past middle life with compact symmetrical bodies and the natural grace of healthy children. One sees them carrying immense burdens without exertion, swimming in the open sea for an hour or two at a time, while spearing fish, loafing ashore with no greater apparent effort for yet longer periods. Sometimes, when they have it, they eat enormous quantities of food at one sitting, and at others under necessity, as sparingly as so many deceptics. It would be impossible to formulate from their example any rules for rational living in more civilized communities. The daily quest for food under primitive condition keeps them alert and sound of body, so that, whether they work or loaf, feast or fast, they seem always to require health by it. There had been no boats at Rotario in five months, and the crowd on the beach was unfanningly glad to see us. The arrival of a schooner at that remote island was an event of great importance. The sight of new places lighted their own with pleasure, which warmed the heart toward them at once. We had brought ashore a consignment of goods for Moiling, the Chinese storekeeper, and when the handshaking was over they gathered around it as eagerly as a group of American children at a Christmas tree. Even the village constable seemed unconscious of any need for a show of dignity or authority. The only badge of his office was a cigarette-card picture of President Poincartier, fastened with a safety pin to his old felt hat. He neglected his duties as a keeper of order and was one of the most excited of Moiling's helpers, with the cargo. He kept patting him affectionately on a back-sing, Matae, Matae, which in that situation may be as freely translated as, you know me, Moiling, and the old Chinaman smile, the pleasant, noncommittal smile of his countrymen the world over. Chinos was the only sour face on the beach. He moved through the crowd, giving orders, grumbling and growling half to himself and half to me. I told you they were a lazy lot, he said. They've seen us making in for three hours. And what have they been doing? Lofing on the beach, waiting for us instead of getting their copper together. Moiling is the only one in the village who was ready to do business. Five tons, all sacked for weighing. He's worth a dozen kanakas. Well, I'll set him to work in quick time now, you watch me. I'm going to be loaded and out of here by six o'clock. But Chance, using me as an innocent accomplice, ordered it otherwise. It was Sir Thomas Brown who said, Those who hold that all things are governed by fortune, had not erred, had they not persisted there. He may be right, although I don't remember now where his own non-persistence lay. But there are some things, some events, which Chance of fortune, whatever one wishes to call it, governs from the outset with an amazing show of omnipotence. Tracing them back, one becomes almost convinced of a fixed intent of farsighted unwavering determination in its apparently haphazard functioning. It is clear to me now that because I had been fond of playing marbles as a boy, I was to be marooned fifteen years later, on a fragment of land six thousand miles from the lumberyard of S. M. Brown and Son. Tino had no more to do with that result than I did. He merely lost his temper because Chance disorganized his plans for an early departure. Tried to quench his anger and rum, and because more furious still because he was drunk, then off he went in the Calib S. Windship. Leaving me stranded ashore, I can hear his parting salutation, which he roared at me through a megaphone across the starlit lagoon. You can stay, but this is anticipating. The story moves in a more leisurely fashion. As I have said, my box of marbles came to light again only a few hours before we reached Reuterio. I took them ashore with me, thinking they might amuse the children. They had a good knowledge of the technique of shooting, acquired in a two-handed game common among the atolls, which is played with bits of polished coral. But theirs had always seemed to me a tame pastime, lacking the interest of stakes to be won or lost. I instructed them in the simple rules of Bullring and Tom's Dead, which they quickly mastered. Then I divided the marbles equally among them and gave them to understand that the winner held his gains, although marbles like trade-goods might be bartered for. I emphasized that feature of the game because of a recollection remaining from my own marble-playing days of the contempt in which boys were held who refused to hazard their marbles in a test of skill. They refused to play for keeps, and the rest of us had nothing to do with them. The youngsters of Reuterio were not of that stamp. They took their losses in good part. When I saw that, I left them to themselves, and went for a walk through the village. I knew at least, I thought I did, that our stay was to be brief and I wanted to make the most of it. I followed the street, bordering the lagoon, past the freshly-thatched houses, with their interways wide to the sun and wind, and came at length to a small burying-ground, which lay in an area of green shadow far from the village. There were a dozen or more graves within the enclosure, some of them neatly mounded over with broken coral and white shell, others encased in a kind of sarcophagus of native cement to keep more restless spirits from wandering abroad. Most of them were unmarked. Two or three had wooden headboards, one of which was covered with a long inscription in Chinese. Beneath this the word repose was printed in English, as though it had some peculiar talismic significance for the Chinaman who had placed it there. It was the grave of a predecessor of Moi Lings. I felt a thinking of him as I sat there and all of the Chinaman. I had met in the earlier days, lonely isolated figures, most of them without family or friends, or the saving companionship of books. What was it that kept them going? What goal were they striving toward through lives which held so little of the comfort or happiness essential to the rest of humankind? Repose. A better end than that surely. The air rang with the sound of the word. The gary sunlight felt piteously on the print of it. To most men I believe with the best of life still before them there is something terrible, infamous, in the thought of the unrelieved blackness of an endless dreamless sleep. I turned from the contemplation of it, let my thoughts wander in a mist of dreams, of half-form fancies, which glimmered through consciousness like streaks of sunlight in a dusty attic. These vanished at length, and for a time I was as dead to thought or feeling as Moi Lings' predecessor, sleeping beside me. I was awakened by someone shaking me by the shoulder. A voice said, Very tipati, come down to the boat. And a dark figure ran on before, turning from time to time to urge me to greater speed. It was almost night, although there was still light enough to see by. I remembered that Tino had told me to be at the Cobra Sheds at five. The tide would serve for getting through the pass until eight. But I hurried nevertheless, feeling that something unusual had happened. Rounding a point of land which cut off the view from the village and inner lagoon, I saw the schooner, about three hundred yards offshore, slim and black, against a streak of orange cloud to the northward. She was moving slowly out, under power. The whale boat was being hoisted over the side, and at the wheel I saw the familiar silhouette of the supercargo. I shouted, Hi, Tino, wait a minute! You're not going to leave me behind, are you? A moment of silence followed. Then came the answer with the odd deliberation of utterance which I knew meant Tahiti Rum. You can stay there and play marbles till hell freezes over. I'm through with you. What had happened as nearly as I could make out afterwards with this? My box of marbles which I had brought ashore for the amusement of the children interested the grown-ups as well, particularly the hazard of stakes in the game I had shown them. Pomodians have a good deal of scotch equitiveness in their makeup. They coveted these marbles. They were really worth coveting. And it was not long until play became general, a family affair, the experts in one being pitted against those in another regardless of age or sex. Tino's threats and entreaties had been to no purpose all work had come to an end, and the only copra of which got aboard the windship was Moiling's Five-Tons, carried out by the sailors themselves. Evidently, Pari the Chief had been one of the most enthusiastic players. He was not a man to be bulldozed or brow-eaten. He had great dignity and force of character for all his boys' delight in simple amusements. What right had Tino to say that he should not play marbles on his own island? He gave me to understand by means of gestures and intonation, and a mixture of French and Pomodian, that this was what the Supercargo had done, at least apparently Tino had sent Oral on an unsuccessful search for me. He thought, I suppose, that, having been the cause of the marble playing Mania, I might be able and willing to check it. Walked there, he went on board in a fit of violent temper and had not been seen again, although his voice was heard for an hour thereafter. Of a sudden anchor was weighed, and I was left as he assured me to play marbles with the inhabitants of Regino for an impossibly long time. Most of these details I gathered afterward. At the moment I guessed just enough of the truth not to be wholly mystified. The watery sputtering of the wind-ship's twenty-five horsepower engine grew faint. Then, with a ghostly gleam of her mainsail in the starlight, she was going. I was thinking, by Joe, I wouldn't have missed this experience for all the copra in the cloud of islands. I was glad there were still adventures, though that sort to be had. In a humdrum world it was so absurd, so fantastically unreal, as to fit nothing but reality. And the event of it was exactly what I had wanted all the time without knowing it. There was no reason why I shouldn't stop at Rotario. To be sure I was shortly to have met my friend Nordolf at Papati, but our rendezvous was planned to be broken. We were wandering in the South Pacific as opportunity, and inclination should direct, which, I take it, is the only way to wander. For a few moments I was so deeply occupied with my own thoughts, that I was not conscious of what was taking place around me. All the village was gathered there, watching the departing schooner. As she vanished a loud murmur ran through the crowd, like a sound wind through trees, a long drawn-out Polynesian, i.e. indicative of astonishment, indignation, pity. Pomodian sympathies are large, and I had been the victim of treachery, they thought, and was silently grieving at the prospect of a long exile. They gathered around, patting me on the back, in their odd way, expressing their condolences as best they could. But I soon relieved their minds on that score. Then, Oari, the constable with the cigarette card insignia, pushed his way through with the first show of authority I had seen him make. I had been frisco, he said, with an odd accent on the last syllable. He had made the journey once as a stoker, on one of the mail-boats. Then he added, You go to hell, me, his eye shining with pride, that he could be of service as a reminder of home to an exiled American. He was about to take charge of me in few of his knowledge of English, but the chief waved him away with a gesture of authority. I was to be his guest, he said, at any rate, for the present. He began his duties as host by entertaining me at dinner, at Moiling's door. I was a little surprised that we did not go to his house for the meal, until I remembered that the Chinaman had received the only consignment of exotic food left by the windship. Oari ordered the feast with the discrimination of a gourmet and the generosity of a sailor on shore leave for the first time in months. We had smoked herring for our doors, followed by soup, fried chicken and rice, edible bird's nests, flavored with crab meat from China and white bread. For dessert, we had small Chinese pears preserved in vinegar, which we ate out of the tin. Woman brand pears, the label said. There was a colored picture on it of a white woman in old-fashioned puff sleeves and a long skirt, seated in a garden, while a Chinaman served her deferentially with pears out of the same kind of a container. Underneath was printed in English. These pears will be found highly stimulating. We respectively submit them to our customers. That was the first evidence I had seen of China's bid for export trade in tin fruit. Stimulating may have been just the word, but I liked the touch of Chinese courtesy which followed it. It didn't seem out of place even coming from a canning factory. Oari gave all his attention to his food and consumed an enormous quantity. My own appetite was a healthy one, but I had not his capacity of stomach. Furthermore he ate with his fingers. While I was handicapped from the first with a two-pronged fork and a small tin spoon, I believe they were the only implements of the sort on the island, for the village had been searched for them before they were found. It was another evidence to me of the unfrequited nature of Rhetorio, and of its slender contact even with this world of puppeteer traders. At most of the islands we had visited. Knives and forks were common, although rarely used except in the presence of strangers. The onlookers had to feast about half the village. I should say watched with interest my efforts to balance mouthfuls of rice on a two-pronged fork. I could see that they regarded it as a ridiculous proceeding. They must have thought Americans as strange folk, checking appetite and worrying digestion with such doubtful aids. Finally I decided to follow the chief's example, and set two with my fingers. They laughed at that, and Paré looked up from his third plate of rice and chicken to not approval. It was a strange meal, reminding me of stories I had read as a boy, of Louis XV, dining in public at Versailles, with a roomful of visitors from foreign courts looking on, whispering behind fans and lace cuffs, exchanging awestruck glances at the splendor of the service, the richness of the food, and the sight of majesty fulfilling a need common to all humankind. There was no whispering among the crowd at the Chinaman shop, no awestruck glances other than Moilings, at the majesty of Paré's appetite. I felt sorry for him as he trotted back and forth, from his outdoor kitchen bringing in more food, thinking of his depleted stock, smiling with an expression of wand and worried amulability. Louis XV would have given something, I'll venture, for that ol' Pomatonian chief's zest for food, for the untingly weight of bone and muscle, which demanded such a store of nourishment. He pushed back his chair at length with a sign of satisfaction and a half-caste girl of seventeen or eighteen, removed the empty dishes. And hospitality is an easy, gracious thing, imposing obligations on neither host nor guest. Dinner over, I told Paré that I wanted to take a walk, and he believed me. I was free at once, and I knew that he would not be worrying meanwhile about my entertainment. I would not be searched for presently and pounced upon with the dreaded, See here! I'm afraid you are not having a good time, of the uneasy host. I was introduced to no one, dragged nowhere to see anything free from the necessity of being amused. I might do as I liked, rare and glorious privilege. And I went outside, grateful for it. And for the cloak of darkness which enabled me to move about unobserved, it lifted here and there in the glow of supper-fires or streak of yellow lamplight from an open doorway. I saw family groups gathered round their meals of fish and coconuts. Heard the loud intake of breath, as they sucked a mighty sauce from their fingers. Dogs were splashing about in the shallows of the lagoon, seeking their own supper of fish. They are a strange breed, the dogs of the atolls. Like no other that I have ever seen a mixture of all breeds, one would think a weird blending of good blood and bad. The peculiar environment and the strange diet have altered them so that they hardly seem dogs at all but rather semi-amphibious animals, more at home in the sea than on land. They are gentle-mannered with their masters and with strangers, but fierce fighters among themselves. I sat down behind a clump of bushes concealed from the light of one of the smoldering supper-fires and watched a group of rotarian dogs in their search for food. They had developed a sort of teamwork in the business, leaped toward the shore altogether with a porpoise-like curving of their bodies, and were quick as a flock of turns to see and seize their prey. Returning from my walk I found the village street deserted, and all the people assembled back of Moiling Shop. He was mixing bread at a table while one of the sons of his strange family piled fresh fuel on the fire under a long brick oven. It was a great event, the bread-making, after long months of dearth and of interest to everyone. Mats were spread within the circle of the fire-light. Paul Ray was there with his wife, a mountain of a woman. Seated at his side she was dressed in red calico wrapper, and her long black hair fell in the pool of shadow on the mat behind her. She was a fit wife for a chief, in size and energy, in the fire and spirit living in the huge bulk of flesh. Her laughter came in a clear stream which it was a delight to hear. There was no undertone of foreboding or bitter remembrance and the flow of it as light-hearted as the child's. Heightened the merry-making mood of the others. There was a babble of talk, bursts of song, impromptu dancing to the accompaniment of an accordion and the clapping of hands. As I looked on I was minded of an account I had read of the Pometonians in which they were described as a dour people, silent, brooding and religious. Religious some of them assured they are, despite a good deal of evidence to the contrary, and they are often silent in the dreamy way of remote island people whose moods are drawn from the sea, whose mind's life fallow to the peace and beauty of it. But dour and brooding is very far from the truth. I took a place among them as quickly as possible for I knew by repeated experience how curious they are about strangers, and first meetings were usually embarrassing. Without long training as a freak with a circus, it would try any man's curry to sit for an hour among a group of Pometonians while he was being discussed item by item. There is nothing consciously brutal or callous in the manner of it, but rather an unreflecting frankness like that of children in the presence of something strange to their experience. I knew little of the language, although I caught a word here and there which indicated the trend of the comet. It was not general, fortunately, but confined to those on either side of me. Two old grandmothers started a speculation as to whether or not I had any children, and from this a discussion rose as to which of the girls of Ritero would be best suited as a wife for me. I was growing desperate when chance the godfather of all wanderers intervened again in my favour. Moiling's fire was burning brightly and it occurred to several of the youngsters to resume their marble-playing. I saw Peruse's face light with pleasure and he was on his feet at once, with his stake in the ring. Others followed and soon all those who had marbles were in the sport. I understood clearly then how helpless Tino had been. I could easily picture him rushing from group to group furious at the thought of his interest being neglected through such childish folly. Those marbles were more desirable than his flour and canned goods, which he stood ready to exchange for copra. The explanation of this astounding fact may have been that no one thought he would go off as he did, and to-morrow would do just as well for getting down to business. Since he had gone, there was an end of that. It was futile to worry about the lost food. Certainly it was forgotten during the great tournament which took place that evening. Moiling worked at his bread-making unnoticed. His fire died down to a heap of coals, another was built and the play went on. Pauly was a splendid shot in marble playing as in other respects, the best man of the village, but there was a slip of a girl who was even better. During the evening she accumulated nearly half of the entire marble supply and at length these two met for a test of skill. It was a long, drawn-out game. I had never seen anything to equal the interest of both players and spectators. Not even at Brown's lumberyard, when the stakes were a boy's most precious possessions. Cornelian stone-tossed. No one thought of sleep except a few of the old men and women who dozed off at intervals with their heads between their knees. The lateness of the hour, the bizarre setting for a game so linked with memories of boyhood combined to give me an impression of only reality. I had the feeling that the island and all the people on it might vanish at any moment, and the roar of the surf resolved itself into the rumble of street traffic in some grey city, and though it were the very city where marbles are made, where in the length and breadth of it could there be found any one who knew the use of them, with either the time or the inclination to play. I might search it street by street, to the soot-stained suburbs, I might go on to the green country, perhaps, visit all the old-time marble-playing rendezvous from one coast to the other, with no better success. And though I passed through a thousand villages of the size of Rotario, could an evening's amusement be provided in any one of them for men, women, and children, at an outlay of four dollars, American? The possibility would not be worth considering. People at home live too fast in these days, and they want too much. I could imagine Tino in a sober mood, giving a grudging assent to this. But, man, he would have added, I wish they had more of their marble-making enthusiasm at Rotario. I would put in here three times a year, and fill the windshield with copra, two with an inch of the main boom every trip. Moiling had enough of it for the whole island, it seemed to me. His ovens were opened as the tournament came to an end, and for half an hour he was kept busy passing out crisp brown loaves and jotting down the list of creditors in his account book. It must have been nearly midnight. The crowd began to disperse. Paul rejoined me, smiling roofily, holding out empty hands. He had lost all of his marbles to a might of a girl whom he could have put in his vest pocket, had he owned one. His wife teased him about it on the way home, laughed hardly at his explanation and excuses. They discussed the events of the day long after the other members of the household had retired to their mats on the veranda. At last I heard their quiet breathing, and a strip of light from the last quarter moon revealed them asleep, two massive heads on the same pillow. I lay awake for a much longer time. Thinking of one thing and another, of my friend Critchton at Tenowell, the loneliest at all in the world, I should say, of the wind-ship far out to sea, homeward bound with one hundred and forty tons of copra in her hold, of Tenowell with his fits of temper and his passion for trade, which blinded him to so much of the beauty and the joy of life. But after all, I thought, it is men like Tenowell who keep wheels turning and boats traveling the seas. If he were to die, his loss would be felt. There would be an eddy in the current life around him. But men like Critchton and myself, we should go down in our time, and the broad stream would flow over our heads without a ripple to show where we had been, without a bubble rising to the surface to carry with it for a moment the memory of our lives. It was not a comforting thought, and I tried to evade it. But I realized that my New England conscience was playing apart in these reflections, and was not to be soothed in any such childish manner. How much copra have you ever produced or carried to market? It appeared to say. I admitted that the amount was negligible. How do you mean to justify your presence here? Was the next question. And before I could think of a satisfactory answer, what good will come of this experience, either to yourself or to anyone else? That was a puzzler until I happened to think of Finley's South Pacific Directory. I remembered that his information about Raterio was very scant. The general remarks confined, as I have already said, to a single sentence, a lonely atoll numbering a population of between 75 and 100 inhabitants. As a sop to my conscience, it occurred to me that I might write to the publishers of that learned work, suggesting that in the light of recent investigations, they added to that description, the bond of playing marbles. End of Chapter 6 Chapter 7. At Deter of Moiling. Poirey's house stood halfway down the village street at Raterio, facing a broad indentation from the lagoon. The Catholic Church had joined it on one side, the Protestant Church on the other. Neither of them was an imposing structure, but they towered above the small-frame dwelling of the chief with an air of projection of jealous watchfulness. On sunny days, they shaded his roof in turn, and when it rained, poured over it streams of water through lead pipes projecting from their own amplar roofs, a purely utilitarian function, since the drainage from the three buildings furnished the freshwater supply of the settlement. If the showers relied the overflow from the largest of the rival churches, splashing on the sheets of corrugated iron filled the house with a monotonous murmur, like the drowsy argument of two soft-voice missionaries. But during a heavy downpour, the senses were stunned by the incessant thunder, as though one were enclosed in an immense drum, beaten with non-sectarian vigor by all the salvation armies in the world. It was during such a deluge one day in early spring that I lay on the guest-bed in Paury's one-room house, watching Pora, his wife, who had washed my linen with her own hands and was then ironing it. It was not strictly speaking linen. The articles were three, a sleeveless gauze singlet, a cotton handkerchief, and a faded khaki shirt, a pair of khaki trousers, a pair of canvas tennis shoes, and a panderless hat, completed my wardrobe. Since I needed the whole of it when going abroad, about the island, it was necessary to go to bed on washing-day and to wait until the laundering was finished, and such repairs made as constant wear had caused and further wear demanded. How to replenish it and to meet other simple urgent needs gave me cause for some concern, and I was going over the problem as I lay on Pora's guest-bed. It was toward the end of my second week at Rotario, and already I was beginning to look decidedly shabby. My shoes were rotted out with seawater, and both shirt-knit trousers, which were far from new at the time of my arrival, gave evidence of early disillusion. Pora had washed, sewed on buttons, drawn seams together, but the garments were chronically ailing, as hopeless of effective repair as an old man far gone into his senile decay. Pora was becoming discouraged about them, and I knew that she must be wondering why I didn't buy some fresh ones. I had a very good reason for not doing so. I had no money. I had been left at Rotario without so much as a twenty-five centime piece, and the bank, the Indochinae, was six hundred miles away. It would not occur to either Pari or his wife that I was in need of funds. Thurs was one of the more primitive atolls in the low archipelago, where all white men are regarded as mysteriously affluent. If instead of being marooned at Rotario through Tino's fit of temper, I had been discovered a mile outside the reef, making toward the land clad only in a pair of swimming trunks. Upon reaching it, my rescuers would have expected me, as a matter of course, to take a bulky parcel of thousand frank notes from beneath that garment. I had, in fact, made a secret inventory of my wealth after the sudden departure of the calub-windship, hoping there might be a forgotten bank note in one of my trouser-pockets. What I found was a cotton handkerchief, a picture postcard of the Woolworth Building, and a small musical instrument called an ocarina, or, more commonly, a sweet potato whistle. The handkerchief I needed, the postcard seemed of no practical use as a means of barter, and while I might have given up the ocarina, it had built a slight monetary value. Moiling, the Chinese storekeeper of the village, was not interested in it. I didn't offer it to him outright. Instead, I played on it in front of his shop, the March of the Black Watch, which I could render with some skill. Thereafter, every young stir on the island coveted the instrument, but Moiling made no offers, and the prospect of a wardrobe was as far away as ever. His supply of European clothing was limited, but ample to supply my wants. He found, for me, three undershirts, size 44, two gingham outer shirts of less ample proportions, a pair of dungary overalls, and a pair of rope-soul shoes. I asked him to put these articles aside and went off to reflect upon ways and means of opening a credit account with the canny Chinaman. There was one possible method open to me. I might adapt the peru as a costume. I could buy three of them for the price of one undershirt, and I believed that Moiling would trust me to that extent. Nearly all of the natives wore perus. They had put aside their trousers and shirts in gingham dresses, now that I was no longer a stranger to them, and were much more comfortable in their simple knee-length garments. Those of the men reaching from the waist, those of the women, twist it tightly under the arms. Simple and convenient, though it was, I felt that it would be absurd for me to assume that type of dress, since I was not accustomed to it. Furthermore, I remembered the ridiculous appearance of Americans and Europeans I had seen at Tahiti, queer people from all sorts of queer places, who come and go through the French capital of Oceania. They rushed into perus the moment of their arrival. At Papati, and before a week had passed, were more primitive in a sophisticated way than the Tahitians themselves. I had no desire to join the ranks of the amateur cannibals, even though there was some excuse for it at Rhetorio, and I knew that the Pumatonians would have more respect for me if I dressed after the manner of my own race. But how to obtain clothing without money, without divulging to anyone that I had no money? The question dined through my brain with annoying persistence, like the thunder of falling water on Paris's iron roof. Would it, after all, be best to confide in the chief? I could tell him of my bank account at Papati, and he knew, of course, that the Calabwinship had left me without a word of warning, taking my sea-chest with her. I was tempted to make a confession of my predicament. But pride or a kind of childish vanity prevented me. No by Jova said, I'll be hanged if I do, Paris his wife, all the rest of them expect me to live up to their traditional conceptions of white men. I am supposed to be mysteriously affluent, and I owe it to them to preserve that myth in all its romantic glamour. I had no feeling of guilt in making this decision, rather a sense of virtue, like that of an indulgent father upon assuring his children that there is a Santa Claus. I decided to be not only mysteriously but incredibly affluent, therefore when the rain had passed I put on my mended garments and went to Moiling's shop. I found him splitting coconuts in front of his copress shed, and beckoned him in my careless way. He came forward smiling pleasantly as usual, but there was a shrewd glitter in his eyes which said quite as plainly as words, Honourable Sir, I bow before you, but I expect an adequate monetary return for the service. I was not intimidated, however, and when he brought forth the articles I had selected earlier I waved them aside, all of them, accepting the rope sold shoes, the only male footgear of any kind on the island. I explained that I had not before seen the bolt of White Dill, the most expensive cloth in his shop, and that I wanted enough of it to make four suits. I saw at once that I had risen in his estimation about seventy-five percent, and thus encouraged I went on buying lavishly white cotton cloth for underwear and shirts, some pencils, and his entire supply of notebooks, for my volumous observations on the life and character of the Pometonians. A Night King flash lamp, a dozen silk handkerchiefs of Chinese manufacture, a dozen pairs of earrings and four lockets and chains, ten kilos of flour and two of coffee, three bottles of perfume and fancy boxes, four large bolts of ribbon, enough to reach from one end of the village to the other, side and back combs for women, superbly ornamented with bits of colored glass, a bolt of mosquito netting, a monkey wrench, two beacon lanterns, a pendulous mat, and one bowtie already made up, the kind sold at home in gents furnishing shops. At the beginning I had no thought of going in so recklessly, but as I went from article to article the conviction grew upon me that the deeper I had plunged the greater the impression I should make upon Moiling, and it was essential that I should convince him that my mythical wealth was real. He became more and more differential as my heap of purchases increased in size. I made no inquiries to the price of anything, believing that to be in keeping with the mysteriously affluent tradition. At my back I heard a hum of excited conversation. The shop was filled with people. I felt the crush behind me, but took no notice of it and went on with my passionless orgy of spending. Two bolts of women dressed goods, four pocket knives, a can of green paint and another white, but details are tiresome. It is enough to say that I bought lavishly and selected odds and ends of things because Moishop contained nothing else. He had a large supply of food, but in other respects his thought was low, and when I had finished some of his shelves were almost bare. On one there remained only a box of chewing gum. An inscription printed on his side of it read, Chewan McDuff, you can't chew out the original mint leaf flavor, or somebody's pepsin gum words to that effect. That product of American apurecarianism is to be found, strangely enough, at nearly every Chinaman store in the low archipelago. I bought twenty packages of it since there were no other confections to be had and distributed them among the children. The youthful McDuff's chewed on for some thirty seconds and then swallowed, believing in their unenlightened way that gum is a sort of food. I had read of monkeys dying in zoos because of the same practice, but in so far as I knew there were no ill effects from it at Rhetorio, either then or later. I succeeded very well in impressing Paul Ray. He was astonished at the number of my purchases and pora, said, Ah yee! chewed out the mint breath-porters who carried them into the house and sat down in the doorway, her enormous body completely blocking the entrance. On the veranda the conversation crackled and sparkled with conjecture. I could hear above, others the voice of Paki, the wife of the constable, enumerating the things I had bought. It sounded odd in Pomonian, a high-pitched recitative of strange words. Most of them adapted from the English since all the articles were unknown to the natives before the coming of the traders. Fara, flower, rapine, ribbon, penny, pencil, or pen, toa, coffee, et cetera. I myself was wondering what use I could make of some of my wealth. The flower I could give to Paré and his ten-ton cutter was badly in need of paint. Pora would be glad to have the dress-goods for herself and her girls for the Rotarians put aside their poros on Sunday and are dressed in European costume. I could also give her the mosquito netting as a drapery for the guest bed. I had, in fact, bought it with that end in mind. For on windless nights, particularly after rain, the mosquitoes were a fearful nuisance. Paré's household was used to them, but I tossed and tumbled, and at last would have to paddle out on the lagoon and stay there till morning. The coffee likewise was for my own use. Paré, believing that the drinking of either tea or coffee, was forbidden by his variety of the Christian religion. Tobacco, too, was a product of evil, and the use of it made broad the way to hell. It is impossible to believe that any missionary would wander so far to preach such theology. What had happened, very likely, was that one of the more austere churchmen who visit Rotario at rare intervals had condemned those white man's comforts as injurious to health. He must have been severe in his denunciation for Paré. Had got the idea that abstinence from the enjoyment of them was exacted in a sort of amendment to the Ten Commandments. I did my best to corrupt him for breakfast at his house was to me a cheerless meal. His faith was not to be shaken, however, although he admitted that coffee drinking might not damn me, since I had been taught to believe that it would not. I was thinking with pleasure of his tolerance and of the comforting beverage I should have the following morning when I remembered that mine was green Tahiti coffee, which must be taken to Moylang for roasting. His shop was deserted. I could see it at the end of the sunlit street, steaming with moisture after the rain. The open doorway was a square of black shadow. Lightened with a misty glimmer, as I watched and suddenly Moy flashed into view, he ran quickly down the steps, halted irresistibly, and stood for a moment, shading his eyes with his hand, looking in the direction of Paré's house. Then he turned, mounted the steps again, and vanished slowly in the gloom. I was uneasy knowing what he was thinking. But an island less than three miles long, with an average width of four hundred yards, offers a poor refuge for a faint-hearted ditter. And so, having stowed my other purchases under the guest bed, I took the bag of coffee and returned to Moy's store, hoping that I might quiet his fears by increasing my obligation to him. When one is without him, clothing, coffee, tobacco, and other such necessities assume a place of exaggerated importance, which is the reason why the memories of the earlier part of my stay at Rotario are tinged with the thought of them. But I had not come to the low islands to spend all of my time and energy in the mere fight for a comfortable existence. I could have done that quite as well at home, with greater results in the development of a more or less carousel-like resourcefulness. At Rotario, the life was strange and new to me, and I found the days too short for observing it and the nights for reflecting upon it. My first interest, of course, was Paré's household. The chief, his wife, two sons, and three daughters, all housed in that one-room frame building. The room was commodious, however, about twenty feet by fifteen, and on the lagoon side there was a broad veranda where a pora and her daughter did much of their work and passed their hours of leisure. Behind the house was a large cistern, built of blocks of cemented coral, and a small out-kitchen made of the odds and ends of packing cases and roofed with thatch. I wondered if Paré's preference for a board-box covered with corrugated iron to the seemly houses of the other Rotarians. He thought it a palace, and, being a chief, the richest man of the atoll, it was in keeping with the later Pomonian tradition that he should have a white man's kind of dwelling. Unsightly, though it was, without the economy of furnishing, gave the interior an air of pleasant spaciousness, like that of the island itself, with the scarcity of plant life and of trees other than a coconut. There was no European furniture with the exception of a sewing machine and the guest bed, an old-fashioned slider to fare, which looked strange in that environment. On it was a mattress of Cosbac, and two immense pillows filled with the same material. The linen was immaculate, and the outer coverlet, decorated with hibiscus flowers, worked in silk. I had no hesitation in accepting the bed, for it would not have held Paré and his wife. The slats would have given away at once under their weight, and Porre assured me that the children preferred sleeping on their mats on the veranda. The rest of the furnishings were like those of the other houses, two or three chests for clothing, pandunas mats for the floor, paddles, fishing spares, and water-glasses. Stacked in a corner, or lying across the rafters, an open cabinet of native manufacturer held the toilet articles of the women, a hand mirror, a few combs, and a bottle of unscented coconut oil, the one cosmetic of the low islands, which was used by all members of the family. There were also several articles of jewelry, such as the trader's cell, some fishing hooks of pearl shell, and, on a lower shelf, a Tahitian Bible. The walls were hung with branches of curiously formed coral, hat wreaths and necklaces of shell, wrought in beautiful and intricate designs. There were no pictures other than the open windows looking out on the lagoon, in one direction and in the other, across the level shaded floor of the island, towards thee. We spent but little time indoors. All of the cooking was done in the open, and we had our food there, sitting cross-legged around the cloth of green fronds. The trees around us furnished the dishes. I had not used my tin spoon and the two-pronged fork since the evening of my arrival, and learned to suck the Mai Tai sauce from my fingers with as loud a zest as any of them. Usually, we had two meals a day at Rotario, but there was no regularity about the time of serving them. We ate when we were hungry, and food was to be had sometimes in the middle of the afternoon and as late as ten in the evening. That is one reason why I remember so well the feast prepared by Pora and her daughters and served by them, for they never sat down to their own food until we had finished. Feasts of a simple kind, but by Jove how good everything tasted after a day of fishing and swimming in the lagoon or out at sea. I didn't tire of coconuts as quickly as I had feared I should, and the fish were prepared in a variety of ways, boiled, roasted over hot stones, grilled on the coals, or we ate them raw with a savor of Mai Tai sauce. Paori's dog, one of the best fishers of the island, was the only member of the family discriminating in his requirements. He often came up while we were at dinner with a live fish in his mouth, which he would lay at Pora's feet, looking at her appealingly until she cooked it for him. Sometimes to tease him, she threw it away, but he would bring it back and, no matter how hungry he might be, refused to eat it raw. The sea furnished occasional variety of diet in the way of turtles and devilfish, and I contributed rice, tinned meat, and other preserved food which I bought of Moiling whenever I imagined his confidence in me was beginning to falter. That was a risky procedure, only to be undertaken on the days when I was so filled with animal spirits that I more than half believed in my wealth, in my power to draw money or anything else I wanted out of the clear dry air of Rotario. One thing I had wanted from the first, above all others, a house. The idea of opposing indefinitely upon Paori's hospitality was distasteful, and no boats were expected within five or six months. I had not, in years, lived for so long a period at any one place. Here was an opportunity I had often dreamed of for having a home of my own. I should have to ask the chief for it. And at first, thought to request seemed a large one. Then, too, how could I say to him, with any show of logic, Paori, I am not willing to bother you longer by occupying the guest bed in your house. Therefore, will you please give me a house to myself? He might think I had peculiar ideas of delicacy. But further reflection convinced me that while I could not ask him for a pair of trousers, not even for so trifling a thing as a shirt-button, since he would have to purchase it at Moiling Stor, I might legitimately suggest the gift of a house. It would cost only the labour of making it. And that was not great. At Rotario houses were built in less time than was needed to sail across the Lagoon and back. The inhabitants might reasonably have adopted the early Chinese method of roasting pig by putting the carcasses in their dwellings and setting fire to the thatch. It would have been a sensible procedure employed at times when the old thatch needed renewal. Nothing permanent would have been destroyed except the framework of poles, and that could be replaced as easily as firewood could be cut for a morey oven. The upshot of the matter was that I was given not only a house, but an island of my own to set it on. I, who had lived much of my life, up four or five flights of stairs, in furnished rooms, looking out on chimney-pots and brick-courts, filled with odours and family washings. The site was a small motu, lying at the entrance to the lagoon four miles from the village island. It had a name which meant the place where the souls were eaten. Once a man, his wife, and two children went there to fish on the reef near the pass, all of them were taken ill of some mysterious disease and died on the same day. As their souls left their bodies, they were seized and eaten by some vindictive human spirits in the form of seabirds. The legend was evidently a very ancient one, and the events which it described had happened so long ago that fear of the place had largely vanished. Nevertheless, the chief tried to persuade me to choose another site, and Pora, when she learned that I wanted to live on the soul-eaters island, was deeply concerned. Neither of them could understand why I should want to live away from the village island. I wince even now when I think of the appalling tactlessness of that request, but the fact is that the Pomodians themselves, by their example, had got me into the vicious habit of truth-telling in such matters. There is no word in their language for tact. They believe that a man has adequate, although sometimes hidden, reasons for doing what he wants to do. And they understand that it explains seemingly uncourtly behavior. I had accepted almost unconsciously, their own point of view so that it didn't occur to me to invent any polite falsehoods. But my knowledge of Pomodian was more limited than Pauri's knowledge of French, and how was I to explain my desire for so lonely a place as the soul-eaters island. The Pomodians, from their scarcity of numbers, the isolation of their fragments of land, the dangers of the sea around them, are drawn together naturally, inevitably. How make clear to them the unnatural gregariousness of life in great cities, suddenly I thought of my picture postcard of the Woolworth building. I told them that in America, many people, thousands of them, were cooped together in houses of that sort. I had been compelled to spend several years in one, and had got such a horror of the life, that I had come all the way to the cloud of islands, searching for a place where I might be occasionally alone. While the postcard was passing from hand to hand, Pauri, the constable, loyal friend in every emergency, gave color to my explanation by describing for the thousand and first time, I suppose, his adventures in San Francisco. Dusk deepened, the last ghostly light faded from the clouds along the northern horizon, and still he talked on. And the idlers on the chiefs Miranda listened with as keen interest as though they had never heard the story before. Pauri, who was at work on my new wardrobe, did a lamp and placed it on the floor beside her, shading it from her eyes with a piece of matting. The light ran smoothly over her brown hands, and the mountain of shadow behind her blotted out the forms of the trees. Now and then she put down her work and gazed intently in Hori's direction. His voice rose and fell, thrilled with excitement, died away to a deep whisper of awe, as he told of the wonders he had seen, the streetcars, the lofty buildings, elevators which rose to an immense height as swiftly as a coconut would fall, the trains, the motors, the ships, the pictures which were alive. He imitated sounds with amazing fidelity, and his gestures vaguely seen in the gloom were vividly pictorial of the marvels he had met within his travels. The story ended abruptly, and Hori sat down, conscious of the effect he had produced. No one spoke for a long while. Then the chief, who was sitting beside me, broke the silence with that strange Polynesian exclamation of wonder too great for words, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, uttered with distinct rapid precision. Like the staccato of a machine-gun fire, he laid his hand on my knee affectionately, with an air of possessorship, and at the contact a feeling of pride rose in me, as though I were the planner of the cities, the magician whose brain had given birth to the marvels, who Hori had described. But conceit of that kind may be measurably reduced by a moment of reflection. And I remembered that the extent of my contribution to my native land was that I had left it. Small cause for vanity there, however, I had no mind for another tussle with my conscience. I had been the indirect cause of eloquence in Harare and of the enjoyment in all his auditors. That was enough for one evening, on the credit side. On the other side, to Hori, to Porra, to his children, and to all the kindly hospitable people of Rotario, I was under an obligation. I could never hope to cancel. But they didn't expect me to cancel it. I was not even under the necessity of showing appreciation. Just as there is no word in their language foretact, there is none approaching our word gratitude and meaning. To a man in my position, owner of Soul Eaters Island, and of a house to be built there the following day, that was something to be grateful for. The Chinese language is richer, I believe, in terms implying obligation. I was reminded less pleasantly of another account on the debit side, by the flair of a match which lit up for a moment. The pensive, cadaverous face of moiling. End of Chapter 7 Chapter 8 An Adventure in Solitude I awoke some time during the latter part of the night with the bemused presentment that a long-for-event was approaching or in the process of happening. Hands had passed lightly over my face, either that or... I had dreamed it. And I heard a faint shout coming from the borderland between sleeping and waking. Hori's guest bed, with its billowy mattress of capoc, seemed strangely hard, which led to the discovery that I was not lying on a bed but on a mat in the corner of an empty room. The floor was covered with crushed poror shell, which made a faint radiance in the gloom, and a roof of green thatch was a light with reflections of moving water. I was trying to puzzle out whose house this could be, when I heard the shout again, clearly this time, in a pause of silence between deafening claps of thunder. From nearer at hand came the sound of subdued laughter, something elfish, light-hearted, in the quality of its stirred-a-dim memory, and there flashed into mind the lines of an old poem. Come, dear children, come out and play. The moon is shining as brightest day, up the ladder and over the wall. Raising my head quickly, I saw through the open doorway their perfect illustration. The wall was the smooth wall of the sea, with a waning moon rising just clear of it, sending a path of light to this trip of white beach in front of the house, palm trees bordering the shore, swarmed with children who were throwing down nuts. One ancient tree, its stem, a fantastic curve, held its foliage far out over the water at a point where the floor of the narrow outer lagoon shelved steeply toward the reef, some fifty yards distant. Both boys and girls were shinning up the trunk one after the other, diving from the plume top, dropping feet foremost, jumping with their hands clasped around their knees, into the foaming water. The wreckage of huge comers, which broke on the reef, pouring across it into the inner shallows. A second group had gathered in the moonlit area, just before the doorway. Several youngsters were peering intently in my direction. Others were playing a sort of hand-claping game to the accompaniment of an odd little sing-song. A small girl with a baby riding a strider hip walked past, and I saw another of ten or twelve standing at the edge of the track of shimmering light, holding a coconut to her lips with both hands. Her head was bent far back in her hair, hung free from her shoulders as she drained the cool liquid to the last drop. Imagine coming out of the depths of sleep to the consciousness of such a scene. I was hardly more sure of the reality of it than I had been of the shout, the touch of hands. It was like a picture out of a book of fairy tales, but one quick with life. The figures coming and going against a background of empty sea were the long swell broken lines of white fire on a ledge of coral. I remembered where I was, of course, in my own house, which stood on the ocean side of a small motu known as the Pomodian legend as the island where the souls were eating. The house had been built for me only the day before by the order of Pari, chief of the Atoll of Rotario, and the motu was on of a dozen uninhabited islands which lay on a thirty-mile circumference to the lagoons. It was ordered by Chance, which took me there. Perhaps that I was never to see the place in the clear light of usual experience, but rather through a glimmer like that of remembered dreams, a long succession of dreams in which, night after night, events shaped themselves according to the heart's desire, or even more fantastically, with an airy disregard of any semblance to reality. So it was, waking from sleep on the first night which I slept under my own roof. I was almost ready to believe that my presence there was not the result of Chance. Waywardness of fancy is one of the most Godlike of the attributes of that divinity, but the display of it is as likely as not to be unfriendly. Here there seemed to be reasoned kindly action. Providence, I said to myself. Providence without a doubt. A little repentant, perhaps because of questionable gifts in the past. A whimsical providence to which delighted and shocking my sense of probability. What could those children be doing on Soul Eater's Island in the middle of the night? I myself had left the village island four miles distant, only a few hours earlier, and at that time everyone was asleep. There was not a sound of human activity in the settlement, not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere, accepting in Moi Ling's The Chinaman Shop, and on the surface of the lagoon where lay the mystery flexions of the stars. Perhaps I thought these are not earthly children. Maybe they are the ghosts of those whose souls were eaten here so many years ago. I was more than half serious in thinking of that possibility. Stranger things had happened on islands not so far removed from the world of men. I dressed very quietly and went to the door, taking care to keep well in the shadow so that I might look on for a moment without being seen. My doubts vanished at once. Not only the children had come out to play, fathers and mothers as well. Tamatanga was there and Rikata and Niha and Pohu and Tahabri and Honga, Naitain, Naivain, Tamaha, Monamo, Awakee. And I saw Ol Raghunate, who was at least seventy and a grandmother several times over, clapping her hands with others of her generation and swaying from side to side in time to the music of Kopia's accordion. All the older people were grouped around Pari, who was seated in an old deck chair, a sort of throne, which was carried about for him wherever he went. Pora, his wife, lay on a mat beside him. Her chin propped on her hands. Both greeted me cordially but offered no explanation for the reason of the midnight visit. I was glad that you didn't. I liked the casualness of it, which was quite in keeping with habits of life at Raterio. But I couldn't help smiling, remembering my reflections earlier in the evening. I believed then that I was crossing the threshold of what was to be an adventure in solitude, and was in a mood of absurdly useful elation at the prospect. I was to delve deeply, for the first time, into my own resources against loneliness. I had known the solitude of cities, but there one has the comfortable sense of nearness to others. The refuge of books, pictures, music, all the distractions we prevent any very searching examination of one's capacity for a life of retirement. At Soul Eater's Island, I would have no books, no pictures, accepting a colored postcard of the Woolworth Building, which had won me this opportunity. And, for music, I was limited to what I could make for myself with my ocarina, my sweet potato whistle, which had a range of one octave. Thus scatterly provided with diversions, I was to learn how far my own thoughts would serve to make a solitary life not only indurable, but pleasant. So I had dreamed, as I paddled down the lagoon, with my island taking form against the starlit sky to the eastward. It was one of those places which set one to dreaming, which seemed fashioned by nature for the enjoyment of a definite kind of experience. Seeing it, whether by day or by night, the most gregarious of man, I'm sure, would have become suddenly enamored of his own companionship, and the most peracic would have discovered a second meditative self which pleads for indulgence with gentle abstinence. But alas, my own unsocial nature gained but a barren victory. Being robbed at the outset of the fruits of it by this seventy-five convenial inhabitants of Rotario. Here within six hours was half the village at my door, and Pari told me that the rest of it, or as many as were provided with canoes, was following. Evidently he had suggested the invasion. My new house needed warming, or the Pomotian equivalent to that festival, so they had come to warm it. Preparations were being made on an elaborate scale. The children were gathering green nuts for drinking and fronds for the cloth at the feast. Women and girls were grating the meat of ripe nuts. Pressing out the milk of the Mutihari cleaning fish, preparing shells for dishes. Some of the men and the older boys were building native ovens, eight of them. Each one large enough for roasting a pig. All of this work was being carried out under Pari's direction, and to the accompaniment of Kapuya's accordion. I wish that I might have, in some way, make real to others the unreal loveliness of the scene. It must be remembered that it took place on one of the loneliest of the a lonely cloud of islands, which lay in the midmost solitude of an empty ocean. The moonlight must be remembered to, and how it lay in splinters of silver on the motionless fronds of the palms as though it were of the very texture of their polished surfaces. And you must hear Kapuya's accordion and the shouts of the children as they dove into the pool of silvered foam. The older ones, out of respect to me, I think were wisps of paru cloth about their loins, but the babies were as naked as on the day they were born. Tariki was standing among these five and six-year-olders who were too small for the climb to the diving-place, taking them up sometimes two at once, and tossing them into the pool, among the others, where they were as much at home as so many men was. Watching them, I thought with regret of my own lost opportunities as a child. I felt a deep pity for all the children of civilization who must wear clothing and who never know the joy of playing at midnight and by moonlight, too. Mother's clubs and child welfare organizations would do well to consider the advisability of repealing the old, duveted seven-law and bugbearer of all children. It's only merits if it may be so called, is that it fosters in children a certain melancholy intellectual enjoyment in such poems as Up the Ladderen over the Wall, where the forbidden pleasures are held out to them as though they were natural ones, which most of them are, of course, and quite possible of attainment. I was sorry that Tino's supercargo of the Calabas Winship could not be present to see how blithely the work went forward. He had called the people of Rotario a lazy lot, and he was right. They were lazy according to the standards of temperate climates, but when they worked toward an end which pleased them their industry was astonishing. Tino's belief was that man was made to labor, rather joyfully or not, in order that he might increase his wealth, rather he needed or not, and that of the world at large I remember meeting somewhat the same point of view in reading the lives and memoirs of some of the old missionaries to the islands. It seemed to have irked them terribly, finding a people who had never heard that, doful him, work for the night is coming. They too believed that the needs of the Polynesians should be increased, but for ethical reasons in order that they should be compelled to cultivate regular habits of industry in order to satisfy them. Although I don't agree with it, Tino's seemed to me the sounder conviction. The missionaries might have argued as reasonably for a general distribution of Job-like boils in order that the virtues of patience and fortitude might have wider dissemination, but neither trade nor religion had altered to any noticeable extent the habits of life at Rotario. The people worked as they had always done under the press of necessity. Their simple needs being satisfied, their inertia was a thing to marvel at. I have often seen them sitting for hours at a time moving only with the shadows which sheltered them. There was something awe-inspiring in their immobility, in their attitude of profound reverie. I felt at times that I was living in a land under perpetual enchantment, of silence and sleep. These periods of calm or, as Tino would say, laziness were usually brought to an end by Pori. It was a fascinating thing to watch him throwing off the enchantment so gradual the process was and so strange the contrast when he was thoroughly awakened and had roused the village from its long sleep. Then would follow a period of activity, fishing, copramaking, canoe-building, whatever there was to do would be done, not speedily perhaps but smoothly and fast would be broken in the case of many of the villagers for the first time in two or three days. My house was built during such a period. I was still living with Pori in the village island wondering when, if ever, I was to have the promise dwelling. Then one afternoon, while I was absent on a shell-gathering expedition, the village set out in mice for sole-eaters island, cut the timbers, branded the fronds, erected, swept, and garnished my house, and were at the settlement again before I myself had returned. That task finished. Here they were back for the warming festival, and the energy spent in preparing for it would have more than loaded Tino Schooner with copra. I couldn't flatter myself that all of this was done solely to give me pleasure. They found pleasure in it, too. Furthermore, I knew that an unusually long interval of fasting called for compensation in the way of feasting. Pori was in a gay mood. Religion sat rather heavily upon him sometimes by virtue of his papati schooling. He was the chief elder of his church, but once he slogged off the his error of Latter-day Saintliness, he made a splendid master of rebels, and he threw it aside the moment the drums began to beat and led a dozen of the younger men in a dance which I had not seen before. It was very much like modern Swedish drills set to music, except that the movements were as intricate and graceful as they were exhausting. Three kinds of drums were used, one an empty gasoline tin upon which the drummer kept up a steady roll while the dance was in progress. The rhythm for the movements was indicated by three others, two of them beating hollowed singlanders of wood, while a third was provided with an old French army drum of the Napoleonic period. The syncopation was extraordinary. Measures were divided in an amazing variety of ways, and often when the opportunity seemed lost, the fragments joined perfectly, just as the next one was at hand. The music was a kaleidoscope and sound, made up of unique and startling variations in tempo, as the dance moved from one figure to the next. At the close of it, Coppia took up her accordion again and dancing by some of the women followed. At length, rangatouille, grandmother, though she was, could resist the music no longer. The others gave way to her, and in a moment she was dancing alone proudly with a sort of wistful abandon, as though she were remembering her youth, throwing a last defiance in the teeth of time. Coppia sang as she played to an air, which had but four changes in it. The verse was five words long and repeated endlessly, ta-fra-to-patamai, ta-fra-po-tatamai. Both the words and the air had a familiar sound. They called to mind a shadowy picture of three tall, thin women in spangled skirts, all of them beating, tambourines and unison, and dancing in front of a painted screen. I couldn't account for the strange vision at first, a glimmered faintly far in the depths of subconscious memory, like in a colored newspaper supplement, lying in mercury water at the end of a pier. Suddenly it rose into focus, drawn to the surface by the buoyant splendor of a name. I remembered then a vaudeville troupe, which long ago made sorry capital of its lack of calmliness. And I saw them again on the island where the souls were eaten as clearly as ever. I had, as a youngster, knocking their tambourines or bony elbows, shaking their curls and saying, Shoo fly, don't bother me, in shrill, cracked voices. Coppia's version was merely a phonetic translation of the words. They meant nothing in the Pomodian dialect. And old woman though she was, Rangite's dance, which accompanied the music, played in faster and faster time, was in striking contrast to the angular movements of the Cherry Sisters, tripping it in the background across the dim footlights of the 1890s. Other canoes were arriving during this time, and at last a large canoe which had put off from the ocean side of the village island was seen making in toward the pass. It was loaded with pigs and chickens, the most important part of the feast, and had been eagerly awaited for more than an hour. Shouts of anticipation went up from the shore, as the boat drew in with its wished for freight. But these were a little premature. There was a stretch of ugly broken water to be passed, where the swift ebb from the lagoon met the swell of the open sea. The canoe was badly jostled in crossing it, and some of the chickens, having worked loose from their bonds, escaped. Like the dogs of the atolls, the chickens were of a wild breed, and they took through the air with sturdy wings. The chase from the shore began at once, but it was a hopeless one. Soul Eater's Island is five hundred yards long by three hundred broad, and there is another on the opposite side of the pass, which is more than a mile in extent. We made frantic efforts to prevent them from reaching it. We threw sticks and stones, tried to entice them with broken coconuts, the meat temptingly accessible. It was to no purpose. They had been enticed before. Their crops were full, and several hours of captivity had made them wary. Furthermore, like all Polynesian chickens, they seemed to have a racial memory of what they had been in other times, in less congenial environments, of the lean days when they had been caught and eaten at will, chased by dogs, run down by horses. They were not so far from all as to have lost conscious pride in the regained prerogative of flight. The last we saw of them they were using it to splendid advantage over the rapid stream which separated the two islands. One old hand alone remained perched on the top of a coconut tree on Soul Eater's Island. She was in no hurry to leave. She knew that she could follow the others whenever she liked, and she knew that we knew it. She seemed drunk with a sense of freedom and power, and cackled proudly as though more than half convinced that the nuts clustered in the nest of foliage beneath her wings were eggs which she had laid, knowing the wholesomeness of the Polynesian appetite. I could understand why the loss of the chickens was regarded seriously. A dozen of them remained and we had eight pigs weighing from one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds each, to say nothing of some fifty pounds of fish. All of this was good insofar as it went, but there was a gloomy shaking of heads as we returned from our fruitless chase. Not that the Pomodians were particularly fond of chicken, on the contrary. They didn't care generally for a foul of any sort, but it served to fill odd corners of their capricious stomachs. It was this, they were thinking of, and the possible lack at the end of the feast, of the feeling of almost painful satiety, which is to them an essential after-dinner sensation. In this emergency I contributed four one-pound tins of beef and salmon, my entire stock of substantial provisions for the adventure in solitude. But I could see that Pari as well as the others regarded this as a mere relish, a wholly acceptable but light course of her doors. Fortunately there was at hand an inexhaustible reservoir of food, the sea, and we prepared to go there for further supplies. I never lost an opportunity to witness those fish-sparing expeditions. Once I had tried my hand as a participant and found myself as dangerously out of my helmet, as a Pomodian would be at the joystick of an airplane. I saw a great many fish, but I could not have speared one of them if it had been moored to the bottom. And after a few absurd attempts was myself fished into the boat half-drowned. I lay there a few minutes, gasping for breath, my ear drums throbbing painfully from the attempt to reach unaccustomed depths. The experiments convinced me that fish-sparing in the open sea is not an easily acquired art, but one handed down in its perfection through the last twenty generations of low island ancestors. It is falling into disuse in some of the atolls where wealth is accumulating and tinned food plentiful. But the inhabitants of Rotario still follow it with old times zest. They handle their spears affectionately as anglers handle and sort their flies. These are true sportsmen's weapons, provided with a single unbarbed dart, bound with synod to a tapering shaft from eight to ten feet long. Their water goggles, like their spears, they make for themselves. They are somewhat like an aviator's goggles. Disks of clear glass fitted in brass rims with an intercusion of rubber which cups closely around the eyes, preventing the entrance of water. When adjusted, they give the wearer an owlish appearance, like the horn-rimmed spectacles which used to be affected by American undergraduates. Thus equipped with their parus girded into loincloth, a half-dozen of the younger men jumped into the rapid current which flows past Sol Eater's Island and swam out to sea. Tohukia, Tehina, Pinga, the boat-steer, and I followed in a canoe. Dawn was at hand and, looking back, I saw the island. My house, and the crowd on the beach in the suffused, unreal light of sun and fading moon. In front of us, the swimmers were already approaching the tumbled waters at the entrance to the pass. Upon reaching it, they disappeared together, and I next saw them far on the other side, swimming in a direction parallel to the reef and some fifty yards beyond the breaking point of the surf. When we joined them, the sun was above the horizon, and they were already at the sport. They lay face down on the surface of the water, turning their heads now and then for a breath of air. They swam with an easy breast-stroke and a barely perceptible movement of the legs, holding their spears with their toes near the end of the long shaft. Riding the long smooth swell, it was hard to keep them in view, and they were diving repeatedly, coming to the surface again at unexpected places. Through the clear water I could see every crevice and cranny in the shelving slope of coral. The mouths of gloomy caverns which undermined the reef in swarms of fish as strangely colored as the coral itself, passing through them, flashing across sunlit spaces or hovering in the shadows of overhanging ledges. It was a strange world to look down upon, and stranger still, to see men moving about it, as though it were their natural home. Sometimes they grasped their spears as a binard would be held for a downward blow, sometimes with the thumb forward, thrusting with an underhand movement. They were marvellously quick and accurate at striking. I had a nicer appreciation of their skill after my one attempt, which had proven to me how difficult it is to judge precisely the distance, the location of the prey, and the second for the thrust. A novice was helpless. He suffered under the heavy pressure of the water, and the long holding of his breath caused him agonizing effort. Even though he were comfortable physically, he might chase with as good a result. The dancing reflections of a mirror turned this way and that in the sunlight. As they searched the depths through the seaward side, the bodies of the fishers grew shadowy, vanished altogether, reappeared as they passed over a lighter background of blue or green, which marked an invisible shoal. At last they would come clearly into view, the spear held erect, rising like embodied spirits through an element of matchless purity, which seemed neither air nor water. The whistling noises which they made as they regained the surface gave the last touch of run reality to this scene. I have never understood the reason for this practice, which is universal among the divers and fishers of the low islands, unless it is that their lungs being famished for air, they breathed out grudgingly through half-closed teeth. Hurting against the thunder of the surf, the sounds, horse, and shrill, according to the want of the diver, seemed anything but human. We returned in an hour's time, with the canoe half filled with fish, square nose, tinga-tingas, silvery tenues, brown spotted kitos, guineras. We had more than made good the loss of the chickens. The preparation for the feast had been completed. The table was set, or better, the cloth of green fronds was laid on the ground near the beach. At each place there was a tin of my colored beef or salmon. The half of a coconut shell, filled with raw fish, cut into small pieces in a sauce of Matihari salted coconut milk and a green coconut for drinking. Along the center of the table were great piles of fish, baked and raw. Roast pork and chicken, mounds of bread, stacked up like cannonballs. The bread was not of Moiling's baking, but made in native fashion, lumps of broiled dough of the size and weight of large grapefruit. One would think that the most optimistic stomach would ache at the prospect of receiving it, but the Pomodian stomach is of ostrich-like hardy-hood, and, as I have said, after long fasting it demands quantity rather than quality in food. It was then about half past six, a seasonable hour for the feast, for the air was still cool and fresh, the food was steaming on the table, but we were not yet ready to sit down to it. Fetty days, like Sundays, required costumes appropriate to the occasion, and every one retired into the bush to change clothing. I thought then that I was to be the only disruptual backwater of the lot, and regretted that I had been so eager to see my new house. Not expecting visitors, I had come away from the village with only my supply of food. Fortunately, Paul Rhee had been thoughtful for me. I found not only my white clothing but my other possessions, bolts of ribbon, perfume, the cheap jewelry, etc., which I had bought on credit of Moiling, and the house itself had been furnished and decorated during the hour when I was out with the fish spears. There was a table and a chair, made of bits of old packing cases, in one corner and, on the sleeping mat, a crazy quilt, and a pillow with my name worked in red silk within a border of flowers. Hanging from the ceiling was a faded paper mache bell, the kind one sees in grocers' windows at home at Christmas time. This was originally the gift of some trader, and the pictures, too, which decorated the walls. They had been cut from the advertising pages of some American magazine. One of them represented a man dressed in a much advertised brand of underwear, who was smiling with cool solicitude at two others who were perspiring heavily and wishing, if the legend printed beneath was true, that their underwear bore the same stamp as that of their fortunate comrade. There was another in color, of a woman smiling across a table at her husband, who smiled back while they ate a particular brand of beans. The four walls of my house were hung with pictures of this sort, strung on cords of coconut fiber, Hari's work, I was sure, done out of the kindness of his heart. He was merely an unconscious agent of the gods, administering this further reproof for my temerity and seeking consciously an adventure in solitude. As I changed my clothing, I pondered the problem as to how I could get rid of the gallery, without giving Hari a fence, and from this I fell to thinking of the people smiling down at me. Is our race made up in large part of such an out and out materialists, whose chief joy in life lies in discovering some hitherto untried brand of soup or talcum powder? Do they live, these people? They look real enough in the picture. I seemed to know many of them, and I remembered their innumerable prototypes. I had bet in the world I had left only a year before. Well, if they are real, I thought. What has become of the old doomsday men and women who used to stand at street corners with bundles of tracks in their hands saying to passered by, My friend, is your soul saved? No answer came from the smiling materialists on all sides of me. They smiled still as, though in mockery of my attempt, to elude them in whatsoever unfrequentened corner of the world. As though life were merely the endless enjoyment of preacher comforts, the endless effortless use of labor-saving devices. One man in his late fifties, who really ought to have been thinking about his soul, had in his eyes only the light of sensual gratification. He was in pajamas and half-shaven, announcing to me, to the world at large, at last, a razor. The sight of him offering me his useful little instrument put an end to my meditation. I rub roofily a three-day growth of beard, thinking of the torture in store for me when I should next go to Ponega for a shave. He was the village barber as well as its most skillful bolt-steer. His other customers were used to his razor and his methods, and their faces were endured to pain, for had not their ancestors, through countless generations, had their beards plucked out hair by hair, I, on any other hand, was the creature of my own land, of creature comforts. The anticipation of a shave was agony in the realization, Punga, sitting on my chest, holding my head firm, with Oneyman's hand while he scraped and rasped with his dull razor. That was to die weakly and to live to die again. I got what amusement I could from the thought of the different set of values at Rotario. I had only to ask for a house and Paria had given me one, with an island of my own to set it on. He thought no more of the request than if I had asked him for a drinking coconut. But not all the wealth of the low island pearl fisheries had it been mine to offer, could have produced for me a safety razor, with a dozen good blades. I heard Pauli shouting, I'm a tamah! and went out to join the others, my unshaved beard, in woeful contrast to my immaculate white clothing. But my guest or host had the native courtesy of many primitive value, and I was not made conscious of my ungrieped chin. Furthermore, every one was hungry, and so after Pari had said grace for the Church of Latter-day Saints, and Pari a second one for the Reformed Church of Latter-day Saints, and Natau a third, as the Catholic representative, we fell to without further loss of time. The enjoyment of food is assuredly one of the great blessings of life, although it is not a cause for perpetual smiling, as the writers of advertisements would have one believe. According to the low island way of thinking, it is not a subject to be talked about at any length. I like their custom of eating in silence, with everyone giving undivided attention to the business in hand. It gave one the privilege of doing likewise a relief to a man weary of the unnatural dining habits of more advanced people. It may be a trifle gross to think of your food while you are eating it, but it is natural, and if the doctors aren't to be believed, an excellent aid to digestion. Now and then Pari would say, Buima Majera, a thing good that, tapping a haunch of roast pork with his forefinger, and I would reply, E-A-M-A-Tain-Tau-Tara. Yes, a thing very good that. Then we would fall to eating again. On my right, Hunga went from fish to pork, and from pork to tin beef, whipping the Mai Tai Hari to his lips, with his fingers, without the loss of a drop. Only once he paused for a moment and let his eyes wander the length of the table. Shaking his head with a sigh of satisfaction, he said, Katanga Aruha Katanga. Food and yet more food. There is no phrase sweeter to Pamatonian ears than that one. Ari, the Constable, was the only one who made any social demands upon me. As already related, he had once made a journey from Papati to San Francisco as a stoker on one of the mail boats, and was immensely proud of the few English phrases which he had picked up during the voyage. He didn't know the meaning of them, but that made no difference. He could put on side before the others made them believe that he was carrying on an intelligent conversation. What's the matter? Oh, yes. Never mind. We're among his favorite expressions. Unusually mild ones, it seemed to me, for one who had been associated with a gang of cockney stokers, and he brought them out a propose of nothing. He was an exasperating old hypocrite, but a genial one, and I couldn't help replying to some of his faints at conversation. Once out of curiosity, wondering what his reply would be, I said, Ari, you're the worst old foreflusher in the seventy-two islands, aren't you? He smiled and nodded and came back with the most telling of all of these phrases. You go to hell, me! On that occasion, it was delivered with what seemed something more than mere parrot-like aptest of reply. Clipped to his undershirt, he wore a fountain-pin, which was as much a part of his costume, on these dress occasions as his dungary trousers and Pandora's hat. It had a broken point, was always dry, and although Ari read fairly well, he could hardly write his own name, no matter. He would no more have forgotten his pin than a French soldier his courtier, but he was not alone in his love for these implements of Popeye's white man's culture. There was Havaki, for example, who owned a small folding camera, which he had bought from some trader. The two men were very jealous of each other. Ari had traveled and had a fountain-pin, but Havaki's camera was a much more complicated instrument. There had never been any films for it, but he was quite satisfied without them. The camera stood on a shelf at his house, an ever-present proof of his better title to distinction. His chief regret, I believe, was that he couldn't wear it, as Ari did his pin. But he often carried it with him on sundaes and went through the pretense of taking pictures. Some of the more sanguins still believed that he would one day surprise the village by producing a large number of magnificent photographs. A further account of the feast at Soul Eater's Island would be nothing more than a detailed statement of the amount of food consumed, and it would not be credited as truthful. It is enough to say that it was a latter-day miracle, comparable to the feeding of the five thousand with this reversal of the circumstances that food, for approximately that number, was eaten by twenty-two men. At last Paris sat back with a groan of content and said, Aie, para hurry, paie tout à tout. It is impossible to translate this, literally, but the exact meaning is, We are all of us full up to the neck. It was true, we were. That is, all of the men, the women and children were waiting, and as soon as we gave them, place they set to on the remnants. Fortunately there was, as Hunguy has said, food and yet more food, so that no one went hungry. At the close of the feast I saw ol' Rangatouille take a fragment of coca-front frond and weave it into a neat basket. Then she gathered into it all of the fish bones and hung the basket from one of the rafters of my house. Rangatouille was pure heathen, one of the unredeemed of the Rhetarians, but I noticed that some of the Catholics and latter-day Saints even reformed Saints of the latter-day persuasion, all in good standing in their churches, assisted her in making the collection. I had observed the same practice at other islands. At the beginning of a meal thanks were given to the God of Christians for the bounty of the sea, but Fisherman's luck was a matter of the first importance, and while the old gods might be overthrown, there seemed to be a fairly general belief that it would not do to trifle with immemorial custom. It was mid-morning before the last of the broken meats had been removed, and the beach made tidy. The breeze died away, and the shadows of the palms moved only within perceptible advance of the sun. It was a time for rest, for quiet meditation, and all of the older people were gathered in the shade gazing out over a sea as tranquil as their minds, as lonely as their lives had always been and would always be. I knew that they would remain thus throughout the day, talking a little after the refreshment of light slumbers, but for the most part sitting without speech or movement. Their consciousness crossed by vague thoughts which would stir it scarcely. More than a cat's palm ruffled the surface of the water. No sudden half-anguished realization of the swift passage of time would disturb the peace of the river-y. No sense of old loss to be retrieved would goad them into swift and feverish action. A land-grab moved across a strip of sunlight, and sided into his hole, pulling his grotesque little shadow after him. And the children, restless little spirits splashed and shouted in the shallows of the lagoon, maneuvering fleets of empty beef and salmon-tim. Reminders of the strange beginning of my adventure in solitude.