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His life had narrowed to his canvases, on which he sought to interpret Marquesan atmosphere and character, its beauty and savage lure. I said to him that it was a pity many great painters did not come here to put on canvas the fading glamor and charm of the Marquesas. "Our craft is too poor," he replied with a sigh.
For the Marquesans are perishing, and, to judge from conditions at Taiohae, the one thing that retards their destruction is the infusion of fresh blood. A pure Marquesan is a rarity. They seem to be all half-breeds and strange conglomerations of dozens of different races.
I showed the chiefs the marvels of my typewriter, displayed to their respectful gaze the Golden Bed, and otherwise did the honors. As they departed, Neo said earnestly, "You come see me you have my house. You like, you bring prenty rum, keep warm if rain." "A wicked man," said Exploding Eggs in Marquesan when the trail lay empty before us.
For many weeks before I came, they said, no man had gone fishing. There were so few natives that the trees supplied them all with enough to eat, and the melancholy Marquesan preferred to sit and meditate upon his paepae rather than to fish, except when appetite demanded it.
"He was like a wild bull in the hills, that ship's captain, when he arose, roaring and cursing me. I feared that he would shoot me, for he had a revolver in his hand and said that he would kill himself. But he did not. "A Marquesan who was as hateful to himself would have eaten the eva, but this man had not the courage, with all his cries.
As he showed me the brochures written beautifully in purple and red inks, recording the history of the Maid of Orleans, with many canticles in her praise, learned dissertations upon her career and holiness, maps showing her march and starred at Oleane, Kopiegne, and Rua to indicate that great things had occurred at Orleans, Compiègne, and Rouen, Père Simeon pointed out to me that it was of supreme importance that the Marquesan people should be given a proper understanding of the historical and geographical conditions of England and France in Joan's time.
With two glasses they circulated the claret until each Marquesan had a pint or so. Song of the Nightingale was a middle-aged savage, with a wicked, leering face, and whiskers from his ears to the corners of his mouth, surely a strange product of the Marquesan race, none of whose men will permit any hair to grow on lip or cheek.
She was a withered Marquesan woman, barefooted and ugly, dressed in a red cotton garment of the hideous night-gown pattern introduced by the missionaries, and her eyes were tragedies of bewilderment and suffering, while her toothless mouth essayed a smile and she struggled with a few words of bad French.
'The coral waxes, the palm grows, and man departs, says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands. And surely this is nature.
It would be interesting, I thought, to consider what the hundred thousand years that have passed since that day have given us of joy, of wealth of mind and soul and body, of real value in customs and manners and attitude toward life, compared to what would have been our portion in the islands of the South Seas before his white cousin fell upon the Marquesan.
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