United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"She loved the Menike!" shouted the old women in chorus, and they threw themselves upon me and smelt me and made as if I had been one of the dead's husbands. The followed me up the trail to my cabin and sat on my paepae wailing and shrieking. It was some time before I realized that their poignant sorrow should force consolation from me. There was not a moan as the rum went round.
The fair chieftess shook her earrings and smiled archly. "Bonne filly pooh voo, Menike," she urged in her Marquesan French. "Good wife for you. It is my pleasure that you are happy. She is beautiful and good. You will be the son of our people while you are here."
"My brother of grandfather have first gun in Marquesas," he said with meaning when I spoke of the days of Halley. "One chief Iotete have prenty trouble Menike whaleman. He send for French admiral help him. Captiane Halley come with sailor. Frenchman he never go 'way." Again his teeth gleamed in a smile. "My brother of grandfather have gun long time in hills," he added cryptically.
The nuns would have had her live in the nun's house forever, and become one of them. But Anna told me on the beach when she came hiding to see her mother, that she would live in the nuns' house only until her Menike father came to take her away. She kept the tiki of Bernadette in its silver box upon her neck, and it was her god to whom she said her prayers." "Epo!" I said, sitting up, dumfounded.
She was made different by her mother, by the prayers of Père Simeon, and by something strange in her kuhane what do you say? Soul. She cared nothing for drink or pipi, the trinkets girls adore. She spoke of herself always as the daughter of a Menike captain, a father who would come for her and take her away. Her mother had kept this always in her mind, and Anna never joined the dances.
To refuse it was as uncustomary and as rude as to refuse the Alaskan miner who offers a drink at a public bar. "Menike," pleaded the chief, "that Hinatini more better marry white man, friend of Teddy, from number one island. She some punkins for be good wife. Suppose may be you like Vait-hua you stay long time; suppose you go soon, make never mind!"
In return, Malicious Gossip spent hours on my paepae telling me of the customs of her people new and old. "When I was thirteen," she said, "the whalers still came to Vait-hua, my valley. There came a young Menike man, straight and bright-eyed, a passenger on a whaling-ship seeking adventure. I sighed the first time in my life when I looked on him.
No white man has looked on it since that time," said Strong in Battle. He brought an axe from a man who was dubbing out a canoe from a breadfruit log, and hacked away a chip for me. We returned to the village and entered an enclosure in which a group of women were squatting around a popoi bowl. "What does the Menike seek?" they asked. "He wants to see the footprint of Hoouiti," said my guide.
You are my woman. No other shall have you. "Then I knew that I was his woman, and I forgot my Menike lover. "You see," she said to me after a pause, "I would have gone to the palace. But I would never have come back to the house of Mouth of God. That was the beginning of our love. He would yield me to nobody.
"Menike haka!" came the cry from each house I passed, for the news had been called over the distance, and to the farthest reaches of the valley it was known that an American, the American who had come on the Roberta, with a box that wrote, was dancing along the route.
Word Of The Day