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This was the Catholic mission, tumbledown and decayed, unpainted for years, overgrown by weeds, marshy and muddy, passing to oblivion like the race to which it ministered. Grelet and I found Père Olivier sweeping out the church, cheerful, humming a cradle-song of the French peasants. He was glad to see us, though my companion was avowedly a pagan.
Twenty years before my host had planted the trees that embowered his home. With the Swiss farmer's love of order, he had neglected nothing to make neat, as nature had made beautiful, his surroundings. "I learned agriculture and dairying on my father's farm in Switzerland," said Grelet.
They say that it is beautiful and that the people are joyous. They have all the namu they can drink. The government is good to them." Tetuahunahuna sighed, and looked at my bag, in which was the bottle of rum Grelet had given me. I poured a drink into the cocoanut-shell Ghost Girl had emptied, and gave it to him. "Kaoha!" he said and, having swallowed the rum, went on.
Père Olivier apologized for the meager fare, but we did well enough, with soup and a tin of boiled beef, breadfruit, and feis. The soup was of a red vegetable, not appetizing, and I could not make out the native name for it, hue arahi, until Grelet cried, "Ah, j'ai trouvé le mot anglais! Ponkeen, ponkeen!" It was a red pumpkin. "La soupe maigre de missionaire," murmured the priest.
With difficulty my luggage was added to the cargo, and we found cramped places for ourselves and bade farewell to Grelet, while the oarsmen held the boat steady at the edge of the lapping waves. Tetuahunahuna, watching the breakers, gave a quick word of command, and we plunged through the foam. The boat leaped and pitched in the flying spray.
I dozed, and wakened to see Grelet asleep. Pae was still filling the emptied cocoanut-shells, and the swollen green man postured before me like some horrid figment of a dream. I roused myself again.
But with the birth of Tamaiti, Pae became reconciled, and looked after the welfare of the infant more than the volatile young mother. Tamaiti had never had a garment upon her sturdy small body, and looked a plump cherub as she played about the veranda, crawling in the puddles when the rain drove across the floor. "The infant has never been sick," Grelet had said.
From San Francisco I sailed on the brig Galilee for Tahiti. I have never finished the journey, for when the brig arrived at Tai-o-hae I left her and installed myself on the Eunice, a small trading-schooner, and for a year I remained aboard her, visiting all the islands of the Marquesas and becoming so attached to them that I bought land and settled down here." Grelet looked about him and smiled.
Orchard and garden beyond the house gave us Valencia and Mandarin oranges, lemons, feis, Guinea cherries, pineapples, Barbadoes cherries, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes, watermelons, cantaloups, Chile peppers, and pumpkins. Watercress came fresh from the river. Cows and goats browsed about the garden, but Grelet banned pigs to a secluded valley to run wild.
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