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Tetuanui got up to stretch his huge body. He had been squatting on his haunches for an hour. "Let Haamoura, my wife, say as to them," he returned laughingly. "She knows all the old ways. I must see if the nets are to be stretched to-day." Mme. Tetuanui and I had a lengthy confabulation.
The pigs and fowl were out of the earth by the day of the feast, and Haamoura and Tatini set the table, a real one on legs. The veranda was elegantly decorated with palms, but the table was below stairs in the cooler, darker, unwalled rooms, on the black pebbles brought from a far-away beach.
None of the Tetuanui younger folk had seen it, but Haamoura directed us to return toward Papara as far as the thirty-ninth kilometer-stone, and to strike from that point towards the beach. Cook had had a sincere friendship, if not a sweeter sentiment, for Oberea, the high chiefess of the clan of Tevas at Papara, and whom at first he thought queen of Tahiti.
The coffee was sweetened with their own brown sugar, and the juice of nearly ripe cocoanuts, grated and pressed, made a delicious substitute for cream. Over the breakfast we talked, Tetuanui and Haamoura answering my questions and taking me along the path of my inquiry into far fields of former customs and ancient lore.
Tetuanui ended with a line of Brault's song about Pomaré: "Puisqu'il est mort ... N'en parlons plus!" Mataiea was the farthest point on Tahiti from Papeete I had reached, and wishing to see more of the island, I set out on foot with Tatini, my handmaid. We bade good-bye to Tetuanui and Haamoura and all the family after the dawn breakfast.
I sent with her my love to the Tetuanui clan, and some delicacies from the Maison des Varos for the half-blind Haamoura. The diligence did not run farther than Taravao, and the next day, with my impedimenta in the cart, and with a boy to drive it, I turned my back on the road to Papeete, and began the jog trot to the famous, but hardly ever visited, district of Tautira.
Ariioehau Amerocarao, commonly known as Tetuanui Tavana, or Monsieur le Chef de Mataiea, Tetuanui, and his wife, Haamoura, were the salt of the earth. The chief was a large man, molded on a great frame, and very corpulent, as are most Polynesians of more than thirty years. He was about sixty, strong and sweet by nature, brave and simple.
The house was set back from the Broom Road in a clearing of a wood of cocoanuts, breadfruits, badamiers, and vi-apples. The father of Haamoura had given the land to his daughter, and they had built on it a residence of two high stories, with wide verandas. The chief and his wife had no children, but had adopted twenty-five.
Lovaina was full of the horror of it, but with a just appreciation of the crime as a happening worth telling. The chefferie was filled with aues. "Aue!" cried Haamoura, the chief's wife. "Aue!" said the chief, and Rupert Brooke, with whom I had been swimming.
"You have eaten the fei in Tahiti nei, and you will come back," they chanted. Raiere drove me in his cart to Taravao, where I had arranged for an automobile to meet me. At Mataiea I was clasped to the bosom of Haamoura, and spent a few minutes with the Chevalier Tetuanui. They could not understand us cold-blooded whites, who go long distances from loved ones.
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