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But they all cheered enthusiastically except Llewellyn. He was an Anglican by faith or paternal inheritance, and though he knew nothing of the real hymns, they being for Dissenters, whom he contemned, he was religious at soul and objected to making light of religion. He called for the "Himene Tatou Arearea." He took his pencil and scribbled the translation I have given.
He was old, and weary from his hot ride, but courteous as world-wide travelers are, and at his request I dropped in on his service before the other. He sat by the middle door, and the twenty or thirty of the congregation on the floor at one end. They sang a himene, and he followed and corrected them from a book, so that their method was formal.
Under my trees the children gathered of late afternoons and imitated the grown-up folk in their melodies. From the verandas and from the church at night issued the peculiar strain of the himene, somehow bringing to me, lying on my mat under the stars, a sense of fitness to the prospect the clear heavens, the purple lagoon, the wind in the groves, and the low rumble of the surf.
The air to which the himene was sung eluded me for long. It was, "Oh, You Beautiful Doll!" They had changed the tune, so that I had not recognized it. The Tahitians have curious variations of European and American airs, of which they adapt many, carrying the thread of them, but differentiating enough to cause the hearer curiously mixed emotions.
On the Sunday of the himene nui, I met the French priest as he tied his horse by the door of the Catholic church. He was in a dark cassock or gown, his long, black beard and a flat, half-melon shaped hat giving him a distinctive appearance in the simple settlement.
The himene was the offspring of the original efforts of the Polynesians to adapt the songs of the sailormen, the national airs of the adventurers of many countries, the rollicking obscenities and drinking doggerel of the navies, and the religious hymns drilled into their ears by the missionaries, English and French. Now the words and the meanings were inextricably confused.
A new himene was improvised about it, and I heard the girls of the Maison des Cocotiers chanting it as I went to Lovaina's to dinner. It was something like this in English: "Oh, the British men they drank all day And threw the limes and iron. The French in fear they ran away. The brave Tahitians alone stood firm." And there were many more verses.
When Kelly played American or English airs and the Tahitians sang their native words, he gave the I. W. W. version in English. Some of these songs were transpositions or parodies of Christian hymns, and one in particular was his favorite. Apparently he had made it very popular with the natives of the band, for it vied with the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in repetition.
Little bays and inlets bounded themselves, and villages and houses sprang up from the tropic groves. The band, which so far as I knew had not been silent a moment to awaken me from my adoration of the sculpture and painting of nature, now poured out the "Himene Tatou Arearea" in token of our approaching landing, which was at Faatoai, the center of population.
That business being poker, and Landers all attention to the cards and the psychology of his antagonists, every time Llewellyn harked to the himene he lost a little, and when he became entangled in a jackpot of size, and drew too many cards on account of his abstraction, he was mulcted of fifty francs and failed of winning the two hundred he might have won.
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