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Updated: May 9, 2025
In her low, delightfully broken English, in vivid French, or sibilant Tahitian, Lovaina issued her orders to the girls, shouted maledictions at the cook, or talked with all who came.
Walking back, late in the afternoon, from the joss-house, we met Lovaina in her automobile, with the American negro chauffeur, William, and Temanu, Atupu, and Iromea. She invited me to accompany them to swim in the Papenoo River, a few miles towards Point Venus. Other guests of the Tiare Hotel came in hired cars, and twenty or thirty joined in the bath.
I wore the pareu, the red strip of calico, bearing designs by William Morris, which the native buys instead of his original one of tapa, the beaten cloth made from tree bark or pith. I met Lovaina coming out of the shower, a sheet about her which could not cover half of her immense and regal body.
It never grow good after like before." Her hair was quite two feet long and very luxuriant, and like all Tahitian hair, simply in two plaits. Brooke expressed his curiosity over what Lovaina had said, "jus' like all T'ytee woman." "Was that a custom of Tahiti mothers, to bury their babes alive at birth?" he asked. Lovaina blushed.
She opened her purse, and poured out more gold. With it fell a cloth medallion, red letters on white flannel, "The Apostleship of Prayer in League with the Sacred Heart of Jesus." "I find that on the floor two day' 'go," said Lovaina, "and I put it in purse to see if good luck. What you think? Argentinas come in nex' day. I don' know, but that thing is good to me.
He was ill often from a rush of blood to his head. Lovaina had offered him a mat to lie on the floor, but he pleaded his habit. All the refuse of the kitchen was thrown into the garden under this window, and with the horses, chickens, dogs, and cats it was first come, first served. On the couch back of the table Lovaina sat for many hours every day.
He became indignant, and in pantomime vividly described the suffering of guests at the Tiare with the ice exhausted, and Lovaina's plight if she could sell no more drinks. Lovaina persisted, and when I went to take the ice myself, he struck me with his horsewhip.
And Lovaina said, in English for Considine, whom she had brought to Mataiea, and for Brooke: "She had five children by that Tuatini. He is custom-officer at Makatea, phosphate island, near T'ytee. He been gone one year, an' she get very fat, but she don' say one thing. Then she get letter speakin' he come back nex' week.
She looked through the room to where I sat in the semi-obscurity, and then knelt down by the first bed, and waited. I gazed again at the starry heavens, and, stepping over the threshold, entered the chamber, lamp in hand. I undressed leisurely, and putting about me the pareu Lovaina had given me, I threw the light upon the two beds to make my nightly choice.
He had been many years with Lovaina, and though he owned valuable land, he preferred the hotel life, half domestic, half manager and confidant, to the quietude of the country. In Afa's single room were two brass bedsteads, many gaudy tidies, an engraving of the execution of Nathan Hale, and a toilet-table full of fancy notions.
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