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Updated: June 9, 2025
Lovaina would not join us, but after we had eaten an excellent dinner, she came in while we drank her health. Llewellyn had been asked, but did not appear, and McHenry said he was "very low" at five o'clock when he passed him on the rue de Rivoli. Lying Bill preferred to spend his last evening ashore with his native wife, or else wished to avoid the chance of a headache on the morrow.
A little while later, when I came to the dining-room for the first breakfast, I met Lovaina in a blue-figured aahu of muslin and lace, a close-fitting, sweeping nightgown, the single garment that Tahitians wear all day and take off at night, a tunic, or Mother Hubbard, which reveals their figures without disguise, unstayed, unpetticoated.
When Lovaina inquired the price, she smiled her sweetest, rubbed the saleslady's back, and uttered some joke that made her sway with laughter, so that price became of no importance. But a sour-faced white or a pompous bureaucrat paid her saving, and Chinese, who kept the restaurants, invoked the curse of barrenness upon the venders.
I bade au revoir to my delightful companion, Edmond Brault, having determined to walk the remaining kilometers, and to send on my inconsiderable bag of clothing. Lovaina had given me a note to the chief of Papara, Tati, whose father was Salmon, an English Jew, and whose sister was Marao, the relict of the late king, and known as the queen.
My contemplated journey to the Marquesas Islands was to them a foolish and dangerous labor for no good reason. The trip to Papeete from Mataiea by motor-car took only an hour and a half, and I was in another world, on the camphorwood chest at the Tiare hotel, by five o'clock. "Mais, Brien, you long time go district!" exclaimed Lovaina. "What you do so long no see you?
I had but to tie up my own pareu of red calico with white leaves in the manner Lovaina had shown me to have an imitation of our usual swimming-trunks. "Allons!" cried the princess, and running toward the waterfall, she climbed up the cliff to a height of a dozen feet, and threw herself, wreathed as she was, with a loud "Aue!" into the pool.
Her mother was the cook of a governor when she was born on the fourteenth of July, the anniversary of the fall of the Bastile, and the governor named her for the month. She was also named Nohorae, and noho means to be naked and rae forehead. Juillet had a high forehead. Lovaina pointed out to me the man who had taken away her favorite helper.
He did old Lovaina up for money as well as board. She believes in him yet, and calls him Lord Innes or Sir Gordon, but says she has no more to risk. He promised to build her a big hotel where the Annexe is. He's got many of the Tahitian girls and their mothers mad over his style and his prospects.
Underneath the table dogs tumbled, or raced about the porch, barking and leaping on laps, cats scurried past, and a cloud of tobacco smoke filled the close air. Lovaina, in one of her sixty bright gowns, a white chemise beneath, her feet bare, sat enthroned.
"What is the secret?" I asked. "I've been away a few months, and haven't heard the news. Has David run off with Miri or Caroline?" Was this what Lovaina was bursting with? They all remained quiet, until McHenry, with an oath, blurted out: "What the hell's the good of all this bloody silence? He's been away and don't know."
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