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Updated: June 9, 2025
Then came blankness until I awoke several hours after midnight. I was sitting on the curbing of the Pool of Psyche, and some one was holding my hand. I thought it must be Atupu or Lovaina, and groped for a moment before I could pull my senses together.
One day when I was hurrying off to swim in the lagoon, I asked Lovaina to guard a considerable sum of money in bank-notes. She assented readily, but when several days later I mentioned the money she struck her head in alarm. She thought and thought, but could not remember in what safe place she had hidden the paper francs. "My God!
What exotic life there was beyond the clubs, the waterfront, and the Asiatic quarter revolved around the Tiare, and entirely so because of its proprietress, Lovaina. She was the best-known and best-liked woman in all these South Seas, remembered from Australia to the Paumotus, from London to China, wherever were people who had visited Tahiti, as "dear old Lovaina." She was very large.
Llewellyn remembers what Lovaina said ol' man Morton hollered when M'seer Lontane took the gun away from him at the Tiare. 'All right! hollered the uncle. 'All right! I'll leave it to God! The ol' boy loved that kid. 'E told Lovaina 'at 'is whole bloody family was drowned when the Rio Janeiro went down off Mile Rock in Frisco bay.
It had a very large garden behind, with tall cocoanut trees, and the finest rose-bushes in Tahiti. Vava, the Dummy, put all the sweepings from his stable on the flower beds, and Lovaina cut the roses for the tables at the Tiare Hotel and for presents to friends and prosperous tourists. Vava was often about the garden, and drove Lovaina to and fro in her old chaise.
They; must have been those made by our ancestors, the first primates, when they began the struggle toward intelligent language. Vava's sounds were as the muttering of an ape, deep in his throat, or, when he was roused, high and shrill, like the cry of a rabbit when the hound seizes it. He could make Lovaina know anything he wanted to, and she could direct him to do anything she wished.
His beard had a diameter of a foot, and obviated any need of collar or shirt-band, for it grew from his shoulder-blades up, so that his forehead, eyes, nose, and lips were white islands in a black sea, and even his nose was not bare, for he had been debited by Lovaina for his champagne as "Hair on nose." He was reading a novel, and asked gruffly what we were there for.
The Tiare girls, all color and sparkle, exchanged quips with the male diners, patted their shoulders, and gigglingly fought when they tried to take them into their laps. In the open porch, Lovaina, gaily adorned, her feet bare, but a wreath of ferns on her head, sped the dishes and the wine. She kept the desserts before her and cut portions to suit the quality of her liking for each patron.
"Lovaina had good fortune all her life, for, being the first one to die, she was buried as we have always buried our people. All of Tahiti that was not ill walked with her coffin. Oh, Maru, I wept for Lovaina. Vava, whom you whites call the Dummy, is dead, too.
Turkey-red muslin with a large, white diamond figure was pasted on the plaster walls and hung in the doorways. "It very bes' the baroness could do in T'ytee," explained Lovaina. "She must be bright all about, and she buy and fix rooms. She have whole top floor Annexe, and spen' money like gentleman, two or three thousand dollar' every month. I wish you know her.
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