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All naked then in the sunlight, she lifted her arms toward the sky and laughed, and sat down on a rock to bathe her feet. "Suddenly the lustful warriors sprang upon her, and stopping her cries with her own pae they swam with her into this cave.
Her mother was Hinatiaiani, a laughing, beautiful girl of sixteen years, and the two were cared for by Pae, a woman of forty, ugly and childless. Hinatiaiani was her adopted daughter, and Pae had been sorely angered when Grelet, whose companion she had been for eighteen years, took the girl.
I dozed, and wakened to see Grelet asleep. Pae was still filling the emptied cocoanut-shells, and the swollen green man postured before me like some horrid figment of a dream. I roused myself again.
Pae herself, though hostess, could not eat till all the men were satisfied, for the tapu still holds, though without authority. Knives nor forks hindered our free onslaught upon the edibles, and there were cocoanut-shells beside each of us for washing our hands between courses, a usual custom.
The pool itself was tapu save for those consecrated to the gods, yet this wretched pair crept through the lantana there on the bank, and watched her. She stood on the rock above the pool and put off her pae, her cap of gauze, her long robe, and her pareu, all of finest tree-cloth, for in those days before the whites came our people were properly clothed.
A half ounce of rum, a pint of cocoanut-milk from a very young nut, the juice of half a lime just from the tree, two lumps of sugar, and I had an invigorating draught, long enough for a golf player after thirty-six holes, and delicate enough for a debutante after her first cotillion. The Paumotan boys and Pae looked on in horror, saying that I was spoiling good rum.
Something of European caution, however, still remained with me and, perhaps unnecessarily, I picked up the dripping little body and carried her up the garden path to the house when I returned for breakfast. Pae received her with no concern, and gave her a piece of cocoanut to suck.
But with the birth of Tamaiti, Pae became reconciled, and looked after the welfare of the infant more than the volatile young mother. Tamaiti had never had a garment upon her sturdy small body, and looked a plump cherub as she played about the veranda, crawling in the puddles when the rain drove across the floor. "The infant has never been sick," Grelet had said.
Usually she and Hinatiaiani, the mother of the baby, ate their food squatting beside the cook-house; they rarely came upon the veranda, never sat upon a chair, and never were asked to our table. Now they were in complete possession of the house and Pae was transformed into a jolly soul, her kinsfolk about her on the veranda and the bottles emptying fast.
Such a house might be higher than three or four cocoanut trees stood one on the other, and no one walked up-stairs, but rode in boxes lifted by ropes. "How many men to a rope?" asked Pae. The old men told me about their battles, much as at a reunion of the Grand Army of the Republic the veterans fight again the Civil war.
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