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Updated: May 16, 2025
Pressing on, hampered by my clinging garments and slipping in the path that had instantly become a miniature torrent, I came upon a little clearing in which stood a dirty, dark shanty, like a hovel in the outskirts of Canton, not raised on a paepae but squat in an acre of mud and the filth of years.
On the eve of my going all the youth and beauty of Atuona crowded my paepae. Water brought his ukulele, a Hawaiian taro-patch guitar, and sang his repertoire of ballads of Hawaii "Aloha Oe," "Hawaii Ponoi," and "One, Two, Three, Four." Urged by all, I gave them for the last time my vocal masterpiece, "All Night Long He Calls Her Snooky-Ukums!" and was rewarded by a clamor of applauding cries.
I know little, but what I do know is my own." Now I learned from the lips of Le Moine that this man had lived and died in my own valley of Atuona, had perhaps sat on this paepae where we were breakfasting. Imagination kindled at the thought. "I will take you to his house," said Le Moine.
Early in the mornings I called "Kaoha!" from my paepae to Mrs. Seventh Man, who came each day from her bath in the via puna attired in her earrings only.
Visit of Le Moine; the story of Paul Gauguin; his house, and a search for his grave beneath the white cross of Calvary. I rose one morning from my Golden Bed to find a stranger quietly smoking a cigarette on my paepae. Against the jungle background he was a strangely incongruous figure; a Frenchman, small, thin, meticulously neat in garments of faded blue denim and shining high boots.
I was the startled witness of the birth of this babe, the delight of his father's heart. My neighbors and I had the same bathing hour, soon after daylight, and usually chose the same pool in the clear river. Kake was lying on a mat on their paepae when I passed one morning, and when I said "Kaoha" to her she did not reply.
He had fought down the wilderness, planted great cocoanut-plantations, forced the unwilling islanders to work for him, and dollar by dollar, with an iron will, he had wrung from their labor the fortune now left in the dainty hands of his half-savage daughter. Song of the Nightingale, the convict cook of the governor, gave me light on the man. "One night he found me with her on his paepae.
"Kaoha!" he said, with a wide smile of welcome, and with him and Vai, my next-door neighbor, I returned gladly to my paepae. Vai, or in English, Water, was a youth of twenty years, a dandy; on ordinary occasions naked, except for the pareu about his loins, but on Sundays or when courting rejoicing in the gayest of Europeanized clothes.
"The American still understood enough Marquesan to understand their answers, and taking me by the arm he left the horses and led me up the valley till he came to a spot where there were fragments of an old paepae, buried in vines and torn apart by their roots. "'We lived here, he said, and then he sat on the forsaken stones and cried.
Presently the huge trunk of a banyan hove in sight, standing upon what seemed the ruins of an ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm, announced that we had reached the paepae tapu.
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