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The coffin, though of late introduction, strangely engages their attention. It is to the mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy. For ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the other day, they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the woman's soul is at rest. I was told a droll instance of the force of this preoccupation.
The pattern upon her feet was much like that of sandals or high mocassins, indicating a former use of leg-coverings in a cold climate. Titihuti herself, after an anxious inch-for-inch matching of picture and living form, said complacently that her legs were meitai ae, which meant that she would not have hesitated to enter her own decorations in beauty competition with those of Vaekehu.
Using his own figures, I computed that, in this commodity alone, the gifts of Vaekehu and Stanislao represented between two and three hundred dollars; and the queen's official salary is of two hundred and forty in the year. But generosity on the one hand, and conspicuous meanness on the other, are in the South Seas, as at home, the exception.
She said that people came from far valleys to see her legs, and I could readily believe it. It was so with the leg of the late Queen Vaekehu, a leg so perfect in mold and so elaborately and artistically inked that it distinguished her even more than her rank. Casual whites, especially, considered it a curiosity, and offended her majesty by laying democratic hands upon the masterpiece.
All other folks slumbered and took their rest: Vaekehu, the native queen, in her trim house under the rustling palms; the Tahitian commissary, in his beflagged official residence; the merchants, in their deserted stores; and even the club-servant in the club, his head fallen forward on the bottle-counter, under the map of the world and the cards of navy officers.
I come 'ere thirty-five years ago when I was a young kid. I come with a skipper and I was the only crew. Me and him, and I was eighteen, and the boat was the Victor. I lived 'ere and about for ten years. Them was the days for a little excitement. There was a chief, Mohuho, who'd a-killed me if I 'adn't been tapu'd by Vaekehu, the queen, wot took a liking to me, me being a kid, and white.
It was my part to accompany our guests ashore: when I kissed the little girl good-bye at the pier steps, Vaekehu gave a cry of gratification, reached down her hand into the boat, took mine, and pressed it with that flattering softness which seems the coquetry of the old lady in every quarter of the earth.
All other folks slumbered and took their rest: Vaekehu, the native Queen, in her trim house under the rustling palms; the Tahitian commissary, in his beflagged official residence; the merchants, in their deserted stores; and even the club-servant in the club, his head fallen forward on the bottle-counter, under the map of the world and the cards of navy officers.
Vaekehu is very deaf; 'merci' is her only word of French; and I do not know that she seemed clever. An exquisite, kind refinement, with a shade of quietism, gathered perhaps from the nuns, was what chiefly struck us. Or rather, upon that first occasion, we were conscious of a sense as of district-visiting on our part, and reduced evangelical gentility on the part of our hostess.
In New Caledonia, at least, where the difference does not exist, has never been remarked, the practice of shampooing seems to be itself unknown. Doctors would be well employed in a study of the point. Vaekehu lives at the other end of the town from the Residency, beyond the buildings of the mission.
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