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Updated: May 31, 2025
Exploding Eggs, who had insisted on accompanying me, took it into his charge, and with it balanced on his shoulders we sauntered along the road to the village where the French gendarme had lost his nose to the mad namu-drinker. Idyllic valley of Vait-hua; the beauty of Vanquished Often; bathing on the beach; an unexpected proposal of marriage.
Exploding Eggs in his new finery and the visiting chief from Vait-hua found welcome among the waiting natives, while Titihuti of the tattooed legs took her seat beside me. She had combed her Titian tresses and anointed them with oil till they shone like the kelp beds of Monterey.
In the lovely, timeless valley of Vait-hua the calendar had dropped below the horizon of memory as my native land had dropped below the rim of the sea. Here in Atuona, whose life was colored by the presence of whites, the days must take up their constricted regular march again.
Vait-hua was to teach me to be modest without pother, to chat with those about me during my ablutions without concern for the false vanities of screens or even the shelter of rocks as in the river in Atuona. In such scenes one perceives that immodesty is in the false shame that makes one cling to clothes, rather than in the simple virtues that walk naked and unashamed.
A great slab of native basalt eroded by seventy years of sun and rain bore the barely discernible epitaph: "Ci Git Edouard Michel Halley Capitaine de Corvette Officier de la Légion d'honneur Fondateur de la colonie de Vait-hua Mort au champ d'honneur Le 17 bre, 1842" I read it to my friends.
His blue eyes twinkled above a carefully trimmed beard, and as he rose to meet me, I observed that the fingers on the cigarette were long, slender, and nervous. This was Monsieur Charles le Moine, the painter from Vait-hua, whose studio I had invaded in his absence from that delightful isle.
The whites, having desolated and depopulated this once thronged valley, had gone, leaving the remnant of its people to return to their native virtue and quietude. Here, perhaps more than in any other spot in all the isles, the Marquesan lived as his forefathers had before the whites came. Doing nothing sweetly was an art in Vait-hua. Pleasure is nature's sign of approval.
I was ever aware that its beauty concealed a menace deadly to the white man who listened too long to the rustle of its palms and the murmur of its stream. Communal life; sport in the waves; fight of the sharks and the mother whale; a day in the mountains; death of Le Capitaine Halley; return to Atuona. Life in Vait-hua was idyllic.
To refuse it was as uncustomary and as rude as to refuse the Alaskan miner who offers a drink at a public bar. "Menike," pleaded the chief, "that Hinatini more better marry white man, friend of Teddy, from number one island. She some punkins for be good wife. Suppose may be you like Vait-hua you stay long time; suppose you go soon, make never mind!"
My last sight of Vait-hua was the dim line of surf on the sand, and beyond it the slender figure of Vanquished Often holding aloft a lantern whose rays faintly illumined against the darkness her windblown white tunic and blurred face. The storm had lured us by, a brief cessation. We had hardly left the beach before the heavens opened and deluged us with rain.
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