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Updated: May 31, 2025
Long lean curving cocoanuts arched above, and beneath their ribbons of shade lay an old canoe, upon which sat those who waited their turn to bathe, to fill calabashes, or merely to gossip. For all time, they said, this had been the center of life in Vait-hua. Old wives' tales had been told here for generations.
Whether it was because this experience became mixed with my first dreams in beautiful Vait-hua, or whether my Celtic blood sees portents where they do not exist, certain it is that as the stealthy charm of that idyllic place grew upon me through the days something within me resisted it.
Sixty years of age, he still walked with upright grace, only the softened contours of his face betraying that he was well in his manhood when his valley was still given over to tribal warfares, orgies, and cannibalism. Behind him came Neo Afitu Atrien, of Vait-hua, a stocky brown man with a lined face, stubby mustache, and brilliant, intelligent eyes.
He told me how on one occasion the Lord had saved him from drowning. With a lay brother of the Catholic Mission, he had been en route to Vait-hua in a canoe with many natives. There was to be a church feast, and Lam Kai Oo was carrying six hundred Chile piastres to back his skill against the natives in gambling; Lam, of course, to operate the wheel of supposed chance.
It was Standard Oil, sending around the world its tipoti, or tin cans, filled with illuminating fluid cheaper than that of the whale, that ended the days of the ships in Vait-hua, and they sailed away for the last time, leaving an island so depopulated that its few remaining people could slip back into the life of the days before the whites came.
That afternoon she was sitting on my paepae, a bewitching sight as she held the suckling to her breast and crooned of his forefather's deeds before the white had gripped them. Visit of Chief Seventh Man Who is So Angry He Wallows in the Mire; journey to Vait-hua on Tahuata island; fight with the devil-fish; story of a cannibal feast and the two who escaped.
You have seen Vanquished Often, in my own valley of Vait-hua, whom I have painted so much. Ah, there is beauty! One will not find her like in all the world. Paris knows nothing like her." Teata waved her hand at us from the brook, and flung her heavy hair backward over her shoulder as she went on with her task.
"Then came Tomefitu from Vait-hua. He was chief of that valley, having been adopted by a woman of Vait-hua, but his father and his mother were of Taaoa. He had heard of the slaying of Beaten to Death, his kinsman, and he was hot in the bowels. Aue! The thunder of the heavens was as the voice of Tomefitu when angered. The earth groaned where he walked. He knew the Farani and their tricks.
In return, Malicious Gossip spent hours on my paepae telling me of the customs of her people new and old. "When I was thirteen," she said, "the whalers still came to Vait-hua, my valley. There came a young Menike man, straight and bright-eyed, a passenger on a whaling-ship seeking adventure. I sighed the first time in my life when I looked on him.
Yet through the darkest nights in Vait-hua I slept serenely, surrounded by all the possessions so desirable in the eyes of my neighbors, in a house the doors of which were never fastened. There was not a lock in all the village, or anything that answered the purpose of one.
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