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Updated: June 19, 2025
"How did you come here?" I asked, at length. "She wanted it," he said. "She's a wonderful woman," he said to me, "a wonderful woman. She would do anything for me, Dole. Anything! We've got a kid." I made shift to get in a question I had carried long in mind. "Somebody beat you out at Papeete, then, after all?" He turned upon me a faintly quizzical look.
But there was no redeeming grace about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins, and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in every store in Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had been discharged from each in turn, for he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old employers so that they passed him in the street as if he were a dog, and all his old comrades so that they shunned him as they would a creditor.
There it was, as big as a church a paragraph of it, tucked away in a column-and-a-half story of the bombardment of Papeete by the German Pacific fleet early in September of 1914: "An incident of the bombardment was the sinking of the German freight steamer Valkyrie by shells from the German fleet.
At two in the morning the gendarmes advised the last revelers to retire, and the Tiare became quiet. But Atupu slept in a little alcove by the bar, and any one in her favor had but to enter her chamber and pull her shapely leg to be served in case of dire need. The incidents of the departure of the Noa-Noa that day for San Francisco will live in the annals of Papeete.
But he had worked his own undoing, for, till they broke camp, Papeete haunted him like a buzz-fly, peeping at him, sometimes from under the tent, trotting after him like a dog, watching him from a distance, till he began to think of "haunts" and "sendings" and spooks. When Berselius and his companion returned, the three men sat and smoked till supper time.
Each miserable shiverer caught the suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that cruel ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when it passed. If a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and in that infected season, was a place to spend it on. And of all the sufferers, perhaps the least deserving, but surely the most pitiable, was the London clerk.
And there are still others, less pliable, less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in these isles of plenty, to lack bread. At the far end of the town of Papeete, three such men were seated on the beach under a purao-tree. It was late.
Bill was square then, as he is now, and he borrows enough money to buy grub, and he steers right back to Papeete. Gott im Himmel! Were the owners glad to see that schooner again? They had given her up as gone for good when the husband told them his wife had run away with the captain. That's how Bill got his certificate to command vessels in this archipelago, which only Frenchmen can have."
Llewellyn, McHenry, David, and I accompanied the count to his residence on the outskirts of Papeete to taste a vintage of Burgundy he had sent him from Beaune. Like most modern houses in Tahiti, his was solely utilitarian, and was built by a former American consul. It exactly ministered to the comforts of a demanding European exquisite.
And he might have carried the situation off, despite the hens and bull-beasts of Papeete, if it hadn't been for the hurricane. That was the year, wasn't it, when Manu-Huhi was swept and eleven hundred drowned?"
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