The Hut in the Mountains—A Modern Fairy—The Escape—Love’s Hospitality—The Stranger from the Infinite Seas! IN this chapter I will tell a true fairy story that is directly connected with Pokara’s and my own experiences. Indeed, I imagine it to be one of the most realistic fairy-tales that it was my lot to hear and witness in its most full-blooded stage; I also deem that it will be interesting, in an educational sense, to students of modern mythology, since it quaintly distinguishes the difference between pre-Christian mythology and the materialized Goddesses and Creation myths of to-day, through being modified by European influences.
About a week after my troubadouring expedition with Pokara, I sat by the old chief’s side wondering what new venture his erratic personality would thrust upon me. My comrade, clad in his finest attire of distinguished chiefdom, had puckered his brows, and his eyes had that look about them which plainly told me that he was about to spring some new surprise upon me. Suddenly he said:
“Masser, you play nicer moosic, therefore am to be trusted; I knower that you feel kinder towards good mans who am in trouble and so no tell what you no tell and so make troubles!”
“Not I, Pokara, old pal,” I responded, though I felt I was no apostle of such mighty virtues any more than was Pokara. Without hesitation the aged Tahitian began to insinuate by gentle hints that he wished me to go 101off with him to see a dear friend who lived in the mountains that formed a grand background to the semi-pagan city, Papeete. Before the screaming coveys of parakeets, that were bound seaward, had faded on the horizon, we were off.
It was a long, hot walk as I tramped by Pokara’s side and we threaded our way through the deep jungle growth. I noticed that the old chief often stopped and looked warily over his shoulder, to see if we were observed as we crept along the winding tracks which ever led upward like some “Excelsior” of Nature’s ambitious loveliness that would climb to scenes of ever-increasing beauty. Indeed, as we climbed the scenery became perfect: distant landscapes dotted with waving palms, chestnut, breadfruit, and strange trees painted with rich crimson and delicate pigments of Nature’s voluptuous art, ever coming into fullest view. Far away, visible between rugged descents and sombre clefts, stretched the sapphire-blue miles of the Pacific Ocean. Seemingly no human habitation existed in those rugged leagues of mountain solitude. Emerging from the thickets of giant bamboo, we came to a space on a plateau, and there, to my astonishment, I found myself standing before two small, yellow bamboo huts. I stared in amazement, and Pokara rubbed his hands in childish delight at seeing the wonder my face expressed. I half fancied he had led up to one of the enchanted homesteads of the fairies that he had sworn had existed in those mountains in his youth. Death-like silence prevailed. Even the giant mahogany trees ceased to sigh to the inblown breath of the distant seas, as I gazed on the magical scene before me. Pokara had uttered a weird kind of cry: “Aloa! Aue!” The spell was broken, for the first hut’s little door was suddenly opened, and out sprang the prettiest fairy-maid it has ever been my lot to meet. She stared at 102me in a half-frightened way for a moment, then said:
“Yorana, Monsieur!”
I lifted my old helmet hat, then in my embarrassment dropped my violin-case on her bare toes, and murmured, “Yorana, Mademoiselle.”
The fright went from the maid’s eyes when Pokara said:
“Ah, he all right; he nicer Englese boy, play moosic, and kind to Pokara.”
On hearing this, the Spanish-Tahitian girl, for such I discovered she was, looked up at me in a most bewitching manner, and, smiling, revealed a set of invaluable pearly teeth. Her bright, far-away-looking eyes cast a spell over me. In my confusion I dropped my own and, finding myself staring at her bare, graceful ankles and knees, I blushed, and once more looked her straight in the face, as Pokara chuckled like a child.
She was clad in true Tahitian style, but with a subtle decorous picturesqueness such as a poet, sensitive to the delicate requirements of his art, might have chosen as a special attire for her after deep meditation—a meditation that was essentially needful, as one will soon see. Bare to about an inch below the knees and again from the exquisitely shaped throat to half an inch below the bosom’s topmost curve, her figure was revealed with a delicacy that enchanted me. She appeared like some half-serious, half-wicked goddess who would lure, would tempt her lover, and turn to stone at the first hint of mortal passion. But she was not a goddess nor a beautifully chiselled terra-cotta statue. Her eyes blinked to the buzz of the forest flies. Like tiny flashes of wriggling lightning in two miniature circles of the midnight tropic skies, those orbs twinkled as the honey-bee 103clung to the crown of her forest-like hair. And—alas for human weakness!—there was that about her which told one that, for all her delicate loveliness, she was imbued with the frailty of mortals.
Just as I was thanking my lucky stars that my eyes could dwell on so sweet a sight and yet remain in the realms of reality, the spell was once again broken. For the maid called out, “Revy! Awaie! Come!” and at once, as though he had awaited that call, out of the same small hut walked a sun-tanned, handsome young Frenchman! And who was he? I will tell you. The young Parisian, standing there before me with staring eyes, was a convict, a fugitive from Ill Nou, the penal settlement of Noumea. He was hiding there in the mountains, secure from the lashes of the remorseless surveillants, hiding, guarded by the tender protection of that beautiful goddess, who was none other than Pokara’s granddaughter! It appeared that Pokara’s son, who had been dead then for years, had married a handsome Spanish woman whom he had saved from a wrecked schooner that had gone ashore at Papeete many years ago.
Aloa was the one child of this marriage, and she was the one remaining joy of Pokara’s long-vanished connubial bliss.
Reveire, for so I will call that young Frenchman, had escaped from the convict settlement by stowing away on a schooner bound for Papeete. He was evidently unaware of the schooner’s destination, for Papeete, being under the French, was about the most dangerous place he could have come to. Probably this fact made his hiding-place the more secure. Pokara had met the escaped man whilst out on one of the schooners, and had immediately accepted the proffered bribe. And it was whilst he was hiding in Pokara’s bungalow that his granddaughter Aloa fell madly in love with the Frenchman, 104and suggested that he should hide with her in the mountains. It was a blessed union. Reveire was a fine type of fellow. It was some crime of passion that had sent him into that dreadful exile. From the young Frenchman’s lips I heard many tales of horrors that were perpetrated by the surveillants on the helpless convicts at Ill Nou, New Caledonia. Some of those tales seemed incredible; but, alas! Reveire’s manner expressed truth too well.
Many times did I visit that magical homestead of the mountains. And many times, while on tropical nights the stars sighed over the mountain trees, Pokara and I would listen as the exile told us his sorrows, while pretty Aloa murmured, “Aue! Aue!” stroked her lover’s face, and kissed his hand, tears coming into her eyes to think he had suffered so much. As I watched that strange scene of secret domestic grief and happiness, Pokara touched me gently on the shoulder and whispered:
“Ah, Masser, we all good peoples here. For I did fetch priest, kackerlick (catholic), for my Aloa’s sake, and he did marry them. He good priest and say nothings, good man he, because he like God and God like him!”
So spake Pokara, thus giving me this utmost satisfaction of recording the fact that my goddess had entered the holy bonds of matrimony according to the modern mythology of the Christian era.
“Wail! O wail! O jug! jug! too ee wailo,” came the plaintive strain of the South Sea nightingale as it serenaded its mate during the intervals of my violin-playing. It was no nightingale to Pokara and pretty Aloa; it was simply a tiny, feathered cavalier, robed in a crimson [woolly] gown of enchantment, singing to its long-dead lover, pouring forth passionate melody over old memories of that time ere the gods disguised it as a bird, when 105it was a brave Tahitian chief! Though I had had many weird, dream-like experiences in my travels on sea and land, I was greatly impressed by the human note of that forest drama. And, as I listened and watched, drinking in each incident like a child at its first pantomime, the fragrant odours of the dying forest flowers and mellowing mountain fruits, wafted by the warm zephyrs over that secret homestead, made the scene seem strangely dream-like. But it was all real enough for, when I placed my violin to my chin and played the strains of the “Marseillaise,” Reveire’s eyes filled with tears over some memory of his far-off La belle France that he would never see again. But thanks to the inscrutable kindness of Providence, a small portion of the wistful soul of chivalrous France came to him, and all seemed well in the end. For, ere I bade Pokara good-bye, I went with him for a last trip up into the mountains to visit that fairy-like secret homestead. Reveire had quite forgotten his home-sick sorrows. He was laughing like a big schoolboy. As for Aloa, she was gazing up into his face, delight sparkling in her eyes, as in her arms she held up another little Frenchman who was just one week old—and who had bravely crossed the Infinite Seas to keep Reveire company.
After losing sight of Pokara, who went on a prolonged visit to some native friends in a neighbouring isle, I secured a position as violinist in the Presidency orchestra at Papeete. But, alas! one night when the sea wind was moaning in the mountain palms near my wooden homestead, I again heard the call of the wild, and plunged into a life of vagabond adventure and madness, as will be seen in the next chapter.