I awoke sometime during the latter part of the night with the bemused presentiment that a longed-for event was approaching or in the process of happening. Hands had passed lightly over my face—either that or I had dreamed it—and I heard a faint shout coming from the borderland between sleeping and waking. Puarei\'s guest bed, with its billowy mattress of kapok, seemed strangely hard, which led to the discovery that I was not lying on a bed, but on a mat in the corner of an empty room. The floor was covered with crushed krora shell which made a faint radiance in the gloom, and a roof of green thatch was alight with the reflections of moving water. I was trying to puzzle out whose house this could be when I heard the shout again, clearly this time, in a pause of silence between deafening claps of thunder. From nearer at hand came the sound of subdued laughter. Something elfish, light-hearted in the quality of it, stirred a dim memory and there flashed into mind the lines of an old poem:

Come, dear children, come out and play.

The moon is shining as bright as day.

Up the ladder and over the wall—

149 Raising my head quickly, I saw through the open doorway their perfect illustration. The wall was the smooth wall of the sea, with a waning moon rising just clear of it, sending a path of light to the strip of white beach in front of the house. The palm trees bordering the shore swarmed with children who were throwing down nuts. One ancient tree, its stem a fantastic curve, held its foliage far out over the water at a point where the floor of the narrow outer lagoon shelved steeply toward the reef some fifty yards distant. Both boys and girls were shinning up the trunk, one after the other, diving from the plumed top, dropping feet foremost, jumping with their hands clasped around their knees into the foaming water—the wreckage of huge combers which broke on the reef pouring across it into the inner shallows. A second group had gathered in the moonlit area just before the doorway. Several youngsters were peering intently in my direction. Others were playing a sort of hand-clapping game to the accompaniment of an odd little singsong. A small girl, with a baby riding astride her hip, walked past, and I saw another, of ten or twelve, standing at the edge of the track of shimmering light, holding a coconut to her lips with both hands. Her head was bent far back and her hair hung free from her shoulders as she drained the cool liquid to the last drop.

Imagine coming out of the depths of sleep to the consciousness of such a scene! I was hardly more sure of the reality of it than I had been of the shout, the touch of hands. It was like a picture out of a book of fairy tales, but one quick with life, the figures coming and going against a background of empty sea where the 150 long swell broke in lines of white fire on a ledge of coral. I remembered where I was, of course: in my own house, which stood on the ocean side of a small motu known in the Paumotuan legend as "The island where the souls were eaten." The house had been built for me only the day before by the order of Puarei, chief of the atoll of Rutiaro; and the motu was one of a dozen uninhabited islands which lay on the thirty-mile circumference to the lagoons.

It was ordered—by chance, which took me there, perhaps—that I was never to see the place in the clear light of usual experience, but rather through a glamour like that of remembered dreams—a long succession of dreams in which, night after night, events shape themselves according to the heart\'s desire, or even more fantastically, with an airy disregard for any semblance to reality. So it was, waking from sleep on the first night which I spent under my own roof. I was almost ready to believe that my presence there was not the result of chance. Waywardness of fancy is one of the most godlike of the attributes of that divinity, but the display of it is as likely as not to be unfriendly. Here there seemed to be reasoned kindly action. "Providence," I said to myself—"Providence without a doubt; a little repentant, perhaps, because of questionable gifts in the past." A whimsical Providence, too, which delighted in shocking my sense of probability. What could those children be doing on Soul-Eaters\' Island in the middle of the night? I, myself, had left the village island, four miles distant, only a few hours earlier, and at that time everyone was asleep. There was not a sound of human activity in the settlement; not a glimmer of light to be seen anywhere excepting in 151 Moy Ling\'s, the Chinaman\'s, shop, and on the surface of the lagoon where lay the misty reflections of the stars. "Perhaps," I thought, "these are not earthly children. Maybe they are the ghosts of those whose souls were eaten here so many years ago." I was more than half serious in thinking of that possibility. Stranger things had happened on islands not so far removed from the world of men.

I dressed very quietly and went to the door, taking care to keep well in the shadow so that I might look on for a moment without being seen. My doubts vanished at once. Not only the children had come out to play; fathers and mothers, as well. Tamitanga was there and Rikitia and Nahea and Pohu and Tahere and Hunga; Nui-Tane and Nui-Vahine, Tamataha, Manono, Havaiki; and I saw old Rangituki, who was at least seventy and a grandmother several times over, clapping her hands with others of her generation and swaying from side to side in time to the music of Kaupia\'s accordion. All the older people were grouped around Puarei, who was seated in an old deck chair, a sort of throne which was carried about for him wherever he went. Poura, his wife, lay on a mat beside him, her chin propped on her hands. Both greeted me cordially, but offered no explanation for the reason of the midnight visit. I was glad that they didn\'t. I liked the casualness of it, which was quite in keeping with habits of life at Rutiaro. But I couldn\'t help smiling, remembering my reflections earlier in the evening. I believed then that I was crossing the threshold of what was to be an adventure in solitude, and was in a mood of absurdly youthful elation at the prospect. "I was to delve deeply, for the 152 first time, into my own resources against loneliness. I had known the solitude of cities, but there one has the comfortable sense of nearness to others; the refuge of books, pictures, music—all the distractions which prevent any very searching examination of one\'s capacity for a life of retirement. At Soul-Eaters\' Island I would have no books, no pictures, excepting a colored post card of the Woolworth Building which had won me this opportunity; and for music I was limited to what I could make for myself with my ocharina, my sweet-potato whistle which had a range of one octave. Thus scantly provided with diversions, I was to learn how far my own thoughts would serve to make a solitary life not only endurable, but pleasant."

So I had dreamed as I paddled down the lagoon, with my island taking form against the starlit sky to the eastward. It was one of those places which set one to dreaming, which seem fashioned by nature for the enjoyment of a definite kind of experience. Seeing it, whether by day or by night, the most gregarious of men, I am sure, would have become suddenly enamored of his own companionship and the most prosaic would have discovered a second, meditative self which pleads for indulgence with gentle obstinacy. But, alas! my own unsocial nature gained but a barren victory, being robbed, at the outset, of the fruits of it, by the seventy-five convivial inhabitants of Rutiaro. Here within six hours was half the village at my door, and Puarei told me that the rest of it, or as many as were provided with canoes, was following. Evidently he had suggested the invasion. My new house needed warming—or the Paumotuan equivalent to that festival—so they had come to warm it.

153 Preparations were being made on an elaborate scale. The children were gathering green nuts for drinking and fronds for the cloth at the feast. Women and girls were grating the meat of ripe nuts, pressing out the milk for the miti haari; cleaning fish; preparing shells for dishes. Some of the men and the older boys were building native ovens—eight of them, each one large enough for roasting a pig. All of this work was being carried out under Puarei\'s direction and to the accompaniment of Kaupia\'s accordion. I wish that I might in some way make real to others the unreal loveliness of the scene. It must be remembered that it took place on one of the loneliest of a lonely cloud of islands which lay in the midmost solitude of an empty ocean. The moonlight must be remembered, too, and how it lay in splinters of silver on the motionless fronds of the palms as though it were of the very texture of their polished surfaces. And you must hear Kaupia\'s accordion, and the shouts of the children as they dove into the pool of silvered foam. The older ones, out of respect to me, I think, wore wisps of parou cloth about their loins, but the babies were as naked as on the day they were born. Tereki was standing among these five-and-six-year-olders, who were too small for the climb to the diving place, taking them up, sometimes two at once, and tossing them into the pool among the others, where they were as much at home as so many minnows. Watching them, I thought with regret of my own lost opportunities as a child. I felt a deep pity for all the children of civilization who must wear clothing and who never know the joy of playing at midnight, and by moonlight too. Mothers\' clubs and child-welfare organizations would do well to 154 consider the advisability of repealing the old "to bed at seven" law, the bugbear of all children. Its only merits, if it may be so called, is that it fosters in children, a certain melancholy intellectual enjoyment in such poems as, "Up the ladder and over the wall," where the forbidden pleasures are held out to them as though they were natural ones—which most of them are, of course—and quite possible of attainment.

I was sorry that Tino, supercargo of the Caleb S. Winship, could not be present to see how blithely the work went forward. He had called the people of Rutiaro a lazy lot, and he was right—they were lazy, according to the standards of temperate climates. But when they worked toward an end which pleased them their industry was astonishing. Tino\'s belief was that man was made to labor, whether joyfully or not, in order that he might increase his wealth, whether he needed it or not, and that of the world at large. I remember meeting somewhat the same point of view in reading the lives and memoirs of some of the old missionaries to the islands. It seems to have irked them terribly, finding a people who had never heard that doleful hymn, "Work, for the Night Is Coming." They, too, believed that the needs of the Polynesians should be increased, but for ethical reasons, in order that they should be compelled to cultivate regular habits of industry in order to satisfy them. Although I didn\'t agree with it, Tino\'s seemed to me the sounder conviction. The missionaries might have argued as reasonably for a general distribution of Job-like boils, in order that the virtues of patience and fortitude might have wider dissemination. But neither trade nor religion had altered to any noticeable extent the habits 155 of life at Rutiaro. The people worked, as they had always done, under the press of necessity. Their simple needs being satisfied, their inertia was a thing to marvel at. I have often seen them sitting for hours at a time, moving only with the shadows which sheltered them. There was something awe-inspiring in their immobility, in their attitude of profound reverie. I felt at times that I was living in a land under a perpetual enchantment of silence and sleep. These periods of calm—or, as Tino would say, laziness—were usually brought to an end by Puarei. It was a fascinating thing to watch him throwing off the enchantment, so gradual the process was and so strange the contrast when he was thoroughly awakened and had roused the village from its long sleep. Then would follow a period of activity—fishing, copra making, canoe building, whatever there was to do would be done, not speedily, perhaps, but smoothly, and fasts would be broken—in the case of many of the villagers for the first time in two or three days. My house was built during such a period. I was still living with Puarei on the village island, wondering when, if ever, I was to have the promised dwelling. Then one afternoon, while I was absent on a shell-gathering expedition, the village set out en masse for Soul-Eaters\' Island, cut the timbers, branded the fronds, erected, swept, and garnished my house, and were at the settlement again before I myself had returned. That task finished, here they were back for the warming festival, and the energy spent in preparing for it would have more than loaded Tino\'s schooner with copra. I couldn\'t flatter myself that all of this was done solely to give me pleasure. They found pleasure in it too, and, furthermore, I 156 knew that an unusually long interval of fasting called for compensation in the way of feasting.

Puarei was in a gay mood. Religion sat rather heavily upon him sometimes—by virtue of his Papeete schooling, he was the chief elder of his church; but once he sloughed off his air of Latter Day Saintliness he made a splendid master of revels; and he threw it aside the moment the drums began to beat, and led a dozen of the younger men in a dance which I had not seen before. It was very much like modern Swedish drill set to music, except that the movements were as intricate and graceful as they were exhausting. Three kinds of drums were used—one, an empty gasoline tin, upon which the drummer kept up a steady roll while the dance was in progress. The rhythm for the movements was indicated by three others, two of them beating hollowed cylinders of wood, while a third was provided with an old French army drum of the Napoleonic period. The syncopation was extraordinary. Measures were divided in an amazing variety of ways, and often when the opportunity seemed lost the fragments joined perfectly just as the next one was at hand. The music was a kaleidoscope in sound, made up of unique and startling variations in tempo, as the dance moved from one figure to the next.

At the close of it Kaupia took up her accordion again, and dancing by some of the women followed. At length, Rangituki, grandmother though she was, could resist the music no longer. The others gave way to her, and in a moment she was dancing alone, proudly, with a sort of wistful abandon, as though she were remembering her youth, throwing a last defiance in the teeth of Time. Kaupia sang as she played to an air 157 which had but four changes in it. The verse was five words long and repeated endlessly.

Tu fra to potta mi,

Tu fra to potta mi.

Both the words and the air had a familiar sound. They called to mind a shadowy picture of three tall, thin women in spangled skirts, all of them beating tambourines in unison and dancing in front of a painted screen. I couldn\'t account for the strange vision at first. It glimmered faintly, far in the depths of subconscious memory, like a colored newspaper supplement, lying in murky water at the end of a pier. Suddenly it rose into focus, drawn to the surface by the buoyant splendor of a name—the Cherry Sisters. I remembered then a vaudeville troupe which long ago made sorry capital of its lack of comeliness; and I saw them again on the island where the souls were eaten as clearly as ever I had as a youngster, knocking their tambourines on bony elbows, shaking their curls, and singing

"Shoe, fly, don\'t bother me,"

in shrill, cracked voices. Kaupia\'s version was merely a phonetic translation of the words. They meant nothing in the Paumotuan dialect; and—old woman though she was—Rangituki\'s dance, which accompanied the music, played in faster and faster time, was in striking contrast to the angular movements of the Cherry Sisters, tripping it in the background, across the dim footlights of the eighteen nineties.

Other canoes were arriving during this time, and at 158 last a large canoe, which had put off from the ocean side of the village island, was seen making in toward the pass. It was loaded with pigs and chickens, the most important part of the feast, and had been eagerly awaited for more than an hour. Shouts of anticipation went up from the shore as the boat drew in with its wished-for freight; but these were a little premature. There was a stretch of ugly, broken water to be passed, where the swift ebb from the lagoon met the swell of the open sea. The canoe was badly jostled in crossing it, and some of the chickens, having worked loose from their bonds, escaped. Like the dogs of the atolls, the chickens are of a wild breed, and they took the air with sturdy wings. The chase from the shore began at once, but it was a hopeless one. Soul-Eaters\' Island is five hundred yards long by three hundred broad, and there is another, on the opposite side of the pass, which is more than a mile in extent. We made frantic efforts to prevent them from reaching it. We threw sticks and stones, tried to entice them with broken coconuts, the meat temptingly accessible. It was to no purpose. They had been enticed before; their crops were full, and several hours of captivity had made them wary. Furthermore, like all Polynesian chickens, they seemed to have a racial memory of what they had been in other times, in less congenial environments—of the lean days when they had been caught and eaten at will, chased by dogs, run down by horses. They were not so far from all that as to have lost conscious pride in their regained prerogative of flight. The last we saw of them they were using it to splendid advantage over the rapid stream which separated the two islands. One old hen, alone, remained perched in the top of a 159 coconut tree on Soul-Eaters\' Island. She was in no hurry to leave. She knew that she could follow the others whenever she liked, and she knew that we knew it. She seemed drunk with a sense of freedom and power, and cackled proudly, as though more than half convinced that the nuts clustered in the nest of foliage beneath her were eggs which she had laid.

Knowing the wholesomeness of the Paumotuan appetite, I could understand why the loss of the chickens was regarded seriously. A dozen of them remained, and we had ei............