CHAPTER V--A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL
No, I had no guess of these men's terrors. Yet I had received ere
that a hint, if I had understood; and the occasion was a funeral.
A little apart in the main avenue of Rotoava, in a low hut of
leaves that opened on a small enclosure, like a pigsty on a pen, an
old man dwelt solitary with his aged wife. Perhaps they were too
old to migrate with the others; perhaps they were too poor, and had
no possessions to dispute. At least they had remained behind; and
it thus befell that they were invited to my feast. I dare say it
was quite a piece of politics in the pigsty whether to come or not
to come, and the husband long swithered between curiosity and age,
till curiosity conquered, and they came, and in the midst of that
last merrymaking death tapped him on the shoulder. For some days,
when the sky was bright and the wind cool, his mat would be spread
in the main highway of the village, and he was to be seen lying
there inert, a mere handful of a man, his wife inertly seated by
his head. They seemed to have outgrown alike our needs and
faculties; they neither spoke nor listened; they suffered us to
pass without a glance; the wife did not fan, she seemed not to
attend upon her husband, and the two poor antiques sat juxtaposed
under the high canopy of palms, the human tragedy reduced to its
bare elements, a sight beyond pathos, stirring a thrill of
curiosity. And yet there was one touch of the pathetic haunted me:
that so much youth and expectation should have run in these starved
veins, and the man should have squandered all his lees of life on a
pleasure party.
On the morning of 17th September the sufferer died, and, time
pressing, he was buried the same day at four. The cemetery lies to
seaward behind Government House; broken coral, like so much road-
metal, forms the surface; a few wooden crosses, a few
inconsiderable upright stones, designate graves; a mortared wall,
high enough to lean on, rings it about; a clustering shrub
surrounds it with pale leaves. Here was the grave dug that
morning, doubtless by uneasy diggers, to the sound of the nigh sea
and the cries of sea-birds; meanwhile the dead man waited in his
house, and the widow and another aged woman leaned on the fence
before the door, no speech upon their lips, no speculation in their
eyes.
Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped
in white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind--not many,
for not many remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these
were poor; the men in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or
the gorgeous parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women,
with a few exceptions, brightly habited. Far in the rear came the
widow, painfully carrying the dead man's mat; a creature aged
beyond humanity, to the likeness of some missing link.
The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone
with the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and
a layman took his office. Standing at the head of the open grave,
in a white coat and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and
one eye bound with a red handkerchief, he read solemnly that
chapter in Job which has been read and heard over the bones of so
many of our fathers, and with a good voice offered up two prayers.
The wind and the surf bore a burthen. By the cemetery gate a
mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue. In the midst
the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the coffin-
stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned her
back to the grave and was playing with a leaf. Did she understand?
God knows. The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered
and threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral.
Dust to dust: but the grains of this dust were gross like
cherries, and the true dust that was to follow sat near by, still
cohering (as by a miracle) in the tragic semblance of a female ape.
So far, Mormon or not, it was a Christian funeral. The well-known
passage had been read from Job, the prayers had been rehearsed, the
grave was filled, the mourners straggled homeward. With a little
coarser grain of covering earth, a little nearer outcry of the sea,
a stronger glare of sunlight on the rude enclosure, and some
incongruous colours of attire, the well-remembered form had been
observed.
By rights it should have been otherwise. The mat should have been
buried with its owner; but, the family being poor, it was thriftily
reserved for a fresh service. The widow should have flung herself
upon the grave and raised the voice of official grief, the
neighbours have chimed in, and the narrow isle rung for a space
with lamentation. But the widow was old; perhaps she had
forgotten, perhaps never understood, and she played like a child
with leaves and coffin-stretchers. In all ways my guest was buried
with maimed rites. Strange to think that his last conscious
pleasure was the Casco and my feast; strange to think that he had
limped there, an old child, looking for some new good. And the
good thing, rest, had been allotted him.
But though the widow had neglected much, there was one part she
must not utterly neglect. She came away with the dispersing
funeral; but the dead man's mat was left behind upon the grave, and
I learned that by set of sun she must return to sleep there. This
vigil is imperative. From sundown till the rising of the morning
star the Paumotuan must hold his watch above the ashes of his
kindred. Many friends, if the dead have been a man of mark, will
keep the watchers company; they will be well supplied with
coverings against the weather; I believe they bring food, and the
rite is persevered in for two weeks. Our poor survivor, if,
indeed, she properly survived, had little to cover, and few to sit
with her; on the night of the funeral a strong squall chased her
from her place of watch; for days the weather held uncertain and
outrageous; and ere seven nights were up she had desisted, and
returned to sleep in her low roof. That she should be at the pains
of returning for so short a visit to a solitary house, that this
borderer of the grave should fear a little wind and a wet blanket,
filled me at the time with musings. I could not say she was
indifferent; she was so far beyond me in experience that the court
of my criticism waived jurisdiction; but I forged excuses, telling
myself she had perhaps little to lament, perhaps suffered much,
perhaps understood nothing. And lo! in the whole affair there was
no question whether of tenderness or piety, and the sturdy return
of this old remnant was a mark either of uncommon sense or of
uncommon fortitude.
Yet one thing had occurred that partly set me on the trail. I have
said the funeral passed much as at home. But when all was over,
when we were trooping in decent silence from the graveyard gate and
down the path to the settlement, a sudden inbreak of a different
spirit startled and perhaps dismayed us. Two people walked not far
apart in our procession: my friend Mr. Donat--Donat-Rimarau:
'Donat the much-handed'--acting Vice-Resident, present ruler of the
archipelago, by far the man of chief importance on the scene, but
known besides for one of an unshakable good temper; and a certain
comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the comeliest on the isle,
not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite. Of a sudden, ere
yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she made a leap at
the Resident, with pointed finger, shrieked a few words, and fell
back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth. 'What did she say
to you?' I asked. 'She did not speak to ME,' said Donat, a shade
perturbed; 'she spoke to the ghost of the dead man.' And the
purport of her speech was this: 'See there! Donat will be a fine
feast for you to-night.'
'M. Donat called it a jest,' I wrote at the time in my diary. 'It
seemed to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as
though she would divert the ghost's attention from herself. A
cannibal race may well have cannibal phantoms.' The guesses of the
traveller appear foredoomed to be erroneous; yet in these I was
precisely right. The woman had stood by in terror at the funeral,
being then in a dread spot, the graveyard. She looked on in terror
to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit, loosed upon the
isle. And the words she had cried in Donat's face were indeed a
terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to dedicate
another in her stead. One thing is to be said in her excuse.
Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great
good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-
caste. For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of
talisman against the powers of hell. In no other way can they
explain the unpunished recklessness of Europeans.
