第9章 THE MAROON(3)

He liked the 'Amelican,'he said,and the 'Inglisman,'but the 'Flessman'was his abhorrence;and he was careful to explain that if he had thought us 'Fless,'we should have had none of his nuts,and never a sight of his house.His distaste for the French I can partly understand,but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-Saxon.The next day he brought me a pig,and some days later one of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second.We were still strange to the islands;we were pained by the poor man's generosity,which he could ill afford,and,by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder,we refused the pig.Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no more;being what he was,the most mild,long-suffering,melancholy man,he took a revenge a hundred times more painful.Scarce had the canoe with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the CASCO was boarded from the other side.It was Tari;coming thus late because he had no canoe of his own,and had found it hard to borrow one;coming thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him),because he was a stranger in the land,and the dreariest of company.The rest of my family basely fled from the encounter.I must receive our injured friend alone;and the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour,for he was loath to tear himself away.'You go 'way.I see you no more -no,sir!'he lamented;and then looking about him with rueful admiration,'This goodee ship -no,sir!-goodee ship!'he would exclaim:the 'no,sir,'thrown out sharply through the nose upon a rising inflection,an echo from New Bedford and the fallacious whaler.From these expressions of grief and praise,he would return continually to the case of the rejected pig.'I like give present all 'e same you,'he complained;'only got pig:you no take him!'He was a poor man;he had no choice of gifts;he had only a pig,he repeated;and I had refused it.I have rarely been more wretched than to see him sitting there,so old,so grey,so poor,so hardly fortuned,of so rueful a countenance,and to appreciate,with growing keenness,the affront which I had so innocently dealt him;but it was one of those cases in which speech is vain.

Tari's son was smiling and inert;his daughter-in-law,a girl of sixteen,pretty,gentle,and grave,more intelligent than most Anaho women,and with a fair share of French;his grandchild,a mite of a creature at the breast.I went up the den one day when Tari was from home,and found the son making a cotton sack,and madame suckling mademoiselle.When I had sat down with them on the floor,the girl began to question me about England;which I tried to describe,piling the pan and the cocoa shells one upon another to represent the houses,and explaining,as best I was able,and by word and gesture,the over-population,the hunger,and the perpetual toil.'PAS DE COCOTIERS?PAS DO POPOI?'she asked.Itold her it was too cold,and went through an elaborate performance,shutting out draughts,and crouching over an imaginary fire,to make sure she understood.But she understood right well;remarked it must be bad for the health,and sat a while gravely reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows.I am sure it roused her pity,for it struck in her another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom;and she began with a smiling sadness,and looking on me out of melancholy eyes,to lament the decease of her own people.'ICI PAS DE KANAQUES,'said she;and taking the baby from her breast,she held it out to me with both her hands.'TENEZ -a little baby like this;then dead.All the Kanaques die.Then no more.'The smile,and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood,affected me strangely;they spoke of so tranquil a despair.Meanwhile the husband smilingly made his sack;and the unconscious babe struggled to reach a pot of raspberry jam,friendship's offering,which I had just brought up the den;and in a perspective of centuries I saw their case as ours,death coming in like a tide,and the day already numbered when there should be no more Beretani,and no more of any race whatever,and (what oddly touched me)no more literary works and no more readers.