Chapter X

WHAT CAME OF THE PARIS DRESS

The effects of Saxon’s illness in Fiji were a long time in wearing off. It was many weeks after Vaiti had come back to the Sybil, flushed with importance and with the lionising she had received on the cable-ship—many weeks after the voyage to the unknown island and the visit to San Francisco—that he took ill again; not very seriously, but badly enough to prevent his going to sea. Of course, the time was an awkward one. They were off Niué, and there was copra waiting to be taken to Raratonga for the steamer—copra which would certainly be secured by some other schooner if Saxon did not take it at the promised date. Neither Harris nor Gray knew enough to be trusted with the ship, and he did not much care about letting Vaiti sail her—not because he doubted his fiery daughter’s ability or desire, but because, rash as he was himself at times, he knew her to be still worse. He had seen her run the Sybil in the trough of the very last swell alongside a barrier reef for miles, sailing all the time so close to the wind that the shifting of a single point would have meant destruction. He had heard her raving about the deck in half a gale as they swept up to the iron-bound coast of Niué, abusing Harris in the strongest of beach talk because he had not another main topsail in the locker to replace the two that had just carried away one after the other and battered themselves to ribbons—the principal ground of her complaint being apparently the fact that she considered herself labouring under a social disadvantage of the most mortifying kind because the schooner was obliged to come up to Niué for the very first time without all sails set. He had seen her perform tricks of steering, getting in and out of Avarua in Raratonga (a perfect death-trap of a port at times, as all old islanders know), that “fairly gave him the jim-jams,” to use his own phraseology.... No, on the whole he thought he would rather miss that fright than lie idle in the trader’s house at Avatele, and think daily and nightly of the cranky though light-heeled Sybil out upon the high seas in Vaiti’s sole command.

This being so, it was natural and inevitable that Vaiti should set her heart upon going and carry out her desire. She did not make any trouble about the matter; neither was she at all unkind to the invalided owner of the ship. On the contrary, she paid the trader’s wife more than that kindly woman wanted, to take good care of her father while she should be away, bought him everything decent to eat that the island contained (which was saying very little), indulgently presented him with a demijohn of whisky, and then informed him, in the coolest manner in the world, that the copra was all loaded, the stores and water on board, and the schooner ready to sail next day, under her command.

Saxon swore at large first of all, then stormed at Vaiti, and finally began a pathetic lament over his own helpless position and the heartlessness of his only child. Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, smoked a big cigar through it all and looked out of the window. When he stopped at last, fairly run out, she laughed and handed him a weed out of her own case and a match.

“You take’m that, no speak nonsense. You know me, what?” she demanded; and Saxon, who was not in reality nearly as ill as he thought himself, laughed, and allowed himself to be won over.

Having gained her point, Vaiti went off again to the schooner through the wonderful pink dusk that wraps a South Sea island at sunset, and left the captain to hold commune with his demijohn and sleep.

As she walked down to the shore, she heard a sound of laughing and the rustle of many dresses among the palms close at hand. Now in Niué it is an important matter that brings people out of evenings, because, although the island has been Christianised long ago, like all the rest of the Eastern Pacific, it still suffers from a perfect plague of heathen ghosts that no amount of Sunday church-goings and week-day pious exercises seem to affect in the least. So the natives are afraid to go out of their houses after sunset, lest uncanny things should rise out of the forest to spring upon the wayfarer’s back unseen and choke him. This Vaiti knew, so she suspected something of interest in the little crowd, and turned aside to look. If she had not, there had been no story to tell about Niué and the happenings there.

She saw a curious scene, so nearly hidden by the growing dark that no one but an island resident could have taken in its full significance. A group of islanders, men and women stood round the door of a big white concrete house with a pandanus roof—the finest native house in the village. They seemed to be waiting for something—something both amusing and exciting, to judge by the explosions of giggles that continually burst through the dusk.

Presently the door of the house swung open with considerable violence, and a large mat was thrown out by an invisible hand. Then the door was slammed, and the giggles redoubled. Within the house now sounded something very like a struggle. There were loud sobs and cries of a shrill, theatrical kind, scuffling, banging, and a dragging sound.

“Tck, tck, tck,” went the tongues of the outsiders delightedly. The interesting moment was at hand.

It came without warning. The door burst open with still more violence than before, and out upon the mat was shot by some invisible agency a very solid young woman in a white loose gown, weeping somewhat mechanically, but with much effect. She fairly rolled over with the force of the shock that had ejected her, and before she could pick herself up the door was closed once more with a slam that shook the whole house. Then the waiting group rushed upon her with cries of joy, and bore her away in their midst, singing as they went.

“A wedding,” said Vaiti to herself. “It must be Mata’s; that is their house. And it will be a big wedding, too. I did not know that it was to be so soon.”

She fell into a fit of musing as she wandered shorewards among the leaning palms.... The palms of Niué sweep downwards to the gleaming sea like a band of lovely maidens hurrying with sweet impatience to meet their lovers on the coral shore. Of a moonlight night, when all things are possible, and nothing seems too wonderful in an air that itself is wonder, it needs but little for those white, slender stems, and tossing, plumy crowns, poised high above the shadowy beach they curve to meet, to change themselves into South Sea dryads of a new and lovely race, and rush down, at long last, upon the calling sea, where Tangaroa, the king of ocean, has his dwelling. Under the palms of Niué, when the blazing white moon has risen so high in the heavens that a perfect star of jetty shadow is rayed about the base of every tree—when the wandering sea winds are held close by the breathless spell of midnight and nothing wakes on all the lonely shore but the long, long song of the droning coral reef—under the wonderful palms of Niué, loveliest and strangest of all the islands in that dreamy world of “perilous seas and fairylands forlorn”—nothing is too strange to be true, no fancy too wild to hold, when the moon is up and the palms are alone with the sea....

Was Vaiti thinking of visionary palm-maidens and sea-foam kings as she went down the winding path to the bay, through a wondrous afterglow of russet-rose laced through with opal moonrays? Perhaps—or of kindred fancies. I who knew her cannot say, for no one ever knew her altogether. It is more likely, however, that less poetic thoughts were in her mind just then. The scene she had witnessed in the palm-grove was the usual ceremony that takes place in Niué the night before a wedding, when the friends of the bridegroom come to the house of the bride’s parents, and the latter go through the symbolical form of casting her out and closing the door, so that the bridegroom’s people may take her over and guard her until the wedding morning. Vaiti liked a wedding above all things (next to a funeral), and the hint of great doings on the morrow, offered by the ceremony she had witnessed, decided her to stay another day. Why not? The copra was loaded, and no rivals were in sight. Besides, she had a motive for staying—the strongest possible motive. She wanted to wear her Paris dress.

Yes, it had been acquired at last. That day in San Francisco, when she had come out of the Russian Consulate with more money in her pocket than any one of her adventures had ever brought before, she had been able to restrain herself no longer. And thereafter, in Madame Retaillaud’s elegant and exclusive Parisian emporium, replete with the choicest imported wares (I quote the lady’s own description of her goods), there took place a scene that is remembered to the present day by those of Madame Retaillaud’s young ladies who survived the earthquake year.

Vaiti, dressed in one of her waistless muslin gowns, with a broad-leafed island hat on her head, a long-bladed sheath-knife stuck quite visibly in the breast of her dress, and her wavy hair falling loose over her shoulders, stalked into the shop among the smartly-gowned San Francisco ladies who were turning over Madame’s stock, and demanded to see—

“One dress belong Palisi, pretty dam quick.”

They are used to all sorts of strange nationalities along the water-front in San Francisco, but not, as a rule, in the milliners’ and modistes’ well-bred establishments. Vaiti concentrated the whole attention of the place upon herself at a single stroke. She did not care about that in the least, but Madame’s hesitation stung her, and she pulled out a thick wad of notes.

“Look ’em alive, my hearties!” she ordered impatiently in her quarter-deck voice. “Lay aft here with that goods. I want um Palisi model, all sort.”

The customers were nearly in hysterics by this time, and the assistants were all a-giggle. Madame herself, however, grasped the situation in a twinkling, and frowned down the girls. Whoever and whatever this pirate queen might be, she certainly had money, and Madame would have welcomed Lucrezia Borgia or the Witch of Endor, under like circumstances, as pleasantly as an Anglo-American duchess.

“Perhaps Madame will come into a private room. Madame would like, no doubt, to look at our most exclusive goods, and we do not bring them into the outer shop,” she said in her most honeyed voice. And the door of the lift closed upon the pair.

What Vaiti underwent in that fitting-room in the course of getting into Madame’s latest model promenade gown, built for a typical French figure, will never be told. Early in the proceedings a message came down to the showroom for the strongest pair of Paris corsets in stock, and a little later Madame herself, very red and overheated, ran down to select a fresh silk lace.

“Ah, but she has courage, that one!” she declared, as the lift received her again. “Never, no, never!—jamais de la vie! ...”

The lift went up.

It was almost an hour before a wonderful vision sailed slowly through the show-room and out into the street—slowly, not alone for pride, but also because it could scarcely move or draw its breath. The vision, as described in the receipted bill that went with it, was made up of the following elements:

“One promenade costume (model, Doucet & Cie.) composed of chiffon velours, couleur poussière de roses, inlet with motifs of point d’Alençon, hand-embroidered with lilies of the valley in French paste. Mounted on chiffon bleu-de-ciel, with full volants edged lace and chiffon ruching. Made over foundation of glacé silk, couleur citron d’or.

“One set silk underclothing to match.

“One Corset Ecraseur, patent laces.

“One pair bronze promenade shoes, Louis XV. heels, extra height. Stockings to match.

“One parasol composed peau-de-soie rose fanée and chiffon bleu-de-ciel.”

To which may be added—one young woman, suffering horrible agony and quite intoxicated with happiness.

* * * * *

It was this marvellous possession that Vaiti yearned to show off at the wedding. She had not had a chance to wear it since the day when she had walked through the streets of San Francisco, with an admiring and amused crowd at her rear, and found it quite impossible to get on board the schooner, when she reached the water front, until she took off her voluminous skirt and handed it up over the side—afterwards climbing the rope-ladder in a storm of applause and a pink silk petticoat. Now the occasion for getting full value out of the wonderful thing had come at last, and she could not—no, she really could not—miss it.

Rather late next morning, when the bride and bridegroom—the former in a gorgeous gown of yellow curtain muslin, the latter in a thick tweed suit from Auckland that caused him to stream at every pore—were sitting on opposite sides of the little white church, enthroned on chairs all by themselves, and listening decorously to a long preliminary address from the native pastor—Vaiti swept in, and at once brought the ceremony to a momentary pause. The pastor stopped in his address and gaped, the women exclaimed audibly, the bridegroom fixed his eyes on the apparition and sighed in a manner that the bride evidently resented as a personal slight, for she grew still darker in the face than nature had made her, and stared penknives and scissors at Vaiti. Wild titters of delight swept indecorously through the church. The entry was indeed a success—the native pastor found it necessary to address his flock directly, and to tell them that they would undoubtedly all go to hell if they did not behave better in church, before order was restored.

It is not necessary to relate at length how Mata and Ivi were made one, how they walked out of the church nonchalantly by different doors, and were subsequently so deeply interested in the killing of the pigs for the marriage feast, and the preparing of the various cooking-pots, that they did not meet again all afternoon. It was a commonplace wedding enough, and this history is not interested in it, other than as it concerned the affairs of Vaiti. These, indeed, were fairly notable.

For with Vaiti pride very literally brought about a fall that day.

She had had a terrible time getting into her dress, and the whole ship’s company had shared in the trouble. First, the native A.B.’s had to fetch her a big looking-glass from the nearest trader’s, and secure it to the bulkhead of her cabin. Then the cook had to deliver up all the hot water in the galley—at seven bells, with dinner just coming on!—and the boatswain must needs broach the cargo for some special scented soap. Matters were only beginning, however. When the dress was disinterred from its many wrappings and finally put on it became immediately apparent that the bodice could not possibly be made to meet. Perhaps the coming of the bread-fruit season had caused the young lady’s waist to expand—perhaps the practised art of Madame Retaillaud had exceeded anything that a mere amateur could compass in the way of lacing. At any rate, it was not till Vaiti had passed her corset laces out through the port and ordered two of the strongest sailors to tail on to them—not till Harris, agonising with laughter, had directed this novel evolution from the poop for at least five delirious minutes, during which Vaiti several times thought she was dying, but remained none the less determined to die rather than give in, that the deed was accomplished at last, and the “Kapitani” of Sybil was enabled to look at herself in the glass and know heavenly certainty that she was the best dressed woman in the Pacific at that instant, whoever saw or did not see.

The natural result of all this was that in the very hour of her triumph she fainted dead away in the church, for the first time in her life, and had to be carried out.

The ceremony was just over by now, and the bride, still burning with jealousy of the woman who had dared to eclipse her on her wedding day, was among the first of those who crowded round like bees going after honey, to stare at the beautiful creature lying senseless on the sunburnt grass. The bridegroom had sped away hot-foot in the direction of the village, whence certain enticing yells indicated that the pig-slaughter was now going on; but Mata was not a bit appeased by his indifference to the visitor. That dress—and oh, how wonderful it was!—still rankled in her soul.

Mata was a teacher’s daughter, and she knew something of white people’s lore. A brilliant thought darted into her mind as she pressed and struggled in the crowd about the deathly form on the grass....

“Ai, ai! she is surely dead!” wailed the people. “Ai! the-great chieftainess will rise no more!”

“Daughters of a turtle!” said Mata contemptuously. “I will show you if she is dead. It is nothing at all but that she is vain, and wanted to make herself a middle like the ’papalangi’ women, who all look like stinging hornets. Give me a knife, someone.”

A knife was given, and Mata, with horrid joy, half lifted Vaiti and slipped the keen point into the back of the dress.

Rip went the silk with a hideous splitting noise, and the delicate underwear swelled out through the opening like a bush lily bursting its sheath. Mata felt for the stay-lace, and cut that too. The tension on the bodice increased frightfully—the seams gaped and strained....

“She will die, I think, if I do not cut it off,” said Mata hastily, feeling Vaiti reviving under her hand, and anxious to finish her work. Two more cuts of the knife did it. The Paris dress was, speaking sartorially, no more; the owner, lying on the ground, was opening her eyes to the outrage that had been done; and Mata, shrieking with malign laughter, was fleeing wildly through the palms in the direction of the pig-killing, peace in her heart again.

Peace was very far indeed from Vaiti’s heart when she revived and found out what had been done. The crowd drew away from her in fear when they saw her flashing eyes and set, furious mouth, though she said never a word. Confronted by that Medusa-head, they were almost too terrified to find words; but one or two stammered out a hasty explanation that freed the present company from blame by inculpating Mata.

Vaiti did not doubt it—she had seen the bride’s face during the ceremony. Still silent, but flashing looks of sheet-lightning all about her, she drew together her garments as best she could, and walked off in the direction of the ship. As she did so, a little ugly man with red hair slipped out from behind the trees, and looked narrowly at her retreating figure.

“It is the white man from the bush!” cried the girls. “White man of ours, why did you not come down for the wedding?”

“Because I didn’t, my little dears,” replied the newcomer in English, still looking after Vaiti. He stood well in the shade, and did not make himself unnecessarily conspicuous.

“That’s a fine girl, that Mata,” he added by and by. “A smart girl. I should like to know Mata.”

Vaiti put off her going for yet another day. She had business to attend to.

It was very simple business, and it was characterised by the directness that attended all the proceedings of Saxon’s daughter. She merely went up to the bride’s new home, that was so handsomely stocked with trade goods and imported furniture, while the wedding party were making merry in the village after dark, and set fire to it with a torch in about a dozen places. It was very dry weather, and there was a strong wind.

There was scarce a stick of the cottage left when she marched into the village with a blazing torch in her hand, and calmly told the assembled revellers what she had done. Then she left them, seething in a tumult of excitement that almost drowned the hysteric screams of Mata, and went to bed and to sleep with a quiet mind, ready for an early start next morning.

The men came on board late and very drunk, but they did come. They were afraid of Vaiti, and so was Harris, who would very well have liked to extend his revels in the village for another twelve hours, but did not dare to do so. He thought, as he stumbled into his bunk, that the sounds proceeding from the forecastle were a good deal odder than usual—he could almost have sworn that there was one person, if not several, crying in there. But he had good reason for mistrusting the evidence of his senses just then, so he flung himself down and went to sleep.