Marital memories. A pillow-fight on the beach. A deep-sea devil. The opening in the atoll. Swank paints a portrait. The fatu-liva bird and its curious gift. My adventure with the wak-wak. Saved!
I shall never forget a day when my bride and I sat on the edge of the lagoon after our matinal dip in its pellucid waters. It was a perfect September morn. So was she.
"My dear," I said suddenly, "Hatiaa Kappa eppe taue."
It sounds like a college fraternity but really means, "My woodlark, what is your name?"
I had been married over a week and I did not know my wife's name.
"Kippiputuonaa," she murmured musically.
"Taro ititi aa moieha ephaa lihaha?" I questioned, which, freely translated, is "What?"
"Kippiputuonaa."
Then, throwing back her head with its superb aureole of hair she softly crooned the words and music of the choral which the community chorus had sung on our wedding night.
Hooio-hooio uku hai unio
Kippiputunonaa aaa titi huti
O tefi tapu, O eio hoki
Hooio-hooio, one naani-tui
How it all came back to me! Leaning towards her, I gently pressed the lobe of her ear with my chin, the native method of expressing deep affection. Her dusky cheeks flushed and with infinite shyness she lifted her left foot and placed it on my knee. Tattooed the length of the roseleaf sole in the graceful ideographic lettering of the islands I read—
"Kippiputuonaa," (Daughter of Pearl and Coral).
"What an exquisite name!" I murmured, "and so unusual!"
I was awed. I felt as if this superb creature, my mate, had revealed to me the last, the most hidden of her secrets. I had heard of Mother of Pearl,—but of the Daughter—never...and I was married to her!
"And you," she whispered, "are Naani-Tui, Face-of-the-Moon!"
I liked that. Frankly I was a bit set up about it. It sounded so much better than Moon-face. I thrust out my left foot, bare of any inscription, and she tickled it playfully with a blade of haro. Radiant Kippiputuonaa—whom I soon called "Kippy" for short—your name shall ever remain a blessed memory, the deepest and dearest wound in my heart.
Kippy proposed that I should be marked for identification in the usual manner, but I shuddered at the thought. I was far too ticklish; I should have died under the needle!
What days of joyous romping we had! One morning a little crowd of us, just the Swanks, Whinneys and ourselves, met on the beach for a pillow-fight. It was a rare sport, and, as the pillows were eighteen-inch logs of rapiti-wood, not without its element of danger. A half-hour of this and we lay bruised and panting on the beach listening to the hoarse bellowing of the wak-waks.
The wak-wak is without exception the most outrageous creature that ploughs the deep in fishy guise. For man-eating qualities he had the shark skinned a nautical mile.
Whinney made a true remark to me one night,—one of the few he ever made. The ocean was particularly audible that evening.
There was something about the unfamiliar appearance of Dr. Traprock's yawl, the Kawa, which filled the beautiful native women with a wonder not unmixed with apprehension. This was particularly true of the lovely creatures who married the three intrepid explorers. The strange object which had brought to the islands these wonderful white men might some day carry them away again! In view of the tragic subsequent events there is something infinitely pathetic in this charming beach-study where Kippiputuonaa is seen anxiously watching "the tree-with-wings" (as she naively called the yawl), where her husband, Dr. Traprock, is at work rigging a new yard-arm. The Kawa, unfortunately, is just out of the picture.]
"Listen to that surf," I remarked. "I never heard it grumble like that before."
"You'd grumble, if you were full of wak-waks," he said.
The wak-wak has a mouth like a subway entrance and I was told that so great was his appetite for human flesh that when, as occasionally happened, some unfortunate swimmer had been eaten by a shark, a wak-wak was sure to come rushing up and bolt shark, man and all. Consequently I did most of my swimming in the lagoon.
Speaking of the lagoon reminds me of an absurd bit of information I picked up from Kippy that made me feel as flat as a pressed fern. We were wandering along the shore one morning and she suddenly pointed to the Kawa and said laughingly.
"Why Tippi-litti (Triplett) bring Tree-with-Wings over Hoopoi (cocoanuts)?"
"Why not swim?" she asked. "Look see. Big hole."
I looked and saw. A whole section of the atoll near where we were standing was movable! Kippy jumped up and down on it and it rocked like a raft. At the edges I saw that it was lashed to the near-by trees with vines! Cheap? You could have bought me for a bad clam. As I thought of the days we had sweated over those damned cocoanuts, of Triplett's peril, of the danger to the yawl, while our very families looked on and laughed, thinking it was a game, and we might have slipped out the movable lock-gate and simply eased through—well, for the first time in my married life I was mad. Kippy was all tenderness in an instant.
"Face-of-Moon, no rain," she begged, "Daughter of Pearl and Coral eat clouds."
She chinned my ear passionately, and I was disarmed in an instant.
I hated to tell Triplett—it seemed to dim his glory, but I needn't have worried.
"Good business," he exclaimed. "We can get her out inter the open an' have some sailin' parties. I'd like to catch one of them wak-waks."
That was the sort Triplett was. He'd done his trick and there was an end of it. The next day he had William Henry Thomas busy re-rigging the Kawa. William Henry Thomas, by the way, insisted on living on board in happy but unholy wedlock, and Whinney, Swank and I felt that it was better so. Somehow we considered him the village scandal.
During these peaceful days I wrote a great deal, posting up my diary as far as we had gone and jotting down a lot of valuable material. Swank had got his impediments off the boat and began daubing furiously, landscapes, seascapes, monotypes, ideographs, everything. Most of them were hideously funny, but he did one thing,—inspired by love, I suppose—a portrait of his wife that was a hummer. She was a lovely little thing with a lovely name, Lupoba-Tilaana, "Mist-on-the-Mountain."
"Swank," I said, "that's a ten-strike. The mountain is a little out of focus but the mist is immense!"
He squirted me with yellow ochre.
Whinney was in his element. Ornithology, botany, ethulology, he took them all on single-handed.
"Listen to that," he said to me one night as we were strolling back from a friendly game of Kahooti with Baahaabaa and some of our friends.
I listened. It was the most unearthly and at the same time the most beautiful bird-song I have ever heard.
"What is it?" I asked, as the cry resounded again, a piercing screech of pain ending in a long yowl of joy.
"It is the motherhood cry of the fatu-liva," he said. "She has just laid an egg."
"But why the note of suffering?" I queried.
"The eggs of the fatu-liva are square," said Whinney, and I was silenced.
Motherhood is indeed the great mystery. Little did I realize that night how much I was to owe to the fatu-liva and her strange maternal gift which saved my life in one of the weirdest adventures that has ever befallen mortal man.
It was a placid day on the sea and Kippy and I were returning from a ten-mile swim to a neighboring island whither I had been taken to be shown off to some relatives.
"Wak-wak," I had said when she first proposed the expedition, but she had laughed gaily and nodded her head to indicate that there was not the slightest danger, and, shamed into it, we had set forth and made an excellent crossing.
On the return trip, midway between the two islands, I was floating lazily, supported by a girdle of inflated dew-fish bladders and towed by Kippy. She had propped over my head her verdant taa-taa without which the natives never swim for fear of the tropical sun, and I think I must have dozed off for I was suddenly roused by a hoarse Klaxon-bellow "Kaaraschaa-gha!" which told me all too plainly that I was in the most hideous peril.
"Wak-wak!" I barked, and all my past life began to unfold before me.
It was a horrid sight—the wak-wak, I mean. He was swimming on the surface, and at ten feet I saw his great jaws open, lined with row upon row of teeth that stretched back into his interior as far as the eye could reach and farther. Mixed up with this dreadful reality were visions of my past. I seemed to be peering into one of those vast, empty auditoriums that had greeted my opera, "Jumping Jean," when it was finally produced, privately.
"Help! Help!" I screamed, reverting to English.
Suddenly Kippy seized the taa-taa from my nerveless grasp. Half closing it, she swam directly toward the monster into whose widening throat she thrust the sharp-pointed instrument, in, in, until I thought she herself would follow it. And then, as she had intended, the point pierced the wak-wak's tonsil.
With a shriek of pain his jaws began to close and, on the instant, Kippy yanked the handle with all her might, opening the taa-taa to its full extent in the beast's very narrows.
Choked though he was, unable for the moment to bite or expel the outer air and submerge, the brute was still dangerous. Kippy was towing me shoreward at a speed which caused the sea to foam about my bladders but the wak-wak still pursued us. A second time my dauntless mate rose to the occasion.
With amazing buoyancy she lifted herself to a half-seated position on the surface of the water and poured forth the most astounding imitation of the motherhood cry of the fatu-liva.
"Biloo-ow-ow-ow-ow-zing-aaa!"
Again, and yet again, it rang across the waters, and in the distance, flying at incredible speed, I saw the rainbow host of fatu-livas coming towards us!
Gallant fowl! Shall I ever forget how they circled about us. One of their clan, as they supposed, was in dire danger and they functioned as only a fatu-liva can. Flying at an immense height, in battle formation, they began laying eggs with marvelous precision. The first two struck the wak-wak square on the nose and he screamed with pain. The third, landing corner-wise, put out his right eye and he began to thrash in helpless circles. The fourth was a direct hit on my left temple. "Face-of-the-Moon" passed over the horizon into oblivion whence he emerged poultice, his heart comforted by Daughter of Pearl and Coral.
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