Lights were placed in the new house.  It was elegantly made, of small bamboos up and down, with a floor of matched boards, the roof of cocoanut-leaves, and hung with blossoms of many kinds.  The table had been spread, and there was a glitter of silver and glass, with all the accoutrements of fashion.  We sat down, eight, the chief making nine, and ate and drank until ten o’clock.  The piece de resistance was the sucking pig, with taro and feis, but roasted in an oven, and not in native style; and there was a delicious young turkey from New Zealand, a ham from Virginia, truffles, a salad of lettuce and tomatoes, and a plum pudding from London.  The claret was 1900 and 1904, a vintage obtained by Polonsky in Paris.  The champagne, also, was of a year, and frapped.  Tahitian coffee, with brown sugar from the chief’s plantation, ended the banquet.

There was no conversation of any interest.  The Parisian count was far removed in experience and culture from the others, and probably only the necessity of companionship in revelry and cards brought them together.  Europe, and all the earth, was his playground, and doubtless he had lavished a fortune in pleasure in the capitals of the Continent.  Llewellyn had an education in the universities of England and Germany, but since young manhood had been in his birthplace, and the others were the rough and ready stuff of business or seafaring.

The table for the gambling was moved to the sward by the shingle, and lamps hung upon bamboos planted at each end.  It was balmy, and we sat in our shirts, the bosoms open for the breeze, the count with his gorgeous Japanese god shining upon his ivory breast, and the round glass in his eye.  The tattooed skeleton upon his forearm was uncanny in the flickering light, the black shadows of the eyes seeming to open and close as the rays fell upon it.

Landers, though he had drunk with all, was appreciative of every nicety of the game, and won fifteen hundred francs.  He alone was cool, watching the faces of the players at every crisis, quick to detect a weakness, to interpret rightly a gesture or counting of losses and gains, remorselessly hammering home his victories, and always suave and generous in action.

Llewellyn would withdraw his attention to listen to the himene of the musicians thirty feet away, which consisted mostly of familiar American airs, interpolated with bizarre staves and dissonances.  One caught a beloved strain, and then it wandered away queerly as if the musician had forgotten the score and had done his best otherwise.  I never heard in Tahiti one air of Europe or America played through as composed, without variation or omission, except the national anthem of France.

“They are happy, those boys,” mused Llewellyn.  “They get more out of life than we do.  Why should we fool with these cards here when we might sing?”