“He did not know he was a leper until they examined him,” Llewellyn went on.  “He does not know how he contracted the disease.  I don’t mind it.  I am not afraid.  You get used to it.  I tell you, the only leper I ever knew that made me cry was a kid.  I used to see on the porch of a house on the road to Papara from Papeete a big doll.  A little leper girl owned it, and she was ashamed to be seen outside her home, so she put on the veranda the doll she loved best to greet her friends.  She made out that the doll was really herself, and she loved to listen when those who might have been playmates talked to the doll and fondled it.  She lived for and in the doll, and those who cherished the little girl saw that each Christmas the doll was exchanged secretly for a bigger one, keeping pace with the growth of the child.  I have caressed it and sung to it, and guessed that the child was peeping and listening inside.  She herself never touched it, for it would be like picking up one’s own self.  Each Christmas she saw herself born again, for the old dolls were burned without her knowledge.  And all the time her own little body was falling to pieces.  Last Christmas she was carried to the door to see the new doll.  I bought it for her, and I had in it a speaking-box, to say ‘Bonjour!’ I sent to Paris for it.  She’s dead now, poor little devil, or they’d have shut her up in the lazaretto.”

Bemis bought cocoanuts for shipment for food purposes.  His firm sold them all over America to fruitdealers for eating raw by children, and shredded and prepared them for confectioners and grocers.  He was the only buyer in Tahiti of fresh nuts, as all others purchased them as copra, split and dried, for the oil.  Bemis had been here years ago, he said.

“I’m married now,” he told me, “but in those days I was a damn fool about the Tahitian girls.  I put in six months here before I was married.”

He became thoughtful, and asked me to accompany him to the soiree of the Alliance Francaise, in the Palais cinema-hall.  The Alliance was for encouraging the study and use of the French language.  A few decades ago Admiral Serre, the governor, had forbidden the teaching of French to girls in the country districts as hurtful to their moral weal.  It was feared that they would seek to air their learning in Papeete, and, as said Admiral Serre, be corrupted.  A new regime reckoned a knowledge of French a requisite of patriotism.

At the Palais the scene was brilliant.  Two large banana-trees were apparently growing at the sides of the stage, and the pillars of the roof were wreathed in palm-leaves.  Scores of French flags draped the walls.  Pupils of the government schools occupied many seats, and their families, friends, and officials the others.  The galleries were filled with native children.  Marao, the former queen, and her daughters, the Princesses Boots and Tekau, with a party of English acquaintances, were in front, and the general audience consisted of French and every caste of Tahitian, from half to a sixteenth.  The men were in white evening suits, and the women and girls in decollete gowns, white and colored.