The next day was all preparation.  I would be gone several months, the usual time for the voyage of a trading schooner to the Marquesas and return to Papeete.  I had no bother about clothes, as I was to be in the same climate, and in less formal circles even than in Tahiti.  But I desired to carry with me a type-writer, and mine was out of order.  There was no tinker of skill in Papeete, and I had about given up hope of repairs, when Lovaina said: 

“May be that eye doctor do you.  He married one of those girl whose father before ran away with that English ship and Tahiti girls to Pitcairn Island, and get los’ there till all chil’ren grow up big.  He has little house on rue de Petit Pologne.”

I found on that street in a cottage an American vendor of spectacles, who by some chance of propinquity had married a descendant of a mutineer of the Bounty.  I surrendered my machine to him while I talked with his wife, whose ancestors, one English, the other Tahitian, had sailed away from here generations ago, after the crew had possessed themselves of the British warship Bounty, and cast their officers adrift at sea.  She was a resident of Norfolk Island, and I wished I had time to hear the full story of her life.  But before we had come to more than platitudes, the eye doctor had repaired the type-writer, and called his wife to other duties.

We had a going-away dinner at the Tiare hotel, Landers, Polonsky, McHenry, Hallman, Schlyter, the tailor, and Lieutenant L’Hermier des Plantes, a French army surgeon who was sailing on the Fetia Taiao to the Marquesas to be acting governor there.  Lovaina would not join us, but after we had eaten an excellent dinner, she came in while we drank her health.  Llewellyn had been asked, but did not appear, and McHenry said he was “very low” at five o’clock when he passed him on the rue de Rivoli.  Lying Bill preferred to spend his last evening ashore with his native wife, or else wished to avoid the chance of a headache on the morrow.

We drank our last toasts at midnight, and I was averse to arising when called at six by Atupu for the early breakfast and the last disposition of my affairs.  By nine o’clock I had put my baggage on board the schooner, Lovaina taking me in her carriage, driven by the Dummy.  Vava was excited and puzzled by my return from the country, and my sudden departure for the sea.  While Lovaina stayed in the garden of the Annexe, gathering a garland of roses for my hat, the Dummy endeavored to narrate to me the tragedy of David.  His own part in preventing Morton from shooting, Vava showed in vivid pantomime with a fervor that would have made a moving-picture actor’s fame; and when he indicated Morton’s abandonment of revenge, though the Dummy could have no knowledge of his words, he gestured with a dignity that conveyed all the meaning of Lying Bill’s relation of the incident.  In the expression and motion of the dramatic mute the aged uncle had the sublimity of Lear.  For Vava, in a mask and an attitude, by some cryptic understanding encompassed the resignation and appeal to Deity.