his groping mentality, and because of his incommunicable feelings.  The hotel was in a fearsome uproar when Vava fell into a tantrum, women patrons afraid of his possible actions and men threatening to club him into a mild frame of mind.  I doubt if any one there could have subdued him physically, for he was a thick-bodied man in his thirties, with a stamina and a strength incredibly developed.  I had seen him once lift over a fence a barrel of flour, two hundred pounds in weight, and without full effort.  His skin was very dark, his facial expression one of ire and frustration, but of conscious superiority to all about him.  He had had no aids to overcome his natal infirmity of deafness and consequent dumbness, none of the educational assistance modern science lends these unfortunates, no finger alphabet, or even another inarticulate for sympathy.  He was like the mutes of history, of courts and romances, condemned to suffer in silence the humor and contempt of all about him, though he felt himself better than they in body and in the understanding of things, which he could not make them know.  This repression made him often like a wild beast, though mostly he was half-clown and half-infant in his conduct.  He had a gift of mimicry incomparably finer than any professional’s I knew of.  This, with his gestures, stood him instead of speech.  A certain haughty English woman whose elaborate hats in an island where women were hatless, or wore simple, native weaves, were noted atrocities, and whose chin was almost nil, kept the carriage and me waiting for breakfast while she primped in her lodging.  The Dummy uttered one of his abortive sounds, much like that of an angry puma, contorted his face, and put his hand above his head, so that I had a very vivid suggestion of the lady, her sloping chin and her hat, at which all Papeete laughed.  Vava’s gesticulations and grimaces were unerring cartoons without paper or ink.  If one could have seen him draw one-self, one’s pride would have tumbled.  He saw the most ridiculous aspect of one.  His indication of Lovaina’s figure made one shriek, and the governor would have sentenced him for lese-majesty had he seen himself taken off.  The sounds he made in which he greeted any one he liked, or in anger, were terrible, dismaying.  They; must have been those made by our ancestors, the first primates, when they began the struggle toward intelligent language.  Vava’s sounds were as the muttering of an ape, deep in his throat, or, when he was roused, high and shrill, like the cry of a rabbit when the hound seizes it.  He could make Lovaina know anything he wanted to, and she could direct him to do anything she wished.  In that house of mirth, brightness, and laughter, he was as a cunning and, at times, hateful jester, feared by the Tahitians, and, indeed, to whites a shadowy skeleton at the feast, a thing of indescribable possibilities.  I knew him, he liked me, and I drew from him by motions and expressions some measure of his feelings and sufferings.  But I, too, occasionally, shuddered at the animal cries and frightful grimaces wrung from him in beating down his soul bent on murder.