The rain, which all day had been falling at intervals, began again, and as the Roberta entered the open sea, she began to kick up her heels.  Our conversation languished.  When the supercargo called us below for dinner, pride and not appetite made me go.  The priest answered with a groan.  Padre Olivier was prostrate on the deck, his noble head on a pillow, his one piece of luggage, embroidered with the monogram of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the needlework of the nuns of Atuona.

“I am seasick if I wade in the surf,” said the priest, in mournful jest.

The Roberta’s cabin was a dark and noisome hole, filled with demijohns and merchandise, with two or three untidy bunks in corners, the air soaked with the smells of thirty years of bilge-water, sealskins, copra, and the cargoes of island traffic.  Capriata, Harry Lee, and I sat on boxes at a rough table, which we clutched as the Roberta pitched and rolled.

[Illustration:  Near the Mission at Hanavave]

[Illustration:  Starting from Hanavave for Oomoa]

When the ragged cook brought the first dish, unmistakably a cat swimming in a liquid I could have sworn by my nose to be drippings from an ammonia tank, I protested a lack of hunger for any food.  My ruse passed for the moment, but was exposed by a flock or swarm of cockroaches, which, scenting a favorite food, suddenly sprang upon the table and upon us, leaping and flying into the plates and drawing Corsican curses from Capriata and Norwegian maledictions from Lee.  I did not wait to see them throwing the invaders from the battlements of the table into the moat of salt water and spilt wine below, but quickly, though feebly, climbed to the deck and laid myself beside Pere Olivier, nor could cries that the enemy had been defeated and that “only a few” were flying about, summon me below again.

Pere Olivier and I stayed prone all night in alternate pelting rain and flooding moonlight, as a fair wind bowled us along at six knots an hour.  Padre Olivier, between naps, recited his rosary to take his mind from his woes.  I could tell when he finished a decade by his involuntary start as he began a new one.  I had no such comfort as beads and prayers, and the flight of those schooner griffins had struck me in the solar plexus of imagination.

“Accept them as stations of the cross,” said the priest.  “This life is but a step to heaven.”

I replied with some comments indicating my belief that cockroaches belonged on a still lower rung, and going in an opposite direction.

“I know those blattes, those saligauds,” he said with sympathy.  “They are sent by Satan to provoke us to blasphemy.  I never go below.”

Those pests of insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics.  Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here.  They had entire possession of the Roberta.