“‘Do not go,’ he said.

“I answered:  ‘I will go.  You told me to go.  I am on my way.’  My tears were salt in my mouth.

“‘No!’ said Mouth of God.  He ran, and he came to me in the pool where I had flung myself.  There in the water he held me, and his arms crushed the breath from my ribs.  ‘You will not go!’ he said.  ’I spoke those words to know if you would go to the governor.  If you had gone quickly, if you had not wept, I would kill you.  You are my woman.  No other shall have you.’

“Then I knew that I was his woman, and I forgot my Menike lover.

“You see,” she said to me after a pause, “I would have gone to the palace.  But I would never have come back to the house of Mouth of God.  That was the beginning of our love.  He would yield me to nobody.  He told the governor that I would not come, and he waited to kill the governor if he must.  But the governor laughed, and said there were many others.  Mouth of God and I were married then by Monsieur Vernier, in the church of his mother.

“That was the manner of my marriage.  The same as that of the girls in your own island, is it not?”

It was much the same, I said.  It differed only in some slight matters of custom.  She listened fascinated while I described to her our complicated conventions of courtship, our calling upon young ladies for months and even years, our gifts, our entertainments, our giving of rings, our setting of the marriage months far in the future, our orange wreaths and veils and bridesmaids.  She found these things almost incredible.

“Marriage here,” she said, “may come to a young man when he does not seek or even expect it.  No Marquesan can marry without the consent of his mother, and often she marries him to a girl without his even thinking of such a thing.

“A young man may bring home a girl he does not know, perhaps a girl he has seen on the beach in the moonlight, to stay with him that night in his mother’s house.  It may be that her beauty and charm will so please his mother that she will call a family council after the two have gone to bed.  If the family thinks as the mother does, they determine to marry the young man to that girl, and they do so after this fashion: 

“Early in the morning, just at dawn, before the young couple awake, all the women of the household arouse them with shrieks.  They beat their breasts, cut themselves with shells, crying loudly, Aue!  Aue! Neighbors rush in to see who has died.  The youth and the girl run forth in terror.  Then the mother, the grandmother and all other women of the house chant the praises of the girl, singing her beauty, and wailing that they cannot let her go.  They demand with anger that the son shall not let her go.  All the neighbors cry with them, Aue!  Aue! and beat their breasts, until the son, covered with shame, asks the girl to stay.

“Then her parents are sent the word, and if they do not object, the girl remains in his house.  That is often the manner of Marquesan marriage.”