Authors: Irving Wallace
Claire removed her sunglasses. For these moments, the scene below had been oddly lifeless, like a tropical ghost town, but now she could make out two tiny bronzed figures, probably males, entering the compound, followed by a dog. The pair traversed a short bridge, and, going to the other side, disappeared into a hut.
She turned to inquire where the natives were, when she saw that Courtney and Maud, who had been discussing something in undertones, separated and acknowledged the curiosity of the company.
“There you have it, my friends,” Courtney said aloud. “If you’re wondering where the people are, they are inside, eating their noon meals or resting, as any sensible human being should at this hour. Those who aren’t in their huts are out in the hills doing their quota of work. Normally, at this hour, you would see more people coming and going across the compound, but today is a special occasion for them—the occasion being your arrival. I told them you would be here about noon, and you are, and out of respect for you—Chief Paoti has endowed you with special mana to overcome the old tabu against strangers—they are indoors. I know that in the States everyone turns out to celebrate an important arrival—parades, confetti, keys to the city—but here the mark of respect and welcome is to give you, for your arrival at least, the freedom of the village without being inspected and observed. I hope you will understand that.”
“All of us understand their hospitality, I am sure,” said Maud. “As a matter of fact,” said Courtney, “many of them will be wearing ceremonial dress tonight, in your honor. I know that Professor Easterday told you that the Sirens males generally attire themselves in pubic bags, the females in grass skirts, and that youngsters run around naked. That is correct, as far as it goes. You will find some exceptions, however. In the infirmary, in the school, in several other places, males wear breechclouts, loincloths, kilts, whatever you wish to call them, and in these places the women wear breast binders along with their grass or tapa skirts. The young and very old have a choice of garmenting themselves as they please. During feasts, and special occasions, such as your welcome tonight, the more formal attire is worn.”
Orville Pence waved his hand for attention. “Mr. Courtney, besides Professor Easterday and the Captain and yourself—are we the first outsiders—whites—ever to come here?”
Courtney’s forehead furrowed. He weighed his reply, “No,” he said at last, “besides the three exceptions you made, you are not the first they have seen since the time Daniel Wright settled here and his descendants intermarried. According to their legend, a Spanish party landed here about five years after Wright—I’d say about 1801—and they were cruel, and tried to remove some of the girls forcibly. They were ambushed returning to the beach and slaughtered to a man, and those remaining on the ship were overcome in the night and killed. In more recent times—early in this century—an elderly, bearded seafarer, going around the world alone, sailed his sloop to the beach. He came upon the village, and when he wanted to leave, they would not let him leave. He resigned himself to staying here, but died of natural causes before a year had passed.”
“Captain Joshua Slocum and the Spray?” asked Claire. Courtney shrugged. “There’s no record of his name. They don’t write here, and history is passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. I thought of Slocum, too. But when I looked him up, it turned out he disappeared in the Atlantic during 1909. Could he have got this far without anyone knowing it? Possible, but not probable.”
“There must be some evidence, a grave, a tombstone, something?” persisted Claire.
“No,” said Courtney. “As you will learn, their funeral rites require absolute and total cremation of a corpse and the burning of all his possessions.” Courtney turned, and addressed himself to Orville Pence. “During the Second World War, a Japanese bomber made a forced landing on the plateau, but it exploded and burned. There were no survivors. Late in the war, an American transport, lost in the night, hit the side of the peak. Again, no survivors. Aside from those instances, your group is, as far as I know, the first—and I hope the last—from the outside to visit The Three Sirens.”
Maud had been studying the village beneath them. “Mr. Courtney, do all the tribesmen live in that one village?”
“They all live there,” said Courtney. “There are several huts scattered about the island, overnight shelters for those who are away farming, hunting, fishing, and near the peak there are some stone colonnades, the remains of an ancient sacred
marae
, but this is the only actual community. It is a small island, and all the advantages are centered in this one hamlet. At last count, there were two hundred and twenty natives. There are about fifty or sixty huts down there. In the last month, four new huts have been built, and two vacated, to accommodate the ten of you.”
Mary Karpowicz, who had been absorbed in the village, suddenly called out, “What are they made of—the huts? They look like a breeze could blow them down.”
“You’ll find them much sturdier than that,” said Courtney, with a smile. “There are no walls as you would think of them, but the framework of each hut is solid timber, influenced by eighteenth-century English architecture, and the roofs are of native thatch, pandanus leaf over cane or bamboo, and the walls are similar, but more heavily reinforced with cane. Most of the huts have two rooms, some have three.”
“Mr. Courtney.” Maud was pointing toward the groves at the end of the village. “Those larger buildings—”
“Ah, yes. One might say the municipal part of the community. In fact, you can’t see all of them from here. Among those trees you’ll find the Sacred Hut—a sort of museum, really, and for some a place of worship—and there are several connected larger huts that represent the school. The food storehouse is near there, also. Two important buildings are in the very center of the village. One is the medical dispensary. The other is Chief Paoti’s hut, rather grand and spacious, many rooms for his kin, for meetings, for feasts. You can’t see it well from here.”
“But the biggest and longest at the end, the one with the thatched-dome top?” asked Maud.
Courtney studied it a moment, and then said gravely, “That is the Social Aid Hut that Professor Easterday wrote you about.”
“The brothel,” said Marc with a grin.
His mother turned upon him angrily, and snapped, “For heaven’s sake, Marc, you know better than that.”
“I’m just kidding,” said Marc, but his smile had become uncertain, and finally apologetic.
“You’ll only confuse the others,” said Maud. She turned to Courtney. “As anthropologists, we’ve a broad knowledge of the pleasure houses of Polynesia. On Mangareva, it is called
are popi
, and on Easter Island it was known as
hare nui
. I assume this hut may have a similar function?”
“Only somewhat,” said Courtney, hesitantly. “To my knowledge, there’s nothing quite like it anywhere in the world. In fact, there are many other things down there utterly unknown to the outside world. To me, for the most, they represent a—an ideal way of life—in the matters of love, at least—that we of the West should one day hope to achieve.” He glanced down at the village with an expression that was, in itself, an act of love. “You’ll see and learn soon enough. Until then, it’s useless for me to prattle on. Let me take you to your assigned huts. There’s a steep path over there, but it’s safe. We’ll be down in ten minutes.”
He descended the slope of the ridge, and disappeared around a stone ledge. One by one the others followed. Claire turned to go, and saw her husband passing Orville Pence. Marc snickered at Orville, the way men do at a stag, Claire supposed, and he said, “I still say brothel.”
He was gone, and Orville with him, and at that second Claire did not want to walk with either of them.
She was furious with Marc, and his unfortunate attempt at levity, and in her heart she knew that Dr. Adley R. Hayden would have been furious, too, and would have liked her more.
She waited until they had gone around the bend, and then she followed. She wanted to enter the village of The Three Sirens alone.
* * *
It was midafternoon in the village.
Claire Hayden, cooler now in a fresh sleeveless gray Dacron dress, leaned in the open doorway of the hut assigned to Marc and herself and absently observed the men of their party—Marc, Orville, Sam, employing tools they had brought along—assist two of the young natives from the beach in opening the last of the wooden crates.
She found her gaze directed at the two young natives, so strapping and graceful, because there was a certain suspenseful fascination in this. As the native youths moved, bending and rising, she was certain that any moment the single strands about their waists, holding in place the pubic bags, would break and expose them. It was impossible to understand why this did not happen, but so far it had not.
Suddenly, she was ashamed of the diversion, and she looked off beyond the men and crates toward the heart of the village. Some inhabitants were in the compound now. There were children and women, at last. The younger children, running, jumping, playing, were stark naked. The women were, as Easterday had promised, nude from the waist up and their short skirts precariously concealed their private parts. Only a few of the older women had pendulous breasts, while the younger ones, and even the middle-aged ones, had high, firm, extremely pointed breasts. When they walked—in short, mincing, peculiarly feminine steps, obviously an attempt to keep their grass skirts properly down—their conical breasts jiggled and their grass skirts undulated, occasionally revealing a portion of buttocks. It puzzled Claire how the women could go about this way, so revealed, and, indeed, how their men could pass them constantly without at least being provoked, if not violating them.
Observing them from afar—they were still too shy, too polite, too correct to come nearer—Claire felt uneasy. Automatically, her hand touched her dress, and for all its thinness, it covered her so completely, just as her brassiere and half-slip and panties covered her, that she felt outlandishly unfeminine. She continued to watch the women of the Sirens, their lustrous raven hair, their tipped bobbing breasts, their seductive hips, their long bare legs, and she was ashamed to be so chastely garmented, like a missionary’s wife.
She began to turn away from all living reproach, determined to resume her unpacking when she heard Marc.
“Well, Claire.”
He came up to the doorway, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead. “What have you been up to?”
“I was emptying suitcases. I took a break for a few minutes. I was watching the—the people.”
“So was I,” Marc said. He stared off toward the center of the compound. “Courtney may be off base in a lot of ways, but he was certainly right about these women.”
“What does that mean?”
“They make the Tahitian girls look like boys. They’re really something. Ten times better than a Miss America contest. I’ve never seen anything like that at home.” Then, observing her face, he added lightly, “Present company excepted.”
She still had a residue of the old resentment, and this became overlaid with a new resentment. She wanted to retaliate in kind, to wound him where he was most vulnerable. “That goes for the men, too,” she said. “Have you ever seen any others so athletic and virile-looking?”
His face darkened, as she knew it would. “What kind of talk is that, anyway?”
“Your kind of talk,” she said, and she pivoted and started inside with her hateful victory.
“Hey, Claire, for God’s sake,” he called after her, contritely, “I was only speaking as an anthropologist.”
“All right,” she said. “You’re forgiven.” But she did not rejoin him.
For a few minutes, blindly, she carried their clothes and toilet articles from the front room to the rear one, until she had simmered down, regained her equilibrium, and was able to push Marc’s insensitivity from her mind. Pausing to rest, she surveyed her quarters. The front room was sizable, at least fifteen by twenty feet, and although warm it was much cooler than outdoors. The cane walls were cozy, and the pandanus mats that covered most of the sanded, gravel floor were springy and soft. There were no large furnishings of any kind, no tables, no chairs, no decorations, but Sam Karpowicz had hung two battery-powered lamps from the ceiling. There was one window facing Maud’s hut, and it was shielded from the sun and heat by a dark-cloth flap that could be fastened.
Earlier, an adolescent native boy, attired in a short loincloth, had brought in two clay bowls of fresh water, and had explained in halting English that one was for drinking, the other for washing. Next, he had delivered a bundle of strong wide leaves, replying to Claire’s question that they were to be used for plates. This room, Claire decided, was supposed to be their living room, dining room, study.
Arms crossed over her chest, Claire walked slowly to the rear, through the opening into a six-foot corridor. Here, a slit in the roof was visible to serve as an outlet for smoke, and beneath it, next to a strip of matting, was the earth oven, a round hole in the ground ready to be filled with hot stones, and huge leaves nearby to cover it. The end of this passage opened into a smaller room, resembling the front room, with but one window. Here, atop the pandanus mats, she had opened their two sleeping bags, but they appeared cumbersome and thick, and if the evenings were as now, she thought that she would sleep on her bag instead of inside it, or even sleep on the native mats themselves, which were several layers thick in this room and probably meant to serve as beds.
Home, sweet home, she thought, and felt adventurous about the primitive hut. Marc had complained instantly, upon entering it, of the crudity and barrenness, and even she had worried briefly at the inevitable discomfort, but now she adored it and wanted nothing else.
She knelt and sorted the clothing, Marc’s in several piles to one side, her own to the other side. Then, tired once more, she fell back from her kneeling position to sit on the mats, legs under her, and extracted the cigarette pack and matches from her dress pocket.