Chapter IX
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Tau immediately bade his men bring out his canoes, while the two jesters, fearing the consequences of their act, especially to themselves, escaped to Papenoo. Tau’s wife, Taia, noticing the preparations, asked her husband where he was going, and he merely replied, “I go to visit your brother.” Very little time was needed for expeditions of this sort in the South Seas, unless some ceremony was to be performed or resistance was expected. A few hours would be enough for the insult, the passion, and the revenge. Tau started immediately, and his men soon paddled his canoes round the point at Matavai and abreast of the village of Papenoo, where they stopped and hailed, with the cry that it was Tauaitaata of Pare. The people of Papenoo gathered on the beach to receive him, but were surprised to find that no one came ashore. The Arii himself, Vanaamaiterai, then hailed the canoes and asked, “Why does not Tauaitaata land?” The reply came that the sea was, for the moment, too rough. Then Vanaa, in the courtesy of the chiefly relation, did what Tau intended him to do, he swam out, and on swimming alongside Tau’s canoe he was quietly and instantly clubbed on the head and his body drawn into the canoe without betraying to the people on the shore a sign of what was happening. They were only somewhat surprised to see that after their chief had got aboard, alone, the canoes turned and paddled back toward Pare with Vanaa, but without a single attendant.
On arriving at Pare, Tau had the body of Vanaa carried to the Marae of Raianaunau, and without going to his house, followed the body to the Marae where the feast was already prepared. Of course Tau meant that the murder should be kept a secret from his wife until he should be ready to deal with her; but when the drums of the feast began beating for the dead, Taia, hearing them and not hearing of her husband’s return, asked: “Why are the drums of Raianaunau beaten?” Her women answered that the Arii must have arrived; but she knew the tones of the pahu too well to be deceived. She listened again, and cried: “That is not for an Arii’s arrival; it is for an Arii dead! Who is dead ? Not Tau, for I should have been told! Why am I not told?” She sent one of her women to ask, but the woman came back without
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© Derived from the revised Paris edition of 1901 page 79, 2004
Published by kind permission of the Library
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