Читать книгу In the Strange South Seas - Beatrice Grimshaw - Страница 11

Then we take out purses, and want to pay Ganymede; but he will not be paid, until it becomes plain to him that the greatest politeness lies in yielding. He takes our franc, and disappears among the trees, to return no more. But in a minute, out from the bush comes running the oddest little figure, a very old, grey-bearded man, very gaily dressed in a green shirt and a lilac pareo, and laden very heavily with ripe pineapples. We guess him to be Ganymede’s father, and see that our guess was right, when he drops the whole heap of fruit upon the ground at our feet, smiling and bowing and murmuring incomprehensively over it, and then begins to vanish like his son.

“Here—stop!” calls my companion. “We don’t want to take your fruit without buying it. Come back, please, come back!”

The little old-gentleman trots back on his thin bare legs, recalled more by the tone than the words, which he obviously does not understand, and takes a hand of each of us in his own brown fingers. He shakes hands with us gently and firmly, shaking his head negatively at the same time, and then, like the romantic youths of Early Victorian novels, “turns, and is immediately lost to view in the surrounding forest,” carrying the honours of war, indubitably, with himself.

“Well, they are real generous!” declares my American companion, as we go back to the tomb. “By the way, Miss G————, I guess you’d better not sit down on that grass to wait for the rest. I wouldn’t, if I was you.”

“Why not? it’s as dry as dust.”

“Because the natives say it’s somehow or other—they didn’t, explain how—infected with leprosy, and I guess they ought to know; there’s plenty of it all over the Pacific—— I rather thought that would hit you where you lived.”

It did. I got up as quickly as a grasshopper in a hurry. Afterwards, on a leper island thousands of miles away from Tahiti—— But that belongs to another place.

L————, the ever-amiable, our half-caste landlady at the little bungalow hotel, all overgrown with bougainvillea and stephanotis, was grieved because we had seen nothing in the way of “sights,” and declared her intention of giving a native dinner for us.