nd romances, condemned to suffer
in silence the humor and contempt of all about him, though he felt
himself better than they in body and in the understanding of things,
which he could not make them know. This repression made him often
like a wild beast, though mostly he was half-clown and half-infant
in his conduct. He had a gift of mimicry incomparably finer than any
professional's I knew of. This, with his gestures, stood him instead
of speech. A certain haughty English woman whose elaborate hats in an
island where women were hatless, or wore simple, native weaves, were
noted atrocities, and whose chin was almost nil, kept the carriage and
me waiting for breakfast while she primped in her lodging. The Dummy
uttered one of his abortive sounds, much like that of an angry puma,
contorted his face, and put his hand above his head, so that I had
a very vivid suggestion of the lady, her sloping chin and her hat,
at which all Papeete laughed. Vava's gesticulations and grimaces
were unerring cartoons without paper or ink. If one could have seen
him draw one-self, one's pride would have tumbled. He saw the most
ridiculous aspect of one. His indication of Lovaina's figure made one
shriek, and the governor would have sentenced him for lese-majesty
had he seen himself taken off. The sounds he made in which he greeted
any one he liked, or in anger, were terrible, dismaying. They; must
have been those made by our ancestors, the first primates, when they
began the struggle toward intelligent language. Vava's sounds were as
the muttering of an ape, deep in his throat, or, when he was roused,
high and shrill, like the cry of a rabbit when the hound seizes it. He
could make Lovaina know anything he wanted to, and she could direct
him to do anything she wished. In that house of mirth, brightness,
and laughter, he was as a cunning and, at times, hateful jester,
feared by the Tahitians, and, indeed, to whites a shadowy skeleton
at the feast, a thing of indescribable possibilities. I knew him,
he liked me, and I drew from him by motions and expressions some
measure of his feelings and sufferings. But I, too, occasionally,
shuddered at the animal cries and frightful grimaces wrung from him
in beating down his soul bent on murder.

Lovaina was a spendthrift, giving money liberally to relatives,
lending it to improvident borrowers, and dispensing it with open hands
when she had it, though always herself in debt. Yet she liked to make
money,