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_ I lived at the Hotel de la Fleur, and Mrs. Johnson, the
proprietress, had a sad story to tell of lost opportunity.
After Strickland's death certain of his effects were sold by
auction in the market-place at Papeete, and she went to it
herself because there was among the truck an American stove
she wanted. She paid twenty-seven francs for it.
"There were a dozen pictures," she told me, "but they were
unframed, and nobody wanted them. Some of them sold for as
much as ten francs, but mostly they went for five or six.
Just think, if I had bought them I should be a rich woman now."
But Tiare Johnson would never under any circumstances have
been rich. She could not keep money. The daughter of a
native and an English sea-captain settled in Tahiti, when I
knew her she was a woman of fifty, who looked older, and of
enormous proportions. Tall and extremely stout, she would
have been of imposing presence if the great good-nature of her
face had not made it impossible for her to express anything
but kindliness. Her arms were like legs of mutton, her
breasts like giant cabbages; her face, broad and fleshy, gave
you an impression of almost indecent nakedness, and vast chin
succeeded to vast chin. I do not know how many of them there were.
They fell away voluminously into the capaciousness of her bosom.
She was dressed usually in a pink Mother Hubbard,
and she wore all day long a large straw hat. But when she let
down her hair, which she did now and then, for she was vain of
it, you saw that it was long and dark and curly; and her eyes
had remained young and vivacious. Her laughter was the most
catching I ever heard; it would begin, a low peal in her throat,
and would grow louder and louder till her whole vast
body shook. She loved three things -- a joke, a glass of
wine, and a handsome man. To have known her is a privilege.
She was the best cook on the island, and she adored good food.
From morning till night you saw her sitting on a low chair in
the kitchen, surrounded by a Chinese cook and two or three
native girls, giving her orders, chatting sociably with all
and sundry, and tasting the savoury messes she devised. When
she wished to do honour to a friend she cooked the dinner with
her own hands. Hospitality was a passion with her, and there
was no one on the island who need go without a dinner when
there was anything to eat at the Hotel de la Fleur. She never
turned her customers out of her house because they did not pay
their bills. She always hoped they would pay when they could.
There was one man there who had fallen on adversity, and to
him she had given board and lodging for several months.
When the Chinese laundryman refused to wash for him without
payment she had sent his things to be washed with hers. She could
not allow the poor fellow to go about in a dirty shirt, she said,
and since he was a man, and men must smoke, she gave him a
franc a day for cigarettes. She used him with the same
affability as those of her clients who paid their bills once a week.
Age and obesity had made her inapt for love, but she took a
keen interest in the amatory affairs of the young. She looked
upon venery as the natural occupation for men and women, and
was ever ready with precept and example from her own wide experience.
"I was not fifteen when my father found that I had a lover,"
she said. "He was third mate on the Tropic Bird.
A good-looking boy."
She sighed a little. They say a woman always remembers her
first lover with affection; but perhaps she does not always
remember him.
"My father was a sensible man."
"What did he do?" I asked.
"He thrashed me within an inch of my life, and then he made me
marry Captain Johnson. I did not mind. He was older,
of course, but he was good-looking too."
Tiare -- her father had called her by the name of the white,
scented flower which, they tell you, if you have once smelt,
will always draw you back to Tahiti in the end, however far
you may have roamed -- Tiare remembered Strickland very well.
"He used to come here sometimes, and I used to see him walking
about Papeete. I was sorry for him, he was so thin, and he
never had any money. When I heard he was in town, I used to
send a boy to find him and make him come to dinner with me.
I got him a job once or twice, but he couldn't stick to
anything. After a little while he wanted to get back to the
bush, and one morning he would be gone."
Strickland reached Tahiti about six months after he left
Marseilles. He worked his passage on a sailing vessel that
was making the trip from Auckland to San Francisco, and he
arrived with a box of paints, an easel, and a dozen canvases.
He had a few pounds in his pocket, for he had found work in
Sydney, and he took a small room in a native house outside the town.
I think the moment he reached Tahiti he felt himself at home.
Tiare told me that he said to her once:
"I'd been scrubbing the deck, and all at once a chap said to me:
`Why, there it is.' And I looked up and I saw the outline
of the island. I knew right away that there was the place I'd
been looking for all my life. Then we came near, and I seemed
to recognise it. Sometimes when I walk about it all seems familiar.
I could swear I've lived here before."
"Sometimes it takes them like that," said Tiare. "I've known
men come on shore for a few hours while their ship was taking
in cargo, and never go back. And I've known men who came here
to be in an office for a year, and they cursed the place, and
when they went away they took their dying oath they'd hang
themselves before they came back again, and in six months
you'd see them land once more, and they'd tell you they
couldn't live anywhere else." _
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