er he went over and, striking it again,
thinks he has reached the ground. He lets go, and smashes on the
rocks his crafty foe has piled below.

CHAPTER XIV

Visit of Le Moine; the story of Paul Gauguin; his house, and a
search for his grave beneath the white cross of Calvary.

I rose one morning from my Golden Bed to find a stranger quietly
smoking a cigarette on my _paepae_. Against the jungle background he
was a strangely incongruous figure; a Frenchman, small, thin,
meticulously neat in garments of faded blue denim and shining high
boots. His blue eyes twinkled above a carefully trimmed beard, and
as he rose to meet me, I observed that the fingers on the cigarette
were long, slender, and nervous.

This was Monsieur Charles le Moine, the painter from Vait-hua, whose
studio I had invaded in his absence from that delightful isle. We
sat long over breakfast coffee and cigarettes, I, charmed by his
conversation, he, eager to hear news of the world he had forsaken.
He had studied in Paris, been governor of the Gambier Islands, and
at last had made his final home among the palms and orchids of these
forgotten isles. His life had narrowed to his canvases, on which he
sought to interpret Marquesan atmosphere and character, its beauty
and savage lure.

I said to him that it was a pity many great painters did not come
here to put on canvas the fading glamor and charm of the Marquesas.

"Our craft is too poor," he replied with a sigh. "A society built on
money does not give its artists and singers the freedom they had in
the old days in these islands, my friend. We are bound to a wheel
that turns relentlessly. Who can come from France and live here
without money? Me, I must work as gendarme and school-teacher to be
able to paint even here. One great painter did live in this valley,
and died here--Paul Gauguin. He was a master, my friend!"

"Paul Gauguin lived here?" I exclaimed. I had known, of course, that
the great modernist had died in the Marquesas, but I had never heard
in which valley, and no one in Atuona had spoken of him. In Florence
I had met an artist who possessed two glass doors taken from Madame
Charbonnier's house and said to have been painted by Gauguin in
payment for rent. I had been in Paris when all artistic France was
shuddering or going into ecstacies over Gauguin's blazing tropic work,
when his massive, crude figures done in violent tones, filled with
sinister power, had been the conversati