Hawaii - James Michener [511]
"What the hell is this?" the general asked, but then the tall, beautiful girl of seventeen who had been assigned to him, took him gently by the hand and started leading him toward his appointed house.
"My God!" the irreverent major cried. "In Bora Bora they got teeth!" And one of the girls must have known some English, for she laughed happily, and because these islanders were more primitive and ate more fish, their teeth were strong and white, and the major accepted his girl's hand and without even so much as looking at the general, disappeared.
"We can't allow this!” the general protested. "Tell them so." But when Hale explained this decision the headman said, "We are not afraid of white babies. The island likes them." And after a while only Hoxworth Hale stood in the meeting shed, looking at his long-tressed, fifteen-year-old Polynesian guide. She was a year older than his own daughter, not quite so tall, but equally beautiful, and he was a totally confused man, and then she took his hand and said in French, "Monsieur le Colonel, your house is waiting. We had better go.”
She led him along dark-graveled paths beneath breadfruit trees whose wide leaves hid the hot sun. They went along a row of coconut palms bending toward the lagoon as they had done a thousand years before, and in time she came to a small house withdrawn from the others, and here she stopped at the trivial lintel that kept out the wandering pigs and chickens, and said, "This house is mine." She waited until he had entered, and then she joined him and untied a length of sennit that held up the woven door, and when it fell they were alone.
He stood rigid in acute embarrassment, holding onto a bundle of papers, as if he were a schoolboy, and these she took from him and then pushed him backwards slowly, until he sat on a bed with a wooden frame and a woven rope mattress, and he was as frightened as he had ever been in his life. But when she had thrown the papers into a comer she said, "My name is Tehani. And this is the house my father built me when I became fifteen. I plaited the roof of pandanus, but he built the rest."
Hoxworth Hale, then forty-four, was ashamed to be with a girl fifteen, but once when she passed where he was sitting on the bed, her long black hair moved past his face, and he smelled the fragrance of that sweetest of all flowers, the taire Tahiti, and he had never encountered that odor before, and automatically he reached up and caught at her hand, but she was moving rather swiftly, and he missed, but he did catch her right leg above the knee, and he felt her whole body stop at this command, and start to move willingly toward him. He kept hold of her leg and pulled her onto the bed, and she fell back happily and smiled up at him, with the taire flowers about her temples, and he took away the sarong and when she was naked she whispered, "I asked my father for you, for you were quieter than the others."
When the inspecting team convened late that afternoon around an improvised table under the breadfruit trees, by common but unspoken agreement, no one mentioned what had happened, and they proceeded to discuss where the airstrip should be, just as if nothing unusual had occurred, but as night fell and girls appeared with an evening meal, each officer instinctively brought his girl to the table beside him, and there was unprecedented tenderness in the way the older men saw to it that their young companions got a fair division of the food.
They had not finished eating when a group of young men with long hair in their eyes and pareus about their hips, appeared with guitars and drums, and soon the Bora Bora night was filled with echoes. The audience waited until the