Shoes And Ships

And Motor Cars

Old Habits Pass in Tahiti

From Our Own Correspondent

Papeete, Nov. 3.

FROM the time of Taaroa—Father of gods and men, and from whom many of the high chiefs of the islands claim descent—the Polynesians • have trod the earth unshod.

Formed in the image of the gods of Olympus the men, proud of the perfec tion of their bodies, walked like patri cians. The women carried themselves with grace and dignity. And so they con tinued until high-heeled shoes and motor cars came into fashion.

There were, indeed, shoes, when we came to the islands many years ago; but only for wear at church on the Sabbath.

These shoes were fitted with low heels, were of ample proportions and were not designed as instruments of torture.

In any case they were worn only while going to church and during the period of the service. On emerging from the meeting house the men were accustomed to take off their shoes at the church steps, tie them together by their laces and walk home after the manner of their ancestors. The women usually wait ed until they came to the bridge at the Pa—where there is a low parapet—be fore divesting themselves of their foot wear and continuing thence, with great sighs of relief, to their several abodes.

Presently, came a change. We began to remark on the faces of our women folk an expression of agonised tension, of desperate endurance. The smooth graceful gait had given place to a hobble.

The long, flowing draperies of women’s apparel, of those days, concealed from our eyes the cause of this transforma tion.

Imagining all manner of reasons we inquired of a young woman who, when we met her on a highway of Papeete, seemed to have descended to the very nadir of despair and desolation; “What in the world has happened?”

She replied: “My feet hurt”, and, lift ing the hem of her garment, she revealed a pair of high-heeled, narrow, pointed Paris shoes.

That was the beginning of the end.

Fashion had come in, and with her advent departed forever the age-long grace of our Polynesian women.

Then came the internal combustion en gine and the motor car.

Men. whose ancestors since time be gan had battled the sea with sail and paddle, now sit supinely amid the thun ders of exploding petrol, as their craft skims over the waters. Persons who once walked kilometres every day with ease and enjoyment now anchor themselves in motor cars, stagger unwillingly from their vehicles to the interior of shops, and lean languidly on counters while they choose their wares.

Many people of the districts of Tahiti pass, apparently, their waking hours aboard motor trucks which shuttle back and forth daily between Papeete and the most remote settlements.

Packed tightly on benches, their feet resting on a carpet of trussed pigs and curtained from the fervid rays of the tropic sun by fringes of strung fish hung along the sides of the canopy, they are wafted to Papeete in the morning and returned again to their districts in the afternoon.

Reliable witnesses affirm that no Poly nesian of this day and generation, who possesses the means to travel by car or truck, will walk one hundred yards dur ing the period of a month.

Perhaps that inexorable law of Nature, which atrophies those members of a liv ing body long neglected by disuse, will one day exact its penalties from man kind—of this and Other countries—by reducing the nether limbs to flapping ap pendages of cartilaginous tissue.