Love Is Blind

Trade's Tale:

By “Tukapa Koko”

rEY buried Porie-Porie yesterday. I attended her simple laying-away.

Gone; and, in accord with the stern philosophy of local native life, best forgotten, for the sake of those who, havfria fn qfriifrfyip fnr a hard livine nrefer not to thtak of the dead , . , . . c . TQC I shall not forget Pone-Pone. She was the greatest self-sacrmcer i ever Knew, You don’t know Kata the Leper. All the better for you; he is an unlovely sight in our village! Noseless, without lips or eyelids, Kata looks like a fiend out of Dante’s Inferno. Yet he is a hard-working quiet native; and, more, no leper at all His tace was ruined by yaw !i .? r f at r e “L i h sy,? saved that terrible disfigurement—but Kata’s childhood was in pre-hospital days. So he goes through life without a face, and strangers shudder when they see him. But he had his hour.

I remember Porie-Porie as a pretty native girl, when I first came to live upon the isle. She was of part-Italian blood. Pietro Giacomini, that knifeartist, who with old Agostini, the Corsican, terrorised our village in the ’seventies, was Porie-Porie’s grandfathers Joe left no issue. Pietro did. A strain of Southern European blood adds beauty to the Polynesian girl, Kata the Leper, misnamed, has two children now They are very fair; and whole andTound as the island’s best. A compensation, perhaps. Thus is the Giacomini strain continued. „

WHEN Porie-Porie married Ruko, in 1928, it “looked all right.” They had the usual “akaipoipo,” that public setting-up-in-housekeeping of every young village couple, in which all the neighbours partake. Later, Ruko went to Rarotonga. He stayed there— and married another woman.

Later came a new protector, Maro the Manihikian. Desecrating an old marae, on which he planted kumaras, Maro in curred the vengeance of the old gods.

Maro died, in agony, of no known cause.

I met Porie-Porie in the taro fields, weeping. Her world had dissolved again.

Porie-Porie worked, weeded, and planted, fished, and wove mats. She worked in all weathers, all day, all the week save Sunday. Church was both holiday and tavern, to her.

A few more years went by, in the rhythm of the island. Por 3rty, from Sep tember to April. Money in the orange season. A leaky and comfortless hut, devoid of all plenishings, was Porie- Porie’s home.

The hurricane of 1941 blew the hut down. Kata the faceless it was who built her a new one . . . and, later, aided the struggler to weed her plantation.

So once more, a protector. But work, still, in rain, in cold, in blazing summer.

The birth of two children was the only respite ... a pause.

Porie-Porie was unwell when this year’s orange season began. But she worked hard —at picking, packing, and driving pack-horses, each laden with two cases, to the beach, as she had always done.

After the ship went, just before the “pay-out” that brought joy to the poor, I was called to the hut. Porie-Porie lay on her sleeping-mat. A village deacon knelt praying at her side. An aged native

woman—her mother—was holding Porie- Porie’s jaw, to prevent the nerveless mouth opening in an unsightly gape.

Tears cascaded down the old mother’s leathery cheeks. When daughter dies be fore mother, it is tragedy! And nothing, too, in which to dress Porie-Porie for her funeral —nothing but “veru-veru” — old rags.

That, we could not allow. My wife supplied fitting raiment. Porie-Porie went to the grave a European lady, and her last day was her best.

Kata is mateless now. But the Giacomini strain goes on in the tribe.

The battered and ruined face expresses nothing but resignation. The “leper” has had his hour; and it has passed.

Mr. L. A. Westcott, of Brisbane, has been appointed a director of, and mining consultant to, Cuthbert’s Misima Gold mine, Ltd. He is a former general mana ger of Mount Morgan, Ltd.

Major L. W. (“Bill”) Heinicke re ceived his discharge in Sydney last month, after six years’ service in the Middle East, and with ANGAU in New Guinea. He was very well known as a Burns Philp and Carpenter employee in New Guinea before the war; he was awarded the British Empire Medal for distinguished service during the Rabaul eruption in 1937; and he was in charge of the first draft of New Guinea volun teers for the AIF in late 1939. His specialty is shipping—he was second in command of the 3rd Australian Port Operating Group in New Guinea. He hopes to return to the Territory, when opportunity presents itself and Mr.

Ward permits.