Un Mouchoir Pour

A Trader’s Tale

Mademoiselle

by "Tukapa Koko"

GONE are the days when my heart was young and gay. At four hundred and ten—mentally—one is sober, the bubble of life’s champagne no longer leaps, rainbow-hued, to the lip of the glass. Not that I ever was much of a lad, for all the stuff they write about the purveyors of canned dog, trade calico and what-all, among piles of which I. and my ilk spend our tropical working-hours, and at times no little of our leisure.

I certainly would like to go to one of these islands where life is a long and languorous day-dream, and pulchritudin ous maidens, each a virtuosa on the steel (or Spanish) guitar, drape them selves around every palm. All we seem to get out of being in my own group of islands is a nasal catarrh, incited by the smell of copra and stale fish. Ah, well, you can’t have everything!

There was once, though, a time when I very nearly got to be un diable avec les dames, as they say in gay Papeete. That was when I, a blushing ingenue, dealt out tins of Jellaby’s over the expansive counter of a great inter-island firm, and spent my evenings, in an atmosphere of cloistered monasticism (and Sunday har monium-psalmody), at the only board ing house on the island, run by an old lady whose interest in her paying guests included their souls as well as their stomachs. You don’t find many such in the Central Pacific —the average dossery is fairly masculine, and merits, more often than not, the title of The Blood House.

Not for me such wordly surroundings!

So I was not what you might call equipped to deal with the opportunity for pleasant dalliance that came my way when I later “dossed” in a room down in the Big City, where the Post Office jostles the pictures and the pictures try to crowd cut the big store of the Plonk Islands Commercial Corporation.

One always felt pushed into the sea on that crowded Beach. And there were two motor-cars, that imperilled your life on the road to the inland valley. Now there are about two hundred, and nobody seems to mind.

BUT that romance. It was brief, and it died a-bornin’. She was a luscious armful. They called her Lehua, so she may have been a Hawaiian. She hula-ed, could play the guitar, (and that not one of the “nasal” variety), and, all in all, gave one’s eye no pain to behold. As a mermaid, I fancy she would have had all the wolves in Hollvwood queueing-up. I don’t know what Lehua did for a living, but she never seemed hard-up. and her wardrobe was a box of rainbows.

This answer to a trader’s prayer was in residence not far from my bachelor room, and I saw her often in the Village.

Suffused with rosy blushes, I would sell the beauty her mid-day tin of meat, re quested in mellifluous Spanish, a language with which few in our archipelago mav claim acquaintance, and of which I happened to have a smattering.

Now, I come to recall, Lehua’s dark eyes gave me fair, speechless messages as the can of bulumakau crossed the counter, but —oh, simpleton!—one had not, at that period, got the wave-length in those matters.

When I am really senile, I fancy the thought of what a good time one could have had if one had had it, will unfit me for contemplation of the blessed Here after. Anyhow, slumbering one night, I

awoke in the morning to find a handker chief, of crimson silk, adorning my pillow.

No such article belonged to me; and, one could be quite certain, not to Hapo, who also lived in the house. I do not refer to Harpo of the Marx fraternity, but to a Polynesian youth, my factotum. Only he and I inhabited the domicile. I called the boy; at first with genteel yodel, then vociferously, and finally cholerically. He came on the run, imagining that the Boston Boarder had found a ten-inch poisonous centipede in the bed.

“This ‘wipe,’ he blong you?” I de manded.

“Nossuh,” said the lad.

“Who-b’long, then?” I inquired.

“My no think,” truthfully remarked Hapo. Then, “My think s’mmun he play game with you.”

“11l teach ’em!” said I.

And I consigned the red hanky, which must have cost at least five shillings, to the cook-hut fire, disregarding the pleas and plaints of Hapo, who begged for it.

At noon the next day, came Lehua for her mid-day armored snack. Even in genuous I could see that the social “feng shui,” to use the apt Cathayan term, was a little disbalanced, and I wondered what the dickens was the matter with the bundle of charms who, snatching her tin of bully, departed forthwith, without light conversation, though I heard her say a rude word in Tahiti French as she swept out of the door.

PELIA it was that enlightened me. He being one of my Polynesian helpers, who had the arduous task of stowing the groceries down cellar, a handy burrow withal to have a nice quiet snooze or a smoke.

“Whaffor you no like Missy Lehua?” inquired this simple truth-seeker. “You no see, he like-a you?”

Like a sudden rush of brains to the head, realisation flooded upon me.

Horrors. I had committed the faux-est of Polynesian faux-pas, by incinerating a love-token, the coy suggestion of a Ukulele Lady that, upon some succeeding evening, the handkerchief might be re placed by its owner.

The position did not appear to have immediate remedy. To tell you the truth, midnight romance didn’t then appeal to my aesthetics—it was only a few years since I had resigned from the Boy Scouts. But at last, a solution became clear. At the Store next day, I purchased half-a-dozen of the best “hanks” the Corporation had —mere cambric ones, no where approaching the florid opulence of the demised article—and, when noon approached, and Lehua came as usual for her tin of bully, these went across the counter with the can of Jellaby’s. But my Spanish, in this emergency, deserted me.

“Le mouchoir, Mam’selle,” I stammered in bad Tahiti-French. “Le mouchoir— que j’ai brulee—je vous fais mes apologies . . . oh, dammit! Je prie votre pardon— and ail that.”

I awaited, with trepidation, the storm of Spanish or flood of French that should overwhelm me when my humble repara tion was slung back at the rapprocheur.

“Forget it, Big Boy!” said the Ukulele Lady, with a smile of generous forgive ness.

And left me, pardoned: but there was a certain something lacking—you don’t give a Polynesian charmer the brush-off twice!

When I am five hundred, which will be at the calendar age of fifty-two, this memory of a lost opportunity may haunt me, belike. But opportunity always did knock with a padded fist.