But what is a Kanaka queen? After all, Signet,
my dear sir, down there, what is one queen, out here?"
The trader was obviously in a good humor. He had not been excited for
years. The man was alive. I've said he was like a Spaniard in that he
could be diabolical without getting red in the face. Diabolically
devious and strategic! Before he resumed he blew three mouthfuls of
cigar smoke out into the moonlight, where they burst from the shadow
under the roof like mute cannon shots, round and silvery. Beneath them,
from the step, Signet's eyes were fixed upon the trader's face, dry,
rapt, glazed with some imperious preoccupation.
"But they tell me this woman has danced in a great many islands. She
will go from here to another island to dance. The three men are her
husbands. But she is no wife. A maid, that woman! They have the
hardihood to tell me that. Ha-ha-ha! But, then, she is daughter to a
queen. With those 'husbands' she crosses a hundred leagues of sea in her
sailing canoe. That royal canoe! To dance at another island.--"
As the Dutchman talked, blowing his smoke bursts into the moonlight, the
vision of that Marquesan woman came again before me. I perceived her,
under the heavy procession of his words, a figure of astounding romance,
an adventuress incomparable, a Polynesian bacchante.
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