“Eh bien,” Count Polonsky said, with a smile of the man of superior knowledge, “he is the greatest painter of this period, and his pictures are bringing high prices now, and will bring the highest pretty soon.  I have bought every one I could to hold for a raise.”

Polonsky was a study in sheeny hues.  He was twenty-seven, his black and naturally curled hair was very thin, there were eight or nine teeth that answered no call from his meat, and he wore in his right eyesocket a round glass, with no rim or string, held by a puckering of cheek and brow, giving him a quizzical, stage-like stare, and twisting his nose into a ripple of tiny wrinkles.  He weighed, say, one hundred pounds or less, was bent, but with a fresh complexion and active step.  I saw him rise naked from his cot one morning, and the first thing he put on was the rimless monocle.  The natives, who name every one, called him “Matatitiahoe,” “the one-windowed man.”  He had journeyed about the world, poked into some queer places, and in Japan had himself tattooed.  On his narrow chest he had a terrible legendary god of Nippon, and on his arms a cock and a skeleton, the latter with a fan and a lantern.  On his belly was limned a nude woman.  He had certain other decorations the fame of which had been bruited wide so that a keen curiosity existed to see them, and they were discussed in whispers by white femininity and with many “Aucs!” of astonishment by the brown.  They were Pompeiian friezes in their unconventionality of subject and treatment.

Llewellyn, McHenry, David, and I accompanied the count to his residence on the outskirts of Papeete to taste a vintage of Burgundy he had sent him from Beaune.  Like most modern houses in Tahiti, his was solely utilitarian, and was built by a former American consul.  It exactly ministered to the comforts of a demanding European exquisite.  The house was framed in wide verandas, and was in a magnificent grove of cocoanut-trees affording beauty and shade, with extensive fields of sugar-cane on the other side of the road, and a glimpse of the beach and lagoon a little distance away.  A singing brook ran past the door.  The bedrooms were large and open to every breeze, and the tables for dining and amusement mostly set upon the verandas.

Polonsky’s toilet-table was covered with gold boxes and bottles and brushes; scents and powders and pastes.  If he moved out, Gaby de Lys might have moved in and lacked nothing.  He was a boulevardier, his clothes from Paris, conforming not at all to the sartorial customs of Tahiti, and his varnished boots and alpine hat, with his saffron automobile, marked him as a person.  In that he resembled Higby, an Englishman in Papeete, who wore the evening dress of London whenever a steamship came in, though it might be noon, and on the king’s birthday and other British feasts put it on when he awoke.  He was the only man who went to dinner at the Tiare in the funeral garb of society.  He said he was setting up a proper standard in Tahiti.  It was suspected really that he was short of clothes, with perhaps only one or two cotton suits, and that when those were soiled he had to resort to full dress during the laundering.