Ah Kee Au was the sole communicant at the rail.  No cloth was spread, but the bell announced the mystery of transubstantiation, and all bowed their heads while Ah Kee Au reverently offered his communion to the welfare of Napoleon, his grandson who had accidentally shot himself.

The service over, the people poured from the church into the brilliant sunshine of the road, and Ah Kee Au said to me, “You savee thlat communio’ blead b’long my place.  My son makee for pliest.”  Lam Kai Oo, pressing forward, offered the communicant a draught of fiery rum he had obtained by the governor’s permission.  He had been told that to give a glass of water to a communicant, who must of course have fasted and abstained from any liquid since midnight according to the law of the Church, was a holy act which brought the giver a blessing, and so the subtle Chinese thought to make his blessing greater by offering a drink better than water.

Ah Kee Au drank with fervor.  “My makee holee thliss morn’,” he said gladly.  “Makee Napoleon more happy.”  Sincerity is not a matter of broken English or a drink of rum; the poor old grandfather of the Little Corporal’s namesake believed earnestly that Napoleon would improve by his sacramental offering.  He, like most Marquesans, took the white man’s religion with little understanding.  It is new magic to them, a comfort, an occupation, and an entertainment.  But who knows the human heart, or understands the soul?

That afternoon while Neo and I lay on my paepae awaiting the favoring wind which should carry him back to his own isle, my neighbors gathered from far and near to lounge the sunny hours away in conversation.  Squatted on the mats, they engaged in serious discussion of the puzzles of religion, appealing to me often to settle vexing questions which they had long wearied of asking their better-informed instructors in religious mysteries.

Their native tongue has no word for religion.  Bishop Dordillon had been obliged to translate it, “Te mea e hakatika me te mea e hana mea koaha toitoi i te Etua” which might be rendered, “Belief in the works and love of a just God.”  Etua, often spelled Atua, was the name of divinity among all Maori peoples, but religion was so associated with natural things, the phenomena of nature, of living things, and of the heavens and sea, that it was part of daily life and needed no word to distinguish it.

Never were people less able to comprehend the creeds and formulas in which the religious beliefs of the white men are clothed.  Marquesans are not deep thinkers.  In fact, they have a word, tahoa, which means, “a headache from thinking.”  Ten years of ardent and nobly self-sacrificing work by missionaries left the islands still without a single soul converted.  It was not until the chiefs began to set the seal of their approval on the new outlandish faiths that the people flocked to the standard of the cross.  And when they did begin to meditate the doctrines preached to them as necessary beliefs in order to win salvation, their heads ached indeed.