12 MYSTIC ISLES 



On the other hand, Halknan more nearly stated the 

 general feeling: 



"By God, he spoiled sport, that black ghost on deck. 

 He was like a tupapau, a Polynesian demon." 



Hallman was in his early forties, with twenty years 

 of South-Seas trading, a tall, strong, well-featured, but 

 hard-faced, European, with thin lips over nearly perfect 

 teeth, and cold, small, pale-blue eyes. He talked little 

 to men, but isolated young women whenever possible, 

 and bent over them in attempted gay, but earnest, con- 

 verse. He was one of those cold sensualists whose pas- 

 sion is as that of some animals, insistent, prowling, 

 fierce, but impersonal. An English South-Sea trader 

 aboard gave me an astonishing light upon him: 



"Some dozen years ago," he said, "I made a visit of 

 a few weeks to the Marquesas Islands. Hallman had 

 kept a store there then for more than ten years, and had 

 a good part of the business of buying and shipping 

 copra and selling supplies to the natives and a few 

 whites. He lived in a shack back of his little store, with 

 his native woman and four or five half -naked children. 

 They told me queer stories about his madness for 

 women. They said he would go out of his house and 

 into the jungle near the trails and would lie in wait. 

 If a woman he coveted passed, he would seize her, and 

 even if her husband or consort was ahead of her, in the 

 custom of these people, he would grab her feet, and 

 make her call out that she was delaying a minute, that 

 her companion was to go along, and she would catch 

 up in a minute. He had some funny power over those 

 women. Anyhow, that 's the story they told me in those 

 cannibal islands. And yet, you know, there 's something 



