McHenry, Llewellyn, David, and Lying Bill, were at this season bent on
pleasure. Landers, the head of a considerable business in Australasia,
with a Papeete branch, had time heavy on his hands. Lying Bill and
McHenry were seamen-traders ashore until their schooner sailed for
another swing about the French groups of islands. Llewellyn and David
were associates in planting, curing, and shipping vanilla-beans,
but were roisterers at heart, and ever ready to desert their office
and warehouse for feasting or gaming. Polonsky was a speculator
in exchange and an investor in lands, and was reputed to be very
rich. He, too, would leave his strong box unlocked in his hurry if
cards or wassail called. These same white men were sib to all their
fellows in the South Seas except a few sour men whom avarice, satiety,
or a broken constitution made fearful of the future and thus heedful
of the decalogue.

These merry men attended to business affairs for a few hours of
mornings, unless the night before had been devoted too arduously to
Bacchus, and the remainder of the day they surrendered to clinking
glasses, converse, Rabelasian tales, and flirting with the gay
Tahitian women in the cinemas or at dances. There was a tolerance,
almost a standard, of such actions among the men of Tahiti, though
of course consuls, high officials, a banker or two of the Banque de
l'Indo-Chine, and a few lawyers or speculators sacrificed their flesh
to their ambitions or hid their peccadillos.

A chorus of wives and widows--there were no old maids in
Tahiti--condemned scathingly the conduct of the voluptuaries, and the
preachers of the gospel lashed them in conversation or sermon now and
then. But on the whole there was not in Tahiti any of the spirit of
American towns and villages, which wrote scarlet letters, ostracized