"Malamalama," said Salesa, "divorce me and let me go, and take thy choice of all the maids of Uvea in my stead. Professor No No loves me not, but I am his bondslave in love, and care for no other man but him."
Now this was very good advice, and the chief would have done well to follow it. But there is in men a pride about their women that blinds their eyes to sense, and Malamalama, instead of heeding, grew, on the contrary, morose and willful. He listened more greedily than ever to Billy Hindoo, and to the tales the nigger brought him constantly of Salesa's misdoing; for Billy Hindoo was crazed with anger against his master, and against the woman who had so successfully supplanted him, and was eager to revenge himself on both. And one day he brought not only a new tale, but a bottle of gin he had managed to pilfer from the camp of Professor No No.
Malamalama began to drink the gin, and the more he drank the more he began to feel the aching of his spirit. He stopped the passers-by and told them of his wrongs; he rolled over in the road, so that he was all dirty, calling out curses on his wife and Professor No No. He cried and cried, and staggered about and shouted, and rushed hither and thither, exclaiming, "I will kill them! I will kill them!" And all the while he drank of the gin with an increasing fury, so that he went at last and got his rifle and four boxes of cartridges and walked unsteadily toward the lagoon, weeping and laughing and beating the air with his loaded gun. And I, then only a little child, followed him at a distance, wondering and mocking with the others.
Now on this occasion it happened that Salesa was away in the boat, and Professor No No, all alone, was sitting at his table and looking at dead fish through bits of glass. Malamalama stopped at the taboo line, not daring to cross it, and withheld, besides, by the notice on the tree; and he was so tipsy with the gin that he could barely shout, nor hold the gun up to his shoulder. But he fired, as straight as he could, in the direction of Professor No No, and shattered a glass barrel of dead fish at his elbow. Professor No No leaped in the air, so that at first we thought, erroneously, that he had been hurt; and he ran this way and that, dodging the bullets from Malamalama's gun. He seemed to believe that the taboo gave him protection, for, instead of bolting into the undergrowth, he raced around and around in a circle, and then inside this tent and that, so that it was laughable to watch him popping in and out like a terrified rat. And Malamalama, so overcome with gin that he could barely see, fired and fired and fired from the four boxes of his cartridges. Then, when all was finished, he rose and went home, while the children crowded the line and shouted, "Professor No No, art thou dead?"