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Island Tales / On the Makaloa Mat

by Jack London · English · Gutenberg #2152 · 328,383 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Island Tales / On the Makaloa Mat

Author: Jack London


        
Release date: April 1, 2000 [eBook #2152]
                Most recently updated: September 27, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2152

Credits: David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ISLAND TALES / ON THE MAKALOA MAT ***

                          [Picture: Book cover]





                            ON THE MAKALOA MAT


                                    BY
                               JACK LONDON

                                * * * * *

                          MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
                             49 RUPERT STREET
                               LONDON, W.1

                                * * * * *

                             _Published 1920_

                                * * * * *

       _Copyright in the United States of America by_ JACK LONDON.




CONTENTS

                                         PAGE
      I.  ON THE MAKALOA MAT               11
     II.  THE BONES OF KAHEKILI            52
    III.  WHEN ALICE TOLD HER SOUL         90
     IV.  SHIN-BONES                      119
      V.  THE WATER BABY                  158
     VI.  THE TEARS OF AH KIM             176
    VII.  THE KANAKA SURF                 202




ON THE MAKALOA MAT


UNLIKE the women of most warm races, those of Hawaii age well and nobly.
With no pretence of make-up or cunning concealment of time’s inroads, the
woman who sat under the hau tree might have been permitted as much as
fifty years by a judge competent anywhere over the world save in Hawaii.
Yet her children and her grandchildren, and Roscoe Scandwell who had been
her husband for forty years, knew that she was sixty-four and would be
sixty-five come the next twenty-second day of June.  But she did not look
it, despite the fact that she thrust reading glasses on her nose as she
read her magazine and took them off when her gaze desired to wander in
the direction of the half-dozen children playing on the lawn.

It was a noble situation—noble as the ancient hau tree, the size of a
house, where she sat as if in a house, so spaciously and comfortably
house-like was its shade furnished; noble as the lawn that stretched away
landward its plush of green at an appraisement of two hundred dollars a
front foot to a bungalow equally dignified, noble, and costly.  Seaward,
glimpsed through a fringe of hundred-foot coconut palms, was the ocean;
beyond the reef a dark blue that grew indigo blue to the horizon, within
the reef all the silken gamut of jade and emerald and tourmaline.

And this was but one house of the half-dozen houses belonging to Martha
Scandwell.  Her town-house, a few miles away in Honolulu, on Nuuanu Drive
between the first and second “showers,” was a palace.  Hosts of guests
had known the comfort and joy of her mountain house on Tantalus, and of
her volcano house, her _mauka_ house, and her _makai_ house on the big
island of Hawaii.  Yet this Waikiki house stressed no less than the rest
in beauty, in dignity, and in expensiveness of upkeep.  Two Japanese
yard-boys were trimming hibiscus, a third was engaged expertly with the
long hedge of night-blooming cereus that was shortly expectant of
unfolding in its mysterious night-bloom.  In immaculate ducks, a house
Japanese brought out the tea-things, followed by a Japanese maid, pretty
as a butterfly in the distinctive garb of her race, and fluttery as a
butterfly to attend on her mistress.  Another Japanese maid, an array of
Turkish towels on her arm, crossed the lawn well to the right in the
direction of the bath-houses, from which the children, in swimming suits,
were beginning to emerge.  Beyond, under the palms at the edge of the
sea, two Chinese nursemaids, in their pretty native costume of white
_yee-shon_ and-straight-lined trousers, their black braids of hair down
their backs, attended each on a baby in a perambulator.

And all these, servants, and nurses, and grandchildren, were Martha
Scandwell’s.  So likewise was the colour of the skin of the
grandchildren—the unmistakable Hawaiian colour, tinted beyond shadow of
mistake by exposure to the Hawaiian sun.  One-eighth and one-sixteenth
Hawaiian were they, which meant that seven-eighths or fifteen-sixteenths
white blood informed that skin yet failed to obliterate the modicum of
golden tawny brown of Polynesia.  But in this, again, only a trained
observer would have known that the frolicking children were aught but
pure-blooded white.  Roscoe Scandwell, grandfather, was pure white;
Martha three-quarters white; the many sons and daughters of them
seven-eighths white; the grandchildren graded up to fifteen-sixteenths
white, or, in the cases when their seven-eighths fathers and mothers had
married seven-eighths, themselves fourteen-sixteenths or seven-eighths
white.  On both sides the stock was good, Roscoe straight descended from
the New England Puritans, Martha no less straight descended from the
royal chief-stocks of Hawaii whose genealogies were chanted in _meles_ a
thousand years before written speech was acquired.

In the distance a machine stopped and deposited a woman whose utmost
years might have been guessed as sixty, who walked across the lawn as
lightly as a well-cared-for woman of forty, and whose actual calendar age
was sixty-eight.  Martha rose from her seat to greet her, in the hearty
Hawaiian way, arms about, lips on lips, faces eloquent and bodies no less
eloquent with sincereness and frank excessiveness of emotion.  And it was
“Sister Bella,” and “Sister Martha,” back and forth, intermingled with
almost incoherent inquiries about each other, and about Uncle This and
Brother That and Aunt Some One Else, until, the first tremulousness of
meeting over, eyes moist with tenderness of love, they sat gazing at each
other across their teacups.  Apparently, they had not seen nor embraced
for years.  In truth, two months marked the interval of their separation.
And one was sixty-four, the other sixty-eight.  But the thorough
comprehension resided in the fact that in each of them one-fourth of them
was the sun-warm, love-warm heart of Hawaii.

The children flooded about Aunt Bella like a rising tide and were
capaciously hugged and kissed ere they departed with their nurses to the
swimming beach.

“I thought I’d run out to the beach for several days—the trades had
stopped blowing,” Martha explained.

“You’ve been here two weeks already,” Bella smiled fondly at her younger
sister.  “Brother Edward told me.  He met me at the steamer and insisted
on running me out first of all to see Louise and Dorothy and that first
grandchild of his.  He’s as mad as a silly hatter about it.”

“Mercy!” Martha exclaimed.  “Two weeks!  I had not thought it that long.”

“Where’s Annie?—and Margaret?” Bella asked.

Martha shrugged her voluminous shoulders with voluminous and forgiving
affection for her wayward, matronly daughters who left their children in
her care for the afternoon.

“Margaret’s at a meeting of the Out-door Circle—they’re planning the
planting of trees and hibiscus all along both sides of Kalakaua Avenue,”
she said.  “And Annie’s wearing out eighty dollars’ worth of tyres to
collect seventy-five dollars for the British Red Cross—this is their tag
day, you know.”

“Roscoe must be very proud,” Bella said, and observed the bright glow of
pride that appeared in her sister’s eyes.  “I got the news in San
Francisco of Ho-o-la-a’s first dividend.  Remember when I put a thousand
in it at seventy-five cents for poor Abbie’s children, and said I’d sell
when it went to ten dollars?”

“And everybody laughed at you, and at anybody who bought a share,” Martha
nodded.  “But Roscoe knew.  It’s selling to-day at twenty-four.”

“I sold mine from the steamer by wireless—at twenty even,” Bella
continued.  “And now Abbie’s wildly dressmaking.  She’s going with May
and Tootsie to Paris.”

“And Carl?” Martha queried.

“Oh, he’ll finish Yale all right—”

“Which he would have done anyway, and you _know_ it,” Martha charged,
lapsing charmingly into twentieth-century slang.

Bella affirmed her guilt of intention of paying the way of her school
friend’s son through college, and added complacently:

“Just the same it was nicer to have Ho-o-la-a pay for it.  In a way, you
see, Roscoe is doing it, because it was his judgment I trusted to when I
made the investment.”  She gazed slowly about her, her eyes taking in,
not merely the beauty and comfort and repose of all they rested on, but
the immensity of beauty and comfort and repose represented by them,
scattered in similar oases all over the islands.  She sighed pleasantly
and observed: “All our husbands have done well by us with what we brought
them.”

“And happily . . . ” Martha agreed, then suspended her utterance with
suspicious abruptness.

“And happily, all of us, except Sister Bella,” Bella forgivingly
completed the thought for her.

“It was too bad, that marriage,” Martha murmured, all softness of
sympathy.  “You were so young.  Uncle Robert should never have made you.”

“I was only nineteen,” Bella nodded.  “But it was not George Castner’s
fault.  And look what he, out of the grave, has done for me.  Uncle
Robert was wise.  He knew George had the far-away vision of far ahead,
the energy, and the steadiness.  He saw, even then, and that’s fifty
years ago, the value of the Nahala water-rights which nobody else valued
then.  They thought he was struggling to buy the cattle range.  He
struggled to buy the future of the water—and how well he succeeded you
know.  I’m almost ashamed to think of my income sometimes.  No; whatever
else, the unhappiness of our marriage was not due to George.  I could
have lived happily with him, I know, even to this day, had he lived.”
She shook her head slowly.  “No; it was not his fault.  Nor anybody’s.
Not even mine.  If it was anybody’s fault—”  The wistful fondness of her
smile took the sting out of what she was about to say.  “If it was
anybody’s fault it was Uncle John’s.”

“Uncle John’s!” Martha cried with sharp surprise.  “If it had to be one
or the other, I should have said Uncle Robert.  But Uncle John!”

Bella smiled with slow positiveness.

“But it was Uncle Robert who made you marry George Castner,” her sister
urged.

“That is true,” Bella nodded corroboration.  “But it was not the matter
of a husband, but of a horse.  I wanted to borrow a horse from Uncle
John, and Uncle John said yes.  That is how it all happened.”

A silence fell, pregnant and cryptic, and, while the voices of the
children and the soft mandatory protests of the Asiatic maids drew nearer
from the beach, Martha Scandwell felt herself vibrant and tremulous with
sudden resolve of daring.  She waved the children away.

“Run along, dears, run along, Grandma and Aunt Bella want to talk.”

And as the shrill, sweet treble of child voices ebbed away across the
lawn, Martha, with scrutiny of the heart, observed the sadness of the
lines graven by secret woe for half a century in her sister’s face.  For
nearly fifty years had she watched those lines.  She steeled all the
melting softness of the Hawaiian of her to break the half-century of
silence.

“Bella,” she said. “We never knew. You never spoke. But we wondered,
oh, often and often—”

“And never asked,” Bella murmured gratefully.

“But I am asking now, at the last.  This is our twilight.  Listen to
them!  Sometimes it almost frightens me to think that they are
grandchildren, _my_ grandchildren—_I_, who only the other day, it would
seem, was as heart-free, leg-free, care-free a girl as ever bestrode a
horse, or swam in the big surf, or gathered _opihis_ at low tide, or
laughed at a dozen lovers.  And here in our twilight let us forget
everything save that I am your dear sister as you are mine.”

The eyes of both were dewy moist.  Bella palpably trembled to utterance.

“We thought it was George Castner,”  Martha went on; “and we could guess
the details.  He was a cold man.  You were warm Hawaiian.  He must have
been cruel.  Brother Walcott always insisted he must have beaten you—”

“No!  No!” Bella broke in.  “George Castner was never a brute, a beast.
Almost have I wished, often, that he had been.  He never laid hand on me.
He never raised hand to me.  He never raised his voice to me.  Never—oh,
can you believe it?—do, please, sister, believe it—did we have a high
word nor a cross word.  But that house of his, of ours, at Nahala, was
grey.  All the colour of it was grey and cool, and chill, while I was
bright with all colours of sun, and earth, and blood, and birth.  It was
very cold, grey cold, with that cold grey husband of mine at Nahala.  You
know he was grey, Martha.  Grey like those portraits of Emerson we used
to see at school.  His skin was grey.  Sun and weather and all hours in
the saddle could never tan it.  And he was as grey inside as out.

“And I was only nineteen when Uncle Robert decided on the marriage.  How
was I to know?  Uncle Robert talked to me.  He pointed out how the wealth
and property of Hawaii was already beginning to pass into the hands of
the _haoles_” (Whites).  “The Hawaiian chiefs let their possessions slip
away from them.  The Hawaiian chiefesses, who married _haoles_, had their
possessions, under the management of their _haole_ husbands, increase
prodigiously.  He pointed back to the original Grandfather Roger Wilton,
who had taken Grandmother Wilton’s poor _mauka_ lands and added to them
and built up about them the Kilohana Ranch—”

“Even then it was second only to the Parker Ranch,” Martha interrupted
proudly.

“And he told me that had our father, before he died, been as far-seeing
as grandfather, half the then Parker holdings would have been added to
Kilohana, making Kilohana first.  And he said that never, for ever and
ever, would beef be cheaper.  And he said that the big future of Hawaii
would be in sugar.  That was fifty years ago, and he has been more than
proved right.  And he said that the young _haole_, George Castner, saw
far, and would go far, and that there were many girls of us, and that the
Kilohana lands ought by rights to go to the boys, and that if I married
George my future was assured in the biggest way.

“I was only nineteen.  Just back from the Royal Chief School—that was
before our girls went to the States for their education.  You were among
the first, Sister Martha, who got their education on the mainland.  And
what did I know of love and lovers, much less of marriage?  All women
married.  It was their business in life.  Mother and grandmother, all the
way back they had married.  It was my business in life to marry George
Castner.  Uncle Robert said so in his wisdom, and I knew he was very
wise.  And I went to live with my husband in the grey house at Nahala.

“You remember it.  No trees, only the rolling grass lands, the high
mountains behind, the sea beneath, and the wind!—the Waimea and Nahala
winds, we got them both, and the _kona_ wind as well.  Yet little would I
have minded them, any more than we minded them at Kilohana, or than they
minded them at Mana, had not Nahala itself been so grey, and husband
George so grey.  We were alone.  He was managing Nahala for the Glenns,
who had gone back to Scotland.  Eighteen hundred a year, plus beef,
horses, cowboy service, and the ranch house, was what he received—”

“It was a high salary in those days,” Martha said.

“And for George Castner, and the service he gave, it was very cheap,”
Bella defended.  “I lived with him for three years.  There was never a
morning that he was out of his bed later than half-past four.  He was the
soul of devotion to his employers.  Honest to a penny in his accounts, he
gave them full measure and more of his time and energy.  Perhaps that was
what helped make our life so grey.  But listen, Martha.  Out of his
eighteen hundred, he laid aside sixteen hundred each year.  Think of it!
The two of us lived on two hundred a year.  Luckily he did not drink or
smoke.  Also, we dressed out of it as well.  I made my own dresses.  You
can imagine them.  Outside of the cowboys who chored the firewood, I did
the work.  I cooked, and baked, and scrubbed—”

“You who had never known anything but servants from the time you were
born!” Martha pitied.  “Never less than a regiment of them at Kilohana.”

“Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!” Bella cried
out.  “How far I was compelled to make a pound of coffee go!  A broom
worn down to nothing before a new one was bought!  And beef!  Fresh beef
and jerky, morning, noon, and night!  And porridge!  Never since have I
eaten porridge or any breakfast food.”

She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment with
unseeing eyes at the colour-lavish reef while she composed herself.  And
she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure, gracious,
high-breasted, noble-headed port of which no out-breeding can ever rob
the Hawaiian woman.  Very _haole_ was Bella Castner, fair-skinned,
fine-textured.  Yet, as she returned, the high pose of head, the
level-lidded gaze of her long brown eyes under royal arches of eyebrows,
the softly set lines of her small mouth that fairly sang sweetness of
kisses after sixty-eight years—all made her the very picture of a
chiefess of old Hawaii full-bursting through her ampleness of _haole_
blood.  Taller she was than her sister Martha, if anything more queenly.

“You know we were notorious as poor feeders,” Bella laughed lightly
enough.  “It was many a mile on either side from Nahala to the next roof.
Belated travellers, or storm-bound ones, would, on occasion, stop with us
overnight.  And you know the lavishness of the big ranches, then and now.
How we were the laughing-stock!  ‘What do we care!’ George would say.
‘They live to-day and now.  Twenty years from now will be our turn,
Bella.  They will be where they are now, and they will eat out of our
hand.  We will be compelled to feed them, they will need to be fed, and
we will feed them well; for we will be rich, Bella, so rich that I am
afraid to tell you.  But I know what I know, and you must have faith in
me.’

“George was right.  Twenty years afterward, though he did not live to see
it, my income was a thousand a month.  Goodness!  I do not know what it
is to-day.  But I was only nineteen, and I would say to George: ‘Now!
now!  We live now.  We may not be alive twenty years from now.  I do want
a new broom.  And there is a third-rate coffee that is only two cents a
pound more than the awful stuff we are using.  Why couldn’t I fry eggs in
butter—now?  I should dearly love at least one new tablecloth.  Our
linen!  I’m ashamed to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven
knows they dare come seldom enough.’

“‘Be patient, Bella,’ he would reply.  ‘In a little while, in only a few
years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep between our
sheets, will be proud of an invitation—those of them who will not be
dead.  You remember how Stevens passed out last year—free-living and
easy, everybody’s friend but his own.  The Kohala crowd had to bury him,
for he left nothing but debts.  Watch the others going the same pace.
There’s your brother Hal.  He can’t keep it up and live five years, and
he’s breaking his uncles’ hearts.  And there’s Prince Lilolilo.  Dashes
by me with half a hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering _kanakas_ in
his train who would be better at hard work and looking after their
future, for he will never be king of Hawaii.  He will not live to be king
of Hawaii.’

“George was right.  Brother Hal died.  So did Prince Lilolilo.  But
George was not _all_ right.  He, who neither drank nor smoked, who never
wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of his lips a
second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who was invariably up
before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp had a tenth emptied
itself, and who never thought to die, was dead even more quickly than
Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.

“‘Be patient, Bella,’ Uncle Robert would say to me.  ‘George Castner is a
coming man.  I have chosen well for you.  Your hardships now are the
hardships on the way to the promised land.  Not always will the Hawaiians
rule in Hawaii.  Just as they let their wealth slip out of their hands,
so will their rule slip out of their hands.  Political power and the land
always go together.  There will be great changes, revolutions no one
knows how many nor of what sort, save that in the end the _haole_ will
possess the land and the rule.  And in that day you may well be first
lady of Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii.
It is written in the books.  It is ever so where the _haole_ conflicts
with the easier races.  I, your Uncle Robert, who am half-Hawaiian and
half-_haole_, know whereof I speak.  Be patient, Bella, be patient.’

“‘Dear Bella,’ Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was tender for
me.  Thank God, he never told me to be patient.  He knew.  He was very
wise.  He was warm human, and, therefore, wiser than Uncle Robert and
George Castner, who sought the thing, not the spirit, who kept records in
ledgers rather than numbers of heart-beats breast to breast, who added
columns of figures rather than remembered embraces and endearments of
look and speech and touch.  ‘Dear Bella,’ Uncle John would say.  He knew.
You have heard always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi.  He was
a true lover.  He loved but the once.  After her death they said he was
eccentric.  He was.  He was the one lover, once and always.  Remember
that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered only after his
death and found it his shrine to her.  ‘Dear Bella,’ it was all he ever
said to me, but I knew he knew.

“And I was nineteen, and sun-warm Hawaiian in spite of my three-quarters
_haole_ blood, and I knew nothing save my girlhood splendours at Kilohana
and my Honolulu education at the Royal Chief School, and my grey husband
at Nahala with his grey preachments and practices of sobriety and thrift,
and those two childless uncles of mine, the one with far, cold vision,
the other the broken-hearted, for-ever-dreaming lover of a dead princess.

“Think of that grey house!  I, who had known the ease and the delights
and the ever-laughing joys of Kilohana, and of the Parkers at old Mana,
and of Puuwaawaa!  You remember.  We did live in feudal spaciousness in
those days.  Would you, can you, believe it, Martha—at Nahala the only
sewing machine I had was one of those the early missionaries brought, a
tiny, crazy thing that one cranked around by hand!

“Robert and John had each given Husband George five thousand dollars at
my marriage.  But he had asked for it to be kept secret.  Only the four
of us knew.  And while I sewed my cheap _holokus_ on that crazy machine,
he bought land with the money—the upper Nahala lands, you know—a bit at a
time, each purchase a hard-driven bargain, his face the very face of
poverty.  To-day the Nahala Ditch alone pays me forty thousand a year.

“But was it worth it?  I starved.  If only once, madly, he had crushed me
in his arms!  If only once he could have lingered with me five minutes
from his own business or from his fidelity to his employers!  Sometimes I
could have screamed, or showered the eternal bowl of hot porridge into
his face, or smashed the sewing machine upon the floor and danced a
_hula_ on it, just to make him burst out and lose his temper and be
human, be a brute, be a man of some sort instead of a grey, frozen
demi-god.”

Bella’s tragic expression vanished, and she laughed outright in sheer
genuineness of mirthful recollection.

“And when I was in such moods he would gravely look me over, gravely feel
my pulse, examine my tongue, gravely dose me with castor oil, and gravely
put me to bed early with hot stove-lids, and assure me that I’d feel
better in the morning.  Early to bed!  Our wildest sitting up was nine
o’clock.  Eight o’clock was our regular bed-time.  It saved kerosene.  We
did not eat dinner at Nahala—remember the great table at Kilohana where
we did have dinner?  But Husband George and I had supper.  And then he
would sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed
magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his socks
and underclothing.  He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff.  And when he
went to bed, I went to bed.  No wastage of kerosene with only one to
benefit by it.  And he went to bed always the same way, winding up his
watch, entering the day’s weather in his diary, and taking off his shoes,
right foot first invariably, left foot second, and placing them just so,
side by side, on the floor, at the foot of the bed, on his side.

“He was the cleanest man I ever knew.  He never wore the same
undergarment a second time.  I did the washing.  He was so clean it hurt.
He shaved twice a day.  He used more water on his body than any _kanaka_.
He did more work than any two _haoles_.  And he saw the future of the
Nahala water.”

“And he made you wealthy, but did not make you happy,” Martha observed.

Bella sighed and nodded.

“What is wealth after all, Sister Martha?  My new Pierce-Arrow came down
on the steamer with me.  My third in two years.  But oh, all the
Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a lover!—the
one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil beside and suffer and
joy beside, the one male man lover husband . . . ”

Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an
ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under a
hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them.  Her eyes,
withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a mongoose’s, and
at Bella’s feet she first sank down, in pure Hawaiian mumbling and
chanting a toothless _mele_ of Bella and Bella’s ancestry and adding to
it an extemporized welcome back to Hawaii after her absence across the
great sea to California.  And while she chanted her _mele_, the old
crone’s shrewd fingers _lomied_ or massaged Bella’s silk-stockinged legs
from ankle and calf to knee and thigh.

Both Bella’s and Martha’s eyes were luminous-moist, as the old retainer
repeated the _lomi_ and the _mele_ to Martha, and as they talked with her
in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial questions about her health
and age and great-great-grandchildren—she who had _lomied_ them as babies
in the great house at Kilohana, as her ancestresses had _lomied_ their
ancestresses back through the unnumbered generations.  The brief duty
visit over, Martha arose and accompanied her back to the bungalow,
putting money into her hand, commanding proud and beautiful Japanese
housemaids to wait upon the dilapidated aborigine with _poi_, which is
compounded of the roots of the water lily, with _iamaka_, which is raw
fish, and with pounded kukui nut and _limu_, which latter is seawood
tender to the toothless, digestible and savoury.  It was the old feudal
tie, the faithfulness of the commoner to the chief, the responsibility of
the chief to the commoner; and Martha, three-quarters _haole_ with the
Anglo-Saxon blood of New England, was four-quarters Hawaiian in her
remembrance and observance of the well-nigh vanished customs of old days.

As she came back across the lawn to the hau tree, Bella’s eyes dwelt upon
the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her, and embraced her
and loved her.  Shorter than Bella was Martha, a trifle, but the merest
trifle, less queenly of port; but beautifully and generously
proportioned, mellowed rather than dismantled by years, her Polynesian
chiefess figure eloquent and glorious under the satisfying lines of a
half-fitting, grandly sweeping, black-silk _holoku_ trimmed with black
lace more costly than a Paris gown.

And as both sisters resumed their talk, an observer would have noted the
striking resemblance of their pure, straight profiles, of their broad
cheek-bones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of their iron-grey
abundance of hair, of their sweet-lipped mouths set with the carriage of
decades of assured and accomplished pride, and of their lovely slender
eyebrows arched over equally lovely long brown eyes.  The hands of both
of them, little altered or defaced by age, were wonderful in their
slender, tapering finger-tips, love-_lomied_ and love-formed while they
were babies by old Hawaiian women like to the one even then eating _poi_
and _iamaka_ and _limu_ in the house.

“I had a year of it,” Bella resumed, “and, do you know, things were
beginning to come right.  I was beginning to draw to Husband George.
Women are so made, I was such a woman at any rate.  For he was good.  He
was just.  All the old sterling Puritan virtues were his.  I was coming
to draw to him, to like him, almost, might I say, to love him.  And had
not Uncle John loaned me that horse, I know that I would have truly loved
him and have lived ever happily with him—in a quiet sort of way, of
course.

“You see, I knew nothing else, nothing different, nothing better in the
way of men.  I came gladly to look across the table at him while he read
in the brief interval between supper and bed, gladly to listen for and to
catch the beat of his horse’s hoofs coming home at night from his endless
riding over the ranch.  And his scant praise was praise indeed, that made
me tingle with happiness—yes, Sister Martha, I knew what it was to blush
under his precise, just praise for the things I had done right or
correctly.

“And all would have been well for the rest of our lives together, except
that he had to take steamer to Honolulu.  It was business.  He was to be
gone two weeks or longer, first, for the Glenns in ranch affairs, and
next for himself, to arrange the purchase of still more of the upper
Nahala lands.  Do you know! he bought lots of the wilder and up-and-down
lands, worthless for aught save water, and the very heart of the
watershed, for as low as five and ten cents an acre.  And he suggested I
needed a change.  I wanted to go with him to Honolulu.  But, with an eye
to expense, he decided Kilohana for me.  Not only would it cost him
nothing for me to visit at the old home, but he saved the price of the
poor food I should have eaten had I remained alone at Nahala, which meant
the purchase price of more Nahala acreage.  And at Kilohana Uncle John
said yes, and loaned me the horse.

“Oh, it was like heaven, getting back, those first several days.  It was
difficult to believe at first that there was so much food in all the
world.  The enormous wastage of the kitchen appalled me.  I saw waste
everywhere, so well trained had I been by Husband George.  Why, out in
the servants’ quarters the aged relatives and most distant hangers-on of
the servants fed better than George and I ever fed.  You remember our
Kilohana way, same as the Parker way, a bullock killed for every meal,
fresh fish by runners from the ponds of Waipio and Kiholo, the best and
rarest at all times of everything . . .

“And love, our family way of loving!  You know what Uncle John was.  And
Brother Walcott was there, and Brother Edward, and all the younger
sisters save you and Sally away at school.  And Aunt Elizabeth, and Aunt
Janet with her husband and all her children on a visit.  It was arms
around, and perpetual endearings, and all that I had missed for a weary
twelvemonth.  I was thirsty for it.  I was like a survivor from the open
boat falling down on the sand and lapping the fresh bubbling springs at
the roots of the palms.

“And _they_ came, riding up from Kawaihae, where they had landed from the
royal yacht, the whole glorious cavalcade of them, two by two,
flower-garlanded, young and happy, gay, on Parker Ranch horses, thirty of
them in the party, a hundred Parker Ranch cowboys and as many more of
their own retainers—a royal progress.  It was Princess Lihue’s progress,
of course, she flaming and passing as we all knew with the dreadful
tuberculosis; but with her were her nephews, Prince Lilolilo, hailed
everywhere as the next king, and his brothers, Prince Kahekili and Prince
Kamalau.  And with the Princess was Ella Higginsworth, who rightly
claimed higher chief blood lines through the Kauai descent than belonged
to the reigning family, and Dora Niles, and Emily Lowcroft, and . . . oh,
why enumerate them all!  Ella Higginsworth and I had been room-mates at
the Royal Chief School.  And there was a great resting time for an
hour—no _luau_, for the _luau_ awaited them at the Parkers’—but beer and
stronger drinks for the men, and lemonade, and oranges, and refreshing
watermelon for the women.

“And it was arms around with Ella Higginsworth and me, and the Princess,
who remembered me, and all the other girls and women, and Ella spoke to
the Princess, and the Princess herself invited me to the progress,
joining them at Mana whence they would depart two days later.  And I was
mad, mad with it all—I, from a twelvemonth of imprisonment at grey
Nahala.  And I was nineteen yet, just turning twenty within the week.

“Oh, I had not thought of what was to happen.  So occupied was I with the
women that I did not see Lilolilo, except at a distance, bulking large
and tall above the other men.  But I had never been on a progress.  I had
seen them entertained at Kilohana and Mana, but I had been too young to
be invited along, and after that it had been school and marriage.  I knew
what it would be like—two weeks of paradise, and little enough for
another twelve months at Nahala.

“And I asked Uncle John to lend me a horse, which meant three horses of
course—one mounted cowboy and a pack horse to accompany me.  No roads
then.  No automobiles.  And the horse for myself!  It was Hilo.  You
don’t remember him.  You were away at school then, and before you came
home, the following year, he’d broken his back and his rider’s neck
wild-cattle-roping up Mauna Kea.  You heard about it—that young American
naval officer.”

“Lieutenant Bowsfield,” Martha nodded.

“But Hilo!  I was the first woman on his back.  He was a three-year-old,
almost a four-year, and just broken.  So black and in such a vigour of
coat that the high lights on him clad him in shimmering silver.  He was
the biggest riding animal on the ranch, descended from the King’s
Sparklingdow with a range mare for dam, and roped wild only two weeks
before.  I never have seen so beautiful a horse.  He had the round,
deep-chested, big-hearted, well-coupled body of the ideal mountain pony,
and his head and neck were true thoroughbred, slender, yet full, with
lovely alert ears not too small to be vicious nor too large to be
stubborn mulish.  And his legs and feet were lovely too, unblemished,
sure and firm, with long springy pasterns that made him a wonder of ease
under the saddle.”

“I remember hearing Prince Lilolilo tell Uncle John that you were the
best woman rider in all Hawaii,” Martha interrupted to say.  “That was
two years afterward when I was back from school and while you were still
living at Nahala.”

“Lilolilo said that!” Bella cried.  Almost as with a blush, her long,
brown eyes were illumined, as she bridged the years to her lover near
half a century dead and dust.  With the gentleness of modesty so innate
in the women of Hawaii, she covered her spontaneous exposure of her heart
with added panegyric of Hilo.

“Oh, when he ran with me up the long-grass slopes, and down the
long-grass slopes, it was like hurdling in a dream, for he cleared the
grass at every bound, leaping like a deer, a rabbit, or a fox-terrier—you
know how they do.  And cut up, and prance, and high life!  He was a mount
for a general, for a Napoleon or a Kitchener.  And he had, not a wicked
eye, but, oh, such a roguish eye, intelligent and looking as if it
cherished a joke behind and wanted to laugh or to perpetrate it.  And I
asked Uncle John for Hilo.  And Uncle John looked at me, and I looked at
him; and, though he did not say it, I knew he was _feeling_ ‘Dear Bella,’
and I knew, somewhere in his seeing of me, was all his vision of the
Princess Naomi.  And Uncle John said yes.  That is how it happened.

“But he insisted that I should try Hilo out—myself, rather—at private
rehearsal.  He was a _handful_, a glorious handful.  But not vicious, not
malicious.  He got away from me over and over again, but I never let him
know.  I was not afraid, and that helped me keep always a _feel_ of him
that prevented him from thinking that he was even a jump ahead of me.

“I have often wondered if Uncle John dreamed of what possibly might
happen.  I know I had no thought of it myself, that day I rode across and
joined the Princess at Mana.  Never was there such festal time.  You know
the grand way the old Parkers had of entertaining.  The pig-sticking and
wild-cattle-shooting, the horse-breaking and the branding.  The servants’
quarters overflowing.  Parker cowboys in from everywhere.  And all the
girls from Waimea up, and the girls from Waipio, and Honokaa, and
Paauilo—I can see them yet, sitting in long rows on top the stone walls
of the breaking pen and making _leis_” (flower garlands) “for their
cowboy lovers.  And the nights, the perfumed nights, the chanting of the
_meles_ and the dancing of the _hulas_, and the big Mana grounds with
lovers everywhere strolling two by two under the trees.

“And the Prince . . . ”  Bella paused, and for a long minute her small
fine teeth, still perfect, showed deep in her underlip as she sought and
won control and sent her gaze vacantly out across the far blue horizon.
As she relaxed, her eyes came back to her sister.

“He was a prince, Martha.  You saw him at Kilohana before . . . after you
came home from seminary.  He filled the eyes of any woman, yes, and of
any man.  Twenty-five he was, in all-glorious ripeness of man, great and
princely in body as he was great and princely in spirit.  No matter how
wild the fun, how reckless mad the sport, he never seemed to forget that
he was royal, and that all his forebears had been high chiefs even to
that first one they sang in the genealogies, who had navigated his
double-canoes to Tahiti and Raiatea and back again.  He was gracious,
sweet, kindly comradely, all friendliness—and severe, and stern, and
harsh, if he were crossed too grievously.  It is hard to express what I
mean.  He was all man, man, man, and he was all prince, with a strain of
the merry boy in him, and the iron in him that would have made him a good
and strong king of Hawaii had he come to the throne.

“I can see him yet, as I saw him that first day and touched his hand and
talked with him . . . few words and bashful, and anything but a year-long
married woman to a grey _haole_ at grey Nahala.  Half a century ago it
was, that meeting—you remember how our young men then dressed in white
shoes and trousers, white silk shirts, with slashed around the middle the
gorgeously colourful Spanish sashes—and for half a century that picture
of him has not faded in my heart.  He was the centre of a group on the
lawn, and I was being brought by Ella Higginsworth to be presented.  The
Princess Lihue had just called some teasing chaff to her which had made
her halt to respond and left me halted a pace in front of her.

“His glance chanced to light on me, alone there, perturbed, embarrassed.
Oh, how I see him!—his head thrown back a little, with that high, bright,
imperious, and utterly care-free poise that was so usual of him.  Our
eyes met.  His head bent forward, or straightened to me, I don’t know
what happened.  Did he command?  Did I obey?  I do not know.  I know only
that I was good to look upon, crowned with fragrant _maile_, clad in
Princess Naomi’s wonderful _holoku_ loaned me by Uncle John from his
taboo room; and I know that I advanced alone to him across the Mana lawn,
and that he stepped forth from those about him to meet me half-way.  We
came to each other across the grass, unattended, as if we were coming to
each other across our lives.

“—Was I very beautiful, Sister Martha, when I was young?  I do not know.
I don’t know.  But in that moment, with all his beauty and truly
royal-manness crossing to me and penetrating to the heart of me, I felt a
sudden sense of beauty in myself—how shall I say? as if in him and from
him perfection were engendered and conjured within myself.

“No word was spoken.  But, oh, I know I raised my face in frank answer to
the thunder and trumpets of the message unspoken, and that, had it been
death for that one look and that one moment I could not have refrained
from the gift of myself that must have been in my face and eyes, in the
very body of me that breathed so high.

“Was I beautiful, very beautiful, Martha, when I was nineteen, just
turning into twenty?”

And Martha, three-score and four, looked upon Bella, three-score and
eight, and nodded genuine affirmation, and to herself added the
appreciation of the instant in what she beheld—Bella’s neck, still full
and shapely, longer than the ordinary Hawaiian woman’s neck, a pillar
that carried regally her high-cheeked, high-browed, high chiefess face
and head; Bella’s hair, high-piled, intact, sparkling the silver of the
years, ringleted still and contrasting definitely and sharply with her
clean, slim, black brows and deep brown eyes.  And Martha’s glance, in
modest overwhelming of modesty by what she saw, dropped down the splendid
breast of her and generously true lines of body to the feet, silken clad,
high-heeled-slippered, small, plump, with an almost Spanish arch and
faultlessness of instep.

“When one is young, the one young time!” Bella laughed.  “Lilolilo was a
prince.  I came to know his every feature and their every phase . . .
afterward, in our wonder days and nights by the singing waters, by the
slumber-drowsy surfs, and on the mountain ways.  I knew his fine, brave
eyes, with their straight, black brows, the nose of him that was
assuredly a Kamehameha nose, and the last, least, lovable curve of his
mouth.  There is no mouth more beautiful than the Hawaiian, Martha.

“And his body.  He was a king of athletes, from his wicked, wayward hair
to his ankles of bronzed steel.  Just the other day I heard one of the
Wilder grandsons referred to as ‘The Prince of Harvard.’  Mercy!  What
would they, what could they have called my Lilolilo could they have
matched him against this Wilder lad and all his team at Harvard!”

Bella ceased and breathed deeply, the while she clasped her fine small
hands in her ample silken lap.  But her pink fairness blushed faintly
through her skin and warmed her eyes as she relived her prince-days.

“Well—you have guessed?” Bella said, with defiant shrug of shoulders and
a straight gaze into her sister’s eyes.  “We rode out from gay Mana and
continued the gay progress—down the lava trails to Kiholo to the swimming
and the fishing and the feasting and the sleeping in the warm sand under
the palms; and up to Puuwaawaa, and more pig-sticking, and roping and
driving, and wild mutton from the upper pasture-lands; and on through
Kona, now _mauka_” (mountainward), “now down to the King’s palace at
Kailua, and to the swimming at Keauhou, and to Kealakekua Bay, and
Napoopoo and Honaunau.  And everywhere the people turning out, in their
hands gifts of flowers, and fruit, and fish, and pig, in their hearts
love and song, their heads bowed in obeisance to the royal ones while
their lips ejaculated exclamations of amazement or chanted _meles_ of old
and unforgotten days.

“What would you, Sister Martha?  You know what we Hawaiians are.  You
know what we were half a hundred years ago.  Lilolilo was wonderful.  I
was reckless.  Lilolilo of himself could make any woman reckless.  I was
twice reckless, for I had cold, grey Nahala to spur me on.  I knew.  I
had never a doubt.  Never a hope.  Divorces in those days were undreamed.
The wife of George Castner could never be queen of Hawaii, even if Uncle
Robert’s prophesied revolutions were delayed, and if Lilolilo himself
became king.  But I never thought of the throne.  What I wanted would
have been the queendom of being Lilolilo’s wife and mate.  But I made no
mistake.  What was impossible was impossible, and I dreamed no false
dream.

“It was the very atmosphere of love.  And Lilolilo was a lover.  I was
for ever crowned with _leis_ by him, and he had his runners bring me
_leis_ all the way from the rose-gardens of Mana—you remember them; fifty
miles across the lava and the ranges, dewy fresh as the moment they were
plucked, in their jewel-cases of banana bark; yard-long they were, the
tiny pink buds like threaded beads of Neapolitan coral.  And at the
_luaus_” (feasts) “the for ever never-ending _luaus_, I must be seated on
Lilolilo’s Makaloa mat, the Prince’s mat, his alone and taboo to any
lesser mortal save by his own condescension and desire.  And I must dip
my fingers into his own _pa wai holoi_” (finger-bowl) “where scented
flower petals floated in the warm water.  Yes, and careless that all
should see his extended favour, I must dip into his _pa paakai_ for my
pinches of red salt, and limu, and kukui nut and chili pepper; and into
his _ipu kai_” (fish sauce dish) “of _kou_ wood that the great Kamehameha
himself had eaten from on many a similar progress.  And it was the same
for special delicacies that were for Lilolilo and the Princess alone—for
his _nelu_, and the _ake_, and the _palu_, and the _alaala_.  And his
_kahilis_ were waved over me, and his attendants were mine, and he was
mine; and from my flower-crowned hair to my happy feet I was a woman
loved.”

Once again Bella’s small teeth pressed into her underlip, as she gazed
vacantly seaward and won control of herself and her memories.

“It was on, and on, through all Kona, and all Kau, from Hoopuloa and
Kapua to Honuapo and Punaluu, a life-time of living compressed into two
short weeks.  A flower blooms but once.  That was my time of
bloom—Lilolilo beside me, myself on my wonderful Hilo, a queen, not of
Hawaii, but of Lilolilo and Love.  He said I was a bubble of colour and
beauty on the black back of Leviathan; that I was a fragile dewdrop on
the smoking crest of a lava flow; that I was a rainbow riding the thunder
cloud . . . ”

Bella paused for a moment.

“I shall tell you no more of what he said to me,” she declared gravely;
“save that the things he said were fire of love and essence of beauty,
and that he composed _hulas_ to me, and sang them to me, before all, of
nights under the stars as we lay on our mats at the feasting; and I on
the Makaloa mat of Lilolilo.

“And it was on to Kilauea—the dream so near its ending; and of course we
tossed into the pit of sea-surging lava our offerings to the Fire-Goddess
of _maile leis_ and of fish and hard _poi_ wrapped moist in the _ti_
leaves.  And we continued down through old Puna, and feasted and danced
and sang at Kohoualea and Kamaili and Opihikao, and swam in the clear,
sweet-water pools of Kalapana.  And in the end came to Hilo by the sea.

“It was the end.  We had never spoken.  It was the end recognized and
unmentioned.  The yacht waited.  We were days late.  Honolulu called, and
the news was that the King had gone particularly _pupule_” (insane),
“that there were Catholic and Protestant missionary plottings, and that
trouble with France was brewing.  As they had landed at Kawaihae two
weeks before with laughter and flowers and song, so they departed from
Hilo.  It was a merry parting, full of fun and frolic and a thousand last
messages and reminders and jokes.  The anchor was broken out to a song of
farewell from Lilolilo’s singing boys on the quarterdeck, while we, in
the big canoes and whaleboats, saw the first breeze fill the vessel’s
sails and the distance begin to widen.

“Through all the confusion and excitement, Lilolilo, at the rail, who
must say last farewells and quip last jokes to many, looked squarely down
at me.  On his head he wore my _ilima lei_, which I had made for him and
placed there.  And into the canoes, to the favoured ones, they on the
yacht began tossing their many _leis_.  I had no expectancy of hope . . .
And yet I hoped, in a small wistful way that I know did not show in my
face, which was as proud and merry as any there.  But Lilolilo did what I
knew he would do, what I had known from the first he would do.  Still
looking me squarely and honestly in the eyes, he took my beautiful _ilima
lei_ from his head and tore it across.  I saw his lips shape, but not
utter aloud, the single word _pau_” (finish).  “Still looking at me, he
broke both parts of the _lei_ in two again and tossed the deliberate
fragments, not to me, but down overside into the widening water.  _Pau_.
It was finished . . . ”

For a long space Bella’s vacant gaze rested on the sea horizon.  Martha
ventured no mere voice expression of the sympathy that moistened her own
eyes.

“And I rode on that day, up the old bad trail along the Hamakua coast,”
Bella resumed, with a voice at first singularly dry and harsh.  “That
first day was not so hard.  I was numb.  I was too full with the wonder
of all I had to forget to know that I had to forget it.  I spent the
night at Laupahoehoe.  Do you know, I had expected a sleepless night.
Instead, weary from the saddle, still numb, I slept the night through as
if I had been dead.

“But the next day, in driving wind and drenching rain!  How it blew and
poured!  The trail was really impassable.  Again and again our horses
went down.  At fist the cowboy Uncle John had loaned me with the horses
protested, then he followed stolidly in the rear, shaking his head, and,
I know, muttering over and over that I was _pupule_.  The pack horse was
abandoned at Kukuihaele.  We almost swam up Mud Lane in a river of mud.
At Waimea the cowboy had to exchange for a fresh mount.  But Hilo lasted
through.  From daybreak till midnight I was in the saddle, till Uncle
John, at Kilohana, took me off my horse, in his arms, and carried me in,
and routed the women from their beds to undress me and _lomi_ me, while
he plied me with hot toddies and drugged me to sleep and forgetfulness.
I know I must have babbled and raved.  Uncle John must have guessed.  But
never to another, nor even to me, did he ever breathe a whisper.
Whatever he guessed he locked away in the taboo room of Naomi.

“I do have fleeting memories of some of that day, all a broken-hearted
mad rage against fate—of my hair down and whipped wet and stinging about
me in the driving rain; of endless tears of weeping contributed to the
general deluge, of passionate outbursts and resentments against a world
all twisted and wrong, of beatings of my hands upon my saddle pommel, of
asperities to my Kilohana cowboy, of spurs into the ribs of poor
magnificent Hilo, with a prayer on my lips, bursting out from my heart,
that the spurs would so madden him as to make him rear and fall on me and
crush my body for ever out of all beauty for man, or topple me off the
trail and finish me at the foot of the _palis_” (precipices), “writing
_pau_ at the end of my name as final as the unuttered _pau_ on Lilolilo’s
lips when he tore across my _ilima lei_ and dropped it in the sea. . . .

“Husband George was delayed in Honolulu.  When he came back to Nahala I
was there waiting for him.  And solemnly he embraced me, perfunctorily
kissed my lips, gravely examined my tongue, decried my looks and state of
health, and sent me to bed with hot stove-lids and a dosage of castor
oil.  Like entering into the machinery of a clock and becoming one of the
cogs or wheels, inevitably and remorselessly turning around and around,
so I entered back into the grey life of Nahala.  Out of bed was Husband
George at half after four every morning, and out of the house and astride
his horse at five.  There was the eternal porridge, and the horrible
cheap coffee, and the fresh beef and jerky.  I cooked, and baked, and
scrubbed.  I ground around the crazy hand sewing machine and made my
cheap _holokus_.  Night after night, through the endless centuries of two
years more, I sat across the table from him until eight o’clock, mending
his cheap socks and shoddy underwear, while he read the years’ old
borrowed magazines he was too thrifty to subscribe to.  And then it was
bed-time—kerosene must be economized—and he wound his watch, entered the
weather in his diary, and took off his shoes, the right shoe first, and
placed them, just so, side by side, at the foot of the bed on his side.

“But there was no more of my drawing to Husband George, as had been the
promise ere the Princess Lihue invited me on the progress and Uncle John
loaned me the horse.  You see, Sister Martha, nothing would have happened
had Uncle John refused me the horse.  But I had known love, and I had
known Lilolilo; and what chance, after that, had Husband George to win
from me heart of esteem or affection?  And for two years, at Nahala, I
was a dead woman who somehow walked and talked, and baked and scrubbed,
and mended socks and saved kerosene.  The doctors said it was the shoddy
underwear that did for him, pursuing as always the high-mountain Nahala
waters in the drenching storms of midwinter.

“When he died, I was not sad.  I had been sad too long already.  Nor was
I glad.  Gladness had died at Hilo when Lilolilo dropped my _ilima lei_
into the sea and my feet were never happy again.  Lilolilo passed within
a month after Husband George.  I had never seen him since the parting at
Hilo.  La, la, suitors a many have I had since; but I was like Uncle
John.  Mating for me was but once.  Uncle John had his Naomi room at
Kilohana.  I have had my Lilolilo room for fifty years in my heart.  You
are the first, Sister Martha, whom I have permitted to enter that room .  . . ”

A machine swung the circle of the drive, and from it, across the lawn,
approached the husband of Martha.  Erect, slender, grey-haired, of
graceful military bearing, Roscoe Scandwell was a member of the “Big
Five,” which, by the interlocking of interests, determined the destinies
of all Hawaii.  Himself pure _haole_, New England born, he kissed Bella
first, arms around, full-hearty, in the Hawaiian way.  His alert eye told
him that there had been a woman talk, and, despite the signs of all
generousness of emotion, that all was well and placid in the twilight
wisdom that was theirs.

“Elsie and the younglings are coming—just got a wireless from their
steamer,” he announced, after he had kissed his wife.  “And they’ll be
spending several days with us before they go on to Maui.”

“I was going to put you in the Rose Room, Sister Bella,” Martha Scandwell
planned aloud.  “But it will be better for her and the children and the
nurses and everything there, so you shall have Queen Emma’s Room.”

“I had it last time, and I prefer it,” Bella said.

Roscoe Scandwell, himself well taught of Hawaiian love and love-ways,
erect, slender, dignified, between the two nobly proportioned women, an
arm around each of their sumptuous waists, proceeded with them toward the
house.

WAIKIKI, HAWAII.
         _June_ 6, 1916




THE BONES OF KAHEKILI


FROM over the lofty Koolau Mountains, vagrant wisps of the trade wind
drifted, faintly swaying the great, unwhipped banana leaves, rustling the
palms, and fluttering and setting up a whispering among the lace-leaved
algaroba trees.  Only intermittently did the atmosphere so breathe—for
breathing it was, the suspiring of the languid, Hawaiian afternoon.  In
the intervals between the soft breathings, the air grew heavy and balmy
with the perfume of flowers and the exhalations of fat, living soil.

Of humans about the low bungalow-like house, there were many; but one
only of them slept.  The rest were on the tense tiptoes of silence.  At
the rear of the house a tiny babe piped up a thin blatting wail that the
quickly thrust breast could not appease.  The mother, a slender
_hapa-haole_ (half-white), clad in a loose-flowing _holoku_ of white
muslin, hastened away swiftly among the banana and papaia trees to remove
the babe’s noise by distance.  Other women, _hapa-haole_ and full native,
watched her anxiously as she fled.

At the front of the house, on the grass, squatted a score of Hawaiians.
Well-muscled, broad-shouldered, they were all strapping men.
Brown-skinned, with luminous brown eyes and black, their features large
and regular, they showed all the signs of being as good-natured,
merry-hearted, and soft-tempered as the climate.  To all of which a
seeming contradiction was given by the ferociousness of their
accoutrement.  Into the tops of their rough leather leggings were thrust
long knives, the handles projecting.  On their heels were huge-rowelled
Spanish spurs.  They had the appearance of banditti, save for the
incongruous wreaths of flowers and fragrant _maile_ that encircled the
crowns of their flopping cowboy hats.  One of them, deliciously and
roguishly handsome as a faun, with the eyes of a faun, wore a flaming
double-hibiscus bloom coquettishly tucked over his ear.  Above them,
casting a shelter of shade from the sun, grew a wide-spreading canopy of
_Ponciana regia_, itself a flame of blossoms, out of each of which sprang
pom-poms of feathery stamens.  From far off, muffled by distance, came
the faint stamping of their tethered horses.  The eyes of all were
intently fixed upon the solitary sleeper who lay on his back on a
_lauhala_ mat a hundred feet away under the monkey-pod trees.

Large as were the Hawaiian cowboys, the sleeper was larger.  Also, as his
snow-white hair and beard attested, he was much older.  The thickness of
his wrist and the greatness of his fingers made authentic the mighty
frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants and cotton shirt,
buttonless, open from midriff to Adam’s apple, exposing a chest matted
with a thatch of hair as white as that of his head and face.  The depth
and breadth of that chest, its resilience, and its relaxed and plastic
muscles, tokened the knotty strength that still resided in him.  Further,
no bronze and beat of sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his
skin that he was all _haole_—a white man.

On his back, his great white beard, thrust skyward, untrimmed of barbers,
stiffened and subsided with every breath, while with the outblow of every
exhalation the white moustache erected perpendicularly like the quills of
a porcupine and subsided with each intake.  A young girl of fourteen,
clad only in a single shift, or _muumuu_, herself a grand-daughter of the
sleeper, crouched beside him and with a feathered fly-flapper brushed
away the flies.  In her face were depicted solicitude, and nervousness,
and awe, as if she attended on a god.

And truly, Hardman Pool, the sleeping whiskery one, was to her, and to
many and sundry, a god—a source of life, a source of food, a fount of
wisdom, a giver of law, a smiling beneficence, a blackness of thunder and
punishment—in short, a man-master whose record was fourteen living and
adult sons and daughters, six great-grandchildren, and more grandchildren
than could he in his most lucid moments enumerate.

Fifty-one years before, he had landed from an open boat at Laupahoehoe on
the windward coast of Hawaii.  The boat was the one surviving one of the
whaler _Black Prince_ of New Bedford.  Himself New Bedford born, twenty
years of age, by virtue of his driving strength and ability he had served
as second mate on the lost whaleship.  Coming to Honolulu and casting
about for himself, he had first married Kalama Mamaiopili, next acted as
pilot of Honolulu Harbour, after that started a saloon and boarding
house, and, finally, on the death of Kalama’s father, engaged in cattle
ranching on the broad pasture lands she had inherited.

For over half a century he had lived with the Hawaiians, and it was
conceded that he knew their language better than did most of them.  By
marrying Kalama, he had married not merely her land, but her own chief
rank, and the fealty owed by the commoners to her by virtue of her
genealogy was also accorded him.  In addition, he possessed of himself
all the natural attributes of chiefship: the gigantic stature, the
fearlessness, the pride; and the high hot temper that could brook no
impudence nor insult, that could be neither bullied nor awed by any
utmost magnificence of power that walked on two legs, and that could
compel service of lesser humans, not by any ignoble purchase by
bargaining, but by an unspoken but expected condescending of largesse.
He knew his Hawaiians from the outside and the in, knew them better than
themselves, their Polynesian circumlocutions, faiths, customs, and
mysteries.

And at seventy-one, after a morning in the saddle over the ranges that
began at four o’clock, he lay under the monkey-pods in his customary and
sacred siesta that no retainer dared to break, nor would dare permit any
equal of the great one to break.  Only to the King was such a right
accorded, and, as the King had early learned, to break Hardman Pool’s
siesta was to gain awake a very irritable and grumpy Hardman Pool who
would talk straight from the shoulder and say unpleasant but true things
that no king would care to hear.

The sun blazed down.  The horses stamped remotely.  The fading trade-wind
wisps sighed and rustled between longer intervals of quiescence.  The
perfume grew heavier.  The woman brought back the babe, quiet again, to
the rear of the house.  The monkey-pods folded their leaves and swooned
to a siesta of their own in the soft air above the sleeper.  The girl,
breathless as ever from the enormous solemnity of her task, still brushed
the flies away; and the score of cowboys still intently and silently
watched.

Hardman Pool awoke.  The next out-breath, expected of the long rhythm,
did not take place.  Neither did the white, long moustache rise up.
Instead, the cheeks, under the whiskers, puffed; the eyelids lifted,
exposing blue eyes, choleric and fully and immediately conscious; the
right hand went out to the half-smoked pipe beside him, while the left
hand reached the matches.

“Get me my gin and milk,” he ordered, in Hawaiian, of the little maid,
who had been startled into a tremble by his awaking.

He lighted the pipe, but gave no sign of awareness of the presence of his
waiting retainers until the tumbler of gin and milk had been brought and
drunk.

“Well?” he demanded abruptly, and in the pause, while twenty faces
wreathed in smiles and twenty pairs of dark eyes glowed luminously with
well-wishing pleasure, he wiped the lingering drops of gin and milk from
his hairy lips.  “What are you hanging around for?  What do you want?
Come over here.”

Twenty giants, most of them young, uprose and with a great clanking and
jangling of spurs and spur-chains strode over to him.  They grouped
before him in a semicircle, trying bashfully to wedge their shoulders,
one behind another’s, their faces a-grin and apologetic, and at the same
time expressing a casual and unconscious democraticness.  In truth, to
them Hardman Pool was more than mere chief.  He was elder brother, or
father, or patriarch; and to all of them he was related, in one way or
another, according to Hawaiian custom, through his wife and through the
many marriages of his children and grandchildren.  His slightest frown
might perturb them, his anger terrify them, his command compel them to
certain death; yet, on the other hand, not one of them would have dreamed
of addressing him otherwise than intimately by his first name, which
name, “Hardman,” was transmuted by their tongues into Kanaka Oolea.

At a nod from him, the semicircle seated itself on the _manienie_ grass,
and with further deprecatory smiles waited his pleasure.

“What do you want?” demanded, in Hawaiian, with a brusqueness and
sternness they knew were put on.

They smiled more broadly, and deliciously squirmed their broad shoulders
and great torsos with the appeasingness of so many wriggling puppies.
Hardman Pool singled out one of them.

“Well, Iliiopoi, what do _you_ want?”

“Ten dollars, Kanaka Oolea.”

“Ten dollars!” Pool cried, in apparent shock at mention of so vast a sum.
“Does it mean you are going to take a second wife?  Remember the
missionary teaching.  One wife at a time, Iliiopoi; one wife at a time.
For he who entertains a plurality of wives will surely go to hell.”

Giggles and flashings of laughing eyes from all greeted the joke.

“No, Kanaka Oolea,” came the reply.  “The devil knows I am hard put to
get _kow-kow_ for one wife and her several relations.”

“_Kow-kow_?” Pool repeated the Chinese-introduced word for food which the
Hawaiians had come to substitute for their own paina.  “Didn’t you boys
get _kow-kow_ here this noon?”

“Yes, Kanaka Oolea,” volunteered an old, withered native who had just
joined the group from the direction of the house.  “All of them had
_kow-kow_ in the kitchen, and plenty of it.  They ate like lost horses
brought down from the lava.”

“And what do you want, Kumuhana?” Pool diverted to the old one, at the
same time motioning to the little maid to flap flies from the other side
of him.

“Twelve dollars,” said Kumuhana.  “I want to buy a Jackass and a
second-hand saddle and bridle.  I am growing too old for my legs to carry
me in walking.”

“You wait,” his _haole_ lord commanded.  “I will talk with you about the
matter, and about other things of importance, when I am finished with the
rest and they are gone.”

The withered old one nodded and proceeded to light his pipe.

“The _kow-kow_ in the kitchen was good,” Iliiopoi resumed, licking his
lips.  “The _poi_ was one-finger, the pig fat, the salmon-belly
unstinking, the fish of great freshness and plenty, though the _opihis_”
(tiny, rock-clinging shell-fish) “had been salted and thereby made tough.
Never should the _opihis_ be salted.  Often have I told you, Kanaka
Oolea, that _opihis_ should never be salted.  I am full of good
_kow-kow_.  My belly is heavy with it.  Yet is my heart not light of it
because there is no _kow-kow_ in my own house, where is my wife, who is
the aunt of your fourth son’s second wife, and where is my baby daughter,
and my wife’s old mother, and my wife’s old mother’s feeding child that
is a cripple, and my wife’s sister who lives likewise with us along with
her three children, the father being dead of a wicked dropsy—”

“Will five dollars save all of you from funerals for a day or several?”
Pool testily cut the tale short.

“Yes, Kanaka Oolea, and as well it will buy my wife a new comb and some
tobacco for myself.”

From a gold-sack drawn from the hip-pocket of his dungarees, Hardman Pool
drew the gold piece and tossed it accurately into the waiting hand.

To a bachelor who wanted six dollars for new leggings, tobacco, and
spurs, three dollars were given; the same to another who needed a hat;
and to a third, who modestly asked for two dollars, four were given with
a flowery-worded compliment anent his prowess in roping a recent wild
bull from the mountains.  They knew, as a rule, that he cut their
requisitions in half, therefore they doubled the size of their
requisitions.  And Hardman Pool knew they doubled, and smiled to himself.
It was his way, and, further, it was a very good way with his
multitudinous relatives, and did not reduce his stature in their esteem.

“And you, Ahuhu?” he demanded of one whose name meant “poison-wood.”

“And the price of a pair of dungarees,” Ahuhu concluded his list of
needs.  “I have ridden much and hard after your cattle, Kanaka Oolea, and
where my dungarees have pressed against the seat of the saddle there is
no seat to my dungarees.  It is not well that it be said that a Kanaka
Oolea cowboy, who is also a cousin of Kanaka Oolea’s wife’s half-sister,
should be shamed to be seen out of the saddle save that he walks backward
from all that behold him.”

“The price of a dozen pairs of dungarees be thine, Ahuhu,” Hardman Pool
beamed, tossing to him the necessary sum.  “I am proud that my family
shares my pride.  Afterward, Ahuhu, out of the dozen dungarees you will
give me one, else shall I be compelled to walk backward, my own and only
dungarees being in like manner well worn and shameful.”

And in laughter of love at their _haole_ chief’s final sally, all the
sweet-child-minded and physically gorgeous company of them departed to
their waiting horses, save the old withered one, Kumuhana, who had been
bidden to wait.

For a full five minutes they sat in silence.  Then Hardman Pool ordered
the little maid to fetch a tumbler of gin and milk, which, when she
brought it, he nodded her to hand to Kumuhana.  The glass did not leave
his lips until it was empty, whereon he gave a great audible out-breath
of “A-a-ah,” and smacked his lips.

“Much _awa_ have I drunk in my time,” he said reflectively.  “Yet is the
_awa_ but a common man’s drink, while the _haole_ liquor is a drink for
chiefs.  The _awa_ has not the liquor’s hot willingness, its spur in the
ribs of feeling, its biting alive of oneself that is very pleasant since
it is pleasant to be alive.”

Hardman Pool smiled, nodded agreement, and old Kumuhana continued.

“There is a warmingness to it.  It warms the belly and the soul.  It
warms the heart.  Even the soul and the heart grow cold when one is old.”

“You _are_ old,” Pool conceded.  “Almost as old as I.”

Kumuhana shook his head and murmured.  “Were I no older than you I would
be as young as you.”

“I am seventy-one,” said Pool.

“I do not know ages that way,” was the reply.  “What happened when you
were born?”

“Let me see,” Pool calculated.  “This is 1880.  Subtract seventy-one, and
it leaves nine.  I was born in 1809, which is the year Keliimakai died,
which is the year the Scotchman, Archibald Campbell, lived in Honolulu.”

“Then am I truly older than you, Kanaka Oolea.  I remember the Scotchman
well, for I was playing among the grass houses of Honolulu at the time,
and already riding a surf-board in the _wahine_” (woman) “surf at
Waikiki.  I can take you now to the spot where was the Scotchman’s grass
house.  The Seaman’s Mission stands now on the very ground.  Yet do I
know when I was born.  Often my grandmother and my mother told me of it.
I was born when Madame Pele” (the Fire Goddess or Volcano Goddess)
“became angry with the people of Paiea because they sacrificed no fish to
her from their fish-pool, and she sent down a flow of lava from Huulalai
and filled up their pond.  For ever was the fish-pond of Paiea filled up.
That was when I was born.”

“That was in 1801, when James Boyd was building ships for Kamehameha at
Hilo,” Pool cast back through the calendar; “which makes you
seventy-nine, or eight years older than I.  You are very old.”

“Yes, Kanaka Oolea,” muttered Kumuhana, pathetically attempting to swell
his shrunken chest with pride.

“And you are very wise.”

“Yes, Kanaka Oolea.”

“And you know many of the secret things that are known only to old men.”

“Yes, Kanaka Oolea.”

“And then you know—” Hardman Pool broke off, the more effectively to
impress and hypnotize the other ancient with the set stare of his
pale-washed blue eyes.  “They say the bones of Kahekili were taken from
their hiding-place and lie to-day in the Royal Mausoleum.  I have heard
it whispered that you alone of all living men truly know.”

“I know,” was the proud answer.  “I alone know.”

“Well, do they lie there?  Yes or no?”

“Kahekili was an _alii_” (high chief).  “It is from this straight line
that your wife Kalama came.  She is an _alii_.”  The old retainer paused
and pursed his lean lips in meditation.  “I belong to her, as all my
people before me belonged to her people before her.  She only can command
the great secrets of me.  She is wise, too wise ever to command me to
speak this secret.  To you, O Kanaka Oolea, I do not answer yes, I do not
answer no.  This is a secret of the _aliis_ that even the _aliis_ do not
know.”

“Very good, Kumuhana,” Hardman Pool commanded.  “Yet do you forget that I
am an _alii_, and that what my good Kalama does not dare ask, I command
to ask.  I can send for her, now, and tell her to command your answer.
But such would be a foolishness unless you prove yourself doubly foolish.
Tell me the secret, and she will never know.  A woman’s lips must pour
out whatever flows in through her ears, being so made.  I am a man, and
man is differently made.  As you well know, my lips suck tight on secrets
as a squid sucks to the salty rock.  If you will not tell me alone, then
will you tell Kalama and me together, and her lips will talk, her lips
will talk, so that the latest _malahini_ will shortly know what,
otherwise, you and I alone will know.”

Long time Kumuhana sat on in silence, debating the argument and finding
no way to evade the fact-logic of it.

“Great is your _haole_ wisdom,” he conceded at last.

“Yes? or no?” Hardman Pool drove home the point of his steel.

Kumuhana looked about him first, then slowly let his eyes come to rest on
the fly-flapping maid.

“Go,” Pool commanded her.  “And come not back without you hear a clapping
of my hands.”

Hardman Pool spoke no further, even after the flapper had disappeared
into the house; yet his face adamantly looked: “Yes or no?”

Again Kumuhana looked carefully about him, and up into the monkey-pod
boughs as if to apprehend a lurking listener.  His lips were very dry.
With his tongue he moistened them repeatedly.  Twice he essayed to speak,
but was inarticulately husky.  And finally, with bowed head, he
whispered, so low and solemnly that Hardman Pool bent his own head to
hear: “No.”

Pool clapped his hands, and the little maid ran out of the house to him
in tremulous, fluttery haste.

“Bring a milk and gin for old Kumuhana, here,” Pool commanded; and, to
Kumuhana: “Now tell me the whole story.”

“Wait,” was the answer.  “Wait till the little _wahine_ has come and
gone.”

And when the maid was gone, and the gin and milk had travelled the way
predestined of gin and milk when mixed together, Hardman Pool waited
without further urge for the story.  Kumuhana pressed his hand to his
chest and coughed hollowly at intervals, bidding for encouragement; but
in the end, of himself, spoke out.

“It was a terrible thing in the old days when a great _alii_ died.
Kahekili was a great _alii_.  He might have been king had he lived.  Who
can tell?  I was a young man, not yet married.  You know, Kanaka Oolea,
when Kahekili died, and you can tell me how old I was.  He died when
Governor Boki ran the Blonde Hotel here in Honolulu.  You have heard?”

“I was still on windward Hawaii,” Pool answered.  “But I have heard.
Boki made a distillery, and leased Manoa lands to grow sugar for it, and
Kaahumanu, who was regent, cancelled the lease, rooted out the cane, and
planted potatoes.  And Boki was angry, and prepared to make war, and
gathered his fighting men, with a dozen whaleship deserters and five
brass six-pounders, out at Waikiki—”

“That was the very time Kahekili died,” Kumuhana broke in eagerly.  “You
are very wise.  You know many things of the old days better than we old
_kanakas_.”

“It was 1829,” Pool continued complacently.  “You were twenty-eight years
old, and I was twenty, just coming ashore in the open boat after the
burning of the _Black Prince_.”

“I was twenty-eight,” Kumuhana resumed.  “It sounds right.  I remember
well Boki’s brass guns at Waikiki.  Kahekili died, too, at the time, at
Waikiki.  The people to this day believe his bones were taken to the
_Hale o Keawe_” (mausoleum) “at Honaunau, in Kona—”

“And long afterward were brought to the Royal Mausoleum here in
Honolulu,” Pool supplemented.

“Also, Kanaka Oolea, there are some who believe to this day that Queen
Alice has them stored with the rest of her ancestral bones in the big
jars in her taboo room.  All are wrong.  I know.  The sacred bones of
Kahekili are gone and for ever gone.  They rest nowhere.  They have
ceased to be.  And many _kona_ winds have whitened the surf at Waikiki
since the last man looked upon the last of Kahekili.  I alone remain
alive of those men.  I am the last man, and I was not glad to be at the
finish.

“For see!  I was a young man, and my heart was white-hot lava for Malia,
who was in Kahekili’s household.  So was Anapuni’s heart white-hot for
her, though the colour of his heart was black, as you shall see.  We were
at a drinking that night—Anapuni and I—the night that Kahekili died.
Anapuni and I were only commoners, as were all of us _kanakas_ and
_wahines_ who were at the drinking with the common sailors and whaleship
men from before the mast.  We were drinking on the mats by the beach at
Waikiki, close to the old _heiau_” (temple) “that is not far from what is
now the Wilders’ beach place.  I learned then and for ever what
quantities of drink _haole_ sailormen can stand.  As for us _kanakas_,
our heads were hot and light and rattly as dry gourds with the whisky and
the rum.

“It was past midnight, I remember well, when I saw Malia, whom never had
I seen at a drinking, come across the wet-hard sand of the beach.  My
brain burned like red cinders of hell as I looked upon Anapuni look upon
her, he being nearest to her by being across from me in the drinking
circle.  Oh, I know it was whisky and rum and youth that made the heat of
me; but there, in that moment, the mad mind of me resolved, if she spoke
to him and yielded to dance with him first, that I would put both my
hands around his throat and throw him down and under the _wahine_ surf
there beside us, and drown and choke out his life and the obstacle of him
that stood between me and her.  For know, that she had never decided
between us, and it was because of him that she was not already and long
since mine.

“She was a grand young woman with a body generous as that of a chiefess
and more wonderful, as she came upon us, across the wet sand, in the
shimmer of the moonlight.  Even the _haole_ sailormen made pause of
silence, and with open mouths stared upon her.  Her walk!  I have heard
you talk, O Kanaka Oolea, of the woman Helen who caused the war of Troy.
I say of Malia that more men would have stormed the walls of hell for her
than went against that old-time city of which it is your custom to talk
over much and long when you have drunk too little milk and too much gin.

“Her walk!  In the moonlight there, the soft glow-fire of the
jelly-fishes in the surf like the kerosene-lamp footlights I have seen in
the new _haole_ theatre!  It was not the walk of a girl, but a woman.
She did not flutter forward like rippling wavelets on a reef-sheltered,
placid beach.  There was that in her manner of walk that was big and
queenlike, like the motion of the forces of nature, like the rhythmic
flow of lava down the slopes of Kau to the sea, like the movement of the
huge orderly trade-wind seas, like the rise and fall of the four great
tides of the year that may be like music in the eternal ear of God, being
too slow of occurrence in time to make a tune for ordinary quick-pulsing,
brief-living, swift-dying man.

“Anapuni was nearest.  But she looked at me.  Have you ever heard a call,
Kanaka Oolea, that is without sound yet is louder than the conches of
God?  So called she to me across that circle of the drinking.  I half
arose, for I was not yet full drunken; but Anapuni’s arm caught her and
drew her, and I sank back on my elbow and watched and raged.  He was for
making her sit beside him, and I waited.  Did she sit, and, next, dance
with him, I knew that ere morning Anapuni would be a dead man, choked and
drowned by me in the shallow surf.

“Strange, is it not, Kanaka Oolea, all this heat called ‘love’?  Yet it
is not strange.  It must be so in the time of one’s youth, else would
mankind not go on.”

“That is why the desire of woman must be greater than the desire of
life,” Pool concurred.  “Else would there be neither men nor women.”

“Yes,” said Kumuhana.  “But it is many a year now since the last of such
heat has gone out of me.  I remember it as one remembers an old sunrise—a
thing that was.  And so one grows old, and cold, and drinks gin, not for
madness, but for warmth.  And the milk is very nourishing.

“But Malia did not sit beside him.  I remember her eyes were wild, her
hair down and flying, as she bent over him and whispered in his ear.  And
her hair covered him about and hid him as she whispered, and the sight of
it pounded my heart against my ribs and dizzied my head till scarcely
could I half-see.  And I willed myself with all the will of me that if,
in short minutes, she did not come over to me, I would go across the
circle and get her.

“It was one of the things never to be.  You remember Chief Konukalani?
Himself he strode up to the circle.  His face was black with anger.  He
gripped Malia, not by the arm, but by the hair, and dragged her away
behind him and was gone.  Of that, even now, can I understand not the
half.  I, who was for slaying Anapuni because of her, raised neither hand
nor voice of protest when Konukalani dragged her away by the hair—nor did
Anapuni.  Of course, we were common men, and he was a chief.  That I
know.  But why should two common men, mad with desire of woman, with
desire of woman stronger in them than desire of life, let any one chief,
even the highest in the land, drag the woman away by the hair?  Desiring
her more than life, why should the two men fear to slay then and
immediately the one chief?  Here is something stronger than life,
stronger than woman, but what is it? and why?”

“I will answer you,” said Hardman Pool.  “It is so because most men are
fools, and therefore must be taken care of by the few men who are wise.
Such is the secret of chiefship.  In all the world are chiefs over men.
In all the world that has been have there ever been chiefs, who must say
to the many fool men: ‘Do this; do not do that.  Work, and work as we
tell you or your bellies will remain empty and you will perish.  Obey the
laws we set you or you will be beasts and without place in the world.
You would not have been, save for the chiefs before you who ordered and
regulated for your fathers.  No seed of you will come after you, except
that we order and regulate for you now.  You must be peace-abiding, and
decent, and blow your noses.  You must be early to bed of nights, and up
early in the morning to work if you would heave beds to sleep in and not
roost in trees like the silly fowls.  This is the season for the
yam-planting and you must plant now.  We say now, to-day, and not
picnicking and hulaing to-day and yam-planting to-morrow or some other
day of the many careless days.  You must not kill one another, and you
must leave your neighbours’ wives alone.  All this is life for you,
because you think but one day at a time, while we, your chiefs, think for
you all days and for days ahead.’”

“Like a cloud on the mountain-top that comes down and wraps about you and
that you dimly see is a cloud, so is your wisdom to me, Kanaka Oolea,”
Kumuhana murmured.  “Yet is it sad that I should be born a common man and
live all my days a common man.”

“That is because you were of yourself common,” Hardman Pool assured him.
“When a man is born common, and is by nature uncommon, he rises up and
overthrows the chiefs and makes himself chief over the chiefs.  Why do
you not run my ranch, with its many thousands of cattle, and shift the
pastures by the rain-fall, and pick the bulls, and arrange the bargaining
and the selling of the meat to the sailing ships and war vessels and the
people who live in the Honolulu houses, and fight with lawyers, and help
make laws, and even tell the King what is wise for him to do and what is
dangerous?  Why does not any man do this that I do?  Any man of all the
men who work for me, feed out of my hand, and let me do their thinking
for them—me, who work harder than any of them, who eats no more than any
of them, and who can sleep on no more than one _lauhala_ mat at a time
like any of them?”

“I am out of the cloud, Kanaka Oolea,” said Kumuhana, with a visible
brightening of countenance.  “More clearly do I see.  All my long years
have the _aliis_ I was born under thought for me.  Ever, when I was
hungry, I came to them for food, as I come to your kitchen now.  Many
people eat in your kitchen, and the days of feasts when you slay fat
steers for all of us are understandable.  It is why I come to you this
day, an old man whose labour of strength is not worth a shilling a week,
and ask of you twelve dollars to buy a jackass and a second-hand saddle
and bridle.  It is why twice ten fool men of us, under these monkey-pods
half an hour ago, asked of you a dollar or two, or four or five, or ten
or twelve.  We are the careless ones of the careless days who will not
plant the yam in season if our _alii_ does not compel us, who will not
think one day for ourselves, and who, when we age to worthlessness, know
that our _alii_ will think _kow-kow_ into our bellies and a grass thatch
over our heads.”

Hardman Pool bowed his appreciation, and urged:

“But the bones of Kahekili.  The Chief Konukalani had just dragged away
Malia by the hair of the head, and you and Anapuni sat on without protest
in the circle of drinking.  What was it Malia whispered in Anapuni’s ear,
bending over him, her hair hiding the face of him?”

“That Kahekili was dead.  That was what she whispered to Anapuni.  That
Kahekili was dead, just dead, and that the chiefs, ordering all within
the house to remain within, were debating the disposal of the bones and
meat of him before word of his death should get abroad.  That the high
priest Eoppo was deciding them, and that she had overheard no less than
Anapuni and me chosen as the sacrifices to go the way of Kahekili and his
bones and to care for him afterward and for ever in the shadowy other
world.”

“The _moepuu_, the human sacrifice,” Pool commented.  “Yet it was nine
years since the coming of the missionaries.”

“And it was the year before their coming that the idols were cast down
and the taboos broken,” Kumuhana added.  “But the chiefs still practised
the old ways, the custom of _hunakele_, and hid the bones of the _aliis_
where no men should find them and make fish-hooks of their jaws or arrow
heads of their long bones for the slaying of little mice in sport.
Behold, O Kanaka Oolea!”

The old man thrust out his tongue; and, to Pool’s amazement, he saw the
surface of that sensitive organ, from root to tip, tattooed in intricate
designs.

“That was done after the missionaries came, several years afterward, when
Keopuolani died.  Also, did I knock out four of my front teeth, and
half-circles did I burn over my body with blazing bark.  And whoever
ventured out-of-doors that night was slain by the chiefs.  Nor could a
light be shown in a house or a whisper of noise be made.  Even dogs and
hogs that made a noise were slain, nor all that night were the ships’
bells of the _haoles_ in the harbour allowed to strike.  It was a
terrible thing in those days when an _alii_ died.

“But the night that Kahekili died.  We sat on in the drinking circle
after Konukalani dragged Malia away by the hair.  Some of the _haole_
sailors grumbled; but they were few in the land in those days and the
_kanakas_ many.  And never was Malia seen of men again.  Konukalani alone
knew the manner of her slaying, and he never told.  And in after years
what common men like Anapuni and me should dare to question him?

“Now she had told Anapuni before she was dragged away.  But Anapuni’s
heart was black.  Me he did not tell.  Worthy he was of the killing I had
intended for him.  There was a giant harpooner in the circle, whose
singing was like the bellowing of bulls; and, gazing on him in amazement
while he roared some song of the sea, when next I looked across the
circle to Anapuni, Anapuni was gone.  He had fled to the high mountains
where he could hide with the bird-catchers a week of moons.  This I
learned afterward.

“I?  I sat on, ashamed of my desire of woman that had not been so strong
as my slave-obedience to a chief.  And I drowned my shame in large drinks
of rum and whisky, till the world went round and round, inside my head
and out, and the Southern Cross danced a _hula_ in the sky, and the
Koolau Mountains bowed their lofty summits to Waikiki and the surf of
Waikiki kissed them on their brows.  And the giant harpooner was still
roaring, his the last sounds in my ear, as I fell back on the _lauhala_
mat, and was to all things for the time as one dead.

“When I awoke was at the faint first beginning of dawn.  I was being
kicked by a hard naked heel in the ribs.  What of the enormousness of the
drink I had consumed, the feelings aroused in me by the heel were not
pleasant.  The _kanakas_ and _wahines_ of the drinking were gone.  I
alone remained among the sleeping sailormen, the giant harpooner snoring
like a whale, his head upon my feet.

“More heel-kicks, and I sat up and was sick.  But the one who kicked was
impatient, and demanded to know where was Anapuni.  And I did not know,
and was kicked, this time from both sides by two impatient men, because I
did not know.  Nor did I know that Kahekili was dead.  Yet did I guess
something serious was afoot, for the two men who kicked me were chiefs,
and no common men crouched behind them to do their bidding.  One was
Aimoku, of Kaneche; the other Humuhumu, of Manoa.

“They commanded me to go with them, and they were not kind in their
commanding; and as I uprose, the head of the giant harpooner was rolled
off my feet, past the edge of the mat, into the sand.  He grunted like a
pig, his lips opened, and all of his tongue rolled out of his mouth into
the sand.  Nor did he draw it back.  For the first time I knew how long
was a man’s tongue.  The sight of the sand on it made me sick for the
second time.  It is a terrible thing, the next day after a night of
drinking.  I was afire, dry afire, all the inside of me like a burnt
cinder, like _aa_ lava, like the harpooner’s tongue dry and gritty with
sand.  I bent for a half-drunk drinking coconut, but Aimoku kicked it out
of my shaking fingers, and Humuhumu smote me with the heel of his hand on
my neck.

“They walked before me, side by side, their faces solemn and black, and I
walked at their heels.  My mouth stank of the drink, and my head was sick
with the stale fumes of it, and I would have cut off my right hand for a
drink of water, one drink, a mouthful even.  And, had I had it, I know it
would have sizzled in my belly like water spilled on heated stones for
the roasting.  It is terrible, the next day after the drinking.  All the
life-time of many men who died young has passed by me since the last I
was able to do such mad drinking of youth when youth knows not capacity
and is undeterred.

“But as we went on, I began to know that some _alii_ was dead.  No
_kanakas_ lay asleep in the sand, nor stole home from their love-making;
and no canoes were abroad after the early fish most catchable then inside
the reef at the change of the tide.  When we came, past the _hoiau_”
(temple), “to where the Great Kamehameha used to haul out his brigs and
schooners, I saw, under the canoe-sheds, that the mat-thatches of
Kahekili’s great double canoe had been taken off, and that even then, at
low tide, many men were launching it down across the sand into the water.
But all these men were chiefs.  And, though my eyes swam, and the inside
of my head went around and around, and the inside of my body was a cinder
athirst, I guessed that the _alii_ who was dead was Kahekili.  For he was
old, and most likely of the _aliis_ to be dead.”

“It was his death, as I have heard it, more than the intercession of
Kekuanaoa, that spoiled Governor Boki’s rebellion,” Hardman Pool
observed.

“It was Kahekili’s death that spoiled it,” Kumuhana confirmed.  “All
commoners, when the word slipped out that night of his death, fled into
the shelter of the grass houses, nor lighted fire nor pipes, nor breathed
loudly, being therein and thereby taboo from use for sacrifice.  And all
Governor Boki’s commoners of fighting men, as well as the _haole_
deserters from ships, so fled, so that the brass guns lay unserved and
his handful of chiefs of themselves could do nothing.

“Aimoku and Humuhumu made me sit on the sand to the side from the
launching of the great double-canoe.  And when it was afloat all the
chiefs were athirst, not being used to such toil; and I was told to climb
the palms beside the canoe-sheds and throw down drink-coconuts.  They
drank and were refreshed, but me they refused to let drink.

“Then they bore Kahekili from his house to the canoe in a _haole_ coffin,
oiled and varnished and new.  It had been made by a ship’s carpenter, who
thought he was making a boat that must not leak.  It was very tight, and
over where the face of Kahekili lay was nothing but thin glass.  The
chiefs had not screwed on the outside plank to cover the glass.  Maybe
they did not know the manner of _haole_ coffins; but at any rate I was to
be glad they did not know, as you shall see.

“‘There is but one _moepuu_,’ said the priest Eoppo, looking at me where
I sat on the coffin in the bottom of the canoe.  Already the chiefs were
paddling out through the reef.

“‘The other has run into hiding,’ Aimoku answered.  ‘This one was all we
could get.’

“And then I knew.  I knew everything.  I was to be sacrificed.  Anapuni
had been planned for the other sacrifice.  That was what Malia had
whispered to Anapuni at the drinking.  And she had been dragged away
before she could tell me.  And in his blackness of heart he had not told
me.

“‘There should be two,’ said Eoppo.  ‘It is the law.’

“Aimoku stopped paddling and looked back shoreward as if to return and
get a second sacrifice.  But several of the chiefs contended no, saying
that all commoners were fled to the mountains or were lying taboo in
their houses, and that it might take days before they could catch one.
In the end Eoppo gave in, though he grumbled from time to time that the
law required two _moepuus_.

“We paddled on, past Diamond Head and abreast of Koko Head, till we were
in the midway of the Molokai Channel.  There was quite a sea running,
though the trade wind was blowing light.  The chiefs rested from their
paddles, save for the steersmen who kept the canoes bow-on to the wind
and swell.  And, ere they proceeded further in the matter, they opened
more coconuts and drank.

“‘I do not mind so much being the _moepuu_,’ I said to Humuhumu; ‘but I
should like to have a drink before I am slain.’  I got no drink.  But I
spoke true.  I was too sick of the much whisky and rum to be afraid to
die.  At least my mouth would stink no more, nor my head ache, nor the
inside of me be as dry-hot sand.  Almost worst of all, I suffered at
thought of the harpooner’s tongue, as last I had seen it lying on the
sand and covered with sand.  O Kanaka Oolea, what animals young men are
with the drink!  Not until they have grown old, like you and me, do they
control their wantonness of thirst and drink sparingly, like you and me.”

“Because we have to,” Hardman Pool rejoined.  “Old stomachs are worn thin
and tender, and we drink sparingly because we dare not drink more.  We
are wise, but the wisdom is bitter.”

“The priest Eoppo sang a long _mele_ about Kahekili’s mother and his
mother’s mother, and all their mothers all the way back to the beginning
of time,” Kumuhana resumed.  “And it seemed I must die of my sand-hot
dryness ere he was done.  And he called upon all the gods of the under
world, the middle world and the over world, to care for and cherish the
dead _alii_ about to be consigned to them, and to carry out the
curses—they were terrible curses—he laid upon all living men and men to
live after who might tamper with the bones of Kahekili to use them in
sport of vermin-slaying.

“Do you know, Kanaka Oolea, the priest talked a language largely
different, and I know it was the priest language, the old language.  Maui
he did not name Maui, but Maui-Tiki-Tiki and Maui-Po-Tiki.  And Hina, the
goddess-mother of Maui, he named Ina.  And Maui’s god-father he named
sometimes Akalana and sometimes Kanaloa.  Strange how one about to die
and very thirsty should remember such things!  And I remember the priest
named Hawaii as Vaii, and Lanai as Ngangai.”

“Those were the Maori names,” Hardman Pool explained, “and the Samoan and
Tongan names, that the priests brought with them in their first voyages
from the south in the long ago when they found Hawaii and settled to
dwell upon it.”

“Great is your wisdom, O Kanaka Oolea,” the old man accorded solemnly.
“Ku, our Supporter of the Heavens, the priest named Tu, and also Ru; and
La, our God of the Sun, he named Ra—”

“And Ra was a sun-god in Egypt in the long ago,” Pool interrupted with a
sparkle of interest.  “Truly, you Polynesians have travelled far in time
and space since first you began.  A far cry it is from Old Egypt, when
Atlantis was still afloat, to Young Hawaii in the North Pacific.  But
proceed, Kumuhana.  Do you remember anything also of what the priest
Eoppo sang?”

“At the very end,” came the confirming nod, “though I was near dead
myself, and nearer to die under the priest’s knife, he sang what I have
remembered every word of.  Listen!  It was thus.”

And in quavering falsetto, with the customary broken-notes, the old man
sang.

“A Maori death-chant unmistakable,” Pool exclaimed, “sung by an Hawaiian
with a tattooed tongue!  Repeat it once again, and I shall say it to you
in English.”

And when it had been repeated, he spoke it slowly in English:

    “But death is nothing new.
    Death is and has been ever since old Maui died.
    Then Pata-tai laughed loud
    And woke the goblin-god,
    Who severed him in two, and shut him in,
    So dusk of eve came on.”

“And at the last,” Kumuhana resumed, “I was not slain.  Eoppo, the
killing knife in hand and ready to lift for the blow, did not lift.  And
I?  How did I feel and think?  Often, Kanaka Oolea, have I since laughed
at the memory of it.  I felt very thirsty.  I did not want to die.  I
wanted a drink of water.  I knew I was going to die, and I kept
remembering the thousand waterfalls falling to waste down the _palis_”
(precipices) “of the windward Koolau Mountains.  I did not think of
Anapuni.  I was too thirsty.  I did not think of Malia.  I was too
thirsty.  But continually, inside my head, I saw the tongue of the
harpooner, covered dry with sand, as I had last seen it, lying in the
sand.  My tongue was like that, too.  And in the bottom of the canoe
rolled about many drinking nuts.  Yet I did not attempt to drink, for
these were chiefs and I was a common man.

“‘No,’ said Eoppo, commanding the chiefs to throw overboard the coffin.
‘There are not two _moepuus_, therefore there shall be none.’

“‘Slay the one,’ the chiefs cried.

“But Eoppo shook his head, and said: ‘We cannot send Kahekili on his way
with only the tops of the taro.’

“‘Half a fish is better than none,’ Aimoku said the old saying.

“‘Not at the burying of an _alii_,’ was the priest’s quick reply.  ‘It is
the law.  We cannot be niggard with Kahekili and cut his allotment of
sacrifice in half.’

“So, for the moment, while the coffin went overside, I was not slain.
And it was strange that I was glad immediately that I was to live.  And I
began to remember Malia, and to begin to plot a vengeance on Anapuni.
And with the blood of life thus freshening in me, my thirst multiplied on
itself tenfold and my tongue and mouth and throat seemed as sanded as the
tongue of the harpooner.  The coffin being overboard, I was sitting in
the bottom of the canoe.  A coconut rolled between my legs and I closed
them on it.  But as I picked it up in my hand, Aimoku smote my hand with
the paddle-edge.  Behold!”

He held up the hand, showing two fingers crooked from never having been
set.

“I had no time to vex over my pain, for worse things were upon me.  All
the chiefs were crying out in horror.  The coffin, head-end up, had not
sunk.  It bobbed up and down in the sea astern of us.  And the canoe,
without way on it, bow-on to sea and wind, was drifted down by sea and
wind upon the coffin.  And the glass of it was to us, so that we could
see the face and head of Kahekili through the glass; and he grinned at us
through the glass and seemed alive already in the other world and angry
with us, and, with other-world power, about to wreak his anger upon us.
Up and down he bobbed, and the canoe drifted closer upon him.

“‘Kill him!’  ‘Bleed him!’  ‘Thrust to the heart of him!’  These things
the chiefs were crying out to Eoppo in their fear.  ‘Over with the taro
tops!’  ‘Let the _alii_ have the half of a fish!’

“Eoppo, priest though he was, was likewise afraid, and his reason
weakened before the sight of Kahekili in his _haole_ coffin that would
not sink.  He seized me by the hair, drew me to my feet, and lifted the
knife to plunge to my heart.  And there was no resistance in me.  I knew
again only that I was very thirsty, and before my swimming eyes, in
mid-air and close up, dangled the sanded tongue of the harpooner.

“But before the knife could fall and drive in, the thing happened that
saved me.  Akai, half-brother to Governor Boki, as you will remember, was
steersman of the canoe, and, therefore, in the stern, was nearest to the
coffin and its dead that would not sink.  He was wild with fear, and he
thrust out with the point of his paddle to fend off the coffined _alii_
that seemed bent to come on board.  The point of the paddle struck the
glass.  The glass broke—”

“And the coffin immediately sank,” Hardman Pool broke in; “the air that
floated it escaping through the broken glass.”

“The coffin immediately sank, being builded by the ship’s carpenter like
a boat,” Kumuhana confirmed.  “And I, who was a _moepuu_, became a man
once more.  And I lived, though I died a thousand deaths from thirst
before we gained back to the beach at Waikiki.

“And so, O Kanaka Oolea, the bones of Kahekili do not lie in the Royal
Mausoleum.  They are at the bottom of Molokai Channel, if not, long
since, they have become floating dust of slime, or, builded into the
bodies of the coral creatures dead and gone, are builded into the coral
reef itself.  Of men I am the one living who saw the bones of Kahekili
sink into the Molokai Channel.”

In the pause that followed, wherein Hardman Pool was deep sunk in
meditation, Kumuhana licked his dry lips many times.  At the last he
broke silence:

“The twelve dollars, Kanaka Oolea, for the jackass and the second-hand
saddle and bridle?”

“The twelve dollars would be thine,” Pool responded, passing to the
ancient one six dollars and a half, “save that I have in my stable junk
the very bridle and saddle for you which I shall give you.  These six
dollars and a half will buy you the perfectly suitable jackass of the
_pake_” (Chinese) “at Kokako who told me only yesterday that such was the
price.”

They sat on, Pool meditating, conning over and over to himself the Maori
death-chant he had heard, and especially the line, “So dusk of eve came
on,” finding in it an intense satisfaction of beauty; Kumuhana licking
his lips and tokening that he waited for something more.  At last he
broke silence.

“I have talked long, O Kanaka Oolea.  There is not the enduring moistness
in my mouth that was when I was young.  It seems that afresh upon me is
the thirst that was mine when tormented by the visioned tongue of the
harpooner.  The gin and milk is very good, O Kanaka Oolea, for a tongue
that is like the harpooner’s.”

A shadow of a smile flickered across Pool’s face.  He clapped his hands,
and the little maid came running.

“Bring one glass of gin and milk for old Kumuhana,” commanded Hardman
Pool.

WAIKIKI, HONOLULU.
         _June_ 28, 1916.




WHEN ALICE TOLD HER SOUL


THIS, of Alice Akana, is an affair of Hawaii, not of this day, but of
days recent enough, when Abel Ah Yo preached his famous revival in
Honolulu and persuaded Alice Akana to tell her soul.  But what Alice told
concerned itself with the earlier history of the then surviving
generation.

For Alice Akana was fifty years old, had begun life early, and, early and
late, lived it spaciously.  What she knew went back into the roots and
foundations of families, businesses, and plantations.  She was the one
living repository of accurate information that lawyers sought out,
whether the information they required related to land-boundaries and land
gifts, or to marriages, births, bequests, or scandals.  Rarely, because
of the tight tongue she kept behind her teeth, did she give them what
they asked; and when she did was when only equity was served and no one
was hurt.

For Alice had lived, from early in her girlhood, a life of flowers, and
song, and wine, and dance; and, in her later years, had herself been
mistress of these revels by office of mistress of the _hula_ house.  In
such atmosphere, where mandates of God and man and caution are inhibited,
and where woozled tongues will wag, she acquired her historical knowledge
of things never otherwise whispered and rarely guessed.  And her tight
tongue had served her well, so that, while the old-timers knew she must
know, none ever heard her gossip of the times of Kalakaua’s boathouse,
nor of the high times of officers of visiting warships, nor of the
diplomats and ministers and councils of the countries of the world.

So, at fifty, loaded with historical dynamite sufficient, if it were ever
exploded, to shake the social and commercial life of the Islands, still
tight of tongue, Alice Akana was mistress of the hula house, manageress
of the dancing girls who _hula_’d for royalty, for _luaus_ (feasts),
house-parties, _poi_ suppers, and curious tourists.  And, at fifty, she
was not merely buxom, but short and fat in the Polynesian peasant way,
with a constitution and lack of organic weakness that promised
incalculable years.  But it was at fifty that she strayed, quite by
chance of time and curiosity, into Abel Ah Yo’s revival meeting.

Now Abel Ah Yo, in his theology and word wizardry, was as much mixed a
personage as Billy Sunday.  In his genealogy he was much more mixed, for
he was compounded of one-fourth Portuguese, one-fourth Scotch, one-fourth
Hawaiian, and one-fourth Chinese.  The Pentecostal fire he flamed forth
was hotter and more variegated than could any one of the four races of
him alone have flamed forth.  For in him were gathered together the
cannyness and the cunning, the wit and the wisdom, the subtlety and the
rawness, the passion and the philosophy, the agonizing spirit-groping and
the legs up to the knees in the dung of reality, of the four radically
different breeds that contributed to the sum of him.  His, also, was the
clever self-deceivement of the entire clever compound.

When it came to word wizardry, he had Billy Sunday, master of slang and
argot of one language, skinned by miles.  For in Abel Ah Yo were the five
verbs, and nouns, and adjectives, and metaphors of four living languages.
Intermixed and living promiscuously and vitally together, he possessed in
these languages a reservoir of expression in which a myriad Billy Sundays
could drown.  Of no race, a mongrel _par excellence_, a heterogeneous
scrabble, the genius of the admixture was superlatively Abel Ah Yo’s.
Like a chameleon, he titubated and scintillated grandly between the
diverse parts of him, stunning by frontal attack and surprising and
confouding by flanking sweeps the mental homogeneity of the more simply
constituted souls who came in to his revival to sit under him and flame
to his flaming.

Abel Ah Yo believed in himself and his mixedness, as he believed in the
mixedness of his weird concept that God looked as much like him as like
any man, being no mere tribal god, but a world god that must look equally
like all races of all the world, even if it led to piebaldness.  And the
concept worked.  Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hawaiian, Porto Rican,
Russian, English, French—members of all races—knelt without friction,
side by side, to his revision of deity.

Himself in his tender youth an apostate to the Church of England, Abel Ah
Yo had for years suffered the lively sense of being a Judas sinner.
Essentially religious, he had foresworn the Lord.  Like Judas therefore
he was.  Judas was damned.  Wherefore he, Abel Ah Yo, was damned; and he
did not want to be damned.  So, quite after the manner of humans, he
squirmed and twisted to escape damnation.  The day came when he solved
his escape.  The doctrine that Judas was damned, he concluded, was a
misinterpretation of God, who, above all things, stood for justice.
Judas had been God’s servant, specially selected to perform a
particularly nasty job.  Therefore Judas, ever faithful, a betrayer only
by divine command, was a saint.  Ergo, he, Abel Ah Yo, was a saint by
very virtue of his apostasy to a particular sect, and he could have
access with clear grace any time to God.

This theory became one of the major tenets of his preaching, and was
especially efficacious in cleansing the consciences of the back-sliders
from all other faiths who else, in the secrecy of their subconscious
selves, were being crushed by the weight of the Judas sin.  To Abel Ah
Yo, God’s plan was as clear as if he, Abel Ah Yo, had planned it himself.
All would be saved in the end, although some took longer than others, and
would win only to backseats.  Man’s place in the ever-fluxing chaos of
the world was definite and pre-ordained—if by no other token, then by
denial that there was any ever-fluxing chaos.  This was a mere bugbear of
mankind’s addled fancy; and, by stinging audacities of thought and
speech, by vivid slang that bit home by sheerest intimacy into his
listeners’ mental processes, he drove the bugbear from their brains,
showed them the loving clarity of God’s design, and, thereby, induced in
them spiritual serenity and calm.

What chance had Alice Akana, herself pure and homogeneous Hawaiian,
against his subtle, democratic-tinged, four-race-engendered,
slang-munitioned attack?  He knew, by contact, almost as much as she
about the waywardness of living and sinning—having been singing boy on
the passenger-ships between Hawaii and California, and, after that, bar
boy, afloat and ashore, from the Barbary Coast to Heinie’s Tavern.  In
point of fact, he had left his job of Number One Bar Boy at the
University Club to embark on his great preachment revival.

So, when Alice Akana strayed in to scoff, she remained to pray to Abel Ah
Yo’s god, who struck her hard-headed mind as the most sensible god of
which she had ever heard.  She gave money into Abel Ah Yo’s collection
plate, closed up the _hula_ house, and dismissed the _hula_ dancers to
more devious ways of earning a livelihood, shed her bright colours and
raiments and flower garlands, and bought a Bible.

It was a time of religious excitement in the purlieus of Honolulu.  The
thing was a democratic movement of the people toward God.  Place and
caste were invited, but never came.  The stupid lowly, and the humble
lowly, only, went down on its knees at the penitent form, admitted its
pathological weight and hurt of sin, eliminated and purged all its
bafflements, and walked forth again upright under the sun, child-like and
pure, upborne by Abel Ah Yo’s god’s arm around it.  In short, Abel Ah
Yo’s revival was a clearing house for sin and sickness of spirit, wherein
sinners were relieved of their burdens and made light and bright and
spiritually healthy again.

But Alice was not happy.  She had not been cleared.  She bought and
dispersed Bibles, contributed more money to the plate, contralto’d
gloriously in all the hymns, but would not tell her soul.  In vain Abel
Ah Yo wrestled with her.  She would not go down on her knees at the
penitent form and voice the things of tarnish within her—the ill things
of good friends of the old days.  “You cannot serve two masters,” Abel Ah
Yo told her.  “Hell is full of those who have tried.  Single of heart and
pure of heart must you make your peace with God.  Not until you tell your
soul to God right out in meeting will you be ready for redemption.  In
the meantime you will suffer the canker of the sin you carry about within
you.”

Scientifically, though he did not know it and though he continually
jeered at science, Abel Ah Yo was right.  Not could she be again as a
child and become radiantly clad in God’s grace, until she had eliminated
from her soul, by telling, all the sophistications that had been hers,
including those she shared with others.  In the Protestant way, she must
bare her soul in public, as in the Catholic way it was done in the
privacy of the confessional.  The result of such baring would be unity,
tranquillity, happiness, cleansing, redemption, and immortal life.

“Choose!”  Abel Ah Yo thundered.  “Loyalty to God, or loyalty to man.”
And Alice could not choose.  Too long had she kept her tongue locked with
the honour of man.  “I will tell all my soul about myself,” she
contended.  “God knows I am tired of my soul and should like to have it
clean and shining once again as when I was a little girl at Kaneohe—”

“But all the corruption of your soul has been with other souls,” was Abel
Ah Yo’s invariable reply.  “When you have a burden, lay it down.  You
cannot bear a burden and be quit of it at the same time.”

“I will pray to God each day, and many times each day,” she urged.  “I
will approach God with humility, with sighs and with tears.  I will
contribute often to the plate, and I will buy Bibles, Bibles, Bibles
without end.”

“And God will not smile upon you,” God’s mouthpiece retorted.  “And you
will remain weary and heavy-laden.  For you will not have told all your
sin, and not until you have told all will you be rid of any.”

“This rebirth is difficult,” Alice sighed.

“Rebirth is even more difficult than birth.”  Abel Ah Yo did anything but
comfort her.  “‘Not until you become as a little child . . . ’”

“If ever I tell my soul, it will be a big telling,” she confided.

“The bigger the reason to tell it then.”

And so the situation remained at deadlock, Abel Ah Yo demanding absolute
allegiance to God, and Alice Akana flirting on the fringes of paradise.

“You bet it will be a big telling, if Alice ever begins,” the
beach-combing and disreputable _kamaainas_ (old-timers) gleefully told
one another over their Palm Tree gin.

In the clubs the possibility of her telling was of more moment.  The
younger generation of men announced that they had applied for front seats
at the telling, while many of the older generation of men joked hollowly
about the conversion of Alice.  Further, Alice found herself abruptly
popular with friends who had forgotten her existence for twenty years.

One afternoon, as Alice, Bible in hand, was taking the electric street
car at Hotel and Fort, Cyrus Hodge, sugar factor and magnate, ordered his
chauffeur to stop beside her.  Willy nilly, in excess of friendliness, he
had her into his limousine beside him and went three-quarters of an hour
out of his way and time personally to conduct her to her destination.

“Good for sore eyes to see you,” he burbled.  “How the years fly!  You’re
looking fine.  The secret of youth is yours.”

Alice smiled and complimented in return in the royal Polynesian way of
friendliness.

“My, my,” Cyrus Hodge reminisced.  “I was such a boy in those days!”

“_Some_ boy,” she laughed acquiescence.

“But knowing no more than the foolishness of a boy in those long-ago
days.”

“Remember the night your hack-driver got drunk and left you—”

“S-s-sh!” he cautioned.  “That Jap driver is a high-school graduate and
knows more English than either of us.  Also, I think he is a spy for his
Government.  So why should we tell him anything?  Besides, I was so very
young.  You remember . . . ”

“Your cheeks were like the peaches we used to grow before the
Mediterranean fruit fly got into them,” Alice agreed.  “I don’t think you
shaved more than once a week then.  You were a pretty boy.  Don’t you
remember the _hula_ we composed in your honour, the—”

“S-s-sh!” he hushed her.  “All that’s buried and forgotten.  May it
remain forgotten.”

And she was aware that in his eyes was no longer any of the ingenuousness
of youth she remembered.  Instead, his eyes were keen and speculative,
searching into her for some assurance that she would not resurrect his
particular portion of that buried past.

“Religion is a good thing for us as we get along into middle age,”
another old friend told her.  He was building a magnificent house on
Pacific Heights, but had recently married a second time, and was even
then on his way to the steamer to welcome home his two daughters just
graduated from Vassar.  “We need religion in our old age, Alice.  It
softens, makes us more tolerant and forgiving of the weaknesses of
others—especially the weaknesses of youth of—of others, when they played
high and low and didn’t know what they were doing.”

He waited anxiously.

“Yes,” she said.  “We are all born to sin and it is hard to grow out of
sin.  But I grow, I grow.”

“Don’t forget, Alice, in those other days I always played square.  You
and I never had a falling out.”

“Not even the night you gave that _luau_ when you were twenty-one and
insisted on breaking the glassware after every toast.  But of course you
paid for it.”

“Handsomely,” he asserted almost pleadingly.

“Handsomely,” she agreed.  “I replaced more than double the quantity with
what you paid me, so that at the next _luau_ I catered one hundred and
twenty plates without having to rent or borrow a dish or glass.  Lord
Mainweather gave that _luau_—you remember him.”

“I was pig-sticking with him at Mana,” the other nodded.  “We were at a
two weeks’ house-party there.  But say, Alice, as you know, I think this
religion stuff is all right and better than all right.  But don’t let it
carry you off your feet.  And don’t get to telling your soul on me.  What
would my daughters think of that broken glassware!”

“I always did have an _aloha_” (warm regard) “for you, Alice,” a member
of the Senate, fat and bald-headed, assured her.

And another, a lawyer and a grandfather: “We were always friends, Alice.
And remember, any legal advice or handling of business you may require,
I’ll do for you gladly, and without fees, for the sake of our old-time
friendship.”

Came a banker to her late Christmas Eve, with formidable, legal-looking
envelopes in his hand which he presented to her.

“Quite by chance,” he explained, “when my people were looking up
land-records in Iapio Valley, I found a mortgage of two thousand on your
holdings there—that rice land leased to Ah Chin.  And my mind drifted
back to the past when we were all young together, and wild—a bit wild, to
be sure.  And my heart warmed with the memory of you, and, so, just as an
_aloha_, here’s the whole thing cleared off for you.”

Nor was Alice forgotten by her own people.  Her house became a Mecca for
native men and women, usually performing pilgrimage privily after
darkness fell, with presents always in their hands—squid fresh from the
reef, _opihis_ and _limu_, baskets of alligator pears, roasting corn of
the earliest from windward Cahu, mangoes and star-apples, taro pink and
royal of the finest selection, sucking pigs, banana _poi_, breadfruit,
and crabs caught the very day from Pearl Harbour.  Mary Mendana, wife of
the Portuguese Consul, remembered her with a five-dollar box of candy and
a mandarin coat that would have fetched three-quarters of a hundred
dollars at a fire sale.  And Elvira Miyahara Makaena Yin Wap, the wife of
Yin Wap the wealthy Chinese importer, brought personally to Alice two
entire bolts of _piña_ cloth from the Philippines and a dozen pairs of
silk stockings.

The time passed, and Abel Ah Yo struggled with Alice for a properly
penitent heart, and Alice struggled with herself for her soul, while half
of Honolulu wickedly or apprehensively hung on the outcome.  Carnival
week was over, polo and the races had come and gone, and the celebration
of Fourth of July was ripening, ere Abel Ah Yo beat down by brutal
psychology the citadel of her reluctance.  It was then that he gave his
famous exhortation which might be summed up as Abel Ah Yo’s definition of
eternity.  Of course, like Billy Sunday on certain occasions, Abel Ah Yo
had cribbed the definition.  But no one in the Islands knew it, and his
rating as a revivalist uprose a hundred per cent.

So successful was his preaching that night, that he reconverted many of
his converts, who fell and moaned about the penitent form and crowded for
room amongst scores of new converts burnt by the pentecostal fire,
including half a company of negro soldiers from the garrisoned
Twenty-Fifth Infantry, a dozen troopers from the Fourth Cavalry on its
way to the Philippines, as many drunken man-of-war’s men, divers ladies
from Iwilei, and half the riff-raff of the beach.

Abel Ah Yo, subtly sympathetic himself by virtue of his racial admixture,
knowing human nature like a book and Alice Akana even more so, knew just
what he was doing when he arose that memorable night and exposited God,
hell, and eternity in terms of Alice Akana’s comprehension.  For, quite
by chance, he had discovered her cardinal weakness.  First of all, like
all Polynesians, an ardent lover of nature, he found that earthquake and
volcanic eruption were the things of which Alice lived in terror.  She
had been, in the past, on the Big Island, through cataclysms that had
slacken grass houses down upon her while she slept, and she had beheld
Madame Pele (the Fire or Volcano Goddess) fling red-fluxing lava down the
long slopes of Mauna Loa, destroying fish-ponds on the sea-brim and
licking up droves of beef cattle, villages, and humans on her fiery way.

The night before, a slight earthquake had shaken Honolulu and given Alice
Akana insomnia.  And the morning papers had stated that Mauna Kea had
broken into eruption, while the lava was rising rapidly in the great pit
of Kilauea.  So, at the meeting, her mind vexed between the terrors of
this world and the delights of the eternal world to come, Alice sat down
in a front seat in a very definite state of the “jumps.”

And Abel Ah Yo arose and put his finger on the sorest part of her soul.
Sketching the nature of God in the stereotyped way, but making the
stereotyped alive again with his gift of tongues in Pidgin-English and
Pidgin-Hawaiian, Abel Ah Yo described the day when the Lord, even His
infinite patience at an end, would tell Peter to close his day book and
ledgers, command Gabriel to summon all souls to Judgment, and cry out
with a voice of thunder: “_Welakahao_!”

This anthromorphic deity of Abel Ah Yo thundering the modern
Hawaiian-English slang of _welakahao_ at the end of the world, is a fair
sample of the revivalist’s speech-tools of discourse.  _Welakahao_ means
literally “hot iron.”  It was coined in the Honolulu Iron-works by the
hundreds of Hawaiian men there employed, who meant by it “to hustle,” “to
get a move on,” the iron being hot meaning that the time had come to
strike.

“And the Lord cried ‘_Welakahao_,’ and the Day of Judgment began and was
over _wiki-wiki_” (quickly) “just like that; for Peter was a better
bookkeeper than any on the Waterhouse Trust Company Limited, and,
further, Peter’s books were true.”

Swiftly Abel Ah Yo divided the sheep from the goats, and hastened the
latter down into hell.

“And now,” he demanded, perforce his language on these pages being
properly Englished, “what is hell like?  Oh, my friends, let me describe
to you, in a little way, what I have beheld with my own eyes on earth of
the possibilities of hell.  I was a young man, a boy, and I was at Hilo.
Morning began with earthquakes.  Throughout the day the mighty land
continued to shake and tremble, till strong men became seasick, and women
clung to trees to escape falling, and cattle were thrown down off their
feet.  I beheld myself a young calf so thrown.  A night of terror
indescribable followed.  The land was in motion like a canoe in a Kona
gale.  There was an infant crushed to death by its fond mother stepping
upon it whilst fleeing her falling house.

“The heavens were on fire above us.  We read our Bibles by the light of
the heavens, and the print was fine, even for young eyes.  Those
missionary Bibles were always too small of print.  Forty miles away from
us, the heart of hell burst from the lofty mountains and gushed red-blood
of fire-melted rock toward the sea.  With the heavens in vast
conflagration and the earth _hulaing_ beneath our feet, was a scene too
awful and too majestic to be enjoyed.  We could think only of the thin
bubble-skin of earth between us and the everlasting lake of fire and
brimstone, and of God to whom we prayed to save us.  There were earnest
and devout souls who there and then promised their pastors to give not
their shaved tithes, but five-tenths of their all to the church, if only
the Lord would let them live to contribute.

“Oh, my friends, God saved us.  But first he showed us a foretaste of
that hell that will yawn for us on the last day, when he cries
‘_Welakahao_!’ in a voice of thunder.  When the iron is hot!  Think of
it!  When the iron is hot for sinners!

“By the third day, things being much quieter, my friend the preacher and
I, being calm in the hand of God, journeyed up Mauna Loa and gazed into
the awful pit of Kilauea.  We gazed down into the fathomless abyss to the
lake of fire far below, roaring and dashing its fiery spray into billows
and fountaining hundreds of feet into the air like Fourth of July
fireworks you have all seen, and all the while we were suffocating and
made dizzy by the immense volumes of smoke and brimstone ascending.

“And I say unto you, no pious person could gaze down upon that scene
without recognizing fully the Bible picture of the Pit of Hell.  Believe
me, the writers of the New Testament had nothing on us.  As for me, my
eyes were fixed upon the exhibition before me, and I stood mute and
trembling under a sense never before so fully realized of the power, the
majesty, and terror of Almighty God—the resources of His wrath, and the
untold horrors of the finally impenitent who do not tell their souls and
make their peace with the Creator. {107}

“But oh, my friends, think you our guides, our native attendants,
deep-sunk in heathenism, were affected by such a scene?  No.  The devil’s
hand was upon them.  Utterly regardless and unimpressed, they were only
careful about their supper, chatted about their raw fish, and stretched
themselves upon their mats to sleep.  Children of the devil they were,
insensible to the beauties, the sublimities, and the awful terror of
God’s works.  But you are not heathen I now address.  What is a heathen?
He is one who betrays a stupid insensibility to every elevated idea and
to every elevated emotion.  If you wish to awaken his attention, do not
bid him to look down into the Pit of Hell.  But present him with a
calabash of _poi_, a raw fish, or invite him to some low, grovelling, and
sensuous sport.  Oh, my friends, how lost are they to all that elevates
the immortal soul!  But the preacher and I, sad and sick at heart for
them, gazed down into hell.  Oh, my friends, it _was_ hell, the hell of
the Scriptures, the hell of eternal torment for the undeserving . . . ”

Alice Akana was in an ecstasy or hysteria of terror.  She was mumbling
incoherently: “O Lord, I will give nine-tenths of my all.  I will give
all.  I will give even the two bolts of _piña_ cloth, the mandarin coat,
and the entire dozen silk stockings . . . ”

By the time she could lend ear again, Abel Ah Yo was launching out on his
famous definition of eternity.

“Eternity is a long time, my friends.  God lives, and, therefore, God
lives inside eternity.  And God is very old.  The fires of hell are as
old and as everlasting as God.  How else could there be everlasting
torment for those sinners cast down by God into the Pit on the Last Day
to burn for ever and for ever through all eternity?  Oh, my friends, your
minds are small—too small to grasp eternity.  Yet is it given to me, by
God’s grace, to convey to you an understanding of a tiny bit of eternity.

“The grains of sand on the beach of Waikiki are as many as the stars, and
more.  No man may count them.  Did he have a million lives in which to
count them, he would have to ask for more time.  Now let us consider a
little, dinky, old _minah_ bird with one broken wing that cannot fly.  At
Waikiki the _minah_ bird that cannot fly takes one grain of sand in its
beak and hops, hops, all day long and for many days, all the day to Pearl
Harbour and drops that one grain of sand into the harbour.  Then it hops,
hops, all day and for many days, all the way back to Waikiki for another
grain of sand.  And again it hops, hops all the way back to Pearl
Harbour.  And it continues to do this through the years and centuries,
and the thousands and thousands of centuries, until, at last, there
remains not one grain of sand at Waikiki and Pearl Harbour is filled up
with land and growing coconuts and pine-apples.  And then, oh my friends,
even then, IT WOULD NOT YET BE SUNRISE IN HELL!”

Here, at the smashing impact of so abrupt a climax, unable to withstand
the sheer simplicity and objectivity of such artful measurement of a
trifle of eternity, Alice Akana’s mind broke down and blew up.  She
uprose, reeled blindly, and stumbled to her knees at the penitent form.
Abel Ah Yo had not finished his preaching, but it was his gift to know
crowd psychology, and to feel the heat of the pentecostal conflagration
that scorched his audience.  He called for a rousing revival hymn from
his singers, and stepped down to wade among the hallelujah-shouting negro
soldiers to Alice Akana.  And, ere the excitement began to ebb,
nine-tenths of his congregation and all his converts were down on knees
and praying and shouting aloud an immensity of contriteness and sin.

                                * * * * *

Word came, via telephone, almost simultaneously to the Pacific and
University Clubs, that at last Alice was telling her soul in meeting;
and, by private machine and taxi-cab, for the first time Abel Ah Yo’s
revival was invaded by those of caste and place.  The first comers beheld
the curious sight of Hawaiian, Chinese, and all variegated racial
mixtures of the smelting-pot of Hawaii, men and women, fading out and
slinking away through the exits of Abel Ah Yo’s tabernacle.  But those
who were sneaking out were mostly men, while those who remained were
avid-faced as they hung on Alice’s utterance.

Never was a more fearful and damning community narrative enunciated in
the entire Pacific, north and south, than that enunciated by Alice Akana;
the penitent Phryne of Honolulu.

“Huh!” the first comers heard her saying, having already disposed of most
of the venial sins of the lesser ones of her memory.  “You think this
man, Stephen Makekau, is the son of Moses Makekau and Minnie Ah Ling, and
has a legal right to the two hundred and eight dollars he draws down each
month from Parke Richards Limited, for the lease of the fish-pond to Bill
Kong at Amana.  Not so.  Stephen Makekau is not the son of Moses.  He is
the son of Aaron Kama and Tillie Naone.  He was given as a present, as a
feeding child, to Moses and Minnie, by Aaron and Tillie.  I know.  Moses
and Minnie and Aaron and Tillie are dead.  Yet I know and can prove it.
Old Mrs. Poepoe is still alive.  I was present when Stephen was born, and
in the night-time, when he was two months old, I myself carried him as a
present to Moses and Minnie, and old Mrs. Poepoe carried the lantern.
This secret has been one of my sins.  It has kept me from God.  Now I am
free of it.  Young Archie Makekau, who collects bills for the Gas Company
and plays baseball in the afternoons, and drinks too much gin, should get
that two hundred and eight dollars the first of each month from Parke
Richards Limited.  He will blow it in on gin and a Ford automobile.
Stephen is a good man.  Archie is no good.  Also he is a liar, and he has
served two sentences on the reef, and was in reform school before that.
Yet God demands the truth, and Archie will get the money and make a bad
use of it.”

And in such fashion Alice rambled on through the experiences of her long
and full-packed life.  And women forgot they were in the tabernacle, and
men too, and faces darkened with passion as they learned for the first
time the long-buried secrets of their other halves.

“The lawyers’ offices will be crowded to-morrow morning,” MacIlwaine,
chief of detectives, paused long enough from storing away useful
information to lean and mutter in Colonel Stilton’s ear.

Colonel Stilton grinned affirmation, although the chief of detectives
could not fail to note the ghastliness of the grin.

“There is a banker in Honolulu.  You all know his name.  He is ’way up,
swell society because of his wife.  He owns much stock in General
Plantations and Inter-Island.”

MacIlwaine recognized the growing portrait and forbore to chuckle.

“His name is Colonel Stilton.  Last Christmas Eve he came to my house
with big _aloha_” (love) “and gave me mortgages on my land in Iapio
Valley, all cancelled, for two thousand dollars’ worth.  Now why did he
have such big cash _aloha_ for me?  I will tell you . . . ”

And tell she did, throwing the searchlight on ancient business
transactions and political deals which from their inception had lurked in
the dark.

“This,” Alice concluded the episode, “has long been a sin upon my
conscience, and kept my heart from God.

“And Harold Miles was that time President of the Senate, and next week he
bought three town lots at Pearl Harbour, and painted his Honolulu house,
and paid up his back dues in his clubs.  Also the Ramsay home at Honokiki
was left by will to the people if the Government would keep it up.  But
if the Government, after two years, did not begin to keep it up, then
would it go to the Ramsay heirs, whom old Ramsay hated like poison.
Well, it went to the heirs all right.  Their lawyer was Charley
Middleton, and he had me help fix it with the Government men.  And their
names were . . . ”  Six names, from both branches of the Legislature,
Alice recited, and added: “Maybe they all painted their houses after
that.  For the first time have I spoken.  My heart is much lighter and
softer.  It has been coated with an armour of house-paint against the
Lord.  And there is Harry Werther.  He was in the Senate that time.
Everybody said bad things about him, and he was never re-elected.  Yet
his house was not painted.  He was honest.  To this day his house is not
painted, as everybody knows.

“There is Jim Lokendamper.  He has a bad heart.  I heard him, only last
week, right here before you all, tell his soul.  He did not tell all his
soul, and he lied to God.  I am not lying to God.  It is a big telling,
but I am telling everything.  Now Azalea Akau, sitting right over there,
is his wife.  But Lizzie Lokendamper is his married wife.  A long time
ago he had the great _aloha_ for Azalea.  You think her uncle, who went
to California and died, left her by will that two thousand five hundred
dollars she got.  Her uncle did not.  I know.  Her uncle cried broke in
California, and Jim Lokendamper sent eighty dollars to California to bury
him.  Jim Lokendamper had a piece of land in Kohala he got from his
mother’s aunt.  Lizzie, his married wife, did not know this.  So he sold
it to the Kohala Ditch Company and wave the twenty-five hundred to Azalea
Akau—”

Here, Lizzie, the married wife, upstood like a fury long-thwarted, and,
in lieu of her husband, already fled, flung herself tooth and nail on
Azalea.

“Wait, Lizzie Lokendamper!” Alice cried out.  “I have much weight of you
on my heart and some house-paint too . . . ”

And when she had finished her disclosure of how Lizzie had painted her
house, Azalea was up and raging.

“Wait, Azalea Akau.  I shall now lighten my heart about you.  And it is
not house-paint.  Jim always paid that.  It is your new bath-tub and
modern plumbing that is heavy on me . . . ”

Worse, much worse, about many and sundry, did Alice Akana have to say,
cutting high in business, financial, and social life, as well as low.
None was too high nor too low to escape; and not until two in the
morning, before an entranced audience that packed the tabernacle to the
doors, did she complete her recital of the personal and detailed
iniquities she knew of the community in which she had lived intimately
all her days.  Just as she was finishing, she remembered more.

“Huh!” she sniffed.  “I gave last week one lot worth eight hundred
dollars cash market price to Abel Ah Yo to pay running expenses and add
up in Peter’s books in heaven.  Where did I get that lot?  You all think
Mr. Fleming Jason is a good man.  He is more crooked than the entrance
was to Pearl Lochs before the United States Government straightened the
channel.  He has liver disease now; but his sickness is a judgment of
God, and he will die crooked.  Mr. Fleming Jason gave me that lot
twenty-two years ago, when its cash market price was thirty-five dollars.
Because his _aloha_ for me was big?  No.  He never had _aloha_ inside of
him except for dollars.

“You listen.  Mr. Fleming Jason put a great sin upon me.  When Frank
Lomiloli was at my house, full of gin, for which gin Mr. Fleming Jason
paid me in advance five times over, I got Frank Lomiloli to sign his name
to the sale paper of his town land for one hundred dollars.  It was worth
six hundred then.  It is worth twenty thousand now.  Maybe you want to
know where that town land is.  I will tell you and remove it off my
heart.  It is on King Street, where is now the Come Again Saloon, the
Japanese Taxicab Company garage, the Smith & Wilson plumbing shop, and
the Ambrosia Ice Cream Parlours, with the two more stories big Addison
Lodging House overhead.  And it is all wood, and always has been well
painted.  Yesterday they started painting it again.  But that paint will
not stand between me and God.  There are no more paint pots between me
and my path to heaven.”

                                * * * * *

The morning and evening papers of the day following held an unholy hush
on the greatest news story of years; but Honolulu was half a-giggle and
half aghast at the whispered reports, not always basely exaggerated, that
circulated wherever two Honoluluans chanced to meet.

“Our mistake,” said Colonel Chilton, at the club, “was that we did not,
at the very first, appoint a committee of safety to keep track of Alice’s
soul.”

Bob Cristy, one of the younger islanders, burst into laughter, so pointed
and so loud that the meaning of it was demanded.

“Oh, nothing much,” was his reply.  “But I heard, on my way here, that
old John Ward had just been run in for drunken and disorderly conduct and
for resisting an officer.  Now Abel Ah Yo fine-toothcombs the police
court.  He loves nothing better than soul-snatching a chronic drunkard.”

Colonel Chilton looked at Lask Finneston, and both looked at Gary
Wilkinson.  He returned to them a similar look.

“The old beachcomber!” Lask Finneston cried.  “The drunken old reprobate!
I’d forgotten he was alive.  Wonderful constitution.  Never drew a sober
breath except when he was shipwrecked, and, when I remember him, into
every deviltry afloat.  He must be going on eighty.”

“He isn’t far away from it,” Bob Cristy nodded.  “Still beach-combs,
drinks when he gets the price, and keeps all his senses, though he’s not
spry and has to use glasses when he reads.  And his memory is perfect.
Now if Abel Ah Yo catches him . . . ”

Gary Wilkinson cleared his throat preliminary to speech.

“Now there’s a grand old man,” he said.  “A left-over from a forgotten
age.  Few of his type remain.  A pioneer.  A true _kamaaina_”
(old-timer).  “Helpless and in the hands of the police in his old age!
We should do something for him in recognition of his yeoman work in
Hawaii.  His old home, I happen to know, is Sag Harbour.  He hasn’t seen
it for over half a century.  Now why shouldn’t he be surprised to-morrow
morning by having his fine paid, and by being presented with return
tickets to Sag Harbour, and, say, expenses for a year’s trip?  I move a
committee.  I appoint Colonel Chilton, Lask Finneston, and . . . and
myself.  As for chairman, who more appropriate than Lask Finneston, who
knew the old gentleman so well in the early days?  Since there is no
objection, I hereby appoint Lask Finneston chairman of the committee for
the purpose of raising and donating money to pay the police-court fine
and the expenses of a year’s travel for that noble pioneer, John Ward, in
recognition of a lifetime of devotion of energy to the upbuilding of
Hawaii.”

There was no dissent.

“The committee will now go into secret session,” said Lask Finneston,
arising and indicating the way to the library.

GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
         _August_ 30, 1916.




SHIN-BONES


    _They have gone down to the pit with their weapons of war_, _and they
    have laid their swords under their heads_.

“IT was a sad thing to see the old lady revert.”

Prince Akuli shot an apprehensive glance sideward to where, under the
shade of a _kukui_ tree, an old _wahine_ (Hawaiian woman) was just
settling herself to begin on some work in hand.

“Yes,” he nodded half-sadly to me, “in her last years Hiwilani went back
to the old ways, and to the old beliefs—in secret, of course.  And,
_believe_ me, she was some collector herself.  You should have seen her
bones.  She had them all about her bedroom, in big jars, and they
constituted most all her relatives, except a half-dozen or so that Kanau
beat her out of by getting to them first.  The way the pair of them used
to quarrel about those bones was awe-inspiring.  And it gave me the
creeps, when I was a boy, to go into that big, for-ever-twilight room of
hers, and know that in this jar was all that remained of my maternal
grand-aunt, and that in that jar was my great-grandfather, and that in
all the jars were the preserved bone-remnants of the shadowy dust of the
ancestors whose seed had come down and been incorporated in the living,
breathing me.  Hiwilani had gone quite native at the last, sleeping on
mats on the hard floor—she’d fired out of the room the great, royal,
canopied four-poster that had been presented to her grandmother by Lord
Byron, who was the cousin of the Don Juan Byron and came here in the
frigate _Blonde_ in 1825.

“She went back to all native, at the last, and I can see her yet, biting
a bite out of the raw fish ere she tossed them to her women to eat.  And
she made them finish her _poi_, or whatever else she did not finish of
herself.  She—”

But he broke off abruptly, and by the sensitive dilation of his nostrils
and by the expression of his mobile features I saw that he had read in
the air and identified the odour that offended him.

“Deuce take it!” he cried to me.  “It stinks to heaven.  And I shall be
doomed to wear it until we’re rescued.”

There was no mistaking the object of his abhorrence.  The ancient crone
was making a dearest-loved _lei_ (wreath) of the fruit of the _hala_
which is the screw-pine or pandanus of the South Pacific.  She was
cutting the many sections or nut-envelopes of the fruit into fluted
bell-shapes preparatory to stringing them on the twisted and tough inner
bark of the _hau_ tree.  It certainly smelled to heaven, but, to me, a
_malahini_ (new-comer), the smell was wine-woody and fruit-juicy and not
unpleasant.

Prince Akuli’s limousine had broken an axle a quarter of a mile away, and
he and I had sought shelter from the sun in this veritable bowery of a
mountain home.  Humble and grass-thatched was the house, but it stood in
a treasure-garden of begonias that sprayed their delicate blooms a score
of feet above our heads, that were like trees, with willowy trunks of
trees as thick as a man’s arm.  Here we refreshed ourselves with
drinking-coconuts, while a cowboy rode a dozen miles to the nearest
telephone and summoned a machine from town.  The town itself we could
see, the Lakanaii metropolis of Olokona, a smudge of smoke on the
shore-line, as we looked down across the miles of cane-fields, the
billow-wreathed reef-lines, and the blue haze of ocean to where the
island of Oahu shimmered like a dim opal on the horizon.

Maui is the Valley Isle of Hawaii, and Kauai the Garden Isle; but
Lakanaii, lying abreast of Oahu, is recognized in the present, and was
known of old and always, as the Jewel Isle of the group.  Not the
largest, nor merely the smallest, Lakanaii is conceded by all to be the
wildest, the most wildly beautiful, and, in its size, the richest of all
the islands.  Its sugar tonnage per acre is the highest, its mountain
beef-cattle the fattest, its rainfall the most generous without ever
being disastrous.  It resembles Kauai in that it is the first-formed and
therefore the oldest island, so that it had had time sufficient to break
down its lava rock into the richest soil, and to erode the canyons
between the ancient craters until they are like Grand Canyons of the
Colorado, with numberless waterfalls plunging thousands of feet in the
sheer or dissipating into veils of vapour, and evanescing in mid-air to
descend softly and invisibly through a mirage of rainbows, like so much
dew or gentle shower, upon the abyss-floors.

Yet Lakanaii is easy to describe.  But how can one describe Prince Akuli?
To know him is to know all Lakanaii most thoroughly.  In addition, one
must know thoroughly a great deal of the rest of the world.  In the first
place, Prince Akuli has no recognized nor legal right to be called
“Prince.”  Furthermore, “Akuli” means the “squid.”  So that Prince Squid
could scarcely be the dignified title of the straight descendant of the
oldest and highest _aliis_ (high chiefs) of Hawaii—an old and exclusive
stock, wherein, in the ancient way of the Egyptian Pharaohs, brothers and
sisters had even wed on the throne for the reason that they could not
marry beneath rank, that in all their known world there was none of
higher rank, and that, at every hazard, the dynasty must be perpetuated.

I have heard Prince Akuli’s singing historians (inherited from his
father) chanting their interminable genealogies, by which they
demonstrated that he was the highest _alii_ in all Hawaii.  Beginning
with Wakea, who is their Adam, and with Papa, their Eve, through as many
generations as there are letters in our alphabet they trace down to
Nanakaoko, the first ancestor born in Hawaii and whose wife was
Kahihiokalani.  Later, but always highest, their generations split from
the generations of Ua, who was the founder of the two distinct lines of
the Kauai and Oahu kings.

In the eleventh century A.D., by the Lakanaii historians, at the time
brothers and sisters mated because none existed to excel them, their rank
received a boost of new blood of rank that was next to heaven’s door.
One Hoikemaha, steering by the stars and the ancient traditions, arrived
in a great double-canoe from Samoa.  He married a lesser _alii_ of
Lakanaii, and when his three sons were grown, returned with them to Samoa
to bring back his own youngest brother.  But with him he brought back
Kumi, the son of Tui Manua, which latter’s rank was highest in all
Polynesia, and barely second to that of the demigods and gods.  So the
estimable seed of Kumi, eight centuries before, had entered into the
_aliis_ of Lakanaii, and been passed down by them in the undeviating line
to reposit in Prince Akuli.

Him I first met, talking with an Oxford accent, in the officers’ mess of
the Black Watch in South Africa.  This was just before that famous
regiment was cut to pieces at Magersfontein.  He had as much right to be
in that mess as he had to his accent, for he was Oxford-educated and held
the Queen’s Commission.  With him, as his guest, taking a look at the
war, was Prince Cupid, so nicknamed, but the true prince of all Hawaii,
including Lakanaii, whose real and legal title was Prince Jonah Kuhio
Kalanianaole, and who might have been the living King of Hawaii Nei had
it not been for the _haole_ (white man) Revolution and Annexation—this,
despite the fact that Prince Cupid’s _alii_ genealogy was lesser to the
heaven-boosted genealogy of Prince Akuli.  For Prince Akuli might have
been King of Lakanaii, and of all Hawaii, perhaps, had not his
grandfather been soundly thrashed by the first and greatest of the
Kamehamehas.

This had occurred in the year 1810, in the booming days of the sandalwood
trade, and in the same year that the King of Kauai came in, and was good,
and ate out of Kamehameha’s hand.  Prince Akuli’s grandfather, in that
year, had received his trouncing and subjugating because he was “old
school.”  He had not imaged island empire in terms of gunpowder and
_haole_ gunners.  Kamehameha, farther-visioned, had annexed the service
of _haoles_, including such men as Isaac Davis, mate and sole survivor of
the massacred crew of the schooner _Fair American_, and John Young,
captured boatswain of the scow _Eleanor_.  And Isaac Davis, and John
Young, and others of their waywardly adventurous ilk, with six-pounder
brass carronades from the captured _Iphigenia_ and _Fair American_, had
destroyed the war canoes and shattered the morale of the King of
Lakanaii’s land-fighters, receiving duly in return from Kamehameha,
according to agreement: Isaac Davis, six hundred mature and fat hogs;
John Young, five hundred of the same described pork on the hoof that was
split.

And so, out of all incests and lusts of the primitive cultures and
beast-man’s gropings toward the stature of manhood, out of all red
murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothers of
the demigods, world-polished, Oxford-accented, twentieth century to the
tick of the second, comes Prince Akuli, Prince Squid, pure-veined
Polynesian, a living bridge across the thousand centuries, comrade,
friend, and fellow-traveller out of his wrecked seven-thousand-dollar
limousine, marooned with me in a begonia paradise fourteen hundred feet
above the sea, and his island metropolis of Olokona, to tell me of his
mother, who reverted in her old age to ancientness of religious concept
and ancestor worship, and collected and surrounded herself with the
charnel bones of those who had been her forerunners back in the darkness
of time.

“King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu,” Prince Akuli
continued.  “And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from him.  They
collected everything—old _makaloa_ mats, old _tapas_, old calabashes, old
double-canoes, and idols which the priests had saved from the general
destruction in 1819.  I haven’t seen a pearl-shell fish-hook in years,
but I swear that Kalakaua accumulated ten thousand of them, to say
nothing of human jaw-bone fish-hooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and
helmets, and stone adzes, and _poi_-pounders of phallic design.  When he
and Kapiolani made their royal progresses around the islands, their hosts
had to hide away their personal relics.  For to the king, in theory,
belongs all property of his people; and with Kalakaua, when it came to
the old things, theory and practice were one.

“From him my father, Kanau, got the collecting bee in his bonnet, and
Hiwilani was likewise infected.  But father was modern to his
finger-tips.  He believed neither in the gods of the _kahunas_” (priests)
“nor of the missionaries.  He didn’t believe in anything except sugar
stocks, horse-breeding, and that his grandfather had been a fool in not
collecting a few Isaac Davises and John Youngs and brass carronades
before he went to war with Kamehameha.  So he collected curios in the
pure collector’s spirit; but my mother took it seriously.  That was why
she went in for bones.  I remember, too, she had an ugly old stone-idol
she used to yammer to and crawl around on the floor before.  It’s in the
Deacon Museum now.  I sent it there after her death, and her collection
of bones to the Royal Mausoleum in Olokona.

“I don’t know whether you remember her father was Kaaukuu.  Well, he was,
and he was a giant.  When they built the Mausoleum, his bones, nicely
cleaned and preserved, were dug out of their hiding-place, and placed in
the Mausoleum.  Hiwilani had an old retainer, Ahuna.  She stole the key
from Kanau one night, and made Ahuna go and steal her father’s bones out
of the Mausoleum.  I know.  And he must have been a giant.  She kept him
in one of her big jars.  One day, when I was a tidy size of a lad, and
curious to know if Kaaukuu was as big as tradition had him, I fished his
intact lower jaw out of the jar, and the wrappings, and tried it on.  I
stuck my head right through it, and it rested around my neck and on my
shoulders like a horse collar.  And every tooth was in the jaw, whiter
than porcelain, without a cavity, the enamel unstained and unchipped.  I
got the walloping of my life for that offence, although she had to call
old Ahuna in to help give it to me.  But the incident served me well.  It
won her confidence in me that I was not afraid of the bones of the dead
ones, and it won for me my Oxford education.  As you shall see, if that
car doesn’t arrive first.

“Old Ahuna was one of the real old ones with the hall-mark on him and
branded into him of faithful born-slave service.  He knew more about my
mother’s family, and my father’s, than did both of them put together.
And he knew, what no living other knew, the burial-place of centuries,
where were hid the bones of most of her ancestors and of Kanau’s.  Kanau
couldn’t worm it out of the old fellow, who looked upon Kanau as an
apostate.

“Hiwilani struggled with the old codger for years.  How she ever
succeeded is beyond me.  Of course, on the face of it, she was faithful
to the old religion.  This might have persuaded Ahuna to loosen up a
little.  Or she may have jolted fear into him; for she knew a lot of the
line of chatter of the old Huni sorcerers, and she could make a noise
like being on terms of utmost intimacy with Uli, who is the chiefest god
of sorcery of all the sorcerers.  She could skin the ordinary _kahuna
lapaau_” (medicine man) “when it came to praying to Lonopuha and
Koleamoku; read dreams and visions and signs and omens and indigestions
to beat the band; make the practitioners under the medicine god, Maiola,
look like thirty cents; pull off a _pule hee_ incantation that would make
them dizzy; and she claimed to a practice of _kahuna hoenoho_, which is
modern spiritism, second to none.  I have myself seen her drink the wind,
throw a fit, and prophesy.  The _aumakuas_ were brothers to her when she
slipped offerings to them across the altars of the ruined _heiaus_”
(temples) “with a line of prayer that was as unintelligible to me as it
was hair-raising.  And as for old Ahuna, she could make him get down on
the floor and yammer and bite himself when she pulled the real mystery
dope on him.

“Nevertheless, my private opinion is that it was the _anaana_ stuff that
got him.  She snipped off a lock of his hair one day with a pair of
manicure scissors.  This lock of hair was what we call the _maunu_,
meaning the bait.  And she took jolly good care to let him know she had
that bit of his hair.  Then she tipped it off to him that she had buried
it, and was deeply engaged each night in her offerings and incantations
to Uli.”

“That was the regular praying-to-death?” I queried in the pause of Prince
Akuli’s lighting his cigarette.

“Sure thing,” he nodded.  “And Ahuna fell for it.  First he tried to
locate the hiding-place of the bait of his hair.  Failing that, he hired
a _pahiuhiu_ sorcerer to find it for him.  But Hiwilani queered that game
by threatening to the sorcerer to practise _apo leo_ on him, which is the
art of permanently depriving a person of the power of speech without
otherwise injuring him.

“Then it was that Ahuna began to pine away and get more like a corpse
every day.  In desperation he appealed to Kanau.  I happened to be
present.  You have heard what sort of a man my father was.

“‘Pig!’ he called Ahuna.  ‘Swine-brains!  Stinking fish!  Die and be done
with it.  You are a fool.  It is all nonsense.  There is nothing in
anything.  The drunken _haole_, Howard, can prove the missionaries wrong.
Square-face gin proves Howard wrong.  The doctors say he won’t last six
months.  Even square-face gin lies.  Life is a liar, too.  And here are
hard times upon us, and a slump in sugar.  Glanders has got into my brood
mares.  I wish I could lie down and sleep for a hundred years, and wake
up to find sugar up a hundred points.’

“Father was something of a philosopher himself, with a bitter wit and a
trick of spitting out staccato epigrams.  He clapped his hands.  ‘Bring
me a high-ball,’ he commanded; ‘no, bring me two high-balls.’  Then he
turned on Ahuna.  ‘Go and let yourself die, old heathen, survival of
darkness, blight of the Pit that you are.  But don’t die on these
premises.  I desire merriment and laughter, and the sweet tickling of
music, and the beauty of youthful motion, not the croaking of sick toads
and googly-eyed corpses about me still afoot on their shaky legs.  I’ll
be that way soon enough if I live long enough.  And it will be my
everlasting regret if I don’t live long enough.  Why in hell did I sink
that last twenty thousand into Curtis’s plantation?  Howard warned me the
slump was coming, but I thought it was the square-face making him lie.
And Curtis has blown his brains out, and his head _luna_ has run away
with his daughter, and the sugar chemist has got typhoid, and
everything’s going to smash.’

“He clapped his hands for his servants, and commanded: ‘Bring me my
singing boys.  And the _hula_ dancers—plenty of them.  And send for old
Howard.  Somebody’s got to pay, and I’ll shorten his six months of life
by a month.  But above all, music.  Let there be music.  It is stronger
than drink, and quicker than opium.’

“He with his music druggery!  It was his father, the old savage, who was
entertained on board a French frigate, and for the first time heard an
orchestra.  When the little concert was over, the captain, to find which
piece he liked best, asked which piece he’d like repeated.  Well, when
grandfather got done describing, what piece do you think it was?”

I gave up, while the Prince lighted a fresh cigarette.

“Why, it was the first one, of course.  Not the real first one, but the
tuning up that preceded it.”

I nodded, with eyes and face mirthful of appreciation, and Prince Akuli,
with another apprehensive glance at the old _wahine_ and her half-made
_hala lei_, returned to his tale of the bones of his ancestors.

“It was somewhere around this stage of the game that old Ahuna gave in to
Hiwilani.  He didn’t exactly give in.  He compromised.  That’s where I
come in.  If he would bring her the bones of her mother, and of her
grandfather (who was the father of Kaaukuu), and who by tradition was
rumoured to have been even bigger than his giant son, she would return to
Ahuna the bait of his hair she was praying him to death with.  He, on the
other hand, stipulated that he was not to reveal to her the secret
burial-place of all the _alii_ of Lakanaii all the way back.
Nevertheless, he was too old to dare the adventure alone, must be helped
by some one who of necessity would come to know the secret, and I was
that one.  I was the highest _alii_, beside my father and mother, and
they were no higher than I.

“So I came upon the scene, being summoned into the twilight room to
confront those two dubious old ones who dealt with the dead.  They were a
pair—mother fat to despair of helplessness, Ahuna thin as a skeleton and
as fragile.  Of her one had the impression that if she lay down on her
back she could not roll over without the aid of block-and-tackle; of
Ahuna one’s impression was that the tooth-pickedness of him would shatter
to splinters if one bumped into him.

“And when they had broached the matter, there was more _pilikia_”
(trouble).  “My father’s attitude stiffened my resolution.  I refused to
go on the bone-snatching expedition.  I said I didn’t care a whoop for
the bones of all the _aliis_ of my family and race.  You see, I had just
discovered Jules Verne, loaned me by old Howard, and was reading my head
off.  Bones?  When there were North Poles, and Centres of Earths, and
hairy comets to ride across space among the stars!  Of course I didn’t
want to go on any bone-snatching expedition.  I said my father was
able-bodied, and he could go, splitting equally with her whatever bones
he brought back.  But she said he was only a blamed collector—or words to
that effect, only stronger.

“‘I know him,’ she assured me.  ‘He’d bet his mother’s bones on a
horse-race or an ace-full.’

“I stood with father when it came to modern scepticism, and I told her
the whole thing was rubbish. ‘Bones?’ I said.  ‘What are bones?  Even
field mice, and many rats, and cockroaches have bones, though the roaches
wear their bones outside their meat instead of inside.  The difference
between man and other animals,’ I told her, ‘is not bones, but brain.
Why, a bullock has bigger bones than a man, and more than one fish I’ve
eaten has more bones, while a whale beats creation when it comes to
bone.’

“It was frank talk, which is our Hawaiian way, as you have long since
learned.  In return, equally frank, she regretted she hadn’t given me
away as a feeding child when I was born.  Next she bewailed that she had
ever borne me.  From that it was only a step to _anaana_ me.  She
threatened me with it, and I did the bravest thing I have ever done.  Old
Howard had given me a knife of many blades, and corkscrews, and
screw-drivers, and all sorts of contrivances, including a tiny pair of
scissors.  I proceeded to pare my finger-nails.

“‘There,’ I said, as I put the parings into her hand.  ‘Just to show you
what I think of it.  There’s bait and to spare.  Go on and _anaana_ me if
you can.’

“I have said it was brave.  It was.  I was only fifteen, and I had lived
all my days in the thick of the mystery stuff, while my scepticism, very
recently acquired, was only skin-deep.  I could be a sceptic out in the
open in the sunshine.  But I was afraid of the dark.  And in that
twilight room, the bones of the dead all about me in the big jars, why,
the old lady had me scared stiff.  As we say to-day, she had my goat.
Only I was brave and didn’t let on.  And I put my bluff across, for my
mother flung the parings into my face and burst into tears.  Tears in an
elderly woman weighing three hundred and twenty pounds are scarcely
impressive, and I hardened the brassiness of my bluff.

“She shifted her attack, and proceeded to talk with the dead.  Nay, more,
she summoned them there, and, though I was all ripe to see but couldn’t,
Ahuna saw the father of Kaaukuu in the corner and lay down on the floor
and yammered.  Just the same, although I almost saw the old giant, I
didn’t quite see him.

“‘Let him talk for himself,’ I said.  But Hiwilani persisted in doing the
talking for him, and in laying upon me his solemn injunction that I must
go with Ahuna to the burial-place and bring back the bones desired by my
mother.  But I argued that if the dead ones could be invoked to kill
living men by wasting sicknesses, and that if the dead ones could
transport themselves from their burial-crypts into the corner of her
room, I couldn’t see why they shouldn’t leave their bones behind them,
there in her room and ready to be jarred, when they said good-bye and
departed for the middle world, the over world, or the under world, or
wherever they abided when they weren’t paying social calls.

“Whereupon mother let loose on poor old Ahuna, or let loose upon him the
ghost of Kaaukuu’s father, supposed to be crouching there in the corner,
who commanded Ahuna to divulge to her the burial-place.  I tried to
stiffen him up, telling him to let the old ghost divulge the secret
himself, than whom nobody else knew it better, seeing that he had resided
there upwards of a century.  But Ahuna was old school.  He possessed no
iota of scepticism.  The more Hiwilani frightened him, the more he rolled
on the floor and the louder he yammered.

“But when he began to bite himself, I gave in.  I felt sorry for him;
but, over and beyond that, I began to admire him.  He was sterling stuff,
even if he was a survival of darkness.  Here, with the fear of mystery
cruelly upon him, believing Hiwilani’s dope implicitly, he was caught
between two fidelities.  She was his living _alii_, his _alii kapo_”
(sacred chiefess).  “He must be faithful to her, yet more faithful must
he be to all the dead and gone _aliis_ of her line who depended solely on
him that their bones should not be disturbed.

“I gave in.  But I, too, imposed stipulations.  Steadfastly had my
father, new school, refused to let me go to England for my education.
That sugar was slumping was reason sufficient for him.  Steadfastly had
my mother, old school, refused, her heathen mind too dark to place any
value on education, while it was shrewd enough to discern that education
led to unbelief in all that was old.  I wanted to study, to study
science, the arts, philosophy, to study everything old Howard knew, which
enabled him, on the edge of the grave, undauntedly to sneer at
superstition, and to give me Jules Verne to read.  He was an Oxford man
before he went wild and wrong, and it was he who had set the Oxford bee
buzzing in my noddle.

“In the end Ahuna and I, old school and new school leagued together, won
out.  Mother promised that she’d make father send me to England, even if
she had to pester him into a prolonged drinking that would make his
digestion go back on him.  Also, Howard was to accompany me, so that I
could decently bury him in England.  He was a queer one, old Howard, an
individual if there ever was one.  Let me tell you a little story about
him.  It was when Kalakaua was starting on his trip around the world.
You remember, when Armstrong, and Judd, and the drunken valet of a German
baron accompanied him.  Kalakaua made the proposition to Howard . . . ”

But here the long-apprehended calamity fell upon Prince Akuli.  The old
_wahine_ had finished her _lei hala_.  Barefooted, with no adornment of
femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed cotton, with
age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she cringed before him and
crooned a _mele_ in his honour, and, still cringing, put the _lei_ around
his neck.  It is true the _hala_ smelled most freshly strong, yet was the
act beautiful to me, and the old woman herself beautiful to me.  My mind
leapt into the Prince’s narrative so that to Ahuna I could not help
likening her.

Oh, truly, to be an _alii_ in Hawaii, even in this second decade of the
twentieth century, is no light thing.  The _alii_, utterly of the new,
must be kindly and kingly to those old ones absolutely of the old.  Nor
did the Prince without a kingdom, his loved island long since annexed by
the United States and incorporated into a territory along with the rest
of the Hawaiian Islands—nor did the Prince betray his repugnance for the
odour of the _hala_.  He bowed his head graciously; and his royal
condescending words of pure Hawaiian I knew would make the old woman’s
heart warm until she died with remembrance of the wonderful occasion.
The wry grimace he stole to me would not have been made had he felt any
uncertainty of its escaping her.

“And so,” Prince Akuli resumed, after the _wahine_ had tottered away in
an ecstasy, “Ahuna and I departed on our grave-robbing adventure.  You
know the Iron-bound Coast.”

I nodded, knowing full well the spectacle of those lava leagues of
weather coast, truly iron-bound so far as landing-places or anchorages
were concerned, great forbidding cliff-walls thousands of feet in height,
their summits wreathed in cloud and rain squall, their knees hammered by
the trade-wind billows into spouting, spuming white, the air, from sea to
rain-cloud, spanned by a myriad leaping waterfalls, provocative, in day
or night, of countless sun and lunar rainbows.  Valleys, so called, but
fissures rather, slit the cyclopean walls here and there, and led away
into a lofty and madly vertical back country, most of it inaccessible to
the foot of man and trod only by the wild goat.

“Precious little you know of it,” Prince Akuli retorted, in reply to my
nod.  “You’ve seen it only from the decks of steamers.  There are valleys
there, inhabited valleys, out of which there is no exit by land, and
perilously accessible by canoe only on the selected days of two months in
the year.  When I was twenty-eight I was over there in one of them on a
hunting trip.  Bad weather, in the auspicious period, marooned us for
three weeks.  Then five of my party and myself swam for it out through
the surf.  Three of us made the canoes waiting for us.  The other two
were flung back on the sand, each with a broken arm.  Save for us, the
entire party remained there until the next year, ten months afterward.
And one of them was Wilson, of Wilson & Wall, the Honolulu sugar factors.
And he was engaged to be married.

“I’ve seen a goat, shot above by a hunter above, land at my feet a
thousand yards underneath.  _Believe_ me, that landscape seemed to rain
goats and rocks for ten minutes.  One of my canoemen fell off the trail
between the two little valleys of Aipio and Luno.  He hit first fifteen
hundred feet beneath us, and fetched up in a ledge three hundred feet
farther down.  We didn’t bury him.  We couldn’t get to him, and flying
machines had not yet been invented.  His bones are there now, and,
barring earthquake and volcano, will be there when the Trumps of Judgment
sound.

“Goodness me!  Only the other day, when our Promotion Committee, trying
to compete with Honolulu for the tourist trade, called in the engineers
to estimate what it would cost to build a scenic drive around the
Iron-bound Coast, the lowest figures were a quarter of a million dollars
a mile!

“And Ahuna and I, an old man and a young boy, started for that stern
coast in a canoe paddled by old men!  The youngest of them, the
steersman, was over sixty, while the rest of them averaged seventy at the
very least.  There were eight of them, and we started in the night-time,
so that none should see us go.  Even these old ones, trusted all their
lives, knew no more than the fringe of the secret.  To the fringe, only,
could they take us.

“And the fringe was—I don’t mind telling that much—the fringe was Ponuloo
Valley.  We got there the third afternoon following.  The old chaps
weren’t strong on the paddles.  It was a funny expedition, into such wild
waters, with now one and now another of our ancient-mariner crew
collapsing and even fainting.  One of them actually died on the second
morning out.  We buried him overside.  It was positively uncanny, the
heathen ceremonies those grey ones pulled off in burying their grey
brother.  And I was only fifteen, _alii kapo_ over them by blood of
heathenness and right of hereditary heathen rule, with a penchant for
Jules Verne and shortly to sail for England for my education!  So one
learns.  Small wonder my father was a philosopher, in his own lifetime
spanning the history of man from human sacrifice and idol worship,
through the religions of man’s upward striving, to the Medusa of rank
atheism at the end of it all.  Small wonder that, like old Ecclesiastes,
he found vanity in all things and surcease in sugar stocks, singing boys,
and _hula_ dancers.”

Prince Akuli debated with his soul for an interval.

“Oh, well,” he sighed, “I have done some spanning of time myself.”  He
sniffed disgustedly of the odour of the _hala lei_ that stifled him.  “It
stinks of the ancient,” he vouchsafed.  “I?  I stink of the modern.  My
father was right.  The sweetest of all is sugar up a hundred points, or
four aces in a poker game.  If the Big War lasts another year, I shall
clean up three-quarters of a million over a million.  If peace breaks
to-morrow, with the consequent slump, I could enumerate a hundred who
will lose my direct bounty, and go into the old natives’ homes my father
and I long since endowed for them.”

He clapped his hands, and the old _wahine_ tottered toward him in an
excitement of haste to serve.  She cringed before him, as he drew pad and
pencil from his breast pocket.

“Each month, old woman of our old race,” he addressed her, “will you
receive, by rural free delivery, a piece of written paper that you can
exchange with any storekeeper anywhere for ten dollars gold.  This shall
be so for as long as you live.  Behold!  I write the record and the
remembrance of it, here and now, with this pencil on this paper.  And
this is because you are of my race and service, and because you have
honoured me this day with your mats to sit upon and your thrice-blessed
and thrice-delicious _lei hala_.”

He turned to me a weary and sceptical eye, saying:

“And if I die to-morrow, not alone will the lawyers contest my
disposition of my property, but they will contest my benefactions and my
pensions accorded, and the clarity of my mind.

“It was the right weather of the year; but even then, with our old weak
ones at the paddles, we did not attempt the landing until we had
assembled half the population of Ponuloo Valley down on the steep little
beach.  Then we counted our waves, selected the best one, and ran in on
it.  Of course, the canoe was swamped and the outrigger smashed, but the
ones on shore dragged us up unharmed beyond the wash.

“Ahuna gave his orders.  In the night-time all must remain within their
houses, and the dogs be tied up and have their jaws bound so that there
should be no barking.  And in the night-time Ahuna and I stole out on our
journey, no one knowing whether we went to the right or left or up the
valley toward its head.  We carried jerky, and hard _poi_ and dried
_aku_, and from the quantity of the food I knew we were to be gone
several days.  Such a trail!  A Jacob’s ladder to the sky, truly, for
that first _pali_” (precipice), “almost straight up, was three thousand
feet above the sea.  And we did it in the dark!

“At the top, beyond the sight of the valley we had left, we slept until
daylight on the hard rock in a hollow nook Ahuna knew, and that was so
small that we were squeezed.  And the old fellow, for fear that I might
move in the heavy restlessness of lad’s sleep, lay on the outside with
one arm resting across me.  At daybreak, I saw why.  Between us and the
lip of the cliff scarcely a yard intervened.  I crawled to the lip and
looked, watching the abyss take on immensity in the growing light and
trembling from the fear of height that was upon me.  At last I made out
the sea, over half a mile straight beneath.  And we had done this thing
in the dark!

“Down in the next valley, which was a very tiny one, we found evidence of
the ancient population, but there were no people.  The only way was the
crazy foot-paths up and down the dizzy valley walls from valley to
valley.  But lean and aged as Ahuna was, he seemed untirable.  In the
second valley dwelt an old leper in hiding.  He did not know me, and when
Ahuna told him who I was, he grovelled at my feet, almost clasping them,
and mumbled a _mele_ of all my line out of a lipless mouth.

“The next valley proved to be the valley.  It was long and so narrow that
its floor had caught not sufficient space of soil to grow _taro_ for a
single person.  Also, it had no beach, the stream that threaded it
leaping a _pali_ of several hundred feet down to the sea.  It was a
god-forsaken place of naked, eroded lava, to which only rarely could the
scant vegetation find root-hold.  For miles we followed up that winding
fissure through the towering walls, far into the chaos of back country
that lies behind the Iron-bound Coast.  How far that valley penetrated I
do not know, but, from the quantity of water in the stream, I judged it
far.  We did not go to the valley’s head.  I could see Ahuna casting
glances to all the peaks, and I knew he was taking bearings, known to him
alone, from natural objects.  When he halted at the last, it was with
abrupt certainty.  His bearings had crossed.  He threw down the portion
of food and outfit he had carried.  It was the place.  I looked on either
hand at the hard, implacable walls, naked of vegetation, and could dream
of no burial-place possible in such bare adamant.

“We ate, then stripped for work.  Only did Ahuna permit me to retain my
shoes.  He stood beside me at the edge of a deep pool, likewise
apparelled and prodigiously skinny.

“‘You will dive down into the pool at this spot,’ he said.  ‘Search the
rock with your hands as you descend, and, about a fathom and a half down,
you will find a hole.  Enter it, head-first, but going slowly, for the
lava rock is sharp and may cut your head and body.’

“‘And then?’ I queried.  ‘You will find the hole growing larger,’ was his
answer.  ‘When you have gone all of eight fathoms along the passage, come
up slowly, and you will find your head in the air, above water, in the
dark.  Wait there then for me.  The water is very cold.’

“It didn’t sound good to me.  I was thinking, not of the cold water and
the dark, but of the bones.  ‘You go first,’ I said.  But he claimed he
could not.  ‘You are my _alii_, my prince,’ he said.  ‘It is impossible
that I should go before you into the sacred burial-place of your kingly
ancestors.’

“But the prospect did not please.  ‘Just cut out this prince stuff,’ I
told him.  ‘It isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.  You go first, and I’ll
never tell on you.’  ‘Not alone the living must we please,’ he
admonished, ‘but, more so, the dead must we please.  Nor can we lie to
the dead.’

“We argued it out, and for half an hour it was stalemate.  I wouldn’t,
and he simply couldn’t.  He tried to buck me up by appealing to my pride.
He chanted the heroic deeds of my ancestors; and, I remember especially,
he sang to me of Mokomoku, my great-grandfather and the gigantic father
of the gigantic Kaaukuu, telling how thrice in battle Mokomoku leaped
among his foes, seizing by the neck a warrior in either hand and knocking
their heads together until they were dead.  But this was not what decided
me.  I really felt sorry for old Ahuna, he was so beside himself for fear
the expedition would come to naught.  And I was coming to a great
admiration for the old fellow, not least among the reasons being the fact
of his lying down to sleep between me and the cliff-lip.

“So, with true _alii_-authority of command, saying, ‘You will immediately
follow after me,’ I dived in.  Everything he had said was correct.  I
found the entrance to the subterranean passage, swam carefully through
it, cutting my shoulder once on the lava-sharp roof, and emerged in the
darkness and air.  But before I could count thirty, he broke water beside
me, rested his hand on my arm to make sure of me, and directed me to swim
ahead of him for the matter of a hundred feet or so.  Then we touched
bottom and climbed out on the rocks.  And still no light, and I remember
I was glad that our altitude was too high for centipedes.

“He had brought with him a coconut calabash, tightly stoppered, of
whale-oil that must have been landed on Lahaina beach thirty years
before.  From his mouth he took a water-tight arrangement of a matchbox
composed of two empty rifle-cartridges fitted snugly together.  He
lighted the wicking that floated on the oil, and I looked about, and knew
disappointment.  No burial-chamber was it, but merely a lava tube such as
occurs on all the islands.

“He put the calabash of light into my hands and started me ahead of him
on the way, which he assured me was long, but not too long.  It was long,
at least a mile in my sober judgment, though at the time it seemed five
miles; and it ascended sharply.  When Ahuna, at the last, stopped me, I
knew we were close to our goal.  He knelt on his lean old knees on the
sharp lava rock, and clasped my knees with his skinny arms.  My hand that
was free of the calabash lamp he placed on his head.  He chanted to me,
with his old cracked, quavering voice, the line of my descent and my
essential high _alii_-ness.  And then he said:

“‘Tell neither Kanau nor Hiwilani aught of what you are about to behold.
There is no sacredness in Kanau.  His mind is filled with sugar and the
breeding of horses.  I do know that he sold a feather cloak his
grandfather had worn to that English collector for eight thousand
dollars, and the money he lost the next day betting on the polo game
between Maui and Oahu.  Hiwilani, your mother, is filled with sacredness.
She is too much filled with sacredness.  She grows old, and weak-headed,
and she traffics over-much with sorceries.’

“‘No,’ I made answer.  ‘I shall tell no one.  If I did, then would I have
to return to this place again.  And I do not want ever to return to this
place.  I’ll try anything once.  This I shall never try twice.’

“‘It is well,’ he said, and arose, falling behind so that I should enter
first.  Also, he said: ‘Your mother is old.  I shall bring her, as
promised, the bones of her mother and of her grandfather.  These should
content her until she dies; and then, if I die before her, it is you who
must see to it that all the bones in her family collection are placed in
the Royal Mausoleum.’

“I have given all the Islands’ museums the once-over,” Prince Akuli
lapsed back into slang, “and I must say that the totality of the
collections cannot touch what I saw in our Lakanaii burial-cave.
Remember, and with reason and history, we trace back the highest and
oldest genealogy in the Islands.  Everything that I had ever dreamed or
heard of, and much more that I had not, was there.  The place was
wonderful.  Ahuna, sepulchrally muttering prayers and _meles_, moved
about, lighting various whale-oil lamp-calabashes.  They were all there,
the Hawaiian race from the beginning of Hawaiian time.  Bundles of bones
and bundles of bones, all wrapped decently in _tapa_, until for all the
world it was like the parcels-post department at a post office.

“And everything!  _Kahilis_, which you may know developed out of the
fly-flapper into symbols of royalty until they became larger than
hearse-plumes with handles a fathom and a half and over two fathoms in
length.  And such handles!  Of the wood of the kauila, inlaid with shell
and ivory and bone with a cleverness that had died out among our
artificers a century before.  It was a centuries-old family attic.  For
the first time I saw things I had only heard of, such as the pahoas,
fashioned of whale-teeth and suspended by braided human hair, and worn on
the breast only by the highest of rank.

“There were _tapas_ and mats of the rarest and oldest; capes and _leis_
and helmets and cloaks, priceless all, except the too-ancient ones, of
the feathers of the _mamo_, and of the _iwi_ and the _akakane_ and the
_o-o_.  I saw one of the _mamo_ cloaks that was superior to that finest
one in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and that they value at between half
a million and a million dollars.  Goodness me, I thought at the time, it
was lucky Kanau didn’t know about it.

“Such a mess of things!  Carved gourds and calabashes, shell-scrapers,
nets of _olona_ fibre, a junk of _iè-iè_ baskets, and fish-hooks of every
bone and spoon of shell.  Musical instruments of the forgotten
days—_ukukes_ and nose flutes, and _kiokios_ which are likewise played
with one unstoppered nostril.  Taboo _poi_ bowls and finger bowls,
left-handed adzes of the canoe gods, lava-cup lamps, stone mortars and
pestles and _poi_-pounders.  And adzes again, a myriad of them, beautiful
ones, from an ounce in weight for the finer carving of idols to fifteen
pounds for the felling of trees, and all with the sweetest handles I have
ever beheld.

“There were the _kaekeekes_—you know, our ancient drums, hollowed
sections of the coconut tree, covered one end with shark-skin.  The first
_kaekeeke_ of all Hawaii Ahuna pointed out to me and told me the tale.
It was manifestly most ancient.  He was afraid to touch it for fear the
age-rotted wood of it would crumble to dust, the ragged tatters of the
shark-skin head of it still attached.  ‘This is the very oldest and
father of all our _kaekeekes_,’ Ahuna told me.  ‘Kila, the son of
Moikeha, brought it back from far Raiatea in the South Pacific.  And it
was Kila’s own son, Kahai, who made that same journey, and was gone ten
years, and brought back with him from Tahiti the first breadfruit trees
that sprouted and grew on Hawaiian soil.’

“And the bones and bones!  The parcel-delivery array of them!  Besides
the small bundles of the long bones, there were full skeletons,
_tapa_-wrapped, lying in one-man, and two- and three-man canoes of
precious _koa_ wood, with curved outriggers of _wiliwili_ wood, and
proper paddles to hand with the _io_-projection at the point simulating
the continuance of the handle, as if, like a skewer, thrust through the
flat length of the blade.  And their war weapons were laid away by the
sides of the lifeless bones that had wielded them—rusty old
horse-pistols, derringers, pepper-boxes, five-barrelled fantastiques,
Kentucky long riffles, muskets handled in trade by John Company and
Hudson’s Bay, shark-tooth swords, wooden stabbing-knives, arrows and
spears bone-headed of the fish and the pig and of man, and spears and
arrows wooden-headed and fire-hardened.

“Ahuna put a spear in my hand, headed and pointed finely with the long
shin-bone of a man, and told me the tale of it.  But first he unwrapped
the long bones, arms, and legs, of two parcels, the bones, under the
wrappings, neatly tied like so many faggots.  ‘This,’ said Ahuna,
exhibiting the pitiful white contents of one parcel, ‘is Laulani.  She
was the wife of Akaiko, whose bones, now placed in your hands, much
larger and male-like as you observe, held up the flesh of a large man, a
three-hundred pounder seven-footer, three centuries agone.  And this
spear-head is made of the shin-bone of Keola, a mighty wrestler and
runner of their own time and place.  And he loved Laulani, and she fled
with him.  But in a forgotten battle on the sands of Kalini, Akaiko
rushed the lines of the enemy, leading the charge that was successful,
and seized upon Keola, his wife’s lover, and threw him to the ground, and
sawed through his neck to the death with a shark-tooth knife.  Thus, in
the old days as always, did man combat for woman with man.  And Laulani
was beautiful; that Keola should be made into a spearhead for her!  She
was formed like a queen, and her body was a long bowl of sweetness, and
her fingers _lomi’d_’ (massaged) ‘to slimness and smallness at her
mother’s breast.  For ten generations have we remembered her beauty.
Your father’s singing boys to-day sing of her beauty in the _hula_ that
is named of her!  This is Laulani, whom you hold in your hands.’

“And, Ahuna done, I could but gaze, with imagination at the one time
sobered and fired.  Old drunken Howard had lent me his Tennyson, and I
had mooned long and often over the _Idyls of the King_.  Here were the
three, I thought—Arthur, and Launcelot, and Guinevere.  This, then, I
pondered, was the end of it all, of life and strife and striving and
love, the weary spirits of these long-gone ones to be invoked by fat old
women and mangy sorcerers, the bones of them to be esteemed of collectors
and betted on horse-races and ace-fulls or to be sold for cash and
invested in sugar stocks.

“For me it was illumination.  I learned there in the burial-cave the
great lesson.  And to Ahuna I said: ‘The spear headed with the long bone
of Keola I shall take for my own.  Never shall I sell it.  I shall keep
it always.’

“‘And for what purpose?’ he demanded.  And I replied: ‘That the
contemplation of it may keep my hand sober and my feet on earth with the
knowledge that few men are fortunate enough to have as much of a remnant
of themselves as will compose a spearhead when they are three centuries
dead.’

“And Ahuna bowed his head, and praised my wisdom of judgment.  But at
that moment the long-rotted _olona_-cord broke and the pitiful woman’s
bones of Laulani shed from my clasp and clattered on the rocky floor.
One shin-bone, in some way deflected, fell under the dark shadow of a
canoe-bow, and I made up my mind that it should be mine.  So I hastened
to help him in the picking up of the bones and the tying, so that he did
not notice its absence.

“‘This,’ said Ahuna, introducing me to another of my ancestors, ‘is your
great-grandfather, Mokomoku, the father of Kaaukuu.  Behold the size of
his bones.  He was a giant.  I shall carry him, because of the long spear
of Keola that will be difficult for you to carry away.  And this is
Lelemahoa, your grandmother, the mother of your mother, that you shall
carry.  And day grows short, and we must still swim up through the waters
to the sun ere darkness hides the sun from the world.’

“But Ahuna, putting out the various calabashes of light by drowning the
wicks in the whale-oil, did not observe me include the shinbone of
Laulani with the bones of my grandmother.”

The honk of the automobile, sent up from Olokona to rescue us, broke off
the Prince’s narrative.  We said good-bye to the ancient and
fresh-pensioned _wahine_, and departed.  A half-mile on our way, Prince
Akuli resumed.

“So Ahuna and I returned to Hiwilani, and to her happiness, lasting to
her death the year following, two more of her ancestors abided about her
in the jars of her twilight room.  Also, she kept her compact and worried
my father into sending me to England.  I took old Howard along, and he
perked up and confuted the doctors, so that it was three years before I
buried him restored to the bosom of my family.  Sometimes I think he was
the most brilliant man I have ever known.  Not until my return from
England did Ahuna die, the last custodian of our _alii_ secrets.  And at
his death-bed he pledged me again never to reveal the location in that
nameless valley, and never to go back myself.

“Much else I have forgotten to mention did I see there in the cave that
one time.  There were the bones of Kumi, the near demigod, son of Tui
Manua of Samoa, who, in the long before, married into my line and
heaven-boosted my genealogy.  And the bones of my great-grandmother who
had slept in the four-poster presented her by Lord Byron.  And Ahuna
hinted tradition that there was reason for that presentation, as well as
for the historically known lingering of the _Blonde_ in Olokona for so
long.  And I held her poor bones in my hands—bones once fleshed with
sensate beauty, informed with sparkle and spirit, instinct with love and
love-warmness of arms around and eyes and lips together, that had begat
me in the end of the generations unborn.  It was a good experience.  I am
modern, ’tis true.  I believe in no mystery stuff of old time nor of the
_kahunas_.  And yet, I saw in that cave things which I dare not name to
you, and which I, since old Ahuna died, alone of the living know.  I have
no children.  With me my long line ceases.  This is the twentieth
century, and we stink of gasolene.  Nevertheless these other and nameless
things shall die with me.  I shall never revisit the burial-place.  Nor
in all time to come will any man gaze upon it through living eyes unless
the quakes of earth rend the mountains asunder and spew forth the secrets
contained in the hearts of the mountains.”

Prince Akuli ceased from speech.  With welcome relief on his face, he
removed the _lei hala_ from his neck, and, with a sniff and a sigh,
tossed it into concealment in the thick _lantana_ by the side of the
road.

“But the shin-bone of Laulani?” I queried softly.

He remained silent while a mile of pasture land fled by us and yielded to
caneland.

“I have it now,” he at last said.  “And beside it is Keola, slain ere his
time and made into a spear-head for love of the woman whose shin-bone
abides near to him.  To them, those poor pathetic bones, I owe more than
to aught else.  I became possessed of them in the period of my
culminating adolescence.  I know they changed the entire course of my
life and trend of my mind.  They gave to me a modesty and a humility in
the world, from which my father’s fortune has ever failed to seduce me.

“And often, when woman was nigh to winning to the empery of my mind over
me, I sought Laulani’s shin-bone.  And often, when lusty manhood stung me
into feeling over-proud and lusty, I consulted the spearhead remnant of
Keola, one-time swift runner, and mighty wrestler and lover, and thief of
the wife of a king.  The contemplation of them has ever been of profound
aid to me, and you might well say that I have founded my religion or
practice of living upon them.”

WAIKIKI, HONOLULU, HAWAIIAN ISLANDS.
                     _July_ 16, 1916.




THE WATER BABY


I LENT a weary ear to old Kohokumu’s interminable chanting of the deeds
and adventures of Maui, the Promethean demi-god of Polynesia who fished
up dry land from ocean depths with hooks made fast to heaven, who lifted
up the sky whereunder previously men had gone on all-fours, not having
space to stand erect, and who made the sun with its sixteen snared legs
stand still and agree thereafter to traverse the sky more slowly—the sun
being evidently a trade unionist and believing in the six-hour day, while
Maui stood for the open shop and the twelve-hour day.

“Now this,” said Kohokumu, “is from Queen Lililuokalani’s own family
_mele_:

    “Maui became restless and fought the sun
    With a noose that he laid.
    And winter won the sun,
    And summer was won by Maui . . . ”

Born in the Islands myself, I knew the Hawaiian myths better than this
old fisherman, although I possessed not his memorization that enabled him
to recite them endless hours.

“And you believe all this?” I demanded in the sweet Hawaiian tongue.

“It was a long time ago,” he pondered.  “I never saw Maui with my own
eyes.  But all our old men from all the way back tell us these things, as
I, an old man, tell them to my sons and grandsons, who will tell them to
their sons and grandsons all the way ahead to come.”

“You believe,” I persisted, “that whopper of Maui roping the sun like a
wild steer, and that other whopper of heaving up the sky from off the
earth?”

“I am of little worth, and am not wise, O Lakana,” my fisherman made
answer.  “Yet have I read the Hawaiian Bible the missionaries translated
to us, and there have I read that your Big Man of the Beginning made the
earth, and sky, and sun, and moon, and stars, and all manner of animals
from horses to cockroaches and from centipedes and mosquitoes to sea lice
and jellyfish, and man and woman, and everything, and all in six days.
Why, Maui didn’t do anything like that much.  He didn’t _make_ anything.
He just put things in order, that was all, and it took him a long, long
time to make the improvements.  And anyway, it is much easier and more
reasonable to believe the little whopper than the big whopper.”

And what could I reply?  He had me on the matter of reasonableness.
Besides, my head ached.  And the funny thing, as I admitted it to myself,
was that evolution teaches in no uncertain voice that man did run on
all-fours ere he came to walk upright, that astronomy states flatly that
the speed of the revolution of the earth on its axis has diminished
steadily, thus increasing the length of day, and that the seismologists
accept that all the islands of Hawaii were elevated from the ocean floor
by volcanic action.

Fortunately, I saw a bamboo pole, floating on the surface several hundred
feet away, suddenly up-end and start a very devil’s dance.  This was a
diversion from the profitless discussion, and Kohokumu and I dipped our
paddles and raced the little outrigger canoe to the dancing pole.
Kohokumu caught the line that was fast to the butt of the pole and
under-handed it in until a two-foot _ukikiki_, battling fiercely to the
end, flashed its wet silver in the sun and began beating a tattoo on the
inside bottom of the canoe.  Kohokumu picked up a squirming, slimy squid,
with his teeth bit a chunk of live bait out of it, attached the bait to
the hook, and dropped line and sinker overside.  The stick floated flat
on the surface of the water, and the canoe drifted slowly away.  With a
survey of the crescent composed of a score of such sticks all lying flat,
Kohokumu wiped his hands on his naked sides and lifted the wearisome and
centuries-old chant of Kuali:

    “Oh, the great fish-hook of Maui!
    _Manai-i-ka-lani_—“made fast to the heavens”!
    An earth-twisted cord ties the hook,
    Engulfed from lofty Kauiki!
    Its bait the red-billed Alae,
    The bird to Hina sacred!
    It sinks far down to Hawaii,
    Struggling and in pain dying!
    Caught is the land beneath the water,
    Floated up, up to the surface,
    But Hina hid a wing of the bird
    And broke the land beneath the water!
    Below was the bait snatched away
    And eaten at once by the fishes,
    The Ulua of the deep muddy places!”

His aged voice was hoarse and scratchy from the drinking of too much
swipes at a funeral the night before, nothing of which contributed to
make me less irritable.  My head ached.  The sun-glare on the water made
my eyes ache, while I was suffering more than half a touch of _mal de
mer_ from the antic conduct of the outrigger on the blobby sea.  The air
was stagnant.  In the lee of Waihee, between the white beach and the
roof, no whisper of breeze eased the still sultriness.  I really think I
was too miserable to summon the resolution to give up the fishing and go
in to shore.

Lying back with closed eyes, I lost count of time.  I even forgot that
Kohokumu was chanting till reminded of it by his ceasing.  An exclamation
made me bare my eyes to the stab of the sun.  He was gazing down through
the water-glass.

“It’s a big one,” he said, passing me the device and slipping over-side
feet-first into the water.

He went under without splash and ripple, turned over and swam down.  I
followed his progress through the water-glass, which is merely an oblong
box a couple of feet long, open at the top, the bottom sealed water-tight
with a sheet of ordinary glass.

Now Kohokumu was a bore, and I was squeamishly out of sorts with him for
his volubleness, but I could not help admiring him as I watched him go
down.  Past seventy years of age, lean as a toothpick, and shrivelled
like a mummy, he was doing what few young athletes of my race would do or
could do.  It was forty feet to bottom.  There, partly exposed, but
mostly hidden under the bulge of a coral lump, I could discern his
objective.  His keen eyes had caught the projecting tentacle of a squid.
Even as he swam, the tentacle was lazily withdrawn, so that there was no
sign of the creature.  But the brief exposure of the portion of one
tentacle had advertised its owner as a squid of size.

The pressure at a depth of forty feet is no joke for a young man, yet it
did not seem to inconvenience this oldster.  I am certain it never
crossed his mind to be inconvenienced.  Unarmed, bare of body save for a
brief malo or loin cloth, he was undeterred by the formidable creature
that constituted his prey.  I saw him steady himself with his right hand
on the coral lump, and thrust his left arm into the hole to the shoulder.
Half a minute elapsed, during which time he seemed to be groping and
rooting around with his left hand.  Then tentacle after tentacle,
myriad-suckered and wildly waving, emerged.  

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