On the Makaloa Mat ...........................................................................................................................................1

Unlike the women of most warm races, those of Hawaii age well and nobly. With no pretence of makeup 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

sixtyfour and would be sixtyfive come the next twentysecond 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 halfdozen children playing on the lawn.

It was a noble situationnoble as the ancient hau tree, the size of a house, where she sat as if in a house, so

spaciously and comfortably houselike 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 hundredfoot 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

And this was but one house of the halfdozen houses belonging to Martha Scandwell. Her townhouse, 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 yardboys were trimming

hibiscus, a third was engaged expertly with the long hedge of nightblooming cereus that was shortly

expectant of unfolding in its mysterious nightbloom. In immaculate ducks, a house Japanese brought out the

teathings, 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 bathhouses, 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 yeeshon andstraightlined trousers, their black braids of hair down

And all these, servants, and nurses, and grandchildren, were Martha Scandwell's. So likewise was the colour

of the skin of the grandchildrenthe unmistakable Hawaiian colour, tinted beyond shadow of mistake by

exposure to the Hawaiian sun. Oneeighth and onesixteenth Hawaiian were they, which meant that

seveneighths or fifteensixteenths 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 pureblooded white. Roscoe Scandwell, grandfather, was pure white;

Martha threequarters white; the many sons and daughters of them seveneighths white; the grandchildren

graded up to fifteensixteenths white, or, in the cases when their seveneighths fathers and mothers had

married seveneighths, themselves fourteensixteenths or seveneighths white. On both sides the stock was

good, Roscoe straight descended from the New England Puritans, Martha no less straight descended from the

royal chiefstocks of Hawaii whose genealogies were chanted in males a thousand years before written

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 wellcaredfor woman of forty, and whose actual calendar

age was sixtyeight. 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 sixtyfour, the other sixtyeight. But the thorough comprehension resided in the

fact that in each of them onefourth of them was the sunwarm, lovewarm heart of Hawaii.

The children flooded about Aunt Bella like a rising tide and were capaciously hugged and kissed ere they

"I thought I'd run out to the beach for several daysthe 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

Martha shrugged her voluminous shoulders with voluminous and forgiving affection for her wayward,

"Margaret's at a meeting of the Outdoor Circlethey'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

"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 Hoolaa's first dividend. Remember when I put a thousand in it

at seventyfive 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.

"I sold mine from the steamer by wirelessat twenty even," Bella continued. "And now Abbie's wildly

"Which he would have done anyway, and you KNOW it," Martha charged, lapsing charmingly into

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

"Just the same it was nicer to have Hoolaa 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

"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

"I was only nineteen," Bella nodded. "But it was not George Castner's fault. And look what he, out of she

grave, has done for me. Uncle Robert was wise. He knew George had the faraway vision of far ahead, the

energy, and the steadiness. He saw, even then, and that's fifty years ago, the value of the Nahala waterrights

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

"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

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

"Bella," she said. "We never know. You never spoke. But we wondered, oh, often and often"

"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 grandchildrenI, who only the other day, it would seem, was as

heartfree, legfree, carefree 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

"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

"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.

Neveroh, can you believe it?do, please, sister, believe itdid 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

"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"

"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

"I was only nineteen. Just back from the Royal Chief Schoolthat 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

"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

"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 halfpast 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

"You who had never known anything but servants from the time you were born!" Martha pitied. "Never less

"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

She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment with unseeing eyes at the colourlavish

reef while she composed herself. And she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure, gracious,

highbreasted, nobleheaded port of which no outbreeding can ever rob the Hawaiian woman. Very haole

was Bella Castner, fairskinned, finetextured. Yet, as she returned, the high pose of head, the levellidded

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 sixtyeight yearsall made her the very picture of a chiefess of old Hawaii

fullbursting through her ampleness of haole blood. Taller she was than her sister Martha, if anything more

"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 stormbound ones, would, on occasion, stop with us

overnight. And you know the lavishness of the big ranches, then and now. How we were the laughingstock!

'What do we care!' George would say. 'They live today 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

"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 today. 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 thirdrate coffee that is only two cents a pound more than the awful stuff we are using. Why couldn't I fry

eggs in butternow? I should dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our linen! I'm ashamed to put a guest

"'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 invitationthose of them who will not be dead. You

remember how Stevens passed out last yearfreeliving 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, ablebodied, 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

"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

"'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

halfHawaiian and halfhaole, 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

"And I was nineteen, and sunwarm 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 brokenhearted, foreverdreaming lover of a

"Think of that grey house! I, who had known the ease and the delights and the everlaughing 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, Marthaat 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 moneythe upper Nahala lands, you knowa bit at a time, each purchase a

harddriven bargain, his face the very face of poverty. Today the Nahala Ditch alone pays me forty

"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,

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 stovelids, 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

bedtime. It saved kerosene. We did not eat dinner at Nahalaremember 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."

"What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new PierceArrow came down on the steamer with me. My third

in two years. But oh, all the PierceArrows 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

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 silkstockinged legs from ankle

Both Bella's and Martha's eyes were luminousmoist, 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 greatgreatgrandchildren 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,

threequarters haole with the AngloSaxon blood of New England, was fourquarters Hawaiian in her

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 halffitting, grandly

sweeping, blacksilk 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 cheekbones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of their irongrey abundance

of hair, of their sweetlipped mouths set with the carriage of decades of assured and accomplished pride, and

of their lovely slender eyerows 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 fingertips, lovelomied and

loveformed while they were babies by old Hawaiian women like to the one even then eating poi and iamaka

"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

"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 upanddown 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

"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 hangerson 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

"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, flowergarlanded, 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 retainersa 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

roommates at the Royal Chief School. And there was a great resting time for an hourno luau, for the luau

awaited them at the Parkers'but beer and stronger drinks for the men, and lemonade, and oranges, and

"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 allI, 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 liketwo weeks of paradise, and little enough for

"And I asked Uncle John to lend me a horse, which meant three horses of courseone 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 wildcattleroping up Mauna Kea. You heard about itthat young

"But Hilo! I was the first woman on his back. He was a three yearold, almost a fouryear, 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, deepchested,

bighearted, wellcoupled 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

"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

"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 longgrass slopes, and down the longgrass 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 terrieryou 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

"But he insisted that I should try Hilo outmyself, ratherat 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

"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 pigsticking and wildcattleshooting, the

horsebreaking 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 PaauiloI 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

"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. Twentyfive he was, in allglorious 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 doublecanoes to Tahiti and

Raiatea and back again. He was gracious, sweet, kindly comradely, all friendlinessand 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

"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 yearlong married woman to a grey haole at grey Nahala. Half a century ago it

was, that meetingyou 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

"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 carefree 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

halfway. We came to each other across the grass, unattended, as if we were coming to each other across our

"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 royalmanness crossing to me and penetrating to the heart of me, I felt a sudden

sense of beauty in myselfhow shall I say? as if in him and from him perfection were engendered and

"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

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

And Martha, threescore and four, looked upon Bella, threescore and eight, and nodded genuine

affirmation, and to herself added the appreciation of the instant in what she beheldBella's neck, still full

and shapely, longer than the ordinary Hawaiian woman's neck, a pillar that carried regally her highcheeked,

highbrowed, high chiefess face and head; Bella's hair, highpiled, 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, highheeledslippered, small, plump,

"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

slumberdrowsy 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

"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

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 princedays.

"Wellyou 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 progressdown 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 pigsticking, and roping and driving, and wild mutton from the upper pasturelands;

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

"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

"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 rosegardens of Manayou remember them; fifty

miles across the lava and the ranges, dewy fresh as the moment they were plucked, in their jewelcases of

banana bark; yardlong 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" (fingerbowl) "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 alonefor 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 flowercrowned

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

"It was on, and on, through all Kona, and all Kau, from Hoopuloa and Kapua to Honuapo and Punaluu, a

lifetime of living compressed into two short weeks. A flower blooms but once. That was my time of

bloomLilolilo 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 . . . "

"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 Kilaueathe dream so near its ending; and of course we tossed into the pit of seasurging

lava our offerings to the FireGoddess 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, sweetwater 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

For a long space Bella's vacant gaze rested on the sea horizon. Martha ventured no mere voice expression of

"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

"I do have fleeting memories of some of that day, all a broken hearted mad rage against fateof 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 bedtimekerosene must be economizedand 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

"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

"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

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, fullhearty, 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

"Elsie and the younglings are comingjust 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."

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

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

laceleaved algaroba trees. Only intermittently did the atmosphere so breathefor breathing it was, the

suspiring of the languid, Hawaiian afternoon. In the intervals between the soft breathings, the air grew heavy

Of humans about the low bungalowlike 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 hapahaole (halfwhite), 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, hapahaole and full native, watched her anxiously as she fled.

At the front of the house, on the grass, squatted a score of Hawaiians. Wellmuscled, broadshouldered, they

were all strapping men. Brownskinned, with luminous brown eyes and black, their features large and

regular, they showed all the signs of being as goodnatured, merryhearted, and softtempered 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

hugerowelled 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 doublehibiscus bloom

coquettishly tucked over his ear. Above them, casting a shelter of shade from the sun, grew a widespreading

canopy of Ponciana regia, itself a flame of blossoms, out of each of which sprang pompoms 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

Large as were the Hawaiian cowboys, the sleeper was larger. Also, as his snowwhite 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

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 granddaughter of the sleeper, crouched beside him and with a feathered flyflapper

brushed away the flies. In her face were depicted solicitude, and nervousness, and awe, as if she attended on a

And truly, Hardman Pool, the sleeping whiskery one, was to her, and to many and sundry, a goda source of

life, a source of food, a fount of wisdom, a giver of law, a smiling beneficence, a blackness of thunder and

punishmentin short, a manmaster 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.

Fiftyone 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

And at seventyone, after a morning in the saddle over the ranges that began at four o'clock, he lay under the

monkeypods 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 tradewind 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 monkeypods 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 outbreath, 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 halfsmoked pipe

"Get me my gin and milk," he ordered, in Hawaiian, of the little maid, who had been startled into a tremble

He lighted the pipe, but gave no sign of awareness of the presence of his waiting retainers until the tumbler of

"Well?" he demanded abruptly, and in the pause, while twenty faces wreathed in smiles and twenty pairs of

dark eyes glowed luminously with wellwishing 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 spurchains

strode over to him. They grouped before him in a semicircle, trying bashfully to wedge their shoulders, one

behind another's, their faces agrin 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,

At a nod from him, the semicircle seated itself on the manienie grass, and with further deprecatory smiles

"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.

"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

"No, Kanaka Oolea," came the reply. "The devil knows I am hard put to get kowkow for one wife and her

"Kowkow?" Pool repeated the Chineseintroduced word for food which the Hawaiians had come to

"Yes, Kanaka Oolea," volunteered an old, withered native who had just joined the group from the direction of

the house. "All of them had kowkow in the kitchen, and plenty of it. They ate like lost horses brought down

"And what do you want, Kumuhana?" Pool diverted to the old one, at the same time motioning to the little

"Twelve dollars," said Kumuhana. "I want to buy a Jackass and a secondhand saddle and bridle. I am

"You wait," his haole lord commanded. "I will talk with you about the matter, and about other things of

"The kowkow in the kitchen was good," Iliiopoi resumed, licking his lips. "The poi was onefinger, the pig

fat, the salmonbelly unstinking, the fish of great freshness and plenty, though the opihis" (tiny,

rockclinging shellfish) "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 kowkow. My belly is

heavy with it. Yet is my heart not light of it because there is no kowkow 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 goldsack drawn from the hippocket of his dungarees, Hardman Pool drew the gold piece and

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

floweryworded 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 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 halfsister, should be shamed to be seen out of the saddle save that he walks backward

"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

And in laughter of love at their haole chief's final sally, all the sweetchildminded and physically gorgeous

company of them departed to their waiting horses, save the old withered one, Kumuhana, who had been

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 outbreath of "Aaah," 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."

"There is a warmingness to it. It warms the belly and the soul. It warms the heart. Even the soul and the heart

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

"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 surfboard 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 fishpool, and she sent down a flow of lava

from Huulalai and filled up their pond. For ever was the fishpond of Paiea filled up. That was when I was

"That was in 1801, when James Boyd was building ships for Kamehameha at Hilo," Pool cast back through

the calendar; "which makes you seventynine, 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 then you know" Hardman Pool broke off, the more effectively to impress and hypnotize the other

ancient with the set stare of his palewashed blue eyes. "They say the bones of Kahekili were taken from

their hidingplace and lie today in the Royal Mausoleum. I have heard it whispered that you alone of all

"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

"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 factlogic of

Kumuhana looked about him first, then slowly let his eyes come to rest on the flyflapping 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

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

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

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

"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

"That was the very time Kahekili died," Kumuhana broke in eagerly. "You are very wise. You know many

"It was 1829," Pool continued complacently. "You were twentyeight years old, and I was twenty, just

"I was twentyeight," 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

"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

"For see! I was a young man, and my heart was whitehot lava for Malia, who was in Kahekili's household.

So was Anapuni's heart whitehot for her, though the colour of his heart was black, as you shall see. We were

at a drinking that nightAnapuni and Ithe 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

"It was past midnight, I remember well, when I saw Malia, whom never had I seen at a drinking, come across

the wethard 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 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

"Her walk! In the moonlight there, the soft glowfire of the jellyfishes in the surf like the kerosenelamp

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 reefsheltered, 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 tradewind 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

"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

"That is why the desire of woman must be greater than the desire of life," Pool concurred. "Else would there

"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 sunrisea thing that was. And so one grows old, and cold, and drinks gin, not for

"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 halfsee. 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

"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 hairnor

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,

"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 peaceabiding, 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 yamplanting and you must plant now. We say now,

today, and not picnicking and hulaing today and yamplanting tomorrow 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

"Like a cloud on the mountaintop 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

"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 rainfall, 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 themme, 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

"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

secondhand saddle and bridle. It is why twice ten fool men of us, under these monkeypods 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 kowkow into our bellies

"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

"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

"The moepuu, the human sacrifice," Pool commented. "Yet it was nine years since the coming of the

"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 fishhooks of their jaws or arrow heads of their long bones for the

The old man thrust out his tongue; and, to Pool's amazement, he saw the surface of that sensitive organ, from

"That was done after the missionaries came, several years afterward, when Keopuolani died. Also, did I

knock out four of my front teeth, and halfcircles did I burn over my body with blazing bark. And whoever

ventured outofdoors 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

"I? I sat on, ashamed of my desire of woman that had not been so strong as my slaveobedience 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

"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

"More heelkicks, 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.

"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 halfdrunk

drinking coconut, but Aimoku kicked it out of my shaking fingers, and Humuhumu smote me with the heel of

"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

lifetime of many men who died young has passed by me since the last I was able to do such mad drinking of

"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 canoesheds, that the matthatches 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

"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

"Aimoku and Humuhumu made me sit on the sand to the side from the launching of the great doublecanoe.

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 canoesheds and throw down drinkcoconuts. They drank and were refreshed, but me they

"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

"'There is but one moepuu,' said the priest Eoppo, looking at me where I sat on the coffin in the bottom of the

"'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

"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

"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 bowon to the wind and swell. And, ere they

"'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 dryhot 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 sandhot

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 cursesthey

were terrible curseshe laid upon all living men and men to live after who might tamper with the bones of

"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 MauiTikiTiki and MauiPoTiki. And Hina,

the goddessmother of Maui, he named Ina. And Maui's godfather he named sometimes Akalana and

sometimes Kanaloa. Strange how one about to die and very thirsty should remember such things! And I

"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

"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 sungod 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

"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."

"A Maori deathchant unmistakable," Pool exclaimed, "sung by an Hawaiian with a tattooed tongue! Repeat

"But death is nothing new. Death is and has been ever since old Maui died. Then Patatai laughed loud And

woke the goblingod, 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 pans" (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,

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

"'Not at the burying of an alii,' was the priest's quick reply. 'It is the law. We cannot be niggard with Kahekili

"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

"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, headend up, had not sunk. It bobbed up and down in the sea astern of us. And the canoe, without

way on it, bowon 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 otherworld 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

"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 midair 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, halfbrother 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

"And the coffin immediately sank," Hardman Pool broke in; "the air that floated it escaping through the

"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

"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

In the pause that followed, wherein Hardman Pool was deep sunk in meditation, Kumuhana licked his dry

"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

They sat on, Pool meditating, conning over and over to himself the Maori deathchant 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.

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

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 landboundaries 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

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 oldtimers 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

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), houseparties, 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

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 onefourth Portuguese, one fourth Scotch,

onefourth Hawaiian, and onefourth 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 spiritgroping and he 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 selfdeceivement of the

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

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, Frenchmembers of all racesknelt without friction,

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

This theory became one of the major tenets of his preaching, and was especially efficacious in cleansing the

consciences of the backsliders 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 everfluxing chaos of the world was definite and preordainedif

by no other token, then by denial that there was any everfluxing 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,

democratictinged, fourraceengendered, slang munitioned attack? He knew, by contact, almost as much

as she about the waywardness of living and sinninghaving been singing boy on the passengerships

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

So, when Alice Akana strayed in to scoff, she remained to pray to Abel Ah Yo's god, who struck her

hardheaded 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, childlike 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

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

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

"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

"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

heavyladen. For you will not have told all your sin, and not until you have told all will you be rid of any."

"Rebirth is even more difficult than birth." Abel Ah Yo did anything but comfort her. "'Not until you become

And so the situation remained at deadlock, Abel Ah Yo demanding absolute allegiance to God, and Alice

"You bet it will be a big telling, if Alice ever begins," the beachcombing and disreputable kamaainas

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

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 threequarters of an hour out of his way and time personally

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

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

"Sssh!" he cautioned. "That Jap driver is a highschool 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

"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

"Sssh!" 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

"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 othersespecially the

weaknesses of youth ofof others, when they played high and low and didn't know what they were doing."

"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 twentyone and insisted on breaking the glassware

"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

"I was pigsticking with him at Mana," the other nodded. "We were at a two weeks' houseparty 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

"I always did have an aloha" (warm regard) "for you, Alice," a member of the Senate, fat and baldheaded,

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 oldtime

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

"Quite by chance," he explained, "when my people were looking up landrecords in Iapio Valley, I found a

mortgage of two thousand on your holdings therethat 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 starapples, 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 fivedollar box of candy and a mandarin coat that would have fetched threequarters 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 pina cloth from the Philippines and a dozen pairs of

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

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 TwentyFifth Infantry, a dozen troopers from

the Fourth Cavalry on its way to the Philippines, as many drunken man ofwar's men, divers ladies from

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 redfluxing lava down the long slopes of Mauna

Loa, destroying fishponds on the seabrim and licking up droves of beef cattle, villages, and humans on her

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 PidginEnglish and

PidginHawaiian, 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

This anthromorphic deity of Abel Ah Yo thundering the modern HawaiianEnglish slang of welakahao at the

end of the world, is a fair sample of the revivalist's speechtools of discourse. Welakahao means literally "hot

iron." It was coined in the Honolulu Ironworks 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 wikiwiki" (quickly) "just

like that; for Peter was a better bookkeeper than any on the Waterhouse Trust Company Limited, and, further,

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 eves 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 redblood of firemelted 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 bubbleskin 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 fivetenths of their all to the

"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

"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

"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 Godthe 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. {1}

"But oh, my friends, think you our guides, our native attendants, deepsunk 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

ninetenths of my all. I will give all. I will give even the two bolts of pina cloth, the mandarin coat, and the

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 smalltoo small to grasp eternity. Yet is it given to me, by God's grace, to

"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 lone 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 pineapples. And then, oh my friends, even then, IT WOULD NOT YET BE

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 hallelujahshouting negro soldiers to Alice Akana. And, ere the excitement began to ebb,

ninetenths of his congregation and all his converts were down on knees and praying and shouting aloud an

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 taxicab, 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 smeltingpot 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

Never was a more fearful and damning community narrative enunciated in the entire Pacific, north and south,

"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 fishpond 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

nighttime, 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

And in such fashion Alice rambled on through the experiences of her long and fullpacked life. And women

forgot they were in the tabernacle, and men too, and faces darkened with passion as they learned for the first

"The lawyers' offices will be crowded tomorrow 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

"There is a banker in Honolulu. You all know his name. He is 'way up, swell society because of his wife. He

"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

And tell she did, throwing the searchlight on ancient business transactions and political deals which from

"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 housepaint 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

reelected. Yet his house was not painted. He was honest. To this day his house is not painted, as everybody

"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 twentyfive hundred to Azalea Akau"

Here, Lizzie, the married wife, upstood like a fury longthwarted, and, in lieu of her husband, already fled,

"Wait, Lizzie Lokendamper!" Alice cried out. "I have much weight of you on my heart and some housepaint

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 housepaint. Jim always paid that.

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.

"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 twentytwo years ago, when its cash market

price was thirtyfive dollars. Because his aloha for me was big? No. He never had aloha inside of him except

"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 lee 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 attain. But that paint will not stand between me and God. There are no more paint pots between me

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

"Our mistake," said Colonel Chilton, at the club, "was that we did not, at the very first, appoint a committee

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

"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

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

"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

"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

"Now there's a grand old man," he said. "A leftover from a forgotten age. Few of his type remain. A

pioneer. A true kamaaina" (oldtimer). "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 tomorrow 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 policecourt 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."

"The committee will now go into secret session," said Lask Finneston, arising and indicating the way to the

They have gone down to the pit with their weapons of war, and they have laid their swords under their heads.

Prince Akuli shot an apprehensive glance sideward to where, under the shade of a kukui tree, an old wahine

"Yes," he nodded halfsadly to me, "in her last years Hiwilani went back to the old ways, and to the old

beliefsin 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

halfdozen 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,

forevertwilight room of hers, and know that in this jar was all that remained of my maternal grandaunt,

and that in that jar was my greatgrandfather, and that in all the jars were the preserved boneremnants 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 floorshe'd fired out of the room the

great, royal, canopied fourposter that had been presented to her grandmother by Lord Byron, who was the

"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.

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 dearestloved lei

(wreath) of the fruit of the hala which is the screwpine or pandanus of the South Pacific. She was cutting the

many sections or nutenvelopes of the fruit into fluted bellshapes 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

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 grassthatched was the house, but it stood

in a treasuregarden 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

drinkingcoconuts, 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

shoreline, as we looked down across the miles of canefields, the billowwreathed reeflines, 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 beefcattle the fattest,

its rainfall the most generous without ever being disastrous. It resembles Kauai in that it is the firstformed

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 midair to descend softly and invisibly through a mirage of rainbows, like so much dew or

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 Hawaiian 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

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

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 doublecanoe 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

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 Oxfordeducated 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

Annexationthis, despite the fact that Prince Cupid's alii genealogy was lesser to the heavenboosted

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, farthervisioned, 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 snow Eleanor. And Isaac Davis, and John Young, and

others of their waywardly adventurous ilk, with sixpounder 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 beastman's gropings toward the stature of

manhood, out of all red murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothers of the demigods,

worldpolished, Oxfordaccented, 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

fellowtraveller out of his wrecked seven thousanddollar 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

"King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu," Prince Akuli continued. "And his queen,

Kapiolani, caught the fad from him. They collected everythingold makaloa mats, old tapas, old calabashes,

old doublecanoes, and idols which the priests had saved from the general destruction in 1819. I haven't seen

a pearlshell fishhook in years, but I swear that Kalakaua accumulated ten thousand of them, to say nothing

of human jawbone fishhooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and helmets, and stone adzes, and

poipounders 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

"From him my father, Kanau, got the collecting bee in his bonnet, and Hiwilani was likewise infected. But

father was modern to his fingertips. He believed neither in the gods of the kahunas" (priests) "nor of the

missionaries. He didn't believe in anything except sugar stocks, horsebreeding, 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 stoneidol 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

"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 hallmark on him and branded into him of faithful

bornslave 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

"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 hairraising. 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 prayingtodeath?" 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 hidingplace 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

"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. 'Swinebrains! 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.

Squareface gin proves Howard wrong. The doctors say he won't last six months. Even squareface 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 highball,' he commanded; 'no, bring me two highballs.' 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 googlyeyed 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 squareface 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

"He clapped his hands for his servants, and commanded: 'Bring me my singing boys. And the hula

dancersplenty 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

"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 halfmade 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 burialplace 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

"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 pairmother 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 blockandtackle; of Ahuna one's impression was that the tooth pickedness of him would shatter

"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 bonesnatching 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 ablebodied, and he could go, splitting equally with her whatever bones he brought back. But she

"'I know him,' she assured me. 'He'd bet his mother's bones on a horserace or an acefull.'

"I stood with fat her 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

"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 screwdrivers, and

all sorts of contrivances, including a tiny pair of scissors. I proceeded to pare my fingernails.

"'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

"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 skindeep. 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 today, 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

"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 burialplace 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 goodbye and departed for the middle world, the over world, or the under world, or wherever they

"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

"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 longapprehended 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 muchwashed cotton, with

agewithered face and labourgnarled 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

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 Islandsnor 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

I nodded, knowing full well the spectacle of those lava leagues of weather coast, truly ironbound so far as

landingplaces or anchorages were concerned, great forbidding cliffwalls thousands of feet in height, their

summits wreathed in cloud and rain squall, their knees hammered by the tradewind billows into spouting,

spuming white, the air, from sea to raincloud, 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

"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 twentyeight

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,

"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

"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

"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 nighttime, 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

"And the fringe wasI don't mind telling that muchthe 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 ancientmariner 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."

"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 threequarters of a million over a million. If peace breaks tomorrow, with the

consequent slump, I could enumerate a hundred who will lose my direct bounty, and go into the old natives'

He clapped his hands, and the old wahine tottered toward him in an excitement of haste to serve. She cringed

"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 thriceblessed and thricedelicious lei hala."

"And if I die tomorrow, not alone will the lawyers contest my disposition of my property, but they will

"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 nighttime 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 nighttime 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

"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 footpaths 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

"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 godforsaken place of naked, eroded lava, to which only

rarely could the scant vegetation find roothold. For miles we followed up that winding fissure through the

towering walls, far into the chaos of back country that lies behind the Ironbound 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 burialplace possible in such bare

"We ate, then stripped for work. Only did Ahuna permit me to retain my shoes. He stood beside me at the

"'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, headfirst, but going slowly, for the lava

"'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

"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

"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,

"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 greatgrandfather 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

"So, with true aliiauthority 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 whaleoil that must have been landed on

Lahaina beach thirty years before. From his mouth he took a watertight arrangement of a matchbox

composed of two empty riflecartridges fitted snugly together. He lighted the wicking that floated on the oil,

and I looked about, and knew disappointment. No burialchamber was it, but merely a lava tube such as

"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 weakheaded, and she traffics overmuch 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

"I have given all the Islands' museums the onceover," Prince Akuli lapsed back into slang, "and I must say

that the totality of the collections cannot touch what I saw in our Lakanaii burialcave. 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 whaleoil lampcalabashes. 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 flyflapper into symbols of royalty

until they became larger than hearseplumes 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 centuriesold family attic. For the first time I

saw things I had only heard of, such as the pahoas, fashioned of whaleteeth and suspended by braided

"There were tapes and mats of the rarest and oldest; capes and leis and helmets and cloaks, priceless all,

except the tooancient ones, of the feathers of the mamo, and of the iwi and the akakane and the oo. 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

"Such a mess of things! Carved gourds and calabashes, shell scrapers, nets of olona fibre, a junk of ieie

baskets, and fish hooks of every bone and spoon of shell. Musical instruments of the forgotten

daysukukes and nose flutes, and kiokios which are likewise played with one unstoppered nostril. Taboo

poi bowls and finger bowls, lefthanded adzes of the canoe gods, lavacup lamps, stone mortars and pestles

and poipounders. 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 kaekeekesyou know, our ancient drums, hollowed sections of the coconut tree, covered

one end with sharkskin. 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 agerotted wood of it would crumble to

dust, the ragged tatters of the sharkskin 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 parceldelivery array of them! Besides the small bundles of the long bones,

there were full skeletons, tapawrapped, lying in oneman, and two and threeman canoes of precious koa

wood, with curved outriggers of wiliwili wood, and proper paddles to hand with the ioprojection 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 themrusty old

horsepistols, derringers, pepperboxes, fivebarrelled fantastiques, Kentucky long riffles, muskets handled

in trade by John Company and Hudson's Bay, sharktooth swords, wooden stabbingknives, arrows and

spears boneheaded of the fish and the pig and of man, and spears and arrows woodenheaded and

"Ahuna put a spear in my hand, headed and pointed finely with the long shinbone 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

malelike as you observe, held up the flesh of a large man, a threehundred pounder seven footer, three

centuries agone. And this spearhead is made of the shinbone 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

sharktooth 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 today 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 thoughtArthur, 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

"For me it was illumination. I learned there in the burialcave 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

"And Ahuna bowed his head, and praised my wisdom of judgment. But at that moment the longrotted

olonacord broke and the pitiful woman's bones of Laulani shed from my clasp and clattered on the rocky

floor. One shinbone, in some way deflected, fell under the dark shadow of a canoebow, 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

"'This,' said Ahuna, introducing me to another of my ancestors, 'is your greatgrandfather, 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

"But Ahuna, putting out the various calabashes of light by drowning the wicks in the whaleoil, did not

The honk of the automobile, sent up from Olokona to rescue us, broke off the Prince's narrative. We said

goodbye to the ancient and freshpensioned wahine, and departed. A halfmile on our way, Prince Akuli

"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 deathbed he pledged me again never to reveal the location in that nameless

"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

heavenboosted my genealogy. And the bones of my great grandmother who had slept in the fourposter

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

handsbones once fleshed with sensate beauty, informed with sparkle and spirit, instinct with love and

lovewarmness 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

burialplace. 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.

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 spearhead for love

of the woman whose shinbone 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,

"And often, when woman was nigh to winning to the empery of my mind over me, I sought Laulani's

shinbone. And often, when lusty manhood stung me into feeling overproud and lusty, I consulted the

spearhead remnant of Keola, onetime 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

I lent a weary ear to old Kohokumu's interminable chanting of the deeds and adventures of Maui, the

Promethean demigod 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 allfours, 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 slowlythe sun being evidently a trade unionist and believing in the sixhour day, while Maui stood

"Maui became restless and fought the sun With a noose that he laid. And winter won the sun, And summer

Born in the Islands myself, I knew the Hawaiian myths better than this old fisherman, although I possessed

"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

"You believe," I persisted, "that whopper of Maui roping the sun like a wild steer, and that other whopper of

"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

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

allfours 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

Fortunately, I saw a bamboo pole, floating on the surface several hundred feet away, suddenly upend 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 underhanded it in until a twofoot 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 centuriesold chant of Kuali:

"Oh, the great fishhook of Maui! Manaiikalani"made fast to the heavens"! An earthtwisted cord ties

the hook, Engulfed from lofty Kauiki! Its bait the redbilled 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

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

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

"It's a big one," he said, passing me the device and slipping over side feetfirst into the water.

He went under without splash and ripple, turned over and swam down. I followed his progress through the

waterglass, which is merely an oblong box a couple of feet long, open at the top, the bottom sealed

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

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, myriadsuckered and wildly waving, emerged. Laying hold of his arm, they writhed

and coiled about his flesh like so many snakes. With a heave and a jerk appeared the entire squid, a proper

But the old man was in no hurry for his natural element, the air above the water. There, forty feet beneath,

wrapped about by an octopus that measured nine feet across from tentacletip to tentacletip and that could

well drown the stoutest swimmer, he coolly and casually did the one thing that gave to him and his empery

over the monster. He shoved his lean, hawklike face into the very centre of the slimy, squirming mass, and

with his several ancient fangs bit into the heart and the life of the matter. This accomplished, he came

upward, slowly, as a swimmer should who is changing atmospheres from the depths. Alongside the canoe,

still in the water and peeling off the grisly clinging thing, the incorrigible old sinner burst into the pule of

triumph which had been chanted by the countless squidcatching generations before him:

"O Kanaloa of the taboo nights! Stand upright on the solid floor! Stand upon the floor where lies the squid!

Stand up to take the squid of the deep sea! Rise up, O Kanaloa! Stir up! Stir up! Let the squid awake! Let the

I closed my eyes and ears, not offering to lend him a hand, secure in the knowledge that he could climb back

"A very fine squid," he crooned. "It is a wahine" (female) "squid. I shall now sing to you the song of the

"You were disgraceful last night at the funeral," I headed him off. "I heard all about it. You made much noise.

You sang till everybody was deaf. You insulted the son of the widow. You drank swipes like a pig. Swipes

are not good for your extreme age. Some day you will wake up dead. You ought to be a wreck today"

"Ha!" he chuckled. "And you, who drank no swipes, who was a babe unborn when I was already an old man,

who went to bed last night with the sun and the chickensthis day are you a wreck. Explain me that. My

ears are as thirsty to listen as was my throat thirsty last night. And here today, behold, I am, as that

Englishman who came here in his yacht used to say, I am in fine form, in devilish fine form."

"I give you up," I retorted, shrugging my shoulders. "Only one thing is clear, and that is that the devil doesn't

"No," he pondered the idea carefully. "It is not that. The devil will be glad for my coming, for I have some

very fine songs for him, and scandals and old gossips of the high aliis that will make him scratch his sides.

So, let me explain to you the secret of my birth. The Sea is my mother. I was born in a doublecanoe, during

a Kona gale, in the channel of Kahoolawe. From her, the Sea, my mother, I received my strength. Whenever I

return to her arms, as for a breastclasp, as I have returned this day, I grow strong again and immediately.

"Some day," old Kohokumu rambled on, "when I am really old, I shall be reported of men as drowned in the

sea. This will be an idle thought of men. In truth, I shall have returned into the arms of my mother, there to

rest under the heart of her breast until the second birth of me, when I shall emerge into the sun a flashing

"When I was younger I muddled my poor head over queerer religions," old Kohokumu retorted. "But listen,

O Young Wise One, to my elderly wisdom. This I know: as I grow old I seek less for the truth from without

me, and find more of the truth from within me. Why have I thought this thought of my return to my mother

and of my rebirth from my mother into the sun? You do not know. I do not know, save that, without whisper

of man's voice or printed word, without prompting from otherwhere, this thought has arisen from within me,

from the deeps of me that are as deep as the sea. I am not a god. I do not make things. Therefore I have not

made this thought. I do not know its father or its mother. It is of old time before me, and therefore it is true.

Man does not make truth. Man, if he be not blind, only recognizes truth when he sees it. Is this thought that I

"Perhaps it is you that are a dream," I laughed. "And that I, and sky, and sea, and the ironhard land, are

"I have often thought that," he assured me soberly. "It may well be so. Last night I dreamed I was a lark bird,

a beautiful singing lark of the sky like the larks on the upland pastures of Haleakala. And I flew up, up,

toward the sun, singing, singing, as old Kohokumu never sang. I tell you now that I dreamed I was a lark bird

singing in the sky. But may not I, the real I, be the lark bird? And may not the telling of it be the dream that I,

the lark bird, am dreaming now? Who are you to tell me ay or no? Dare you tell me I am not a lark bird

"And how do you know but what you are old Maui himself asleep and dreaming that you are John Lakana

talking with me in a canoe? And may you not awake old Maui yourself, and scratch your sides and say that

"There is much more in dreams than we know," he assured me with great solemnity. "Dreams go deep, all the

way down, maybe to before the beginning. May not old Maui have only dreamed he pulled Hawaii up from

the bottom of the sea? Then would this Hawaii land be a dream, and you, and I, and the squid there, only

"And I worry my old head about the secrets undiscoverable," he resumed, "until I grow tired and want to

forget, and so I drink swipes, and go fishing, and sing old songs, and dream I am a lark bird singing in the

sky. I like that best of all, and often I dream it when I have drunk much swipes . . . "

In great dejection of mood he peered down into the lagoon through the waterglass.

"There will be no more bites for a while," he announced. "The fishsharks are prowling around, and we shall

have to wait until they are gone. And so that the time shall not be heavy, I will sing you the canoehauling

"Give to me the trunk of the tree, O Lono! Give me the tree's main root, O Lono! Give me the ear of the tree,

"For the love of mercy, don't sing!" I cut him short. "I've got a headache, and your singing hurts. You may be

in devilish fine form today, but your throat is rotten. I'd rather you talked about dreams, or told me

"It is too bad that you are sick, and you so young," he conceded cheerily. "And I shall not sing any more. I

shall tell you something you do not know and have never heard; something that is no dream and no whopper,

but is what I know to have happened. Not very long ago there lived here, on the beach beside this very

lagoon, a young boy whose name was Keikiwai, which, as you know, means Water Baby. He was truly a

water baby. His gods were the sea and fish gods, and he was born with knowledge of the language of fishes,

which the fishes did not know until the sharks found it out one day when they heard him talk it.

"It happened this way. The word had been brought, and the commands, by swift runners, that the king was

making a progress around the island, and that on the next day a luau" (feast) "was to be served him by the

dwellers here of Waihee. It was always a hardship, when the king made a progress, for the few dwellers in

small places to fill his many stomachs with food. For he came always with his wife and her women, with his

priests and sorcerers, his dancers and fluteplayers, and hulasingers, and fighting men and servants, and his

"Sometimes, in small places like Waihee, the path of his journey was marked afterward by leanness and

famine. But a king must be fed, and it is not good to anger a king. So, like warning in advance of disaster,

Waihee heard of his coming, and all food getters of field and pond and mountain and sea were busied with

getting food for the feast. And behold, everything was got, from the choicest of royal taro to sugarcane

joints for the roasting, from opihis to limu, from fowl to wild pig and poifed puppies everything save one

"Now be it known that the king's favourite food was lobster. He esteemed it above all kaikai" (food), "and

his runners had made special mention of it. And there were no lobsters, and it is not good to anger a king in

the belly of him. Too many sharks had come inside the reef. That was the trouble. A young girl and an old

man had been eaten by them. And of the young men who dared dive for lobsters, one was eaten, and one lost

"But there was Keikiwai, the Water Baby, only eleven years old, but half fish himself and talking the

language of fishes. To his father the head men came, begging him to send the Water Baby to get lobsters to

"Now this what happened was known and observed. For the fishermen, and their women, and the

tarogrowers and the birdcatchers, and the head men, and all Waihee, came down and stood back from the

edge of the rock where the Water Baby stood and looked down at the lobsters far beneath on the bottom.

"And a shark, looking up with its cat's eyes, observed him, and sent out the sharkcall of 'fresh meat' to

assemble all the sharks in the lagoon. For the sharks work thus together, which is why they are strong. And

the sharks answered the call till there were forty of them, long ones and short ones and lean ones and round

ones, forty of them by count; and they talked to one another, saying: 'Look at that titbit of a child, that morsel

delicious of humanflesh sweetness without the salt of the sea in it, of which salt we have too much, savoury

and good to eat, melting to delight under our hearts as our bellies embrace it and extract from it its sweet.'

"Much more they said, saying: 'He has come for the lobsters. When he dives in he is for one of us. Not like

the old man we ate yesterday, tough to dryness with age, nor like the young men whose members were too

hardmuscled, but tender, so tender that he will melt in our gullets ere our bellies receive him. When he dives

in, we will all rush for him, and the lucky one of us will get him, and, gulp, he will be gone, one bite and one

"And Keikiwai, the Water Baby, heard the conspiracy, knowing the shark language; and he addressed a

prayer, in the shark language, to the shark god Mokuhalii, and the sharks heard and waved their tails to one

another and winked their cat's eyes in token that they understood his talk. And then he said: 'I shall now dive

for a lobster for the king. And no hurt shall befall me, because the shark with the shortest tail is my friend and

"And, so saying, he picked up a chunk of lavarock and tossed it into the water, with a big splash, twenty feet

to one side. The forty sharks rushed for the splash, while he dived, and by the time they discovered they had

missed him, he had gone to bottom and come back and climbed out, within his hand a fat lobster, a wahine

"'Ha!' said the sharks, very angry. 'There is among us a traitor. The titbit of a child, the morsel of sweetness,

has spoken, and has exposed the one among us who has saved him. Let us now measure the lengths of our

"Which they did, in a long row, side by side, the shortertailed ones cheating and stretching to gain length on

themselves, the longertailed ones cheating and stretching in order not to be out cheated and outstretched.

They were very angry with the one with the shortest tail, and him they rushed upon from every side and

"Again they listened while they waited for the Water Baby to dive in. And again the Water Baby made his

prayer in the shark language to Mokuhalii, and said: 'The shark with the shortest tail is my friend and will

protect me.' And again the Water Baby tossed in a chunk of lava, this time twenty feet away off to the other

side. The sharks rushed for the splash, and in their haste ran into one another, and splashed with their tails till

the water was all foam, and they could see nothing, each thinking some other was swallowing the titbit. And

"And the thirtynine sharks measured tails, devoting the one with the shortest tail, so that there were only

thirtyeight sharks. And the Water Baby continued to do what I have said, and the sharks to do what I have

told you, while for each shark that was eaten by his brothers there was another fat lobster laid on the rock for

the king. Of course, there was much quarrelling and argument among the sharks when it came to measuring

tails; but in the end it worked out in rightness and justice, for, when only two sharks were left, they were the

"And the Water Baby again claimed the shark with the shortest tail was his friend, fooled the two sharks with

another lavachunk, and brought up another lobster. The two sharks each claimed the other had the shorter

"I know just what you are going to say," he snatched his recital back from me. "And you are right. It took him

so long to eat the thirtyninth shark, for inside the thirtyninth shark were already the nineteen other sharks

he had eaten, and inside the fortieth shark were already the nineteen other sharks he had eaten, and he did not

have the appetite he had started with. But do not forget he was a very big shark to begin with.

"It took him so long to eat the other shark, and the nineteen sharks inside the other shark, that he was still

eating when darkness fell, and the people of Waihee went away home with all the lobsters for the king. And

didn't they find the last shark on the beach next morning dead, and burst wide open with all he had eaten?"

"Hold, O Lakana!" he checked the speech that rushed to my tongue. "I know what next you would say. You

would say that with my own eyes I did not see this, and therefore that I do not know what I have been telling

you. But I do know, and I can prove it. My father's father knew the grandson of the Water Baby's father's

uncle. Also, there, on the rocky point to which I point my finger now, is where the Water Baby stood and

dived. I have dived for lobsters there myself. It is a great place for lobsters. Also, and often, have I seen

sharks there. And there, on the bottom, as I should know, for I have seen and counted them, are the thirty

"Ha!" he baffled me. "Look! While we have talked the fish have begun again to bite."

He pointed to three of the bamboo poles erect and devildancing in token that fish were hooked and

struggling on the lines beneath. As he bent to his paddle, he muttered, for my benefit:

"Of course I know. The thirtynine lava rocks are still there. You can count them any day for yourself. Of

There was a great noise and racket, but no scandal, in Honolulu's Chinatown. Those within hearing distance

merely shrugged their shoulders and smiled tolerantly at the disturbance as an affair of accustomed usualness.

"What is it?" asked Chin Mo, down with a sharp pleurisy, of his wife, who had paused for a second at the

The fracas was taking place in the garden, behind the living rooms that were at the back of the store that

fronted on the street with the proud sign above: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. The

garden was a miniature domain, twenty feet square, that somehow cunningly seduced the eye into a sense and

seeming of illimitable vastness. There were forests of dwarf pines and oaks, centuries old yet two or three

feet in height, and imported at enormous care and expense. A tiny bridge, a pace across, arched over a

miniature river that flowed with rapids and cataracts from a miniature lake stocked with myriadfinned,

orangemiracled goldfish that in proportion to the lake and landscape were whales. On every side the many

windows of the severalstoried shackbuildings looked down. In the centre of the garden, on the narrow

No Chinese lad of tender and beatable years was Ah Kim. His was the store of Ah Kim Company, and his

was the achievement of building it up through the long years from the shoestring of savings of a contract

coolie labourer to a bank account in four figures and a credit that was gilt edged. An even halfcentury of

summers and winters had passed over his head, and, in the passing, fattened him comfortably and snugly.

Short of stature, his full front was as rotund as a watermelon seed. His face was moon faced. His garb was

dignified and silken, and his blacksilk skullcap with the red button atop, now, alas! fallen on the ground,

But his appearance, in this moment of the present, was anything but dignified. Dodging and ducking under a

rain of blows from a bamboo cane, he was crouched over in a halfdoubled posture. When he was rapped on

the knuckles and elbows, with which he shielded his face and head, his winces were genuine and involuntary.

From the many surrounding windows the neighbourhood looked down with placid enjoyment.

And she who wielded the stick so shrewdly from long practice! Seventyfour years old, she looked every

minute of her time. Her thin legs were encased in straightlined pants of linen stiff textured and

shinyblack. Her scraggly grey hair was drawn unrelentingly and flatly back from a narrow, unrelenting

forehead. Eyebrows she had none, having long since shed them. Her eyes, of pinhole tininess, were blackest

black. She was shockingly cadaverous. Her shrivelled forearm, exposed by the loose sleeve, possessed no

more of muscle than several taut bowstrings stretched across meagre bone under yellow, parchmentlike

skin. Along this mummy arm jade bracelets shot up and down and clashed with every blow.

"Ah!" she cried out, rhythmically accenting her blows in series of three to each shrill observation. "I forbade

you to talk to Li Faa. Today you stopped on the street with her. Not an hour ago. Half an hour by the clock

"It was the thriceaccursed telephone," Ah Kim muttered, while she suspended the stick to catch what he

said. "Mrs. Chang Lucy told you. I know she did. I saw her see me. I shall have the telephone taken out. It is

"It is a device of all the devils," Mrs. Tai Fu agreed, taking a fresh grip on the stick. "Yet shall the telephone

"She has the eyes of ten thousand cats," quoth Ah Kim, ducking and receiving the stick stinging on his

knuckles. "And the tongues of ten thousand toads," he supplemented ere his next duck.

"I speak of Li Faa," his mother corrected with stick emphasis. "She is only half Chinese, as you know. Her

mother was a shameless kanaka. She wears skirts like the degraded haole womenalso corsets, as I have

"A year of her, unworthy son of a noble father, and you would gladly be going out to get drowned or be

"I had the good taste not to marry a third. Besides, my two husbands died honourably in their beds. They

were not kicked by horses nor drowned at sea. What business is it of our neighbours that you should inform

them I have had two husbands, or ten, or none? You have made a scandal of me, before all our neighbours,

Ah Kim endured the staccato rain of blows, and said when his mother paused, breathless and weary:

"Always have I insisted and pleaded, honourable mother, that you beat me in the house, with the windows

and doors closed tight, and not in the open street or the garden open behind the house.

"You have called this unthinkable Li Faa the Silvery Moon Blossom," Mrs. Tai Fu rejoined, quite illogically

and femininely, but with utmost success in so far as she deflected her son from continuance of the thrust he

"I was told over the telephone," his mother evaded. "I do not know all voices that speak to me over that

Strangely, Ah Kim made no effort to run away from his mother, which he could easily have done. She, on the

"Ah! Stubborn one! Why do you not cry? Mule that shameth its ancestors! Never have I made you cry. From

the time you were a little boy I have never made you cry. Answer me! Why do you not cry?"

Weak and breathless from her exertions, she dropped the stick and panted and shook as if with a nervous

"I do not know, except that it is my way," Ah Kim replied, gazing solicitously at his mother. "I shall bring

But she flung away from him with a snort and tottered agedly across the garden into the house. Meanwhile

recovering his skullcap and smoothing his disordered attire, Ah Kim rubbed his hurts and gazed after her

with eyes of devotion. He even smiled, and almost might it appear that he had enjoyed the beating.

Ah Kim had been so beaten ever since he was a boy, when he lived on the high banks of the eleventh cataract

of the Yangtse river. Here his father had been born and toiled all his days from young manhood as a towing

coolie. When he died, Ah Kim, in his own young manhood, took up the same honourable profession. Farther

back than all remembered annals of the family, had the males of it been towing coolies. At the time of Christ

his direct ancestors had been doing the same thing, meeting the precisely similarly modelled junks below the

white water at the foot of the canyon, bending the halfmile of rope to each junk, and, according to size,

tailing on from a hundred to two hundred coolies of them and by sheer, two legged manpower, bowed

forward and down till their hands touched the ground and their faces were sometimes within a foot of it,

Apparently, down all the intervening centuries, the payment of the trade had not picked up. His father, his

father's father, and himself, Ah Kim, had received the same invariable remunerationper junk

onefourteenth of a cent, at the rate he had since learned money was valued in Hawaii. On long lucky

summer days when the waters were easy, the junks many, the hours of daylight sixteen, sixteen hours of such

heroic toil would earn over a cent. But in a whole year a towing coolie did not earn more than a dollar and a

half. People could and did live on such an income. There were women servants who received a yearly wage

of a dollar. The net makers of Ti Wi earned between a dollar and two dollars a year. They lived on such

wages, or, at least, they did not die on them. But for the towing coolies there were pickings, which were what

made the profession honourable and the guild a close and hereditary corporation or labour union. One junk in

five that was dragged up through the rapids or lowered down was wrecked. One junk in every ten was a total

loss. The coolies of the towing guild knew the freaks and whims of the currents, and grappled, and raked, and

netted a wet harvest from the river. They of the guild were looked up to by lesser coolies, for they could

And Ah Kim had been contented and proud, until, one bitter spring day of driving sleet and hail, he dragged

ashore a drowning Cantonese sailor. It was this wanderer, thawing out by his fire, who first named the magic

name Hawaii to him. He had himself never been to that labourer's paradise, said the sailor; but many Chinese

had gone there from Canton, and he had heard the talk of their letters written back. In Hawaii was never frost

nor famine. The very pigs, never fed, were ever fat of the generous offal disdained by man. A Cantonese or

Yangtse family could live on the waste of an Hawaii coolie. And wages! In gold dollars, ten a month, or, in

trade dollars, two a month, was what the contract Chinese coolie received from the whitedevil sugar kings.

In a year the coolie received the prodigious sum of two hundred and forty trade dollars more than a

hundred times what a coolie, toiling ten times as hard, received on the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse. In

short, all things considered, an Hawaii coolie was one hundred times better off, and, when the amount of

labour was estimated, a thousand times better off. In addition was the wonderful climate.

When Ah Kim was twentyfour, despite his mother's pleadings and beatings, he resigned from the ancient

and honourable guild of the eleventh cataract towing coolies, left his mother to go into a boss coolie's

household as a servant for a dollar a year, and an annual dress to cost not less than thirty cents, and himself

departed down the Yangtse to the great sea. Many were his adventures and severe his toils and hardships ere,

as a saltsea junksailor, he won to Canton. When he was twentysix he signed five years of his life and

labour away to the Hawaii sugar kings and departed, one of eight hundred contract coolies, for that far island

land, on a festering steamer run by a crazy captain and drunken officers and rejected of Lloyds.

Honourable, among labourers, had Ah Kim's rating been as a towing coolie. In Hawaii, receiving a hundred

times more pay, he found himself looked down upon as the lowest of the lowa plantation coolie, than

which could be nothing lower. But a coolie whose ancestors had towed junks up the eleventh cataract of the

Yangtse since before the birth of Christ inevitably inherits one character in large degree, namely, the

character of patience. This patience was Ah Kim's. At the end of five years, his compulsory servitude over,

thin as ever in body, in bank account he lacked just ten trade dollars of possessing a thousand trade dollars.

On this sum he could have gone back to the Yangtse and retired for life a really wealthy man. He would have

possessed a larger sum, had he not, on occasion, conservatively played che fa and fan tan, and had he not, for

a twelvemonth, toiled among the centipedes and scorpions of the stifling canefields in the semidream of a

continuous opium debauch. Why he had not toiled the whole five years under the spell of opium was the

expensiveness of the habit. He had had no moral scruples. The drug had cost too much.

But Ah Kim did not return to China. He had observed the business life of Hawaii and developed a vaulting

ambition. For six months, in order to learn business and English at the bottom, he clerked in the plantation

store. At the end of this time he knew more about that particular store than did ever plantation manager know

about any plantation store. When he resigned his position he was receiving forty gold a month, or eighty

trade, and he was beginning to put on flesh. Also, his attitude toward mere contract coolies had become

distinctively aristocratic. The manager offered to raise him to sixty fold, which, by the year, would constitute

a fabulous fourteen hundred and forty trade, or seven hundred times his annual earning on the Yangtse as a

Instead of accepting, Ah Kim departed to Honolulu, and in the big general merchandise store of Fong Chow

Fong began at the bottom for fifteen gold per month. He worked a year and a half, and resigned when he was

thirtythree, despite the seventyfive gold per month his Chinese employers were paying him. Then it was

that he put up his own sign: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE. Also, better fed, there was

about his less meagre figure a foreshadowing of the melonseed rotundity that was to attach to him in future

With the years he prospered increasingly, so that, when he was thirtysix, the promise of his figure was

fulfilling rapidly, and, himself a member of the exclusive and powerful Hai Gum Tong, and of the Chinese

Merchants' Association, he was accustomed to sitting as host at dinners that cost him as much as thirty years

of towing on the eleventh cataract would have earned him. Two things he missed: a wife, and his mother to

When he was thirtyseven he consulted his bank balance. It stood him three thousand gold. For twentyfive

hundred down and an easy mortgage he could buy the threestory shackbuilding, and the ground in fee

simple on which it stood. But to do this, left only five hundred for a wife. Fu Yee Po had a marriageable,

properly smallfooted daughter whom he was willing to import from China, and sell to him for eight hundred

gold, plus the costs of importation. Further, Fu Yee Po was even willing to take five hundred down and the

Ah Kim, thirtyseven years of age, fat and a bachelor, really did want a wife, especially a smallfooted wife;

for, China born and reared, the immemorial smallfooted female had been deeply impressed into his fantasy

of woman. But more, even more and far more than a smallfooted wife, did he want his mother and his

mother's delectable beatings. So he declined Fu Yee Po's easy terms, and at much less cost imported his own

mother from servant in a boss coolie's house at a yearly wage of a dollar and a thirty cent dress to be

mistress of his Honolulu threestory shack building with two household servants, three clerks, and a porter of

all work under her, to say nothing of ten thousand dollars' worth of dress goods on the shelves that ranged

from the cheapest cotton crepes to the most expensive handembroidered silks. For be it known that even in

that early day Ah Kim's emporium was beginning to cater to the tourist trade from the States.

For thirteen years Ah Kim had lived tolerably happily with his mother, and by her been methodically beaten

for causes just or unjust, real or fancied; and at the end of it all he knew as strongly as ever the ache of his

heart and head for a wife, and of his loins for sons to live after him, and carry on the dynasty of Ah Kim

Company. Such the dream that has ever vexed men, from those early ones who first usurped a hunting right,

monopolized a sandbar for a fishtrap, or stormed a village and put the males thereof to the sword. Kings,

millionaires, and Chinese merchants of Honolulu have this in common, despite that they may praise God for

And the ideal of woman that Ah Kim at fifty ached for had changed from his ideal at thirtyseven. No

smallfooted wife did he want now, but a free, natural, outstepping normalfooted woman that, somehow,

appeared to him in his day dreams and haunted his night visions in the form of Li Faa, the Silvery Moon

Blossom. What if she were twice widowed, the daughter of a kanaka mother, the wearer of whitedevil skirts

and corsets and highheeled slippers! He wanted her. It seemed it was written that she should be joint

ancestor with him of the line that would continue the ownership and management through the generations, of

"I will have no halfpake daughterinlaw," his mother often reiterated to Ah Kim, pake being the Hawaiian

word for Chinese. "All pake must my daughterinlaw be, even as you, my son, and as I, your mother. And

she must wear trousers, my son, as all the women of our family before her. No woman, in shedevil skirts

and corsets, can pay due reverence to our ancestors. Corsets and reverence do not go together. Such a one is

this shameless Li Faa. She is impudent and independent, and will be neither obedient to her husband nor her

husband's mother. This brazenfaced Li Faa would believe herself the source of life and the first ancestor,

recognizing no ancestors before her. She laughs at our joss sticks, and paper prayers, and family gods, as I

"Not alone Mrs. Chang Lucy, O son. I have inquired. At least a dozen have heard her say of our joss house

that it is all monkey foolishness. The words are hersshe, who eats raw fish, raw squid, and baked dog. Ours

is the foolishness of monkeys. Yet would she marry you, a monkey, because of your store that is a palace and

of the wealth that makes you a great man. And she would put shame on me, and on your father before you

And there was no discussing the matter. As things were, Ah Kim knew his mother was right. Not for nothing

had Li Faa been born forty years before of a Chinese father, renegade to all tradition, and of a kanaka mother

whose immediate forebears had broken the taboos, cast down their own Polynesian gods, and weakheartedly

listened to the preaching about the remote and unimageable god of the Christian missionaries. Li Faa,

educated, who could read and write English and Hawaiian and a fair measure of Chinese, claimed to believe

in nothing, although in her secret heart she feared the kahunas (Hawaiian witchdoctors), who she was

certain could charm away ill luck or pray one to death. Li Faa would never come into Ah Kim's house, as he

thoroughly knew, and kowtow to his mother and be slave to her in the immemorial Chinese way. Li Faa,

from the Chinese angle, was a new woman, a feminist, who rode horseback astride, disported immodestly

garbed at Waikiki on the surfboards, and at more than one luau (feast) had been known to dance the hula

Ah Kim himself, a generation younger than his mother, had been bitten by the acid of modernity. The old

order held, in so far as he still felt in his subtlest crypts of being the dusty hand of the past resting on him,

residing in him; yet he subscribed to heavy policies of fire and life insurance, acted as treasurer for the local

Chinese revolutionises that were for turning the Celestial Empire into a republic, contributed to the funds of

the Hawaiiborn Chinese baseball nine that excelled the Yankee nines at their own game, talked theosophy

with Katso Suguri, the Japanese Buddhist and silk importer, fell for police graft, played and paid his insidious

share in the democratic politics of annexed Hawaii, and was thinking of buying an automobile. Ah Kim never

dared bare himself to himself and thrash out and winnow out how much of the old he had ceased to believe

in. His mother was of the old, yet he revered her and was happy under her bamboo stick. Li Faa, the Silvery

Moon Blossom, was of the new, yet he could never be quite completely happy without her.

For he loved Li Faa. Moonfaced, rotund as a watermelon seed, canny business man, wise with half a

century of living nevertheless Ah Kim became an artist when he thought of her. He thought of her in

poems of names, as woman transmuted into flower terms of beauty and philosophic abstractions of

achievement and easement. She was, to him, and alone to him of all men in the world, his Plum Blossom, his

Tranquillity of Woman, his Flower of Serenity, his Moon Lily, and his Perfect Rest. And as he murmured

these love endearments of namings, it seemed to him that in them were the ripplings of running waters, the

tinklings of silver wind bells, and the scents of the oleander and the jasmine. She was his poem of woman, a

lyric delight, a threedimensions of flesh and spirit delicious, a fate and a good fortune written, ere the first

man and woman were, by the gods whose whim had been to make all men and women for sorrow and for joy.

But his mother put into his hand the inkbrush and placed under it, on the table, the writing tablet.

He obeyed, scarcely wondering, with the deft artistry of his race and training painting the symbolic

Ah Kim looked at her, curious, willing to please, unaware of the drift of her intent.

"Of what is it composed?" she persisted. "What are the three originals, the sum of which is it: to marry,

marriage, the coming together and wedding of a man and a woman? Paint them, paint them apart, the three

originals, unrelated, so that we may know how the wise men of old wisely built up the ideograph of to

And Ah Kim, obeying and painting, saw that what he had painted were three picturesignsthe

"It is true," said she. "It is a great tale. It is the stuff of the painted pictures of marriage. Such marriage was in

the beginning; such shall it always be in my house. The hand of the man takes the woman's ear, and by it

leads her away to his house, where she is to be obedient to him and to his mother. I was taken by the ear, so,

by your long honourably dead father. I have looked at your hand. It is not like his hand. Also have I looked at

the ear of Li Faa. Never will you lead her by the ear. She has not that kind of an ear. I shall live a long time

yet, and I will be mistress in my son's house, after our ancient way, until I die."

He was timidly unhappy; for Li Faa, having ascertained that Mrs. Tai Fu was at the temple of the Chinese

AEsculapius making a food offering of dried duck and prayers for her declining health, had taken advantage

Li Faa pursed her insolent, unpainted lips into the form of a half opened rosebud, and replied:

"That will do for China. I do not know China. This is Hawaii, and in Hawaii the customs of all foreigners

"She is nevertheless my ancestress," Ah Kim protested, "the mother who gave me birth, whether I am in

"I have had two husbands," Li Faa stated placidly. "One was a pake, one was a Portuguese. I learned much

from both. Also am I educated. I have been to High School, and I have played the piano in public. And I

learned from my two husbands much. The pake makes the best husband. Never again will I marry anything

"Mrs. Chang Lucy," was the reply. "Mrs. Chang Lucy tells me everything that your mother tells her, and your

mother tells her much. So let me tell you that mine is not that kind of an ear."

"Which is what your honoured mother told Mrs. Chang Lucy, which is what Mrs. Chang Lucy told me," Li

Faa completed equably. "And I now tell you, O Third Husband To Be, that the man is not born who will lead

me by the ear. It is not the way in Hawaii. I will go only hand in hand with my man, side by side, fiftyfifty

as is the haole slang just now. My Portuguese husband thought different. He tried to beat me. I landed him

three times in the police court and each time he worked out his sentence on the reef. After that he got

"And for fifty years has she beaten you," Li Faa giggled. "How my father used to laugh at Yap Ten Shin!

Like you, Yap Ten Shin had been born in China, and had brought the China customs with him. His old father

was for ever beating him with a stick. He loved his father. But his father beat him harder than ever when he

became a missionary pake. Every time he went to the missionary services, his father beat him. And every

time the missionary heard of it he was harsh in his language to Yap Ten Shin for allowing his father to beat

him. And my father laughed and laughed, for my father was a very liberal pake, who had changed his

customs quicker than most foreigners. And all the trouble was because Yap Ten Shin had a loving heart. He

loved his honourable father. He loved the God of Love of the Christian missionary. But in the end, in me, he

found the greatest love of all, which is the love of woman. In me he forgot his love for his father and his love

"And he offered my father six hundred gold, for methe price was small because my feet were not small.

But I was half kanaka. I said that I was not a slavewoman, and that I would be sold to no man. My

highschool teacher was a haole old maid who said love of woman was so beyond price that it must never be

sold. Perhaps that is why she was an old maid. She was not beautiful. She could not give herself away. My

kanaka mother said it was not the kanaka way to sell their daughters for a money price. They gave their

daughters for love, and she would listen to reason if Yap Ten Shin provided luaus in quantity and quality. My

pake father, as I have told you, was liberal. He asked me if I wanted Yap Ten Shin for my husband. And I

said yes; and freely, of myself, I went to him. He it was who was kicked by a horse; but he was a very good

"As for you, Ah Kim, you shall always be honourable and lovable for me, and some day, when it is not

necessary for you to take me by the ear, I shall marry you and come here and be with you always, and you

will be the happiest pake in all Hawaii; for I have had two husbands, and gone to high school, and am most

wise in making a husband happy. But that will be when your mother has ceased to beat you. Mrs. Chang

"She does," Ah Kim affirmed. "Behold! He thrust back his loose sleeves, exposing to the elbow his smooth

and cherubic forearms. They were mantled with black and blue marks that advertised the weight and number

"But she has never made me cry," Ah Kim disclaimed hastily. "Never, from the time I was a little boy, has

"So Mrs. Chang Lucy says," Li Faa observed. "She says that your honourable mother often complains to her

A sibilant warning from one of his clerks was too late. Having regained the house by way of the back alley,

Mrs. Tai Fu emerged right upon them from out of the living apartments. Never had Ah Kim seen his mother's

"Then let us go into the back rooms, honourable mother," Ah Kim suggested. "We will close the windows

"No. Here shall you be beaten before all the world and this shameless woman who would, with her own hand,

"I am going to stay anyway," said Li Faa. She favoured the clerks with a truculent stare. "And I'd like to see

"The sun rises each morning," Li Faa said enigmatically. "All my life have I seen it rise"

"But I do not dye my hairthat will come later," Li Faa calmly retorted. "As to my age, you are right. I shall

be fortyone next Kamehameha Day. For forty years I have seen the sun rise. My father was an old man.

Before he died he told me that he had observed no difference in the rising of the sun since when he was a

little boy. The world is round. Confucius did not know that, but you will find it in all the geography books.

The world is round. Ever it turns over on itself, over and over and around and around. And the times and

seasons of weather and life turn with it. What is, has been before. What has been, will be again. The time of

the breadfruit and the mango ever recurs, and man and woman repeat themselves. The robins nest, and in the

springtime the plovers come from the north. Every spring is followed by another spring. The coconut palm

rises into the air, ripens its fruit, and departs. But always are there more coconut palms. This is not all my

own smart talk. Much of it my father told me. Proceed, honourable Mrs. Tai Fu, and beat your son who is my

Ah Kim dropped down on his knees so as to give his mother every advantage. And while she rained blows

upon him with the bamboo stick, Li Faa smiled and giggled, and finally burst into laughter.

Mrs. Tai Fu did her best, which was notably weak, until she observed what made her drop the stick by her

side in amazement. Ah Kim was crying. Down both cheeks great round tears were coursing. Li Faa was

amazed. So were the gaping clerks. Most amazed of all was Ah Kim, yet he could not help himself; and,

"But why did you cry?" Li Faa demanded often of Ah Kim. "It was so perfectly foolish a thing to do. She was

"Wait until we are married," was Ah Kim's invariable reply, "and then, O Moon Lily, will I tell you."

Two years later, one afternoon, more like a watermelon seed in configuration than ever, Ah Kim returned

home from a meeting of the Chinese Protective Association, to find his mother dead on her couch. Narrower

and more unrelenting than ever were the forehead and the brushedback hair. But on her face was a withered

He telephoned first of all to Li Faa's number but did not find her until he called up Mrs. Chang Lucy. The

news given, the marriage was dated ahead with ten times the brevity of the oldline Chinese custom. And if

there be anything analogous to a bridesmaid in a Chinese wedding, Mrs. Chang Lucy was just that.

"Why," Li Faa asked Ah Kim when alone with him on their wedding night, "why did you cry when your

mother beat you that day in the store? You were so foolish. She was not even hurting you."

"I cried," he explained, "because I suddenly knew that my mother was nearing her end. There was no weight,

no hurt, in her blows. I cried because I knew SHE NO LONGER HAD STRENGTH ENOUGH TO HURT

ME. That is why I cried, my Flower of Serenity, my Perfect Rest. That is the only reason why I cried."

The tourist women, under the hau tree arbour that lines the Moana hotel beach, gasped when Lee Barton and

his wife Ida emerged from the bathhouse. And as the pair walked past them and down to the sand, they

continued to gasp. Not that there was anything about Lee Barton provocative of gasps. The tourist women

were not of the sort to gasp at sight of a mere man's swimmingsuited body, no matter with what swelling

splendour of line and muscle such body was invested. Nevertheless, trainers and conditioners of men would

have drawn deep breaths of satisfaction at contemplation of the physical spectacle of him. But they would not

have gasped in the way the women did, whose gasps were indicative of moral shock.

Ida Barton was the cause of their perturbation and disapproval. They disapproved, seriously so, at the first

instant's glimpse of her. They thoughtsuch ardent selfdeceivers were theythat they were shocked by

her swimming suit. But Freud has pointed out how persons, where sex is involved, are prone sincerely to

substitute one thing for another thing, and to agonize over the substituted thing as strenuously as if it were the

Ida Barton's swimming suit was a very nice one, as women's suits go. Of thinnest of firmwoven black wool,

with white trimmings and a white beltline, it was highthroated, shortsleeved, and brief skirted. Brief as

was the skirt, the legtights were no less brief. Yet on the beach in front of the adjacent Outrigger Club, and

entering and leaving the water, a score of women, not provoking gasping notice, were more daringly garbed.

Their men's suits, as brief of legtights and skirts, fitted them as snugly, but were sleeveless after the way of

men's suits, the armholes deeply low cut and incut, and, by the exposed armpits, advertiseful that the

So it was not Ida Barton's suit, although the women deceived themselves into thinking it was. It was, first of

all, say her legs; or, first of all, say the totality of her, the sweet and brilliant jewel of her femininity bursting

upon them. Dowager, matron, and maid, conserving their softfat muscles or protecting their hothouse

complexions in the shade of the hautree arbour, felt the immediate challenge of her. She was menace as

well, an affront of superiority in their own chosen and variously successful game of life.

But they did not say it. They did not permit themselves to think it. They thought it was the suit, and said so to

one another, ignoring the twenty women more daringly clad but less perilously beautiful. Could one have

winnowed out of the souls of these disapproving ones what lay at bottom of their condemnation of her suit, it

would have been found to be the sexjealous thought: THAT NO WOMAN, SO BEAUTIFUL AS THIS

ONE, SHOULD BE PERMITTED TO SHOW HER BEAUTY. It was not fair to them. What chance had

They were justified. As Stanley Patterson said to his wife, where the two of them lolled wet in the sand by the

tiny freshwater stream that the Bartons waded in order to gain the Outrigger Club beach:

"Lord god of models and marvels, behold them! My dear, did you ever see two such legs on one small

woman! Look at the roundness and taperingness. They're boy's legs. I've seen featherweights go into the ring

with legs like those. And they're allwoman's legs, too. Never mistake them in the world. The arc of the front

line of that upper leg! And the balanced adequate fullness at the back! And the way the opposing curves

slender in to the knee that IS a knee! Makes my fingers itch. Wish I had some clay right now."

"It's a true human knee," his wife concurred, no less breathlessly; for, like her husband, she was a sculptor.

"Look at the joint of it working under the skin. It's got form, and blessedly is not covered by a bag of fat."

She paused to sigh, thinking of her own knees. "It's correct, and beautiful, and dainty. Charm! If ever I beheld

"Notice that the round musclepads on the inner sides that make most women appear knockkneed are

"And sweet woman's legs, soft and round," his wife hastened to balance. "And look, Stanley! See how she

walks on the balls of her feet. It makes her seem light as swan's down. Each step seems just a little above the

earth, and each other step seems just a little higher above until you get the impression she is flying, or just

So Stanley and Mrs. Patterson. But they were artists, with eyes therefore unlike the next batteries of human

eyes Ida Barton was compelled to run, and that laired on the Outrigger lanais (verandas) and in the hautree

shade of the closely adjoining seaside. The majority of the Outrigger audience was composed, not of tourist

guests, but of club members and oldtimers in Hawaii. And even the oldtimes women gasped.

"It's positively indecent," said Mrs. Hanley Black to her husband, herself a toostoutinthemiddle matron

of fortyfive, who had been born in the Hawaiian islands, and who had never heard of Ostend.

Hanley Black surveyed his wife's criminal shapelessness and voluminousness of antediluvian, NewEngland

swimming dress with a withering, contemplative eye. They had been married a sufficient number of years for

"That strange woman's suit makes your own look indecent. You appear as a creature shameful, under a

"She carries her body like a Spanish dancer," Mrs. Patterson said to her husband, for the pair of them had

"By George, she does," Stanley Patterson concurred. "Reminds me of Estrellita. Torso just well enough

forward, slender waist, not too lean in the stomach, and with muscles like some lad boxer's armouring that

stomach to fearlessness. She has to have them to carry herself that way and to balance the back muscles. See

"There she deceives," was the appraised answer. "She might be fivefeetone, or fivefeetthree or four. It's

"Yes, that's it," Mrs. Patterson concurred. "It's her energy, her seemingness of being on tip toe with rising

"That's it," he enounced. "She IS a little thing. I'll give her fivetwo in her stockings. And I'll weigh her a

"And with her clothes on, plus her carriage (which is builded of her vitality and will), I'll wager she'd never

"I know her type," his wife nodded. "You meet her out, and you have the sense that, while not exactly a fine

"It's not her legs alone," he cried on enthusiastically. "It's the all of her. Look at the delicacy of that forearm.

And the swell of line to the shoulder. And that biceps! It's alive. Dollars to drowned kittens she can flex a

No woman, much less an Ida Barton, could have been unconscious of the effect she was producing along

Waikiki Beach. Instead of making her happy in the small vanity way, it irritated her.

"The cats," she laughed to her husband. "And to think I was born here an almost even third of a century ago!

But they weren't nasty then. Maybe because there weren't any tourists. Why, Lee, I learned to swim right here

on this beach in front of the Outrigger. We used to come out with daddy for vacations and for weekends and

sort of camp out in a grass house that stood right where the Outrigger ladies serve tea now. And centipedes

fell out of the thatch on us, while we slept, and we all ate poi and opihis and raw aku, and nobody wore much

of anything for the swimming and squidding, and there was no real road to town. I remember times of big

rain when it was so flooded we had to go in by canoe, out through the reef and in by Honolulu Harbour."

"Remember," Lee Barton added, "it was just about that time that the youngster that became me arrived here

for a few weeks' stay on our way around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time one of the

kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the women here were all riding crosssaddle, and that was

long before the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came around to sitting

simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I

may even have tried bodysurfing on the same waves, or I may have splashed a handful of water into your

Interrupted by an audible gasp of shock from a spinsterappearing female sunning herself hard by and

angularly in the sand in a swimming suit monstrously unbeautiful, Lee Barton was aware of an involuntary

"I smile with pleasure," he told her. "It serves only to make your valiant little shoulders the more valiant. It

For, be it known in advance, Lee Barton was a superman and Ida Barton a superwomanor at least they

were personalities so designated by the cub bookreviewers, flatfloor men and women, and scholastically

emasculated critics, who from across the dreary levels of their living can descry no glorious humans

overtopping their horizons. These dreary folk, echoes of the dead past and importunate and selfelected

pallbearers for the present and future, proxylivers of life and vicarious sensualists that they are in a eunuch

sort of way, insist, since their own selves, environments, and narrow agitations of the quick are mediocre and

Lacking gloriousness in themselves, they deny gloriousness to all mankind; too cowardly for whimsy and

derringdo, they assert whimsy and derringdo ceased at the very latest no later than the middle ages;

flickering little tapers themselves, their feeble eyes are dazzled to unseeingness of the flaming conflagrations

of other souls that illumine their skies. Possessing power in no greater quantity than is the just due of

pygmies, they cannot conceive of power greater in others than in themselves. In those days there were giants;

but, as their mouldy books tell them, the giants are long since passed, and only the bones of them remain.

In the mud of their complacently perpetuated barnyard pond, they assert that no brightbrowed,

brightapparelled shining figures can be outside of fairy books, old histories, and ancient superstitions. Never

having seen the stars, they deny the stars. Never having glimpsed the shining ways nor the mortals that tread

them, they deny the existence of the shinning ways as well as the existence of the highbright mortals who

adventure along the shining ways. The narrow pupils of their eyes the centre of the universe, they image the

universe in terms of themselves, of their meagre personalities make pitiful yardsticks with which to measure

the highbright souls, saying: "Thus long are all souls, and no longer; it is impossible that there should exist

greaterstatured souls than we are, and our gods know that we are great of stature."

But all, or nearly all on the beach, forgave Ida Barton her suit and form when she took the water. A touch of

her hand on her husband's arm, indication and challenge in her laughing face, and the two ran as one for half

a dozen paces and leapt as one from the hardwet sand of the beach, their bodies describing flat arches of

There are two surfs at Waikiki: the big, bearded man surf that roars far out beyond the divingstage; the

smaller, gentler, wahine, or woman, surf that breaks upon the shore itself. Here is a great shallowness, where

one may wade a hundred or several hundred feet to get beyond depth. Yet, with a good surf on outside, the

wahine surf can break three or four feet, so that, close in against the shore, the hardsand bottom may be

three feet or three inches under the welter of surface foam. To dive from the beach into this, to fly into the air

off racing feet, turn in mid flight so that heels are up and head is down, and, so to enter the water headfirst,

requires wisdom of waves, timing of waves, and a trained deftness in entering such unstable depths of water

with pretty, unapprehensive, headfirst cleavage, while at the same time making the shallowest possible of

It is a sweet, and pretty, and daring trick, not learned in a day, nor learned at all without many a milder bump

on the bottom or close shave of fractured skull or broken neck. Here, on the spot where the Bartons so

beautifully dived, two days before a Stanford track athlete had broken his neck. His had been an error in

"A professional," Mrs. Hanley Black sneered to her husband at Ida Barton's feat.

"Some vaudeville tank girl," was one of the similar remarks with which the women in the shade complacently

reassured one another finding, by way of the weird mental processes of selfillusion, a great satisfaction in

the money castedistinction between one who worked for what she ate and themselves who did not work for

It was a day of heavy surf on Waikiki. In the wahine surf it was boisterous enough for good swimmers. But

out beyond, in the kanaka, or man, surf, no one ventured. Not that the score or more of young surfriders

loafing on the beach could not venture there, or were afraid to venture there; but because their biggest

outrigger canoes would have been swamped, and their surfboards would have been overwhelmed in the

tooimmense overtopple and downfall of the thundering monsters. They themselves, most of them, could

have swum, for man can swim through breakers which canoes and surfboards cannot surmount; but to ride

the backs of the waves, rise out of the foam to stand full length in the air above, and with heels winged with

the swiftness of horses to fly shoreward, was what made sport for them and brought them out from Honolulu

The captain of Number Nine canoe, himself a charter member of the Outrigger and a manytimes medallist

in longdistance swimming, had missed seeing the Bartons take the water, and first glimpsed them beyond

the last festoon of bathers clinging to the lifelines. From then on, from his vantage of the upstairs lanai, he

kept his eyes on them. When they continued out past the steel divingstage where a few of the hardiest divers

Now malahini means newcomer, tenderfoot; and, despite the prettiness of their stroke, he knew that none

except malahinis would venture into the racing channel beyond the divingstage. Hence the vexation of the

captain of Number Nine. He descended to the beach, with a low word here and there picked a crew of the

strongest surfers, and returned to the lanai with a pair of binoculars. Quite casually, the crew, six of them,

carried Number Nine to the water's edge, saw paddles and everything in order for a quick launching, and

lolled about carelessly on the sand. They were guilty of not advertising that anything untoward was afoot,

although they did steal glances up to their captain straining through the binoculars.

What made the channel was the freshwater stream. Coral cannot abide fresh water. What made the channel

race was the immense shoreward surffling of the sea. Unable to remain flung up on the beach, pounded ever

back toward the beach by the perpetual shoreward rush of the kanaka surf, the uppiled water escaped to the

sea by way of the channel and in the form of undertow along the bottom under the breakers. Even in the

channel the waves broke big, but not with the magnificent bigness of terror as to right and left. So it was that

a canoe or a comparatively strong swimmer could dare the channel. But the swimmer must be a strong

swimmer indeed, who could successfully buck the current in. Wherefore the captain of Number Nine

continued his vigil and his muttered damnation of malahinis, disgustedly sure that these two malahinis would

compel him to launch Number Nine and go after them when they found the current too strong to swim in

against. As for himself, caught in their predicament, he would have veered to the left toward Diamond Head

and come in on the shoreward fling of the kanaka surf. But then, he was no one other than himself, a bronze.

Hercules of twentytwo, the whitest blond man ever burned to mahogany brown by a subtropic sun, with

body and lines and muscles very much resembling the wonderful ones of Duke Kahanamoku. In a hundred

yards the world champion could invariably beat him a second flat; but over a distance of miles he could swim

No one of the many hundreds on the beach, with the exception of till captain and his crew, knew that the

Bartons had passed beyond the divingstage. All who had watched them start to swim out had taken for

The captain suddenly sprang upon the railing of the lanai, held on to a pillar with one hand, and again picked

up the two specks of heads through the glasses. His surprise was verified. The two fools had veered out of the

channel toward Diamond Head, and were directly seaward of the kanaka surf. Worse, as he looked, they were

He glanced down quickly to the canoe, and even as he glanced, and as the apparently loafing members

quietly arose and took their places by the canoe for the launching, he achieved judgment. Before the canoe

could get abreast in the channel, all would be over with the man and woman. And, granted that it could get

abreast of them, the moment it ventured into the kanaka surf it would be swamped, and a sorry chance would

the strongest swimmer of them have of rescuing a person pounding to pulp on the bottom under the smashes

The captain saw the first kanaka wave, large of itself, but small among its fellows, lift seaward behind the

two speckswimmers. Then he saw them strike a crawlstroke, side by side, faces downward, fulllengths

outstretched on surface, their feet sculling like propellers and their arms flailing in rapid overhand strokes,

as they spurted speed to approximate the speed of the overtaking wave, so that, when overtaken, they would

become part of the wave, and travel with it instead of being left behind it. Thus, if they were coolly skilled

enough to ride outstretched on the surface and the forward face of the crest instead of being flung and

crumpled or driven headfirst to bottom, they would dash shoreward, not propelled by their own energy, but

And they did it! "SOME swimmers!" the captain of Number Nine made announcement to himself under his

breath. He continued to gaze eagerly. The best of swimmers could hold such a wave for several hundred feet.

But could they? If they did, they would be a third of the way through the perils they had challenged. But, not

unexpected by him, the woman failed first, her body not presenting the larger surfaces that her husband's did.

At the end of seventy feet she was overwhelmed, being driven downward and out of sight by the tons of

water in the overtopple. Her husband followed and both appeared swimming beyond the wave they had lost.

The captain saw the next wave first. "If they try to bodysurf on that, good night," he muttered; for he knew

the swimmer did not live who would tackle it. Beardless itself, it was father of all bearded ones, a mile long,

rising up far out beyond where the others rose, towering its solid bulk higher and higher till it blotted out the

horizon, and was a giant among its fellows ere its beard began to grow as it thinned its crest to the overcurl.

But it was evident that the man and woman knew big water. No racing stroke did they make in advance of the

wave. The captain inwardly applauded as he saw them turn and face the wave and wait for it. It was a picture

that of all on the beach he alone saw, wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the binoculars.

The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the

colours of the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it. The green thinned to lighter green that

merged blue even as he looked. But it was a blue gembrilliant with innumerable sparklepoints of rose and

gold flashed through it by the sun. On and up, to the sprouting beard of growing crest, the colour orgy

Against the face of the wave showed the heads of the man and woman like two sheer specks. Specks they

were, of the quick, adventuring among the blind elemental forces, daring the titanic buffets of the sea. The

weight of the downfall of that father of waves, even then imminent above their heads, could stun a man or

break the fragile bones of a woman. The captain of Number Nine was unconscious that he was holding his

breath. He was oblivious of the man. It was the woman. Did she lose her head or courage, or misplay her

muscular part for a moment, she could be hurled a hundred feet by that giant buffet and left wrenched,

helpless, and breathless to be pulped on the coral bottom and sucked out by the undertow to be battened on by

Why didn't they dive deep, and with plenty of time, the captain wanted to know, instead of waiting till the last

tick of safety and the first tick of peril were one? He saw the woman turn her head and laugh to the man, and

his head turn in response. Above them, overhanging them, as they mounted the body of the wave, the beard,

creaming white, then frothing into rose and gold, tossed upward into a spray of jewels. The crisp offshore

tradewind caught the beard's fringes and blew them backward and upward yards and yards into the air. It

was then, side by side, and six feet apart, that they dived straight under the overcurl even then disintegrating

to chaos and falling. Like insects disappearing into the convolutions of some gorgeous gigantic orchid, so

they disappeared, as beard and crest and spray and jewels, in many tons, crashed and thundered down just

Beyond the wave they had gone through, they finally showed, side by side, still six feet apart, swimming

shoreward with a steady stroke until the next wave should make them bodysurf it or face and pierce it. The

captain of Number Nine waved his hand to his crew in dismissal, and sat down on the lanai railing, feeling

"Whoever and whatever they are," he murmured, "they aren't malahinis. They simply can't be malahinis."

Not all days, and only on rare days, is the surf heavy at Waikiki; and, in the days that followed, Ida and Lee

Barton, much in evidence on the beach and in the water, continued to arouse disparaging interest in the

breasts of the tourist ladies, although the Outrigger captains ceased from worrying about them in the water.

They would watch the pair swim out and disappear in the blue distance, and they might, or might not, chance

to see them return hours afterward. The point was that the captains did not bother about their returning,

The reason for this was that they were not malahinis. They belonged. In other words, or, rather, in the potent

Islandsword, they were kamaaina. Kamaaina men and women of forty remembered Lee Barton from their

childhood days, when, in truth, he had been a malahini, though a very young specimen. Since that time, in the

As for Ida Barton, young matrons of her own age (privily wondering how she managed to keep her figure)

met her with arms around and hearty Hawaiian kisses. Grandmothers must have her to tea and reminiscence

in old gardens of forgotten houses which the tourist never sees. Less than a week after her arrival, the aged

Queen Liliuokalani must send for her and chide her for neglect. And old men, on cool and balmy lanais,

toothlessly maundered to her about Grandpa Captain Wilton, of before their time, but whose wild and lusty

deeds and pranks, told them by their fathers, they remembered with gustoGrandpa Captain Wilton, or

David Wilton, or "All Hands" as the Hawaiians of that remote day had affectionately renamed him. All

Hands, exNorthwest trader, the godless, beachcombing, clippershipless and shipwrecked skipper who

had stood on the beach at Kailua and welcomed the very first of missionaries, off the brig Thaddeus, in the

year 1820, and who, not many years later, made a scandalous runaway marriage with one of their daughters,

quieted down and served the Kamehamehas long and conservatively as Minister of the Treasury and Chief of

the Customs, and acted as intercessor and mediator between the missionaries on one side and the

beachcombing crowd, the trading crowd, and the Hawaiian chiefs on the variously shifting other side.

Nor was Lee Barton neglected. In the midst of the dinners and lunches, the luaus (Hawaiian feasts) and

poisuppers, and swims and dances in aloha (love) to both of them, his time and inclination were claimed by

the crowd of lively youngsters of old Kohala days who had come to know that they possessed digestions and

various other internal functions, and who had settled down to somewhat of sedateness, who roistered less, and

who played bridge much, and went to baseball often. Also, similarly oriented, was the old poker crowd of

Lee Barton's younger days, which crowd played for more consistent stakes and limits, while it drank mineral

water and orange juice and timed the final round of "Jacks" never later than midnight.

Appeared, through all the rout of entertainment, Sonny Grandison, Hawaiiborn, Hawaiiprominent, who,

despite his youthful fortyone years, had declined the proffered governorship of the Territory. Also, he had

ducked Ida Barton in the surf at Waikiki a quarter of a century before, and, still earlier, vacationing on his

father's great Lakanaii cattle ranch, had hairraisingly initiated her, and various other tender tots of five to

seven years of age, into his boys' band, "The Cannibal HeadHunters" or "The Terrors of Lakanaii." Still

farther, his Grandpa Grandison and her Grandpa Wilton had been business and political comrades in the old

Educated at Harvard, he had become for a time a worldwandering scientist and social favourite. After

serving in the Philippines, he had accompanied various expeditions through Malaysia, South America, and

Africa in the post of official entomologist. At fortyone he still retained his travelling commission from the

Smithsonian Institution, while his friends insisted that he knew more about sugar "bugs" than the expert

entomologists employed by him and his fellow sugar planters in the Experiment Station. Bulking large at

home, he was the bestknown representative of Hawaii abroad. It was the axiom among travelled Hawaii

folk, that wherever over the world they might mention they were from Hawaii, the invariable first question

In brief, he was a wealthy man's son who had made good. His father's million he inherited he had increased to

ten millions, at the same time keeping up his father's benefactions and endowments and overshadowing them

But there was still more to him. A ten years' widower, without issue, he was the most eligible and most

pathetically soughtafter marriageable man in all Hawaii. A cleanandstrongfeatured brunette, tall,

slenderly graceful, with the lean runner's stomach, always fit as a fiddle, a distinguished figure in any group,

the greying of hair over his temples (in juxtaposition to his young textured skin and bright vital eyes) made

him appear even more distinguished. Despite the social demands upon his time, and despite his many

committee meetings, and meetings of boards of directors and political conferences, he yet found time and

space to captain the Lakanaii polo team to more than occasional victory, and on his own island of Lakanaii

Given a markedly strong and vital man and woman, when a second equally markedly strong and vital man

enters the scene, the peril of a markedly strong and vital triangle of tragedy becomes imminent. Indeed, such

a triangle of tragedy may be described, in the terminology of the flatfloor folk, as "super" and "impossible."

Perhaps, since within himself originated the desire and the daring, it was Sonny Grandison who first was

conscious of the situation, although he had to be quick to anticipate the sensing intuition of a woman like Ida

Barton. At any rate, and undebatable, the last of the three to attain awareness was Lee Barton, who promptly

His first awareness, he quickly saw, was so belated that half his hosts and hostesses were already aware.

Casting back, he realized that for some time any affair to which he and his wife were invited found Sonny

Grandison likewise invited. Wherever the two had been, the three had been. To Kahuku or to Haleiwa, to

Ahuimanu, or to Kaneohe for the coral gardens, or to Koko Head for a picnicking and a swimming, somehow

it invariably happened that Ida rode in Sonny's car or that both rode in somebody's car. Dances, luaus,

Having become aware, Lee Barton could not fail to register Ida's note of happiness ever rising when in the

same company with Sonny Grandison, and her willingness to ride in the same cars with him, to dance with

him, or to sit out dances with him. Most convincing of all, was Sonny Grandison himself. Fortyone, strong,

experienced, his face could no more conceal what he felt than could be concealed a lad of twenty's ordinary

lad's love. Despite the control and restraint of forty years, he could no more mask his soul with his face than

could Lee Barton, of equal years, fail to read that soul through so transparent a face. And often, to other

women, talking, when the topic of Sonny came up, Lee Barton heard Ida express her fondness for Sonny, or

her almost tooeloquent appreciation of his poloplaying, his work in the world, and his general

About Sonny's state of mind and heart Lee had no doubt. It was patent enough for the world to read. But how

about Ida, his own dozenyears' wife of a glorious lovematch? He knew that woman, ever the mysterious

sex, was capable any time of unguessed mystery. Did her frank comradeliness with Grandison token merely

frank comradeliness and childhood contacts continued and recrudesced into adult years? or did it hide, in

woman's subtler and more secretive ways, a beat of heart and return of feeling that might even out balance

Lee Barton was not happy. A dozen years of utmost and postnuptial possession of his wife had proved to

him, so far as he was concerned, that she was his one woman in the world, and that the woman was unborn,

much less unglimpsed, who could for a moment compete with her in his heart, his soul, and his brain.

Impossible of existence was the woman who could lure him away from her, much less overbid her in the

Was this, then, he asked himself, the dreaded contingency of all fond Benedicts, to be her first "affair?" He

tormented himself with the ever iterant query, and, to the astonishment of the reformed Kohala poker crowd

of wise and middleaged youngsters as well as to the reward of the keen scrutiny of the dinnergiving and

dinnerattending women, he began to drink King William instead of orange juice, to bully up the poker limit,

to drive of nights his own car more than rather recklessly over the Pali and Diamond Head roads, and, ere

dinner or lunch or after, to take more than an average man's due of oldfashioned cocktails and Scotch highs.

All the years of their marriage she had been ever complaisant toward him in his cardplaying. This

complaisance, to him, had become habitual. But now that doubt had arisen, it seemed to him that he noted an

eagerness in her countenancing of his poker parties. Another point he could not avoid noting was that Sonny

Grandison was missed by the poker and bridge crowds. He seemed to be too busy. Now where was Sonny,

while he, Lee Barton, was playing? Surely not always at committee and boards of directors meetings. Lee

Barton made sure of this. He easily learned that at such times Sonny was more than usually wherever Ida

chanced to be at dances, or dinners, or moonlight swimming parties, or, the very afternoon he had flatly

pleaded rush of affairs as an excuse not to join Lee and Langhorne Jones and Jack Holstein in a bridge battle

at the Pacific Clubthat afternoon he had played bridge at Dora Niles' home with three women, one of

Returning, once, from an afternoon's inspection of the great dry dock building at Pearl Harbour, Lee Barton,

driving his machine against time, in order to have time to dress for dinner, passed Sonny's car; and Sonny's

one passenger, whom he was taking home, was Ida. One night, a week later, during which interval he had

played no cards, he came home at eleven from a stag dinner at the University Club, just preceding Ida's return

from the Alstone poi supper and dance. And Sonny had driven her home. Major Fanklin and his wife had first

been dropped off by them, they mentioned, at Fort Shafter, on the other side of town and miles away from the

Lee Barton, after all mere human man, as a human man unfailingly meeting Sonny in all friendliness,

suffered poignantly in secret. Not even Ida dreamed that he suffered; and she went her merry, careless,

laughing way, secure in her own heart, although a trifle perplexed at her husband's increase in number of

Apparently, as always, she had access to almost all of him; but now she did not have access to his

unguessable torment, nor to the long parallel columns of mental bookkeeping running their totalling

balances from moment to moment, day and night, in his brain. In one column were her undoubtable

spontaneous expressions of her usual love and care for him, her many acts of comfortserving and of

adviceasking and adviceobeying. In another column, in which the items increasingly were entered, were

her expressions and acts which he could not but classify as dubious. Were they what they seemed? Or were

they of duplicity compounded, whether deliberately or unconsciously? The third column, longest of all,

totalling most in human heartappraisements, was filled with items relating directly or indirectly to her and

Sonny Grandison. Lee Barton did not deliberately do this bookkeeping. He could not help it. He would have

liked to avoid it. But in his fairly ordered mind the items of entry, of themselves and quite beyond will on his

In his distortion of vision, magnifying apparently trivial detail which half the time he felt he magnified, he

had recourse to MacIlwaine, to whom he had once rendered a very considerable service. MacIlwaine was

chief of detectives. "Is Sonny Grandison a womaning man?" Barton had demanded. MacIlwaine had said

nothing. "Then he is a womaning man," had been Barton's declaration. And still the chief of detectives had

Briefly afterward, ere he destroyed it as so much dynamite, Lee Barton went over the written report. Not bad,

not really bad, was the summarization; but not too good after the death of his wife ten years before. That had

been a lovematch almost notorious in Honolulu society, because of the completeness of infatuation, not only

before, but after marriage, and up to her tragic death when her horse fell with her a thousand feet off Nahiku

Trail. And not for a long time afterward, MacIlwaine stated, had Grandison been guilty of interest in any

woman. And whatever it was, it had been unvaryingly decent. Never a hint of gossip or scandal; and the

entire community had come to accept that he was a onewoman man, and would never marry again. What

small affairs MacIlwaine had jotted down he insisted that Sonny Grandison did not dream were known by

Barton glanced hurriedly, almost shamedly, at the several names and incidents, and knew surprise ere he

committed the document to the flames. At any rate, Sonny had been most discreet. As he stared at the ashes,

Barton pondered how much of his own younger life, from his bachelor days, resided in old MacIlwaine's

keeping. Next, Barton found himself blushing, to himself, at himself. If MacIlwaine knew so much of the

private lives of community figures, then had not he, her husband and protector and shielder, planted in

"Anything on your mind?" Lee asked his wife that evening, as he stood holding her wrap while she put the

This was in line with their old and successful compact of frankness, and he wondered, while he waited her

She became absorbed in gazing at herself in the mirror, while she dabbed some powder on her nose and

"You know my way, Lee," she added, after the pause. "It takes me time to gather things together in my own

waywhen there are things to gather; but when I do, you always get them. And often there's nothing in them

She held out her arms for him to place the wrap about herher valiant little arms that were so wise and

steellike in battling with the breakers, and that yet were such just merewoman's arms, round and warm and

white, delicious as a woman's arms should be, with the canny muscles, masking under softroundness of

contour and fine smooth skin, capable of being flexed at will by the will of her.

He pondered her, with a grievous hurt and yearning of appreciation so delicate she seemed, so

"We must hurry!" she cried, as he lingered in the adjustment of the flimsy wrap over her flimsyprettiness of

gown. "We'll be late. And if it showers up Nuuanu, putting the curtains up will make us miss the second

He made a note to observe with whom she danced that second dance, as she preceded him across the room to

the door; while at the same time he pleasured his eye in what he had so often named to himself as the

"You don't feel I'm neglecting you in my toomuch poker?" he tried again, by indirection.

"Mercy, no! You know I just love you to have your card orgies. They're tonic for you. And you're so much

nicer about them, so much more middleaged. Why, it's almost years since you sat up later than one."

It did not shower up Nuuanu, and every overhead star was out in a clear tradewind sky. In time at the

Inchkeeps' for the second dance, Lee Barton observed that his wife danced it with Grandison which, of

itself, was nothing unusual, but which became immediately a registered item in Barton's mental books.

An hour later, depressed and restless, declining to make one of a bridge foursome in the library and escaping

from a few young matrons, he strolled out into the generous grounds. Across the lawn, at the far edge, he

came upon the hedge of nightblooming cereus. To each flower, opening after dark and fading, wilting,

perishing with the dawn, this was its one night of life. The great, creamwhite blooms, a foot in diameter and

more, lilylike and waxlike, white beacons of attraction in the dark, penetrating and seducing the night with

But the way along the hedge was populous with humans, two by two, male and female, stealing out between

the dances or strolling the dances out, while they talked in low soft voices and gazed upon the wonder of

flowerlove. From the lanai drifted the lovecaressing strains of "Hanalei" sung by the singing boys.

Vaguely Lee Barton rememberedperhaps it was from some Maupassant storythe abbe, obsessed by the

theory that behind all things were the purposes of God and perplexed so to interpret the night, who discovered

The unanimity of the night as betrayed by flowers and humans was a hurt to Barton. He circled back toward

the house along a winding path that skirted within the edge of shadow of the monkeypods and algaroba

trees. In the obscurity, where his path curved away into the open again, he looked across a space of a few feet

where, on another path in the shadow, stood a pair in each other's arms. The impassioned low tones of the

man had caught his ear and drawn his eyes, and at the moment of his glance, aware of his presence, the voice

He continued his walk, sombred by the thought that in the gloom of the trees was the next progression from

the openness of the sky over those who strolled the nightflower hedge. Oh, he knew the game when of old

no shadow was too deep, no ruse of concealment too furtive, to veil a love moment. After all, humans were

like flowers, he meditated. Under the radiance from the lighted lanai, ere entering the irritating movement of

life again to which he belonged, he paused to stare, scarcely seeing, at a flaunt of display of scarlet

doublehibiscus blooms. And abruptly all that he was suffering, all that he had just observed, from the night

blooming hedge and the twobytwo lovemurmuring humans to the pair like thieves in each other's arms,

crystallized into a parable of life enunciated by the dayblooming hibiscus upon which he gazed, now at the

end of its day. Bursting into its bloom after the dawn, snowwhite, warming to pink under the hours of sun,

and quickening to scarlet with the dark from which its beauty and its being would never emerge, it seemed to

What further connotations he might have drawn he was never to know; for from behind, in the direction of

the algarobas and monkeypods, came Ida's unmistakable serene and merry laugh. He did not look, being too

afraid of what he knew he would see, but retreated hastily, almost stumbling, up the steps to the lanai. Despite

that he knew what he was to see, when he did turn his head and beheld his wife and Sonny, the pair he had

seen thieving in the dark, he went suddenly dizzy, and paused, supporting himself with a hand against a

pillar, and smiling vacuously at the grouped singing boys who were pulsing the sensuous night into richer

The next moment he had wet his lips with his tongue, controlled his face and flesh, and was bantering with

Mrs. Inchkeep. But he could not waste time, or he would have to encounter the pair he could hear coming up

"I feel as if I had just crossed the Great Thirst," he told his hostess, "and that nothing less than a highball

She smiled permission and nodded toward the smoking lanai, where they found him talking sugar politics

Quite a party of half a dozen machines were starting for Waikiki, and he found himself billeted to drive the

Leslies and Burnstons home, though he did not fail to note that Ida sat in the driver's seat with Sonny in

Sonny's car. Thus, she was home ahead of him and brushing her hair when he arrived. The parting of

bedgoing was usual, on the face of it, although he was almost rigid in his successful effort for casualness as

Was, then, woman the utterly unmoral creature as depicted by the German pessimists? he asked himself, as

he tossed under his reading lamp, unable to sleep or read. At the end of an hour he was out of bed, and into

his medicine case. Five grains of opium he took straight. An hour later, afraid of his thoughts and the

prospect of a sleepless night, he took another grain. At onehour intervals he twice repeated the grain dosage.

But so slow was the action of the drug that dawn had broken ere his eyes closed.

At seven he was awake again, drymouthed, feeling stupid and drowsy, yet incapable of dozing off for more

than several minutes at a time. He abandoned the idea of sleep, ate breakfast in bed, and devoted himself to

the morning papers and the magazines. But the drug effect held, and he continued briefly to doze through his

eating and reading. It was the same when he showered and dressed, and, though the drug had brought him

little forgetfulness during the night, he felt grateful for the dreaming lethargy with which it possessed him

It was when his wife arose, her serene and usual self, and came in to him, smiling and roguish, delectable in

her kimono, that the whimmadness of the opium in his system seized upon him. When she had clearly and

simply shown that she had nothing to tell him under their ancient compact of frankness, he began building his

"Miserably. Twice I was routed wide awake with cramps in my feet. I was almost too afraid to sleep again.

"Maybe it's going to become a seasonal affliction," he smiled. "They're not serious, but they're horrible to

wake up to. They won't come again till tonight, if they come at all, but in the meantime I feel as if I had

In the afternoon of the same day, Lee and Ida Barton made their shallow dive from the Outrigger beach, and

went on, at a steady stroke, past the divingstage to the big water beyond the Kanaka Surf. So quiet was the

sea that when, after a couple of hours, they turned and lazily started shoreward through the Kanaka Surf they

had it all to themselves. The breakers were not large enough to be exciting, and the last languid surfboarders

"My footcramp," he answered calmly, though the words were twisted out through clenched jaws of

The opium still had its dreamy way with him, and he was without excitement. He watched her swimming

toward him with so steady and unperturbed a stroke that he admired her own selfcontrol, although at the

same time doubt stabbed him with the thought that it was because she cared so little for him, or, rather, so

"Which foot?" she asked, as she dropped her legs down and began treading water beside him.

He doubled his knees, as if involuntarily raised his head and chest forward out of the water, and sank out of

sight in the downwash of a scarcely cresting breaker. Under no more than a brief several seconds, he

Almost he grinned, although he managed to turn the grin into a paingrimace, for his simulated cramp had

"The right is the worst," he muttered, as she evinced her intention of laying hands on his cramp and rubbing it

out. "But you'd better keep away. I've had cramps before, and I know I'm liable to grab you if these get any

Instead, she laid her hands on the hardknotted muscles, and began to rub and press and bend.

"Please," he gritted through his teeth. "You must keep away. Just let me lie out hereI'll bend the ankle and

toejoints in the opposite ways and make it pass. I've done it before and know how to work it."

She released him, remaining close beside him and easily treading water, her eyes upon his face to judge the

progress of his own attempt at remedy. But Lee Barton deliberately bent joints and tensed muscles in the

directions that would increase the cramp. In his bout the preceding year with the affliction, he had learned,

lying in bed and reading when seized, to relax and bend the cramps away without even disturbing his reading.

But now he did the thing in reverse, intensifying the cramp, and, to his startled delight, causing it to leap into

his right calf. He cried out with anguish, apparently lost control of himself, attempted to sit up, and was

He came up, spluttered, spreadeagled on the surface, and had his knotted calf gripped by the strong fingers

"It's all right," she said, while she worked. "No cramp like this lasts very long."

"I didn't know it could be so savage," he groaned. "If only it doesn't go higher! It makes one feel so helpless."

He gripped the biceps of both her arms in a sudden spasm, attempting to climb out upon her as a drowning

man might try to climb out on an oar and sinking her down under him. In the struggle under water, before he

permitted her to wrench clear, her rubber cap was torn off, and her hairpins pulled out, so that she came up

gasping for air and halfblinded by her wetclinging hair. Also, he was certain he had surprised her into

But her fingers were deep into the honest painwrack of his calf, and in her he could observe no reluctance of

"It's creeping up," he grunted through tight teeth, the grunt itself a halfcontrolled groan.

He stiffened his whole right leg, as with another spasm, hurting his real minor cramps, but flexing the

The opium still worked in his brain, so that he could playact cruelly, while at the same time he appraised

and appreciated her stress of control and will that showed in her drawn face, and the terror of death in her

eyes, with beyond it and behind it, in her eyes and through her eyes, the something more of the spirit of

Still further, she did not enunciate so cheap a surrender as, "I'll die with you." Instead, provoking his

admiration, she did say, quietly: "Relax. Sink until only your lips are out. I'll support your head. There must

be a limit to cramp. No man ever died of cramp on land. Then in the water no strong swimmer should die of

cramp. It's bound to reach its worst and pass. We're both strong swimmers and coolheaded"

He distorted his face and deliberately dragged her under. But when they emerged, still beside him, supporting

"Relax. Take it easy. I'll hold your head up. Endure it. Live through it. Don't fight it. Make yourself

slackslack in your mind; and your body will slack. Yield. Remember how you taught me to yield to the

An unusually large breaker for so mild a surf curled overhead, and he climbed out on her again, sinking both

"Forgive me," he mumbled through pain clenched teeth, as they drew in their first air again. "And leave me."

He spoke jerkily, with painfilled pauses between his sentences. "There is no need for both of us to drown.

I've got to go. It will be in my stomach, at any moment, and then I'll drag you under, and be unable to let go

of you. Please, please, dear, keep away. One of us is enough. You've plenty to live for."

She looked at him in reproach so deep that the last vestige of the terror of death was gone from her eyes. It

was as if she had said, and more than if she had said: "I have only you to live for."

Then Sonny did not count with her as much as he did!was Barton's exultant conclusion. But he

remembered her in Sonny's arms under the monkeypods and determined on further cruelty. Besides, it was

the lingering opium in him that suggested this cruelty. Since he had undertaken this acid test, urged the poppy

He doubled up and went down, emerged, and apparently strove frantically to stretch out in the floating

"It's too much!" he groaned, almost screamed. "I'm losing my grip. I've got to go. You can't save me. Keep

But she was to him, striving to float his mouth clear of the salt, saying: "It's all right. It's all right. The worst

He screamed out, doubled, seized her, and took her down with him. And he nearly did drown her, so well did

he playact his own drowning. But never did she lose her head nor succumb to the fear of death so dreadfully

imminent. Always, when she got her head out, she strove to support him while she panted and gasped

encouragement in terms of: "Relax . . . Relax . . . Slack . . . Slack out . . . At any time . . . now . . . you'll pass .

. . the worst . . . No matter how much it hurts . . . it will pass . . . You're easier now . . . aren't you?"

And then he would put her down again, going from bad to worsein his illtreatment of her; making her

swallow pints of salt water, secure in the knowledge that it would not definitely hurt her. Sometimes they

came up for brief emergences, for gasping seconds in the sunshine on the surface, and then were under again,

Although she struggled and tore herself from his grips, in the times he permitted her freedom she did not

attempt to swim away from him, but, with fading strength and reeling consciousness, invariably came to him

to try to save him. When it was enough, in his judgment, and more than enough, he grew quieter, left her

"Aah," he sighed long, almost luxuriously, and spoke with pauses for breath. "It is passing. It seems like

heaven. My dear, I'm waterlogged, yet the mere absence of that frightful agony makes my present state

"I'm all right," he assured her. "Let us float and rest up. Stretch out, yourself, and get your wind back."

And for half an hour, side by side, on their backs, they floated in the fairly placid Kanaka Surf. Ida Barton

"I feel as if I'd been run over by a steamroller," he replied. "And you, poor darling?"

"I feel I'm the happiest woman in the world. I'm so happy I could almost cry, but I'm too happy even for that.

Lee Barton's heart pounded up. Never a mention of losing herself. This, then, was love, and all real love,

"And I'm the proudest man in the world," he told her; "because my wife is the bravest woman in the world."

"Brave!" she repudiated. "I love you. I never knew how much, how really much, I loved you as when I was

losing you. And now let's work for shore. I want you all alone with me, your arms around me, while I tell you

In another halfhour, swimming strong and steadily, they landed on the beach and walked up the hard wet

"What were the two of you doing out there?" queried one of the Outrigger captains. "Cutting up?"

That evening, the evening's engagement cancelled, found the two, in a big chair, in each other's arms.

"Sonny sails tomorrow noon," she announced casually and irrelevant to anything in the conversation. "He's

going out to the Malay Coast to inspect what's been done with that lumber and rubber company of his."

"Very sudden." Ida withdrew herself from her husband's arms and sat up. "And I want to talk to you about

Sonny. I've never had a real secret from you before. I didn't intend ever to tell you. But it came to me today,

out in the Kanaka Surf, that if we passed out, it would be something left behind us unsaid."

She paused, and Lee, halfanticipating what was coming, did nothing to help her, save to girdle and press her

"Sonny rather lost his . . . his head over me," she faltered. "Of course, you must have noticed it. And . . . and

last night, he wanted me to run away with him. Which isn't my confession at all . . . "

"My confession," she resumed, "is that I wasn't the least bit angry with himonly sorrowful and regretful.

My confession is that I rather slightly, only rather more than slightly, lost my own head. That was why I was

kind and gentle to him last night. I am no fool. I knew it was due. Andoh, I know, I'm just a feeble female

of vanity compoundedI was proud to have such a man swept off his feet by me, by little me. I encouraged

him. I have no excuse. Last night would not have happened had I not encouraged him. And I, and not he, was

the sinner last night when he asked me. And I told him no, impossible, as you should know why without my

repeating it to you. And I was maternal to him, very much maternal. I let him take me in his arms, let myself

rest against him, and, for the first time because it was to be the forever last time, let him kiss me and let

myself kiss him. You . . . I know you understand . . . it was his renunciation. And I didn't love Sonny. I don't

She waited, and felt her husband's arm pass around her shoulder and under her own arm, and yielded to his

"You did have me worried more than a bit," he admitted, "until I was afraid I was going to lose you. And . . .

" He broke off in patent embarrassment, then gripped the idea courageously. "Oh, well, you know you're my

She fumbled the matchbox from his pocket and struck a match to enable him to light his longextinct cigar.

"Well," he said, as the smoke curled about them, "knowing you as I know you, and ALL of you, all I can say

is that I'm sorry for Sonny for what he's missedawfully sorry for him, but equally glad for me. And . . . one

other thing: five years hence I've something to tell you, something rich, something ridiculously rich, and all

"I shall keep it if it is fifty years," she sighed, as she nestled closer to him.