On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales Part 11

July 16, 1916.

THE WATER BABY

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

"Now this," said Kohok.u.mu, "is from Queen Lililuokalani's own family mele:

"Maui became restless and fought the sun With a noose that he laid.

And winter won the sun, And summer was won by Maui . . . "

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

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

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

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

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

And what could I reply? He had me on the matter of reasonableness.

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

Fortunately, I saw a bamboo pole, floating on the surface several hundred feet away, suddenly up-end and start a very devil's dance.

This was a diversion from the profitless discussion, and Kohok.u.mu and I dipped our paddles and raced the little outrigger canoe to the dancing pole. Kohok.u.mu caught the line that was fast to the b.u.t.t of the pole and under-handed it in until a two-foot ukikiki, battling fiercely to the end, flashed its wet silver in the sun and began beating a tattoo on the inside bottom of the canoe. Kohok.u.mu 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, Kohok.u.mu wiped his hands on his naked sides and lifted the wearisome and centuries-old chant of Kuali:

"Oh, the great fish-hook of Maui!

Manai-i-ka-lani--"made fast to the heavens"!

An earth-twisted cord ties the hook, Engulfed from lofty Kauiki!

Its bait the red-billed Alae, The bird to Hina sacred!

It sinks far down to Hawaii, Struggling and in pain dying!

Caught is the land beneath the water, Floated up, up to the surface, But Hina hid a wing of the bird And broke the land beneath the water!

Below was the bait s.n.a.t.c.hed away And eaten at once by the fishes, The Ulua of the deep muddy places!

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

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

"It's a big one," he said, pa.s.sing me the device and slipping over- side feet-first into the water.

He went under without splash and ripple, turned over and swam down.

I followed his progress through the water-gla.s.s, which is merely an oblong box a couple of feet long, open at the top, the bottom sealed water-tight with a sheet of ordinary gla.s.s.

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

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

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 tentacle-tip to tentacle-tip 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, hawk-like face into the very centre of the slimy, squirming ma.s.s, 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 squid-catching generations before him:

"O Ka.n.a.loa 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 Ka.n.a.loa!

Stir up! Stir up! Let the squid awake!

Let the squid that lies flat awake! Let the squid that lies spread out . . . "

I closed my eyes and ears, not offering to lend him a hand, secure in the knowledge that he could climb back unaided into the unstable craft without the slightest risk of upsetting it.

"A very fine squid," he crooned. "It is a wahine" (female) "squid.

I shall now sing to you the song of the cowrie sh.e.l.l, the red cowrie sh.e.l.l that we used as a bait for the squid--"

"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 to-day--"

"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 chickens--this day are you a wreck. Explain me that. My ears are as thirsty to listen as was my throat thirsty last night. And here to-day, 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 want you.

Report of your singing has gone before you."

"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 double-canoe, 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 breast-clasp, as I have returned this day, I grow strong again and immediately. She, to me, is the milk-giver, the life- source--"

"Shades of Antaeus!" thought I.

"Some day," old Kohok.u.mu 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 flas.h.i.+ng youth of splendour like Maui himself when he was golden young."

"A queer religion," I commented.

"When I was younger I muddled my poor head over queerer religions,"

old Kohok.u.mu 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 G.o.d. 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 have thought a dream?"

"Perhaps it is you that are a dream," I laughed. "And that I, and sky, and sea, and the iron-hard land, are dreams, all dreams."

"I have often thought that," he a.s.sured 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 Kohok.u.mu 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 asleep and dreaming that I am old Kohok.u.mu?"

I shrugged my shoulders, and he continued triumphantly: