On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales Part 6

All the chiefs were crying out in horror. The coffin, head-end up, had not sunk. It bobbed up and down in the sea astern of us. And the canoe, without way on it, bow-on to sea and wind, was drifted down by sea and wind upon the coffin. And the gla.s.s of it was to us, so that we could see the face and head of Kahekili through the gla.s.s; and he grinned at us through the gla.s.s and seemed alive already in the other world and angry with us, and, with other-world power, about to wreak his anger upon us. Up and down he bobbed, and the canoe drifted closer upon him.

"'Kill him!' 'Bleed him!' 'Thrust to the heart of him!' These things the chiefs were crying out to Eoppo in their fear. 'Over with the taro tops!' 'Let the alii have the half of a fis.h.!.+'

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

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

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

"The coffin immediately sank, being builded by the s.h.i.+p's carpenter like a boat," k.u.muhana confirmed. "And I, who was a moepuu, became a man once more. And I lived, though I died a thousand deaths from thirst before we gained back to the beach at Waikiki.

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

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

"The twelve dollars, Kanaka Oolea, for the jacka.s.s and the second- hand saddle and bridle?"

"The twelve dollars would be thine," Pool responded, pa.s.sing 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 jacka.s.s of the pake" (Chinese) "at Kokako who told me only yesterday that such was the price."

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

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

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

"Bring one gla.s.s of gin and milk for old k.u.muhana," commanded Hardman Pool.

WAIKIKI, HONOLULU June 28, 1916.

WHEN ALICE TOLD HER SOUL

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

For Alice Akana was fifty years old, had begun life early, and, early and late, lived it s.p.a.ciously. What she knew went back into the roots and foundations of families, businesses, and plantations.

She was the one living repository of accurate information that lawyers sought out, whether the information they required related to land-boundaries and land gifts, or to marriages, births, bequests, or scandals. Rarely, because of the tight tongue she kept behind her teeth, did she give them what they asked; and when she did was when only equity was served and no one was hurt.

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

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

Now Abel Ah Yo, in his theology and word wizardry, was as much mixed a personage as Billy Sunday. In his genealogy he was much more mixed, for he was compounded of one-fourth Portuguese, one- fourth Scotch, one-fourth Hawaiian, and one-fourth Chinese. The Pentecostal fire he flamed forth was hotter and more variegated than could any one of the four races of him alone have flamed forth. For in him were gathered together the cannyness and the cunning, the wit and the wisdom, the subtlety and the rawness, the pa.s.sion and the philosophy, the agonizing spirit-groping 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 self-deceivement of the entire clever compound.

When it came to word wizardry, he had Billy Sunday, master of slang and argot of one language, skinned by miles. For in Abel Ah Yo were the five verbs, and nouns, and adjectives, and metaphors of four living languages. Intermixed and living promiscuously and vitally together, he possessed in these languages a reservoir of expression in which a myriad Billy Sundays could drown. Of no race, a mongrel par excellence, a heterogeneous scrabble, the genius of the admixture was superlatively Abel Ah Yo's. Like a chameleon, he t.i.tubated and scintillated grandly between the diverse parts of him, stunning by frontal attack and surprising and confouding by flanking sweeps the mental h.o.m.ogeneity of the more simply const.i.tuted souls who came in to his revival to sit under him and flame to his flaming.

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

Himself in his tender youth an apostate to the Church of England, Abel Ah Yo had for years suffered the lively sense of being a Judas sinner. Essentially religious, he had foresworn the Lord. Like Judas therefore he was. Judas was d.a.m.ned. Wherefore he, Abel Ah Yo, was d.a.m.ned; and he did not want to be d.a.m.ned. So, quite after the manner of humans, he squirmed and twisted to escape d.a.m.nation.

The day came when he solved his escape. The doctrine that Judas was d.a.m.ned, he concluded, was a misinterpretation of G.o.d, who, above all things, stood for justice. Judas had been G.o.d's servant, specially selected to perform a particularly nasty job. Therefore Judas, ever faithful, a betrayer only by divine command, was a saint. Ergo, he, Abel Ah Yo, was a saint by very virtue of his apostasy to a particular sect, and he could have access with clear grace any time to G.o.d.

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

What chance had Alice Akana, herself pure and h.o.m.ogeneous Hawaiian, against his subtle, democratic-tinged, four-race-engendered, slang- munitioned attack? He knew, by contact, almost as much as she about the waywardness of living and sinning--having been singing boy on the pa.s.senger-s.h.i.+ps between Hawaii and California, and, after that, bar boy, afloat and ash.o.r.e, from the Barbary Coast to Heinie's Tavern. In point of fact, he had left his job of Number One Bar Boy at the University Club to embark on his great preachment revival.

So, when Alice Akana strayed in to scoff, she remained to pray to Abel Ah Yo's G.o.d, who struck her hard-headed mind as the most sensible G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

Place and caste were invited, but never came. The stupid lowly, and the humble lowly, only, went down on its knees at the penitent form, admitted its pathological weight and hurt of sin, eliminated and purged all its bafflements, and walked forth again upright under the sun, child-like and pure, upborne by Abel Ah Yo's G.o.d's arm around it. In short, Abel Ah Yo's revival was a clearing house for sin and sickness of spirit, wherein sinners were relieved of their burdens and made light and bright and spiritually healthy again.

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

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

"Choose!" Abel Ah Yo thundered. "Loyalty to G.o.d, 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. "G.o.d knows I am tired of my soul and should like to have it clean and s.h.i.+ning once again as when I was a little girl at Kaneohe--"

"But all the corruption of your soul has been with other souls,"

was Abel Ah Yo's invariable reply. "When you have a burden, lay it down. You cannot bear a burden and be quit of it at the same time."

"I will pray to G.o.d each day, and many times each day," she urged.

"I will approach G.o.d with humility, with sighs and with tears. I will contribute often to the plate, and I will buy Bibles, Bibles, Bibles without end."

"And G.o.d will not smile upon you," G.o.d's mouthpiece retorted. "And you will remain weary and heavy-laden. For you will not have told all your sin, and not until you have told all will you be rid of any."

"This rebirth is difficult," Alice sighed.

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

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

"The bigger the reason to tell it then."

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

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

In the clubs the possibility of her telling was of more moment.

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

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

"Good for sore eyes to see you," he burbled. "How the years fly!

You're looking fine. The secret of youth is yours."

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