Hawaii

by James Michener

  When prayers were ended, and the children dismissed, the reverend asked Gideon for a sheet of paper on which to report to the Board. "Will it be a long letter?" Gideon asked anxiously.

  "A short one," Eliphalet replied. "I have happy news to report."

  Gideon, therefore, prudently tore his letter paper in half and handed his visitor one portion. "We waste nothing here," he explained, and as the tall missionary began his letter: "Brethren, I have visited the home of Abner Hale and have found that he comes from a family totally dedicated to God ..." he happened to look at the narrow shelf where books were kept, and he saw with pleasure that they much resembled the books his family had collected--a battered copy of Euclid, Fox's Book of Martyrs, a speller of Noah Webster's, and a well-worn edition of John Bunyan standing beside a family Bible. "I see with some pleasure," Reverend Thorn interrupted, "that this Christian family does not surrender to loose poetry and the novels which are becoming so popular in our land."

  "This family is striving toward salvation," Gideon replied bleakly, and the thin-faced missionary finished the letter which would send Abner Hale to Owhyhee.

  As Ehphalet Thorn stepped into the cool spring air, Mr. and Mrs. Hale accompanied him to the bright road that shimmered in moonlight. "If it were raining," Gideon said, "or if there were no moon, I'd saddle the horses . . ." Instead, he pointed the way to Marlboro with his powerful right arm. "It's not far," he assured his guest.

  Reverend Thorn bade the couple good night and started off toward the dim lights of Marlboro, but after he had gone a short distance he stopped and turned to survey once more the bleak and arid home from which his proteg6 had come. The trees were in line; the fields were well trimmed; the cattle were fat. For the rest of the farm, one could see only penury, a complete lack of anything relating to beauty, and an austerity of purpose that was positively repellent, except that it so obviously called to the passer by: "Here is a home that is dedicated to God." And as if to underline that fact, it was less than two hours after Reverend Thorn's departure that Abner Hale's oldest sister rushed weeping into her mother's room and stood trembling in the moonlight, crying, "Mother! Mother! I was lying awake thinking of the poor Africans about whom Reverend Thorn spoke tonight, and I began to shake, and I heard God's voice speaking directly to me."

  "Did you have a sense of overwhelming sin?" her mother asked, slipping into a long coat which she used as a night wrap.

  "Yes! I saw for the first time that I was hopelessly and utterly damned and that I had no escape."

  "And you felt willing to surrender yourself totally to God?"

  "It was as if a great hand were shaking me, violently, bringing me to my senses at last."

  "Gideon!" the girl's mother cried in ecstasy. "Esther has been initiated into a sense of sin!"

  The news was more pleasing than any other that Gideon Hale could have heard, and he cried, "Has she entered into a state of grace?"

  "She has!" Mrs. Hale cried. "Oh, blessed Beulah Land, another sinner has found you!" And the three Hales knelt in the moonlight and gave ardent thanks to their bleak and forbidding Protector for having disclosed to still another member of their family the remorseless weight of sin under which mankind lives, the nearness of the inextinguishable fires to which ninety-nine out of every hundred human beings are forever and hopelessly committed, and the joyless, bitter path of salvation.

  Within three days Reverend Thorn approached one of the most gracious villages ever to have developed in America: the tree-lined, white-clapboarded, well-gabled village of Walpole, near the Connecticut River in southwestern New Hampshire. It was a village to gladden the heart, for its glistening church steeple could be seen from afar, and the rolling hills that surrounded it were prosperous. It was to Walpole that Reverend Thorn's older sister Abigail had come when she had stubbornly insisted upon marrying the young Harvard lawyer, Charles Bromley, whose family had lived in Walpole for several generations.

  Reverend Thorn had never approved of either the Bromleys or their village, for both bespoke good living rather than piety, and he rarely approached Walpole without a definite feeling that God must one day punish this sybaritic place, a conviction which deepened when he neared the Bromley home, a handsome, large, white three-storied house with many gables. He could hear, with some dismay, his sister playing English dances on the family organ. The dance terminated abruptly and a bright-faced, round-cheeked woman of forty rushed to the door, crying, "It's Eliphalet!” He, avoiding her kiss and looking about anxiously, was gratified to see that his niece Jerusha was not at home.

  "Yes, she is!" Abigail corrected. "She's upstairs. Brooding. She's doing very poorly, but if you ask me, it's because she wants to. She refuses to get him out of her mind, and just when time is about to solve the problem, a letter reaches Boston from Canton or California, and she goes into a decline again."

  "Have you thought of intercepting the letters?" Eliphalet asked.

  "Charles would never permit that. He insists that any room which an individual holds within a house is that individual's castle. And foreign powers, even though they be corrupt, have an inalienable right of communicating with that castle."

  Reverend Thorn was about to say he still could not understand why the Lord did not strike Charles Bromley dead, but since he had been wondering this for the past twenty-two years, and since the Lord stubbornly refused to do anything about it, he left his hackneyed observation unvoiced. What did gall him, however, was the fact that the Lord went out of his way to bless Bromley's various occupations.

  "No," he said stiffly when his sister asked if he would stay with her. "I shall stop at the inn."

  "Then why did you come so far?" Abigail asked.

  "Because I have found an opportunity whereby your daugther may be saved."

  "Jerusha?"

  "Yes. Three times I have heard her say that she wanted to surrender her life to Jesus. To work wherever He sent her ... as a missionary."

  "Eliphalet!" his sister interrupted. "Those were the words of a young girl disappointed in love. When she spoke thus she hadn't heard from him for a year."

  "It is in moments of disappointment that we speak our true thoughts," Thorn insisted.

  "But Jerusha has everything she wants right here, Eliphalet."

  "She wants God in her life, Abigail, and here she lacks that."

  "Now, Eliphalet! Don't you dare . . ."

  "Have you ever discussed with her the things she has told me?" Reverend Thorn pressed. "Have you had the courage?"

  "All we know is that if she has recently received a letter from him, she's in heaven on earth and wants to get married as soon as he docks at New Bedford. But if six or seven months of silence have gone by, she swears she will become a missionary and serve in Africa . . . like her uncle."

  "Let me speak to her now," Eliphalet proposed.

  "No! She's in a fit of depression now and she'd agree to anything."

  "Even, perhaps, to the salvation of her immortal soul?"

  "Eliphalet! Don't talk like that. You know that Charles and I try to live good Christian lives . . ."

  "Nobody could live a good Christian life in Walpole, New Hampshire," he muttered with disgust. "Vanity is all I see here. Look at this room! An organ not used for hymns. Novels. Books of lascivious poems. Money that should be going to missions going into ostentatious decoration. Abigail, a young Massachusetts man, dedicated to God, is about to sail as a missionary to Owhyhee. He has asked me to speak to you regarding Jerusha's hand."

  Mrs. Bromley fell back in her damasked chair, then collected herself and called a servant. "Go fetch Mr. Bromley immediately," she ordered.

  "I did not come here to talk to your husband," Eliphalet protested.

  "It is my husband, not God, who is Jerusha's father," Abigail replied.

  "Blasphemy!"

  "No, love!"

  The brother and sister sat in hateful silence until Charles Bromley, rotund, jovial, successful and overfed, came into the room. "Family fig
ht?" he asked robustly.

  "My brother Eliphalet . . ."

  "I know who he is, dear. Just call him Phet." He laughed and added, "I've found in these matters that if you can get the litigants to start off on an informal basis it's so much better. If you call a man 'My brother Eliphalet,' why, out of self-respect you've almost got to wind up in court. What r'ya up to, Phet?"

  "A fine young man in the divinity school at Yale College is about to depart as a missionary to Owhyhee . . ."

  "Where's Owhyhee?"

  "Near Asia."

  "Chinese?"

  "No. Owhyheean."

  "Never heard of it."

  "And he was much impressed with what I had to say about my niece Jerusha."

  "How did her name come up?" Bromley asked suspiciously.

  "It's humiliating," Abigail sniffed. "Eliphalet's going around peddling our daughter. To get her married."

  "I think it's very generous of him, Abby," Bromley exploded. "God knows I haven't had much success peddling her. One week she's in love with a sailor, whom she hasn't seen for three years. Abby, did that sailor ever even kiss her?"

  "Charles!"

  "And the next week she's in love with God and self-punishment on some distant island. Frankly, Phet, if you could find her a good husband I'd be obliged. I could then spend my efforts on her two sisters."

  "The young man of whom I speak is Abner Hale," Thorn said stiffly. "Here's what his professors think of him. I visited his home . . ."

  "Oh, Eliphalet!" his sister protested.

  "In the guise of satisfying myself as to his Christian upbringing."

  "And was it a good Christian home?" Bromley inquired.

  "It was," Eliphalet replied. "In every respect."

  Charles Bromley paced the handsomely decorated room for several moments, and then said unexpectedly, "If you say it was a good Christian home, Phet, I'm sure it must have been horrible indeed. I can see young Abner Hale right now. Skinny, bad complexion, eyes ruined through too much study, sanctimonious, dirty fingernails, about six years retarded in all social graces. And yet, do you know, as I watch life go past here in Walpole, it's often those boys who in the long run turn out to be the best husbands."

  In spite of himself, Reverend Thorn always admired the acuity of his brother-in-law's mind, so now he added what he had never intended saying: "Charles and Abigail, this young man is all the things Charles has just predicted. But he's also a dedicated man, extremely honest with himself, and one who is going to grow in grace. I wouldn't want him as a son-in-law now, but in ten years he'll be the best husband a woman could have."

  "Is he as tall as Jerusha?" Abigail asked.

  "Not quite, and he's a year younger."

  Mrs. Bromley began to cry, but her gruff husband joshed her. "You know how it is, Phet! This sailor that Jerusha fell in love with . . . Some ridiculous dance here in Walpole . . . He's a cousin of the Lowells, I think . . . I've always thought it was her mother who fell most completely in love that night. These tall men with commanding eyes!" He patted his own rotund belly and coaxed his wife away from her tears.

  "It amounts to this," Eliphalet said bluntly. "You have a daughter and I have a niece. We both love her very much. She's twenty-two, and she grows more confused each day. We must find her a husband. We must help her choose a way of life. I offer both."

  "And I appreciate the offer," Charles said warmly. "God knows I've been helpless."

  "Do you still wish to speak with her, Eliphalet?" Abigail asked, swayed by her husband's reactions.

  "No, Abigail," her husband interrupted. "This is your problem, not Phet's."

  "It is, isn't it?" Mrs. Bromley sniffed. "But what can I tell her about the young man?"

  Eliphalet, having anticipated this, handed her a neatly written dossier on Abner Hale, including a minute description of the young minister, a transcript of his marks in college, an essay he had written on Church Discipline in Geneva, and a sketchy genealogy of the Gideon Hales of Marlboro, descendants of Elisha Hale of Bucks, England. There was also a separate sheet which indicated that confidential letters could be addressed to John Whipple and President Day at Yale, to several Christian citizens at Marlboro, Massachusetts, and to Abner's sister Esther on the family farm. Abigail Bromley peeked first at the physical description: "Fine clear complexion but sallow; fine teeth."

  Bad news she could have taken, but these hopeful comments collapsed her and she sobbed, "We don't even know where Owhyhee Then she accused her husband of lacking parental love: "Are you willing to send your daughter .

  "My dear," Charles said firmly, "the only thing I'm not willing to do is to abandom my child to fits of depression and religious mania in a small upstairs room. If she can find love and a rich life in Owhyhee, it's a damned sight better than she's doing in Walpole, New Hampshire. Now you go up and talk with her. I believe she's in a religious swing of the pendulum this month and she'll probably jump at the chance of marrying a minister and going to Owhyhee." Therefore, as a result of Reverend Eliphalet Thorn's importunate trip to Marlboro and to Walpole, young Abner Hale, sweating the June days nervously at Yale, finally received his letter from Boston: "Dear Mr. Hale: As a result of careful inquiries conducted on our behalf by Reverend Eliphalet Thorn, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions is happy in the will of God to advise you that you have been chosen for mission duty in Hawaii. You and your wife will depart Boston on September first in the brig Thetis. Captain Janders." There was enclosed a printed list of some two hundred articles that venturing missionaries were urged to carry with them:

  3 razors

  compass

  towels

  washbasin

  calash

  1 parasol

  3 scissors

  4 mugs

  3 chambers

  1 lantern

  1 nest Hingham boxes

  1 pair bellows

  3 stone jugs

  1 pair andirons

  1 crane and hooks . . .

  There was also a much shorter letter which said simply: "You would be well advised to present yourself in late July at the home of Charles and Abigail Bromley in Walpole, New Hampshire, there to meet their daughter Jerusha, a Christian girl of twenty-two. It occurs to me that you may require some few necessities to make yourself additionally presentable for this important meeting, so I enclose herewith three dollars, which you need not repay me." This letter was "Eliphalet Thorn, of the African Mission."

  IN THESE YEARS of the early 1820's, there were many young ministers destined for Hawaii who, absorbed in study, found no time to make the acquaintance of marriageable young women and who were unexpectedly faced with the positive necessity of getting married within the space of a few weeks, for the A.B.C.F.M. resolutely refused to send any unmarried men to the islands and advised all such who wished to labor there for the Lord to inquire of their friends to see if a suitable female might be found, and there is no record of failure. Of course, some young ministers were rejected by the first nominees of their friends, but sooner or kter all found wives, "not because the young fellers was handsome, but because New England turns out so danged many old maids. Our best boys is all out to sea." There was much argument as to whether the decision of the A.B.C.F.M. to reject unmarried men stemmed from understanding of what errors men living alone might fall into; or from specific knowledge of what life in Hawaii was like, and it seems probable that the latter was the case, for many whalers had often returned to New Bedford and Nantucket, if they bothered to come home at all, with faraway tales of generous maidens, endless supplies of coconuts and thatched houses in magnificent valleys. In all seaports one could hear the sad refrain:

  "I want to go back to Owhyhee,

  Where the sea sings a soulful song,

  Where the gals is kind and gentle,

  And they don't know right from wrong!"

  From listening to such songs the Board concluded that, conditions being what they were, it would be prudent to require even youn
g men who lived in a state of grace to take their own converted women with them. More potent however was the conviction that women were the civilizing agents, the visual harbingers of Christian life. The A.B.C.F.M. therefore required females, not only to keep the young missionaries in line, but also because a devoted young wife was herself a missionary of the most persuasive kind. And so the young men scattered over New England, meeting shy, dedicated girls for the first time on Friday, proposing on Saturday, getting married after three Sundays had elapsed for banns, and departing for Hawaii immediately thereafter.

  But none of these amorous odysseys was stranger than the one conducted by Abner Hale. When he left Yale in early July, duly ordained a minister in the Congregational Church, he was five feet four inches tall, weighed one hundred and thirty-six pounds, had a most sallow complexion, a somewhat stooped bearing, and stringy blond hair which he parted in the middle and pasted down with water, bear grease and tallow. He wore the black claw-hammer coat favored by ministers, had a skimpy cotton stock about his neck, and a new ten-inch-high beaver stovepipe hat which tapered inward about five inches above his head and then flared out to a considerable expanse of flatness on top. In his meager luggage, tied together in a box, he carried a small brush which he had been told to use in grooming his hat, and this was the one vanity of dress he allowed himself, for he reasoned that this hat, more than anything else, heralded him as a clergyman. His cowhide shoes, black with elastic webs, he ignored.

  When the coach landed him at Marlboro, he stepped primly down, adjusted his tall hat, grabbed his box, and set out on foot for home, To his disappointment, no one in Marlboro bothered to congratulate him on having attained the ministry, for in his tall hat no one recognized him, and he reached the tree-lined lane leading to his home without having spoken to anyone, and there he stood in the hot dust, greeting, as he felt, for the last time, this bleak, unkindly home in which generations of Hales had been born, and it seemed to him so marked with love that he bowed his head and wept. He was standing in this manner when the younger children spotted him and led the whole family out to welcome him home.