reminders and jokes. The anchor was broken out to a song of
farewell from Lilolilo's singing boys on the quarterdeck, while we,
in the big canoes and whaleboats, saw the first breeze fill the
vessel's sails and the distance begin to widen.
"Through all the confusion and excitement, Lilolilo, at the rail,
who must say last farewells and quip last jokes to many, looked
squarely down at me. On his head he wore my ilima lei, which I had
made for him and placed there. And into the canoes, to the
favoured ones, they on the yacht began tossing their many leis. I
had no expectancy of hope . . . And yet I hoped, in a small wistful
way that I know did not show in my face, which was as proud and
merry as any there. But Lilolilo did what I knew he would do, what
I had known from the first he would do. Still looking me squarely
and honestly in the eyes, he took my beautiful ilima lei from his
head and tore it across. I saw his lips shape, but not utter
aloud, the single word pau" (finish). "Still looking at me, he
broke both parts of the lei in two again and tossed the deliberate
fragments, not to me, but down overside into the widening water.
Pau. It was finished . . . "
For a long space Bella's vacant gaze rested on the sea horizon.
Martha ventured no mere voice expression of the sympathy that
moistened her own eyes.
"And I rode on that day, up the old bad trail along the Hamakua
coast," Bella resumed, with a voice at first singularly dry and
harsh. "That first day was not so hard. I was numb. I was too
full with the wonder of all I had to forget to know that I had to
forget it. I spent the night at Laupahoehoe. Do you know, I had
expected a sleepless night. Instead, weary from the saddle, still
numb, I slept the night through as if I had been dead.
"But the next day, in driving wind and drenching rain! How it blew
and poured! The trail was really impassable. Again and again our
horses went down. At fist the cowboy Uncle John had loaned me with
the horses protested, then he followed stolidly in the rear,
shaking his head, and, I know, muttering over and over that I was
pupule. The pack horse was abandoned at Kukuihaele. We almost
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swam up Mud Lane in a river of mud. At Waimea the cowboy had to
exchange for a fresh mount. But Hilo lasted through. From
daybreak till midnight I was in the saddle, till Uncle John, at
Kilohana, took me off my horse, in his arms, and carried me in, and
routed the women from their beds to undress me and lomi me, while
he plied me with hot toddies and drugged me to sleep and
forgetfulness. I know I must have babbled and raved. Uncle John
must have guessed. But never to another, nor even to me, did he
ever breathe a whisper. Whatever he guessed he locked away in the
taboo room of Naomi.
"I do have fleeting memories of some of that day, all a broken-
hearted mad rage against fate--of my hair down and whipped wet and
stinging about me in the driving rain; of endless tears of weeping
contributed to the general deluge, of passionate outbursts and
resentments against a world all twisted and wrong, of beatings of
my hands upon my saddle pommel, of asperities to my Kilohana
cowboy, of spurs into the ribs of poor magnificent Hilo, with a
prayer on my lips, bursting out from my heart, that the spurs would
so madden him as to make him rear and fall on me and crush my body
for ever out of all beauty for man, or topple me off the trail and
finish me at the foot of the palis" (precipices), "writing pau at
the end of my name as final as the unuttered pau on Lilolilo's lips
when he tore across my ilima lei and dropped it in the sea. . . .
"Husband George was delayed in Honolulu. When he came back to
Nahala I was there waiting for him. And solemnly he embraced me,
perfunctorily kissed my lips, gravely examined my tongue, decried
my looks and state of health, and sent me to bed with hot stove-
lids and a dosage of castor oil. Like entering into the machinery
of a clock and becoming one of the cogs or wheels, inevitably and
remorselessly turning around and around, so I entered back into the
grey life of Nahala. Out of bed was Husband George at half after
four every morning, and out of the house and astride his horse at
five. There was the eternal porridge, and the horrible cheap
coffee, and the fresh beef and jerky. I cooked, and baked, and
scrubbed. I ground around the crazy hand sewing machine and made
my cheap holokus. Night after night, through the endless centuries
of two years more, I sat across the table from him until eight
o'clock, mending his cheap socks and shoddy underwear, while he
read the years' old borrowed magazines he was too thrifty to
subscribe to. And then it was bed-time--kerosene must be
economized--and he wound his watch, entered the weather in his
diary, and took off his shoes, the right shoe first, and placed
them, just so, side by side, at the foot of the bed on his side.
"But there was no more of my drawing to Husband George, as had been
the promise ere the Princess Lihue invited me on the progress and
Uncle John loaned me the horse. You see, Sister Martha, nothing
would have happened had Uncle John refused me the horse. But I had
known love, and I had known Lilolilo; and what chance, after that,
had Husband George to win from me heart of esteem or affection?
And for two years, at Nahala, I was a dead woman who somehow walked
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and talked, and baked and scrubbed, and mended socks and saved
kerosene. The doctors said it was the shoddy underwear that did
for him, pursuing as always the high-mountain Nahala waters in the
drenching storms of midwinter.
"When he died, I was not sad. I had been sad too long already.
Nor was I glad. Gladness had died at Hilo when Lilolilo dropped my
ilima lei into the sea and my feet were never happy again.
Lilolilo passed within a month after Husband George. I had never
seen him since the parting at Hilo. La, la, suitors a many have I
had since; but I was like Uncle John. Mating for me was but once.
Uncle John had his Naomi room at Kilohana. I have had my Lilolilo
room for fifty years in my heart. You are the first, Sister
Martha, whom I have permitted to enter that room . . . "
A machine swung the circle of the drive, and from it, across the
lawn, approached the husband of Martha. Erect, slender, grey-
haired, of graceful military bearing, Roscoe Scandwell was a member
of the "Big Five," which, by the interlocking of interests,
determined the destinies of all Hawaii. Himself pure haole, New
England born, he kissed Bella first, arms around, full-hearty, in
the Hawaiian way. His alert eye told him that there had been a
woman talk, and, despite the signs of all generousness of emotion,
that all was well and placid in the twilight
wisdom that was
theirs.
"Elsie and the younglings are coming--just got a wireless from
their steamer," he announced, after he had kissed his wife. "And
they'll be spending several days with us before they go on to
Maui."
"I was going to put you in the Rose Room, Sister Bella," Martha
Scandwell planned aloud. "But it will be better for her and the
children and the nurses and everything there, so you shall have
Queen Emma's Room."
"I had it last time, and I prefer it," Bella said.
Roscoe Scandwell, himself well taught of Hawaiian love and love-
ways, erect, slender, dignified, between the two nobly proportioned
women, an arm around each of their sumptuous waists, proceeded with
them toward the house.
WAIKIKI, HAWAII.
June 6, 1916
THE BONES OF KAHEKILI
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From over the lofty Koolau Mountains, vagrant wisps of the trade
wind drifted, faintly swaying the great, unwhipped banana leaves,
rustling the palms, and fluttering and setting up a whispering
among the lace-leaved algaroba trees. Only intermittently did the
atmosphere so breathe--for breathing it was, the suspiring of the
languid, Hawaiian afternoon. In the intervals between the soft
breathings, the air grew heavy and balmy with the perfume of
flowers and the exhalations of fat, living soil.
Of humans about the low bungalow-like house, there were many; but
one only of them slept. The rest were on the tense tiptoes of
silence. At the rear of the house a tiny babe piped up a thin
blatting wail that the quickly thrust breast could not appease.
The mother, a slender hapa-haole (half-white), clad in a loose-
flowing holoku of white muslin, hastened away swiftly among the
banana and papaia trees to remove the babe's noise by distance.
Other women, hapa-haole and full native, watched her anxiously as
she fled.
At the front of the house, on the grass, squatted a score of
Hawaiians. Well-muscled, broad-shouldered, they were all strapping
men. Brown-skinned, with luminous brown eyes and black, their
features large and regular, they showed all the signs of being as
good-natured, merry-hearted, and soft-tempered as the climate. To
all of which a seeming contradiction was given by the ferociousness
of their accoutrement. Into the tops of their rough leather
leggings were thrust long knives, the handles projecting. On their
heels were huge-rowelled Spanish spurs. They had the appearance of
banditti, save for the incongruous wreaths of flowers and fragrant
maile that encircled the crowns of their flopping cowboy hats. One
of them, deliciously and roguishly handsome as a faun, with the
eyes of a faun, wore a flaming double-hibiscus bloom coquettishly
tucked over his ear. Above them, casting a shelter of shade from
the sun, grew a wide-spreading canopy of Ponciana regia, itself a
flame of blossoms, out of each of which sprang pom-poms of feathery
stamens. From far off, muffled by distance, came the faint
stamping of their tethered horses. The eyes of all were intently
fixed upon the solitary sleeper who lay on his back on a lauhala
mat a hundred feet away under the monkey-pod trees.
Large as were the Hawaiian cowboys, the sleeper was larger. Also,
as his snow-white hair and beard attested, he was much older. The
thickness of his wrist and the greatness of his fingers made
authentic the mighty frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants
and cotton shirt, buttonless, open from midriff to Adam's apple,
exposing a chest matted with a thatch of hair as white as that of
his head and face. The depth and breadth of that chest, its
resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty
strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of
sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he was
all haole--a white man.
On his back, his great white beard, thrust skyward, untrimmed of
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barbers, stiffened and subsided with every breath, while with the
outblow of every exhalation the white moustache erected
perpendicularly like the quills of a porcupine and subsided with
each intake. A young girl of fourteen, clad only in a single
shift, or muumuu, herself a grand-daughter of the sleeper, crouched
beside him and with a feathered fly-flapper brushed away the flies.
In her face were depicted solicitude, and nervousness, and awe, as
if she attended on a god.
And truly, Hardman Pool, the sleeping whiskery one, was to her, and
to many and sundry, a god--a source of life, a source of food, a
fount of wisdom, a giver of law, a smiling beneficence, a blackness
of thunder and punishment--in short, a man-master whose record was
fourteen living and adult sons and daughters, six great-
grandchildren, and more grandchildren than could he in his most
lucid moments enumerate.
Fifty-one years before, he had landed from an open boat at
Laupahoehoe on the windward coast of Hawaii. The boat was the one
surviving one of the whaler Black Prince of New Bedford. Himself
New Bedford born, twenty years of age, by virtue of his driving
strength and ability he had served as second mate on the lost
whaleship. Coming to Honolulu and casting about for himself, he
had first married Kalama Mamaiopili, next acted as pilot of
Honolulu Harbour, after that started a saloon and boarding house,
and, finally, on the death of Kalama's father, engaged in cattle
ranching on the broad pasture lands she had inherited.
For over half a century he had lived with the Hawaiians, and it was
conceded that he knew their language better than did most of them.
By marrying Kalama, he had married not merely her land, but her own
chief rank, and the fealty owed by the commoners to her by virtue
of her genealogy was also accorded him. In addition, he possessed
of himself all the natural attributes of chiefship: the gigantic
stature, the fearlessness, the pride; and the high hot temper that
could brook no impudence nor insult, that could be neither bullied
nor awed by any utmost magnificence of power that walked on two
legs, and that could compel service of lesser humans, not by any
ignoble purchase by bargaining, but by an unspoken but expected
condescending of largesse. He knew his Hawaiians from the outside
and the in, knew them better than themselves, their Polynesian
circumlocutions, faiths, customs, and mysteries.
And at seventy-one, after a morning in the saddle over the ranges
that began at four o'clock, he lay under the monkey-pods in his
customary and sacred siesta that no retainer dared to break, nor
would dare permit any equal of the great one to break. Only to the
King was such a right accorded, and, as the King had early learned,
to break Hardman Pool's siesta was to gain awake a very irrita
ble
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
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trade-wind wisps sighed and rustled between longer intervals of
quiescence. The perfume grew heavier. The woman brought back the
babe, quiet again, to the rear of the house. The monkey-pods
folded their leaves and swooned to a siesta of their own in the
soft air above the sleeper. The girl, breathless as ever from the
enormous solemnity of her task, still brushed the flies away; and
the score of cowboys still intently and silently watched.
Hardman Pool awoke. The next out-breath, expected of the long
rhythm, did not take place. Neither did the white, long moustache
rise up. Instead, the cheeks, under the whiskers, puffed; the
eyelids lifted, exposing blue eyes, choleric and fully and
immediately conscious; the right hand went out to the half-smoked
pipe beside him, while the left hand reached the matches.
"Get me my gin and milk," he ordered, in Hawaiian, of the little
maid, who had been startled into a tremble by his awaking.
He lighted the pipe, but gave no sign of awareness of the presence
of his waiting retainers until the tumbler of gin and milk had been
brought and drunk.
"Well?" he demanded abruptly, and in the pause, while twenty faces
wreathed in smiles and twenty pairs of dark eyes glowed luminously
with well-wishing pleasure, he wiped the lingering drops of gin and
milk from his hairy lips. "What are you hanging around for? What
do you want? Come over here."
Twenty giants, most of them young, uprose and with a great clanking
and jangling of spurs and spur-chains strode over to him. They
grouped before him in a semicircle, trying bashfully to wedge their
shoulders, one behind another's, their faces a-grin and apologetic,
and at the same time expressing a casual and unconscious
democraticness. In truth, to them Hardman Pool was more than mere
chief. He was elder brother, or father, or patriarch; and to all
of them he was related, in one way or another, according to
Hawaiian custom, through his wife and through the many marriages of
his children and grandchildren. His slightest frown might perturb
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