On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales

by On The Makaloa Mat

  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