On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales

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by On The Makaloa Mat


  boy on the passenger-ships between Hawaii and California, and,

  after that, bar boy, afloat and ashore, 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 god, who struck her hard-headed mind as the most

  sensible god 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 God.

  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 god'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. "Hell is full of those who have

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  tried. Single of heart and pure of heart must you make your peace

  with God. Not until you tell your soul to God 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 God'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 God, 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. "God knows I am tired of my soul and

  should like to have it clean and shining 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 God each day, and many times each day," she urged.

  "I will approach God with humility, with sighs and with tears. I

  will contribute often to the plate, and I will buy Bibles, Bibles,

  Bibles without end."

  "And God will not smile upon you," God'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 God, 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

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  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. Willy 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.

  "My, my," Cyrus Hodge reminisced. "I was such a boy in those

  days!"

  "SOME boy," she laughed acquiescence.

  "But knowing no more than the foolishness of a boy in those long-

  ago days."

  "Remember the night your hack-driver got drunk and left you--"

  "S-s-sh!" he cautioned. "That Jap driver is a high-school graduate

  and knows more English than either of us. Also, I think he is a

  spy for his Government. So why should we tell him anything?

  Besides, I was so very young. You remember . . . "

  "Your cheeks were like the peaches we used to grow before the

  Mediterranean fruit fly got into them," Alice agreed. "I don't

  think you shaved more than once a week then. You were a pretty

  boy. Don't you remember the hula we composed in your honour, the--

  "

  "S-s-sh!" he hushed her. "All that's buried and forgotten. May it

  remain forgotten."

  And she was aware that in his eyes was no longer any of the

  ingenuousness of youth she remembered. Instead, his eyes were keen

  and speculative, searching into her for some assurance that she

  would not resurrect his particular portion of that buried past.

  "Religion is a good thing for us as we get along into middle age,"

  another old friend told her. He was building a magnificent house

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  45

  on Pacific Heights, but had recently married a second time, and was

  even then on his way to the steamer to welcome home his two


  daughters just graduated from Vassar. "We need religion in our old

  age, Alice. It softens, makes us more tolerant and forgiving of

  the weaknesses of others--especially the weaknesses of youth of--of

  others, when they played high and low and didn't know what they

  were doing."

  He waited anxiously.

  "Yes," she said. "We are all born to sin and it is hard to grow

  out of sin. But I grow, I grow."

  "Don't forget, Alice, in those other days I always played square.

  You and I never had a falling out."

  "Not even the night you gave that luau when you were twenty-one and

  insisted on breaking the glassware after every toast. But of

  course you paid for it."

  "Handsomely," he asserted almost pleadingly.

  "Handsomely," she agreed. "I replaced more than double the

  quantity with what you paid me, so that at the next luau I catered

  one hundred and twenty plates without having to rent or borrow a

  dish or glass. Lord Mainweather gave that luau--you remember him."

  "I was pig-sticking with him at Mana," the other nodded. "We were

  at a two weeks' house-party there. But say, Alice, as you know, I

  think this religion stuff is all right and better than all right.

  But don't let it carry you off your feet. And don't get to telling

  your soul on me. What would my daughters think of that broken

  glassware!"

  "I always did have an aloha" (warm regard) "for you, Alice," a

  member of the Senate, fat and bald-headed, assured her.

  And another, a lawyer and a grandfather: "We were always friends,

  Alice. And remember, any legal advice or handling of business you

  may require, I'll do for you gladly, and without fees, for the sake

  of our old-time friendship."

  Came a banker to her late Christmas Eve, with formidable, legal-

  looking envelopes in his hand which he presented to her.

  "Quite by chance," he explained, "when my people were looking up

  land-records in Iapio Valley, I found a mortgage of two thousand on

  your holdings there--that rice land leased to Ah Chin. And my mind

  drifted back to the past when we were all young together, and wild-

  -a bit wild, to be sure. And my heart warmed with the memory of

  you, and, so, just as an aloha, here's the whole thing cleared off

  for you."

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  Nor was Alice forgotten by her own people. Her house became a

  Mecca for native men and women, usually performing pilgrimage

  privily after darkness fell, with presents always in their hands--

  squid fresh from the reef, opihis and limu, baskets of alligator

  pears, roasting corn of the earliest from windward Cahu, mangoes

  and star-apples, taro pink and royal of the finest selection,

  sucking pigs, banana poi, breadfruit, and crabs caught the very day

  from Pearl Harbour. Mary Mendana, wife of the Portuguese Consul,

  remembered her with a five-dollar box of candy and a mandarin coat

  that would have fetched three-quarters of a hundred dollars at a

  fire sale. And Elvira Miyahara Makaena Yin Wap, the wife of Yin

  Wap the wealthy Chinese importer, brought personally to Alice two

  entire bolts of pina cloth from the Philippines and a dozen pairs

  of silk stockings.

  The time passed, and Abel Ah Yo struggled with Alice for a properly

  penitent heart, and Alice struggled with herself for her soul,

  while half of Honolulu wickedly or apprehensively hung on the

  outcome. Carnival week was over, polo and the races had come and

  gone, and the celebration of Fourth of July was ripening, ere Abel

  Ah Yo beat down by brutal psychology the citadel of her reluctance.

  It was then that he gave his famous exhortation which might be

  summed up as Abel Ah Yo's definition of eternity. Of course, like

  Billy Sunday on certain occasions, Abel Ah Yo had cribbed the

  definition. But no one in the Islands knew it, and his rating as a

  revivalist uprose a hundred per cent.

  So successful was his preaching that night, that he reconverted

  many of his converts, who fell and moaned about the penitent form

  and crowded for room amongst scores of new converts burnt by the

  pentecostal fire, including half a company of negro soldiers from

  the garrisoned Twenty-Fifth Infantry, a dozen troopers from the

  Fourth Cavalry on its way to the Philippines, as many drunken man-

  of-war's men, divers ladies from Iwilei, and half the riff-raff of

  the beach.

  Abel Ah Yo, subtly sympathetic himself by virtue of his racial

  admixture, knowing human nature like a book and Alice Akana even

  more so, knew just what he was doing when he arose that memorable

  night and exposited God, hell, and eternity in terms of Alice

  Akana's comprehension. For, quite by chance, he had discovered her

  cardinal weakness. First of all, like all Polynesians, an ardent

  lover of nature, he found that earthquake and volcanic eruption

  were the things of which Alice lived in terror. She had been, in

  the past, on the Big Island, through cataclysms that had slacken

  grass houses down upon her while she slept, and she had beheld

  Madame Pele (the Fire or Volcano Goddess) fling red-fluxing lava

  down the long slopes of Mauna Loa, destroying fish-ponds on the

  sea-brim and licking up droves of beef cattle, villages, and humans

  on her fiery way.

  The night before, a slight earthquake had shaken Honolulu and given

  Alice Akana insomnia. And the morning papers had stated that Mauna

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  Kea had broken into eruption, while the lava was rising rapidly in

  the great pit of Kilauea. So, at the meeting, her mind vexed

  between the terrors of this world and the delights of the eternal

  world to come, Alice sat down in a front seat in a very definite

  state of the "jumps."

  And Abel Ah Yo arose and put his finger on the sorest part of her

  soul. Sketching the nature of God in the stereotyped way, but

  making the stereotyped alive again with his gift of tongues in

  Pidgin-English and Pidgin-Hawaiian, Abel Ah Yo described the day

  when the Lord, even His infinite patience at an end, would tell

  Peter to close his day book and ledgers, command Gabriel to summon

  all souls to Judgment, and cry out with a voice of thunder:

  "Welakahao!"

  This anthromorphic deity of Abel Ah Yo thundering the modern

  Hawaiian-English slang of welakahao at the end of the world, is a

  fair sample of the revivalist's speech-tools of discourse.

  Welakahao means literally "hot iron." It was coined in the

  Honolulu Iron-works by the hundreds of Hawaiian men there employed,

  who meant by it "to hustle," "to get a move on," the iron being hot

  meaning that the time had come to strike.

  "And the Lord cried 'Welakahao,' and the Day of Judgment began and

  was over wiki-wiki" (quickly) "just like that; for Peter was a

  better bookkeeper than any on the Waterhouse Trust Company Limited,

  and, further, Peter's books were true."

 
; Swiftly Abel Ah Yo divided the sheep from the goats, and hastened

  the latter down into hell.

  "And now," he demanded, perforce his language on these pages being

  properly Englished, "what is hell like? Oh, my friends, let me

  describe to you, in a little way, what I have beheld with my own

  eves on earth of the possibilities of hell. I was a young man, a

  boy, and I was at Hilo. Morning began with earthquakes.

  Throughout the day the mighty land continued to shake and tremble,

  till strong men became seasick, and women clung to trees to escape

  falling, and cattle were thrown down off their feet. I beheld

  myself a young calf so thrown. A night of terror indescribable

  followed. The land was in motion like a canoe in a Kona gale.

  There was an infant crushed to death by its fond mother stepping

  upon it whilst fleeing her falling house.

  "The heavens were on fire above us. We read our Bibles by the

  light of the heavens, and the print was fine, even for young eyes.

  Those missionary Bibles were always too small of print. Forty

  miles away from us, the heart of hell burst from the lofty

  mountains and gushed red-blood of fire-melted rock toward the sea.

  With the heavens in vast conflagration and the earth hulaing

  beneath our feet, was a scene too awful and too majestic to be

  enjoyed. We could think only of the thin bubble-skin of earth

  between us and the everlasting lake of fire and brimstone, and of

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  48

  God to whom we prayed to save us. There were earnest and devout

  souls who there and then promised their pastors to give not their

  shaved tithes, but five-tenths of their all to the church, if only

  the Lord would let them live to contribute.

  "Oh, my friends, God saved us. But first he showed us a foretaste

  of that hell that will yawn for us on the last day, when he cries

  'Welakahao!' in a voice of thunder. When the iron is hot! Think

  of it! When the iron is hot for sinners!

  "By the third day, things being much quieter, my friend the

  preacher and I, being calm in the hand of God, journeyed up Mauna

  Loa and gazed into the awful pit of Kilauea. We gazed down into

  the fathomless abyss to the lake of fire far below, roaring and

  dashing its fiery spray into billows and fountaining hundreds of

  feet into the air like Fourth of July fireworks you have all seen,

 

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