On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales
Page 8
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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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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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,