The captain suddenly sprang upon the railing of the lanai, held on
to a pillar with one hand, and again picked up the two specks of
heads through the glasses. His surprise was verified. The two
fools had veered out of the channel toward Diamond Head, and were
directly seaward of the kanaka surf. Worse, as he looked, they
were starting to come in through the kanaka surf.
He glanced down quickly to the canoe, and even as he glanced, and
as the apparently loafing members quietly arose and took their
places by the canoe for the launching, he achieved judgment.
Before the canoe could get abreast in the channel, all would be
over with the man and woman. And, granted that it could get
abreast of them, the moment it ventured into the kanaka surf it
would be swamped, and a sorry chance would the strongest swimmer of
them have of rescuing a person pounding to pulp on the bottom under
the smashes of the great bearded ones.
The captain saw the first kanaka wave, large of itself, but small
among its fellows, lift seaward behind the two speck-swimmers.
Then he saw them strike a crawl-stroke, side by side, faces
downward, full-lengths out-stretched on surface, their feet
sculling like propellers and their arms flailing in rapid over-hand
strokes, as they spurted speed to approximate the speed of the
overtaking wave, so that, when overtaken, they would become part of
the wave, and travel with it instead of being left behind it.
Thus, if they were coolly skilled enough to ride outstretched on
the surface and the forward face of the crest instead of being
flung and crumpled or driven head-first to bottom, they would dash
shoreward, not propelled by their own energy, but by the energy of
the wave into which they had become incorporated.
And they did it! “SOME swimmers!” the captain of Number Nine made
announcement to himself under his breath. He continued to gaze
eagerly. The best of swimmers could hold such a wave for several
hundred feet. But could they? If they did, they would be a third
of the way through the perils they had challenged. But, not
unexpected by him, the woman failed first, her body not presenting
the larger surfaces that her husband’s did. At the end of seventy
feet she was overwhelmed, being driven downward and out of sight by
the tons of water in the over-topple. Her husband followed and
both appeared swimming beyond the wave they had lost.
The captain saw the next wave first. “If they try to body-surf on
that, good night,” he muttered; for he knew the swimmer did not
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
100
live who would tackle it. Beardless itself, it was father of all
bearded ones, a mile long, rising up far out beyond where the
others rose, towering its solid bulk higher and higher till it
blotted out the horizon, and was a giant among its fellows ere its
beard began to grow as it thinned its crest to the over-curl.
But it was evident that the man and woman knew big water. No
racing stroke did they make in advance of the wave. The captain
inwardly applauded as he saw them turn and face the wave and wait
for it. It was a picture that of all on the beach he alone saw,
wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the
binoculars. The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever
mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the colours of
the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it. The
green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked.
But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of
rose and gold flashed through it by the sun. On and up, to the
sprouting beard of growing crest, the colour orgy increased until
it was a kaleidoscopic effervescence of transfusing rainbows.
Against the face of the wave showed the heads of the man and woman
like two sheer specks. Specks they were, of the quick, adventuring
among the blind elemental forces, daring the titanic buffets of the
sea. The weight of the down-fall of that father of waves, even
then imminent above their heads, could stun a man or break the
fragile bones of a woman. The captain of Number Nine was
unconscious that he was holding his breath. He was oblivious of
the man. It was the woman. Did she lose her head or courage, or
misplay her muscular part for a moment, she could be hurled a
hundred feet by that giant buffet and left wrenched, helpless, and
breathless to be pulped on the coral bottom and sucked out by the
undertow to be battened on by the fish-sharks too cowardly to take
their human meat alive.
Why didn’t they dive deep, and with plenty of time, the captain
wanted to know, instead of waiting till the last tick of safety and
the first tick of peril were one? He saw the woman turn her head
and laugh to the man, and his head turn in response. Above them,
overhanging them, as they mounted the body of the wave, the beard,
creaming white, then frothing into rose and gold, tossed upward
into a spray of jewels. The crisp off-shore trade-wind caught the
beard’s fringes and blew them backward and upward yards and yards
into the air. It was then, side by side, and six feet apart, that
they dived straight under the over-curl even then disintegrating to
chaos and falling. Like insects disappearing into the convolutions
of some gorgeous gigantic orchid, so they disappeared, as beard and
crest and spray and jewels, in many tons, crashed and thundered
down just where they had disappeared the moment before, but where
they were no longer.
Beyond the wave they had gone through, they finally showed, side by
side, still six feet apart, swimming shoreward with a steady stroke
until the next wave should make them body-surf it or face and
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
101
pierce it. The captain of Number Nine waved his hand to his crew
in dismissal, and sat down on the lanai railing, feeling vaguely
tired and still watching the swimmers through his glasses.
“Whoever and whatever they are,” he murmured, “they aren’t
malahinis. They simply can’t be malahinis.”
Not all days, and only on rare days, is the surf heavy at Waikiki;
and, in the days that followed, Ida and Lee Barton, much in
evidence on the beach and in the water, continued to arouse
disparaging interest in the breasts of the tourist ladies, although
the Outrigger captains ceased from worrying about them in the
water. They would watch the pair swim out and disappear in the
blue distance, and they might, or might not, chance to see them
return hours afterward. The point was that the captains did not
bother about their returning, because they knew they would return.
The reason for this was that they were not malahinis. They
belonged. In other words, or, rather, in the potent Islands-word,
they were kamaaina. Kamaaina men and women of forty remembered Lee
Barton from their childhood days, when, in truth, he had been a
malahini, though a very young specimen. Since that time, in the
course of various long stays, he had earned the kamaaina
distinction.
As for Ida Barton, young matrons of her own age (privily wondering
how she managed to keep her figure) met her with arms around and
hearty Hawaiian kisses. Grandmothers must have her to tea and
reminiscence in old gardens of forgotten houses which the tourist
never sees. Less than a week after her arrival, the aged Queen
Liliuokalani must send for her and chide her for neglect. And old
men, on cool and balmy lanais, toothlessly maundered to her about
Grandpa Captain Wilton, of before their time, but whose wild and
lusty deeds and pranks, told them by their fathers, they remembered
with gusto–Grandpa Captain Wilton, or David Wilton, or “All Hands”
as the Hawaiians of that remote day had affectionately renamed him.
All Hands, ex-Northwest trader, the godless, beach-combing,
clipper-shipless and ship-wrecked skipper who had stood on the
beach at Kailua and welcomed the very first of missionaries, off
the brig Thaddeus, in the year 1820, and who, not many years later,
made a scandalous runaway marriage with one of their daughters,
quieted down and served the Kamehamehas long and conservatively as
Minister of the Treasury and Chief of the Customs, and acted as
intercessor and mediator between the missionaries on one side and
the beach-combing crowd, the trading crowd, and the Hawaiian chiefs
on the variously shifting other side.
Nor was Lee Barton neglected. In the midst of the dinners and
lunches, the luaus (Hawaiian feasts) and poi-suppers, and swims and
dances in aloha (love) to both of them, his time and inclination
were claimed by the crowd of lively youngsters of old Kohala days