already in the other world and angry with us, and, with other-world
power, about to wreak his anger upon us. Up and down he bobbed,
and the canoe drifted closer upon him.
“‘Kill him!’ ‘Bleed him!’ ‘Thrust to the heart of him!’ These
things the chiefs were crying out to Eoppo in their fear. ‘Over
with the taro tops!’ ‘Let the alii have the half of a fish!’
“Eoppo, priest though he was, was likewise afraid, and his reason
weakened before the sight of Kahekili in his haole coffin that
would not sink. He seized me by the hair, drew me to my feet, and
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
39
lifted the knife to plunge to my heart. And there was no
resistance in me. I knew again only that I was very thirsty, and
before my swimming eyes, in mid-air and close up, dangled the
sanded tongue of the harpooner.
“But before the knife could fall and drive in, the thing happened
that saved me. Akai, half-brother to Governor Boki, as you will
remember, was steersman of the canoe, and, therefore, in the stern,
was nearest to the coffin and its dead that would not sink. He was
wild with fear, and he thrust out with the point of his paddle to
fend off the coffined alii that seemed bent to come on board. The
point of the paddle struck the glass. The glass broke–”
“And the coffin immediately sank,” Hardman Pool broke in; “the air
that floated it escaping through the broken glass.”
“The coffin immediately sank, being builded by the ship’s carpenter
like a boat,” Kumuhana confirmed. “And I, who was a moepuu, became
a man once more. And I lived, though I died a thousand deaths from
thirst before we gained back to the beach at Waikiki.
“And so, O Kanaka Oolea, the bones of Kahekili do not lie in the
Royal Mausoleum. They are at the bottom of Molokai Channel, if
not, long since, they have become floating dust of slime, or,
builded into the bodies of the coral creatures dead and gone, are
builded into the coral reef itself. Of men I am the one living who
saw the bones of Kahekili sink into the Molokai Channel.”
In the pause that followed, wherein Hardman Pool was deep sunk in
meditation, Kumuhana licked his dry lips many times. At the last
he broke silence:
“The twelve dollars, Kanaka Oolea, for the jackass and the second-
hand saddle and bridle?”
“The twelve dollars would be thine,” Pool responded, passing to the
ancient one six dollars and a half, “save that I have in my stable
junk the very bridle and saddle for you which I shall give you.
These six dollars and a half will buy you the perfectly suitable
jackass of the pake” (Chinese) “at Kokako who told me only
yesterday that such was the price.”
They sat on, Pool meditating, conning over and over to himself the
Maori death-chant he had heard, and especially the line, “So dusk
of eve came on,” finding in it an intense satisfaction of beauty;
Kumuhana licking his lips and tokening that he waited for something
more. At last he broke silence.
“I have talked long, O Kanaka Oolea. There is not the enduring
moistness in my mouth that was when I was young. It seems that
afresh upon me is the thirst that was mine when tormented by the
visioned tongue of the harpooner. The gin and milk is very good, O
Kanaka Oolea, for a tongue that is like the harpooner’s.”
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
40
A shadow of a smile flickered across Pool’s face. He clapped his
hands, and the little maid came running.
“Bring one glass of gin and milk for old Kumuhana,” commanded
Hardman Pool.
WAIKIKI, HONOLULU
June 28, 1916.
WHEN ALICE TOLD HER SOUL
This, of Alice Akana, is an affair of Hawaii, not of this day, but
of days recent enough, when Abel Ah Yo preached his famous revival
in Honolulu and persuaded Alice Akana to tell her soul. But what
Alice told concerned itself with the earlier history of the then
surviving generation.
For Alice Akana was fifty years old, had begun life early, and,
early and late, lived it spaciously. What she knew went back into
the roots and foundations of families, businesses, and plantations.
She was the one living repository of accurate information that
lawyers sought out, whether the information they required related
to land-boundaries and land gifts, or to marriages, births,
bequests, or scandals. Rarely, because of the tight tongue she
kept behind her teeth, did she give them what they asked; and when
she did was when only equity was served and no one was hurt.
For Alice had lived, from early in her girlhood, a life of flowers,
and song, and wine, and dance; and, in her later years, had herself
been mistress of these revels by office of mistress of the hula
house. In such atmosphere, where mandates of God and man and
caution are inhibited, and where woozled tongues will wag, she
acquired her historical knowledge of things never otherwise
whispered and rarely guessed. And her tight tongue had served her
well, so that, while the old-timers knew she must know, none ever
heard her gossip of the times of Kalakaua’s boathouse, nor of the
high times of officers of visiting warships, nor of the diplomats
and ministers and councils of the countries of the world.
So, at fifty, loaded with historical dynamite sufficient, if it
were ever exploded, to shake the social and commercial life of the
Islands, still tight of tongue, Alice Akana was mistress of the
hula house, manageress of the dancing girls who hula’d for royalty,
for luaus (feasts), house-parties, poi suppers, and curious
tourists. And, at fifty, she was not merely buxom, but short and
fat in the Polynesian peasant way, with a constitution and lack of
organic weakness that promised incalculable years. But it was at
fifty that she strayed, quite by chance of time and curiosity, into
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
41
Abel Ah Yo’s revival meeting.
Now Abel Ah Yo, in his theology and word wizardry, was as much
mixed a personage as Billy Sunday. In his genealogy he was much
more mixed, for he was compounded of one-fourth Portuguese, one-
fourth Scotch, one-fourth Hawaiian, and one-fourth Chinese. The
Pentecostal fire he flamed forth was hotter and more variegated
than could any one of the four races of him alone have flamed
forth. For in him were gathered together the cannyness and the
cunning, the wit and the wisdom, the subtlety and the rawness, the
passion and the philosophy, the agonizing spirit-groping and he
legs up to the knees in the dung of reality, of the four radically
different breeds that contributed to the sum of him. His, also,
was the clever self-deceivement of the entire clever compound.
When it came to word wizardry, he had Billy Sunday, master of slang
and argot of one language, skinned by miles. For in Abel Ah Yo
were the five verbs, and nouns, and adjectives, and metaphors of
four living languages. Intermixed and living promiscuously and
vitally together, he possessed in these languages a reservoir of
expression in which a myriad Billy Sundays could drown. Of no
race, a mongrel par excellence, a heterogeneous scrabble, the
genius of the admixture was superlatively Abel Ah Yo’s. Like a
chameleon, he titubated and scintillated grandly between the
diverse parts of him, stunning by frontal attack and surprising and
confouding by flanking sweeps the mental homogeneity of the more
simply constituted souls who came in to his revival to sit under
him and flame to his flaming.
Abel Ah Yo believed in himself and his mixedness, as he believed in
the mixedness of his weird concept that God looked as much like him
as like any man, being no mere tribal god, but a world god that
must look equally like all races of all the world, even if it led
to piebaldness. And the concept worked. Chinese, Korean,
Japanese, Hawaiian, Porto Rican, Russian, English, French–members
of all races–knelt without friction, side by side, to his revision
of deity.
Himself in his tender youth an apostate to the Church of England,
Abel Ah Yo had for years suffered the lively sense of being a Judas
sinner. Essentially religious, he had foresworn the Lord. Like
Judas therefore he was. Judas was damned. Wherefore he, Abel Ah
Yo, was damned; and he did not want to be damned. So, quite after
the manner of humans, he squirmed and twisted to escape damnation.
The day came when he solved his escape. The doctrine that Judas
was damned, he concluded, was a misinterpretation of God, who,
above all things, stood for justice. Judas had been God’s servant,
specially selected to perform a particularly nasty job. Therefore
Judas, ever faithful, a betrayer only by divine command, was a
saint. Ergo, he, Abel Ah Yo, was a saint by very virtue of his