apostasy to a particular sect, and he could have access with clear
grace any time to God.
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
42
This theory became one of the major tenets of his preaching, and
was especially efficacious in cleansing the consciences of the
back-sliders from all other faiths who else, in the secrecy of
their subconscious selves, were being crushed by the weight of the
Judas sin. To Abel Ah Yo, God’s plan was as clear as if he, Abel
Ah Yo, had planned it himself. All would be saved in the end,
although some took longer than others, and would win only to
backseats. Man’s place in the ever-fluxing chaos of the world was
definite and pre-ordained–if by no other token, then by denial
that there was any ever-fluxing chaos. This was a mere bugbear of
mankind’s addled fancy; and, by stinging audacities of thought and
speech, by vivid slang that bit home by sheerest intimacy into his
listeners’ mental processes, he drove the bugbear from their
brains, showed them the loving clarity of God’s design, and,
thereby, induced in them spiritual serenity and calm.
What chance had Alice Akana, herself pure and homogeneous Hawaiian,
against his subtle, democratic-tinged, four-race-engendered, slang-
munitioned attack? He knew, by contact, almost as much as she
about the waywardness of living and sinning–having been singing
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
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
43
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
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
44
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
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
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