praying him to death with. He, on the other hand, stipulated that
he was not to reveal to her the secret burial-place of all the alii
of Lakanaii all the way back. Nevertheless, he was too old to dare
the adventure alone, must be helped by some one who of necessity
would come to know the secret, and I was that one. I was the
highest alii, beside my father and mother, and they were no higher
than I.
“So I came upon the scene, being summoned into the twilight room to
confront those two dubious old ones who dealt with the dead. They
were a pair–mother fat to despair of helplessness, Ahuna thin as a
skeleton and as fragile. Of her one had the impression that if she
lay down on her back she could not roll over without the aid of
block-and-tackle; of Ahuna one’s impression was that the tooth-
pickedness of him would shatter to splinters if one bumped into
him.
“And when they had broached the matter, there was more pilikia”
(trouble). “My father’s attitude stiffened my resolution. I
refused to go on the bone-snatching expedition. I said I didn’t
care a whoop for the bones of all the aliis of my family and race.
You see, I had just discovered Jules Verne, loaned me by old
Howard, and was reading my head off. Bones? When there were North
Poles, and Centres of Earths, and hairy comets to ride across space
among the stars! Of course I didn’t want to go on any bone-
snatching expedition. I said my father was able-bodied, and he
could go, splitting equally with her whatever bones he brought
back. But she said he was only a blamed collector–or words to
that effect, only stronger.
“‘I know him,’ she assured me. ‘He’d bet his mother’s bones on a
horse-race or an ace-full.’
“I stood with fat her when it came to modern scepticism, and I told
her the whole thing was rubbish. ‘Bones?’ I said. ‘What are
bones? Even field mice, and many rats, and cockroaches have bones,
though the roaches wear their bones outside their meat instead of
inside. The difference between man and other animals,’ I told her,
‘is not bones, but brain. Why, a bullock has bigger bones than a
man, and more than one fish I’ve eaten has more bones, while a
whale beats creation when it comes to bone.’
“It was frank talk, which is our Hawaiian way, as you have long
since learned. In return, equally frank, she regretted she hadn’t
given me away as a feeding child when I was born. Next she
bewailed that she had ever borne me. From that it was only a step
to anaana me. She threatened me with it, and I did the bravest
thing I have ever done. Old Howard had given me a knife of many
blades, and corkscrews, and screw-drivers, and all sorts of
contrivances, including a tiny pair of scissors. I proceeded to
pare my finger-nails.
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
61
“‘There,’ I said, as I put the parings into her hand. ‘Just to
show you what I think of it. There’s bait and to spare. Go on and
anaana me if you can.’
“I have said it was brave. It was. I was only fifteen, and I had
lived all my days in the thick of the mystery stuff, while my
scepticism, very recently acquired, was only skin-deep. I could be
a sceptic out in the open in the sunshine. But I was afraid of the
dark. And in that twilight room, the bones of the dead all about
me in the big jars, why, the old lady had me scared stiff. As we
say to-day, she had my goat. Only I was brave and didn’t let on.
And I put my bluff across, for my mother flung the parings into my
face and burst into tears. Tears in an elderly woman weighing
three hundred and twenty pounds are scarcely impressive, and I
hardened the brassiness of my bluff.
“She shifted her attack, and proceeded to talk with the dead. Nay,
more, she summoned them there, and, though I was all ripe to see
but couldn’t, Ahuna saw the father of Kaaukuu in the corner and lay
down on the floor and yammered. Just the same, although I almost
saw the old giant, I didn’t quite see him.
“‘Let him talk for himself,’ I said. But Hiwilani persisted in
doing the talking for him, and in laying upon me his solemn
injunction that I must go with Ahuna to the burial-place and bring
back the bones desired by my mother. But I argued that if the dead
ones could be invoked to kill living men by wasting sicknesses, and
that if the dead ones could transport themselves from their burial-
crypts into the corner of her room, I couldn’t see why they
shouldn’t leave their bones behind them, there in her room and
ready to be jarred, when they said good-bye and departed for the
middle world, the over world, or the under world, or wherever they
abided when they weren’t paying social calls.
“Whereupon mother let loose on poor old Ahuna, or let loose upon
him the ghost of Kaaukuu’s father, supposed to be crouching there
in the corner, who commanded Ahuna to divulge to her the burial-
place. I tried to stiffen him up, telling him to let the old ghost
divulge the secret himself, than whom nobody else knew it better,
seeing that he had resided there upwards of a century. But Ahuna
was old school. He possessed no iota of scepticism. The more
Hiwilani frightened him, the more he rolled on the floor and the
louder he yammered.
“But when he began to bite himself, I gave in. I felt sorry for
him; but, over and beyond that, I began to admire him. He was
sterling stuff, even if he was a survival of darkness. Here, with
the fear of mystery cruelly upon him, believing Hiwilani’s dope
implicitly, he was caught between two fidelities. She was his
living alii, his alii kapo” (sacred chiefess). “He must be
faithful to her, yet more faithful must he be to all the dead and
gone aliis of her line who depended solely on him that their bones
should not be disturbed.
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
62
“I gave in. But I, too, imposed stipulations. Steadfastly had my
father, new school, refused to let me go to England for my
education. That sugar was slumping was reason sufficient for him.
Steadfastly had my mother, old school, refused, her heathen mind
too dark to place any value on education, while it was shrewd
enough to discern that education led to unbelief in all that was
old. I wanted to study, to study science, the arts, philosophy, to
study everything old Howard knew, which enabled him, on the edge of
the grave, undauntedly to sneer at superstition, and to give me
Jules Verne to read. He was an Oxford man before he went wild and
wrong, and it was he who had set the Oxford bee buzzing in my
noddle.
“In the end Ahuna and I, old school and new school leagued
together, won out. Mother promised that she’d make father send me
to England, even if she had to pester him into a prolonged drinking
that would make his digestion go back on him. Also, Howard was to
accompany me, so that I could decently bury him in England. He was
a queer one, old Howard, an individual if there ever was one. Let
me tell you a little story about him. It was when Kalakaua was
starting on his trip around the world. You remember, when
Armstrong, and Judd, and the drunken valet of a German baron
accompanied him. Kalakaua made the proposition to Howard . . . ”
But here the long-apprehended calamity fell upon Prince Akuli. The
old wahine had finished her lei hala. Barefooted, with no
adornment of femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed
cotton, with age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she
cringed before him and crooned a mele in his honour, and, still
cringing, put the lei around his neck. It is true the hala smelled
most freshly strong, yet was the act beautiful to me, and the old
woman herself beautiful to me. My mind leapt into the Prince’s
narrative so that to Ahuna I could not help likening her.
Oh, truly, to be an alii in Hawaii, even in this second decade of
the twentieth century, is no light thing. The alii, utterly of the
new, must be kindly and kingly to those old ones absolutely of the
old. Nor did the Prince without a kingdom, his loved island long
since annexed by the United States and incorporated into a
territory along with the rest of the Hawaiian Islands–nor did the
Prince betray his repugnance for the odour of the hala. He bowed
his head graciously; and his royal condescending words of pure