know what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say
to George: ‘Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty
years from now. I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate
coffee that is only two cents a pound more than the awful stuff we
are using. Why couldn’t I fry eggs in butter–now? I should
dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our linen! I’m ashamed
to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven knows they dare
come seldom enough.’
“‘Be patient, Bella,’ he would reply. ‘In a little while, in only
a few years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep
between our sheets, will be proud of an invitation–those of them
who will not be dead. You remember how Stevens passed out last
year–free-living and easy, everybody’s friend but his own. The
Kohala crowd had to bury him, for he left nothing but debts. Watch
the others going the same pace. There’s your brother Hal. He
can’t keep it up and live five years, and he’s breaking his uncles’
hearts. And there’s Prince Lilolilo. Dashes by me with half a
hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering kanakas in his train who
would be better at hard work and looking after their future, for he
will never be king of Hawaii. He will not live to be king of
Hawaii.’
“George was right. Brother Hal died. So did Prince Lilolilo. But
George was not ALL right. He, who neither drank nor smoked, who
never wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of
his lips a second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who
was invariably up before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp
had a tenth emptied itself, and who never thought to die, was dead
even more quickly than Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.
“‘Be patient, Bella,’ Uncle Robert would say to me. ‘George
Castner is a coming man. I have chosen well for you. Your
hardships now are the hardships on the way to the promised land.
Not always will the Hawaiians rule in Hawaii. Just as they let
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
10
their wealth slip out of their hands, so will their rule slip out
of their hands. Political power and the land always go together.
There will be great changes, revolutions no one knows how many nor
of what sort, save that in the end the haole will possess the land
and the rule. And in that day you may well be first lady of
Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii.
It is written in the books. It is ever so where the haole
conflicts with the easier races. I, your Uncle Robert, who am
half-Hawaiian and half-haole, know whereof I speak. Be patient,
Bella, be patient.’
“‘Dear Bella,’ Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was
tender for me. Thank God, he never told me to be patient. He
knew. He was very wise. He was warm human, and, therefore, wiser
than Uncle Robert and George Castner, who sought the thing, not the
spirit, who kept records in ledgers rather than numbers of heart-
beats breast to breast, who added columns of figures rather than
remembered embraces and endearments of look and speech and touch.
‘Dear Bella,’ Uncle John would say. He knew. You have heard
always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was a true
lover. He loved but the once. After her death they said he was
eccentric. He was. He was the one lover, once and always.
Remember that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered
only after his death and found it his shrine to her. ‘Dear Bella,’
it was all he ever said to me, but I knew he knew.
“And I was nineteen, and sun-warm Hawaiian in spite of my three-
quarters haole blood, and I knew nothing save my girlhood
splendours at Kilohana and my Honolulu education at the Royal Chief
School, and my grey husband at Nahala with his grey preachments and
practices of sobriety and thrift, and those two childless uncles of
mine, the one with far, cold vision, the other the broken-hearted,
for-ever-dreaming lover of a dead princess.
“Think of that grey house! I, who had known the ease and the
delights and the ever-laughing joys of Kilohana, and of the Parkers
at old Mana, and of Puuwaawaa! You remember. We did live in
feudal spaciousness in those days. Would you, can you, believe it,
Martha–at Nahala the only sewing machine I had was one of those
the early missionaries brought, a tiny, crazy thing that one
cranked around by hand!
“Robert and John had each given Husband George five thousand
dollars at my marriage. But he had asked for it to be kept secret.
Only the four of us knew. And while I sewed my cheap holokus on
that crazy machine, he bought land with the money–the upper Nahala
lands, you know–a bit at a time, each purchase a hard-driven
bargain, his face the very face of poverty. To-day the Nahala
Ditch alone pays me forty thousand a year.
“But was it worth it? I starved. If only once, madly, he had
crushed me in his arms! If only once he could have lingered with
me five minutes from his own business or from his fidelity to his
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
11
employers! Sometimes I could have screamed, or showered the
eternal bowl of hot porridge into his face, or smashed the sewing
machine upon the floor and danced a hula on it, just to make him
burst out and lose his temper and be human, be a brute, be a man of
some sort instead of a grey, frozen demi-god.”
Bella’s tragic expression vanished, and she laughed outright in
sheer genuineness of mirthful recollection.
“And when I was in such moods he would gravely look me over,
gravely feel my pulse, examine my tongue, gravely dose me with
castor oil, and gravely put me to bed early with hot stove-lids,
and assure me that I’d feel better in the morning. Early to bed!
Our wildest sitting up was nine o’clock. Eight o’clock was our
regular bed-time. It saved kerosene. We did not eat dinner at
Nahala–remember the great table at Kilohana where we did have
dinner? But Husband George and I had supper. And then he would
sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed
magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his
socks and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff.
And when he went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene
with only one to benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same
way, winding up his watch, entering the day’s weather in his diary,
and taking off his shoes, right foot first invariably, left foot
second, and placing them just so, side by side, on the floor, at
the foot of the bed, on his side.
“He was the cleanest man I ever knew. He never wore the same
undergarment a second time. I did the washing. He was so clean it
hurt. He shaved twice a day. He used more water on his body than
any kanaka. He did more work than any two haoles. And he saw the
future of the Nahala water.”
“And he made you wealthy, but did not make you happy,” Martha
observed.
Bella sighed and nodded.
“What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new Pierce-Arrow came
down on the steamer with me. My third in two years. But oh, all
the Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a
lover!–the one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil
beside and suffer and joy beside, the one male man lover husband .
. . ”
Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an
ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under
a hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her
eyes, withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a
mongoose’s, and at Bella’s feet she first sank down, in pure
Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless mele of Bella and
Bella’s ancestry and adding to it an extemporized welcome back to
Hawaii after her absence across the great sea to California. And
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
12
while she chanted her mele, the old crone’s shrewd fingers lomied
or massaged Bella’s silk-stockinged legs from ankle and calf to
knee and thigh.
Both Bella’s and Martha’s eyes were luminous-moist, as the old
retainer repeated the lomi and the mele to Martha, and as they
talked with her in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial
questions about her health and age and great-great-grandchildren–
she who had lomied them as babies in the great house at Kilohana,