THE HOUSE OF PRIDE
Contents:
The House of Pride
Koolau the Leper
Good-bye, Jack
Aloha Oe
Chun Ah Chun
The Sheriff of Kona
Jack London
THE HOUSE OF PRIDE
Percival Ford wondered why he had come. He did not dance. He did
not care much for army people. Yet he knew them all--gliding and
revolving there on the broad lanai of the Seaside, the officers in
their fresh-starched uniforms of white, the civilians in white and
black, and the women bare of shoulders and arms. After two years in
Honolulu the Twentieth was departing to its new station in Alaska,
and Percival Ford, as one of the big men of the Islands, could not
help knowing the officers and their women.
But between knowing and liking was a vast gulf. The army women
frightened him just a little. They were in ways quite different
from the women he liked best--the elderly women, the spinsters and
the bespectacled maidens, and the very serious women of all ages
whom he met on church and library and kindergarten committees, who
came meekly to him for contributions and advice. He ruled those
women by virtue of his superior mentality, his great wealth, and the
high place he occupied in the commercial baronage of Hawaii. And he
was not afraid of them in the least. Sex, with them, was not
obtrusive. Yes, that was it. There was in them something else, or
more, than the assertive grossness of life. He was fastidious; he
acknowledged that to himself; and these army women, with their bare
shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes, their
vitality and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.
Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly,
drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and
asserting the essential grossness of flesh no less shamelessly than
their women. He was always uncomfortable in the company of the army
men. They seemed uncomfortable, too. And he felt, always, that
they were laughing at him up their sleeves, or pitying him, or
tolerating him. Then, too, they seemed, by mere contiguity, to
emphasize a lack in him, to call attention to that in them which he
did not possess and which he thanked God he did not possess. Faugh!
They were like their women!
In fact, Percival Ford was no more a woman's man than he was a man's
man. A glance at him told the reason. He had a good constitution,
never was on intimate terms with sickness, nor even mild disorders;
but he lacked vitality. His was a negative organism. No blood with
a ferment in it could have nourished and shaped that long and narrow
face, those thin lips, lean cheeks, and the small, sharp eyes. The
thatch of hair, dust-coloured, straight and sparse, advertised the
niggard soil, as did the nose, thin, delicately modelled, and just
hinting the suggestion of a beak. His meagre blood had denied him
much of life, and permitted him to be an extremist in one thing
only, which thing was righteousness. Over right conduct he pondered
and agonized, and that he should do right was as necessary to his
nature as loving and being loved were necessary to commoner clay.
He was sitting under the algaroba trees between the lanai and the
beach. His eyes wandered over the dancers and he turned his head
away and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the
Southern Cross burning low on the horizon. He was irritated by the
bare shoulders and arms of the women. If he had a daughter he would
never permit it, never. But his hypothesis was the sheerest
abstraction. The thought process had been accompanied by no inner
vision of that daughter. He did not see a daughter with arms and
shoulders. Instead, he smiled at the remote contingency of
marriage. He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal
experience of love, he looked upon it, not as mythical, but as
bestial. Anybody could marry. The Japanese and Chinese coolies,
toiling on the sugar plantations and in the rice-fields, married.
They invariably married at the first opportunity. It was because
they were so low in the scale of life. There was nothing else for
them to do. They were like the army men and women. But for him
there were other and higher things. He was different from them--
from all of them. He was proud of how he happened to be. He had
come of no petty love-match. He had come of lofty conception of
duty and of devotion to a cause. His father had not married for
love. Love was a madness that had never perturbed Isaac Ford. When
he answered the call to go to the heathen with the message of life,
he had had no thought and no desire for marriage. In this they were
alike, his father and he. But the Board of Missions was economical.
With New England thrift it weighed and measured and decided that
married missionaries were less expensive per capita and more
efficacious. So the Board commanded Isaac Ford to marry.
Furthermore, it furnished him with a wife, another zealous soul with
no thought of marriage, intent only on doing the Lord's work among
the heathen. They saw each other for the first time in Boston. The
Board brought them together, arranged everything, and by the end of
the week they were married and started on the long voyage around the
Horn.
Percival Ford was proud that he had come of such a union. He had
been born high, and he thought of himself as a spiritual aristocrat.
And he was proud of his father. It was a passion with him. The
erect, austere figure of Isaac Ford had burned itself upon his
pride. On his desk was a miniature of that soldier of the Lord. In
his bedroom hung the portrait of Isaac Ford, painted at the time
when he had served under the Monarchy as prime minister. Not that
Isaac Ford had coveted place and worldly wealth, but that, as prime
minister, and, later, as banker, he had been of greater service to
the missionary cause. The German crowd, and the English crowd, and
all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered at Isaac Ford as a
commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different. When the
natives, emerging abruptly from their feudal system, with no
conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were
letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac
Ford who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey and
taken possession of fat, vast holdings. Small wonder the trading
crowd did not like his memory. But he had never looked upon his
enormous wealth as his own. He had considered himself God's
steward. Out of the revenues he had built schools, and hospitals,
and churches. Nor was it his fault that sugar, after the slump, had
paid forty per cent; that the bank he founded had prospered into a
railroad; and that, among other things, fifty thousand acres of Oahu
pasture land, which he had bought for a dollar an acre, grew eight
tons of sugar to the acre every eighteen months. No, in all truth,
Isaac Ford was an heroic figure, fit, so Percival Ford thought
privately, to stand beside the statue of Kamehameha I. in front of
the Judiciary Building. Isaac Ford was gone, but he, his son,
carried on the good work at least as inflexibly if not as
masterfully.
He turned his eyes back to the lanai. What was the difference, he
asked himself, between the shameless, grass-girdled hula dances and
the decollete dances of the women of his own race? Was there an
essential difference? or was it a matter of degree?
As he pondered the problem a hand rested on his shoulder.
"Hello, Ford, what are you doing here? Isn't this a bit festive?"
"I try to be lenient, Dr. Kennedy, even as I look on," Percival Ford
answered gravely. "Won't you sit down?"
Dr. Kennedy sat down, clapping his palms sharply. A white-clad
Japanese servant answered swiftly.
Scotch and soda was Kennedy's order; then, turning to the other, he
said:-
"Of course, I don't ask you."
"But I will take something," Ford said firmly. The doctor's eyes
showed surprise, and the servant waited. "Boy, a lemonade, please."
The doctor laughed at it heartily, as a joke on himself, and glanced
at the musicians under the hau tree.
"Why, it's the Aloha Orchestra," he said. "I thought they were with
the Hawaiian Hotel on Tuesday nights. Some rumpus, I guess."
His eyes paused for a moment, and dwelt upon the one who was playing
a guitar and singing a Hawaiian song to the accompaniment of all the
instruments.
His face became grave as he looked at the singer, and it was still
grave as he turned it to his companion.
"Look here, Ford, isn't it time you let up on Joe Garland? I
understand you are in opposition to the Promotion Committee's
sending him to the States on this surf-board proposition, and I've
been wanting to speak to you about it. I should have thought you'd
be glad to get him out of the country. It would be a good way to
end your persecution of him."
"Persecution?" Percival Ford's eyebrows lifted interrogatively.
"Call it by any name you please," Kennedy went on. "You've hounded
that poor devil for years. It's not his fault. Even you will admit
that."
"Not his fault?" Percival Ford's thin lips drew tightly together
for the moment. "Joe Garland is dissolute and idle. He has always
been a wastrel, a profligate."
"But that's no reason you should keep on after him the way you do.
I've watched you from the beginning. The first thing you did when
you returned from college and found him working on the plantation as
outside luna was to fire him--you with your millions, and he with
his sixty dollars a month."
"Not the first thing," Percival Ford said judicially, in a tone he
was accustomed to use in committee meetings. "I gave him his
warning. The superintendent said he was a capable luna. I had no
objection to him on that ground. It was what he did outside working
hours. He undid my work faster than I could build it up. Of what
use were the Sunday schools, the night schools, and the sewing
classes, when in the evenings there was Joe Garland with his
infernal and eternal tum-tumming of guitar and ukulele, his strong
drink, and his hula dancing? After I warned him, I came upon him--I
shall never forget it--came upon him, down at the cabins. It was
evening. I could hear the hula songs before I saw the scene. And
when I did see it, there were the girls, shameless in the moonlight
and dancing--the girls upon whom I had worked to teach clean living
and right conduct. And there were three girls there, I remember,
just graduated from the mission school. Of course I discharged Joe
Garland. I know it was the same at Hilo. People said I went out of
my way when I persuaded Mason and Fitch to discharge him. But it
was the missionaries who requested me to do so. He was undoing
their work by his reprehensible example."
"Afterwards, when he got on the railroad, your railroad, he was
discharged without cause," Kennedy challenged.
"Not so," was the quick answer. "I had him into my private office
and talked with him for half an hour."
"You discharged him for inefficiency?"
"For immoral living, if you please."
Dr. Kennedy laughed with a grating sound. "Who the devil gave it to
you to be judge and jury? Does landlordism give you control of the
immortal souls of those that toil for you? I have been your
physician. Am I to expect tomorrow your ukase that I give up Scotch
and soda or your patronage? Bah! Ford, you take life too
seriously. Besides, when Joe got into that smuggling scrape (he
wasn't in your employ, either), and he sent word to you, asked you
to pay his fine, you left him to do his six months' hard labour on
the reef. Don't forget, you left Joe Garland in the lurch that
time. You threw him down, hard; and yet I remember the first day
you came to school--we boarded, you were only a day scholar--you had
to be initiated. Three times under in the swimming tank--you
remember, it was the regular dose every new boy got. And you held
back. You denied that you could swim. You were frightened,
hysterical--"
"Yes, I know," Percival Ford said slowly. "I was frightened. And
it was a lie, for I could swim . . . And I was frightened."
"And you remember who fought for you? who lied for you harder than
you could lie, and swore he knew you couldn't swim? Who jumped into
the tank and pulled you out after the first under and was nearly
drowned for it by the other boys, who had discovered by that time
that you COULD swim?"
"Of course I know," the other rejoined coldly. "But a generous act
as a boy does not excuse a lifetime of wrong living."
"He has never done wrong to you?--personally and directly, I mean?"
"No," was Percival Ford's answer. "That is what makes my position
impregnable. I have no personal spite against him. He is bad, that
is all. His life is bad--"
"Which is another way of saying that he does not agree with you in
the way life should be lived," the doctor interrupted.
"Have it that way. It is immaterial. He is an idler--"
"With reason," was the interruption, "considering the jobs out of
which you have knocked him."
"He is immoral--"
"Oh, hold on now, Ford. Don't go harping on that. You are pure New
England stock. Joe Garland is half Kanaka. Your blood is thin.
His is warm. Life is one thing to you, another thing to him. He
laughs and sings and dances through life, genial, unselfish,
childlike, everybody's friend. You go through life like a
perambulating prayer-wheel, a friend of nobody but the righteous,
and the righteous are those who agree with you as to what is right.
And after all, who shall say? You live like an anchorite. Joe
Garland lives like a good fellow. Who has extracted the most from
life? We are paid to live, you know. When the wages are too meagre
we throw up the job, which is the cause, believe me, of all rational
suicide. Joe Garland would starve to death on the wages you get
from life. You see, he is made differently. So would you starve on
his wages, which are singing, and love--"
"Lust, if you will pardon me," was the interruption.
Dr. Kennedy smiled.
"Love, to you, is a word of four letters and a definition which you
have extracted from the dictionary. But love, real love, dewy and
palpitant and tender, you do not know. If God made you and me, and
men and women, believe me He made love, too. But to come back.
It's about time you quit hounding Joe Garland. It is not worthy of
you, and it is cowardly. The thing for you to do is to reach out
and lend him a hand."
"Why I, any more than you?" the other demanded. "Why don't you
reach him a hand?"
"I have. I'm reaching him a hand now. I'm trying to get you not to
down the Promotion Committee's proposition of sending him away. I
got him the job at Hilo with Mason and Fitch. I've got him half a
dozen jobs, out of every one of which you drove him. But never mind
that. Don't forget one thing--and a little frankness won't hurt
you--it is not fair play to saddle another fault on Joe Garland; and
you know that you, least of all, are the man to do it. Why, man,
it's not good taste. It's positively indecent."
"Now I don't follow you," Percival Ford answered. "You're up in the
air with some obscure scientific theory of heredity and personal
irresponsibility. But how any theory can hold Joe Garland
irresponsible for his wrongdoings and at the same time hold me
personally responsible for them--more responsible than any one else,
including Joe Garland--is beyond me."
"It's a matter of delicacy, I suppose, or of taste, that prevents
you from following me," Dr. Kennedy snapped out. "It's all very
well, for the sake of society, tacitly to ignore some things, but
you do more than tacitly ignore."
"What is it, pray, that I tacitly ignore!"
Dr. Kennedy was angry. A deeper red than that of constitutional
Scotch and soda suffused his face, as he answered:
"Your father's son."
"Now just what do you mean?"
"Damn it, man, you can't ask me to be plainer spoken than that. But
if you will, all right--Isaac Ford's son--Joe Garland--your
brother."
Percival Ford sat quietly, an annoyed and shocked expression on his
face. Kennedy looked at him curiously, then, as the slow minutes
dragged by, became embarrassed and frightened.
"My God!" he cried finally, "you don't mean to tell me that you
didn't know!"
As in answer, Percival Ford's cheeks turned slowly grey.
"It's a ghastly joke," he said; "a ghastly joke."
The doctor had got himself in hand.
"Everybody knows it," he said. "I thought you knew it. And since
you don't know it, it's time you did, and I'm glad of the chance of
setting you straight. Joe Garland and you are brothers--half-
brothers."
"It's a lie," Ford cried. "You don't mean it. Joe Garland's mother
was Eliza Kunilio." (Dr. Kennedy nodded.) "I remember her well,
with her duck pond and taro patch. His father was Joseph Garland,
the beach-comber." (Dr. Kennedy shook his head.) "He died only two
or three years ago. He used to get drunk. There's where Joe got
his dissoluteness. There's the heredity for you."
"And nobody told you," Kennedy said wonderingly, after a pause.
"Dr. Kennedy, you have said something terrible, which I cannot allow
to pass. You must either prove or, or . . . "
"Prove it yourself. Turn around and look at him. You've got him in
profile. Look at his nose. That's Isaac Ford's. Yours is a thin
edition of it. That's right. Look. The lines are fuller, but they
are all there."
Percival Ford looked at the Kanaka half-breed who played under the
hau tree, and it seemed, as by some illumination, that he was gazing
on a wraith of himself. Feature after feature flashed up an
unmistakable resemblance. Or, rather, it was he who was the wraith
of that other full-muscled and generously moulded man. And his
features, and that other man's features, were all reminiscent of
Isaac Ford. And nobody had told him. Every line of Isaac Ford's
face he knew. Miniatures, portraits, and photographs of his father
were passing in review through his mind, and here and there, over
and again, in the face before him, he caught resemblances and vague
hints of likeness. It was devil's work that could reproduce the
austere features of Isaac Ford in the loose and sensuous features
before him. Once, the man turned, and for one flashing instant it
seemed to Percival Ford that he saw his father, dead and gone,
peering at him out of the face of Joe Garland.
"It's nothing at all," he could faintly hear Dr. Kennedy saying,
"They were all mixed up in the old days. You know that. You've
seen it all your life. Sailors married queens and begat princesses
and all the rest of it. It was the usual thing in the Islands."
"But not with my father," Percival Ford interrupted.
"There you are." Kennedy shrugged his shoulders. "Cosmic sap and
smoke of life. Old Isaac Ford was straitlaced and all the rest, and
I know there's no explaining it, least of all to himself. He
understood it no more than you do. Smoke of life, that's all. And
don't forget one thing, Ford. There was a dab of unruly blood in
old Isaac Ford, and Joe Garland inherited it--all of it, smoke of
life and cosmic sap; while you inherited all of old Isaac's ascetic
blood. And just because your blood is cold, well-ordered, and well-
disciplined, is no reason that you should frown upon Joe Garland.
When Joe Garland undoes the work you do, remember that it is only
old Isaac Ford on both sides, undoing with one hand what he does
with the other. You are Isaac Ford's right hand, let us say; Joe
Garland is his left hand."
Percival Ford made no answer, and in the silence Dr. Kennedy
finished his forgotten Scotch and soda. From across the grounds an
automobile hooted imperatively.
"There's the machine," Dr. Kennedy said, rising. "I've got to run.
I'm sorry I've shaken you up, and at the same time I'm glad. And
know one thing, Isaac Ford's dab of unruly blood was remarkably
small, and Joe Garland got it all. And one other thing. If your
father's left hand offend you, don't smite it off. Besides, Joe is
all right. Frankly, if I could choose between you and him to live
with me on a desert isle, I'd choose Joe."
Little bare-legged children ran about him, playing, on the grass;
but Percival Ford did not see them. He was gazing steadily at the
singer under the hau tree. He even changed his position once, to
get closer. The clerk of the Seaside went by, limping with age and
dragging his reluctant feet. He had lived forty years on the
Islands. Percival Ford beckoned to him, and the clerk came
respectfully, and wondering that he should be noticed by Percival
Ford.
"John," Ford said, "I want you to give me some information. Won't
you sit down?"
The clerk sat down awkwardly, stunned by the unexpected honour. He
blinked at the other and mumbled, "Yes, sir, thank you."
"John, who is Joe Garland?"
The clerk stared at him, blinked, cleared his throat, and said
nothing.
"Go on," Percival Ford commanded.
"Who is he?"
"You're joking me, sir," the other managed to articulate.
"I spoke to you seriously."
The clerk recoiled from him.
"You don't mean to say you don't know?" he questioned, his question
in itself the answer.
"I want to know."
"Why, he's--" John broke off and looked about him helplessly.
"Hadn't you better ask somebody else? Everybody thought you knew.
We always thought . . . "
"Yes, go ahead."
"We always thought that that was why you had it in for him."
Photographs and miniatures of Isaac Ford were trooping through his
son's brain, and ghosts of Isaac Ford seemed in the air about hint
"I wish you good night, sir," he could hear the clerk saying, and he
saw him beginning to limp away.
"John," he called abruptly.
John came back and stood near him, blinking and nervously moistening
his lips.
"You haven't told me yet, you know."
"Oh, about Joe Garland?"
"Yes, about Joe Garland. Who is he?"
"He's your brother, sir, if I say it who shouldn't."
"Thank you, John. Good night."
"And you didn't know?" the old man queried, content to linger, now
that the crucial point was past.
"Thank you, John. Good night," was the response.
"Yes, sir, thank you, sir. I think it's going to rain. Good night,
sir."
Out of the clear sky, filled only with stars and moonlight, fell a
rain so fine and attenuated as to resemble a vapour spray. Nobody
minded it; the children played on, running bare-legged over the
grass and leaping into the sand; and in a few minutes it was gone.
In the south-east, Diamond Head, a black blot, sharply defined,
silhouetted its crater-form against the stars. At sleepy intervals
the surf flung its foam across the sands to the grass, and far out
could be seen the black specks of swimmers under the moon. The
voices of the singers, singing a waltz, died away; and in the
silence, from somewhere under the trees, arose the laugh of a woman
that was a love-cry. It startled Percival Ford, and it reminded him
of Dr. Kennedy's phrase. Down by the outrigger canoes, where they
lay hauled out on the sand, he saw men and women, Kanakas, reclining
languorously, like lotus-eaters, the women in white holokus; and
against one such holoku he saw the dark head of the steersman of the
canoe resting upon the woman's shoulder. Farther down, where the
strip of sand widened at the entrance to the lagoon, he saw a man
and woman walking side by side. As they drew near the light lanai,
he saw the woman's hand go down to her waist and disengage a
girdling arm. And as they passed him, Percival Ford nodded to a
captain he knew, and to a major's daughter. Smoke of life, that was
it, an ample phrase. And again, from under the dark algaroba tree
arose the laugh of a woman that was a love-cry; and past his chair,
on the way to bed, a bare-legged youngster was led by a chiding
Japanese nurse-maid. The voices of the singers broke softly and
meltingly into an Hawaiian love-song, and officers and women, with
encircling arms, were gliding and whirling on the lanai; and once
again the woman laughed under the algaroba trees.
And Percival Ford knew only disapproval of it all. He was irritated
by the love-laugh of the woman, by the steersman with pillowed head
on the white holoku, by the couples that walked on the beach, by the
officers and women that danced, and by the voices of the singers
singing of love, and his brother singing there with them under the
hau tree. The woman that laughed especially irritated him. A
curious train of thought was aroused. He was Isaac Ford's son, and
what had happened with Isaac Ford might happen with him. He felt in
his cheeks the faint heat of a blush at the thought, and experienced
a poignant sense of shame. He was appalled by what was in his
blood. It was like learning suddenly that his father had been a
leper and that his own blood might bear the taint of that dread
disease. Isaac Ford, the austere soldier of the Lord--the old
hypocrite! What difference between him and any beach-comber? The
house of pride that Percival Ford had builded was tumbling about his
ears.
The hours passed, the army people laughed and danced, the native
orchestra played on, and Percival Ford wrestled with the abrupt and
overwhelming problem that had been thrust upon him. He prayed
quietly, his elbow on the table, his head bowed upon his hand, with
all the appearance of any tired onlooker. Between the dances the
army men and women and the civilians fluttered up to him and buzzed
conventionally, and when they went back to the lanai he took up his
wrestling where he had left it off.
He began to patch together his shattered ideal of Isaac Ford, and
for cement he used a cunning and subtle logic. It was of the sort
that is compounded in the brain laboratories of egotists, and it
worked. It was incontrovertible that his father had been made of
finer clay than those about him; but still, old Isaac had been only
in the process of becoming, while he, Percival Ford, had become. As
proof of it, he rehabilitated his father and at the same time
exalted himself. His lean little ego waxed to colossal proportions.
He was great enough to forgive. He glowed at the thought of it.
Isaac Ford had been great, but he was greater, for he could forgive
Isaac Ford and even restore him to the holy place in his memory,
though the place was not quite so holy as it had been. Also, he
applauded Isaac Ford for having ignored the outcome of his one step
aside. Very well, he, too, would ignore it.
The dance was breaking up. The orchestra had finished "Aloha Oe"
and was preparing to go home. Percival Ford clapped his hands for
the Japanese servant.
"You tell that man I want to see him," he said, pointing out Joe
Garland. "Tell him to come here, now."
Joe Garland approached and halted respectfully several paces away,
nervously fingering the guitar which he still carried. The other
did not ask him to sit down.
"You are my brother," he said.
"Why, everybody knows that," was the reply, in tones of wonderment.
"Yes, so I understand," Percival Ford said dryly. "But I did not
know it till this evening."
The half-brother waited uncomfortably in the silence that followed,
during which Percival Ford coolly considered his next utterance.
"You remember that first time I came to school and the boys ducked
me?" he asked. "Why did you take my part?"
The half-brother smiled bashfully.
"Because you knew?"
"Yes, that was why."
"But I didn't know," Percival Ford said in the same dry fashion.
"Yes," the other said.
Another silence fell. Servants were beginning to put out the lights
on the lanai.
"You know . . . now," the half-brother said simply.
Percival Ford frowned. Then he looked the other over with a
considering eye.
"How much will you take to leave the Islands and never come back?"
he demanded.
"And never come back?" Joe Garland faltered. "It is the only land I
know. Other lands are cold. I do not know other lands. I have
many friends here. In other lands there would not be one voice to
say, 'Aloha, Joe, my boy.'"
"I said never to come back," Percival Ford reiterated. "The Alameda
sails tomorrow for San Francisco."
Joe Garland was bewildered.
"But why?" he asked. "You know now that we are brothers."
"That is why," was the retort. "As you said yourself, everybody
knows. I will make it worth your while."
All awkwardness and embarrassment disappeared from Joe Garland.
Birth and station were bridged and reversed.
"You want me to go?" he demanded.
"I want you to go and never come back," Percival Ford answered.
And in that moment, flashing and fleeting, it was given him to see
his brother tower above him like a mountain, and to feel himself
dwindle and dwarf to microscopic insignificance. But it is not well
for one to see himself truly, nor can one so see himself for long
and live; and only for that flashing moment did Percival Ford see
himself and his brother in true perspective. The next moment he was
mastered by his meagre and insatiable ego.
"As I said, I will make it worth your while. You will not suffer.
I will pay you well."
"All right," Joe Garland said. "I'll go."
He started to turn away.
"Joe," the other called. "You see my lawyer tomorrow morning. Five
hundred down and two hundred a month as long as you stay away."
"You are very kind," Joe Garland answered softly. "You are too
kind. And anyway, I guess I don't want your money. I go tomorrow
on the Alameda."
He walked away, but did not say goodbye.
Percival Ford clapped his hands.
"Boy," he said to the Japanese, "a lemonade."
And over the lemonade he smiled long and contentedly to himself.
KOOLAU THE LEPER
"Because we are sick they take away our liberty. We have obeyed the
law. We have done no wrong. And yet they would put us in prison.
Molokai is a prison. That you know. Niuli, there, his sister was
sent to Molokai seven years ago. He has not seen her since. Nor
will he ever see her. She must stay there until she dies. This is
not her will. It is not Niuli's will. It is the will of the white
men who rule the land. And who are these white men?
"We know. We have it from our fathers and our fathers' fathers.
They came like lambs, speaking softly. Well might they speak
softly, for we were many and strong, and all the islands were ours.
As I say, they spoke softly. They were of two kinds. The one kind
asked our permission, our gracious permission, to preach to us the
word of God. The other kind asked our permission, our gracious
permission, to trade with us. That was the beginning. Today all
the islands are theirs, all the land, all the cattle--everything is
theirs. They that preached the word of God and they that preached
the word of Rum have fore-gathered and become great chiefs. They
live like kings in houses of many rooms, with multitudes of servants
to care for them. They who had nothing have everything, and if you,
or I, or any Kanaka be hungry, they sneer and say, 'Well, why don't
you work? There are the plantations.'
Koolau paused. He raised one hand, and with gnarled and twisted
fingers lifted up the blazing wreath of hibiscus that crowned his
black hair. The moonlight bathed the scene in silver. It was a
night of peace, though those who sat about him and listened had all
the seeming of battle-wrecks. Their faces were leonine. Here a
space yawned in a face where should have been a nose, and there an
arm-stump showed where a hand had rotted off. They were men and
women beyond the pale, the thirty of them, for upon them had been
placed the mark of the beast.
They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night, and
their lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped approval of
Koolau's speech. They were creatures who once had been men and
women. But they were men and women no longer. They were monsters--
in face and form grotesque caricatures of everything human. They
were hideously maimed and distorted, and had the seeming of
creatures that had been racked in millenniums of hell. Their hands,
when they possessed them, were like harpy claws. Their faces were
the misfits and slips, crushed and bruised by some mad god at play
in the machinery of life. Here and there were features which the
mad god had smeared half away, and one woman wept scalding tears
from twin pits of horror, where her eyes once had been. Some were
in pain and groaned from their chests. Others coughed, making
sounds like the tearing of tissue. Two were idiots, more like huge
apes marred in the making, until even an ape were an angel. They
mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of drooping,
golden blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe flapped like a fan
upon his shoulder, caught up a gorgeous flower of orange and scarlet
and with it decorated the monstrous ear that flip-flapped with his
every movement.
And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his kingdom,--a
flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which
floated the blattings of wild goats. On three sides the grim walls
rose, festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and
pierced by cave-entrances--the rocky lairs of Koolau's subjects. On
the fourth side the earth fell away into a tremendous abyss, and,
far below, could be seen the summits of lesser peaks and crags, at
whose bases foamed and rumbled the Pacific surge. In fine weather a
boat could land on the rocky beach that marked the entrance of
Kalalau Valley, but the weather must be very fine. And a cool-
headed mountaineer might climb from the beach to the head of Kalalau
Valley, to this pocket among the peaks where Koolau ruled; but such
a mountaineer must be very cool of head, and he must know the wild-
goat trails as well. The marvel was that the mass of human wreckage
that constituted Koolau's people should have been able to drag its
helpless misery over the giddy goat-trails to this inaccessible
spot.
"Brothers," Koolau began.
But one of the mowing, apelike travesties emitted a wild shriek of
madness, and Koolau waited while the shrill cachination was tossed
back and forth among the rocky walls and echoed distantly through
the pulseless night.
"Brothers, is it not strange? Ours was the land, and behold, the
land is not ours. What did these preachers of the word of God and
the word of Rum give us for the land? Have you received one dollar,
as much as one dollar, any one of you, for the land? Yet it is
theirs, and in return they tell us we can go to work on the land,
their land, and that what we produce by our toil shall be theirs.
Yet in the old days we did not have to work. Also, when we are
sick, they take away our freedom."
"Who brought the sickness, Koolau?" demanded Kiloliana, a lean and
wiry man with a face so like a laughing faun's that one might expect
to see the cloven hoofs under him. They were cloven, it was true,
but the cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions. Yet
this was Kiloliana, the most daring climber of them all, the man who
knew every goat-trail and who had led Koolau and his wretched
followers into the recesses of Kalalau.
"Ay, well questioned," Koolau answered. "Because we would not work
the miles of sugar-cane where once our horses pastured, they brought
the Chinese slaves from overseas. And with them came the Chinese
sickness--that which we suffer from and because of which they would
imprison us on Molokai. We were born on Kauai. We have been to the
other islands, some here and some there, to Oahu, to Maui, to
Hawaii, to Honolulu. Yet always did we come back to Kauai. Why did
we come back? There must be a reason. Because we love Kauai. We
were born here. Here we have lived. And here shall we die--unless-
-unless--there be weak hearts amongst us. Such we do not want.
They are fit for Molokai. And if there be such, let them not
remain. Tomorrow the soldiers land on the shore. Let the weak
hearts go down to them. They will be sent swiftly to Molokai. As
for us, we shall stay and fight. But know that we will not die. We
have rifles. You know the narrow trails where men must creep, one
by one. I, alone, Koolau, who was once a cowboy on Niihau, can hold
the trail against a thousand men. Here is Kapalei, who was once a
judge over men and a man with honour, but who is now a hunted rat,
like you and me. Hear him. He is wise."
Kapalei arose. Once he had been a judge. He had gone to college at
Punahou. He had sat at meat with lords and chiefs and the high
representatives of alien powers who protected the interests of
traders and missionaries. Such had been Kapalei. But now, as
Koolau had said, he was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law,
sunk so deep in the mire of human horror that he was above the law
as well as beneath it. His face was featureless, save for gaping
orifices and for the lidless eyes that burned under hairless brows.
"Let us not make trouble," he began. "We ask to be left alone. But
if they do not leave us alone, then is the trouble theirs and the
penalty. My fingers are gone, as you see." He held up his stumps
of hands that all might see. "Yet have I the joint of one thumb
left, and it can pull a trigger as firmly as did its lost neighbour
in the old days. We love Kauia. Let us live here, or die here, but
do not let us go to the prison of Molokai. The sickness is not
ours. We have not sinned. The men who preached the word of God and
the word of Rum brought the sickness with the coolie slaves who work
the stolen land. I have been a judge. I know the law and the
justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal a man's land, to
make that man sick with the Chinese sickness, and then to put that
man in prison for life."
"Life is short, and the days are filled with pain," said Koolau.
"Let us drink and dance and be happy as we can."
From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and passed
round. The calabashes were filled with the fierce distillation of
the root of the ti-plant; and as the liquid fire coursed through
them and mounted to their brains, they forgot that they had once
been men and women, for they were men and women once more. The
woman who wept scalding tears from open eye-pits was indeed a woman
apulse with life as she plucked the strings of an ukulele and lifted
her voice in a barbaric love-call such as might have come from the
dark forest-depths of the primeval world. The air tingled with her
cry, softly imperious and seductive. Upon a mat, timing his rhythm
to the woman's song Kiloliana danced. It was unmistakable. Love
danced in all his movements, and, next, dancing with him on the mat,
was a woman whose heavy hips and generous breast gave the lie to her
disease-corroded face. It was a dance of the living dead, for in
their disintegrating bodies life still loved and longed. Ever the
woman whose sightless eyes ran scalding tears chanted her love-cry,
ever the dancers of love danced in the warm night, and ever the
calabashes went around till in all their brains were maggots
crawling of memory and desire. And with the woman on the mat danced
a slender maid whose face was beautiful and unmarred, but whose
twisted arms that rose and fell marked the disease's ravage. And
the two idiots, gibbering and mouthing strange noises, danced apart,
grotesque, fantastic, travestying love as they themselves had been
travestied by life.
But the woman's love-cry broke midway, the calabashes were lowered,
and the dancers ceased, as all gazed into the abyss above the sea,
where a rocket flared like a wan phantom through the moonlit air.
"It is the soldiers," said Koolau. "Tomorrow there will be
fighting. It is well to sleep and be prepared."
The lepers obeyed, crawling away to their lairs in the cliff, until
only Koolau remained, sitting motionless in the moonlight, his rifle
across his knees, as he gazed far down to the boats landing on the
beach.
The far head of Kalalau Valley had been well chosen as a refuge.
Except Kiloliana, who knew back-trails up the precipitous walls, no
man could win to the gorge save by advancing across a knife-edged
ridge. This passage was a hundred yards in length. At best, it was
a scant twelve inches wide. On either side yawned the abyss. A
slip, and to right or left the man would fall to his death. But
once across he would find himself in an earthly paradise. A sea of
vegetation laved the landscape, pouring its green billows from wall
to wall, dripping from the cliff-lips in great vine-masses, and
flinging a spray of ferns and air-plants in to the multitudinous
crevices. During the many months of Koolau's rule, he and his
followers had fought with this vegetable sea. The choking jungle,
with its riot of blossoms, had been driven back from the bananas,
oranges, and mangoes that grew wild. In little clearings grew the
wild arrowroot; on stone terraces, filled with soil scrapings, were
the taro patches and the melons; and in every open space where the
sunshine penetrated were papaia trees burdened with their golden
fruit.
Koolau had been driven to this refuge from the lower valley by the
beach. And if he were driven from it in turn, he knew of gorges
among the jumbled peaks of the inner fastnesses where he could lead
his subjects and live. And now he lay with his rifle beside him,
peering down through a tangled screen of foliage at the soldiers on
the beach. He noted that they had large guns with them, from which
the sunshine flashed as from mirrors. The knife-edged passage lay
directly before him. Crawling upward along the trail that led to it
he could see tiny specks of men. He knew they were not the
soldiers, but the police. When they failed, then the soldiers would
enter the game.
He affectionately rubbed a twisted hand along his rifle barrel and
made sure that the sights were clean. He had learned to shoot as a
wild-cattle hunter on Niihau, and on that island his skill as a
marksman was unforgotten. As the toiling specks of men grew nearer
and larger, he estimated the range, judged the deflection of the
wind that swept at right angles across the line of fire, and
calculated the chances of overshooting marks that were so far below
his level. But he did not shoot. Not until they reached the
beginning of the passage did he make his presence known. He did not
disclose himself, but spoke from the thicket.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
"We want Koolau, the leper," answered the man who led the native
police, himself a blue-eyed American.
"You must go back," Koolau said.
He knew the man, a deputy sheriff, for it was by him that he had
been harried out of Niihau, across Kauai, to Kalalau Valley, and out
of the valley to the gorge.
"Who are you?" the sheriff asked.
"I am Koolau, the leper," was the reply.
"Then come out. We want you. Dead or alive, there is a thousand
dollars on your head. You cannot escape."
Koolau laughed aloud in the thicket.
"Come out!" the sheriff commanded, and was answered by silence.
He conferred with the police, and Koolau saw that they were
preparing to rush him.
"Koolau," the sheriff called. "Koolau, I am coming across to get
you."
"Then look first and well about you at the sun and sea and sky, for
it will be the last time you behold them."
"That's all right, Koolau," the sheriff said soothingly. "I know
you're a dead shot. But you won't shoot me. I have never done you
any wrong."
Koolau grunted in the thicket.
"I say, you know, I've never done you any wrong, have I?" the
sheriff persisted.
"You do me wrong when you try to put me in prison," was the reply.
"And you do me wrong when you try for the thousand dollars on my
head. If you will live, stay where you are."
"I've got to come across and get you. I'm sorry. But it is my
duty."
"You will die before you get across."
The sheriff was no coward. Yet was he undecided. He gazed into the
gulf on either side and ran his eyes along the knife-edge he must
travel. Then he made up his mind.
"Koolau," he called.
But the thicket remained silent.
"Koolau, don't shoot. I am coming."
The sheriff turned, gave some orders to the police, then started on
his perilous way. He advanced slowly. It was like walking a tight
rope. He had nothing to lean upon but the air. The lava rock
crumbled under his feet, and on either side the dislodged fragments
pitched downward through the depths. The sun blazed upon him, and
his face was wet with sweat. Still he advanced, until the halfway
point was reached.
"Stop!" Koolau commanded from the thicket. "One more step and I
shoot."
The sheriff halted, swaying for balance as he stood poised above the
void. His face was pale, but his eyes were determined. He licked
his dry lips before he spoke.
"Koolau, you won't shoot me. I know you won't."
He started once more. The bullet whirled him half about. On his
face was an expression of querulous surprise as he reeled to the
fall. He tried to save himself by throwing his body across the
knife-edge; but at that moment he knew death. The next moment the
knife-edge was vacant. Then came the rush, five policemen, in
single file, with superb steadiness, running along the knife-edge.
At the same instant the rest of the posse opened fire on the
thicket. It was madness. Five times Koolau pulled the trigger, so
rapidly that his shots constituted a rattle. Changing his position
and crouching low under the bullets that were biting and singing
through the bushes, he peered out. Four of the police had followed
the sheriff. The fifth lay across the knife-edge still alive. On
the farther side, no longer firing, were the surviving police. On
the naked rock there was no hope for them. Before they could
clamber down Koolau could have picked off the last man. But he did
not fire, and, after a conference, one of them took off a white
undershirt and waved it as a flag. Followed by another, he advanced
along the knife-edge to their wounded comrade. Koolau gave no sign,
but watched them slowly withdraw and become specks as they descended
into the lower valley.
Two hours later, from another thicket, Koolau watched a body of
police trying to make the ascent from the opposite side of the
valley. He saw the wild goats flee before them as they climbed
higher and higher, until he doubted his judgment and sent for
Kiloliana, who crawled in beside him.
"No, there is no way," said Kiloliana.
"The goats?" Koolau questioned.
"They come over from the next valley, but they cannot pass to this.
There is no way. Those men are not wiser than goats. They may fall
to their deaths. Let us watch."
"They are brave men," said Koolau. "Let us watch."
Side by side they lay among the morning-glories, with the yellow
blossoms of the hau dropping upon them from overhead, watching the
motes of men toil upward, till the thing happened, and three of
them, slipping, rolling, sliding, dashed over a cliff-lip and fell
sheer half a thousand feet.
Kiloliana chuckled.
"We will be bothered no more," he said.
"They have war guns," Koolau made answer. "The soldiers have not
yet spoken."
In the drowsy afternoon, most of the lepers lay in their rock dens
asleep. Koolau, his rifle on his knees, fresh-cleaned and ready,
dozed in the entrance to his own den. The maid with the twisted
arms lay below in the thicket and kept watch on the knife-edge
passage. Suddenly Koolau was startled wide awake by the sound of an
explosion on the beach. The next instant the atmosphere was
incredibly rent asunder. The terrible sound frightened him. It was
as if all the gods had caught the envelope of the sky in their hands
and were ripping it apart as a woman rips apart a sheet of cotton
cloth. But it was such an immense ripping, growing swiftly nearer.
Koolau glanced up apprehensively, as if expecting to see the thing.
Then high up on the cliff overhead the shell burst in a fountain of
black smoke. The rock was shattered, the fragments falling to the
foot of the cliff.
Koolau passed his hand across his sweaty brow. He was terribly
shaken. He had had no experience with shell-fire, and this was more
dreadful than anything he had imagined.
"One," said Kapahei, suddenly bethinking himself to keep count.
A second and a third shell flew screaming over the top of the wall,
bursting beyond view. Kapahei methodically kept the count. The
lepers crowded into the open space before the caves. At first they
were frightened, but as the shells continued their flight overhead
the leper folk became reassured and began to admire the spectacle.
The two idiots shrieked with delight, prancing wild antics as each
air-tormenting shell went by. Koolau began to recover his
confidence. No damage was being done. Evidently they could not aim
such large missiles at such long range with the precision of a
rifle.
But a change came over the situation. The shells began to fall
short. One burst below in the thicket by the knife-edge. Koolau
remembered the maid who lay there on watch, and ran down to see.
The smoke was still rising from the bushes when he crawled in. He
was astounded. The branches were splintered and broken. Where the
girl had lain was a hole in the ground. The girl herself was in
shattered fragments. The shell had burst right on her.
First peering out to make sure no soldiers were attempting the
passage, Koolau started back on the run for the caves. All the time
the shells were moaning, whining, screaming by, and the valley was
rumbling and reverberating with the explosions. As he came in sight
of the caves, he saw the two idiots cavorting about, clutching each
other's hands with their stumps of fingers. Even as he ran, Koolau
saw a spout of black smoke rise from the ground, near to the idiots.
They were flung apart bodily by the explosion. One lay motionless,
but the other was dragging himself by his hands toward the cave.
His legs trailed out helplessly behind him, while the blood was
pouring from his body. He seemed bathed in blood, and as he crawled
he cried like a little dog. The rest of the lepers, with the
exception of Kapahei, had fled into the caves.
"Seventeen," said Kapahei. "Eighteen," he added.
This last shell had fairly entered into one of the caves. The
explosion caused the caves to empty. But from the particular cave
no one emerged. Koolau crept in through the pungent, acrid smoke.
Four bodies, frightfully mangled, lay about. One of them was the
sightless woman whose tears till now had never ceased.
Outside, Koolau found his people in a panic and already beginning to
climb the goat-trail that led out of the gorge and on among the
jumbled heights and chasms. The wounded idiot, whining feebly and
dragging himself along on the ground by his hands, was trying to
follow. But at the first pitch of the wall his helplessness
overcame him and he fell back.
"It would be better to kill him," said Koolau to Kapahei, who still
sat in the same place.
"Twenty-two," Kapahei answered. "Yes, it would be a wise thing to
kill him. Twenty-three--twenty-four."
The idiot whined sharply when he saw the rifle levelled at him.
Koolau hesitated, then lowered the gun.
"It is a hard thing to do," he said.
"You are a fool, twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Kapahei. "Let me
show you."
He arose, and with a heavy fragment of rock in his hand, approached
the wounded thing. As he lifted his arm to strike, a shell burst
full upon him, relieving him of the necessity of the act and at the
same time putting an end to his count.
Koolau was alone in the gorge. He watched the last of his people
drag their crippled bodies over the brow of the height and
disappear. Then he turned and went down to the thicket where the
maid had keen killed. The shell-fire still continued, but he
remained; for far below he could see the soldiers climbing up. A
shell burst twenty feet away. Flattening himself into the earth, he
heard the rush of the fragments above his body. A shower of hau
blossoms rained upon him. He lifted his head to peer down the
trail, and sighed. He was very much afraid. Bullets from rifles
would not have worried him, but this shell-fire was abominable.
Each time a shell shrieked by he shivered and crouched; but each
time he lifted his head again to watch the trail.
At last the shells ceased. This, he reasoned, was because the
soldiers were drawing near. They crept along the trail in single
file, and he tried to count them until he lost track. At any rate,
there were a hundred or so of them--all come after Koolau the leper.
He felt a fleeting prod of pride. With war guns and rifles, police
and soldiers, they came for him, and he was only one man, a crippled
wreck of a man at that. They offered a thousand dollars for him,
dead or alive. In all his life he had never possessed that much
money. The thought was a bitter one. Kapahei had been right. He,
Koolau, had done no wrong. Because the haoles wanted labour with
which to work the stolen land, they had brought in the Chinese
coolies, and with them had come the sickness. And now, because he
had caught the sickness, he was worth a thousand dollars--but not to
himself. It was his worthless carcass, rotten with disease or dead
from a bursting shell, that was worth all that money.
When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was prompted
to warn them. But his gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid,
and he kept silent. When six had ventured on the knife-edge, he
opened fire. Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare. He
emptied his magazine, reloaded, and emptied it again. He kept on
shooting. All his wrongs were blazing in his brain, and he was in a
fury of vengeance. All down the goat-trail the soldiers were
firing, and though they lay flat and sought to shelter themselves in
the shallow inequalities of the surface, they were exposed marks to
him. Bullets whistled and thudded about him, and an occasional
ricochet sang sharply through the air. One bullet ploughed a crease
through his scalp, and a second burned across his shoulder-blade
without breaking the skin.
It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing. The soldiers
began to retreat, helping along their wounded. As Koolau picked
them off he became aware of the smell of burnt meat. He glanced
about him at first, and then discovered that it was his own hands.
The heat of the rifle was doing it. The leprosy had destroyed most
of the nerves in his hands. Though his flesh burned and he smelled
it, there was no sensation.
He lay in the thicket, smiling, until he remembered the war guns.
Without doubt they would open upon him again, and this time upon the
very thicket from which he had inflicted the danger. Scarcely had
he changed his position to a nook behind a small shoulder of the
wall where he had noted that no shells fell, than the bombardment
recommenced. He counted the shells. Sixty more were thrown into
the gorge before the war-guns ceased. The tiny area was pitted with
their explosions, until it seemed impossible that any creature could
have survived. So the soldiers thought, for, under the burning
afternoon sun, they climbed the goat-trail again. And again the
knife-edged passage was disputed, and again they fell back to the
beach.
For two days longer Koolau held the passage, though the soldiers
contented themselves with flinging shells into his retreat. Then
Pahau, a leper boy, came to the top of the wall at the back of the
gorge and shouted down to him that Kiloliana, hunting goats that
they might eat, had been killed by a fall, and that the women were
frightened and knew not what to do. Koolau called the boy down and
left him with a spare gun with which to guard the passage. Koolau
found his people disheartened. The majority of them were too
helpless to forage food for themselves under such forbidding
circumstances, and all were starving. He selected two women and a
man who were not too far gone with the disease, and sent them back
to the gorge to bring up food and mats. The rest he cheered and
consoled until even the weakest took a hand in building rough
shelters for themselves.
But those he had dispatched for food did not return, and he started
back for the gorge. As he came out on the brow of the wall, half a
dozen rifles cracked. A bullet tore through the fleshy part of his
shoulder, and his cheek was cut by a sliver of rock where a second
bullet smashed against the cliff. In the moment that this happened,
and he leaped back, he saw that the gorge was alive with soldiers.
His own people had betrayed him. The shell-fire had been too
terrible, and they had preferred the prison of Molokai.
Koolau dropped back and unslung one of his heavy cartridge-belts.
Lying among the rocks, he allowed the head and shoulders of the
first soldier to rise clearly into view before pulling trigger.
Twice this happened, and then, after some delay, in place of a head
and shoulders a white flag was thrust above the edge of the wall.
"What do you want?" be demanded.
"I want you, if you are Koolau the leper," came the answer.
Koolau forgot where he was, forgot everything, as he lay and
marvelled at the strange persistence of these haoles who would have
their will though the sky fell in. Aye, they would have their will
over all men and all things, even though they died in getting it.
He could not but admire them, too, what of that will in them that
was stronger than life and that bent all things to their bidding.
He was convinced of the hopelessness of his struggle. There was no
gainsaying that terrible will of the haoles. Though he killed a
thousand, yet would they rise like the sands of the sea and come
upon him, ever more and more. They never knew when they were
beaten. That was their fault and their virtue. It was where his
own kind lacked. He could see, now, how the handful of the
preachers of God and the preachers of Rum had conquered the land.
It was because -
"Well, what have you got to say? Will you come with me?"
It was he voice of the invisible man under the white flag. There he
was, like any haole, driving straight toward the end determined.
"Let us talk," said Koolau.
The man's head and shoulders arose, then his whole body. He was a
smooth-faced, blue-eyed youngster of twenty-five, slender and natty
in his captain's uniform. He advanced until halted, then seated
himself a dozen feet away.
"You are a brave man," said Koolau wonderingly. "I could kill you
like a fly."
"No, you couldn't," was the answer.
"Why not?"
"Because you are a man, Koolau, though a bad one. I know your
story. You kill fairly."
Koolau grunted, but was secretly pleased.
"What have you done with my people?" he demanded. "The boy, the two
women, and the man?"
"They gave themselves up, as I have now come for you to do."
Koolau laughed incredulously.
"I am a free man," he announced. "I have done no wrong. All I ask
is to be left alone. I have lived free, and I shall die free. I
will never give myself up."
"Then your people are wiser than you," answered the young captain.
"Look--they are coming now."
Koolau turned and watched the remnant of his band approach.
Groaning and sighing, a ghastly procession, it dragged its
wretchedness past. It was given to Koolau to taste a deeper
bitterness, for they hurled imprecations and insults at him as they
went by; and the panting hag who brought up the rear halted, and
with skinny, harpy-claws extended, shaking her snarling death's head
from side to side, she laid a curse upon him. One by one they
dropped over the lip-edge and surrendered to the hiding soldiers.
"You can go now," said Koolau to the captain. "I will never give
myself up. That is my last word. Good-bye."
The captain slipped over the cliff to his soldiers. The next
moment, and without a flag of truce, he hoisted his hat on his
scabbard, and Koolau's bullet tore through it. That afternoon they
shelled him out from the beach, and as he retreated into the high
inaccessible pockets beyond, the soldiers followed him.
For six weeks they hunted him from pocket to pocket, over the
volcanic peaks and along the goat-trails. When he hid in the
lantana jungle, they formed lines of beaters, and through lantana
jungle and guava scrub they drove him like a rabbit. But ever he
turned and doubled and eluded. There was no cornering him. When
pressed too closely, his sure rifle held them back and they carried
their wounded down the goat-trails to the beach. There were times
when they did the shooting as his brown body showed for a moment
through the underbrush. Once, five of them caught him on an exposed
goat-trail between pockets. They emptied their rifles at him as he
limped and climbed along his dizzy way. Afterwards they found
bloodstains and knew that he was wounded. At the end of six weeks
they gave up. The soldiers and police returned to Honolulu, and
Kalalau Valley was left to him for his own, though head-hunters
ventured after him from time to time and to their own undoing.
Two years later, and for the last time, Koolau crawled into a
thicket and lay down among the ti-leaves and wild ginger blossoms.
Free he had lived, and free he was dying. A slight drizzle of rain
began to fall, and he drew a ragged blanket about the distorted
wreck of his limbs. His body was covered with an oilskin coat.
Across his chest he laid his Mauser rifle, lingering affectionately
for a moment to wipe the dampness from the barrel. The hand with
which he wiped had no fingers left upon it with which to pull the
trigger.
He closed his eyes, for, from the weakness in his body and the fuzzy
turmoil in his brain, he knew that his end was near. Like a wild
animal he had crept into hiding to die. Half-conscious, aimless and
wandering, he lived back in his life to his early manhood on Niihau.
As life faded and the drip of the rain grew dim in his ears it
seemed to him that he was once more in the thick of the horse-
breaking, with raw colts rearing and bucking under him, his stirrups
tied together beneath, or charging madly about the breaking corral
and driving the helping cowboys over the rails. The next instant,
and with seeming naturalness, he found himself pursuing the wild
bulls of the upland pastures, roping them and leading them down to
the valleys. Again the sweat and dust of the branding pen stung his
eyes and bit his nostrils.
All his lusty, whole-bodied youth was his, until the sharp pangs of
impending dissolution brought him back. He lifted his monstrous
hands and gazed at them in wonder. But how? Why? Why should the
wholeness of that wild youth of his change to this? Then he
remembered, and once again, and for a moment, he was Koolau, the
leper. His eyelids fluttered wearily down and the drip of the rain
ceased in his ears. A prolonged trembling set up in his body.
This, too, ceased. He half-lifted his head, but it fell back. Then
his eyes opened, and did not close. His last thought was of his
Mauser, and he pressed it against his chest with his folded,
fingerless hands.
GOOD-BYE, JACK
Hawaii is a queer place. Everything socially is what I may call
topsy-turvy. Not but what things are correct. They are almost too
much so. But still things are sort of upside down. The most ultra-
exclusive set there is the "Missionary Crowd." It comes with rather
a shock to learn that in Hawaii the obscure martyrdom-seeking
missionary sits at the head of the table of the moneyed aristocracy.
But it is true. The humble New Englanders who came out in the third
decade of the nineteenth century, came for the lofty purpose of
teaching the kanakas the true religion, the worship of the one only
genuine and undeniable God. So well did they succeed in this, and
also in civilizing the kanaka, that by the second or third
generation he was practically extinct. This being the fruit of the
seed of the Gospel, the fruit of the seed of the missionaries (the
sons and the grandsons) was the possession of the islands
themselves,--of the land, the ports, the town sites, and the sugar
plantations: The missionary who came to give the bread of life
remained to gobble up the whole heathen feast.
But that is not the Hawaiian queerness I started out to tell. Only
one cannot speak of things Hawaiian without mentioning the
missionaries. There is Jack Kersdale, the man I wanted to tell
about; he came of missionary stock. That is, on his grandmother's
side. His grandfather was old Benjamin Kersdale, a Yankee trader,
who got his start for a million in the old days by selling cheap
whiskey and square-face gin. There's another queer thing. The old
missionaries and old traders were mortal enemies. You see, their
interests conflicted. But their children made it up by
intermarrying and dividing the island between them.
Life in Hawaii is a song. That's the way Stoddard put it in his
"Hawaii Noi":-
"Thy life is music--Fate the notes prolong!
Each isle a stanza, and the whole a song."
And he was right. Flesh is golden there. The native women are sun-
ripe Junos, the native men bronzed Apollos. They sing, and dance,
and all are flower-bejewelled and flower-crowned. And, outside the
rigid "Missionary Crowd," the white men yield to the climate and the
sun, and no matter how busy they may be, are prone to dance and sing
and wear flowers behind their ears and in their hair. Jack Kersdale
was one of these fellows. He was one of the busiest men I ever met.
He was a several-times millionaire. He was a sugar-king, a coffee
planter, a rubber pioneer, a cattle rancher, and a promoter of three
out of every four new enterprises launched in the islands. He was a
society man, a club man, a yachtsman, a bachelor, and withal as
handsome a man as was ever doted upon by mammas with marriageable
daughters. Incidentally, he had finished his education at Yale, and
his head was crammed fuller with vital statistics and scholarly
information concerning Hawaii Nei than any other islander I ever
encountered. He turned off an immense amount of work, and he sang
and danced and put flowers in his hair as immensely as any of the
idlers.
He had grit, and had fought two duels--both, political--when he
was no more than a raw youth essaying his first adventures in
politics. In fact, he played a most creditable and courageous part
in the last revolution, when the native dynasty was overthrown; and
he could not have been over sixteen at the time. I am pointing out
that he was no coward, in order that you may appreciate what happens
later on. I've seen him in the breaking yard at the Haleakala
Ranch, conquering a four-year-old brute that for two years had
defied the pick of Von Tempsky's cow-boys. And I must tell of one
other thing. It was down in Kona,--or up, rather, for the Kona
people scorn to live at less than a thousand feet elevation. We
were all on the lanai of Doctor Goodhue's bungalow. I was talking
with Dottie Fairchild when it happened. A big centipede--it was
seven inches, for we measured it afterwards--fell from the rafters
overhead squarely into her coiffure. I confess, the hideousness of
it paralysed me. I couldn't move. My mind refused to work. There,
within two feet of me, the ugly venomous devil was writhing in her
hair. It threatened at any moment to fall down upon her exposed
shoulders--we had just come out from dinner.
"What is it?" she asked, starting to raise her hand to her head.
"Don't!" I cried. "Don't!"
"But what is it?" she insisted, growing frightened by the fright she
read in my eyes and on my stammering lips.
My exclamation attracted Kersdale's attention. He glanced our way
carelessly, but in that glance took in everything. He came over to
us, but without haste.
"Please don't move, Dottie," he said quietly.
He never hesitated, nor did he hurry and make a bungle of it.
"Allow me," he said.
And with one hand he caught her scarf and drew it tightly around her
shoulders so that the centipede could not fall inside her bodice.
With the other hand--the right--he reached into her hair, caught the
repulsive abomination as near as he was able by the nape of the
neck, and held it tightly between thumb and forefinger as he
withdrew it from her hair. It was as horrible and heroic a sight as
man could wish to see. It made my flesh crawl. The centipede,
seven inches of squirming legs, writhed and twisted and dashed
itself about his hand, the body twining around the fingers and the
legs digging into the skin and scratching as the beast endeavoured
to free itself. It bit him twice--I saw it--though he assured the
ladies that he was not harmed as he dropped it upon the walk and
stamped it into the gravel. But I saw him in the surgery five
minutes afterwards, with Doctor Goodhue scarifying the wounds and
injecting permanganate of potash. The next morning Kersdale's arm
was as big as a barrel, and it was three weeks before the swelling
went down.
All of which has nothing to do with my story, but which I could not
avoid giving in order to show that Jack Kersdale was anything but a
coward. It was the cleanest exhibition of grit I have ever seen.
He never turned a hair. The smile never left his lips. And he
dived with thumb and forefinger into Dottie Fairchild's hair as
gaily as if it had been a box of salted almonds. Yet that was the
man I was destined to see stricken with a fear a thousand times more
hideous even than the fear that was mine when I saw that writhing
abomination in Dottie Fairchild's hair, dangling over her eyes and
the trap of her bodice.
I was interested in leprosy, and upon that, as upon every other
island subject, Kersdale had encyclopedic knowledge. In fact,
leprosy was one of his hobbies. He was an ardent defender of the
settlement at Molokai, where all the island lepers were segregated.
There was much talk and feeling among the natives, fanned by the
demagogues, concerning the cruelties of Molokai, where men and
women, not alone banished from friends and family, were compelled to
live in perpetual imprisonment until they died. There were no
reprieves, no commutations of sentences. "Abandon hope" was written
over the portal of Molokai.
"I tell you they are happy there," Kersdale insisted. "And they are
infinitely better off than their friends and relatives outside who
have nothing the matter with them. The horrors of Molokai are all
poppycock. I can take you through any hospital or any slum in any
of the great cities of the world and show you a thousand times worse
horrors. The living death! The creatures that once were men!
Bosh! You ought to see those living deaths racing horses on the
Fourth of July. Some of them own boats. One has a gasoline launch.
They have nothing to do but have a good time. Food, shelter,
clothes, medical attendance, everything, is theirs. They are the
wards of the Territory. They have a much finer climate than
Honolulu, and the scenery is magnificent. I shouldn't mind going
down there myself for the rest of my days. It is a lovely spot."
So Kersdale on the joyous leper. He was not afraid of leprosy. He
said so himself, and that there wasn't one chance in a million for
him or any other white man to catch it, though he confessed
afterward that one of his school chums, Alfred Starter, had
contracted it, gone to Molokai, and there died.
"You know, in the old days," Kersdale explained, "there was no
certain test for leprosy. Anything unusual or abnormal was
sufficient to send a fellow to Molokai. The result was that dozens
were sent there who were no more lepers than you or I. But they
don't make that mistake now. The Board of Health tests are
infallible. The funny thing is that when the test was discovered
they immediately went down to Molokai and applied it, and they found
a number who were not lepers. These were immediately deported.
Happy to get away? They wailed harder at leaving the settlement
than when they left Honolulu to go to it. Some refused to leave,
and really had to be forced out. One of them even married a leper
woman in the last stages and then wrote pathetic letters to the
Board of Health, protesting against his expulsion on the ground that
no one was so well able as he to take care of his poor old wife."
"What is this infallible test?" I demanded.
"The bacteriological test. There is no getting away from it.
Doctor Hervey--he's our expert, you know--was the first man to apply
it here. He is a wizard. He knows more about leprosy than any
living man, and if a cure is ever discovered, he'll be that
discoverer. As for the test, it is very simple. They have
succeeded in isolating the bacillus leprae and studying it. They
know it now when they see it. All they do is to snip a bit of skin
from the suspect and subject it to the bacteriological test. A man
without any visible symptoms may be chock full of the leprosy
bacilli."
"Then you or I, for all we know," I suggested, "may be full of it
now."
Kersdale shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"Who can say? It takes seven years for it to incubate. If you have
any doubts go and see Doctor Hervey. He'll just snip out a piece of
your skin and let you know in a jiffy."
Later on he introduced me to Dr. Hervey, who loaded me down with
Board of Health reports and pamphlets on the subject, and took me
out to Kalihi, the Honolulu receiving station, where suspects were
examined and confirmed lepers were held for deportation to Molokai.
These deportations occurred about once a month, when, the last good-
byes said, the lepers were marched on board the little steamer, the
Noeau, and carried down to the settlement.
One afternoon, writing letters at the club, Jack Kersdale dropped in
on me.
"Just the man I want to see," was his greeting. "I'll show you the
saddest aspect of the whole situation--the lepers wailing as they
depart for Molokai. The Noeau will be taking them on board in a few
minutes. But let me warn you not to let your feelings be harrowed.
Real as their grief is, they'd wail a whole sight harder a year
hence if the Board of Health tried to take them away from Molokai.
We've just time for a whiskey and soda. I've a carriage outside.
It won't take us five minutes to get down to the wharf."
To the wharf we drove. Some forty sad wretches, amid their mats,
blankets, and luggage of various sorts, were squatting on the
stringer piece. The Noeau had just arrived and was making fast to a
lighter that lay between her and the wharf. A Mr. McVeigh, the
superintendent of the settlement, was overseeing the embarkation,
and to him I was introduced, also to Dr. Georges, one of the Board
of Health physicians whom I had already met at Kalihi. The lepers
were a woebegone lot. The faces of the majority were hideous--too
horrible for me to describe. But here and there I noticed fairly
good-looking persons, with no apparent signs of the fell disease
upon them. One, I noticed, a little white girl, not more than
twelve, with blue eyes and golden hair. One cheek, however, showed
the leprous bloat. On my remarking on the sadness of her alien
situation among the brown-skinned afflicted ones, Doctor Georges
replied:-
"Oh, I don't know. It's a happy day in her life. She comes from
Kauai. Her father is a brute. And now that she has developed the
disease she is going to join her mother at the settlement. Her
mother was sent down three years ago--a very bad case."
"You can't always tell from appearances," Mr. McVeigh explained.
That man there, that big chap, who looks the pink of condition, with
nothing the matter with him, I happen to know has a perforating
ulcer in his foot and another in his shoulder-blade. Then there are
others--there, see that girl's hand, the one who is smoking the
cigarette. See her twisted fingers. That's the anaesthetic form.
It attacks the nerves. You could cut her fingers off with a dull
knife, or rub them off on a nutmeg-grater, and she would not
experience the slightest sensation."
"Yes, but that fine-looking woman, there," I persisted; "surely,
surely, there can't be anything the matter with her. She is too
glorious and gorgeous altogether."
"A sad case," Mr. McVeigh answered over his shoulder, already
turning away to walk down the wharf with Kersdale.
She was a beautiful woman, and she was pure Polynesian. From my
meagre knowledge of the race and its types I could not but conclude
that she had descended from old chief stock. She could not have
been more than twenty-three or four. Her lines and proportions were
magnificent, and she was just beginning to show the amplitude of the
women of her race.
"It was a blow to all of us," Dr. Georges volunteered. "She gave
herself up voluntarily, too. No one suspected. But somehow she had
contracted the disease. It broke us all up, I assure you. We've
kept it out of the papers, though. Nobody but us and her family
knows what has become of her. In fact, if you were to ask any man
in Honolulu, he'd tell you it was his impression that she was
somewhere in Europe. It was at her request that we've been so quiet
about it. Poor girl, she has a lot of pride."
"But who is she?" I asked. "Certainly, from the way you talk about
her, she must be somebody."
"Did you ever hear of Lucy Mokunui?" he asked.
"Lucy Mokunui?" I repeated, haunted by some familiar association. I
shook my head. "It seems to me I've heard the name, but I've
forgotten it."
"Never heard of Lucy Mokunui! The Hawaiian nightingale! I beg your
pardon. Of course you are a malahini, {1} and could not be expected
to know. Well, Lucy Mokunui was the best beloved of Honolulu--of
all Hawaii, for that matter."
"You say WAS," I interrupted.
"And I mean it. She is finished." He shrugged his shoulders
pityingly. "A dozen haoles--I beg your pardon, white men--have lost
their hearts to her at one time or another. And I'm not counting in
the ruck. The dozen I refer to were haoles of position and
prominence."
"She could have married the son of the Chief Justice if she'd wanted
to. You think she's beautiful, eh? But you should hear her sing.
Finest native woman singer in Hawaii Nei. Her throat is pure silver
and melted sunshine. We adored her. She toured America first with
the Royal Hawaiian Band. After that she made two more trips on her
own--concert work."
"Oh!" I cried. "I remember now. I heard her two years ago at the
Boston Symphony. So that is she. I recognize her now."
I was oppressed by a heavy sadness. Life was a futile thing at
best. A short two years and this magnificent creature, at the
summit of her magnificent success, was one of the leper squad
awaiting deportation to Molokai. Henley's lines came into my mind:-
"The poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers;
Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame."
I recoiled from my own future. If this awful fate fell to Lucy
Mokunui, what might my lot not be?--or anybody's lot? I was
thoroughly aware that in life we are in the midst of death--but to
be in the midst of living death, to die and not be dead, to be one
of that draft of creatures that once were men, aye, and women, like
Lucy Mokunui, the epitome of all Polynesian charms, an artist as
well, and well beloved of men -. I am afraid I must have betrayed
my perturbation, for Doctor Georges hastened to assure me that they
were very happy down in the settlement.
It was all too inconceivably monstrous. I could not bear to look at
her. A short distance away, behind a stretched rope guarded by a
policeman, were the lepers' relatives and friends. They were not
allowed to come near. There were no last embraces, no kisses of
farewell. They called back and forth to one another--last messages,
last words of love, last reiterated instructions. And those behind
the rope looked with terrible intensity. It was the last time they
would behold the faces of their loved ones, for they were the living
dead, being carted away in the funeral ship to the graveyard of
Molokai.
Doctor Georges gave the command, and the unhappy wretches dragged
themselves to their feet and under their burdens of luggage began to
stagger across the lighter and aboard the steamer. It was the
funeral procession. At once the wailing started from those behind
the rope. It was blood-curdling; it was heart-rending. I never
heard such woe, and I hope never to again. Kersdale and McVeigh
were still at the other end of the wharf, talking earnestly--
politics, of course, for both were head-over-heels in that
particular game. When Lucy Mokunui passed me, I stole a look at
her. She WAS beautiful. She was beautiful by our standards, as
well--one of those rare blossoms that occur but once in generations.
And she, of all women, was doomed to Molokai. She straight on
board, and aft on the open deck where the lepers huddled by the
rail, wailing now, to their dear ones on shore.
The lines were cast off, and the Noeau began to move away from the
wharf. The wailing increased. Such grief and despair! I was just
resolving that never again would I be a witness to the sailing of
the Noeau, when McVeigh and Kersdale returned. The latter's eyes
were sparkling, and his lips could not quite hide the smile of
delight that was his. Evidently the politics they had talked had
been satisfactory. The rope had been flung aside, and the lamenting
relatives now crowded the stringer piece on either side of us.
"That's her mother," Doctor Georges whispered, indicating an old
woman next to me, who was rocking back and forth and gazing at the
steamer rail out of tear-blinded eyes. I noticed that Lucy Mokunui
was also wailing. She stopped abruptly and gazed at Kersdale. Then
she stretched forth her arms in that adorable, sensuous way that
Olga Nethersole has of embracing an audience. And with arms
outspread, she cried:
"Good-bye, Jack! Good-bye!"
He heard the cry, and looked. Never was a man overtaken by more
crushing fear. He reeled on the stringer piece, his face went white
to the roots of his hair, and he seemed to shrink and wither away
inside his clothes. He threw up his hands and groaned, "My God! My
God!" Then he controlled himself by a great effort.
"Good-bye, Lucy! Good-bye!" he called.
And he stood there on the wharf, waving his hands to her till the
Noeau was clear away and the faces lining her after-rail were vague
and indistinct.
"I thought you knew," said McVeigh, who had been regarding him
curiously. "You, of all men, should have known. I thought that was
why you were here."
"I know now," Kersdale answered with immense gravity. "Where's the
carriage?"
He walked rapidly--half-ran--to it. I had to half-run myself to
keep up with him.
"Drive to Doctor Hervey's," he told the driver. "Drive as fast as
you can."
He sank down in a seat, panting and gasping. The pallor of his face
had increased. His lips were compressed and the sweat was standing
out on his forehead and upper lip. He seemed in some horrible
agony.
"For God's sake, Martin, make those horses go!" he broke out
suddenly. "Lay the whip into them!--do you hear?--lay the whip into
them!"
"They'll break, sir," the driver remonstrated.
"Let them break," Kersdale answered. "I'll pay your fine and square
you with the police. Put it to them. That's right. Faster!
Faster!"
"And I never knew, I never knew," he muttered, sinking back in the
seat and with trembling hands wiping the sweat away.
The carriage was bouncing, swaying and lurching around corners at
such a wild pace as to make conversation impossible. Besides, there
was nothing to say. But I could hear him muttering over and over,
"And I never knew. I never knew."
ALOHA OE
Never are there such departures as from the dock at Honolulu. The
great transport lay with steam up, ready to pull out. A thousand
persons were on her decks; five thousand stood on the wharf. Up and
down the long gangway passed native princes and princesses, sugar
kings and the high officials of the Territory. Beyond, in long
lines, kept in order by the native police, were the carriages and
motor-cars of the Honolulu aristocracy. On the wharf the Royal
Hawaiian Band played "Aloha Oe," and when it finished, a stringed
orchestra of native musicians on board the transport took up the
same sobbing strains, the native woman singer's voice rising
birdlike above the instruments and the hubbub of departure. It was
a silver reed, sounding its clear, unmistakable note in the great
diapason of farewell.
Forward, on the lower deck, the rail was lined six deep with khaki-
clad young boys, whose bronzed faces told of three years'
campaigning under the sun. But the farewell was not for them. Nor
was it for the white-clad captain on the lofty bridge, remote as the
stars, gazing down upon the tumult beneath him. Nor was the
farewell for the young officers farther aft, returning from the
Philippines, nor for the white-faced, climate-ravaged women by their
sides. Just aft the gangway, on the promenade deck, stood a score
of United States Senators with their wives and daughters--the
Senatorial junketing party that for a month had been dined and
wined, surfeited with statistics and dragged up volcanic hill and
down lava dale to behold the glories and resources of Hawaii. It
was for the junketing party that the transport had called in at
Honolulu, and it was to the junketing party that Honolulu was saying
good-bye.
The Senators were garlanded and bedecked with flowers. Senator
Jeremy Sambrooke's stout neck and portly bosom were burdened with a
dozen wreaths. Out of this mass of bloom and blossom projected his
head and the greater portion of his freshly sunburned and perspiring
face. He thought the flowers an abomination, and as he looked out
over the multitude on the wharf it was with a statistical eye that
saw none of the beauty, but that peered into the labour power, the
factories, the railroads, and the plantations that lay back of the
multitude and which the multitude expressed. He saw resources and
thought development, and he was too busy with dreams of material
achievement and empire to notice his daughter at his side, talking
with a young fellow in a natty summer suit and straw hat, whose
eager eyes seemed only for her and never left her face. Had Senator
Jeremy had eyes for his daughter, he would have seen that, in place
of the young girl of fifteen he had brought to Hawaii a short month
before, he was now taking away with him a woman.
Hawaii has a ripening climate, and Dorothy Sambrooke had been
exposed to it under exceptionally ripening circumstances. Slender,
pale, with blue eyes a trifle tired from poring over the pages of
books and trying to muddle into an understanding of life--such she
had been the month before. But now the eyes were warm instead of
tired, the cheeks were touched with the sun, and the body gave the
first hint and promise of swelling lines. During that month she had
left books alone, for she had found greater joy in reading from the
book of life. She had ridden horses, climbed volcanoes, and learned
surf swimming. The tropics had entered into her blood, and she was
aglow with the warmth and colour and sunshine. And for a month she
had been in the company of a man--Stephen Knight, athlete, surf-
board rider, a bronzed god of the sea who bitted the crashing
breakers, leaped upon their backs, and rode them in to shore.
Dorothy Sambrooke was unaware of the change. Her consciousness was
still that of a young girl, and she was surprised and troubled by
Steve's conduct in this hour of saying good-bye. She had looked
upon him as her playfellow, and for the month he had been her
playfellow; but now he was not parting like a playfellow. He talked
excitedly and disconnectedly, or was silent, by fits and starts.
Sometimes he did not hear what she was saying, or if he did, failed
to respond in his wonted manner. She was perturbed by the way he
looked at her. She had not known before that he had such blazing
eyes. There was something in his eyes that was terrifying. She
could not face it, and her own eyes continually drooped before it.
Yet there was something alluring about it, as well, and she
continually returned to catch a glimpse of that blazing, imperious,
yearning something that she had never seen in human eyes before.
And she was herself strangely bewildered and excited.
The transport's huge whistle blew a deafening blast, and the flower-
crowned multitude surged closer to the side of the dock. Dorothy
Sambrooke's fingers were pressed to her ears; and as she made a moue
of distaste at the outrage of sound, she noticed again the
imperious, yearning blaze in Steve's eyes. He was not looking at
her, but at her ears, delicately pink and transparent in the
slanting rays of the afternoon sun. Curious and fascinated, she
gazed at that strange something in his eyes until he saw that he had
been caught. She saw his cheeks flush darkly and heard him utter
inarticulately. He was embarrassed, and she was aware of
embarrassment herself. Stewards were going about nervously begging
shore-going persons to be gone. Steve put out his hand. When she
felt the grip of the fingers that had gripped hers a thousand times
on surf-boards and lava slopes, she heard the words of the song with
a new understanding as they sobbed in the Hawaiian woman's silver
throat:
"Ka halia ko aloha kai hiki mai,
Ke hone ae nei i ku'u manawa,
O oe no kan aloha
A loko e hana nei."
Steve had taught her air and words and meaning--so she had thought,
till this instant; and in this instant of the last finger clasp and
warm contact of palms she divined for the first time the real
meaning of the song. She scarcely saw him go, nor could she note
him on the crowded gangway, for she was deep in a memory maze,
living over the four weeks just past, rereading events in the light
of revelation.
When the Senatorial party had landed, Steve had been one of the
committee of entertainment. It was he who had given them their
first exhibition of surf riding, out at Waikiki Beach, paddling his
narrow board seaward until he became a disappearing speck, and then,
suddenly reappearing, rising like a sea-god from out of the welter
of spume and churning white--rising swiftly higher and higher,
shoulders and chest and loins and limbs, until he stood poised on
the smoking crest of a mighty, mile-long billow, his feet buried in
the flying foam, hurling beach-ward with the speed of an express
train and stepping calmly ashore at their astounded feet. That had
been her first glimpse of Steve. He had been the youngest man on
the committee, a youth, himself, of twenty. He had not entertained
by speechmaking, nor had he shone decoratively at receptions. It
was in the breakers at Waikiki, in the wild cattle drive on Manna
Kea, and in the breaking yard of the Haleakala Ranch that he had
performed his share of the entertaining.
She had not cared for the interminable statistics and eternal
speechmaking of the other members of the committee. Neither had
Steve. And it was with Steve that she had stolen away from the
open-air feast at Hamakua, and from Abe Louisson, the coffee
planter, who had talked coffee, coffee, nothing but coffee, for two
mortal hours. It was then, as they rode among the tree ferns, that
Steve had taught her the words of "Aloha Oe," the song that had been
sung to the visiting Senators at every village, ranch, and
plantation departure.
Steve and she had been much together from the first. He had been
her playfellow. She had taken possession of him while her father
had been occupied in taking possession of the statistics of the
island territory. She was too gentle to tyrannize over her
playfellow, yet she had ruled him abjectly, except when in canoe, or
on horse or surf-board, at which times he had taken charge and she
had rendered obedience. And now, with this last singing of the
song, as the lines were cast off and the big transport began backing
slowly out from the dock, she knew that Steve was something more to
her than playfellow.
Five thousand voices were singing "Aloha Oe,"--"MY LOVE BE WITH YOU
TILL WE MEET AGAIN,"--and in that first moment of known love she
realized that she and Steve were being torn apart. When would they
ever meet again? He had taught her those words himself. She
remembered listening as he sang them over and over under the hau
tree at Waikiki. Had it been prophecy? And she had admired his
singing, had told him that he sang with such expression. She
laughed aloud, hysterically, at the recollection. With such
expression!--when he had been pouring his heart out in his voice.
She knew now, and it was too late. Why had he not spoken? Then she
realized that girls of her age did not marry. But girls of her age
did marry--in Hawaii--was her instant thought. Hawaii had ripened
her--Hawaii, where flesh is golden and where all women are ripe and
sun-kissed.
Vainly she scanned the packed multitude on the dock. What had
become of him? She felt she could pay any price for one more
glimpse of him, and she almost hoped that some mortal sickness would
strike the lonely captain on the bridge and delay departure. For
the first time in her life she looked at her father with a
calculating eye, and as she did she noted with newborn fear the
lines of will and determination. It would be terrible to oppose
him. And what chance would she have in such a struggle? But why
had Steve not spoken? Now it was too late. Why had he not spoken
under the hau tree at Waikiki?
And then, with a great sinking of the heart, it came to her that she
knew why. What was it she had heard one day? Oh, yes, it was at
Mrs. Stanton's tea, that afternoon when the ladies of the
"Missionary Crowd" had entertained the ladies of the Senatorial
party. It was Mrs. Hodgkins, the tall blonde woman, who had asked
the question. The scene came back to her vividly--the broad lanai,
the tropic flowers, the noiseless Asiatic attendants, the hum of the
voices of the many women and the question Mrs. Hodgkins had asked in
the group next to her. Mrs. Hodgkins had been away on the mainland
for years, and was evidently inquiring after old island friends of
her maiden days. "What has become of Susie Maydwell?" was the
question she had asked. "Oh, we never see her any more; she married
Willie Kupele," another island woman answered. And Senator
Behrend's wife laughed and wanted to know why matrimony had affected
Susie Maydwell's friendships.
"Hapa-haole," was the answer; "he was a half-caste, you know, and we
of the Islands have to think about our children."
Dorothy turned to her father, resolved to put it to the test.
"Papa, if Steve ever comes to the United States, mayn't he come and
see us some time?"
"Who? Steve?"
"Yes, Stephen Knight--you know him. You said good-bye to him not
five minutes ago. Mayn't he, if he happens to be in the United
States some time, come and see us?"
"Certainly not," Jeremy Sambrooke answered shortly. "Stephen Knight
is a hapa-haole and you know what that means."
"Oh," Dorothy said faintly, while she felt a numb despair creep into
her heart.
Steve was not a hapa-haole--she knew that; but she did not know that
a quarter-strain of tropic sunshine streamed in his veins, and she
knew that that was sufficient to put him outside the marriage pale.
It was a strange world. There was the Honourable A. S. Cleghorn,
who had married a dusky princess of the Kamehameha blood, yet men
considered it an honour to know him, and the most exclusive women of
the ultra-exclusive "Missionary Crowd" were to be seen at his
afternoon teas. And there was Steve. No one had disapproved of his
teaching her to ride a surf-board, nor of his leading her by the
hand through the perilous places of the crater of Kilauea. He could
have dinner with her and her father, dance with her, and be a member
of the entertainment committee; but because there was tropic
sunshine in his veins he could not marry her.
And he didn't show it. One had to be told to know. And he was so
good-looking. The picture of him limned itself on her inner vision,
and before she was aware she was pleasuring in the memory of the
grace of his magnificent body, of his splendid shoulders, of the
power in him that tossed her lightly on a horse, bore her safely
through the thundering breakers, or towed her at the end of an
alpenstock up the stern lava crest of the House of the Sun. There
was something subtler and mysterious that she remembered, and that
she was even then just beginning to understand--the aura of the male
creature that is man, all man, masculine man. She came to herself
with a shock of shame at the thoughts she had been thinking. Her
cheeks were dyed with the hot blood which quickly receded and left
them pale at the thought that she would never see him again. The
stem of the transport was already out in the stream, and the
promenade deck was passing abreast of the end of the dock.
"There's Steve now," her father said. "Wave good-bye to him,
Dorothy."
Steve was looking up at her with eager eyes, and he saw in her face
what he had not seen before. By the rush of gladness into his own
face she knew that he knew. The air was throbbing with the song -
My love to you.
My love be with you till we meet again.
There was no need for speech to tell their story. About her,
passengers were flinging their garlands to their friends on the
dock. Steve held up his hands and his eyes pleaded. She slipped
her own garland over her head, but it had become entangled in the
string of Oriental pearls that Mervin, an elderly sugar king, had
placed around her neck when he drove her and her father down to the
steamer.
She fought with the pearls that clung to the flowers. The transport
was moving steadily on. Steve was already beneath her. This was
the moment. The next moment and he would be past. She sobbed, and
Jeremy Sambrooke glanced at her inquiringly.
"Dorothy!" he cried sharply.
She deliberately snapped the string, and, amid a shower of pearls,
the flowers fell to the waiting lover. She gazed at him until the
tears blinded her and she buried her face on the shoulder of Jeremy
Sambrooke, who forgot his beloved statistics in wonderment at girl
babies that insisted on growing up. The crowd sang on, the song
growing fainter in the distance, but still melting with the sensuous
love-languor of Hawaii, the words biting into her heart like acid
because of their untruth.
Aloha oe, Aloha oe, e ke onaona no ho ika lipo,
A fond embrace, ahoi ae au, until we meet again.
CHUN AH CHUN
There was nothing striking in the appearance of Chun Ah Chun. He
was rather undersized, as Chinese go, and the Chinese narrow
shoulders and spareness of flesh were his. The average tourist,
casually glimpsing him on the streets of Honolulu, would have
concluded that he was a good-natured little Chinese, probably the
proprietor of a prosperous laundry or tailorshop. In so far as good
nature and prosperity went, the judgment would be correct, though
beneath the mark; for Ah Chun was as good-natured as he was
prosperous, and of the latter no man knew a tithe the tale. It was
well known that he was enormously wealthy, but in his case
"enormous" was merely the symbol for the unknown.
Ah Chun had shrewd little eyes, black and beady and so very little
that they were like gimlet-holes. But they were wide apart, and
they sheltered under a forehead that was patently the forehead of a
thinker. For Ah Chun had his problems, and had had them all his
life. Not that he ever worried over them. He was essentially a
philosopher, and whether as coolie, or multi-millionaire and master
of many men, his poise of soul was the same. He lived always in the
high equanimity of spiritual repose, undeterred by good fortune,
unruffled by ill fortune. All things went well with him, whether
they were blows from the overseer in the cane field or a slump in
the price of sugar when he owned those cane fields himself. Thus,
from the steadfast rock of his sure content he mastered problems
such as are given to few men to consider, much less to a Chinese
peasant.
He was precisely that--a Chinese peasant, born to labour in the
fields all his days like a beast, but fated to escape from the
fields like the prince in a fairy tale. Ah Chun did not remember
his father, a small farmer in a district not far from Canton; nor
did he remember much of his mother, who had died when he was six.
But he did remember his respected uncle, Ah Kow, for him had he
served as a slave from his sixth year to his twenty-fourth. It was
then that he escaped by contracting himself as a coolie to labour
for three years on the sugar plantations of Hawaii for fifty cents a
day.
Ah Chun was observant. He perceived little details that not one man
in a thousand ever noticed. Three years he worked in the field, at
the end of which time he knew more about cane-growing than the
overseers or even the superintendent, while the superintendent would
have been astounded at the knowledge the weazened little coolie
possessed of the reduction processes in the mill. But Ah Chun did
not study only sugar processes. He studied to find out how men came
to be owners of sugar mills and plantations. One judgment he
achieved early, namely, that men did not become rich from the labour
of their own hands. He knew, for he had laboured for a score of
years himself. The men who grew rich did so from the labour of the
hands of others. That man was richest who had the greatest number
of his fellow creatures toiling for him.
So, when his term of contract was up, Ah Chun invested his savings
in a small importing store, going into partnership with one, Ah
Yung. The firm ultimately became the great one of "Ah Chun and Ah
Yung," which handled anything from India silks and ginseng to guano
islands and blackbird brigs. In the meantime, Ah Chun hired out as
cook. He was a good cook, and in three years he was the highest-
paid chef in Honolulu. His career was assured, and he was a fool to
abandon it, as Dantin, his employer, told him; but Ah Chun knew his
own mind best, and for knowing it was called a triple-fool and given
a present of fifty dollars over and above the wages due him.
The firm of Ah Chun and Ah Yung was prospering. There was no need
for Ah Chun longer to be a cook. There were boom times in Hawaii.
Sugar was being extensively planted, and labour was needed. Ah Chun
saw the chance, and went into the labour-importing business. He
brought thousands of Cantonese coolies into Hawaii, and his wealth
began to grow. He made investments. His beady black eyes saw
bargains where other men saw bankruptcy. He bought a fish-pond for
a song, which later paid five hundred per cent and was the opening
wedge by which he monopolized the fish market of Honolulu. He did
not talk for publication, nor figure in politics, nor play at
revolutions, but he forecast events more clearly and farther ahead
than did the men who engineered them. In his mind's eye he saw
Honolulu a modern, electric-lighted city at a time when it
straggled, unkempt and sand-tormented, over a barren reef of
uplifted coral rock. So he bought land. He bought land from
merchants who needed ready cash, from impecunious natives, from
riotous traders' sons, from widows and orphans and the lepers
deported to Molokai; and, somehow, as the years went by, the pieces
of land he had bought proved to be needed for warehouses, or coffee
buildings, or hotels. He leased, and rented, sold and bought, and
resold again.
But there were other things as well. He put his confidence and his
money into Parkinson, the renegade captain whom nobody would trust.
And Parkinson sailed away on mysterious voyages in the little Vega.
Parkinson was taken care of until he died, and years afterward
Honolulu was astonished when the news leaked out that the Drake and
Acorn guano islands had been sold to the British Phosphate Trust for
three-quarters of a million. Then there were the fat, lush days of
King Kalakaua, when Ah Chun paid three hundred thousand dollars for
the opium licence. If he paid a third of a million for the drug
monopoly, the investment was nevertheless a good one, for the
dividends bought him the Kalalau Plantation, which, in turn, paid
him thirty per cent for seventeen years and was ultimately sold by
him for a million and a half.
It was under the Kamehamehas, long before, that he had served his
own country as Chinese Consul--a position that was not altogether
unlucrative; and it was under Kamehameha IV that he changed his
citizenship, becoming an Hawaiian subject in order to marry Stella
Allendale, herself a subject of the brown-skinned king, though more
of Anglo-Saxon blood ran in her veins than of Polynesian. In fact,
the random breeds in her were so attenuated that they were valued at
eighths and sixteenths. In the latter proportions was the blood of
her great-grandmother, Paahao--the Princess Paahao, for she came of
the royal line. Stella Allendale's great-grandfather had been a
Captain Blunt, an English adventurer who took service under
Kamehameha I and was made a tabu chief himself. Her grandfather had
been a New Bedford whaling captain, while through her own father had
been introduced a remote blend of Italian and Portuguese which had
been grafted upon his own English stock. Legally a Hawaiian, Ah
Chun's spouse was more of any one of three other nationalities.
And into this conglomerate of the races, Ah Chun introduced the
Mongolian mixture. Thus, his children by Mrs. Ah Chun were one
thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one sixteenth
Portuguese, one-half Chinese, and eleven thirty-seconds English and
American. It might well be that Ah Chun would have refrained from
matrimony could he have foreseen the wonderful family that was to
spring from this union. It was wonderful in many ways. First,
there was its size. There were fifteen sons and daughters, mostly
daughters. The sons had come first, three of them, and then had
followed, in unswerving sequence, a round dozen of girls. The blend
of the race was excellent. Not alone fruitful did it prove, for the
progeny, without exception, was healthy and without blemish. But
the most amazing thing about the family was its beauty. All the
girls were beautiful--delicately, ethereally beautiful. Mamma Ah
Chun's rotund lines seemed to modify papa Ah Chun's lean angles, so
that the daughters were willowy without being lathy, round-muscled
without being chubby. In every feature of every face were haunting
reminiscences of Asia, all manipulated over and disguised by Old
England, New England, and South of Europe. No observer, without
information, would have guessed, the heavy Chinese strain in their
veins; nor could any observer, after being informed, fail to note
immediately the Chinese traces.
As beauties, the Ah Chun girls were something new. Nothing like
them had been seen before. They resembled nothing so much as they
resembled one another, and yet each girl was sharply individual.
There was no mistaking one for another. On the other hand, Maud,
who was blue-eyed and yellow-haired, would remind one instantly of
Henrietta, an olive brunette with large, languishing dark eyes and
hair that was blue-black. The hint of resemblance that ran through
them all, reconciling every differentiation, was Ah Chun's
contribution. He had furnished the groundwork upon which had been
traced the blended patterns of the races. He had furnished the
slim-boned Chinese frame, upon which had been builded the delicacies
and subtleties of Saxon, Latin, and Polynesian flesh.
Mrs. Ah Chun had ideas of her own to which Ah Chun gave credence,
though never permitting them expression when they conflicted with
his own philosophic calm. She had been used all her life to living
in European fashion. Very well. Ah Chun gave her a European
mansion. Later, as his sons and daughters grew able to advise, he
built a bungalow, a spacious, rambling affair, as unpretentious as
it was magnificent. Also, as time went by, there arose a mountain
house on Tantalus, to which the family could flee when the "sick
wind" blew from the south. And at Waikiki he built a beach
residence on an extensive site so well chosen that later on, when
the United States government condemned it for fortification
purposes, an immense sum accompanied the condemnation. In all his
houses were billiard and smoking rooms and guest rooms galore, for
Ah Chun's wonderful progeny was given to lavish entertainment. The
furnishing was extravagantly simple. Kings' ransoms were expended
without display--thanks to the educated tastes of the progeny.
Ah Chun had been liberal in the matter of education. "Never mind
expense," he had argued in the old days with Parkinson when that
slack mariner could see no reason for making the Vega seaworthy;
"you sail the schooner, I pay the bills." And so with his sons and
daughters. It had been for them to get the education and never mind
the expense. Harold, the eldest-born, had gone to Harvard and
Oxford; Albert and Charles had gone through Yale in the same
classes. And the daughters, from the eldest down, had undergone
their preparation at Mills Seminary in California and passed on to
Vassar, Wellesley, or Bryn Mawr. Several, having so desired, had
had the finishing touches put on in Europe. And from all the world
Ah Chun's sons and daughters returned to him to suggest and advise
in the garnishment of the chaste magnificence of his residences. Ah
Chun himself preferred the voluptuous glitter of Oriental display;
but he was a philosopher, and he clearly saw that his children's
tastes were correct according to Western standards.
Of course, his children were not known as the Ah Chun children. As
he had evolved from a coolie labourer to a multi-millionaire, so had
his name evolved. Mamma Ah Chun had spelled it A'Chun, but her
wiser offspring had elided the apostrophe and spelled it Achun. Ah
Chun did not object. The spelling of his name interfered no whit
with his comfort nor his philosophic calm. Besides, he was not
proud. But when his children arose to the height of a starched
shirt, a stiff collar, and a frock coat, they did interfere with his
comfort and calm. Ah Chun would have none of it. He preferred the
loose-flowing robes of China, and neither could they cajole nor
bully him into making the change. They tried both courses, and in
the latter one failed especially disastrously. They had not been to
America for nothing. They had learned the virtues of the boycott as
employed by organized labour, and he, their father, Chun Ah Chun,
they boycotted in his own house, Mamma Achun aiding and abetting.
But Ah Chun himself, while unversed in Western culture, was
thoroughly conversant with Western labour conditions. An extensive
employer of labour himself, he knew how to cope with its tactics.
Promptly he imposed a lockout on his rebellious progeny and erring
spouse. He discharged his scores of servants, locked up his
stables, closed his houses, and went to live in the Royal Hawaiian
Hotel, in which enterprise he happened to be the heaviest
stockholder. The family fluttered distractedly on visits about with
friends, while Ah Chun calmly managed his many affairs, smoked his
long pipe with the tiny silver bowl, and pondered the problem of his
wonderful progeny.
This problem did not disturb his calm. He knew in his philosopher's
soul that when it was ripe he would solve it. In the meantime he
enforced the lesson that complacent as he might be, he was
nevertheless the absolute dictator of the Achun destinies. The
family held out for a week, then returned, along with Ah Chun and
the many servants, to occupy the bungalow once more. And thereafter
no question was raised when Ah Chun elected to enter his brilliant
drawing-room in blue silk robe, wadded slippers, and black silk
skull-cap with red button peak, or when he chose to draw at his
slender-stemmed silver-bowled pipe among the cigarette- and cigar-
smoking officers and civilians on the broad verandas or in the
smoking room.
Ah Chun occupied a unique position in Honolulu. Though he did not
appear in society, he was eligible anywhere. Except among the
Chinese merchants of the city, he never went out; but he received,
and he always was the centre of his household and the head of his
table. Himself peasant, born Chinese, he presided over an
atmosphere of culture and refinement second to none in all the
islands. Nor were there any in all the islands too proud to cross
his threshold and enjoy his hospitality. First of all, the Achun
bungalow was of irreproachable tone. Next, Ah Chun was a power.
And finally, Ah Chun was a moral paragon and an honest business man.
Despite the fact that business morality was higher than on the
mainland, Ah Chun outshone the business men of Honolulu in the
scrupulous rigidity of his honesty. It was a saying that his word
was as good as his bond. His signature was never needed to bind
him. He never broke his word. Twenty years after Hotchkiss, of
Hotchkiss, Morterson Company, died, they found among mislaid papers
a memorandum of a loan of thirty thousand dollars to Ah Chun. It
had been incurred when Ah Chun was Privy Councillor to Kamehameha
II. In the bustle and confusion of those heyday, money-making
times, the affair had slipped Ah Chun's mind. There was no note, no
legal claim against him, but he settled in full with the Hotchkiss'
Estate, voluntarily paying a compound interest that dwarfed the
principal. Likewise, when he verbally guaranteed the disastrous
Kakiku Ditch Scheme, at a time when the least sanguine did not dream
a guarantee necessary--"Signed his cheque for two hundred thousand
without a quiver, gentlemen, without a quiver," was the report of
the secretary of the defunct enterprise, who had been sent on the
forlorn hope of finding out Ah Chun's intentions. And on top of the
many similar actions that were true of his word, there was scarcely
a man of repute in the islands that at one time or another had not
experienced the helping financial hand of Ah Chun.
So it was that Honolulu watched his wonderful family grow up into a
perplexing problem and secretly sympathized with him, for it was
beyond any of them to imagine what he was going to do with it. But
Ah Chun saw the problem more clearly than they. No one knew as he
knew the extent to which he was an alien in his family. His own
family did not guess it. He saw that there was no place for him
amongst this marvellous seed of his loins, and he looked forward to
his declining years and knew that he would grow more and more alien.
He did not understand his children. Their conversation was of
things that did not interest him and about which he knew nothing.
The culture of the West had passed him by. He was Asiatic to the
last fibre, which meant that he was heathen. Their Christianity was
to him so much nonsense. But all this he would have ignored as
extraneous and irrelevant, could he have but understood the young
people themselves. When Maud, for instance, told him that the
housekeeping bills for the month were thirty thousand--that he
understood, as he understood Albert's request for five thousand with
which to buy the schooner yacht Muriel and become a member of the
Hawaiian Yacht Club. But it was their remoter, complicated desires
and mental processes that obfuscated him. He was not slow in
learning that the mind of each son and daughter was a secret
labyrinth which he could never hope to tread. Always he came upon
the wall that divides East from West. Their souls were inaccessible
to him, and by the same token he knew that his soul was inaccessible
to them.
Besides, as the years came upon him, he found himself harking back
more and more to his own kind. The reeking smells of the Chinese
quarter were spicy to him. He sniffed them with satisfaction as he
passed along the street, for in his mind they carried him back to
the narrow tortuous alleys of Canton swarming with life and
movement. He regretted that he had cut off his queue to please
Stella Allendale in the prenuptial days, and he seriously considered
the advisability of shaving his crown and growing a new one. The
dishes his highly paid chef concocted for him failed to tickle his
reminiscent palate in the way that the weird messes did in the
stuffy restaurant down in the Chinese quarter. He enjoyed vastly
more a half-hour's smoke and chat with two or three Chinese chums,
than to preside at the lavish and elegant dinners for which his
bungalow was famed, where the pick of the Americans and Europeans
sat at the long table, men and women on equality, the women with
jewels that blazed in the subdued light against white necks and
arms, the men in evening dress, and all chattering and laughing over
topics and witticisms that, while they were not exactly Greek to
him, did not interest him nor entertain.
But it was not merely his alienness and his growing desire to return
to his Chinese flesh-pots that constituted the problem. There was
also his wealth. He had looked forward to a placid old age. He had
worked hard. His reward should have been peace and repose. But he
knew that with his immense fortune peace and repose could not
possibly be his. Already there were signs and omens. He had seen
similar troubles before. There was his old employer, Dantin, whose
children had wrested from him, by due process of law, the management
of his property, having the Court appoint guardians to administer it
for him. Ah Chun knew, and knew thoroughly well, that had Dantin
been a poor man, it would have been found that he could quite
rationally manage his own affairs. And old Dantin had had only
three children and half a million, while he, Chun Ah Chun, had
fifteen children and no one but himself knew how many millions.
"Our daughters are beautiful women," he said to his wife, one
evening. "There are many young men. The house is always full of
young men. My cigar bills are very heavy. Why are there no
marriages?"
Mamma Achun shrugged her shoulders and waited.
"Women are women and men are men--it is strange there are no
marriages. Perhaps the young men do not like our daughters."
"Ah, they like them well enough," Mamma Chun answered; "but you see,
they cannot forget that you are your daughters' father."
"Yet you forgot who my father was," Ah Chun said gravely. "All you
asked was for me to cut off my queue."
"The young men are more particular than I was, I fancy."
"What is the greatest thing in the world?" Ah Chun demanded with
abrupt irrelevance.
Mamma Achun pondered for a moment, then replied: "God."
He nodded. "There are gods and gods. Some are paper, some are
wood, some are bronze. I use a small one in the office for a paper-
weight. In the Bishop Museum are many gods of coral rock and lava
stone."
"But there is only one God," she announced decisively, stiffening
her ample frame argumentatively.
Ah Chun noted the danger signal and sheered off.
"What is greater than God, then?" he asked. "I will tell you. It
is money. In my time I have had dealings with Jews and Christians,
Mohammedans and Buddhists, and with little black men from the
Solomons and New Guinea who carried their god about them, wrapped in
oiled paper. They possessed various gods, these men, but they all
worshipped money. There is that Captain Higginson. He seems to
like Henrietta."
"He will never marry her," retorted Mamma Achun. "He will be an
admiral before he dies--"
"A rear-admiral," Ah Chun interpolated.
"Yes, I know. That is the way they retire."
"His family in the United States is a high one. They would not like
it if he married . . . if he did not marry an American girl."
Ah Chun knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thoughtfully refilling
the silver bowl with a tiny pleget of tobacco. He lighted it and
smoked it out before he spoke.
"Henrietta is the oldest girl. The day she marries I will give her
three hundred thousand dollars. That will fetch that Captain
Higginson and his high family along with him. Let the word go out
to him. I leave it to you."
And Ah Chun sat and smoked on, and in the curling smoke-wreaths he
saw take shape the face and figure of Toy Shuey--Toy Shuey, the maid
of all work in his uncle's house in the Cantonese village, whose
work was never done and who received for a whole year's work one
dollar. And he saw his youthful self arise in the curling smoke,
his youthful self who had toiled eighteen years in his uncle's field
for little more. And now he, Ah Chun, the peasant, dowered his
daughter with three hundred thousand years of such toil. And she
was but one daughter of a dozen. He was not elated at the thought.
It struck him that it was a funny, whimsical world, and he chuckled
aloud and startled Mamma Achun from a revery which he knew lay deep
in the hidden crypts of her being where he had never penetrated.
But Ah Chun's word went forth, as a whisper, and Captain Higginson
forgot his rear-admiralship and his high family and took to wife
three hundred thousand dollars and a refined and cultured girl who
was one thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one-
sixteenth Portuguese, eleven thirty-seconds English and Yankee, and
one-half Chinese.
Ah Chun's munificence had its effect. His daughters became suddenly
eligible and desirable. Clara was the next, but when the Secretary
of the Territory formally proposed for her, Ah Chun informed him
that he must wait his turn, that Maud was the oldest and that she
must be married first. It was shrewd policy. The whole family was
made vitally interested in marrying off Maud, which it did in three
months, to Ned Humphreys, the United States immigration
commissioner. Both he and Maud complained, for the dowry was only
two hundred thousand. Ah Chun explained that his initial generosity
had been to break the ice, and that after that his daughters could
not expect otherwise than to go more cheaply.
Clara followed Maud, and thereafter, for a space of two years; there
was a continuous round of weddings in the bungalow. In the meantime
Ah Chun had not been idle. Investment after investment was called
in. He sold out his interests in a score of enterprises, and step
by step, so as not to cause a slump in the market, he disposed of
his large holdings in real estate. Toward the last he did
precipitate a slump and sold at sacrifice. What caused this haste
were the squalls he saw already rising above the horizon. By the
time Lucille was married, echoes of bickerings and jealousies were
already rumbling in his ears. The air was thick with schemes and
counter-schemes to gain his favour and to prejudice him against one
or another or all but one of his sons-in-law. All of which was not
conducive to the peace and repose he had planned for his old age.
He hastened his efforts. For a long time he had been in
correspondence with the chief banks in Shanghai and Macao. Every
steamer for several years had carried away drafts drawn in favour of
one, Chun Ah Chun, for deposit in those Far Eastern banks. The
drafts now became heavier. His two youngest daughters were not yet
married. He did not wait, but dowered them with a hundred thousand
each, which sums lay in the Bank of Hawaii, drawing interest and
awaiting their wedding day. Albert took over the business of the
firm of Ah Chun and Ah Yung, Harold, the eldest, having elected to
take a quarter of a million and go to England to live. Charles, the
youngest, took a hundred thousand, a legal guardian, and a course in
a Keeley institute. To Mamma Achun was given the bungalow, the
mountain House on Tantalus, and a new seaside residence in place of
the one Ah Chun sold to the government. Also, to Mamma Achun was
given half a million in money well invested.
Ah Chun was now ready to crack the nut of the problem. One fine
morning when the family was at breakfast--he had seen to it that all
his sons-in-law and their wives were present--he announced that he
was returning to his ancestral soil. In a neat little homily he
explained that he had made ample provision for his family, and he
laid down various maxims that he was sure, he said, would enable
them to dwell together in peace and harmony. Also, he gave business
advice to his sons-in-law, preached the virtues of temperate living
and safe investments, and gave them the benefit of his encyclopedic
knowledge of industrial and business conditions in Hawaii. Then he
called for his carriage, and, in the company of the weeping Mamma
Achun, was driven down to the Pacific Mail steamer, leaving behind
him a panic in the bungalow. Captain Higginson clamoured wildly for
an injunction. The daughters shed copious tears. One of their
husbands, an ex-Federal judge, questioned Ah Chun's sanity, and
hastened to the proper authorities to inquire into it. He returned
with the information that Ah Chun had appeared before the commission
the day before, demanded an examination, and passed with flying
colours. There was nothing to be done, so they went down and said
good-bye to the little old man, who waved farewell from the
promenade deck as the big steamer poked her nose seaward through the
coral reef.
But the little old man was not bound for Canton. He knew his own
country too well, and the squeeze of the Mandarins, to venture into
it with the tidy bulk of wealth that remained to him. He went to
Macao. Now Ah Chun had long exercised the power of a king and he
was as imperious as a king. When he landed at Macao and went into
the office of the biggest European hotel to register, the clerk
closed the book on him. Chinese were not permitted. Ah Chun called
for the manager and was treated with contumely. He drove away, but
in two hours he was back again. He called the clerk and manager in,
gave them a month's salary, and discharged them. He had made
himself the owner of the hotel; and in the finest suite he settled
down during the many months the gorgeous palace in the suburbs was
building for him. In the meantime, with the inevitable ability that
was his, he increased the earnings of his big hotel from three per
cent to thirty.
The troubles Ah Chun had flown began early. There were sons-in-law
that made bad investments, others that played ducks and drakes with
the Achun dowries. Ah Chun being out of it, they looked at Mamma Ah
Chun and her half million, and, looking, engendered not the best of
feeling toward one another. Lawyers waxed fat in the striving to
ascertain the construction of trust deeds. Suits, cross-suits, and
counter-suits cluttered the Hawaiian courts. Nor did the police
courts escape. There were angry encounters in which harsh words and
harsher blows were struck. There were such things as flower pots
being thrown to add emphasis to winged words. And suits for libel
arose that dragged their way through the courts and kept Honolulu
agog with excitement over the revelations of the witnesses.
In his palace, surrounded by all dear delights of the Orient, Ah
Chun smokes his placid pipe and listens to the turmoil overseas. By
each mail steamer, in faultless English, typewritten on an American
machine, a letter goes from Macao to Honolulu, in which, by
admirable texts and precepts, Ah Chun advises his family to live in
unity and harmony. As for himself, he is out of it all, and well
content. He has won to peace and repose. At times he chuckles and
rubs his hands, and his slant little black eyes twinkle merrily at
the thought of the funny world. For out of all his living and
philosophizing, that remains to him--the conviction that it is a
very funny world.
THE SHERIFF OF KONA
"You cannot escape liking the climate," Cudworth said, in reply to
my panegyric on the Kona coast. "I was a young fellow, just out of
college, when I came here eighteen years ago. I never went back,
except, of course, to visit. And I warn you, if you have some spot
dear to you on earth, not to linger here too long, else you will
find this dearer."
We had finished dinner, which had been served on the big lanai, the
one with a northerly exposure, though exposure is indeed a misnomer
in so delectable a climate.
The candles had been put out, and a slim, white-clad Japanese
slipped like a ghost through the silvery moonlight, presented us
with cigars, and faded away into the darkness of the bungalow. I
looked through a screen of banana and lehua trees, and down across
the guava scrub to the quiet sea a thousand feet beneath. For a
week, ever since I had landed from the tiny coasting-steamer, I had
been stopping with Cudworth, and during that time no wind had
ruffled that unvexed sea. True, there had been breezes, but they
were the gentlest zephyrs that ever blew through summer isles. They
were not winds; they were sighs--long, balmy sighs of a world at
rest.
"A lotus land," I said.
"Where each day is like every day, and every day is a paradise of
days," he answered. "Nothing ever happens. It is not too hot. It
is not too cold. It is always just right. Have you noticed how the
land and the sea breathe turn and turn about?"
Indeed, I had noticed that delicious rhythmic, breathing. Each
morning I had watched the sea-breeze begin at the shore and slowly
extend seaward as it blew the mildest, softest whiff of ozone to the
land. It played over the sea, just faintly darkening its surface,
with here and there and everywhere long lanes of calm, shifting,
changing, drifting, according to the capricious kisses of the
breeze. And each evening I had watched the sea breath die away to
heavenly calm, and heard the land breath softly make its way through
the coffee trees and monkey-pods.
"It is a land of perpetual calm," I said. "Does it ever blow here?-
-ever really blow? You know what I mean."
Cudworth shook his head and pointed eastward.
"How can it blow, with a barrier like that to stop it?"
Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming
to blot out half the starry sky. Two miles and a half above our
heads they reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic
sun had failed to melt.
"Thirty miles away, right now, I'll wager, it is blowing forty miles
an hour."
I smiled incredulously.
Cudworth stepped to the lanai telephone. He called up, in
succession, Waimea, Kohala, and Hamakua. Snatches of his
conversation told me that the wind was blowing: "Rip-snorting and
back-jumping, eh? . . . How long? . . . Only a week? . . . Hello,
Abe, is that you? . . . Yes, yes . . . You WILL plant coffee on the
Hamakua coast . . . Hang your wind-breaks! You should see MY
trees."
"Blowing a gale," he said to me, turning from hanging up the
receiver. "I always have to joke Abe on his coffee. He has five
hundred acres, and he's done marvels in wind-breaking, but how he
keeps the roots in the ground is beyond me. Blow? It always blows
on the Hamakua side. Kohala reports a schooner under double reefs
beating up the channel between Hawaii and Maui, and making heavy
weather of it."
"It is hard to realize," I said lamely. "Doesn't a little whiff of
it ever eddy around somehow, and get down here?"
"Not a whiff. Our land-breeze is absolutely of no kin, for it
begins this side of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. You see, the land
radiates its heat quicker than the sea, and so, at night, the land
breathes over the sea. In the day the land becomes warmer than the
sea, and the sea breathes over the land . . . Listen! Here comes
the land-breath now, the mountain wind."
I could hear it coming, rustling softly through the coffee trees,
stirring the monkey-pods, and sighing through the sugar-cane. On
the lanai the hush still reigned. Then it came, the first feel of
the mountain wind, faintly balmy, fragrant and spicy, and cool,
deliciously cool, a silken coolness, a wine-like coolness--cool as
only the mountain wind of Kona can be cool.
"Do you wonder that I lost my heart to Kona eighteen years ago?" he
demanded. "I could never leave it now. I think I should die. It
would be terrible. There was another man who loved it, even as I.
I think he loved it more, for he was born here on the Kona coast.
He was a great man, my best friend, my more than brother. But he
left it, and he did not die."
"Love?" I queried. "A woman?"
Cudworth shook his head.
"Nor will he ever come back, though his heart will be here until he
dies."
He paused and gazed down upon the beachlights of Kailua. I smoked
silently and waited.
"He was already in love . . . with his wife. Also, he had three
children, and he loved them. They are in Honolulu now. The boy is
going to college."
"Some rash act?" I questioned, after a time, impatiently.
He shook his head. "Neither guilty of anything criminal, nor
charged with anything criminal. He was the Sheriff of Kona."
"You choose to be paradoxical," I said.
"I suppose it does sound that way," he admitted, "and that is the
perfect hell of it."
He looked at me searchingly for a moment, and then abruptly took up
the tale.
"He was a leper. No, he was not born with it--no one is born with
it; it came upon him. This man--what does it matter? Lyte Gregory
was his name. Every kamaina knows the story. He was straight
American stock, but he was built like the chieftains of old Hawaii.
He stood six feet three. His stripped weight was two hundred and
twenty pounds, not an ounce of which was not clean muscle or bone.
He was the strongest man I have ever seen. He was an athlete and a
giant. He was a god. He was my friend. And his heart and his soul
were as big and as fine as his body.
"I wonder what you would do if you saw your friend, your brother, on
the slippery lip of a precipice, slipping, slipping, and you were
able to do nothing. That was just it. I could do nothing. I saw
it coming, and I could do nothing. My God, man, what could I do?
There it was, malignant and incontestable, the mark of the thing on
his brow. No one else saw it. It was because I loved him so, I do
believe, that I alone saw it. I could not credit the testimony of
my senses. It was too incredibly horrible. Yet there it was, on
his brow, on his ears. I had seen it, the slight puff of the
earlobes--oh, so imperceptibly slight. I watched it for months.
Then, next, hoping against hope, the darkening of the skin above
both eyebrows--oh, so faint, just like the dimmest touch of sunburn.
I should have thought it sunburn but that there was a shine to it,
such an invisible shine, like a little highlight seen for a moment
and gone the next. I tried to believe it was sunburn, only I could
not. I knew better. No one noticed it but me. No one ever noticed
it except Stephen Kaluna, and I did not know that till afterward.
But I saw it coming, the whole damnable, unnamable awfulness of it;
but I refused to think about the future. I was afraid. I could
not. And of nights I cried over it.
"He was my friend. We fished sharks on Niihau together. We hunted
wild cattle on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. We broke horses and branded
steers on the Carter Ranch. We hunted goats through Haleakala. He
taught me diving and surfing until I was nearly as clever as he, and
he was cleverer than the average Kanaka. I have seen him dive in
fifteen fathoms, and he could stay down two minutes. He was an
amphibian and a mountaineer. He could climb wherever a goat dared
climb. He was afraid of nothing. He was on the wrecked Luga, and
he swam thirty miles in thirty-six hours in a heavy sea. He could
fight his way out through breaking combers that would batter you and
me to a jelly. He was a great, glorious man-god. We went through
the Revolution together. We were both romantic loyalists. He was
shot twice and sentenced to death. But he was too great a man for
the republicans to kill. He laughed at them. Later, they gave him
honour and made him Sheriff of Kona. He was a simple man, a boy
that never grew up. His was no intricate brain pattern. He had no
twists nor quirks in his mental processes. He went straight to the
point, and his points were always simple.
"And he was sanguine. Never have I known so confident a man, nor a
man so satisfied and happy. He did not ask anything from life.
There was nothing left to be desired. For him life had no arrears.
He had been paid in full, cash down, and in advance. What more
could he possibly desire than that magnificent body, that iron
constitution, that immunity from all ordinary ills, and that lowly
wholesomeness of soul? Physically he was perfect. He had never
been sick in his life. He did not know what a headache was. When I
was so afflicted he used to look at me in wonder, and make me laugh
with his clumsy attempts at sympathy. He did not understand such a
thing as a headache. He could not understand. Sanguine? No
wonder. How could he be otherwise with that tremendous vitality and
incredible health?
"Just to show you what faith he had in his glorious star, and, also,
what sanction he had for that faith. He was a youngster at the
time--I had just met him--when he went into a poker game at Wailuku.
There was a big German in it, Schultz his name was, and he played a
brutal, domineering game. He had had a run of luck as well, and he
was quite insufferable, when Lyte Gregory dropped in and took a
hand. The very first hand it was Schultz's blind. Lyte came in, as
well as the others, and Schultz raised them out--all except Lyte.
He did not like the German's tone, and he raised him back. Schultz
raised in turn, and in turn Lyte raised Schultz. So they went, back
and forth. The stakes were big. And do you know what Lyte held? A
pair of kings and three little clubs. It wasn't poker. Lyte wasn't
playing poker. He was playing his optimism. He didn't know what
Schultz held, but he raised and raised until he made Schultz squeal,
and Schultz held three aces all the time. Think of it! A man with
a pair of kings compelling three aces to see before the draw!
"Well, Schultz called for two cards. Another German was dealing,
Schultz's friend at that. Lyte knew then that he was up against
three of a kind. Now what did he do? What would you have done?
Drawn three cards and held up the kings, of course. Not Lyte. He
was playing optimism. He threw the kings away, held up the three
little clubs, and drew two cards. He never looked at them. He
looked across at Schultz to bet, and Schultz did bet, big. Since he
himself held three aces he knew he had Lyte, because he played Lyte
for threes, and, necessarily, they would have to be smaller threes.
Poor Schultz! He was perfectly correct under the premises. His
mistake was that he thought Lyte was playing poker. They bet back
and forth for five minutes, until Schultz's certainty began to ooze
out. And all the time Lyte had never looked at his two cards, and
Schultz knew it. I could see Schultz think, and revive, and splurge
with his bets again. But the strain was too much for him."
"'Hold on, Gregory,' he said at last. 'I've got you beaten from the
start. I don't want any of your money. I've got--'"
"'Never mind what you've got,' Lyte interrupted. 'You don't know
what I've got. I guess I'll take a look.'"
"He looked, and raised the German a hundred dollars. Then they went
at it again, back and forth and back and forth, until Schultz
weakened and called, and laid down his three aces. Lyte faced his
five cards. They were all black. He had drawn two more clubs. Do
you know, he just about broke Schultz's nerve as a poker player. He
never played in the same form again. He lacked confidence after
that, and was a bit wobbly."
"'But how could you do it?' I asked Lyte afterwards. 'You knew he
had you beaten when he drew two cards. Besides, you never looked at
your own draw.'"
"'I didn't have to look,' was Lyte's answer. 'I knew they were two
clubs all the time. They just had to be two clubs. Do you think I
was going to let that big Dutchman beat me? It was impossible that
he should beat me. It is not my way to be beaten. I just have to
win. Why, I'd have been the most surprised man in this world if
they hadn't been all clubs.'"
"That was Lyte's way, and maybe it will help you to appreciate his
colossal optimism. As he put it he just had to succeed, to fare
well, to prosper. And in that same incident, as in ten thousand
others, he found his sanction. The thing was that he did succeed,
did prosper. That was why he was afraid of nothing. Nothing could
ever happen to him. He knew it, because nothing had ever happened
to him. That time the Luga was lost and he swam thirty miles, he
was in the water two whole nights and a day. And during all that
terrible stretch of time he never lost hope once, never once doubted
the outcome. He just knew he was going to make the land. He told
me so himself, and I know it was the truth.
"Well, that is the kind of a man Lyte Gregory was. He was of a
different race from ordinary, ailing mortals. He was a lordly
being, untouched by common ills and misfortunes. Whatever he wanted
he got. He won his wife--one of the Caruthers, a little beauty--
from a dozen rivals. And she settled down and made him the finest
wife in the world. He wanted a boy. He got it. He wanted a girl
and another boy. He got them. And they were just right, without
spot or blemish, with chests like little barrels, and with all the
inheritance of his own health and strength.
"And then it happened. The mark of the beast was laid upon him. I
watched it for a year. It broke my heart. But he did not know it,
nor did anybody else guess it except that cursed hapa-haole, Stephen
Kaluna. He knew it, but I did not know that he did. And--yes--Doc
Strowbridge knew it. He was the federal physician, and he had
developed the leper eye. You see, part of his business was to
examine suspects and order them to the receiving station at
Honolulu. And Stephen Kaluna had developed the leper eye. The
disease ran strong in his family, and four or five of his relatives
were already on Molokai.
"The trouble arose over Stephen Kaluna's sister. When she became
suspect, and before Doc Strowbridge could get hold of her, her
brother spirited her away to some hiding-place. Lyte was Sheriff of
Kona, and it was his business to find her.
"We were all over at Hilo that night, in Ned Austin's. Stephen
Kaluna was there when we came in, by himself, in his cups, and
quarrelsome. Lyte was laughing over some joke--that huge, happy
laugh of a giant boy. Kaluna spat contemptuously on the floor.
Lyte noticed, so did everybody; but he ignored the fellow. Kaluna
was looking for trouble. He took it as a personal grudge that Lyte
was trying to apprehend his sister. In half a dozen ways he
advertised his displeasure at Lyte's presence, but Lyte ignored him.
I imagined Lyte was a bit sorry for him, for the hardest duty of his
office was the apprehension of lepers. It is not a nice thing to go
in to a man's house and tear away a father, mother, or child, who
has done no wrong, and to send such a one to perpetual banishment on
Molokai. Of course, it is necessary as a protection to society, and
Lyte, I do believe, would have been the first to apprehend his own
father did he become suspect.
"Finally, Kaluna blurted out: 'Look here, Gregory, you think you're
going to find Kalaniweo, but you're not.'
"Kalaniweo was his sister. Lyte glanced at him when his name was
called, but he made no answer. Kaluna was furious. He was working
himself up all the time.
"'I'll tell you one thing,' he shouted. 'You'll be on Molokai
yourself before ever you get Kalaniweo there. I'll tell you what
you are. You've no right to be in the company of honest men.
You've made a terrible fuss talking about your duty, haven't you?
You've sent many lepers to Molokai, and knowing all the time you
belonged there yourself.'
"I'd seen Lyte angry more than once, but never quite so angry as at
that moment. Leprosy with us, you know, is not a thing to jest
about. He made one leap across the floor, dragging Kaluna out of
his chair with a clutch on his neck. He shook him back and forth
savagely, till you could hear the half-caste's teeth rattling.
"'What do you mean?' Lyte was demanding. 'Spit it out, man, or I'll
choke it out of you!'
"You know, in the West there is a certain phrase that a man must
smile while uttering. So with us of the islands, only our phrase is
related to leprosy. No matter what Kaluna was, he was no coward.
As soon as Lyte eased the grip on his throat he answered:-
"'I'll tell you what I mean. You are a leper yourself.'
Lyte suddenly flung the half-caste sideways into a chair, letting
him down easily enough. Then Lyte broke out into honest, hearty
laughter. But he laughed alone, and when he discovered it he looked
around at our faces. I had reached his side and was trying to get
him to come away, but he took no notice of me. He was gazing,
fascinated, at Kaluna, who was brushing at his own throat in a
flurried, nervous way, as if to brush off the contamination of the
fingers that had clutched him. The action was unreasoned, genuine.
"Lyte looked around at us, slowly passing from face to face.
"'My God, fellows! My God!' he said.
"He did not speak it. It was more a hoarse whisper of fright and
horror. It was fear that fluttered in his throat, and I don't think
that ever in his life before he had known fear.
"Then his colossal optimism asserted itself, and he laughed again.
"'A good joke--whoever put it up,' he said. 'The drinks are on me.
I had a scare for a moment. But, fellows, don't do it again, to
anybody. It's too serious. I tell you I died a thousand deaths in
that moment. I thought of my wife and the kids, and . . . '
"His voice broke, and the half-caste, still throat-brushing, drew
his eyes. He was puzzled and worried.
"'John,' he said, turning toward me.
"His jovial, rotund voice rang in my ears. But I could not answer.
I was swallowing hard at that moment, and besides, I knew my face
didn't look just right.
"'John,' he called again, taking a step nearer.
"He called timidly, and of all nightmares of horrors the most
frightful was to hear timidity in Lyte Gregory's voice.
"'John, John, what does it mean?' he went on, still more timidly.
'It's a joke, isn't it? John, here's my hand. If I were a leper
would I offer you my hand? Am I a leper, John?'
"He held out his hand, and what in high heaven or hell did I care?
He was my friend. I took his hand, though it cut me to the heart to
see the way his face brightened.
"'It was only a joke, Lyte,' I said. 'We fixed it up on you. But
you're right. It's too serious. We won't do it again.'
"He did not laugh this time. He smiled, as a man awakened from a
bad dream and still oppressed by the substance of the dream.
"'All right, then,' he said. 'Don't do it again, and I'll stand for
the drinks. But I may as well confess that you fellows had me going
south for a moment. Look at the way I've been sweating.'
"He sighed and wiped the sweat from his forehead as he started to
step toward the bar.
"'It is no joke,' Kaluna said abruptly. I looked murder at him, and
I felt murder, too. But I dared not speak or strike. That would
have precipitated the catastrophe which I somehow had a mad hope of
still averting.
"'It is no joke,' Kaluna repeated. 'You are a leper, Lyte Gregory,
and you've no right putting your hands on honest men's flesh--on the
clean flesh of honest men.'
"Then Gregory flared up.
"'The joke has gone far enough! Quit it! Quit it, I say, Kaluna,
or I'll give you a beating!'
"'You undergo a bacteriological examination,' Kaluna answered, 'and
then you can beat me--to death, if you want to. Why, man, look at
yourself there in the glass. You can see it. Anybody can see it.
You're developing the lion face. See where the skin is darkened
there over your eyes.
"Lyte peered and peered, and I saw his hands trembling.
"'I can see nothing,' he said finally, then turned on the hapa-
haole. 'You have a black heart, Kaluna. And I am not ashamed to
say that you have given me a scare that no man has a right to give
another. I take you at your word. I am going to settle this thing
now. I am going straight to Doc Strowbridge. And when I come back,
watch out.'
"He never looked at us, but started for the door.
"'You wait here, John,' he said, waving me back from accompanying
him.
"We stood around like a group of ghosts.
"'It is the truth,' Kaluna said. 'You could see it for yourselves.'
"They looked at me, and I nodded. Harry Burnley lifted his glass to
his lips, but lowered it untasted. He spilled half of it over the
bar. His lips were trembling like a child that is about to cry.
Ned Austin made a clatter in the ice-chest. He wasn't looking for
anything. I don't think he knew what he was doing. Nobody spoke.
Harry Burnley's lips were trembling harder than ever. Suddenly,
with a most horrible, malignant expression he drove his fist into
Kaluna's face. He followed it up. We made no attempt to separate
them. We didn't care if he killed the half-caste. It was a
terrible beating. We weren't interested. I don't even remember
when Burnley ceased and let the poor devil crawl away. We were all
too dazed.
"Doc Strowbridge told me about it afterward. He was working late
over a report when Lyte came into his office. Lyte had already
recovered his optimism, and came swinging in, a trifle angry with
Kaluna to be sure, but very certain of himself. 'What could I do?'
Doc asked me. 'I knew he had it. I had seen it coming on for
months. I couldn't answer him. I couldn't say yes. I don't mind
telling you I broke down and cried. He pleaded for the
bacteriological test. "Snip out a piece, Doc," he said, over and
over. "Snip out a piece of skin and make the test."
"The way Doc Strowbridge cried must have convinced Lyte. The
Claudine was leaving next morning for Honolulu. We caught him when
he was going aboard. You see, he was headed for Honolulu to give
himself up to the Board of Health. We could do nothing with him.
He had sent too many to Molokai to hang back himself. We argued for
Japan. But he wouldn't hear of it. 'I've got to take my medicine,
fellows,' was all he would say, and he said it over and over. He
was obsessed with the idea.
"He wound up all his affairs from the Receiving Station at Honolulu,
and went down to Molokai. He didn't get on well there. The
resident physician wrote us that he was a shadow of his old self.
You see he was grieving about his wife and the kids. He knew we
were taking care of them, but it hurt him just the same. After six
months or so I went down to Molokai. I sat on one side a plate-
glass window, and he on the other. We looked at each other through
the glass and talked through what might be called a speaking tube.
But it was hopeless. He had made up his mind to remain. Four
mortal hours I argued. I was exhausted at the end. My steamer was
whistling for me, too.
"But we couldn't stand for it. Three months later we chartered the
schooner Halcyon. She was an opium smuggler, and she sailed like a
witch. Her master was a squarehead who would do anything for money,
and we made a charter to China worth his while. He sailed from San
Francisco, and a few days later we took out Landhouse's sloop for a
cruise. She was only a five-ton yacht, but we slammed her fifty
miles to windward into the north-east trade. Seasick? I never
suffered so in my life. Out of sight of land we picked up the
Halcyon, and Burnley and I went aboard.
"We ran down to Molokai, arriving about eleven at night. The
schooner hove to and we landed through the surf in a whale-boat at
Kalawao--the place, you know, where Father Damien died. That
squarehead was game. With a couple of revolvers strapped on him he
came right along. The three of us crossed the peninsula to
Kalaupapa, something like two miles. Just imagine hunting in the
dead of night for a man in a settlement of over a thousand lepers.
You see, if the alarm was given, it was all off with us. It was
strange ground, and pitch dark. The leper's dogs came out and bayed
at us, and we stumbled around till we got lost.
"The squarehead solved it. He led the way into the first detached
house. We shut the door after us and struck a light. There were
six lepers. We routed them up, and I talked in native. What I
wanted was a kokua. A kokua is, literally, a helper, a native who
is clean that lives in the settlement and is paid by the Board of
Health to nurse the lepers, dress their sores, and such things. We
stayed in the house to keep track of the inmates, while the
squarehead led one of them off to find a kokua. He got him, and he
brought him along at the point of his revolver. But the kokua was
all right. While the squarehead guarded the house, Burnley and I
were guided by the kokua to Lyte's house. He was all alone.
"'I thought you fellows would come,' Lyte said. 'Don't touch me,
John. How's Ned, and Charley, and all the crowd? Never mind, tell
me afterward. I am ready to go now. I've had nine months of it.
Where's the boat?'
"We started back for the other house to pick up the squarehead. But
the alarm had got out. Lights were showing in the houses, and doors
were slamming. We had agreed that there was to be no shooting
unless absolutely necessary, and when we were halted we went at it
with our fists and the butts of our revolvers. I found myself
tangled up with a big man. I couldn't keep him off me, though twice
I smashed him fairly in the face with my fist. He grappled with me,
and we went down, rolling and scrambling and struggling for grips.
He was getting away with me, when some one came running up with a
lantern. Then I saw his face. How shall I describe the horror of
it. It was not a face--only wasted or wasting features--a living
ravage, noseless, lipless, with one ear swollen and distorted,
hanging down to the shoulder. I was frantic. In a clinch he hugged
me close to him until that ear flapped in my face. Then I guess I
went insane. It was too terrible. I began striking him with my
revolver. How it happened I don't know, but just as I was getting
clear he fastened upon me with his teeth. The whole side of my hand
was in that lipless mouth. Then I struck him with the revolver butt
squarely between the eyes, and his teeth relaxed."
Cudworth held his hand to me in the moonlight, and I could see the
scars. It looked as if it had been mangled by a dog.
"Weren't you afraid?" I asked.
"I was. Seven years I waited. You know, it takes that long for the
disease to incubate. Here in Kona I waited, and it did not come.
But there was never a day of those seven years, and never a night,
that I did not look out on . . . on all this . . . " His voice
broke as he swept his eyes from the moon-bathed sea beneath to the
snowy summits above. "I could not bear to think of losing it, of
never again beholding Kona. Seven years! I stayed clean. But that
is why I am single. I was engaged. I could not dare to marry while
I was in doubt. She did not understand. She went away to the
States and married. I have never seen her since.
"Just at the moment I got clear of the leper policeman there was a
rush and clatter of hoofs like a cavalry charge. It was the
squarehead. He had been afraid of a rumpus and he had improved his
time by making those blessed lepers he was guarding saddle up four
horses. We were ready for him. Lyte had accounted for three
kokuas, and between us we untangled Burnley from a couple more. The
whole settlement was in an uproar by that time, and as we dashed
away somebody opened upon us with a Winchester. It must have been
Jack McVeigh, the superintendent of Molokai.
"That was a ride! Leper horses, leper saddles, leper bridles,
pitch-black darkness, whistling bullets, and a road none of the
best. And the squarehead's horse was a mule, and he didn't know how
to ride, either. But we made the whaleboat, and as we shoved off
through the surf we could hear the horses coming down the hill from
Kalaupapa.
"You're going to Shanghai. You look Lyte Gregory up. He is
employed in a German firm there. Take him out to dinner. Open up
wine. Give him everything of the best, but don't let him pay for
anything. Send the bill to me. His wife and the kids are in
Honolulu, and he needs the money for them. I know. He sends most
of his salary, and lives like an anchorite. And tell him about
Kona. There's where his heart is. Tell him all you can about
Kona."
JACK LONDON
BY HIMSELF
I was born in San Francisco in 1876. At fifteen I was a man among
men, and if I had a spare nickel I spent it on beer instead of
candy, because I thought it was more manly to buy beer. Now, when
my years are nearly doubled, I am out on a hunt for the boyhood
which I never had, and I am less serious than at any other time of
my life. Guess I'll find that boyhood! Almost the first things I
realized were responsibilities. I have no recollection of being
taught to read or write--I could do both at the age of five--but I
know that my first school was in Alameda before I went out on a
ranch with my folks and as a ranch boy worked hard from my eighth
year.
The second school were I tried to pick up a little learning was an
irregular hit or miss affair at San Mateo. Each class sat in a
separate desk, but there were days when we did not sit at all, for
the master used to get drunk very often, and then one of the elder
boys would thrash him. To even things up, the master would then
thrash the younger lads, so you can think what sort of school it
was. There was no one belonging to me, or associated with me in any
way, who had literary tastes or ideas, the nearest I can make to it
is that my great-grandfather was a circuit writer, a Welshman, known
as "Priest" Jones in the backwoods, where his enthusiasm led him to
scatter the Gospel.
One of my earliest and strongest impressions was of the ignorance of
other people. I had read and absorbed Washington Irving's
"Alhambra" before I was nine, but could never understand how it was
that the other ranchers knew nothing about it. Later I concluded
that this ignorance was peculiar to the country, and felt that those
who lived in cities would not be so dense. One day a man from the
city came to the ranch. He wore shiny shoes and a cloth coat, and I
felt that here was a good chance for me to exchange thoughts with an
enlightened mind. From the bricks of an old fallen chimney I had
built an Alhambra of my own; towers, terraces, and all were
complete, and chalk inscriptions marked the different sections.
Here I led the city man and questioned him about "The Alhambra," but
he was as ignorant as the man on the ranch, and then I consoled
myself with the thought that there were only two clever people in
the world--Washington Irving and myself.
My other reading-matter at that time consisted mainly of dime
novels, borrowed from the hired men, and newspapers in which the
servants gloated over the adventures of poor but virtuous shop-
girls.
Through reading such stuff my mind was necessarily ridiculously
conventional, but being very lonely I read everything that came my
way, and was greatly impressed by Ouida's story "Signa," which I
devoured regularly for a couple of years. I never knew the finish
until I grew up, for the closing chapters were missing from my copy,
so I kept on dreaming with the hero, and, like him, unable to see
Nemesis, at the end. My work on the ranch at one time was to watch
the bees, and as I sat under a tree from sunrise till late in the
afternoon, waiting for the swarming, I had plenty of time to read
and dream. Livermore Valley was very flat, and even the hills
around were then to me devoid of interest, and the only incident to
break in on my visions was when I gave the alarm of swarming, and
the ranch folks rushed out with pots, pans, and buckets of water. I
think the opening line of "Signa" was "It was only a little lad,"
yet he had dreams of becoming a great musician, and having all
Europe at his feet. Well, I was only a little lad, too, but why
could not I become what "Signa" dreamed of being?
Life on a Californian ranch was then to me the dullest possible
existence, and every day I thought of going out beyond the sky-line
to see the world. Even then there were whispers, promptings; my
mind inclined to things beautiful, although my environment was
unbeautiful. The hills and valleys around were eyesores and aching
pits, and I never loved them till I left them.
Before I was eleven I left the ranch and came to Oakland, where I
spent so much of my time in the Free Public Library, eagerly reading
everything that came to hand, that I developed the first stages of
St. Vitus' dance from lack of exercise. Disillusions quickly
followed, as I learned more of the world. At this time I made my
living as a newsboy, selling papers in the streets; and from then on
until I was sixteen I had a thousand and one different occupations--
work and school, school and work--and so it ran.
* * *
Then the adventure-lust was strong within me, and I left home. I
didn't run, I just left--went out in the bay, and joined the oyster
pirates. The days of the oyster pirates are now past, and if I had
got my dues for piracy, I would have been given five hundred years
in prison. Later, I shipped as a sailor on a schooner, and also
took a turn at salmon fishing. Oddly enough, my next occupation was
on a fish-patrol, where I was entrusted with the arrest of any
violators of the fishing laws. Numbers of lawless Chinese, Greeks,
and Italians were at that time engaged in illegal fishing, and many
a patrolman paid his life for his interference. My only weapon on
duty was a steel table-fork, but I felt fearless and a man when I
climbed over the side of a boat to arrest some marauder.
Subsequently I shipped before the mast and sailed for the Japanese
coast on a seal-hunting expedition, later going to Behring Sea.
After sealing for seven months I came back to California and took
odd jobs at coal shovelling and longshoring and also in a jute
factory, where I worked from six in the morning until seven at
night. I had planned to join the same lot for another sealing trip
the following year, but somehow I missed them. They sailed away on
the Mary Thomas, which was lost with all hands.
In my fitful school-days I had written the usual compositions, which
had been praised in the usual way, and while working in the jute
mills I still made an occasional try. The factory occupied thirteen
hours of my day, and being young and husky, I wanted a little time
for myself, so there was little left for composition. The San
Francisco Call offered a prize for a descriptive article. My mother
urged me to try for it, and I did, taking for my subject "Typhoon
off the Coast of Japan." Very tired and sleepy, knowing I had to be
up at half-past five, I began the article at midnight and worked
straight on until I had written two thousand words, the limit of the
article, but with my idea only half worked out. The next night,
under the same conditions, I continued, adding another two thousand
words before I finished, and then the third night I spent in cutting
out the excess, so as to bring the article within the conditions of
the contest. The first prize came to me, and the second and third
went to students of the Stanford and Berkeley Universities.
My success in the San Francisco Call competition seriously turned my
thoughts to writing, but my blood was still too hot for a settled
routine, so I practically deferred literature, beyond writing a
little gush for the Call, which that journal promptly rejected.
I tramped all through the United States, from California to Boston,
and up and down, returning to the Pacific coast by way of Canada,
where I got into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole
tramping experience made me become a Socialist. Previously I had
been impressed by the dignity of labour, and, without having read
Carlyle or Kipling, I had formulated a gospel of work which put
theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification
and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day's work well done
would be inconceivable to you. I was as faithful a wage-slave as
ever a capitalist exploited. In short, my joyous individualism was
dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I had fought my way
from the open west, where men bucked big and the job hunted the man,
to the congested labour centres of the eastern states, where men
were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth, and
I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different
angle. I saw the workers in the shambles at the bottom of the
Social Pit. I swore I would never again do a hard day's work with
my body except where absolutely compelled to, and I have been busy
ever since running away from hard bodily labour.
In my nineteenth year I returned to Oakland and started at the High
School, which ran the usual school magazine. This publication was a
weekly--no, I guess a monthly--one, and I wrote stories for it, very
little imaginary, just recitals of my sea and tramping experiences.
I remained there a year, doing janitor work as a means of
livelihood, and leaving eventually because the strain was more than
I could bear. At this time my socialistic utterances had attracted
considerable attention, and I was known as the "Boy Socialist," a
distinction that brought about my arrest for street-talking. After
leaving the High School, in three months cramming by myself, I took
the three years' work for that time and entered the University of
California. I hated to give up the hope of a University education
and worked in a laundry and with my pen to help me keep on. This
was the only time I worked because I loved it, but the task was too
much, and when half-way through my Freshman year I had to quit.
I worked away ironing shirts and other things in the laundry, and
wrote in all my spare time. I tried to keep on at both, but often
fell asleep with the pen in my hand. Then I left the laundry and
wrote all the time, and lived and dreamed again. After three
months' trial I gave up writing, having decided that I was a
failure, and left for the Klondike to prospect for gold. At the end
of the year, owing to the outbreak of scurvy, I was compelled to
come out, and on the homeward journey of 1,900 miles in an open boat
made the only notes of the trip. It was in the Klondike I found
myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. You get your true
perspective. I got mine.
While I was in the Klondike my father died, and the burden of the
family fell on my shoulders. Times were bad in California, and I
could get no work. While trying for it I wrote "Down the River,"
which was rejected. During the wait for this rejection I wrote a
twenty-thousand word serial for a news company, which was also
rejected. Pending each rejection I still kept on writing fresh
stuff. I did not know what an editor looked like. I did not know a
soul who had ever published anything. Finally a story was accepted
by a Californian magazine, for which I received five dollars. Soon
afterwards "The Black Cat" offered me forty dollars for a story.
Then things took a turn, and I shall probably not have to shovel
coal for a living for some time to come, although I have done it,
and could do it again.
My first book was published in 1900. I could have made a good deal
at newspaper work; but I had sufficient sense to refuse to be a
slave to that man-killing machine, for such I held a newspaper to be
to a young man in his forming period. Not until I was well on my
feet as a magazine-writer did I do much work for newspapers. I am a
believer in regular work, and never wait for an inspiration.
Temperamentally I am not only careless and irregular, but
melancholy; still I have fought both down. The discipline I had as
a sailor had full effect on me. Perhaps my old sea days are also
responsible for the regularity and limitations of my sleep. Five
and a half hours is the precise average I allow myself, and no
circumstance has yet arisen in my life that could keep me awake when
the time comes to "turn in."
I am very fond of sport, and delight in boxing, fencing, swimming,
riding, yachting, and even kite-flying. Although primarily of the
city, I like to be near it rather than in it. The country, though,
is the best, the only natural life. In my grown-up years the
writers who have influenced me most are Karl Marx in a particular,
and Spencer in a general, way. In the days of my barren boyhood, if
I had had a chance, I would have gone in for music; now, in what are
more genuinely the days of my youth, if I had a million or two I
would devote myself to writing poetry and pamphlets. I think the
best work I have done is in the "League of the Old Men," and parts
of "The Kempton-Wace Letters." Other people don't like the former.
They prefer brighter and more cheerful things. Perhaps I shall feel
like that, too, when the days of my youth are behind me.
Footnotes:
{1} Malahini--new-comer.