not the croaking of sick toads and googly-eyed corpses about me
still afoot on their shaky legs. I'll be that way soon enough if I
live long enough. And it will be my everlasting regret if I don't
live long enough. Why in hell did I sink that last twenty thousand
into Curtis's plantation? Howard warned me the slump was coming,
but I thought it was the square-face making him lie. And Curtis
has blown his brains out, and his head luna has run away with his
daughter, and the sugar chemist has got typhoid, and everything's
going to smash.'
"He clapped his hands for his servants, and commanded: 'Bring me
my singing boys. And the hula dancers--plenty of them. And send
for old Howard. Somebody's got to pay, and I'll shorten his six
months of life by a month. But above all, music. Let there be
music. It is stronger than drink, and quicker than opium.'
"He with his music druggery! It was his father, the old savage,
who was entertained on board a French frigate, and for the first
time heard an orchestra. When the little concert was over, the
captain, to find which piece he liked best, asked which piece he'd
like repeated. Well, when grandfather got done describing, what
piece do you think it was?"
I gave up, while the Prince lighted a fresh cigarette.
"Why, it was the first one, of course. Not the real first one, but
the tuning up that preceded it."
I nodded, with eyes and face mirthful of appreciation, and Prince
Akuli, with another apprehensive glance at the old wahine and her
half-made hala lei, returned to his tale of the bones of his
ancestors.
"It was somewhere around this stage of the game that old Ahuna gave
in to Hiwilani. He didn't exactly give in. He compromised.
That's where I come in. If he would bring her the bones of her
mother, and of her grandfather (who was the father of Kaaukuu, and
who by tradition was rumoured to have been even bigger than his
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giant son, she would return to Ahuna the bait of his hair she was
praying him to death with. He, on the other hand, stipulated that
he was not to reveal to her the secret burial-place of all the alii
of Lakanaii all the way back. Nevertheless, he was too old to dare
the adventure alone, must be helped by some one who of necessity
would come to know the secret, and I was that one. I was the
highest alii, beside my father and mother, and they were no higher
than I.
"So I came upon the scene, being summoned into the twilight room to
confront those two dubious old ones who dealt with the dead. They
were a pair--mother fat to despair of helplessness, Ahuna thin as a
skeleton and as fragile. Of her one had the impression that if she
lay down on her back she could not roll over without the aid of
block-and-tackle; of Ahuna one's impression was that the tooth-
pickedness of him would shatter to splinters if one bumped into
him.
"And when they had broached the matter, there was more pilikia"
(trouble). "My father's attitude stiffened my resolution. I
refused to go on the bone-snatching expedition. I said I didn't
care a whoop for the bones of all the aliis of my family and race.
You see, I had just discovered Jules Verne, loaned me by old
Howard, and was reading my head off. Bones? When there were North
Poles, and Centres of Earths, and hairy comets to ride across space
among the stars! Of course I didn't want to go on any bone-
snatching expedition. I said my father was able-bodied, and he
could go, splitting equally with her whatever bones he brought
back. But she said he was only a blamed collector--or words to
that effect, only stronger.
"'I know him,' she assured me. 'He'd bet his mother's bones on a
horse-race or an ace-full.'
"I stood with fat her when it came to modern scepticism, and I told
her the whole thing was rubbish. 'Bones?' I said. 'What are
bones? Even field mice, and many rats, and cockroaches have bones,
though the roaches wear their bones outside their meat instead of
inside. The difference between man and other animals,' I told her,
'is not bones, but brain. Why, a bullock has bigger bones than a
man, and more than one fish I've eaten has more bones, while a
whale beats creation when it comes to bone.'
"It was frank talk, which is our Hawaiian way, as you have long
since learned. In return, equally frank, she regretted she hadn't
given me away as a feeding child when I was born. Next she
bewailed that she had ever borne me. From that it was only a step
to anaana me. She threatened me with it, and I did the bravest
thing I have ever done. Old Howard had given me a knife of many
blades, and corkscrews, and screw-drivers, and all sorts of
contrivances, including a tiny pair of scissors. I proceeded to
pare my finger-nails.
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"'There,' I said, as I put the parings into her hand. 'Just to
show you what I think of it. There's bait and to spare. Go on and
anaana me if you can.'
"I have said it was brave. It was. I was only fifteen, and I had
lived all my days in the thick of the mystery stuff, while my
scepticism, very recently acquired, was only skin-deep. I could be
a sceptic out in the open in the sunshine. But I was afraid of the
dark. And in that twilight room, the bones of the dead all about
me in the big jars, why, the old lady had me scared stiff. As we
say to-day, she had my goat. Only I was brave and didn't let on.
And I put my bluff across, for my mother flung the parings into my
face and burst into tears. Tears in an elderly woman weighing
three hundred and twenty pounds are scarcely impressive, and I
hardened the brassiness of my bluff.
"She shifted her attack, and proceeded to talk with the dead. Nay,
more, she summoned them there, and, though I was all ripe to see
but couldn't, Ahuna saw the father of Kaaukuu in the corner and lay
down on the floor and yammered. Just the same, although I almost
saw the old giant, I didn't quite see him.
"'Let him talk for himself,' I said. But Hiwilani persisted in
doing the talking for him, and in laying upon me his solemn
injunction that I must go with Ahuna to the burial-place and bring
back the bones desired by my mother. But I argued that if the dead
ones could be invoked to kill living men by wasting sicknesses, and
that if the dead ones could transport themselves from their burial-
crypts into the corner of her room, I couldn't see why they
shouldn't leave their bones behind them, there in her room and
ready to be jarred, when they said good-bye and departed for the
middle world, the over world, or the under world, or wherever they
abided when they weren't paying social calls.
"Whereupon mother let loose on poor old Ahuna, or let loose upon
him the ghost of Kaaukuu's father, supposed to be crouching there
<
br /> in the corner, who commanded Ahuna to divulge to her the burial-
place. I tried to stiffen him up, telling him to let the old ghost
divulge the secret himself, than whom nobody else knew it better,
seeing that he had resided there upwards of a century. But Ahuna
was old school. He possessed no iota of scepticism. The more
Hiwilani frightened him, the more he rolled on the floor and the
louder he yammered.
"But when he began to bite himself, I gave in. I felt sorry for
him; but, over and beyond that, I began to admire him. He was
sterling stuff, even if he was a survival of darkness. Here, with
the fear of mystery cruelly upon him, believing Hiwilani's dope
implicitly, he was caught between two fidelities. She was his
living alii, his alii kapo" (sacred chiefess). "He must be
faithful to her, yet more faithful must he be to all the dead and
gone aliis of her line who depended solely on him that their bones
should not be disturbed.
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"I gave in. But I, too, imposed stipulations. Steadfastly had my
father, new school, refused to let me go to England for my
education. That sugar was slumping was reason sufficient for him.
Steadfastly had my mother, old school, refused, her heathen mind
too dark to place any value on education, while it was shrewd
enough to discern that education led to unbelief in all that was
old. I wanted to study, to study science, the arts, philosophy, to
study everything old Howard knew, which enabled him, on the edge of
the grave, undauntedly to sneer at superstition, and to give me
Jules Verne to read. He was an Oxford man before he went wild and
wrong, and it was he who had set the Oxford bee buzzing in my
noddle.
"In the end Ahuna and I, old school and new school leagued
together, won out. Mother promised that she'd make father send me
to England, even if she had to pester him into a prolonged drinking
that would make his digestion go back on him. Also, Howard was to
accompany me, so that I could decently bury him in England. He was
a queer one, old Howard, an individual if there ever was one. Let
me tell you a little story about him. It was when Kalakaua was
starting on his trip around the world. You remember, when
Armstrong, and Judd, and the drunken valet of a German baron
accompanied him. Kalakaua made the proposition to Howard . . . "
But here the long-apprehended calamity fell upon Prince Akuli. The
old wahine had finished her lei hala. Barefooted, with no
adornment of femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed
cotton, with age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she
cringed before him and crooned a mele in his honour, and, still
cringing, put the lei around his neck. It is true the hala smelled
most freshly strong, yet was the act beautiful to me, and the old
woman herself beautiful to me. My mind leapt into the Prince's
narrative so that to Ahuna I could not help likening her.
Oh, truly, to be an alii in Hawaii, even in this second decade of
the twentieth century, is no light thing. The alii, utterly of the
new, must be kindly and kingly to those old ones absolutely of the
old. Nor did the Prince without a kingdom, his loved island long
since annexed by the United States and incorporated into a
territory along with the rest of the Hawaiian Islands--nor did the
Prince betray his repugnance for the odour of the hala. He bowed
his head graciously; and his royal condescending words of pure
Hawaiian I knew would make the old woman's heart warm until she
died with remembrance of the wonderful occasion. The wry grimace
he stole to me would not have been made had he felt any uncertainty
of its escaping her.
"And so," Prince Akuli resumed, after the wahine had tottered away
in an ecstasy, "Ahuna and I departed on our grave-robbing
adventure. You know the Iron-bound Coast."
I nodded, knowing full well the spectacle of those lava leagues of
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weather coast, truly iron-bound so far as landing-places or
anchorages were concerned, great forbidding cliff-walls thousands
of feet in height, their summits wreathed in cloud and rain squall,
their knees hammered by the trade-wind billows into spouting,
spuming white, the air, from sea to rain-cloud, spanned by a myriad
leaping waterfalls, provocative, in day or night, of countless sun
and lunar rainbows. Valleys, so called, but fissures rather, slit
the cyclopean walls here and there, and led away into a lofty and
madly vertical back country, most of it inaccessible to the foot of
man and trod only by the wild goat.
"Precious little you know of it," Prince Akuli retorted, in reply
to my nod. "You've seen it only from the decks of steamers. There
are valleys there, inhabited valleys, out of which there is no exit
by land, and perilously accessible by canoe only on the selected
days of two months in the year. When I was twenty-eight I was over
there in one of them on a hunting trip. Bad weather, in the
auspicious period, marooned us for three weeks. Then five of my
party and myself swam for it out through the surf. Three of us
made the canoes waiting for us. The other two were flung back on
the sand, each with a broken arm. Save for us, the entire party
remained there until the next year, ten months afterward. And one
of them was Wilson, of Wilson & Wall, the Honolulu sugar factors.
And he was engaged to be married.
"I've seen a goat, shot above by a hunter above, land at my feet a
thousand yards underneath. BELIEVE me, that landscape seemed to
rain goats and rocks for ten minutes. One of my canoemen fell off
the trail between the two little valleys of Aipio and Luno. He hit
first fifteen hundred feet beneath us, and fetched up in a ledge
three hundred feet farther down. We didn't bury him. We couldn't
get to him, and flying machines had not yet been invented. His
bones are there now, and, barring earthquake and volcano, will be
there when the Trumps of Judgment sound.
"Goodness me! Only the other day, when our Promotion Committee,
trying to compete with Honolulu for the tourist trade, called in
the engineers to estimate what it would cost to build a scenic
drive around the Iron-bound Coast, the lowest figures were a
quarter of a million dollars a mile!
"And Ahuna and I, an old man and a young boy, started for that
stern coast in a canoe paddled by old men! The youngest of them,
the steersman, was over sixty, while the rest of them averaged
seventy at the very least. There were eight of them, and we
started in the night-time, so that none should see us go. Even
these old ones, trusted all their lives, knew no more than the
fringe of the secret. To the fringe, only, could they take us.
"And the fringe was--I don't mind telling that much--the fringe was
Ponuloo Valley. We got the
re the third afternoon following. The
old chaps weren't strong on the paddles. It was a funny
expedition, into such wild waters, with now one and now another of
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our ancient-mariner crew collapsing and even fainting. One of them
actually died on the second morning out. We buried him overside.
It was positively uncanny, the heathen ceremonies those grey ones
pulled off in burying their grey brother. And I was only fifteen,
alii kapo over them by blood of heathenness and right of hereditary
heathen rule, with a penchant for Jules Verne and shortly to sail
for England for my education! So one learns. Small wonder my
father was a philosopher, in his own lifetime spanning the history
of man from human sacrifice and idol worship, through the religions
of man's upward striving, to the Medusa of rank atheism at the end
of it all. Small wonder that, like old Ecclesiastes, he found
vanity in all things and surcease in sugar stocks, singing boys,
and hula dancers."
Prince Akuli debated with his soul for an interval.
"Oh, well," he sighed, "I have done some spanning of time myself."
He sniffed disgustedly of the odour of the hala lei that stifled
him. "It stinks of the ancient." he vouchsafed. "I? I stink of
the modern. My father was right. The sweetest of all is sugar up
a hundred points, or four aces in a poker game. If the Big War
lasts another year, I shall clean up three-quarters of a million
over a million. If peace breaks to-morrow, with the consequent
slump, I could enumerate a hundred who will lose my direct bounty,
and go into the old natives' homes my father and I long since
endowed for them."
He clapped his hands, and the old wahine tottered toward him in an
excitement of haste to serve. She cringed before him, as he drew
pad and pencil from his breast pocket.
"Each month, old woman of our old race," he addressed her, "will
you receive, by rural free delivery, a piece of written paper that
you can exchange with any storekeeper anywhere for ten dollars
gold. This shall be so for as long as you live. Behold! I write
the record and the remembrance of it, here and now, with this
pencil on this paper. And this is because you are of my race and
service, and because you have honoured me this day with your mats
to sit upon and your thrice-blessed and thrice-delicious lei hala."
On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales Page 11
