On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales Read online

we dressed out of it as well. I made my own dresses. You can

  imagine them. Outside of the cowboys who chored the firewood, I

  did the work. I cooked, and baked, and scrubbed--"

  "You who had never known anything but servants from the time you

  were born!" Martha pitied. "Never less than a regiment of them at

  Kilohana."

  "Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!" Bella

  cried out. "How far I was compelled to make a pound of coffee go!

  A broom worn down to nothing before a new one was bought! And

  beef! Fresh beef and jerky, morning, noon, and night! And

  porridge! Never since have I eaten porridge or any breakfast

  food."

  She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment

  with unseeing eyes at the colour-lavish reef while she composed

  herself. And she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure,

  gracious, high-breasted, noble-headed port of which no out-breeding

  can ever rob the Hawaiian woman. Very haole was Bella Castner,

  fair-skinned, fine-textured. Yet, as she returned, the high pose

  of head, the level-lidded gaze of her long brown eyes under royal

  arches of eyebrows, the softly set lines of her small mouth that

  fairly sang sweetness of kisses after sixty-eight years--all made

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  her the very picture of a chiefess of old Hawaii full-bursting

  through her ampleness of haole blood. Taller she was than her

  sister Martha, if anything more queenly.

  "You know we were notorious as poor feeders," Bella laughed lightly

  enough. "It was many a mile on either side from Nahala to the next

  roof. Belated travellers, or storm-bound ones, would, on occasion,

  stop with us overnight. And you know the lavishness of the big

  ranches, then and now. How we were the laughing-stock! 'What do

  we care!' George would say. 'They live to-day and now. Twenty

  years from now will be our turn, Bella. They will be where they

  are now, and they will eat out of our hand. We will be compelled

  to feed them, they will need to be fed, and we will feed them well;

  for we will be rich, Bella, so rich that I am afraid to tell you.

  But I know what I know, and you must have faith in me.'

  "George was right. Twenty years afterward, though he did not live

  to see it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not

  know what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say

  to George: 'Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty

  years from now. I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate

  coffee that is only two cents a pound more than the awful stuff we

  are using. Why couldn't I fry eggs in butter--now? I should

  dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our linen! I'm ashamed

  to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven knows they dare

  come seldom enough.'

  "'Be patient, Bella,' he would reply. 'In a little while, in only

  a few years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep

  between our sheets, will be proud of an invitation--those of them

  who will not be dead. You remember how Stevens passed out last

  year--free-living and easy, everybody's friend but his own. The

  Kohala crowd had to bury him, for he left nothing but debts. Watch

  the others going the same pace. There's your brother Hal. He

  can't keep it up and live five years, and he's breaking his uncles'

  hearts. And there's Prince Lilolilo. Dashes by me with half a

  hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering kanakas in his train who

  would be better at hard work and looking after their future, for he

  will never be king of Hawaii. He will not live to be king of

  Hawaii.'

  "George was right. Brother Hal died. So did Prince Lilolilo. But

  George was not ALL right. He, who neither drank nor smoked, who

  never wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of

  his lips a second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who

  was invariably up before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp

  had a tenth emptied itself, and who never thought to die, was dead

  even more quickly than Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.

  "'Be patient, Bella,' Uncle Robert would say to me. 'George

  Castner is a coming man. I have chosen well for you. Your

  hardships now are the hardships on the way to the promised land.

  Not always will the Hawaiians rule in Hawaii. Just as they let

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  their wealth slip out of their hands, so will their rule slip out

  of their hands. Political power and the land always go together.

  There will be great changes, revolutions no one knows how many nor

  of what sort, save that in the end the haole will possess the land

  and the rule. And in that day you may well be first lady of

  Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii.

  It is written in the books. It is ever so where the haole

  conflicts with the easier races. I, your Uncle Robert, who am

  half-Hawaiian and half-haole, know whereof I speak. Be patient,

  Bella, be patient.'

  "'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was

  tender for me. Thank God, he never told me to be patient. He

  knew. He was very wise. He was warm human, and, therefore, wiser

  than Uncle Robert and George Castner, who sought the thing, not the

  spirit, who kept records in ledgers rather than numbers of heart-

  beats breast to breast, who added columns of figures rather than

  remembered embraces and endearments of look and speech and touch.

  'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say. He knew. You have heard

  always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was a true

  lover. He loved but the once. After her death they said he was

  eccentric. He was. He was the one lover, once and always.

  Remember that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered

  only after his death and found it his shrine to her. 'Dear Bella,'

  it was all he ever said to me, but I knew he knew.

  "And I was nineteen, and sun-warm Hawaiian in spite of my three-

  quarters haole blood, and I knew nothing save my girlhood

  splendours at Kilohana and my Honolulu education at the Royal Chief

  School, and my grey husband at Nahala with his grey preachments and

  practices of sobriety and thrift, and those two childless uncles of

  mine, the one with far, cold vision, the other the broken-hearted,

  for-ever-dreaming lover of a dead princess.

  "Think of that grey house! I, who had known the ease and the

  delights and the ever-laughing joys of Kilohana, and of the Parkers

  at old Mana, and of Puuwaawaa! You remember. We did live in

  feudal spaciousness in those days. Would you, can you, believe it,

  Martha--at Nahala the only sewing machine I had was one of those

  the early missionaries brought, a tiny, crazy thing that one

  cranked around by hand!

  "Robert and John had each given Husband George five thousand

  dollars at my marriage. But he had asked for it to be kept secret.

  Only the four of us knew. And wh
ile I sewed my cheap holokus on

  that crazy machine, he bought land with the money--the upper Nahala

  lands, you know--a bit at a time, each purchase a hard-driven

  bargain, his face the very face of poverty. To-day the Nahala

  Ditch alone pays me forty thousand a year.

  "But was it worth it? I starved. If only once, madly, he had

  crushed me in his arms! If only once he could have lingered with

  me five minutes from his own business or from his fidelity to his

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  employers! Sometimes I could have screamed, or showered the

  eternal bowl of hot porridge into his face, or smashed the sewing

  machine upon the floor and danced a hula on it, just to make him

  burst out and lose his temper and be human, be a brute, be a man of

  some sort instead of a grey, frozen demi-god."

  Bella's tragic expression vanished, and she laughed outright in

  sheer genuineness of mirthful recollection.

  "And when I was in such moods he would gravely look me over,

  gravely feel my pulse, examine my tongue, gravely dose me with

  castor oil, and gravely put me to bed early with hot stove-lids,

  and assure me that I'd feel better in the morning. Early to bed!

  Our wildest sitting up was nine o'clock. Eight o'clock was our

  regular bed-time. It saved kerosene. We did not eat dinner at

  Nahala--remember the great table at Kilohana where we did have

  dinner? But Husband George and I had supper. And then he would

  sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed

  magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his

  socks and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff.

  And when he went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene

  with only one to benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same

  way, winding up his watch, entering the day's weather in his diary,

  and taking off his shoes, right foot first invariably, left foot

  second, and placing them just so, side by side, on the floor, at

  the foot of the bed, on his side.

  "He was the cleanest man I ever knew. He never wore the same

  undergarment a second time. I did the washing. He was so clean it

  hurt. He shaved twice a day. He used more water on his body than

  any kanaka. He did more work than any two haoles. And he saw the

  future of the Nahala water."

  "And he made you wealthy, but did not make you happy," Martha

  observed.

  Bella sighed and nodded.

  "What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new Pierce-Arrow came

  down on the steamer with me. My third in two years. But oh, all

  the Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a

  lover!--the one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil

  beside and suffer and joy beside, the one male man lover husband .

  . . "

  Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an

  ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under

  a hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her

  eyes, withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a

  mongoose's, and at Bella's feet she first sank down, in pure

  Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless mele of Bella and

  Bella's ancestry and adding to it an extemporized welcome back to

  Hawaii after her absence across the great sea to California. And

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  while she chanted her mele, the old crone's shrewd fingers lomied

  or massaged Bella's silk-stockinged legs from ankle and calf to

  knee and thigh.

  Both Bella's and Martha's eyes were luminous-moist, as the old

  retainer repeated the lomi and the mele to Martha, and as they

  talked with her in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial

  questions about her health and age and great-great-grandchildren--

  she who had lomied them as babies in the great house at Kilohana,

  as her ancestresses had lomied their ancestresses back through the

  unnumbered generations. The brief duty visit over, Martha arose

  and accompanied her back to the bungalow, putting money into her

  hand, commanding proud and beautiful Japanese housemaids to wait

  upon the dilapidated aborigine with poi, which is compounded of the

  roots of the water lily, with iamaka, which is raw fish, and with

  pounded kukui nut and limu, which latter is seawood tender to the

  toothless, digestible and savoury. It was the old feudal tie, the

  faithfulness of the commoner to the chief, the responsibility of

  the chief to the commoner; and Martha, three-quarters haole with

  the Anglo-Saxon blood of New England, was four-quarters Hawaiian in

  her remembrance and observance of the well-nigh vanished customs of

  old days.

  As she came back across the lawn to the hau tree, Bella's eyes

  dwelt upon the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her,

  and embraced her and loved her. Shorter than Bella was Martha, a

  trifle, but the merest trifle, less queenly of port; but

  beautifully and generously proportioned, mellowed rather than

  dismantled by years, her Polynesian chiefess figure eloquent and

  glorious under the satisfying lines of a half-fitting, grandly

  sweeping, black-silk holoku trimmed with black lace more costly

  than a Paris gown.

  And as both sisters resumed their talk, an observer would have

  noted the striking resemblance of their pure, straight profiles, of

  their broad cheek-bones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of

  their iron-grey abundance of hair, of their sweet-lipped mouths set

  with the carriage of decades of assured and accomplished pride, and

  of their lovely slender eye-rows arched over equally lovely long

  brown eyes. The hands of both of them, little altered or defaced

  by age, were wonderful in their slender, tapering finger-tips,

  love-lomied and love-formed while they were babies by old Hawaiian

  women like to the one even then eating poi and iamaka and limu in

  the house.

  "I had a year of it," Bella resumed, "and, do you know, things were

  beginning to come right. I was beginning to draw to Husband

  George. Women are so made, I was such a woman at any rate. For he

  was good. He was just. All the old sterling Puritan virtues were

  his. I was coming to draw to him, to like him, almost, might I

  say, to love him. And had not Uncle John loaned me that horse, I

  know that I would have truly loved him and have lived ever happily

  with him--in a quiet sort of way, of course.

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  "You see, I knew nothing else, nothing different, nothing better in

  the way of men. I came gladly to look across the table at him

  while he read in the brief interval between supper and bed, gladly

  to listen for and to catch the beat of his horse's hoofs coming

  home at night from his endless riding over the ranch. And his

  scant praise was praise indeed, that made me tingle with happiness-

  -yes, S
ister Martha, I knew what it was to blush under his precise,

  just praise for the things I had done right or correctly.

  "And all would have been well for the rest of our lives together,

  except that he had to take steamer to Honolulu. It was business.

  He was to be gone two weeks or longer, first, for the Glenns in

  ranch affairs, and next for himself, to arrange the purchase of

  still more of the upper Nahala lands. Do you know! he bought lots

  of the wilder and up-and-down lands, worthless for aught save

  water, and the very heart of the watershed, for as low as five and

  ten cents an acre. And he suggested I needed a change. I wanted

  to go with him to Honolulu. But, with an eye to expense, he

  decided Kilohana for me. Not only would it cost him nothing for me

  to visit at the old home, but he saved the price of the poor food I

  should have eaten had I remained alone at Nahala, which meant the

  purchase price of more Nahala acreage. And at Kilohana Uncle John

  said yes, and loaned me the horse.

  "Oh, it was like heaven, getting back, those first several days.

  It was difficult to believe at first that there was so much food in

  all the world. The enormous wastage of the kitchen appalled me. I

  saw waste everywhere, so well trained had I been by Husband George.

  Why, out in the servants' quarters the aged relatives and most

  distant hangers-on of the servants fed better than George and I

  ever fed. You remember our Kilohana way, same as the Parker way, a

  bullock killed for every meal, fresh fish by runners from the ponds

  of Waipio and Kiholo, the best and rarest at all times of

  everything . . .

  "And love, our family way of loving! You know what Uncle John was.

  And Brother Walcott was there, and Brother Edward, and all the

  younger sisters save you and Sally away at school. And Aunt

  Elizabeth, and Aunt Janet with her husband and all her children on

  a visit. It was arms around, and perpetual endearings, and all

  that I had missed for a weary twelvemonth. I was thirsty for it.

  I was like a survivor from the open boat falling down on the sand

  and lapping the fresh bubbling springs at the roots of the palms.

  "And THEY came, riding up from Kawaihae, where they had landed from

  the royal yacht, the whole glorious cavalcade of them, two by two,

  flower-garlanded, young and happy, gay, on Parker Ranch horses,

  thirty of them in the party, a hundred Parker Ranch cowboys and as