IN MEMORY OFHENRY OPUKAHAIABorn in Kau 1792.Resided at Napoopoo 1797-1808Lived in New England Until His Death at Cornwall,Conn., in 1818.His Zeal for Christ and Love for His People Inspiredthe First American Board Mission to Hawaii in 1820.
IN MEMORY OF
HENRY OPUKAHAIA
Born in Kau 1792.
Resided at Napoopoo 1797-1808
Lived in New England Until His Death at Cornwall,
Conn., in 1818.
His Zeal for Christ and Love for His People Inspired
the First American Board Mission to Hawaii in 1820.
Standing or sitting in the grass, without boredom for hours on end I listened to the exercises. The oratory of the Hawaiian leaders, several of them government officials, is like music. There is nothing they would rather do than launch into speechmaking upon public occasions; and with good reason, for there is nothing they do better. Their rounded periods, their intonations, are impressive in the extreme. They know the value of emphasis, of pause, of repose. I was transported to Bora-Bora, the Jolly Isle, and heard again the ringing improvisations of the Talking Men. Not the least among the speakers at Napoopoo that day was our good friend Mr. Kawewehi. Some of the old men of the district, perspiring patiently in resurrected frock-coats that were moss-green with age and damp, delivered themselves of word and gesture with volume and fervor that betokened they had been long-pent.
Between speeches, the choirs from various churches and Sunday schools about the island, including every adopted race, were heard in songs and hymns and recitations. School songs were also given, and I can only wish I had reels of motion-picture, in colors, to preserve the types, beautiful, comical, dark, fair, largeand small, from royally-fleshed Hawaiian, on through the score of other nationalities, to the tiniest, bashfullest Chinese or Japanese maiden, or babe from sunny Portugal. Such a gathering may never be again upon the strand of storied Kealakekua.
One distinguished figure that mingled with the gathering was Miss Bertha Ben Taylor. Her official title is Supervising Principal of the West Hawaii government schools. For years this strong and capable woman has devoted her abilities to maintaining the high standard she has set for the schools under her charge.
“Do you approve of whipping children?” I once asked Miss Taylor.
“Not now,” she replied, breaking into a smile. Then, to my questioning look, she went on:
“The last time I ever spanked a child, it suddenly occurred to me to ask the little fellow if he knew why I had punished him. ‘Yes,’ he blubbered. ‘Why, then?’ said I. ‘Because you’re bigger’n me!’ Why else? it struck me. I have never laid hand on a child since that day.”
The collection plate was passed by the sheriff—could that have been unpremeditated by the committee in charge? The last hymn died away upon the seabreeze, and the amen of the final invocation to Deity floated up to blue heaven. The summery throng, so solemnly happy throughout the warm hours of attention, left chairs, stones, grass, and the walls of the heiau, and descended upon a huge feast in a half-open building at water’s edge. Preparations had been afoot for days. More than once, bound through for other points, we had noted the busy wahines and their men, and passed the time o’ day with them. That very morning our nostrils had dilated to delicious odors of roast pig.
We remained at the luau only long enough for a first course, because we had been invited by the head of the Captain Cook Coffee Company to dine at his cottage on the beach beyond the heiau. One could envy our host his location, tucked away back in the cool shadow of the hoary temple, half-surrounded by ponds, and with splendid swimming outside off the shelving sands. There seems to be no fear of sharks here; why, I could not unearth, for the ocean pours over no barrier reef. I never had finer swimming than out beyond in those large, billowing rollers that did not burst until close to the beach, and then mildly. But it is a wicked place, they promise, in stormy weather.
There is no part of the world I have seen that is so fascinating to me as Kona. Aside from its material beauty from surf-frilled coast to timberline, it is pervaded by a mysterious charm that links it with my oldest dreams. Back in childhood, in the beginnings of personal memory, my dreaming at intervals took me upon a mountain where dwelt a sophisticated people who lived for beauty and pleasure. There were dark rooms somewhere in the steeps, but I never fathomed their significance. Although the men and women were my kind—I saw no children—I seemed to wander among them in a sort of seclusion, with little attention paid me. For years I had not thought of this land of unconsciousness until that week on the Paris ranch. As soon as the clover-leaf had emerged upon the Kona slopes, its high ridge began to stir a remembrance that led to the all but forgotten dream mountain. That skyline was a constant lure. The tender wedges of young papaia groves and other crops, fingering into the primeval forest, did not lessen the impression of familiarity with older visits than my former ones here. By daylight and by dark the whole prospectretained its unreality. Twilight and dawn lent the mountain-side a perpendicularity, the depressions and shadows caverns of mystery. In the eerie gloom one was almost afraid to find the ghostly wall impalpable.
By far the most savage thing in the Kona district is a small Catholic church that clings to the precipitous land. Some holy brother of long ago had decorated every inch of this chapel with his conception of the Hereafter. I will say that his sense of fitness kept the scene in key with native surroundings, for the wooden pillars simulated coco palms, their fronds spreading upon the blue ceiling. The painted trunks were scrolled in the native with hopeful prophecies such as “You are going to hell.” The tormented souls depicted on the right-hand wall were indubitably Hawaiians, with a sprinkling of imported tillers of the soil. Most of them wore expressions of pained surprise at shrewd punishments for sins they wotted not of. It was an unfortunate skurrying paké, Chinaman, however, with a long and inconvenient queue, who seemed to be having a peculiarly unpleasant time of it, between fire and snakes and an extremely unstable equilibrium. The distinguished attention lavished upon his execution, artistically and spiritually, by a harrying, tailed demon with a red pitchfork, led one to hazard that the painter had “had it in” for his earthly prototype. An artist of old Salem could not have used more lurid and thrilling realism!
On the opposite wall, with a certain rude sublimity, was limned the Temptation in the Wilderness, besides scenes of heavenly reward for righteousness.
The story runs, if I remember aright, that when the earnest proselyter was called to another parish, his mural illuminations failing to meet with aught but contumely, he revenged himself by paintingbrownthe angels’ faces!
I was more than curious to learn if that three miles of new automobile road across the lava from Napoopoo had altered the native atmosphere of Honaunau. I record with thanksgiving that such is not to any grave extent the case. The pilgrim, approaching the beach village with open spirit and sympathy, may still find a bit of real Hawaii. Myself, I spent a perfect day, the abominable fumes and noise of gas-cars excepted. The church convention, taking the opportunity to revisit the heiau, motored overen masse. From what I observed, not a Hawaiian was guilty of the slightest levity within the pagan precincts.
It is a sweet spot, Honaunau, removed as far from the restless work-a-day world as may be in a machine age, considering its nearness to the continent. As all over the island, the old women, reminded of my identity, caressed me half-reverently for my widowhood. They recalled Jack London of the sea-gray eyes, and sunny curls as recalcitrant as their own, and that he wrote understandingly of their people. “A good man,” they murmured in the native; andAuwe!and again Auwe! they repeated in the kindest voices I had heard since far days in Samoa.
Ethel Paris, unknown to me, also hinted to the villagers that Lakana Wahine favored, above haole oysters, raw tidbits of Hawaiian fish. I had found, in the stone-walled palm grove, a coconut frond twenty feet long that suited me well for a sylvan couch. With head on log, I was complete. I sharpened my pencil on a convenient lava bowlder, and went at making word-sketches of my environs, unwilling to lose one moment in entire forgetfulness. I wrote a few sentences, set down some of the colors. But I found my mood better fed by idly wondering why the drowsy interval between the impact of an ax wielded by a distant woodchopper, and the sound of it, seemedlonger than in any other atmosphere. An old break in the stone wall opened up a deep bight, striped in peacock and green-turquoise, where rolled at anchor a dove-gray sampan that dully mirrored the gaudy tide. To either side, arms of lava embraced miniature bays. On a moss-green islet stood a native boy, in perspective a mere Tanagre figurine, tarnished with vert reflections. In his hand was a snow-white crust of coconut, and motionless he watched a green-crested, red-webbed duck nozzling in the shallows.
Not far off, in a wind-ruffled, reef-sheltered place, swam a dozen men and women. They wore loincloths and white or red muumuus, and threshed the water, brilliant blue even close inshore, with overhand breast-strokes from brown arms smooth-shining against the lava background of rougher bronze surface. The unrestrained laughter and exclamations were too much for me, and I went out upon the piled lava shore for a nearer view of their gambols. While I sat, feet trailing in the brine-washed sand, a sumptuous wahine strolled by with the correct, straight-front poise of the heaviest Hawaiians. With the slightest recognition of my presence, a diffident reticence often mistaken for hauteur, she rested at a distance, filled and smoked a small pipe at her ease, the while carelessly studying a salt pool near by. Pipe empty, it and her sack of Bull Durham were tucked jauntily into the band of a tattered straw of native weave that tilted at a killing angle over her pretty eyes and saucy nose. The up-ended back of the brim gave view of a generous toss of curls that made me envious of her very probable ignorance of its beauty. With a hand-net and bag she commenced hunting for seafood in the sandy places, planting her feet on lava hummocks as squarely and ponderously, with her mighty ankles, as might a quickened idol of stone. When she ventured in above the knees, her floating redholoku revealed limbs like trunks, laughably fat, yet pleasantly proportioned.
A bevy of young women came wading in from their swim, shaking out yards of splendid hair to dry in the sun along with their dripping muumuus—hair abundant, not coarse, breaking into wonderful red-bronze waves, ringleting at the long ends and about face and neck as if in sheer celebration of vital life. Some of these wahines and their men converged where a swift current poured through a wee channel from one rocky pool to another, and began netting colored fish. Joining them with my friends, half in and half out in the drifting sand and milk-warm water, I watched the pretty sport.
“Do you know that they’re after the right fish foryourlunch?” Margaret whispered to me. Repeating to the fishers in their tongue what she had said to me in mine, they all laughed, lowered their eyelids with the movement that caresses the cheek with the lashes, and bobbed their heads in delighted confusion.
I swam and frolicked in the racing brine, and once, floating face-down, spied a long shadow that sent me half-laughing, half-panicky, to win to safety ahead of an imaginary shark. But the natives knew that no sea-tiger comes into these lava-rimmed baylets, and I joined in the rippling explosion of mirth that went up at my discomfiture.
When I had returned to my shady coconut grove and palm-frond, ready to have lunch, a handsome elderly Hawaiian, with leonine gray mane above beautiful wide eyes of brown, approached with the grand air of a queen’s minister. In his shapely hand was a large leaf. Upon this natural platter lay freshly-snared game of the right varieties, white-fleshed and size of my palm, cleansed and sliced raw. Not a smile marred the high respectfulness of his manner; only themost formal ceremoniousness, without affectation, of service from one race to another. Without a word, he went as he had come, in unhurried and graceful stateliness. After I had eaten, curiously yet courteously observed by the passing dignified pilgrims to the ancient shrine, I joined my fish-host at the water’s edge, where he sat with the large wahine, who proved to be his wife. We waxed as chummy as our lingual disadvantage would permit. I was glad to learn that in these unprolific times the fine couple had at least one child; but he did not appear strong.
And thus, in all leisureliness, I linked with a chain of hours that seemed like days, in which there was enough of unspoiled human nature and habit to link one in turn with Hawaii’s yesterday. These child-people of the beach were pleased, too, in their way, that an outsider should love to be at one, as a matter of course, with their customs.
Ten days of reuniting with friends in Honolulu, and there came my sailing date. The four months’ vacation I had allotted myself was done. I must get home to the finishing of Jack London’s biography.
On the big wharf was scarcely standing room for those come to God-speed the ship. The faces of the passengers were regretful, no matter what their pleasure of home-going. Bedecked with wreaths, they struggled through the flowery crush to reinforce the crowded steamer rails that appeared like tiered garden walls.
The embracing was over, the eyes-to-eyes of farewells that tried to remain composed. Jack Atkinson, who at the last took charge of breasting a way for me to the gangplank, handed me through the gate. I was banked to the eyes with the rarest leis of roses, violets, plumeria, proud ilima and all. It being a warm Marchday, and the weight of flowers very palpable, one felt much as if in a perfumed Turkish bath!
Leaning over the topmost rail, trying to locate faces in the dense gathering, I realized again all the sweetness of my welcome and parting. Diffidently, desolately, I had approached Our Hawaii. As I had been welcomed for two, so I departed for two; and my speeding was two-fold. And now in my heart was gratitude and happiness for the renewed love and trust that made it My Hawaii.
The hawsers were cast off, the band melted into Aloha Oe, the streams of serpentine began to part and blossoms to fly, as theMatsoniagot under way. Something made me glance down at the stringer-piece of the pier. A handsome Hawaiian youth stood looking aloft at me in mute distress, holding up fathoms of pink cables made from stripped carnations. He had failed to get aboard with them in time. It was Kalakaua Kawananakoa. Princess David had sent him in her stead, for I had made her promise that she would not brave the exhaustion of the merry mob.
Then I lost track of the young prince. A few moments later, one of the music boys came to me bearing the royal ropes of flowers, five inches in diameter, which Kalakaua had somehow contrived to land on the lower deck across the widening gap. Still unable to detect his among the myriad faces, I swung the wondrous lariat, letting out its yards about my flower-crowned head, that he might know the gift was safely mine.
With a sob in the throat, I recalled Jack’s words, that last time I had stood in the same place at theMatsonia’shurricane rail:
“Of all lands of joy and beauty under the sun...”
But always the sob must turn to song, in contemplation of that beauty and joy.
Not alone because it was Jack London’s Loveland do I adore Hawaii and her people. To me, native and kamaaina alike, have they given their heart of sorrow, and their Welcome Home, in ways numerous and touching. To them, therefore, this book,Our Hawaii. To them, friends all, greeting and farewell.
“Love without end.”“Aloha pau ole.”
“Love without end.”“Aloha pau ole.”
“Love without end.”“Aloha pau ole.”
“Love without end.”
“Aloha pau ole.”
Jack London Ranch,In the Valley of the Moon,1921.
Jack London Ranch,
In the Valley of the Moon,
1921.