(1) Diamond Head. (2) A Pair of Jacks—Atkinson and London. (3) Ahuimanu.
(1) Diamond Head. (2) A Pair of Jacks—Atkinson and London. (3) Ahuimanu.
One toothsome accompaniment to a Hawaiian meal is thekukui, or candlenut (Aleurites Moluccana). Itsmeat is baked and crushed, then mixed with native salt. Pinches of this relish, calledi-na-mo-na, are taken with poi and other viands, and it is sometimes stirred in to season a mess of raw mullet. The kukui tree, a comparatively recent introduction from the South Seas, has nearly as many uses as the coconut palm, for aside from the gustatory excellence of its nut, a gum from the bark is valuable, and a dye found in the nut shell was formerly used to paint the intricate patterns of the tapa that served for clothing. This dye also formed a waterproofing for tapa cloaks, and with it tattoo artists drew fashionable designs into the flesh of their patrons, who also rubbed their bodies with oil pressed from the nut, especially in making them slippery for wrestling and fighting. The nuts strung on the midrib of a coconut leaf formed the Hawaiians’ only torch. The oil of the nut, expressed under pressure, is a valuable paint oil.
For the drinking we were given choice of a mild beer and “pop” (soda-water of various colors), and coconut water in the shell; and for dessert, the not unpleasant anti-climax of good old vanilla ice cream to remind us that Hawaii has long been in the grasp of Jack’s “inevitable white man.”
Next came the dancing. Mr. Moore had promised us a hula; but a hula, except by professional dancers, is more easily promised than delivered. The native must be in the precise right humor before any performance is forthcoming for the malihini. Our pleasant task was to overcome the shyness that whelmed both Kanakas and wahines when we coaxed them to show their paces. Few, very likely, had ever danced before strangers. Indeed, for the most part, the hula is frowned upon by haole residents. And the majority of these were simple rural folk with a terror ofwrong-doing. I think the Hawaiians are quick to detect a meretricious gayety or any patronizing, overdone familiarity; and to make them feel one’s genuine interest in their customs is the only means by which to establish a basis of confidence. Left to themselves, they will dance anywhere at any time. Tochigi witnessed his first hula on Toby’s train! He did not comment upon it; but after seeing Americans dance, each couple following its own method, he had respectfully observed that he thought we danced more for our own pleasure than for that of onlookers.
At length a bolder or more persuadable spirit, yearning to express the real general desire to please, broke through the crust of reserve and began a series of convolutions to the endless two-step measure of guitars and ukuleles that during the luau had throbbed in a leafy corner of the grass shelter.
Arch faces lighted, hands clapped and feet beat time, eyes and teeth flashed in the dim light of lanterns and lamps, and flower-burdened shoulders swung involuntarily to the rhythm. One after another added the music of his throat to an old hula that has never seen printer’s ink, while the violin threnody of the Alapai raised the plaintive, savage lilt to something incommunicably high and haunting.
Jack seemed in a trance, his eyes like stars, while his broad shoulders swayed to the measure. Discovering my regard, caught in his emotion of delight in this pregnant folk dance and song, he did not smile, but half-veiled his eyes as he laid a hand on mine in token of acknowledgment of my comprehension of his deep mood. For in every manifestation of human life, he goes down into the tie ribs of racial development, as if in eternal quest to connect up the abysmal past with the palpable present.
A pause, full of murmurs and low laughter, then a strapping young wahine with the profile of Diana seized an old guitar. With a shout to another girl to get on her feet, she leaned over and swept the strings masterfully with the backs of her fingers, at the same time setting up a wanton, thrilling hula song that was a love cry in the starlight, each repeated phrase ending in a fainting, crooning, tremulous falsetto which trailed into a vanishing wisp of sound. She could not sit quietly, but swung her body and lissom limbs in rhythm like a wild thing possessed, seeming to galvanize the dancers by sheer force of will, for one by one they sprang to the bidding of her voice and magnetic fingers, into the flickering light where they swayed and bent and undulated like mad sweet nymphs and fauns. Now and again a brown sprite separated from the moving group, and came to dance before the haole guests, the dance a provocation to join the revelry. Sometimes the love appeal was unmistakable, accompanied by singing words we wotted not of, but which were the cause of good-natured merriment from the others. Then abruptly the performer would become impersonal in face and gesture, and melt back into the weaving group.
After a while the dancing lagged, and we sensed it was time to relieve these kind people of our more or less restraining presence. They had done so much, and to wear out such welcome would have been a crime against good heart and manners.
Having neglected to ask the obliging Tony to wait his dummy, down the track we footed, listening to small noises of the night, among which was the sighing of water buffalo, those grotesque gray shapes that patiently toil by day in the rice fields.
Pearl Lochs, June 14.
At luncheon to-day Miss Johnson introduced us to a girl from Maine, and it was a unique experience to sit in the hot-house air, gazing out upon the hot-house vegetation, the while we conversed in “down-east” colloquialisms. “Did you see her jump at the sound of that falling leaf!” Jack laughed on the way home, for the young stranger had been not the only one startled when a twenty-foot frond let go its parent palm and crashed to earth.
Our captain of the roseate name is painting theSnark, and she floats, a boat of white enamel, in the still blue and silver of the morning flood; while for frame to the fair picture a painted double-rainbow overarches, flinging the misty fringes of its ends in our enraptured faces. From the shell-pink dawn, through the green and golden day, to sunset and purple twilight and starshine, we move in beauty. “What a lot of people must have been shanghaied here by their own desire!” Jack ruminates. And truly, Hawaii is sufficient excuse for never going home.
One of our pleasures, of a Sunday, is watching the yachts from Honolulu sail into Pearl Harbor and slant about on the crisping water, for a look at theSnark. Last Sunday came a corps of young engineers from the Iron Works, who had offered to give their holiday for the fellow who wrote “The Game” and “The Sea Wolf.” Jack was much touched; and especially pleased at the tribute to “The Game,” which novel is a favorite of his own.
Last evening we had opportunity again to come in contact with the Hawaiians, receiving a party in our sylvan drawing- and music-room. Miss Johnson had told us that Judge Hookano (Ho-o-kah-no), the native district judge at Pearl City, wished to bringhis wife to call. To our prompt invitation they responded with the large immediate family as well as more distant relatives. One of these, who dislikes Americans, during a conversation with Miss Johnson concerning the Londons, remarked: “Oh, yes, the English are always very nice.” “But the Londons are American—very American!” Miss Johnson straightened her out. However, the dusky lady was cordial enough when our meeting took place, as were all the party. The Judge proved an intelligent and kindly soul, and Mrs. Hookano whom we had long admired at a distance, is a magnificently proportioned woman with the port of a queen, always attired in stately lines of black lawn or silk.
None of our visitors had heard Hawaiian music on the phonograph and clapped their shapely hands over the hulas like joyous children. But those merry hands folded devoutly when the Trinity Choir voices rose on the night air, and all joined in singing the harmonies of “Lead, Kindly Light” and the several other beautiful hymns. The spirit of these folk is so sweet, so guileless; I know I shall love them forever. Manners among them are gentle and considerate, so courteous in every conventional observance, prompted by their simple, affectionate hearts. Hookano meansproud, and these who bear the name demonstrate a blending of pride and gentlehood that is altogether aristocratic.
While Jack manipulated the talking-machine, I lay happily with head in a friendly lap, while satin-brown fingers caressed face and hair; looking high through the lacy foliage to where big stars hung like bright fruit in the branches. Jack ended the machine-made concert with the Hawaiian National Anthem, and the Judge removed his hat and stood, the others rising about him. Then we cajoled them into contributing their own music, and after some hesitation, untingedby the faintest unwillingness, they settled dreamily to singing their melodies—brown velvet maids with laughing, shining eyes, who warbled in voices thin and penetrating as sweet zither-strings, softly, as if afraid to vex the calm night with greater volume.
At parting we walked to the gate, arms around the shoulders of our new friends, their own Aloha nui on our lips. And every aloha spoken or sung in Hawaii is the tender tone-fall of a dying bell, tolling for the olden Hawaii Nei.
Then, arms-around, we two paced back across the grass, and stood for a moment on the edge of our bewitching garden, looking at the slender sliver of a new moon of good omen dipping low above the shadowy hills.
Waikiki, June 25.
Once more in the tent-cottage at Waikiki, as the hub for many spokes of exploration in the Islands. I mistrust we shall never again pursue the idyllic life of the peninsula. Unfortunately, no way has been devised to live in two or more places simultaneously—except in the imagination, and that we can richly do. Artemus Ward is responsible for the delicious paradox: “No man can be in two places at once unless he is a bird.”
Many jaunts are in prospect: an automobile journey around Oahu; a yacht race girdling the same island, on which “Wahine Kapu,” no woman, is writ large upon the visages of the yachtsmen; a torchlight fishing expedition fifty miles distant with Prince Cupid, under the same no-petticoat mandate; a wonderful trip to Maui, to camp through the greatest extinct crater in the world, Haleakala, said to surpass Ætna in extent and elevation; and Jack has been deftly pulling wires to bring about a visit for us both to the famous LeperSettlement on Molokai, which is said to occupy one of the most beautiful sites in the Islands. Lucius E. Pinkham, president of the Board of Health, has been our guest to dinner, and not only has he put no obstacles in our way, but appears anxious for us to see Molokai. There has been considerable misrepresentation of the Settlement, and he evidently believes that Jack will paint a just picture. Mr. Pinkham seems to have the welfare of the lepers close at heart; and I have heard that when he fails to obtain from the Government certain appropriations for improvements, he draws on his own funds.
Thus, the air is brimful of glamour and interest, which helps to offset a tender regret for the lovely Lochs and for our neighbors who have been so lavish in neighborliness. One night before we departed, the Hookano young folk arranged a crabbing party, and sang the hours away under the light of a half-moon; another time, at sunset, we fished off the lee shore of the peninsula, where we landed a mess of “colored fish” like a flock of wet butterflies.
Here at the Beach life is so gay there is hardly chance to sleep and work, what with arrivals of transports and the ensuing frivolities in the hotel lanai, varied by swimming and surf-boarding under sun and moon. One fine day we essayed to ride the breakers in a Canadian canoe, and capsized in a wild smoker exactly as we had been warned. I stayed under water such a time that Jack, alarmed, came hunting for me; but I was safe beneath the overturned canoe, which I was holding from bumping my head. He was so relieved to find me unhurt and capable of staying submerged so long that promptly he read me a lecture upon swimming as fast as possible from a capsized boat, to avoid being struck in event of succeeding rollers flinging it about.
One night we attended a moonlight swimming party at a seaside home and became acquainted with more of the white Islands’ kamaainas. A lovely custom prevails here among the owners, who, in absences abroad, allow friends the use of their suburban places for occasions of this kind. Across the hedges we peeped into the next garden where, in the smother of scented foliage, there still lurks the house Robert Louis Stevenson once occupied.
After a military dance at the hotel last evening, tables were carried out on the lawn to the sands-edge, where supper was served by silent, swift Japanese in white. It was like a dream, there among the trees hung with soft rosy lights, our eyes sweeping the horizon touched by a low gold disk of moon, and on across the effervescing foam of an ebbing tide at our feet, and the white sea horses charging the crescent beach, to Diamond Head purple black against the star-dusted southern sky. “Do you know where you are?” And there was but one answer to Jack’s whisper—“Just Waikiki,” which tells it all. The charm of Waikiki—it is the charm of Hawaii Nei, “All Hawaii.”
June 28.
To Mr. Ford we owe a new debt of gratitude. And so does Hawaii, for such another promoter never existed. All he does is for Hawaii, desiring nothing for himself except the pleasure of sharing the attractions of his adopted land. The past two days have been spent encircling Oahu, or partly so, since only the railroad continues around the entire shore-line, the automobile drive cutting across a tableland midway of the island. Oahu comprises an area of 598 square miles, is trapezoidal in shape, its coast the most regular of any in the group. Another notable feature is that it possesses two distinct mountain chains, Koolau andWaianae, whereas the other islands have isolated peaks and no distinct ranges. Waianae is much the older of the two. The geology of this volcanic isle is a continual temptation to diverge.
Two machines carried ten of us, including the drivers. The party was composed of men whom Mr. Ford wanted Jack to know, representing the best of Hawaii’s white citizenship. There was Mr. Joseph P. Cooke, dominating figure of Alexander & Baldwin, which firm is the leading financial force of the Islands (it was Mr. Cooke’s missionary grandparents, the Amos P. Cookes, who founded and for many years conducted what was known as the “Chiefs’ School,” afterward called the “Royal School,” which was patronized by all of the higher chiefs and their families); Mr. Lorrin A. Thurston, also descended from the first missionaries, and associated conspicuously with the affairs of Hawaii, both monarchical and republican—and incidentally owner of the morning paper; and Senor A. de Souza Canavarro, Portuguese Consul, an able man who has lived here twenty years and whose brain is shelved with Islands lore.
The world was all dewy cool and the air redolent with flowers when, after an early dip in the surf, we glided down Kalakaua Avenue between the awakening duck ponds with their lily pads and grassy partitions. Leaving the center of town by way of Nuuanu Avenue, along which an electric car runs for two miles, we headed for the storied heights of the Pali (precipice), and presently began climbing between converging mountains to the pass through the Koolau Range. This Nuuanu Valley is a wondrous residence section, of old-fashioned white mansions of by-gone styles of architecture, still wearing their stateliness like a page in history. The dwellers therein are cooled by every breeze—not to mention frequent rains. It is ahumorous custom for a resident to say, “I live at the first shower,” or the second shower, or even the third, according to his distance from moister elevations in the city limits. The rainfall in upper Nuuanu, and Manoa, the next valley to the southeast, is from 140 inches to 150 inches annually. In lower Nuuanu—only three or four miles distant—it averages around 30-35 inches. Many of these old houses stand amidst expansive lawns, the driveways columned with royal palms—the first brought to the Islands. One white New England house was pointed out as having been the country home of Queen Emma, bought with its adjoining acres by the Government and turned into a public park. The building contains some of the Queen’s furniture, and other antiques of the period. “The Daughters of Hawaii,” an organization of Hawaii-born women of all nationalities, has the care of the premises.
I promised myself an afternoon in the cemetery, where quaint tombs show through beautiful trees and shrubbery, and where, in the Mausoleum, are laid the bones of the Kamehameha and Kalakaua dynasties. King Lunalilo, who was the last of the Kamehamehas and preceded Kalakaua, rests in a mausoleum at Kawaiahao Church in town.
Up we swung on a smooth road graded along the hillsides, the flanks of the valley drawing together, the violet-shadowed walls of the mountains growing more sheer until they seemed almost to overtop with their clouded heads breaking into morning gold—Lanihuli and Konahuanui rising three thousand feet to left and right. From a keen curve, we looked back and down the green miles we had come, to a fairy white city suffused in blue mist beside a fairy blue sea.
Four miles from the end of the car-track, quite unexpectedly to me, suddenly the car emerged from a narrow defile upon a platform hewn out of the rockyearth, and my senses were momentarily stunned, for the high island had broken off, fallen away beneath our feet to the east and north. Alighting, we pressed against a wall of wind that eternally drafts through the gap, and threading among a score of small pack-mules resting on the way to Honolulu, gained the railed brink of the Pali. In the center of a scene that had haunted me for years, since I beheld it in a painting at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, I looked a thousand feet into an emerald abyss. Over its awful pitch Kamehameha a century ago forced the warriors of the King of Oahu, Kalanikupule—a “legion of the lost ones” whose shining skulls became souvenirs for strong climbers in succeeding generations. Some one pointed to a ferny, bowery spot far below, where Prince Cupid once kept a hunting cabin; but there was now neither trace of it nor of any trail penetrating the dense jungle.
To the left, lying northwest, stretch the perpendicular, inaccessible ramparts of the Koolau Range, which extends the length of the island, bastioned by erosions, and based in rich green slopes of forest and pasture that fall away to alluvial plains fertile with rice and cane, and rippled with green hillocks. Where we stood, a spur of the range bent in a right-angle to the eastward at our back; and off to the right, the great valley is bounded by desultory low hills, amid which an alluring red road winds to Kailua and Waimanalo by the sapphire sea, where we are told the bathing beaches and surf are unsurpassed.
A reef-embraced bay on the white-fringed shore caused me to inquire why Honolulu had not been builded upon this cool windward coast of Oahu, with its opulent and ready-made soil. “Any navigator could tell you that,” Jack chided. “Honolulu was begunwhen there was no steam, and the lee side of the island was the only safe anchorage for sailing vessels.”
The sun was now burning up the moving mists below, and through opalescent rents and thinning spaces we could trace the ruddy ribbon of road we were to travel. If I had dreamed of the majestic grandeur of these mountains, of the wondrous painted valley to the east, how feebly I should have anticipated other islands until first exploring this one. Jack keeps repeating that he cannot understand why it is not thronged with tourists, and calls it the garden of the world. We have seen nothing like it in America or Europe. And yet Oahu is not generally spoken of as by any means the most beautiful of the Hawaiian Islands. Instead, both residents and visitors rave over the “Garden Isle,” Kauai, the Kona coast of Hawaii and that Big Island’s gulches, the wonders of Maui with its Iao Valley and Haleakala, “The House of the Sun.” What must they all be, say we, if these persons have not been stirred by Windward Oahu!
After clinging spellbound to our windy vantage for half an hour (meanwhile speculating how many times Kalanikupule’s unfortunate army bumped in its headlong fall), we coasted the serpentine road that is railed and reënforced with masonry, fairly hanging to a stark wall for the best part of two miles. I noticed that Mr. Cooke preferred himself to negotiate his car on this blood-tingling descent, until we rounded into the undulating floor of the plain whence we stared abruptly up at the astonishing way we had come, with its retaining walls of cement, some of them four hundred feet in length.
One stands at the base of an uncompromising two-thousand-foot crag, an outjut of the range, and it appears but a few hundred feet to its head. For there is an elusiveness about the atmosphere that makesunreal the sternest palisades, the ruggedest gorges. Everything is as if seen in a mirror that has been dulled by a silver breath. That is it—it is all a reflection—these are mirrored mountains and shall always remain to me like something envisioned in a glass.
I for one was commencing to realize how early I had breakfasted, when the machines turned aside from the road on which we had been running through miles of the Kahuku sugar plantation into a private driveway that led to Mrs. James B. Castle’s sea-rim retreat, The Dunes. Having been called unexpectedly to Honolulu, she had left the manager of the plantation to do the honors, together with a note of apology embodying the wish that we make ourselves at home, and a request that we write in her guest book. After luncheon the men insisted that I inscribe something fitting for them to witness. Warm and tired, I wrote the following uninspired if grateful sentiment:
“With appreciation of the perfect hospitality—and deep regret that the giver was absent.”
“With appreciation of the perfect hospitality—and deep regret that the giver was absent.”
The others followed with their signatures; and when Mr. Ford’s turn came, his eye read what I had written, but his unresting mind must have been wool-gathering, for he scribbled:
“Hoping that every passer-by may be as fortunate.”
“Hoping that every passer-by may be as fortunate.”
A chorus of derision caused him to bend an alarmed eye upon the page, which he carefully scanned, especially my latter phrase. And then out came the page.
We were shown over the labor barracks, neat settlements of Japanese and Portuguese, in which we saw swarms of beautiful children rolling in the grass. The Portuguese flocked around the Consul, who was apparently an old and loved friend.
Several miles farther, we came to the Reform School, where the erring youth of Oahu, largely of nativestock, are guided in the way they should go. There was not a criminal face among them, and probably the majority are detained for temperamental laxness of one sort or another. Emotional they are, easily led, and inordinately fond of games of chance—but dishonest never. A small sugar plantation is carried on in connection with the school, which is worked by the boys.
Our last lap was from the Reform School to Haleiwa Hotel, at Waialua, which lies at the sea edge of the Waialua Plantation. Haleiwa means “House Beautiful,” and is pronounced Hah-lay-e-vah. There is so much dissension as to how the “v” sound crept into the “w,” that I am going to retire with the statement that Alexander, in his splendid “History of the Hawaiian People,” remarks that “The letter ‘w’ generally sounds like ‘v’ between the penult and final syllable of a word.”
House and grounds are very attractive, broad lawns sloping to an estuary just inside the beach; and in this river-like bit of water picturesque fishing boats and canoes lie at anchor. A span of rustic Japanese bridge leads to the bath-houses, and thither we went for a swim before dinner. I would not advise beginners to choose this beach for their first swimming lessons. It shelves with startling abruptness, while the undertow is more noticeable than at Waikiki. But for those who can take care of themselves, this lively water is good sport and more bracing than on the leeward coast.
We strolled through the gardens and along green little dams between duck ponds spotted with lily pads, and the men renewed their boyhood by “chucking” rocks into a sumptuous mango tree, bringing down the russet-gold, luscious fruit for an appetizer. I may some day be rash enough to describe the flavor of amango, or try to; but not yet—though I seem to resent some author’s statement that it bears more than a trace of turpentine.
Leaving Haleiwa next morning, we deserted the seashore for very different country. The motor ascended steadily toward the southwest, on a fine red road—so red that on ahead the very atmosphere was tinged. Looking back as we climbed, many a lovely surf-picture rewarded the quest of our eyes, white breakers ruffling the creamy beaches, with a sea bluer than the deep blue sky.
At an elevation of about eight hundred feet one strikes the rolling green prairieland of the “Plains,” where the ocean is visible northwest and southeast, on two sides of the island. It is a wonderful plateau, between mountain-walls, swept by the freshening northeast trade—miles upon miles of rich grazing, and hill upon hill ruled with blue-green lines of pineapple growth. At one plantation we stopped to look around at the fabulously promising industry. Mr. Kellogg, the manager, gave an interesting demonstration of how simple is the cultivation of the luscious “pines,” and held stoutly that a woman, unaided, could earn a good living out of a moderate patch. The first “pine” plantation in Hawaii was established in Manoa valley, back of Honolulu, by a Devonshire man, Captain John Kidwell. He started in the early ‘80’s with native shoots from the Kona Coast, later importing old stumps from Florida. In 1892 a hundred thousand plants were growing, and the Hawaiian Fruit and Packing Company was established, the second canning industry in Hawaii—fish-canning having been the only other.
Although like prairie seen from a distance, we discovered that this section of Oahu is serrated by enormous gullies, in character resembling our Californiabarrancas, but of vastly greater proportions. A huge dam has been constructed for the purpose of conserving the water for irrigation.
Something went wrong with one of our machines and we were obliged to telephone from Wahiawa to Honolulu for some parts. Think of this old savage isle in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where, from its high interior, one may talk over a wire to a modern city, for modern parts of a “horseless carriage,” to be sent by steam over a steel track! It is stimulating once in a day to ponder the age in which we live.
And on one of these ridges near Wahiawa, not so long ago, there preyed a regular ogre, a robber-chief whose habit it was to lie in wait in a narrow pass, and pounce upon his victims, whom he slew on a large, flat rock, and ate them—the only sure-enough cannibal in Hawaiian history.
June 29.
“Have you been in the Cleghorn Gardens?” is a frequent question to the malihini, and only another way of asking if one has seen the gardens of the late Princess Victoria Kaiulani, lovely hybrid flower of Scottish and Polynesian parentage, daughter of a princess of Hawaii, Miriam Likelike (sister of Liliuokalani and Kalakaua) and the Honorable Archibald Scott Cleghorn. We are too late by twenty years to be welcomed by Likelike, and eight years behind time to hear the merriment of Kaiulani in her father’s house—Kaiulani, who would now be of the same age as Jack London. King Kalakaua died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on January 20, 1891, and when his remains arrived in Honolulu from the U. S. S.Charlestonnine days later, and his sister Liliuokalani was proclaimed his successor, the little Princess Kaiulani, their niece, was appointed heir apparent.
The house, Ainahau, is not visible from the Avenue. Here the bereft consort of Likelike lives in solitary state with his servants, amid the relics of unforgotten days. He receives few visitors, and we felt as if breaking his privacy were an intrusion, even though by invitation. But the commandingly tall, courtly Scot, wide brown eyes smiling benevolently under white hair and beetling brows, paced halfway down his palm-pillared driveway in greeting, and led our little party about the green-shady ways of the wonderland of flowers and vines, lily ponds and arbors, “Where Kaiulani sat,” or sewed, or read, or entertained—all in a forest of high interlacing trees of many varieties, both native and foreign. I was most fascinated by a splendid banyan, a tree which from childhood I had wanted to see. This pleased the owner, whose especial pride it is—“Kaiulani’s banyan”; although he is obliged to trim it unmercifully lest its predatory tentacles capture the entire park.
Into nurseries and vegetable gardens we followed him, and real grass huts that have stood untouched for years. Another pride of Mr. Cleghorn’s is his sixteen varieties of hibiscus, of sizes and shapes and tints that we would hardly have believed possible—magic puffs of exquisite color springing like miracles from slender green stems that are often too slight, and snap under the full blossom-weight. Honolulu holds an annual hibiscus exhibition, in which many leading citizens compete.
The portion of the house once occupied by the vanished Princess is never opened to strangers, nor used in any way. Only her father wanders there, investing the pretty suite of rooms with recollection of her tuneful young presence. For she was little over twenty when she died.
But we were made welcome in the great drawing-room, reached by three broad descending steps, walled with rare books, and containing works of art and curios from all the world: old furniture from European palaces that would be the despair of a repulsed collector; tables of lustrous Hawaiian woods fashioned to order in Germany half a century ago; rare oriental vases set upon flare-topped pedestals ingeniously made from inverted tree stumps of native brownkouwood, polished like marble; a quaint and stately concert grand piano; old portraits of royalty, white and dusky; and, most fascinating of all, treasures of Hawaiian courts, among them some of the marvelous feather work. In dim corners,kahilisstand as if on guard—barbaric royal insignia, plumed staffs of state, some of them twice the height of a man. The feathers are fastened at right angles to the pole of shining hardwood, forming a barrel-shaped decoration, somewhat like our hearse-plumes of a past generation. But the kahili is only sometimes of funereal hue, more often flaming in scarlet, or some grade of the rich yellows loved of the Islanders. Originally a fly-brush in savage courts, the kahili progressed in dignity through the dynasties to an indispensable adjunct to official occasions, sometimes exceeding thirty feet in height. To me, it and the outrigger canoe are the most significantly impressive of royal barbaric forms.
Mr. Cleghorn suggested that he could arrange a private audience with Queen Liliuokalani at her residence in town, if we desired. Which reminds me that Jack holds a letter of introduction to her from Charles Warren Stoddard, who knew her in the days of her tempestuous reign. He and Jack have called each other Dad and Son for years, though acquainted only by correspondence. But we have little wish to intrude upon the Queen, for it can be scant pleasure to her tomeet Americans, no matter how sympathetic they may be with her changed state.
Upon a carven desk lay open a guest book, an old ledger, in which we were asked to leave our hand. The first name written in this thick tome is that of “Oskar, of Sweden and Norway,” and, running over the yellowed pages, among other notable autographs we read that of Agassiz.
Here, there, and everywhere, in photograph, in oil portraiture, on wall and upon easel, we met the lovely, pale face of Kaiulani, in whose memory her father seems to exist in a mood of adoration. Every event dates from her untimely passing. “When Kaiulani died,” he would begin; or “Since Kaiulani went away,” and “Before Kaiulani left me—” was the burden of his thought and conversation concerning the past of which we loved to hear. Pictures show her to have been a woman compounded of the beauty of her dual races, proud, loving, sensitive, spirituelle, with the characteristic curling mouth and luminous brown eyes of the Hawaiian, looking out wistfully upon a world of pleasure and opportunity that could not detain her frail body. Flower of romance she was—romance that nothing in the old books of South Sea adventuring can rival; her sire, a handsome roving boy ashore from an English ship back in the ’50’s; her mother a dusky princess of the blood royal, who loved the handsome fair-skinned youth and constituted him governor of Oahu under the Crown, that she might with honor espouse him.
And now, the boy, grown old—his Caucasian vitality having survived the gentle Polynesian blood of the wife who brought him laurels in her own land,—having watched the changing administrations of that land for nearly threescore years, abides alone with the shadow of her and of the daughter with the poet browwho did honor to them both by coming into being. To this beloved child-woman, previous to her voyage to England’s Court, Robert Louis Stevenson, living where we peeped into the garden but a few nights gone, sent the following:
[Written in April to Kaiulani in the April of her age; and at Waikiki, within easy walk of Kaiulani’s banyan! When she comes to my land and her father’s, and the rain beats upon the window (as I fear it will), let her look at this page; it will be like a weed gathered and pressed at home; and she will remember her own islands, and the shadow of the mighty tree; and she will hear the peacocks screaming in the dusk and the wind blowing in the palms; and she will think of her father sitting there alone.—R. L. S.]“Forth from her land to mine she goes,The island maid, the island rose,Light of heart and bright of face:The daughter of a double race.“Her islands here, in Southern sun,Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone;And I in her dear banyan shade.Look vainly for my little maid.“But our Scots islands far awayShall glitter with unwonted day,And cast for once their tempests byTo smile in Kaiulani’s eye.”
[Written in April to Kaiulani in the April of her age; and at Waikiki, within easy walk of Kaiulani’s banyan! When she comes to my land and her father’s, and the rain beats upon the window (as I fear it will), let her look at this page; it will be like a weed gathered and pressed at home; and she will remember her own islands, and the shadow of the mighty tree; and she will hear the peacocks screaming in the dusk and the wind blowing in the palms; and she will think of her father sitting there alone.—R. L. S.]
“Forth from her land to mine she goes,The island maid, the island rose,Light of heart and bright of face:The daughter of a double race.“Her islands here, in Southern sun,Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone;And I in her dear banyan shade.Look vainly for my little maid.“But our Scots islands far awayShall glitter with unwonted day,And cast for once their tempests byTo smile in Kaiulani’s eye.”
“Forth from her land to mine she goes,The island maid, the island rose,Light of heart and bright of face:The daughter of a double race.“Her islands here, in Southern sun,Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone;And I in her dear banyan shade.Look vainly for my little maid.“But our Scots islands far awayShall glitter with unwonted day,And cast for once their tempests byTo smile in Kaiulani’s eye.”
“Forth from her land to mine she goes,The island maid, the island rose,Light of heart and bright of face:The daughter of a double race.
“Forth from her land to mine she goes,
The island maid, the island rose,
Light of heart and bright of face:
The daughter of a double race.
“Her islands here, in Southern sun,Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone;And I in her dear banyan shade.Look vainly for my little maid.
“Her islands here, in Southern sun,
Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone;
And I in her dear banyan shade.
Look vainly for my little maid.
“But our Scots islands far awayShall glitter with unwonted day,And cast for once their tempests byTo smile in Kaiulani’s eye.”
“But our Scots islands far away
Shall glitter with unwonted day,
And cast for once their tempests by
To smile in Kaiulani’s eye.”
Aboard theNoeau, bound for Molokai, Monday Evening, July 1.
Noeau(No-a-ah-oo—quickly No-a-ow)—the very name has a mournful, ominous sound;Noeau, ship of despair, ferry of human freight condemned. We are not merry, Jack and I, for what we have witnessed during the past two hours would wring emotion from a graven image. And just when we would cheer a trifle, it not being our mutual temperament long to remain downcast, our eyes are again compelled by the huddle of doomed fellow-creatures amidst their pathetic bundles of belongings on the open after-deck of the plunging interisland steamer bound for Molokai.
None of it did we miss—the parting and the embarkation of the banished; and never, should I live a thousand fair years, shall I forget the memory of that strange, rending wailing, escaping bestiality by its very deliberateness; for, no matter how deep and true may be the grief, this wailing expression of it constitutes a ceremonial in this as in other countries where it survives as a set form of lamentation. Shrill, piercing, it curdled the primitive life-current in us, every tone in the gamut of sorrow being played upon the plaintive wordauwe(ah-oo-way’—quickly ow-way’),alas, in recurrent chorusing when each parting took place and the loved one stepped upon the gangplank, untouched by officers and crew of the small steamer.
“Clean” passengers were taken aboard first, the vessel picking up at another wharf those who bore no return ticket to the land of the clean. As theNoeauranged alongside, the crowd ashore appeared like any other dock-gathering of natives, even to the flowers; but suddenly Jack at my elbow jerked out, “Look—look at that boy’s face!” It was a lad of twelve or so, and one of his cheeks was so swollen that the bursting eye seemed as if extended on a fleshy horn. Beside him a woman hovered, her face dark with sorrow. We were soon quick to detect the marks and roved from face to face, selecting more or less accurately those who proved later to be passengers for the dark fifty-odd miles across Kaiwi Channel and along the north coast of Molokai to the village of Kalaupapa, is their final destination and home on this earth.
But one can only see what one can see, and there were men and women who bore no apparent blemish; and yet these are now among the disfigured company on the lurching after-deck.
The ultimate wrench of hearts and hands, the supreme acme of ruth, came when, separated by thewidening breach between steamer and dock, the lost and the deserted gazed upon one another, and the last offerings of leis fell short into the water. No normal malihini could stand by unwrung; it was utterly, hopelessly sad—a funeral in which the dead themselves walked.
Toward one white child, a blonde-haired little German maid, we felt especial solicitude. Her bronze companions all had dear ones to wail for them and for whom to “keen.” She stood quite apart, with dry eyes old before their time, watching an alien race voice its woe in ways she had not learned. Whose baby is she? To whom is she dear? Where is the mother who bore her? And the answer was just now volunteered by the Superintendent of the Leper colony, returning from a vacation, Mr. J. D. McVeigh. The child’s mother is already in Kalaupapa, far gone with a rapid form of leprosy; and this little daughter, who had been left with a drunken father who treated her ill, has been found with the same manifestation, and will live but a few years. So she is going to her own, and her own is waiting for her, and it is well. But think of the whole distorted face of the dream of life...
(1) Princess Likelike (Mrs. Cleghorn). (2) Princess Victoria Kaiulani. (3) Kaiulani at Ainahau. (4) “Kaiulani’s Banyan.”
(1) Princess Likelike (Mrs. Cleghorn). (2) Princess Victoria Kaiulani. (3) Kaiulani at Ainahau. (4) “Kaiulani’s Banyan.”
...Now the white child has fallen asleep in a dull red sunset glow, her flaxen head in the lap of a beautiful hapa haole girl who carries no apparent spot of corrosion. She looks down right motherly upon the tired face of the small Saxon maid. Hawaiian women eternally “rock cradles in their hearts,” which are so expansive that it is said to matter little whose child they cradle—bringing up one another’s offspring with impartial loving-kindness. This practice extended even into highest circles, as Liliuokalani attests in her entertaining book, “Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen.” She herself was “given away” at birth,wrapped in the finest tapa cloth, to Konia, a granddaughter of Kamehameha the Great, wedded to a high chief, Paki. Their own daughter, Bernice Pauahi. Liliuokalani’s foster-sister, was afterward married to C. R. Bishop, Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1893 under King Lunallio, Kalakaua’s predecessor. The Queen writes that in using the term foster-sister she merely adopts one customary in the English language, there being no such modification recognized in her own tongue. As a matter of fact, in childhood she knew no other parents than Paki and Konia, no other sister than Pauahi. Her own father and mother were no more than interesting acquaintances. For this custom she offers only the reason that the alliance by adoption cemented ties of friendship between chiefs, which, spreading to the common people, doubtless encouraged harmony—a harmony that would have delighted King Solomon, to say nothing of white men’s courts of law!
They forget quickly, these Hawaiians, one hears; and one must believe, I suppose—and, believing, thank whatever gods may be; for this blissful latitude never was created for the harboring of grief. But the ability or tendency to forget pain has little to do with its momentary poignancy. The passionate Hawaiian suffers with all the abandon of the blood that keeps him always young. The sorrow is real, and the weeping. If these people could not recover speedily from despair, they would die off faster than they are already perishing from their arcadian isles.
On our deck, observing the dolorous scene aft, is a young native girl, round and ripe and more lovely than any we have yet seen. Clean and wholesome, unsullied by any blight, a happy body, she stands beside her father, a stalwart gray-haired Hawaiian with lofty mien. One wonders what are the young girl’s thoughts as she gazes upon these wrecks of her kind. And yet,she herself might have to be sought in Molokai another year. As well seek her under-ground, is the next thought. Poor human flesh and blood!
Kalaupapa, Molokai, July 2.
We are trying to reconstruct whatever mind-picture we have hitherto entertained of that grave of living death, Molokai. But it is no use, and we would best give it up. Eye and brain are possessed of the bewildering actuality, and having expected Heaven knows what lugubrious prospect, we are all at sea. Certain it is that our preconceptions were far removed from the joyous sunny scene now before us, as I rock in a hammock on the Superintendent’s lanai, shaded from the late sunshine by a starry screen of white jasmine. Jack stretches at length on a rattan lounge, cigarette in one hand and long cool glass in the other; and what we see is a serene pasture of many acres, a sort of bulging village green, in the center a white bandstand breathing of festivity. Around the verdant semi-hemisphere, widely straggling as if space and real estate values were the least consideration of mankind, are dotted the flower-bedecked homes of the leprous inhabitants. Breaking gaily into this vision of repose, a cowboy on a black horse dashes across the field and out of sight. A leper. Two comely wahines in ruffly white holokus, starched to a nicety, stroll chatting by the house, looking up brightly to smile Aloha with eyes and lips. Lepers. Jack looks at me. I look at Jack. And this is Molokai the dread; Molokai, isle of despair, where Father Damien spent his martyrdom.
The Settlement lies on a low triangle, a sort of wide-based peninsula, selected by Dr. Hutchinson in 1865, shut effectively off as it is from the rest of the island to the south by a formidable wall rising over twothousand feet against the deep-blue sky—a wall of mystery, for it is well-nigh unscalable except by the bands of wild goats that we can discover only by aid of Mr. McVeigh’s telescope. Every little while, as a sailor sweeps the horizon, he steps to the glass, hidden from the community by the jasmine screen, and studies the land of his charge, keeping track of the doings of the village.
The only trail out of or into this isolated lowland zigzags the bare face of the pali near its northern end, at the seagirt extremity of the Settlement reserve. A silvery-green cluster of kukui trees marks the beginning of the trail not far up from the water’s edge. Thus far and no farther may the residents of the peninsula stray; and the telescope is most often trained to this point of the compass. That trail does not look over-inviting; but we have set our hearts upon leaving Kalaupapa by this route, albeit Mr. McVeigh, who knows what is in our thought, warns that it is undergoing repairs and is unsafe. Indeed, he has gone so far as to hint that it is out of the question for us to ascend now.
In view of the pleasant reality of the island, yesternight’s racking experience seems a nightmare. Over and above pity for the stricken exiles, we were none too comfortable ourselves. In the tiny stuffy staterooms it was impossible to sleep, and except for coolness the populous deck was scarcely less disturbing. Besides the Superintendent, the other passengers were hapa haoles and a white Catholic father with his Bishop, bound for the Settlement to inspect their institutions.
We turned in early on deck-mattresses, after listening to some thrilling yarns from the captain and mate of the sorry little steamer, to say nothing of those of Mr. McVeigh, who sparkles with Hibernian wit. Asthe miles and time increased between the lepers and the harbor of farewells, they searched out their ubiquitous ukeleles and guitars, and rendered us happier for their presence. All would have been well, and the music and murmuring voices soon have had us drowsing, but for a tipsy native sailor who chipped in noisily with ribald song and speech that was loudly profane.
At intervals the captain and mates issued from their unrestful cubbies on to the short strip of plunging deck (these interisland channels have a reputation equal to the passage between Dover and Calais), and conversed at length in unmuffled accents. To cap my sleepless discomfort, Jack, who had been fighting all night, he avers unconsciously, to wrest away the soft pillow he had insisted upon my using, finally appropriated the same with a determined “pounding of the ear” in hobo parlance. And poor I, lacking the meanness to reclaim it at price of rousing him from his troubled slumber, languished upon a neck-wrenching bolster stuffed, I swear, with scrap-iron. It has since occurred to us that it may have been a life-preserver.
At the chill hour of four, all passengers for Kalaupapa were landed in a rough-and-ready life-boat through breakers which, to our regret, were the reverse of boisterous. We had looked forward to making through a breach of surf like that shown in photographs of Kalaupapa Landing. But it was novel enough, this being let down the lurching black flank of the ship where she rolled in the unseen swell, into an uncertain boat where muscular arms eased us into invisible seats. The merest fitful whisper of air was stirring, and there was something solemn in our progress, deep-dipping oars sending the heavy boat in large, slow rhythm over a broad swell and under thefrown of a wall of darker darkness against the jeweled southern sky.
The landing is a small concrete breakwater, into the crooked arm of which we slipped, trusting in the lantern gleam to hands of natives that reached to help. We wondered, entirely without alarm, if they were leprous fingers we grasped, but rested upon fate and climbed our spryest.
The wall was rimmed with sitting figures, and when our twenty-five leper passengers set foot on the cement, some were greeted in low, hesitant Hawaiian speech as if by acquaintances. In the flicker of the swinging lanterns we saw a white woman’s anxious face and two pale hands stretched out. And tears were in my eyes to see the German mother and child united, even in their awful plight.
A silent Japanese took charge of me and my suitcase, and I was carried in a cart up a gentle rise to this cottage smothered in trees, the door of which is reached by way of a fragrant, vine-clasped arbor. The night was almost grewsomely still, and I tried to pierce the gloom to judge how near was that oppressive wall in the velvet black to the south.
The Japanese turned me over to his wife, a small motherly thing who fluttered me into a bright white room with canopied bed, into which she indicated I was to plump forthwith; that the bath was just across the lanai; breakfast at eight; and could she do anything for me?
After breakfast the official “clean” members of the colony dropped in, Doctors Goodhue and Hollmann, the pioneer resident surgeon and his assistant, with their wives, as well as the German-Hawaiian parents of Mrs. Goodhue, who had tramped down the pali the previous day from their ranch in the highlands “beyond the pale,” to visit their daughter. Jack and Ipromptly registered the thought that if they could negotiate that trail, why not we?
Never have we spent a day of such strange interest. Before luncheon, Mr. McVeigh drove us to within two or three hundred yards of the foot of the pali, to see the Kalaupapa Rifle Club at practice. Quite as a matter of course we sat on benches side by side with the lepers, and when our turns came, stood in their shooting boxes, and with rifles warm from their hands hit the target at two hundred yards. Oh, I did not quite make the bull’s-eye, but there were certain drawbacks to my best marksmanship—the heavy and unfamiliar gun that I had not the strength to hold perfectly steady, and the audience of curious men whose personal characteristics were far from quieting to malihini wahine nerves. We were duly decorated with the proud red badge of the Club, bearing “Kalaupapa Rifle Club, 1907,” in gilt letters.
But fancy watching these blasted remnants of humanity, lost in the delight of scoring, their knotted hands holding the guns, on the triggers the stumps of what had once been fingers, while their poor ruined eyes strove to run along the sights...
It took all our steel, at first, to avoid shrinking from their hideousness; but, assured as we were of the safety of mingling, our concern was to let them know we were unafraid. And it made such a touching difference. From out their watchful silence and bashful loneliness they emerged into their natural care-free Hawaiian spirits.
For, you must know, all leprosy is not painful. There is what is termed the anæsthetic variety, which twists and deforms but which ceases from twinging as the disease progresses or is arrested, and the nerves go to sleep. Another and loathsome form manifests itself in running sores; but Dr. Goodhue now takesprompt action with such cases, his brave, deft surgery producing marvelous results. Tubercular leprosy makes swift inroads and quick disposal of the sufferer. But it should make the public happier to know that here the majority of the patients come and go about the business of their lives as in other villages the world over, if with less beauty of face and form.
In the afternoon Dr. Hollmann took us in charge and showed us first the Bishop (Catholic) Home for Girls, presided over by Mother Marianne, the plucky, aged Mother Superior of Hawaii Nei. Here she spends most of her life, two sisters living with her. Like a tall spirit she guided us across the playground and through schoolrooms and dormitories. In one of the latter we recognized a young girl who came on theNoeaulast night. Standing in a corner talking with two old friends whose faces were almost obliterated, this latest comer neither looked nor acted as if there was anything unusual about them. She has a rare sense of adjustment, that girl—or else is mercifully wanting in imagination.
Women seem more susceptible to the ruin of disease, mental or physical, than their brothers—at least they show it more ruinously. I have noticed in feeble-minded and insanity institutions that the eclipse of personality is more complete among the females. Perhaps it is because we are used to especial comeliness in women; and to see a vacant or disfigured countenance above feminine habiliments instead of the sweet flower of woman’s face, is dreadful beyond the dreadfulness of man’s features under similar misfortune.
“Would you like to hear the girls sing?”
Likewas hardly the word; I would have fled weeping from what could only be an ordeal to every one. But we could not refuse good Mother Marianne theopportunity to display the talents of her pupils, and a Sister was dispatched to summon them.
Draggingly enough they came, unsmiling, their bloated or contracted features emerging grotesquely from the clean holokus. Every gesture and averted head bespoke a piteous shame over lost fairness—a sensitive pridefulness that does not appear to trouble the male patients.
Clustered round a piano, one played with hands that were not hands—for where were the fingers? But play she did, and weep I did, in a corner, in sheer uncontrol of heartache at the girlish voices gone shrill and sexless and tinny like the old French piano, and the writhen mouths that tried to frame words carolled in happier days. They gazed dumbly at the white wahine who grieved for them—indeed, it would have been difficult to say who was sorrier for the other. Out of their horrible eye-pits they watched us go, and I wonder if Jack’s sad face and my wet cheek were any solace to them. But they called Aloha bravely as we went down the steps, as did a group of girls under a hau tree—one of whom, a beautiful thing, crossing the inclosure with the high-breasted, processional carriage of Hawaiian, showed no mark of the curse upon her swart skin where the blood surged in response to our greeting.
The Bay View Home was our next objective, in which are kept the most advanced cases of the men. Nothing would do but Jack would see everything to be seen—and where he goes and can take me, there does he wish me to go to learn the face, fair and foul, of the world in which we live. Here we found several of our own race who appeared quite cheerful—let us say philosophical. One in particular, a ghastly white old man whose eyes hung impossibly upon his cheeks, spoke with the gentlest Christian fortitude, tryingto smile with a lip that fanned his chest—I do not exaggerate. Only one there was who seemed not in the slightest resigned—he who led us among his brother sufferers in this house of tardy dissolution.
“Do any of them ever become used to their condition?”
His terrible eyes came down to my face with a look of utter hopelessness.
“I have been here twenty-five years, Mrs. London, and I am not used to it yet.”
Glancing back from the gate, we saw him still standing on the lanai, straight and tall, gazing out over the sea; a man once wealthy and honored in his world—a senator, in fact. And now there remains nothing, after his two and a half disintegrating decades of exile, but long years of the same to follow; at the end of which he sees himself, an unsightly object, laid in the ground out of the light of heaven.
There is one hope, always, for those of the lepers who think—the shining hope that blessed science, now aroused, may discover at any illuminated moment the natural enemy of thebacillus lepræwhich has been isolated and become thoroughly familiar to the germ specialists. Jack, visiting the Kalihi Detention Home and Experiment Station, in Honolulu, was shown thebacillus lepræunder the microscope. Plans are under way for a federal experiment laboratory and hospital on Molokai for the study of the evil germ. The Settlement itself is a territorial care, managed by the Board of Health.
In still another building we inspected the little dispensary, and here met Annie Kekoa, a half-white telephone operator from Hilo, on Hawaii, daughter of a native minister. One of her small hands is very slightly warped; otherwise she is without blemish, and very charming—educated and refined, with the loveliestbrown eyes and heart-shaped face. Being a deft typewriter, she is employed in the dispensary to fill her days, for she is unreconciled to her changed condition. Little she spoke of herself, but was eager for news of Honolulu and our own travels. We told her of a resemblance she bears to a friend at home, and she said in a shaken voice: “When you see your friend again, tell her she has a little sister on Molokai.” At the moment of parting, a sudden impulse caused us both to forget the rules, and we reached for each other’s hands. I know I shall never be sorry.
“Major” Lee, one-time American engineer in the Inter-Island Steamship Company, demonstrated the workings of a newly installed steam poi factory. He was in the gayest of humors, and ever so proud of his spick-and-span machinery. “We’re not so badly off here as the Outside chooses to think,” he announced, patting a rotund boiler. And then, with explosive earnestness: “I say, Mr. London—give ’em a breeze about us, will you? Tell ’em how we really live. Nobody knows—nobody has told half the truth about Molokai and the splendid way things are run. Why, they give the impression that you can go around with a basket and pick up fingers and toes and hands and feet. They don’t take the trouble to find out the truth, and nobody seems to put ’em straight. Why, leprosy doesn’t work that way, anyhow. Things don’tfall off: theytake up—they absorb. We’ve got our pride, you know and we don’t like the wrong thing believed on the Outside, naturally. So you give the public a breeze about us, Mr. London, and you’ll have the gratitude of the fellows on Molokai.”
And I thought I saw, in Jack’s active eye, a hint of the fair breeze to a gale that he would set a-blowing on the subject of “the fellows on Molokai.”
When “Major” Lee sailed his last trip on the old Line, the luckier engineers of theNoeau, taking him to Kalaupapa, said: “Come on down to our rooms, and be comfortable.” Lee protested—No, it would not be right; it wouldn’t be playing the game; he was a leper now, a leper, do you hear?—and things were different, old fellows.... “Different, your granny!” and with friendly oaths and suspicious movements of shirtsleeves across eyes, the chief and his men had their old comrade into their quarters and gave him the best they had, even to a stirrup-cup—an infringement of orders, as alcohol is the best accomplice of leprosy.
Leaving Kalaupapa, we drove to the elder village, Kalawao, across the mile of the rolling peninsula, a pathway of beauty from the iron-bound, surf-fountained sea line, to the grandeurs of the persistent pali to the south, which is beyond word-painting, unfolding like a giant panorama even along that scant mile. Such crannied canyons, crowded with ferns; such shelves for waterfalls that banner out in the searching wind; such green of tree and purple of shadow. Midway of the trip, Dr. Hollmann turned to the left up a short, steep knoll, from the top of which our eyes dropped into a tiny crater—deep, emerald cup jeweled with red stones, a deeper emerald pool in the bottom, fringed with clashing sisal swords. We came near having a more intimate view of the inverted cone, for a sudden powerful gust of the strong trade that sweeps the peninsula caught us off guard and obliged us to lean sharply back against the blast. Descending the outer slopes of the miniature extinct volcano, we poked around amidst some nameless graves, the old cement mounds and decorations crumbling to dust. The place was provocative of much speculation upon human destiny.
In Kalawao we called at the Catholic Home for Boys, presided over by Father Emmerau and the Brothers, and met up with Brother Dutton, veteran of the Civil War, Thirteenth Wisconsin, who later entered the priesthood, and has immolated himself for years among the leper youth. We found him very entertaining, as he found Jack, with whose career he proved himself well acquainted.
Across the road in a little churchyard, we stood beside the tombstone of Father Damien—name revered by every one who knows how this simple Belgian priest came to no sanitary, law-abiding, well-ordered community such as to-day adorns this shunned region. He realized his destination before he leaped from the boat; and, once ashore, did not shrink nor turn back from the duty he had imposed upon himself. A life of toil and a fearful lingering death were the forfeit of this true martyr of modern times. We have seen photographs of him in the progressing stages of his torment, and nothing more frightful can be conjured.
Never had we thought to stand beside his grave. Just a little oblong plot of tended green, inclosed in iron railing, with a white marble cross and a footstone—that is all; fittingly simple for the simple worker, as is the Damien Chapel alongside, into which we stepped with the Bishop, our fellow passenger on theNoeau, and Fathers Emmerau and Maxime, to see the modest altar. Standing before the shrine in the subdued light, it seemed as if there could have been no death for the devoted young priest who came so far to lay down his life for his friends.
After dinner, cooked by the pretty Japanese Masa and her husband, the other household came over to our lanai. And while we talked, in through the twilight stole vibrations of swept strings, and the sob ofa violin, and voices of the men’s “Glee Club” that wove in perfect harmonies—voices thrilling as the metal wires but sharpened and thinned by corroded throats. There we sat in plenitude of health and circumstance, while at the gate, through which none but the clean may ever stray, outside the pale of ordinary human association, these poor pariahs, these shapes that once were men in a world of men, sang to us, the whole, the fortunate, who possess return passage for that free world, the Outside—lost world to them.
On and on they sang, the melting Hawaiian airs, charming “Ua Like No a Like,” and “Dargie Hula,” “Mauna Kea” beloved of Jack, and his more than favorite, Kalakaua’s “Sweet Lei Lehua,” with tripping, ripping hula harmonies unnumbered. At the end of an hour bewitched, to Mr. McVeigh’s low “Good night, boys,” their last Queen’s “Aloha Oe,” with its fadeless “Love to You,” that has helped to make Hawaii the Heart-Home of countless lovers the world over, laid the uttermost touch of eloquence upon the strange occasion. The sweet-souled musicians, who in their extremity could offer pleasure of sound if not of sight to us happy ones, melted away in the blue starlight, the hulaing of their voices that could not cease abruptly, drifting faint and fainter on the wind.
Kalaupapa, Wednesday, July 3, 1907.
“Quick! First thought!Where are you?” Jack quizzed, as through the jasmine we peered at a score of vociferous lepers running impromptu horse races on the rounding face of the green. Remote, fearsome Molokai, where the wretched victims of an Asiatic blight try out their own fine animals for the prize events of the Glorious Fourth! And all forenoon we listened to no less than four separate and distinct brass bands practicing in regardless fervor for thegreat day. Laughing, chattering wahines bustled about the sunny landscape, carrying rolls of calico and bunting; for they, too, will turn out in force on the morrow to show how the women of Hawaii once rode throughout the kingdom, following upon that gift of the first horse by Captain Cook to Kamehameha, astride in long, flowing skirts of bright colors—thepa’uriders of familiar illustrations.
Mr. McVeigh, satisfaction limned upon his Gaelic countenance at all this gay preparation, is much occupied, together with hiskokuas(helpers), in an effort to forestall another brand of conviviality that is sought by the lepers on their feast days; and, denied all forms of alcohol, they slyly distil “swipes” from anything and everything that will ferment—even potatoes.
But the lusty Superintendent was not too busy to plan for us a ride to the little valleys of the pali. There was an odd assortment of mounts—every one of which, despite the appearance of two I could name, was excellent in its way. Jack’s allotment was a stout, small-footed beastie little larger than a Shetland, and to me fell an undersized, gentle-seeming white palfrey. To my observant eye, Jacklookedmore than courtesy would allow him to express, for his appearance was highly ridiculous. Although of medium height, his feet hung absurdly near the ground, and his small Australian saddle nearly covered the pony.
We ambled along for a short distance, when our host’s huge gray suddenly bolted, followed by the others, and I as suddenly became aware that my husband was no longer by my side. The next instant I was in the thick of a small stampede across country, the meekness of the milk-white palfrey a patent delusion and snare, while Jack’s inadequate scrap, leaping like a jackrabbit, had outdistanced the larger horses. Every one was laughing, and Jack, now enjoying thepractical joke, waved an arm and disappeared down Damien Road in a cloud of red dust.
Pulling up to a decorous gait through Kalawao, we left the peninsula and held on around the base of the pali till the spent breakers washed our trail, where a tremendous wall of volcanic rock rose abruptly on the right. The trail for the most part was over bowlders covered with seaweed, and we two came to appreciate these pig-headed little horses whose faultless bare hoofs carried us unslipping.
Skirting the outleaning black wall, we looked ahead to a coast line of lordly promontories that rise beachless from out the peacock-blue ocean, and between which are grand valleys inaccessible except by boat and then only in calm weather. Two of these valleys, Pelekunu and Wailau, contain settlements of non-leprous Hawaiians, who are said to live much as they did before the discovery of the Islands, although they now sell their produce to the Leper Settlement.
Turning into the broad entrance of a swiftly narrowing cleft called Waikolu, we rode as far as the horses could go, and some nice problems were set them on the sliding, crumbling trail. We overheard the Superintendent’s undertone to Dr. Goodhue: “No malihini riders with us to-day!” which is encouragement that we may be permitted to travel the coveted zigzag out of the Settlement. Then tethering the animals in the kukui shade, we proceeded on foot up a muddy steep where the vegetation, drenched overnight with rain, in turn drenched us and cooled our perspiring skins. Except for the trail—and for all we knew that might have been a wild-pig run—the valley appeared innocent of man; but presently we gained to where orderly patches of water taro with its heart-shaped leaves terraced the steep, like a nursery of lilies, and glimpsed idyllic pictures of grass-houses clinging to fernyledges of the mountain side, shaded by large banana and breadfruit trees, and learned that in these upland vales live certain of the lepers who, preferring an agricultural life, furnish the Settlement with vegetables and fruit. And we tried some “mountain apples,” theohia ai, as distinguished from theohia lehuawhich furnishes a beautiful dark hardwood. This fruit is pear-shaped, red and varnished as cherries, and sweet and pulpy like marshmallows.
Here were also many pandanus trees (pandanus ordoratissimus), calledlauhalaorhalaby the natives. Lest one fall into the misconception that the Hawaiian tongue is a simple one, or depreciate the manifold importance of the pandanus, it is interesting to note that the tree itself is known more strictly aspuuhala; the flat, pointed knives of leaves,lauhala; the edible nut growing at the base,ahuihala; the flower from which leis are strung,hinana.Aakalaare the many stilted aerial roots which uphold the tree and even branch downward from some of the limbs. These gradually lift the trunk, at the same time anchoring it to the ground in all directions. They bear a very slight resemblance to the mangrove, but are straight, while the other writhes into an inextricable tangle. The pandanus is also familiarly spoken of as the screw-pine, from the manner in which its sheaves of blades twist in a perfect spiral upon the hole.
The number of its benefits to mankind is rivaled only by the coconut. Thepuuhala, besides furnishing food in the shape of nuts and esthetic pleasure by its orange leis and its tropical beauty, is the staple for mat-, hat-, fan-, and cushion-weaving. Of old, strands of its fiber went to make deadly slings for warfare. The fibrous wood of the mature trees is hard and takes so high a polish that it is used in making thehandsome turned bowls that have come to be known as calabashes.
Jack’s imagination went a-roving over the possibilities of the peninsula: “Why, look here, Mate Woman,” he planned, “we could, if ever we contracted leprosy, live here according to our means. I could go on writing and earning money, and we could have a mountain place, a town house down in the village, a bungalow anywhere on the seashore that suited us, set up our own dairy with imported Jerseys, and ride our own horses, as well as sail our own yacht—within the prescribed radius, of course—and let Dr. Goodhue experiment on our cure!—Isn’t it all practical enough?” this to the grinning “Jack” McVeigh, who was regarding him with unconcealed delight, and who assured us he wished us no harm, but for the pleasure of our company he could almost hope the plan might come to pass!
Hours Jack London spends “cramming” on leprosy from every book the doctors have in their libraries. And literally it is one of the themes about which what is not known fills many volumes. The only point upon which all agree is that they are sure of nothing as regards the means by which the disease is communicated. The nearest they can hazard is that it isfeeblycontagious, and that a person to contract it must have a predisposition. Thus, one might enter the warm blankets of a leper just risen, and, by hours of contact with the effluvia therein, “catch” the disease. The same if one slept long in touch with a victim—and then only if one had the predisposition. But who is to know if the predisposition be his? Certain theories as to the mode of contagion were given us as settled facts by the authorities of the Lazar Hospital in Havana, where we first became interested in leprosy; but that there is little dependence to be placed onthese opinions is borne out by at least two known cases on Molokai; one, a native who has remained “clean” though living with a wife so far gone that she attends to her yearly babies with her deft feet; and the other, a wahine who has buried five successive leprous husbands, and has failed to contract their malady.
We recall that in Havana we were assured that no attendant, no Caucasian living for years within the confines of the institution, had ever become afflicted; and the same is held on Molokai—which reports make us, as visitors, feel secure. On the other hand, several of the few white men here assert that they are absolutely ignorant as to the means of their own contagion, not having, to their knowledge, been exposed. One of these is the village storekeeper, a hearty soul whom we have seen riding about in smart togs on a good horse. He possesses but a spot—on one foot—which to date has neither increased nor diminished. When he discovered the “damned spot,” promptly he reported himself to the Board of Health; and here he makes the courageous best of his situation.