The last day of thefêtewas, of course, less joyous to me. A score of nameless nags were to be ridden by light weights in breech-cloths; and I sought consolation in the prospect of seeing some bewitching horsemanship. The track, in use but once every twelvemonth, and yielding annually a young orchard of guava-trees, presented to the astonished gaze of the foreign sporting-gentleman who happened to be on the ground—if, indeed, there was such a one present—a half-mile course, with numerous stones and hollows relieving its surface, while the rope that enclosed it kept giving way every few moments, letting in a mixed multitude among the half-broken horses.
The Queen was present at the races,—Pomare, whose life has been one long, sorrowful romance; the Admiral was also there; and many a petty officer, with abundant gilt and tinsel. At a signal from the trumpeter the horses were entered unannounced, and everybody betted wildly. One little African jockey, mounted upon the cleverest piece of flesh and blood in the field, called for the larger stakes; and he would certainly have won, but for an unavoidable accident: the little African was pressing in on the home-stretch, and everything looked lovely for the winning mare, when, unluckily, she put her nigh leg in a crab-hole, and snapped her shin-bone square off. The undaunted little African tried his best to finish the heat on his own responsibility, and went off into the air in finestyle, but missed his calculation, and burrowed about three lengths from the goal. His neck was driven in nearly up to the ears, and the mare had to be shot; but the races went mercilessly on until a tremendous thunder-storm flooded the track and washed the population back to town. Dance after dance consumed the afternoon hours; and song upon song, eternally reiterated, finally failed to create any special enthusiasm.
I saw no further traces of Taboo. Again and again I followed knots of the curious into the larger native houses, where the lascivious dances were given with the utmostabandon; thither—I suspected—Taboo would most likely be impelled, for the music was wilder and the applause more boisterous and unrestrained.
The evening of the last day of thefêtewas darkening; most people were growing a little weary of the long-drawn festivities; many had succumbed to their fatigue, and slept by the wayside, or, it may be, they had known too well the nature of the Tahitian juices, such as no man may drink and not fall!
The palace of Pomare—a great, hollow, incomplete shell, whose windows have never been glazed, and whose doors have never been hung—was the scene of the concluding ceremonials of the season. The long verandas were thickly hung with numberless paper-lanterns, swinging continually in the soft night-winds that stole down from the star-litslopes of Fautahua; the broad lawns in front of the palace were blocked out in squares, like the map of a liliputian city. Each one of these plats was set apart for a band of singers, and there were as many bands as districts in Tahiti and Moorea, together with delegations from islands more remote. Soon the choruses began to assemble. Choirs of fifty voices each, male and female, led by tight-headed drums and screaming fifes, drew toward the palace-gardens, and were formally admitted by the proper authorities, who were very much swollen with the pomp of office and, perhaps, a little sprinkle of the exhilarating accompaniments of the season. One after another the white-robed processions approached,—each fresh arrival looking more like the chorus in "Norma" than the last, though it then seemed impossible that any Druid could presume to appear more gracefully ghostlike. Each singer wore a plume of cocoa-leaves, whose feathers were more lovely than the downy wands of the ostrich. They were made of knots of long, slender ribbons, softer than satin, veined like clouded silver, as transparent as the clearest isinglass, and as delicate as the airiest gauze.
Out of the core of the palm-tree, in the midst of its rich, dark mass of foliage, springs a tuft of leaves as tender as the first sprouts of a lily-bulb. These budding leaves are carefully removed, split edgewise, and the enamelled sheets laid open to thesun; then, with the thumb-nail, passed skilfully over the inner surface, a filmy membrane is separated, and spread in the air to dry. A single tree yields but a small cluster of these pale, cloud-like leaves, scarcely a handful in all, yet the tree withers when they pluck the heart of it. It is the very soul of the Southern palm, with every leaf spiritualized, and looking vapory as tangible moonlight.
The leader of the concert having challenged the choruses from the veranda of the palace, at once twenty choirs struck into their particular anthem with the utmost zeal. A discord about six acres in extent was the result. It seemed as though each choir was seeking whom it might drown out with superior vocal compass and volume. With much difficulty the several bands of singers were persuaded to await their turn for asoloeffort that might be listened to with no small degree of pleasure. From time to time, during the entire evening, some obstreperous chorus would break loose, spite of every precaution; and it had always to sing itself out before order could be restored. Taboo would have thoroughly enjoyed those two thousand singers, each singing his or her favorite roundelay, independent of all laws of time and melody. He might have been there, as it was, offering his inharmonious chant with the mob of contestants.
By the time the series of prize-songs had been sung, the sky grew cloudy, and the torches beganto flicker in the increasing wind; a few great drops of rain spat down in the midst of the singers, and the reef moaned loudly, like the baying of signal-guns. It was ominous of coming storms. At the climax of a choral revolution, in which every man's voice seemed raised against his neighbor's, a roar as of approaching armies was heard, mingled with the accompanying crash of artillery. A sudden puff of wind extinguished the major part of the torches, and wrecked many of the lanterns in the palace porch. It was simply a tropical shower in all its magnificence; but it was enough! Thefêteconcluded then and there, in the promptest manner. The narrow streets of Papeete were clogged with retreating hosts, who continually shouted a sort of general adieu to everybody, as they gathered their skirts about them, and, with shoes in hand, turned their bare feet homeward.
Since the end had at last come, and I had no further claims upon the people, nor the people upon me,—if, indeed, either of us were ever anything in particular to one another,—I drifted with the majority, and soon found myself in the suburban wilderness that girdles the small capital of the queendom. I wandered on till the noise of the revellers grew more and more indistinct. They were scattering themselves over the length and breadth of the island, carrying their songs with them. Now and then a fresh gust of wind bore down to me an echo of a refrain that hadgrown familiar during the days of thefête, and will not soon be forgotten; but the past was rapidly fading, and the necessities of the future began to present themselves with unusual boldness. Instinctively I turned into the winding trail that once before had led me toward that mysterious mountain sacristy, over whose font fell the spiritual and dreamlike rivulet whose baptismal virtues Taboo and I had sought together. I felt certain that I could find it without guidance; for the broken clouds let slip such floods of moonlight as made day of darkness, and rendered the smallest landmark easily distinguishable.
I paused for rest in the breadfruit grove where first I met with my weird companion. Presently I resumed my pilgrimage, wending my way toward the slender path that led through fern, forest, and bamboo-jungle, to the crystal lake and waterfall. In vain I sought it; the slightest traces of the trail seemed obliterated. I wandered up and down the winding way, till I was in despair of finding the slightest clew to the mystery. I sat down and thought how a slight accident of forgetfulness was lending a sense of enchantment to the whole valley, when I heard a stumbling step, too marked to be soon forgotten. I crept into a shadow, and awaited the approach of the solitary wanderer. How he tottered as he drew near! He seemed to have lost part of his small skill since I last saw him. He was laughing quietlyto himself while he journeyed: perhaps some memory of thefêtestill pleased him. He passed me, unconscious of my presence. I ran cautiously, and followed him at a safe distance. We threaded the old path, by stream and cliff and brake, and, after a little, reached the secluded and silent borders of the lake. Once or twice he had heard me as I brushed past the bamboos or a twig snapped under foot, but those forest-sounds scarcely disconcerted him; he was too well used to them. He paused at the margin of the lake, stooped awkwardly and drank of it, went a little to one side where an outlet fed the torrent we had forded some distance down the valley, and there he bathed. Having started once or twice, as though with some remembered and definite purpose, he paused a moment or two, looked about him helplessly, and returned to the foot of the great tree where we slept the first night of our acquaintance.
There was a faint suggestion of the fall across the sombre breast of the cliff opposite, but whether it were real or a delusion, I could scarcely determine. Taboo was soon asleep among the roots of the banyan; and I, weary of seeking some revelation of the island mysteries, lay down near him, and gradually sank into unconsciousness. Once in the night I awoke: the clouds had blown over, and the moon was more resplendent than I ever remember to have seen it. Out onthe mossy rim of the lake stood Taboo, gazing wistfully upon the mountains. Instinctively my eyes followed his, and there I beheld the waterfall in all its glory, leaping, like a ray of light, from the bosom of the sky. I could scarcely determine whether or no it really fell into the lake, for the foliage about its shores was too profuse. It flashed like handfuls of diamond-dust thrown into the light, and descended as noiselessly and airily as vapor.
The clouds soon gathered again. I slept, overcome with weariness; and when I awoke at dawn, Taboo was missing, as well as all traces of the fall. This, however, scarcely surprised me, for I had grown to look upon it as some lunar effect that came and went with the increasing or decreasing splendor of the moon; or it might have been the short-lived offspring of the showers that sweep over the island at uncertain intervals. It was probably the only dramatic result to be looked for in the career of Taboo. You never can depend upon one of those veering minds, whose north-star has burned out in oblivion. I believe it was his destiny to disappear with that rainbow, and, perhaps, return with it when the fall should noiselessly steal down the mountain once more.
He may have had an object in secreting himself for a season; perhaps he was renewing his youthful innocence in some more solitary spot. He may have gone apart to laugh by the hour atthe folly of the foreigners whofêtea disgraced emperor; or was he making his queer noises to hear the queerer echoes that came back to him, and all the while caring no more for life or death than a parrot or a magpie, or even a poor, half-shapen soul,—one of those sacred idiots that have found worshippers before now, and never yet failed to awaken a chord of sympathy in the heart that is fashioned after the Divine pattern of the Son of God?
IWAS stormed in at Lahaina. Now, Lahaina is a little slice of civilization, beached on the shore of barbarism. One can easily stand that little of it, for brown and brawny heathendom becomes more wonderful and captivating by contrast. So I was glad of dear, drowsy, little Lahaina; and was glad, also, that she had but one broad street, which possibly led to destruction, and yet looked lovely in the distance. It didn't matter to me that the one broad street had but one side to it; for the sea lapped over the sloping sands on its lower edge, and the sun used to set right in the face of every solitary citizen of Lahaina, just as he went to supper.
I was waiting to catch a passage in a passing schooner, and that's why I came there; but the schooner flashed by us in a great gale from the south, and so I was stormed in indefinitely.
It was Holy Week, and I concluded to go to housekeeping, because it would be so nice to havemy frugal meals in private, to go to mass and vespers daily, and then to come back and feel quite at home. My villa was suburban,—built of dried grasses on the model of a haystack, dug out in the middle, with doors and windows let into the four sides thereof. It was planted in the midst of a vineyard, with avenues stretching in all directions, under a network of stems and tendrils.
"Her breath is sweeter than the sweet windsThat breathe over the grape-blossoms of Lahaina."
"Her breath is sweeter than the sweet windsThat breathe over the grape-blossoms of Lahaina."
"Her breath is sweeter than the sweet windsThat breathe over the grape-blossoms of Lahaina."
So the song said; and I began to think upon the surpassing sweetness of that breath, as I inhaled the sweet winds of Lahaina, while the wilderness of its vineyards blossomed like the rose. I used to sit in my veranda and turn to Joe (Joe was my private and confidential servant), and I would say to Joe, while we scented the odor of grape, and saw the great banana-leaves waving their cambric sails, and heard the sea moaning in the melancholy distance,—I would say to him, "Joe, housekeepingisgood fun, isn't it?" Whereupon Joe would utter a sort of unanimous Yes, with his whole body and soul; so that question was carried triumphantly, and we would relapse into a comfortable silence, while the voices of the wily singers down on the city front would whisper to us, and cause us to wonder what they could possibly be doing at that moment in the broad way that led to destruction. Then we would take a drink of cocoa-milk,and finish our bananas, and go to bed, because we had nothing else to do.
This is the way that we began our co-operative housekeeping: One night, when there was a riotous sort of a festival off in a retired valley, I saw, in the excited throng of natives who were going mad over their national dance, a young face that seemed to embody a whole tropical romance. On another night, when a lot of us were bathing in the moonlight, I saw a figure so fresh and joyous that I began to realize how the old Greeks could worship mere physical beauty and forget its higher forms. Then I discovered that face on this body,—a rare enough combination,—and the whole constituted Joe, a young scapegrace who was schooling at Lahaina, under the eye—not a very sharp one—of his uncle. When I got stormed in, and resolved on housekeeping for a season, I took Joe, bribing his uncle to keep the peace, which he promised to do, provided I gave bonds for Joe's irreproachable conduct while with me. I willingly gave bonds—verbal ones—for this was just what I wanted of Joe: namely, to instil into his youthful mind those counsels which, if rigorously followed, must result in his becoming a true and unterrified American. This compact settled, Joe took up his bed,—a roll of mats,—and down we marched to my villa, and began housekeeping in good earnest.
We soon got settled, and began to enjoy life,though we were not without occasional domestic infelicities. For instance, Joe would wake up in the middle of the night, declaring to me that itwasmorning, and thereupon insist upon sweeping out at once, and in the most vigorous manner. Having filled the air with dust, he would rush off to the baker's for our hot rolls and a pat of breakfast butter, leaving me, meantime, to recover as I might. Having settled myself for a comfortable hour's reading, bolstered up in a luxurious fashion, Joe would enter with breakfast, and orders to the effect that it be eaten at once and without delay. It was useless for me to remonstrate with him: he was tyrannical.
He got me into all sorts of trouble. It was Holy Week, and I had resolved upon going to mass and vespers daily. I went. The soft night-winds floated in through the latticed windows of the chapel, and made the candles flicker upon the altar. The little throng of natives bowed in the impressive silence, and were deeply moved. It was rest for the soul to be there; yet, in the midst of it, while the Father, with his pale, sad face, gave his instructions, to which we listened as attentively as possible,—for there was something in his manner and his voice that made us better creatures,—while we listened, in the midst of it I heard a shrill little whistle, a sort of chirp, that I knew perfectly well. It was Joe, sitting on a cocoa-stump in the garden adjoining, andbeseeching me to come out, right off. When service was over, I remonstrated with him for his irreverence. "Joe," I said, "if you have no respect for religion yourself, respect those who are more fortunate than you." But Joe was dressed in his best, and quite wild at the entrancing loveliness of the night. "Let's walk a little," said Joe, covered with fragrant wreaths, and redolent of cocoanut-oil. What could I do? If I had tried to do anything to the contrary, he might have taken me and thrown me away somewhere into a well, or a jungle, and then I could no longer hope to touch the chord of remorse,—which chord I sought vainly, and which I have since concluded was not in Joe's physical corporation at all. So we walked a little. In vain I strove to break Joe of the shocking habit of whistling me out of vespers. He would persist in doing it. Moreover, during the day he would collect crusts of bread and banana-skins, station himself in ambush behind the curtain of the window next the lane, and, as some solitary creature strode solemnly past, Joe would discharge a volley of ammunition over him, and then laugh immoderately at his indignation and surprise. Joe was my pet elephant, and I was obliged to play with him very cautiously.
One morning he disappeared. I was without the consolations of a breakfast, even. I made my toilet, went to my portmanteau for my purse,—for I had decided upon a visit to the baker,—whenlo! part of my slender means had mysteriously disappeared. Joe was gone, and the money also. All day I thought about it. In the morning, after a very long and miserable night, I woke up, and when I opened my eyes, there, in the doorway, stood Joe, in a brand-new suit of clothes, including boots and hat. He was gorgeous beyond description, and seemed overjoyed to see me, and as merry as though nothing unusual had happened. I was quite startled at this apparition. "Joseph!" I said in my severest tone, and then turned over and looked away from him. Joe evaded the subject in the most delicate manner, and was never so interesting as at that moment. He sang his specialties, and played clumsily upon his bamboo flute,—to soothe me, I suppose,—and wanted me to eat a whole flat pie which he had brought home as a peace-offering, buttoned tightly under his jacket. I saw I must strike at once, if I struck at all; so I said, "Joe, what on earth did you do with that money?" Joe said he had replenished his wardrobe, and bought the flat pie especially for me. "Joseph," I said, with great dignity, "do you know that you have been stealing, and that it is highly sinful to steal, and may result in something unpleasant in the world to come?" Joe said, "Yes," pleasantly, though I hardly think he meant it; and then he added, mildly, "that he couldn't lie,"—which was a glaring falsehood,—"but wanted me to be surethat he took the money, and so had come back to tell me."
"Joseph," I said, "you remind me of our noble Washington"; and, to my amazement, Joe was mortified. He didn't, of course, know who Washington was, but he suspected that I was ridiculing him. He came to the bed and haughtily insisted upon my taking the little change he had received from his costumers, but I implored him to keep it, as I had no use at all for it, and, as I assured him, I much preferred hearing it jingle in his pocket.
The next day I sailed out of Lahaina, and Joe came to the beach with his new trousers tucked into his new boots, while he waved his new hat violently in a final adieu, much to the envy and admiration of a score of hatless urchins, who looked upon Joe as the glass of fashion, and but little lower than the angels. When I entered the boat to set sail, a tear stood in Joe's bright eye, and I think he was really sorry to part with me; and I don't wonder at it, because our housekeeping experiences were new to him,—and, I may add, not unprofitable.
Some months of mellow and beautiful weather found me wandering here and there among the islands, when the gales came on again, and I wasdriven about homeless, and sometimes friendless, until, by and by, I heard of an opportunity to visit Molokai,—an island seldom visited by the tourist,—where, perhaps, I could get a close view of a singularly sad and interesting colony of lepers.
The whole island is green, but lonely. As you ride over its excellent turnpike, you see the ruins of a nation that is passing, like a shadow, out of sight. Deserted garden-patches, crumbling walls, and roofs tumbled into the one state-chamber of the house, while knots of long grass wave at halfmast in the chinks and crannies. A land of great traditions, of magic, and witchcraft, and spirits. A fertile and fragrant solitude. How I enjoyed it; and yet how it was all telling upon me, in its own way! One cannot help feeling sad there, for he seems to be living and moving in a long revery, out of which he dreads to awaken to a less pathetic life. I rode a day or two among the solemn and reproachful ruins with inexpressible complacence, and, having finally climbed a series of verdant and downy hills, and ridden for twenty minutes in a brisk shower, came suddenly upon the brink of a great precipice, three thousand feet in the air. My horse instinctively braced himself, and I nervously jerked the bridle square up to my breastbone, as I found we were poised between heaven and earth, upon a trembling pinnacle of rock. A broad peninsula was stretchedbelow me, covered with grassy hills; here and there clusters of brown huts were visible, and to the right, the white dots of houses to which I was hastening, for that was the leper village. To that spot were the wandering and afflicted tribes brought home to die. Once descending the narrow stairs in the cliff under me, never again could they hope to strike their tents and resume their pilgrimage; for the curse was on them, and necessity had narrowed down their sphere of action to this compass,—a solitary slope between sea and land, with the invisible sentinels of Fear and Fate forever watching its borders.
I seemed to be looking into a fiery furnace, wherein walked the living bodies of those whom Death had already set his seal upon. What a mockery it seemed to be climbing down that crag,—through wreaths of vine, and under leafy cataracts breaking into a foam of blossoms a thousand feet below me; swinging aside the hanging parasites that obstructed the narrow way,—entering the valley of death, and the very mouth of hell, by these floral avenues!
A brisk ride of a couple of miles across the breadth of the peninsula brought me to the gate of the keeper of the settlement, and there I dismounted, and hastened into the house, to be rid of the curious crowd that had gathered to receive me. The little cottage was very comfortable, my host and hostess friends of precious memory; andwith them I felt at once at home, and began the new life that every one begins when the earth seems to have been suddenly transformed into some better or worse world, and he alone survives the transformation.
Have you never had such an experience? Then go into the midst of a community of lepers; have ever before your eyes their Gorgon-like faces; see the horrors, hardly to be recognized as human, that grope about you; listen in vain for the voices that have been hushed forever by decay; breathe the tainted atmosphere; and bear ever in mind that, while they hover about you,—forbidden to touch you, yet longing to clasp once more a hand that is perfect and pure,—the insidious seeds of the malady may be generating in your vitals, and your heart, even then, be drunk with death!
I might as well confess that I slept indifferently the first night; that I was not entirely free from nervousness the next day, as I passed through the various wards assigned to patients in every stage of decomposition. But I recovered myself in time to observe the admirable system adopted by the Hawaiian government for the protection of its unfortunate people. I used to sit by the window and see the processions of the less afflicted come for little measures of milk, morning and evening. Then there was a continuous raid upon the ointment-pot, with the contents of which they delighted to anoint themselves. Trifling disturbancessometimes brought the plaintiff and defendant to the front gate, for final judgment at the hands of their beloved keeper. And it was a constant entertainment to watch the progress of events in that singular little world of doomed spirits. They were not unhappy. I used to hear them singing every evening: their souls were singing while their bodies were falling rapidly to dust. They continued to play their games, as well as they could play them with the loss of a finger-joint or a toe, from week to week: it is thus gradually and thus slowly that they died, feeling their voices growing fainter and their strength less, as the idle days passed over them and swept them to the tomb.
Sitting at the window on the second evening, as the patients came up for milk, I observed one of them watching me intently, and apparently trying to make me understand something or other, but what that something was I could not guess. He rushed to the keeper and talked excitedly with him for a moment, and then withdrew to one side of the gate and waited till the others were served with their milk, still watching me all the while. Then the keeper entered and told me how I had a friend out there who wished to speak with me,—some one who had seen me somewhere, he supposed, but whom I would hardly remember. It was their way never to forget a face they had once become familiar with. Out I went. There was a face I could not have recognized as anythingfriendly or human. Knots of flesh stood out upon it; scar upon scar disfigured it. The expression was like that of a mummy, stony and withered. The outlines of a youthful figure were preserved, but the hands and feet were pitiful to look at. What was this ogre that knew me and loved me still?
He soon told me who he had once been, but was no longer. Our little, unfortunate "Joe," my Lahaina charge. In his case the disease had spread with fearful rapidity: the keeper thought he could hardly survive the year. Many linger year after year, and cannot die; but Joe was more fortunate. His life had been brief and passionate, and death was now hastening him to his dissolution.
Joe was forbidden to come near me, so he crouched down by the fence, and pressing his hands between the pickets sifted the dust at my feet, while he wailed in a low voice, and called me, over and over, "dear friend," "good friend," and "master." I wish I had never seen him so humbled. To think of my disreputable littleprotégé, who was wont to lord it over me as though he had been a born chief,—to think of Joe as being there in his extremity, grovelling in the dust at my feet; forbidden to climb the great wall of flowers that towered between him and his beautiful world, while the rough sea lashed the coast about him, and his only companions were such hideous foes as would frighten one out of a dream!
How I wanted to get close to him! but I dared not; so we sat there with the slats of the fence between us, while we talked very long in the twilight; and I was glad when it grew so dark that I could no longer see his face,—his terrible face, that came to kill the memory of his former beauty.
And Joe wondered whether I still remembered how we used to walk in the night, and go home, at last, to our little house when Lahaina was as still as death, and you could almost hear the great stars throbbing in the clear sky! How well I remembered it, and the day when we went a long way down the beach, and, looking back, saw a wide curve of the land cutting the sea like a sickle, and turning up a white and shining swath! Then, in another place, a grove of cocoa-palms and a melancholy, monastic-looking building, with splendid palm-branches in its broad windows; for it was just after Palm Sunday, and the building belonged to a Sisterhood. And I remembered how the clouds fell and the rain drove us into a sudden shelter, and we ate tamarind-jam, spread thick on thin slices of bread, and were supremely happy. In this connection, I could not forget how Joe became very unruly about that time, and I got mortified, and found great difficulty in getting him home at all; and yet the memory of it would have been perfect but for this fate. O Joe! my poor, dear, terrible cobra! to think that I should ever be afraid to look into your face in my life!
Joe wanted to call to my mind one other reminiscence,—a night when we two walked to the old wharf, and went out to the end of it, and sat there looking inland, watching the inky waves slide up and down the beach, while the full moon rose over the superb mountains where the clouds were heaped like wool, and the very air seemed full of utterances that you could almost hear and understand but for something that made them all a mystery. I tried then, if ever I tried in my life, to make Joe a little less bad than he was naturally, and he seemed nearly inclined to be better, and would, I think, have been so, but for the thousand temptations that gravitated to him when we got on solid earth again. He forgot my precepts then, and I'm afraid I forgot them myself. Joe remembered that night vividly. I was touched to hear him confess it; and I pray earnestly that that one moment may plead for him in the last day, if, indeed, he needs any special plea other than that Nature has published for her own.
"Sing for me, Joe," said I; and Joe, still crouching on the other side of the lattice, sang some of his old songs. One of them, a popular melody, was echoed through the little settlement, where faint voices caught up the chorus, and the night was wildly and weirdly musical. We walked by the sea the next day, and the day following that, Joe taking pains to stay on the leeward side of me,—he was so careful to keep the knowledge ofhis fate uppermost in his mind: how could I dismiss it from my own, when it was branded in his countenance? The desolated beauty of his face plead for measureless pity, and I gave it, out of my prodigality, yet felt that I could not begin to give sufficient.
Link by link he was casting off his hold on life; he was no longer a complete being; his soul was prostrated in the miry clay, and waited, in agony, its long deliverance.
In leaving the leper village, I had concluded to say nothing to Joe, other than the usual "aloha" at night, when I could ride off, in the darkness, and, sleeping at the foot of the cliff, ascend it in the first light of morning, and get well on my journey before the heat of the day. We took a last walk by the rocks on the shore; heard the sea breathing its long breath under the hollow cones of lava, with a noise like a giant leper in his asthmatic agony. Joe heard it, and laughed a little, and then grew silent; and finally said he wanted to leave the place,—he hated it; he loved Lahaina dearly: how was everybody in Lahaina?—a question he had asked me hourly since my arrival.
When night came I asked Joe to sing, as usual; so he gathered his mates about him, and they sang the songs I liked best. The voices rang, sweeter than ever, up from the group of singers congregated a few rods off, in the darkness; and while they sang,my horse was saddled, and I quietly bade adieu to my dear friends, the keepers, and mounting, walked the horse slowly up the grass-grown road. I shall never see little Joe again, with his pitiful face, growing gradually as dreadful as a cobra's, and almost as fascinating in its hideousness. I waited, a little way off, in the darkness,—waited and listened, till the last song was ended, and I knew he would be looking for me, to sayGood night. But he didn't find me; and he will never again find me in this life, for I left him sitting in the dark door of his sepulchre,—sitting and singing in the mouth of his grave,—clothed all in death.
THE afternoon sun was tinting the snowy crest of Mauna Kea, and folds of shadow were draping the sea-washed eastern cliffs of Hawaii, as Felix and I endeavored to persuade our fagged steeds that they must go and live, or stay and die in the middle of a lava-trail by no means inviting. As we rode, we thought of the scandal that had so recently regaled our too willing ears: here it is, in a mild solution, to be taken with three parts of disbelief.
Two venerable and warm-hearted missionaries, whose good works seemed to have found dissimilar expression, equally effective, I trust, proved their specialties to be church-building.
Rev. Mr. A seemed to think the more the merrier, and his pretty little meeting-houses looked as though they had been baked in the lot, like a sheet of biscuits; while Rev. Mr. B condensed his efforts into the consummation of one resplendent edifice. Mr. A was always wondering why Mr. B should waste his money in a single church, while Mr. B was nonplussed at seeing Mr. A break outin a rash of diminutive chapels. Well, Felix and I were riding northward up the coast, over dozens and dozens of lovely ridges; through scores of deep gullies cushioned with ferns as high as our pommels, and fording numberless streams, white with froth and hurry, eagerly seeking the most exquisite valley in the Pacific, as some call it. We rode till we were tired out twenty times over; again and again we looked forward to the bit of Mardi-life we were about to experience in the vale of the Waipio, while now and then we passed one of Mr. A's pretty little churches. Once we were impatient enough to make inquiry of a native who was watching our progress with considerable emotion: there is always some one to watch you when you are wishing yourself at the North Pole. Our single spectator affected an air of gravity, and seemed quite interested as he said, "Go six or seven churches farther on that trail, and you'll come to Waipio." On we went with renewed spirits, for the churches were frequent, almost within sight of each other. But we faltered presently and lost our reckoning, they were so much alike. Again we asked our way of a solitary watcher on a hill-top, who had had his eye upon us ever since we rose above the rim of the third ridge back: he revealed to us the glad fact that we were only two churches from Paradise! How we tore over the rest of that straight and narrow way with the little life left to us, and came infinally all of a foam, fairly jumping the last mite of a chapel that hung upon the brink of the beautiful valley like a swallow's nest! And down we dropped into fifty fathoms of the sweetest twilight imaginable,—so sweet it seemed to have been born of a wilderness of the night-blooming cereus and fed forever on jasmine buds.
There were shelter and refreshment for two hungry souls, and we slid out of our saddles as though we had been boned expressly for a cannibal feast.
By this time the rosy flush on Mauna Kea had faded, and its superb brow was pale with an unearthly pallor. "Come in," said the host; and he led us under the thatched gable, that was fragrant as new-mown hay. There we sat, "in," as he called it, though there was never a side to the concern thicker than a shadow.
A stream flowed noiselessly at our feet. Canoes drifted by us, with dusky and nude forms bowed over the paddles. Each occupant greeted us, being guests in the valley, just lifting their slumberous eyelids,—masked batteries, that made Felix forget his danger; they seldom paused, but called back to us from the gathering darkness with inexpressibly tender, contralto voices.
Thereupon we were summoned to dinner in another apartment, screened with vines. The faint flicker of the tapers suggested that what breath of air might be stirring came from the mountain, and it brought with it a message from the orangeryup the valley. "How will you take your oranges?" queried Felix; "in pulp, liquid, or perfume?"—and such a dense odor swept past us at the moment, I thought I had taken them in the triple forms. "You are just in time," said our host. "Why, what's up?" asked I. "The moon will be up presently, and after moonrise you shall see thehula-hula."
Felix desired to be enlightened as to the nature of the what-you-call-it, and was assured that it was worth seeing, and would require no explanatory chorus when its hour came.
It was at least a mile to the scene of action; a tortuous stream wound thither, navigable in spots, but from time to time the canoe would have to take to the banks for a short cut into deeper water.
"I can never get there," growled Felix; "I'm full of needles and pins"; to which the host responded by excusing himself for a few moments, leaving Felix and me alone. It was deathly still in the valley, though a thousand crickets sang, and the fish smacked their round mouths at the top of the water. Evening comes slowly in those beloved tropics, but it comes so satisfactorily that there is nothing left out.
A moonlight night is a continuous festival. The natives sing and dance till daybreak, making it all up by sleeping till the next twilight. Nothing is lost by this ingenious and admirable arrangement. Why should they sleep, when a night there has the very essence of five nights anywhere else, extracted and enriched with spices till it is so inspiring that the soul cries out in triumph, and the eyes couldn't sleep if they would?
At this period, enter to us the host, with several young native girls, who seat themselves at our feet, clasping each a boot-leg encasing the extremities of Felix and myself.
Felix kicked violently, and left the room with some embarrassment, and I appealed to the hospitable gentleman of the house, who was smiling somewhat audibly at our perplexity.
He assured me that if I would throw myself upon the mats in the corner, two of these maids would speedily relieve me of any bodily pain I might at that moment be suffering with.
I did so: the two proceeded as set down in the verbal prospectus; and whatever bodily pain I may have possessed at the beginning of the process speedily dwindled into insignificance by comparison with the tortures of my novel cure. Every limb had to be unjointed and set over again. Places were made for new joints, and I think the new joints were temporarily set in, for my arms and legs went into angles I had never before seen them in, nor have I since been able to assume those startling attitudes. The stomach was then kneaded like dough. The ribs were crushed down against the spine, and then forced out by well-directed blows in the back. The spinal column was undoubtedly abstracted, and some mechanical substitute now does its best to help me through the world. The arms were tied in bow-knots behind, and the skull cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg, worked into shape again, and left to heal.
By this time I was unconscious, and for an hour my sleep promised to be eternal. I must have lain flat on the matting, without a curve in me, when Nature, taking pity, gradually let me rise and assume my own proportions, as though a little leaven had been mixed in my making over.
The awakening was like coming from a bath of the elements. I breathed to the tips of my toes. Perfumes penetrated me till I was saturated with them. I felt a thousand years younger; and as I looked back upon the old life I seemed to have risen from, I thought of it much as a butterfly must think of his grub-hood, and was in the act of expanding my wings, when I saw Felix, just recovering, a few feet from me, apparently as ecstatic as myself. I never dared to ask him how he was reduced to submission, for I little imagined he could so far forget himself. There are some sudden and inexplicable revolutions in the affairs of humanity that should not be looked into too closely, because a chaotic chasm yawns between the old man and the new, which no one has ever yet explored. Felix sprang to his feet like Prometheus unbound, and embraced me with fervor, as onemight after a hair-breadth escape, exclaiming, "Did you ever see anything like it, Old Boy?" to which the Old Boy, thus familiarly addressed (O. B. is a pet monogram of mine, designed and frequently executed by Felix), responded, "There wasn't much to see, but my feelings were past expression." "What's its name?" asked Felix. "I think they call itlomi-lomi," said I. "Passlomi-lomi!" shouted Felix; and then we both roared again, which summoned the host, who congratulated us and invited us to his canoe.
Felix again endeavored to fathom the mysteries of thehula-hula. Was it something to eat?—did they keep it tied in the daytime?—what was its color? etc., till the amused gentleman who was conducting us to an exhibition of the great Unknown nearly capsized our absurdly narrow canoe in the very deepest part of the creek. Bands of fishermen and women passed us, wading breast-high in the water, beating it into a foam before them, and singing at the top of their voices as they drove the fish down stream into a broad net a few rods below. Grass-houses, half buried in foliage, lined the mossy banks; while the dusky groups of women and children, clustering about the smouldering flames that betokened the preparation of the evening meal, added not a little to the poetry of twilight in the tropics.
Felix thought he would like to turn Kanaka on the spot; so we beached the canoe, and approachedthe fire, built on a hollow stone under a tamarind-tree, and were at once offered the cleanest mat to sit on, and a calabash ofpoifor our refreshment. How to eat paste without a spoon was the next question. The whole family volunteered to show us; drew up around the calabash in a hungry circle, and dipped in with a vengeance. Six right hands spread their first and second fingers like sign-boards pointing to a focus in the very centre of thatpoi-paste; six fists dove simultaneously, and were buried in the luscious mass. There was a spasmodic working in the elbows, an effort to come to the top, and in a moment the hands were lifted aloft in triumph, and seemed to be tracing half a dozen capital O's in the transparent air, during which manœuvre the mass ofpoiadhering to the fingers assumed fair proportions, resembling, to a remarkable degree, large, white swellings; whereupon they were immediately conveyed to the several mouths, instinctively getting into the right one, and, having discharged freight, reappeared as good as ever, if not better than before.
"Disgusting!" gasped Felix, as he returned to the water-side. I thought him unreasonable in his harsh judgment, assuring him that our own flour was fingered as often before it came, at last, to our lips in the form of bread. "Moreover," I added, "thispoiis glutinous: the moment a finger enters it, a thin coating adheres to the skin,and that finger may wander about the calabash all day without touching another particle of the substance. Therefore, six or sixteen fellows fingering in one dish for dinner are in reality safer than we, who eat steaks that have been mesmerized under the hands of the butcher and the cook."
Felix scorned to reply, but breathed a faint prayer for a safe return to Chicago, as we slid into the middle of the stream, and resumed our course.
The boughs of densely leaved trees reached out to one another across the water. We proceeded with more caution as the channel grew narrow; and pressing through a submerged thicket of reeds, we routed a flock of water-fowls that wheeled overhead on heavy wings, filling the valley with their clamor.
Two or three dogs barked sleepily off somewhere in the darkness, and the voice of some one calling floated to us as clear as a bird's note, though we knew it must be far away. We strode through a cane-field, its smoky plumes just tipped with moonlight, and saw the pinnacle of Mauna Kea, as spacious and splendid as the fairy pavilion that Nourgihan brought to Pari-Banou, illuminated as for a festival. To the left, a stream fell from the cliff, a ribbon of gauze fluttering noiselessly in the wind.
"O, look!" said Felix, who had yielded again to the influences of Nature. Looking, I saw the moon resting upon the water for a moment, while thedew seemed actually to drip from her burnished disk. Again Felix exclaimed, or was on the point of exclaiming, when he checked himself in awe. I ran to him, and was silent with him, while we two stood worshipping one stately palm that rested its glorious head upon the glowing bosom of the moon, like the Virgin in the radiant aureola.
"Well," said our host, "supposing we get along!" We got along, by land and water, into a village in an orange-grove. There was a subdued murmur of many voices. I think the whole community would have burst out into a song of some sort at the slightest provocation. On we paced, in Indian file, through narrow lanes, under the shining leaves. Pale blossoms rained down upon us, and the air was oppressively sweet. Groups of natives sat in the lanes, smoking and laughing. Lovers made love in the face of heaven, utterly unconscious of any human presence. Felix grew nervous, and proposed withdrawing; but whither, O Felix, in all these islands, wouldst thou hope to find love unrequited, or lovers shamefaced withal? Much Chicago hath made thee mad!
Through a wicket we passed, where a sentinel kept ward. Within the bamboo paling, a swarm of natives gathered about us, first questioning the nature of our visit, which having proved entirely satisfactory, we were welcomed in real earnest, and offered a mat in an inner room of a large house, rather superior to the average, and a disagreeable liquor,—brewed of oranges, very intoxicating when not diluted, and therefore popular.
We were evidently the lions of the hour, for we sat in the centre of the first row of spectators who were gathered to witness thehula-hula. We reclined as gracefully as possible upon our mats, supported by plump pillows, stuffed with dried ferns. Slender rushes—strung withkukui-nuts, about the size of chestnuts, and very oily—were planted before us like foot-lights, which, being lighted at the top, burned slowly downward, till the whole were consumed, giving a good flame for several hours.
The great mat upon the floor before us was the stage. On one side of it a half-dozen muscular fellows were squatted, with large calabashes headed with tightly drawn goat-skins. These were the drummers and singers, who could beat nimbly with their fingers, and sing the epics of their country, to the unceasing joy of all listeners. "It's an opera!" shouted Felix, in a frenzy of delight at his discovery. A dozen performers entered, sitting in two lines, face to face,—six women and six men. Each bore a long joint of bamboo, slit at one end like a broom. Then began a singularly intricate exercise, calledpi-ulu. Taking a bamboo in one hand, they struck it in the palm of the other, on the shoulder, on the floor in front, to left and right; thrust it out before them, and were parried by the partners opposite; crossed itover and back, and turned in a thousand ways to a thousand metres, varied with chants and pauses. "Then it's a pantomime," added Felix, getting interested in the unusual skill displayed. For half an hour or more the thrashing of the bamboos was prolonged, while we were hopelessly confused in our endeavors to follow the barbarous harmony, which was never broken nor disturbed by the expert and tireless performers.
During the first rest, liquor was served in gourds. Part of the company withdrew to smoke, and the conversation became general and noisy. Felix was enthusiastic, and drank the health of some of the younger members of thetroupewho had offered him the gourd.
A rival company then repeated thepi-ulu, with some additions; the gourds were again filled and emptied. "Now for thehula-hula," said the host, who had imbibed with Felix, though he reserved his enthusiasm for something less childish thanpi-ulu. It is the national dance, taught to all children by their parents, but so difficult to excel in that the few who perfect themselves can afford to travel on this one specialty.
There was a murmur of impatience, speedily checked, and followed by a burst of applause, as a band of beautiful girls, covered with wreaths of flowers and vines, entered and seated themselves before us. While the musicians beat an introductory overture upon the tom-toms, the dancers proceeded to bind shawls and scarfs about their waists, turban-fashion. They sat in a line, facing us, a foot or two apart. The loose sleeves of their dresses were caught up at the shoulder, exposing arms of almost perfect symmetry, while their bare throats were scarcely hidden by the necklaces of jasmines that coiled about them.
Then the leader of the band, who sat, gray-headed and wrinkled, at one end of the room, throwing back his head, uttered a long, wild, and shrill guttural,—a sort of invocation to the goddess of thehula-hula. There had, no doubt, been some sort of sacrifice offered in the early part of the evening,—such as a pig or a fowl,—for the dance has a religious significance, and is attended by its appropriate ceremonies. When this clarion cry had ended, the dance began, all joining in with wonderfully accurate rhythm, the body swaying slowly backward and forward, to left and right; the arms tossing, or rather waving, in the air above the head, now beckoning some spirit of light, so tender and seductive were the emotions of the dancers, so graceful and free the movements of the wrists; now, in violence and fear, they seemed to repulse a host of devils that hovered invisibly about them.
The spectators watched and listened breathlessly, fascinated by the terrible wildness of the song and the monotonous thrumming of the accompaniment. Presently the excitement increased. Swifter and more wildly the bare arms beat the air, embracing, as it were, the airy forms that haunted the dancers, who rose to their knees, and, with astonishing agility, caused the clumsy turbans about their loins to quiver with an undulatory motion, increasing or decreasing with the sentiment of the song and the enthusiasm of the spectators.
Felix wanted to know "how long they could keep that up and live?"
Till daybreak, as we found! There was a little resting-spell—a very little resting-spell, now and then—for the gourd's sake, or three whiffs at a pipe that would poison a White Man in ten minutes; and before we half expected it, or had a thought of urging the unflagging dancers to renew their marvellous gyrations, they were at it in terrible earnest.
From the floor to their knees, from their knees to their feet, now facing us, now turning from us, they spun and ambled, till the ear was deafened with cheers and boisterous, half-drunken, wholly passionate laughter.
The room whirled with the reeling dancers, who seemed encircled with living serpents in the act of swallowing big lumps of something from their throats clear to the tips of their tails, and the convulsions continued till the hysterical dancers staggered and fell to the floor, overcome by unutterable fatigue.
The sympathetic Felix fell with them, his headsinking under one of the rush candles, that must have burned into his brain had he been suffered to immolate himself at that inappropriate and unholy time and place. This was the seductive dance still practised in secret, though the law forbids it; and to the Hawaiian it is more beautiful, because more sensuous, than anything else in the world.
I proposed departing at this stage of the festival, but Felix said it was not practicable. He felt unwell, and suggested the efficacy of another attack oflomi-lomi.
A slight variation in the order of the dances followed. A young lover, seated in the centre of the room, beat a tattoo upon his calabash and sang a song of love. In a moment he was answered. Out of the darkness rose the sweet, shrill voice of the loved one. Nearer and nearer it approached; the voice rang clear and high, melodiously swelling upon the air. It must have been heard far off in the valley, it was so plaintive and penetrating. Secreted at first behind shawls hung in the corner of the room, some dramatic effect was produced by her entrance at the right moment. She enacted her part with graceful energy. To the regular and melancholy thrumming of the calabash, she sang her song of love. Yielding to her emotion, she did not hesitate to betray all, neither was he of the calabash slow to respond; and, scorning the charms of goat-skin and gourd,he sprang toward her in the madness of his soul, when she, having reached the climax of desperation, was hurried from the scene of her conquest amid whirlwinds of applause.
"It's a dance, that's what it is!" muttered Felix, as the audience began slowly to disperse. Leading him back to the canoe, we had the whole night's orgie reported to us in a very mixed and reiterative manner, as well as several attempts at illustrating the peculiarities of the performance, which came near resulting in a watery grave for three, or an upset canoe, at any rate. Our host, to excuse any impropriety, for which he felt more or less responsible, said "it was so natural for them to be jolly under all circumstances that when they have concluded to die they make their P. P. C.'s with infinite grace, and then die on time."
Of course they are jolly; and to prove it, I told Felix how the lepers, who had been banished to one little corner of the kingdom, and forbidden to leave there in the flesh, were as merry as the merriest, and once upon a time those decaying remnants of humanity actually gave a grand ball in their hospital. There was a general clearing out of disabled patients, and a brushing up of old finery, while the ball itself wasthetopic of conversation. Two or three young fellows, who had a few fingers left (they unjoint and drop off as the disease progresses), began to pick up a tune ortwo on bamboo flutes. Old, young, and middle-aged took a sly turn in some dark corner, getting their stiffened joints limber again.
Night came at last. The lamps flamed in the death-chamber of the lazar-house. Many a rejoicing soul had fled from that foul spot, to flash its white wings in the eternal sunshine.
At an early hour the strange company assembled. The wheezing of voices no longer musical, the shuffling of half-paralyzed limbs over the bare floor, the melancholy droning of those bamboo flutes, and the wild sea moaning in the wild night were the sweetest sounds that greeted them. And while the flutes piped dolorously to this unlovely spectacle, there was a rushing to and fro of unlovely figures; a bleeding, half-blind leper, seizing another of the accursed beings,—snatching her, as it were, from the grave, in all her loathsome clay,—dragged her into the bewildering maelstrom of the waltz.
Naturally excitable, heated with exertion, drunk with the very odors of death that pervaded the hall of revels, that mad crowd reeled through the hours of thefête. Satiated, at last, in the very bitterness of their unnatural gayety, they called for thehula-hulaas a fitting close.
In that reeking atmosphere, heavy with the smoke of half-extinguished lamps, they fed on the voluptuousabandonof the dancers till passion itself fainted with exhaustion.
"That was a dance of death, was it not, Felix?" Felix lay on his mat, sleeping heavily, and evidently unmindful of a single word I had uttered.
Our time was up at daybreak, and, with an endless deal of persuasion, Felix followed me out of the valley to the little chapel on the cliff. Our horses took a breath there, and so did we, bird's-eying the scene of the last night's orgie.
Who says it isn't a delicious spot,—that deep, narrow, and secluded vale, walled by almost perpendicular cliffs, hung with green tapestries of ferns and vines; that slender stream, like a thread of silver, embroidering a carpet of Nature's richest pattern; that torrent, leaping from the cliff into a garden of citrons; the sea sobbing at its mouth, while wary mariners, coasting in summer afternoons, catch glimpses of the tranquil and forbidden paradise, yet are heedless of all its beauty, and reck not the rustling of the cane-fields, nor the voices of the charmers, because—because these things are so common in that latitude that one grows naturally indifferent?
As for Felix, who talks in his sleep of thehula-hula, and insists that only by thelomi-lomihe shall be saved, he points a moral, though at present he is scarcely in a condition to adorn any tale whatever; and said moral I shall be glad to furnish, on application, to any sympathetic soul who has witnessed by proxy the unlawful revels of those night-dancers of Waipio.