UNLIKE the women of most warm races, those of Hawaii age well and nobly.
With no pretence of make-up or cunning concealment of time’s inroads, the
woman who sat under the hau tree might have been permitted as much as
fifty years by a judge competent anywhere over the world save in Hawaii.
Yet her children and her grandchildren, and Roscoe Scandwell who had been
her husband for forty years, knew that she was sixty-four and would be
sixty-five come the next twenty-second day of June. But she did not look
it, despite the fact that she thrust reading glasses on her nose as she
read her magazine and took them off when her gaze desired to wander in
the direction of the half-dozen children playing on the lawn.
It was a noble situation—noble as the ancient hau tree, the size of a
house, where she sat as if in a house, so spaciously and comfortably
house-like was its shade furnished; noble as the lawn that stretched away
landward its plush of green at an appraisement of two hundred dollars a
front foot to a bungalow equally dignified, noble, and costly. Seaward,
glimpsed through a fringe of hundred-foot coconut palms, was the ocean;
beyond the reef a dark blue that grew indigo blue to the horizon, within
the reef all the silken gamut of jade and emerald and tourmaline.
And this was but one house of the half-dozen houses belonging to Martha
Scandwell. Her town-house, a few miles away in Honolulu, on Nuuanu Drive
between the first and second “showers,” was a palace. Hosts of guests
had known the comfort and joy of her mountain house on Tantalus, and of
her volcano house, her _mauka_ house, and her _makai_ house on the big
island of Hawaii. Yet this Waikiki house stressed no less than the rest
in beauty, in dignity, and in expensiveness of upkeep. Two Japanese
yard-boys were trimming hibiscus, a third was engaged expertly with the
long hedge of night-blooming cereus that was shortly expectant of
unfolding in its mysterious night-bloom. In immaculate ducks, a house
Japanese brought out the tea-things, followed by a Japanese maid, pretty
as a butterfly in the distinctive garb of her race, and fluttery as a
butterfly to attend on her mistress. Another Japanese maid, an array of
Turkish towels on her arm, crossed the lawn well to the right in the
direction of the bath-houses, from which the children, in swimming suits,
were beginning to emerge. Beyond, under the palms at the edge of the
sea, two Chinese nursemaids, in their pretty native costume of white
_yee-shon_ and-straight-lined trousers, their black braids of hair down
their backs, attended each on a baby in a perambulator.
And all these, servants, and nurses, and grandchildren, were Martha
Scandwell’s. So likewise was the colour of the skin of the
grandchildren—the unmistakable Hawaiian colour, tinted beyond shadow of
mistake by exposure to the Hawaiian sun. One-eighth and one-sixteenth
Hawaiian were they, which meant that seven-eighths or fifteen-sixteenths
white blood informed that skin yet failed to obliterate the modicum of
golden tawny brown of Polynesia. But in this, again, only a trained
observer would have known that the frolicking children were aught but
pure-blooded white. Roscoe Scandwell, grandfather, was pure white;
Martha three-quarters white; the many sons and daughters of them
seven-eighths white; the grandchildren graded up to fifteen-sixteenths
white, or, in the cases when their seven-eighths fathers and mothers had
married seven-eighths, themselves fourteen-sixteenths or seven-eighths
white. On both sides the stock was good, Roscoe straight descended from
the New England Puritans, Martha no less straight descended from the
royal chief-stocks of Hawaii whose genealogies were chanted in _meles_ a
thousand years before written speech was acquired.
In the distance a machine stopped and deposited a woman whose utmost
years might have been guessed as sixty, who walked across the lawn as
lightly as a well-cared-for woman of forty, and whose actual calendar age
was sixty-eight. Martha rose from her seat to greet her, in the hearty
Hawaiian way, arms about, lips on lips, faces eloquent and bodies no less
eloquent with sincereness and frank excessiveness of emotion. And it was
“Sister Bella,” and “Sister Martha,” back and forth, intermingled with
almost incoherent inquiries about each other, and about Uncle This and
Brother That and Aunt Some One Else, until, the first tremulousness of
meeting over, eyes moist with tenderness of love, they sat gazing at each
other across their teacups. Apparently, they had not seen nor embraced
for years. In truth, two months marked the interval of their separation.
And one was sixty-four, the other sixty-eight. But the thorough
comprehension resided in the fact that in each of them one-fourth of them
was the sun-warm, love-warm heart of Hawaii.
The children flooded about Aunt Bella like a rising tide and were
capaciously hugged and kissed ere they departed with their nurses to the
swimming beach.
“I thought I’d run out to the beach for several days—the trades had
stopped blowing,” Martha explained.
“You’ve been here two weeks already,” Bella smiled fondly at her younger
sister. “Brother Edward told me. He met me at the steamer and insisted
on running me out first of all to see Louise and Dorothy and that first
grandchild of his. He’s as mad as a silly hatter about it.”
“Mercy!” Martha exclaimed. “Two weeks! I had not thought it that long.”
“Where’s Annie?—and Margaret?” Bella asked.
Martha shrugged her voluminous shoulders with voluminous and forgiving
affection for her wayward, matronly daughters who left their children in
her care for the afternoon.
“Margaret’s at a meeting of the Out-door Circle—they’re planning the
planting of trees and hibiscus all along both sides of Kalakaua Avenue,”
she said. “And Annie’s wearing out eighty dollars’ worth of tyres to
collect seventy-five dollars for the British Red Cross—this is their tag
day, you know.”
“Roscoe must be very proud,” Bella said, and observed the bright glow of
pride that appeared in her sister’s eyes. “I got the news in San
Francisco of Ho-o-la-a’s first dividend. Remember when I put a thousand
in it at seventy-five cents for poor Abbie’s children, and said I’d sell
when it went to ten dollars?”
“And everybody laughed at you, and at anybody who bought a share,” Martha
nodded. “But Roscoe knew. It’s selling to-day at twenty-four.”
“I sold mine from the steamer by wireless—at twenty even,” Bella
continued. “And now Abbie’s wildly dressmaking. She’s going with May
and Tootsie to Paris.”
“And Carl?” Martha queried.
“Oh, he’ll finish Yale all right—”
“Which he would have done anyway, and you _know_ it,” Martha charged,
lapsing charmingly into twentieth-century slang.
Bella affirmed her guilt of intention of paying the way of her school
friend’s son through college, and added complacently:
“Just the same it was nicer to have Ho-o-la-a pay for it. In a way, you
see, Roscoe is doing it, because it was his judgment I trusted to when I
made the investment.” She gazed slowly about her, her eyes taking in,
not merely the beauty and comfort and repose of all they rested on, but
the immensity of beauty and comfort and repose represented by them,
scattered in similar oases all over the islands. She sighed pleasantly
and observed: “All our husbands have done well by us with what we brought
them.”
“And happily . . . ” Martha agreed, then suspended her utterance with
suspicious abruptness.
“And happily, all of us, except Sister Bella,” Bella forgivingly
completed the thought for her.
“It was too bad, that marriage,” Martha murmured, all softness of
sympathy. “You were so young. Uncle Robert should never have made you.”
“I was only nineteen,” Bella nodded. “But it was not George Castner’s
fault. And look what he, out of the grave, has done for me. Uncle
Robert was wise. He knew George had the far-away vision of far ahead,
the energy, and the steadiness. He saw, even then, and that’s fifty
years ago, the value of the Nahala water-rights which nobody else valued
then. They thought he was struggling to buy the cattle range. He
struggled to buy the future of the water—and how well he succeeded you
know. I’m almost ashamed to think of my income sometimes. No; whatever
else, the unhappiness of our marriage was not due to George. I could
have lived happily with him, I know, even to this day, had he lived.”
She shook her head slowly. “No; it was not his fault. Nor anybody’s.
Not even mine. If it was anybody’s fault—” The wistful fondness of her
smile took the sting out of what she was about to say. “If it was
anybody’s fault it was Uncle John’s.”
“Uncle John’s!” Martha cried with sharp surprise. “If it had to be one
or the other, I should have said Uncle Robert. But Uncle John!”
Bella smiled with slow positiveness.
“But it was Uncle Robert who made you marry George Castner,” her sister
urged.
“That is true,” Bella nodded corroboration. “But it was not the matter
of a husband, but of a horse. I wanted to borrow a horse from Uncle
John, and Uncle John said yes. That is how it all happened.”
A silence fell, pregnant and cryptic, and, while the voices of the
children and the soft mandatory protests of the Asiatic maids drew nearer
from the beach, Martha Scandwell felt herself vibrant and tremulous with
sudden resolve of daring. She waved the children away.
“Run along, dears, run along, Grandma and Aunt Bella want to talk.”
And as the shrill, sweet treble of child voices ebbed away across the
lawn, Martha, with scrutiny of the heart, observed the sadness of the
lines graven by secret woe for half a century in her sister’s face. For
nearly fifty years had she watched those lines. She steeled all the
melting softness of the Hawaiian of her to break the half-century of
silence.
“Bella,” she said. “We never knew. You never spoke. But we wondered,
oh, often and often—”
“And never asked,” Bella murmured gratefully.
“But I am asking now, at the last. This is our twilight. Listen to
them! Sometimes it almost frightens me to think that they are
grandchildren, _my_ grandchildren—_I_, who only the other day, it would
seem, was as heart-free, leg-free, care-free a girl as ever bestrode a
horse, or swam in the big surf, or gathered _opihis_ at low tide, or
laughed at a dozen lovers. And here in our twilight let us forget
everything save that I am your dear sister as you are mine.”
The eyes of both were dewy moist. Bella palpably trembled to utterance.
“We thought it was George Castner,” Martha went on; “and we could guess
the details. He was a cold man. You were warm Hawaiian. He must have
been cruel. Brother Walcott always insisted he must have beaten you—”
“No! No!” Bella broke in. “George Castner was never a brute, a beast.
Almost have I wished, often, that he had been. He never laid hand on me.
He never raised hand to me. He never raised his voice to me. Never—oh,
can you believe it?—do, please, sister, believe it—did we have a high
word nor a cross word. But that house of his, of ours, at Nahala, was
grey. All the colour of it was grey and cool, and chill, while I was
bright with all colours of sun, and earth, and blood, and birth. It was
very cold, grey cold, with that cold grey husband of mine at Nahala. You
know he was grey, Martha. Grey like those portraits of Emerson we used
to see at school. His skin was grey. Sun and weather and all hours in
the saddle could never tan it. And he was as grey inside as out.
“And I was only nineteen when Uncle Robert decided on the marriage. How
was I to know? Uncle Robert talked to me. He pointed out how the wealth
and property of Hawaii was already beginning to pass into the hands of
the _haoles_” (Whites). “The Hawaiian chiefs let their possessions slip
away from them. The Hawaiian chiefesses, who married _haoles_, had their
possessions, under the management of their _haole_ husbands, increase
prodigiously. He pointed back to the original Grandfather Roger Wilton,
who had taken Grandmother Wilton’s poor _mauka_ lands and added to them
and built up about them the Kilohana Ranch—”
“Even then it was second only to the Parker Ranch,” Martha interrupted
proudly.
“And he told me that had our father, before he died, been as far-seeing
as grandfather, half the then Parker holdings would have been added to
Kilohana, making Kilohana first. And he said that never, for ever and
ever, would beef be cheaper. And he said that the big future of Hawaii
would be in sugar. That was fifty years ago, and he has been more than
proved right. And he said that the young _haole_, George Castner, saw
far, and would go far, and that there were many girls of us, and that the
Kilohana lands ought by rights to go to the boys, and that if I married
George my future was assured in the biggest way.
“I was only nineteen. Just back from the Royal Chief School—that was
before our girls went to the States for their education. You were among
the first, Sister Martha, who got their education on the mainland. And
what did I know of love and lovers, much less of marriage? All women
married. It was their business in life. Mother and grandmother, all the
way back they had married. It was my business in life to marry George
Castner. Uncle Robert said so in his wisdom, and I knew he was very
wise. And I went to live with my husband in the grey house at Nahala.
“You remember it. No trees, only the rolling grass lands, the high
mountains behind, the sea beneath, and the wind!—the Waimea and Nahala
winds, we got them both, and the _kona_ wind as well. Yet little would I
have minded them, any more than we minded them at Kilohana, or than they
minded them at Mana, had not Nahala itself been so grey, and husband
George so grey. We were alone. He was managing Nahala for the Glenns,
who had gone back to Scotland. Eighteen hundred a year, plus beef,
horses, cowboy service, and the ranch house, was what he received—”
“It was a high salary in those days,” Martha said.
“And for George Castner, and the service he gave, it was very cheap,”
Bella defended. “I lived with him for three years. There was never a
morning that he was out of his bed later than half-past four. He was the
soul of devotion to his employers. Honest to a penny in his accounts, he
gave them full measure and more of his time and energy. Perhaps that was
what helped make our life so grey. But listen, Martha. Out of his
eighteen hundred, he laid aside sixteen hundred each year. Think of it!
The two of us lived on two hundred a year. Luckily he did not drink or
smoke. Also, we dressed out of it as well. I made my own dresses. You
can imagine them. Outside of the cowboys who chored the firewood, I did
the work. I cooked, and baked, and scrubbed—”
“You who had never known anything but servants from the time you were
born!” Martha pitied. “Never less than a regiment of them at Kilohana.”
“Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!” Bella cried
out. “How far I was compelled to make a pound of coffee go! A broom
worn down to nothing before a new one was bought! And beef! Fresh beef
and jerky, morning, noon, and night! And porridge! Never since have I
eaten porridge or any breakfast food.”
She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment with
unseeing eyes at the colour-lavish reef while she composed herself. And
she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure, gracious,
high-breasted, noble-headed port of which no out-breeding can ever rob
the Hawaiian woman. Very _haole_ was Bella Castner, fair-skinned,
fine-textured. Yet, as she returned, the high pose of head, the
level-lidded gaze of her long brown eyes under royal arches of eyebrows,
the softly set lines of her small mouth that fairly sang sweetness of
kisses after sixty-eight years—all made her the very picture of a
chiefess of old Hawaii full-bursting through her ampleness of _haole_
blood. Taller she was than her sister Martha, if anything more queenly.
“You know we were notorious as poor feeders,” Bella laughed lightly
enough. “It was many a mile on either side from Nahala to the next roof.
Belated travellers, or storm-bound ones, would, on occasion, stop with us
overnight. And you know the lavishness of the big ranches, then and now.
How we were the laughing-stock! ‘What do we care!’ George would say.
‘They live to-day and now. Twenty years from now will be our turn,
Bella. They will be where they are now, and they will eat out of our
hand. We will be compelled to feed them, they will need to be fed, and
we will feed them well; for we will be rich, Bella, so rich that I am
afraid to tell you. But I know what I know, and you must have faith in
me.’
“George was right. Twenty years afterward, though he did not live to see
it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not know what it
is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say to George: ‘Now!
now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty years from now. I do want
a new broom. And there is a third-rate coffee that is only two cents a
pound more than the awful stuff we are using. Why couldn’t I fry eggs in
butter—now? I should dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our
linen! I’m ashamed to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven
knows they dare come seldom enough.’
“‘Be patient, Bella,’ he would reply. ‘In a little while, in only a few
years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep between our
sheets, will be proud of an invitation—those of them who will not be
dead. You remember how Stevens passed out last year—free-living and
easy, everybody’s friend but his own. The Kohala crowd had to bury him,
for he left nothing but debts. Watch the others going the same pace.
There’s your brother Hal. He can’t keep it up and live five years, and
he’s breaking his uncles’ hearts. And there’s Prince Lilolilo. Dashes
by me with half a hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering _kanakas_ in
his train who would be better at hard work and looking after their
future, for he will never be king of Hawaii. He will not live to be king
of Hawaii.’
“George was right. Brother Hal died. So did Prince Lilolilo. But
George was not _all_ right. He, who neither drank nor smoked, who never
wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of his lips a
second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who was invariably up
before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp had a tenth emptied
itself, and who never thought to die, was dead even more quickly than
Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.
“‘Be patient, Bella,’ Uncle Robert would say to me. ‘George Castner is a
coming man. I have chosen well for you. Your hardships now are the
hardships on the way to the promised land. Not always will the Hawaiians
rule in Hawaii. Just as they let their wealth slip out of their hands,
so will their rule slip out of their hands. Political power and the land
always go together. There will be great changes, revolutions no one
knows how many nor of what sort, save that in the end the _haole_ will
possess the land and the rule. And in that day you may well be first
lady of Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii.
It is written in the books. It is ever so where the _haole_ conflicts
with the easier races. I, your Uncle Robert, who am half-Hawaiian and
half-_haole_, know whereof I speak. Be patient, Bella, be patient.’
“‘Dear Bella,’ Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was tender for
me. Thank God, he never told me to be patient. He knew. He was very
wise. He was warm human, and, therefore, wiser than Uncle Robert and
George Castner, who sought the thing, not the spirit, who kept records in
ledgers rather than numbers of heart-beats breast to breast, who added
columns of figures rather than remembered embraces and endearments of
look and speech and touch. ‘Dear Bella,’ Uncle John would say. He knew.
You have heard always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was
a true lover. He loved but the once. After her death they said he was
eccentric. He was. He was the one lover, once and always. Remember
that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered only after his
death and found it his shrine to her. ‘Dear Bella,’ it was all he ever
said to me, but I knew he knew.
“And I was nineteen, and sun-warm Hawaiian in spite of my three-quarters
_haole_ blood, and I knew nothing save my girlhood splendours at Kilohana
and my Honolulu education at the Royal Chief School, and my grey husband
at Nahala with his grey preachments and practices of sobriety and thrift,
and those two childless uncles of mine, the one with far, cold vision,
the other the broken-hearted, for-ever-dreaming lover of a dead princess.
“Think of that grey house! I, who had known the ease and the delights
and the ever-laughing joys of Kilohana, and of the Parkers at old Mana,
and of Puuwaawaa! You remember. We did live in feudal spaciousness in
those days. Would you, can you, believe it, Martha—at Nahala the only
sewing machine I had was one of those the early missionaries brought, a
tiny, crazy thing that one cranked around by hand!
“Robert and John had each given Husband George five thousand dollars at
my marriage. But he had asked for it to be kept secret. Only the four
of us knew. And while I sewed my cheap _holokus_ on that crazy machine,
he bought land with the money—the upper Nahala lands, you know—a bit at a
time, each purchase a hard-driven bargain, his face the very face of
poverty. To-day the Nahala Ditch alone pays me forty thousand a year.
“But was it worth it? I starved. If only once, madly, he had crushed me
in his arms! If only once he could have lingered with me five minutes
from his own business or from his fidelity to his employers! Sometimes I
could have screamed, or showered the eternal bowl of hot porridge into
his face, or smashed the sewing machine upon the floor and danced a
_hula_ on it, just to make him burst out and lose his temper and be
human, be a brute, be a man of some sort instead of a grey, frozen
demi-god.”
Bella’s tragic expression vanished, and she laughed outright in sheer
genuineness of mirthful recollection.
“And when I was in such moods he would gravely look me over, gravely feel
my pulse, examine my tongue, gravely dose me with castor oil, and gravely
put me to bed early with hot stove-lids, and assure me that I’d feel
better in the morning. Early to bed! Our wildest sitting up was nine
o’clock. Eight o’clock was our regular bed-time. It saved kerosene. We
did not eat dinner at Nahala—remember the great table at Kilohana where
we did have dinner? But Husband George and I had supper. And then he
would sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed
magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his socks
and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff. And when he
went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene with only one to
benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same way, winding up his
watch, entering the day’s weather in his diary, and taking off his shoes,
right foot first invariably, left foot second, and placing them just so,
side by side, on the floor, at the foot of the bed, on his side.
“He was the cleanest man I ever knew. He never wore the same
undergarment a second time. I did the washing. He was so clean it hurt.
He shaved twice a day. He used more water on his body than any _kanaka_.
He did more work than any two _haoles_. And he saw the future of the
Nahala water.”
“And he made you wealthy, but did not make you happy,” Martha observed.
Bella sighed and nodded.
“What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new Pierce-Arrow came down
on the steamer with me. My third in two years. But oh, all the
Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a lover!—the
one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil beside and suffer and
joy beside, the one male man lover husband . . . ”
Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an
ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under a
hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her eyes,
withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a mongoose’s, and
at Bella’s feet she first sank down, in pure Hawaiian mumbling and
chanting a toothless _mele_ of Bella and Bella’s ancestry and adding to
it an extemporized welcome back to Hawaii after her absence across the
great sea to California. And while she chanted her _mele_, the old
crone’s shrewd fingers _lomied_ or massaged Bella’s silk-stockinged legs
from ankle and calf to knee and thigh.
Both Bella’s and Martha’s eyes were luminous-moist, as the old retainer
repeated the _lomi_ and the _mele_ to Martha, and as they talked with her
in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial questions about her health
and age and great-great-grandchildren—she who had _lomied_ them as babies
in the great house at Kilohana, as her ancestresses had _lomied_ their
ancestresses back through the unnumbered generations. The brief duty
visit over, Martha arose and accompanied her back to the bungalow,
putting money into her hand, commanding proud and beautiful Japanese
housemaids to wait upon the dilapidated aborigine with _poi_, which is
compounded of the roots of the water lily, with _iamaka_, which is raw
fish, and with pounded kukui nut and _limu_, which latter is seawood
tender to the toothless, digestible and savoury. It was the old feudal
tie, the faithfulness of the commoner to the chief, the responsibility of
the chief to the commoner; and Martha, three-quarters _haole_ with the
Anglo-Saxon blood of New England, was four-quarters Hawaiian in her
remembrance and observance of the well-nigh vanished customs of old days.
As she came back across the lawn to the hau tree, Bella’s eyes dwelt upon
the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her, and embraced her
and loved her. Shorter than Bella was Martha, a trifle, but the merest
trifle, less queenly of port; but beautifully and generously
proportioned, mellowed rather than dismantled by years, her Polynesian
chiefess figure eloquent and glorious under the satisfying lines of a
half-fitting, grandly sweeping, black-silk _holoku_ trimmed with black
lace more costly than a Paris gown.
And as both sisters resumed their talk, an observer would have noted the
striking resemblance of their pure, straight profiles, of their broad
cheek-bones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of their iron-grey
abundance of hair, of their sweet-lipped mouths set with the carriage of
decades of assured and accomplished pride, and of their lovely slender
eyebrows arched over equally lovely long brown eyes. The hands of both
of them, little altered or defaced by age, were wonderful in their
slender, tapering finger-tips, love-_lomied_ and love-formed while they
were babies by old Hawaiian women like to the one even then eating _poi_
and _iamaka_ and _limu_ in the house.
“I had a year of it,” Bella resumed, “and, do you know, things were
beginning to come right. I was beginning to draw to Husband George.
Women are so made, I was such a woman at any rate. For he was good. He
was just. All the old sterling Puritan virtues were his. I was coming
to draw to him, to like him, almost, might I say, to love him. And had
not Uncle John loaned me that horse, I know that I would have truly loved
him and have lived ever happily with him—in a quiet sort of way, of
course.
“You see, I knew nothing else, nothing different, nothing better in the
way of men. I came gladly to look across the table at him while he read
in the brief interval between supper and bed, gladly to listen for and to
catch the beat of his horse’s hoofs coming home at night from his endless
riding over the ranch. And his scant praise was praise indeed, that made
me tingle with happiness—yes, Sister Martha, I knew what it was to blush
under his precise, just praise for the things I had done right or
correctly.
“And all would have been well for the rest of our lives together, except
that he had to take steamer to Honolulu. It was business. He was to be
gone two weeks or longer, first, for the Glenns in ranch affairs, and
next for himself, to arrange the purchase of still more of the upper
Nahala lands. Do you know! he bought lots of the wilder and up-and-down
lands, worthless for aught save water, and the very heart of the
watershed, for as low as five and ten cents an acre. And he suggested I
needed a change. I wanted to go with him to Honolulu. But, with an eye
to expense, he decided Kilohana for me. Not only would it cost him
nothing for me to visit at the old home, but he saved the price of the
poor food I should have eaten had I remained alone at Nahala, which meant
the purchase price of more Nahala acreage. And at Kilohana Uncle John
said yes, and loaned me the horse.
“Oh, it was like heaven, getting back, those first several days. It was
difficult to believe at first that there was so much food in all the
world. The enormous wastage of the kitchen appalled me. I saw waste
everywhere, so well trained had I been by Husband George. Why, out in
the servants’ quarters the aged relatives and most distant hangers-on of
the servants fed better than George and I ever fed. You remember our
Kilohana way, same as the Parker way, a bullock killed for every meal,
fresh fish by runners from the ponds of Waipio and Kiholo, the best and
rarest at all times of everything . . .
“And love, our family way of loving! You know what Uncle John was. And
Brother Walcott was there, and Brother Edward, and all the younger
sisters save you and Sally away at school. And Aunt Elizabeth, and Aunt
Janet with her husband and all her children on a visit. It was arms
around, and perpetual endearings, and all that I had missed for a weary
twelvemonth. I was thirsty for it. I was like a survivor from the open
boat falling down on the sand and lapping the fresh bubbling springs at
the roots of the palms.
“And _they_ came, riding up from Kawaihae, where they had landed from the
royal yacht, the whole glorious cavalcade of them, two by two,
flower-garlanded, young and happy, gay, on Parker Ranch horses, thirty of
them in the party, a hundred Parker Ranch cowboys and as many more of
their own retainers—a royal progress. It was Princess Lihue’s progress,
of course, she flaming and passing as we all knew with the dreadful
tuberculosis; but with her were her nephews, Prince Lilolilo, hailed
everywhere as the next king, and his brothers, Prince Kahekili and Prince
Kamalau. And with the Princess was Ella Higginsworth, who rightly
claimed higher chief blood lines through the Kauai descent than belonged
to the reigning family, and Dora Niles, and Emily Lowcroft, and . . . oh,
why enumerate them all! Ella Higginsworth and I had been room-mates at
the Royal Chief School. And there was a great resting time for an
hour—no _luau_, for the _luau_ awaited them at the Parkers’—but beer and
stronger drinks for the men, and lemonade, and oranges, and refreshing
watermelon for the women.
“And it was arms around with Ella Higginsworth and me, and the Princess,
who remembered me, and all the other girls and women, and Ella spoke to
the Princess, and the Princess herself invited me to the progress,
joining them at Mana whence they would depart two days later. And I was
mad, mad with it all—I, from a twelvemonth of imprisonment at grey
Nahala. And I was nineteen yet, just turning twenty within the week.
“Oh, I had not thought of what was to happen. So occupied was I with the
women that I did not see Lilolilo, except at a distance, bulking large
and tall above the other men. But I had never been on a progress. I had
seen them entertained at Kilohana and Mana, but I had been too young to
be invited along, and after that it had been school and marriage. I knew
what it would be like—two weeks of paradise, and little enough for
another twelve months at Nahala.
“And I asked Uncle John to lend me a horse, which meant three horses of
course—one mounted cowboy and a pack horse to accompany me. No roads
then. No automobiles. And the horse for myself! It was Hilo. You
don’t remember him. You were away at school then, and before you came
home, the following year, he’d broken his back and his rider’s neck
wild-cattle-roping up Mauna Kea. You heard about it—that young American
naval officer.”
“Lieutenant Bowsfield,” Martha nodded.
“But Hilo! I was the first woman on his back. He was a three-year-old,
almost a four-year, and just broken. So black and in such a vigour of
coat that the high lights on him clad him in shimmering silver. He was
the biggest riding animal on the ranch, descended from the King’s
Sparklingdow with a range mare for dam, and roped wild only two weeks
before. I never have seen so beautiful a horse. He had the round,
deep-chested, big-hearted, well-coupled body of the ideal mountain pony,
and his head and neck were true thoroughbred, slender, yet full, with
lovely alert ears not too small to be vicious nor too large to be
stubborn mulish. And his legs and feet were lovely too, unblemished,
sure and firm, with long springy pasterns that made him a wonder of ease
under the saddle.”
“I remember hearing Prince Lilolilo tell Uncle John that you were the
best woman rider in all Hawaii,” Martha interrupted to say. “That was
two years afterward when I was back from school and while you were still
living at Nahala.”
“Lilolilo said that!” Bella cried. Almost as with a blush, her long,
brown eyes were illumined, as she bridged the years to her lover near
half a century dead and dust. With the gentleness of modesty so innate
in the women of Hawaii, she covered her spontaneous exposure of her heart
with added panegyric of Hilo.
“Oh, when he ran with me up the long-grass slopes, and down the
long-grass slopes, it was like hurdling in a dream, for he cleared the
grass at every bound, leaping like a deer, a rabbit, or a fox-terrier—you
know how they do. And cut up, and prance, and high life! He was a mount
for a general, for a Napoleon or a Kitchener. And he had, not a wicked
eye, but, oh, such a roguish eye, intelligent and looking as if it
cherished a joke behind and wanted to laugh or to perpetrate it. And I
asked Uncle John for Hilo. And Uncle John looked at me, and I looked at
him; and, though he did not say it, I knew he was _feeling_ ‘Dear Bella,’
and I knew, somewhere in his seeing of me, was all his vision of the
Princess Naomi. And Uncle John said yes. That is how it happened.
“But he insisted that I should try Hilo out—myself, rather—at private
rehearsal. He was a _handful_, a glorious handful. But not vicious, not
malicious. He got away from me over and over again, but I never let him
know. I was not afraid, and that helped me keep always a _feel_ of him
that prevented him from thinking that he was even a jump ahead of me.
“I have often wondered if Uncle John dreamed of what possibly might
happen. I know I had no thought of it myself, that day I rode across and
joined the Princess at Mana. Never was there such festal time. You know
the grand way the old Parkers had of entertaining. The pig-sticking and
wild-cattle-shooting, the horse-breaking and the branding. The servants’
quarters overflowing. Parker cowboys in from everywhere. And all the
girls from Waimea up, and the girls from Waipio, and Honokaa, and
Paauilo—I can see them yet, sitting in long rows on top the stone walls
of the breaking pen and making _leis_” (flower garlands) “for their
cowboy lovers. And the nights, the perfumed nights, the chanting of the
_meles_ and the dancing of the _hulas_, and the big Mana grounds with
lovers everywhere strolling two by two under the trees.
“And the Prince . . . ” Bella paused, and for a long minute her small
fine teeth, still perfect, showed deep in her underlip as she sought and
won control and sent her gaze vacantly out across the far blue horizon.
As she relaxed, her eyes came back to her sister.
“He was a prince, Martha. You saw him at Kilohana before . . . after you
came home from seminary. He filled the eyes of any woman, yes, and of
any man. Twenty-five he was, in all-glorious ripeness of man, great and
princely in body as he was great and princely in spirit. No matter how
wild the fun, how reckless mad the sport, he never seemed to forget that
he was royal, and that all his forebears had been high chiefs even to
that first one they sang in the genealogies, who had navigated his
double-canoes to Tahiti and Raiatea and back again. He was gracious,
sweet, kindly comradely, all friendliness—and severe, and stern, and
harsh, if he were crossed too grievously. It is hard to express what I
mean. He was all man, man, man, and he was all prince, with a strain of
the merry boy in him, and the iron in him that would have made him a good
and strong king of Hawaii had he come to the throne.
“I can see him yet, as I saw him that first day and touched his hand and
talked with him . . . few words and bashful, and anything but a year-long
married woman to a grey _haole_ at grey Nahala. Half a century ago it
was, that meeting—you remember how our young men then dressed in white
shoes and trousers, white silk shirts, with slashed around the middle the
gorgeously colourful Spanish sashes—and for half a century that picture
of him has not faded in my heart. He was the centre of a group on the
lawn, and I was being brought by Ella Higginsworth to be presented. The
Princess Lihue had just called some teasing chaff to her which had made
her halt to respond and left me halted a pace in front of her.
“His glance chanced to light on me, alone there, perturbed, embarrassed.
Oh, how I see him!—his head thrown back a little, with that high, bright,
imperious, and utterly care-free poise that was so usual of him. Our
eyes met. His head bent forward, or straightened to me, I don’t know
what happened. Did he command? Did I obey? I do not know. I know only
that I was good to look upon, crowned with fragrant _maile_, clad in
Princess Naomi’s wonderful _holoku_ loaned me by Uncle John from his
taboo room; and I know that I advanced alone to him across the Mana lawn,
and that he stepped forth from those about him to meet me half-way. We
came to each other across the grass, unattended, as if we were coming to
each other across our lives.
“—Was I very beautiful, Sister Martha, when I was young? I do not know.
I don’t know. But in that moment, with all his beauty and truly
royal-manness crossing to me and penetrating to the heart of me, I felt a
sudden sense of beauty in myself—how shall I say? as if in him and from
him perfection were engendered and conjured within myself.
“No word was spoken. But, oh, I know I raised my face in frank answer to
the thunder and trumpets of the message unspoken, and that, had it been
death for that one look and that one moment I could not have refrained
from the gift of myself that must have been in my face and eyes, in the
very body of me that breathed so high.
“Was I beautiful, very beautiful, Martha, when I was nineteen, just
turning into twenty?”
And Martha, three-score and four, looked upon Bella, three-score and
eight, and nodded genuine affirmation, and to herself added the
appreciation of the instant in what she beheld—Bella’s neck, still full
and shapely, longer than the ordinary Hawaiian woman’s neck, a pillar
that carried regally her high-cheeked, high-browed, high chiefess face
and head; Bella’s hair, high-piled, intact, sparkling the silver of the
years, ringleted still and contrasting definitely and sharply with her
clean, slim, black brows and deep brown eyes. And Martha’s glance, in
modest overwhelming of modesty by what she saw, dropped down the splendid
breast of her and generously true lines of body to the feet, silken clad,
high-heeled-slippered, small, plump, with an almost Spanish arch and
faultlessness of instep.
“When one is young, the one young time!” Bella laughed. “Lilolilo was a
prince. I came to know his every feature and their every phase . . .
afterward, in our wonder days and nights by the singing waters, by the
slumber-drowsy surfs, and on the mountain ways. I knew his fine, brave
eyes, with their straight, black brows, the nose of him that was
assuredly a Kamehameha nose, and the last, least, lovable curve of his
mouth. There is no mouth more beautiful than the Hawaiian, Martha.
“And his body. He was a king of athletes, from his wicked, wayward hair
to his ankles of bronzed steel. Just the other day I heard one of the
Wilder grandsons referred to as ‘The Prince of Harvard.’ Mercy! What
would they, what could they have called my Lilolilo could they have
matched him against this Wilder lad and all his team at Harvard!”
Bella ceased and breathed deeply, the while she clasped her fine small
hands in her ample silken lap. But her pink fairness blushed faintly
through her skin and warmed her eyes as she relived her prince-days.
“Well—you have guessed?” Bella said, with defiant shrug of shoulders and
a straight gaze into her sister’s eyes. “We rode out from gay Mana and
continued the gay progress—down the lava trails to Kiholo to the swimming
and the fishing and the feasting and the sleeping in the warm sand under
the palms; and up to Puuwaawaa, and more pig-sticking, and roping and
driving, and wild mutton from the upper pasture-lands; and on through
Kona, now _mauka_” (mountainward), “now down to the King’s palace at
Kailua, and to the swimming at Keauhou, and to Kealakekua Bay, and
Napoopoo and Honaunau. And everywhere the people turning out, in their
hands gifts of flowers, and fruit, and fish, and pig, in their hearts
love and song, their heads bowed in obeisance to the royal ones while
their lips ejaculated exclamations of amazement or chanted _meles_ of old
and unforgotten days.
“What would you, Sister Martha? You know what we Hawaiians are. You
know what we were half a hundred years ago. Lilolilo was wonderful. I
was reckless. Lilolilo of himself could make any woman reckless. I was
twice reckless, for I had cold, grey Nahala to spur me on. I knew. I
had never a doubt. Never a hope. Divorces in those days were undreamed.
The wife of George Castner could never be queen of Hawaii, even if Uncle
Robert’s prophesied revolutions were delayed, and if Lilolilo himself
became king. But I never thought of the throne. What I wanted would
have been the queendom of being Lilolilo’s wife and mate. But I made no
mistake. What was impossible was impossible, and I dreamed no false
dream.
“It was the very atmosphere of love. And Lilolilo was a lover. I was
for ever crowned with _leis_ by him, and he had his runners bring me
_leis_ all the way from the rose-gardens of Mana—you remember them; fifty
miles across the lava and the ranges, dewy fresh as the moment they were
plucked, in their jewel-cases of banana bark; yard-long they were, the
tiny pink buds like threaded beads of Neapolitan coral. And at the
_luaus_” (feasts) “the for ever never-ending _luaus_, I must be seated on
Lilolilo’s Makaloa mat, the Prince’s mat, his alone and taboo to any
lesser mortal save by his own condescension and desire. And I must dip
my fingers into his own _pa wai holoi_” (finger-bowl) “where scented
flower petals floated in the warm water. Yes, and careless that all
should see his extended favour, I must dip into his _pa paakai_ for my
pinches of red salt, and limu, and kukui nut and chili pepper; and into
his _ipu kai_” (fish sauce dish) “of _kou_ wood that the great Kamehameha
himself had eaten from on many a similar progress. And it was the same
for special delicacies that were for Lilolilo and the Princess alone—for
his _nelu_, and the _ake_, and the _palu_, and the _alaala_. And his
_kahilis_ were waved over me, and his attendants were mine, and he was
mine; and from my flower-crowned hair to my happy feet I was a woman
loved.”
Once again Bella’s small teeth pressed into her underlip, as she gazed
vacantly seaward and won control of herself and her memories.
“It was on, and on, through all Kona, and all Kau, from Hoopuloa and
Kapua to Honuapo and Punaluu, a life-time of living compressed into two
short weeks. A flower blooms but once. That was my time of
bloom—Lilolilo beside me, myself on my wonderful Hilo, a queen, not of
Hawaii, but of Lilolilo and Love. He said I was a bubble of colour and
beauty on the black back of Leviathan; that I was a fragile dewdrop on
the smoking crest of a lava flow; that I was a rainbow riding the thunder
cloud . . . ”
Bella paused for a moment.
“I shall tell you no more of what he said to me,” she declared gravely;
“save that the things he said were fire of love and essence of beauty,
and that he composed _hulas_ to me, and sang them to me, before all, of
nights under the stars as we lay on our mats at the feasting; and I on
the Makaloa mat of Lilolilo.
“And it was on to Kilauea—the dream so near its ending; and of course we
tossed into the pit of sea-surging lava our offerings to the Fire-Goddess
of _maile leis_ and of fish and hard _poi_ wrapped moist in the _ti_
leaves. And we continued down through old Puna, and feasted and danced
and sang at Kohoualea and Kamaili and Opihikao, and swam in the clear,
sweet-water pools of Kalapana. And in the end came to Hilo by the sea.
“It was the end. We had never spoken. It was the end recognized and
unmentioned. The yacht waited. We were days late. Honolulu called, and
the news was that the King had gone particularly _pupule_” (insane),
“that there were Catholic and Protestant missionary plottings, and that
trouble with France was brewing. As they had landed at Kawaihae two
weeks before with laughter and flowers and song, so they departed from
Hilo. It was a merry parting, full of fun and frolic and a thousand last
messages and reminders and jokes. The anchor was broken out to a song of
farewell from Lilolilo’s singing boys on the quarterdeck, while we, in
the big canoes and whaleboats, saw the first breeze fill the vessel’s
sails and the distance begin to widen.
“Through all the confusion and excitement, Lilolilo, at the rail, who
must say last farewells and quip last jokes to many, looked squarely down
at me. On his head he wore my _ilima lei_, which I had made for him and
placed there. And into the canoes, to the favoured ones, they on the
yacht began tossing their many _leis_. I had no expectancy of hope . . .
And yet I hoped, in a small wistful way that I know did not show in my
face, which was as proud and merry as any there. But Lilolilo did what I
knew he would do, what I had known from the first he would do. Still
looking me squarely and honestly in the eyes, he took my beautiful _ilima
lei_ from his head and tore it across. I saw his lips shape, but not
utter aloud, the single word _pau_” (finish). “Still looking at me, he
broke both parts of the _lei_ in two again and tossed the deliberate
fragments, not to me, but down overside into the widening water. _Pau_.
It was finished . . . ”
For a long space Bella’s vacant gaze rested on the sea horizon. Martha
ventured no mere voice expression of the sympathy that moistened her own
eyes.
“And I rode on that day, up the old bad trail along the Hamakua coast,”
Bella resumed, with a voice at first singularly dry and harsh. “That
first day was not so hard. I was numb. I was too full with the wonder
of all I had to forget to know that I had to forget it. I spent the
night at Laupahoehoe. Do you know, I had expected a sleepless night.
Instead, weary from the saddle, still numb, I slept the night through as
if I had been dead.
“But the next day, in driving wind and drenching rain! How it blew and
poured! The trail was really impassable. Again and again our horses
went down. At fist the cowboy Uncle John had loaned me with the horses
protested, then he followed stolidly in the rear, shaking his head, and,
I know, muttering over and over that I was _pupule_. The pack horse was
abandoned at Kukuihaele. We almost swam up Mud Lane in a river of mud.
At Waimea the cowboy had to exchange for a fresh mount. But Hilo lasted
through. From daybreak till midnight I was in the saddle, till Uncle
John, at Kilohana, took me off my horse, in his arms, and carried me in,
and routed the women from their beds to undress me and _lomi_ me, while
he plied me with hot toddies and drugged me to sleep and forgetfulness.
I know I must have babbled and raved. Uncle John must have guessed. But
never to another, nor even to me, did he ever breathe a whisper.
Whatever he guessed he locked away in the taboo room of Naomi.
“I do have fleeting memories of some of that day, all a broken-hearted
mad rage against fate—of my hair down and whipped wet and stinging about
me in the driving rain; of endless tears of weeping contributed to the
general deluge, of passionate outbursts and resentments against a world
all twisted and wrong, of beatings of my hands upon my saddle pommel, of
asperities to my Kilohana cowboy, of spurs into the ribs of poor
magnificent Hilo, with a prayer on my lips, bursting out from my heart,
that the spurs would so madden him as to make him rear and fall on me and
crush my body for ever out of all beauty for man, or topple me off the
trail and finish me at the foot of the _palis_” (precipices), “writing
_pau_ at the end of my name as final as the unuttered _pau_ on Lilolilo’s
lips when he tore across my _ilima lei_ and dropped it in the sea. . . .
“Husband George was delayed in Honolulu. When he came back to Nahala I
was there waiting for him. And solemnly he embraced me, perfunctorily
kissed my lips, gravely examined my tongue, decried my looks and state of
health, and sent me to bed with hot stove-lids and a dosage of castor
oil. Like entering into the machinery of a clock and becoming one of the
cogs or wheels, inevitably and remorselessly turning around and around,
so I entered back into the grey life of Nahala. Out of bed was Husband
George at half after four every morning, and out of the house and astride
his horse at five. There was the eternal porridge, and the horrible
cheap coffee, and the fresh beef and jerky. I cooked, and baked, and
scrubbed. I ground around the crazy hand sewing machine and made my
cheap _holokus_. Night after night, through the endless centuries of two
years more, I sat across the table from him until eight o’clock, mending
his cheap socks and shoddy underwear, while he read the years’ old
borrowed magazines he was too thrifty to subscribe to. And then it was
bed-time—kerosene must be economized—and he wound his watch, entered the
weather in his diary, and took off his shoes, the right shoe first, and
placed them, just so, side by side, at the foot of the bed on his side.
“But there was no more of my drawing to Husband George, as had been the
promise ere the Princess Lihue invited me on the progress and Uncle John
loaned me the horse. You see, Sister Martha, nothing would have happened
had Uncle John refused me the horse. But I had known love, and I had
known Lilolilo; and what chance, after that, had Husband George to win
from me heart of esteem or affection? And for two years, at Nahala, I
was a dead woman who somehow walked and talked, and baked and scrubbed,
and mended socks and saved kerosene. The doctors said it was the shoddy
underwear that did for him, pursuing as always the high-mountain Nahala
waters in the drenching storms of midwinter.
“When he died, I was not sad. I had been sad too long already. Nor was
I glad. Gladness had died at Hilo when Lilolilo dropped my _ilima lei_
into the sea and my feet were never happy again. Lilolilo passed within
a month after Husband George. I had never seen him since the parting at
Hilo. La, la, suitors a many have I had since; but I was like Uncle
John. Mating for me was but once. Uncle John had his Naomi room at
Kilohana. I have had my Lilolilo room for fifty years in my heart. You
are the first, Sister Martha, whom I have permitted to enter that room . . . ”
A machine swung the circle of the drive, and from it, across the lawn,
approached the husband of Martha. Erect, slender, grey-haired, of
graceful military bearing, Roscoe Scandwell was a member of the “Big
Five,” which, by the interlocking of interests, determined the destinies
of all Hawaii. Himself pure _haole_, New England born, he kissed Bella
first, arms around, full-hearty, in the Hawaiian way. His alert eye told
him that there had been a woman talk, and, despite the signs of all
generousness of emotion, that all was well and placid in the twilight
wisdom that was theirs.
“Elsie and the younglings are coming—just got a wireless from their
steamer,” he announced, after he had kissed his wife. “And they’ll be
spending several days with us before they go on to Maui.”
“I was going to put you in the Rose Room, Sister Bella,” Martha Scandwell
planned aloud. “But it will be better for her and the children and the
nurses and everything there, so you shall have Queen Emma’s Room.”
“I had it last time, and I prefer it,” Bella said.
Roscoe Scandwell, himself well taught of Hawaiian love and love-ways,
erect, slender, dignified, between the two nobly proportioned women, an
arm around each of their sumptuous waists, proceeded with them toward the
house.
WAIKIKI, HAWAII.
_June_ 6, 1916