_They have gone down to the pit with their weapons of war_, _and they
have laid their swords under their heads_.
“IT was a sad thing to see the old lady revert.”
Prince Akuli shot an apprehensive glance sideward to where, under the
shade of a _kukui_ tree, an old _wahine_ (Hawaiian woman) was just
settling herself to begin on some work in hand.
“Yes,” he nodded half-sadly to me, “in her last years Hiwilani went back
to the old ways, and to the old beliefs—in secret, of course. And,
_believe_ me, she was some collector herself. You should have seen her
bones. She had them all about her bedroom, in big jars, and they
constituted most all her relatives, except a half-dozen or so that Kanau
beat her out of by getting to them first. The way the pair of them used
to quarrel about those bones was awe-inspiring. And it gave me the
creeps, when I was a boy, to go into that big, for-ever-twilight room of
hers, and know that in this jar was all that remained of my maternal
grand-aunt, and that in that jar was my great-grandfather, and that in
all the jars were the preserved bone-remnants of the shadowy dust of the
ancestors whose seed had come down and been incorporated in the living,
breathing me. Hiwilani had gone quite native at the last, sleeping on
mats on the hard floor—she’d fired out of the room the great, royal,
canopied four-poster that had been presented to her grandmother by Lord
Byron, who was the cousin of the Don Juan Byron and came here in the
frigate _Blonde_ in 1825.
“She went back to all native, at the last, and I can see her yet, biting
a bite out of the raw fish ere she tossed them to her women to eat. And
she made them finish her _poi_, or whatever else she did not finish of
herself. She—”
But he broke off abruptly, and by the sensitive dilation of his nostrils
and by the expression of his mobile features I saw that he had read in
the air and identified the odour that offended him.
“Deuce take it!” he cried to me. “It stinks to heaven. And I shall be
doomed to wear it until we’re rescued.”
There was no mistaking the object of his abhorrence. The ancient crone
was making a dearest-loved _lei_ (wreath) of the fruit of the _hala_
which is the screw-pine or pandanus of the South Pacific. She was
cutting the many sections or nut-envelopes of the fruit into fluted
bell-shapes preparatory to stringing them on the twisted and tough inner
bark of the _hau_ tree. It certainly smelled to heaven, but, to me, a
_malahini_ (new-comer), the smell was wine-woody and fruit-juicy and not
unpleasant.
Prince Akuli’s limousine had broken an axle a quarter of a mile away, and
he and I had sought shelter from the sun in this veritable bowery of a
mountain home. Humble and grass-thatched was the house, but it stood in
a treasure-garden of begonias that sprayed their delicate blooms a score
of feet above our heads, that were like trees, with willowy trunks of
trees as thick as a man’s arm. Here we refreshed ourselves with
drinking-coconuts, while a cowboy rode a dozen miles to the nearest
telephone and summoned a machine from town. The town itself we could
see, the Lakanaii metropolis of Olokona, a smudge of smoke on the
shore-line, as we looked down across the miles of cane-fields, the
billow-wreathed reef-lines, and the blue haze of ocean to where the
island of Oahu shimmered like a dim opal on the horizon.
Maui is the Valley Isle of Hawaii, and Kauai the Garden Isle; but
Lakanaii, lying abreast of Oahu, is recognized in the present, and was
known of old and always, as the Jewel Isle of the group. Not the
largest, nor merely the smallest, Lakanaii is conceded by all to be the
wildest, the most wildly beautiful, and, in its size, the richest of all
the islands. Its sugar tonnage per acre is the highest, its mountain
beef-cattle the fattest, its rainfall the most generous without ever
being disastrous. It resembles Kauai in that it is the first-formed and
therefore the oldest island, so that it had had time sufficient to break
down its lava rock into the richest soil, and to erode the canyons
between the ancient craters until they are like Grand Canyons of the
Colorado, with numberless waterfalls plunging thousands of feet in the
sheer or dissipating into veils of vapour, and evanescing in mid-air to
descend softly and invisibly through a mirage of rainbows, like so much
dew or gentle shower, upon the abyss-floors.
Yet Lakanaii is easy to describe. But how can one describe Prince Akuli?
To know him is to know all Lakanaii most thoroughly. In addition, one
must know thoroughly a great deal of the rest of the world. In the first
place, Prince Akuli has no recognized nor legal right to be called
“Prince.” Furthermore, “Akuli” means the “squid.” So that Prince Squid
could scarcely be the dignified title of the straight descendant of the
oldest and highest _aliis_ (high chiefs) of Hawaii—an old and exclusive
stock, wherein, in the ancient way of the Egyptian Pharaohs, brothers and
sisters had even wed on the throne for the reason that they could not
marry beneath rank, that in all their known world there was none of
higher rank, and that, at every hazard, the dynasty must be perpetuated.
I have heard Prince Akuli’s singing historians (inherited from his
father) chanting their interminable genealogies, by which they
demonstrated that he was the highest _alii_ in all Hawaii. Beginning
with Wakea, who is their Adam, and with Papa, their Eve, through as many
generations as there are letters in our alphabet they trace down to
Nanakaoko, the first ancestor born in Hawaii and whose wife was
Kahihiokalani. Later, but always highest, their generations split from
the generations of Ua, who was the founder of the two distinct lines of
the Kauai and Oahu kings.
In the eleventh century A.D., by the Lakanaii historians, at the time
brothers and sisters mated because none existed to excel them, their rank
received a boost of new blood of rank that was next to heaven’s door.
One Hoikemaha, steering by the stars and the ancient traditions, arrived
in a great double-canoe from Samoa. He married a lesser _alii_ of
Lakanaii, and when his three sons were grown, returned with them to Samoa
to bring back his own youngest brother. But with him he brought back
Kumi, the son of Tui Manua, which latter’s rank was highest in all
Polynesia, and barely second to that of the demigods and gods. So the
estimable seed of Kumi, eight centuries before, had entered into the
_aliis_ of Lakanaii, and been passed down by them in the undeviating line
to reposit in Prince Akuli.
Him I first met, talking with an Oxford accent, in the officers’ mess of
the Black Watch in South Africa. This was just before that famous
regiment was cut to pieces at Magersfontein. He had as much right to be
in that mess as he had to his accent, for he was Oxford-educated and held
the Queen’s Commission. With him, as his guest, taking a look at the
war, was Prince Cupid, so nicknamed, but the true prince of all Hawaii,
including Lakanaii, whose real and legal title was Prince Jonah Kuhio
Kalanianaole, and who might have been the living King of Hawaii Nei had
it not been for the _haole_ (white man) Revolution and Annexation—this,
despite the fact that Prince Cupid’s _alii_ genealogy was lesser to the
heaven-boosted genealogy of Prince Akuli. For Prince Akuli might have
been King of Lakanaii, and of all Hawaii, perhaps, had not his
grandfather been soundly thrashed by the first and greatest of the
Kamehamehas.
This had occurred in the year 1810, in the booming days of the sandalwood
trade, and in the same year that the King of Kauai came in, and was good,
and ate out of Kamehameha’s hand. Prince Akuli’s grandfather, in that
year, had received his trouncing and subjugating because he was “old
school.” He had not imaged island empire in terms of gunpowder and
_haole_ gunners. Kamehameha, farther-visioned, had annexed the service
of _haoles_, including such men as Isaac Davis, mate and sole survivor of
the massacred crew of the schooner _Fair American_, and John Young,
captured boatswain of the scow _Eleanor_. And Isaac Davis, and John
Young, and others of their waywardly adventurous ilk, with six-pounder
brass carronades from the captured _Iphigenia_ and _Fair American_, had
destroyed the war canoes and shattered the morale of the King of
Lakanaii’s land-fighters, receiving duly in return from Kamehameha,
according to agreement: Isaac Davis, six hundred mature and fat hogs;
John Young, five hundred of the same described pork on the hoof that was
split.
And so, out of all incests and lusts of the primitive cultures and
beast-man’s gropings toward the stature of manhood, out of all red
murders, and brute battlings, and matings with the younger brothers of
the demigods, world-polished, Oxford-accented, twentieth century to the
tick of the second, comes Prince Akuli, Prince Squid, pure-veined
Polynesian, a living bridge across the thousand centuries, comrade,
friend, and fellow-traveller out of his wrecked seven-thousand-dollar
limousine, marooned with me in a begonia paradise fourteen hundred feet
above the sea, and his island metropolis of Olokona, to tell me of his
mother, who reverted in her old age to ancientness of religious concept
and ancestor worship, and collected and surrounded herself with the
charnel bones of those who had been her forerunners back in the darkness
of time.
“King Kalakaua started this collecting fad, over on Oahu,” Prince Akuli
continued. “And his queen, Kapiolani, caught the fad from him. They
collected everything—old _makaloa_ mats, old _tapas_, old calabashes, old
double-canoes, and idols which the priests had saved from the general
destruction in 1819. I haven’t seen a pearl-shell fish-hook in years,
but I swear that Kalakaua accumulated ten thousand of them, to say
nothing of human jaw-bone fish-hooks, and feather cloaks, and capes and
helmets, and stone adzes, and _poi_-pounders of phallic design. When he
and Kapiolani made their royal progresses around the islands, their hosts
had to hide away their personal relics. For to the king, in theory,
belongs all property of his people; and with Kalakaua, when it came to
the old things, theory and practice were one.
“From him my father, Kanau, got the collecting bee in his bonnet, and
Hiwilani was likewise infected. But father was modern to his
finger-tips. He believed neither in the gods of the _kahunas_” (priests)
“nor of the missionaries. He didn’t believe in anything except sugar
stocks, horse-breeding, and that his grandfather had been a fool in not
collecting a few Isaac Davises and John Youngs and brass carronades
before he went to war with Kamehameha. So he collected curios in the
pure collector’s spirit; but my mother took it seriously. That was why
she went in for bones. I remember, too, she had an ugly old stone-idol
she used to yammer to and crawl around on the floor before. It’s in the
Deacon Museum now. I sent it there after her death, and her collection
of bones to the Royal Mausoleum in Olokona.
“I don’t know whether you remember her father was Kaaukuu. Well, he was,
and he was a giant. When they built the Mausoleum, his bones, nicely
cleaned and preserved, were dug out of their hiding-place, and placed in
the Mausoleum. Hiwilani had an old retainer, Ahuna. She stole the key
from Kanau one night, and made Ahuna go and steal her father’s bones out
of the Mausoleum. I know. And he must have been a giant. She kept him
in one of her big jars. One day, when I was a tidy size of a lad, and
curious to know if Kaaukuu was as big as tradition had him, I fished his
intact lower jaw out of the jar, and the wrappings, and tried it on. I
stuck my head right through it, and it rested around my neck and on my
shoulders like a horse collar. And every tooth was in the jaw, whiter
than porcelain, without a cavity, the enamel unstained and unchipped. I
got the walloping of my life for that offence, although she had to call
old Ahuna in to help give it to me. But the incident served me well. It
won her confidence in me that I was not afraid of the bones of the dead
ones, and it won for me my Oxford education. As you shall see, if that
car doesn’t arrive first.
“Old Ahuna was one of the real old ones with the hall-mark on him and
branded into him of faithful born-slave service. He knew more about my
mother’s family, and my father’s, than did both of them put together.
And he knew, what no living other knew, the burial-place of centuries,
where were hid the bones of most of her ancestors and of Kanau’s. Kanau
couldn’t worm it out of the old fellow, who looked upon Kanau as an
apostate.
“Hiwilani struggled with the old codger for years. How she ever
succeeded is beyond me. Of course, on the face of it, she was faithful
to the old religion. This might have persuaded Ahuna to loosen up a
little. Or she may have jolted fear into him; for she knew a lot of the
line of chatter of the old Huni sorcerers, and she could make a noise
like being on terms of utmost intimacy with Uli, who is the chiefest god
of sorcery of all the sorcerers. She could skin the ordinary _kahuna
lapaau_” (medicine man) “when it came to praying to Lonopuha and
Koleamoku; read dreams and visions and signs and omens and indigestions
to beat the band; make the practitioners under the medicine god, Maiola,
look like thirty cents; pull off a _pule hee_ incantation that would make
them dizzy; and she claimed to a practice of _kahuna hoenoho_, which is
modern spiritism, second to none. I have myself seen her drink the wind,
throw a fit, and prophesy. The _aumakuas_ were brothers to her when she
slipped offerings to them across the altars of the ruined _heiaus_”
(temples) “with a line of prayer that was as unintelligible to me as it
was hair-raising. And as for old Ahuna, she could make him get down on
the floor and yammer and bite himself when she pulled the real mystery
dope on him.
“Nevertheless, my private opinion is that it was the _anaana_ stuff that
got him. She snipped off a lock of his hair one day with a pair of
manicure scissors. This lock of hair was what we call the _maunu_,
meaning the bait. And she took jolly good care to let him know she had
that bit of his hair. Then she tipped it off to him that she had buried
it, and was deeply engaged each night in her offerings and incantations
to Uli.”
“That was the regular praying-to-death?” I queried in the pause of Prince
Akuli’s lighting his cigarette.
“Sure thing,” he nodded. “And Ahuna fell for it. First he tried to
locate the hiding-place of the bait of his hair. Failing that, he hired
a _pahiuhiu_ sorcerer to find it for him. But Hiwilani queered that game
by threatening to the sorcerer to practise _apo leo_ on him, which is the
art of permanently depriving a person of the power of speech without
otherwise injuring him.
“Then it was that Ahuna began to pine away and get more like a corpse
every day. In desperation he appealed to Kanau. I happened to be
present. You have heard what sort of a man my father was.
“‘Pig!’ he called Ahuna. ‘Swine-brains! Stinking fish! Die and be done
with it. You are a fool. It is all nonsense. There is nothing in
anything. The drunken _haole_, Howard, can prove the missionaries wrong.
Square-face gin proves Howard wrong. The doctors say he won’t last six
months. Even square-face gin lies. Life is a liar, too. And here are
hard times upon us, and a slump in sugar. Glanders has got into my brood
mares. I wish I could lie down and sleep for a hundred years, and wake
up to find sugar up a hundred points.’
“Father was something of a philosopher himself, with a bitter wit and a
trick of spitting out staccato epigrams. He clapped his hands. ‘Bring
me a high-ball,’ he commanded; ‘no, bring me two high-balls.’ Then he
turned on Ahuna. ‘Go and let yourself die, old heathen, survival of
darkness, blight of the Pit that you are. But don’t die on these
premises. I desire merriment and laughter, and the sweet tickling of
music, and the beauty of youthful motion, not the croaking of sick toads
and googly-eyed corpses about me still afoot on their shaky legs. I’ll
be that way soon enough if I live long enough. And it will be my
everlasting regret if I don’t live long enough. Why in hell did I sink
that last twenty thousand into Curtis’s plantation? Howard warned me the
slump was coming, but I thought it was the square-face making him lie.
And Curtis has blown his brains out, and his head _luna_ has run away
with his daughter, and the sugar chemist has got typhoid, and
everything’s going to smash.’
“He clapped his hands for his servants, and commanded: ‘Bring me my
singing boys. And the _hula_ dancers—plenty of them. And send for old
Howard. Somebody’s got to pay, and I’ll shorten his six months of life
by a month. But above all, music. Let there be music. It is stronger
than drink, and quicker than opium.’
“He with his music druggery! It was his father, the old savage, who was
entertained on board a French frigate, and for the first time heard an
orchestra. When the little concert was over, the captain, to find which
piece he liked best, asked which piece he’d like repeated. Well, when
grandfather got done describing, what piece do you think it was?”