“Why, it was the first one, of course. Not the real first one, but the
tuning up that preceded it.”
I nodded, with eyes and face mirthful of appreciation, and Prince Akuli,
with another apprehensive glance at the old _wahine_ and her half-made
_hala lei_, returned to his tale of the bones of his ancestors.
“It was somewhere around this stage of the game that old Ahuna gave in to
Hiwilani. He didn’t exactly give in. He compromised. That’s where I
come in. If he would bring her the bones of her mother, and of her
grandfather (who was the father of Kaaukuu), and who by tradition was
rumoured to have been even bigger than his giant son, she would return to
Ahuna the bait of his hair she was praying him to death with. He, on the
other hand, stipulated that he was not to reveal to her the secret
burial-place of all the _alii_ of Lakanaii all the way back.
Nevertheless, he was too old to dare the adventure alone, must be helped
by some one who of necessity would come to know the secret, and I was
that one. I was the highest _alii_, beside my father and mother, and
they were no higher than I.
“So I came upon the scene, being summoned into the twilight room to
confront those two dubious old ones who dealt with the dead. They were a
pair—mother fat to despair of helplessness, Ahuna thin as a skeleton and
as fragile. Of her one had the impression that if she lay down on her
back she could not roll over without the aid of block-and-tackle; of
Ahuna one’s impression was that the tooth-pickedness of him would shatter
to splinters if one bumped into him.
“And when they had broached the matter, there was more _pilikia_”
(trouble). “My father’s attitude stiffened my resolution. I refused to
go on the bone-snatching expedition. I said I didn’t care a whoop for
the bones of all the _aliis_ of my family and race. You see, I had just
discovered Jules Verne, loaned me by old Howard, and was reading my head
off. Bones? When there were North Poles, and Centres of Earths, and
hairy comets to ride across space among the stars! Of course I didn’t
want to go on any bone-snatching expedition. I said my father was
able-bodied, and he could go, splitting equally with her whatever bones
he brought back. But she said he was only a blamed collector—or words to
that effect, only stronger.
“‘I know him,’ she assured me. ‘He’d bet his mother’s bones on a
horse-race or an ace-full.’
“I stood with father when it came to modern scepticism, and I told her
the whole thing was rubbish. ‘Bones?’ I said. ‘What are bones? Even
field mice, and many rats, and cockroaches have bones, though the roaches
wear their bones outside their meat instead of inside. The difference
between man and other animals,’ I told her, ‘is not bones, but brain.
Why, a bullock has bigger bones than a man, and more than one fish I’ve
eaten has more bones, while a whale beats creation when it comes to
bone.’
“It was frank talk, which is our Hawaiian way, as you have long since
learned. In return, equally frank, she regretted she hadn’t given me
away as a feeding child when I was born. Next she bewailed that she had
ever borne me. From that it was only a step to _anaana_ me. She
threatened me with it, and I did the bravest thing I have ever done. Old
Howard had given me a knife of many blades, and corkscrews, and
screw-drivers, and all sorts of contrivances, including a tiny pair of
scissors. I proceeded to pare my finger-nails.
“‘There,’ I said, as I put the parings into her hand. ‘Just to show you
what I think of it. There’s bait and to spare. Go on and _anaana_ me if
you can.’
“I have said it was brave. It was. I was only fifteen, and I had lived
all my days in the thick of the mystery stuff, while my scepticism, very
recently acquired, was only skin-deep. I could be a sceptic out in the
open in the sunshine. But I was afraid of the dark. And in that
twilight room, the bones of the dead all about me in the big jars, why,
the old lady had me scared stiff. As we say to-day, she had my goat.
Only I was brave and didn’t let on. And I put my bluff across, for my
mother flung the parings into my face and burst into tears. Tears in an
elderly woman weighing three hundred and twenty pounds are scarcely
impressive, and I hardened the brassiness of my bluff.
“She shifted her attack, and proceeded to talk with the dead. Nay, more,
she summoned them there, and, though I was all ripe to see but couldn’t,
Ahuna saw the father of Kaaukuu in the corner and lay down on the floor
and yammered. Just the same, although I almost saw the old giant, I
didn’t quite see him.
“‘Let him talk for himself,’ I said. But Hiwilani persisted in doing the
talking for him, and in laying upon me his solemn injunction that I must
go with Ahuna to the burial-place and bring back the bones desired by my
mother. But I argued that if the dead ones could be invoked to kill
living men by wasting sicknesses, and that if the dead ones could
transport themselves from their burial-crypts into the corner of her
room, I couldn’t see why they shouldn’t leave their bones behind them,
there in her room and ready to be jarred, when they said good-bye and
departed for the middle world, the over world, or the under world, or
wherever they abided when they weren’t paying social calls.
“Whereupon mother let loose on poor old Ahuna, or let loose upon him the
ghost of Kaaukuu’s father, supposed to be crouching there in the corner,
who commanded Ahuna to divulge to her the burial-place. I tried to
stiffen him up, telling him to let the old ghost divulge the secret
himself, than whom nobody else knew it better, seeing that he had resided
there upwards of a century. But Ahuna was old school. He possessed no
iota of scepticism. The more Hiwilani frightened him, the more he rolled
on the floor and the louder he yammered.
“But when he began to bite himself, I gave in. I felt sorry for him;
but, over and beyond that, I began to admire him. He was sterling stuff,
even if he was a survival of darkness. Here, with the fear of mystery
cruelly upon him, believing Hiwilani’s dope implicitly, he was caught
between two fidelities. She was his living _alii_, his _alii kapo_”
(sacred chiefess). “He must be faithful to her, yet more faithful must
he be to all the dead and gone _aliis_ of her line who depended solely on
him that their bones should not be disturbed.
“I gave in. But I, too, imposed stipulations. Steadfastly had my
father, new school, refused to let me go to England for my education.
That sugar was slumping was reason sufficient for him. Steadfastly had
my mother, old school, refused, her heathen mind too dark to place any
value on education, while it was shrewd enough to discern that education
led to unbelief in all that was old. I wanted to study, to study
science, the arts, philosophy, to study everything old Howard knew, which
enabled him, on the edge of the grave, undauntedly to sneer at
superstition, and to give me Jules Verne to read. He was an Oxford man
before he went wild and wrong, and it was he who had set the Oxford bee
buzzing in my noddle.
“In the end Ahuna and I, old school and new school leagued together, won
out. Mother promised that she’d make father send me to England, even if
she had to pester him into a prolonged drinking that would make his
digestion go back on him. Also, Howard was to accompany me, so that I
could decently bury him in England. He was a queer one, old Howard, an
individual if there ever was one. Let me tell you a little story about
him. It was when Kalakaua was starting on his trip around the world.
You remember, when Armstrong, and Judd, and the drunken valet of a German
baron accompanied him. Kalakaua made the proposition to Howard . . . ”
But here the long-apprehended calamity fell upon Prince Akuli. The old
_wahine_ had finished her _lei hala_. Barefooted, with no adornment of
femininity, clad in a shapeless shift of much-washed cotton, with
age-withered face and labour-gnarled hands, she cringed before him and
crooned a _mele_ in his honour, and, still cringing, put the _lei_ around
his neck. It is true the _hala_ smelled most freshly strong, yet was the
act beautiful to me, and the old woman herself beautiful to me. My mind
leapt into the Prince’s narrative so that to Ahuna I could not help
likening her.
Oh, truly, to be an _alii_ in Hawaii, even in this second decade of the
twentieth century, is no light thing. The _alii_, utterly of the new,
must be kindly and kingly to those old ones absolutely of the old. Nor
did the Prince without a kingdom, his loved island long since annexed by
the United States and incorporated into a territory along with the rest
of the Hawaiian Islands—nor did the Prince betray his repugnance for the
odour of the _hala_. He bowed his head graciously; and his royal
condescending words of pure Hawaiian I knew would make the old woman’s
heart warm until she died with remembrance of the wonderful occasion.
The wry grimace he stole to me would not have been made had he felt any
uncertainty of its escaping her.
“And so,” Prince Akuli resumed, after the _wahine_ had tottered away in
an ecstasy, “Ahuna and I departed on our grave-robbing adventure. You
know the Iron-bound Coast.”
I nodded, knowing full well the spectacle of those lava leagues of
weather coast, truly iron-bound so far as landing-places or anchorages
were concerned, great forbidding cliff-walls thousands of feet in height,
their summits wreathed in cloud and rain squall, their knees hammered by
the trade-wind billows into spouting, spuming white, the air, from sea to
rain-cloud, spanned by a myriad leaping waterfalls, provocative, in day
or night, of countless sun and lunar rainbows. Valleys, so called, but
fissures rather, slit the cyclopean walls here and there, and led away
into a lofty and madly vertical back country, most of it inaccessible to
the foot of man and trod only by the wild goat.
“Precious little you know of it,” Prince Akuli retorted, in reply to my
nod. “You’ve seen it only from the decks of steamers. There are valleys
there, inhabited valleys, out of which there is no exit by land, and
perilously accessible by canoe only on the selected days of two months in
the year. When I was twenty-eight I was over there in one of them on a
hunting trip. Bad weather, in the auspicious period, marooned us for
three weeks. Then five of my party and myself swam for it out through
the surf. Three of us made the canoes waiting for us. The other two
were flung back on the sand, each with a broken arm. Save for us, the
entire party remained there until the next year, ten months afterward.
And one of them was Wilson, of Wilson & Wall, the Honolulu sugar factors.
And he was engaged to be married.
“I’ve seen a goat, shot above by a hunter above, land at my feet a
thousand yards underneath. _Believe_ me, that landscape seemed to rain
goats and rocks for ten minutes. One of my canoemen fell off the trail
between the two little valleys of Aipio and Luno. He hit first fifteen
hundred feet beneath us, and fetched up in a ledge three hundred feet
farther down. We didn’t bury him. We couldn’t get to him, and flying
machines had not yet been invented. His bones are there now, and,
barring earthquake and volcano, will be there when the Trumps of Judgment
sound.
“Goodness me! Only the other day, when our Promotion Committee, trying
to compete with Honolulu for the tourist trade, called in the engineers
to estimate what it would cost to build a scenic drive around the
Iron-bound Coast, the lowest figures were a quarter of a million dollars
a mile!
“And Ahuna and I, an old man and a young boy, started for that stern
coast in a canoe paddled by old men! The youngest of them, the
steersman, was over sixty, while the rest of them averaged seventy at the
very least. There were eight of them, and we started in the night-time,
so that none should see us go. Even these old ones, trusted all their
lives, knew no more than the fringe of the secret. To the fringe, only,
could they take us.
“And the fringe was—I don’t mind telling that much—the fringe was Ponuloo
Valley. We got there the third afternoon following. The old chaps
weren’t strong on the paddles. It was a funny expedition, into such wild
waters, with now one and now another of our ancient-mariner crew
collapsing and even fainting. One of them actually died on the second
morning out. We buried him overside. It was positively uncanny, the
heathen ceremonies those grey ones pulled off in burying their grey
brother. And I was only fifteen, _alii kapo_ over them by blood of
heathenness and right of hereditary heathen rule, with a penchant for
Jules Verne and shortly to sail for England for my education! So one
learns. Small wonder my father was a philosopher, in his own lifetime
spanning the history of man from human sacrifice and idol worship,
through the religions of man’s upward striving, to the Medusa of rank
atheism at the end of it all. Small wonder that, like old Ecclesiastes,
he found vanity in all things and surcease in sugar stocks, singing boys,
and _hula_ dancers.”
Prince Akuli debated with his soul for an interval.
“Oh, well,” he sighed, “I have done some spanning of time myself.” He
sniffed disgustedly of the odour of the _hala lei_ that stifled him. “It
stinks of the ancient,” he vouchsafed. “I? I stink of the modern. My
father was right. The sweetest of all is sugar up a hundred points, or
four aces in a poker game. If the Big War lasts another year, I shall
clean up three-quarters of a million over a million. If peace breaks
to-morrow, with the consequent slump, I could enumerate a hundred who
will lose my direct bounty, and go into the old natives’ homes my father
and I long since endowed for them.”
He clapped his hands, and the old _wahine_ tottered toward him in an
excitement of haste to serve. She cringed before him, as he drew pad and
pencil from his breast pocket.
“Each month, old woman of our old race,” he addressed her, “will you
receive, by rural free delivery, a piece of written paper that you can
exchange with any storekeeper anywhere for ten dollars gold. This shall
be so for as long as you live. Behold! I write the record and the
remembrance of it, here and now, with this pencil on this paper. And
this is because you are of my race and service, and because you have
honoured me this day with your mats to sit upon and your thrice-blessed
and thrice-delicious _lei hala_.”
He turned to me a weary and sceptical eye, saying:
“And if I die to-morrow, not alone will the lawyers contest my
disposition of my property, but they will contest my benefactions and my
pensions accorded, and the clarity of my mind.
“It was the right weather of the year; but even then, with our old weak
ones at the paddles, we did not attempt the landing until we had
assembled half the population of Ponuloo Valley down on the steep little
beach. Then we counted our waves, selected the best one, and ran in on
it. Of course, the canoe was swamped and the outrigger smashed, but the
ones on shore dragged us up unharmed beyond the wash.
“Ahuna gave his orders. In the night-time all must remain within their
houses, and the dogs be tied up and have their jaws bound so that there
should be no barking. And in the night-time Ahuna and I stole out on our
journey, no one knowing whether we went to the right or left or up the
valley toward its head. We carried jerky, and hard _poi_ and dried
_aku_, and from the quantity of the food I knew we were to be gone
several days. Such a trail! A Jacob’s ladder to the sky, truly, for
that first _pali_” (precipice), “almost straight up, was three thousand
feet above the sea. And we did it in the dark!
“At the top, beyond the sight of the valley we had left, we slept until
daylight on the hard rock in a hollow nook Ahuna knew, and that was so
small that we were squeezed. And the old fellow, for fear that I might
move in the heavy restlessness of lad’s sleep, lay on the outside with
one arm resting across me. At daybreak, I saw why. Between us and the
lip of the cliff scarcely a yard intervened. I crawled to the lip and
looked, watching the abyss take on immensity in the growing light and
trembling from the fear of height that was upon me. At last I made out
the sea, over half a mile straight beneath. And we had done this thing
in the dark!
“Down in the next valley, which was a very tiny one, we found evidence of
the ancient population, but there were no people. The only way was the
crazy foot-paths up and down the dizzy valley walls from valley to
valley. But lean and aged as Ahuna was, he seemed untirable. In the
second valley dwelt an old leper in hiding. He did not know me, and when
Ahuna told him who I was, he grovelled at my feet, almost clasping them,
and mumbled a _mele_ of all my line out of a lipless mouth.
“The next valley proved to be the valley. It was long and so narrow that
its floor had caught not sufficient space of soil to grow _taro_ for a
single person. Also, it had no beach, the stream that threaded it
leaping a _pali_ of several hundred feet down to the sea. It was a
god-forsaken place of naked, eroded lava, to which only rarely could the
scant vegetation find root-hold. For miles we followed up that winding
fissure through the towering walls, far into the chaos of back country
that lies behind the Iron-bound Coast. How far that valley penetrated I
do not know, but, from the quantity of water in the stream, I judged it
far. We did not go to the valley’s head. I could see Ahuna casting
glances to all the peaks, and I knew he was taking bearings, known to him
alone, from natural objects. When he halted at the last, it was with
abrupt certainty. His bearings had crossed. He threw down the portion
of food and outfit he had carried. It was the place. I looked on either
hand at the hard, implacable walls, naked of vegetation, and could dream
of no burial-place possible in such bare adamant.
“We ate, then stripped for work. Only did Ahuna permit me to retain my
shoes. He stood beside me at the edge of a deep pool, likewise
apparelled and prodigiously skinny.
“‘You will dive down into the pool at this spot,’ he said. ‘Search the
rock with your hands as you descend, and, about a fathom and a half down,
you will find a hole. Enter it, head-first, but going slowly, for the
lava rock is sharp and may cut your head and body.’
“‘And then?’ I queried. ‘You will find the hole growing larger,’ was his
answer. ‘When you have gone all of eight fathoms along the passage, come
up slowly, and you will find your head in the air, above water, in the
dark. Wait there then for me. The water is very cold.’
“It didn’t sound good to me. I was thinking, not of the cold water and
the dark, but of the bones. ‘You go first,’ I said. But he claimed he
could not. ‘You are my _alii_, my prince,’ he said. ‘It is impossible
that I should go before you into the sacred burial-place of your kingly
ancestors.’
“But the prospect did not please. ‘Just cut out this prince stuff,’ I
told him. ‘It isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You go first, and I’ll
never tell on you.’ ‘Not alone the living must we please,’ he
admonished, ‘but, more so, the dead must we please. Nor can we lie to
the dead.’
“We argued it out, and for half an hour it was stalemate. I wouldn’t,
and he simply couldn’t. He tried to buck me up by appealing to my pride.
He chanted the heroic deeds of my ancestors; and, I remember especially,
he sang to me of Mokomoku, my great-grandfather and the gigantic father
of the gigantic Kaaukuu, telling how thrice in battle Mokomoku leaped
among his foes, seizing by the neck a warrior in either hand and knocking
their heads together until they were dead. But this was not what decided
me. I really felt sorry for old Ahuna, he was so beside himself for fear
the expedition would come to naught. And I was coming to a great
admiration for the old fellow, not least among the reasons being the fact
of his lying down to sleep between me and the cliff-lip.
“So, with true _alii_-authority of command, saying, ‘You will immediately
follow after me,’ I dived in. Everything he had said was correct. I
found the entrance to the subterranean passage, swam carefully through
it, cutting my shoulder once on the lava-sharp roof, and emerged in the
darkness and air. But before I could count thirty, he broke water beside
me, rested his hand on my arm to make sure of me, and directed me to swim
ahead of him for the matter of a hundred feet or so. Then we touched
bottom and climbed out on the rocks. And still no light, and I remember
I was glad that our altitude was too high for centipedes.
“He had brought with him a coconut calabash, tightly stoppered, of
whale-oil that must have been landed on Lahaina beach thirty years
before. From his mouth he took a water-tight arrangement of a matchbox
composed of two empty rifle-cartridges fitted snugly together. He
lighted the wicking that floated on the oil, and I looked about, and knew
disappointment. No burial-chamber was it, but merely a lava tube such as
occurs on all the islands.
“He put the calabash of light into my hands and started me ahead of him
on the way, which he assured me was long, but not too long. It was long,
at least a mile in my sober judgment, though at the time it seemed five
miles; and it ascended sharply. When Ahuna, at the last, stopped me, I
knew we were close to our goal. He knelt on his lean old knees on the
sharp lava rock, and clasped my knees with his skinny arms. My hand that
was free of the calabash lamp he placed on his head. He chanted to me,
with his old cracked, quavering voice, the line of my descent and my
essential high _alii_-ness. And then he said:
“‘Tell neither Kanau nor Hiwilani aught of what you are about to behold.
There is no sacredness in Kanau. His mind is filled with sugar and the
breeding of horses. I do know that he sold a feather cloak his
grandfather had worn to that English collector for eight thousand
dollars, and the money he lost the next day betting on the polo game
between Maui and Oahu. Hiwilani, your mother, is filled with sacredness.
She is too much filled with sacredness. She grows old, and weak-headed,
and she traffics over-much with sorceries.’
“‘No,’ I made answer. ‘I shall tell no one. If I did, then would I have
to return to this place again. And I do not want ever to return to this
place. I’ll try anything once. This I shall never try twice.’
“‘It is well,’ he said, and arose, falling behind so that I should enter
first. Also, he said: ‘Your mother is old. I shall bring her, as
promised, the bones of her mother and of her grandfather. These should
content her until she dies; and then, if I die before her, it is you who
must see to it that all the bones in her family collection are placed in
the Royal Mausoleum.’
“I have given all the Islands’ museums the once-over,” Prince Akuli
lapsed back into slang, “and I must say that the totality of the
collections cannot touch what I saw in our Lakanaii burial-cave.
Remember, and with reason and history, we trace back the highest and
oldest genealogy in the Islands. Everything that I had ever dreamed or
heard of, and much more that I had not, was there. The place was
wonderful. Ahuna, sepulchrally muttering prayers and _meles_, moved
about, lighting various whale-oil lamp-calabashes. They were all there,
the Hawaiian race from the beginning of Hawaiian time. Bundles of bones
and bundles of bones, all wrapped decently in _tapa_, until for all the
world it was like the parcels-post department at a post office.
“And everything! _Kahilis_, which you may know developed out of the
fly-flapper into symbols of royalty until they became larger than
hearse-plumes with handles a fathom and a half and over two fathoms in
length. And such handles! Of the wood of the kauila, inlaid with shell
and ivory and bone with a cleverness that had died out among our
artificers a century before. It was a centuries-old family attic. For
the first time I saw things I had only heard of, such as the pahoas,
fashioned of whale-teeth and suspended by braided human hair, and worn on
the breast only by the highest of rank.
“There were _tapas_ and mats of the rarest and oldest; capes and _leis_
and helmets and cloaks, priceless all, except the too-ancient ones, of
the feathers of the _mamo_, and of the _iwi_ and the _akakane_ and the
_o-o_. I saw one of the _mamo_ cloaks that was superior to that finest
one in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and that they value at between half
a million and a million dollars. Goodness me, I thought at the time, it
was lucky Kanau didn’t know about it.
“Such a mess of things! Carved gourds and calabashes, shell-scrapers,
nets of _olona_ fibre, a junk of _iè-iè_ baskets, and fish-hooks of every
bone and spoon of shell. Musical instruments of the forgotten
days—_ukukes_ and nose flutes, and _kiokios_ which are likewise played
with one unstoppered nostril. Taboo _poi_ bowls and finger bowls,
left-handed adzes of the canoe gods, lava-cup lamps, stone mortars and
pestles and _poi_-pounders. And adzes again, a myriad of them, beautiful
ones, from an ounce in weight for the finer carving of idols to fifteen
pounds for the felling of trees, and all with the sweetest handles I have
ever beheld.
“There were the _kaekeekes_—you know, our ancient drums, hollowed
sections of the coconut tree, covered one end with shark-skin. The first
_kaekeeke_ of all Hawaii Ahuna pointed out to me and told me the tale.
It was manifestly most ancient. He was afraid to touch it for fear the
age-rotted wood of it would crumble to dust, the ragged tatters of the
shark-skin head of it still attached. ‘This is the very oldest and
father of all our _kaekeekes_,’ Ahuna told me. ‘Kila, the son of
Moikeha, brought it back from far Raiatea in the South Pacific. And it
was Kila’s own son, Kahai, who made that same journey, and was gone ten
years, and brought back with him from Tahiti the first breadfruit trees
that sprouted and grew on Hawaiian soil.’
“And the bones and bones! The parcel-delivery array of them! Besides
the small bundles of the long bones, there were full skeletons,
_tapa_-wrapped, lying in one-man, and two- and three-man canoes of
precious _koa_ wood, with curved outriggers of _wiliwili_ wood, and
proper paddles to hand with the _io_-projection at the point simulating
the continuance of the handle, as if, like a skewer, thrust through the
flat length of the blade. And their war weapons were laid away by the
sides of the lifeless bones that had wielded them—rusty old
horse-pistols, derringers, pepper-boxes, five-barrelled fantastiques,
Kentucky long riffles, muskets handled in trade by John Company and
Hudson’s Bay, shark-tooth swords, wooden stabbing-knives, arrows and
spears bone-headed of the fish and the pig and of man, and spears and
arrows wooden-headed and fire-hardened.
“Ahuna put a spear in my hand, headed and pointed finely with the long
shin-bone of a man, and told me the tale of it. But first he unwrapped
the long bones, arms, and legs, of two parcels, the bones, under the
wrappings, neatly tied like so many faggots. ‘This,’ said Ahuna,
exhibiting the pitiful white contents of one parcel, ‘is Laulani. She
was the wife of Akaiko, whose bones, now placed in your hands, much
larger and male-like as you observe, held up the flesh of a large man, a
three-hundred pounder seven-footer, three centuries agone. And this
spear-head is made of the shin-bone of Keola, a mighty wrestler and
runner of their own time and place. And he loved Laulani, and she fled
with him. But in a forgotten battle on the sands of Kalini, Akaiko
rushed the lines of the enemy, leading the charge that was successful,
and seized upon Keola, his wife’s lover, and threw him to the ground, and
sawed through his neck to the death with a shark-tooth knife. Thus, in
the old days as always, did man combat for woman with man. And Laulani
was beautiful; that Keola should be made into a spearhead for her! She
was formed like a queen, and her body was a long bowl of sweetness, and
her fingers _lomi’d_’ (massaged) ‘to slimness and smallness at her
mother’s breast. For ten generations have we remembered her beauty.
Your father’s singing boys to-day sing of her beauty in the _hula_ that
is named of her! This is Laulani, whom you hold in your hands.’
“And, Ahuna done, I could but gaze, with imagination at the one time
sobered and fired. Old drunken Howard had lent me his Tennyson, and I
had mooned long and often over the _Idyls of the King_. Here were the
three, I thought—Arthur, and Launcelot, and Guinevere. This, then, I
pondered, was the end of it all, of life and strife and striving and
love, the weary spirits of these long-gone ones to be invoked by fat old
women and mangy sorcerers, the bones of them to be esteemed of collectors
and betted on horse-races and ace-fulls or to be sold for cash and
invested in sugar stocks.
“For me it was illumination. I learned there in the burial-cave the
great lesson. And to Ahuna I said: ‘The spear headed with the long bone
of Keola I shall take for my own. Never shall I sell it. I shall keep
it always.’
“‘And for what purpose?’ he demanded. And I replied: ‘That the
contemplation of it may keep my hand sober and my feet on earth with the
knowledge that few men are fortunate enough to have as much of a remnant
of themselves as will compose a spearhead when they are three centuries
dead.’
“And Ahuna bowed his head, and praised my wisdom of judgment. But at
that moment the long-rotted _olona_-cord broke and the pitiful woman’s
bones of Laulani shed from my clasp and clattered on the rocky floor.
One shin-bone, in some way deflected, fell under the dark shadow of a
canoe-bow, and I made up my mind that it should be mine. So I hastened
to help him in the picking up of the bones and the tying, so that he did
not notice its absence.
“‘This,’ said Ahuna, introducing me to another of my ancestors, ‘is your
great-grandfather, Mokomoku, the father of Kaaukuu. Behold the size of
his bones. He was a giant. I shall carry him, because of the long spear
of Keola that will be difficult for you to carry away. And this is
Lelemahoa, your grandmother, the mother of your mother, that you shall
carry. And day grows short, and we must still swim up through the waters
to the sun ere darkness hides the sun from the world.’
“But Ahuna, putting out the various calabashes of light by drowning the
wicks in the whale-oil, did not observe me include the shinbone of
Laulani with the bones of my grandmother.”
The honk of the automobile, sent up from Olokona to rescue us, broke off
the Prince’s narrative. We said good-bye to the ancient and
fresh-pensioned _wahine_, and departed. A half-mile on our way, Prince
Akuli resumed.
“So Ahuna and I returned to Hiwilani, and to her happiness, lasting to
her death the year following, two more of her ancestors abided about her
in the jars of her twilight room. Also, she kept her compact and worried
my father into sending me to England. I took old Howard along, and he
perked up and confuted the doctors, so that it was three years before I
buried him restored to the bosom of my family. Sometimes I think he was
the most brilliant man I have ever known. Not until my return from
England did Ahuna die, the last custodian of our _alii_ secrets. And at
his death-bed he pledged me again never to reveal the location in that
nameless valley, and never to go back myself.
“Much else I have forgotten to mention did I see there in the cave that
one time. There were the bones of Kumi, the near demigod, son of Tui
Manua of Samoa, who, in the long before, married into my line and
heaven-boosted my genealogy. And the bones of my great-grandmother who
had slept in the four-poster presented her by Lord Byron. And Ahuna
hinted tradition that there was reason for that presentation, as well as
for the historically known lingering of the _Blonde_ in Olokona for so
long. And I held her poor bones in my hands—bones once fleshed with
sensate beauty, informed with sparkle and spirit, instinct with love and
love-warmness of arms around and eyes and lips together, that had begat
me in the end of the generations unborn. It was a good experience. I am
modern, ’tis true. I believe in no mystery stuff of old time nor of the
_kahunas_. And yet, I saw in that cave things which I dare not name to
you, and which I, since old Ahuna died, alone of the living know. I have
no children. With me my long line ceases. This is the twentieth
century, and we stink of gasolene. Nevertheless these other and nameless
things shall die with me. I shall never revisit the burial-place. Nor
in all time to come will any man gaze upon it through living eyes unless
the quakes of earth rend the mountains asunder and spew forth the secrets
contained in the hearts of the mountains.”
Prince Akuli ceased from speech. With welcome relief on his face, he
removed the _lei hala_ from his neck, and, with a sniff and a sigh,
tossed it into concealment in the thick _lantana_ by the side of the
road.
“But the shin-bone of Laulani?” I queried softly.
He remained silent while a mile of pasture land fled by us and yielded to
caneland.
“I have it now,” he at last said. “And beside it is Keola, slain ere his
time and made into a spear-head for love of the woman whose shin-bone
abides near to him. To them, those poor pathetic bones, I owe more than
to aught else. I became possessed of them in the period of my
culminating adolescence. I know they changed the entire course of my
life and trend of my mind. They gave to me a modesty and a humility in
the world, from which my father’s fortune has ever failed to seduce me.
“And often, when woman was nigh to winning to the empery of my mind over
me, I sought Laulani’s shin-bone. And often, when lusty manhood stung me
into feeling over-proud and lusty, I consulted the spearhead remnant of
Keola, one-time swift runner, and mighty wrestler and lover, and thief of
the wife of a king. The contemplation of them has ever been of profound
aid to me, and you might well say that I have founded my religion or
practice of living upon them.”
WAIKIKI, HONOLULU, HAWAIIAN ISLANDS.
_July_ 16, 1916.