On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales Part 7

"My, my," Cyrus Hodge reminisced. "I was such a boy in those days!"

"SOME boy," she laughed acquiescence.

"But knowing no more than the foolishness of a boy in those long- ago days."

"Remember the night your hack-driver got drunk and left you--"

"S-s-sh!" he cautioned. "That j.a.p driver is a high-school graduate and knows more English than either of us. Also, I think he is a spy for his Government. So why should we tell him anything?

Besides, I was so very young. You remember . . . "

"Your cheeks were like the peaches we used to grow before the Mediterranean fruit fly got into them," Alice agreed. "I don't think you shaved more than once a week then. You were a pretty boy. Don't you remember the hula we composed in your honour, the-- "

"S-s-sh!" he hushed her. "All that's buried and forgotten. May it remain forgotten."

And she was aware that in his eyes was no longer any of the ingenuousness of youth she remembered. Instead, his eyes were keen and speculative, searching into her for some a.s.surance that she would not resurrect his particular portion of that buried past.

"Religion is a good thing for us as we get along into middle age,"

another old friend told her. He was building a magnificent house on Pacific Heights, but had recently married a second time, and was even then on his way to the steamer to welcome home his two daughters just graduated from Va.s.sar. "We need religion in our old age, Alice. It softens, makes us more tolerant and forgiving of the weaknesses of others--especially the weaknesses of youth of--of others, when they played high and low and didn't know what they were doing."

He waited anxiously.

"Yes," she said. "We are all born to sin and it is hard to grow out of sin. But I grow, I grow."

"Don't forget, Alice, in those other days I always played square.

You and I never had a falling out."

"Not even the night you gave that luau when you were twenty-one and insisted on breaking the gla.s.sware after every toast. But of course you paid for it."

"Handsomely," he a.s.serted almost pleadingly.

"Handsomely," she agreed. "I replaced more than double the quant.i.ty with what you paid me, so that at the next luau I catered one hundred and twenty plates without having to rent or borrow a dish or gla.s.s. Lord Mainweather gave that luau--you remember him."

"I was pig-sticking with him at Mana," the other nodded. "We were at a two weeks' house-party there. But say, Alice, as you know, I think this religion stuff is all right and better than all right.

But don't let it carry you off your feet. And don't get to telling your soul on me. What would my daughters think of that broken gla.s.sware!"

"I always did have an aloha" (warm regard) "for you, Alice," a member of the Senate, fat and bald-headed, a.s.sured her.

And another, a lawyer and a grandfather: "We were always friends, Alice. And remember, any legal advice or handling of business you may require, I'll do for you gladly, and without fees, for the sake of our old-time friendship."

Came a banker to her late Christmas Eve, with formidable, legal- looking envelopes in his hand which he presented to her.

"Quite by chance," he explained, "when my people were looking up land-records in Iapio Valley, I found a mortgage of two thousand on your holdings there--that rice land leased to Ah Chin. And my mind drifted back to the past when we were all young together, and wild- -a bit wild, to be sure. And my heart warmed with the memory of you, and, so, just as an aloha, here's the whole thing cleared off for you."

Nor was Alice forgotten by her own people. Her house became a Mecca for native men and women, usually performing pilgrimage privily after darkness fell, with presents always in their hands-- squid fresh from the reef, opihis and limu, baskets of alligator pears, roasting corn of the earliest from windward Cahu, mangoes and star-apples, taro pink and royal of the finest selection, sucking pigs, banana poi, breadfruit, and crabs caught the very day from Pearl Harbour. Mary Mendana, wife of the Portuguese Consul, remembered her with a five-dollar box of candy and a mandarin coat that would have fetched three-quarters of a hundred dollars at a fire sale. And Elvira Miyahara Makaena Yin Wap, the wife of Yin Wap the wealthy Chinese importer, brought personally to Alice two entire bolts of pina cloth from the Philippines and a dozen pairs of silk stockings.

The time pa.s.sed, and Abel Ah Yo struggled with Alice for a properly penitent heart, and Alice struggled with herself for her soul, while half of Honolulu wickedly or apprehensively hung on the outcome. Carnival week was over, polo and the races had come and gone, and the celebration of Fourth of July was ripening, ere Abel Ah Yo beat down by brutal psychology the citadel of her reluctance.

It was then that he gave his famous exhortation which might be summed up as Abel Ah Yo's definition of eternity. Of course, like Billy Sunday on certain occasions, Abel Ah Yo had cribbed the definition. But no one in the Islands knew it, and his rating as a revivalist uprose a hundred per cent.

So successful was his preaching that night, that he reconverted many of his converts, who fell and moaned about the penitent form and crowded for room amongst scores of new converts burnt by the pentecostal fire, including half a company of negro soldiers from the garrisoned Twenty-Fifth Infantry, a dozen troopers from the Fourth Cavalry on its way to the Philippines, as many drunken man- of-war's men, divers ladies from Iwilei, and half the riff-raff of the beach.

Abel Ah Yo, subtly sympathetic himself by virtue of his racial admixture, knowing human nature like a book and Alice Akana even more so, knew just what he was doing when he arose that memorable night and exposited G.o.d, h.e.l.l, and eternity in terms of Alice Akana's comprehension. For, quite by chance, he had discovered her cardinal weakness. First of all, like all Polynesians, an ardent lover of nature, he found that earthquake and volcanic eruption were the things of which Alice lived in terror. She had been, in the past, on the Big Island, through cataclysms that had slacken gra.s.s houses down upon her while she slept, and she had beheld Madame Pele (the Fire or Volcano G.o.ddess) fling red-fluxing lava down the long slopes of Mauna Loa, destroying fish-ponds on the sea-brim and licking up droves of beef cattle, villages, and humans on her fiery way.

The night before, a slight earthquake had shaken Honolulu and given Alice Akana insomnia. And the morning papers had stated that Mauna Kea had broken into eruption, while the lava was rising rapidly in the great pit of Kilauea. So, at the meeting, her mind vexed between the terrors of this world and the delights of the eternal world to come, Alice sat down in a front seat in a very definite state of the "jumps."

And Abel Ah Yo arose and put his finger on the sorest part of her soul. Sketching the nature of G.o.d in the stereotyped way, but making the stereotyped alive again with his gift of tongues in Pidgin-English and Pidgin-Hawaiian, Abel Ah Yo described the day when the Lord, even His infinite patience at an end, would tell Peter to close his day book and ledgers, command Gabriel to summon all souls to Judgment, and cry out with a voice of thunder: "Welakahao!"

This anthromorphic deity of Abel Ah Yo thundering the modern Hawaiian-English slang of welakahao at the end of the world, is a fair sample of the revivalist's speech-tools of discourse.

Welakahao means literally "hot iron." It was coined in the Honolulu Iron-works by the hundreds of Hawaiian men there employed, who meant by it "to hustle," "to get a move on," the iron being hot meaning that the time had come to strike.

"And the Lord cried 'Welakahao,' and the Day of Judgment began and was over wiki-wiki" (quickly) "just like that; for Peter was a better bookkeeper than any on the Waterhouse Trust Company Limited, and, further, Peter's books were true."

Swiftly Abel Ah Yo divided the sheep from the goats, and hastened the latter down into h.e.l.l.

"And now," he demanded, perforce his language on these pages being properly Englished, "what is h.e.l.l like? Oh, my friends, let me describe to you, in a little way, what I have beheld with my own eves on earth of the possibilities of h.e.l.l. I was a young man, a boy, and I was at Hilo. Morning began with earthquakes.

Throughout the day the mighty land continued to shake and tremble, till strong men became seasick, and women clung to trees to escape falling, and cattle were thrown down off their feet. I beheld myself a young calf so thrown. A night of terror indescribable followed. The land was in motion like a canoe in a Kona gale.

There was an infant crushed to death by its fond mother stepping upon it whilst fleeing her falling house.

"The heavens were on fire above us. We read our Bibles by the light of the heavens, and the print was fine, even for young eyes.

Those missionary Bibles were always too small of print. Forty miles away from us, the heart of h.e.l.l burst from the lofty mountains and gushed red-blood of fire-melted rock toward the sea.

With the heavens in vast conflagration and the earth hulaing beneath our feet, was a scene too awful and too majestic to be enjoyed. We could think only of the thin bubble-skin of earth between us and the everlasting lake of fire and brimstone, and of G.o.d to whom we prayed to save us. There were earnest and devout souls who there and then promised their pastors to give not their shaved t.i.thes, but five-tenths of their all to the church, if only the Lord would let them live to contribute.

"Oh, my friends, G.o.d saved us. But first he showed us a foretaste of that h.e.l.l that will yawn for us on the last day, when he cries 'Welakahao!' in a voice of thunder. When the iron is hot! Think of it! When the iron is hot for sinners!

"By the third day, things being much quieter, my friend the preacher and I, being calm in the hand of G.o.d, journeyed up Mauna Loa and gazed into the awful pit of Kilauea. We gazed down into the fathomless abyss to the lake of fire far below, roaring and dashing its fiery spray into billows and fountaining hundreds of feet into the air like Fourth of July fireworks you have all seen, and all the while we were suffocating and made dizzy by the immense volumes of smoke and brimstone ascending.

"And I say unto you, no pious person could gaze down upon that scene without recognizing fully the Bible picture of the Pit of h.e.l.l. Believe me, the writers of the New Testament had nothing on us. As for me, my eyes were fixed upon the exhibition before me, and I stood mute and trembling under a sense never before so fully realized of the power, the majesty, and terror of Almighty G.o.d--the resources of His wrath, and the untold horrors of the finally impenitent who do not tell their souls and make their peace with the Creator. {1}

"But oh, my friends, think you our guides, our native attendants, deep-sunk in heathenism, were affected by such a scene? No. The devil's hand was upon them. Utterly regardless and unimpressed, they were only careful about their supper, chatted about their raw fish, and stretched themselves upon their mats to sleep. Children of the devil they were, insensible to the beauties, the sublimities, and the awful terror of G.o.d's works. But you are not heathen I now address. What is a heathen? He is one who betrays a stupid insensibility to every elevated idea and to every elevated emotion. If you wish to awaken his attention, do not bid him to look down into the Pit of h.e.l.l. But present him with a calabash of poi, a raw fish, or invite him to some low, grovelling, and sensuous sport. Oh, my friends, how lost are they to all that elevates the immortal soul! But the preacher and I, sad and sick at heart for them, gazed down into h.e.l.l. Oh, my friends, it WAS h.e.l.l, the h.e.l.l of the Scriptures, the h.e.l.l of eternal torment for the undeserving . . . "

Alice Akana was in an ecstasy or hysteria of terror. She was mumbling incoherently: "O Lord, I will give nine-tenths of my all.

I will give all. I will give even the two bolts of pina cloth, the mandarin coat, and the entire dozen silk stockings . . . "

By the time she could lend ear again, Abel Ah Yo was launching out on his famous definition of eternity.

"Eternity is a long time, my friends. G.o.d lives, and, therefore, G.o.d lives inside eternity. And G.o.d is very old. The fires of h.e.l.l are as old and as everlasting as G.o.d. How else could there be everlasting torment for those sinners cast down by G.o.d into the Pit on the Last Day to burn for ever and for ever through all eternity?

Oh, my friends, your minds are small--too small to grasp eternity.

Yet is it given to me, by G.o.d's grace, to convey to you an understanding of a tiny bit of eternity.

"The grains of sand on the beach of Waikiki are as many as the stars, and more. No man may count them. Did he have a million lives in which to count them, he would have to ask for more time.

Now let us consider a little, d.i.n.ky, old minah bird with one broken wing that cannot fly. At Waikiki the minah bird that cannot fly takes one grain of sand in its beak and hops, hops, all day lone and for many days, all the day to Pearl Harbour and drops that one grain of sand into the harbour. Then it hops, hops, all day and for many days, all the way back to Waikiki for another grain of sand. And again it hops, hops all the way back to Pearl Harbour.

And it continues to do this through the years and centuries, and the thousands and thousands of centuries, until, at last, there remains not one grain of sand at Waikiki and Pearl Harbour is filled up with land and growing coconuts and pine-apples. And then, oh my friends, even then, IT WOULD NOT YET BE SUNRISE IN h.e.l.l!

Here, at the smashing impact of so abrupt a climax, unable to withstand the sheer simplicity and objectivity of such artful measurement of a trifle of eternity, Alice Akana's mind broke down and blew up. She uprose, reeled blindly, and stumbled to her knees at the penitent form. Abel Ah Yo had not finished his preaching, but it was his gift to know crowd psychology, and to feel the heat of the pentecostal conflagration that scorched his audience. He called for a rousing revival hymn from his singers, and stepped down to wade among the hallelujah-shouting negro soldiers to Alice Akana. And, ere the excitement began to ebb, nine-tenths of his congregation and all his converts were down on knees and praying and shouting aloud an immensity of contriteness and sin.

Word came, via telephone, almost simultaneously to the Pacific and University Clubs, that at last Alice was telling her soul in meeting; and, by private machine and taxi-cab, for the first time Abel Ah Yo's revival was invaded by those of caste and place. The first comers beheld the curious sight of Hawaiian, Chinese, and all variegated racial mixtures of the smelting-pot of Hawaii, men and women, fading out and slinking away through the exits of Abel Ah Yo's tabernacle. But those who were sneaking out were mostly men, while those who remained were avid-faced as they hung on Alice's utterance.

Never was a more fearful and d.a.m.ning community narrative enunciated in the entire Pacific, north and south, than that enunciated by Alice Akana; the penitent Phryne of Honolulu.