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retainer paused and pursed his lean lips in meditation. "I belong
to her, as all my people before me belonged to her people before
her. She only can command the great secrets of me. She is wise,
too wise ever to command me to speak this secret. To you, O Kanaka
Oolea, I do not answer yes, I do not answer no. This is a secret
of the aliis that even the aliis do not know."
"Very good, Kumuhana," Hardman Pool commanded. "Yet do you forget
that I am an alii, and that what my good Kalama does not dare ask,
I command to ask. I can send for her, now, and tell her to command
your answer. But such would be a foolishness unless you prove
yourself doubly foolish. Tell me the secret, and she will never
know. A woman's lips must pour out whatever flows in through her
ears, being so made. I am a man, and man is differently made. As
you well know, my lips suck tight on secrets as a squid sucks to
the salty rock. If you will not tell me alone, then will you tell
Kalama and me together, and her lips will talk, her lips will talk,
so that the latest malahini will shortly know what, otherwise, you
and I alone will know."
Long time Kumuhana sat on in silence, debating the argument and
finding no way to evade the fact-logic of it.
"Great is your haole wisdom," he conceded at last.
"Yes? or no?" Hardman Pool drove home the point of his steel.
Kumuhana looked about him first, then slowly let his eyes come to
rest on the fly-flapping maid.
"Go," Pool commanded her. "And come not back without you hear a
clapping of my hands."
Hardman Pool spoke no further, even after the flapper had
disappeared into the house; yet his face adamantly looked: "Yes or
no?"
Again Kumuhana looked carefully about him, and up into the monkey-
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pod boughs as if to apprehend a lurking listener. His lips were
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
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29
very dry. With his tongue he moistened them repeatedly. Twice he
essayed to speak, but was inarticulately husky. And finally, with
bowed head, he whispered, so low and solemnly that Hardman Pool
bent his own head to hear: "No."
Pool clapped his hands, and the little maid ran out of the house to
him in tremulous, fluttery haste.
"Bring a milk and gin for old Kumuhana, here," Pool commanded; and,
to Kumuhana: "Now tell me the whole story."
"Wait," was the answer. "Wait till the little wahine has come and
gone."
And when the maid was gone, and the gin and milk had travelled the
way predestined of gin and milk when mixed together, Hardman Pool
waited without further urge for the story. Kumuhana pressed his
hand to his chest and coughed hollowly at intervals, bidding for
encouragement; but in the end, of himself, spoke out.
"It was a terrible thing in the old days when a great alii died.
Kahekili was a great alii. He might have been king had he lived.
Who can tell? I was a young man, not yet married. You know,
Kanaka Oolea, when Kahekili died, and you can tell me how old I
was. He died when Governor Boki ran the Blonde Hotel here in
Honolulu. You have heard?"
"I was still on windward Hawaii," Pool answered. "But I have
heard. Boki made a distillery, and leased Manoa lands to grow
sugar for it, and Kaahumanu, who was regent, cancelled the lease,
rooted out the cane, and planted potatoes. And Boki was angry, and
prepared to make war, and gathered his fighting men, with a dozen
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whaleship deserters and five brass six-pounders, out at Waikiki--"
"That was the very time Kahekili died," Kumuhana broke in eagerly.
"You are very wise. You know many things of the old days better
than we old kanakas."
"It was 1829," Pool continued complacently. "You were twenty-eight
years old, and I was twenty, just coming ashore in the open boat
after the burning of the Black Prince."
"I was twenty-eight," Kumuhana resumed. "It sounds right. I
remember well Boki's brass guns at Waikiki. Kahekili died, too, at
the time, at Waikiki. The people to this day believe his bones
were taken to the Hale o Keawe" (mausoleum) "at Honaunau, in Kona--
"
"And long afterward were brought to the Royal Mausoleum here in
Honolulu," Pool supplemented.
"Also, Kanaka Oolea, there are some who believe to this day that
Queen Alice has them stored with the rest of her ancestral bones in
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
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30
the big jars in her taboo room. All are wrong. I know. The
sacred bones of Kahekili are gone and for ever gone. They rest
nowhere. They have ceased to be. And many kona winds have
whitened the surf at Waikiki since the last man looked upon the
last of Kahekili. I alone remain alive of those men. I am the
last man, and I was not glad to be at the finish.
"For see! I was a young man, and my heart was white-hot lava for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]