Fleurs du Mal Magazine
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Het lot van de knecht
Op de Col du Grand Cucheron groeide je
door de angst voor de leegte heen, deed je
steeds beter voort, door hoogte aangejaagd.
Ook die ellendige Col du Granier schroeide.
De schuren die jij passeert zie je niet. Toch
zijn ze vol van voedsel, van te melken geiten.
Je drijfveer? Het vuur van die fijne pijn, daar
gaat het je om. Het volste recht heb je. Maar
mocht het te herdoen zijn, dan zou je liever
beter zijn. Je bent echter wat je bent. Meer
valt er straks niet te doen dan je toekomst aan
het verleden te meten. Dat moest je al weten
voor je hieraan begon, jongen. In je dromen
wegduikende kopmannen, en doortraptheid.
Als je morgen vroeg ontwaakt voel je je weer
een adelaar, maar wel met honger. Wie weet
wat de rit naar de zee brengt. Nu is je palmares
nog leeg, als een volière zonder vogels.
Bert Bevers
uit Geelzucht III, De Letterloods, Puyvelde, 2012
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive A-B, Bevers, Bert
James Joyce
(1882-1941)
An Encounter
It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack , Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel . Every evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and his fat young brother Leo, the idler, held the loft of the stable while we tried to carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we fought, we never won siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s war dance of victory. His parents went to eight-o’clock mass every morning in Gardiner Street and the peaceful odour of Mrs. Dillon was prevalent in the hall of the house. But he played too fiercely for us who were younger and more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:
“Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!”
Everyone was incredulous when it was reported that he had a vocation for the priesthood. Nevertheless it was true.
A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The Halfpenny Marvel.
“This page or this page? This page Now, Dillon, up! ‘Hardly had the day’ . . . Go on! What day? ‘Hardly had the day dawned’ . . . Have you studied it? What have you there in your pocket?”
Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning.
“What is this rubbish?” he said. “The Apache Chief! Is this what you read instead of studying your Roman History? Let me not find any more of this wretched stuff in this college. The man who wrote it, I suppose, was some wretched fellow who writes these things for a drink. I’m surprised at boys like you, educated, reading such stuff. I could understand it if you were . . . National School boys. Now, Dillon, I advise you strongly, get at your work or . . . ”
This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one of my consciences. But when the restraining influence of the school was at a distance I began to hunger again for wild sensations, for the escape which those chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me. The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.
The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to break out of the weariness of schoollife for one day at least. With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s miching. Each of us saved up sixpence. We were to meet at ten in the morning on the Canal Bridge. Mahony’s big sister was to write an excuse for him and Leo Dillon was to tell his brother to say he was sick. We arranged to go along the Wharf Road until we came to the ships, then to cross in the ferryboat and walk out to see the Pigeon House. Leo Dillon was afraid we might meet Father Butler or someone out of the college; but Mahony asked, very sensibly, what would Father Butler be doing out at the Pigeon House. We were reassured: and I brought the first stage of the plot to an end by collecting sixpence from the other two, at the same time showing them my own sixpence. When we were making the last arrangements on the eve we were all vaguely excited. We shook hands, laughing, and Mahony said:
“Till tomorrow, mates!”
That night I slept badly. In the morning I was firstcomer to the bridge as I lived nearest. I hid my books in the long grass near the ashpit at the end of the garden where nobody ever came and hurried along the canal bank. It was a mild sunny morning in the first week of June. I sat up on the coping of the bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipeclayed overnight and watching the docile horses pulling a tramload of business people up the hill. All the branches of the tall trees which lined the mall were gay with little light green leaves and the sunlight slanted through them on to the water. The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy.
When I had been sitting there for five or ten minutes I saw Mahony’s grey suit approaching. He came up the hill, smiling, and clambered up beside me on the bridge. While we were waiting he brought out the catapult which bulged from his inner pocket and explained some improvements which he had made in it. I asked him why he had brought it and he told me he had brought it to have some gas with the birds. Mahony used slang freely, and spoke of Father Butler as Old Bunser. We waited on for a quarter of an hour more but still there was no sign of Leo Dillon. Mahony, at last, jumped down and said:
“Come along. I knew Fatty’d funk it.”
“And his sixpence . . . ?” I said.
“That’s forfeit,” said Mahony. “And so much the better for us, a bob and a tanner instead of a bob.”
We walked along the North Strand Road till we came to the Vitriol Works and then turned to the right along the Wharf Road. Mahony began to play the Indian as soon as we were out of public sight. He chased a crowd of ragged girls, brandishing his unloaded catapult and, when two ragged boys began, out of chivalry, to fling stones at us, he proposed that we should charge them. I objected that the boys were too small and so we walked on, the ragged troop screaming after us: “Swaddlers! Swaddlers!” thinking that we were Protestants because Mahony, who was dark-complexioned, wore the silver badge of a cricket club in his cap. When we came to the Smoothing Iron we arranged a siege; but it was a failure because you must have at least three. We revenged ourselves on Leo Dillon by saying what a funk he was and guessing how many he would get at three o’clock from Mr. Ryan.
We came then near the river. We spent a long time walking about the noisy streets flanked by high stone walls, watching the working of cranes and engines and often being shouted at for our immobility by the drivers of groaning carts. It was noon when we reached the quays and as all the labourers seemed to be eating their lunches, we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping beside the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce, the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.
We crossed the Liffey in the ferryboat, paying our toll to be transported in the company of two labourers and a little Jew with a bag. We were serious to the point of solemnity, but once during the short voyage our eyes met and we laughed. When we landed we watched the discharging of the graceful three-master which we had observed from the other quay. Some bystander said that she was a Norwegian vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it but, failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for I had some confused notion. . . . The sailors’ eyes were blue and grey and even black. The only sailor whose eyes could have been called green was a tall man who amused the crowd on the quay by calling out cheerfully every time the planks fell:
“All right! All right!”
When we were tired of this sight we wandered slowly into Ringsend. The day had grown sultry, and in the windows of the grocers’ shops musty biscuits lay bleaching. We bought some biscuits and chocolate which we ate sedulously as we wandered through the squalid streets where the families of the fishermen live. We could find no dairy and so we went into a huckster’s shop and bought a bottle of raspberry lemonade each. Refreshed by this, Mahony chased a cat down a lane, but the cat escaped into a wide field. We both felt rather tired and when we reached the field we made at once for a sloping bank over the ridge of which we could see the Dodder.
It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House. We had to be home before four o’clock lest our adventure should be discovered. Mahony looked regretfully at his catapult and I had to suggest going home by train before he regained any cheerfulness. The sun went in behind some clouds and left us to our jaded thoughts and the crumbs of our provisions.
There was nobody but ourselves in the field. When we had lain on the bank for some time without speaking I saw a man approaching from the far end of the field. I watched him lazily as I chewed one of those green stems on which girls tell fortunes. He came along by the bank slowly. He walked with one hand upon his hip and in the other hand he held a stick with which he tapped the turf lightly. He was shabbily dressed in a suit of greenish-black and wore what we used to call a jerry hat with a high crown. He seemed to be fairly old for his moustache was ashen-grey. When he passed at our feet he glanced up at us quickly and then continued his way. We followed him with our eyes and saw that when he had gone on for perhaps fifty paces he turned about and began to retrace his steps. He walked towards us very slowly, always tapping the ground with his stick, so slowly that I thought he was looking for something in the grass.
He stopped when he came level with us and bade us goodday. We answered him and he sat down beside us on the slope slowly and with great care. He began to talk of the weather, saying that it would be a very hot summer and adding that the seasons had changed gready since he was a boy, a long time ago. He said that the happiest time of one’s life was undoubtedly one’s schoolboy days and that he would give anything to be young again. While he expressed these sentiments which bored us a little we kept silent. Then he began to talk of school and of books. He asked us whether we had read the poetry of Thomas Moore or the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton. I pretended that I had read every book he mentioned so that in the end he said:
“Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. Now,” he added, pointing to Mahony who was regarding us with open eyes, “he is different; he goes in for games.”
He said he had all Sir Walter Scott’s works and all Lord Lytton’s works at home and never tired of reading them. “Of course,” he said, “there were some of Lord Lytton’s works which boys couldn’t read.” Mahony asked why couldn’t boys read them, a question which agitated and pained me because I was afraid the man would think I was as stupid as Mahony. The man, however, only smiled. I saw that he had great gaps in his mouth between his yellow teeth. Then he asked us which of us had the most sweethearts. Mahony mentioned lightly that he had three totties. The man asked me how many I had. I answered that I had none. He did not believe me and said he was sure I must have one. I was silent.
“Tell us,” said Mahony pertly to the man, “how many have you yourself?”
The man smiled as before and said that when he was our age he had lots of sweethearts.
“Every boy,” he said, “has a little sweetheart.”
His attitude on this point struck me as strangely liberal in a man of his age. In my heart I thought that what he said about boys and sweethearts was reasonable. But I disliked the words in his mouth and I wondered why he shivered once or twice as if he feared something or felt a sudden chill. As he proceeded I noticed that his accent was good. He began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had and how soft their hands were and how all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one only knew. There was nothing he liked, he said, so much as looking at a nice young girl, at her nice white hands and her beautiful soft hair. He gave me the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in the same orbit. At times he spoke as if he were simply alluding to some fact that everybody knew, and at times he lowered his voice and spoke mysteriously as if he were telling us something secret which he did not wish others to overhear. He repeated his phrases over and over again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice. I continued to gaze towards the foot of the slope, listening to him.
After a long while his monologue paused. He stood up slowly, saying that he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:
“I say! Look what he’s doing!”
As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again:
“I say . . . He’s a queer old josser!”
“In case he asks us for our names,” I said “let you be Murphy and I’ll be Smith.”
We said nothing further to each other. I was still considering whether I would go away or not when the man came back and sat down beside us again. Hardly had he sat down when Mahony, catching sight of the cat which had escaped him, sprang up and pursued her across the field. The man and I watched the chase. The cat escaped once more and Mahony began to throw stones at the wall she had escaladed. Desisting from this, he began to wander about the far end of the field, aimlessly.
After an interval the man spoke to me. He said that my friend was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school. I was going to reply indignantly that we were not National School boys to be whipped, as he called it; but I remained silent. He began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and round its new centre. He said that when boys were that kind they ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound whipping. A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face. As I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again.
The man continued his monologue. He seemed to have forgotten his recent liberalism. He said that if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls. And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that. He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.
I waited till his monologue paused again. Then I stood up abruptly. Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments pretending to fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was obliged to go, I bade him good-day. I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by the ankles. When I reached the top of the slope I turned round and, without looking at him, called loudly across the field:
“Murphy!”
My voice had an accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed of my paltry stratagem. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw me and hallooed in answer. How my heart beat as he came running across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little.
James Joyce: An Encounter
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive I-J, Joyce, James, Joyce, James
Jack London
(1876-1916)
Shin-Bones
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 aweinspiring. 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 snow 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 landfighters, 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 brothersof 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 hidingplace, 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?”
I gave up, while the Prince lighted a fresh cigarette.
“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 bonesnatching 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 fat her 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 burialcrypts 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 burialplace. 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 burialplace 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 lavasharp 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 aliiness. 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 parcelspost 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 tapes 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, shellscrapers, nets of olona fibre, a junk of ie-ie baskets, and fishhooks 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 wiliwiliwood, 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 sevenfooter, 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 longgone ones to be invoked by fat old women and mangy sorcerers, the bones of them to be esteemed of collectors and betted on horseraces and ace-fulls or to be sold for cash and invested in sugar stocks. “For me it was illumination. I learned there in the burialcave 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 greatgrandmother 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.
From Jack London: ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive K-L, London, Jack
Christine de Pisan
(ca 1364-1430)
BALLAD
In all the world is none so happy here
Nor is there any joy to match with mine,
Since she that hath no rival and no peer
Doth mercifully to my suit incline.
Her slave am I till death, for all my pain
In very truth hath met with guerdon meet:
She was my help on whom I called amain,
For she hath granted me her love so sweet.
Fair queen, in whom all nobleness is clear,
Thou would’st not have me for thy presence pine:
Nay, bid me cry in every lover’s ear,
“Thirsty was I for Love’s immortal wine!”
Not all my weeping might the gift obtain,
Yet she, enthroned on beauty’s mercy-seat,
Hath pardoned all: too soon did I complain
For she hath granted me her love so sweet.
Now to delight returns the torrent drear
That of my mourning was the sorry sign:
Now am I joyous and of merry cheer,
More than aforetime in her grace divine.
Love bade me follow in his chosen train
Where gladness walks beside my lady’s feet,
Nor any loss is mingled with my gain,
For she hath granted me her love so sweet.
Princess of love, my sorrow I disdain
Since out of mourning cometh joy complete
By grace of her who is love’s suzerain,
For she hath granted me her love so sweet.
Christine de Pisan poetry
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: Archive O-P, Pisan, Christine de
Henry Bataille
(1872-1922)
Je t’ai rêvée en la naïveté des choses . . .
Je t’ai rêvée en la naïveté des choses,
Et j’ai parlé de toi aux plus vieilles d’entre elles,
À des champs, à des blés, aux arbres, à des roses. –
Elles n’en seront pas pourtant plus éternelles,
Mais d’elles ou de moi celui qui doit survivre
En gardera quelque douceur pour ses vieux jours…
Je m’en vais les quitter, puisque voici les givres.
Tu ne les connaîtras jamais… les temps sont courts . . .
Mais vous ne pouvez pas vous être indifférentes,
Simplement parce que je vous ai très aimées . . .
Ô les toutes petites et si vieilles plantes !
Moi qui ne me les suis jamais imaginées
Hors de leur sol natal, ce m’est un grand chagrin
De savoir qu’elles mourront sans t’avoir connue . . .
Elles ont des airs si résignés, si sereins,
Et si tristes de ce que tu n’es pas venue !. . .
Que mon coeur soit pour toi le grand champ paternel,
Où si tu n’es pas née au moins tu dois mourir.
Que je te plante en moi, germe de toute rose,
Pour oublier que tu vécus ailleurs qu’en moi. –
Et tu passeras moins qu’ont passé bien des choses. –
Henry Bataille poetry
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive A-B, Bataille, Henry
Armoede (Verborgen) armoede
Voor de Tilburgse Voedselbank
en hun vraag naar kerstpakketten.
De armen van nu zijn als… de armen van vroeger.
Bespot, belast, beknibbeld.
Niemand kent ze, niemand is ze
Maar iedereen wil vergelijken.
“Het valt wel mee, met mij valt het mee”,
Als een lopende naast de lamme.
We weten alles beter,
Meer doen, minder klagen,
Koken voor vier euro kan toch best?
De rijkdom toont zich:
Naast de lamgeslagen
Zitten wij gepoft te piepen
Rond de tafel met schimmig licht
Sfeervol en hip knagen we
Aan onze knapperige borden.
Haute Cuisine van vroeger is van nu.
Arm en dus dom, denken we,
Verslagen is nooit echt gestreden
Gevallen heeft nooit goed gestaan
Op eigen benen, de eigen broekriem aan.
Schenken uit de dozen op zolder
Met oude broeken en gatensokken
Verfrommelde jurken en blikjes maïs
We zijn het kwijt, gegeven is gegeven
Dankbaarheid komt met een prijs.
Meer? Willen ze meer?
“Hoe durven ze ’t in de bek te kijken?
Ik werk hard hoor, ik werk hard!”
Voor elke cent zo tien andere.
Het kratje, thuis, zorgvuldig gedekt
Met een theedoek over de koekjes.
“Hier gaat iemand van overleven,
Hiervoor verdien ik respect.”
Wij drogen in gedachte hun tranen
Met kaasstengels en zeven bananen,
En, na gretig te hebben gegeven,
Bedenken wij hoe zij gelukkig zijn
Vier kinderen zonder honger
ook de hond dankt zijn baas.
Onze voldaanheid toont zich
in andermans verdriet.
We stellen ons voor hoe ze lachen
Hoe wij hun lichaam verwarmen,
Maar echt kennen doen we ze niet,
Onze, verborgen, armen.
Esther Porcelijn, 2013
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive O-P, Porcelijn, Esther, Porcelijn, Esther
Gottfried Keller
(1819–1890)
Poetentod
Der Herbstwind zieht, der Dichter liegt am Sterben,
Die Wolkenschatten jagen an der Wand;
An seinem Lager knien die zarten Erben,
Des Weibes Stirn ruht heiß auf seiner Hand.
Darin ein flücht’ger Abendstrahl ertrunken,
Mit dunklem Purpurwein netzt er den Mund;
Und wieder rückwärts auf den Pfühl gesunken,
Tut er den letzten Willen also kund:
»Die ich aus Wunderklängen aufgerichtet,
Vorbei ist dieses Hauses Herrlichkeit!
Ich habe ausgelebt und ausgedichtet
Mein blühend Lied, dich, meine Erdenzeit!
Das stolz und mächtig diese Welt regierte,
Es bricht mein Herz, mit ihm das Königshaus!
Der Gastfreund, der die edlen Hallen zierte,
Der Ruhm wallt mit dem Leichenzug hinaus.
Dann löschet meines Herdes helle Flamme
Und zündet wieder stille Kohlen an,
Wie’s Sitte war bei meiner Väter Stamme,
Eh ich den Schritt auf dieses Rund getan.
Und was den Herd in schönen Formen zierte,
Was sich an alter Weisheit um ihn fand,
Die heil’gen Schriften, die ich bei mir führte,
Streut in den Wind, gebt in der Juden Hand:
Daß meines Geistes namenloser Erbe
Mit klarem Aug, im leichten Schülerkleid,
Auf offnem Markt sich ahnungsvoll erwerbe,
Was ich in Sternennächten eingeweiht.
Nur meine Rosengärten lasset stehen,
Bis auch mein herrliches Poetenweib
Im nächsten Lenze wird zur Ruhe gehen,
Den Blumen schenkend ihren schönen Leib.
Dann aber mäht die Rosenbüsche nieder
Und brechet meine grünen Lauben ab!
Der Boden trage Kohl und Rüben wieder –
Nur eine Rose laßt auf meinem Grab!
Mein Lied wird siegreich durch die Lande klingen,
Ein Banner, von den Höhn der Erde wehn;
Doch ungekannt, mit mühsalschwerem Ringen
Wird meine Sippe dran vorübergehn.
Drum sollt ihr meinem Sohn das Leben gründen,
Gebt ihm ein Handwerk oder auch ein Schwert,
Und meine Tochter laßt den Freier finden,
Der sie in Lieb und Treuen redlich nährt.
Gebt jenen Band verblichner Schrift den Flammen,
‘s ist meiner Jugend greller Widerschein;
Die Asche und mein Lorbeerreis zusammen
Legt mir zu Häupten dann im Totenschrein!
Arm, wie ich kam, soll man hinaus mich tragen!
Den Lorbeer nur will ich mit Zaubermacht
Als Wünschelrute an die Sterne schlagen
Nach neuen Klängen aus der Strahlenpracht!« –
Noch überläuft sein Angesicht, das reine,
Mit einem Strahl das sinkende Gestirn –
So glühte eben noch im Rosenscheine,
Nun starret kalt und weiß des Berges Firn.
Und wie das Schneegebirg, erlöscht, verblichen,
Zum Himmel raget zwischen Tag und Nacht,
Der letzte Nachhall übers Tal gestrichen,
Dann tiefe Stille auf den Landen wacht:
Die ganze Größe dieses schönen Spieles
Liegt in der engen Totenkammer nun,
Wo Weib und Kinder, stumm, voll Wehgefühles,
Verlassen um die Dichterleiche ruhn!
Und wie durch Alpendämmerung das Rauschen
Von eines späten Adlers Flügeln weht:
Ist in der Totenstille zu erlauschen,
Wie eine Geisterschar von hinnen geht.
Sie ziehen aus, des Seligen Penaten,
In reiche Prachtgewänder tief verhüllt;
Sie gehn, die an der Wiege schon beraten,
Was er in Liedern dann so schön erfüllt.
Voran, gesenkten Blicks, das Leid der Erde,
Verschlungen mit der Freude Traumgestalt,
Die Phantasie, und endlich ihr Gefährte,
Der Witz, mit leerem Becher, stolz und kalt.
Gottfried Keller poetry
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive K-L, Keller, Gottfried
Arthur Conan Doyle
(1859-1930)
Haig is moving
August 1918
Haig is moving!
Three plain words are all that matter,
Mid the gossip and the chatter,
Hopes in speeches, fears in papers,
Pessimistic froth and vapours–
Haig is moving!
Haig is moving!
We can turn from German scheming,
From humanitarian dreaming,
From assertions, contradictions,
Twisted facts and solemn fictions–
Haig is moving!
Haig is moving!
All the weary idle phrases,
Empty blamings, empty praises,
Here’s an end to their recital,
There is only one thing vital–
Haig is moving!
Haig is moving!
He is moving, he is gaining,
And the whole hushed world is straining,
Straining, yearning, for the vision
Of the doom and the decision–
Haig is moving!
Arthur Conan Doyle poetry
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: *War Poetry Archive, Archive C-D, Arthur Conan Doyle, Doyle, Arthur Conan
Mijn stad
Nu speelt men hier de
nazomerkoning miauwt
men tegen muren of raast
in een richting door over
de cityring elk mooi oud
gebouw slopen we direct
maakt niet uit over veertig
jaar staat hier de toekomst
de lindeboom een hologram
de stadsheer verpauperd
verpulverd met de grond
gelijk bewoners op straat
Dit lijkt wel mijn stad
we proberen eens wat en
tonen vooral niet teveel
gevoel zo gewend reeds
aan afbraak dat melancholie
is als overrijp fruit in een
stilleven het ziet er nog uit
maar het begint meer en
meer te rotten.
Martin Beversluis
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive A-B, Beversluis, Martin
Jack London
(1876-1916)
When Alice told her soul
This, of Alice Akana, is an affair of Hawaii, not of this day, but
of days recent enough, when Abel Ah Yo preached his famous revival
in Honolulu and persuaded Alice Akana to tell her soul. But what
Alice told concerned itself with the earlier history of the then
surviving generation.
For Alice Akana was fifty years old, had begun life early, and,
early and late, lived it spaciously. What she knew went back into
the roots and foundations of families, businesses, and plantations.
She was the one living repository of accurate information that
lawyers sought out, whether the information they required related
to land-boundaries and land gifts, or to marriages, births,
bequests, or scandals. Rarely, because of the tight tongue she
kept behind her teeth, did she give them what they asked; and when
she did was when only equity was served and no one was hurt.
For Alice had lived, from early in her girlhood, a life of flowers,
and song, and wine, and dance; and, in her later years, had herself
been mistress of these revels by office of mistress of the hula
house. In such atmosphere, where mandates of God and man and
caution are inhibited, and where woozled tongues will wag, she
acquired her historical knowledge of things never otherwise
whispered and rarely guessed. And her tight tongue had served her
well, so that, while the old-timers knew she must know, none ever
heard her gossip of the times of Kalakaua’s boathouse, nor of the
high times of officers of visiting warships, nor of the diplomats
and ministers and councils of the countries of the world.
So, at fifty, loaded with historical dynamite sufficient, if it
were ever exploded, to shake the social and commercial life of the
Islands, still tight of tongue, Alice Akana was mistress of the
hula house, manageress of the dancing girls who hula’d for royalty,
for luaus (feasts), house-parties, poi suppers, and curious
tourists. And, at fifty, she was not merely buxom, but short and
fat in the Polynesian peasant way, with a constitution and lack of
organic weakness that promised incalculable years. But it was at
fifty that she strayed, quite by chance of time and curiosity, into
Abel Ah Yo’s revival meeting.
Now Abel Ah Yo, in his theology and word wizardry, was as much
mixed a personage as Billy Sunday. In his genealogy he was much
more mixed, for he was compounded of one-fourth Portuguese, one-
fourth Scotch, one-fourth Hawaiian, and one-fourth Chinese. The
Pentecostal fire he flamed forth was hotter and more variegated
than could any one of the four races of him alone have flamed
forth. For in him were gathered together the cannyness and the
cunning, the wit and the wisdom, the subtlety and the rawness, the
passion and the philosophy, the agonizing spirit-groping and he
legs up to the knees in the dung of reality, of the four radically
different breeds that contributed to the sum of him. His, also,
was the clever self-deceivement of the entire clever compound.
When it came to word wizardry, he had Billy Sunday, master of slang
and argot of one language, skinned by miles. For in Abel Ah Yo
were the five verbs, and nouns, and adjectives, and metaphors of
four living languages. Intermixed and living promiscuously and
vitally together, he possessed in these languages a reservoir of
expression in which a myriad Billy Sundays could drown. Of no
race, a mongrel par excellence, a heterogeneous scrabble, the
genius of the admixture was superlatively Abel Ah Yo’s. Like a
chameleon, he titubated and scintillated grandly between the
diverse parts of him, stunning by frontal attack and surprising and
confouding by flanking sweeps the mental homogeneity of the more
simply constituted souls who came in to his revival to sit under
him and flame to his flaming.
Abel Ah Yo believed in himself and his mixedness, as he believed in
the mixedness of his weird concept that God looked as much like him
as like any man, being no mere tribal god, but a world god that
must look equally like all races of all the world, even if it led
to piebaldness. And the concept worked. Chinese, Korean,
Japanese, Hawaiian, Porto Rican, Russian, English, French–members
of all races–knelt without friction, side by side, to his revision
of deity.
Himself in his tender youth an apostate to the Church of England,
Abel Ah Yo had for years suffered the lively sense of being a Judas
sinner. Essentially religious, he had foresworn the Lord. Like
Judas therefore he was. Judas was damned. Wherefore he, Abel Ah
Yo, was damned; and he did not want to be damned. So, quite after
the manner of humans, he squirmed and twisted to escape damnation.
The day came when he solved his escape. The doctrine that Judas
was damned, he concluded, was a misinterpretation of God, who,
above all things, stood for justice. Judas had been God’s servant,
specially selected to perform a particularly nasty job. Therefore
Judas, ever faithful, a betrayer only by divine command, was a
saint. Ergo, he, Abel Ah Yo, was a saint by very virtue of his
apostasy to a particular sect, and he could have access with clear
grace any time to God.
This theory became one of the major tenets of his preaching, and
was especially efficacious in cleansing the consciences of the
back-sliders from all other faiths who else, in the secrecy of
their subconscious selves, were being crushed by the weight of the
Judas sin. To Abel Ah Yo, God’s plan was as clear as if he, Abel
Ah Yo, had planned it himself. All would be saved in the end,
although some took longer than others, and would win only to
backseats. Man’s place in the ever-fluxing chaos of the world was
definite and pre-ordained–if by no other token, then by denial
that there was any ever-fluxing chaos. This was a mere bugbear of
mankind’s addled fancy; and, by stinging audacities of thought and
speech, by vivid slang that bit home by sheerest intimacy into his
listeners’ mental processes, he drove the bugbear from their
brains, showed them the loving clarity of God’s design, and,
thereby, induced in them spiritual serenity and calm.
What chance had Alice Akana, herself pure and homogeneous Hawaiian,
against his subtle, democratic-tinged, four-race-engendered, slang-
munitioned attack? He knew, by contact, almost as much as she
about the waywardness of living and sinning–having been singing
boy on the passenger-ships between Hawaii and California, and,
after that, bar boy, afloat and ashore, from the Barbary Coast to
Heinie’s Tavern. In point of fact, he had left his job of Number
One Bar Boy at the University Club to embark on his great
preachment revival.
So, when Alice Akana strayed in to scoff, she remained to pray to
Abel Ah Yo’s god, who struck her hard-headed mind as the most
sensible god of which she had ever heard. She gave money into Abel
Ah Yo’s collection plate, closed up the hula house, and dismissed
the hula dancers to more devious ways of earning a livelihood, shed
her bright colours and raiments and flower garlands, and bought a
Bible.
It was a time of religious excitement in the purlieus of Honolulu.
The thing was a democratic movement of the people toward God.
Place and caste were invited, but never came. The stupid lowly,
and the humble lowly, only, went down on its knees at the penitent
form, admitted its pathological weight and hurt of sin, eliminated
and purged all its bafflements, and walked forth again upright
under the sun, child-like and pure, upborne by Abel Ah Yo’s god’s
arm around it. In short, Abel Ah Yo’s revival was a clearing house
for sin and sickness of spirit, wherein sinners were relieved of
their burdens and made light and bright and spiritually healthy
again.
But Alice was not happy. She had not been cleared. She bought and
dispersed Bibles, contributed more money to the plate, contralto’d
gloriously in all the hymns, but would not tell her soul. In vain
Abel Ah Yo wrestled with her. She would not go down on her knees
at the penitent form and voice the things of tarnish within her–
the ill things of good friends of the old days. “You cannot serve
two masters,” Abel Ah Yo told her. “Hell is full of those who have
tried. Single of heart and pure of heart must you make your peace
with God. Not until you tell your soul to God right out in meeting
will you be ready for redemption. In the meantime you will suffer
the canker of the sin you carry about within you.”
Scientifically, though he did not know it and though he continually
jeered at science, Abel Ah Yo was right. Not could she be again as
a child and become radiantly clad in God’s grace, until she had
eliminated from her soul, by telling, all the sophistications that
had been hers, including those she shared with others. In the
Protestant way, she must bare her soul in public, as in the
Catholic way it was done in the privacy of the confessional. The
result of such baring would be unity, tranquillity, happiness,
cleansing, redemption, and immortal life.
“Choose!” Abel Ah Yo thundered. “Loyalty to God, or loyalty to
man.” And Alice could not choose. Too long had she kept her
tongue locked with the honour of man. “I will tell all my soul
about myself,” she contended. “God knows I am tired of my soul and
should like to have it clean and shining once again as when I was a
little girl at Kaneohe–“
“But all the corruption of your soul has been with other souls,”
was Abel Ah Yo’s invariable reply. “When you have a burden, lay it
down. You cannot bear a burden and be quit of it at the same time.”
“I will pray to God each day, and many times each day,” she urged.
“I will approach God with humility, with sighs and with tears. I
will contribute often to the plate, and I will buy Bibles, Bibles,
Bibles without end.”
“And God will not smile upon you,” God’s mouthpiece retorted. “And
you will remain weary and heavy-laden. For you will not have told
all your sin, and not until you have told all will you be rid of any.”
“This rebirth is difficult,” Alice sighed.
“Rebirth is even more difficult than birth.” Abel Ah Yo did
anything but comfort her. “‘Not until you become as a little child . . . ‘”
“If ever I tell my soul, it will be a big telling,” she confided.
“The bigger the reason to tell it then.”
And so the situation remained at deadlock, Abel Ah Yo demanding
absolute allegiance to God, and Alice Akana flirting on the fringes
of paradise.
“You bet it will be a big telling, if Alice ever begins,” the
beach-combing and disreputable kamaainas (old-timers) gleefully
told one another over their Palm Tree gin.
In the clubs the possibility of her telling was of more moment.
The younger generation of men announced that they had applied for
front seats at the telling, while many of the older generation of
men joked hollowly about the conversion of Alice. Further, Alice
found herself abruptly popular with friends who had forgotten her
existence for twenty years.
One afternoon, as Alice, Bible in hand, was taking the electric
street car at Hotel and Fort, Cyrus Hodge, sugar factor and
magnate, ordered his chauffeur to stop beside her. Willy nilly, in
excess of friendliness, he had her into his limousine beside him
and went three-quarters of an hour out of his way and time
personally to conduct her to her destination.
“Good for sore eyes to see you,” he burbled. “How the years fly!
You’re looking fine. The secret of youth is yours.”
Alice smiled and complimented in return in the royal Polynesian way
of friendliness.
“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 Jap 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 assurance 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 Vassar. “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 glassware after every toast. But of
course you paid for it.”
“Handsomely,” he asserted almost pleadingly.
“Handsomely,” she agreed. “I replaced more than double the
quantity 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 glass. 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
glassware!”
“I always did have an aloha” (warm regard) “for you, Alice,” a
member of the Senate, fat and bald-headed, assured 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 passed, 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 God, hell, 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
grass houses down upon her while she slept, and she had beheld
Madame Pele (the Fire or Volcano Goddess) 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 God 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 hell.
“And now,” he demanded, perforce his language on these pages being
properly Englished, “what is hell 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 hell. 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 hell 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
God 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 tithes, but five-tenths of their all to the church, if only
the Lord would let them live to contribute.
“Oh, my friends, God saved us. But first he showed us a foretaste
of that hell 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 God, 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
Hell. 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 God–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.
“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 God’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 Hell. 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 hell. Oh, my friends, it WAS
hell, the hell of the Scriptures, the hell 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. God lives, and, therefore,
God lives inside eternity. And God is very old. The fires of hell
are as old and as everlasting as God. How else could there be
everlasting torment for those sinners cast down by God 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 God’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, dinky, 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
HELL!
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 damning community narrative enunciated
in the entire Pacific, north and south, than that enunciated by
Alice Akana; the penitent Phryne of Honolulu.
“Huh!” the first comers heard her saying, having already disposed
of most of the venial sins of the lesser ones of her memory. “You
think this man, Stephen Makekau, is the son of Moses Makekau and
Minnie Ah Ling, and has a legal right to the two hundred and eight
dollars he draws down each month from Parke Richards Limited, for
the lease of the fish-pond to Bill Kong at Amana. Not so. Stephen
Makekau is not the son of Moses. He is the son of Aaron Kama and
Tillie Naone. He was given as a present, as a feeding child, to
Moses and Minnie, by Aaron and Tillie. I know. Moses and Minnie
and Aaron and Tillie are dead. Yet I know and can prove it. Old
Mrs. Poepoe is still alive. I was present when Stephen was born,
and in the night-time, when he was two months old, I myself carried
him as a present to Moses and Minnie, and old Mrs. Poepoe carried
the lantern. This secret has been one of my sins. It has kept me
from God. Now I am free of it. Young Archie Makekau, who collects
bills for the Gas Company and plays baseball in the afternoons, and
drinks too much gin, should get that two hundred and eight dollars
the first of each month from Parke Richards Limited. He will blow
it in on gin and a Ford automobile. Stephen is a good man. Archie
is no good. Also he is a liar, and he has served two sentences on
the reef, and was in reform school before that. Yet God demands
the truth, and Archie will get the money and make a bad use of it.”
And in such fashion Alice rambled on through the experiences of her
long and full-packed life. And women forgot they were in the
tabernacle, and men too, and faces darkened with passion as they
learned for the first time the long-buried secrets of their other halves.
“The lawyers’ offices will be crowded to-morrow morning,”
MacIlwaine, chief of detectives, paused long enough from storing
away useful information to lean and mutter in Colonel Stilton’s ear.
Colonel Stilton grinned affirmation, although the chief of
detectives could not fail to note the ghastliness of the grin.
“There is a banker in Honolulu. You all know his name. He is ‘way
up, swell society because of his wife. He owns much stock in
General Plantations and Inter-Island.”
MacIlwaine recognized the growing portrait and forbore to chuckle.
“His name is Colonel Stilton. Last Christmas Eve he came to my
house with big aloha” (love) “and gave me mortgages on my land in
Iapio Valley, all cancelled, for two thousand dollars’ worth. Now
why did he have such big cash aloha for me? I will tell you . . .”
And tell she did, throwing the searchlight on ancient business
transactions and political deals which from their inception had
lurked in the dark.
“This,” Alice concluded the episode, “has long been a sin upon my
conscience, and kept my heart from God.
“And Harold Miles was that time President of the Senate, and next
week he bought three town lots at Pearl Harbour, and painted his
Honolulu house, and paid up his back dues in his clubs. Also the
Ramsay home at Honokiki was left by will to the people if the
Government would keep it up. But if the Government, after two
years, did not begin to keep it up, then would it go to the Ramsay
heirs, whom old Ramsay hated like poison. Well, it went to the
heirs all right. Their lawyer was Charley Middleton, and he had me
help fix it with the Government men. And their names were . . . “
Six names, from both branches of the Legislature, Alice recited,
and added: “Maybe they all painted their houses after that. For
the first time have I spoken. My heart is much lighter and softer.
It has been coated with an armour of house-paint against the Lord.
And there is Harry Werther. He was in the Senate that time.
Everybody said bad things about him, and he was never re-elected.
Yet his house was not painted. He was honest. To this day his
house is not painted, as everybody knows.
“There is Jim Lokendamper. He has a bad heart. I heard him, only
last week, right here before you all, tell his soul. He did not
tell all his soul, and he lied to God. I am not lying to God. It
is a big telling, but I am telling everything. Now Azalea Akau,
sitting right over there, is his wife. But Lizzie Lokendamper is
his married wife. A long time ago he had the great aloha for
Azalea. You think her uncle, who went to California and died, left
her by will that two thousand five hundred dollars she got. Her
uncle did not. I know. Her uncle cried broke in California, and
Jim Lokendamper sent eighty dollars to California to bury him. Jim
Lokendamper had a piece of land in Kohala he got from his mother’s
aunt. Lizzie, his married wife, did not know this. So he sold it
to the Kohala Ditch Company and wave the twenty-five hundred to
Azalea Akau–“
Here, Lizzie, the married wife, upstood like a fury long-thwarted,
and, in lieu of her husband, already fled, flung herself tooth and
nail on Azalea.
“Wait, Lizzie Lokendamper!” Alice cried out. “I have much weight
of you on my heart and some house-paint too . . . “
And when she had finished her disclosure of how Lizzie had painted
her house, Azalea was up and raging.
“Wait, Azalea Akau. I shall now lighten my heart about you. And
it is not house-paint. Jim always paid that. It is your new bath-
tub and modern plumbing that is heavy on me . . . “
Worse, much worse, about many and sundry, did Alice Akana have to
say, cutting high in business, financial, and social life, as well
as low. None was too high nor too low to escape; and not until two
in the morning, before an entranced audience that packed the
tabernacle to the doors, did she complete her recital of the
personal and detailed iniquities she knew of the community in which
she had lived intimately all her days. Just as she was finishing,
she remembered more.
“Huh!” she sniffed. “I gave last week one lot worth eight hundred
dollars cash market price to Abel Ah Yo to pay running expenses and
add up in Peter’s books in heaven. Where did I get that lot? You
all think Mr. Fleming Jason is a good man. He is more crooked than
the entrance was to Pearl Lochs before the United States Government
straightened the channel. He has liver disease now; but his
sickness is a judgment of God, and he will die crooked. Mr.
Fleming Jason gave me that lot twenty-two years ago, when its cash
market price was thirty-five dollars. Because his aloha for me was
big? No. He never had aloha inside of him except for dollars.
“You listen. Mr. Fleming Jason put a great sin upon me. When
Frank Lomiloli was at my house, full of gin, for which gin Mr.
Fleming Jason paid me in advance five times over, I got Frank
Lomiloli to sign his name to the sale paper of his town land for
one hundred dollars. It was worth six hundred then. It is worth
twenty thousand now. Maybe you want to know where that town land
is. I will tell you and remove it off my heart. It is on King
Street, where is now the Come Again Saloon, the Japanese Taxicab
Company garage, the Smith & Wilson plumbing shop, and the Ambrosia
lee Cream Parlours, with the two more stories big Addison Lodging
House overhead. And it is all wood, and always has been well
painted. Yesterday they started painting it attain. But that
paint will not stand between me and God. There are no more paint
pots between me and my path to heaven.”
The morning and evening papers of the day following held an unholy
hush on the greatest news story of years; but Honolulu was half a-
giggle and half aghast at the whispered reports, not always basely
exaggerated, that circulated wherever two Honoluluans chanced to meet.
“Our mistake,” said Colonel Chilton, at the club, “was that we did
not, at the very first, appoint a committee of safety to keep track
of Alice’s soul.”
Bob Cristy, one of the younger islanders, burst into laughter, so
pointed and so loud that the meaning of it was demanded.
“Oh, nothing much,” was his reply. “But I heard, on my way here,
that old John Ward had just been run in for drunken and disorderly
conduct and for resisting an officer. Now Abel Ah Yo fine-
toothcombs the police court. He loves nothing better than soul-
snatching a chronic drunkard.”
Colonel Chilton looked at Lask Finneston, and both looked at Gary
Wilkinson. He returned to them a similar look.
“The old beachcomber!” Lask Finneston cried. “The drunken old
reprobate! I’d forgotten he was alive. Wonderful constitution.
Never drew a sober breath except when he was shipwrecked, and, when
I remember him, into every deviltry afloat. He must be going on eighty.”
“He isn’t far away from it,” Bob Cristy nodded. “Still beach-
combs, drinks when he gets the price, and keeps all his senses,
though he’s not spry and has to use glasses when he reads. And his
memory is perfect. Now if Abel Ah Yo catches him . . . “
Gary Wilkinson cleared his throat preliminary to speech.
“Now there’s a grand old man,” he said. “A left-over from a
forgotten age. Few of his type remain. A pioneer. A true
kamaaina” (old-timer). “Helpless and in the hands of the police in
his old age! We should do something for him in recognition of his
yeoman work in Hawaii. His old home, I happen to know, is Sag
Harbour. He hasn’t seen it for over half a century. Now why
shouldn’t he be surprised to-morrow morning by having his fine
paid, and by being presented with return tickets to Sag Harbour,
and, say, expenses for a year’s trip? I move a committee. I
appoint Colonel Chilton, Lask Finneston, and . . . and myself. As
for chairman, who more appropriate than Lask Finneston, who knew
the old gentleman so well in the early days? Since there is no
objection, I hereby appoint Lask Finneston chairman of the
committee for the purpose of raising and donating money to pay the
police-court fine and the expenses of a year’s travel for that
noble pioneer, John Ward, in recognition of a lifetime of devotion
of energy to the upbuilding of Hawaii.”
There was no dissent.
“The committee will now go into secret session,” said Lask
Finneston, arising and indicating the way to the library.
GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA,
August 30, 1916.
From Jack London: ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive K-L, Archive K-L, London, Jack
James Joyce
(1882-1941)
A Painful Case
Mr. James Duffy lived in Chapelizod because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern and pretentious. He lived in an old sombre house and from his windows he could look into the disused distillery or upwards along the shallow river on which Dublin is built. The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron washstand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons and a square table on which lay a double desk. A bookcase had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood. The bed was clothed with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A little hand-mirror hung above the washstand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament of the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were arranged from below upwards according to bulk. A complete Wordsworth stood at one end of the lowest shelf and a copy of the Maynooth Catechism, sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook, stood at one end of the top shelf. Writing materials were always on the desk. In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink, and a little sheaf of papers held together by a brass pin. In these sheets a sentence was inscribed from time to time and, in an ironical moment, the headline of an advertisement for Bile Beans had been pasted on to the first sheet. On lifting the lid of the desk a faint fragrance escaped, the fragrance of new cedarwood pencils or of a bottle of gum or of an overripe apple which might have been left there and forgotten.
Mr. Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A medival doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large head grew dry black hair and a tawny moustache did not quite cover an unamiable mouth. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny eyebrows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.
He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke’s and took his lunch, a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o’clock he was set free. He dined in an eating-house in George’s Street where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin’s gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare. His evenings were spent either before his landlady’s piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart’s music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life.
He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity’s sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his hank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly, an adventureless tale.
One evening he found himself sitting beside two ladies in the Rotunda. The house, thinly peopled and silent, gave distressing prophecy of failure. The lady who sat next him looked round at the deserted house once or twice and then said:
“What a pity there is such a poor house tonight! It’s so hard on people to have to sing to empty benches.”
He took the remark as an invitation to talk. He was surprised that she seemed so little awkward. While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory. When he learned that the young girl beside her was her daughter he judged her to be a year or so younger than himself. Her face, which must have been handsome, had remained intelligent. It was an oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil reasserted itself quickly, this half-disclosed nature fell again under the reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fullness, struck the note of defiance more definitely.
He met her again a few weeks afterwards at a concert in Earlsfort Terrace and seized the moments when her daughter’s attention was diverted to become intimate. She alluded once or twice to her husband but her tone was not such as to make the allusion a warning. Her name was Mrs. Sinico. Her husband’s great-great-grandfather had come from Leghorn. Her husband was captain of a mercantile boat plying between Dublin and Holland; and they had one child.
Meeting her a third time by accident he found courage to make an appointment. She came. This was the first of many meetings; they met always in the evening and chose the most quiet quarters for their walks together. Mr. Duffy, however, had a distaste for underhand ways and, finding that they were compelled to meet stealthily, he forced her to ask him to her house. Captain Sinico encouraged his visits, thinking that his daughter’s hand was in question. He had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect that anyone else would take an interest in her. As the husband was often away and the daughter out giving music lessons Mr. Duffy had many opportunities of enjoying the lady’s society. Neither he nor she had had any such adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.
Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life. With almost maternal solicitude she urged him to let his nature open to the full: she became his confessor. He told her that for some time he had assisted at the meetings of an Irish Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen in a garret lit by an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances. The workmen’s discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was inordinate. He felt that they were hard-featured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the produce of a leisure not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.
She asked him why did he not write out his thoughts. For what, he asked her, with careful scorn. To compete with phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds? To submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios?
He went often to her little cottage outside Dublin; often they spent their evenings alone. Little by little, as their thoughts entangled, they spoke of subjects less remote. Her companionship was like a warm soil about an exotic. Many times she allowed the dark to fall upon them, refraining from lighting the lamp. The dark discreet room, their isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them. This union exalted him, wore away the rough edges of his character, emotionalised his mental life. Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek.
Mr. Duffy was very much surprised. Her interpretation of his words disillusioned him. He did not visit her for a week, then he wrote to her asking her to meet him. As he did not wish their last interview to be troubled by the influence of their ruined confessional they meet in a little cakeshop near the Parkgate. It was cold autumn weather but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse: every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow. When they came out of the Park they walked in silence towards the tram; but here she began to tremble so violently that, fearing another collapse on her part, he bade her good-bye quickly and left her. A few days later he received a parcel containing his books and music.
Four years passed. Mr. Duffy returned to his even way of life. His room still bore witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk. One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. He kept away from concerts lest he should meet her. His father died; the junior partner of the bank retired. And still every morning he went into the city by tram and every evening walked home from the city after having dined moderately in George’s Street and read the evening paper for dessert.
One evening as he was about to put a morsel of corned beef and cabbage into his mouth his hand stopped. His eyes fixed themselves on a paragraph in the evening paper which he had propped against the water-carafe. He replaced the morsel of food on his plate and read the paragraph attentively. Then he drank a glass of water, pushed his plate to one side, doubled the paper down before him between his elbows and read the paragraph over and over again. The cabbage began to deposit a cold white grease on his plate. The girl came over to him to ask was his dinner not properly cooked. He said it was very good and ate a few mouthfuls of it with difficulty. Then he paid his bill and went out.
He walked along quickly through the November twilight, his stout hazel stick striking the ground regularly, the fringe of the buff Mail peeping out of a side-pocket of his tight reefer overcoat. On the lonely road which leads from the Parkgate to Chapelizod he slackened his pace. His stick struck the ground less emphatically and his breath, issuing irregularly, almost with a sighing sound, condensed in the wintry air. When he reached his house he went up at once to his bedroom and, taking the paper from his pocket, read the paragraph again by the failing light of the window. He read it not aloud, but moving his lips as a priest does when he reads the prayers Secreto. This was the paragraph:
DEATH OF A LADY AT SYDNEY PARADE
A PAINFUL CASE
Today at the City of Dublin Hospital the Deputy Coroner (in the absence of Mr. Leverett) held an inquest on the body of Mrs. Emily Sinico, aged forty-three years, who was killed at Sydney Parade Station yesterday evening. The evidence showed that the deceased lady, while attempting to cross the line, was knocked down by the engine of the ten o’clock slow train from Kingstown, thereby sustaining injuries of the head and right side which led to her death.
James Lennon, driver of the engine, stated that he had been in the employment of the railway company for fifteen years. On hearing the guard’s whistle he set the train in motion and a second or two afterwards brought it to rest in response to loud cries. The train was going slowly.
P. Dunne, railway porter, stated that as the train was about to start he observed a woman attempting to cross the lines. He ran towards her and shouted, but, before he could reach her, she was caught by the buffer of the engine and fell to the ground.
A juror. “You saw the lady fall?”
Witness. “Yes.”
Police Sergeant Croly deposed that when he arrived he found the deceased lying on the platform apparently dead. He had the body taken to the waiting-room pending the arrival of the ambulance.
Constable 57 corroborated.
Dr. Halpin, assistant house surgeon of the City of Dublin Hospital, stated that the deceased had two lower ribs fractured and had sustained severe contusions of the right shoulder. The right side of the head had been injured in the fall. The injuries were not sufficient to have caused death in a normal person. Death, in his opinion, had been probably due to shock and sudden failure of the heart’s action.
Mr. H. B. Patterson Finlay, on behalf of the railway company, expressed his deep regret at the accident. The company had always taken every precaution to prevent people crossing the lines except by the bridges, both by placing notices in every station and by the use of patent spring gates at level crossings. The deceased had been in the habit of crossing the lines late at night from platform to platform and, in view of certain other circumstances of the case, he did not think the railway officials were to blame.
Captain Sinico, of Leoville, Sydney Parade, husband of the deceased, also gave evidence. He stated that the deceased was his wife. He was not in Dublin at the time of the accident as he had arrived only that morning from Rotterdam. They had been married for twenty-two years and had lived happily until about two years ago when his wife began to be rather intemperate in her habits.
Miss Mary Sinico said that of late her mother had been in the habit of going out at night to buy spirits. She, witness, had often tried to reason with her mother and had induced her to join a League. She was not at home until an hour after the accident. The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence and exonerated Lennon from all blame.
The Deputy Coroner said it was a most painful case, and expressed great sympathy with Captain Sinico and his daughter. He urged on the railway company to take strong measures to prevent the possibility of similar accidents in the future. No blame attached to anyone.
Mr. Duffy raised his eyes from the paper and gazed out of his window on the cheerless evening landscape. The river lay quiet beside the empty distillery and from time to time a light appeared in some house on the Lucan road. What an end! The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted him to think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred. The threadbare phrases, the inane expressions of sympathy, the cautious words of a reporter won over to conceal the details of a commonplace vulgar death attacked his stomach. Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His soul’s companion! He thought of the hobbling wretches whom he had seen carrying cans and bottles to be filled by the barman. Just God, what an end! Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared. But that she could have sunk so low! Was it possible he had deceived himself so utterly about her? He remembered her outburst of that night and interpreted it in a harsher sense than he had ever done. He had no difficulty now in approving of the course he had taken.
As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched his. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. He put on his overcoat and hat quickly and went out. The cold air met him on the threshold; it crept into the sleeves of his coat. When he came to the public-house at Chapelizod Bridge he went in and ordered a hot punch.
The proprietor served him obsequiously but did not venture to talk. There were five or six workingmen in the shop discussing the value of a gentleman’s estate in County Kildare They drank at intervals from their huge pint tumblers and smoked, spitting often on the floor and sometimes dragging the sawdust over their spits with their heavy boots. Mr. Duffy sat on his stool and gazed at them, without seeing or hearing them. After a while they went out and he called for another punch. He sat a long time over it. The shop was very quiet. The proprietor sprawled on the counter reading the Herald and yawning. Now and again a tram was heard swishing along the lonely road outside.
As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realised that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease. He asked himself what else could he have done. He could not have carried on a comedy of deception with her; he could not have lived with her openly. He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory, if anyone remembered him.
It was after nine o’clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.
When he gained the crest of the Magazine Hill he halted and looked along the river towards Dublin, the lights of which burned redly and hospitably in the cold night. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast. One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame. He knew that the prostrate creatures down by the wall were watching him and wished him gone. No one wanted him; he was outcast from life’s feast. He turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river, winding along towards Dublin. Beyond the river he saw a goods train winding out of Kingsbridge Station, like a worm with a fiery head winding through the darkness, obstinately and laboriously. It passed slowly out of sight; but still he heard in his ears the laborious drone of the engine reiterating the syllables of her name.
He turned back the way he had come, the rhythm of the engine pounding in his ears. He began to doubt the reality of what memory told him. He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away. He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.
James Joyce: A Painful Case
kempis.nl poetry magazine
More in: Archive I-J, Joyce, James, Joyce, James
Serge Gainsbourg, vie héroïque
film met Lucy Gordon
CANVAS TV BE
vrijdag 15 februari 2013 – 22.10
Film, Frankrijk – 2010
Duur: 130 min
Door haar Joods-Russische afkomst heeft de familie van de jonge Lucien Ginsburg het niet gemakkelijk in het bezette Parijs tijdens de oorlogsjaren. Later gaat Lucien aan de kunstschool studeren. Hij komt aan de kost met optredens in bars en cabarets. In de jaren 60 breekt hij door als Serge Gainsbourg, de ster van het cabaret de Swinging Sixties. Hij verlegt de grenzen van het chanson en maakt naam met zijn onconventionele muziek en zijn rebelse gedrag. Hij is bevriend met onder meer Brigitte Bardot en Juliette Gréco. Gainsbourg wordt een icoon van de Franse cultuur, maar maakt ook ophef met zijn turbulente liefdesleven met Jane Birkin en vele anderen
Regisseur Joann SFAR
Acteurs
Eric ELMOSNINO / Serge Gainsbourg
Lucy GORDON / Jane Birkin
Laetitia CASTA / Brigitte Bardot
Anna MOUGLALIS / Juliette Gréco
Sara FORESTIER / France Gall
Kacey MOTTET KLEIN / Lucien Ginsburg
Lucy Gordon
(May 22, 1980 – May 20, 2009)
Lucy Gordon was a British actress and model, born in Oxford, England. She committed suicide on 20 May 2009, in her apartment in Paris, France, two days before her 29th birthday.
Filmography
2001: Perfume (Lucy Gordon as Sarah)
2001: Serendipity (Lucy Gordon as Caroline Mitchell)
2002: The Four Feathers by Shekhar Kapur (Lucy Gordon as Isabelle)
2005: The Russian Dolls by Cédric Klapisch (Lucy Gordon as Celia Shelburn)
2007: Serial de Kevin Arbouet et Larry Strong (Lucy Gordon as Sadie Grady)
2007: Spider-Man 3 by Sam Raimi (Lucy Gordon as Jennifer Dugan)
2008: Frost by Steve Clark (Lucy Gordon as Kate Hardwick)
2009: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by John Krasinski (Lucy Gordon as Hitchhiker)
2009: Cinéman (Lucy gordon as Fernandel’s friend)
2010: Serge Gainsbourg, vie héroïque (Lucy Gordon as Jane Birkin)
To be published soon Collected Stories by Jef van Kempen:
(with Angel of Paris. Life and death of Lucy Gordon)
fleursdumal.nl magazine
More in: AUDIO, CINEMA, RADIO & TV, Jef van Kempen, Kempen, Jef van, Lucy Gordon
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