Jack London: When Alice told her soul

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

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