BUHR A A qn i nl R 1 7 n L 7k 1, "~ I "" i I-l ''. 1 -,- I ~~:: - - I.-~-~~~ -1I.1 i~-_~I_:_.r.~1;.- -.:;.C~I.I_~ 1L~~~;. I ~ F. I I I I 1.-r~.. - I ---— lll~ -- I II c —~ f A- -r - I S Sn n~~~~~~~7 623, CcQs c -f r~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I I BOOKS BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROIJLD PUBLISHED Dy CHARLES SORIBNER'S SONS HAWAII: SCENEs AmD ImpRESSIONS. Ilustrated l2mo net $1.50 VAIN OBLATIONS. l2mo...net $1.35 THE GREAT TRADITION, AND (flER STORIES l2mo net $1.35 HAWAII SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS -I .............~~Ii... a* lmhmpih by It K. h 1 D4. 6ff6i flilii'mu uiuog, l _ 4*6 *f xE~i. It. Pi. E................P.... Ad HAWAII SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS BY KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS o NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1916 COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published September, 1916 I a * I TO G. H. G. I I t\9A. x ' * PREFACE OF all the books that have been written on Hawaii, the pages that follow constitute the least pretentious. Mine, indeed, is a book at all only by accident of physical form. It boasts no architectonics, scarcely even a beginning and an end. Its sole unity is the unity derived from being the record, by a single pen, of some of the experiences of a single month. It wanders almost consciously; it leaps from the general to the intimate and particular with no apology, with hardly even a transition. In that sense, it is ragged-ragged like almost any month of life. Yet it falls already, for me-that brief season-into a memory that "composes." [vii] PREFACE In that month, thick-packed with happy adventures of eye and ear, it is hard for one's nostalgic mood to recall one jarring note or one unlucky tint. The remembered sweetness of Hawaiian voices has haunted each sentence as it was written; palms should droop over every page; the white Pacific surf should beat round every margin. It has, in memory, the unity at least of a curious and varied perfection. I have tried not to vex the pages with history or statistics-except where such are registered first of all by one's own senses, or dog an impression unescapably. "Information" I have tried modestly to leave to the encyclopaedic mind. But-and here is my only defense-if I have contrived to suggest a tithe of the beauties of that "loveliest fleet of islands," to inspire one creature with an effective desire to go and taste for himself, I can claim one virtue. The half is not [ viii ] PREFACE told; and Hawaii waits with open arms, under the Southern Cross, to give more than I have even hinted. My great fear is simply that I have not hinted enough. These pages are the wandering record of a month-with how many crowding pleasures, social and aesthetic, of necessity left out! My context is richer than my page; my memory than my manuscript. If you travel undominated by a fixed idea, it must be so. Only those under vows can defy the unexpected and make of their days a pattern. Our adventure was rich, brief, an unforeseen and beautiful motley. A full third of the little book goes to description of a place most Islanders ignore, a place as untypical and "special" as any in the world: the Leper Settlement on Molokai. That in itself would destroy "unity"; though it is positively the finest of our memories. [ix] PREFACE Nor is there even unity in the group to which I owe thanks. But I beg that all those who know that I have reason to be grateful to them will take to themselves my tacit acknowledgment. Explicit, it might seem to be oddly shared. At all events, to those who, in their different ways, made the adventure possible and made it what it was, I humbly offer the record-in the phrase of the prophet, "a basket of summer fruit." K. F. G. [x CONTENTS PAGH HONOLULU: THE MELTING-POT.... 1 BY-WAYS IN HAWAII....... 59 KALATAPAP: THE LEPER SETTLEMENT ON MOLOKAI........ 119 I ILLUSTRATIONS Distant view of the federal experimental station, Kalawao......... Frontispiece FACING PAG Honolulu harbor.... The Kanaka is amphibious-all his life, naturally in and out of the water.... Rice-field and cocoanut-trees... In the gardens at Ainahau..... Diamond Head from Tantalus-Oahu.. Waikiki Beach, Honolulu Good golf is provided at the Oahu Country Club, Honolulu Ape-ape-Pohakumoa Gulch. The Pali-Island of Oahu. Kalihiwai, Kauai Cane flume on Hawaii......... Onomea, native village on Hawaii iao Needle in lao Valley-near Wailuku [ xiii] 8 12 18 22 28 34 36 44 56 64 68 76 88 ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGB Haleakala, looking across Koolau Gap from one of the small inside craters.... 9 The narrow-gauge railway between Kahuku and Hauula... 100 The Sacred Falls of Kaliuwaa.... 104 Brother Joseph Dutton at the grave of Father Damien..... 132 Homes of the better class of lepers on the island of Molokai.... 144 Sunday morning in Kalaupapa.. 156 Father Damien's church, Kalawao.. 160 The Baldwin Home for boys at Kalawao.... 168 The compound of the superintendent and physicians at Kalaupapa, showing the Pali in the distance 170 Kalaupapa from Pali..... 174 Map showing travel routes among the Hawaiian Islands...... At end of volume [ xiv ] HONOLULU: THIE MELTING-POT I HONOLULU: THE MELTING-POT T HEY have a name in Hawaii for such as we-malihinis, newcomers -in contrast to the Island-born or the Island-bred, the "old-timers," who are kamaainas. In any account of foreign places not purely aesthetic and sensuous, there should be a residuum of confessed ignorance. The foreigners that drift to usward on fickle wing, then write books longer than their total sojourn with us, are our malihinis; and we all know with what seas-full of salt we take their accounts of America. A traveller must flatter himself that his eyes have caught the truth, or for very shame he could not write. But we malihinis of a month must have inevitably, in the background of our [3] HAWAII: minds, the patient, quizzical smile of the kamaaina. The mdlihini's dearest hope is not to turn that smile to a frown. This, as of obligation, from one who has but passed, to those whose roots have struck deep in the gentlest soil of earth.... To most people who have never been to the Islands, and who have never contemplated going there long enough to get up a Hawaiian dossier, the name of Honolulu suggests, perhaps, half a dozen things: sugar, surf-riding, volcanoes, leis, missionaries, and poi. I doubt, at all events, if the list is much larger; and I am not sure that to include both leis and poi is not to be too generous. I am not speaking of sophisticated creatures on the "Coast" who, whether or not they have run "down" to Honolulu themselves, can be glib about friends who have run "down." [41 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Certainly we knew originally little more than the list suggests. But knowledge somehow bursts upon one when one is contemplating a specific journey: the detached air of the steamship clerk and the railway agent breed in one a kind of knowingness. Long before we saw Diamond Head we had made a hundred traveller's choices, and could be glib, ourselves, about Island problems. We had made out not only that Honolulu was the tourist's paradise-our luggage-labels said so-but also that it was a paradise with a grievance. Free sugar, the seaman's bill, the prevailingly yellow tinge of the population, and the perishing Hawaiian were all familiar formulae before a single maile wreath had been flung about our necks. There were Island people on the steamer; and wherever Island people are met together, to pass the time or to instruct the stranger, Island [5] HAWAII: problems are hot in the mouth. To talk about the insularity of an island is to be tautological; but the insular American on Oahu is more insular, so to speak, than the insular Englishman in London. England is the centre of an empire; but Hawaii is the mere outpost of a republic: a Territory, something as helpless in the hands of Congress as a ward in chancery is helpless; bent therefore on self-preservation solely, and on keeping up its own little state and luxury in its own little midPacific Eden. Islanders are not interested in the "Great War"-not as we of the East understand interest: their newspapers confess it. Very few of them are interested even in a possible Japanese complication; Mexico is as naught to them. So far, they but accentuate the general indifference (excepting always California's anti-Japanese frenzy) of the States [6] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS west of the Mississippi. Though the Islands look so Oriental, they are in many ways Western of the Western. Not only are they not internationally minded; they are not even nationally minded. They are almost more "sectional" than the "solid" South or the State of Utah. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, for the Islander, are bound up in sugar. Hinc ille lacrimca. Yes, the grievances of this paradise stir one to wrath on the steamer-though they sink into the background after one lands and the pleasures of the eye are pre-eminent. Except, that is, as the grievances touch one personally. The coastwise shipping law touched us nearly: thanks to our inability to pick and choose among steamers, we could not stay to see Kauai. It is maddening to see good Japanese boats steam out half empty, and [7] HAWAII: to be restricted-now that the Pacific Mail steamers have had to stop business -to one overcrowded line. The mysteries of sugar, in all their detail, I could not hope to penetrate; though I thought it quite clear at the time that Hawaii cannot compete with Cuba. Thence resulted a wry-mouthed admiration of our doctrinaire democracy. Is it not like us (one asks with tearful pride) to fight Spain for Cuban freedom, and to crown that activity by presenting Cuba with the world's market for cane-sugar, destroying our domestic industries? The war is temporarily keeping the Hawaiian canefields from tragic fallowness; but free sugar may well outlast the war. Let no man say we are not altruistic. "The gray beard of Uncle Sam" (I scribbled frantically with Honolulu harbor spread prismatically before my eyes) "is as wild [8] a:s;,~ e~iiiii: iP888il:BB:'"'i~lulpr~"~';~~~8,;i;, ',iiiii il;l rri E;~~ IIIi,., ;; ~''~A::,~~~Rl;i: ~n;a:, iili~, *i;ii~~i~ ~III;I;:i~?, a~;:~~, ~~i:;lilr;ns~~ ~ii """' ili.,,,, rrsa~ iUIA.i~i~ilii: e, ~i:lap;,, "''I ~,,,,,,,,.,,,..."I ,LiPlill ii;- I i; ps uii:l;i;a~ irl.,,,,,, I~ii~ s yr B a 1111 I ~iilEsbia i t; r!iErl a s,,;i88888 w c? r Jr.*rR 16sil Bi-BII art~ I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS in the air as ever Don Quixote's." As for the Japanese, no Islander will give any real comfort to the chauvinist. There is no Yellow Peril. They begin saying it a little past the Farralones, and they are still saying it when the rosy pallor of Diamond Head first takes your breath away at dawn. Then you drift into waters that are like the harbors of a sunset sky; the more acrid chapter of preconception ends, while the sweeter one of experience begins. Hawaii is a melting-pot: that is the first thing, perhaps, to strike one, humanly speaking. The strictly Polynesian effect lurks rather in the air, the foliage, the sky and the sea: the ever delightful, never conventional decor of the Pacific island. True, you find, now and then, tucked away under its coco-palms on thunderous shores, a Hawaiian village all complete [9] HAWAII: with its taro-patches, its fish-nets, its outrigger canoes drawn up on the sand, its lazy life, and its innocence of English. But you have now to go far afield for such. The bulk of the Island population, as every one knows, is Japanese-some 90,000 as against some 24,000 Hawaiians and an equal number of "all Caucasians." Then come Portuguese (for some reason not reckoned officially as Caucasians) and Chinese, nearly even in the census lists23,000 and 21,000, respectively. PartHawaiians (a motley breed!) and Filipinos pair, farther down, with some 14,000 each. There are a few thousand each of Porto Ricans, Spanish, and "all others." Yet this melting-pot is not depressing like that which you get the full sense of, say, on lower Fifth Avenue at noon. In Hawaii, save for a few Russian peasants, there are no Slavs; there are no Jews; [10] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS there are virtually no negroes; there is no Levantine scum. The Mediterranean coast, from Gibraltar to Sicily, from Sicily to Jaffa and Crete and Constantinople, is unrepresented; Central Europe and the Balkans have sent nothing. No Ruthenians, no Slovaks, no Lithuanians, no Armenians, no Huns. A few Greek hotelkeepers serve to make life tolerable in the smaller towns; but in numbers the Greeks hardly count. Even in Honolulu the white man is in a visual minority; and outside Honolulu nearly all the faces are yellow or brown. The Hawaiian melting-pot at first is picturesque; it ends by being lovable-and being missed. Even the pessimist may find comfort in the fact that the Oriental has no vote. The fat babies in rainbow kimonos will have them; but that story is for another day. The AngloSaxon is still dominant. [11] HAWAII: The Hawaiian has the ballot-and in consequence the Hawaiian vote is the largest in the Islands-but his vote will pass with his existence; which means that he will not long trouble the polls. Civilization has killed him, as is its way: vice and disease came in with the sea-captains and sailors of all the globe, and the missionaries finished the work. As far as one can make out, the missionaries were more responsible than Captain Cook or the New Bedford whalers, for the Hawaiian is dying, quite literally, of clothes. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, and bronchitis are what carry him off in far the largest numbers. The race is not weak or degenerate: it is, physically, magnificent in strength and beautiful of feature. But the Kanaka is amphibious-fishing, surfriding, swimming, he is, all his life, naturally in and out of the water. It is one [ 12 ] -IDIRM aqj jo 4no ul n~~~~~~~tanivit lq~~~~jj,!t[ S qD~ Ng~~~~~~~~, EN~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ r 164. ~ SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS thing to cover yourself with palm-oil and let the Pacific spray run off you in shining drops while you rest on the sands; it is quite another to keep your wet clothes on as you go about your business on the shore-but it is to ask too much of Polynesian intelligence to request it to see the difference. If clothes are good, they are good, wet or dry. If you do not yourself perceive the initial beauty of clothes, you cannot be very sophisticated about their uses. The Kanaka is not up to Sartor Resartus. That the Polynesian has never employed his keen aesthetic sense on the matter of dress is proved, I think, by the fact that the native women still universally wear the holoku-a shapeless Mother Hubbard gown which the most tasteless Puritan could not condemn. Tradition says that the first missionary ladies, in mad haste to dress their converts, handed [13] HAWAII: over the patterns of their own nightgowns. A race (I submit) that has stuck faithfully for nearly a hundred years to the model of our great-grandmothers' nightdresses-for "best" as well as for every day-is a docile, an admirable, a lovable race, which "vaunteth not itself and is not puffed up." It is almost a pity, too, hygienically speaking, that the grass house has become unfashionable. It is engaging of the Kanaka to build himself a wooden shack to live in because white men live in wooden houses and provide such for their laborers; but there is nothing particularly amiable in opening your windows at night, and, since his fine tact is all social and not in the least scientific, he does not open them. The grass house ventilated itself, and the wooden shack does not. Hence more tuberculosis, more bronchitis, more pneumonia. The women hang leis about [ 14] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS their necks, and all the men wear flowerwreaths round their junk-shop American hats. To the charm ancestrally perceived they are faithful; but they have never learned to improve on Caucasian ideas. They have accepted the, brutal fact of clothes, just as they Christianized themselves en masse; they have accepted the silly American standard of the wooden house. But you must not expect them to go further: you must not expect them to like to work, or to care how their foolish clothes look (if we were made to wear barrels, I dare say we should feel a like indifference to fashions in hoops and staves) or to think about cubic feet of air. - It works the same way, I fancy, with religion. "They say what they think will please you," was the report of a kamaaina who came of the old missionary stock and who had worked much [15] HAWAII: among Hawaiians. Of course they do: they are polite to the death-literally. The idols were officially broken, by royal order, even before the missionaries arrived; and when the missionaries came, the Hawaiians embraced Christianity about as simply as France did under Clovis. They are Christians, and have been, now, for some three generations; but they will not build where there has been a heiau,* and their propitiatory offerings to Pele line all the sombre trail to the Sacred Falls of Kaliuwaa. Every kamaaina can give you some authentic tale of some one who has been kahuna-ed-prayed to death. Officially the kahuna is proscribed: there is a price on his head. But the authentic tales are there; and indeed I have seen lost villages where a kahuna would be very safe from the short arm of the law. *A native temple. [16] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Such docility, such unwillingness to be rude, such indifference to the logic of the laws by which the natives must now live, do not make for self-preservation. They make for listlessness, for forgetting strenuous traditions, for seizing the day, for making leis, and singing sad and idle music by the incomparable Pacific. Politically the Hawaiians have no hope: America has absorbed them; they know they are dying, though they do not quite know why; but they have not enough sternness or strength for the black pessimism that Stevenson recorded among their cousins, the cannibal Marquesans. The old meles and the old hero-tales are nearly forgotten, as are the old hulas. A few aged men and women can still sing and dance in traditional fashion for their aged Queen-but there is no one to whom they can pass on the words of the songs or [17] HAWAII: the motions of the dance. The new songs are different-lyrical at best, never epic; and. the new dances might perhaps delight a cabaret, if any cabaret could conceivably be allowed to present them. I have seen a native hula in a country village, in full swing after hours of feasting; and the muscle-dancing of expositions is innocuous beside it-though far more disgusting because not spontaneous. 'The old hulas were different: were stately and, I dare say, a little tiresome, with their monotonous swaying and arm-gestures repeated a thousand times. Only a very old person now can dance in the earlier fashion; you could easily count up the Hawaiians who know the meles; and there is just one man, I believe, left on Oahu (if indeed he is still living) who can play the nose-flute as it should be played, to the excruciation of every nerve in a Caucasian body. [18] 1- Up I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Regular work is almost an impossibility to the Polynesian; therefore he is seldom, if ever, to be found in the cane or pineapple fields. He is very strong, and makes an excellent stevedore; and that employment suits him, for he can leave it and come back to it as he chooses.. The ships come in from Australia and the South Seas, from the Orient or round the Horn; and whenever. they come in or go out, there is work a-plenty. Until his money is gone he can exist beautifully, singing to his ukulele and washing down his raw fish and poi with square-face. He makes occasionally a good chauffeur; but.the regular profession most dear to him is that of policeman. To stand directing traffic at King and Fort Streets, his beautiful poses plastiques legitimized by authority, is as near heaven, I fancy, as a serious-minded Hawaiian can get. [ 19 ] HAWAII: In Honolulu-and Honolulu draws to itself, magnet-wise, all the interests and activities of Oahu-the white man is more in evidence than anywhere else on the Islands. That is natural. It is the social and commercial metropolis, the capital, the traditional home of most of the missionaries, the residence still of the Queen, the centre of military and naval business, the pre-eminent port of the Islands. In Honolulu itself the melting-pot seems to seethe most hotly; for the white man is there in numbers to remind you of the extraordinary foreignness of the other human beings who frequent the paved streets, ride on the familiar trolley-cars, and pour out of the "movies" at the classic hours. Away from Honolulu you often forget the white man: the tropics beat in on you more vividly; the great tree-ferns rise mysteriously above your head; the surf is [,20 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS the surf of the South Seas; the world is wholly different; and it is very curious and exotic of you yourself to be white. Save for the mental mirror all people carry about with them, one would forget one was. But Honolulu is American, very. It is,even part of its charm that it should be so; for there is nothing pathetic, no savor of exile, in the resolute dominance of American ways. The Islanders are not backwardlooking, like (we are told) Englishmen in India. Honolulu is "home," and they look as little to the mainland (save, now and then, sardonically to Washington) as the Westerner looks to the Atlantic coast. They have not even had to compound with the climate, for the climate is quite simply perfect. They can afford not to seek their greatest comfort; for, after all, it is impossible to be very uncomfortable. It is the tourist, the visitor, who [ 211 HAWAII: wears Palm Beach clothes and soft collars. The business man of Honolulu dresses as the business man in New York dressestweeds, starched neck-gear, and all. Most men wear black evening clothes at dinner. A certain amount of white is worn, of course; but the general impression of the visitor from the temperate zone is that these folk do not live up to their privileges. As for their houses, I should positively hesitate to say how bad Island architecture is, if so quintessential an Islander as Mr. W. R. Castle, Jr., had not said it before me. Life in Hawaii is lived under the palm and the mango, the banyan and the poinciana, the algaroba and the monkey-pod. The great hibiscus hedges are as high as, in England, the border of ancestral yew; the night-blooming cereus hangs in multitudinous clusters over your garden-wall; the scent of ginger is heavy [22] .................. He b/R:W FM a N X W h b# 'M. MWtt~ IXn 1X i X! fAd tei g dore s Wn a hi 9t - ow } tga (|a| m+ me Ha xW~t ts tv~ffi( R}X<.lr Acre ~lll.} raqi to Irango I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS round your lanai; the orange and the lime bloom in your compound, and the guava runs wild by the wayside; your yard-boy eats his dinner under a banana-tree. A garden is old in ten years; in thirty it has become a tropical forest, a gigantic and fragrant gloom. But the houses breathe none of all this. They are hardly ever even Southern in type-low and pillared and wide-verandahed. The architecture of Hawaii is uncompromising; it is-for want of a better word let me say evangelical. It stands rigidly by the worst traditions of the nineteenth century; it is the same that disfigures our New England streets and stultifies the fine situation of many a Western town. Two stories and sometimes three; scamped porches set about with jig-saw decoration; colors that must make the gentle Jap swear ritually as he patters by in his immaculate kimono: [23 ] HAWAII: the kind of thing that is quaint and endearing in Portland, Oregon, but which, in the full sweetness of the Trade, is simply the Great Refusal. Not much better, from this point of view, is the newer house, half timbered or of tapestry brick; for if there ever was a place with which the Tudors and their ways and works" had nothing to do, it is the islands of the Pacific. Chinese merchants are inheriting the older houses in the town; but the released Americans, who go farther up the Manoa or the Nuuanu Valley, do not always improve on their ancestral homes. There is melancholy comfort to a monarchically inclined person in the fact that Liliuokalani lives in the loveliest house in Honolulu. Washington Place, which she now inhabits, is of the old Southern type, and it does not insult the vegetation. (As for the Royal Palace-now the Executive ['24 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Building-I believe I am alone in admiring it. It is of absurdly ornamented type, but so like many a bad minor palace in Europe that it endears itself. The throne-room is just what any petty sovereign would have found fit, and the space and height of the rooms are literally palatial. There is something very fine and aesthetically decent about the sweep of the broad stone galleries, and the slow, lavish curve of the central staircase. Kamehameha's statue, in bronze and gold, faces the palace majestically across the square; and that, too, is fine, though no one now pays homage except an ancient Portuguese lunatic, who spends his life before it.) Some people have had the wit to build low, shingled bungalows, and they will have paradise about them when they die. But it verily seems as though no sensitive soul could make its peace [ 25] HAWAII: with God while the poinciana. and the banyan look down on tortured clap-boarding, built into a high and narrow shape. Were I to cite exceptions-and of course there are exceptions-it would be almost like naming names, so I refrain. Nor do I speak of interiors, only of the front presented to the world. But it is a great pity that some young architect with a sense of fitness does not feel "called" to make man's part in the aspect of Honolulu a little more akin to God's. The Atlantic States had Georgian memories to help them out; California has had Spain; but Hawaii is singularly isolated. The natives, of course, contributed no architectural ideas. It is a singular misfortune that the Islanders should have selected, and stuck at, the wrong period. It was not because they had never had anything else before their eyes: nothing could be more [ 26] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS charming than Washington Place in Honolulu, or the old "missionary house" in Lahaina, on Maui. They did not, however, stick to the good aesthetics of the pioneers; they progressed: they seem to have gone to Kansas for their later inspiration-and never to have come away. When that is said, nothing remains to be charged against civilization in Honolulu. This in itself would be small cause for petulance in another place. But here the eye enters upon an inheritance so gorgeous beyond preconception that it shrinks unwontedly from all that is not beauty. The part of the town that is not occupied by Americans is oddly uninteresting. Here and there a district known as "Portuguee town" contributes a vivid pink house to the general audacity. But the Chinese and Japanese districts are far [ 7 ] HAWAII: less picturesque than the Oriental quarter in San Francisco-even since the "fire." Rows and rows of barrack-like tenements, housing Hawaiians and the poorer Orientals, are very like any other slumssave that here the sun will find out a way. It is a platitude that foreign slums-Italian, for example-are often picturesque. In Honolulu they scarcely are; for the buildings are not old, and they make the most colorless corner of that parti-colored world. Prosperity, I suppose, makes for gayer kimonos, for paler stuffs in Chinese coats and trousers, for more leis and fresher flowers setting off the Hawaiian bronze. The folk who live in the Honolulu tenements are very poor; "drab" is the formal epithet for poverty, and with drab even the sun can do little. The poorer quarters of Honolulu are not so depressing as some other slums; for until [28] t'""';"""s~~~~~~`'~:~~~~~~~~-~~~ p~~~~~~~~~~~~lf C 'K~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~"" I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS one is quite used to the visual preponderance of yellow and brown men, there is delight in the mere strangeness of the crowds. And they are not so extensive, these poorer quarters; they are far outstripped by the comfort and beauty of the rest. Still, in this sociological day, who could refrain from noticing, and mentioning, such slums as there are? Another feature prominent in the mere aspect of Honolulu is the army. We have seven or eight thousand troops there; it is a regulation for Hawaii that officers and men alike must wear uniform; and the ugly, efficient khaki is everywhere, as well as the tropical white. On the whole, the khaki uniform is less beautiful than the holoku; and the military note is a note of pure ugliness. After a few weeks the negro regiments seem strange to the eye. It is impossible not to match up [ 29 HAWAII: the negro type against the Polynesian and find it wanting. An aesthetically passionate person can quite understand the contempt with which the Hawaiian looks down upon the black man. This, though the negro soldier is usually a fine creature, physically speaking, and at his best suggests the imposing Zulu. It is the modelling of the Polynesian countenance that gives the Hawaiian the palm: the delicate aquiline contour, the eyes large for the face, the thick hair, like a European's, crowning the head. Geographically, too, the army counts immensely in Oahu. There are five forts in or about Honolulu town, not to mention Schofield Barracks on a neighboring plateau. Diamond Head is mined and galleried, so that on occasion it could be as dangerous as in its volcanically "active" days. The monstrous works going [ 30] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS on at Pearl Harbor it would take an expert to appreciate; at present they are in the least illuminating of all stages-that of dredging. A visit to Pearl Harbora strange, octopus-shaped arm of the sea -is about as unrewarding for the common person as a visit to a sugar-mill. Our New England consciences took us to both; and, personally, I brought back from the adventures only the conviction that dredging is not pretty to look at and that sugar-cane is not good to chew. Those who like to chew sugar-cane may very fairly infer that I have done little justice to the dredging. I confess it freely. The tourist's Honolulu, I suspect, lies wholly Waikiki of the town-that being, literally, the topographical idiom. (You are never told to go north or south, east or west: you go "mauka"-towards the mountains, or go "makai"-towards the [31] HAWAIIL sea; a shop lies on King Street "Waikiki" or "Ewa" of Fort or Nuuanu.) The city stretches some seven miles, end to end, along the sea-front, running back, up enchanted valleys, to the mountains: the Pali, or Tantalus. "Ewa" of Honolulu are Pearl Harbor and Ewa plantation; "Waikiki" of it is-Waikiki. Here are the seaside hotels and restaurants, the Outrigger Club, Kapiolani Park, the beach-houses of rich Honolulans, and Diamond Head. Here are the bathing, the surf-riding, the general tourist activity -as well as the amusements of Honolulans themselves. Across from the Moana Hotel is Ainahau, among whose giant trees and flowers Stevenson often sat with the little Kaiulani, heiress-apparent to the now longsuperseded Queen. Kaiulani died during Liliuokalani's reign, and her father, Mr. Cleghorn, has been dead these many years. [ 32 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Ainahau has been sold; but one can still lose oneself in those winding, overhung paths, the great palms cutting off the sky above one's head, and imagine the operabouffe days of the monarchy, half wishing that strange chapter back. The portraits of Kaiulani show her as very lovely and ininevitably beloved. She had, too, the supreme wit to die young. To a man of Stevenson's predilections, a beautiful young princess, half Polynesian and half Scotch, must have seemed one of the choicest works of God; and at Ainahau, if ever, he must have been happy. In all successful social life, variety must somehow be achieved. In their circumscribed space happy Honolulans manage it by having several houses. Precisely as here, you go to the, mountains or the sea for recuperation and amusement; only in Hawaii you do not have to go so far. [33] HAWAII: Half an hour will take you to your bungalow beneath Diamond Head; there at Kahala you can spend your Sunday, bathing in the multi-colored ocean. If mosquitoes bother you at Kahala, you can motor to the top of Tantalus, where, at two thousand feet, you are safe from them. Or you may have your beach-house on the windward side of the Island, between Kahana and Kahuku. For a severer change, you can have a ranch on Kauai or Maui. If it is absolutely necessary for you to shiverand one can conceive that-you can visit the volcano on Hawaii, or take the comfortable Kilauea to Maui, and climb Haleakala. In the concrete rest-house on that ten-thousand-foot rim you will need all the fur coats the family can provide. It is easy enough to change your climate and see a different beauty. Meanwhile there is bridge, and the tango, and polo f 34] er. s..................... I~~~~i I 0 0 I l -—.11>01 l M m _111, _-__X_ any an -.__1S1'%g1_ l: g 1111 | 11 * *l~~i" _i g1:, -,fi0'j I,, |X| a Al _g g-_ | An'' *~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~iP 1_1: g l _ - ~~~~~~~~~~~I iAt ~~Z a II'I *..~~~~~, _x~g~gg isi X e M I. N..a. C)...... I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~~ SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS at Moanalua, and everything else that American civilization provides for one's distraction. Plays and operas are rare, of course, though now and then some company stops off between Australia and San Francisco. The Islanders, too, must be blessedly free from lectures. Good golf is provided at the Oahu Country Club, or at Haleiwa. If you are tired of domesticity, you can sit on the floor in a kimono at a Japanese tea-house, while little geisha girls bring you all the things that the yellow man most oddly likes to eat, and the sake that he most wisely likes to drink. You cannot skate or ski; but you can go riding or bathing or surf-boating or sharkfishing any time you feel like it; and on Hawaii, they tell me, you can put on a bathing-suit at the end of the day and coast down the dizzy cane-flumes. Except in a Kona storm you are seldom housed. [35 HAWAII: Here the "unswerving season" brings no mitigation of beauty. Some transplanted people long at times for snow; the true Islander, I believe, not often. In any case, the Canadian Rockies are not so much farther from them than from us-above all, the journey is not so much more expensive. If you really want to be uncomfortably cold, there is, I am told, no chillier, snowier place than Japan in winter. And even Japan is only nine days away. There is scarcely space to tell of all the sights of Honolulu. In the aquarium you can see fish that seem to have been created by French dressmakers. They look more like audacious mannequins at the Longchamps races than citizens of the simple ocean-save that nature is less careful of color-harmonies than Worth and Paquin are wont to be, and that no dressmaker would venture on a costume [361 i~'~x'i"i li;~si; ~rii;,I r;r Is,i?~nii Ia I i IEg,lir O 7rr lil CIBI illiiEli..,., L1 D ib~"i"~ii~"i~E.i i;;.~i~~~~ i;i x~x~~li ~i;:;rs. r818p sR ii:allloli 3: '";;"~~";i:i~xa~i niuiirei-; r;lalii s~rnr.;,:,,,,,,, r~~,s~,;xan~r;,:8 ~j;;Rslai 4 ""~1;;;";;";; C r '";RQ ~liiiiii I -~""~~I;;I w Q:6.,,, a,,,~,u,~-s~ s~:,~xi :""" -~ .,,,,lr,, r;li 18i,'il;l ~n~i:;a~:ar -;;i; "" % ~iiirr ICb,' y-is6y Bx "LI iBL1 I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS a la squid. The aquarium, I believe, had this summer been rifled for the Hawaiian exhibit at the Panama-Pacific; but, even so, it is a smallish place, not comparable with the chambers of wonder and horror at Naples. Or you can go out by the Kamehameha Schools to the Bishop Museum —exquisitely panelled in the beautiful Hawaiian koa wood, dusky-gold and wildly grained; repository of feather-cloaks and Polynesian antiquities of every sort. Mrs. Bishop, the donor, was the daughter of Paki, and his giant surf-boards are nailed up in the entrance porch. Everywhere in Honolulu you find witnesses to a now perished state of society, when princesses of the blood and daughters of great chiefs married AngloSaxons. With the passing of the monarchy and the subsidence of the native aristocracy, there is less temptation to the Amer[37] HAWAII: ican or Englishman to espouse a native, and I believe it is not much done at present except in the lower classes-though a deal of the best white blood is said to have received at some time or other a Polynesian tributary. It is natural, with the change of government, and all that change entails, that the fashion should have passed. Much else has passed with it-the knowledge of Hawaiian, for example. Every one uses Hawaiian words, but the majority of American children do not learn the language. They are carefully not allowed to, lest a chance Hawaiian playmate should let in a flood of Polynesian information on their innocent minds. The Kanaka infant has "nothing to learn"; therefore much too much to teach. It is again, in some ways, a pity, for the Hawaiian himself has no interest in the preservation of his tongue, and it is degenerat38] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS ing into pidgin-talk. A scholar like Mr. Parker, for fifty years pastor of the Kawaiahao church in Honolulu, now and then a native demagogue who has cultivated the language for his own purposesthese may keep some interest in the mellifluous and moribund tongue; but that is all. It has virtually ceased to be stuff of rhetoric. Any learning the Kanaka may acquire is won at school, in English. It is easy to see the result. Beyond a convenient practical knowledge-for it is often, in remote places, convenient to speak Hawaiian-almost no one cares to go. Besides, it would be more to the point, practically, to learn Japanese. There are other sights a-plenty in Honolulu. There are the schools, from Punahou Academy down; there is the Lunalilo Home for aged Hawaiians, which I distinctly advise against visiting, comforta[39.] HAWAII: ble though it is. The Hawaiian does not grow old well-nature's revenge for his beauty in youth and maturity-and the Home was to us actually more depressing than the Leper Colony on Molokai. The shops are not particularly interesting: Hawaiian curios consist chiefly of ukuleles, bead and shell necklaces, and tapa cloth -which, I regret to say, in this twilight of the Hawaiian day, is chiefly imported from Samoa. You can get calabashes and lauhala mats made to order, but the market is not drugged with them. The Hawaiian, as I have said, does not like to work. Even his poi —except in country districts-is made for him at a Japanese or Chinese poi-factory. There is nothing "native" that you want to take home with you, except the fruit, and even if you were naive enough to pack papayas and mangoes in your steamer-trunk, a [40] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS California official would take them away from you before he let you through the Golden Gate. It seems that there are fruit-pests in the Eight Islands: another grievance, since all pests of every sortincluding mosquitoes and leprosy-have been brought thither from somewhere else. There are as yet no snakes, but sometime some one will smuggle in a rattler or two. The servant problem is made easy by the Orient. The Japanese cook will do everything in the world besides cooking: he will water your flowers and clean your car, raise your vegetables and press your clothes. If he is married, his wife will do that part of the work which he least likes, and between them you will be singularly comfortable. Your children will have Japanese nursemaids, your yard-boy will be Japanese as well. You will be wise to choose a Portuguese chauffeur; [41] HAWAII: but except for that one service the Japs will look after you. It is well, I am told, to give very positive orders, and to keep to your own regime, for the Jap's imagination is peculiar to his race, and left to himself he will always do the most romantic thing. Hear now the confession of a reformed Japanophobe.... Before our Hawaiian experience I had been quite convinced that the Japanese were the Prussians of Asia. Every one knows how easy that impression is to get. I do not pretend to have arrived at it by profound study. It shocked me not a little, at first, to find Islanders taking the Yellow Peril so lightly-not to say scoffingly. They seemed to me like those folk who have always nestled comfortably under Vesuvius. In another generation the voters of Hawaii will be overwhelmingly Japa[492] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS nese;. for Japanese children, Hawaiianborn, are, of course, American citizens. It is interesting, too, to note that the Japanese do not, like Chinese, Portuguese, and whites, intermarry with other races. They are in the melting-pot, but they do not, in that sense, melt. Japanese children must go to the government schools and learn English; but they must also go to Japanese schools, before and after school hours, as- well as on Saturdays and Sundays, and be instructed in their ancestral language, literature, and history. How they can work so hard, poor babies, and still look so gay and ephemeral, is a puzzle. Perhaps the secret of it is the kimono-as, indeed, I suspect (though it is a frivolous confession) the kimono was at the root of my own conversion. A Jap father in a clean kimono, tending the baby, is the most disarming sight in the world. And [43] HAWAII: they are always doing it, whether in front of their Honolulu shops or in their plantation villages. Undoubtedly they work, and work hard, but they are always playing with the babies, first, last, and in between. While we saw them daily in this attitude, I forgot the "Japan Language Schools" (often placed, for convenience, next the government-school building) and the Shinto temples tucked away everywhere in the foliage. It is impossible to be afraid of any one who wears a kimono, and that fact may be either our salvation or our undoing in our relations with the Orient. I do not pretend to say. But my conversion was not so frivolous a matter, after all. The Japanese character is apparently a very different thing from that which many of us, at least, had conceived it to be. First of all, the Japanese is a romantic-an out-and-out, ab[44] a Tw It. K.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~i~i Ape-ape-Poliakurnw~i C~g~iufli.~~ ~i; III X iB g ~ ~ ~~~," ~rli^l s~P;~H~i L II SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS surd romantic. He is very sure of himself; he will undertake to do anything you ask him to; he is confident that he can imitate anything that he has seen, or perform any act that he has watched. He is his own publicity agent, too-like the braggart child, and as little objectionable. (I have even heard, authentically enough, that the famous Red Cross service in the Russo-Japanese War amounted only to a campaign of self-praise; that actually the Japanese lost a greater proportion of men through disease than did the Russians.) He is ambitious, always anxious to better himself. But — The Jap will build your house for you -probably in most cases he does; but he is as likely as not to put in your windows upside down. Often, as soon as he saves enough money on the plantation, he drifts into a Honolulu commission merchant's, [ 45] HAWAII: saying engagingly: "This time I make store." He pays down his savings, gets additional credit, and proceeds to "make store." But he is apt, in a year or two, to go bankrupt. He is so enamoured of his idea that he would rather sell everything in his shop on credit than to sell for cash and have any goods left on his shelves. Or he will be a chauffeur; but the god of speed also is in his Pantheon, and he will break his or your neck with the most devoted abandon. It is terrifying to meet a car-load of Japs in a narrow place. It is even more terrifying to be driven by a Jap, yourself, round a mountain road with a pali on your left and the sea five hundred feet below on your right. At the steepest point the Jap is sure to turn and tell you that this is a very dangerous place-not relaxing, meanwhile, his speed. If you are not impressed (though, for many reasons, [46] SCENES AND'IMPRESSIONS you probably are) he will, very likely, add a dramatic account of how, not long ago, he was attacked at this very spot, by a band of Filipino marauders, all armed; how, fortunately, he had no money- (you begin here to be grateful for your express cheques); how, finally, by dint of coolness, courage, and speed, he got away. Even in his pidgin-English he makes literature of it-until he becomes positively too excited by his own romance to proceed. It is like listening to the wild Odysseys of your own small boy. Luckily, the Jap likes to toot his horn: it is your only safeguard. Return over the same ground a few days later with a cautious Portuguese driver, and you will feel infinitely safer-but you will find yourself missing something. The Japanese, in spite of their romance, are law-abiding folk-another disarming [47] HAWAII: fact. The Filipino is the bad boy of the Islands: he will loot, and kill for lootfor an astonishingly small amount of loot. He kills very brutally, too. Occasionally, in the day's work, the Japanese will slay -but seldom; and when he does, I have heard, it is apt to be a case of jealousya crime passionel. It must, of course, be remembered that in Hawaii one deals largely with a Japanese type very different from that which we encounter here; not the student or the merchant, but the laborer, the coolie. There are merchants, and there are educated Japanese of the better classes: priests, teachers, editors of papers, and so on. There is even the distinguished artist who will "do" your Japanese garden, or build your room for the tea ceremony, but who will not do either unless he has all the time he wants and absolute liberty to follow [48'] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS his tradition to the least detail of material and form. But these are few in comparison. The Japanese have been imported chiefly to work with their hands, and the bulk of them are the common people. The women work on the plantations as well as the men, wearing a special dress: an odd series of dark garments, putteelike leg-gear, huge flat hats tilted on their chignons at an angle of forty-five degrees, a white cloth hanging down beneath to protect the neck from the sun. A kamaaina can tell at once the nationality and the breed of any individual whom he passes; but, though I am seldom at a loss to distinguish Chinese from Japanese in America, in Hawaii I found it as impossible as a task in a fairy-tale. The Japanese coolie is very like the Chinese coolie; and in country districts there are the Koreans to confuse one. The women are easier [49] HAWAII: to distinguish than the men, on account of their dress-the Chinese trousers, the vast Filipino sleeves, are as unmistakable as the kimono. But the men in the canefields dress as is most convenient and, until they have gone home and changed, it is not always easy to know. There are, besides, infinite complications of race-mixture; and, while we thought it easy to recognize a pure Hawaiian, the malihini could never be sure of the part-Hawaiian -whether he was part Portuguese, part white, or part Chinese. It was like a child's game to drive along a country road and ask: "This one? This one? This one?" The kamaainas could always label them. At the end of the day it was easier for the malihini to guess; for the Jap in his kimono is different from every one else in the world. On the whole, it is easy to see why the [50] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Islanders discount the Japanese peril. We heard one or two men of sense and long experience dissent from the common opinion, but not more than that. Only one or two were willing to admit that there might, in the next generation, be trouble. Most Americans in Hawaii have faith in the melting-pot; they think the Jap soluble. This, though they confess that Japan did want the Islands, and would still exceedingly like to possess them. When we quoted to them fears that we had heard expressed at home, they usually said, in sum: You won't find any one here outside of the army who believes that alarmist stuff; of course, the army is always looking for trouble. Certainly, the daily revelation of the Japanese temperament is allaying to fears. Whether Americans in Hawaii are misreading that temperament or not is in the womb of fate. But the Is[51] HAWAII: lander, at least, has a better chance to estimate the Japanese situation-psychological, economic, political-than we on the mainland. It may be that the Mikado sends out thousands of Japanese laborers with strict instructions to provide a spectacle of romantic inefficiency for the deluded American. It may be that wearing white kimonos and petting the babies are both done by imperial order. Perhaps the tale of overcrowded Japan is as false as the tale of overcrowded Germany; perhaps, really, the Japanese, like the Germans, have to import labor from without. The cane-cutting may all be a blind. If they are the Prussians of Asia, that is plausible. But in that case the Prussians of Asia do their deceiving much better than the Prussians of Europe. The Chinaman in Hawaii is very like himself anywhere. Every village, even [52] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS the smallest, has its pake (Chinese) store. Often the pake storekeeper has a Hawaiian wife. The Chinaman has, as we all know, a great gift for business; he is prudent, industrious, and honest. No one has ever paid him the doubtful compliment of fancying that there was a "Chinese problem." The Chinese virtues are too well known for mention here; though it may be remarked in passing that the Chinese-Hawaiian blend is said to be the best for character (as it is, by and large, for physique) of all those to which the Hawaiians treat themselves. The Chinaman, ploughing his rice-fields with the classic water-buffalo, sitting decorously in his tidy shop, or selling unspeakable foods in his markets, lends a grave and welcome note to the medley. There is experience back of the Chinese face, male or female; it is uralt; it has [53] HAWAII: psychology in it; you feel that it would respond to a human problem. The flitting Japanese seem ephemeral creatures in comparison: artistic by blessed instinct, but not pre-eminently intellectual. Even when a Chinaman gets drunk, he does it with a difference. But that is for another and more exotic chapter... In Honolulu we often ended up the evening by motoring to the Pali. Why, I do not know; for in the darkness that view, which seems to gather into its lavish bounds half the history and half the beauty of Hawaii, does not exist. You peer over the great parapet, down the seven-hundred-foot drop, and see nothing but the glow-worm lights of Kaneohe, far beneath you and beyond, near the illimitable sea. You cannot hear the surf; you cannot see the fern-stippled rock, or the pineapple plantations that tint wind[5 4] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS ward Oahu with an ineffable green. Only the wind rushes through this narrow cleft in the volcanic mountain chain and nearly oversets you. It is like a heavy scarf across your eyelids; your lips can scarce move against it; and you cling to any friend that is near. A hundred yards *away there was not a breath, will not be when you return. But here, if you want to climb a few feet to the Kamehameha tablet set in the side of the cliff, you will be glad of the little railing to clutch. Except for that, you might be lifted and blown across the parapet, down the cliff over which Kamehameha the Great once drove an army. The view from the Pali is ever various-morning and afternoon, mist and sun tell different tales of it. But it is always significant: all the violent volcanic beauty of Hawaii, together with its tropic softness, is mea[55a] HAWAII: sured there lavishly for you. Kamehameha has stamped his legend on the cliff where your feet are set; the multi-colored ocean, beyond the coral-gardens of Kaneohe, spreads out its lonely leagues before you; the wind itself that sweeps disdainfully over, past, and through you, is overdue for the Equator and the sinister low archipelagoes of the South. Some sense of this was always heavy upon us as we breasted that expanse. Even at night the lights of Kaneohe seemed to hint it all. Every tourist, in his few hours' stopover, can drive to the Pali; and of that one is glad. For the Pali is more essential than Waikiki or Diamond Head or Pearl Harbor. Its memories are pre-Territorial, and its inclusive beauty is as poignant and inimitable as the Hawaiian voice lifted in Polynesian song. Returning, you wind through dim jun[56] a byg~E WIt B7, Pkit>. Fro*4 omppog te IhL- Lrup o Oa Th'ii view Winhi it' ii m all o f e ar n 66 iat au n d Ads n till Adfltl okW I t r SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS gles of hau-trees that no army, it seems, could cut or blast away, until you reach the Country Club and Nuuanu Avenue, and then Honolulu town and harbor. The wind, free of the rock wall and appeased, follows you down to the ships. Six miles from the cleft in the Pali the lei women sit on Hotel Street (as per postcard) and sell their wreaths. If you are a departing traveller-and sooner or later, alas! you must be-your friends stock themselves heavily. You are bowed down with weight of flowers as you steam away from Honolulu. Very likely your heart is heavy, too. Sooner than you would wish, the long, parti-colored streamers that you have flung to your friends on the dock break and fall away into the ocean. The fragile rainbow bond is severed; the last boy dives, Kanaka-fashion, standing erect, from the top of a life-boat; and you take [57] HAWAII: SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS up the trail again. But, whichever way one sails, the keenest visual memory is of the Pacific seen from a volcanic height: the view from the Pali windward, half a world away to the frozen North; for us, ever the view southward across the town, the harbor, the reef, and the blazing ocean, from the happy heights of Alewa. [58 BY-WAYS IN HAWAII BY-WAYS IN HAWAII. TC W E were always weaving a shuttle's path back and forth from Honolulu to other islands, ports, and places. Indeed, it was outside Honolulu that our most exotic adventures came to us. There can be no coherence in the tale of them, for our most careful plans were sometimes frustrated, and the best things often came to us by mere brute luck. Moreover, it is a traveller's platitude that you never can tell beforehand, or take another person's word: it is not always the star in Baedeker that guides you to the hallowed spot. So it was, as ever, in Hawaii. Follows the disconnected tale: I had had, privately, a prejudice against Kilauea; why, I do not know. There is a great choice in the works of God; and I [61] HAWAII: was not at all sure that I should rejoice in the volcano. It is a nasty sail from Honolulu to Hilo on Hawaii; besides, there were a vast number of tourists profiting by the Matsonia's trip to go. It is the conventional thing to take, for this purpose, three days out of a week's stay. But all arrangements had been delightfully and inexorably made for us; and we had scarcely been two days in Honolulu before we packed our suitcases for Hawaii. It is better to go to Hilo than to come away from it-in every sense. The worst part of the trip, then, comes when you are safe in your berth; during the first hours you are usually under the lee of some island. It is better, too, to travel in an ocean-going steamer than in an inter-island boat, for the bigger steamer makes lighter work of the choppy interisland channels. I may candidly say that [621 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS the run from Honolulu to Hilo on the Matsonia was the only poetic experience I have ever had at sea: a full moon, a quiet ocean, and the shifting panorama of the six islands (for Kauai and Niihau lie off in the other direction, to the northwest) as you thread your way among them. Scarcely have you dropped Koko Head in the sunset before you lift the lowlying barrenness of westward Molokai, brown-glimmering under the moon. One light midway of the island shows you Kaunakakai; and a scant ten miles across from there the tragic promontory points a frail wedge into the foaming Pacific. Later we visited windward Molokai, and trod the grassy "streets" of Kalaupapa, all in the celestial light of an August morning; but at that time we did not know whether we should ever be nearer to the scene of Damien's martyrdom than [63] HAWAII: we were in the July moonlight, slipping past Kaunakakai. It seemed a very miracle to be only a dozen miles away, as the crow flies, from that lone settlement of shuddering connotation. There was dancing on the deck, under the bright lamps; and no one besides ourselves, I dare say, was thinking of Kalaupapa. Neither kamaaina nor malihini is supposed to think of it; it is excessively bad form, in Hawaii, to think of it. Lanai soon appeared to starboard, virtually lightless; and then for a long time we were under the lee of Maui, the bright lights of Lahaina having beckoned us in vain. Little Molokini one could almost have swung oneself into from the deck-rail. It is the mere tip of a crater, lifting its hollowed summit above the waves, looking more like a tiny atoll than anything volcanic. We passed between it and Kahoolawe-an island about [64 ] L~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~___:: _ _ F'~ li~lil 8, 1 1;1 ii1:..iiii...lii;...: lW.:...l.EMU...........~Ai;:":8il8~~RI8u ~ 8~i~rUi i~ i, K u m PorkinC ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~~ ~~ll;llBAlurj;r~i;;: ~ ~, '"~~~~ I I I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS sixty-nine square miles in extent, humanly inhabited at the present time by one old Jap, who seems to be the only person capable of enduring that solitude without going mad. Just why Kahoolawe has to have a caretaker I do not know, but apparently it does; and that is Kahcolawe's distinction. Finally, even East Maui dropped to stern; we were in the Hawaii channel, and it was past midnight. The dancing had stopped; the ukuleles were dumb; those people who had insisted on seeing the Southern Cross had got it pointed out to them, in spite of the fact that it was not there; and every one-we last of all-went to bed. Early in the morning we were off Hilo, beside the rusting bulk of an interned German tramp, and a sophisticated motor-launch was taking people off in relays. Every one was hotfoot for the volcano, [65] HAWAII: and there were hardly motor-cars enough to go round. We waited a little in Hilo for ours to return from the Volcano House -thirty-six miles away. Meanwhile, in another car, with a Japanese chauffeur, we sought out some of the natural wonders of the immediate vicinity. It was a wild and fruitless morning; unreal and scarce in retrospect to be believed in. I feel sure that we have seen Rainbow Falls and the Boiling Pots; for I know intimately now, for all time, the stifling heat of the path through the sugar-cane. There is nothing hotter in the world than that sweating shade, with the cane clipping you on either side; a calidarium with always a possible scorpion or centipede under foot. A narrow trail through high cane seems to lie straight along the Equator. You are glad to emerge again into the coolness of the noonday sun. [66 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Apparently we could not let well enough alone; for we went on, by an abominably muddy road, to a down-at-heel sugar village. Our Jap was confident, of courseso confident that he turned the big car in a slough at the end of a frowzy lane, and ran the hind wheels down a lush bank above a stream. Only some six miles out of Hilo, we were at the world's end. Twenty feet above us a Filipino flume-tender waved a condescending hand, signalling that he could not leave his flume. Women and children peeped out of knot-hole windows in their very dirty barracks; but neither their shock heads nor their shyness could help us. Moreover, among Americans, Filipinos, and one ardent Jap, there was very little Hawaiian to be collected, and Hawaiian would have been the only chance of a common tongue. A great deal of gesturing and shouting on the part of the [67] HAWAII: Olympian flume-tender brought out some straggling male Filipinos. They changed their rags for worse rags-any eye could see that it was going to be a dirty jobfetched stones from the stream and wooden joists from heaven knows where, and set to work. The flume-tender bossed from his height until he could bear it no more; then descended, leaving the cane to pile up, if it liked, at the curve of the flume. But nothing availed. The wheels would whir, then sink back. Suddenly a cheer went up for a new arrival-a Chinaman appeared in the frowzy lane driving a Ford. Another language was added to the confusion; but our chauffeur proudly, produced a rope, and the Chinaman, beinghe, too-a motorist, understood. We waited confidently for the Ford to pull the car out of the mud. But we had not reckoned with Japanese optimism. The Ford did its [68] I~~~~~~~ ~ ~~~~ Ii Ii ii 1l 1i 1i I ~~lB 191 1;..l11Iilj 111 II 11.1,,,_ 9 j,. 2 9....9 9~~~~~ g! 9 9 _ ~~~~~~~~~~~~l _~J * 1011 1l l 9l~ililil l l ~ 9 * {.r r~~~~%i i i~i r1ir.I1SS100......... r 1 rr.E.1 1.11.1 1. I I ~~~~~~srr 11..... *.- 1... '..,.. ~l gg99999 _ g _ 9 _ g _ ~~~~~~i;~g illlllE * I * | I g~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I~Ij i..i999S1.l. 1 > 1 ~n1~ r04. aricl 9 gj I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS best, but the chauffeur's rope was rotten and broke in the middle. More Filipinos arrived; a few children ventured out of the slummy barracks to stare; the flumetender clean forgot his flume; Oriental eloquence thickened the air; and at last, by some superhuman heaving of brown breasts and shoulders, the trick was done. Our car was once more safe in the lane. The Chinaman, in his Ford, disappeared somewhere, gracious, imperturbable, and superior to the end, making us feel as if we had somehow undergone a diplomatic defeat at the hands of Yuan Shih-K'ai. Our Japanese chauffeur. seemed our ineffectual brother-in-blood. Money was distributed; there was long cheering; and the flume-tender reappeared on his perch as if he had never condescended to leave it. We had the unplanned-for luck to stay four days in and about Hilo; and Hilo [69 HAWAII: was to me the supreme experience on Hawaii. After all our wanderings my heart is still there. I think I know the reason, though our beloved kamaainas could not understand it. Hilo, it should be admitted, has nearly the highest rainfall in the world, and that is enough to damn it in the eyes of those who live where they appear to control the weather, so admirably adapted to life it is. They also consider Hilo hot; but of course these tropic folk know nothing about heat. They are used to perfection in the way of climate, and they are ignorant of the rigors of the temperate zone. It rained in Hilo while we were there, but not excessively-just enough to give us an excuse, now and then, for sitting on our porch and watching the ladies of Hilo fend off the rain with paper umbrellas. Either from the mountains or the sea there is nearly [70 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS always a breeze; except for one night (in their hottest season) we slept under blankets. My own reason for loving Hilo was something deeper than this, however. It seemed to be a distinguished port of that imaginary hemisphere which has come to outweigh the other in charm. Imaginary, because it corresponds to nothing on the charts; indeed is not, strictly speaking, a hemisphere at all. It includes all of Africa except Egypt, all of the South Seas, and most of Asia east of Bombay. The Indian Ocean and the South Pacific wash its shores. It excludes Europe, the two Americas, and everything north of the fortieth parallel. It is not even wholly "east of Suez." Various tropic seas, like the Caribbean, do not belong to it. You can see that that is not really a hemisphere; and that it has no more ethno[711 HAWAII: graphic than geographic coherence. Soerabaya, Singapore, Raratonga, Dakar, Tunis, Antananarivo, Hong-Kong, and Sydney are all important places therein. Many people have sung of it, but Conrad is its laureate. I recognized immediately that I loved Hilo because Hilo was unquestionably of it. So, too, are other places in the Islands; but the hotel at Hilo gives the last authentic touch. If "Marlow" is ever fortunate enough to stay there, he will linger until, gazing at the big caoutchouc in the garden, he has told us some five hundred pages of vivid history. Ever and anon I looked for the dim light of his cigar. Hilo is a quiet town: there are no trolley-cars as yet, and the dampness of the climate makes you see and hear everything through a gorgeous mist of tropical vegetation. Here are the most enormous [72] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS poincianas and monkey-pods, the thickest forests of breadfruit and bananas, and here the palms shoulder highest into the sky. In the court-house grounds at Hilo the royal and coco-palms stand side by side like wedded creatures, male and female of a stately genus; the royal palm topping perceptibly-in some neck-craning, vertical distance-his spouse. Hilo is girt about by sounds of flowing water; and even when the sun is brightest, the clouds are impenetrable round the fourteenthousand-foot summit of Mauna Kea. You can stand, in mid-Hilo, on one of the bridges over the Wailuku River and watch the native children dive, feet first, into the pool, their long hair standing horizontally off their heads. We stopped to watch, one brilliant morning, and they, perceiving us, came farther down the gorge to dive where the haoles-the white folk[73] HAWAII: could see them better. They were inaccessible to us, unless we had walked a halfmile round to the top of the gorge; we could not so much as throw a coin to them. They moved out of the background into the middle distance for sheer amiability and tact. One boy sat at the top of the fall and coasted down the serpentine rockflume with the impetuous torrent-feet out, at his ease, letting the sinuous rush of water bear him up on its solid wave. Over and over he did it, with the regularity and grace of a natural phenomenon; each time reappearing out of the deep pool into which he had been flung, to clamber up the wall of the gorge-e da capo. Why he was not cut to pieces on the rocks only the Kanaka and his watergods know. How we lost ourselves happily in tiny Hilo, emerging ever upon the ocean; how [74] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS we watched the fishermen send their great nets, in one masterly throw, to settle in a huge, perfect circle on the water; how we nearly, in a briny little shop, bought a yellow fisherman's coat, simply because I would rather buy something I do not want from a Chinaman than something I do from any one else; how we learned to know the fringy palm-silhouette of Cocoanut Island authentically from any angle-these memories must not be dwelt on, diaryfashion. Much as we should have liked to dwell in Hilo forever, fed with strange fruits, sung to sleep by strange trees, and ministered to by Japanese boys whose smiles implied that we were samurai, we could not do it. We were always, in those few days, leaving it for some hinterland and coming back to our cottage-porch for perfect refreshment. Always there was the sense of being at the heart of a Con[ 75] HAWAII: rad novel; only, as in Conrad, those nameless, white-clad gentlemen-adventurers, and those beautiful, inarticulate natives were living in a drama to which the mere traveller had no clue. In the next street, with its madly mixed population, anything might be happening; a few miles back of us, in the tropical forest, the great treeferns might be making a living sanctuary for the indiscreet. Incredible that there should not be there, under our hands, the stuff of Victory or Falk! But we were the faithful Rechabites: we could not stay. Of the volcano of Kilauea who shall speak? Approach it as cynically as you like, you will be startled from your indifference. It will be strange if you do not feel, looking down into that pit, many comfortable veils stripped off your swathed mind. A naked human emotion is a great and terrible thing to encounter; some[76] Fi I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS times a thing to turn one's face from. But this is even more appalling. You may clutch, first-off, at the easy metaphor of hell. Kilauea is not like hell-it is worse. Worse, because there is no moral significance in it, to knit our souls to such a spectacle. Dante's eighth circle, with its barattieri sunk in boiling pitch, was part of a mighty plan; a physical result of moral facts; comprehensible, its very hideousness dependent on the historic threescoreyears-and-ten of mortal life. You can avoid hell by being good; and even if you descend into it, you will have human company. But this has nothing to do with vice or virtue; it makes naught of moral values. You squat on that rim and stare seven hundred feet down into Halemaumau -the inner pit of Kilauea-and history is superseded. The sulphur stench blows up now and then like a great wave and drives [77] HAWAII: you gasping from the brink. You wander about the lava-bed for a little (you could wander on that same lava-bed for miles, if you chose) and then return. The simple fact of Halemaumau is a pit, some twenty acres in extent, that seethes and boils incessantly. Every few moments an acre of solid lava rises up out of the caldron, is sucked back into the scarlet waves, and molten again before your eyes. In another corner of the pit a fiery fountain bursts like a great geyser. The worst of it is that you can hear it: the pot seethes and boils and groans in your very ears, for all the seven hundred feet between you and it. And if you cared to make a misstep, you could bound, from little ledge to little ledge, straight into the mutter and flame of it. I leave you to imagine the spectacle of Kilauea when the sudden tropic night has fallen on the vast crater of which [ 78] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Halemaumau is only the deepest pocket. The vague geologic visions of the layman do not lag behind. This goes on, one reflects, beneath us, to the very core of the planet; and the end of it is mere dying like the moon. Yes, geology is worse than theology.... "Are you going to write us a little story about the volcano?" a cheerful reporter telephoned to ask, after we had returned to Honolulu; and when I refused, the only reward of my decency was a head-line: "Mrs. Gerould Refuses to Boom Volcano." It still shocks me a little to think of booming Kilauea; but I will indorse anything the Promotion Committee cares to say about it. We wanted, not strangely, to see Hawaiian life in some remote and untouched corner, and the kamaainas sent us to Kalapana. A chauffeur was chosen for [79] HAWAII: us (an Island-born Norwegian) who could speak Hawaiian, and we were recommended to him as malihinis. It is a longish run through the forest of ohia and koa and wild banana and tree-fern. We took luncheon with us, but supplemented it with fresh mangoes from the pake store in Pahoa. Just outside Pahoa we passed by the lumber-mill, skirting great heaps of ohia ties for the Santa Fe Railway. Then we broke definitely with civilization. In mid-forest we stopped to eat,' leaving room at the side of the road for the scant Sunday traffic to pass us. Odd traffic indeed; for what tourist goes to Kaimu or Kalapana? Hawaiians (with a Portuguese strain?) on donkeys, wearing sombreros and looking for all the world like kindly Mexicans (if there be any kindly Mexicans!)-sitting, guitar on hip, and smiling broadly as the little [80] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS cavalcade piled up in the narrow defile, which was all our huge car left of the right of way; a Chinaman, weighed down by his broad panniers, pattering for miles along the road-we kept picking him up and passing him all the way from Pahoa, until finally he disappeared down an unnamed path into the very jungle; women and children in white holokus, astride of their unpedigreed mounts, bound for some surfeit of poi and fish with relatives at the back of beyond: all this fading gradually into utter loneliness as we approached the sea. Patches of dry taro would suddenly spring into view; making your eyes search swiftly for the grass house that could scarce be found among the foliage. There was, besides, the wonder that the tropic jungle always arouses, that it should be so lush and yet so barren of aspect. Nature is no landscape-gardener, and in that unchang[81] HAWAII: ing clime it is always both spring and autumn. The tree-fern thirty feet high is encumbered with decaying brown stalks; the ghosts of ohia-trees rise among their living kin, stripped to the bone by the ie-ie vine, which embraces and then kills. Bamboo clumps that are like little banyans crowd out their neighbors and dance upon the tangle underfoot. Vegetable life is as cheap here as human life in the slums. The idle jungle takes a long time to bury its dead; nature is a beautiful slattern, and earth very careless of the pieties. We had left good roads behind us at Pahoa, and we nearly tore the car to pieces getting into Kaimu. A line of native houses fronts the sea; between the road and the surf are thick groves of cocopalms, rooted deep in the sands of the beach. Little black pigs play tag round [82] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS your legs, and the infants of Kaimu run out, not to chide the pigs but to stare. There is no purer color in the world than this: the green palms fringing the brilliant blue ocean; the big Pacific surf breaking white and clamorous on coal-black volcanic sands. You scarcely need a red holoku in the middle distance, or the seawashed gray of the outrigger canoes on the shore. And, a mile beyond, Kalapanadesolate beyond emptiness, little gray houses set round a treeless open common, with a little shut church in one corner. What reminiscence of New England village greens is there, we wondered. Life has ebbed long since from Kalapana, and it seems to have kept, of tradition, only that bequeathed bleakness; as if nearly a hundred years ago it had passionately imitated the exotic North, and then died. In 1825 Kaimu and Kalapana were popu[83] HAWAII: ibus towns with potent chiefs. Both are tiny remnants now; but Kaimu has at least kept its tropical heritage. Kalapana has been blown upon by strong winds and washed clean of color; it has a Puritan cast, and that Sunday afternoon felt like a Puritan Sabbath. No one crossed the common or peered out of the little houses. Yet as soon as we had passed beyond the village centre and come to the pake store, we knew we were in Hawaii and not in Massachusetts Bay Colony. An automobile stood before the pake store, and it was filled with Hawaiians: grave elders sitting in the tonneau, children packed on the steps and the engine, and some one solemnly holding the wheel. We were bound for a Cave of Refuge half a mile off, and when we returned from our disheartening scramble over rocky ridges-I cannot "boom" the Cave of [84 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Refuge at Kalapana: it is not worth the scramble-the automobile was still there and still full-only of a different crowd. These passengers were equally motionless and equally solemn, and in a flash the explanation became clear to us. Some vague dots off on the sands were the owners of the automobile, and they had left the car for safe-keeping with the pake storekeeper. All Kalapana was busy wiping from its 'scutcheon the blot of never having motored. Each villager was having his chance to sit in or on the wondrous vehicle. Kalapana was sophisticating itself, and in so orderly a fashion that we suspected the pake storekeeper of renting out the priceless opportunity. Perhaps the one who took the wheel had to pay more. But even if the Kalapanans did to this extent belie their bleak New England common, I do not believe they shelter a kahuna. I [85] HAWAII: should be far surer of finding him in a grass house at Kaimu. Lahaina, on Maui, should have a chapter to itself, for the life of the little old town has been a drama. Lahaina is an aged gossip sitting by the sea, careless of her looks, her lost youth, and her dead romance. Some tropic towns grow old like the women of the tropics, completely and passively. Lahaina is no better preserved than any Hawaiian crone. The vast banyan under which a whole village could feast has been decently propped; the "missionary house," long deserted, has been "done up" and put to some public use or other; the Lahainaluna School, two miles away up the mountain, carries on a useful life. All this is done by the haoles as part of the white man's burden. But Lahaina herself puts forth no effort. [86] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS The town straggles vaguely along the beach-front, quite without a plan. There are a few dirty back cross-lanes, but most of Lahaina is the one long band of houses. Blue sampans crowd the shore, and an Oriental throng of children bathes and fights and plays in the water among the sampans. The dock is the business centre and lounging-place of the town. Across from it is the Pioneer Hotel, a bare, verandahed structure, seldom, I fancy, anything like filled. Tourists do not often get to Maui; when they do, they go straight on to Wailuku, a charming, well-kempt little town, thence to explore the enchanting Iao Valley or to climb Haleakala. No one, I might almost say, stops in Lahaina except on business-of which the neighboring sugar plantations create a certain amount. So it is not odd that in the Pioneer Hotel meals should be served at unsophisticated [87] HAWAII: hours, and that the public rooms should consist chiefly of a bar. It is not uncomfortable to sit on the upper verandah outside one's room and watch the sampans, and the water breaking olyr the reef. But it is impossible to think of Lahaina as a place to stay in, even as headquarters for the wanderer. Except for business, there is nothing to keep any one there. Lahaina has so renounced its past that it is hard even to reconstruct in imagination the days when it was the capital of the kingdom, when eighty or ninety whalers would be rocking in the roadstead, so close that you could step from deck to deck-when, thanks to the same whalers, Lahaina was such a sink of vice that even the lazy Hawaiian monarch had to bestir himself in the interests of morality. Earlier still, before 1849, rich Americans on the Pacific coast used to [88] 8 ~~t^ i OA6N#MA 66O~~~~i~~k b# K C Rd A~~iA6 IM NOMIO iii 166 VAOS~~~~fi~ak Witillikils I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS send their children to Lahaina to be educated; but Lahainaluna has long since been turned into a school for Hawaiians only. The hotel proprietor has time to operate two or three "movie" theatres, running off Japanese films for the plantation laborers. No, Lahaina has got beyond the point of mentioning her past; she is not garrulous; she does not protest against the yellow man; she sits in the sun and takes what the day brings. The vast banyans, the few old buildings set in deep antique verdure, give a dignity to her resignation-if indeed there is not an initial dignity in refusing to prattle forever about grander days. And we in our turn must have perplexed Lahaina, if Lahaina were given -which I fancy she is not-to psychologic curiosity. We arrived asking for food at untoward hours, and departed after decent folk had gone to bed. We [89] c HAWAII: invaded pake stores of a Sunday morning, demanding articles of vertu that Maui had never heard of. Lahaina manifested no impatience-and no alacrity. Sandwiches might be fetched, after a reasonable delay; but the fact that the Mauna Kea regularly lands her passengers at 9 P. M. will never induce a Lahaina hostelry to serve a meal at that hour. I might explain in my best pidgin-English to a Chinese tailoress what I wanted-her only reply was: "I no make." And she could have made it-sewing-machine at hand and shelves full of stuffs beside her-in twenty minutes at the outside. Lahaina had no standards that included us. "Most people go straight on to Wailuku," we had been told; and they do. There are plenty of rooms in the hotel, and judging from the unpopulous table d'h6te most of them must always be empty. Yet once, at [90 1 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS least, when we had several hours to wait for a steamer, I had great difficulty in finding an empty bedroom to rest in. I made many journeys to and fro before, finally, a Jap boy with no English grudgingly opened a door for me. Even then a large cockroach stalked me jealously up and down the stairs, and when at last I took possession and shook down the mosquitobar, the same cockroach (I had kept her well in sight for ten minutes-I could not mistake her) established herself disapprovingly on the floor by the wash-stand to chaperone me while I napped. We were destined to climb Haleakalaof which, you might say, East Maui consists. Everything in Hawaii has some superlative to distinguish it; and Haleakala is the largest extinct crater in the world. If I had had my doubts about Kilauea, I had them still more about [91] HAWAII: Haleakala, especially as Haleakala meant a stiff seven miles on mule-back. Something sinister hung over Maui from the first-something, that is, personally sinister for me; whether the vast shadow of Haleakala or the more distant and more psychic prospect of Kalaupapa-for we were to visit Molokai before returning to Honolulu. Perhaps the shadow was deepened by the knowledge that our remaining days in the Eight Islands were very few. My feet lagged on Maui; I never wanted to do the next thing. I did not always want to leave Lahaina; I never wanted to leave Wailuku; it is impossible for any one to wish to leave the Iao Valley. Besides, my heart was in Hilo, and we were not to see Hilo again. If East Maui means only Haleakala and its slopes, West Maui means only a more [ 92] himile ac a f f MOh a s K.ei4 Iia kiehkaL 166kftiiig ~wro Koolau Gaph 1rom 6&bof the oioiff ide retes SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS diversified mountain group. The two halves of Maui, once separate islands; are now joined by a narrow strip of green earth not much above sea-level. Going from Lahaina to Wailuku, you skirt the West Maui mountains, the road winding along a hacked-out ledge hung high above the sea. Haleakala, opposite you, steadily refuseslike Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea-to look its height. It is usually tremendous luck for a mountain to rise straight from sealevel-witness Rainier and (I suppose) Fujiyama. Such peaks seem to tower like Everest. But these Hawaiian mountains are so vast, so broad-based, so gradually inclined, that they produce less effect of height than of mere bigness. East Maui is one mountain; Hawaii, you might say, is two mountains. Life blooms and clings on the vast maternal slopes. Wailuku stands to windward between [93] HAWAII: the West Maui range and the ocean; and Wailuku is drenched in green and heavenly cool. The Trade blows eternally through your rooms-a bland and tempered blast. At your very door is the entrance to the lao Valley, which unites in a desperate and tantalizing perfection all the essential beauties of all the valleys you have seen or dreamed. The fantastic peaks rise ever ahead of you as you wind up the road beside the stream. As always in Hawaii, half the magic lies in the gorges that open on either side-so near, it seems, that you could stretch your hand into them, yet inaccessible for all that. They run back from the trail to a precipice with a waterfall; and no human being has ever climbed that cliff or knows what lies just beyond. They are narrow and dark with a perpetual green twilight; and wandering perfumes invisibly gird them [94 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS in. The Iao Valley is about the size of the Yosemite, and if the photographers have done any justice to the Yosemite, the Iao Valley is by far the more beautiful. It works back into a tangle of peaks, and the trail stops suddenly at a bridge over the torrent. Thence you can only stare. Eventually you turn, having paid one of those bitter farewells of the traveller. If it was hard to speak of Kilauea, it is far harder to speak of Haleakala; for Haleakala left me cold. The exquisite hospitality which guarded and guided us throughout that adventure I would separate entirely from Haleakala itself. Yet I feel treasonable in so doing, for it was a great lover of Haleakala who took us up -he was going himself, for the sixty-first time-and he and his household are a happy memory. May I, with that apol[95 ] HAWAII: ogy, be rude to the crater itself? Not, I think, without explaining that I am a tenderfoot; that the seven-mile trail from the last ranch to the rim is not a trail at all, but a mere indicated route over a boulder-strewn, ravine-cut slope; that I made the trip on the wisest and wickedest mule in the world, whose wickedness was by no means crude, but rather of a subtle and heartless Renaissance type. She was a Catherine de Medecis of a mule, and her sardonic pity of me was one of the bitterest things I have ever had to bear. The concrete rest-house is perched on the rim of the extinct crater, ten thousand feet in air-so close to the rim that at one corner you can barely squeeze round the little building. In the rest-house, rolled in your blankets, you await the dawn. It comes, breaking charily over a sea of clouds. Perhaps you see Mauna Loa and [96] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Mauna Kea-perhaps even Oahu-in the distance; but chiefly you see cloud, with bergs and drift and ice-pack, like a polar sea. If a polar bear could be discerned, you might well feel like a discoverer. Below you is the largest extinct crater in the world, its huge cinder-cones lifting towards you out of a half-mile depth. They look like titanic bake-ovens rusted out of use. The chief romantic interest of the crater is that Kamehameha the First once chose to lead his army through that world of ash and lava, up to the rim, there to surprise and conquer the King of Maui. Certainly on the rim of Haleakala even a king might have expected to be safe. The place enhances the legend of Kamehameha: he must have had a canny eye for settings who chose Haleakala, and the Iao Valley, and the edge of the Honolulu Pali for battle-fields. Were it not for the Arctic [97 HAWAII: imitations of the cloud-sea, one might epically dream. But the mule awaits you, and the Polynesian Napoleon is dead. My companions, it is fair to say, did not share a single one of my impressions or sensations. Haleakala "got across" for them. So, apparently, it does for the Japanese; for the guest-book in the rest-house is filled chiefly with Japanese names and Japanese attempts to celebrate the crater in English verse. Like little Kahoolawe, Haleakala has a Japanese caretaker-an old man who lives in a tiny shack down the slope and supports life, evidently, on the aesthetic passion. His friends come up to visit him now and then, and I was put to shame that very morning by a Jap who lingered lengthily on the rim, staring down at the cinder-cones. My own impatience compared ill enough with his aesthetic trance. Another disarming fact: [98] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS that so often the last thing to perish in the Japanese should be his delight in a natural wonder; that he should, at the end of life, be content with utter isolation, feeding only on sky and sea. The caretaker here must roam the crater itselfa stiff adventure for gnarled old bonesfor he brought me a clump of silversword to hang on my saddle-bow; and silver-sword grows, on all the planet, only within the crater of Haleakala, and in some other still remoter place of which I forget even the name. Yes, I drank deep of humility on Haleakala. Who shall say if there was not in it, too, a kind of claustrophobia, odd though that may sound? For it is not only within four walls that one can have the sense of being enclosed. Caught on that knife-ridge between the crater and the trail, with nothing to do save sit and stare, I felt hemmed in. On [99] HAWAII: three sides of us the cloud-pack cut off the world below. It was quite possible to conceive of that spot as the bourne from which no traveller returns. But I have apologized long enough for my own unworthiness. I would not discourage any one from Haleakala. Back, back to Olinda and Paia and Kahului and Puunene and Wailuku, and once again to Lahaina; then Molokai, of which I shall tell hereafter.... One of our wildest adventures came to us on Oahu itself. The kamaainas had sent us to Hauula, a village on the windward side of the island. We took a train from Honolulu to Kahuku-past Pearl Harbor and Waianae and Haleiwa and Marconi, where the great wireless apparatus rises starkly out of a barren plain by the sea, looking like an illustration for [ 100 ] fJThe ntrrokw-gauO Nli mWA bk(ffi Ki ui ldil Jufdg ifthislt yolt Old thmoh Mho sugar-mim ll[Nixt thin owspol"Us 8166iii. ~ i pu Lail, i~~~~i I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS some novel of the future. In three hours you reach Kahuku, and there the real train stops. You get into another-one car and an engine on a narrow-gauge track, like a rather bad mechanical toy. Then you puff through the sugar-cane past the prosperous Mormon village of Laie (the Mormon faith is very strong among the Kanakas) to Hauula. An excellent little inn, buried in verdure-a few cottages round a green compound, backed by a wilderness of fruit-trees-receives you there. I did not take the difficult walk to the Sacred Falls of Kaliuwaa; but G. went, leaving (like a good folk-lorist) his offerings to Pele all along the dark trail. The little votive cairns of Hawaiian visitors lined the ledges, and there would have been indecency in refusing to follow suit. Yet I have G.'s word for it that there was [ 101 HAWAII: more than folk-lore in his ritual correctness. It is G. and not I who should write of Kaliuwaa, for he and not I trod the sombre gorge-the authentic chasm, so he avers, of Kubla Khan. The photograph of Kaliuwaa speaks for itself. The falls are some fifty feet high, and the cliff behind them is unscalable. No white man, and no unmythical native, has ever been in the valley beyond, between the falls and the mountain ridges behind. Small wonder that the falls are sacred, or that a green mist of legend hangs over the hidden gorge that leads to them. Hauula soaked us deep in the Polynesian solution. We sat by night on the sands, listening to Hawaiian music. The faint guitar notes and the one rich voice mingled with the beat of the surf at our feet-"Ua like no a like," "Hawaii ponoi," "The Maui Girl," "Aloha oe," rising just [102] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS above the sound of the high tide on the shore. The night was moonless, but the breakers showed white through the dusk; the whole world was narrowed to song and sea-the surf like no other surf, the song like no other song. We have heard the cruel travesties of Hawaiian music that some phonographs give, and wondered why an instrument that can reproduce Caruso should so insult the Hawaiian voice and the Hawaiian strings. Wherever and whoever the Hawaiian, we found, the voice seizes you. They can all sing, and with a poignancy past the poignancy of any Italian aria. You are infinitely sorry for the Hawaiian when he sings; you feel sorry for yourself that you must part company with him. What is it? A greater liquidity in the strings than other fingers can achieve? A minor strain that no other vocal scale has discovered Something, at all events, [ 108] HAWAII: that there may be technical words to explain, but that there is, evidently, no technical skill anywhere to imitate. On our second day in Hauula we discovered signs of strange activity: busy goings and comings in the little hamlet; rhythmic pounding of poi; little ovens smoking in cottage compounds; leis of flowers and maile being woven in every garden. The focal centre of activity was the pake store. I am afraid that we stayed a long time with our noses pressed against the fence of the Chinese storekeeper. We were in the same case with a very old woman who lay full-length outside her grass house down the road, peering out at the passers-by: we were not invited. Benches had been pulled out of the court-house and set up in the compound; tables had been fashioned and were covered with food and drink; a low [104 1 Tin- SaTeOI Io.ililn of o lKat liiia~. kte Th~~~~~~ ~~~~ HAL A ~~~~~~~~~~ij. I I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS swaying roof of woven palm-leaves sheltered the feasters from the sun; behind, the size of the stone ovens showed that animals at least as large as pigs were being roasted underground. We did not exactly want to dip our hands into the poibowls or pull at a tentacle of raw squid; but we felt excruciatingly "out of it," all the same-quite like the old lady in the grass house down the road. Bathing in the ocean was delightful; in its way our own early supper at the hotel was equally so. Still, it was very hard... For every longing malihini there is a benevolent kamaaina. Suddenly, after dusk, on the hotel-porch, we found ourselves being invited-positively invitedby two kamaainas, to go to the luau. By virtue of being kamaainas, with a little Hawaiian to spare, and of having fished and canoed for a month or so past with [105 HAWAII: these particular villagers, they were free of the luau-which was an exclusively native festival, given by the pake storekeeper and his Hawaiian wife for their year-old son. The kamaainas offered to take us. They exacted from us only the solemn promise not to be shocked at anything we might see. It would never do to go nose in air to a native feast which had already been going on since 11 A. M., and was expected to last for twenty-four hours. Hawaiians are sensitive; it was a real country luau, none of your got-up Honolulu affairs; besides, it could not be concealed that every one would probably be quite drunk before morning. We promised; we fairly danced through the dark lanes to the pake store. The other kamaainas in the little inn professed no desire to attend; they had lived in the Islands for twenty years, and, thank Heaven, they [ 106 1 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS had never been to a luau. Their noses were already in air at the very thought. There is a difference in kamaainas. Our costumes were critically inspected; but after a little dishevelling of ourselves we were pronounced not grand to the point of suspicion. One has to smile a great deal in Hawaii if one leaves the tourist-track. On Molokai, later, we smiled unbrokenly at the lepers; we smiled almost continuously at the luau. With only some six words of Hawaiian, there was nothing else to do. The less an object or an event is in one's own tradition, the safer it is to smile at it. And, oh, the perils of stalking through the Polynesian scene with no knowledge of Polynesian etiquette! But we had luck at the luau-after a little the Kanakas forgot about us. The smell assailed us first as we stepped [107] HAWAII: from the road into the low-roofed compound. Only the fragrant maile-wreaths twined in among the palm-leaves mitigated it a little. The great torchesbranches of the kukui-tree stuck into the ground and set alight-added their fumes to the stench of roasted pig and puppy, raw fish, poi, and the liberal sweat of dancing and feasting humanity. We paid our scot-a gift to the pink-clad baby, who looked nearly luau-ed to death-and were made free of everything that was going. Our names, or at least some collocation of letters that spelled nothing, but went down pro formd, were inscribed by the white-haired Kanaka uncle in a very dirty little book. We sank down on a bench and pretended, for a time, to take no notice. We smiled impartially at the poibowls, the torches, and the ground. Presently we must have been voted harmless, [ 108 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS for the momentary lull caused by our entrance burst again into sound. People ate and drank as they liked, and danced in between. Sometimes they went to sleep for a few moments, then rose up refreshed. Such English as there was among the guests was spent in assuring us that there was no drink going except pink lemonade. Certainly neither "swipes" nor square-face was offered to us; and we affected a passionate belief in their absence. In point of fact, I preserve, myself, a perpetual innocence as to drunkenness; I always think that a man is eccentric, or insane, or ill, but never that he is drunk. That, somehow, does not occur to me until all other hypotheses have been exhausted. I credited even the abandoned' hula-ing of a very agile young woman in a blue holoku to Polynesian manners and customs pure and simple. True, I wondered why these young [109] HAWAII: Hawaiian giants should sway so gently, as though they were always on the verge of dancing; and some of them seemed to shake hands with us too many times over. But it took Chinese honesty to enlighten me. On the bench behind us sat half a dozen mothers with babies in their arms. I heard suddenly an authentic maternal cluck of disgust, and felt our own bench rock. Peering back, we saw that a Chinaman in a blue smock had fallen on the ground between the benches. Some Kanaka singing-boys thrust their ukuleles into G.'s arms, lifted the man, seated him limply on the very end of the bench, and propped him there as best they could. Every one proceeded, with the greatest art, to be scandalized. But in five minutes a boy with a great garland of white flowers round his dark hair was offering me pink lemonade, and again we got [110] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS eager assurances in pidgin-English that there was nothing else to drink. The Chinaman (who was utterly void of hypocrisy) had not yet come to; and he was quite beside the point. He remained beside the point, although he had periodically to be lifted from the ground and carried farther into the dark environs of the feast. He could no more sit up than his blue smock could have sat up by itself. We imitated the tact of our hosts -there were nearly a hundred of them by that time in the little low-roofed compound: there was no Chinaman, and in any case he was only very, very tired. There is a certain furiousness in that scene as I recall it-vividly, for all the intervening weeks. We were there a little past midway of the feast, and we had caught, probably, the wildest moment. It is fixed, to the last detail, in the memory: [111] HAWAII: the compound, shut in by its palm roof from the night, inflamed by its guttering, barbaric torches, its heavy reek cut by the pungent perfume of tropic flowers; the gorging and singing, and the spontaneous, savage dancing; every voice, every body stirred and moving to the time of the neverceasing hula songs. A few hours later, one had no reason to doubt, the bananaclumps by the roadside, the great kamani trees by the shore, would shelter exhausted couples who were sleeping off the luau. The kamaainas who would not go were very explicit about the drunken Kanakas we might trip over in the dark. We left, however, before the feast had come to a sordid decline, though, frankly, all the more amiable elements of orgy were there. I am told that on such an occasion one is fortunate not to understand Hawaiian, because if one understood the words of the hula [ 112] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS songs, one would have to get up and go away. Perhaps, though (contrary to our own tradition of the risque), no words could be so explicit as the actual gestures of the dancers. At the Panama-Pacific, a little earlier, we had drifted into a "show" in the Zone and found there an exhibition of muscle-dancing. That particular "show" was closed, later in the summer, by the Panama-Pacific authorities. But the young Hawaiian girl, though she may hula in a holoku, or even in a "middy" blouse and skirt, goes far beyond any Little Egypt of them all; and the fact that she rises from her bench, dances (if you call it dancing) in front of some youth until he comes out to join her, then dances in like fashion with him, removes her utterly from the unreality of whatsoever goes on behind footlights. This was purely spontaneous; they are not doing it for pay, [113] HAWAII: not even, I believe, for applause; they are as frank as mating leopards-though I cannot see in muscle-dancing (if that be the proper euphemism for these Polynesian agilities) any of the leopard's grace. You shrink back on your bench not to impede them; but you are not shocked. At least, we scarcely dared to be. The hula-ing Kanaka simply does not come into the realm of morals: he is a jungle-creature marked for death; civilization has never really touched him; he is amiable because he was born so, not because he has ever taken the Golden Rule to heart. He will have to be several reincarnations on, before he is ripe for the moral law or for anything that we understand by religion. It seemed physically impossible that such a feast should not end in pure orgy under the stars. There was nothing suggestive in the exhibition: it was completely ex[114] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS plicit; and, by some curious inversion of psychology, was not disgusting as the merely suggestive would have been. It was gay, shot with laughter and the friendly rivalry of singing-boys, timed to the cumulative provocation of the hula music that went dizzily on forever-and every now and then they would break off and rush, like greedy children, for a poi-bowl. They were literally animal; not animal as we use the word, with a squinting reference to something better which is called human. They laughed until the tears came; they were very kind to the babies; to us they were positively courtly; they doubtless said unprintable things, but there was not an eye you could not meet. As usual, one tried to make one's manners as good as theirs, even if one hoped that one's customs were a little better. The final comment was offered by G. [ 115] HAWAII: after we returned to the hotel. I could not refrain from congratulating him on the gracious figure he had made-his arms full of ukuleles, his fingers rolling a cigarette for an exhausted singing-boy, he flirting, meanwhile, in his best pidgin-English, with very beautiful brown ladies in snowwhite holokus. "Oh, I sized it up early," was his nonchalant reply. "What you needed at the luau was just the manners that you need at a Sunday-school picnic in the country." I asked a little tartlyfor I was clutching my exotic evening hard, and did not want it snatched awaywhether he had ever been at a Sundayschool picnic where the deacons were carried out drunk, where the deacons' wives danced the hula, and the deacons' babies ate raw squid. He was imperturbable: mutatis mutandis, he insisted, the social atmosphere was the same. But then, as the kamaainas [ 116] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS were always telling him, G. has the makings of a good Kanaka: he liked poi (which tastes to me like sour oatmeal) from the start, and it is a matter of keen regret to him that never once in the Eight Islands did he eat poi-fed puppy. "They say it's delicious," he still murmurs, a little wistfully. I do not know that he cares to suck out the true inwardness of a squid from its flimsy, toad-like skin; but he still holds to the Sunday-school-picnic theory of the luau. I offer it not only for its own quaintness, but because it brings out, better than all my words, the element of na'vete in the Kanaka festival. A disconnected tale has no perfectly appointed ending. Yet I have no choice but to end. I should have liked to tell of Puunene plantation, of the immaculate little brown creatures who pack our pineapples on windward Oahu, of Onomea on [117] HAWAII: SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Hawaii, and of Kahului on Maui, and a score of other things. Most of all I should like to spend myself on the Hawaiians themselves; for they are lovable beyond most peoples, and I fear I have done them scant justice. The Hawaiian is the important thing, if only because he is passing. Time has pulled down his heiaus; history has destroyed his sovereignties; museums alone preserve his art. Before so very long he will be gone; or will linger only as a thrill of incomparably sad music in the memory of a few old people whose children are inheriting the commonwealths of the future. [ 118] KALAUPAPA: THE LEPER SETTLEMENT ON MOLOKAI I KALAUPAPA: THE LEPER SETTLEMENT ON MOLOKAI T O begin with Kalaupapa on the note of comedy sounds perhaps strange; yet there was comedy, of the serious sort, in our approach to it. Nor would it be easy to translate that complicated adventure without some hint of the states of mind we encountered and traversed. We had not long been on the shores of Oahu-the scent of the mailewreaths still hung about us-when we discovered that our desire to visit Kalaupapa (the leper Settlement on Molokai) was going to make us unpopular. Decent citizens, unless they belong to the autocratic and efficient Board of Health, do not think about Kalaupapa. They prefer not to. [ 121 ] HAWAII: If put with their backs to the wall, by the innocent and tactless malihini, they deliver themselves of language which in its mingling of beauty and blasphemy is Apocalyptic, no less. They tell you in flowery words that the Settlement is unbelievably beautiful (which it is); that there is not a happier group of people in the world than the Kalaupapa lepers; that their well-nigh painless existence is compounded of "movies," ball-games, horse-races, and lotus-eating idleness; that it is with the utmost difficulty that any of them, if paroled, are induced to leave. So far, so good; and they are very near the truth. Why, in that case, should the decent citizen so resent one's interest in this paradise? Just as one is putting that question to oneself, it is answered by the decent citizen. They don't like to think about leprosy; it is not a nice subject; they [ 122] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS wonder at you for liking to talk about it; hang you, why can't you take their word about Kalaupapa without preposterously and morbidly wishing to go there? Nobody goes there except on business; the lepers don't like to be made a show of; the Islanders don't want it written up; they have trouble enough now with fools on the "Coast" who think the whole Hawaiian soil a sort of culture for the disease; and, anyhow, there are more lepers in Minnesota than in the whole Territory of Hawaii. (I was quite unable to substantiate this, later, in Minnesota.) Nothing would induce them to visit Kalaupapa: not because they are afraid, for there is no danger; not because they do not wish to look upon horrors, for there are no horrors to look upon; not because they are afraid of sympathetic suffering, for of course the lepers are happy; chiefly, one is forced to [ 123 1 HAWAII: infer, because they themselves are "nice." The next inference, about oneself, comes all too quickly. Even the mild mention of Stevenson does not justify one before men. And the result of the last cartridge one has to shoot-" Why, if there is no horror, don't you want the rest of the world, stirred up by Stevenson and others, to know it?"-is the mere sulky restatement of the fact that they do not want the rest of the world to know anything about it at all. Whatever may be said of the sorry logic, the jumbled, contradictory replies of the decent citizen, he produces his effect. Far from exciting in one a mulish desire to visit Kalaupapa in spite of him, he nearly persuades one that it is better to stay away. If, with all mitigations, it is so bad as that! The plain truth is, I believe, that Island [ 124] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS people are afraid of leprosy, though they are perfectly aware that their fear is groundless. They are undoubtedly justified in resenting the easy association, in the mind of the world at large, between leprosy and Hawaii. They feel rightly that they ought not to be made to pay for the fact that they are taking magnificent and notorious care of their lepers, while, in the backward Orient generally, no such strict tactics are adopted. "We segregate them and people talk; elsewhere they run about freely, and no one pays any attention," is a fair enough complaint. They are sensitive, not without reason; and one does not wholly blame the Promotion Committee for omitting, in its excellent series of maps, any map whatsoever of Molokai-though the omission is inconvenient. Other factors have entered into their sensitiveness. Stevenson, to begin with, did them a bad turn by [125 1 HAWAII: focussing the attention of the reading public on that remote promontory; doctors, of all people in the world, have sometimes been inconceivable cowards; there is always in every one's mind the rare case of the respectable white man or woman who has contracted the disease, God alone knows how. And underneath all is the fact that investigators are still sailing cautiously an uncharted sea. No one knows the whence, the wherefore, and the cure, for this disease. It is small comfort to know that typhus is transmitted by body-lice, because in a stricken country body-lice are not easily guarded against; but it is some comfort. Leprosy is difficult to get, and is probably contracted only by inoculationyes: the difficulty lies in the "probably." Careful physicians will not speak of cures, only of "arrested cases." You cannot be very comfortable about anything so un[ 126] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS certain as all that. And, finally, though we all know how much greater is the menace of tuberculosis than that of leprosy, tuberculosis has not staggered down to us, a very metaphor of all that is horrible, from the pages of the Bible. The only thing that the malihini may reproach the kamaainas for, in this connection, is ignorance of their own merits. By playing the ostrich about Kalaupapa they lose the finest chance in the world of being praised. By our initial plea, before the Island attitude was clear to us, we had set in motion benevolent machinery that it would not have been good manners, by the lightest touch, either to accelerate or to stop. Some sporting instinct prevented us from ever quite saying: "Don't take any further trouble"; even as etiquette precluded any impatience over the unwinding of red tape. By the time the red tape was all [ 127] HAWAII: unwound we could only, in decent calm, await the event we had invited. We could not have refused to go to Kalaupapa without presenting a rare spectacle of inconsistency; nor could we have gone with any silly sense of triumph, as importunate tourists who had at last got their way. It should be recorded here and not later that the visit was in the most solemn sense a great adventure, and that our thanks are eternally due to those who procured and those who gave the permission. One comes away with a desperate desire to pay tribute, and to cry out concerning many people that they have foully lied. From the little comedy of our gradual introduction to the scene we came to the very noble human drama enacting itself lonelily on the remote stage of windward Molokai. To most Americans who have had no direct relations with the Hawaiian Islands [128] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Molokai automatically suggests Father Damien and Stevenson's incomparable "Open Letter." To rake up old scandals is caddish work; but not necessarily if the object is rehabilitation. One may tardily defend a dead man; and I fancy I am not the only person for whom Damien needed more defending than he got from R. L. S. In Honolulu, where the truth always coexisted with gossip, Damien has his rights. His name is no household word, but at least he is not, I fancy, scandalously thought of. But for a wider circle, Stevenson and the unfortunate Doctor Hyde, between them, have managed to malign Father Damien almost beyond redress. Most of us know about Damien solely from that unhappy controversy. It cannot be too firmly or too often reiterated that Damien suffered an unmystical and truly glorious martyrdom without breaking one of his [129 ] HAWAII: priestly vows. Dirty he was, apparently, as Stevenson says repeatedly in his magnificent polemic. Certainly he did not carry a bottle of lysol in his pocket; if he had, he would doubtless never have been, in the technical sense, a martyr. He worked incessantly for the health of the Settlement: for pure water, for clean houses, for sanitation, as any one not an expert could have understood it in the '70's and '80's. Damien, remember, was the first member of any religious body to concern himself with that purgatory-for no one pretends that Kalaupapa was a paradise then. And because there was no toil that he disdained, he worked with the lepers to build them houses, running the constant risk-a risk that in some unknown, unrecognized moment fulfilled itself fatally-of inoculation. The "torn and bleeding fingers" of the carpenter-priest encountered, over tools [130] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS and timbers, the stumps and sores of his flock; and for Damien it can always have been only a question of time-only a question of time before that memorable day when, after a difficult exploration of the canons of the great cliff (in search of a pure water-supply for the Settlement), he drew his shoes off his tired feet, found one heel bleeding and lacerated, and felt no pain. There is no need to go at length into the question here. Damien's own reports to the authorities, the long report from Mr. Reynolds (the contemporary superintendent of the Settlement) on Damien's work -called forth by the Stevenson-Hyde controversy-tell the tale quite clearly. Any one to whom the royal and Territorial archives are inaccessible can find enough for purposes of conviction in the appendices to Mr. Arthur Johnstone's book on "Stevenson in the Pacific." No one [131] HAWAII: with taste can regret Stevenson's "Open Letter"; it is one of the finest polemics we have. But it is a pity that Stevenson's hero should have been also his victim, and ironic that Stevenson, in the end, should have seemed to agree (for I think most people read it that way) with Doctor Hyde and "the man in the Apia bar-room." Stevenson makes us all feel with him, for the moment, that even if the scandal is true it does not matter; but from the moment that the scandal is not true it does matter immensely. There is all the difference in the world between a good man and a saint; between excusable human frailty and superhuman self-control. The leashes are off, the bars are down, then, for our enthusiasm; and Damien's very grave, hushed and shaded and small, beside his Kalawao church, becomes a different thing. To the sisters, too, Stevenson's is but a [ 13i] I, ~ '' il _iiiI Icz.. ii iiiRii11 S 1 l _1 E~~~~s; 1 I,,, ~, I _=, I ~ B~B~~. i~li a~ s tt j J1 t)ggt ro tM ttS. l )Xtt l.g, X y0;le m e.~xgrk fifihr rvB h.|>js~lste b~ zel,1Xl t X } X W I |~~~~~~~~~~~"1 ~'~iprc a r~clbirar l ei~yrrr~. 1 1 Sli.a ~i~l l ~ E Wte~1 I I r~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS squinting tribute. Catholicism was never dear to him: whenever he comes face to face with Rome, whether it is Frangois Villon writing the "Ballade pour sa Mere" or the Franciscan sisters disembarking at Kalaupapa, his admiration halts, his mouth is wry. He thinks them saintly poorcreatures; he boggles over the "pass-book kept with heaven." To him who does not love, it is seldom given wholly to see. I do not question the authenticity of the "ticket-office to heaven." It sounds like many a mild convent joke that I have heard from the lips of nuns. The most devout nun will talk with familiarity and gayety of the things that are most important to her; homely metaphors are on her lips for the most reverend facts. Religion is her business, and all her practical business, for her, is religion. The Pauline or the Miltonic mind may not find the Catholic [ 133 ] HAWAII: practicality alluring, but the Catholic practicality is not for that any the less Christian. Of Mother Maryanne, Stevenson had nothing but good-in a little poem-to say. I love R. L. S. as much as one can love any man for style alone, and I am not tempted to quarrel with his "horror of moral beauty" that broods over Kalaupapa, or even "the population-gorgons and chimaeras dire." But things have changed greatly since '89 and the days of the monarchy. In point of fact, at the present day, the moral beauty is without horror, and the "gorgons and chimeras dire" do not bulk big in the visitor's vision. And now I have done with Stevenson. I have mentioned him because his scant pages have so long been, for many of us, our only document on Molokai. Scant though they are, they are the pages of a master; they are the best we have or are [ 134 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS like to have; and it is fair that they should thus isolate themselves. The more recent unofficial accounts that I have seen or heard of-and they are not more than two or three-are beneath contempt, and, justly enough, virtually unknown: written from the safe haven of Honolulu and puffed out with hearsay, or else in the full panic of a visit that turned out to be precisely as bad as it was firmly expected to be. The California journalist who wrote that hands and feet, toes and fingers, were free in Kalaupapa for any one who would stoop to pick them up; the man who recorded the terrors of a twenty-four hours' stayinventing them presumably from the superintendent's lanai, from which, in point of fact, he could not be induced to stir during his visit —are among the chief causes of the present difficulty of getting to Kalaupapa. A great work, physically, socially, [135 ] r HAWAII: morally, has been achieved there; and the quiet heroes who do not boast are very shy of being lied about. They are even shy of being talked about at all, and (though the official personnel, and, of course, the whole form of government, have changed since Stevenson's time) I do not make out that Island people are, even now, very enthusiastic about the Damien letter. Stevenson cannot have been popular in Honolulu. His constant tendency to stand by the Polynesian instead of the white man would not have made him so. His attack on Doctor Hyde kicked up a Kona storm in the old missionary aristocracy; and even those who had no personal affection for Doctor Hyde had much more admiration for him than for Stevenson's reprobate friend, King Kalakaua. It was probably the gutter-gossip of Kalakaua's intimate circle that gave Stevenson his obvious mis[ 136] 1 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS givings about Damien's morality. Certainly he would have liked, if he could have done so, to contradict Doctor Hyde. Whatever one's political attitude to annexation, there can be no doubt that Kalakaua was, in feminine phrase, a "horror." One is not by way of reproaching R. L. S. for preferring him to the "missionaries," but one could not expect the "missionaries" to feel that Stevenson had chosen delicately. I fancy the traditional objection of the patriotic Islanders to having Molokai "written up" may have begun with Stevenson himself. This is, however, the merest inference of my own. The technique of leper-segregation in the Islands is admirably sane and simple. The great majority of the lepers are Hawaiians, though there are some Chinese, some Portuguese, some Japanese, and usu[ 137] HAWAII: ally a very few whites. All officials of whatever sort throughout the Territoryincluding policemen-have, as part of their regular duty, to report cases or suspected cases to the Board of Health. Many cases so reported are, of course, not leprous, but, if the suspicion exists, examination is made. Obvious, or even doubtful, cases are then taken to the receiving-station at Kalihi (near Honolulu) and are kept there under observation and treatment for six months. If they are declared non-leprous, they are returned to their homes at government expense; if the disease is clinically present, they are sent to Kalaupapa. Kalaupapa, even, is not the exile terminable only by death that it has been called, for every year a number of patients are discharged from the Settlement itself. While it is unwise as yet to speak of cures, it is certain that the disease can sometimes be arrested, [ 138 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS so that the patient is once more a perfectly harmless member of society. In such a case he is discharged on parole, his only duty being to report to the Board of Health once a month. The babies born at Kalaupapa are removed from their parents at birth to a well-equipped nursery, and come into no sort of contact with lepers thereafter. If, after a year, they are still "clean," they are taken to Honolulu and placed in the homes there provided for them (one for "non-leprous boys," one for "non-leprous girls"). They are cared for, educated, and prepared for self-support. If, when grown, they are still "clean," they go out into the world and live their lives among their fellow beings. The system of removing babies at birth was entered on only seven years ago, and it is too early for positive statement; but so far, with one possible exception (this [139] HAWAII: being a baby under observation at Kalaupapa when we were there), the children removed from their parents at birth have not contracted the disease. That Doctor Pratt and the Board of Health have succeeded in developing in Hawaiians a sane attitude to the disease is shown by the fact that hardly a week passes when some native does not enter Doctor Pratt's office in Honolulu and ask to be examined for leprosy-though, more often than not, his suspicions are unfounded. Gone are the days of Koolau, the leper who intrenched himself in the Kauai canons, defying the law. At the Settlement itself there are two villages: Kalaupapa, the larger, on the western side, and Kalawao, three miles across from it on the east. The official purpose now is to concentrate all the activities of the Settlement at Kalaupapa, [ 140 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS which has the boat-landing. Lepers are no longer allowed to build houses at Kalawao, and cottages there are razed as they become useless. Except for the United States leprosarium at Kalawao and the federal lighthouse, everything is under Territorial jurisdiction. To the Settlement at large the Federal Government contributes nothing. The study, care, and treatment of leprosy in the Islands are financed by the Territorial government and carried on by the Territorial. officials-notably, of course, the Board of Health, the resident physician, and the superintendent. All of these have faithfully worked together to the superb results that are there; more especially, perhaps, if distinctions can be made in such a devoted group, is credit due to the superintendent, Mr. McVeigh, who is lord of the domain. He is directly responsible for it all: provisioning the Set[ 141 HAWAII: tlement, erecting new buildings, condemning and destroying old ones, making life sanitary, comfortable, practicable for eight hundred souls-the brothers at the Baldwin Home, the sisters at the Bishop Home, the helpers and servants, as well as all the population of lepers themselves. He must arrange for every detail of life-no simple task in a community so cut off from the world. Landward the single trail over the pali behind is a dangerous one to mount or descend; and seaward the Kalaupapa landing, even for ships' boats manned by amphibious Kanakas, not always safe. Kalaupapa has been known to go six weeks without the possibility of communication by sea. All responsibility for the Molokai lepers is, as I have said, assumed by the Territorial government. Houses are built for them if they wish it; a semi-weekly ration [ 142] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS is issued to them; they need do no work whatever unless they choose, and if they do choose they are well paid. Those who have money of their own may have their own houses built to suit themselves. If the leper has a non-leprous husband, wife, or relative who wishes to come to the Settlement to live and care for him or her, it is permitted. There are some fifty-odd of these kokuas (helpers) who, though well themselves, make Kalaupapa their permanent home. (Men have been known to have two or three leper wives successively, women to have successive leper husbands, and still themselves remain "clean.") Friends of the lepers are allowed to make the journey to Kalaupapa to see themtalking with them, of course, only in a specially appointed house through a glass screen that prevents any contact. The life of the inhabitants of Kalaupapa is as [ 143] HAWAII: normal in every way as it can be made. If they choose to work in their gardens, the climate soon gives them a verdurous little paradise all their own. Those who can afford it, and desire it, may have, Hawaiian-fashion, beach-houses. The rough land between Kalaupapa and Kalawao is overrun by four hundred horses and donkeys, owned by lepers who scarcely ever mount them-pasturage, of course, free. Medical treatment is not obligatory, but is offered to all, and nearly all take it. Such, briefly, is the regime that science and pity have collaborated to produce. Arid it may sound when formally set down, but nothing so rigid was ever so little terrifying or institutional. Of Wailuku and Lahaina I have spoken elsewhere, but my keenest "sense" of Lahaina perhaps came on that evening when [ 144] I1Bi; aia;; a ~t r3 c;i,i,,, r: ilii a; s~;8 n I ~ i~rii,,,,, iSs I ~ "1 C1 "j a r Zi I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS we waited, after all the town had gone to bed, for the Mikahala to whistle for us. By the courtesy of the Inter-Island Steamship Company the Mikahala was to change its schedule (a wild, Conrad-ish schedule of minor ports and smaller islands, where docks are not and landings are made by the grace of God) and make a special call for us that night at Lahaina. It has come to seem to us that a perceptible portion of our lives has been spent at Lahaina waiting for steamers, and I fancy that the sense of long time thus spent comes chiefly from that imperishable evening. The long beach front was dark; the Jap boys in the hotel had gone to bed; not a sampan showed a light; even the children, who apparently are the last to sleep in Lahaina, had forsaken the shore, and there was no sound of yellow and brown babies splashing out of the sea to croon strange syllables to the [145 HAWAII: tune of "Tipperary'"-a game they will keep up as long as there is a single light left on the dock. The only people up and dressed in the tropic night were we and the English proprietor of the hotel, who, with Arabian courtesy, beguiled our vigil with tales of longer vigils of his own in the Klondike rush. A little after midnight the Mikahala's whistle came, and in due time a boat swept darkly across the lapping waves, through the slit in the reef, and finally to the landing-stair. The Hawaiian purser had come with it; I stretched out my hands, and to him and the boatmen I committed my stiff and helpless form. "The Kanakas will take care of you" is an Island formula for landings, and it is impossible to take it too piously. By sheer instinct I drew my hands away from G. and the hotel-keeper, and thrust them out to whatever brown [ 146 SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS paws would grasp them. We reached the Mikahala, and soon she began to bob towards Molokai. Too much cannot be said of the utter "niceness" of the InterIsland officers and crews. Our stateroom being positively unnavigable for smallness-one hit the wall at every motion of the ship-the purser offered us two "apartments," which we accepted. Then he retired, doubtless to take off the white shoes that he always ceremonially donned when near a port. At sea, he went beautifully barefoot. I am grateful, eternally grateful, to the Mikahala, to those who own and those who sail her; but her motion is the motion of an egg-beater, and identically the same whether she is "under the lee" of something or in mid-channel. She may or may not run to seven hundred tons; she hoists a schooner sail when the Hawaiian captain [147] HAWAII: feels like it; she is never empty of sugar and deck passengers; and her delightful morale does not prevent her from inevitably smelling to heaven with a smell that I swear no pen can describe. I am always seasick on a small boat, and I got no wink of sleep that night. I was tired beyond my fatigue record, and under the lee of Maui I had time to reflect a good deal on the decent citizen and the multitudinous sharpness of "I told you so." Thanks to the Medicean mule of Haleakala (who had hated me at least as much as I hated her) I was sore in every joint; and though I felt vaguely that I was being a "sport," there is no moral tonic in being a "sport" in spite of oneself. I knew I was acquiring no merit. One thing, and one thing only, sustained me: the remark of a commercial traveller who had shared our motor the evening before from Wailuku to La[ 148] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS haina. "Have you ever seen a leper?" he asked, knowing, as all Maui knew, that we were bound for Kalaupapa. "No," I confessed. "I have, hundreds of 'em -fitted 'em to shoes, heaps o' times." Blessed be "Windy Ben"! He flung sunlight into my mind. Yet, even so, it was not a cheerful night, and I hardly knew, when at 6 A. M. the Jap boy knocked on my latticed door and murmured "Kalaupapa," whether I was hearing the crack of doom or the flutes of heaven where there is no more sea. At all events, the Mikahala had stopped beating eggs, and I dressed and greeted G. with something of relief. G. had been over to the port side while I finished preparing myself, and came back reporting Kalaupapa "awfully interesting" from the roadstead. With that, and a cup of coffee drunk standing by the deck rail, I was fortified, and we scrambled [ 149 HAWAII: down into our little boat, a mere stone's throw, it seemed, from the concrete jetty where we finally landed. The Pacific was as calm as its name that morning, but that same concrete jetty, I am told, has a great gift of smashing boats to splinters. The leper settlement is, as every one knows from Stevenson, a low-lying shelf projecting beyond the forty-mile cliff of windward Molokai. It is, in G.'s phrase, "of the shape of a strung bow"; it is not more than three miles across at its greatest width; the taut string is the great pali that is Molokai's northern wall-fifteen hundred to two thousand feet of sheer rock, insurmountable along its whole length save by one difficult and dangerous trail. The shelf is thus surrounded on three sides by ocean, and at the extreme curve of the bow the federal lighthouse faces the Tropic of Cancer and the North Pole. It is "the [ 150] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS shore that hath no shore beyond it set in all the sea." The first glimpse of windward Molokai is so beautiful that one scarce believes it, even in that land of miraculous shore-lines. Mr. Bonine's photographs will make more vivid than can any words of mine the conformation of cliff and sea-line, but no photograph can reproduce that melting-pot of tropical color, seething gorgeously in the morning sun, fanned by the sweet Trade. There was tonic to every nerve in the mere light and air of the place. The superintendent met us at the landing, took our permit, saw that we carried no camera, and led us to a little motor-car. One of the leprosarium employees acted as chauffeur. Doctor Goodhue, the resident physician, was absent from the Settlement that morning, and we did not have the privilege of meeting him. After a few moments on Mr. McVeigh's lanai we pro[ 151] HAWAII: ceeded along the low sea front, following the curve of the bow to Kalawao, then back from Kalawao under the lee of the pali, along grassy roads named for Honolulu streets, to Kalaupapa. Everywhere we alighted and talked: with the caretakers at the leprosarium, with Brother Dutton at the Baldwin Home, with Mother Maryanne at the Bishop Home, with the Hawaiian matron at the nursery, and always with Mr. McVeigh himself, who threw his domain open to us in friendly wise. Everywhere were lepers-crowded about the landing-stair to watch the unloading of supplies; sitting in front of the Molokai store; working as Kanakas can work, and idling as only Kanakas can idle, so gracefully that it seems a career in itself; nearly all smiling, waving their hands, lifting their hats, or running up to Mr. McVeigh for a word of direction or advice. [ 15 ] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS Stevenson and others had warned us of much hand-shaking to be done. I had been reassured as to that before ever setting foot on Molokai; still, I wore gloves. G. declared that he should feel both tactless and a fool, and would wear none. He had more prevision of facts and atmosphere than I. On no occasion did we have to shake hands with the lepers: a smile, a nod, an "Aloha," were all that was expected of us. White magic seems to be at work in Kalaupapa. I can record it as solemn fact that once you are on the promontory all panic, fear, or disgust drops utterly away. The one step, from the world that is not Kalaupapa to the world that is, does the trick: a trick appreciable only for those who on some noisy summer noon have come suddenly into the dusk and incense and vastness of a great cathedral. There is nothing church-like [ 15 ] HAWAII: in this atmosphere: it is all sunlight and Polynesian cheer; but the mental change is as great. I got at Kalaupapa-and got it before five minutes were sped-the highest impression of social decency that I have ever had. The highest, probably, for the reason that this is not the natural atmosphere for social exquisiteness to flourish in; and to find here breeding that would do credit to high birth and good fortune is to have swift intuition of a miracle. Never have I been so tightly held up to civilization as on Molokai. The Hawaiian is naturally amiable, anxious to please, and easily contented; Kalaupapa is exceedingly beautiful, and enjoys, as Doctor Goodhue has said, "the most perfect climate on earth short of Eden"; leprosy is not, I am told, in itself a painful disease. Yet even so, leprosy and exile are not essential elements of Paradise, and [ 154] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS if ever credit was due, it is due here. Faces smiled at us now and then that could scarce smile at all, and even in the stare that the flesh made senseless one knew that "Aloha" and no other meaning lay behind the mask. As we left Kalaupapa, a bell was sounding faintly, and we saw the sisters going to mass. The Union and Mormon churches were austerely closed. We passed the racecourse and ball field (there is a triangular league at the Settlement, and Mr. McVeigh, among his other activities, serves as umpire), with its grand-stand-empty, naturally, at seven in the morning. Beyond Kalaupapa the wild low shore that curves to Kalawao is humanly barren. Only the lighthouse and a few beach houses break the pasturage of horses, donkeys, and cattle. At Kalawao we alighted to inspect the federal leprosarium. Not a room, not [155 1 HAWAII: an alcove, not a workshop of that great congeries of buildings escaped us. "But nothing in the sounding halls he saw." The leprosarium has been finished for seven or eight years, and for only some six weeks of that time has it harbored patients. Four or five caretakers keep the frame of it from utter ruin; but, except for the vast laboratory where the federal physician (absent on leave in the States at the time of our visit) struggles heroically with what to a scientist must be very like despair, the place is disused. The wards are empty, save of piled-up furniture, much of which has never even been uncrated. A huge piece of apparatus, as intricate and unintelligible to look upon as a seismograph, has a room to itself to fall to pieces in. The dynamo is kept in running order to prevent it from rusting out, though what it lights and why are a mystery to the out[ 156] a ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ /^ 5^ ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS sider. The treasures of the big machineshop would make a Honolulu plumber turn in his bed to dream of grand larceny. The place is as modern as an Eastern hospital, and as desolate as the moated grange. The heroic labors of the present federal appointee-and I am told that they are heroic-cannot suffice to redeem the leprosarium from uselessness. Even the uninformed visitor must feel bitterness to see the dynamo purring as vainly as a cat by the fire, when, a few miles away, the Settlement itself, the homes, the nursery, the very hospital must do with lamps and candles because the Territorial government cannot afford a dynamo. The truth is that the leprosarium was "queered" in the early days of its being, and since then the federal appropriation has been greatly cut down -not unnaturally, since no apparent results came from the larger sum. Tribute [ 157] HAWAII: to the work of Doctor McCoy was everywhere voluntary and unstinted, but never was man more handicapped by past events with which he had nothing to do. It is not likely that he will ever have any patients at the leprosarium itself. Exile to Molokai is, of course, not always voluntary, but once there the patient finds his liberty well-nigh complete. He need take no treatment unless he wishes. Voluntarily once some lepers went to the leprosarium for treatment, but a few weeks of confinement sufficed, and they fled. It would not occur to any leper now-so vivid is that chapter of tradition-to go to Kalawao for treatment, and even did Hawaiian psychology change, the hospital is scarcely now in condition or in funds to take care of them. Not without relief did we turn from this grave of humanitarian hopes to make one more call in Kalawao [ 158] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS -on Brother Dutton at the Baldwin Home. This was the scene of Damien's labors and his death. Across the grassy road is Damien's church and beside it his grave. The Home itself, where he lived, is now under Brother Dutton's charge, and after the long years nothing remains of principle or aspect that gave it the name of "Damien's Chinatown." Mai pake (the "Chinese Evil") is Hawaiian for leprosy; and it so happened that of the group of lepers on Brother Dutton's tiny porchsome ten or a dozen-through which we had to make our way, only one, a Chinaman, could positively not be looked at. Brother Dutton's little crowded porch was my fire-test; after that there was nothing in Kalaupapa I could not face. A curious medley of emotions is the reward of the visitor to Kalaupapa, and one [ 159] HAWAII: of the hardest with which to deal is this sudden fear, face to face with a leper who is all but touching you, of not striking the human, right note. It does not happen often-it is pitifully true that half the visible population of the Settlement would be unsuspected by the layman of any dread illness. I honestly believe that the worst of it is the mere knowing that they are lepers. But now and then one is flung suddenly on the mercy of one's instincts. There is no time to decide whether to look or not to look; to fix the exact shade of decent attention between aversion and curiosity. One must not stare, one must not shrink; and the vision of unspeakable disfigurement, just because it is so rare, finds one unprepared and praying inwardly, after the visual shock, that one's smile was in the right place and the movement of one's eyes and muscles decorous and un[ 160] as OD SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS hasty. In a case like that, one's ancestors are responsible, and one hopes, for their credit, that the smile which feels a little stiff has not looked so. For to give pain to one of these unfortunates would be high treason to the spirit of the place. Their manners never fail. We had read that they thrust themselves upon the visitor in eagerness of welcome; we had heard from the decent citizen that they shrank from being looked at. Both statements were in intent discouraging, and neither is true. You walk through Kalawao and Kalaupapa as you might walk through any Hawaiian village, and if there is embarrassment, it is all on your side. No one intrudes himself on your path; no one shrinks from your sight. They expect to look and be looked at, and their greetings are too frequent and too spontaneous for self-consciousness of any sort. Perhaps they seem a hint [161] HAWAII: more cordial than folk in the other islands, but life here is, after all, far emptier of strangers than even in Kalapana or Kaimu. Save for the worst stricken, they are less apathetic than the men pounding poi or mending fish-nets on the shores of Hawaii or Maui. They are a little more glad to see you, but they quite realize that you are none of their business. The extraordinary naturalness of the Settlement is its great feature both to eye and mind. Much of one's visit is, in a sense, without incident, because there is nothing "special" to stare at. You meet people going about their business or pass them sitting on their porches, just as elsewhere. Some of the leper homes are as charming as any of their size in Honolulu; some are desolate like certain shacks in Hauula or Olaa. There may be a riot of foliage or a barren enclosure. Here, as elsewhere, there is a [ 162] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS difference in human beings-that is all. Prizes are offered yearly for the best garden, but it is apparently held no sin not to compete. Never was philanthropy less stern. Beretania Street, King Street-the grassy roads take the names of Honolulu streets; and there is pathos in that, but it is a brave gesture, too. There is a Catholic Red Cross Society in Kalaupapa (the Calvinistic and Mormon pastors "were not interested"), and lepers out of their strength minister to lepers in their weakness-delivering medicines, calling on the sick and reporting cases to the physicians, waiting at table on "holiday f6te occasions"-doing whatsoever their hands find to do. Remember, too, that the human comedy goes on in Kalaupapa as well as elsewhere. Litigation and "swipes" (a villainous drink brewed from any vegetable thing that will ferment) are as dear to the leper as to the [ 163 HAWAII: "clean" Kanaka, and it is hard to dissuade him from pursuing them. Most of the disputes are settled out of court by Mr. McVeigh at his garden gate-how satisfactorily in general can be inferred from the expression with which well-nigh all faces are turned to him; but sometimes the full pomp and joy of a lawsuit is achieved. There are a court-house and a jail, a native judge and a native policeman (both lepers); every facility, indeed, for the happy airing of quarrels in formal fashion. With "swipes," Mr. McVeigh admitted, he has his troubles: he sometimes makes eight or ten arrests a month. They will never learn; like children, they are unquenchably hopeful; potato-parings, or almost anything else, will serve; and a little group goes up the pali or into a graveyard or to any other appropriate spot, and drinks until discovered. "You [164] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS see, if we could only have a saloon," mused the superintendent, with tender irony, "it would be an ideal existence." Every now and then a request for divorce comes from Kalaupapa to the proper official in Honolulu. "Please divorce me from my husband [or wife] in -- " is apt to be all that is said. Leprosy is ground for divorce in the islands; and, while many follow a stricken spouse to Molokai, many, of course, do not. In such a case the leper, man or woman, is apt to find an affinity in the Settlement itself and to want freedom to marry there. The "clean" helpmeet left at home is, one supposes, freer to indulge his fancy without such formalities than the leper under constant supervision; which would account for the oddness of divorce proceedings, starting from this end. It sounds grotesque at first, but it is part of the high normality of Kalaupapa. And [ 165 ] HAWAII: many of the lepers are personable creatures -still magnificent in strength, and showing to the eye no hint of ruin. Moreover, Doctor Goodhue, the resident physician, performs many operations, especially in cases of the tubercular type, for purely aesthetic reasons. In the wisdom of his heart he turns beauty-doctor, and they look in a glass and find comfort. Let loose in Kalaupapa a shrill eugenist from the East, and you would soon have a Kanaka hell. It is cause for thanking God that the Settlement is managed by men who can make science and religion walk hand in hand. This, too, was a question that preoccupied the ascetic Damien, to whom marriage was a sacrament and fornication of the devil: it was Damien who first pleaded that husbands and wives should not be separated against their will. "Damien's Chinatown," as I have said, [166] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS no longer hints of the slum. Brother Dutton had a long Civil War experience to prepare him for his work at Kalawao, and the compound of the Baldwin Home, with snow-white cottages set round a noble greensward that centres in an immense lauhala palm, has a sort of military exquisiteness. His study was filled with shelves on which books and medicines disputed the space. The low door gave on the crowded porch; at one end is the little room where sores are dressed; somewhere beyond, I am told, is Damien's own bedroom, where his successor sleeps. He at least had time, while he served Damien, to worship the man, for he is unwilling, I believe, even to stray from Kalawao-to be out of sight, as it were, of Damien's very footprints. Happily Damien is like to be the last (as he was, immortally, the first) of Molokai martyrs. Of saints, uncanon[ 167 HAWAII: ized, it has held many, and will yet hold more. As always happens, when the world goes in for informal canonization, some quite unmerited sainting has been done, and more that should be done is to this day neglected. But the whirligig of time brings in his revenges, and some day these men and women will get their due, though it is a very faint light of publicity that beats on Kalaupapa. The Bishop Home for women and girls at Kalaupapa corresponds to the Baldwin Home for men and boys at Kalawao; and here, even in the sisters' tiny cottage facing out on their green compound, was the authentic convent atmosphere. Mother Maryanne, in her little parlor, was the blood-kin of all superiors I have ever known: the same soft, yellowed skin, with something both tender and sexless in the features; the same hint of latent authority [ 168 ] ~*1Zlil X'"""'""~'X~"~"" l":'a~~is,,~ ~;; I-I i:;ir~:aa3xi -"'" _.,:,,:r;~i i:;~iil:j~i~l~r;;; ~~;n;u~i~i ~li B Vi ~iii cb '~"'"":;;le:~a.~nF~n~a~ ilrBtB%;l;;j;ll1;ailanor~l~~iC~ni~:~'".."";' """:a~;ul,nl";" iiA;r I FI I~~~~r~iiaili~iil~~illla _a P i~ i sar-a -di,,,, tct: ra~ ~~iir;l rI ii'i izi $ a;r,~;naiilrrr~ns I:?,!!*i" e4ii a ";xn I t?; " slllnn r.kS i~,i;~,i;~ pi,c ~~~ ~:~~~i:i;li;iiiii:lili rii-r iiiusi iii~ iiiiiiiiiiii I e~.,,,~,, 14 FtD:1,5i~ _,,,,,:,,::,;1 -,,~ia-~,,n~,~~~ Ej ~I m ~iii~i~~x~-i~x~-~x~ ~c Cs: I( iE? I 1 3 L~ U 3 ii — ~ o iounl;si I L i~i~~ 5 sil8"il F3 811 br" ~ja ililJi liri I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS in the quiet manner; the same gentle aristocratic gayety; the same tacit endeavor to make human pity co-terminous with God's. Like other superiors I have known, from childhood up, she seemed an old, old woman who had seen many things. It was only when one stopped to think of the precise nature of those things which, in thirty years on Molokai, Mother Maryanne has seen, that the breath failed for an instant. The parlor was half filled with garments ready to be given out to lepers, and if one but glanced through the window, one saw the pitiful figures on the cottage porches across the compound. Yet those eyes of hers might have been looking out on a Gothic cloister this half-century. She confessed apologetically that the night had been hot and sleep difficult. And once again the malihinis felt sheer impotent rage that they could not, with their own hands, [ 169] HAWAII: wrench the federal dynamo from its magnificent foundations and give Mother Maryanne an electric fan. Rage, however, is the distinguishing mark of the malihinino such emotion stalks abroad in heroic Kalaupapa. "You wouldn't think we'd be busy here," Mother Maryanne ventured, smiling, "but there is a good deal to do." So natural has it come to seem, to five sisters, to manage life for some eighty-odd lepers. The youngest inmate of the Bishop Home is five, the oldest eighty. It was not hard to imagine the sisters busy. As we walked out across the compound, set round with cottages, a sister-pink-andwhite and blooming-waved her free hand at us from a porch. The other hand held the bandaged stump of a leper. Beside the two a woman squatted on the lanai; a creature of no age or race, her head a mere featureless lump. Yet just beyond [ 170] ~~f- l try;;;;;;;;;;; r;- ~~~~i":~i;'~i,:;iP ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 5; I,,,.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~XN V.s ~~~~~~~~~~I~~~~~~~~.j, Mr He I MBT SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS the compound, where the new home for advanced cases was building, the leper luna ran up to consult Mr. McVeigh, and a finer-looking Kanaka I have never seenwhiter teeth, more stalwart shoulders, or a gayer smile. These are the contrasts of Kalaupapa; such are the hierarchies of the doomed. It was not in ourselves that we found the even temper to face these things as naturally as the sights of any street: the place carries its own antidote to its own sights. All have worked together to produce that miraculous morale which immunizes even the stranger within their gates. Yet we grew to feel, both of us, that we bore that morale like an icon with us in the person of the superintendent himself. The duties and the "spheres" of the others are limited; he alone is everywhere, and all things are subject to him. No matter how admirable his collaborators, [171] HAWAII: that wondrous fabric of science and pity, of common sense and cheerfulness, might fall to pieces like a hut of twigs if he did not keep it whole. The hospital is the last western outpost of the Settlement; very close to the pali it looks from the roadstead. Most lepers on Molokai die of other things than leprosy -intercurrent diseases, which their weakened systems cannot resist. Even so, the hospital is bound to be a place of last resort.... We did not go in, though the chance was given us. Only a physician, a priest, or a friend, only some one who can minister to the remnant of a creature there lying helpless, has a right, we simultaneously felt, to enter. I have been in a big hospital and seen patients who were to die in an hour or two, and not willingly would I again feel so indecent as I did then. Mr. McVeigh thought our decision [ 17] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS right, though he told us that there were now and then visitors who wanted most of all to see the hospital. To each his own code; but our inhibitions laid a check, at that point, on our passion for fact. We had seen enough to fill out easily the visual tale of terror to the utmost, if we chose. I will not pretend that natural distaste did not, in my case, aid manners. Probably it did; though I know that one could have borne in Kalaupapa things one could not bear elsewhere. When your eyes have encountered a man whose blind face is one undulating purple sore, or a man whose mouth is a great, gashed-in triangle, seeming to fill the whole countenance from eyes to chin, you would be singularly dull if you could not guess at any mutilation disease is capable of. In any case, it was very clear to us, as we stood making our quick decision in the [173 ] HAWAII: midst of -all that tropic sweetness, that we were doing the mannerly thing. It may be that our refusal cost us an invitation to visit the home for advanced casesthough I doubt it. At all events, it was according to the very spirit of the Settlement not to go and stare, uselessly and with a layman's ignorance, at those who must, by no will of their own, offend every sense. Neither of us has ever regretted for a moment our moral squeamishness. Before going across to the "movie" theatre, we visited the nursery-established, I believe, largely through the efforts of Governor Pinkham while serving on the Board of Health. He has always been keenly interested in the welfare of the lepers. Thirteen babies rolled and played and gurgled in the big sun-room. They represent the birth-rate for the last year. At [ 174 ] g " X r | X hi I SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS one end of the house is a small room where one or two cribs are placed against a glass partition. Here the parents can come and look at their children. No caress is possible, and before the babies are old enough to have any feeling of human kindness they are, if "clean," taken to Honolulu. Provision is made for them there as I have elsewhere described it. It is the saddest spot, if you like, in Kalaupapa; more lingeringly sad, perhaps, to us even than to the victims of this especial destiny. Shall I seem callous if I recall the fact that Hawaiians, though devoted to children in general, are quite as apt to give their firstborn away at birth as to adopt an eleventh when they have already ten at home? Both are characteristic gestes to a Kanaka. It is quite the thing to give your baby to your best friend; sometimes you get the best friend's baby in exchange, and some[175] HAWAII: times you do not. At all events, that wellknown trait of Hawaiian psychology was all we had to comfort us, and I pass it on for mitigation. Across the hospital compound, on the lanai of the matron's own cottage, a girl baby crawled about by herself-under observation for a spot on her arm. They had good hope that the spot was meaningless: may her isolation, ere this, be over! It was time to be getting back to the Mikahala, which was patiently waiting in the roadstead until we should be ready to go. But we had still to see the little "movie" theatre and the ice-making plant. Mr. R. K. Bonine, of Honolulu, installed the "movie" apparatus for the government. A plaster screen in the open fronts a score of rough benches, lightly roofed over. Twice a week the inhabitants of Kalaupapa gather on the benches, and Mr. [176] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS McVeigh shows them films. It was good to see, good to know about; so was the ice-making plant. But again we wished our hands held the price of a dynamo. The Territorial government taxes itself almost beyond its power to do the magnificent work it does; those in authority, doctors and laymen, spend and are spent in all good faith, doing their day's work in the manner of strong men, the world over, with little talk and many deeds. Sometime, we may hope, leprosy will be stamped out in the Eight Islands, and the sorry gift of the Orient to Hawaii will be forgotten. But I should like to think that before the hospital goes to welcome ruin it will be electric-lighted. I should even like to think that Mother Maryanne, before she dies, will have an electric fan. And I am very impatient with the useless monster, perfect in all its parts, that purrs in seclusion over [177] HAWAII: at Kalawao. Nowhere, for example, could a few miles of wire do more good. But federal red tape must go on unwinding; and doubtless I have already said too much for the proper pride of the Territorial officials. When they have sufficed to so much, it is perhaps the last word of tactlessness to reveal the fact that there is anything they have not been able to do. I hope I may without tactlessness record that there was real regret in bidding Mr. McVeigh good-bye, for it is not often that one meets unexpectedly, in the flesh, with a great man. We had company back in our boat to the Mikahala-a handful of Hawaiians, deck passengers, who had come over to visit stricken friends. The crowd on the landing was pathetic enough; the little white cloud of waving handkerchiefs more piteous than farewell gestures on other [ 178] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS wharves. There were tears among our companions, and the stout young woman in the white holoku who took at once to the comfort of cigarettes wept the most. It was good to realize that in one little way we had served; for the Mikahala, having orders to wait for us, had given the other visitors a longer time than usual. Back in our exiguous staterooms, we were at liberty to be fearfully ill in perfect peace while the Mikahala churned her way across the channel to Lahaina. If lurid words have seemed here unwontedly to fail me, it is because Kalaupapa is not, in strictest truth, lurid. Sights so horrid as some of the inhabitants we encountered I shall not, I hope, soon behold again. But to say that the bulk of one's impressions, or the dominant recollection; is horrible would be to lie damnably. Not to admit that the spectacle of [179] HAWAII: kindness and blitheness and sturdy common sense is, to the end, unmarred, would be to show oneself incapable of registering fact. Any imagination can construct the tragedies that must inevitably drag out their slow length in Kalaupapa. I am not trying to whitewash fate or to rehabilitate pain. But the mere fact that those discharged go unwillingly means much;. for the Hawaiians have no instinctive horror of the disease, and a man can go back to his own people without difficulty. If any one thinks it is easy to construct an exile which the exiled shall love-and love when he has leprosy-let him go and give unneeded advice to those who have made Kalaupapa what it is. I have no pen for "uplift"; and it is a sorry chance that it is so. For I have never seen anything in our contemporary chaos of prophylactic legislation and humanitarian hysteria one [ 180] SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS half so humanly fine as what has been done, as quietly as the coral-insect builds the reef, on the low promontory of windward Molokai. [ 181 ] I i~~~~~~~~~~.......... I I I I r I I C~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I I To renew the charge, book must be brought to the desk. TWO WEEK BOOK DO NOT RETURN BOOKS ON SUNDAY DATE DUE..Q. _ Form 7079 3.50 30M S UNIVERSITY OF M I 3 9015 04878 4527 7, // ~ /~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ /~~~~~~ / K 7,I