we dressed out of it as well. I made my own dresses. You can
imagine them. Outside of the cowboys who chored the firewood, I
did the work. I cooked, and baked, and scrubbed--"
"You who had never known anything but servants from the time you
were born!" Martha pitied. "Never less than a regiment of them at
Kilohana."
"Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!" Bella
cried out. "How far I was compelled to make a pound of coffee go!
A broom worn down to nothing before a new one was bought! And
beef! Fresh beef and jerky, morning, noon, and night! And
porridge! Never since have I eaten porridge or any breakfast
food."
She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment
with unseeing eyes at the colour-lavish reef while she composed
herself. And she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure,
gracious, high-breasted, noble-headed port of which no out-breeding
can ever rob the Hawaiian woman. Very haole was Bella Castner,
fair-skinned, fine-textured. Yet, as she returned, the high pose
of head, the level-lidded gaze of her long brown eyes under royal
arches of eyebrows, the softly set lines of her small mouth that
fairly sang sweetness of kisses after sixty-eight years--all made
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her the very picture of a chiefess of old Hawaii full-bursting
through her ampleness of haole blood. Taller she was than her
sister Martha, if anything more queenly.
"You know we were notorious as poor feeders," Bella laughed lightly
enough. "It was many a mile on either side from Nahala to the next
roof. Belated travellers, or storm-bound ones, would, on occasion,
stop with us overnight. And you know the lavishness of the big
ranches, then and now. How we were the laughing-stock! 'What do
we care!' George would say. 'They live to-day and now. Twenty
years from now will be our turn, Bella. They will be where they
are now, and they will eat out of our hand. We will be compelled
to feed them, they will need to be fed, and we will feed them well;
for we will be rich, Bella, so rich that I am afraid to tell you.
But I know what I know, and you must have faith in me.'
"George was right. Twenty years afterward, though he did not live
to see it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not
know what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say
to George: 'Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty
years from now. I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate
coffee that is only two cents a pound more than the awful stuff we
are using. Why couldn't I fry eggs in butter--now? I should
dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our linen! I'm ashamed
to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven knows they dare
come seldom enough.'
"'Be patient, Bella,' he would reply. 'In a little while, in only
a few years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep
between our sheets, will be proud of an invitation--those of them
who will not be dead. You remember how Stevens passed out last
year--free-living and easy, everybody's friend but his own. The
Kohala crowd had to bury him, for he left nothing but debts. Watch
the others going the same pace. There's your brother Hal. He
can't keep it up and live five years, and he's breaking his uncles'
hearts. And there's Prince Lilolilo. Dashes by me with half a
hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering kanakas in his train who
would be better at hard work and looking after their future, for he
will never be king of Hawaii. He will not live to be king of
Hawaii.'
"George was right. Brother Hal died. So did Prince Lilolilo. But
George was not ALL right. He, who neither drank nor smoked, who
never wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of
his lips a second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who
was invariably up before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp
had a tenth emptied itself, and who never thought to die, was dead
even more quickly than Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.
"'Be patient, Bella,' Uncle Robert would say to me. 'George
hardships now are the hardships on the way to the promised land.
Not always will the Hawaiians rule in Hawaii. Just as they let
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their wealth slip out of their hands, so will their rule slip out
of their hands. Political power and the land always go together.
There will be great changes, revolutions no one knows how many nor
of what sort, save that in the end the haole will possess the land
and the rule. And in that day you may well be first lady of
Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii.
It is written in the books. It is ever so where the haole
conflicts with the easier races. I, your Uncle Robert, who am
half-Hawaiian and half-haole, know whereof I speak. Be patient,
Bella, be patient.'
"'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was
tender for me. Thank God, he never told me to be patient. He
knew. He was very wise. He was warm human, and, therefore, wiser
than Uncle Robert and George Castner, who sought the thing, not the
spirit, who kept records in ledgers rather than numbers of heart-
beats breast to breast, who added columns of figures rather than
remembered embraces and endearments of look and speech and touch.
'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say. He knew. You have heard
always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was a true
lover. He loved but the once. After her death they said he was
eccentric. He was. He was the one lover, once and always.
Remember that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered
only after his death and found it his shrine to her. 'Dear Bella,'
it was all he ever said to me, but I knew he knew.
"And I was nineteen, and sun-warm Hawaiian in spite of my three-
quarters haole blood, and I knew nothing save my girlhood
splendours at Kilohana and my Honolulu education at the Royal Chief
School, and my grey husband at Nahala with his grey preachments and
practices of sobriety and thrift, and those two childless uncles of
mine, the one with far, cold vision, the other the broken-hearted,
for-ever-dreaming lover of a dead princess.
"Think of that grey house! I, who had known the ease and the
delights and the ever-laughing joys of Kilohana, and of the Parkers
at old Mana, and of Puuwaawaa! You remember. We did live in
feudal spaciousness in those days. Would you, can you, believe it,
Martha--at Nahala the only sewing machine I had was one of those
the early missionaries brought, a tiny, crazy thing that one
cranked around by hand!
"Robert and John had each given Husband George five thousand
dollars at my marriage. But he had asked for it to be kept secret.
Only the four of us knew. And wh
ile I sewed my cheap holokus on
that crazy machine, he bought land with the money--the upper Nahala
lands, you know--a bit at a time, each purchase a hard-driven
bargain, his face the very face of poverty. To-day the Nahala
Ditch alone pays me forty thousand a year.
"But was it worth it? I starved. If only once, madly, he had
crushed me in his arms! If only once he could have lingered with
me five minutes from his own business or from his fidelity to his
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employers! Sometimes I could have screamed, or showered the
eternal bowl of hot porridge into his face, or smashed the sewing
machine upon the floor and danced a hula on it, just to make him
burst out and lose his temper and be human, be a brute, be a man of
some sort instead of a grey, frozen demi-god."
Bella's tragic expression vanished, and she laughed outright in
sheer genuineness of mirthful recollection.
"And when I was in such moods he would gravely look me over,
gravely feel my pulse, examine my tongue, gravely dose me with
castor oil, and gravely put me to bed early with hot stove-lids,
and assure me that I'd feel better in the morning. Early to bed!
regular bed-time. It saved kerosene. We did not eat dinner at
Nahala--remember the great table at Kilohana where we did have
dinner? But Husband George and I had supper. And then he would
sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed
magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his
socks and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff.
And when he went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene
with only one to benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same
way, winding up his watch, entering the day's weather in his diary,
and taking off his shoes, right foot first invariably, left foot
second, and placing them just so, side by side, on the floor, at
the foot of the bed, on his side.
"He was the cleanest man I ever knew. He never wore the same
undergarment a second time. I did the washing. He was so clean it
hurt. He shaved twice a day. He used more water on his body than
any kanaka. He did more work than any two haoles. And he saw the
future of the Nahala water."
"And he made you wealthy, but did not make you happy," Martha
observed.
Bella sighed and nodded.
"What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new Pierce-Arrow came
down on the steamer with me. My third in two years. But oh, all
the Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a
lover!--the one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil
beside and suffer and joy beside, the one male man lover husband .
. . "
Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an
ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under
a hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her
eyes, withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a
mongoose's, and at Bella's feet she first sank down, in pure
Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless mele of Bella and
Bella's ancestry and adding to it an extemporized welcome back to
Hawaii after her absence across the great sea to California. And
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while she chanted her mele, the old crone's shrewd fingers lomied
or massaged Bella's silk-stockinged legs from ankle and calf to
knee and thigh.
Both Bella's and Martha's eyes were luminous-moist, as the old
retainer repeated the lomi and the mele to Martha, and as they
talked with her in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial
questions about her health and age and great-great-grandchildren--
she who had lomied them as babies in the great house at Kilohana,
as her ancestresses had lomied their ancestresses back through the
unnumbered generations. The brief duty visit over, Martha arose
and accompanied her back to the bungalow, putting money into her
hand, commanding proud and beautiful Japanese housemaids to wait
upon the dilapidated aborigine with poi, which is compounded of the
roots of the water lily, with iamaka, which is raw fish, and with
pounded kukui nut and limu, which latter is seawood tender to the
toothless, digestible and savoury. It was the old feudal tie, the
faithfulness of the commoner to the chief, the responsibility of
the chief to the commoner; and Martha, three-quarters haole with
the Anglo-Saxon blood of New England, was four-quarters Hawaiian in
her remembrance and observance of the well-nigh vanished customs of
old days.
As she came back across the lawn to the hau tree, Bella's eyes
dwelt upon the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her,
and embraced her and loved her. Shorter than Bella was Martha, a
trifle, but the merest trifle, less queenly of port; but
beautifully and generously proportioned, mellowed rather than
dismantled by years, her Polynesian chiefess figure eloquent and
glorious under the satisfying lines of a half-fitting, grandly
sweeping, black-silk holoku trimmed with black lace more costly
than a Paris gown.
And as both sisters resumed their talk, an observer would have
noted the striking resemblance of their pure, straight profiles, of
their broad cheek-bones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of
their iron-grey abundance of hair, of their sweet-lipped mouths set
with the carriage of decades of assured and accomplished pride, and
of their lovely slender eye-rows arched over equally lovely long
brown eyes. The hands of both of them, little altered or defaced
by age, were wonderful in their slender, tapering finger-tips,
love-lomied and love-formed while they were babies by old Hawaiian
women like to the one even then eating poi and iamaka and limu in
the house.
"I had a year of it," Bella resumed, "and, do you know, things were
beginning to come right. I was beginning to draw to Husband
George. Women are so made, I was such a woman at any rate. For he
was good. He was just. All the old sterling Puritan virtues were
his. I was coming to draw to him, to like him, almost, might I
say, to love him. And had not Uncle John loaned me that horse, I
know that I would have truly loved him and have lived ever happily
with him--in a quiet sort of way, of course.
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"You see, I knew nothing else, nothing different, nothing better in
the way of men. I came gladly to look across the table at him
while he read in the brief interval between supper and bed, gladly
to listen for and to catch the beat of his horse's hoofs coming
home at night from his endless riding over the ranch. And his
scant praise was praise indeed, that made me tingle with happiness-
-yes, S
ister Martha, I knew what it was to blush under his precise,
just praise for the things I had done right or correctly.
"And all would have been well for the rest of our lives together,
except that he had to take steamer to Honolulu. It was business.
He was to be gone two weeks or longer, first, for the Glenns in
ranch affairs, and next for himself, to arrange the purchase of
still more of the upper Nahala lands. Do you know! he bought lots
of the wilder and up-and-down lands, worthless for aught save
water, and the very heart of the watershed, for as low as five and
ten cents an acre. And he suggested I needed a change. I wanted
to go with him to Honolulu. But, with an eye to expense, he
decided Kilohana for me. Not only would it cost him nothing for me
to visit at the old home, but he saved the price of the poor food I
should have eaten had I remained alone at Nahala, which meant the
purchase price of more Nahala acreage. And at Kilohana Uncle John
said yes, and loaned me the horse.
"Oh, it was like heaven, getting back, those first several days.
It was difficult to believe at first that there was so much food in
all the world. The enormous wastage of the kitchen appalled me. I
saw waste everywhere, so well trained had I been by Husband George.
Why, out in the servants' quarters the aged relatives and most
distant hangers-on of the servants fed better than George and I
ever fed. You remember our Kilohana way, same as the Parker way, a
bullock killed for every meal, fresh fish by runners from the ponds
of Waipio and Kiholo, the best and rarest at all times of
everything . . .
"And love, our family way of loving! You know what Uncle John was.
And Brother Walcott was there, and Brother Edward, and all the
younger sisters save you and Sally away at school. And Aunt
Elizabeth, and Aunt Janet with her husband and all her children on
a visit. It was arms around, and perpetual endearings, and all
that I had missed for a weary twelvemonth. I was thirsty for it.
I was like a survivor from the open boat falling down on the sand
and lapping the fresh bubbling springs at the roots of the palms.
"And THEY came, riding up from Kawaihae, where they had landed from
the royal yacht, the whole glorious cavalcade of them, two by two,
flower-garlanded, young and happy, gay, on Parker Ranch horses,
thirty of them in the party, a hundred Parker Ranch cowboys and as