Part 7 (1/2)

”My, my,” Cyrus Hodge reminisced. ”I was such a boy in those days!”

”SOME boy,” she laughed acquiescence.

”But knowing no more than the foolishness of a boy in those long- ago days.”

”Remember the night your hack-driver got drunk and left you--”

”S-s-s.h.!.+” he cautioned. ”That j.a.p driver is a high-school graduate and knows more English than either of us. Also, I think he is a spy for his Government. So why should we tell him anything?

Besides, I was so very young. You remember . . . ”

”Your cheeks were like the peaches we used to grow before the Mediterranean fruit fly got into them,” Alice agreed. ”I don't think you shaved more than once a week then. You were a pretty boy. Don't you remember the hula we composed in your honour, the-- ”

”S-s-s.h.!.+” he hushed her. ”All that's buried and forgotten. May it remain forgotten.”

And she was aware that in his eyes was no longer any of the ingenuousness of youth she remembered. Instead, his eyes were keen and speculative, searching into her for some a.s.surance that she would not resurrect his particular portion of that buried past.

”Religion is a good thing for us as we get along into middle age,”

another old friend told her. He was building a magnificent house on Pacific Heights, but had recently married a second time, and was even then on his way to the steamer to welcome home his two daughters just graduated from Va.s.sar. ”We need religion in our old age, Alice. It softens, makes us more tolerant and forgiving of the weaknesses of others--especially the weaknesses of youth of--of others, when they played high and low and didn't know what they were doing.”

He waited anxiously.

”Yes,” she said. ”We are all born to sin and it is hard to grow out of sin. But I grow, I grow.”

”Don't forget, Alice, in those other days I always played square.

You and I never had a falling out.”

”Not even the night you gave that luau when you were twenty-one and insisted on breaking the gla.s.sware after every toast. But of course you paid for it.”

”Handsomely,” he a.s.serted almost pleadingly.

”Handsomely,” she agreed. ”I replaced more than double the quant.i.ty with what you paid me, so that at the next luau I catered one hundred and twenty plates without having to rent or borrow a dish or gla.s.s. Lord Mainweather gave that luau--you remember him.”

”I was pig-sticking with him at Mana,” the other nodded. ”We were at a two weeks' house-party there. But say, Alice, as you know, I think this religion stuff is all right and better than all right.

But don't let it carry you off your feet. And don't get to telling your soul on me. What would my daughters think of that broken gla.s.sware!”

”I always did have an aloha” (warm regard) ”for you, Alice,” a member of the Senate, fat and bald-headed, a.s.sured her.

And another, a lawyer and a grandfather: ”We were always friends, Alice. And remember, any legal advice or handling of business you may require, I'll do for you gladly, and without fees, for the sake of our old-time friends.h.i.+p.”

Came a banker to her late Christmas Eve, with formidable, legal- looking envelopes in his hand which he presented to her.

”Quite by chance,” he explained, ”when my people were looking up land-records in Iapio Valley, I found a mortgage of two thousand on your holdings there--that rice land leased to Ah Chin. And my mind drifted back to the past when we were all young together, and wild- -a bit wild, to be sure. And my heart warmed with the memory of you, and, so, just as an aloha, here's the whole thing cleared off for you.”

Nor was Alice forgotten by her own people. Her house became a Mecca for native men and women, usually performing pilgrimage privily after darkness fell, with presents always in their hands-- squid fresh from the reef, opihis and limu, baskets of alligator pears, roasting corn of the earliest from windward Cahu, mangoes and star-apples, taro pink and royal of the finest selection, sucking pigs, banana poi, breadfruit, and crabs caught the very day from Pearl Harbour. Mary Mendana, wife of the Portuguese Consul, remembered her with a five-dollar box of candy and a mandarin coat that would have fetched three-quarters of a hundred dollars at a fire sale. And Elvira Miyahara Makaena Yin Wap, the wife of Yin Wap the wealthy Chinese importer, brought personally to Alice two entire bolts of pina cloth from the Philippines and a dozen pairs of silk stockings.

The time pa.s.sed, and Abel Ah Yo struggled with Alice for a properly penitent heart, and Alice struggled with herself for her soul, while half of Honolulu wickedly or apprehensively hung on the outcome. Carnival week was over, polo and the races had come and gone, and the celebration of Fourth of July was ripening, ere Abel Ah Yo beat down by brutal psychology the citadel of her reluctance.

It was then that he gave his famous exhortation which might be summed up as Abel Ah Yo's definition of eternity. Of course, like Billy Sunday on certain occasions, Abel Ah Yo had cribbed the definition. But no one in the Islands knew it, and his rating as a revivalist uprose a hundred per cent.

So successful was his preaching that night, that he reconverted many of his converts, who fell and moaned about the penitent form and crowded for room amongst scores of new converts burnt by the pentecostal fire, including half a company of negro soldiers from the garrisoned Twenty-Fifth Infantry, a dozen troopers from the Fourth Cavalry on its way to the Philippines, as many drunken man- of-war's men, divers ladies from Iwilei, and half the riff-raff of the beach.

Abel Ah Yo, subtly sympathetic himself by virtue of his racial admixture, knowing human nature like a book and Alice Akana even more so, knew just what he was doing when he arose that memorable night and exposited G.o.d, h.e.l.l, and eternity in terms of Alice Akana's comprehension. For, quite by chance, he had discovered her cardinal weakness. First of all, like all Polynesians, an ardent lover of nature, he found that earthquake and volcanic eruption were the things of which Alice lived in terror. She had been, in the past, on the Big Island, through cataclysms that had slacken gra.s.s houses down upon her while she slept, and she had beheld Madame Pele (the Fire or Volcano G.o.ddess) fling red-fluxing lava down the long slopes of Mauna Loa, destroying fish-ponds on the sea-brim and licking up droves of beef cattle, villages, and humans on her fiery way.