On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales | Page 6

the hands of the haoles" (Whites). "The Hawaiian chiefs let their
possessions slip away from them. The Hawaiian chiefesses, who
married haoles, had their possessions, under the management of their
haole husbands, increase prodigiously. He pointed back to the original
Grandfather Roger Wilton, who had taken Grandmother Wilton's poor
mauka lands and added to them and built up about them the Kilohana
Ranch--"
"Even then it was second only to the Parker Ranch," Martha interrupted

proudly.
"And he told me that had our father, before he died, been as far- seeing
as grandfather, half the then Parker holdings would have been added to
Kilohana, making Kilohana first. And he said that never, for ever and
ever, would beef be cheaper. And he said that the big future of Hawaii
would be in sugar. That was fifty years ago, and he has been more than
proved right. And he said that the young haole, George Castner, saw far,
and would go far, and that there were many girls of us, and that the
Kilohana lands ought by rights to go to the boys, and that if I married
George my future was assured in the biggest way.
"I was only nineteen. Just back from the Royal Chief School--that was
before our girls went to the States for their education. You were among
the first, Sister Martha, who got their education on the mainland. And
what did I know of love and lovers, much less of marriage? All women
married. It was their business in life. Mother and grandmother, all the
way back they had married. It was my business in life to marry George
Castner. Uncle Robert said so in his wisdom, and I knew he was very
wise. And I went to live with my husband in the grey house at Nahala.
"You remember it. No trees, only the rolling grass lands, the high
mountains behind, the sea beneath, and the wind!--the Waimea and
Nahala winds, we got them both, and the kona wind as well. Yet little
would I have minded them, any more than we minded them at Kilohana,
or than they minded them at Mana, had not Nahala itself been so grey,
and husband George so grey. We were alone. He was managing Nahala
for the Glenns, who had gone back to Scotland. Eighteen hundred a
year, plus beef, horses, cowboy service, and the ranch house, was what
he received--"
"It was a high salary in those days," Martha said.
"And for George Castner, and the service he gave, it was very cheap,"
Bella defended. "I lived with him for three years. There was never a
morning that he was out of his bed later than half-past four. He was the
soul of devotion to his employers. Honest to a penny in his accounts, he
gave them full measure and more of his time and energy. Perhaps that

was what helped make our life so grey. But listen, Martha. Out of his
eighteen hundred, he laid aside sixteen hundred each year. Think of it!
The two of us lived on two hundred a year. Luckily he did not drink or
smoke. Also, 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 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