On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales | Page 8

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 while 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 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! Our wildest sitting up
was nine o'clock. Eight o'clock was our 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 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