Summer Cruising in the South Seas Part 6

He involved me in all manner of difficulties. It was Holy Week, and I had resolved upon going to ma.s.s and vespers daily. I went. The soft night-winds floated in through the latticed windows of the chapel, and made the candles flicker upon the altar. The little throng of natives bowed in the impressive silence, and were deeply moved. It was rest for the soul to be there; yet, in the midst of it, while the Father, with his pale, sad face, gave his instructions, to which we listened as attentively as possible,--for there was something in his manner and his voice that made us better creatures,--while we listened, in the midst of it I heard a shrill little whistle, a sort of chirp, that I knew perfectly well. It was Joe, sitting on a cocoa-stump in the garden adjoining, and beseeching me to come out, right off. When service was over, I remonstrated with him for his irreverence. "Joe," I said, "if you have no respect for religion yourself, respect those who are more fortunate than you." But Joe was dressed in his best, and quite wild at the entrancing loveliness of the night. "Let's walk a little," said Joe, covered with fragrant wreaths, and redolent of cocoanut-oil. What could I do? If I had tried to do anything to the contrary, he might have taken me and thrown me away somewhere into a well, or a jungle, and then I could no longer hope to touch the chord of remorse,--which chord I sought vainly, and which I have since concluded was not in Joe's physical corporation at all. So we walked a little. In vain I strove to break Joe of the shocking habit of whistling me out at vespers. He would persist in doing it. Moreover, during the day he would collect crusts of bread and banana-skins, station himself in ambush behind the curtain of the window next the lane, and, as some solitary creature strode solemnly past, Joe would discharge a volley of ammunition over him, and then laugh immoderately at his indignation and surprise. Joe was my pet elephant, and I was obliged to play with him very cautiously.

One morning he disappeared. I was without the consolations of a breakfast, even. I made my toilet, went to my portmanteau for my purse,--for I had decided upon a visit to the baker,--when lo! part of my slender means had mysteriously disappeared. Joe was gone, and the money also. All day I thought about it. In the morning, after a very long and miserable night, I woke up, and when I opened my eyes, there, in the doorway, stood Joe, in a brand-new suit of clothes, including boots and hat. He was gorgeous beyond description, and seemed overjoyed to see me, and as merry as though nothing unusual had happened. I was quite startled at this apparition. "Joseph!" I said in my severest tones, and then turned over and looked away from him. Joe evaded the subject in the most delicate manner, and was never so interesting as at that moment. He sang his specialities, and played clumsily upon his bamboo flute,--to soothe me, I suppose,--and wanted me to eat a whole flat pie which he had brought home as a peace-offering, b.u.t.toned tightly under his jacket. I saw I must strike at once, if I struck at all; so I said, "Joe, what on earth did you do with that money?" Joe said he had replenished his wardrobe, and bought the flat pie especially for me.

"Joseph," I said, with great dignity, "do you know that you have been stealing, and that it is highly sinful to steal, and may result in something unpleasant in the world to come?" Joe said, "Yes," pleasantly, though I hardly think he meant it; and then he added, mildly, "that he couldn't lie,"--which was a glaring falsehood,--"but wanted me to be sure that he took the money, and so had come back to tell me."

"Joseph," I said, "you remind me of our n.o.ble Was.h.i.+ngton"; and, to my amazement, Joe was mortified. He didn't, of course, know who Was.h.i.+ngton was, but he suspected that I was ridiculing him. He came to the bed and haughtily insisted upon my taking the little change he had received from his customers, but I implored him to keep it, as I had no use at all for it, and, as I a.s.sured him, I much preferred hearing it jingle in his pocket.

The next day I sailed out of Lahaina, and Joe came to the beach with his new trousers tucked into his new boots, while he waved his new hat violently in a final adieu, much to the envy and admiration of a score of hatless urchins, who looked upon Joe as the gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on, and but little lower than the angels. When I entered the boat to set sail, a tear stood in Joe's bright eye, and I think he was really sorry to part with me; and I don't wonder at it, because our housekeeping experiences were new to him,--and, I may add, not unprofitable.

II.

Some months of mellow and beautiful weather found me wandering here and there among the islands, when the gales came on again, and I was driven about homeless, and sometimes friendless, until, by-and-by, I heard of an opportunity to visit Molokai,--an island seldom visited by the tourist,--where, perhaps, I could get a close view of a singularly sad and interesting colony of lepers.

The whole island is green, but lonely. As you ride over its excellent turnpike, you see the ruins of a nation that is pa.s.sing, like a shadow, out of sight. Deserted garden-patches, crumbling walls, and roofs tumbled into the one state-chamber of the house, while knots of long gra.s.s wave at half-mast in the c.h.i.n.ks and crannies. A land of great traditions, of magic, and witchcraft, and spirits. A fertile and fragrant solitude. How I enjoyed it; and yet how it was all telling upon me, in its own way! One cannot help feeling sad there, for he seems to be living and moving in a long reverie, out of which he dreads to awaken to a less pathetic life. I rode a day or two among the solemn and reproachful ruins with inexpressible complacence, and, having finally climbed a series of verdant and downy hills, and ridden for twenty minutes in a brisk shower, came suddenly upon the brink of a great precipice, three thousand feet in the air. My horse instinctively braced himself, and I nervously jerked the bridle square up to my breast-bone, as I found we were poised between heaven and earth, upon a trembling pinnacle of rock. A broad peninsular was stretched below me, covered with gra.s.sy hills; here and there cl.u.s.ters of brown huts were visible, and to the right, the white dots of houses to which I was hastening, for that was the leper village. To that spot were the wandering and afflicted tribes brought home to die. Once descending the narrow stairs in the cliff under me, never again could they hope to strike their tents and resume their pilgrimage; for the curse was on them, and necessity had narrowed down their sphere of action to this compa.s.s,--a solitary slope between sea and land, with the invisible sentinels of Fear and Fate for ever watching its borders.

I seemed to be looking into a fiery furnace, wherein walked the living bodies of those whom Death had already set his seal upon. What a mockery it seemed to be climbing down that crag,--through wreaths of vine, and under leafy cataracts breaking into a foam of blossoms a thousand feet below me; swinging aside the hanging parasites that obstructed the narrow way,--entering the valley of death, and the very mouth of h.e.l.l, by these floral avenues!

A brisk ride of a couple of miles across the breadth of the peninsula brought me to the gate of the keeper of the settlement, and there I dismounted, and hastened into the house, to be rid of the curious crowd that had gathered to receive me. The little cottage was very comfortable, my host and hostess friends of precious memory; and with them I felt at once at home, and began the new life that every one begins when the earth seems to have been suddenly transformed into some better or worse world, and he alone survives the transformation.

Have you never had such an experience? Then go into the midst of a community of lepers; have ever before your eyes their Gorgon-like faces; see the horrors, hardly to be recognized as human, that grope about you; listen in vain for the voices that have been hushed for ever by decay; breathe the tainted atmosphere; and bear ever in mind that, while they hover about you,--forbidden to touch you, yet longing to clasp once more a hand that is perfect and pure,--the insidious seeds of the malady may be generating in your vitals, and your heart, even then, be drunk with death!

I might as well confess that I slept indifferently the first night; that I was not entirely free from nervousness the next day, as I pa.s.sed through the various wards a.s.signed to patients in every stage of decomposition. But I recovered myself in time to observe the admirable system adopted by the Hawaiian government for the protection of its unfortunate people. I used to sit by the window and see the processions of the less afflicted come for little measures of milk, morning and evening. Then there was a continuous raid upon the ointment-pot, with the contents of which they delighted to anoint themselves. Trifling disturbances sometimes brought the plaintiff and defendant to the front gate, for final judgment at the hands of their beloved keeper. And it was a constant entertainment to watch the progress of events in that singular little world of doomed spirits. They were not unhappy. I used to hear them singing every evening: their souls were singing while their bodies were falling rapidly to dust. They continued to play their games, as well as they could play them with the loss of a finger joint or a toe, from week to week: it is thus gradually and thus slowly that they died, feeling their voices growing fainter and their strength less, as the idle days pa.s.sed over them and swept them to the tomb.

Sitting at the window on the second evening, as the patients came up for milk, I observed one of them watching me intently, and apparently trying to make me understand something or other, but what that something was I could not guess. He rushed to the keeper and talked excitedly with him for a moment, and then withdrew to one side of the gate and waited till the others were served with their milk, still watching me all the while.

Then the keeper entered and told me how I had a friend out there who wished to speak with me,--some one who had seen me somewhere, he supposed, but whom I would hardly remember. It was their way never to forget a face they had once become familiar with. Out I went. There was a face I could not have recognized as anything friendly or human. Knots of flesh stood out upon it; scar upon scar disfigured it. The expression was like that of a mummy, stony and withered. The outlines of a youthful figure were preserved, but the hands and feet were pitiful to look at.

What was this ogre that knew me and loved me still?

He soon told me who he once had been, but was no longer. Our little, unfortunate "Joe," my Lahaina charge. In his case the disease had spread with fearful rapidity: the keeper thought he could hardly survive the year. Many linger year after year, and cannot die; but Joe was more fortunate. His life had been brief and pa.s.sionate, and death was now hastening him to his dissolution.

Joe was forbidden to come near me, so he crouched down by the fence, and pressing his hands between the pickets sifted the dust at my feet, while he wailed in a low voice, and called me, over and over, "dear friend,"

"good friend," and "master." I wish I had never seen him so humbled. To think of my disreputable little _protege_, who was wont to lord it over me as though he had been a born chief,--to think of Joe as being there in his extremity, grovelling in the dust at my feet; forbidden to climb the great wall of flowers that towered between him and his beautiful world, while the rough sea lashed the coast about him, and his only companions were such hideous foes as would frighten one out of a dream!

How I wanted to get close to him! but I dared not; so we sat there with the slats of the fence between us, while we talked very long in the twilight; and I was glad when it grew so dark that I could no longer see his face,--his terrible face, that came to kill the memory of his former beauty.

And Joe wondered whether I still remembered how we used to walk in the night, and go home, at last, to our little house when Lahaina was as still as death, and you could almost hear the great stars throbbing in the clear sky! How well I remembered it, and the day when we went a long way down the beach, and, looking back, saw a wide curve of the land cutting the sea like a sickle, and turning up a white and s.h.i.+ning swath!

Then, in another place, a grove of cocoa-palms and a melancholy, monastic-looking building, with splendid palm-branches in its broad windows; for it was just after Palm Sunday, and the building belonged to a Sisterhood. And I remembered how the clouds fell and the rain drove as into a sudden shelter, and we ate tamarind-jam, spread thick on thin slices of bread, and were supremely happy. In this connection, I could not forget how Joe became very unruly about that time, and I got mortified, and found great difficulty in getting him home at all; and yet the memory of it would have been perfect but for this fate. O Joe!

my poor, dear, terrible cobra! to think that I should ever be afraid to look into your face in my life!

Joe wanted to call to my mind one other reminiscence,--a night when we two walked to the old wharf, and went out to the end of it, and sat there looking inland, watching the inky waves slide up and down the beach, while the full moon rose over the superb mountains where the clouds were heaped like wool, and the very air seemed full of utterances that you could almost hear and understand but for something that made all a mystery. I tried then, if ever I tried in my life, to make Joe a little less bad than he was naturally, and he seemed nearly inclined to be better, and would, I think, have been so, but for the thousand temptations that gravitated to him when we got on solid earth again. He forgot my precepts then, and I'm afraid I forgot them myself. Joe remembered that night vividly. I was touched to hear him confess it; and I pray earnestly that that one moment may plead for him in the last day, if, indeed, he needs any special plea other than that Nature has published for her own.

"Sing for me, Joe," said I; and Joe, still crouching on the other side of the lattice, sang some of his old songs. One of them, a popular melody, was echoed through the little settlement, where faint voices caught up the chorus, and the night was wildly and weirdly musical. We walked by the sea the next day, and the day following that, Joe taking pains to stay on the leeward side of me,--he was so careful to keep the knowledge of his fate uppermost in his mind: how could I dismiss it from my own, when it was branded in his countenance? The desolated beauty of his face pleaded for measureless pity, and I gave it, out of my prodigality, yet felt that I could not begin to give sufficient.

Link by link he was casting off his hold on life; he was no longer a complete being; his soul was prostrated in the miry clay, and waited, in agony, its long deliverance.

In leaving the leper village, I had concluded to say nothing to Joe, other than the usual "_aloha_" at night, when I could ride off, in the darkness, and, sleeping at the foot of the cliff, ascend it in the first light of the morning, and get well on my journey before the heat of the day. We took a last walk by the rocks on the sh.o.r.e; heard the sea breathing its long breath under the hollow cones of lava, with a noise like a giant leper in his asthmatic agony. Joe heard it, and laughed a little, and then grew silent; and finally said he wanted to leave the place,--he hated it; he loved Lahaina dearly: how was everybody in Lahaina?--a question he had asked me hourly since my arrival.

When night came I asked Joe to sing, as usual; so he gathered his mates about him, and they sang the songs I liked best. The voices rang, sweeter than ever, up from the group of singers congregated a few rods off, in the darkness; and while they sang, my horse was saddled, and I quietly bade adieu to my dear friends, the keepers, and mounting, walked the horse slowly up the gra.s.s-grown road. I shall never see little Joe again, with his pitiful face, growing gradually as dreadful as a cobra's, and almost as fascinating in its hideousness. I waited, a little way off, in the darkness, waited and listened, till the last song was ended, and I knew he would be looking for me, to say _Good-night_.

But he didn't find me; and he will never again find me in this life, for I left him sitting in the dark door of his sepulchre,--sitting and singing in the mouth of his grave,--clothed all in death.

THE NIGHT-DANCERS OF WAIPIO.

The afternoon sun was tinting the snowy crest of Mauna Kea, and folds of shadow were draping the sea-washed eastern cliffs of Hawaii, as Felix and I endeavoured to persuade our f.a.gged steeds that they must go and live, or stay and die in the middle of a lava-trail by no means inviting. As we rode, we thought of the scandal that had so recently regaled our too willing ears: here it is, in a mild solution, to be taken with three parts of disbelief.

Two venerable and warm-hearted missionaries, whose good works seemed to have found dissimilar expression, equally effective, I trust, proved their specialties to be church-building.

Rev. Mr. A seemed to think the more the merrier, and his pretty little meeting-houses looked as though they had been baked in the lot, like a sheet of biscuits; while Rev. Mr. B condensed his efforts into the consummation of one resplendent edifice. Mr. A was always wondering why Mr. B should waste his money in a single church, while Mr. B was nonplussed at seeing Mr. A break out in a rash of diminutive chapels.

Well, Felix and I were riding northward up the coast, over dozens and dozens of lovely ridges; through scores of deep gullies cus.h.i.+oned with ferns as high as our pommels, and fording numberless streams, white with froth and hurry, eagerly seeking the most exquisite valley in the Pacific, as some call it. We rode till we were tired out twenty times over; again and again we looked forward to the bit of Mardi-life we were about to experience in the vale of the Waipio, while now and then we pa.s.sed one of Mr. A's pretty little churches. Once we were impatient enough to make inquiry of a native who was watching our progress with considerable emotion: there is always some one to watch you when you are wis.h.i.+ng yourself at the North Pole. Our single spectator affected an air of gravity, and seemed quite interested as he said, "Go six or seven churches farther on that trail, and you'll come to Waipio." On we went with renewed spirits, for the churches were frequent, almost within sight of each other. But we faltered presently and lost our reckoning, they were so much alike. Again we asked our way of a solitary watcher on a hill-top, who had had his eye upon us ever since we rose above the rim of the third ridge back: he revealed to us the glad fact that we were only two churches from Paradise! How we tore over the rest of that straight and narrow way with the little the left to us, and came in finally all of a foam, fairly jumping the last mite of a chapel that hung upon the brink of the beautiful valley like a swallow's nest! And down we dropped into fifty fathoms of the sweetest twilight imaginable,--so sweet it seemed to have been born of a wilderness of the night-blooming cereus and fed for ever on jasmine buds.

There were shelter and refreshment for two hungry souls, and we slid out of our saddles as though we had been boned expressly for a cannibal feast.

By this time the rosy flush on Mauna Kea had faded, and its superb brow was pale with an unearthly pallor. "Come in," said the host; and he led us under the thatched gable, that was fragrant as new-mown hay. There we sat, "in," as he called it, though there was never a side to the concern thicker than a shadow.

A stream flowed noiselessly at our feet. Canoes drifted by us, with dusky and nude forms bowed over the paddles. Each occupant greeted us, being guests in the valley, just lifting their slumberous eyelids,--masked batteries, that made Felix forget his danger; they seldom paused, but called back to us from the gathering darkness with inexpressibly tender, contralto voices.

In another apartment screened with vines we found our dinner ready. The faint nicker of the tapers suggested that what breath of air might be stirring came from the mountain, and it brought with it a message from the orangery up the valley. "How will you take your oranges?" queried Felix; "in pulp, liquid, or perfume?"--and such a dense odour swept past us at the moment, I thought I had taken them in the triple forms. "You are just in time," said our host. "Why, what's up?" asked I. "The moon will be up presently, and after moonrise you shall see the _hula-hula_."

Felix desired to be enlightened as to the nature of the what-you-call-it, and was a.s.sured that it was worth seeing, and would require no explanatory chorus when its hour came.

It was at least a mile to the scene of action; a tortuous stream wound thither, navigable in spots, but from time to time the canoe would have to take to the banks for a short cut into deeper water.

"I can never get there," growled Felix; "I'm full of needles and pins;"

to which the host responded by excusing himself for a few moments, leaving Felix and me alone. It was deathly still in the valley, though a thousand crickets sang, and the fish smacked their round mouths at the top of the water. Evening comes slowly in those beloved tropics, but it comes so satisfactorily that there is nothing left out.

A moonlight night is a continuous festival. The natives sing and dance till daybreak, making it all up by sleeping till the next twilight.

Nothing is lost by this ingenious and admirable arrangement. Why should they sleep, when a night there has the very essence of five nights anywhere else, extracted and enriched with spices till it is so inspiring that the soul cries out in triumph, and the eyes couldn't sleep if they would?

At this period, enter to us the host, with several young native girls, who seat themselves at our feet, clasping each a boot-leg encasing the extremities of Felix and myself.

Felix kicked violently, and left the room with some embarra.s.sment, and I appealed to the hospitable gentleman of the house, who was smiling somewhat audibly at our perplexity.

He a.s.sured me that if I would throw myself upon the mats in the corner, two of these maids would speedily relieve me of any bodily pain I might at that moment be suffering with.

I did so: the two proceeded as set down in the verbal prospectus; and whatever bodily pain I may have possessed at the beginning of the process speedily dwindled into insignificance by comparison with the tortures of my novel cure. Every limb had to be unjointed and set over again. Places were made for new joints, and I think the new joints were temporarily set in, for my arms and legs went into angles I had never before seen them in, nor have I since been able to a.s.sume those startling att.i.tudes. The stomach was then kneaded like dough. The ribs were crushed down against the spine, and then forced out by well-directed blows in the back. The spinal column was undoubtedly abstracted, and some mechanical subst.i.tute now does its best to help me through the world. The arms were tied in bow-knots behind, and the skull cracked like the sh.e.l.l of a hard-boiled egg, worked into shape again, and left to heal.

By this time I was unconscious, and for an hour my sleep promised to be eternal. I must have lain flat on the matting, without a curve in me, when Nature, taking pity, gradually let me rise and a.s.sume my own proportions, as though a little leaven had been mixed in my making over.

The awakening was like coming from a bath of the elements. I breathed to the tips of my toes. Perfumes penetrated me till I was saturated with them. I felt a thousand years younger; and as I looked back upon the old life I seemed to have risen from, I thought of it much as a b.u.t.terfly must think of his grub-hood, and was in the act of expanding my wings, when I saw Felix, just recovering, a few feet from me, apparently as ecstatic as myself. I never dared to ask him how he was reduced to submission, for I little imagined he could so far forget himself. There are some sudden and inexplicable revolutions in the affairs of humanity that should not be looked into too closely, because a chaotic chasm yawns between the old man and the new, which no one has ever yet explored. Felix sprang to his feet like Prometheus unbound, and embraced me with fervour, as one might after a hair-breadth escape, exclaiming, "Did you ever see anything like it, Old Boy?" to which the Old Boy, thus familiarly addressed (O. B. is a pet monogram of mine, designed and frequently executed by Felix), responded, "There wasn't much to see, but my feelings were past expression." "What's its name?" asked Felix. "I think they call it _lomi-lomi_," said I. "Pa.s.s _lomi-lomi_!" shouted Felix; and then we both roared again, which summoned the host, who congratulated us and invited us to his canoe.

Felix again endeavoured to fathom the mysteries of the _hula-hula_. Was it something to eat?--did they keep it tied in the daytime?--what was its colour? etc., till the amused gentleman who was conducting us to an exhibition of the great Unknown nearly capsized our absurdly narrow canoe in the very deepest part of the creek. Bands of fishermen and women pa.s.sed us, wading breast-high in the water, beating it into a foam before them, and singing at the top of their voices as they drove the fish down stream into a broad net a few rods below. Gra.s.s-houses, half buried in foliage, lined the mossy banks; while the dusky groups of women and children, cl.u.s.tering about the smouldering flames that betokened the preparation of the evening meal, added not a little to the poetry of twilight in the tropics.

Felix thought he would like to turn Kanaka on the spot; so we beached the canoe, and approached the fire, built on a hollow stone under a tamarind-tree, and were at once offered the cleanest mat to sit on, and a calabash of _poi_ for our refreshment. How to eat paste without a spoon was the next question. The whole family volunteered to show us; drew up around the calabash in a hungry circle, and dipped in with a vengeance. Six right hands spread their first and second fingers like sign-boards pointing to a focus in the very centre of that _poi_-paste; six fists dove simultaneously, and were buried in the luscious ma.s.s.

There was a spasmodic working in the elbows, an effort to come to the top, and in a moment the hands were lifted aloft in triumph, and seemed to be tracing half a dozen capital O's in the transparent air, during which manoeuvre the ma.s.s of _poi_ adhering to the fingers a.s.sumed fair proportions, resembling, to a remarkable degree, large, white swellings; whereupon they were immediately conveyed to the several mouths, instinctively getting into the right one, and, having discharged freight, reappeared as good as ever, if not better than before.

"Disgusting!" gasped Felix, as he returned to the water-side. I thought him unreasonable in his harsh judgment, a.s.suring him that our own flour was fingered as often before it came, at last, to our lips in the form of bread. "Moreover," I added, "this _poi_ is glutinous: the moment a finger enters it, a thin coating adheres to the skin, and that finger may wander about the calabash all day without touching another particle of the substance. Therefore, six or sixteen fellows fingering in one dish for dinner are in reality safer than we, who eat steaks that have been mesmerized under the hands of the butcher and the cook."