Hawaii (145 page)

"What for?" he had asked.

"So they could remember the day," the old lady had replied. "But why they would want to remember it I never understood."

There were many Hawaiians, even in 1942, who preferred not to speak with a Hale and who refused to eat at the same table with one. But others remembered not stern Micah who had stolen their islands but his mother Jerusha who had loved the Hawaiians, and those who remembered her would eat with the Hales while the others would not. Now, in Samoa where the rains fell, Hoxworth Hale, the descendant of both Micah and Jerusha, felt their two natures warring in his sympathies, and he wished that something could be done to rectify the injustices of Hawaiian annexation so that his Polynesians would take as much pride in their new flag as the Samoans did in theirs; but he knew that this was not possible, and the old sorrow

FROM THE INLAND SEA

727

that had attacked him at Yale when he contemplated the stolen Jarves paintings returned and he thought: "Who can assess the results of an action?" And he found no joy in Samoa.

But when he reached Tahiti, that Mecca of the South Seas, and his seaplane landed in the small bay that lies off Papeete, between the island of Moorea and the Diademe of Tahiti, making it surely the loveliest seaplane base in the world, his spirits were again excited, for these were the islands from which his people had come. This was the storied capital of the seas, and it was more beautiful than he had imagined. He felt proud to be of a blood that had started from Tahiti. He was disappointed in the legendary girls of the island, however, for few of them had teeth. Australian canned foods and a departure from the traditional fish diet had conspired to rob girls in their teens of their teeth, but, as one of the air corps majors said, "If a man goes for beautiful gums, he can have a hell of a time in Tahiti."

What interested Hoxworth most, however, was not the girls but the Chinese. The French governor pointed out that the Americans would find a secure base in Tahiti, because the Chinese were well in hand. They were allowed to own no land, were forbidden to enter many kinds of business, were severely spied on by currency control, and were in general so held down that the Americans could rest assured there would be no problems. Hoxworth started to say, "In Hawaii our island wealth is multiplied several times each year by the Chinese, who do own land and who do go into business. The only currency control we have is that all our banks would like to get hold of what the Chinese keep in their own banks." But as a visitor he kept his mouth shut and looked.

It seemed to him that Tahiti would be approximately ten times better off in all respects if the Chinese were not only allowed but encouraged to prosper. "You hear so much about Tahiti," he said in some disappointment to the general leading his party, "but compare their roads to Hawaii's."

"Shocking," the general agreed.

"Or their health services, or their stores, or their churches."

"Pretty grubby in comparison with what you fellows have done in Hawaii," the general agreed.

"Where are the Tahiti schools? Where is the university? Or the airport or the clean hospitals? You know, General, the more I see of the rest of Polynesia, the more impressed I am with Hawaii."

The general was concerned with other matters, and on the third day he announced to his team: "It's incredible, but there simply isn't any place here in Tahiti to put an airstrip. But there seems to be an island farther north where we could probably flatten out one of the reefs and find ourselves with a pretty fine landing strip."

"What island?" Hale asked.

"It's called Bora Bora," the general said, and early next morning he flew the PBY up there, and Hoxworth Hale thus became the first part-Hawaiian ever to see his ancestral island of Bora Bora from the

air. He saw it on a bright sunny day, when a running sea was breaking on the outer reef, while the lagoon was a placid blue surrounding the dark island from which rose the tall mountains and the solid, brutal block of basalt in the middle. He gasped at the sheer physical delight of this fabled island, its deep-cut bays, its thundering surf, its outrigger canoes converging near the landing area, and he thought: "No wonder we still remember poems about this island," and he began to chant fragments of a passage his great-great-grandfather Abner Hale had transcribed about Bora Bora:

"Under the bright red stars hides the land, Cut by the perfect bays, marked by the mountains, Rimmed by the reef of flying spume, Bora Bora of the muffled paddlesl Bora Bora of the great navigators."

The other occupants of the PBY were equally impressed by the isknd, but for other reasons. It possessed an enormous anchorage, and if necessary an entire invasion fleet could find refuge within the lagoon; but more important, the little islands along the outer reef were long, smooth and flat. "Throw a couple of bulldozers there for three days, and a plane could land right now," an engineer volunteered.

"We'll fly around once more," the general announced, "and see if we can agree on which of the outer islands looks best." So while the military people looked outward, to study the fringing reef, Hoxworth Hale looked inward, to see the spires of rock and the scintillating bays that cut far inland, so that every home on Bora Bora that he could spot lay near the sea. How marvelous that island was, how like a sacred home in a turbulent sea.

Now the PBY leveled off and started descending toward the lagoon, and Hoxworth thought how exciting it was to be within an airplane that had the capacity to land on water, for this must have been the characteristic of the first great beasts on earth who mastered flight. They must have risen from the sea and landed on it, as the PBY now prepared to do. When it was near the water, speeding along at more than a hundred miles an hour, Hoxworth realized for the first time how swiftly this bird was flying, and as it reached down with its underbelly step to find the waves, he caught himself straining with his buttocks, adjusting them to insure level flight, and then seeking to let them down into the waves, and he flew his bottom so well that soon the plane was rushing along the tiptop particles of the sea, half bird, half fish, and then it lost its flight and subsided into the primordial element, a plane that had conquered the Pacific and come at last to rest upon it.

"Halloo, Joe!" a native cried at the door, and in a moment the plane was surrounded by Bora Borans in their swift, small canoes.

Among the first to go ashore was Hale, because he knew a few words of Polynesian and many of French, and as he sat precariously

FROM THE INLAND SEA 729

on the thwarts of one of the canoes, and felt himself speeding across the limpid waters of the lagoon toward a sprawling, coconut-fringed village whose roofs were made of grass, he thought: "Hawaii has nothing to compare with this."

In a way he was right, for after the general and his staff had been fed with good sweet fish from the lagoon and red wine from Paris, the headman of the village approached with some embarrassment and said in French, which Hale had to interpret: "General, we people of Bora Bora know that you have come here to save us. God himself knows the French would do nothing to rescue us, because they hate Bora Borans, and do you know why? Because in all history we have never been conquered, not even by the French, and officially we are a voluntary part of their empire. They have never forgiven us for not surrendering peacefully like the others, but we say to hell with the French."

"Shut him upl" the general commanded. "The French have been damned good to us, Hale, and I want to hear no more of this sedition."

But the headman was already past his preamble and into more serious business: "So we Bora Borans want to help you in every way we can. You say you want to build an airstrip. Goodl We'll help. You say you'll need water and food. Good! We'll help there too. But there is one matter you seem not to have thought about, and on this we will help too.

"While your flying boat sleeps in the lagoon, you will have to have some place to sleep on shore. We will put aside seven houses for you."

"Tell him we need only two," the general interrupted. "We don't want to disrupt native life."

The proud headman, dressed in a brown lava-lava and flowered wreath about his temples, did not allow the interruption to divert him: "The biggest house will be for the general, and the rest are about the same size. Now because it is not comfortable for a man to sleep alone in such a house, we have asked seven of our young girls if they will take care of everything."

It was here that Hoxworth Hale, son of missionaries, began to blush, and when the maidens were brought forth, clean, shapely, dark-haired, barefoot girls in sarongs and flowers, he began to protest, but when the headman actually started apportioning the girls, the tallest and prettiest to the general, and a shy, slim creature of fifteen to him, Hale quite broke up and the translation stopped.

"What the hell is this?" the general asked, but then the tall, beautiful girl of seventeen who had been assigned to him, took him gently by the hand and started leading him toward his appointed house.

"My God!" the irreverent major cried. "In Bora Bora they got teeth!" And one of the girls must have known some English, for she laughed happily, and because these islanders were more primitive and ate more fish, their teeth were strong and white, and the major

accepted his girl's hand and without even so much as looking at the general, disappeared.

"We can't allow thisl" the general protested. "Tell them so." But when Hale explained this decision the headman said, "We are not afraid of white babies. The island likes them." And after a while only Hoxworth Hale stood in the meeting shed, looking at his long-tressed, fifteen-year-old Polynesian guide. She was a year older than his own daughter, not quite so tall, but equally beautiful, and he was a totally confused man, and then she took his hand and said in French, "Monsieur le Colonel, your house is waiting. We had better

g�-"

She led him along dark-graveled paths beneath breadfruit trees whose wide leaves hid the hot sun. They went along a row of coconut palms bending toward the lagoon as they had done a thousand years before, and in time she came to a small house withdrawn from the others, and here she stopped at the trivial lintel that kept out the wandering pigs and chickens, and said, "This house is mine." She waited until he had entered, and then she joined him and untied a length of sennit that held up the woven door, and when it fell they were alone.

He stood rigid in acute embarrassment, holding onto a bundle of papers, as if he were a schoolboy, and these she took from him and then pushed him backwards slowly, until he sat on a bed with a wooden frame and a woven rope mattress, and he was as frightened as he had ever been in his life. But when she had thrown the papers into a comer she said, "My name is Tehani. And this is the house my father built me when I became fifteen. I plaited the roof of pandanus, but he built the rest."

Hoxworth Hale, then forty-four, was ashamed to be with a girl fifteen, but once when she passed where he was sitting on the bed, her long black hair moved past his face, and he smelled the fragrance of that sweetest of all flowers, the taire Tahiti, and he had never encountered that odor before, and automatically he reached up and caught at her hand, but she was moving rather swiftly, and he missed, but he did catch her right leg above the knee, and he felt her whole body stop at this command, and start to move willingly toward him. He kept hold of her leg and pulled her onto the bed, and she fell back happily and smiled up at him, with the taire flowers about her temples, and he took away the sarong and when she was naked she whispered, "I asked my father for you, for you were quieter than the others."

When the inspecting team convened late that afternoon around an improvised table under the breadfruit trees, by common but unspoken agreement, no one mentioned what had happened, and they proceeded to discuss where the airstrip should be, just as if nothing unusual had occurred, but as night fell and girls appeared with an evening meal, each officer instinctively brought his girl to the table beside him, and there was unprecedented tenderness in the way

FROM THE INLAND SEA

731

the older men saw to it that their young companions got a fair division of the food.

They had not finished eating when a group of young men with long hair in their eyes and pareus about their hips, appeared with guitars and drums, and soon the Bora Bora night was filled with echoes. The audience waited until the general's tall, slim beauty leaped into the dancing ring and executed the wild, passionate dance of that island. This was a signal which permitted the other girls to do the same, and soon one had the cocky major in the ring with her, attempting a version of the dance, and he was followed by a colonel and then by the general himself. It became a wild, frenzied, delightful dance under the stars, and all the older people who were watching applauded.

Hoxworth Hale's girl, Tehani, did not ask him to dance, knowing from what had transpired in the grass house that he was a shy man, so finally an old woman with no teeth muscled her way through the crowd, stood before Hale and did a few lascivious steps. To the surprise of everyone, Hale leaped to his feet and swung into the Hawaiian hula, at which, like most of his Honolulu contemporaries, he was skilled. The audience stopped making noise and the military visitors sat down, tired as they were from their own exertions, while Hale and the old woman performed an admirable dance. Finally, when the astonishment was becoming vocal, the major shouted, "Hale for President!" and Hoxworth broke into a much swifter version while the old woman executed a downright lewd movement, to the howls of the crowd.

At this Tehani stepped forward, firmly pushed the old beldame away and took her place, and for a few minutes Hale and the delicately formed young girl with streams of flowers in her hair, brought an ancient grace to the sands of Bora Bora. He felt himself caught up in passions he had thought long dead, while the girl smiled softly to herself and, knowing that she was the envy of all the others for her man could dance, thought: "I got the best one of the group, and I was smart enough to ask for him."