Hawaii (65 page)

Holding the sacred rock of Pele aloft, she cried, "Pele! Great goddess! You are destroying the town of those who love you! I pray you to halt!"

And standing there with the stone aloft, she watched new fires reach the ugly snout and start to gush forward toward the town of Hilo, and as the fires trembled, she threw into them tobacco, and two bottles of brandy which flamed furiously, and four red scarves, for that was a color Pele loved, and a red rooster and finally a lock of her own hair. And the fires of Pele hung in the snout, consumed the tobacco, and slowly froze into position. The flow of lava had halted at Noelani's feet, but there were no cheers, only the soft prayers of all who had trusted that Pele would never destroy the town of Hilo. The fires went out. The probing fingers consumed no more homes,

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and in a daze of glory and confusion Noelani returned to her ship and went once more to Lahaina, there to await the birth of the child who, when she was gone, would take her place as intercessor with the gods.

This halting of the lava was the worst single blow Abner Hale experienced in Lahaina, for coming so quickly after the defection of Keoki and his sister, it was interpreted as confirming their marriage; while Noelani's demonstrated ability to influence the ancient gods convinced Hawaiians that they still survived, and many began drifting away from the Christian church. But what hurt Abner most was the hilarity with which Americans greeted the miracle. One profane captain kept shouting, "From here on count me a firm believer in Madame Pele!" Another promised, "Now if Noelani will only take care of the storms, I'll join her church, too."

Abner, suffering at each defection from his church and wincing at the American jibes, became obsessed with the lava incident and went about arguing with anyone who would listen: "The burning rock came so far and stopped. What's so miraculous about that?"

"Ah, but who stopped it?" his tormentors would parry.

"A woman stands before a nose of lava as it's about to die down, and that's a miracle," he snorted contemptuously.

"Ah, but what if she hadn't been there?" the logicians queried.

After some weeks Abner went at last, and grudgingly, to consult with John Whipple, and the young scientist reassured him. "When the internal pressures of a volcano become powerful enough, they erupt into violence. Depending solely upon the interior forces within the earth, and nothing more, lava is spewed forth and rolls down mountainsides. If there's enough lava, it's got to reach the ocean. If there isn't, it stops somewhere en route."

"Are these things known?" Abner asked.

"By anyone with a grain of intelligence," Whipple replied. "Look at Lanai. Anyone can see it was a volcano once. Look at our own Maui. At one time it had to be two separate volcanoes, gradually coalescing along that line. I would guess that at some time all the separate islands we see from this pier were one great island."

"How could that have been?" Abner queried.

"Either the islands sank oi the sea rose. Either explanation would do."

The grandeur of this concept was too difficult for Abner to accept, and he retreated to certainty: "We know that the world was created four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ, and there is no record of islands having risen or fallen." The idea was repugnant to him.

Whipple was going to ask about the Flood, but he changed the subject and casually remarked, "Abner, why did you put yourself in such a bad light at the marriage of Keoki and Noelani? You surrendered a lot of influence that week."

"It was an abomination, unnatural, unclean!" Abner stormed.

"I've been thinking about it a great deal," Whipple reflected. "What's so dreadful about it? Now really, don't quote me incidents from the Bible. Just tell me."

"It's abhorrent and unnatural," Abner stormed, still hurting from the actions of his two preferred Hawaiians.

"What's really so abhorrent about it?" Whipple pressed.

"Every civilized society . . ." Abner began, but his companion grew impatient and snapped: "Damn it, Abner, every time you start an answer that way I know it's going to be irrelevant. Two of the most completely civilized societies we've ever had were the Egyptians and the Incas. Now, no Egyptian king was ever allowed to marry anybody but his sister, and if I can believe what I've heard, the same was true of the Incas. They prospered. As a matter of fact," Whipple continued, "it's not a bad system, scientifically. That is, if you're willing to kill off ruthlessly any children with marked defects, and apparently the Egyptians, the Incas and the Hawaiians were willing to do so. Have you ever seen a handsomer group of people than the alii?"

Abner felt that he was going to be sick, but before he could react to Whipple's astonishing reflections, the doctor said, "Noelani has asked me to attend her at the birth of the baby."

"Of course you rebuked her," Abner said with assurance.

"Oh, nol A doctor could practice an entire lifetime and not meet such an opportunity," Whipple explained.

"You would be partner to such a crime?" Abner asked, stunned by the prospect.

"Naturally," Whipple said, and the two men walked back from the pier in silence, but when Abner reached home and sent the children out into the walled yard he confided in whispers to his wife the nauseating news that John Whipple was preparing to attend Noelani, but to his surprise Jerusha replied, "Of course. The girl deserves all consideration. This must be doubly frightening for her."

"But John Whipple, a consecrated Christian!"

"The important thing is that he's a doctor. Do you suppose I ever rested easily, knowing that a totally untrained man would be my attendant when the children were born?"

"Were you so afraid?" Abner asked in surprise.

"I began by being," Jerusha said, "but my love for you made it possible to control my fears. Even so, I'm glad that Brother John is going to tend the girl."

Abner started to rant, but Jerusha had in these months of his defeat heard enough, and now she said firmly, "My dearest husband, I am afraid you are making a fool of yourself."

"What do you mean?" he gasped, rising and walking with agitation to the door.

"You are fighting the kahunas, and Kelolo, and Keoki and Noelani, and even Dr. Whipple. In church you speak without benevolence. You act as if you hated Lahaina and all that was in it. You've even

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withdrawn from your children, so that Micah told me, 'Father hasn't taught me Hebrew for two months.' "

"I have been sorely tried," Abner confessed.

"I appreciate the shocks you've suffered," Jerusha said tenderly, pulling her tense little husband into one of the whaling chairs. "But if, as I think, we are here engaged in a tremendous battle between the old gods and the new . . ." She saw that this phraseology hurt Abner, so she quickly modified it. "What I mean is, between heathenish ways and the way of the Lord, then we ought to fight with our subtlest resources. When the old seems about to reconquer the islands, we ought to combat it with . . ."

"I've warned them all!" Abner shouted, rising from his chair and striding about the earthen floor. "I told Kelolo . . ."

"What I meant was," Jerusha said gently, rising to be with her agitated husband, "that in these crucial times you ought to be calmer than usual, quieter, and more forceful. You've told me how you pointed at the evil three, Keoki, Noelani and Kelolo, and told them in turn. 'God will destroy you!' But you haven't told me or shown me how with Christ's gentle love you have tried to guide the people in these confusing times. I've watched you become increasingly bitter, and, Abner, it must stop. It is you who are destroying the good you have accomplished."

"I feel as if I had achieved nothing," he said from the depths of his spiritual humiliation.

Jerusha caught her husband's passing hand and imprisoned him, turning his pinched face to hers. "My dearest husband," she said formally, "if I were to recount your accomplishments in Lahaina it would take the rest of my life. Look at that little girl in the sunlight. If you had not been here, she would have been sacrificed."

"When I see her," Abner said with racking pain in his heart, "I can see only little Iliki, that sweetest of all children, being passed from one whaling ship to another."

The words were so unexpected, for Abner had not spoken of Iliki for some time, that Jerusha, recalling her dearest pupil, felt bitter tears welling into her eyes, but she fought them back and said, "If in losing Iliki we impressed the islanders . . . and, Abner, they were impressed!" She stopped and blew her nose, concluding her remarks with a firm command: "My dearest counselor, you are to smile. You are to preach about great and lofty subjects. You are to win these

ale to the Lord with bonds of charity so profound that the is-; will be God's forever. You . . . must . . . preach . . . love." With this master theme drummed into his ears by Jerusha, week after week, Abner Hale launched into the series of sermons which completed the winning of Lahaina, for as he spoke of the good life and the effect of God's love upon mankind, he found that whereas he had believed that the islanders had turned away from the Lord, following the example of Kelolo and his children, exactly the contrary was the case; for the common people sensed that in Kelolo's

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reversion to the old ways there was no real hope for them; and Abner's thoughtful, quiet words of consolation found their way into many hearts that had rejected his earlier ranting.

He preached a doctrine which was new to him . . . "The Holy Word of God as Interpreted by Jerusha Bromley, Modified by the Mysteries Encountered in an Alien Land." He continued to hammer forcefully at man's inescapable sin, but his major emphasis was now upon the consoling intercession of Jesus Christ. And what held his listeners doubly was his return to the tactic he had used as a very young man when preaching to the whalers on the Falklands: he addressed himself exactly to those problems which were perplexing his congregation, so that when he spoke of Christ's compassion he said bluntly, "Jesus Christ will understand the confusions faced by His beloved son, Keoki Kanakoa, and Jesus will find it possible to love His erring servant, even as you and I should love him."

These words, when they reached Keoki in the grass palace, shattered him and drove him to the seashore, where he walked for hours, pondering the nature of Christ, as he recalled Him from the early, secure days in the mission school at Cornwall, in distant Connecticut. Then Jesus was perceptible reality, and the eroding loss of this concept agonized Keoki.

When it was known that Noelani was approaching her time of delivery and that her child must be born before the next Sabbath, Abner took public cognizance of this fact, and instead of ranting against the circumstances in which the child had been conceived, he spoke for more than a hour and a half on the particular love Christ has for little children, and he recalled his own emotions at the birth of his two sons and two daughters, of his love for the child Iliki, who was now lost�for as he receded from the facts of Iliki's disappearance, she became younger and younger in his memory�and of the joy that, all Lahaina must feel that their beloved Alii Nui was about to have a child. Since Hawaiians loved nothing more than children, with whom they were gentle and understanding, the two thousand worshipers sniffled quietly during the last fifteen minutes of the sermon, so that without quite knowing how he had accomplished the strategy, Abner found that his words of compassion had quite won Lahaina away from Kelolo and his kahunas, whereas his earlier ranting had been driving the Hawaiians back to the old gods. It was with confusion, therefore, that Lahaina awaited the birth of its next Alii Nui: as loyal Hawaiians they rejoiced that their noble line was to be continued; as Christians they knew that an evil thing had been done by Kelolo and his children.

Noelani bore twins, and Dr. Whipple, after he left the grass palace, reported to his waiting wife, "We must prepare ourselves for an ugly moment, Amanda. The boy was a handsome child, but the girl was deformed. I suppose they will abandon her before morning." And when it was whispered through the town that Keoki Kanakoa, with his own hands, had taken his malformed daughter, and had

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placed her at the edge of the tide for the shark-god Mano, a wave of revulsion swept through the town.

On Sunday the Lahaina church was jammed with nearly three thousand people, as in the old days, but on the way to service Jerusha said quietly to her husband, "Remember, my beloved husband, God has spoken on this subject. You are not required to." And on the instant Abner threw away the text on which he was prepared to thunder, Luke 23, verse 34: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do," and spoke instead from those majestic words of Ecclesiastes which had been much in his mind of late: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down. . . . All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. . . . The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. . . . There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come."

He spoke of the permanence of Maui, of how the whales came back each year to play in the roads, and of how the sunset moved majestically through the months from the volcano of Lanai to the tip of Molokai. He referred to the whistling wind that could blow down churches and of the dead past when Kamehameha himself had trod these roads in mighty conquest. "The earth abideth forever," he cried in soft Hawaiian, and Jerusha, listening to the inspired flow of images, knew that the hatred he had recently held for Lahaina was now discharged, for he passed on from the physical world that endures to the human society which occupies the world. "With all its imperfections it endures," Abner confessed; but promptly he went on to his permanent vision of Geneva as it had been ruled by Calvin and Beza, and by suggesting many unspoken comparisons, he led his huge congregation to the truth he himself was seeking: some forms of human behavior are better than others; and at this point he returned to an idea which had, through the years, become a passion with him: that a society is good when it protects children. "Jesus Christ loves even children who are not perfect," he preached, and on this awful contrast he concluded.