Hawaii is a queer place. Everything socially is what I may call
topsy-turvy. Not but what things are correct. They are almost too
much so. But still things are sort of upside down. The most ultra-
exclusive set there is the "Missionary Crowd." It comes with rather
a shock to learn that in Hawaii the obscure martyrdom-seeking
missionary sits at the head of the table of the moneyed aristocracy.
But it is true. The humble New Englanders who came out in the third
decade of the nineteenth century, came for the lofty purpose of
teaching the kanakas the true religion, the worship of the one only
genuine and undeniable God. So well did they succeed in this, and
also in civilizing the kanaka, that by the second or third
generation he was practically extinct. This being the fruit of the
seed of the Gospel, the fruit of the seed of the missionaries (the
sons and the grandsons) was the possession of the islands
themselves,--of the land, the ports, the town sites, and the sugar
plantations: The missionary who came to give the bread of life
remained to gobble up the whole heathen feast.
But that is not the Hawaiian queerness I started out to tell. Only
one cannot speak of things Hawaiian without mentioning the
missionaries. There is Jack Kersdale, the man I wanted to tell
about; he came of missionary stock. That is, on his grandmother's
side. His grandfather was old Benjamin Kersdale, a Yankee trader,
who got his start for a million in the old days by selling cheap
whiskey and square-face gin. There's another queer thing. The old
missionaries and old traders were mortal enemies. You see, their
interests conflicted. But their children made it up by
intermarrying and dividing the island between them.
Life in Hawaii is a song. That's the way Stoddard put it in his
"Hawaii Noi":-
"Thy life is music--Fate the notes prolong!
Each isle a stanza, and the whole a song."
And he was right. Flesh is golden there. The native women are sun-
ripe Junos, the native men bronzed Apollos. They sing, and dance,
and all are flower-bejewelled and flower-crowned. And, outside the
rigid "Missionary Crowd," the white men yield to the climate and the
sun, and no matter how busy they may be, are prone to dance and sing
and wear flowers behind their ears and in their hair. Jack Kersdale
was one of these fellows. He was one of the busiest men I ever met.
He was a several-times millionaire. He was a sugar-king, a coffee
planter, a rubber pioneer, a cattle rancher, and a promoter of three
out of every four new enterprises launched in the islands. He was a
society man, a club man, a yachtsman, a bachelor, and withal as
handsome a man as was ever doted upon by mammas with marriageable
daughters. Incidentally, he had finished his education at Yale, and
his head was crammed fuller with vital statistics and scholarly
information concerning Hawaii Nei than any other islander I ever
encountered. He turned off an immense amount of work, and he sang
and danced and put flowers in his hair as immensely as any of the
idlers.
He had grit, and had fought two duels--both, political--when he
was no more than a raw youth essaying his first adventures in
politics. In fact, he played a most creditable and courageous part
in the last revolution, when the native dynasty was overthrown; and
he could not have been over sixteen at the time. I am pointing out
that he was no coward, in order that you may appreciate what happens
later on. I've seen him in the breaking yard at the Haleakala
Ranch, conquering a four-year-old brute that for two years had
defied the pick of Von Tempsky's cow-boys. And I must tell of one
other thing. It was down in Kona,--or up, rather, for the Kona
people scorn to live at less than a thousand feet elevation. We
were all on the lanai of Doctor Goodhue's bungalow. I was talking
with Dottie Fairchild when it happened. A big centipede--it was
seven inches, for we measured it afterwards--fell from the rafters
overhead squarely into her coiffure. I confess, the hideousness of
it paralysed me. I couldn't move. My mind refused to work. There,
within two feet of me, the ugly venomous devil was writhing in her
hair. It threatened at any moment to fall down upon her exposed
shoulders--we had just come out from dinner.
"What is it?" she asked, starting to raise her hand to her head.
"Don't!" I cried. "Don't!"
"But what is it?" she insisted, growing frightened by the fright she
read in my eyes and on my stammering lips.
My exclamation attracted Kersdale's attention. He glanced our way
carelessly, but in that glance took in everything. He came over to
us, but without haste.
"Please don't move, Dottie," he said quietly.
He never hesitated, nor did he hurry and make a bungle of it.
"Allow me," he said.
And with one hand he caught her scarf and drew it tightly around her
shoulders so that the centipede could not fall inside her bodice.
With the other hand--the right--he reached into her hair, caught the
repulsive abomination as near as he was able by the nape of the
neck, and held it tightly between thumb and forefinger as he
withdrew it from her hair. It was as horrible and heroic a sight as
man could wish to see. It made my flesh crawl. The centipede,
seven inches of squirming legs, writhed and twisted and dashed
itself about his hand, the body twining around the fingers and the
legs digging into the skin and scratching as the beast endeavoured
to free itself. It bit him twice--I saw it--though he assured the
ladies that he was not harmed as he dropped it upon the walk and
stamped it into the gravel. But I saw him in the surgery five
minutes afterwards, with Doctor Goodhue scarifying the wounds and
injecting permanganate of potash. The next morning Kersdale's arm
was as big as a barrel, and it was three weeks before the swelling
went down.
All of which has nothing to do with my story, but which I could not
avoid giving in order to show that Jack Kersdale was anything but a
coward. It was the cleanest exhibition of grit I have ever seen.
He never turned a hair. The smile never left his lips. And he
dived with thumb and forefinger into Dottie Fairchild's hair as
gaily as if it had been a box of salted almonds. Yet that was the
man I was destined to see stricken with a fear a thousand times more
hideous even than the fear that was mine when I saw that writhing
abomination in Dottie Fairchild's hair, dangling over her eyes and
the trap of her bodice.
I was interested in leprosy, and upon that, as upon every other
island subject, Kersdale had encyclopedic knowledge. In fact,
leprosy was one of his hobbies. He was an ardent defender of the
settlement at Molokai, where all the island lepers were segregated.
There was much talk and feeling among the natives, fanned by the
demagogues, concerning the cruelties of Molokai, where men and
women, not alone banished from friends and family, were compelled to
live in perpetual imprisonment until they died. There were no
reprieves, no commutations of sentences. "Abandon hope" was written
over the portal of Molokai.
"I tell you they are happy there," Kersdale insisted. "And they are
infinitely better off than their friends and relatives outside who
have nothing the matter with them. The horrors of Molokai are all
poppycock. I can take you through any hospital or any slum in any
of the great cities of the world and show you a thousand times worse
horrors. The living death! The creatures that once were men!
Bosh! You ought to see those living deaths racing horses on the
Fourth of July. Some of them own boats. One has a gasoline launch.
They have nothing to do but have a good time. Food, shelter,
clothes, medical attendance, everything, is theirs. They are the
wards of the Territory. They have a much finer climate than
Honolulu, and the scenery is magnificent. I shouldn't mind going
down there myself for the rest of my days. It is a lovely spot."
So Kersdale on the joyous leper. He was not afraid of leprosy. He
said so himself, and that there wasn't one chance in a million for
him or any other white man to catch it, though he confessed
afterward that one of his school chums, Alfred Starter, had
contracted it, gone to Molokai, and there died.
"You know, in the old days," Kersdale explained, "there was no
certain test for leprosy. Anything unusual or abnormal was
sufficient to send a fellow to Molokai. The result was that dozens
were sent there who were no more lepers than you or I. But they
don't make that mistake now. The Board of Health tests are
infallible. The funny thing is that when the test was discovered
they immediately went down to Molokai and applied it, and they found
a number who were not lepers. These were immediately deported.
Happy to get away? They wailed harder at leaving the settlement
than when they left Honolulu to go to it. Some refused to leave,
and really had to be forced out. One of them even married a leper
woman in the last stages and then wrote pathetic letters to the
Board of Health, protesting against his expulsion on the ground that
no one was so well able as he to take care of his poor old wife."
"What is this infallible test?" I demanded.
"The bacteriological test. There is no getting away from it.
Doctor Hervey--he's our expert, you know--was the first man to apply
it here. He is a wizard. He knows more about leprosy than any
living man, and if a cure is ever discovered, he'll be that
discoverer. As for the test, it is very simple. They have
succeeded in isolating the bacillus leprae and studying it. They
know it now when they see it. All they do is to snip a bit of skin
from the suspect and subject it to the bacteriological test. A man
without any visible symptoms may be chock full of the leprosy
bacilli."
"Then you or I, for all we know," I suggested, "may be full of it
now."
Kersdale shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"Who can say? It takes seven years for it to incubate. If you have
any doubts go and see Doctor Hervey. He'll just snip out a piece of
your skin and let you know in a jiffy."
Later on he introduced me to Dr. Hervey, who loaded me down with
Board of Health reports and pamphlets on the subject, and took me
out to Kalihi, the Honolulu receiving station, where suspects were
examined and confirmed lepers were held for deportation to Molokai.
These deportations occurred about once a month, when, the last good-
byes said, the lepers were marched on board the little steamer, the
Noeau, and carried down to the settlement.
One afternoon, writing letters at the club, Jack Kersdale dropped in
on me.
"Just the man I want to see," was his greeting. "I'll show you the
saddest aspect of the whole situation--the lepers wailing as they
depart for Molokai. The Noeau will be taking them on board in a few
minutes. But let me warn you not to let your feelings be harrowed.
Real as their grief is, they'd wail a whole sight harder a year
hence if the Board of Health tried to take them away from Molokai.
We've just time for a whiskey and soda. I've a carriage outside.
It won't take us five minutes to get down to the wharf."
To the wharf we drove. Some forty sad wretches, amid their mats,
blankets, and luggage of various sorts, were squatting on the
stringer piece. The Noeau had just arrived and was making fast to a
lighter that lay between her and the wharf. A Mr. McVeigh, the
superintendent of the settlement, was overseeing the embarkation,
and to him I was introduced, also to Dr. Georges, one of the Board
of Health physicians whom I had already met at Kalihi. The lepers
were a woebegone lot. The faces of the majority were hideous--too
horrible for me to describe. But here and there I noticed fairly
good-looking persons, with no apparent signs of the fell disease
upon them. One, I noticed, a little white girl, not more than
twelve, with blue eyes and golden hair. One cheek, however, showed
the leprous bloat. On my remarking on the sadness of her alien
situation among the brown-skinned afflicted ones, Doctor Georges
replied:-
"Oh, I don't know. It's a happy day in her life. She comes from
Kauai. Her father is a brute. And now that she has developed the
disease she is going to join her mother at the settlement. Her
mother was sent down three years ago--a very bad case."
"You can't always tell from appearances," Mr. McVeigh explained.
That man there, that big chap, who looks the pink of condition, with
nothing the matter with him, I happen to know has a perforating
ulcer in his foot and another in his shoulder-blade. Then there are
others--there, see that girl's hand, the one who is smoking the
cigarette. See her twisted fingers. That's the anaesthetic form.
It attacks the nerves. You could cut her fingers off with a dull
knife, or rub them off on a nutmeg-grater, and she would not
experience the slightest sensation."
"Yes, but that fine-looking woman, there," I persisted; "surely,
surely, there can't be anything the matter with her. She is too
glorious and gorgeous altogether."
"A sad case," Mr. McVeigh answered over his shoulder, already
turning away to walk down the wharf with Kersdale.
She was a beautiful woman, and she was pure Polynesian. From my
meagre knowledge of the race and its types I could not but conclude
that she had descended from old chief stock. She could not have
been more than twenty-three or four. Her lines and proportions were
magnificent, and she was just beginning to show the amplitude of the
women of her race.
"It was a blow to all of us," Dr. Georges volunteered. "She gave
herself up voluntarily, too. No one suspected. But somehow she had
contracted the disease. It broke us all up, I assure you. We've
kept it out of the papers, though. Nobody but us and her family
knows what has become of her. In fact, if you were to ask any man
in Honolulu, he'd tell you it was his impression that she was
somewhere in Europe. It was at her request that we've been so quiet
about it. Poor girl, she has a lot of pride."
"But who is she?" I asked. "Certainly, from the way you talk about
her, she must be somebody."
"Did you ever hear of Lucy Mokunui?" he asked.
"Lucy Mokunui?" I repeated, haunted by some familiar association. I
shook my head. "It seems to me I've heard the name, but I've
forgotten it."
"Never heard of Lucy Mokunui! The Hawaiian nightingale! I beg your
pardon. Of course you are a malahini, {1} and could not be expected
to know. Well, Lucy Mokunui was the best beloved of Honolulu--of
all Hawaii, for that matter."
"You say WAS," I interrupted.
"And I mean it. She is finished." He shrugged his shoulders
pityingly. "A dozen haoles--I beg your pardon, white men--have lost
their hearts to her at one time or another. And I'm not counting in
the ruck. The dozen I refer to were haoles of position and
prominence."
"She could have married the son of the Chief Justice if she'd wanted
to. You think she's beautiful, eh? But you should hear her sing.
Finest native woman singer in Hawaii Nei. Her throat is pure silver
and melted sunshine. We adored her. She toured America first with
the Royal Hawaiian Band. After that she made two more trips on her
own--concert work."
"Oh!" I cried. "I remember now. I heard her two years ago at the
Boston Symphony. So that is she. I recognize her now."
I was oppressed by a heavy sadness. Life was a futile thing at
best. A short two years and this magnificent creature, at the
summit of her magnificent success, was one of the leper squad
awaiting deportation to Molokai. Henley's lines came into my mind:-
"The poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers;
Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame."
I recoiled from my own future. If this awful fate fell to Lucy
Mokunui, what might my lot not be?--or anybody's lot? I was
thoroughly aware that in life we are in the midst of death--but to
be in the midst of living death, to die and not be dead, to be one
of that draft of creatures that once were men, aye, and women, like
Lucy Mokunui, the epitome of all Polynesian charms, an artist as
well, and well beloved of men -. I am afraid I must have betrayed
my perturbation, for Doctor Georges hastened to assure me that they
were very happy down in the settlement.
It was all too inconceivably monstrous. I could not bear to look at
her. A short distance away, behind a stretched rope guarded by a
policeman, were the lepers' relatives and friends. They were not
allowed to come near. There were no last embraces, no kisses of
farewell. They called back and forth to one another--last messages,
last words of love, last reiterated instructions. And those behind
the rope looked with terrible intensity. It was the last time they
would behold the faces of their loved ones, for they were the living
dead, being carted away in the funeral ship to the graveyard of
Molokai.
Doctor Georges gave the command, and the unhappy wretches dragged
themselves to their feet and under their burdens of luggage began to
stagger across the lighter and aboard the steamer. It was the
funeral procession. At once the wailing started from those behind
the rope. It was blood-curdling; it was heart-rending. I never
heard such woe, and I hope never to again. Kersdale and McVeigh
were still at the other end of the wharf, talking earnestly--
politics, of course, for both were head-over-heels in that
particular game. When Lucy Mokunui passed me, I stole a look at
her. She WAS beautiful. She was beautiful by our standards, as
well--one of those rare blossoms that occur but once in generations.
And she, of all women, was doomed to Molokai. She straight on
board, and aft on the open deck where the lepers huddled by the
rail, wailing now, to their dear ones on shore.
The lines were cast off, and the Noeau began to move away from the
wharf. The wailing increased. Such grief and despair! I was just
resolving that never again would I be a witness to the sailing of
the Noeau, when McVeigh and Kersdale returned. The latter's eyes
were sparkling, and his lips could not quite hide the smile of
delight that was his. Evidently the politics they had talked had
been satisfactory. The rope had been flung aside, and the lamenting
relatives now crowded the stringer piece on either side of us.
"That's her mother," Doctor Georges whispered, indicating an old
woman next to me, who was rocking back and forth and gazing at the
steamer rail out of tear-blinded eyes. I noticed that Lucy Mokunui
was also wailing. She stopped abruptly and gazed at Kersdale. Then
she stretched forth her arms in that adorable, sensuous way that
Olga Nethersole has of embracing an audience. And with arms
outspread, she cried:
"Good-bye, Jack! Good-bye!"
He heard the cry, and looked. Never was a man overtaken by more
crushing fear. He reeled on the stringer piece, his face went white
to the roots of his hair, and he seemed to shrink and wither away
inside his clothes. He threw up his hands and groaned, "My God! My
God!" Then he controlled himself by a great effort.
"Good-bye, Lucy! Good-bye!" he called.
And he stood there on the wharf, waving his hands to her till the
Noeau was clear away and the faces lining her after-rail were vague
and indistinct.
"I thought you knew," said McVeigh, who had been regarding him
curiously. "You, of all men, should have known. I thought that was
why you were here."
"I know now," Kersdale answered with immense gravity. "Where's the
carriage?"
He walked rapidly--half-ran--to it. I had to half-run myself to
keep up with him.
"Drive to Doctor Hervey's," he told the driver. "Drive as fast as
you can."
He sank down in a seat, panting and gasping. The pallor of his face
had increased. His lips were compressed and the sweat was standing
out on his forehead and upper lip. He seemed in some horrible
agony.
"For God's sake, Martin, make those horses go!" he broke out
suddenly. "Lay the whip into them!--do you hear?--lay the whip into
them!"
"They'll break, sir," the driver remonstrated.
"Let them break," Kersdale answered. "I'll pay your fine and square
you with the police. Put it to them. That's right. Faster!
Faster!"
"And I never knew, I never knew," he muttered, sinking back in the
seat and with trembling hands wiping the sweat away.
The carriage was bouncing, swaying and lurching around corners at
such a wild pace as to make conversation impossible. Besides, there
was nothing to say. But I could hear him muttering over and over,
"And I never knew. I never knew."
Footnotes:
{1} Malahini--new-comer.
_________
-THE END-
Jack London's short story: Good-bye, Jack
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
