The collection plate was passed by the sheriff—could that have been unpremeditated by the committee in charge? The last hymn died away upon the seabreeze, and the amen of the final invocation to Deity floated up to blue heaven. The summery throng, so solemnly happy throughout the warm hours of attention, left chairs, stones, grass, and the walls of the heiau, and descended upon a huge feast in a half-open building at water’s edge. Preparations had been afoot for days. More than once, bound through for other points, we had noted the busy wahines and their men, and passed the time o’ day with them. That very morning our nostrils had dilated to delicious odors of roast pig.
We remained at the luau only long enough for a first course, because we had been invited by the head of the Captain Cook Coffee Company to dine at his cottage on the beach beyond the heiau. One could envy our host his location, tucked away back in the cool shadow of the hoary temple, half-surrounded by ponds, and with splendid swimming outside off the shelving sands. There seems to be no fear of sharks here; why, I could not unearth, for the ocean pours over no barrier reef. I never had finer swimming than out beyond in those large, billowing rollers that did not burst until close to the beach, and then mildly. But it is a wicked place, they promise, in stormy weather.
There is no part of the world I have seen that is so fascinating to me as Kona. Aside from its material beauty from surf-frilled coast to timberline, it is pervaded by a mysterious charm that links it with my oldest dreams. Back in childhood, in the beginnings of personal memory, my dreaming at intervals took me upon a mountain where dwelt a sophisticated people who lived for beauty and pleasure. There were dark rooms somewhere in the steeps, but I never fathomed their significance. Although the men and women were my kind—I saw no children—I seemed to wander among them in a sort of seclusion, with little attention paid me. For years I had not thought of this land of unconsciousness until that week on the Paris ranch. As soon as the clover-leaf had emerged upon the Kona slopes, its high ridge began to stir a remembrance that led to the all but forgotten dream mountain. That skyline was a constant lure. The tender wedges of young papaia groves and other crops, fingering into the primeval forest, did not lessen the impression of familiarity with older visits than my former ones here. By daylight and by dark the whole prospect retained its unreality. Twilight and dawn lent the mountain-side a perpendicularity, the depressions and shadows caverns of mystery. In the eerie gloom one was almost afraid to find the ghostly wall impalpable.
By far the most savage thing in the Kona district is a small Catholic church that clings to the precipitous land. Some holy brother of long ago had decorated every inch of this chapel with his conception of the Hereafter. I will say that his sense of fitness kept the scene in key with native surroundings, for the wooden pillars simulated coco palms, their fronds spreading upon the blue ceiling. The painted trunks were scrolled in the native with hopeful prophecies such as “You are going to hell.” The tormented souls depicted on the right-hand wall were indubitably Hawaiians, with a sprinkling of imported tillers of the soil. Most of them wore expressions of pained surprise at shrewd punishments for sins they wotted not of. It was an unfortunate skurrying paké, Chinaman, however, with a long and inconvenient queue, who seemed to be having a peculiarly unpleasant time of it, between fire and snakes and an extremely unstable equilibrium. The distinguished attention lavished upon his execution, artistically and spiritually, by a harrying, tailed demon with a red pitchfork, led one to hazard that the painter had “had it in” for his earthly prototype. An artist of old Salem could not have used more lurid and thrilling realism!
On the opposite wall, with a certain rude sublimity, was limned the Temptation in the Wilderness, besides scenes of heavenly reward for righteousness.
The story runs, if I remember aright, that when the earnest proselyter was called to another parish, his mural illuminations failing to meet with aught but contumely, he revenged himself by painting brown the angels’ faces!
I was more than curious to learn if that three miles of new automobile road across the lava from Napoopoo had altered the native atmosphere of Honaunau. I record with thanksgiving that such is not to any grave extent the case. The pilgrim, approaching the beach village with open spirit and sympathy, may still find a bit of real Hawaii. Myself, I spent a perfect day, the abominable fumes and noise of gas-cars excepted. The church convention, taking the opportunity to revisit the heiau, motored over en masse. From what I observed, not a Hawaiian was guilty of the slightest levity within the pagan precincts.
It is a sweet spot, Honaunau, removed as far from the restless work-a-day world as may be in a machine age, considering its nearness to the continent. As all over the island, the old women, reminded of my identity, caressed me half-reverently for my widowhood. They recalled Jack London of the sea-gray eyes, and sunny curls as recalcitrant as their own, and that he wrote understandingly of their people. “A good man,” they murmured in the native; and Auwe! and again Auwe! they repeated in the kindest voices I had heard since far days in Samoa.
Ethel Paris, unknown to me, also hinted to the villagers that Lakana Wahine favored, above haole oysters, raw tidbits of Hawaiian fish. I had found, in the stone-walled palm grove, a coconut frond twenty feet long that suited me well for a sylvan couch. With head on log, I was complete. I sharpened my pencil on a convenient lava bowlder, and went at making word-sketches of my environs, unwilling to lose one moment in entire forgetfulness. I wrote a few sentences, set down some of the colors. But I found my mood better fed by idly wondering why the drowsy interval between the impact of an ax wielded by a distant woodchopper, and the sound of it, seemed longer than in any other atmosphere. An old break in the stone wall opened up a deep bight, striped in peacock and green-turquoise, where rolled at anchor a dove-gray sampan that dully mirrored the gaudy tide. To either side, arms of lava embraced miniature bays. On a moss-green islet stood a native boy, in perspective a mere Tanagre figurine, tarnished with vert reflections. In his hand was a snow-white crust of coconut, and motionless he watched a green-crested, red-webbed duck nozzling in the shallows.