“No, and I don’t know it now. What is it?”
“It’s a newcomer, a tenderfoot, a wayfarer on the shores of chance, a—”
“I like it—it’s a beautiful word,” Jack curbed my literary output. “And I can’t help being it, anyway. But what shall I be if I stay here?”
Recourse to a scratch-pad in my pocket divulged the fascinating sobriquet that even an outlander, be he the right kind of outlander, might come in time—a long time—to deserve. It is kamaaina, and its significance is that of old-timer, and more, much more. It means one who belongs, who has come to belong in the heart and life and soil of Hawaii; as one might say, a subtropical “sour-dough.”
“How should it be pronounced, since you know so much?”
“Kah-mah-ah-ee-nah,” I struggled with careful notes and tongue. “But when Miss Frances says it quickly, it seems to run into ‘Kah-mah-I’-nah.’—And you mustn’t say ‘Kammy-hammy-hah’ for ‘Kam-may-hah-may’-hah,’” I got back at him, for Kamehameha the Great’s name had tripped us both in the books read aloud at sea.
“I’d rather be called ‘Kamaaina’ than any name in the world, I think,” Jack ignored my efforts at his education. “I love the land and I love the people.”
For be it known this is not his first sight of these islands. Eleven or twelve years ago, on the way to the sealing grounds off the Japan coast in the Sophie Sutherland, he first saw the loom of the southernmost of the group, Hawaii, on its side Kilauea’s pillar of smoke by day and fiery glow by night. Again, in 1904, bound for Korea as correspondent to the Japanese-Russian War, he was in Honolulu for the short stop-over of the Manchuria, and spent as brief a time there on his return aboard the Korea six months later. And ever since, despite the scantiness of acquaintance, he has been drawn to return—so irresistibly as now to make a very roundabout voyage to the Marquesas in the South Pacific, in order that Hawaii might be first port of call.
“Here’s something I didn’t show you in the mail,” he said presently, picking up a thick envelope addressed in his California agent’s hand. It contained a sheaf of rejections of his novel “The Iron Heel” which has proved too radical for the editors, or at least for their owners’ policies. “I had hoped it was timely,” he went on, “and would prove a ten-strike; but it seems I was wrong.
“They’re all afraid of it, Mate-Woman. They see their subscriptions dropping off if they run it; but they give hell to us poor devils of writers if they catch us writing for the mere sake of money instead of pure literature. What’s a fellow to do? We’ve got to eat, and our families have got to eat. And we’ve got to buy holo—what do you call those flowy white things? for small wives;—and sail boats, and gather fresh material for more stories that will and won’t sell...” he trailed off lugubriously.