We should have preferred to remain in the garden of palms and flowers. But we were ushered to the cottage, where one glance into the hot little parlor, fainting with heavy-scented bouquets, every window sealed tight as if in a New England winter, taught us that this was the pride of their simple, generous lives, with its neat furniture and immaculate “tidies” on chair, sofa, and exact center-table. Head and neck and shoulders, we were garlanded with ropes of buff ginger blossoms twined with mailé, and sat around straight-backed in delighted discomfort, praying for fans. Admiring the handsome slumbering infant who was the object and beneficiary of the festival, we strove the while to express to our host and hostess how glad and honored we felt to be with them.
From the cool twilight lanai floated in the most bewitching, sleepy, sensuous music, rippled through with gurgles of lazy laughter. Presently, left to wander at will, whom should we discover in the happy huddle of musicians but Madame Alapai herself, not at all the grand prima of her Prince’s park, but a benevolent, smiling wahine, robed simply like all the rest in spotless white holoku, and unaffectedly ready, once her sudden, laughing bashfulness was conquered, to warble anything and everything she knew.
The coyness of these winsome brown women is only skin deep, for to smiles and sincerity they warm and unfold like their own tropic blossoms to the morning sun. Deliciously they laugh at everything or nothing, with an abandon that does not tire, but draws the becharmed malihini fervently to wish he were one of them for the nonce—a product of sunshine and dew and affection, without painful responsibility, with no care but the living, loving present.
Madame Alapai accompanied the first American tour of the Royal Hawaiian Band. The story runs that she was prepared to go on the second, but her husband, jealous of her successes and advantages, decided he needed a change of air and scene, and made the manager of his song-bird a proposition the prompt rejection of which cost the band its prima donna. His amiable suggestion was that he travel with the troupe and be paid a salary for the honor of his mere company, since he possessed no marketable talent. It seemed enough to his limited vision that he should allow his wife to earn her salary. Be it credited the lady that the facts were made public without her assistance, for she remains guiltless of shaming her life-companion by ridicule or criticism. When asked why she did not go to the Coast the second time, she replies, with a slightly lofty air that is without offense, what of its childlikeness: “Oh, they wanted me to go, but I refused.”
She sang for us without reserve, out of her very good repertory. Her voice is remarkable, and I never heard another of its kind, for it is more like a stringed instrument than anything I can think of—metallic, but sweetly so, pure and true as a lark’s, with falls and slurs that are indescribably musical and human. The love-eyed men and women lounging about her with their guitars and ukuleles, garlanded with drooping roses and carnations and ginger, were commendably vain of showing off their first singer in the land, and thrummed their loveliest to her every song. None can waken strings as do these people. Their fingers bestow caresses to which wood and steel and cord become sentient and tremulously responsive.
The ukulele, with its petite guitar-shape, and four slender strings, seems a part of the Hawaiian at every merrymaking. It hailed originally from Portugal, but one seldom remembers this, so native has it become to the Islands. Primitive Hawaiians played on a crude little affair that was a mere stick from the wood of the ulei, a flowering indigenous shrub. The tuneful stick was cut eighteen or twenty inches long and three or four wide, strung across with gut, and was held in the teeth like a Jew’s harp, while the strings were swept with a fine grass-straw. Lovers thus whispered through their teeth an understood language of longing and trysting, the light wood vibrating the voice to some distance in the still night.
From temporary arbors broke the clatter of busy wahines making ready the feast, and new guests laughed their way into the garden. Our nostrils twitched to unknown but appetizing odors. We expected as a matter of course that we should be invited to sit cross-legged on grass-mats, and were disappointed to find a table prepared for the more distinguished of the company.
At every place was a heap of food so attractive that one did not know which mysterious packet to open first. Each diner had at least a quart of poi, of the approved royal-pink tint, in a big shiny goblet carved from a coconut thinned and polished and scalloped around the brim, and this substance as usual formed the pièce de résistance. There are varying consistencies of poi. The “one-finger” poi is thick enough to admit of a mouthful being twirled at one twirl upon the forefinger; two-fingered poi is thinner, requiring two digits to carry the required portion. I do not know whether or not three-fingered poi is ever exceeded; but if it is, I am sure no true Hawaiian or kamaaina would hesitate to apply his whole fist to it.
It is etiquette to sample every delicacy forthwith, rather than to finish any one or two until all have been tasted. And we depended solely upon our fingers in place of forks and spoons. A twist of poi on the forefinger is conveyed neatly to the lips, followed by a pinch of salt salmon, for seasoning, or of hot roast fish or beef or fowl steaming in freshly opened leaf-wrappings; for this is the incomparable way roast foods are prepared, then laid in the ground among heated stones, and covered with earth. Thus none of the essential flavor is liberated until the clean hot leaves of the ti-plant, or the canna in absence of the ti, are removed at table.
There was also chicken stewed in coconut milk, sweet and tasty; for relishes, outlandish forms of sea-life, particularly the opihis (o-pe-hees), salt and savory, which we may come to prefer to raw oysters. Mullet is eaten raw, cut in tempting little gray cubes and dusted with coarse red salt. Jack pronounced it one of his favorite articles of diet henceforth. I may in time acquire a liking for well-seasoned raw fish, which in all logic is less offensive than live raw oysters and squirming razor-back clams; but fairly certain am I that never shall I assimilate ake (ah-kay)—which is raw liver and chile peppers.