At six we were roused by the shouting clan trooping to the pool, and the indefatigable Jack rose to write for a couple of hours before breakfast, on his Maui article, “The House of the Sun.” By nine, with dewy cables of roses about our shoulders, unwillingly we bade farewell to the household, and drove under a lovely broken sky to the foot of the Nuuanu Pali. Here, as much for the experience of climbing the up-ended ridges as to ease the burden of the horses, we left the carriage to meet it at the pass. Except for a short climb I once made at Schynige Platte in Switzerland, this wet path, lying straight up an extremely narrow hog-back, was the steepest and most difficult of my life. The ground drops with startling suddenness on either hand—or foot; and for me it was not infrequently both hand and foot. But we won over the horses, and had leisure at the drafty platform once more to feast our unsatiated eyes on the wide beauty of that scene which never can tire.
My husband, who holds that it is a waste of valuable effort to shave himself when he might be enjoying the soothing ministrations of a specialist, went to the barber in town while I shopped in the fascinating Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and East Indian stores, always with an eye to the fine Filipino and other embroideries, pina or pineapple cloth, of exquisite tints, and unusual and gorgeous stuffs worn by the oriental women in Honolulu—silk and wool and mysterious fibers impossible to buy in the States, as there is no demand. And the heart feminine thrills not in vain over kimonos and mandarin coats, for the prices are absurdly cheap, and the colors food for the eye, with untold possibilities for household as well as personal decoration.
From little houses and huts on the rolling fields, parties of natives, men, women, old and young, and naked brown imps of babies, gather to bathe—always the favorite sport—in a rocky basin of the verdant ravine. From the balconies of the big house often we watch them playing, in gaudy, wet-clinging muumuus, unaware of any haole observer—their carefree, childlike selves, splashing, diving, laughing and singing, laundering their hair, and calling to one another in wild, sweet gutturals. This afternoon we were struck with a new note—a strange, savage chanting. In it there was distinct, accentuated rhythm, but no music as we understand the term—only the harsh, primitive voicing of a man with the noble, grayed head of the old Hawaiians. Listening to the curious untamed note, the like of which we had never heard, Mr. Thurston said: “You are lucky to hear it under these circumstances—when the old fellow thinks no one but his own people are listening. He is probably intoning the oli, genealogy of one of the swimmers. There was no music, what we would call music, until the missionaries brought it here.”
In the sudden transition from the ancient tabu system to an entirely changed order that came with the death of Kamehameha I in 1819, followed by the arrival from Boston a year later of the first missionaries, the old “singing” became obsolescent. The new music, with its pa, ko, li, conforming to our do, re, mi, was taken up by everyone, soon becoming universal with these people who learned with such facility; and out of the simple, melodious Christian hymning, the natives evolved a music inoculated with their primal rhythms, that has become uniquely their own. Captain James King, who sailed with Captain Cook on his disastrous last voyage, makes the interesting statement that the men and women chanted in parts.
The predominance of vowel and labial sounds lends a distinct character to the tone-quality of Polynesian language, lacking, as it does our consonants, b, c, s and d, f, g, j, q, x, and z, so that the upper cavities of the throat are not called into full play. Therefore the voice, with its Italian vowels, developed a low and sensuous quality that, when strained for dramatic or passional expression, breaks into the half-savage, barbaric tones that stir the ferine blood lying so close to the outer skin of the human. Sometimes there is a throaty musical gurgle that seems a tone-language out of the very tie-ribs of the human race.
The phrasing was made by old Hawaiians to suit the verse of the mélé, a sort of chanted saga, and not to express a musical idea. The cadencing was marked by a prolonged trilling or fluctuating movement called i’i, in which the tones rose and fell, touching the main note that formed the framework of the chant, repeatedly springing away for short intervals—a half-step or even less. In the hula the verses are shorter, with a repetitional refrain of the last phrase of each stanza. That full-throated, lissom-limbed girl at the christening feast on the peninsula illustrated much of the foregoing when she sang for the dancers.
With a pleasant thrill I looked forward to meeting Alice Roosevelt Longworth at a dinner and dance given this evening at the Seaside. In one’s imagination she seems the epitome of the American Girl, and I found her far more beautiful than her pictures, with eyes wide apart, unafraid and level, looking like topazes from across the table in a glow of yellow candleshades upon yellow roses. And when “Princess Alice” smiles, she smiles, with eyes as well as lips. There is inner as well as outer poise about her brown-golden head, and she is straight as a young Indian and fair as a lily.
She and Jack were in no time cheek-by-jowl in a heated argument upon “nature-faking” that would have delighted, by proxy, her illustrious father, with whom Jack has all these weeks been tilting in the press; and I heard him offering to back a bull-dog against the Colonel’s wolf-dog, in the latter’s back yard!
I sat between Nicholas Longworth and “Jack” Atkinson, and our talk at table—strange subject for a banquet—was largely concerned with the welfare of the Leper Settlement, in which both Mr. Longworth and Mr. Atkinson are extraordinarily interested.