Now they found it richer and stronger than ever in the white men's alliance. They saw its comfortable homes, and large plantations of strange new grains and fruits. They were introduced to the pleasures of the chase. They ate piglet and wild goat, and found them good. They tasted still deeper of the novel atmosphere of law and order, and found these things also very good.
They watched the boys at cricket and football, and the men, brown and white, fencing and boxing as though their lives depended on it, and no harm done. They watched the cutlass drill, and tingled to do likewise. They saw the white men bowl over coco-nuts with their Winchesters at many times the distance they could hurl a spear, and do the same again quicker than they could wink, and for their benefit Long Tom bellowed his loudest, and they heard the roar of him clang to and fro among the hills. They compared the new Kapaa'a boats with their own, and they sat open-mouthed and listened to the last squeals of an ironwood tree from up the valley, as the circular saw cleft it into planks which they could not have imitated with weeks of hardest labour. And—they saw men sleep without weapons by their sides, and without fear. And these things wrought powerfully upon them, and set them thinking.
The christening feast of Kenni-Kenni and Alivani was long remembered in the Dark Islands. Aunt Jannet Harvey always professed regret at having missed it, but Kenneth Blair always assured her, with a great light in his face, that in missing it as she had done she had rendered service to the mission which no words could express.
Aunt Jannet's exile ran into a longer term than she had expected, and there were many anxious faces and apprehensive hearts in the island villages before the Torch came gliding quietly round the heads, and dropped her passengers at their homes.
They all came laden with presents, which already, before they landed, inclined them favourably towards similar trips in the future. But they brought with them also richer invisible freight of new ideas and new hopes, which kept their tongues wagging for weeks afterwards, and set their brains working.
For the visit had not by any means been confined to sight-seeing and enjoyment. The white men turned it to fullest account in the clear and definite explanation of their views and hopes for the whole group of islands, offering all an equal share in the new order of things on the sole condition of union and cohesion. The higher matters which lay closest to their hearts were touched on, but only lightly as yet. Blair had no faith in outward conversion born of a hankering after material good things. He had a firm belief in the advantages of hastening slowly. Get the savages out of their savagery, open the dark minds to the lower lights, and the higher would come in good time.
He suggested regular meetings of the headmen on Kapaa'a, and the idea was received with acclaim. Kapaa'a was a storehouse of good things. They desired no better than to come there often. And in that he saw the germ of a united nation. Ha'o, as the most advanced among them, would naturally preside. Of Ha'o's loyalty and level-headedness he had no doubt. He was years ahead of the rest already. Blair believed his influence would grow, and in time make itself felt throughout the whole group, and through Ha'o he hoped to win them all to the higher life.
If on these highest matters of all he touched as yet but lightly, in others, concerning their material welfare, he gave them some very straight talk, by way of putting them on their guard against that which might come any day.
He told them that other white men would come offering to trade with them, to buy their land, to do great things for them, and of such he begged them to beware, and to allow him to deal with them.
He told them just what had happened in other places, where grasping white traders had pushed themselves in, bringing in with them drink, disease, and dispossession. He showed them how they, the heads of the communities, were responsible for their people. And he promised them every advantage these other men could offer them without any of the penalties.