Hawaiian idylls of love and death

The laws of men are merciful in intent, but they sometimes grind hard upon the innocent and the poor, at times through the necessary imperfection of all human efforts after the ideal, at times through the harsh administration of enactments good enough in themselves.

No laws have ever seemed so necessary in Hawaii as the laws enforcing the segregation of lepers; no laws just in themselves have ever been the cause of so much grief and pain. There have been times, moreover, when they were carried out neither wisely nor mercifully.

At such a time only could the following story have been possible—the story of a love which laws could not abrogate nor death itself annul.

Pauoa is a valley of almost perpetual rainbow, where the mists dance in the sunshine on the mountainside and the waters trickle down through thickets of ferns and scarlet creepers to the long lines of cocoanut palms which stand like sentinels along the beach from Diamond Head to Honolulu.

But its chief beauty to Keoua, returning with his net from fishing outside the coral reef, lay in the fact that he was homeward bent. There, a hundred yards further, was the grass hut, secluded behind a screen of banana trees, and rising apparently out of a glistening swamp of taro-patch made on a terrace of the mountainside. What joy to feel the embrace of his good wahine, Luka, and to have the crowing brown baby thrust into his arms to fondle! Was it not always worth while to be the long day away to know such a homecoming as this?

But to-night there was no welcome, and Keoua’s heart sank. In his haste he waded through the taro-patch, instead of skirting the enclosure as usual. The child was there, he heard its cry before he entered, but of wife there was no sign. The baby lay on the matted floor, feebly whining; the mother was gone, apparently not without struggle, for the matting at the door had been torn violently away, making the hut look like a desolate cave.

Keoua did not search the enclosure: he knew what had happened. The officers of the Board of Health had found his hut at last, and had taken away his wife, for—she was a leper. They had taken her away in the husband’s absence, for they knew that, had he been there, he would have fought to the death. His loaded gun still lay where he had left it in the corner of the hut. They had taken her by violence as it seemed, and callously left the helpless babe behind, for Hawaiian officials, even those with bowels of compassion, were not much given to thinking about babies. Some Chinese coolies working in the neighborhood corroborated the suggestions of his fear. Luka had been carried away to the haole (white) doctors, and she would be taken to Molokai, and there be dead—dead to husband, child and friends.

Keoua was a crushed man when he took his helpless babe in his arms. It did not occur to him to give it away, as many of his friends would have done, or even to find a nurse for it. Somehow it reminded him that he once had a home. He did not go fishing now. For three or four days he tried to make the babe eat some poi, or even, so stupid or ignorant was the man, some hard taro, or a piece of banana, but, although it did not cry, it refused to eat, and one day towards evening its cries ceased forever. Then Keoua, more miserable and lonely than ever, wrapped the tiny corpse in fold upon fold of kapa and took it to the Kawaiahao cemetery. Here, among the graves of so many of his fast-dying race, he found a little wooden hut and knocked at the door. An old white-haired Hawaiian, no other indeed than Keoua’s father, opened. He was living here on the very soil which was in time to be his grave, and to him Keoua handed the bundle without a word of explanation, even as to the absence of Luka. The two men uttered their “auwe” together, the young man in his youth and the old man in his age, over the body of the babe. Then, as the moon rose, silvering the cocoanut groves of Waikiki, Keoua stole back to his deserted hut, with the instinct of a beast wishing to hide its head in the earth.

Two days later the “Likelike” is on her way from Honolulu to Mani. What a dream that voyage is! For a while the empty craters of Leahi and Koko Head, fringed with breakers along the coral reef, stand out in glorious sunlight. Then suddenly—

Mattresses are spread on deck, the passengers stretch themselves for sleep, the air is heavy with the scent of the wreaths of flowers with which almost every voyager is bedecked; overhead the stars swing like lamps, or as though the whole vault of heaven, with its million eyes, were one lamp swaying in infinite space. Then, with a faint consciousness of something breaking in upon your dream, you feel an anchor drop and hear the splash of oars. You have not, however, reached your destination yet. This is some boat coming off from the shores of Molokai for stores for a lonely ranch in the mountains. If you rise, you may lean over the bulwarks and look through the mists upon a black mass of mountain wall which conceals the most loathsome scene the world affords—the great lazar house of Hawaii in Nature’s fairest garden, the saddest witness our earth possesses to the existence of the serpent’s trail.

Yes, it is not the chill night-mist which makes you shiver; for, although you know the leper settlement is not on this side of the island, at Kaunakakai, but on the other side over the pali at Kalaupapa, you feel that no wall of mountain can shut out the thought of thirteen hundred fellow creatures suffering a living death in the land which God made so fair.

If you had been onboard the “Likelike” on the day of which I speak, you would have heard, almost coincident with the lifting of the anchor, a splash so indistinct that when some one shouted “Man overboard!” few believed the cry. Men lazily looked over the bulwarks, but saw nothing, for the moon was behind the mountain, and presently, with the comforting assurance that, if anybody had gone overboard, he was by this time food for sharks, lay back on their mattresses to continue their dreams and their voyage.

But a man had gone overboard, a man whose heart was bent on crossing seas and mountains to his leper bride. Keoua swam ashore silently, fearing every second to see the white fin of a shark start up beside him in the water. Once he felt the cold, slimy sucker of a squid against his ankle, but he tore himself free, and, shooting on a high roller through a narrow break in the reef, lay at last, spent and breathless, but safe upon the beach.

Yet the worst was still before him. Kalaupapa could only be approached by crossing the mountain range, and the only path on the other side was down a pali so steep that it made the head of the bravest climber dizzy to look upon it. However, there was no help for it, and in a few minutes, Keoua, recovering from the exhaustion consequent upon his swim, set off on the upward journey. This was comparatively easy, though it was still easier in the darkness to miss the path and get into those haunted gorges where of old the poison goddess had her grove. Long ropes of ieie, tough as wire cables, formed a ladder up the face of the mountain. By these, scarcely touching the ground, he toiled upwards through tangled growths which would otherwise have been impassable. When he reached the top, the sun was just rising from the clouds, and revealing one after another the majestic ridges of Haleakala and the rock-bound coasts of Maui and Lanai. Then the wind came sweeping up and threatened to dash the intruder backwards down the rocks. The trees swayed and bent, the foliage of the kukui shivered with its ghostly sheen, the clouds swept away from the bay of Kalawao, and there, several thousand feet below, lay the white roofs and lanais of as peaceful a settlement, to all appearances, as any upon which the sun has ever shone.

But if ever a place could be called a whited sepulchre it was this; not that Christian love and self-sacrifice had not cast an aureole of beauty about it which made it sacred, but because here was the realization of Milton’s terrible vision:

How could Nature sing so sweetly and smile so fair when the eyes rested upon a cancer so foul!

Keoua looked down as though he expected to see there the grass hut of Pauoa Valley with Luka and her baby at the door to greet him, but the place seemed deserted till, when half-way down, the sweet tinkle of a chapel bell roused him from a dream, and he supported himself by a clump of guava bushes to watch the dark-cassocked priests and white-hooded sisters passing from the House of Misery to the solace of the House of God. Such was the mood of Keoua that he could not feel any thrill in the thought of these brave men and sweet women thus living in grim company with death. He thought only of the curse the white man had brought to his race from the days of Cook, the discoverer, to the day when the fruits of ancient vice had burst forth in the heart of his own home. So it was with hard and bitter thoughts he hastened on his way, scarce knowing what he intended to do, perhaps carry Luka bodily away from the pest-house to the fastnesses of the mountains, where they might live like the free wild beasts and die in peace.

As he came near the hospital, however, there met him, sauntering forth, a man dressed in a cool suit of white linen, whose keen eye and earnest serious face proclaimed him the doctor.

He glanced at the wayfarer with something of surprise, seeing that he was endeavoring to avoid an encounter.

“Aloha!” he exclaimed, using the familiar Hawaiian greeting. The man made no response, but looked savagely on the ground.

“Hello, my man; what’s the matter?” For Keoua looked ghastly through his olive skin, and his steps tottered. But strength came to answer, fiercely:

“Hele aku—go away—curse you. Before time, kanaka live here, no pake mai—(leprosy)—all maikai loa—very good. Then haole man come, bring pake mai. Poor kanaka die; make die all time. Haole man thief steal kanaka’s wahine; haole man kill kanaka’s keiki (child). Hele!”

The doctor thought of all he might say, for it was eminently reasonable, all this segregation, and the kanaka had much cause to be grateful for what the government was doing for the lepers. But he knew logic was not what the poor wretch wanted, and while he hesitated the need of answering vanished, for there rose up from the hospital a strange sound, strange at least from such a place. It was the strain of a band of music, plaintive yet joyful—no dirge, but the voice of rejoicing. For in this lazar-house joy is not unknown, albeit it comes at an hour when others weep. A soul freed from pain, from pollution, and from the body of death, born into the light of Paradise—in such a case was it not fitting that cymbals should clash and trumpets sound?

“Heaha kela?” exclaimed Keoua; “what is that?”

“The good God has taken to rest the soul of a poor woman who was glad to go.”

“What was her name?” cried the Hawaiian, excitedly.

“Luka,” replied the doctor.

An ashy pallor spread over the man’s already bloodless face. It was plain to the doctor that Death had come even quicker than Love. Then there came a bitter cry, mingled with bitter laughter.

“Akua maikai! Good God!... Ha, ha, ha, ha.... He bad God! He all same haole! Steal poor kanaka’s wahine.... Auwe ... auwe.... Me curse Him!”

But the curse came not. A change as though an angel had whispered to him came swift as thought. He pressed his hands on his heart and murmured:

“Me no curse Him! Good God! He good God! Sweet wife, sweet keiki ... I come. E Christo e aloha mai.” Then he fell heavily to the ground.

An angel had indeed spoken to him—the kindest angel whom God had sent to Kalaupapa—the angel of Death.

The music played on, and celestial harmonies seemed to mingle with its strains. It was as though glad spirits met and welcomed one another in a land fairer even than Hawaii, a land, moreover, where the serpent’s blight may never come.

A double funeral took place in the leper cemetery that very afternoon, and those who were there said the priest must have been absent-minded, for at the close of the service he spread his hands over the grave and said:

“Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”