Hawaii - James Michener [162]
"I will take Deland's Midwifery and do what I can," Abner said dully, but what he wanted to cry was: "I will be with you, Jerusha! By the will of God, I will see that your baby is well born."
And she replied, "You must help Sister Urania," but what she intended was: "I am afraid, and I wish my mother were here."
So the two young missionaries, each so desperately in love but lacking capacity to speak of it to the other, because they judged that Congregationalism would not approve, looked at each other in the noonday sunlight, and then looked away; but it was Abner who broke, for when they had gone inside to pack Deland it was he who could not control his hands, and the package fell awry and the crucial book fell onto the dusty floor, and when he kneeled to recover he hid his face in his hands and sobbed, "Sister Urania, may God spare you!" But it was another name he longed to say.
The journey on foot from Lahaina to Wailuku, on the other side of Maui, took Abner and the messenger high into the mountains, and as they hiked over barren and rocky fields, with sweat pouring from them, they came upon a cloud of dust, and it was Kelolo and his lieutenants, driving their men down to the plains with a vast cargo of sandalwood. For an instant Abner was infuriated and admonished the chief: "While you cut sandalwood, your town diminishes." But before he heard Kelolo's justification--"These are my men. I do with them as I please."--he saw that many of the servants were carrying not sawed trunks from grown trees but saplings and roots grubbed out of the soil.
"Did you take even the new trees?" Abner asked in disgust.
"It is my sandalwood," Kelolo explained.
"You faithless servant," Abner cried and limped on.
When they reached the topmost ridge and could see the houses of Wailuku below, Abner paused to wipe away his sweat and thought: "If it is such hard work for us to climb this little hill, how could Urania have borne her journey?"
In the village of Wailuku they found out. When the canoe in which they were journeying broke up, Abraham had pushed and hauled his wife more than forty miles overland in an effort to join with the Hales at Lahaina, and this had precipitated her labor pains. Now they were bogged down in a trader's shack, helpless in panic.
It was a miracle that Urania, after such a trip, was still alive, but it was a greater miracle that Abraham had not thought to enlist the aid of Hawaiian midwives at his home mission, for they were some of the most highly skilled in the Pacific and within ten minutes would have diagnosed Urania's case as one of simple premature birth brought on by exhaustion. Had the Hewletts relied on them, they would have produced a clean birth and a healthy baby; but for the Hewletts to have accepted their aid would have meant admitting that a heathen, brown-skinned Hawaiian knew how to deliver a Christian white baby, and such an idea was unthinkable.
"I was sorely tempted to call in the local midwives," Brother Abraham confessed to Abner, when he ran up to meet the limping traveler, "but I was ever mindful of Jeremiah 10, verse 2: "Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen.' So I have brought my wife to her own people."
Abner agreed that he had acted wisely, and for a moment the two young men congratulated themselves on their righteousness, but then Abner asked, "How is Sister Urania?"
At this question poor Brother Abraham was seized with a blush of respectability which made it almost impossible for him to say the words,