• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4433 0

importance the most effective school was Abner's, where the alii studied, and his choice pupil was Malama's daughter, Noelani, whom he had rescued from the sailors. The girl was, by birth, entitled to be the next alii nui, for her blood strain was impeccable. Her parents were full brother and sister, each noble in his own right, so that she inherited the glory of numberless generations of Hawaiian greatness. She was clever and industrious, an ornament in any society. In a report to Honolulu, Abner said of her, "She is almost as good a student as her mother. She can read and write, speak English and do the easier sums. And I feel certain that she is dedicated to the way of God and will be one of our first full members of the church." When he told the girl this, she was radiant.

Teaching Malama was more difficult. The great alii was stubborn to a point of obstinacy. She required everything to be proved and she had that irritating quality which teachers deplore: she remembered what the instructor had said the day before, for after each visit she recalled the steps of his reasoning, so that when he reappeared she was able to present him with his own contradictions. Few classes in the history of education were more stubbornly hilarious than those which occurred when Abner tutored Malama alone. She would lie prone on her enormous belly, her round moonlike face propped on her hands, demanding, "Teach me the way to attain grace."

"I cannot do that," Abner invariably replied. "You have got to learn it for yourself."

What made the lessons difficult was not Malama's intellectual intransigence, which was pronounced, but her insistence upon answering all questions in broken English, which she quickly identified as God's chosen language, since the Bible was written in English, and since those who were dear to God conveyed their thoughts in that language. She was determined to learn English.

Abner, on his part, was equally insistent that the lessons be held in Hawaiian, for he saw that if he was to make progress in Christianizing the islands, he would have to speak in the native tongue. It was true that many of the Honolulu alii knew English, but it was not only to the alii that he intended speaking. Therefore, whenever Malama asked him a question in broken English, he replied in worse Hawaiian, and the lesson staggered on. For example, when he inveighed against eating dog, the conversation went like this: "Dog good kau kau. You no like for what?" Malama asked. "Poki pilau, pilau," Abner explained contemptuously. "Pig every time sleep mud. You s'pose dog he make like that?" "Kela mea, kela mea eat pua'a. Pua'a good. Poki bad." If each had used his own natural tongue, conversation would have been simple, for each now understood the other's spoken language. But Malama stubbornly insisted that she be the first on Maui to speak English while Abner was equally determined to preach his first sermon in the new church in flowing Hawaiian.

What irritated him most was that whenever he succeeded in backing big Malama into a logical corner, so that her next statement would have to be a confession of defeat, she would call on her maids to lomilomi her, and while they pounded her stomach, moving her enormous meals about, she would smile sweetly and say, "Go on! Go on!"

"So if civilized nations don't eat dogs, neither should Hawaiians,' Abner would argue, and Malama would call sweetly for her maids to brush his face with feathers: "Kokuo dis one man face. Fly too many on it, poor t'ing." And while Abner fought with the infuriating feathers his argument would die away.

But the two antagonists respected each other. Malama knew that the little missionary was fighting for no less than her entire soul. He would be content with no substitute, and he was an honest man whom she could trust. She also knew him to be a brave man who was willing to face any adversary, and she sensed that through her he intended to capture all of Maui. "That would not be a bad thing," she thought to herself. "Of all the white men who have come to Lahaina"--and she recalled