Hawaii - James Michener [218]
Abner was pondering these exasperating mysteries when he saw from his Dutch door a line of seven natives coming down from the hills bearing maile branches and great bouquets of ginger flowers. Leaving his Bible-translating, he hurried to the roadway and demanded, "Why are you bearing maile and ginger?"
"We don't know," the Hawaiians replied.
"Who sent you to the hills?" Abner insisted.
"We don't know."
"Where are you taking the flowers?"
"We don't know."
"Of course you know!" he fumed. "It's ridiculous to say you don't know where you're going," and he limped after them to the waterfront, where they wandered off, each in his own accidental direction.
Infuriated, Abner stood for some minutes in the hot sun trying to piece together his various clues. Then, jamming his hands into his coat pockets, he stomped over to J & W's and said brusquely, "John, what's going on in Lahaina?"
"What do you mean?" Whipple parried.
"I just encountered seven natives bringing down maile and ginger. Why are they doing that?"
"Why didn't you ask them?"
"I did, and they'd tell me nothing."
"Probably some kind of ceremony," Whipple guessed.
Abner both despised and feared this word, for it conjured up forbidden rites and heathen sex orgies, so he asked tentatively, "You mean . . . pagan ceremonies?"
Then Whipple remembered. "Now that you bring it up, two days ago some of the whalers wanted extra supplies of tapa for calking. Usually I can find a hundred yards by snapping my fingers, but I went to a dozen homes, and they were all making tapa, but no one had any for sale."
"What were they doing with it?" Abner pressed.
"They all said the same thing. 'It's for Kelolo.' "
At this, Abner placed before the doctor the various bits of evidence he had collected, and when they had studied the facts, he asked, "John what's going on?"
"I don't know," Whipple replied. "Have Kelolo and his children been in church recently?"
"Yes, as pious as they ever were."
"I'd keep my eye on Kelolo," Whipple laughed. "He's a wily old shark." And for the rest of that day Abner brooded over the fact that an event of obvious significance had been masked from his surveillance; but his present exasperation was nothing compared to what it became when in the late afternoon he heard as if from a distant valley the muffled, haunting throb of a pagan drum. He listened, and it stopped. Then it began again, and he cried, "The hula!"
Without even informing Jerusha of where he was going, he started out in search of the long-forbidden hula, and he followed the echoes from one area to the next, until at last he pinpointed them as coming from a house on the edge of town. Hurrying along a winding footpath, he was determined to catch the lascivious revelers and punish them, when suddenly from behind a tree a tall native casually stepped into the middle of the path, asking, "Where are you going, Makua Hale?"
"There's a hula in that house!" Abner said ominously, but the man must have been a sentry, for when Abner reached the place from which the drum had echoed, he found only a collection of sweet-faced men and women practicing hymns, with never a drum in evidence.
"Where did you hide them?" he stormed.
"Hide what, Makua Hale?"
"The drums."
"We had no drums, Makua Hale," they said with the most winning simplicity. "We were singing hymns for Sabbath."
But when he reached home again, he heard once more the sound of drums, and he told Jerusha, "Something is happening in this town, and it drives me mad that I can't find out what it is." He ate no supper, but later, as the moon was rising, he announced sternly: "I shall not go to bed till I discover what evil is afoot."
Against Jerusha's protests he donned his white shirt, best stick, claw-hammer coat and beaver hat. Then, fortifying himself with a stout cane, he went out into the warm tropical night and for the first several minutes stood silent under the stars and