Hawaii - James Michener [221]
The giant alii stared at his old friend and mumbled, "I begged you, Reverend Hale, to make me a minister. If your church doesn't want me . . ."
"A minister?" Abner shouted, and suddenly the hideousness of this night--the hulas, the living stone, the drums and the kahunas--overwhelmed him and he began to laugh hysterically. "A minister?" he repeated several times, until Kelolo placed his hand gently but firmly over the missionary's mouth and had him dragged away from the ceremonies, but the God-driven little man struggled loose and rushed back almost to the bridal couple before he was apprehended.
"Keoki!" he shouted. "Are you proceeding with this marriage?"
"As my father before me," Keoki replied.
"Infamous!" Abner moaned. "It puts you outside the pale of civilized . . ."
"Hush!" an imperious voice commanded, and Abner drew back. It was Noelani who came close to him and said softly, "Beloved Makua Hale, we are not doing this to hurt you."
Abner looked at the beautiful young woman with flowers in her hair and he argued, with equal control, "Noelani, you are being tempted by these men to commit a grave sin."
The Alii Nui did not argue, but pointed instead toward the dark hills, saying, "In former days we followed our own gods, and our valleys were filled with people. We have tried following yours, and our islands are sunk in despair. Death, awful sickness, cannon and fear. That is what you have brought us, Makua Hale, although we know you did not intend it to be so. I am the Alii Nui, and if I die without child, who will keep the Hawaiian spirit alive?"
"Noelani, dear little girl of my hopes, there are dozens of men . .. right here . . . who would be proud to be your husband."
"But could their children be designated Alii Nui?" Noelani countered, and this line of pagan reasoning so infuriated Abner that he drew back and cried in dismal voice, "Abomination! Malama would curse you from, her grave!"
Later, Kelolo confessed that he should have kept silent, but he could not, and asked tauntingly, "What directions do you think Malama gave me when she whispered on her deathbed?"
In horror the little missionary, his pale face and watery blond hair shining in the torchlight, stared at Kelolo. Could what the alii said be true? Had Malama commanded this obscenity? The repulsiveness of this possibility was more than he could accommodate at the moment, and he stumbled from the compound while the kahunas restored Kane, and the drums resumed their nuptial beat.
Bedazed, Abner moved along the dark and dusty road whose stones in recent years had witnessed so many changes. He saw the shadowy houses of the king and the wooden stores of the Americans who had scorned God and fought the mission. In the roads the whalers were snug-anchored, his permanent enemies, and at Murphy's grog shop somebody was playing a lonely concertina. How alien these things were to his lacerated spirit.
In the deep night he left the town and climbed a barren field strewn with rocks, and when he stumbled upon a clump of dwarfed trees he sat among their roots and looked back at his silent parish as if he were no longer responsible for it. To the south he could see the monstrous torches of the pagans. In the roads he could spot the swaying night-lights of the whalers, and between lay the grass-roofed shacks of the people. How miserable and grubby this town really was, how pitiful. What a minimum impression he had made upon Lahaina, how inconsequential his accomplishments. Malama had tricked him. Keoki had betrayed him. And Iliki was God knows where. Now even the gentlest of them all, Noelani, had turned against him and had rebuked his church.
For nearly ten years he had worn only one coat; God had not once sent him a pair of trousers that fitted; he had acquired only such learned books as he could beg from distant Boston; his wife had slaved in a wretched hut; and he had accomplished nothing. Now, as dawn began breaking over his little town, he studied in humiliation of