Hawaii - James Michener [247]
Micah could not stop her, and she hurried along the brook, past the mission house and up to the grass shack into which she saw Abner Hale disappear in tottering rage. "Reverend Hale!" she pleaded. "I am sorry that . . ."
He looked out from his shack and saw a woman who seemed much like Noelani, more like Rafer Hoxworth, and she was his son's wife. "Abomination!" he rasped. "Whore! Contaminator of the islands!" And as she gazed in horror, he limped over to the wall, reached up and ceremoniously ripped away the pencil sketch of his elder son. Tearing it into shreds, he threw them at Malama, whimpering, "Take him from Lahaina. He is unclean."
Those were the circumstances under which Micah Hale, most brilliant of the mission children, resigned from the ministry and became partner with Captain Rafer Hoxworth, a man he feared and who hated him, but they formed a brilliant pair--Hoxworth bold and daring, Hale most far-seeing of the Hawaii traders--and in time all ports in the Pacific became familiar with the trim ships which flew the blue flag of the H & H line.
IV
From the Starving Village
IN THE YEAR 817, when King Tamatoa VI of Bora Bora and his brother Teroro fled to Havaiki-of-the-North, there to establish a new society, the northern sections of China were ravaged by an invading horde of Tartars whose superior horsemanship, primitive moral courage and lack of hesitation in applying brute force quickly overwhelmed the more sophisticated Chinese, who vainly and at times only half-heartedly tried to resist them. As the difficult years passed, Peking fell, and the coastal cities, and it became apparent that the Tartars had entered China to stay.
The effect of the invasion fell most heavily upon the great Middle Kingdom, the heartland of China, for it was these lush fields and rich cities that the Tartars sought, so toward the middle of the century they dispatched an army southward to invest HunanProvince, some three hundred and fifty miles below Peking and south of the Yellow River. In Hunan at this time there lived a cohesive body of Chinese known by no special name, but different from their neighbors. They were taller, more conservative, spoke a pure ancient language uncontaminated by modern flourishes, and were remarkably good farmers. When the Tartar pressures fell heavily upon their immediate neighbors to the north, those neighbors supinely accepted the invaders, and this embittered the group of which I now wish to speak.
In a mountain village, in the year 856, the farmer Char Ti Chong, a tall, thin man with handsome high-boned face and a profusion of black hair which he wore in an unruly manner, swore to his wife Nyuk Moi, "We will not surrender these good lands to the barbarians."
"What can you do?" his stolid, sensible wife countered, for in her twenty-three years with Char she had heard some fairly far-reaching promises, most of which had come to nothing.
"We will resist them!" Char proposed.
"With grain stalks as an army?" Nyuk Moi asked wearily. She was a thin, angular woman who seemed always on the verge of complaining, but her life was so difficult that she rarely wasted her strength in whining. Her hopeful father had named her after the most beautiful object he had seen, a scintillating pendant resting among a rich man's jewels; unfortunately, she had not lived up to this name, Nyuk Moi, Plum Jade, but she possessed what was better than beauty: an absolutely realistic evaluation of life. "So you are determined to fight the invaders?" she asked.
"We will destroy them!" her husband repeated stoutly, certain that his boasts had already made his lands more secure.
They were not good lands, and in other parts of the world they would hardly have been deemed worthy of defense, for although