Hawaii - James Michener [515]
And so they lazed the day away, and ate poisson cru, the best dish that any island ever invented, and played the silly games of love that Bora Borans had been teaching their daughters for nearly two thousand years, and in. due time shadows crept across the lagoon, and night fell, and after the drams had been beating at the village dancing ground for some hours, Tehani wrapped herself in a sarong and said, "Come, Hale-tane, I should like the people of Bora Bora to see me dancing with you one more time. Then, if I do have your baby, they will remember that among all the Americans, you were the best dancer."
In the morning, as the inspection team piled into the PBY for take-off and the return to Hawaii, no one spoke of the long-haired girls of Bora Bora, or of their flashing teeth, or of the games they knew how to play, for if anyone had spoken, all would have wanted to remain, on the island for another day, another week; but when the plane had torn its bulk free from the waters of the lagoon and stood perched on what the aviators called "the step," the small after-portion on which the huge boat rode on the waves until it finally soared into the air, Hale again felt the aesthetic moment when men are half of the ocean, and half of the air, and in this attitude the speeding PBY whipped across the lagoon until it finally soared aloft, and all were wholly of the sky.
It was then, as Bora Bora disappeared in the brilliance of morning sunlight, that the major observed bitterly, "To think! We're going to draft decent young American boys, tear them from their mothers' arms, slam them into uniform and send them down to Bora Bora. God, it's inhuman." And for the rest of the war, and for many years thereafter, there would be a confraternity of men who met casually in bars, or at cocktail parties, or at business luncheons, and one would say to the other, "They write mostly crap about the Pacific, but there's one island . . ."
"Are you speaking of Bora Bora?" the other would interrupt.
"Yes. Did you serve there?"
"Yep." Usually, nothing more was said, because if a man had served his hitch on Bora Bora nothing more was required to be said, but whenever Hoxworth Hale met such men he invariably went one step further: "Did you ever know a slim, long-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen? Lived by the mountain. Named Tehani."
Once he met a lieutenant-commander from a destroyer-escort who had known Tehani, and the destroyer man said, "Wonderful girl. Danced like an angel. She was the first one on the island to have an American baby."
"Was it a boy?" Hale asked.
"Yes, but she gave it to a family on Maupiti. Girls there had no chance to produce American babies, and the island wanted one."
And suddenly, in the smoke-filled bar, Hoxworth Hale saw a young girl dancing beside a lagoon, and he saw on the blue waters an ancient double-hulled canoe and he thought: "I am forever a part of Bora Bora, and my son lives on in the islands." Then the memory vanished and he heard a girl's voice lamenting: "The years go by very fast, and soon we play no more games."
In time, Hale's visit to the South Seas produced other fruit than his memory of Tehani Vahine, for in addition to her lilting song of the coconut-grater, he constantly recalled his conversation with Sir Ratu Salaka in Fiji, and he began to compare all aspects of Hawaii with similar conditions in Fiji and Tahiti, and he came to this unshakable conclusion: "In every respect but one we Americans have done a better job in Hawaii than the English have in Fiji or the French in Tahiti. Health, education, building and the creation of new wealth ... we are really far ahead. And in the way we've integrated our Orientals into the very heart of our society, we're so far ahead that no comparisons are even permissible. But in the way we have allowed our Hawaiians to lose their land, their language, and their culture, we have been terribly remiss. We could have accomplished all our good and at the same time protected the Hawaiians." But whenever