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We all sat cross-legged round our meal, and all Laupahoehoe crowded into the room and verandah with the most persistent, unwinking, gimleting stare I ever saw. It was really unpleasant, not only to hear a Babel of talking, of which, judging from the constant repetition of the words wahine haole, I was the subject, but to have to eat under the focussed stare of twenty pair of eyes.
“Here it is, to be sure,” thought Keawe, and so with this man he noways veiled his errand. “I am come to buy the bottle,” said he. At the word, the young Haole of Beritania Street reeled against the wall. “The bottle!” he gasped. “To buy the bottle!” Then he seemed to choke, and seizing Keawe by the arm carried him into a room and poured out wine in two glasses.
The brown tattooed limbs of one man are stretched across the mat, the others are sitting cross-legged, making lauhala leis. Nearly all the people of the valley are outside, having come to see the wahine haole: only one white woman, and she a resident of Hawaii, having been seen in Waimanu before. I am really alone, miles of mountain and gulch lie between me and the nearest whites.
"Yet is the awa but a common man's drink, while the haole liquor is a drink for chiefs. The awa has not the liquor's hot willingness, its spur in the ribs of feeling, its biting alive of oneself that is very pleasant since it is pleasant to be alive." Hardman Pool smiled, nodded agreement, and old Kumuhana continued. "There is a warmingness to it. It warms the belly and the soul.
It was September and the beach was uncrowded. Joe felt, as much as a haole can, that it was his island, that he had a right to be there. Mo showed up and ordered a Lillet on the rocks, happy to have closed shop for the day. "Slow, but promising," she said of her business. He complimented her on the Jade Willow Lady picture. "I was lucky," she said.
"Twelve dollars," said Kumuhana. "I want to buy a Jackass and a second-hand saddle and bridle. I am growing too old for my legs to carry me in walking." "You wait," his haole lord commanded. "I will talk with you about the matter, and about other things of importance, when I am finished with the rest and they are gone." The withered old one nodded and proceeded to light his pipe.
I learned then and for ever what quantities of drink haole sailormen can stand. As for us kanakas, our heads were hot and light and rattly as dry gourds with the whisky and the rum. "It was past midnight, I remember well, when I saw Malia, whom never had I seen at a drinking, come across the wet-hard sand of the beach.
All the time Keawe was ill at ease, because he was taking this pastime while his wife was sad, and because he knew in his heart that she was more right than he; and the knowledge made him drink the deeper. Now there was an old brutal Haole drinking with him, one that had been a boatswain of a whaler, a runaway, a digger in gold mines, a convict in prisons.
"I can see him yet, as I saw him that first day and touched his hand and talked with him . . . few words and bashful, and anything but a year-long married woman to a grey haole at grey Nahala.
The long name of Sandwich Islanders is dropped, and they are called by the whites, all over the Pacific ocean, "Kanákas," from a word in their own language which they apply to themselves, and to all South Sea Islanders, in distinction from whites, whom they call "Haole." This name, "Kanaka," they answer to, both collectively and individually.
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