The time passed, and Abel Ah Yo struggled with Alice for a properly
penitent heart, and Alice struggled with herself for her soul, while half
of Honolulu wickedly or apprehensively hung on the outcome. Carnival
week was over, polo and the races had come and gone, and the celebration
of Fourth of July was ripening, ere Abel Ah Yo beat down by brutal
psychology the citadel of her reluctance. It was then that he gave his
famous exhortation which might be summed up as Abel Ah Yo’s definition of
eternity. Of course, like Billy Sunday on certain occasions, Abel Ah Yo
had cribbed the definition. But no one in the Islands knew it, and his
rating as a revivalist uprose a hundred per cent.
So successful was his preaching that night, that he reconverted many of
his converts, who fell and moaned about the penitent form and crowded for
room amongst scores of new converts burnt by the pentecostal fire,
including half a company of negro soldiers from the garrisoned
Twenty-Fifth Infantry, a dozen troopers from the Fourth Cavalry on its
way to the Philippines, as many drunken man-of-war’s men, divers ladies
from Iwilei, and half the riff-raff of the beach.
Abel Ah Yo, subtly sympathetic himself by virtue of his racial admixture,
knowing human nature like a book and Alice Akana even more so, knew just
what he was doing when he arose that memorable night and exposited God,
hell, and eternity in terms of Alice Akana’s comprehension. For, quite
by chance, he had discovered her cardinal weakness. First of all, like
all Polynesians, an ardent lover of nature, he found that earthquake and
volcanic eruption were the things of which Alice lived in terror. She
had been, in the past, on the Big Island, through cataclysms that had
slacken grass houses down upon her while she slept, and she had beheld
Madame Pele (the Fire or Volcano Goddess) fling red-fluxing lava down the
long slopes of Mauna Loa, destroying fish-ponds on the sea-brim and
licking up droves of beef cattle, villages, and humans on her fiery way.
The night before, a slight earthquake had shaken Honolulu and given Alice
Akana insomnia. And the morning papers had stated that Mauna Kea had
broken into eruption, while the lava was rising rapidly in the great pit
of Kilauea. So, at the meeting, her mind vexed between the terrors of
this world and the delights of the eternal world to come, Alice sat down
in a front seat in a very definite state of the “jumps.”
And Abel Ah Yo arose and put his finger on the sorest part of her soul.
Sketching the nature of God in the stereotyped way, but making the
stereotyped alive again with his gift of tongues in Pidgin-English and
Pidgin-Hawaiian, Abel Ah Yo described the day when the Lord, even His
infinite patience at an end, would tell Peter to close his day book and
ledgers, command Gabriel to summon all souls to Judgment, and cry out
with a voice of thunder: “_Welakahao_!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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