“The grains of sand on the beach of Waikiki are as many as the stars, and
more. No man may count them. Did he have a million lives in which to
count them, he would have to ask for more time. Now let us consider a
little, dinky, old _minah_ bird with one broken wing that cannot fly. At
Waikiki the _minah_ bird that cannot fly takes one grain of sand in its
beak and hops, hops, all day long and for many days, all the day to Pearl
Harbour and drops that one grain of sand into the harbour. Then it hops,
hops, all day and for many days, all the way back to Waikiki for another
grain of sand. And again it hops, hops all the way back to Pearl
Harbour. And it continues to do this through the years and centuries,
and the thousands and thousands of centuries, until, at last, there
remains not one grain of sand at Waikiki and Pearl Harbour is filled up
with land and growing coconuts and pine-apples. And then, oh my friends,
even then, IT WOULD NOT YET BE SUNRISE IN HELL!”
Here, at the smashing impact of so abrupt a climax, unable to withstand
the sheer simplicity and objectivity of such artful measurement of a
trifle of eternity, Alice Akana’s mind broke down and blew up. She
uprose, reeled blindly, and stumbled to her knees at the penitent form.
Abel Ah Yo had not finished his preaching, but it was his gift to know
crowd psychology, and to feel the heat of the pentecostal conflagration
that scorched his audience. He called for a rousing revival hymn from
his singers, and stepped down to wade among the hallelujah-shouting negro
soldiers to Alice Akana. And, ere the excitement began to ebb,
nine-tenths of his congregation and all his converts were down on knees
and praying and shouting aloud an immensity of contriteness and sin.
* * * * *
Word came, via telephone, almost simultaneously to the Pacific and
University Clubs, that at last Alice was telling her soul in meeting;
and, by private machine and taxi-cab, for the first time Abel Ah Yo’s
revival was invaded by those of caste and place. The first comers beheld
the curious sight of Hawaiian, Chinese, and all variegated racial
mixtures of the smelting-pot of Hawaii, men and women, fading out and
slinking away through the exits of Abel Ah Yo’s tabernacle. But those
who were sneaking out were mostly men, while those who remained were
avid-faced as they hung on Alice’s utterance.
Never was a more fearful and damning community narrative enunciated in
the entire Pacific, north and south, than that enunciated by Alice Akana;
the penitent Phryne of Honolulu.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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