“And Harold Miles was that time President of the Senate, and next week he
bought three town lots at Pearl Harbour, and painted his Honolulu house,
and paid up his back dues in his clubs. Also the Ramsay home at Honokiki
was left by will to the people if the Government would keep it up. But
if the Government, after two years, did not begin to keep it up, then
would it go to the Ramsay heirs, whom old Ramsay hated like poison.
Well, it went to the heirs all right. Their lawyer was Charley
Middleton, and he had me help fix it with the Government men. And their
names were . . . ” Six names, from both branches of the Legislature,
Alice recited, and added: “Maybe they all painted their houses after
that. For the first time have I spoken. My heart is much lighter and
softer. It has been coated with an armour of house-paint against the
Lord. And there is Harry Werther. He was in the Senate that time.
Everybody said bad things about him, and he was never re-elected. Yet
his house was not painted. He was honest. To this day his house is not
painted, as everybody knows.
“There is Jim Lokendamper. He has a bad heart. I heard him, only last
week, right here before you all, tell his soul. He did not tell all his
soul, and he lied to God. I am not lying to God. It is a big telling,
but I am telling everything. Now Azalea Akau, sitting right over there,
is his wife. But Lizzie Lokendamper is his married wife. A long time
ago he had the great _aloha_ for Azalea. You think her uncle, who went
to California and died, left her by will that two thousand five hundred
dollars she got. Her uncle did not. I know. Her uncle cried broke in
California, and Jim Lokendamper sent eighty dollars to California to bury
him. Jim Lokendamper had a piece of land in Kohala he got from his
mother’s aunt. Lizzie, his married wife, did not know this. So he sold
it to the Kohala Ditch Company and wave the twenty-five hundred to Azalea
Akau—”
Here, Lizzie, the married wife, upstood like a fury long-thwarted, and,
in lieu of her husband, already fled, flung herself tooth and nail on
Azalea.
“Wait, Lizzie Lokendamper!” Alice cried out. “I have much weight of you
on my heart and some house-paint too . . . ”
And when she had finished her disclosure of how Lizzie had painted her
house, Azalea was up and raging.
“Wait, Azalea Akau. I shall now lighten my heart about you. And it is
not house-paint. Jim always paid that. It is your new bath-tub and
modern plumbing that is heavy on me . . . ”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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