Worse, much worse, about many and sundry, did Alice Akana have to say,
cutting high in business, financial, and social life, as well as low.
None was too high nor too low to escape; and not until two in the
morning, before an entranced audience that packed the tabernacle to the
doors, did she complete her recital of the personal and detailed
iniquities she knew of the community in which she had lived intimately
all her days. Just as she was finishing, she remembered more.
“Huh!” she sniffed. “I gave last week one lot worth eight hundred
dollars cash market price to Abel Ah Yo to pay running expenses and add
up in Peter’s books in heaven. Where did I get that lot? You all think
Mr. Fleming Jason is a good man. He is more crooked than the entrance
was to Pearl Lochs before the United States Government straightened the
channel. He has liver disease now; but his sickness is a judgment of
God, and he will die crooked. Mr. Fleming Jason gave me that lot
twenty-two years ago, when its cash market price was thirty-five dollars.
Because his _aloha_ for me was big? No. He never had _aloha_ inside of
him except for dollars.
“You listen. Mr. Fleming Jason put a great sin upon me. When Frank
Lomiloli was at my house, full of gin, for which gin Mr. Fleming Jason
paid me in advance five times over, I got Frank Lomiloli to sign his name
to the sale paper of his town land for one hundred dollars. It was worth
six hundred then. It is worth twenty thousand now. Maybe you want to
know where that town land is. I will tell you and remove it off my
heart. It is on King Street, where is now the Come Again Saloon, the
Japanese Taxicab Company garage, the Smith & Wilson plumbing shop, and
the Ambrosia Ice Cream Parlours, with the two more stories big Addison
Lodging House overhead. And it is all wood, and always has been well
painted. Yesterday they started painting it again. But that paint will
not stand between me and God. There are no more paint pots between me
and my path to heaven.”
* * * * *
The morning and evening papers of the day following held an unholy hush
on the greatest news story of years; but Honolulu was half a-giggle and
half aghast at the whispered reports, not always basely exaggerated, that
circulated wherever two Honoluluans chanced to meet.
“Our mistake,” said Colonel Chilton, at the club, “was that we did not,
at the very first, appoint a committee of safety to keep track of Alice’s
soul.”
Bob Cristy, one of the younger islanders, burst into laughter, so pointed
and so loud that the meaning of it was demanded.
“Oh, nothing much,” was his reply. “But I heard, on my way here, that
old John Ward had just been run in for drunken and disorderly conduct and
for resisting an officer. Now Abel Ah Yo fine-toothcombs the police
court. He loves nothing better than soul-snatching a chronic drunkard.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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