The Afternoon Request

They came at two, by appointment, which was the first thing that had happened by appointment all day.

Cunningham had telephoned at a quarter past one, on the one line from his office that still reached the palace, and asked Takemoto, with a formality that Takemoto relayed exactly, whether His Majesty would receive an officer of the commanding general’s staff at two o’clock, on a matter the commanding general regarded as urgent. Takemoto had asked what matter. Cunningham had said that he would prefer the officer to say it himself. The King had said yes. Then he had gone upstairs and changed his shirt, because the one he had put on for church at half past six had been through the morning, and had put on a fresh collar, and tied his tie once.

He received them in the Blue Room. Its windows had gone with the others at a quarter past nine; Moses had swept up the glass and closed the shutters across the empty frames, so that the room was dim and blue and the afternoon came into it only in bars.

He thought about it first. He stood in the doorway of the Blue Room at five to two, alone, and looked at the chairs: his own between the windows, and the low one on its right, the Realm’s, where he had put Cunningham at half past eight with a cut hand, and the others along the walls. Then he went and sat down in his own chair, and left the Realm’s chair empty, and waited.

---

The officer was a colonel. He came in behind Cunningham, and stopped inside the door, and saluted, and the King saw that he was very tired.

He was a tall thin man of about fifty in the Realm’s army khaki, not the dress uniform the Realm’s officers wore to dinner at ʻIolani but the working one, with dust on the trousers and dark patches under the arms and a holster on his belt with the flap buttoned down. His face was long and brown and lined, and his eyes were red at the rims, and he had cut himself shaving, early, before any of it began, and the cut had dried. He had the look of a man who had been awake and on his feet and giving orders since five minutes to eight and who did not yet know what most of the orders had been for.

“Your Majesty,” said Cunningham. “May I present Colonel Pryce, of the commanding general’s staff. Colonel Pryce, His Majesty the King.”

“Sir,” said Pryce.

“Colonel.” The King did not stand. He had thought about that too. “Thank you for coming. I know what your day has been. Please sit down.”

Cunningham steered the Colonel, with a slight pressure of the elbow, towards a chair along the wall on the right, a little way from the King’s; not the low chair beside it. Pryce went where he was steered, and sat, and put his cap on his knee, and his eyes went once to the empty chair on the King’s right, and away again, and Cunningham, who sat down along the wall beside him, did not look at the King at all.

The empty chair stood between them. The King did not explain it. Nobody asked.

---

“Sir,” said Pryce. “I have been sent by the commanding general to make a request of Your Majesty. A formal request. I am to say that it is formal.” He had it by heart; the King could hear him reading it off the inside of his head. “The commanding general’s compliments to His Majesty. The commanding general has reason to believe that the enemy may attempt a landing on the island of Oʻahu tonight or in the early hours of tomorrow. He cannot say where. He thinks it likely that if a landing is attempted, the harbour of Honolulu will be among its objects. ʻIolani Palace is a quarter of a mile from the harbour. The commanding general cannot guarantee the safety of His Majesty’s person at ʻIolani in the event of a landing, and he formally requests that His Majesty, and Her Majesty, and the household, remove before dark to a place of safety inland, where the commanding general has made arrangements to secure them.” He paused. “The Nuʻuanu house, sir, the summer house, has been looked at by my officers. Or, if Your Majesty prefers, there is a place higher up, in the mountains, that the Army has prepared. I am to say that the commanding general would prefer the higher place.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

“Sir.” Pryce hesitated, and then, because he was a soldier and had been given a task and was tired, he said the rest of it, which was not by heart. “I came in past your gate, sir. I saw the street.” “Sir, we do not know what is coming. I will be honest with Your Majesty. We do not know. We did not know this morning and we do not know now. We have lost a great deal. I cannot tell you how much. I have been at Hickam.” He stopped. His face did not change. “There are reports of ships off Barbers Point. There are reports of parachutists. There are reports of landings at Kāneʻohe. None of them are true, so far as we can find, and we cannot find very far. But the commanding general would not forgive himself, sir, and nor would I, if they came tonight, and the King of Hawaiʻi was a quarter of a mile from the harbour in a house with a slate roof.”

The King sat for a moment.

He had known it was coming. He had known since a quarter past eight, when Kealoha stood in the hall and said there is a plan, sir. He had been asked already, four times: by Kealoha and Kaʻai and Nāone and Cunningham, each in his own way, each with his own reasons. He had thought each time that it was the last time, and each time it had not been. He understood now, sitting in his chair in the Blue Room with the Realm’s chair empty beside him and a tired colonel with a cut on his chin looking at him across the carpet, that it was never going to be the last time; that they were going to ask him tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after, every day until whatever this was had ended, and that every time they asked him he was going to have to say the same thing, in the same words, as though it were the first time. That was what it was going to be. Not one refusal. A great many of them, one after another, each as costly as the first.

He thought: then I had better say it properly.

---

He stood up.

Pryce stood up at once, and Cunningham with him. The King stood in front of his chair between the windows, with the light behind him and the empty chair at his right hand, and spoke in the voice he used for the speech from the throne once a year, at the opening of the ʻAhaʻōlelo, which was the only formal speech he made.

“Colonel Pryce. I am obliged to the commanding general for his message, and for his care of me, and for sending an officer who has been at Hickam to bring it, on this of all days. Will you tell him from me that the King of Hawaiʻi has received his request, and has considered it, and declines it. The King will remain at ʻIolani. The Queen will remain with him. The household will remain. The gates of the palace will remain open.” He paused. “And will you tell him also that the King is grateful, and that he knows the commanding general asked in good faith, and that the refusal is not a reproach.”

Pryce stood at attention with his cap under his arm.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I will tell him exactly that.”

“Thank you. Now please sit down again, Colonel. I should like to tell you why. Not the commanding general. You.”

---

They sat. The King sat too.

“There are about six hundred people on my lawn,” he said. “Did you see them when you came in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“They came in off King Street this morning, when the bombs fell at my gate, and after. Some of them are hurt. Some of the people who were standing at my railings this morning, to see whether I had gone, are dead. Most of them are not hurt. They came because their streets had been hit, or because they were frightened, or because they did not know where else to go, and they came here, and stood at the railings, and I opened the gates. And they have been sitting there since, on the grass, under the trees. They are not doing anything. They are not asking for anything. Every few minutes, Colonel, every one of them looks up at the roof of this house, at the flag, to see if it is still there.” He looked at Pryce. “If I go up into the mountains tonight, the flag comes down. That is the rule. The flag over ʻIolani flies when the King is in residence, and when he is not, it does not; it has been so since Kalākaua. And tomorrow morning at a quarter to seven, when the Guard would have run it up, there will be nothing on the roof of ʻIolani, and six hundred people will look up and see that, and by nine o’clock the whole of Honolulu will know that the King went up the mountain in the night, because the Realm asked him to.”

Pryce said nothing.

“I am not a soldier, Colonel. I do not know anything about landings. If they come tonight, I expect you are right, and this is not a safe place to be. But I do know one thing, and it is the only thing I do know. The people of this city have had a very bad day. The worst day the Kingdom has had in a hundred years. And the one thing in it that has not moved is this house. I do not think it would be a kindness to them to move it tonight. I do not think it would be a help to the commanding general either, if tomorrow morning he had a city full of people who had looked up at an empty roof.” He paused. “Will you tell him that part too, if you think he would want to hear it? I leave it to you.”

Pryce was silent. Then he looked down at the cap on his knee, and turned it a little, the way a man turns his cap when he is thinking about something he did not expect to think about.

“My wife is in Wahiawā, sir,” he said. “Near the plateau. I have not been able to get word to her. Our house is a mile from the airfield.” He looked up. “I will tell him, sir. All of it.”

---

He got up to go, and then did not.

“There is one more thing, sir,” he said. “I was told to mention it. Not to ask. To mention.” He had gone back to the voice of the message by heart. “The commanding general wishes His Majesty to know that, in view of the emergency, he may find it necessary to seek certain powers from the Kingdom’s government, for the duration. In respect of the roads, and the harbour, and the movement of persons at night, and certain other matters. He does not seek them today. He wishes His Majesty to be aware that he may.”

Cunningham, along the wall, had gone very still.

The King had known that was coming too. Nāone had said it at the desk upstairs, with the red book closed between them: they will ask nicely the first time. They will ask tomorrow, or the day after. They will want the courts most of all.

“Thank you, Colonel,” he said. “I am aware of it now. Will you tell the commanding general that the Kuhina Nui will be glad to consider anything he wishes to put to the Kingdom’s government, and that the Kuhina Nui is in the building across the road, at the long table, with the door open. And will you tell him also that the Kingdom’s courts sit tomorrow at ten, as they do every Monday, and that the Chief Justice will be sitting in the Supreme Court himself, and will be glad to hear any application the commanding general cares to make.”

Pryce looked at him. The King looked back.

“Yes, sir,” said Pryce slowly. “The courts sit at ten.”

“They do.”

“I will tell him that, sir.” He put his cap on, under the roof of the Blue Room, which no officer of the Realm had ever done; and then realised he had done it, and took it off again, and held it, and for the first time since he came into the room something that was nearly a smile went across his long tired face and was gone. “I beg your pardon, sir. I have been wearing it since eight o’clock. I had forgotten it was there.”

“Keep it on, Colonel,” said the King. “You may need it.”

---

Cunningham saw the Colonel to the door, and then came back.

He stood inside the Blue Room with his bandaged hand held against his chest, and looked at the empty chair on the King’s right, and then at the King.

“You left it empty, sir,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I wondered if you would. After this morning. When you put me in it.” He paused. “May I ask why, sir? I would like to be able to tell myself I understand.”

The King considered it.

“This morning,” he said, “you came to this house as a man who had seen what you had seen, with your hand cut, and nowhere else to go. And the Kingdom put you in the Realm’s chair because you were the Realm, this morning, Sir Arthur, all of it that was in reach: a man who had stopped his car on the ridge to look, because he thought somebody ought to know. That was worth the chair.” He looked at it. “This afternoon the Realm sent a colonel to ask the King of Hawaiʻi to leave his house. He asked very well, and he meant it kindly, and I like him. But it was the Realm asking the Kingdom to leave. And I wanted the Realm’s chair to be standing there, empty, where he could see it, while he asked. So that he would know, without anybody having to say it, whose house he was asking it in.”

Cunningham was quiet for a while.

“He noticed it, sir,” he said at last. “He looked at it twice.”

“I know. I saw him.”

“I shall have to write a report of this,” said Cunningham. “Of all of today. For New Westminster. Whenever the cable is free again, if it ever is.” He looked down at his hand. “I do not know how I shall put the chair.”

“Leave it out,” said the King. “Nobody in New Westminster would understand it. They have never sat in it.”

Cunningham almost laughed. It went across his grey face and was gone, the way the Colonel’s smile had, and he bowed, from the neck, properly, and went out; and the King sat alone in the Blue Room between the windows, with the afternoon light behind him and Louis Philippe looking down at him from the wall, and the Realm’s chair empty at his right hand, and found that he was shaking, a little, all over, as though he were cold; and sat still, and waited for it to stop, and after a while it did.