The Midnight Resolve

The Queen fell asleep at half past eleven, in the chair by the bedroom window, in the middle of a sentence.

She had been telling him about the nurses from the Queen’s Hospital, the real ones, who had arrived at the barracks at eight with a tin trunk full of dressings and had looked at what the Queen of Hawaiʻi had been doing with the Guard’s sheets since half past ten and said nothing at all, very politely, and begun again; and she had been laughing about it, quietly, with her head back against the chair, and then she had stopped laughing and stopped talking and he had looked round and she was asleep, with one arm over her head, the way she slept in the bed, as though she had been about to wave to somebody.

He took off his jacket and put it over her. He took the cable from London out of the breast pocket first, and put it in his shirt. Then he stood and looked at her for a while, in the dark, by the faint pink light from the cloud over the Koʻolau; and did not wake her; and went out.

---

He went along the corridor in the dark, past the door at the end. He did not stop at it. He put his hand on it, flat, as he went by, for a moment, the way you touch the shoulder of somebody sleeping in a chair; and then he was past.

He went out onto the upper veranda on the ewa side, to the place at the rail where he had stood at a quarter to six that morning with his coffee, before any of it.

It was the same place. It was not the same view.

At a quarter to six there had been lights, a few: the lamps along King Street, a kettle at the courts, the harbour lights red and green, a scatter of kitchens in Kakaʻako and Kalihi where somebody was going fishing or going to early Mass. There were no lights now at all. Not on King Street, not at the harbour, not in a single window from here to the mountains. The city lay under him in the dark as though it had been taken away in the night and only the shape of it left, the roofs a little blacker than the sky, the trees blacker than the roofs, the tower at the harbour a black finger, and nothing else, nothing moving, not a car, not a cart, not a lamp in a hand. He could hear it, though. A city does not go silent because it is dark. He could hear dogs, and a baby, and somewhere towards Kakaʻako a man coughing, on and on, and the wind in the palms, and from the lawn below him, round the corner of the house, the long low sound of several hundred people breathing in their sleep on the grass.

And in the west, the glow.

It was lower now. It was not the stove-red it had been at six, filling the sky; it had sunk, as the fires were got under or burned themselves out, to a dull orange line along the horizon over the plain, very low, steady, the colour of the bars of a grate when the fire has gone down. The smoke was invisible against the dark. But he knew it was there. He could smell it. The trade wind had gone round a little in the evening, more to the north, and it was bringing the smell of the anchorage over the city now for the first time all day, faintly: burnt oil, and something under it that he did not want to name.

He put his hands on the rail.

---

Kaʻai came up at a quarter to twelve with the coffee.

He came along the veranda in the dark without a light, as he had come at a quarter past six without needing one, and set the tray down on the little table without a word, and waited. The King could just see him, a small upright shape a little blacker than the night, with white hair.

“Nothing since the guns, sir,” said Kaʻai.

“Nothing at all?”

“A constable at a quarter past eleven, to say that the police have taken eighteen of the twenty-two, and are still looking for four, who are not at home and are thought to be at their daughters’ houses. And a message from Sir Arthur, by the boy, to say that the cable to London has gone, by the Foreign Office’s line, at ten minutes to ten, and that he has gone to bed on the floor of his office beside the telephone, and that he would be obliged if the palace would not ring him unless it must.” The shape paused. “The boy asked me to say that the cable clerk counted the words twice, sir, because he did not believe them.”

“Which words?”

“We are at our post, sir,” said Kaʻai. “The clerk said that in nineteen years he had never sent a cable to the King of the Realm before, and that he wished to be sure he had it right.”

The King poured his own coffee. It was one of his small number of rules, and he had kept it at a quarter past six, and he kept it now, by feel, in the dark, and did not spill any. It was Kona coffee, from the farm above Kealakekua that had never sent an invoice. It was very hot. He drank it standing at the rail.

“Thank you, Kaʻai.”

“Sir.” Kaʻai did not go. He stood by the table in the dark. “Sir, may I say something to Your Majesty that I have no business saying?”

“Yes.”

“I came into this house in 1886, sir, in King Kalākaua’s time. I was fifteen. I have seen King Kalākaua in it, and the old Queen, and your father, and you. I was on the stairs, sir, when the old Queen came down from the library after she had signed the Treaty, with the commissioners behind her, and I was in the Grand Hall, sir, the morning they proclaimed your father.” The shape was quite still. “I have never in fifty-five years seen this house do what it did today. I wished to say that I saw it. That is all. I shall not say it again.”

He went away along the veranda in the dark before the King could answer.

---

On the gravel below, a long way down, a shape was moving.

It was Kealoha. He knew the walk, as he had known the Queen’s on the gravel at six. The Captain was going the rounds of the gates, one by one, as he must have gone them every hour since the morning, to see the Guard and to be seen by it, and he was walking slowly now, unhurried, the way a man walks on a Sunday when the day is over; and halfway across the gravel between the barracks and the makai gate he stopped, and looked up at the veranda.

He could not have seen anything. There was no light. The King was a shape against a black house against a black sky. But Kealoha stopped, and looked up, at the place on the ewa veranda where the King stood every morning at a quarter past six with his coffee, and after a moment, in the dark, he saluted.

The King lifted his cup.

Neither of them could have seen the other. It did not matter. It was their arrangement.

Then Kealoha went on, towards the gate, and was gone into the dark.

---

They would ask again tomorrow.

He knew that, standing at the rail with the cup. He had known it since two o’clock in the Blue Room, watching Colonel Pryce look twice at the empty chair. They would ask in the morning: the commanding general, through Pryce, or through somebody, politely, because a landing had not come in the night but might come the next; and Cunningham would bring it, because he was the Realm, and would look at the chairs, and would be ashamed of it, and would ask. And the Kuhina Nui would come across the road at nine with the rice order and the land and the first of the generals’ requests for powers, nicely, the first time; and he would sign the rice order and say that the Kuhina Nui would consider the rest, and that the courts sat at ten. And at some time in the day somebody would say to him again that the sovereign should be moved inland, and he would say no. And the day after. And the day after that.

He did not know for how long. He did not know anything about what was coming, except that it was going to be long, and that the Realm was going to be at war by the time he woke, if he slept, and that the war was going to be fought in his Kingdom and from it and over it, by the Realm, under the seventh article, for as long as it took; and that every day of it somebody was going to come into his house and ask him for something, a beach or a valley or a power or a list, or simply to leave; and that he was going to have to decide, every time, as though it were the first time, what the Crown was for.

He had thought, at fourteen, that his father had given him the answer on the mauka veranda in the last of the light. The Crown is there. He had thought, at thirty-seven, at a quarter to six this morning, that it was the best account of constitutional monarchy he had ever been given, and that he understood it. He had not understood it. He understood it now, a little, standing at the rail at midnight with his coffee in a dark city, after a day in which he had done, as far as he could see, nothing at all. He had refused to get into a car. He had opened some gates. He had written a note to a policeman and eleven sentences to a city and three lines to a King, and read a list, and not crossed anything out. He had stood on the steps. That was all he had done. He had not saved anybody. He had not stopped anything. He had told Nāone at a quarter past eight that nobody was aiming at him, and an hour later the bombs had come up King Street to his gate, and he did not know, still, whether anybody had been aiming at him, and found that it did not matter. He had been, all day long, from a quarter to eight in the morning until now, the one thing in Honolulu that had not moved.

And they had come. They had come in off King Street and sat down on his grass and looked up at his roof, all day, to see whether the flag was still there, and it had been. That was what it had been for. Not to do something. To be the thing that was still there when everything else had moved.

His father had known that. His father had known that the Crown of a small Kingdom in a great Realm had only one power that nobody could take from it, and that it was the power to stay where it was; and had spent thirty-eight years practising it on ordinary days, against the day when it would be wanted, without ever being sure the day would come. It had come. It had come on the first Sunday in December, on the morning of the Anglican service, a little before eight, out of a clear sky; and the son had been standing on the lawn with his hat in his hand, and had found that he knew how.

He did not think of it as a policy. He did not think of it as anything he would be remembered for. He thought of it, if he thought of it at all, as the one thing he knew how to do, and the only thing tomorrow was going to ask of him, and the next day, and the next. Stand here. Be here. Do not go.

He finished the coffee and set the cup down on the tray, without looking, in the dark, and put his hands back on the rail.

---

Across the road, on the dark face of the court, at the bottom of one window, there was a line of light.

He had not seen it before. It was very thin, a thread, where the blanket hung over the empty window of the Supreme Court did not quite reach the sill; and through it, faint as a candle under a door, came the light of a single lamp, on a table, in the room where the Chief Justice of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was still sitting, at midnight, in his robe, reading, one at a time, what the Realm’s officers had brought him, and asking two questions, and signing, or refusing, and writing down why.

The King watched the thread of light. In front of the court, between it and the palace, invisible in the dark, the first Kamehameha stood on his plinth with his spear and his cloak and his arm held out towards the palace, untouched, with the hole in King Street at his feet, as he had stood that morning, as he had stood every morning of the King’s life; and the King could not see him at all, but he knew exactly where he was.

The trade wind moved in the palms. On the roof above him, the flagstaff stood bare in the dark. In six hours and forty-five minutes the Guard would run the flag up it, from inside the tower, so that nobody would see it done, and it would simply be there, at a quarter to seven, as it was every morning; and the people on the lawn would wake up on the grass and look up, and see it; and he would be here.

Across the dark city, from the church at Kawaiahaʻo, beyond the courts, the clock began to strike midnight. It was the clock the third Kamehameha had given the church in 1850, and it had struck every hour for ninety years, and nobody that day had thought to stop it, and nobody had thought it would be needed. It struck slowly, a long way off, out of the dark, twelve times.

He stood and counted them. He had not moved. He was not going to.