Immovable

The car was at the front door with its engine running.

He saw it as soon as he came into the Grand Hall from the mauka side, through the open doors at the far end: the long black car on the gravel, the driver at the wheel with his cap on, and two men of the Guard standing by the rear door holding it open, in their shirtsleeves, with rifles. The engine made a low patient sound under the noise from the west. Somebody had brought it round from where it always stood on the first and third Sundays and put it at the foot of the makai steps, pointing at the gate, and somebody had told the driver to start it. The King stood in the hall with his hat still on and looked at it for a moment, and understood that it was for him.

Kealoha came in at the makai door, fast, and stopped when he saw the King, and took his cap off.

“Sir. The car is ready.”

“I see that it is.”

“Sir, with respect, I would like you and the Queen to get into it now.” He said it very plainly, the way he said everything, and he was breathing hard, and there was a long smear of something grey on the sleeve of his tunic where he had brushed against the barracks door. “There is a plan, sir. I drew it up in 1938, after the accession, and the Kuhina Nui approved it, and it has been in the drawer of my desk ever since. It is for a fire, or an earthquake, or a riot, or anything that makes the palace unsafe. The car takes you up Nuʻuanu Avenue to Queen Emma’s house, two and a half miles. The house is kept ready. There is water and a telephone. The road is clear. The Guard follows in the truck. It is inland, sir, and three hundred feet up, and nobody has any reason to bomb a valley.” He stopped. “I wrote it so that it could be done in three minutes from the word. I have given the word.”

“Without asking me.”

“Yes, sir. I am asking you now.”

---

The palace shook.

It was not a large shake. It was a single hard jolt, felt through the floor more than heard, and every window in the Grand Hall answered it at once in a long rising buzz, and one of the crystal drops on the chandelier over the stairs swung and tapped against its neighbour and went on tapping, very lightly, for some seconds after the windows had stopped. Then the sound arrived, a deep flat concussion from the west that went on longer than any of the others, rolling, and somewhere on the upper floor a door that had been standing open swung shut.

Nobody in the hall moved.

Moses was at the foot of the stairs with a duster in his hand. The maid who did the Queen’s hair was halfway down them. Kaʻai was by the door to the basement. Leinani was beside him, the King realised, still holding his arm, with her hat on. They were all looking at him.

He went out onto the makai veranda, because he wanted to see, and Kealoha said “Sir” behind him once, sharply, and then followed.

From the makai side you could not see the west well; the corner of the house was in the way and you had to go along the veranda to the ewa end. He went along it. At the end, where he had stood at a quarter to six with his coffee, he put his hands on the rail and looked.

The darkness over the plain had changed shape. Out of the middle of it, rising through it and above it, there was a new column, very much larger than the others, not black but a dirty reddish brown at the base and white at its edges, boiling, and still going up, and as he watched it the top of it opened out and began to flatten against nothing, the way a column of steam flattens against a ceiling. There was no sound now from that part of the sky. The sound had already come. The black flowers were still opening over the plain and over the harbour and over Kalihi, more of them than before and nearer, and the crackle of them was continuous, and under it the guns pounded and stammered, and the specks went round and round above all of it in their long patient curves.

He did not know what that great column was. He was not going to know for a long time. He knew that it was something at the anchorage, and that it was very large, and that whatever it was had had men in it.

“Sir,” said Kealoha, at his shoulder.

“What was that, Thomas?”

“I don’t know, sir. A magazine. A ship’s magazine.” Kealoha was looking at it too. “Or a fuel store. I don’t know.”

“How many men are there on one of those ships?”

Kealoha did not answer at once. “A battleship, sir? Twelve hundred. Fourteen hundred.”

There was a sound like gravel on tin again, nearer, a long hissing patter, and then something came down out of the clear sky onto the gravel path below the veranda with a sharp crack, and bounced, and lay there in the raked lines, smoking.

Kealoha went down the steps at the end of the veranda in two strides and stood over it. It was a piece of metal the size of his thumb, jagged, dark grey, with one bright edge where it had been torn, and a thread of smoke came off it. He put his foot on it, quite gently, as though it were a cigarette end, and then bent and picked it up in his handkerchief and looked at it, and the King, looking down at him from the rail, watched his face change.

“What is it?”

“A shell fragment, sir.” Kealoha folded the handkerchief over it and put it in his pocket, and came back up the steps. “From one of the black ones. They burst up there and the pieces come down. There will be a great many of them coming down on the city.” He looked at the King. “Sir, you must come inside now. And then you must go up the valley. Please.”

---

They went back into the hall. He took off his hat at last and gave it to Moses, who took it and held it against his chest with both hands as though it were something that might be dropped.

“Kaʻai,” the King said.

“Sir.”

“Is there anybody on the telephone?”

“The Kuhina Nui, sir. He rang while you were on the veranda. He is at home in Mānoa. He asked me to tell you that he can see the smoke from his garden and that he is coming in as soon as he can find his driver, and he asked me to ask you, sir, to go up to the Nuʻuanu house in the meantime.” Kaʻai paused. “He asked me to say that it was his formal advice. He said the word formal, sir, twice.”

“Is he still on the line?”

“I asked him to hold, sir.”

The telephone was in the Chamberlain’s office in the basement, at the bottom of the narrow stair behind the dining room, and the King went down to it with Kaʻai behind him, and Kealoha behind Kaʻai, and he did not look round to see if the Queen was coming because he knew she was. The office was a small square room with a window at the height of the gravel outside and a great many hooks with keys on them, and a desk, and the wireless set on a shelf, and the telephone on the wall. The wireless was still playing hymns. It was playing “Abide with Me”, in a version for the organ, very slowly.

He picked up the receiver.

“Nāone.”

“Your Majesty.” The Kuhina Nui’s voice was very small and very clear down the line, as though it were coming from much further than Mānoa. “Sir, I am glad. I have been ringing for five minutes. Sir, the exchange is nearly gone, half the lines are down or full, I do not know how long this one will last. Kaʻai has given you my advice?”

“He has.”

“Then I will say it once more, sir, myself, and then I will come in. You should go up the valley. Now. The Kingdom needs its King alive a great deal more than it needs him in Honolulu, today of all days. They are bombing the city, sir. I can see the smoke from the harbour from my garden. If they are bombing the harbour they will bomb the rest of it, and if they are landing, they will land there, and the palace is a quarter of a mile from the harbour. I do not know what is happening, sir. Nobody knows. Which is the reason to go.”

“Joseph.”

“Sir.”

“If I go up the valley,” the King said, “the city will know by noon that the King went up the valley.”

There was a silence on the line, full of small crackling.

“Yes, sir,” said Nāone. “I expect it will.”

“And by one o’clock everybody in Honolulu who owns a car or can borrow one will be on Nuʻuanu Avenue going up after me. And by two the road will be full, and nobody will be able to get down it who needs to, and nobody will be able to get up it who needs to. And everybody who cannot get a car will be standing in the street looking at an empty palace.”

“Sir, that is a reason. It is not a reason to risk…”

“Nobody is aiming at me,” the King said. “Nobody has ever aimed at me. I am not important enough. They are aiming at the Realm’s ships, and the Realm’s aerodromes, and the harbour, and the power station, things that matter to a war, and I do not matter to a war at all. If I were the Japanese admiral I would not waste a single bomb on ʻIolani, which has nothing in it but a King, and the King has no ships; and I do not think he is a stupid man, since he has evidently managed to bring an air force across the Pacific without anybody noticing.” He heard his own voice, and was surprised again at how ordinary it sounded. “I am staying here, Joseph. Come in when you can. Come in carefully.”

There was another silence. Then the Kuhina Nui said, in a different voice, the voice he used in the House when he had lost a vote and wished it recorded that he had known he would:

“Sir. I advise you formally to go. I would like it noted that I did.”

“It is noted.”

“Then I am coming in,” said Nāone, and the line went dead, not because he had put it down but because it had stopped, all at once, in the middle of a crackle, and there was nothing on it at all.

---

He put the receiver back on its hook. The wireless had finished “Abide with Me” and begun something else. He did not know what it was.

When he turned round they were all there: Kaʻai by the desk, and Kealoha in the doorway with his cap in his hands, and the Queen behind him on the stair, with her hat off now and held in one hand by the brim, and behind her on the stairs, he saw, Moses, and the maid, and a face he did not at first recognise and then did, which was Mrs Higa’s, very white, with her apron still on. They had all come down after him. They had heard all of it.

“Sir,” said Kealoha. “With respect.”

“Yes, Thomas.”

“With respect, sir. It is my duty to see to your safety. It is the only duty I have. It is the whole of what I am for.” He said it without heat, in the same plain voice. “I cannot see to it if you stay here. There is nothing between this house and that sky but a slate roof. If you stay here and something happens to you I will have failed in the only thing I was ever asked to do, and I would like you to know that, sir, before you decide.”

The King looked at him. Thomas Kealoha was thirty-one, and he read books about how guns worked so that he would understand things, and he had drawn up a plan in 1938 to take the King up a valley in three minutes, and had put it in his drawer, and had taken it out this morning and given the word, and the car was standing at the front door with its engine running because of him. It was a good plan. It was exactly the right plan. He would have been ashamed of his aide if there had not been one.

“I know, Thomas,” he said. “I have decided.”

“Sir.”

“My father,” the King said, and stopped, because he had been about to say the sentence, and he found he could not say it in front of Mrs Higa in her apron. He said instead: “The Crown is the only thing in this Kingdom that has never once gone anywhere when there was trouble. It did not go anywhere in 1887, when men came into this house with rifles and made it sign. It did not go anywhere in 1893, when they came to pull it down. It has stood in this house for sixty years while people came and went. If I get into that car, it will be the first time.” He looked at Kealoha. “It is not a brave thing, Thomas. Please do not think it is. I am not brave. It is only the one thing I know how to do. Turn the engine off.”

Kealoha stood very still for a moment. Then he put his cap on, and saluted, and went up the stairs past the Queen and Moses and the maid and Mrs Higa, who all moved against the wall to let him by, and a minute later, through the small window at the height of the gravel, they heard the engine of the car stop.

---

“Leinani,” he said.

She came down the last two stairs.

“I would like you to go,” he said. “Up the valley. With Mrs Higa and the maids. Kealoha can send four of the Guard with you. You can be back by tonight if it is over.”

“No,” said Leinani.

“I am asking you.”

“I know you are asking me. I am telling you no.” She did not raise her voice. “If you were going, I would not go, because somebody would have to stay in the house. Since you are not going, I am not going either, because somebody has to stay with you, and Kaʻai is seventy.” She put her hat down on the Chamberlain’s desk, very carefully, on top of a pile of papers. “And if they bomb the palace I would rather be in it than be the Queen who was up the valley having tea with Mrs Higa when it happened. I think you would rather that too, if you were me. I think it is the same thing you just said to the Captain, only shorter.”

He could not argue with that, and did not try.

Mrs Higa had begun to cry on the stairs, quite quietly, the way the Queen had said she cried on the sea wall, without seeming to know she was doing it. Leinani went up and put an arm round her and said something to her in a low voice, and Mrs Higa nodded several times and wiped her face on the corner of her apron, and then said, quite clearly, in English, that she had better see to lunch, then, if everybody was staying, and went back up the stairs towards the kitchen.

---

He went up to the tower.

It was a thing he had not done since he was a boy. There was a narrow stair from the upper floor up into the central tower, behind a door that was kept locked, and Kaʻai had the key, and gave it to him without a word, and he went up the stair with the noise of the guns getting louder at every turn, and came out into the little square room under the flagstaff where the Guard ran up the flag. There was a window on each side. The rope came down from the roof through a pipe in the ceiling and was cleated to the wall. Corporal Akana was long dead and there was nobody there, and no malasada.

He went to the west window.

From here, forty feet up, he could see over the roofs of the town, over Kakaʻako and the cannery and the harbour and Kalihi, all the way across the plain to where the land went flat and low before the anchorage. He could not see the anchorage. He could see where it was. The darkness stood over it, a single great cloud now, black at its base and brown above and shot through at the bottom with orange where the fires were, and it lay along the whole of the western sky from the airfield at Hickam to somewhere beyond Puʻuloa that he could not name, and it was moving very slowly towards the Waiʻanae range on the wind that had come back. The black flowers opened under it and around it and over the city in hundreds now. The specks still turned above it. As he watched, two of them came down out of the darkness, low, one behind the other, and went away fast towards the north, towards the middle of the island and the plateau and Schofield, and were gone.

And nearer, in the city, under him, there was smoke of its own. It came up from the waterfront below the tower, thick and black, where the bomb had fallen at eight; and from somewhere in Kakaʻako, a grey column, leaning; and from the power station along the harbour, where something was burning with a white heat that he could see even in the sunlight, and a lazy dirty cloud standing over it. Three smokes. Honolulu had never had a smoke in it that was not a cane fire or a chimney. As he watched, an aircraft came in low from the sea over Kakaʻako, unhurried, and there was the tearing sound again, the long stammer, along a street he could not see, and it lifted over the roofs and went away to the west towards the darkness, and somewhere below where it had been, a woman began to scream, and went on.

He had a pair of field glasses in his hand. He did not remember taking them from the hook in the Chamberlain’s office. He put them up and looked through them, and saw, magnified and swimming in the heat, the darkness, and the orange at the bottom of it, and nothing else whatever. Not a mast. Not a ship. Not a man. Six miles of air and smoke, and somewhere under it the Realm’s fleet, and he could not see it.

He put the glasses down on the sill.

Below him, on King Street, people were coming out of the houses. They were standing on the pavement in their Sunday clothes and their nightclothes and looking west, and some of them were looking up at the black flowers over their heads, and a man was pulling a child in from the road by the arm. Along the railings of the palace, on the makai side, a few people had stopped, and were standing with their hands on the rails. They were not looking west. They were looking at the palace. They were looking, he understood, at the front doors, which were standing open, as they always stood open in the daytime; and at the flag on the roof above him, lifting a little now in the wind that had come back; and at the car on the gravel, with its engine stopped, and nobody getting into it.