The Second Wave

The palace had had a telephone since 1881, when there were not twenty in the Kingdom, and Kalākaua had used it chiefly to ring the boathouse. It had had a switchboard since 1912. The switchboard stood in a cupboard off the Chamberlain’s office, a varnished wooden cabinet with brass jacks and a rack of cords and a headset on a hook, and it connected the six lines of the palace with the public exchange and with each other, and on an ordinary day it was worked from nine to five by a young woman from Kaimukī named Miss Lau, who did not come in on Sundays.

Takemoto sat down at it without being asked.

He did it as though it were the obvious thing, which it was, and as though he had done it before, which it turned out he had, for two summers, nights, at the exchange in Hilo, when he was saving for California. He put on the headset and pulled the stool in and looked at the board for a moment with his head on one side, and then began to work it, pulling cords and putting them in, flicking keys, saying “ʻIolani Palace” into the mouthpiece in a voice the King had never heard him use, a flat quick professional voice from somewhere outside himself, over and over, to the lines that were dead and the lines that were alive.

“Five of the six are still up, sir,” he said, without turning round. “The exchange is nearly jammed. Everybody in the city is trying to ring everybody else. But the exchange will put the palace through before anybody else if I ask. I am asking.”

The King pulled up the Chamberlain’s chair and sat beside him with a pad and a pencil.

---

Overhead, the second wave had come.

It sounded different from the first. There were more of the flat heavy blows now, in the city, near, the bombs, and with each one the jars of pens on the Chamberlain’s desk jumped and chattered, and plaster dust came down very fine from the ceiling and lay on the King’s sleeve; and over them, continuous, the guns and the crackle of the black flowers, so continuous now that it had stopped being a sound at all and become a kind of weather; and through it, every so often, an aircraft went over the city low enough to rattle the window at the height of the gravel. The wireless on the shelf was playing music again, the same hymns, as though the man at the station had put a pile of records on the machine and gone out.

Takemoto said, “The Queen’s Hospital, sir.”

He passed the King the earpiece of the second headset. A woman’s voice, very calm, said that she was the night sister and that she had been on since eight last night, and that the hospital had been told to expect wounded from the anchorage and from Hickam, and was getting them, and was getting them now from the waterfront too, and from Kakaʻako, from the streets, men and women and children, and that they had two hundred beds and had begun putting people in the corridors; and that she was ringing ʻIolani because she had been ringing everybody and ʻIolani had answered. She asked whether the King could send doctors. She asked it as though it were a perfectly ordinary request.

“I will send whatever I can,” the King said. “Who is with you?”

“Everybody who could get here, sir. The Chinese doctors from Chinatown came on foot. There is a dentist.” A pause. “There is blood on the floor of the lobby, sir. I am sorry. I do not know why I said that.”

He wrote: Queen’s. Doctors. Blood. He did not know why he wrote the last word either.

The line went. Takemoto pulled the cord and put in another.

---

It came like that for twenty minutes. It came in pieces.

The harbourmaster’s office, at the pier by the tower, a man shouting over the guns that the first bomb at eight had gone through the roof of the warehouse on the pier and the warehouse was burning, and the freighter at the pier was alight at the stern, and there had been men on the pier, and a second bomb now in the water by the fish market, and the fire engines could not get through because of the people in the street. The Kuhina Nui’s office across the road, a young clerk who had come in on his own account and found it empty, and had rung the palace rather than cross King Street under the aircraft, and did not know what to do and wanted to be told. A Noble from Kailua, on the windward side, an old man the King knew well, who had got through somehow on a party line and was very angry, and said that the Navy’s airfield at Kāneʻohe across the bay from his house was burning from end to end, and that the aircraft had come over his roof so low he could see the faces of the men in them, and that he wanted the King to know that he had seen their faces and they were young.

He wrote: Kāneʻohe. Burning. Young.

A woman from Aiea, on the hill above the anchorage, a schoolteacher, who had climbed up to the telephone in the plantation manager’s house because hers was dead, and who said that she could see the whole of the anchorage from the window, and that all the battleships along the island were on fire, every one of them, the whole line.

A man from the naval district, a lieutenant, who had been put through to the palace by mistake and was so polite about it that he stayed on the line for half a minute apologising, and in the course of apologising said that it was not as bad as it looked, that two of the battleships were hit and the rest were firing, and that the King should not believe what he heard.

The night sister again, to say that the first trucks had come in from Hickam and that she had stopped counting.

A boy, very young, who would not give his name, who had got the palace number from the book and wanted to know if it was true that the Japanese were landing at Waikīkī. He told the boy it was not true. He did not know whether it was true. He told the boy to go home to his mother and stay off the street. The boy said, yes, Your Majesty, and then, after a pause, said thank you, Your Majesty, and the line went.

A voice he did not know, a man, Hawaiian, out of breath, who said he was ringing from a shop in Pālama and that an aeroplane had come down the street with its guns going and there was a man dead outside on the pavement and nobody had come, and what should he do. The King asked him whether he had a sheet. The man said he had. The King said, then cover him, and stay with him until somebody comes, and somebody will come. And then the line went, and he sat with the earpiece in his hand and knew that he had no idea whether somebody would come, and that he had said it in the voice of a man who did.

He wrote: Pālama. A man.

“Turned over,” said Takemoto, with his hand over the mouthpiece. “This is the naval district again, sir, a different officer. He says one of the battleships has turned over. And another is on fire from end to end and has settled on the bottom. He says they are not sinking because there is not enough water under them to sink in. They are sitting on the mud. He won’t say which. He says he isn’t permitted to give the names of ships on an open line.”

The King looked at what he had written. He had covered most of two pages. Turned over. On fire. Settling. All of them. Two of them. Not as bad as it looks. The whole line. None of it agreed. He had written it down in the order it came, and he had been trying, for twenty minutes, to make it into a picture; and he understood now, quite suddenly, that it would never be one, because nobody who was speaking to him could see the whole of it. They were all telling him the truth. It was simply that there was too much of it.

He put the pencil down. It came to him then, sitting on the Chamberlain’s chair with the plaster dust on his sleeve, what it was that had happened. Not the pieces. The thing. The Realm’s Pacific fleet, the battle line, the great grey ships that had come past the harbour mouth on Friday afternoon while half the city cheered on the sea wall, the ships the Realm had sent to Puʻuloa to be its whole strength in this ocean: they were burning in the mud of Hawaiian water, and the men in them were dying. And the city over his head was being bombed. It was not two ships. It was not as bad as it looked. It was worse, in the only way that mattered, which was that it had happened at all.

---

“Sir,” said Kealoha, in the doorway.

He had come down the stair without the King hearing him. He had his cap under his arm and dust on his boots, and there was a cut on his chin that had bled a little and stopped.

“There is a bomb on Smith Street, sir, near the harbour. It came through the roof of a shop. The engines are there. There are people hurt.” He paused. “The Guard is at all four gates. There are people at the railings. A great many people, sir. More every minute, even with the aircraft over. They are not doing anything. They are standing there.”

“What are they waiting for?”

Kealoha looked at him with an expression the King could not read.

“I asked one of them, sir,” he said. “An old woman. Hawaiian. I asked her what she was waiting for, and she said she was not waiting for anything, she had come to see if the King had gone.” He paused again. “I told her he had not. She said she knew. She said she could see the car.”

---

He went up.

He did not decide to; he found himself on the stair, and then in the hall, and then out through the open front doors onto the makai veranda, where he could hear it properly for the first time since he had gone down: the guns and the crackle and the blows of the bombs in the town, and over it the engines; and he went to the rail, to the middle of the veranda, over the steps, where he could be seen.

There were a great many people at the railings. Kealoha had not exaggerated. They stood along the whole length of the iron fence on King Street, and round the corner on Richards Street, two and three deep in places, in their Sunday clothes, men and women and children and old people, Hawaiian faces and Chinese and Japanese and Portuguese and Filipino and haole, the whole of the city, with the smoke of the waterfront behind them at the bottom of the street, and they had their hands on the railings or their arms round each other, and they were looking at the palace. When he came out onto the veranda a sound went along the railings that was not a word, a long low sound like a sigh going from mouth to mouth, and then stopped.

He stood at the rail where they could see him. He did not wave. He did not know what he would have meant by it. He stood there.

The seventh article of the Treaty came into his head then, entire, as Mr Pell had made him learn it at fifteen, in its dull clauses of lawyer’s English: that the defence of the Kingdom, and its dealings with every foreign Power, were the charge of the Realm; and that such Hawaiian land as that defence required should be made available to it. The old Queen had signed it upstairs, in the room that was now his library, in 1898, because the Kingdom had a few hundred soldiers and no navy and had looked out across the Pacific and seen Japan growing, and had concluded that it would be inside somebody’s empire within twenty years, and that the only question open to it was whose. It had chosen. It had given its defence away so that this would not happen.

And it had happened. Forty-three years later, it had happened anyway. Japan had come, as the old Queen’s ministers had known it would, and had set the Realm’s fleet on fire at the anchorage the Kingdom had made available for its defence, and was bombing Honolulu.

He did not let himself finish the thought. He understood very clearly that he must not, today, in front of anybody; and he put it away, as Mr Pell had taught him to put away a thought that a constitutional sovereign was not entitled to, carefully, where he could find it again.

---

Kealoha saw it first.

He had come up behind the King and was standing three paces back, where he always stood, and the King heard him say “Sir,” quite quietly, and then, not quietly at all, a word in Hawaiian that the King had not heard since he was a boy on the ranch at Hualālai, a cowboy’s word, and then Kealoha’s hands were on him.

He had a glimpse of it, as he went down. An aircraft, low, coming up King Street from the harbour end, from the direction of the smoke, lower than the roofs of the waterfront, so low that it seemed to be coming along the street itself, between the buildings, with the red sun on its wings and its engine screaming, and something falling away under it, two things, dark, end over end.

Then the floor of the veranda hit him, and Kealoha was on top of him, and the world went white.

---

He did not hear it. He felt it. The whole house moved under him, once, like a ship taking a sea, and every window on the makai side of ʻIolani went at the same moment, the hall, the Blue Room, the dining room, the windows of the upper floor above him, with a sound like a great tray of glasses dropped down a stair; and then the air was full of glass and dust and small stones, raining down on the veranda boards and on his back and on Kealoha’s, and a second blow came behind the first, further off, across the road, and the house moved again.

Then nothing. A ringing. Dust.

Kealoha’s weight came off him. Kealoha’s face was over his, grey with dust, the cut on his chin open again, saying something the King could not hear; and then he could, faintly, as though through a wall: “Sir. Sir. Are you hurt. Sir.”

“No,” said the King. He did not know if it was true. He sat up. Nothing seemed to be broken. There was glass in his hair and down the back of his collar, and his hands were cut a little, both palms, from the boards. “No. Thomas. Are you?”

“No, sir.”

He got to his feet. Kealoha tried to stop him and he did not let him. He went to the rail.

King Street was full of dust. It hung in the air in a great brown cloud that the wind was already taking, and through it, as it thinned, he saw the street, and the railings, and what had been done.

The first bomb had fallen in the road just beyond the makai gate, in front of the palace, a little to the right. There was a hole in King Street that had not been there, and the tram rails were bent up out of it like the ribs of something, and a car that had been standing in the road was on its side against the far kerb. The railings had held, mostly; there was a gap where a length of them had gone down. And along them, along the pavement where a minute ago the people of Honolulu had been standing with their hands on the iron, looking at the palace, there were people lying down. Some of them were moving. Some were not. Others were getting up, slowly, white with dust, and looking about them as though they did not know where they were. A woman was sitting on the pavement with her hat still on, holding a child across her knees. Nobody was screaming yet. It was too soon for screaming.

The second bomb had fallen across the road, on the lawn in front of the courts, and the windows of the courts were gone, all of them, and its front was scarred and black. And in front of it, in the middle of the dust, with his spear and his cloak and his gilt and his arm held out towards the palace, quite untouched, the first Kamehameha stood on his plinth, as he had stood at a quarter to six, looking at the King.

---

“Open the gates,” the King said.

He heard himself say it. He was already going down the steps.

“Sir, there may be more…”

“Open the gates, Thomas. All of them. Now. Bring them in.”

Kealoha went past him down the steps at a run, shouting to the Guard in Hawaiian, and the Guard, who had been flat on the gravel behind the railings and were getting up now with their rifles and their white tunics grey with dust, ran to the gates and swung them back, and went out through them into the street, and began to bring the people in. They carried the ones who could not walk. They brought them in through the makai gate and laid them on the grass under the banyan, and went back for more, and people from along King Street who had not been hurt came out of the doorways and helped them, and in a minute the lawn of ʻIolani, which had been raked into lines at a quarter to eight, was full of people lying down.

The King was on the gravel at the foot of the steps. He did not remember coming down the rest of them. He knelt by a man the Guard had laid on the grass, a stevedore by his clothes, Hawaiian, with blood on his face, who looked up at him, and knew him, and tried to get up; and the King put a hand on his chest and said, in Hawaiian, lie still, uncle, and the man lay still.

Then Leinani was beside him. She had come out of the hall at a run with her skirt in her hand and her hair coming down, and she knelt on the gravel and looked at the man and then at the lawn and then at the King, at his cut hands and the glass in his hair, quickly, the way she looked at a horse, and decided.

“The barracks,” she said. “Everybody who is hurt goes into the barracks. Everybody who is not, helps. Kahikina, I need Dr Chun. He is at Emma Street or he is at the Queen’s. Send somebody running for him. And every sheet in the house.”

“Take them.”

“I am going to.” She was already on her feet, calling to the sergeant of the Guard in Hawaiian; and the sergeant, who had been standing at the barracks door with no order in the book for any of this, turned with an expression of enormous relief, and began to shout.

---

Kealoha came back to him across the gravel. The King was standing now, at the foot of the steps, with the people being carried past him into the barracks and laid on the grass, and the dust settling on all of it, and the guns still going over the west and the black flowers still opening over the city and the engines still in the sky; and Kealoha stopped in front of him and stood very straight, with his cap gone somewhere and his face grey, and said, very quietly, so that nobody else would hear:

“Sir. Now. Will you go now? Please.”

The King looked at him. Then he looked past him, at the lawn, at the people the Guard were bringing in through the open gates, at the woman with the child who was being helped in now through the gap in the railings, with her hat still on; at the street beyond, and the hole in it, and the car on its side, and the courts with no glass in their windows, and the statue standing in front of them with its arm out.

“They came to see if I had gone,” the King said. “Thomas. Look at them. They came to the railings to see if I had gone.”

Kealoha did not say anything.

“No,” said the King.

---

At a quarter to ten the aircraft went away.

He was still on the gravel. He saw them go. They went north, the last of them, high, in twos and threes, towards the middle of the island and over it, and the guns went on after them for a while, firing at nothing, and then, one by one, stopped. The black flowers drifted and thinned and came apart. The last of it was a single gun somewhere towards the harbour, firing, and firing again, and then a pause, and then once more, and then not.

The silence came in after it like a tide. It was not a silence. There were sirens in it, and the fire bells of the engines at the waterfront, and the dogs, and the people on his lawn, crying now, at last, the crying that had been too soon a quarter of an hour ago; and from the west, very faint, or perhaps not there at all, a long low sound like a wind in a forest, which might have been the fires at the anchorage six miles off, or might have been nothing but the blood in his own ears.

Behind him, in the hall, among the glass, he heard Takemoto come up the basement stair and stop. When he turned, his secretary was standing in the doorway with the headset still round his neck, holding the pad the King had left on the desk, and his face was white.

“Sir,” said Takemoto. “You are hurt.”

“No. A little. My hands.” He looked at them. “What is it, Haruo?”

“My father.” Takemoto looked at the pad in his hands as though he did not know how it had got there. “I meant to tell you. When I left the house this morning, he was putting on his good suit. He was going down to the school, sir, to open it. He said the families in the valley would want somewhere to go if there were more aircraft, and the school has a cellar, and he has the key. He said the Japanese of Nuʻuanu should go to a Japanese school today, to be safe, and be seen there, and that he would sit at the door himself.” He stopped. “And then he told me to come to you. He said that my place was here, and that his was there, and that it would be a disgrace to both of us if either of us were anywhere else.”

“Your father is a wise man.”

“Yes, sir,” said Takemoto. “I have been trying to ring the school. The line is down.”