The Kuhina Nui

Joseph Nāone came in at the makai gate at twenty past eleven, past the hole in King Street and the car on its side and the gap in the railings, and up the makai steps with his hat on and his jacket over his arm and his collar undone, which the King had never seen, and at the top of the steps Kaʻai was waiting for him with a folded sheet of the palace paper, and held it out.

“From His Majesty, sir,” Kaʻai said. “His Majesty asked that you should have it before anything else. Before you took your hat off.”

The Kuhina Nui looked at Kaʻai, and then at the paper, and then over Kaʻai’s shoulder at the King, who was standing in the doorway of the hall, and then he took the paper and unfolded it and read it standing on the top step, with his hat on and his jacket over his arm and the sweat running down the side of his face from the walk. He read it twice. The King watched him do it. He had watched Nāone read a great many papers in two and a half years, in the library and in the House and at the long table in the Kuhina Nui’s room across the road, and he knew the way he read: slowly, with his lips very slightly pressed together, as though each sentence were a step on a rotten stair, and he was testing it before he put his weight on it.

Nāone folded the paper again. Then he took off his hat.

“Sir,” he said.

“Was I wrong?”

“No, sir.” He held the paper in one hand and the hat in the other. “You were very nearly wrong, which is a different thing, and you were not.” He looked at the paper. “The last line is the best thing in it. And nothing else. I would have been very glad to have written that line myself. I would not have been sure I had the right to.” He put the paper in his inside pocket. “I passed the Chief of Police on the way in, sir, at the corner of Punchbowl Street, standing in the road directing a fire engine with his own hands. He said that the King’s note had reached him at five past nine and that he had read it to his sergeants in the street, all of it, including the last three words, and that it was the first order anybody had given him all morning that he had been able to understand.”

“It was not an order.”

“No, sir,” said Nāone. “That was what he understood.”

---

Joseph Nāone was sixty-one. He had been born in Lahaina, the son of a Hawaiian whaler’s widow and a Scottish harbourmaster she had married late, and had been sent to school in Honolulu and then to read law in the chambers of an old Hawaiian judge who had trained half the bar of the Kingdom, and had practised in Wailuku for thirty years, on Maui, in a small office over a dry-goods shop, doing land cases. He had been in the House for twelve of those years, on the back benches, saying very little, and voting against everybody at least once. The King had appointed him Kuhina Nui in the spring of 1939 because the previous one had died and because Nāone was the only man in the House whom nobody had ever been able to describe as anybody’s man, and the House had confirmed him by a majority of four, which Nāone had said afterwards was about right. He was a short broad man with grey hair cut very close and a face like the side of a hill, and he wore the same dark suit every day, and he had never once, in two and a half years, told the King anything he wanted to hear unless it happened also to be true.

“Come upstairs,” the King said. “You have walked from Mānoa.”

“I have walked from Mānoa, sir,” Nāone agreed, “and I am sixty-one, and I would very much like to sit down. And I would like a glass of water. And then I would like to look at the Treaty.”

---

The library was on the upper floor, on the ewa side, at the back.

It had been Kalākaua’s study, and then the old Queen’s, and then his father’s, and now his, and none of them had changed it very much. It was a square room, not large, lined with bookcases of koa with glass doors, and there was a big desk in the middle of it with a green leather top, and two windows looking west, and a door onto the upper veranda that he had opened at a quarter to six that morning, and that someone had shut since. On the wall between the windows there was a framed photograph, rather faded, of a group of people in black standing round this desk. The old Queen was sitting at it, in the middle, with a pen in her hand. The men standing round her were the Realm’s commissioners and the Kingdom’s ministers, and some of them were looking at the camera and some at the Queen, and one, at the end, a young man with a moustache, was looking out of the window, as though something had caught his eye.

It was the signing of the Treaty of Honolulu. It had been done at this desk. The King had done his lessons at it at fourteen with Mr Pell, and had not known for a year what the photograph was, because nobody had thought to tell him; and when he found out, he had been unable for a week to put his elbows on the desk.

He gave Nāone the chair by the window and went to the bookcase on the left of the door and took down the book.

It was not the Treaty itself. The Treaty itself, the signed instrument, in Hawaiian and in English, the Hawaiian signed first, was in the Kingdom’s archives, in the stone building on the far side of the grounds, in a steel cabinet behind two locked doors, and it had been taken out four times in forty-three years. This was the printed text, the one the House used, bound in red leather, with the two languages on facing pages. It was the only book in the library that had been read more than any of the others, and its spine was cracked in three places.

He put it on the desk between them and opened it.

---

They read it the way lawyers read, which is to say slowly and out of order.

The second article first, because Nāone asked for it. It was the article everything turned on, and they both knew it by heart, and they read it anyway: that the Crown of Hawaiʻi was a Crown distinct from the Realm’s, and vested in the sovereign of Hawaiʻi alone. Everything else in the Treaty came after that sentence, and everything else in the Kingdom came out of it.

“That is still true,” said Nāone, when they had read it. “This morning. Whatever else is true. I wanted to see it.”

Then the seventh, which was the one the morning had been about. Defence, and foreign affairs, to the Realm. Hawaiian land available for defence. He read it aloud, in the English, because Nāone asked him to, and then Nāone read it again to himself in the Hawaiian, moving his lips, and then sat back.

“They will want more land,” Nāone said. “Tomorrow. The Navy and the Army both. They will want everything they have now and a great deal more. They will want the beaches for guns. They will want the outer islands for airfields. They will want, I should think, sir, a whole island somewhere to shoot at, because they will have to train men to do whatever it is they are going to do, and they cannot do it on Oʻahu.” He looked at the page. “The article says available. It does not say given. It does not say for ever. It says that Hawaiian land shall be available for the defence of the Kingdom. We shall make it available. We shall be very careful to write down, every time, that it was the Kingdom that made it so.” He paused. “That is not today, sir. I am only saying it so that you will have heard it.”

“I have heard it.”

And then the eighth.

They both looked at it for a while before either of them said anything. The eighth article was about subjects. It said who the subjects of the Kingdom were, and that they were the subjects of its King, and it said it in the English in a long sentence with three subordinate clauses, and in the Hawaiian in rather fewer words.

“Sir,” said Nāone. “You know why I want to look at that one.”

“Yes.”

“Then I will say it, so that it has been said in this room.” He put one broad finger on the page. “Every person born in this Kingdom is a subject of the King. Every person naturalised in it is a subject of the King. There is no third thing. There is no kind of person in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi who is a little bit a subject, or a subject on sufferance, or a subject unless there is a war. The law does not know of any such kind of person. It never has.” He took his finger away. “Before tonight, sir, somebody from the Realm is going to come into this palace and say a word to you that the law of the Kingdom does not have. I do not know what the word will be. Alien, perhaps, or enemy, or dual. I want you to have the eighth article in your head when they say it.”

“It is in my head.”

“I know it is, sir. I wanted it to be in mine as well, out loud, with the book open.” Nāone closed the book. “Forgive me. I am a lawyer from Wailuku. We like to see the page.”

---

Then they did the rest of it, which took three-quarters of an hour and was not about the Treaty at all.

The hospitals. The Queen’s was full and the others were filling, and the dressing station in the Guard’s barracks was full too, and Nāone had passed two churches on the walk in that had opened their halls for the wounded on their own account, and he would ask every church and every school in the city to do the same, and the Board of Health would find them doctors, and the Board of Health would also, he said, find out how much blood there was in the Kingdom, and he expected the answer to be not enough.

The water. The reservoirs in the valleys and the pumping stations, which the police were standing outside now because of the King’s note, and which the Army would want to stand outside instead by tonight, and the Kuhina Nui would let it, because the Army had more men, and would make sure the Kingdom’s police stood there too.

Food. Nāone was very quiet about food. The Kingdom grew sugar and pineapple and coffee and not enough of anything a person could live on for a month, and the rest came in by sea, from the coast, in ships that would not be coming now, or not soon, or not without escort, and there were perhaps sixty days of rice in the warehouses on the waterfront, if nobody started buying it all on Monday morning, and everybody would start buying it all on Monday morning. He would have the warehouses shut tonight by order. He would ask the King to sign the order. It would be the first order the King had signed in his reign that he would have to explain to anybody.

“I will sign it.”

“I know you will, sir. I am telling you so that you will know whom to blame.”

The courts. They would sit tomorrow at ten, as always, in a building with no glass left in its windows, and the Chief Justice would sit in the Supreme Court himself, as a sign, and the Kingdom’s courts would remain open every day of whatever this was, as long as there was a judge alive to sit in them. Nāone said this in the same voice as the rest. He did not look up while he said it.

The ʻAhaʻōlelo. It was not sitting; it never sat in December. The Nobles from the other islands would have to be brought to Honolulu if it was to be summoned, and nothing was flying between the islands today and nothing would be sailing tonight, and it would have to wait. The House members from Oʻahu could be got together by Tuesday. The rest would come when they could.

The schools: closed tomorrow, all of them, the government schools and the Japanese schools and the church schools, by order of the Board of Education, which Nāone would ring when the telephone allowed it, and which would agree.

The blackout, which was the Army’s business and would be announced by the Army, and which the Kingdom’s police would help to keep.

The lists. Nāone said the word, and stopped, and looked at the King, and the King looked back at him, and neither of them said anything more about it, and Nāone wrote one word on the bottom of the sheet of notes he had been making, and underlined it, and went on.

---

“And the generals, sir,” Nāone said, at the end.

They had come to the end of the notes. The Kuhina Nui sat back in the chair by the window, with the sheet on his knee and the red book closed on the desk, and the light from the west window lay across him. It was a different light from the morning. It was yellower, and it came through something, a haze, and when the King looked past Nāone through the window he saw why: the darkness over the plain had spread, as the wind took it, all along the western sky and out over the sea, and the sun was coming through the edge of it.

“The Realm’s generals,” Nāone said, “are going to want powers. Not land. Powers. I do not know which powers, or how much of them. I know generals. They will say that the defence of the Kingdom is in the seventh article, and that the defence of the Kingdom now requires that they govern it. They will want the roads, and the harbour, and the curfew, and the newspapers, and the wireless, and they will want the courts. They will want the courts most of all, sir, because a general who governs an island and does not have the courts is a general who can be sued.” He folded the sheet. “They will not ask today. Today they are too busy, and too frightened, and they have lost too much. They will ask tomorrow, or the day after. They will ask nicely the first time.”

“And what do I say?”

“You say nothing, sir. I say it. It is my office.” Nāone stood up. He did it slowly. “But you should hear it from me first, so that if anybody comes into this palace today and asks you for something that sounds like a power, you will know to say that the Kuhina Nui will consider it, and that the courts sit tomorrow at ten.”

“Not today,” said the King.

“Sir?”

“Not today, Joseph. Whatever they want. Not today. Today we are here.” He heard himself, and was not sure what he had meant, and then he was. “Today the Kingdom is here, in its own house, with its own Crown, with the gates open. Tomorrow they can ask. Today, I want them to look at it.”

Nāone said nothing at all for a while.

“I gave you my formal advice this morning, sir,” he said, “to go up the valley.”

“I remember.”

“I withdraw it.” He picked up his hat from the desk. “Not formally. I would not like it noted that I withdrew it. But I withdraw it.”

---

Downstairs, in the Chamberlain’s office, the wireless had been playing hymns since eight o’clock.

The King heard it stop. He was coming down the koa stair with Nāone behind him at ten to twelve, and the sound of the organ came up the basement stair as it had all morning, faintly, under everything, and then it stopped in the middle of a bar, and there was a click, and a man’s voice. The King stood still on the stair. He could not hear the words from there. He went down, past the hall and the dining room and down the narrow stair to the basement, and Kaʻai was standing in the office door with his hand up, the way a man holds up his hand in a crowd for silence, and Takemoto was at the switchboard with the headset off, turned round on his stool, listening.

”… by order of the commanding general,” the voice was saying. It was a young man’s voice, very tired. “This station is going off the air. All stations in the Kingdom are going off the air. Listen for further announcements. Stay off the streets. Do not use the telephone except in an emergency. Do not believe rumours. This station is going off the air.”

And then the click again, and a hiss, and nothing.

Kaʻai put his hand down. Nobody said anything. The hiss went on, very faintly, from the set on the shelf, the sound of an empty room a long way off, and in the switchboard cupboard one of the lines buzzed, and Takemoto turned back to it and put on his headset, and said “ʻIolani Palace” into the mouthpiece in his flat outside voice, and listened.

“By order of the commanding general,” Nāone said, very quietly, behind the King. “You see, sir. They have begun.”