The Subject List

Cunningham came back at three, and this time he did not telephone first, and this time he did not look at the chairs.

He came into the library, where the King was sitting at the desk with Nāone, going through the order about the rice warehouses, and he stood inside the door with a thick envelope in his good hand, the long buff kind the Realm’s offices used, and he did not come any further into the room. He looked at the King and then at the Kuhina Nui and then at the photograph on the wall between the windows, the old Queen at this desk with the pen in her hand, and he seemed for a moment to have forgotten what he had come to say.

“Sir,” he said. “I have been asked to bring you this. I have been asked to bring it to the Kuhina Nui, strictly. But I thought, sir, that you ought to see it, and I knew he would be here.” He held out the envelope. “It is from the Realm’s Constabulary, sir, and from the intelligence officers of the Army and the naval district, together. They gave it to me at my office at half past two. They asked me to bring it to the Kingdom’s government and to ask for an answer before dark.”

Nāone held out his hand for it. Cunningham gave it to him. The King watched the Kuhina Nui open it, and take out what was inside, and look at the first page, and then turn to the last page to see how many there were, which was what a lawyer did, and then look up, not at Cunningham but at the King.

“It is a list, sir,” Nāone said.

---

It was twenty-two pages long. It was typed, on the Realm’s foolscap, single-spaced, and it was a carbon, not a top copy, so that the letters were faintly blurred and in places the ribbon had been running out and the typist had pressed harder. There was a covering letter clipped to the front, a page and a half, signed by three men whose names the King did not know, over three titles he did.

The letter said that the persons named on the attached schedule were believed by the Realm’s intelligence services to be of interest in connection with the security of the Territory. It said Territory. The King read the word twice. It said that it was considered necessary in the interests of the defence of the islands that the persons named be taken into custody without delay, and held pending examination, and that arrangements had been made to hold them at the quarantine station on the island in the harbour. It said that the officers of the Realm’s Constabulary were ready to effect the arrests tonight. It said that, under the arrangements obtaining in the Kingdom, the Constabulary could not act within the Kingdom without the consent of the Kingdom’s government; and it requested, therefore, either that the Kingdom’s police should themselves take the named persons into custody tonight and deliver them to the quarantine station, or that the Kingdom’s government should consent to the Constabulary doing so. It requested an answer by six o’clock. It said that the matter was of the utmost urgency. It was very courteous. It did not say why any of the people on the list were on it.

The schedule had four columns. A number. A name, surname first, in capitals. An address. And a column headed Category.

The King read the categories first. He could not help it. They were the words the list was made of. Priest. Priest. Teacher, language school. Principal, language school. Consular agent. Consular agent. Editor. Fishing co-operative, officer. Priest. Kendō instructor. Merchant. Teacher, language school. Consular agent. Society, officer. Priest.

There were three hundred and forty-one numbers.

---

“I should like to read it,” the King said.

“Sir,” said Nāone. “It is three hundred and forty names. It will take an hour.”

“Then it will take an hour.”

Nāone looked at him for a moment, and then gave him the list, and sat back in the chair by the window, and folded his hands on his stomach, and waited. Cunningham remained standing by the door until the King said, without looking up, “Sit down, Sir Arthur,” and then he sat down on the hard chair against the bookcase, the one Mr Pell had sat in, and waited too.

The King read every name.

He did it properly. He did it the way his father had read the papers the Kuhina Nui put in front of him every day for thirty-eight years, every word, from the top of the page to the bottom, without skipping, because his father had said that a King who signs what he has not read is a stamp, and that a King who reads it is at least a witness. He read the number and the name and the address and the category, each one, and then the next. He did not hurry. Outside the west windows the smoke still leaned over the sea, and the light came yellow through the edge of it and lay across the desk, across the old Queen’s green leather, and across the pages as he turned them.

He knew some of them. Not many. A Buddhist priest from the Hongwanji up the valley who had come to the palace with the other heads of churches at New Year, every year, and stood at the end of the line, and bowed, and said nothing. The editor of one of the Japanese papers, whose name he knew from the House’s press gallery, where the man sat every afternoon of the session taking notes in a small careful hand. A merchant on Hotel Street from whom the palace bought its rice, and had done since his father’s time. A man who taught kendō in a hall in Mōʻiliʻili and had been brought to ʻIolani once, years ago, to give a display on the lawn for the King’s father’s birthday, and had broken a bamboo sword over a pine plank with a shout that had made the King’s mother drop her fan.

The rest he did not know. They were names. Addresses in Kakaʻako, in Pālama, in Mōʻiliʻili, in Kalihi, in Nuʻuanu, in Hilo, in Lahaina, in Līhuʻe, in Kona. Priests and teachers and fishermen and shopkeepers and men who held offices in societies the King had never heard of, a prefectural association, a young men’s club, a co-operative for the purchase of fertiliser. Old men, mostly, he thought, from the ages given in some of the entries. Men who had come out to cut cane in the nineties and the nineteen hundreds and had walked off the plantations into schoolrooms and temples and shops and boats, and had been in the Kingdom forty years, and had sent their sons to school in it.

On page nineteen, about two-thirds of the way down, number two hundred and seventy-eight:

TAKEMOTO, Kenzō. School, Nuʻuanu Avenue. Principal, language school.

---

He did not stop. He made himself not stop. He read number two hundred and seventy-nine, and two hundred and eighty, and to the bottom of the page, and turned over, and read pages twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two, to the end, to number three hundred and forty-one, who was a priest in Kona.

Then he put the list down on the desk and put his hand flat on it.

The room was very quiet. Nāone had not moved. Cunningham had not moved. Somewhere below, through the floor, very faint, he could hear the switchboard buzz, and Takemoto’s voice saying ʻIolani Palace, flat and quick, and then the buzz again.

“Joseph,” the King said.

“Sir.”

“The eighth article.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are these the King’s subjects?”

Nāone did not answer at once. He reached across the desk and turned the list round so that he could read it, and turned the pages, slowly, looking at the addresses, not the names.

“Most of them, sir,” he said. “The priests from Japan, some of them, are not. They are here on licence. A few of the consular agents are subjects of the Emperor and nobody else’s. But most of these men were naturalised in the Kingdom twenty and thirty years ago, sir, and some of them were born in it. They are the King’s subjects. Every one of them who is a subject at all.” He turned the list back. “The letter says the Territory, sir. I noticed.”

“So did I.”

“Somebody in an office in the naval district has been using a form that was drawn up for the Philippines,” said Nāone, “and has not had time to change the word. I do not think it was meant. I think it was a tired man at a typewriter.” He paused. “But it was typed, sir. And it went out over three signatures.”

---

The King sat with his hand on the list.

He knew what he could do. He had known on page nineteen. He was the King of Hawaiʻi and the list was in his hand, and the Realm’s Constabulary could not touch a single name on it without the consent of the Kingdom’s government; and the Kingdom’s government was the man in the chair by the window, who would do, the King thought, very nearly anything the King asked of him today, and would do it gladly. He could take a pen from the stand on the desk and put a line through number two hundred and seventy-eight. Nobody in the room would say anything. Nāone would not. Cunningham would not. The Realm’s officers would not notice, among three hundred and forty-one, or would notice and not dare. He could do it in a second, and Haruo Takemoto, who was sitting at the switchboard downstairs saying ʻIolani Palace into a mouthpiece in his outside voice, and who had walked down Nuʻuanu Avenue that morning because his father told him his place was here, would never know that it had been done, or that it had needed doing.

And then he would be a King who crossed out the names of his friends’ fathers. And the next King would be a King who crossed out the names of his own friends. And the one after that would cross out whoever he liked, and put in whoever he liked, and the Crown would have become what every King of his house before his father had made it, a thing that did things, and somebody would come and take the Kingdom away again for a while.

He did not pick up the pen.

“What does the law of the Kingdom say,” he said, “about taking a man into custody?”

“That it may be done on a warrant, sir,” said Nāone. “Signed by a judge of the Kingdom. For a named person, on evidence sworn before the judge, of an offence or of a danger. Or without a warrant, by a constable, on reasonable cause, if the man is caught in the act, and then he must be brought before a judge within a day.” He said it as though reading it off the page, which in a sense he was, having drafted the last amendment to it himself. “There is no other way, sir. There has never been any other way. There is no provision in the law of the Kingdom for taking a man because of what he is.”

“Then that is the answer.”

---

He said it to Cunningham, because Cunningham was the Realm, in the room, and had brought the list.

“Sir Arthur. Will you tell the Realm’s officers that the Kingdom’s government has received their request, and that the Kingdom’s police will take into custody any person on this list, or any other person, for whom a judge of the Kingdom signs a warrant. Tonight, if they wish it. The Kuhina Nui will ask the Chief Justice to have a judge sitting across the road from six o’clock until there is nobody left to hear. The Realm’s officers may bring whatever they have, for each man, one at a time, and swear it, and the judge will decide. Where he signs, the police will act. Where he does not, they will not.” He looked at the list under his hand. “And the Kingdom does not consent to the Constabulary taking anybody in the Kingdom on any other footing. Not tonight. Not on this list.”

Cunningham was looking at him with an expression the King could not read.

“Sir,” he said. “They will say there is no time. They will say that it is a war, and that a judge cannot hear three hundred cases in a night, and that some of these men may be dangerous, and that every hour’s delay is a risk.”

“Then they will have to bring their best cases first,” said the King, “and the judge will hear as many as he can, and the rest will wait until Monday, and in the meantime the Kingdom’s police will know where every one of these men is, because they are not going anywhere. They are priests and schoolmasters, Sir Arthur. They are sitting in their temples and their schools with their doors open. One of them,” he said, and stopped, and then went on, “one of them, I know for a fact, opened his school this morning in his best suit so that the families of his valley would have a cellar to shelter in, and is sitting at the door of it now.”

Cunningham was quiet.

“They may be right,” the King said. “Some of these men may be dangerous. I do not know. Neither do you. A judge can find out. That is what judges are for.” He took his hand off the list. “If the Realm has evidence against a man, let it show it to a judge of the Kingdom, and he will be taken. If it has only a word in a column, then it has nothing the Kingdom’s law can see.”

---

Nāone stood up.

“I will go across to the Chief Justice now, sir,” he said. “He is at the court. He has been there since nine. He will sit himself, I think, tonight, if I ask him, and he will want a second judge to relieve him at midnight.” He picked up the list and the covering letter and squared them on the desk and put them back in the long buff envelope. “Sir Arthur, will you walk across with me? I should like the Realm’s officers to have the Kingdom’s answer in writing, over my signature, before five, and I should like you to carry it.”

“Yes, Kuhina Nui.”

“Thank you.” Nāone looked at the King. He looked at him for a long time, across the desk, the way he had looked at the paper on the top step that morning, testing it before he put his weight on it.

“You did not cross anything out, sir,” he said.

“No.”

“I saw page nineteen when I turned it round.” He held the envelope against his chest. “I would have done it for you, sir. If you had asked. I want you to know that I would have done it, and I want you to know that I am very glad you did not ask.”

He went out. Cunningham went after him, and at the door turned, and bowed, from the neck, and did not say anything, and went.

---

The King sat alone in the library, at the old Queen’s desk.

There was a sentence in his head. It had been there since page one, since the first word in the column headed Category, and it had grown, page by page, as he read, until by page nineteen it was the whole of what he was thinking, and he had not said it, and he did not say it now. It was not his to say yet. It was not anybody’s yet. Nobody had yet come into the palace and asked for the thing it was an answer to, the larger thing, the thing behind the list; but somebody would. Nāone had said so at this desk at noon. Before long somebody from the Realm would come and use a word the law of the Kingdom did not have, and ask for something that could only be done by category, to all of them, the whole hundred and fifty thousand, Mrs Higa and Mr Shiroma and the boy in the barracks with the bandaged leg who had made the Queen laugh; and on that day the sentence would have to be said, out loud, by the King and by the ʻAhaʻōlelo together, in a form that would stand.

He did not know when that day would be. He knew what the sentence was. He said it now only to himself, at the old Queen’s desk, under the photograph, in the yellow light, so that he would know he could:

The Crown does not intern its subjects by category.

Then he got up, and went down to the basement, to the switchboard, where Haruo Takemoto was sitting with the headset on, saying ʻIolani Palace into the mouthpiece in his outside voice; and he stood behind him for a while, and did not say anything, and after a while Takemoto turned round on the stool and looked up at him, and the King saw that he did not know, and that he would have to be told, and that it would not be the King who told him.