News from the Mainland

The cables came at four, all at once, the way letters come after a strike.

A boy brought them from the Resident Commissioner’s office on a bicycle, a Chinese boy of about fifteen in a white shirt with the Realm’s arms on a brass badge on his chest, who had been sent with them because the office’s car had gone to the naval district and not come back; and he came in at the Richards Street gate and was stopped by the Guard and showed his badge and was brought up the side steps to the hall, where he stood with the envelope held out in front of him in both hands, very straight, looking at the chandelier. Kaʻai took it from him and gave him a glass of water and a musubi, and the boy drank the water and put the musubi in his pocket, and said, in a voice that broke on the second word, that Sir Arthur’s compliments to His Majesty and these were everything that had come in since eleven; and then he went back down the steps to his bicycle and rode away along King Street towards the harbour, alone, in the middle of the empty road, pedalling hard.

There were nine of them. Cunningham had put a note on top in his own hand, written fast, with the pen digging into the paper. Sir. These are what the cable office has passed, and what the naval district has let me have from its own traffic. Most are not addressed to you. I have sent them anyway. I thought you would rather know than not. A. C.

The King read them in the library, at the desk, with Takemoto standing at his elbow to take down whatever needed answering. Nāone had gone back across the road at a quarter to four, to the Chief Justice and the warrants, and the library was very quiet.

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The first was from the mainland, from the Realm’s news agency, a summary of the afternoon’s bulletins, passed by the cable office for the information of the Resident Commissioner. It was in the clipped grammar of cables, all capitals, no articles. It said that the news of the attack on Honolulu had first been broadcast in the Realm at 2.25 in the afternoon, Eastern time, interrupting regular programmes on all networks. It said that crowds had gathered outside Government House in New Westminster and outside the Parliament building, and stood in the street in the cold, and sang. It said that the Japanese envoys had called at the Foreign Office at a little after two, by appointment, to deliver their government’s reply to the Realm’s last note, and that the Foreign Secretary had received them and read the reply, and that when they left the building they had not stopped to speak to the press.

He did the arithmetic. Half past two on the Potomac was nine o’clock in Honolulu. At nine o’clock in Honolulu he had been sitting at the switchboard in the basement writing Turned over. On fire. Settling. on a pad, and the second wave had been over the city, and on the mainland a man at a microphone had stopped the music and said the word Honolulu to the whole of the Realm, most of which, the King thought, would have had to look it up.

The second was from the naval district’s traffic, a copy of a message from the Navy’s Board in New Westminster to every station in the Pacific, and it was mostly in a code the King could not read, except for the first line, which was in plain language, and said that hostilities had commenced with Japan.

The third was from the Prime Minister’s office, through the Foreign Office, to the Resident Commissioner, for the information of the Kingdom’s government. It said that the Prime Minister had been in conference since the afternoon with the service chiefs and with members of the Cabinet. It said that no statement of losses would be made by the Realm’s government until the losses had been verified, and that the Resident Commissioner was to ask the Kingdom’s government, with the Prime Minister’s compliments, to make none either. It said that the Prime Minister would address both Houses of Parliament at noon tomorrow, Monday, Eastern time.

The King read that one twice.

“Noon on the Potomac,” said Takemoto quietly, at his elbow. “Half past six tomorrow morning here, sir.”

“He will ask them for war.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And they will give it to him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Takemoto. “Everybody on the mainland who was against it at breakfast is for it now. You can hear it in the cables, sir. Even in the cables.”

It was true. He could hear it. The cables had no voices and no adjectives, they were bare as bones, but there was something in them all the same, in the speed with which they had been sent and the shortness of them and the word Honolulu repeated in all of them, a kind of heat, as though they had been written by men who had been running. For two years the Realm had argued with itself about the war in Europe, in the Commons and in the papers and on the wireless, and the Kingdom had read the arguments a week late off the boat and thought them very far away. It was not arguing now. In a single afternoon, between half past two and dark, the whole of the Realm had stopped arguing, and become one thing, and the thing it had become was angry. He thought: they are angry for us. He thought: they have never in forty years been anything for us at all, and now they are angry, all of them, the whole Realm, because of what happened at Puʻuloa this morning, on Hawaiian water. He did not know whether to be grateful or afraid. He thought that very likely he was going to have to be both, for a long time.

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The others were shorter and worse.

The fourth and fifth were from the naval district’s traffic again, copies of signals in plain language to every ship and station: that Japanese forces had attacked Hong Kong. That Japanese forces had landed in Malaya, in the north, on the coast near the frontier with Siam. The sixth, that Japanese aircraft had attacked the Realm’s Philippines, at Davao, in the south, in the early morning their time, and then at Baguio, in the mountains of Luzon. The seventh was a line only: that there were reports of attack on Guam, unconfirmed.

He laid them out on the green leather in a row. Hong Kong. Malaya. Davao. Baguio. Guam. Places he knew from maps. Places on the map in Mr Pell’s schoolroom that had been coloured different colours, for different Crowns and different empires, and that had seemed to him at fourteen to be about as far from the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi as it was possible to be and still be on the same page.

“It is everywhere,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Takemoto. “It was not only us.”

It was the first time all day that anybody had said us, meaning the Kingdom, as one of a number of things; and the King looked at the row of cables on the desk and understood that it was true, and that it changed nothing, and that it changed everything. The anchorage had not been the war. It had been the first morning of the war, in one place among a dozen, chosen because the Realm’s fleet was there. It had been done so that the rest of it could be done. That was what the Japanese admiral had come across the Pacific for: not for the Kingdom, not for Honolulu, not for the six hundred people on the lawn or the man dead on the pavement in Pālama. To clear a space. And the Kingdom had been the space.

The eighth was from the Governor-General’s office to the Resident Commissioner, asking for a report on the situation in the islands as soon as one could be made, in the plain courteous form of every message he had ever seen from Government House. The ninth was a cable from a newspaper in Chicago to its correspondent in Honolulu, misdelivered, asking for two thousand words by midnight and photographs if possible.

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“I want to say something to them,” the King said.

He had not known he was going to say it until he did. Takemoto looked at him.

“To the people on the lawn, sir?”

“To everybody. To the Kingdom. Tonight.” He looked at the window, at the yellow light coming through the edge of the smoke. “They have had nothing all day. The wireless played hymns until noon and then the army switched it off. The papers will not be out until tomorrow, if they come out at all. Nobody has told them anything, Haruo, except what they could see and what their neighbours said. And tonight it will be dark, and the army says there will be no lights, and there will be rumours, there are rumours already, every rumour in the world, and they will be sitting in the dark in their houses listening to them.” He turned back. “I want them to hear one thing tonight that is true. One thing. From me.”

“What thing, sir?”

“I don’t know yet,” said the King. “Get a pencil.”

---

They wrote it at the desk, together, in an hour.

He wrote it in Hawaiian first. He had not meant to; he had picked up the pen meaning to write it in English, the language of every paper he had ever signed, and his hand had written the first line in Hawaiian, in the old woman’s Hawaiian from the room at the back of the barracks, before he knew it was doing it, and he let it. Takemoto read each sentence as it was written and said nothing, or said, sir, that word, and the King would look at it and change it, or not. When the Hawaiian was done, they did the English from it, sentence by sentence, Takemoto writing it out fair in his small clean hand while the King said it aloud.

It was very short. It was shorter than anything the King had ever written for the public in his life, shorter than the speech from the throne, which the Kuhina Nui wrote, shorter than his messages to the outer islands at New Year. When it was finished it was eleven sentences. He read it over in both languages and could not make it any shorter, and could not see that it needed to be any longer.

To the people of the Kingdom.

The King is at ʻIolani tonight, with the Queen, and will remain here.

The Kingdom was struck this morning, and many of you have lost people you love. The Queen and I grieve with you, and will go on grieving with you, for as long as it takes.

Keep the darkness tonight, as the Realm’s soldiers ask. Stay in your houses. If your neighbour is alone, go to him.

Do not believe the rumours, and do not repeat them. When there is something true to tell you, you will be told it.

Every subject of the Kingdom is a subject of the King, and is under the protection of the Crown and of the law, tonight and every night.

The courts of the Kingdom sit tomorrow at ten.

God keep the Kingdom.

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“The courts,” said Takemoto, when he had written it out. He was looking at the English. “Sir. Will the people understand that one? Why it is there?”

“Some of them will.”

“The rest will think it is a strange thing for a King to say on the night of a war.”

“Yes,” said the King. “And tomorrow at ten they will see the doors of the Supreme Court open across the road, and the Chief Justice go in, in his robe, and sit down. And then they will understand it.” He looked at the sentence above it, the one about subjects, and then at Takemoto, who was looking at the same sentence. “That one, they will understand tonight.”

Takemoto did not say anything. He folded the two fair copies, the Hawaiian and the English, and put them together.

“The wireless is off, sir,” he said. “By order of the commanding general.”

“Ring Sir Arthur. Ask him to ask Colonel Pryce, from me, whether the commanding general will open the Honolulu station for ten minutes at nine o’clock tonight, for a message from the King of Hawaiʻi to his people, to be read by the station’s announcer, in Hawaiian and then in English. Tell him the Kuhina Nui has seen the text.” He paused. “Then take it across the road to the Kuhina Nui, so that the Kuhina Nui has seen the text.”

Takemoto very nearly smiled.

“Yes, sir,” he said, and went down to the switchboard.

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The answer came at a quarter to five, by the same Chinese boy on the same bicycle, with a note from Cunningham. The commanding general’s compliments, and the Honolulu station would be opened at nine o’clock for ten minutes for the purpose His Majesty proposed. The text was to be delivered to the station by half past seven. The station would be closed again immediately afterwards. And Colonel Pryce had added a line in pencil at the foot of Cunningham’s note, in a hand like a row of tent pegs: The C.G. asked me whether the King was going to say anything about the courts. I said I expected he would. P.

Nāone had sent the text back across the road with one change, in his own hand, in the Hawaiian only. He had crossed out one word in the sentence about the neighbour and written another above it, and put his initials beside it. The King looked at it. It was a better word. It was the word his father’s old kahu would have used.

He gave both copies to Kaʻai, to go to the station with one of the Guard, on foot, by half past seven.

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It was nearly five.

The sun had come down the sky into the smoke, and the light that came through it into the library was red now instead of yellow, and lay across the old Queen’s desk and the row of cables on it like the light from a stove door left open. In half an hour it would be gone. The army had said that there would be no lights tonight anywhere in the city, not a lamp, not a match at a window, and along King Street, as far as the King could see from the library, people were already closing their shutters in the daylight, early, as though the dark were a visitor they did not want to be caught unready for.

He stood at the window and watched it. Behind him, in the corridor, he heard Nāone’s voice, low, and Takemoto’s; and when he turned, he saw them through the half-open door, at the head of the stair, the Kuhina Nui with his hand on the young man’s shoulder, saying something, and Takemoto standing very still with his spectacles in his hand, listening, and then nodding once.

Then Nāone took his hand away, and went down the stair, and Takemoto stood alone at the top of it for a while, in the near-dark, and put his spectacles back on. And then he too went down, to the switchboard, and after a moment the King heard the line buzz, and his secretary’s voice saying ʻIolani Palace into the mouthpiece, flat and quick and steady, exactly as it had all day.