The Cable from London

The Guard brought the flag down at six, in the dark.

It had never been brought down in the dark before. At six on every other evening of the King’s life there had been light, or the end of it, at every season of the year, and the flag had come down the staff into the tower against a sky that was still some colour; and the people on King Street, if they looked up, had seen it go. Tonight there was no light. The sun had been down for forty minutes and the city had gone black with it, all of it, every house and every street, the way the army had said it must, and the only light in the whole sky was the dull red breathing glow along the west, low down, where the anchorage was, and nearer, small and orange over the waterfront, the power station, still burning. The flag was a darker thing against the dark. You could see it only if you knew where it was.

The King went out onto the makai steps to see it come down. He did not decide to. He found that he was there.

The bugle went inside the tower, muffled by the stone, the eight notes, the same eight as the morning, and the flag came down. He could not see it come down. He heard the rope, very faintly, running in the pipe, and saw the dark shape on the roof shorten and go; and below him, on the lawn, in the dark, he heard something he had not expected, which was several hundred people getting to their feet. They did it without a word. He could not see them; he could only hear them, the rustle and the shuffle and the small sounds of children being lifted, all across the lawn and under the banyan and along the wall of the barracks, the whole crowd standing up in the dark because the bugle had gone and the flag of the Kingdom was coming down, and they had not been able to see it and had stood up anyway. Then the bugle stopped, and there was a pause, and then the rustle again as they sat down.

He stood on the steps for some time after that, in the dark.

---

The palace was dark too. Kaʻai had seen to it at five, before the sun went, going through the house with two of the maids and every blanket in the linen cupboards, hanging them over the windows of the three rooms that would have to be used, the Chamberlain’s office in the basement and the switchboard cupboard and the small sitting room off the hall; and the rest of the house he had simply shut up, the curtains drawn and the doors closed and the lamps not lit, so that ʻIolani at six o’clock was a great black house with three small rooms of candlelight hidden somewhere in the middle of it, like coals in a banked fire. The electric light, which had gone at a quarter past eight with the power station and come back at three, when the station’s men got one of the machines running, had been turned off at the switch in the basement. Kaʻai had done that himself, too, and had stood for a moment afterwards with his hand on the switch, and the King, who had been watching from the stair, knew why. The palace had had electric light since 1887. It had not been dark in the evening for fifty-four years.

There was a candle on the table in the small sitting room, in a saucer, and a blanket over the window, and the King sat there, because there was nowhere else in the house he could sit with a light, and waited for whatever was going to come next.

---

What came next was Cunningham, on foot.

He came up King Street from the harbour in the dark, without a light, past the hole outside the gate, which he nearly walked into, because there were no lights to be had and the Guard at the gate challenged him in Hawaiian and then in English before they knew who he was. He had walked from his office. His car had not come back from the naval district and he had not waited for it. He came into the small sitting room with his bandaged hand held against his chest and an envelope in the other, and he was out of breath, and in the candlelight his face was the colour of the candle.

“Sir,” he said. “From London. It came through the cable office at half past five, for you, by name, in clear. It came through the Foreign Office’s own line. The cable office rang me and I went down for it myself. I did not want to send the boy in the dark.” He held it out. “It is from the King, sir.”

The King took it.

It was the cable company’s form, buff, with the strip pasted on in the usual way, in capitals, and the address at the top was a line he had never seen on any cable in his life: TO HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF HAWAII IOLANI PALACE HONOLULU. The cable company had no ʻokina on its machines and never had. Under the address was the time of handing in, at the London end. It said 0345.

Quarter to four in the morning. Monday morning, in London, the eighth of December. He did the arithmetic without meaning to, the way he had done it with the bulletins at four o’clock. The news would have reached London in the evening, their time, on the wireless, or by telephone from somebody. And somebody had woken the King of the Realm, or he had not yet gone to bed; and at some time in the small hours, between the news and a quarter to four, the King of the Realm had sat down at a desk in a house in London, in the dark, very likely, in the blackout that London had kept every night for two years, and had written this, and had sent it down to the Foreign Office to go by its own line, by name, in clear.

He unfolded it and read it by the candle.

TO HIS MAJESTY THE KING OF HAWAII. I HAVE LEARNED TONIGHT WHAT HAS BEEN DONE AT HONOLULU. MY THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOUR MAJESTY AND WITH ALL THE PEOPLE OF YOUR KINGDOM AND WITH THE MEN OF THE FLEET AND THEIR FAMILIES. I KNOW YOU WILL BE WITH YOUR PEOPLE AND THAT THEY WILL BE THE STRONGER FOR IT. IF THERE IS ANYTHING THAT I CAN DO YOU HAVE ONLY TO TELL ME. ERNEST R.

---

He read it twice. Then he put it down on the table, under the candle, and sat looking at it.

I know you will be with your people.

Nobody had told London anything about ʻIolani. Nobody could have. Cunningham’s report had not gone; there had been no line to send it on. The cable had been written in London at a quarter to four in the morning by a man who knew nothing at all about what the King of Hawaiʻi had done all day, except, it seemed, what the King of Hawaiʻi would do.

He had met Ernest IV twice.

The first time had been in New Westminster, in 1925, at the Governor-General’s reception after the State Opening, the evening the gentleman from the Foreign Office had asked him about the climate in Manila. He had been twenty-one and standing by himself at the edge of the room near a pillar, as he had been standing all evening, with a glass in his hand that he had not drunk from, and a young man had come across the room to him, through the crowd, on his own account. A tall fair young man a few years older than himself, with a long face and a quiet careful voice and a very good coat, who had held out his hand and said, Prince, I believe you are from Hawaiʻi; and had said the ʻokina, properly, in the right place, the glottal stop in the middle of the word that nobody in New Westminster ever said. And had then asked him whether it was true that people in the Kingdom stood up on boards in the sea and rode the waves into the shore, and whether he did it himself, and whether it was very difficult. He had said that it was true, and that he did, and that it was. And the young man had said that he had always wanted to see it, and that one day he would come, and that he hoped the Prince would show him; and then somebody had come to take him away, because he was the Prince of Columbia, the heir to the Realm, and was wanted elsewhere; and he had gone, looking back once over his shoulder, and the King had stood by his pillar for the rest of the evening feeling for the first time since he had landed that he was in the same country as everybody else.

The second time had been in London, in 1937, at the coronation, where the King had been one of perhaps forty princes and representatives in the Abbey from all the Crowns of the union, and had seen Ernest crowned from a very long way off, a small figure in gold under the lantern, and had not spoken to him at all, except for a moment at the reception afterwards, in a line, when Ernest had stopped in front of him and looked at him and smiled, and said, you never showed me, and moved on.

He had never come. Kings of the Realm did not come to Honolulu. The chair in the Blue Room had stood on the right of the King of Hawaiʻi’s chair for forty-one years, a little lower, waiting for one of them, and none of them had ever sat in it. The King had sometimes thought that if one of them ever did, it would be this one, and that he would sit in it without being told, and would understand without being told why it was a little lower; and would be amused, and would not mind.

He was forty-one. He was the King of the Realm, and of Britain, and of a dozen other Crowns, and his British realm had been at war for two years, and his London had been bombed for a year of it, and tonight his American realm had been struck at its anchorage in the Pacific and would be at war by tomorrow; and in the middle of the night he had sat down and written to the King of Hawaiʻi, because Honolulu had been named on the wireless, and because he had once been told by a young man at a reception in New Westminster that people there stood on boards in the sea.

---

“Sir,” said Cunningham. “Will there be an answer? The cable office will take it tonight if I take it down myself. It will go by the Foreign Office’s line.”

“Yes.”

He took a sheet of the palace paper from the drawer of the table and the pen from the stand, and wrote, by the candle, slowly, because the light was poor and because he wanted the letters plain for the clerk at the cable office who would have to count them.

To His Majesty the King. I am more grateful for Your Majesty’s message than I can say, and I shall make it known tonight to the people of the Kingdom. We are at our post. Kamehameha.

He looked at it. It was three lines. He could not think of anything to add that would not have made it less.

He folded it and gave it to Cunningham, and Cunningham took it and put it in his breast pocket with his good hand, and buttoned the pocket over it.

“We are at our post,” Cunningham said. He had not read it; he had seen the King write it, upside down, across the table. “He will like that, sir.”

“I hope he will.”

“Sir.” Cunningham stood by the table in the candlelight, with his hand on the buttoned pocket. “May I say something that is not my business?”

“Yes.”

“I have served the Realm for thirty-two years, sir. In four places. I have never seen a cable from the King of the Realm to anybody, in all that time, that said I know you will be with your people.” He paused. “I think it is the most extraordinary thing I have ever carried. I shall walk it back to the cable office now, sir, in the dark. I should not like you to think I carried it without knowing what it was.”

---

He went. The King sat for a little while longer with the candle and the cable, and then he folded the cable and put it in his own breast pocket, and buttoned the pocket, and went out into the hall, and through the dark hall to the makai door, which was still standing open, as it had stood all day.

The lawn was dark. The red glow in the west lay along the horizon over the roofs of the town, and by it, after a moment, as his eyes changed, he could make out the shapes on the lawn: the dark mass of the banyan, and under it and all round it the people, lying and sitting on the grass, a great shadowy field of them, very quiet now, the children mostly asleep. Somebody was talking low under the banyan in Japanese. Somebody further off was talking in Hawaiian. The barracks was a long black shape against the glow, with blankets over its windows, and a thin line of light showing at the bottom of its door.

The door opened. The light came out, a long yellow bar across the gravel, and somebody came out into it, and the door shut, and the light was gone, and the somebody came across the gravel towards the steps in the dark. He knew the walk.

“Leinani.”

“You’re on the steps,” she said. “I thought you would be. Dr Chun has sent me out. He says I have been in there seven hours and that if I do not sit down for a quarter of an hour he will put me in one of the beds himself and give me something.” She came up the steps. She stopped on the one below his, so that their faces were level, and in the faint red light from the west he could see that her face was smudged, and her hair was down altogether now, and the front of the white dress she had put on for church that morning was dark from the waist to the hem.

“It’s blood,” she said, seeing him look. “Not mine. Nobody’s that you know. A man from Kakaʻako with his arm open from the elbow to the wrist. Dr Chun sewed it up and I held the lamp.” She looked at her hands. “I have never held a lamp for anybody before. I have never been any use to anybody in my life, Kahikina, in any way that anybody could see. I was very good at holding the lamp.”

He did not say anything. He put out his hand and she took it, and they stood on the steps together in the dark, the King on the top step and the Queen on the one below, and looked at the lawn.

“There is a cable from London,” he said, after a while. “From Ernest.”

“What does he say?”

“That he knows I will be with my people.”

Leinani was quiet for a moment.

“How did he know?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said the King. “I told him once that I rode the waves. In 1925. He said he would come and I would show him. I suppose he remembered.”

“That isn’t how he knew.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose it is.”