The Blackout

The rumours came in at the gates.

They came in all evening, from the moment it was dark, in the mouths of people who walked in off King Street and Richards Street to find the families they had lost in the crowd, and of the constables who came by on foot every half hour to see that the Guard was there, and of the Guard themselves, who had been standing at the gates since the morning and heard everything that went past them in the dark; and they came up to the palace with whoever was going that way, and reached the King in the small sitting room with the candle and the blanket over the window, where he sat with Kealoha and Kaʻai and let them come.

That there were Japanese parachutists in Mānoa valley, in blue overalls, and that a man had seen them land behind the university.

That there were ships off Barbers Point, a great many ships, transports, and that the landing would come at midnight.

That the Japanese gardeners on the plantations had cut arrows in the cane fields, great arrows a hundred yards long, pointing at the anchorage, to guide the aircraft in.

That the water in the city had been poisoned, all of it, at the reservoirs, by Japanese, and nobody was to drink from the tap.

That a Japanese milkman in Kaimukī had been seen signalling to the sea with a torch.

That the Japanese consul was burning papers in his garden on Nuʻuanu Avenue, which was true; Kealoha had it from a constable who had seen the smoke over the wall at noon and gone in, and found the consul and two clerks in their shirtsleeves feeding a bonfire, and had stood and watched them do it, because nobody had told him he could do anything else.

That San Francisco had been bombed.

That the fleet had sailed and caught the Japanese carriers and sunk them all.

That the fleet was gone, all of it, every ship, and there was nothing left in the Pacific between the Kingdom and Japan.

---

He listened to all of them. He did not repeat any of them. When Kealoha brought the one about the arrows in the cane, which a sergeant of the Guard had heard from a man at the gate who had heard it from his cousin at Waipahu, the King said, “Has anybody seen these arrows, Thomas?”

“No, sir.”

“Has anybody seen the parachutists?”

“A man in Mānoa, sir. He says.”

“In the dark.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then we will wait until it is light,” said the King, “and somebody will go and look at the cane, and somebody will go and look at Mānoa. And until then, nobody in this house repeats any of it. Not to the people on the lawn. Not to each other. Not to the constables. If anybody in the Guard repeats a rumour to anybody tonight, I should like you to tell him from me that he is to stop.” He thought. “Gently. They are frightened too.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kealoha. “And if they ask me what to say instead?”

“Tell them to say that they do not know.”

Kealoha looked at him in the candlelight. “That is a very hard thing to say, sir. Tonight.”

“Yes,” said the King. “I have been saying it all day.”

---

At a quarter past eight he went out onto the steps and told the people on the lawn about the cable.

He had not planned to. He had told Ernest he would make it known tonight, and he had thought, writing it, that he would send the text to the station after his own message, to be read with it; and then at half past seven, when the Guard went off on foot to the station with the two fair copies, he had found that he did not want to. He did not want a stranger at a microphone to read out the King of the Realm’s cable to the Kingdom in a stranger’s voice. He wanted the people to hear it from him. And the people were on his lawn.

There was no light. He stood at the top of the makai steps in the dark, with the red glow in the west behind the roofs of the town and the shapes of the people below him on the grass, and he did not have the cable in his hand, because he could not have read it; but he did not need it. It was five sentences. He had read it four times.

He said it in Hawaiian first. He said that the King of the Realm had sent a cable that evening from London, from the far side of the world, in the middle of his night, to the King of Hawaiʻi, by name; and that the King of the Realm had written that his thoughts were with all the people of the Kingdom, and with the men of the fleet, and with their families; and that he had written, I know you will be with your people. And that the King of Hawaiʻi had answered him that the Kingdom was at its post.

Then he said it again, in English, because there were people on the lawn who had no Hawaiian.

Nobody said anything. He had not expected them to. He stood on the step for a little while after he had finished, in the dark, and he could hear them taking it in, the way a crowd takes in a thing: a long low sound going out across the grass and under the banyan, from mouth to mouth, in Hawaiian and English and Japanese and Portuguese and Chinese and Ilocano, the people who had understood telling the people who had not. It went on for some time. He let it. Then he went back in.

---

At ten to nine the guns began again.

It was the most frightening thing that happened all night. Everybody in the palace was afterwards agreed about that, and so, from what they heard, was everybody in the city. There was no warning. There had been silence all evening over the west, except for the low breathing glow, and then all at once, without a sound before it, the whole of the western sky lit up with lines. Long lines of light, red and white and orange, going up out of the darkness over the plain in great curving streams, hundreds of them, crossing and recrossing, and the sound came after, the stammer and the pounding, the morning’s sound, so loud and so sudden that on the lawn below the palace several hundred people screamed together, once, and then fell silent.

He was on the stair. He went out onto the makai veranda without thinking about it, and stood at the rail, and looked.

The lines went up and up. They went up from the anchorage and from the airfield and from all along the plain, and from the hills behind, and from the ships, from whatever ships could still fire, and they made a lattice over the whole of the western sky, a great burning net, and he looked for what they were firing at and could not see it. There was nothing in the sky but the lines. No black flowers, in the dark; no specks. Nothing. They were firing at the dark.

It went on for perhaps five minutes. It felt much longer. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped, a line at a time, the last few streams going up alone into the night and falling away, and then nothing, and the silence came back over the west, and the red glow, breathing.

On the lawn, a child was crying, and somebody was hushing it.

“What were they firing at, Thomas?” he said.

Kealoha was behind him at the rail. He had come out after him without being told.

“I don’t know, sir.” He was quiet a moment. “Aircraft, sir. They must have thought there were aircraft. Perhaps there were.” He was quiet again. “Perhaps they were ours.”

The King said nothing. He thought of the fragment in Kealoha’s pocket, folded in the handkerchief, with three English letters on it. He thought of the woman in Moʻiliʻili hanging out her washing.

“Not tonight, Thomas,” he said.

“No, sir,” said Kealoha. “I know.”

---

At nine o’clock they listened to the wireless in the Chamberlain’s office.

There were eleven of them in the little room, more than had ever been in it: the King and the Queen, who had come over from the barracks for it and was sitting on the Chamberlain’s desk with her ruined skirt spread round her; Kaʻai, standing by the shelf with his hand on the set, the way he had stood with his hand on the light switch at five; Kealoha in the doorway; Takemoto, who had come out of the switchboard cupboard with the headset round his neck; Moses; Mrs Higa and her two girls; the maid who did the Queen’s hair; and Dr Chun, who had come across with the Queen and stood against the wall with his sleeves still rolled up and his bag at his feet. There was one candle, on the desk by the Queen, and a blanket over the window. The room was very hot.

At one minute to nine Kaʻai turned the knob, and the set came on with a hiss, and the hiss went on.

At nine, exactly, there was a click, and a hum, and a man’s voice said, in Hawaiian, that this was the Honolulu station, opened for ten minutes by permission of the commanding general, for a message from His Majesty the King to the people of the Kingdom. Then it said the same in English. Then there was a pause, a long one, in which they could hear a paper being moved, very close to the microphone; and then the man began.

It was the young announcer from the morning, the tired one, who had said by order of the commanding general this station is going off the air. The King knew the voice. He had heard it say that, at ten to twelve, on the basement stair. He did not know the young man’s name. He was a Hawaiian, from the sound of him, and he read the Hawaiian well, better than well; he read it slowly, as though he had been given the paper an hour ago and had sat with it since, and had understood every word, and wanted every word to be heard. He read the King’s Hawaiian in a voice that went out of the set and into the small hot room and filled it, the old woman’s Hawaiian from the room at the back of the barracks, with the Kuhina Nui’s one better word in it, about the neighbour.

Nobody in the room moved. The King watched them, because he could not listen to his own words; he found that he could not bear to. He watched Kaʻai’s hand on the set, quite still. He watched Moses, who had closed his eyes. He watched Mrs Higa, who had no Hawaiian to speak of, listening with her head on one side as though she were trying to hear a voice in another room.

Then the announcer stopped, and turned the paper over, and began again, in English.

To the people of the Kingdom.

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

Mrs Higa began to cry. She did it without any sound at all, as she had cried on the stairs in the morning, and the Queen put out her hand from the desk and Mrs Higa took it.

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.

He looked at Takemoto. Takemoto was standing by the switchboard cupboard with the headset round his neck and his spectacles on, looking at the set on the shelf, and his face was entirely still.

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.

Takemoto did not move. He did not look at the King. He stood looking at the set, with his face still, and the King saw his hand, at his side, close, and open again, and close.

The courts of the Kingdom sit tomorrow at ten.

God keep the Kingdom.

There was a pause. Then the announcer said, in English and then in Hawaiian, that this station was now closing by order of the commanding general, and that listeners should stay off the streets, and keep the blackout, and not believe rumours. And then, after the Hawaiian, before the click, there was a very small sound, so small that afterwards nobody in the room could agree whether they had heard it; it might have been the paper being put down, or a chair; or it might have been the young man at the microphone saying something under his breath, two or three words, in Hawaiian, that were not on the paper. The King thought that it was. He thought that he knew what the words were. He never found out.

The click came, and the hiss, and Kaʻai turned the knob, and the set was quiet.

---

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Dr Chun bent and picked up his bag, and said, to the room in general, that he had nineteen people in the barracks and would go back to them; and he bowed to the King, and to the Queen, and went. The Queen got down off the desk and went after him. At the door she turned and looked back at the King, in the candlelight, and did not say anything, and went.

Mrs Higa wiped her face on her apron and went up the stair to the kitchen, with her girls.

Takemoto stood by the switchboard cupboard. After a moment he turned to the King.

“Sir,” he said. “With your permission. The court.”

“Go.”

“I will come back, sir.”

“I know you will,” said the King.

Takemoto took off the headset and hung it on its hook, carefully, and put on his jacket, and went out and up the stair; and the King heard him cross the hall in the dark, and go out by the makai door, and his footsteps on the gravel, quick and light, going away towards the gate and King Street and the dark building across the road, where behind the blankets on the windows of the Supreme Court a judge of the Kingdom was sitting at a table under a single lamp, with a row of the Realm’s officers waiting on a bench in the corridor outside, their files on their knees, and was reading, one at a time, what each of them had brought.

Kaʻai turned the set off at the wall.

“It was well read, sir,” he said.

“It was,” said the King. “I should like to know his name.”