The First Bell

They breakfasted on the makai veranda, as they did on every morning that was not raining, at a small table that had been carried out from the State Dining Room in his father’s time and never carried back. From it you looked down the length of the lawn, across King Street to the courts and the statue, and beyond the courts to the roofs of the harbour and the top of the tower, and on a clear morning to a strip of sea. This was a clear morning. The sea was a hard bright line now, the dawn colour gone out of it, and the flag on the roof above them cracked now and then in the wind.

Leinani was already there when he came out, in a white dress with a blue belt, reading the paper with her elbows on the table in a way that would have caused her mother on Kauaʻi to leave the room. Her hat was on the next chair. It was a straw hat with a blue band, and he had seen it at the Anglican cathedral on the first and third Sundays of every month for four years, and he had once made the mistake of saying that he liked it, so that he would now see it at the Anglican cathedral on the first and third Sundays of every month for the rest of his life.

“You tied your tie twice,” she said, without looking up.

“Moses told you.”

“Moses told Kaʻai, and Kaʻai told the maid, and the maid told me while she was doing my hair. It is the most interesting thing that has happened in this house since Tuesday.” She turned a page. “Sit down. There is papaya. Mrs Higa says the papaya is from the tree by the barracks and that if you do not eat it she will know.”

He sat down and ate the papaya. It was very good. The tree by the barracks had been planted by a corporal of the Guard in 1922 and was regarded by the kitchen as the property of the Crown in some special sense that did not extend to the other trees.

---

“There is nothing in it,” Leinani said, of the paper. “I have read every word. The talks in New Westminster are continuing. The Japanese envoys have been to the Foreign Office again. The Prime Minister has been in conference with the service chiefs, which the paper says is significant, and which it said was significant on Thursday and on Tuesday and, as I recall, at intervals since about August. There are Japanese ships off Indochina going south, or going somewhere. Somebody in Manila has said something. The Navy beat the Army at football at the stadium yesterday, twenty-one to six, and there was a fight in the stand that the paper describes as spirited.” She folded it. “And there is a letter from a man in Mānoa who says that the Navy’s sailors have ruined Hotel Street, and a letter from a man in Kalihi who says that the Navy’s sailors have made his fortune, and I suspect they are the same man.”

“It is a good paper.”

“It is the only paper,” said Leinani, who read the Hawaiian one as well and regarded it as a separate thing, like a letter from a relation.

The King took the folded paper from her and looked at the front of it. She was right. It was the front of every Sunday paper since August. The talks continued. Oil was mentioned, and rubber, and the word embargo, which the paper had been printing in the same type every week for so long that it had stopped looking like a word and become a sort of decoration. There was a photograph of the envoys on the steps of the Foreign Office in New Westminster, two small men in morning coats holding their hats, and one of them was smiling in the way men smile when a photographer has asked them to, and the other was not. Under it, in smaller type: PRIME MINISTER CONFERS. There was always somebody conferring.

He put it down. He had read the cables on Friday, the ones the Resident Commissioner’s office sent across once a week with a covering note that said they were for the King’s information and implied that the King should not have any. There had been nothing in those, either. The Realm was negotiating with Japan in New Westminster about oil, and Japan was moving ships about in the South China Sea, and the Realm’s ministers were saying in public that they expected the talks to succeed and in private that they did not expect anything at all. It had been so for months. He had stopped reading the cables twice.

“Where is Takemoto?” he said.

“Downstairs with Kaʻai, giving him the papers for tomorrow. He came in at a quarter to seven. I told him he should be in bed, and he said that a man who goes to bed on a Saturday night in Honolulu at present is the only man in the city who gets any sleep, and so he had had plenty.”

“Did he say that?”

“He says a great many things before eight o’clock that he would never say after it,” said Leinani. “It is why I like him.”

---

Takemoto came up a few minutes later, with a leather case under his arm and his hat in his hand, and stopped at the door of the veranda and bowed, which he always did, and which the King had given up asking him not to do.

Haruo Takemoto was twenty-nine. He had been born in Hilo, the elder son of a man who had come out from Kumamoto in the nineties to cut cane at Hāmākua and had walked off the plantation after four years and into a schoolroom, and he had gone to school in Hilo and to the university in California on a scholarship from the Kuhina Nui’s office that he had won at seventeen against every boy in the Kingdom. He had come home with a degree in law and an accent from San Francisco that he had spent two years carefully losing. He had been the King’s private secretary since the accession. He was a slight, neat, precise man with round spectacles and very clean hands, who could take dictation in English and Hawaiian and Japanese and who had a habit, when he thought the King was about to sign something unwise, of clearing his throat in a way that could not have been described as a protest by anybody in the world.

“Your Majesty. Ma’am. I beg your pardon. I have given Mr Kaʻai the boxes for tomorrow, and the Kauaʻi lease, which the Kuhina Nui has marked in three places, and the agenda for the Nobles on Tuesday. And I have brought the paper you asked for on Friday, sir, about the schools.”

“Sit down.”

“Sir, I had not meant to stay.”

“Sit down and have some coffee, and then you can go and not stay.”

Takemoto sat, on the edge of the chair, with the case on his knees. Leinani poured him coffee and pushed the papaya towards him, and he looked at it with the expression of a man who has been told about the corporal’s tree.

“The paper about the schools,” the King said.

“Yes, sir.” Takemoto opened the case and took out four sheets clipped together. “You asked how many of the Japanese-language schools there are in the Kingdom, and how many children, and who pays. There are a little over a hundred and forty schools, sir. About forty thousand children go to them in the afternoons, after the government school. The parents pay, and the temples and the churches, and some of the plantations still, though fewer than before. The teachers are mostly from Japan. Some are not.” He hesitated. “My father’s is in Nuʻuanu, sir, as you know. He has four hundred children and eleven teachers, and he is in debt to the bank for the roof.”

“I did know,” the King said. “I did not know about the roof.”

“Nobody knows about the roof, sir. My mother would prefer it if it stayed so.”

“Why do you want to know about the schools?” said Leinani.

“Because a gentleman from the Realm’s army told me at dinner last month that they were a danger to the Kingdom,” the King said, “and I found I did not know enough about them to tell him that he was wrong, and I disliked the feeling very much.”

Takemoto said nothing. He set the four sheets on the table by the King’s plate and put his hand flat on them for a moment, as though to keep the wind off them, and then took it away.

---

The King read the first page while they finished breakfast. It was a good paper. Takemoto’s papers were always good, plain and short, with the numbers in a column on the right and the uncomfortable thing at the bottom of the last page where it could not be missed, and the uncomfortable thing at the bottom of this one was a sentence that said that the Realm’s army kept a list of the teachers.

He did not say anything about it. He turned it face down.

“Minoru was home last Sunday,” Takemoto said, to the Queen, in the voice of a man changing the subject. “My brother, ma’am. The regiment gave the Oʻahu company a pass. He ate everything in my mother’s house and slept for eleven hours and went back to Schofield with a cake. He says they are to have new rifles in the spring.”

“Is he still courting the girl from the bakery?” said Leinani, who knew everybody’s brother.

“He says not, ma’am. My mother says he is. She has found flour on his uniform.”

Leinani laughed. The King watched Takemoto smile, which he did rarely and with an air of being surprised by it, and thought that he had never in three years asked his secretary a single question about his brother, and that the Queen had apparently been asking them all along.

“If there were a war,” Leinani said, and the smile went off Takemoto’s face, though not quickly. “I do not mean anything by it. I only want to know. If there were a war with Japan, Kahikina, what would you do?”

It was the only time anybody had called him by his name that day, and she had done it on purpose, in front of Takemoto, which she did not usually do. He looked at her. She had her chin in her hand and she was looking back at him with the expression she had worn in the first year of their marriage when she had asked him things about the constitution to find out whether he knew the answers, and he had come to understand that she knew the answers perfectly well and was asking to find out whether he would say them.

“Nothing,” he said. “The Treaty gives the defence of the Kingdom to the Realm. It has since 1898. The seventh article. If there were a war, the Realm would fight it, and the Kingdom would do what the Realm asked of it under the Treaty, which is to make Hawaiian land available for defence, and the Kuhina Nui would see to the rest. And the Crown would do what it is for.”

“And what is it for?”

“Being here,” he said.

“That is your father’s sentence.”

“It is a good sentence.”

“It is a very good sentence. It is the best sentence in the Kingdom. I have heard it about forty times.” She took her chin off her hand. “I was asking about you.”

He did not know how to answer that, and so he did not, and she let him not answer it, which was one of the several hundred kindnesses she did him every week without either of them remarking on it. A white bird went over the lawn from the banyan towards the courts and settled on the statue’s outstretched hand, which was where the white birds always settled, and the statue held it out to them every day as though he had been put there for the purpose.

Takemoto had his coffee cup in both hands and was looking at the table.

“My father says,” he said, carefully, and stopped.

“Go on.”

“My father says, sir, that if there is a war, the Japanese in the Kingdom will be the most loyal subjects Your Majesty has. Because they will have the most to prove.” He put the cup down. “He says it to the teachers. He says it to the parents at the school. He has been saying it all year. He makes the children sing Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī at the start of every afternoon, in Hawaiian, and then the Japanese lessons begin, and he says that he does it so that nobody can ever say he did not. I think it is the only thing he is afraid of.” He seemed to hear himself. “I beg your pardon, ma’am. Sir. I did not come in to talk about my father.”

“You came in to bring me a paper about your father’s school,” the King said, “on a Sunday, at a quarter to seven. I think you came in to talk about your father.”

Takemoto looked at him, and for a moment the King thought he was going to say something else; and then he did not, and stood up instead, and put the case under his arm.

“With Your Majesty’s permission, I will go home. My mother is expecting me for lunch, and she will want me to have been to church.”

“Which church?”

“She is not particular, sir,” said Takemoto, “as long as I have been seen at one.” And he bowed, to the Queen and then to the King, and went away along the veranda and down the steps, and they watched him cross the lawn with his hat on and his case under his arm, a small neat figure walking very straight, and go out at the side gate onto Richards Street, where the Guard at the gate came to attention for him, as it did for everyone, and he lifted his hat to them, as he always did.

---

“He is frightened,” Leinani said.

“Of what?”

“Of the same thing everybody is frightened of, and does not say.” She stood up and took her hat off the chair and did not put it on. “You never read the cables, Kahikina. I read them. I read them on Fridays after you have stopped reading them, when they are on the table in the library. I know what the Realm says in private. It says that it does not know what Japan will do and that it will very likely be something. And every Japanese family in the Kingdom has read the same thing in the faces of everybody else on the streetcar.”

“I read them.”

“You read the first page.”

That was true. He did not say so.

“When the fleet came in on Friday,” she said, “Mrs Higa stood on the sea wall with half of Kakaʻako to watch it go by, and she came home and cried in the kitchen for ten minutes and then made a cake. I asked her why she was crying and she said she did not know. She said it was very beautiful. I think she meant that it was very large.” She put the hat on at last, and looked at him from under it. “That is all. I am not saying anything. I wanted you to know that the people in your kitchen are frightened, since you are the King.”

He stood up too. They stood at the rail together and looked down the lawn.

The city was fully awake now, and on a Sunday morning it had a sound of its own that it had on no other day, which was the sound of bells. The Catholic cathedral had begun, up on Fort Street, a single bell rung slowly; and the Kawaiahaʻo church beyond the courts, which had been built out of coral blocks cut from the reef by hand in the old King’s time and had a bell to match; and somewhere in Kakaʻako a smaller one, in a hurry. Further off, faint, the temple drum from the Hongwanji up the valley, which kept its own time and had done for forty years. The bells did not agree with one another. They had never agreed. It was the sound of Honolulu on a Sunday morning, a dozen faiths each calling its own people in its own time, and none of them established, and the King of Hawaiʻi going to two of them by turns and belonging to neither.

There was an aircraft, too, very high in the west, a drone so faint he could hardly separate it from the bells. The Realm’s aircraft flew on Sundays now. They had begun in the summer. Nobody in the city looked up at them anymore.

“Your father,” said Leinani, “told the Bishop of Honolulu and the Bishop of the Catholics, on the same afternoon, in separate rooms, that he belonged to neither of them. Kaʻai says it took him the whole afternoon and that he did it with the same face both times.”

“He was very good at faces.”

“You are better. You do not know it.” She took his arm. “It is the first Sunday, and it is the Anglicans, and they will want us at a quarter to eight, and the Dean will preach for twenty-five minutes on the duties of a Christian prince, as he does on every first Sunday of December, because he once preached it in front of your father and your father said afterwards that it was very fine.”

“Did he say that?”

“He said it was very long. The Dean has been improving it ever since.” She held his arm a little tighter, as though he might go somewhere. “Kahikina.”

“Yes.”

“Nothing,” she said. “Only that it is a fine morning.”

It was a fine morning. The sun was high enough now to be hot on the boards, and the wind off the mountains had dropped a little, and the bells went on, and the high drone in the west went on under them and then seemed to stop.

At half past seven exactly the bell of the Anglican cathedral began, which was the first bell for the eight o’clock, rung for three minutes by a verger named Ching who had rung it for twenty-two years and had never once been late; and the King, who had heard that bell on the first and third Sundays of every month for as long as he could remember, put down his napkin, and went in to fetch his hat.