The Resident Commissioner

At about twenty-five past eight the noise from the west began to thin.

It did not stop. The guns went on, but raggedly now, in bursts, the way a crowd goes on clapping after the thing it was clapping for has gone, and the black flowers came fewer and further apart, and the specks overhead were fewer too and seemed to be drawing off to the north. The darkness stood over the plain where it had stood. It was not going anywhere. But for the first time since a quarter to eight there was a space between one sound and the next, and in the space you could hear the city: a siren somewhere towards Kakaʻako, going up and down; a great many dogs; a car horn held down and not let go; and from the street outside the railings, a woman calling a name over and over, not loudly, as though she expected an answer at any moment and was patient.

He had come down from the tower. He was standing in the Grand Hall at the foot of the koa stair, because it seemed to him that it was where the King should be standing, though he could not have said why, and the front doors were open in front of him, and through them he could see the car still on the gravel with its engine off, and beyond it the gate, and beyond the gate King Street, and the courts, and the statue with its hand out.

“It is stopping,” said Leinani, beside him.

“It is pausing.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” he said. “Thomas thinks so.”

Kealoha had said it on the tower stair, coming up to fetch him: that they would come back, that they always came in waves, that a single attack was never one attack. He had said it as though he were reading it out of one of his books, and then had stopped and said, sir, I do not know anything, I have only read about it; and the King had thought that this was the most honest sentence anybody had said to him all morning, and very likely would remain so.

---

A car came in at the makai gate a little after half past.

It was a large dark green car with a small flag on the wing, the Realm’s ensign, and it came in too fast and stopped on the gravel behind the King’s own car with a crunch, and the driver got out and came round to open the rear door, and the man who got out of the back was the Realm’s Resident Commissioner in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, Sir Arthur Cunningham, and he was grey.

He was grey all over. His face was grey, and his Sunday suit, which was a pale linen suit of a kind the King had never seen him in, was grey with dust from the shoulders to the knees, and there was dust in his hair. He had no hat. He had a handkerchief wound round his left hand with a dark stain coming through it. He stood on the gravel for a moment with his hand on the car door, looking up at the palace, and then he seemed to collect himself, and put his right hand to his head as though to take off the hat that was not there, and came up the steps.

The King went out to meet him at the top.

“Sir Arthur.”

“Your Majesty.” Cunningham bowed. He did it properly, from the neck, the way he always did it, and when he came up out of the bow his face had changed, as though the bow had been a door he had gone through and shut behind him. “I beg your pardon, sir, for the state of me. I have come from Moanalua. I came the top road, over the ridge. I thought it would be quicker.” He looked at his bandaged hand as though it belonged to someone else. “It was not.”

“Come in,” said the King. “Come in and sit down.”

---

He took him into the Blue Room, because it was the room for the Realm.

It was on the ground floor, on the Diamond Head side of the hall, and it had been Kalākaua’s room for receiving people informally, which meant that it was the most formal room in the palace after the Throne Room, and its walls were blue and its curtains were blue and its chairs were blue, and there was a portrait of Louis Philippe on one wall that had been sent to the Kingdom by the King of the French in the eighteen-forties and that nobody had ever had the heart to take down. The Realm’s officers were always received in the Blue Room. Its chairs were arranged in a particular way. There was a large chair at the end of the room, between the windows, that was the King’s, and there were chairs along the sides, and there was one chair, on the right of the King’s and a little lower, that had been placed there in his father’s time and never moved, and that every officer of the Realm who came into the room knew to look at and none of them knew why.

He knew why. It was the chair for the Realm’s own King, if the Realm’s own King should ever come to ʻIolani. It had been put there in 1900 by his father, a little lower than the King of Hawaiʻi’s chair, and the custom had been written down nowhere, and it had never been departed from, because no King of the Realm had ever come. The King thought sometimes that it was the only piece of furniture in the Kingdom that had been designed purely as an argument.

Cunningham stood inside the door and looked at the chairs, as he always did, and then, as he always did, made for the lowest one, the plain one by the door that was meant for secretaries. He was a man who had been taught very carefully where to sit.

“No,” said the King. “Not that one. Here.”

He took him by the arm, which he had never done to anybody in that room in three years, and put him in the chair on the right of his own, the low one, the Realm’s chair. Cunningham sat down in it because he was being made to, and then realised where he was sitting, and made to get up again, and the King put a hand on his shoulder and kept him there.

“Sit,” the King said. “You have come over the ridge. It is the least the Kingdom can do.” He sat down in his own chair. “Kaʻai, would you bring Sir Arthur some brandy. And a basin of water for his hand. And would you ask the Queen if she would come in.”

---

The brandy came. Cunningham drank half of it and set the glass down on the arm of the chair and looked at it.

“I stopped the car,” he said. “At the top of the ridge road. Above Moanalua. You can see the whole of the anchorage from there, sir, the whole of it, it is laid out underneath you like a map. I have stopped there before. I took my wife there in the summer to see the fleet. It is a very fine view.” He picked up the glass again and did not drink. “I stopped because I wanted to see. I am sorry. I am a civil servant. I thought I ought to know what was happening so that I could report it. That is what I thought.”

The King waited.

“The water is on fire, sir,” said Cunningham.

He said it quite flatly, as though it were a line in a report. “The oil. It is on the water, all across the anchorage, and it is burning. The ships are in it. There is a line of them along the island in the middle, the big ones, the battleships, two by two, and they are all burning, or most of them, I could not count, the smoke was too thick. One of them is upside down. I could see the bottom of it. It is red. I had not known that the bottoms of ships were painted red.” He looked up. “And there were men in the water, sir. In the burning part. I could see them from the ridge. I could see them swimming.”

Leinani had come in. She was standing by the door. She did not come any further.

“Then an aeroplane came along the road,” Cunningham said, “very low, from the direction of the airfield, and my driver pulled me into the ditch, and I cut my hand on something, I do not know what, and the aeroplane went over and fired at the road. Not at us, I think. At the road. At everything. And then it was gone, and we got back in the car, and I told Martin to drive here, because I did not know where else to go. We came in along the waterfront. They have bombed the city too, sir. The pier below the tower is burning, and the power station, and there are fires in Kakaʻako, and there was a car on its side in the road by the cannery with the doors open and nobody in it.” He put the glass down. “I have no orders, sir. You understand. I have no orders from anybody. I tried to telephone the army’s headquarters at Shafter from the house before I left and the line was dead, and I tried the naval district and could not get through, and I tried New Westminster, which was absurd, it is Sunday afternoon there, there is nobody in the office, and anyway the cable office would not have taken it. I have no orders, and I have no standing, and I have a cut hand, and I have come to the King of Hawaiʻi because his is the only door in the city I could think of that I was certain would be open.”

“It is open,” the King said.

---

Kaʻai brought the basin. The Queen took it from him and knelt by Cunningham’s chair and unwound the handkerchief from his hand without asking, and he let her, looking at her with an expression of great surprise, as though he had not been aware until now that Queens did this. The cut was across the palm, not deep, full of dirt. She washed it. She did it the way she did everything, quickly and without fuss, and talked to him the whole time in a low voice about nothing at all, about his wife and whether she was at home and whether she had gone to the hills, and Cunningham answered her, and while he answered her the King watched the colour come back into his face a little at a time.

Arthur Cunningham was fifty-five. He had been born in Boston and educated at the college across the river from it and had gone into the Realm’s colonial service at twenty-three, and had served in Manila and in the Canal Zone and in Porto Rico, and had come to Honolulu in 1937 with the evident expectation of a quiet posting before his pension, and had found a quiet posting, and had been, in his way, a good Resident Commissioner. He had learned the order of precedence at a Hawaiian dinner, which no previous Commissioner had troubled to. He had learned forty words of Hawaiian and used them correctly. He came to tea once a month and talked about the weather and was never once, in four years, anything but scrupulously aware that he was a civil servant of the Realm’s government in a Kingdom that had its own Crown, and that the Treaty gave him no position whatever, and that he was in that Kingdom on sufferance and good manners. The King had thought him a dull man. He thought now that he had been wrong about that, and that it was a thing he had been wrong about in a good many people, because he had not been looking.

“Sir Arthur,” the King said, when the Queen had finished and was tying a clean napkin round the hand. “What do you need?”

---

Cunningham thought about it. The King watched him do it, and saw the civil servant come back into his face, the man who had served in Manila and the Canal Zone and knew how to make a list.

“The roads, sir,” he said. “The roads to the anchorage and to Hickam must be kept clear. For ambulances. For fire engines. For whatever the Navy needs to send and whatever it needs to bring back. If people come out into the roads to look, and they will, they will block them. The Kingdom’s police will need to keep them clear.” He touched the napkin. “And the hospitals. The Queen’s Hospital and the others. They must be told what is coming. I think a great deal is coming. I think there will be more wounded this morning than there are beds in the Kingdom. And the water, sir, the reservoirs, and the power station. Somebody should be standing outside them. I do not know who. I do not know what the Army is doing. I do not know if the Army knows.” He stopped. “I cannot ask for any of it. I have no authority to ask the Kingdom’s police for anything. Only the Kuhina Nui can give them orders. And I could not reach him either.”

“He is on his way.”

“Then he will do it when he comes, and I am wasting your time.”

“He may be an hour coming,” the King said. “The roads.”

They looked at each other.

It was quite simple, and the King saw the whole of it at once, the way you see a room when a light is put on. The Chief of Police was sworn to the King. Every constable in the Kingdom was sworn to the King. They took their orders from the Kuhina Nui, who took his authority from the House, and the King gave them no orders at all and never had, and that was the constitution, and his father had spent thirty-eight years keeping it so. But the Chief of Police would do what the King told him to. Anybody in Honolulu would do what the King told them to, this morning. That was the thing he saw. He had more power at half past eight on this Sunday morning than any King of Hawaiʻi had had since Kalākaua, and it was precisely because nobody would question it that he must not use it.

“Sir,” said Cunningham, who had seen it too, and was a good civil servant, and would not say it.

“I know,” said the King.

He got up and went to the writing table between the windows, and sat down at it, and took a sheet of the palace paper and a pen, and thought for a moment, and then wrote:

To the Chief of Police. The Kuhina Nui is on his way to ʻIolani and will give you his orders as soon as he arrives. Until he does, I should be grateful if you would do whatever the officers of the Realm ask of you to keep the roads clear, protect the hospitals and the water, and help the wounded. And nothing else.

He looked at it. Then he wrote the last three words again, underneath, and underlined them.

He signed it Kamehameha, as he signed everything, and blotted it and folded it and gave it to Kaʻai.

“Send one of the Guard with it,” he said. “Running. And Kaʻai, write the time on the outside. And keep a copy, and give the copy to the Kuhina Nui when he comes, before anything else, before he takes his hat off. Tell him I would like him to tell me afterwards whether I was wrong.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cunningham was watching him from the Realm’s chair with the napkin round his hand.

“You could have written a great deal more than that, sir,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I have served in four places, sir. In three of them, the man in your chair would have written a great deal more.”

“I know,” the King said. “That is why I did not.”

---

The noise had begun to come back.

They both heard it at the same time. It was far off still, and from a different direction, more to the north and east, and it was the same noise as before, the stammering and the deep pounding and then, nearer, the crackle of the black flowers opening; and the windows of the Blue Room began, very faintly, to buzz. Cunningham stood up. He did it too quickly and the brandy glass fell off the arm of the chair onto the carpet and did not break.

“They are coming back,” said Leinani, from the door.

“Sir,” said Cunningham, “I must go. I am sorry. I must go to the office. There is a telephone there with a direct line to the naval district, and if anybody in the Realm wants to reach the Kingdom this morning that is the number they will ring, and there must be somebody at the other end of it.” He picked up the glass and put it on the table, carefully, the right way up. “It is the one useful thing I can do. It is the only thing the Realm has given me to do it with.”

“Stay,” said the King. “Ring from here.”

“With respect, sir, no.” Cunningham looked at him. He looked at him quite steadily, and the King saw that it had cost him something. “With respect, sir. I have been sitting in your chair. In the Realm’s chair. You put me in it. I think it would be a poor return for that if the only officer of the Realm in the city who is not in uniform were to spend the morning hiding in your palace while you do not.” He put his right hand to his head again for the hat that was not there, and this time he seemed to notice that it was not, and smiled for the first time, briefly. “I shall come back, sir. When I know something. I shall come back and tell you whatever I know.”

“Sir Arthur.”

“Sir.”

“Before you go. You came here to ask me something. You have not asked it.”

Cunningham stood very still by the door.

“For the Realm’s peace of mind, sir,” he said at last, slowly, “and for mine. Would Your Majesty consider going inland? Up the valley. Only until this is over.”

“No,” said the King.

“No, sir. I thought not.” Cunningham bowed again, from the neck, properly. “I shall tell the Realm that I asked. I do not suppose it will want to know. It does not, as a rule, want to know very much about the Kingdom.” He paused at the door. “I represent nobody here, sir. I know that. It is in the Treaty, I think, more or less. There is nobody for me to represent. The Kingdom has its own Crown.” He looked round the blue room, at the blue chairs and the blue curtains and Louis Philippe on the wall, and the low chair on the right of the King’s that he had been made to sit in. “I have never been so glad of it in my life.”

---

He went down the steps into the noise, and the King went out after him to the top of the steps and watched him go.

The second wave had reached the city. Somewhere towards the harbour there was the flat heavy blow of a bomb, and then another, nearer, and the windows of the hall behind him rang. The black flowers were opening over Kakaʻako and over the harbour and over the town in dozens, nearer than any of the first, and the crackle was continuous, and over it the high hard engine note again, more than one, and the hiss and patter of the fragments coming down on the roofs all round, like the beginning of rain. Cunningham’s driver had the engine running. Cunningham got into the back of the car with his napkin round his hand and did not look back, and the car went out of the makai gate fast and turned left along King Street towards the harbour and the office with the telephone, and was gone.

As it went out, a man came in at the side gate on Richards Street, running.

He was hatless and in his shirtsleeves, with his jacket over his arm, and he was running in the way a man runs who has been running a long way and has stopped thinking about it, with his head down and his elbows close, and the Guard at the gate came to attention for him as it did for everyone, and he did not lift his hat to them because he had no hat. He came across the gravel and up the side steps and stopped at the top, by the King, bent over, with his hands on his knees and his spectacles slipping down his nose, and could not speak.

It was Takemoto.

“I said you should have the day off,” said the King.

Takemoto straightened up. He pushed his spectacles back. He was soaked through with sweat, and his face was a colour the King had not seen on it before.

“The streetcars have stopped, sir,” he said. “I came down Nuʻuanu on foot. My father.” He stopped, and breathed, and began again. “My father said that my place was here.”