The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1909-10-31
a HAWAIIAN TALE
Repubashed From the Blue Mule Mag azine
BY EDWARD P. IRWIN.


1
| turned and saw the woman.
'FCome,' she said. ~ want to talk
to you.
/ followed her down to the beach,
about a quarter of a mile away. She
moved ahead without speaking, fitting
along through the starlight like some
impalpable shadow.
We reached the water and she sat
! down on the sand and motioned me to
| a place beside her. For a while she
/ didn' speak. Something seemed to
| hold us both There was so much to
| say, so much to explain.
| can see it all now-that tropic
night scene One bright star, Venus it
was, l think, was sinking into the sea
and cast long trail of yellow light
! across the water. Out In the distance
was the white foam of the breakers,
half seen in the dim light, seeming al
ways to approach yet never reaching
the shore. The sound of the roaring
came to US across the distance, steady,
sonorous, masterful, expressive of might,
of eternity of duration, of infnitude
| of strength.
In shore, wavelets babbled along the
sand, rushing up in playful dashes, then
falling back, strangely like a kitten at
play. I picked up a pebble and threw
it into the water. The effort seemed
puerile, feeble, in the face of that I'M
speakable mass of sea that by its own
weight seemed to squeeze the land up
out of it. Behind us the land was dark
and silent. There was no sound of
bird or insect, nothing but the drone
of the breakers and the foolish splash
ing of the wavelets.
She told me the story without pre-
face, without interruption. She didn It
seem to be telling me. 1t was more
as if she was thinking aloud. Some
times she would stop for minutes to-
gether and the silence would hang about
US, weighty, oppressive, charged with
the dim wonder of that land It was
almost a physical effort to speak again,
as if to do so one must force back that
weight.
It was the story of woman s love,
of sacrifice incredible, preprosterous.
IF I had not heard it there, under those
strange circumstances, would not have
believed it. But I knew the woman
was speaking the truth.
She had love Jack Holloway with
love greater than woman s. Perhaps
it was her dreary, repressed life that
made it all the greater Nothing, you
see, had ever come into her life to make
it more than mere existence until he
came. That changed it all. For her
there was nothing else in the universe.
He was God to her, and Love, and all
that means most to woman. She gave
herself to him absolutely. That he
took nothing but her love was because
he asked nothing more. And because
she gave so much, she got as much in
return. He treated her as he had
treated no woman in all his wild, care
less life. He loved her only less than
she loved him. It is strange that a man
ike him should have been capable of
it all. Yet because she was so much to
him he would not take her.
"Ay,' she said, 'sI offered him all
in the world. l forgot I was a woman,
that I had been spiritless, without
thought or feeling of my own. I knew
he loved me. Yet he would not say so.
So / told him. l found words that no
woman had ever found before. What
they were I don t know now But
when I finished he stood moment as
if he were without life. His muscles
were contracted His face was drawn
and white as the face of the dead. But
his arms remained closed. He spoke
from lips that were hard and stiff He
loved me, he said, loved me too much
| to marry me. I was too good for him.
! 1t would be an insult to my love, to my
womanhood, to offer me the love of a
man like him. man who had lived as
he had lived, done as he had done.
FAnd so he left me.
81 was too good for him, he said l,
who thought of nothing else but him,
whose dreams were of him, whose God
was he. / was too good for himi''
The rest is incredible. Can you i'm
agine it-a woman trying to kill the
good that is in her, to smirch 'her
name, drag herself in the mire of the
world, make herself a by-word and a
reproaeh to those who knew her-so
that she might sink low enough for the
man she loved to be worthy of her?
But that is what she tried to do.
And she couldn t. She told me, in
fragmentary sentences. There was
something in her that would not let
her. Appearances mattered nothing.
She didn t care for them. But the ac-
tual shining against herself-that she
could not do.
I don t know where she had been.
Many cities, in all parts of the world.
How she had lived [ don't know. 1t
doesn t matter. She had been loved
much and by many men, but she cared
nothing for any of them. She tried
tried desperately, to make herself the
thing she would be, to descend low
| enough in the scale of womanhood ia
make herself a fit mate, as she thought
for the man she loved She could not
That something in her that is in all OF
us to a greater or less degree. call il
: deeeney if You will, or what you will
, always held her back.
81 am not bad she said. and she
said it as if it were a tragedy. some
thing terrible. some frightful mora
disease. 81 am not bad, I can't be
: bad"
;, 1t was all so weird. I felt almost
that I should encourage the woman
: urge her to go on. use those pIatitudes
, that we use in encouraging a falterine
fellow-being to be good-only platitude,