A Writer's Notebook (36 page)

The Red Light District. You go down side-streets by the harbour, in the darkness, across a rickety bridge, and you come to a road, all ruts and holes; a little farther, and there is parking
room for motors on either side; there are saloons gaily lit and a barber's shop; there is a certain stir, an air of expectant agitation; you turn down a narrow alley, either to the right or to the left, and find yourself in the district. The street divides Iwelei into two parts, but each part is exactly like the other. Rows of little bungalows, painted green and very neat and tidy in appearance, even a trifle prim; and the road between them is broad and straight.

Iwelei is laid out like a garden city, and in its respectable regularity, its order and trimness, gives an impression of sardonic horror; for never can the search for love have been so planned and systematised. The pretty bungalows are divided into two lodgings; each is inhabited by a woman, and each consists of two rooms and a kitchenette. One is a bedroom in which there is a chest-of-drawers, a large bed with a canopy and curtains, and a chair or two. It has an overcrowded look. The parlour contains a large table, a gramophone, sometimes a piano, and half a dozen chairs. On the walls are pennants from the San Francisco exhibition and sometimes cheap prints, the favourite of which is
September Morn
, and photographs of San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the kitchenette is disorder. Here beer and gin are kept for visitors.

The women sit at their windows so that they may be clearly seen. Some are reading, some are sewing, and take no notice of the passer-by; others watch him approach and call out to him as he passes. They are of all ages and all nations. There are Japanese, Negro women, Germans, Americans, Spaniards. (It is strange and nostalgic as you pass to hear on a gramophone
coplas
or a
seguidilla
.) Most of them have no trace of youth or beauty, and you wonder how, looking as they do, they can earn a living. Their cheeks are heavily rouged and they are dressed in cheap finery. When you go in the blinds are drawn down and if someone knocks the answer is: Busy. You are at once invited to drink beer and the woman tells you how many glasses she has had that day. She asks you where you come from. The gramophone is turned on. The price is a dollar.

The streets between are lit by a rare street lamp, but chiefly by the light that comes from the open windows of the bungalows. Men wander about, for the most part silently, looking at the women; now and then one makes up his mind and slinks up the three steps that lead into the parlour, is let in, and then the door and window are shut and the blind is pulled down. Most of the men are only there to look. They are of all nationalities. Sailors from the ships in port, sailors from the American gunboats, mostly drunk, Hawaiians, soldiers from the regiments, white and black, quartered on the island, Chinese, Japanese. They wander about in the night, and desire seems to throb in the air.

For some time the local papers had been writing articles about the scandal of Iwelei, the missionaries had been clamorous, but the police refused to stir. Their argument was that with the great preponderance of men in Oahu prostitution was inevitable, and to localise it made it easy to control and rendered medical examination more reliable. The papers attacked the police and at last they were forced to act. A raid was made, and fourteen ponces were arrested; oddly enough on the charge sheet most of them claimed French nationality. It suggests that the profession is peculiarly attractive to the citizens of France. A few days later all the women were summoned and sentenced to be on their good behaviour for a year on pain of being sent to prison. Most of them went straight back to San Francisco. I went to Iwelei the night of the raid. Most of the houses were closed, and there was hardly anyone in the streets. Here and there little groups of three or four women discussed the news in undertones. The place was dark and silent. Iwelei had ceased to exist.

Haula. A little hotel on the windward side of Oahu kept by a German Swiss and his Belgian wife. It is a wooden bungalow
with a wide veranda and the doors are protected from mosquitos by wire netting. In the garden bananas, papaias and coconut trees. The Swiss is a little man with a square German head, a head too large for his body, bald, with a long, untidy moustache. His wife is matronly, stout and red-faced, with brown hair severely brushed back. She gives you the impression of being competent and business-like. They like to talk of their homes which they haven't seen for seventeen years, he of Berne, she of the village near Namur where she was born. After dinner the hostess comes into the living-rooms and chats while she plays patience and presently the landlord, who is also the cook, comes in and sits down to gossip.

From here you visit the sacred waterfall, passing through fields of sugar-cane, and then along a narrow brook upwards towards the mountains. A track runs along it, now on one side, now on the other, so that every now and then you have to ford the stream. Wherever there is a large stone with a flattish top, you see numbers of leaves that have been placed on it and are held down by a pebble. They are offerings to propitiate the deity of the place. The water falls through a narrow gorge into a deep round pool, and you are surrounded by tangled scrub, green and immensely luxuriant. Beyond, above, is a valley which, it is said, no one has ever explored.

The Hawaiians. Their colour ranges from copper almost to black. They are tall and well-made, their nose is flattish, their eyes are large and their lips full and sensual. Their hair is dark and crisply curling. They incline to fat, and the women, graceful and slender in youth, with age become very stout. When they grow old both sexes become ugly, like monkeys; and it is strange after the beauty of their youth. Perhaps age is only beautiful when thought, activity, or violence of emotion has moulded the character. The Hawaiians, having lived a life purely animal, revert with age to the animal type.

Kanakas at Waikiki. Tough Bill: a tall, dark fellow, with
protruding lips, boastful like a child or a Negro. Holstein, known as Bananas, a descendant of a shipwrecked sailor in a Danish boat lost on one of the islands in the eighteenth century, odd on account of his dark red hair. Fat Miller: a stout, very dark man with a round face and the manner of a buffoon oddly at variance with a kind of innate dignity.

The Hula-Hula. A small room with papered walls, decorated with Californian pennants and furnished with cheap wicker furniture. At one end sits an old man on the floor, with his legs tucked under him. He is thin and lined, with grey hair cut very short. He looks like a fisherman in some piece of realistic sculpture of the Hellenistic school. His dark face is impassive. He makes strange rhythmical sounds by beating a gourd with his hands and sings in a monotonous undertone. He seems never to stop to take breath. The dancers are two women, neither of them young, one fat, the other thin. They dance with little movement of the feet, but much of the body. Each dance is said to express in motion the words of the song the old man sings.

The Departure. At the entrance to the wharf women assail the passers-by with offers of leis, garlands of flowers or of yellow tissue paper. They are hung round the neck of the departing. The people on board throw coloured streamers to those standing below, and the side of the ship is gay with the thin lines of paper, yellow, green, blue and violet. The band plays “Aloaha Oe”, and amid shouted farewells the ship, breaking the streamers, moves slowly away.

Kilauea. The volcano is on Hawaii, the largest island of the group. You land at Hilo and drive up, first through fields of rice and sugar-cane and then, climbing all the time, through a forest of great tree-ferns. They are weird and strange like the
imaginations of some draughtsman of the horrible. All manner of climbing plants wind around the trees in an impenetrable tangle. Gradually the vegetation stops and you come to the lava field, grey, dead, silent; here no plants grow and no birds sing; you see the smoke rising, here and there thickly, in other places ascending thin and straight like the smoke from a cottage chimney. You get out and walk. The lava crunches under your feet. Now and then you step over narrow fissures from which the sulphurous smoke rises, making you cough. You come to the jagged edge of the crater. Nothing has prepared you for the sight. It is stupendous and alarming. You look down upon a vast sea of lava. It is black and heavy. It is in perpetual movement. The lava is only a thin crust and it is broken at irregular intervals by gashes of red fire, and here and there again are geysers of flame rising into the air, thirty, or forty, or fifty feet. They spurt up, white hot, like artificial fountains. The two most impressive things are the roar: it is like the roar of surf on a gloomy day, as unceasing, or like the roar of a cataract, as formidable; and secondly the movement: the lava moves on, on, all the time, with a stealthy movement in which you may almost see the purpose of a living thing. There is something strangely determined about its quiet progress, it has a malign tenacity; and yet it transcends anything living, it has the inevitableness of fate and the ruthlessness of time. The lava is like some huge formless creature born of primeval slime crawling slowly in pursuit of some loathsome prey. The lava moves forward steadily towards a fiery gap and then seems to fall into a bottomless cavern of flame. You see vast holes of fire, great caves of flame. A man standing near said: “Gosh, it's like hell,” but a priest beside him turned and said: “No, it is like the face of God.”