Chapter 12

Elmer McFarthingale should have been pleased and greatly relieved at the way things went, at least during the initial hour of the luau. The food was superb, the two native orchestras magnificent, and the series of singers and dancers outdid themselves. Even the punchbowl was very popular, although neither he nor the big boss sampled it, both being confirmed non-drinkers. He had a bad moment when the time came to introduce Lynn Charles to Euclid J. Barrington-Phaff, but the beautiful redhead looked as fresh and sweet and as innocent as a sophomore, accepting the hotel baron's compliments on the job she had turned out with becoming grace and modesty. Elmer could hardly believe that she was the same girl he had seen, less than two hours earlier, astride a naked Hawaiian while a naked Japanese lashed her fabulous fanny with a white whip.

Yes, Elmer should have been pleased, but he wasn't. Instead, he was running scared. After the things he had witnessed in the kitchen, and in Lynn's room, was there any limit to the catastrophic possibilities germane to this perilous predicament? Furthermore, although the big boss was apparently delighted with the program, his fat face beaming with joviality, Elmer sensed a strange and alarming mood that seemed to be slowly gripping the guests. True, the punchbowl was liberally spiked with several kinds of rum and brandy. But this was something more than mere drunkenness. From the assembled throng of revelers he got the distinct impression of a kind of lazy, dreamlike, to-hell-with-it- anyway permissiveness, as though the bars of their inhibitions had not only been lowered but had been cast entirely aside. He noticed, for instance, that all the guests at the feast sat cross legged on the ground in the style traditional at luaus, but, whereas the women had begun the feast with skirts decorously pulled down to hide their knees, most of them now had allowed the hems to hike up until many thighs were bare nearly to the crotch. He glanced nervously at his boss to see if the big man had noticed, but apparently he had not.

A low stage had been erected at one end of the courtyard and it was there that the entertainers had been performing. A change in the tempo of the music drew the attention of everyone back to the stage as though they knew by instinct that the next act was to be the grand climax, the great finale for which all the other acts had been mere preliminaries.

Elmer shuddered. Kalola! She wouldn't dare!

He allowed himself to breathe again when she came running onto the stage to a fanfare of music. He saw that she was clad in a full-length grass skirt, halter top and at least six flower leis. The dance she did was one of the innocuous routines worked out earlier. It was greeted with applause but with no mighty ovation. Kalola smiled--and held up a small hand for silence. Elmer saw that she was going to speak, and fear crept back to walk with cold fingers up his spine. What was the little savage up to? This was not part of the program. Oh, well, maybe no one would be able to understand her anyway. Then she did the thing that eternally baffles mainlanders... she abandoned the patois she most frequently used and spoke in clear, precise and perfectly enunciated English.

"Thank you," she said simply. "The dance you have just seen might properly be labeled a theatrical version of our native dances and bears about as much resemblance to the real thing as oatmeal mush does to poi. You've been a great audience and I think you are entitled to view the Hawaiian hula-hula in its original form, and in a way in which it has only rarely been done since the days of Kamekameha The Great." She signaled the orchestra and all of the instruments remained silent but for the dull, hypnotic beating of the drums and the sharper, rhythmic clatter of the hardwood sticks on gourds. She fumbled for a moment behind her, then her halter top came off to be tossed off the floor of the stage. Her brown, beautiful breasts bobbed free, thrusting themselves out through the garlands of flowers that decorated her bosom. Her feet began the shuffling dance and her hands to move in the melting, liquid grace that is the soul of the hula.

"McFarthingale, what is this?" Euclid J. Barrington-Phaff demanded, his face purpling and his small, piggy eyes glowing with rising indignation. "That dancer... that savage... she's... why, she's completely topless!"

Elmer's answer was drowned in a roar of approval from the audience. They stamped and whistled and shouted. One of the men yelled the old, burlesque call of encouragement. "Take it off!" The others immediately took it up, and it became a chant, the swelling thunder of which drowned out even the drums. "Take it off! Take it off! Take it off!"

Kalola paused in her dance, regarded them quizzically with tilted head, then she grinned and quickly unfastened the top of her grass skirt. The flower leis followed it to the floor, and she was gloriously and primitively naked before them, her bronzed body gleaming in the murky, fitful light of the tiki torches that illumined the courtyard. The roar of appreciation that went up from the guests was deafening.

"Elmer!" Barrington-Phaff screamed, "do something about this at once!"

"Yes, sir," Elmer screamed back and summoned the nearest waiter. "Get up there on that stage and do something about this at once!" he yelled in the man's ear, unconsciously repeating Barrington-Phaff's own words.

The waiter, a Hawaiian, misunderstood his meaning. He had been sampling the punch, too. He ran laughing onto the stage, stripped himself of his white uniform and underwear and joined Kalola in the dance she was doing, his frenzied movements causing his cock to rotate like a majorette's baton.

"Oh, my God, no!" Elmer groaned, then manfully plowed and elbowed his way through the crowd that had now gathered around the stage. He made it and leaped up on the wooden platform, attempting to seize the wildly gyrating waiter.

"Leave him alone!" someone shouted. A woman jumped up behind him and began beating him on the back of the head with her handbag.

Barrington-Phaff was no coward. Seeing his employee thus set upon, he hurled his bulk stageward, knocking people right and left with his huge belly and massive shoulders. He almost made it before one of the men in the crowd tripped him and another one hit him in the eye as he was going down. The hotel employees who were professional servants--not the prostitutes, beach boys and bums Lynn had influenced Elmer to hire--rallied to the defense of their manager and of the big boss from New York. The ensuing donnybrook now ranks in history as the only major engagement fought in the South Pacific since the end of World War II. Like gladiators of ancient Rome, the contestants battled it out in the arena of the courtyard, and it must be admitted that the ladies of the A.A. of S.P.M. acquitted themselves as well as their men. Even so, the doughty warriors representing the toilet paper manufacturing industry might have gone down to defeat had not Ellen and Lynn arrived with reinforcements. When Ellen's chippies joined the fray on the side of the guests, the outcome was decided. The regular hotel men were routed and the victors sank wearily to the ground to rest.