“... to inhabit the earth is to love that which is; to catch the savor of things.”
“... to inhabit the earth is to love that which is; to catch the savor of things.”
This brown canvas domicile, comprising three rooms separated by thin portieres, with an accessory bath-house and servant room, also of tenting, is the last of a scattered row of detached accommodations belonging to the Seaside Hotel, some of them weathered old cottages of the palmy days when Hawaiian royalty spent most of its time on the beach. A short distancemauka(mountainward) or away frommakai(toward the sea), on a lawn pillared with sky-brushing coconut palms, still stands a true old grass houseof romantic association. It was created for the seaside retreat of King Lot, Kamehameha V, during his reign in the decade commencing 1863, and each Wednesday was devoted to the fashioning of it, fromLamawood inside and pandanus (screw-pine) leaves outside. It was named Lama House, for the wood was sacred to the construction of temples and idols in the older days. The King left no issue, and upon his death the estate went to the Princess Ruta (Ruth) Keelikolani, and at her demise to Mrs. Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last known descendant of Kamehameha the Great.
To the south we are separated from the big Moana Hotel with its tiers of green roofs, by a sand-banked stream fed from the mountains, with, beyond, a lavender field of lilies. Kalakaua Avenue is so far away across the hotel gardens that the only sound from that quarter is an occasional rumble of electric trams over a bridge that spans the stream, fitting into our bright solitude like distant thunder from the black range that is visible through a grove of palms and algaroba.
Not twenty feet in front, where grass grows to the water’s edge at highest tide, the sands, sparkling under blazing sunrays, are frilled by the lazy edges of the surf; and the flawed tourmaline of the reef-waters, pale green, or dull pink from underlying coral patches, stretches to the low white line of breakers on the barrier reef some half-mile seaward, while farthest beyond lies the peacock-blue ribbon of the deep-sea horizon.
In the cool of morning, we skipped across the prickly grasses for a dip, accompanied by a frisking collie neighbor. The water was even more wonderful than at the Lochs, invigorating enough at this early hour, full of life and movement. Jack gave me lessons indiving through the mild breakers, and it was hard to tear ourselves away, even for the tempting breakfast tray that a white-suited Filipino was bearing to the tent-house.
Besides our cottage row, the Seaside Hotel includes one large frame house of many rooms, half over the water, reached by a winding driveway from the main avenue through a grove of lofty coconut palms, under which stray large cottages belonging to the hotel. In a rambling one-storied building are the kitchen, the bar, an oriental private dining room, and a reception hall, also furnished in Chinese carved woods and splendid fittings, that belong to the estate. This hall opens into a circular lanai with frescoed ceiling—a round dining and ballroom open half its disk. Beyond the curving steps, on the lawn toward the sea, grow two huge gnarledhautrees, each in the center of a round platform where drinks are served. The hau is a native of the Islands, and is related to the hibiscus. The limbs snarl into an impenetrable shape, and are hung with light yellow bells formed of five to ten lobes, which turn to mauve and then to ruddy brown when they fall.
Mr. and Mrs. Fred Church (he is manager, and an old Klondike acquaintance of Jack) gave us a dinner before the “Transport Night Dance.” While the first word is appropriate for the bewitchment of dancing in a Hawaiian night to the music of Hawaii, it is here used to designate the entertainment on arrival of a United States Army transport, when the officers and their ladies come ashore midway in the long passage to or from the Coast and the Philippines.
The immense half-open circle of the lanai was cleared of dining equipment, and the shining floor dusted with shavings of wax. Many-hued Chinese lanterns werethe only lighting here and out among the trees, where dancers rested in the pauses of the music.
And the music. It was made entirely by an Hawaiian orchestra of guitars and ukuleles, with a piano for accent, and all I had heard and dreamed of the glamour of “steamer night in Honolulu” came to pass. It seemed hardly more real than the dream, gliding over the glassy floor to lilt of hulas played and sung by these brown musicians whose mellow, slurring voices sang to the ukuleles and guitars because they could not refrain from singing.
Between two dances I found Jack talking with Princess David Kawananakoa and her husband, who is brother to Prince Cupid, and whom he resembles. Both Princes are nephews of King Kalakaua’s queen, Kapiolani. Princess David, Abigail, was a Campbell, and is only about an eighth Hawaiian. She is a beauty; no more splendid in carriage than her sister-in-law, but much more European in coloring and feature. Doubtless she could be quite as regal upon occasion; but this evening she was charmingly vivacious, and I caught myself looking with affection born of the instant into her beautiful eyes that smiled irresistibly with her beautiful mouth—“a smile of pearls.”
The lovely ball closed with “Aloha Oe,” Love to You, in waltz measure, while the dancers joined in singing. The last, dying cadence left one with a reposeful sense of fulfillment, and none broke this dreamy repose by clapping for an encore.
Waikiki, June 1.
Yesterday, after a luncheon that included our firstyam(little different from a fried potato-patty), we rode to Diamond Head, where at last I gazed into a real crater. The way led through Kapiolani Park,where the little sleeping volcano formed a painted background for the scattered trees and blossoming lotus ponds. Once out of the shady driveways, we sweltered in a windless glare upon the rising white road.
It was a mud volcano, this Leahi, and upon its oblong steep sides remain the gutterings of age-ago eruptions. While less than eight hundred feet high, at a distance it appears much higher. We had had a never-to-be-forgotten view of it on our first ride to Honolulu, when, through a gap, we looked across the tree-embowered city, and the low red crater of Punchbowl—Puowaina; and far Diamond Head rose too ethereal in the shimmering atmosphere to be of solid earth thrown up by ancient convulsions.
Skirting the south side of the Head, we tethered our dripping horses, and on foot climbed the limy wall, seething hot under the midday sun. I arrived at the edge of the crater sans heart and lungs, muscles quivering, and eyes dim. But what I there saw brought me back in short order to my normal state of joy at being alive. Compared with other wonders of Hawaii Nei, probably this small hollow mountain should be sung without trumpets. But I have not seen Haleakala and Kilauea, Mauna Kea or Hualalai, and lacked no thrills over my first volcano, albeit a dead one. The bowl is a symmetrical oval, and may be half a mile long—we could not judge, for the eye measures all awry these incurving walls of tender green, cradling, far beneath, the still, green oval mirror of a lakelet.
We rested our burned eyes on the soft green shell of earth before retracing the scorching way to the horses, and decided that small-boat travel is ill training for mountain scaling anywhere near the Southern Cross. Around Diamond Head we continued, gazingoff across blue bays and white beaches to Koko Head, very innocent seen from the land by light of day, but full of omen by night when winds blow hot and smallSnarksdrift near wicked reefs. To-day the road led close by Diamond Head lighthouse and the signal station that telephoned our approach to Honolulu; and we learned that it was wirelessed from the city to the island of Maui, where the Congressional party hung 10,000 feet, on the lip of Haleakala’s twenty-three-mile crater. How different from times when the only way of messages was by the watery miles separating the islands, in sloops and schooners or outrigger canoes, and telephones had never been dreamed of.
On the way to return the mares, Jack took me aside to the transport wharf that I might see the departure of a vessel from Honolulu, for never, since his own experiences, has he spoken without emotion of this beautiful ceremonial. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world.
The steamer decks were bowers of fragrant color, as was the wharf, for the shoulders of the departing congressmen and their womenfolk were high-piled with wreaths, of ilima, of roses, of heliotrope, carnations, lilies, and scented green things; while the dense throng ashore was hardly less garlanded, and streams of flowers flowed back and forth on the gangways. A great humming of voices blent with the quivering strains of an Hawaiian orchestra on the upper deck, and now and again all tuneful din drowned in a patriotic burst from Berger’s Royal Hawaiian Band ashore. An impressive scene it was, not alone for beauty, but in a human way, for the myriad faces of the concourse shaded from white through all the browns to yellow skins, mingling in good fellowship and oneness of spirit in this hour of farewell to the lawmakers oftheir common cause. And none of these wishing godspeed were more imposing nor charming than the Hawaiians, from the two Princes and their splendid consorts to the humblest commoners of their people.Humblestis wrong—there is no humility in the breed. Their eyes look only an innocent equality of sweet frankness, and their feet step without fear the soil they can but still regard as their dearest own.
Prince Cupid, the delegate, received round after round of cheers from the passengers when a deep-mouthed siren called the parting moment; and at the last, the native orchestra, descending the gangway, joined with the wind instruments in Queen Liliuokalani’s own song, tenderest of farewells and hopes for a returning, “Aloha Oe.” The human being did not live whose heart was not conscious of a nameless longing for he knew not what. One ached with burden of all the good-bys that ever were and ever will be, of all the sailings of all the ships of all the world.
“O warp her out with garlands from the quays,”
“O warp her out with garlands from the quays,”
went through my mind when the vessel glided slowly past the wharf, and the ropes of living blossoms and network of wild-hued serpentine parted and fell into the water. Flowers filled the air as they were tossed to and from the gay decks of the ship, many falling into the stream, until she moved upon a gorgeous tapestry that clung to her forefoot.
As the huge black transport cleared, suddenly her surface seemed flying to pieces. A perfect fusillade of small dark objects in human form sprang from her sides, rails, rigging, from every height of ringbolt and sill, and disappeared in almost unrippling dives through the swirling blossomy carpet of the harbor.
“Look—look at them!” Jack cried, incoherent with the excitement of his joy in the kanaka imps whoentered the water so perfectly and came up shaking petals from their curly heads, white teeth flashing, their child faces eloquent with expectation of a lucrative shower from the passengers. A bountiful hour it was for them, and little their bright eyes and brown hands lost of the copper and silver disks that slowly angled through the bubbling flood. We wished we were down there with them, for it is great fun to pick a coin from the deep as it filters down with a short, tipping motion.
“Do you wish you were aboard, going back?” Jack asked, as we turned for the last time to look at the diminishing bulk of the ship, bannered with scarves and handkerchiefs and serpentine. I did not. I want to go home only from east to west.
Such content is ours here at Waikiki, that it is a shame to press it all into one life, for it could be spread over several incarnations. We sleep like babies, in the salt night airs wafting through mosquito canopies. Before breakfast, it is into the blissful warm tide, diving through bubbling combers, coming up eyes level with tiny sails of fishermen beyond the barrier reef. All hours one hears the steady, gentle boom and splash of the surf—not the disturbing, ominous gnashing and roaring of the Pacific Coast rollers, nor the carnivorous growlings off the rock-jagged line of New England. And under sun or moon, it is all a piece of beauty. Toward Diamond Head, when the south wind drives, swift breakers, like endless charges of white cavalry, leap and surge shoreward, flinging back long silver manes. The thrill of these landward races never palls at Waikiki. One seems to vision Pharaoh’s Horses in mighty contest with backwashing waters, arriving nowhere, dying and melting impotent upon the sand.
Jack, to whom beauty is never marred by knowledge of its why and wherefore, has explained to me the physics of a breaking wave.
“A wave is a communicated agitation,” he says. “The water that composes a wave really does not move. If it moved, when you drop a stone in a pool and the ripples widen in an increasing circle, there should be at the center an increasing hole. So the water in the body of a wave is stationary. If you observe a portion of the ocean’s surface, you will see that the same water rises and falls endlessly to the agitation communicated by endless successive waves. Then picture this communicated agitation moving toward shore. As the land shoals, the bottom of the wave hits first and is stopped. Water is fluid, and the upper part of the wave not having been stopped, it keeps on communicating its agitation, and moves on shoreward. Ergo,” says he, “something is bound to be doing when the top of a wave keeps on after the bottom has stopped, dropped out from under. Of course, the wave-top starts to fall, forward, down, cresting, overcurling, and crashing. So, don’t you see? don’t you see?” he warms to his illustration, “it is actually the bottom of the wave striking against the rising land that causes the surf! And where the land shoals gradually, as inside this barrier reef at Waikiki, the rising of the undulating water is as gradual, and a ride of a quarter of a mile or more can be made shoreward on the cascading face of a wave.”
Alexander Hume Ford, true to promise, appeared to-day with an enormous surf-board, made fun of the small ones that had been lent us, and we went down to the sea to learn something ofhee-nalu, sport of Hawaiian kings. The only endeavor of fish, flesh, and fowl, which Mr. Ford seems not to have partiallycompassed, is that of the feathered tribe—undoubtedly from lack of time, for his energy and ambition seem tireless enough even to grow feathers. Jack, who seldom stops short of what he wants to accomplish, finds this man most stimulating in an unselfish enthusiasm to revive neglected customs of elder islands days, for the benefit of Hawaii and her advertisement to the world. Although we have seen a number of natives riding the breakers, face downward, and even standing upright, almost no white men appear to be expert. Mr. Ford, born genius of pioneering and promoting, swears he is going to make this islands pastime one of the most popular on earth, and judging by his personal valor, he cannot fail.
The thick board, somewhat coffin-shaped, with rounded ends, should be over six feet long. This plank is floated out to the breaking water, which can be done either wading alongside or lying face-downward paddling; and there you wait for the right wave. When you see it coming, stand ready to launch the board on the gathering slope, spring upon it, and—keep on going if you can. Lie flat on your chest, hands grasping the sides of the large end of the heavy timber, and steer with your feet. The expert, having gauged the right speed, rises cautiously to his knees, to full stature, and then, erect with feet in the churning foam, makes straight for the beach, rides up the sparkling incline, and steps easily from his grounded sea-car.
A brisk breeze this afternoon, with a rising surf, brought out the best men, and we saw some splendid natives at close range, who took our breath away with their reckless, beautiful performance. One, George Freeth, who is only one quarter Hawaiian, is accounted the best surf-board rider and swimmer in Honolulu.
When a gloriously bodied Hawaiian, naked but for a loin-cloth carved against his shining bronze, takes form like a miracle in the down-rushing smother of a breaking wave, arms outstretched and heels winged with backward-streaming spray, you watch, stricken of speech. It is not the sheer physical splendor of the thing that so moves one, for, lighting and informing this, is an all dominating spirit of joyful fearlessness and freedom that manifests an almost visible soul, and lends a slow thrilling of awe to one’s contemplation of the beauty and wonder of the human. What was it an old Attic philosopher exclaimed? “Things marvelous there are many, but among all naught moves more truly marvelous than man.”
And our journalist friend, malihini, white-skinned, slim, duplicated the act, and Jack murmured, “Gee! What a sport he is—and what a sport this is for white men too!” His glowing eyes, and a well-known firm expression about the jaw, told me he would be satisfied with nothing less than hours a day in the deep-water smokers. As it was, in the small surf, he came safely in several times. I accomplished one successful landing, slipping up the beach precisely to the feet of some stranger hotel guests, who were not half so surprised as myself. It took some while to learn to mount the board without help, for it is a cumbrous and unruly affair in the heaving water.
The rising tide was populous with Saturday afternoon bathers, but comparatively few women, except close inshore. A fleet of young surf-boarders hovered around Ford and his haole pupils, for he loves children and is a great favorite with these. Often, timing our propelling wave, we would find a brown and smiling cherub of ten or so, all eyes and teeth, timing the same wave, watching with anxiety lest we fail andtangle up with the pitching slice of hardwood. Not a word would he utter—but in every gesture was “See! See! This way! It is easy!”
Several times, on my own vociferous way, I was spilled diagonally down the face of a combing wave, the board whirling as it overturned, and slithering up-ended, while I swam to bottom for very life, in fear of a smash on the cranium. And once I got it, coming up wildly, stars shooting through my brain. And once Jack’s board, on which he had lain too far forward, dived, struck bottom, and flung him head over heels in the most ludicrous somersault. His own head was struck in the ensuing mix-up and we were able to compare size and number of stars. Of course, his stars were the bigger—because my power of speech was not equal to his. It seems to us both that never were we sowetin all our lives, as during those laughing, strenuous, half-drowned hours in the milk warm surf.
Sometimes, just sometimes, when I want to play the game beyond my known vitality, I almost wish I were a boy. I do my best, as to-day; but when it comes to piloting an enormous weighty plank out where the high surf smokes, above a depth of twelve to fifteen feet, I fear that no vigor of spirit can lend my scant five-feet-two, short hundred-and-eleven, the needful endurance. Mr. Ford pooh-poohs: “Yes, you can. It’s easier than you think—but better let your husband try it out first.”
(1) Old Hawaiian. (2) The Sudden Vision. (3) The Mirrored Mountains. (Painting by Hitchcock.)
(1) Old Hawaiian. (2) The Sudden Vision. (3) The Mirrored Mountains. (Painting by Hitchcock.)
Waikiki, June 2.
An eventful day, this, especially for Jack, who is in bed thinking it over between groans, eyes puffed shut with a strange malady, and agonizing in a severe case of sunburn. I can sympathize to some extent, for, in addition to a considerable roasting, my whole bodyis racked with muscular quirkings and lameness from the natatorial gymnastics of the past forty-eight hours. Our program to-day began at ten, with a delirious hour of canoe riding in a pounding sea. While less individual boldness is called upon, this game is even more exciting than surf-boarding, for more can take part in the shoreward rush.
The great canoes are the very embodiment of royal barbaric sea spirit—dubbed out of hard koa logs, long, narrow, over two feet deep, with slightly curved perpendicular sides and rounded bottoms; furnished with steadying outriggers on the left, known as the “i-á-ku”—two curved timbers, of the light tough hardwood, their outer ends fastened to the heavy horizontal spar, or float, of wili-wili, called the “a-ma,” nearly the canoe’s length. The hulls are painted lusterless, dead black, and trimmed by a slightly in-set, royal-yellow inch-rail, broadening upward at each end of the boat, with a sharp tip. There is an elegance of savage warlikeness about these long sable shapes; but the sole warfare in this day and age is with Neptune, when, manned by shining bronze crews, they breast or fight through the oncoming legions of rearing, trampling, neighing sea cavalry.
It required several men on a side to launch our forty-foot canoe, and altogether eight embarked, vaulting aboard as she took the water, each into a seat only just wide enough. Jack wielded a paddle, but I was placed in the very bow, where, both outward and back, the sharpest thrills are to be had. As we worked reefward in the high breaking flood, more than once breath was knocked out of me when the bow lunged straight into a stiff wall of green water just beginning to crest. Again, the canoe poised horizontally on the springing knife-edge of a tall wave on the imminenceof overcurling, and then, forward-half in midair, plunged head-into the oily abyss, with a prodigious slap that bounced us into space, deafened with the grind of the shore-going leviathan at our backs. I could hear Jack laughing in the abating tumult of sound, as he watched me trimming my lines so as to present the least possible surface to the next deluge. He knew, despite my desperate clutches at the canary streak on either hand, that I was having the time of my life, as, from his own past experience, he had told me I would have.
It was more than usually rough, so that our brown crew would not venture out as far as we had hoped, shaking their curly heads like serious children at the big white water on the barrier reef. Then they selected a likely wave for the slide home, shouting strange cries to one another that brought about the turning of the stern seaward to a low green mounting hill that looked half a mile long and ridged higher and higher to the burst.
“‘A hill, a gentle hill, Green and of mild declivity,’... It is not!” some one quoted and commented on his Byron and the threatening young mountain, with firm hands grasping his paddle, when, at exactly the right instant, he joined the frantic shrill “Hoe! Hoe!” (Paddle! paddle like—everything!) that sent all the blades madly flying to maintain equal speed with the abrupt, emerald slope. Almost on end,wiki-wiki, faster—faster, and yet faster, we shot, ever the curl of white water behind, above, overhanging, menacing any laggard crew. Once I dared to look back. Head above head I marked them all; but never can fade the picture of the last of all, a magnificent Hawaiian sitting stark in the stern, hardly breathing, curls straight back in the wind, his biceps bulging to theweight of canoe and water against the steering paddle, his wide brown eyes reflecting all the responsibility of bringing right-side-up to shore his haole freight.
And then the stern settles a little at a time, as the seething bulk of water dissipates upon the gentle up-slope of the land before the Moana, while dripping crew and passengers swing around in the backwash and work out to repeat the maneuver.
Few other canoes were tempted out to-day, but we saw one capsize by coasting crookedly down a wave. The yellow outrigger rose in air, then disappeared in white chaos. Everything emerged on the sleek back of the comber, but the men were unable in the ensuing rough water to right the swamped boat. We lost sight of them as the next breaker set us zipping inshore, but later saw them swimming slowly in, towing the canoe bottom-upward, like a black dead sea monster, and making a picnic of their plight.
An hour of this tense and tingling recreation left us surprisingly tired, as well as chilled from the strong breeze on wet suits. Mr. Ford, with a paternal “I-told-you-so” smile at our enthusiasm over the canoeing, was prompt for the next event on our program, a further lesson in surf-boarding. After assisting me for a time I noticed he and Jack were sending desireful glances toward the leaping backs of Pharaoh’s Horses, and I knew they wanted to be quit of the pony breakers inshore—thewahine(woman) surf, as the native swimmers have it, and manfulwise ride the big water. Our friend had a thorough pupil in Jack, who with characteristic abandon never touched foot to sand in four broiling hours.
Nursing my own reddened skin in the cool tent-house, I saw a weary figure dragging its feet across the lawns, which it was hard to recognize for Jack until he came quite near. Face and body, he wascovered with large swollen blotches, like hives, and his mouth and throat were closing painfully. Rather against his wish, I sent Tochigi to summon a doctor. He had not given a thought during those four hours, face-downward on the board, to the fact that under the vertical rays of a tropic sun a part of him never before so exposed was being cooked through and through. Shoulders and back of neck were cruelly grilled; but the really frightful damage was to the backs of his legs, especially the tender hind-side of the knee joints, which were actually warping so rapidly that in a few moments he could not stand erect because the limbs refused to straighten. Between us we managed to get him into bed, and later on, restless with the intolerable pain of his ruined surfaces, and thinking my room might be cooler, he could progress there only onheels and palms, face upward. “Don’t let me laugh—it hurts too much,” he moaned through swollen lips, realizing the preposterous spectacle.
Little aid could be rendered, either of diagnosis or practice, by the physician, Dr. Charles B. Cooper. From his six-foot-odd of height he bent wide, black eyes upon the piteous mass on my bed, that indisputably required all known sun-burn remedies; but the swollen blotches were plainly beyond him. He had observed cases of mouth and throat swelling from fruit poisoning in the tropics; but this patient had eaten nothing that he had not been living on for weeks. And also there was the blotched body.
“Just my luck!” this from the sufferer. “I’m always running into something no one ever saw or heard of! Although this is something like the shingles I had on theSophie Sutherland.”
Dr. Cooper left some medicine, and later his filled prescription came from a druggist, to relieve the torturing burn. Meantime I kept up a steady changingof cool, wet cloths on the warped legs, while Jack’s “It can’t last forever!” was the best cheer under the circumstances, until the blotches began to subside and the throat could swallow grateful drafts of cold water, and a supper of long, iced poi-cocktail—“Such beneficent stuff,” he dwelt upon it.
You! All whiteskins who would learn Ford’s rejuvenescent royal sport, take warning that the “particular star” which illumes our world, despite its insidiousness, is particularly ardent in Hawaiian skies.
Pearl Lochs, June 6.
Home in our Dream Harbor, after a full week away. The burning hours at Waikiki were beguiled with cool cloths and reading aloud, Jack taking his turn when I grew nervous with my own distressed cuticle and an aching ear from diving. Out of his grip of varied reading matter, he had selected Lilian Bell’s “The Under Side of Things”—I wonder if with reference to his fried-and-turned-over condition! A Bulletin reporter lightened a half hour in an interview upon our unplotted future around the globe, and told us that our erstwhile sailing master, leaving yesterday for the Coast on theSierra, had given the impression that he considered theSnarkunsafe.
“He built her!” was Jack’s only comment.
“And sailed over two thousand miles in her,” the newspaper man grinned.
On Tuesday, waiving all discussion, Jack got into his clothing, the operation (not an unappropriate word) accompanied by running commentary on things as they were, which would be both interesting and instructive in a biographical sense, did one dare the editorial censor. Neither of us was this day “admirin’ how the world was made,” and my widest sympathywas with his fevered sentiments concerning astronomy, geology, the starry hereafter, mid-Pacific watering places—and Alexander-Hume-Fords.
“But I warned you, and warned you!” fended poor Ford, suppressing a snicker as the fervid cripple, now on his feet, essayed a step or two. “And you’re luckier than I was the first time I got burned—worse than you are—and by mistake used capsicum vaseline!—And anyway, I really did think you had become toughened a bit on your month at sea.”
With stiff-crooked legs, for he could neither unbend nor further bend the knees, and feet pitched some twenty inches apart, Jack’s action was perforce unlike that of any known biped. So enamored did he become of the wonder of it that he insisted upon employing it to progress to the lanai for luncheon, where his most pitying acquaintances failed to keep back their mirth. Be assured he enjoyed it all as much as they, for the lessening hurt made him very happy. An hour face-downward on the beach that fateful afternoon had not improved my own carriage, but I was not unwilling to risk it on a short trip along Kalakaua Avenue to the Aquarium, which Jack, from his memories, had pronounced a world-wonder. In the cool many-roomed grotto, built of quarried lava, we forgot all earthly dole, spellbound before the incredible forms and colors of the sentient rainbows.
It is impossible to communicate an adequate idea of these color organisms. If an object could be laughably lovely, any one of these fish would serve; Striped Roman scarf effects showed behind the glass as if in a shop window display; polka-dot patterns in color schemes beyond imagining; against the crystal lay figured designs that manufacturers would make no mistake in copying. And all were possessed of an iridescent quality that made one expect them to meltinto the shifting greens of their element, as they faded into the farther spaces of the tanks. But presently they would intensify, coming on larger and brighter like marine headlights in Elfland.
One fish was an aquatic bird-of-paradise for hues, with a long spine like an aigrette springing from midway of a body almost as round as a coin and not much larger, with golden-brown beak and bold black eye. His name was the kihi-kihi. The hinaleanukuiwi was a turquoise-blue, five-inch shuttle, terminating in a peacock-blue wisp of tail, with fins like ruffles tipped with stripes of yellow and black, and a long blue needle for beak. The fins back of and below its beaded eyes were tiny azure butterflies striped two ways with purple and gold; and on each side the turquoise body a splotch of opaque gold rested like a sunbeam. Around this bright blue marvel slowly wove one of magenta as vivid, and half as long, of familiar shape but with the bulging eye of a frog shaded by a thick ruby lid, two pale-pink fins shaped like center-boards, and a dorsal fin carrying five smartly raked masts.
The kikakapu did not look his bristly name, being a mere shapeless handful of pigments—green as a parrot, with birdlike head of harlequin opal and parrot eye of black and yellow. Half of the dorsal was a black-velvet spot rimmed with gold, his tail two shades of gray with a root of scarlet. I have not patience to spell the name of an almost perfect oval of blue black, with a flaming autumn leaf on each side, a narrow dorsal of shaded rose and salmon-yellow bearing a dotted line of red, and a gray and red flag for tail, while two sapphire-blue feathers trailed underneath. Next him flaunted a bright yellow fish that had patently been scissored midlength and grown a stiff mauve tail in the middle of its vertical rear, to match a mauve-velvet, long-beaked face. A canary-wing formed this one’sdorsal fin, and two absurd back-slanted spikes and a ribby trailer decorated its horizontal base.
The opule and the luahine were both meant to be normally formed,—the first, speckled on top like a mountain trout, its frills red and black and blue, jaw crimson spotted, with grass-green gills and tiny gilt fins, and on its dark sides three parallel rows of larger dots, and one dropped below, of startling blue, each with an electric light behind! The second, all brown save for a scarlet headlight on the tall dorsal, was similarly lit up, all over, fins as well, the head zigzagged with lightning streaks of the same electric blue. The akilolo wore cold blue jewels on plum satin, with electric-green stripes on its head, crimson and green fins and sharply demarked rudder of yellow.
One lovely thing would have been a little heart of gold, if its white-and-gilt tail had not transformed it into a prefect ace of spades. Another, modestly fashioned, bore pink fins socketed in emerald like the head and tail, a yellow stomach, seal-brown back, with three broad downward bands of the emerald joining a wide lateral band of the same, decorated in hollow squares of indigo! There were also dainty mother-of-pearl forms, and gorgeous autumnal petals of the ocean drifting among the jeweled swimming creatures, with little rainbow crabs lying on the bottom of sand and shells, and other crannied creatures.
An imaginative child could spin unending day dreams about these living pictures in the Honolulu Aquarium; and for nightmares, there be excellent specimens of the octopus family. These squid we have on the Pacific Coast, but there is no way of observing them. Mr. Potter, the superintendent, said his were unusually active to-day, and we saw them displaying all their paces—a very useful spectacle for those who may venture among the more unfrequented coral hummocks atWaikiki. A wader can be made very uncomfortable by their ugly ability to attach to a rock and a victim at one and the same time. They showed their fighting colors through the glass, coming straight at us, their little devil’s-heads set with narrow serpent-eyes glinting maliciously, and sharp turtle-beaks; all their tentacles—awful constricting arms covered with awful suckers—cast behind in the lightning dart.
When attacked, the squid opens an “ink bag,” fouling the water to the confusion of its enemy. A native in trouble with one bites its head, and to such mortal wound the pediculate marine dragon gives up the ghost. The only thing about the squid that is not unpleasant is its color—in action a rosy tan; but when curled in the rock crevices, protective tinting makes it hard to find. Mr. Potter dropped some tiny crabs into the tank from behind the scenes which caused an exhibition not soon to be forgotten. The almost invisible squid, watching with one bright eye, unwreathed its eight flexile, trailing limbs, rose swiftly, swooped, and enfolded the prey as with a swirl of grey net or veiling. When the monster presently unwound, the mites of crabs had been absorbed.
“And the Creator sat up nights inventing that,” Jack observed with sacrilegious gravity. The superintendent looked appropriately startled, but not unappreciative.
This Honolulu Aquarium, though small, is said to surpass in the beauty of its exhibit anything in the world, not excepting the Italian; and fancy our surprise to learn that it is not maintained by the Territory, nor yet by the city, existing solely by the enterprise of the electric railway company. The “colored” fish are recruited from the chance catch of fishermen and from adjacent reefs by the Aquarium attendants. It is not easy to understand why Honolulu remainsluke-warm with regard to this, one of her greatest attractions. Mr. Ford should be spoken to about it!
Hawaii is a paradise for the visiting fisherman, where can be hooked anything from a shark to small fry of various sorts, whether “painted” or otherwise. Among the many game fish may be named black sea bass, barracuda in schools, albacore, dolphin, swordfish, yellow-tail, amber fish, leaping tuna and several other kinds of tuna—these of unthinkable weight and size. And flying fish may be picked off with rifle or shotgun—or netted, as by the old Hawaiians.[4]
Ever keen on the trail of Why and Wherefore, Jack has left no stone of research unturned as to the cause of the violent swelling that succeeded his sunburning, and has finally diagnosed it as urticaria.
Glad are we to rest once more in our Sweet Home, in sight of that bright reminder of the long voyage yet to be, theSnarkand her unwonted clatter of active repairs. For a Captain Rosehill has accepted the commission, and “dry bones are rattling,” as Jack chuckled a moment ago from the hammock. The sad old sea-dog has taken hold with a vengeance, but professes little respect for all the modern “fol-de-rol of gewgaws” that he found lying around, costly labor-saving gear, unavailing only because of the ruinous mishandling it received in the post-earthquake days of building. But standing with huge, limp-hanging arms, healmosthalf-smiled at our big sea anchor—an article he has always yearned to possess. Clearly it is the one thing aboard with which he is satisfied.
Jack finds endless source of amusement in his skipper and the irrepressible Schwank, who, it seems, once sailed together. The experience evidently has notendeared one to the other, and all our gravity is taxed when the pair display their divergent ways of showing dislike and contempt. Rosehill is a man of few words; but words are not needed when Schwank’s name is mentioned. The sound of that raucous proper noun curdles the old sailor’s sober and asymmetrical features. On the other hand, Schwank is voluble and expressive. Never in his wildest tales of that ill-starred voyage with Rosehill has he hinted that he was ship’s cook under Rosehill. When he recounts how the vessel was wrecked, one would conclude that Schwank had been in command instead of the other, and, in giving this intentional twist, he loses sight of the fact that it looks much as if he, Schwank, must be responsible for the loss. “I told Rosehill to brace up,” he will roar pompously, throwing a mighty chest. He always appears about to rise triumphant from the solid earth. Nor has he lost all of his piratical tendencies. From his acre of fruitful soil, he sells produce at extortionate prices, and is clever enough to vend the same through his most beautiful offspring. When Maria-of-the-Seraph-Smile or Ysabel-of-the-Divine-Gaze stands before me in the very artistry of colorful and revealing tatters, proffering a scraggly pineapple or an abortive tomato, valued at Israelitic sums, they are not to be gainsaid. The pleasure is mine to be robbed.
Pearl Lochs, June 7.
When you come to Hawaii, do not fail to visit one of the big sugar plantations, to see the working of this foremost industry of the Territory, for nowhere in the world has it been brought to such perfection. Mr. Ford had arranged a trip to the Ewa Plantation, a short distance by rail southwest of the Lochs. With him came a young South African millionaire, who wasmuch more bent upon discussing socialism with Jack London than inspecting sugar mills—although in the varied nationalities among the laborers he might find a rare mine of sociological data.
The railroad traverses a level of country dotted with pretty villages peopled by imported human breeds. In my mind’s eye lingers one wee hamlet like a jewel in the sun—a cluster of little Portuguese shacks covered with brilliant flowering vines and hedged with scarlet hibiscus, all imaged in an unrippled stream that brimmed even with its green banks. Not for nothing were these sunny-blooded children of Portugal blessed with wide and beautiful eyes; for they can see no virtue in a dwelling that is not surrounded and entwined with living color. No matter how squalid their circumstance, they do not rest until growing things begin to weave a covering of beauty. The tourist could not please himself more than by hunting out these adoptive spots of color in Hawaii.
Our station was in the center of the Plantation, which embraces about 5,000 acres. It was the far-sighted sire of Princess Kawananakoa, Mr. Campbell, who only ten years ago bought this property for one dollar an acre. Last year its output of sugar was over 29,000 tons. One alone of the underground pumping plants which we wandered through, cost $180,000; and every day 70,000,000 gallons of water are pumped on this Plantation.
The manager devoted his day to our party. It must be more or less of a satisfaction, however, to a man of his patent capabilities, lord over the complicated affairs of such a project and its horde of workers, to display his achievement to men who can comprehend its enormousness and possibilities.
In comfortable chairs on a flat car drawn by a small locomotive, over a network of tracks that intersect theproperty, we rode from point to point, meanwhile simmering gently in the moist hot air thick with odor of growing cane, or, near the huge mill, of sugar in the making. The land reminded us of Southern California in springtime, with tree-arbored roads and flower-drifted banks and fine irrigating ditches. We want to spend a day on horseback at Ewa, in the lanes and byways with their lovely vistas. Judging from Mr. Renton’s own leisurely enjoyment of the occasion and frequent halting of the car that we might gather wildflowers and wild red tomatoes the size of cranberries, one would not have dreamed how busy a man he is.
It is hard, in the peaceful heart of this agricultural prospect, to realize that not long ago it was a place dark with pain and blood and terror. For here, a hundred and eleven years ago, Kamehameha the Great dedicated a temple,heiau, with human sacrifices, preparatory to sailing for Kauai on conquest bent.
Sugar cane is classified as a “giant perennial grass,” but, unlike most members of the grass family, has solid stems, and grows from eight to twenty feet high. The origin of cane in these islands is unknown though it is thought to have been introduced from the South Sea Islands by early native navigators in their exploring canoes. It was used as an article of diet at the time white men first set foot in Hawaii, but not made into sugar until about 1828; and less than a decade afterward the first exportation of sugar was shipped. Primitive stone or wooden rollers pressed out the sweet juice, which was boiled in crude iron vessels. Present-day processes have been brought to a high state of scientific excellence, and probably no plant in the world has been so exhaustively exploited. The red lava soil, decomposed through the ages, has been found through experimentation to be the mostproductive, and the irrigation scheme of one of these large plantations, with its artesian wells and mountain reservoirs whence water is carried great distances, is a colossal feat of engineering.
A man once wrote that agriculture in the tropics consisted of not hindering the growth of things. But the raising and converting into sugar of these vast areas of rustling sugar-in-the-stem is not such smooth luck, for either employer or employed. He who would manufacture sugar has many formidable if infinitesimal foes to success, among which are named the nimble leaf hopper, the cane borer, the leaf roller, the mole cricket, the mealy bug, the cypress girdler, and Fisher’s rose beetle, known locally as the Olinda bug. To discover the natural enemies of these pests requires an able corps of entomologists seeking over the face of the globe, as well as working sedulously in the Experiment Station in Honolulu.
The mill, with its enormous processes, I shall not attempt to describe further than to assure that it is a place of breathless interest and wonder. One sees and tastes the sugar in its successive phases of manufacture, up to the point where it is shipped to the States for the last stage of refining.
And more absorbing than these technicalities of the Plantation were the human races represented among the workers who live and labor, are born, married, and die within its confines. Through a bewilder of foreign villages we wandered on foot—Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Porto Rican; even the Russians were here but lately. One cannot fail to note the scarcity of Hawaiian laborers—and rejoice in it, for they are proud and free creatures, and it would seem pity to bind them on their own soil. On the other hand, there is no gainsaying that they are capable toilers whenthey will. Indeed, it is said that they accomplish twice the work that a Japanese is willing to do in a day; but following pay day the Hawaiian is likely not to appear again until all his money is gloriously squandered. He is strong and trustworthy, and makes an excellent overseer, orluna, as well as teacher; for he is not merely imitative, but intelligent in applying what he has learned.
We were led into schools and kindergartens maintained for the scores of children, and presided over for the most part by white women. In one room there was a Japanese-Hawaiian teacher—a sweet and maidenly young thing, her Nipponese strain lending an elusive delicacy to the round warm native features. In faultless English she explained the duties of her schoolroom, showing great pride in a sewing class then in session, and pointing through the window to where the boys of her class could be seen putting the yard to rights.
I thought we could never leave the kindergartens, with their engaging babies of endless colors and variety of lineaments, pure types and crossbred. Most beautiful of all were the Portuguese, with only one drawback to their childish charm—the grave maturity of their faces. Bella, however, two-years-tiny, golden-eyed and gold-tawny of skin, forgot her temperamental soberness and coquetted shamelessly from an absurd chair in the circle on the bright floor, when she should have been attending to Teacher. But even Bella came to grief. Like some other coquettes she was winningly familiar at a distance; but when I tried to cultivate a closer acquaintance with the young pomegranate blossom, and take a picture of her loveliness, she fell victim to a panic of embarrassment and terror that ended in violent weeping in Teacher’s lap.
Homeward bound, it seemed as if we had been transported to and from a foreign land for the day, though what land was the problem, in view of the manifold types we had walked among.
In the soft black evening, some of our neighbors drifted across the yielding turf beneath the ancient trees, the women taking form in the velvet dark like tall spirit vestals trailing dim draperies and swirling incense. We lay in the cool grass, the lighted ends of our scented punks flitting and darting like fireflies, and listened to Peer Gynt from the Victor indoors, and Mascagni’s orchestral paradises of sound, Patti’s rippling treble, and Emma Eames’s clear fluting of “Still as the Night,” floating upward to the sighing obligato of a rising wind from across the rustling reef-waters.
Sweet land of palms and peace, love and song—and yet, those who knew her in days gone by would walk sadly now in remembered haunts. Old faces are missing, and faces resembling them are few. The Hawaii of yesterday passes, and it makes even the stranger pensive to see the changing. To one who views her from the height of his heart, a bright commercial future is cold compensation for the irreplaceable loss of the old Hawaii.
Pearl Lochs, June 11.
A bit of real Hawaii was ours last night—Hawaii as she is, with more than a trace of what she has been. It came about through an invitation from one of our neighbors, who owns the cemetery near Pearl City, to accompany his wife and himself to a nativeluau(loo-ah-oo—quickly, loo-ow), meaning feast. And a luau becomes ahookupuwhen the guests bring the food. We four were the only white guests, for in these latter days the natives are chary of includingforeigners in their more intimate entertainments. But for our friend’s confidential and sympathetic relation toward them, nothing would have induced them to consent to our intrusion.
The feast was a sort of “benefit,” given at the christening of the baby of one “Willie,” this being a familiar custom among the people. Mr. Willie and his pretty, giggly wife were in a small frenzy of hospitality and diffidence at receiving a man who writes books, and ran out to the gate calling “Come in! Come in! Come in!” in rapid sweet staccato.
We should have preferred to remain in the garden of palms and flowers. But we were ushered to the cottage, where one glance into the hot little parlor, fainting with heavy-scented bouquets, every window sealed tight as if in a New England winter, taught us that this was the pride of their simple, generous lives, with its neat furniture and immaculate “tidies” on chair, sofa, and exact center-table. Head and neck and shoulders, we were garlanded with ropes of buff ginger blossoms twined with mailé, and sat around straight-backed in delighted discomfort, praying for fans. Admiring the handsome slumbering infant who was the object and beneficiary of the festival, we strove the while to express to our host and hostess how glad and honored we felt to be with them.
From the cool twilight lanai floated in the most bewitching, sleepy, sensuous music, rippled through with gurgles of lazy laughter. Presently, left to wander at will, whom should we discover in the happy huddle of musicians but Madame Alapai herself, not at all the grand prima of her Prince’s park, but a benevolent, smiling wahine, robed simply like all the rest in spotless white holoku, and unaffectedly ready, once her sudden, laughing bashfulness was conquered, to warble anything and everything she knew.
The coyness of these winsome brown women is only skin deep, for to smiles and sincerity they warm and unfold like their own tropic blossoms to the morning sun. Deliciously they laugh at everything or nothing, with an abandon that does not tire, but draws the becharmed malihini fervently to wish he were one of them for the nonce—a product of sunshine and dew and affection, without painful responsibility, with no care but the living, loving present.
Madame Alapai accompanied the first American tour of the Royal Hawaiian Band. The story runs that she was prepared to go on the second, but her husband, jealous of her successes and advantages, decided he needed a change of air and scene, and made the manager of his song-bird a proposition the prompt rejection of which cost the band its prima donna. His amiable suggestion was that he travel with the troupe and be paid a salary for the honor of his mere company, since he possessed no marketable talent. It seemed enough to his limited vision that he should allow his wife to earnhersalary. Be it credited the lady that the facts were made public without her assistance, for she remains guiltless of shaming her life-companion by ridicule or criticism. When asked why she did not go to the Coast the second time, she replies, with a slightly lofty air that is without offense, what of its childlikeness: “Oh, they wanted me to go, but I refused.”
She sang for us without reserve, out of her very good repertory. Her voice is remarkable, and I never heard another of its kind, for it is more like a stringed instrument than anything I can think of—metallic, but sweetly so, pure and true as a lark’s, with falls and slurs that are indescribably musical and human. The love-eyed men and women lounging about her with their guitars and ukuleles, garlanded with droopingroses and carnations and ginger, were commendably vain of showing off their first singer in the land, and thrummed their loveliest to her every song. None can waken strings as do these people. Their fingers bestow caresses to which wood and steel and cord become sentient and tremulously responsive.
The ukulele, with its petite guitar-shape, and four slender strings, seems a part of the Hawaiian at every merrymaking. It hailed originally from Portugal, but one seldom remembers this, so native has it become to the Islands. Primitive Hawaiians played on a crude little affair that was a mere stick from the wood of theulei, a flowering indigenous shrub. The tuneful stick was cut eighteen or twenty inches long and three or four wide, strung across with gut, and was held in the teeth like a Jew’s harp, while the strings were swept with a fine grass-straw. Lovers thus whispered through their teeth an understood language of longing and trysting, the light wood vibrating the voice to some distance in the still night.
From temporary arbors broke the clatter of busy wahines making ready the feast, and new guests laughed their way into the garden. Our nostrils twitched to unknown but appetizing odors. We expected as a matter of course that we should be invited to sit cross-legged on grass-mats, and were disappointed to find a table prepared for the more distinguished of the company.
At every place was a heap of food so attractive that one did not know which mysterious packet to open first. Each diner had at least a quart of poi, of the approved royal-pink tint, in a big shiny goblet carved from a coconut thinned and polished and scalloped around the brim, and this substance as usual formed the pièce de résistance. There are varying consistencies of poi. The “one-finger” poi is thick enough toadmit of a mouthful being twirled at one twirl upon the forefinger; two-fingered poi is thinner, requiring two digits to carry the required portion. I do not know whether or not three-fingered poi is ever exceeded; but if it is, I am sure no true Hawaiian or kamaaina would hesitate to apply his whole fist to it.
It is etiquette to sample every delicacy forthwith, rather than to finish any one or two until all have been tasted. And we depended solely upon our fingers in place of forks and spoons. A twist of poi on the forefinger is conveyed neatly to the lips, followed by a pinch of salt salmon, for seasoning, or of hot roast fish or beef or fowl steaming in freshly opened leaf-wrappings; for this is the incomparable way roast foods are prepared, then laid in the ground among heated stones, and covered with earth. Thus none of the essential flavor is liberated until the clean hot leaves of the ti-plant, or the canna in absence of the ti, are removed at table.
There was also chicken stewed in coconut milk, sweet and tasty; for relishes, outlandish forms of sea-life, particularly theopihis(o-pe-hees), salt and savory, which we may come to prefer to raw oysters. Mullet is eaten raw, cut in tempting little gray cubes and dusted with coarse red salt. Jack pronounced it one of his favorite articles of diet henceforth. I may in time acquire a liking for well-seasoned raw fish, which in all logic is less offensive than live raw oysters and squirming razor-back clams; but fairly certain am I that never shall I assimilateake(ah-kay)—which is raw liver and chile peppers.
Small crabs,alemihi, were very good, and pinkish round tidbits from squid tentacles; to say nothing of some little parboiled lobsters.