Chapter VII: Part THREE (4)

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 native _luau_ (loo-ah-oo—quickly, loo-ow), meaning feast. And a luau becomes a _hookupu_ when the guests bring the food. We four were the only white guests, for in these latter days the natives are chary of including foreigners 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 earn _her_ salary. 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 drooping roses 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 the _ulei_, 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 to admit 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 the _opihis_ (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 assimilate _ake_ (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.

One toothsome accompaniment to a Hawaiian meal is the _kukui_, or candlenut (_Aleurites Moluccana_). Its meat is baked and crushed, then mixed with native salt. Pinches of this relish, called _i-na-mo-na_, are taken with poi and other viands, and it is sometimes stirred in to season a mess of raw mullet. The kukui tree, a comparatively recent introduction from the South Seas, has nearly as many uses as the coconut palm, for aside from the gustatory excellence of its nut, a gum from the bark is valuable, and a dye found in the nut shell was formerly used to paint the intricate patterns of the tapa that served for clothing. This dye also formed a waterproofing for tapa cloaks, and with it tattoo artists drew fashionable designs into the flesh of their patrons, who also rubbed their bodies with oil pressed from the nut, especially in making them slippery for wrestling and fighting. The nuts strung on the midrib of a coconut leaf formed the Hawaiians’ only torch. The oil of the nut, expressed under pressure, is a valuable paint oil.

For the drinking we were given choice of a mild beer and “pop” (soda-water of various colors), and coconut water in the shell; and for dessert, the not unpleasant anti-climax of good old vanilla ice cream to remind us that Hawaii has long been in the grasp of Jack’s “inevitable white man.”

Next came the dancing. Mr. Moore had promised us a hula; but a hula, except by professional dancers, is more easily promised than delivered. The native must be in the precise right humor before any performance is forthcoming for the malihini. Our pleasant task was to overcome the shyness that whelmed both Kanakas and wahines when we coaxed them to show their paces. Few, very likely, had ever danced before strangers. Indeed, for the most part, the hula is frowned upon by haole residents. And the majority of these were simple rural folk with a terror of wrong-doing. I think the Hawaiians are quick to detect a meretricious gayety or any patronizing, overdone familiarity; and to make them feel one’s genuine interest in their customs is the only means by which to establish a basis of confidence. Left to themselves, they will dance anywhere at any time. Tochigi witnessed his first hula on Toby’s train! He did not comment upon it; but after seeing Americans dance, each couple following its own method, he had respectfully observed that he thought we danced more for our own pleasure than for that of onlookers.

At length a bolder or more persuadable spirit, yearning to express the real general desire to please, broke through the crust of reserve and began a series of convolutions to the endless two-step measure of guitars and ukuleles that during the luau had throbbed in a leafy corner of the grass shelter.

Arch faces lighted, hands clapped and feet beat time, eyes and teeth flashed in the dim light of lanterns and lamps, and flower-burdened shoulders swung involuntarily to the rhythm. One after another added the music of his throat to an old hula that has never seen printer’s ink, while the violin threnody of the Alapai raised the plaintive, savage lilt to something incommunicably high and haunting.

Jack seemed in a trance, his eyes like stars, while his broad shoulders swayed to the measure. Discovering my regard, caught in his emotion of delight in this pregnant folk dance and song, he did not smile, but half-veiled his eyes as he laid a hand on mine in token of acknowledgment of my comprehension of his deep mood. For in every manifestation of human life, he goes down into the tie ribs of racial development, as if in eternal quest to connect up the abysmal past with the palpable present.

A pause, full of murmurs and low laughter, then a strapping young wahine with the profile of Diana seized an old guitar. With a shout to another girl to get on her feet, she leaned over and swept the strings masterfully with the backs of her fingers, at the same time setting up a wanton, thrilling hula song that was a love cry in the starlight, each repeated phrase ending in a fainting, crooning, tremulous falsetto which trailed into a vanishing wisp of sound. She could not sit quietly, but swung her body and lissom limbs in rhythm like a wild thing possessed, seeming to galvanize the dancers by sheer force of will, for one by one they sprang to the bidding of her voice and magnetic fingers, into the flickering light where they swayed and bent and undulated like mad sweet nymphs and fauns. Now and again a brown sprite separated from the moving group, and came to dance before the haole guests, the dance a provocation to join the revelry. Sometimes the love appeal was unmistakable, accompanied by singing words we wotted not of, but which were the cause of good-natured merriment from the others. Then abruptly the performer would become impersonal in face and gesture, and melt back into the weaving group.

After a while the dancing lagged, and we sensed it was time to relieve these kind people of our more or less restraining presence. They had done so much, and to wear out such welcome would have been a crime against good heart and manners.

Having neglected to ask the obliging Tony to wait his dummy, down the track we footed, listening to small noises of the night, among which was the sighing of water buffalo, those grotesque gray shapes that patiently toil by day in the rice fields.

Pearl Lochs, June 14.

At luncheon to-day Miss Johnson introduced us to a girl from Maine, and it was a unique experience to sit in the hot-house air, gazing out upon the hot-house vegetation, the while we conversed in “down-east” colloquialisms. “Did you see her jump at the sound of that falling leaf!” Jack laughed on the way home, for the young stranger had been not the only one startled when a twenty-foot frond let go its parent palm and crashed to earth.

Our captain of the roseate name is painting the _Snark_, and she floats, a boat of white enamel, in the still blue and silver of the morning flood; while for frame to the fair picture a painted double-rainbow overarches, flinging the misty fringes of its ends in our enraptured faces. From the shell-pink dawn, through the green and golden day, to sunset and purple twilight and starshine, we move in beauty. “What a lot of people must have been shanghaied here by their own desire!” Jack ruminates. And truly, Hawaii is sufficient excuse for never going home.

One of our pleasures, of a Sunday, is watching the yachts from Honolulu sail into Pearl Harbor and slant about on the crisping water, for a look at the _Snark_. Last Sunday came a corps of young engineers from the Iron Works, who had offered to give their holiday for the fellow who wrote “The Game” and “The Sea Wolf.” Jack was much touched; and especially pleased at the tribute to “The Game,” which novel is a favorite of his own.

Last evening we had opportunity again to come in contact with the Hawaiians, receiving a party in our sylvan drawing- and music-room. Miss Johnson had told us that Judge Hookano (Ho-o-kah-no), the native district judge at Pearl City, wished to bring his wife to call. To our prompt invitation they responded with the large immediate family as well as more distant relatives. One of these, who dislikes Americans, during a conversation with Miss Johnson concerning the Londons, remarked: “Oh, yes, the English are always very nice.” “But the Londons are American—very American!” Miss Johnson straightened her out. However, the dusky lady was cordial enough when our meeting took place, as were all the party. The Judge proved an intelligent and kindly soul, and Mrs. Hookano whom we had long admired at a distance, is a magnificently proportioned woman with the port of a queen, always attired in stately lines of black lawn or silk.

None of our visitors had heard Hawaiian music on the phonograph and clapped their shapely hands over the hulas like joyous children. But those merry hands folded devoutly when the Trinity Choir voices rose on the night air, and all joined in singing the harmonies of “Lead, Kindly Light” and the several other beautiful hymns. The spirit of these folk is so sweet, so guileless; I know I shall love them forever. Manners among them are gentle and considerate, so courteous in every conventional observance, prompted by their simple, affectionate hearts. Hookano means _proud_, and these who bear the name demonstrate a blending of pride and gentlehood that is altogether aristocratic.

While Jack manipulated the talking-machine, I lay happily with head in a friendly lap, while satin-brown fingers caressed face and hair; looking high through the lacy foliage to where big stars hung like bright fruit in the branches. Jack ended the machine-made concert with the Hawaiian National Anthem, and the Judge removed his hat and stood, the others rising about him. Then we cajoled them into contributing their own music, and after some hesitation, untinged by the faintest unwillingness, they settled dreamily to singing their melodies—brown velvet maids with laughing, shining eyes, who warbled in voices thin and penetrating as sweet zither-strings, softly, as if afraid to vex the calm night with greater volume.

At parting we walked to the gate, arms around the shoulders of our new friends, their own Aloha nui on our lips. And every aloha spoken or sung in Hawaii is the tender tone-fall of a dying bell, tolling for the olden Hawaii Nei.

Then, arms-around, we two paced back across the grass, and stood for a moment on the edge of our bewitching garden, looking at the slender sliver of a new moon of good omen dipping low above the shadowy hills.

Waikiki, June 25.

Once more in the tent-cottage at Waikiki, as the hub for many spokes of exploration in the Islands. I mistrust we shall never again pursue the idyllic life of the peninsula. Unfortunately, no way has been devised to live in two or more places simultaneously—except in the imagination, and that we can richly do. Artemus Ward is responsible for the delicious paradox: “No man can be in two places at once unless he is a bird.”

Many jaunts are in prospect: an automobile journey around Oahu; a yacht race girdling the same island, on which “Wahine Kapu,” no woman, is writ large upon the visages of the yachtsmen; a torchlight fishing expedition fifty miles distant with Prince Cupid, under the same no-petticoat mandate; a wonderful trip to Maui, to camp through the greatest extinct crater in the world, Haleakala, said to surpass Ætna in extent and elevation; and Jack has been deftly pulling wires to bring about a visit for us both to the famous Leper Settlement on Molokai, which is said to occupy one of the most beautiful sites in the Islands. Lucius E. Pinkham, president of the Board of Health, has been our guest to dinner, and not only has he put no obstacles in our way, but appears anxious for us to see Molokai. There has been considerable misrepresentation of the Settlement, and he evidently believes that Jack will paint a just picture. Mr. Pinkham seems to have the welfare of the lepers close at heart; and I have heard that when he fails to obtain from the Government certain appropriations for improvements, he draws on his own funds.

Thus, the air is brimful of glamour and interest, which helps to offset a tender regret for the lovely Lochs and for our neighbors who have been so lavish in neighborliness. One night before we departed, the Hookano young folk arranged a crabbing party, and sang the hours away under the light of a half-moon; another time, at sunset, we fished off the lee shore of the peninsula, where we landed a mess of “colored fish” like a flock of wet butterflies.

Here at the Beach life is so gay there is hardly chance to sleep and work, what with arrivals of transports and the ensuing frivolities in the hotel lanai, varied by swimming and surf-boarding under sun and moon. One fine day we essayed to ride the breakers in a Canadian canoe, and capsized in a wild smoker exactly as we had been warned. I stayed under water such a time that Jack, alarmed, came hunting for me; but I was safe beneath the overturned canoe, which I was holding from bumping my head. He was so relieved to find me unhurt and capable of staying submerged so long that promptly he read me a lecture upon swimming as fast as possible from a capsized boat, to avoid being struck in event of succeeding rollers flinging it about.

One night we attended a moonlight swimming party at a seaside home and became acquainted with more of the white Islands’ kamaainas. A lovely custom prevails here among the owners, who, in absences abroad, allow friends the use of their suburban places for occasions of this kind. Across the hedges we peeped into the next garden where, in the smother of scented foliage, there still lurks the house Robert Louis Stevenson once occupied.

After a military dance at the hotel last evening, tables were carried out on the lawn to the sands-edge, where supper was served by silent, swift Japanese in white. It was like a dream, there among the trees hung with soft rosy lights, our eyes sweeping the horizon touched by a low gold disk of moon, and on across the effervescing foam of an ebbing tide at our feet, and the white sea horses charging the crescent beach, to Diamond Head purple black against the star-dusted southern sky. “Do you know where you are?” And there was but one answer to Jack’s whisper—“Just Waikiki,” which tells it all. The charm of Waikiki—it is the charm of Hawaii Nei, “All Hawaii.”

June 28.

To Mr. Ford we owe a new debt of gratitude. And so does Hawaii, for such another promoter never existed. All he does is for Hawaii, desiring nothing for himself except the pleasure of sharing the attractions of his adopted land. The past two days have been spent encircling Oahu, or partly so, since only the railroad continues around the entire shore-line, the automobile drive cutting across a tableland midway of the island. Oahu comprises an area of 598 square miles, is trapezoidal in shape, its coast the most regular of any in the group. Another notable feature is that it possesses two distinct mountain chains, Koolau and Waianae, whereas the other islands have isolated peaks and no distinct ranges. Waianae is much the older of the two. The geology of this volcanic isle is a continual temptation to diverge.

Two machines carried ten of us, including the drivers. The party was composed of men whom Mr. Ford wanted Jack to know, representing the best of Hawaii’s white citizenship. There was Mr. Joseph P. Cooke, dominating figure of Alexander & Baldwin, which firm is the leading financial force of the Islands (it was Mr. Cooke’s missionary grandparents, the Amos P. Cookes, who founded and for many years conducted what was known as the “Chiefs’ School,” afterward called the “Royal School,” which was patronized by all of the higher chiefs and their families); Mr. Lorrin A. Thurston, also descended from the first missionaries, and associated conspicuously with the affairs of Hawaii, both monarchical and republican—and incidentally owner of the morning paper; and Senor A. de Souza Canavarro, Portuguese Consul, an able man who has lived here twenty years and whose brain is shelved with Islands lore.

The world was all dewy cool and the air redolent with flowers when, after an early dip in the surf, we glided down Kalakaua Avenue between the awakening duck ponds with their lily pads and grassy partitions. Leaving the center of town by way of Nuuanu Avenue, along which an electric car runs for two miles, we headed for the storied heights of the Pali (precipice), and presently began climbing between converging mountains to the pass through the Koolau Range. This Nuuanu Valley is a wondrous residence section, of old-fashioned white mansions of by-gone styles of architecture, still wearing their stateliness like a page in history. The dwellers therein are cooled by every breeze—not to mention frequent rains. It is a humorous custom for a resident to say, “I live at the first shower,” or the second shower, or even the third, according to his distance from moister elevations in the city limits. The rainfall in upper Nuuanu, and Manoa, the next valley to the southeast, is from 140 inches to 150 inches annually. In lower Nuuanu—only three or four miles distant—it averages around 30-35 inches. Many of these old houses stand amidst expansive lawns, the driveways columned with royal palms—the first brought to the Islands. One white New England house was pointed out as having been the country home of Queen Emma, bought with its adjoining acres by the Government and turned into a public park. The building contains some of the Queen’s furniture, and other antiques of the period. “The Daughters of Hawaii,” an organization of Hawaii-born women of all nationalities, has the care of the premises.

I promised myself an afternoon in the cemetery, where quaint tombs show through beautiful trees and shrubbery, and where, in the Mausoleum, are laid the bones of the Kamehameha and Kalakaua dynasties. King Lunalilo, who was the last of the Kamehamehas and preceded Kalakaua, rests in a mausoleum at Kawaiahao Church in town.

Up we swung on a smooth road graded along the hillsides, the flanks of the valley drawing together, the violet-shadowed walls of the mountains growing more sheer until they seemed almost to overtop with their clouded heads breaking into morning gold—Lanihuli and Konahuanui rising three thousand feet to left and right. From a keen curve, we looked back and down the green miles we had come, to a fairy white city suffused in blue mist beside a fairy blue sea.

Four miles from the end of the car-track, quite unexpectedly to me, suddenly the car emerged from a narrow defile upon a platform hewn out of the rocky earth, and my senses were momentarily stunned, for the high island had broken off, fallen away beneath our feet to the east and north. Alighting, we pressed against a wall of wind that eternally drafts through the gap, and threading among a score of small pack-mules resting on the way to Honolulu, gained the railed brink of the Pali. In the center of a scene that had haunted me for years, since I beheld it in a painting at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, I looked a thousand feet into an emerald abyss. Over its awful pitch Kamehameha a century ago forced the warriors of the King of Oahu, Kalanikupule—a “legion of the lost ones” whose shining skulls became souvenirs for strong climbers in succeeding generations. Some one pointed to a ferny, bowery spot far below, where Prince Cupid once kept a hunting cabin; but there was now neither trace of it nor of any trail penetrating the dense jungle.

To the left, lying northwest, stretch the perpendicular, inaccessible ramparts of the Koolau Range, which extends the length of the island, bastioned by erosions, and based in rich green slopes of forest and pasture that fall away to alluvial plains fertile with rice and cane, and rippled with green hillocks. Where we stood, a spur of the range bent in a right-angle to the eastward at our back; and off to the right, the great valley is bounded by desultory low hills, amid which an alluring red road winds to Kailua and Waimanalo by the sapphire sea, where we are told the bathing beaches and surf are unsurpassed.

A reef-embraced bay on the white-fringed shore caused me to inquire why Honolulu had not been builded upon this cool windward coast of Oahu, with its opulent and ready-made soil. “Any navigator could tell you that,” Jack chided. “Honolulu was begun when there was no steam, and the lee side of the island was the only safe anchorage for sailing vessels.”

The sun was now burning up the moving mists below, and through opalescent rents and thinning spaces we could trace the ruddy ribbon of road we were to travel. If I had dreamed of the majestic grandeur of these mountains, of the wondrous painted valley to the east, how feebly I should have anticipated other islands until first exploring this one. Jack keeps repeating that he cannot understand why it is not thronged with tourists, and calls it the garden of the world. We have seen nothing like it in America or Europe. And yet Oahu is not generally spoken of as by any means the most beautiful of the Hawaiian Islands. Instead, both residents and visitors rave over the “Garden Isle,” Kauai, the Kona coast of Hawaii and that Big Island’s gulches, the wonders of Maui with its Iao Valley and Haleakala, “The House of the Sun.” What must they all be, say we, if these persons have not been stirred by Windward Oahu!

After clinging spellbound to our windy vantage for half an hour (meanwhile speculating how many times Kalanikupule’s unfortunate army bumped in its headlong fall), we coasted the serpentine road that is railed and reënforced with masonry, fairly hanging to a stark wall for the best part of two miles. I noticed that Mr. Cooke preferred himself to negotiate his car on this blood-tingling descent, until we rounded into the undulating floor of the plain whence we stared abruptly up at the astonishing way we had come, with its retaining walls of cement, some of them four hundred feet in length.

One stands at the base of an uncompromising two-thousand-foot crag, an outjut of the range, and it appears but a few hundred feet to its head. For there is an elusiveness about the atmosphere that makes unreal the sternest palisades, the ruggedest gorges. Everything is as if seen in a mirror that has been dulled by a silver breath. That is it—it is all a reflection—these are mirrored mountains and shall always remain to me like something envisioned in a glass.

I for one was commencing to realize how early I had breakfasted, when the machines turned aside from the road on which we had been running through miles of the Kahuku sugar plantation into a private driveway that led to Mrs. James B. Castle’s sea-rim retreat, The Dunes. Having been called unexpectedly to Honolulu, she had left the manager of the plantation to do the honors, together with a note of apology embodying the wish that we make ourselves at home, and a request that we write in her guest book. After luncheon the men insisted that I inscribe something fitting for them to witness. Warm and tired, I wrote the following uninspired if grateful sentiment:

“With appreciation of the perfect hospitality—and deep regret
that the giver was absent.”

The others followed with their signatures; and when Mr. Ford’s turn came, his eye read what I had written, but his unresting mind must have been wool-gathering, for he scribbled:

“Hoping that every passer-by may be as fortunate.”

A chorus of derision caused him to bend an alarmed eye upon the page, which he carefully scanned, especially my latter phrase. And then out came the page.

We were shown over the labor barracks, neat settlements of Japanese and Portuguese, in which we saw swarms of beautiful children rolling in the grass. The Portuguese flocked around the Consul, who was apparently an old and loved friend.

Several miles farther, we came to the Reform School, where the erring youth of Oahu, largely of native stock, are guided in the way they should go. There was not a criminal face among them, and probably the majority are detained for temperamental laxness of one sort or another. Emotional they are, easily led, and inordinately fond of games of chance—but dishonest never. A small sugar plantation is carried on in connection with the school, which is worked by the boys.

Our last lap was from the Reform School to Haleiwa Hotel, at Waialua, which lies at the sea edge of the Waialua Plantation. Haleiwa means “House Beautiful,” and is pronounced Hah-lay-e-vah. There is so much dissension as to how the “v” sound crept into the “w,” that I am going to retire with the statement that Alexander, in his splendid “History of the Hawaiian People,” remarks that “The letter ‘w’ generally sounds like ‘v’ between the penult and final syllable of a word.”

House and grounds are very attractive, broad lawns sloping to an estuary just inside the beach; and in this river-like bit of water picturesque fishing boats and canoes lie at anchor. A span of rustic Japanese bridge leads to the bath-houses, and thither we went for a swim before dinner. I would not advise beginners to choose this beach for their first swimming lessons. It shelves with startling abruptness, while the undertow is more noticeable than at Waikiki. But for those who can take care of themselves, this lively water is good sport and more bracing than on the leeward coast.

We strolled through the gardens and along green little dams between duck ponds spotted with lily pads, and the men renewed their boyhood by “chucking” rocks into a sumptuous mango tree, bringing down the russet-gold, luscious fruit for an appetizer. I may some day be rash enough to describe the flavor of a mango, or try to; but not yet—though I seem to resent some author’s statement that it bears more than a trace of turpentine.

Leaving Haleiwa next morning, we deserted the seashore for very different country. The motor ascended steadily toward the southwest, on a fine red road—so red that on ahead the very atmosphere was tinged. Looking back as we climbed, many a lovely surf-picture rewarded the quest of our eyes, white breakers ruffling the creamy beaches, with a sea bluer than the deep blue sky.

At an elevation of about eight hundred feet one strikes the rolling green prairieland of the “Plains,” where the ocean is visible northwest and southeast, on two sides of the island. It is a wonderful plateau, between mountain-walls, swept by the freshening northeast trade—miles upon miles of rich grazing, and hill upon hill ruled with blue-green lines of pineapple growth. At one plantation we stopped to look around at the fabulously promising industry. Mr. Kellogg, the manager, gave an interesting demonstration of how simple is the cultivation of the luscious “pines,” and held stoutly that a woman, unaided, could earn a good living out of a moderate patch. The first “pine” plantation in Hawaii was established in Manoa valley, back of Honolulu, by a Devonshire man, Captain John Kidwell. He started in the early ‘80’s with native shoots from the Kona Coast, later importing old stumps from Florida. In 1892 a hundred thousand plants were growing, and the Hawaiian Fruit and Packing Company was established, the second canning industry in Hawaii—fish-canning having been the only other.

Although like prairie seen from a distance, we discovered that this section of Oahu is serrated by enormous gullies, in character resembling our California barrancas, but of vastly greater proportions. A huge dam has been constructed for the purpose of conserving the water for irrigation.

Something went wrong with one of our machines and we were obliged to telephone from Wahiawa to Honolulu for some parts. Think of this old savage isle in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where, from its high interior, one may talk over a wire to a modern city, for modern parts of a “horseless carriage,” to be sent by steam over a steel track! It is stimulating once in a day to ponder the age in which we live.

And on one of these ridges near Wahiawa, not so long ago, there preyed a regular ogre, a robber-chief whose habit it was to lie in wait in a narrow pass, and pounce upon his victims, whom he slew on a large, flat rock, and ate them—the only sure-enough cannibal in Hawaiian history.

June 29.

“Have you been in the Cleghorn Gardens?” is a frequent question to the malihini, and only another way of asking if one has seen the gardens of the late Princess Victoria Kaiulani, lovely hybrid flower of Scottish and Polynesian parentage, daughter of a princess of Hawaii, Miriam Likelike (sister of Liliuokalani and Kalakaua) and the Honorable Archibald Scott Cleghorn. We are too late by twenty years to be welcomed by Likelike, and eight years behind time to hear the merriment of Kaiulani in her father’s house—Kaiulani, who would now be of the same age as Jack London. King Kalakaua died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on January 20, 1891, and when his remains arrived in Honolulu from the U. S. S. _Charleston_ nine days later, and his sister Liliuokalani was proclaimed his successor, the little Princess Kaiulani, their niece, was appointed heir apparent.

The house, Ainahau, is not visible from the Avenue. Here the bereft consort of Likelike lives in solitary state with his servants, amid the relics of unforgotten days. He receives few visitors, and we felt as if breaking his privacy were an intrusion, even though by invitation. But the commandingly tall, courtly Scot, wide brown eyes smiling benevolently under white hair and beetling brows, paced halfway down his palm-pillared driveway in greeting, and led our little party about the green-shady ways of the wonderland of flowers and vines, lily ponds and arbors, “Where Kaiulani sat,” or sewed, or read, or entertained—all in a forest of high interlacing trees of many varieties, both native and foreign. I was most fascinated by a splendid banyan, a tree which from childhood I had wanted to see. This pleased the owner, whose especial pride it is—“Kaiulani’s banyan”; although he is obliged to trim it unmercifully lest its predatory tentacles capture the entire park.

Into nurseries and vegetable gardens we followed him, and real grass huts that have stood untouched for years. Another pride of Mr. Cleghorn’s is his sixteen varieties of hibiscus, of sizes and shapes and tints that we would hardly have believed possible—magic puffs of exquisite color springing like miracles from slender green stems that are often too slight, and snap under the full blossom-weight. Honolulu holds an annual hibiscus exhibition, in which many leading citizens compete.

The portion of the house once occupied by the vanished Princess is never opened to strangers, nor used in any way. Only her father wanders there, investing the pretty suite of rooms with recollection of her tuneful young presence. For she was little over twenty when she died.

But we were made welcome in the great drawing-room, reached by three broad descending steps, walled with rare books, and containing works of art and curios from all the world: old furniture from European palaces that would be the despair of a repulsed collector; tables of lustrous Hawaiian woods fashioned to order in Germany half a century ago; rare oriental vases set upon flare-topped pedestals ingeniously made from inverted tree stumps of native brown _kou_ wood, polished like marble; a quaint and stately concert grand piano; old portraits of royalty, white and dusky; and, most fascinating of all, treasures of Hawaiian courts, among them some of the marvelous feather work. In dim corners, _kahilis_ stand as if on guard—barbaric royal insignia, plumed staffs of state, some of them twice the height of a man. The feathers are fastened at right angles to the pole of shining hardwood, forming a barrel-shaped decoration, somewhat like our hearse-plumes of a past generation. But the kahili is only sometimes of funereal hue, more often flaming in scarlet, or some grade of the rich yellows loved of the Islanders. Originally a fly-brush in savage courts, the kahili progressed in dignity through the dynasties to an indispensable adjunct to official occasions, sometimes exceeding thirty feet in height. To me, it and the outrigger canoe are the most significantly impressive of royal barbaric forms.

Mr. Cleghorn suggested that he could arrange a private audience with Queen Liliuokalani at her residence in town, if we desired. Which reminds me that Jack holds a letter of introduction to her from Charles Warren Stoddard, who knew her in the days of her tempestuous reign. He and Jack have called each other Dad and Son for years, though acquainted only by correspondence. But we have little wish to intrude upon the Queen, for it can be scant pleasure to her to meet Americans, no matter how sympathetic they may be with her changed state.

Upon a carven desk lay open a guest book, an old ledger, in which we were asked to leave our hand. The first name written in this thick tome is that of “Oskar, of Sweden and Norway,” and, running over the yellowed pages, among other notable autographs we read that of Agassiz.

Here, there, and everywhere, in photograph, in oil portraiture, on wall and upon easel, we met the lovely, pale face of Kaiulani, in whose memory her father seems to exist in a mood of adoration. Every event dates from her untimely passing. “When Kaiulani died,” he would begin; or “Since Kaiulani went away,” and “Before Kaiulani left me—” was the burden of his thought and conversation concerning the past of which we loved to hear. Pictures show her to have been a woman compounded of the beauty of her dual races, proud, loving, sensitive, spirituelle, with the characteristic curling mouth and luminous brown eyes of the Hawaiian, looking out wistfully upon a world of pleasure and opportunity that could not detain her frail body. Flower of romance she was—romance that nothing in the old books of South Sea adventuring can rival; her sire, a handsome roving boy ashore from an English ship back in the ’50’s; her mother a dusky princess of the blood royal, who loved the handsome fair-skinned youth and constituted him governor of Oahu under the Crown, that she might with honor espouse him.

And now, the boy, grown old—his Caucasian vitality having survived the gentle Polynesian blood of the wife who brought him laurels in her own land,—having watched the changing administrations of that land for nearly threescore years, abides alone with the shadow of her and of the daughter with the poet brow who did honor to them both by coming into being. To this beloved child-woman, previous to her voyage to England’s Court, Robert Louis Stevenson, living where we peeped into the garden but a few nights gone, sent the following:

[Written in April to Kaiulani in the April of her age; and at
Waikiki, within easy walk of Kaiulani’s banyan! When she comes
to my land and her father’s, and the rain beats upon the window
(as I fear it will), let her look at this page; it will be like
a weed gathered and pressed at home; and she will remember her
own islands, and the shadow of the mighty tree; and she will
hear the peacocks screaming in the dusk and the wind blowing in
the palms; and she will think of her father sitting there
alone.—R. L. S.]

“Forth from her land to mine she goes,
The island maid, the island rose,
Light of heart and bright of face:
The daughter of a double race.

“Her islands here, in Southern sun,
Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone;
And I in her dear banyan shade.
Look vainly for my little maid.

“But our Scots islands far away
Shall glitter with unwonted day,
And cast for once their tempests by
To smile in Kaiulani’s eye.”

Aboard the _Noeau_, bound for Molokai, Monday Evening, July 1.

_Noeau_ (No-a-ah-oo—quickly No-a-ow)—the very name has a mournful, ominous sound; _Noeau_, ship of despair, ferry of human freight condemned. We are not merry, Jack and I, for what we have witnessed during the past two hours would wring emotion from a graven image. And just when we would cheer a trifle, it not being our mutual temperament long to remain downcast, our eyes are again compelled by the huddle of doomed fellow-creatures amidst their pathetic bundles of belongings on the open after-deck of the plunging interisland steamer bound for Molokai.

None of it did we miss—the parting and the embarkation of the banished; and never, should I live a thousand fair years, shall I forget the memory of that strange, rending wailing, escaping bestiality by its very deliberateness; for, no matter how deep and true may be the grief, this wailing expression of it constitutes a ceremonial in this as in other countries where it survives as a set form of lamentation. Shrill, piercing, it curdled the primitive life-current in us, every tone in the gamut of sorrow being played upon the plaintive word _auwe_ (ah-oo-way’—quickly ow-way’), _alas_, in recurrent chorusing when each parting took place and the loved one stepped upon the gangplank, untouched by officers and crew of the small steamer.

“Clean” passengers were taken aboard first, the vessel picking up at another wharf those who bore no return ticket to the land of the clean. As the _Noeau_ ranged alongside, the crowd ashore appeared like any other dock-gathering of natives, even to the flowers; but suddenly Jack at my elbow jerked out, “_Look_—look at that boy’s face!” It was a lad of twelve or so, and one of his cheeks was so swollen that the bursting eye seemed as if extended on a fleshy horn. Beside him a woman hovered, her face dark with sorrow. We were soon quick to detect the marks and roved from face to face, selecting more or less accurately those who proved later to be passengers for the dark fifty-odd miles across Kaiwi Channel and along the north coast of Molokai to the village of Kalaupapa, is their final destination and home on this earth.

But one can only see what one can see, and there were men and women who bore no apparent blemish; and yet these are now among the disfigured company on the lurching after-deck.

The ultimate wrench of hearts and hands, the supreme acme of ruth, came when, separated by the widening breach between steamer and dock, the lost and the deserted gazed upon one another, and the last offerings of leis fell short into the water. No normal malihini could stand by unwrung; it was utterly, hopelessly sad—a funeral in which the dead themselves walked.

Toward one white child, a blonde-haired little German maid, we felt especial solicitude. Her bronze companions all had dear ones to wail for them and for whom to “keen.” She stood quite apart, with dry eyes old before their time, watching an alien race voice its woe in ways she had not learned. Whose baby is she? To whom is she dear? Where is the mother who bore her? And the answer was just now volunteered by the Superintendent of the Leper colony, returning from a vacation, Mr. J. D. McVeigh. The child’s mother is already in Kalaupapa, far gone with a rapid form of leprosy; and this little daughter, who had been left with a drunken father who treated her ill, has been found with the same manifestation, and will live but a few years. So she is going to her own, and her own is waiting for her, and it is well. But think of the whole distorted face of the dream of life...

...Now the white child has fallen asleep in a dull red sunset glow, her flaxen head in the lap of a beautiful hapa haole girl who carries no apparent spot of corrosion. She looks down right motherly upon the tired face of the small Saxon maid. Hawaiian women eternally “rock cradles in their hearts,” which are so expansive that it is said to matter little whose child they cradle—bringing up one another’s offspring with impartial loving-kindness. This practice extended even into highest circles, as Liliuokalani attests in her entertaining book, “Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen.” She herself was “given away” at birth, wrapped in the finest tapa cloth, to Konia, a granddaughter of Kamehameha the Great, wedded to a high chief, Paki. Their own daughter, Bernice Pauahi. Liliuokalani’s foster-sister, was afterward married to C. R. Bishop, Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1893 under King Lunallio, Kalakaua’s predecessor. The Queen writes that in using the term foster-sister she merely adopts one customary in the English language, there being no such modification recognized in her own tongue. As a matter of fact, in childhood she knew no other parents than Paki and Konia, no other sister than Pauahi. Her own father and mother were no more than interesting acquaintances. For this custom she offers only the reason that the alliance by adoption cemented ties of friendship between chiefs, which, spreading to the common people, doubtless encouraged harmony—a harmony that would have delighted King Solomon, to say nothing of white men’s courts of law!

They forget quickly, these Hawaiians, one hears; and one must believe, I suppose—and, believing, thank whatever gods may be; for this blissful latitude never was created for the harboring of grief. But the ability or tendency to forget pain has little to do with its momentary poignancy. The passionate Hawaiian suffers with all the abandon of the blood that keeps him always young. The sorrow is real, and the weeping. If these people could not recover speedily from despair, they would die off faster than they are already perishing from their arcadian isles.

On our deck, observing the dolorous scene aft, is a young native girl, round and ripe and more lovely than any we have yet seen. Clean and wholesome, unsullied by any blight, a happy body, she stands beside her father, a stalwart gray-haired Hawaiian with lofty mien. One wonders what are the young girl’s thoughts as she gazes upon these wrecks of her kind. And yet, she herself might have to be sought in Molokai another year. As well seek her under-ground, is the next thought. Poor human flesh and blood!

Kalaupapa, Molokai, July 2.