Our Hawaii

Thus, under a full moon, we retraced the road descended eight years earlier in the heat of midday. The moonlight bewitched the remembered landscape, and silvered the receding ocean floor; and very tenuous and unreal it all seemed, as the eager horses forged lightly up, mile upon inclining mile, into chill air, for which I, for one, was unprepared. To Jack’s insistence that I wear his coat I refused to listen, until, riding alongside, he pressed his warm hands to my cheek. “See—how warm I am—you know me!” His circulation was always of the best, and never have I known his hands to be cold. Even on frosty days, tobogganing or sleighing, or long, damp hours at the Roamer’s winter wheel up the Sacramento or San Joaquin rivers, it was the same; “See—how warm my hands are!”

Ten very short miles to ourselves and the home-bound animals lay behind when we-reached the Myers’ house-gate. I shall always blame-sweet Hawaiian backwardness that set a silence upon Kalama’s red lips. No word she spoke except “Aloha,” as smiling she led the flagged way to the guest-cottage. And how were we to know that this imperial-bodied, full-blossomed Juno was molded on the frame of that tall, slim, strapping cow-girl we had met nearly ten years ago? There was something only vaguely familiar about her, and I dared to ask: “We knew you here before?” Oh, shades of night, protect and hide! “Why, yes,” quietly, “I am Kalama—don’t you remember?” Kalama! Kalama! Will you ever forgive? Why were you so gorgeously, amply different that we knew you not?

“Do you know where you are?” this, when, after three hours’ sleep, Henry Ma had tapped upon the begonia-screened window, and we had breakfasted and mounted and were galloping over green pastures to Molokai’s great falling-off place. Almost, as one hesitates to unlock a long-sealed box of letters and pictures, I drew back from the imminent verge. How I should like to have been the first who ever came suddenly upon this unexpected void of disaster and gazed upon the incredible lapse of the world below! We had yet to search for its equal.

A very different trail from the one we had never forgotten was that we now descended—wider, and so depressed in the middle that the earth was raised at the outer edge. Man nor beast could fall off the palisade except he went out of his way to do so. But the action of water had on the steepest declivities exposed large bowlders that were exceeding disconcerting to horse and rider. Still hanging with hind-hoofs, while feeling below with fore-, a grunt from the cheerfully alert buckskin pony would advertise that its unprotected belly had come in contact or impact with an equally rounded if less yielding object. Several times our saddles slipped so far over-neck that the beasts almost overbalanced to a somersault.

“It would be far simpler to walk and lead them,” Jack giggled. “But I rode up the trail without getting off, and I’m going down the damned thing the same way! What do you say?” And we did not dismount, save when necessary to set back our saddles.

Once at the doubly luxuriant kukui cluster at the feet of the pali, we saw a rider urging his flying steed in our direction—Jack McVeigh, could it be? It was; and the handclasp and voice were the same, if more than ever cordial. One of the first remarks was: “I wish you were going to be here for the Fourth. We’re going to whoop it up in grander style than ever. The Fourth you saw won’t be a patch on what’s going to happen this time.”

Dr. Will Goodhue, a little heavier, and if anything more benign if that could be, with his beautiful Madonna, in her arms their newest babe, waited at the arbored gate to welcome us of the wayward feet. Dr. Hollmann was now with the indefatigable Dr. George W. McCoy, at the Kalihi Receiving Station in Honolulu, where subsequently we renewed acquaintance.

The huge Belgian dairyman of old memory, good Van Lil, now a patient, had married another, and the pair lived happily in a vine-hidden cottage near Kalawao, making the most of their remaining time on earth. Beyond a fleeting embarrassment in his vague blue eye, he met us on the Damien Road with the undimmed buoyancy of other years, and our eyes could see no blemish on his face. Probably we were the more affected, for in the main the victim of leprosy is as optimistic as he of the White Plague.

Emil Van Lil was not the only one whom we saw who had perforce changed his status toward society in the intervening eight years. The little mail-carrier who had led us up out of the Settlement, we found in the Bay View Home, cheerful as of yore, though far gone with the malefic blight. And, auwe!—some of the men and women we had known here before as extreme cases still lingered, sightless perhaps, but trying to smile with what was left of their contorted visages, in recognition of our voices. Others, whose closing throats had smothered them, breathed through silver tubes in their windpipes. Strange is this will to persist—tenacity of life!

To light the almost desperate gloom of pity that could not but overwhelm me, Jack, with the shadow on his bright face too often there since the Great War commenced, said:

“Dear child—awful it is; but awful as it is, think of how thousands of healthy, beautiful human beings are making one another look in the shambles of civilized Europe right now while we stand here looking at these.”

Annie Kekoa, we were cheered to hear, had been discharged years before, all tests having failed to locate further evidence in her of the bacillus lepræ. Its depredations had ceased with her slightly twisted hand.

With pardonable pride the Superintendent showed us through the new “McVeigh Home,” for white lepers; and next forenoon, while Jack finished writing a chapter of “Jerry,” I visited the Nursery, also new. There behind glass, mothers may see their babes once a week until the tiny things are removed to the Detention Home in Honolulu. Born as they are “clean” of the disease, they are taken from their mothers immediately after birth, since further contact is a peril most strictly to be avoided.

Probably not one remained of the Bishop Home girls who had wrung our souls with their plaintive singing; but for Mother Marianne, wraith-like in her frail transparency, with blessings in her blue-veined hands and old eyes that seemed to look through and beyond us, we endured, as in the past, a concert. And it was no easier for them and for us than it had been for us and those who had gone before. Again were the tender things more sorrowful for my unconcealable grief than for their own.

But facts are facts, and joyous ones must overbalance the sorrowful. By stern and sterner segregation, as was done in Europe, leprosy is slowly being stamped out of the Hawaiian Islands. Eight years before, on Molokai, there were nearly a thousand lepers, and the Noeau made four yearly trips to carry the apprehended victims of the Territory; now there are a trifle over six hundred, and but one human cargo in the twelve months disembarks at Kalaupapa. This diminution of roughly thirty per cent of patients led Jack to prognosticate that fifty years hence the good rich acres of the Molokai Peninsula will be clean farmland for the clean, and moreover an accessible and unparalleled scenic wonder for the travelers of the world.

“I am happier about this place than I ever hoped to be,” he imparted to me. “Oh, don’t think for a moment that I minimize the dreadfulness of leprosy. But I am certain now of the passing of it, if the Islands persist in this rigid segregation.”

Jack ever stood reverent before the beyond-price work of Dr. Will Goodhue toward freeing the inhabitants of the Settlement from their thrall. Let me quote from his article, requested by the Advertiser upon our return to Honolulu:

But that is not all. Jack London’s hopeful prophecy did not take into account the discovery of a positive cure for leprosy. Alas, that he could not have read with me the glad, almost incredible tidings that meet my eyes in newspaper and periodical. The latest is a quotation from the lips of Dr. William J. Goodhue himself, speaking to members of the legislature visiting Kalaupapa in 1921. Said he:

“With two years’ chaulmoogra oil treatment, I believe sixty-five per cent of the chronic cases of leprosy on Molokai can be cured.” And within ten years, he added, all cases should be cured, and Kalaupapa be abandoned as a leper settlement. That same day, Dr. F. E. Trotter, president of the territorial board of health, announced to the lepers assembled in their amusement hall, that within a period of two years probably not twenty-five of their number would be compelled to stay on Molokai.

The feelings of those in the audience undoubtedly varied. To the majority, the hope held out for a return to the outside world must have been received with solemn thanksgiving; but there were some, I am sure, who, suffering little, have been happy in the harmoniousness of life on the peninsula, and who look with dismay upon being torn from its care and kindness.

The astounding revelation, after many centuries, is based upon results obtained at Kalihi, under Dr. J. T. McDonald, Director Leprosy Investigation Station, from the use of chaulmoogra oil. The history is brief. In 1918, the distinguished chemist, Dr. Arthur L. Dean, president of the University of Hawaii, and head of its chemistry department, was asked by the United States Public Health Service to add to the college research work some scientific problems in relation to chaulmoogra oil, which had enjoyed a good reputation with experimenters in different parts of the world. Chaulmoogra, according to my Standard Dictionary, is an East-Indian tree (Gynocardia odorata) of the Indian plum family, with a succulent fruit yielding a fixed oil.

It seems that the ethyl esters of the fatty acids of the oil had been reported by observers elsewhere to be ineffective on leprosy. Dr. Dean, however, succeeded in producing a form of that derivative of the oil, which in its curative effects on the patients of Kalihi Hospital has surpassed, so far as known, anything ever attained in the line of leprosy therapy.

It was in the beginning of the reign of Kamehameha V, Prince Lot, that compulsory segregation was established by law and the process of isolation commenced. And now, over half a century later, in no equal period of the history of segregation in the Hawaiian Islands have there been so many voluntary surrenders as since the “Dean Cure” has been known to make headway. Not only have adults asked to be taken for treatment, but children have been brought freely as soon as the nature of their disease was guessed by parents and guardians. This is in striking contrast to the necessity in past years of arresting suspected lepers through deputy sheriffs.

The Kalihi Station is flooded with letters from all over the world, requesting its remedies. The reply must perforce be that these are still of an experimental nature, and not yet commercially available; also that they are for hospital treatment, where the patient is under observation; that they do not lend themselves to the practice even of the family physician; and that they are impossible of self-administration.

Dr. Goodhue is using Dr. Dean’s derivatives of chaulmoogra oil at Kalaupapa; and out of the five hundred and twelve patients, one hundred and seventy-five have been taking regular treatment. Lack of oil is the sole reason that all were not sharing in the capsules or the hypodermic injections; but a full supply has been promised. At the meeting in Kalaupapa, above referred to, Senator L. M. Judd, commenting upon the willingness of the legislature to do everything possible for the patients, remarked that the board of health budget is larger in 1921 than the territorial budget was eight years ago. Dr. Dean, called to speak, was not to be found in the hall. Summoned from outside, he spoke briefly, saying that the laboratory of the University of Hawaii, its force supplemented by workers furnished by the board of health, is working to turn out the oil in sufficient quantities for all needs.

But it was our friend Charles F. Chillingworth, president of the senate, who brought up the problem of finding homes for the patients who would be paroled after they had made Kalaupapa their home for years. He suggested the homesteading by them of lands on Molokai, and voiced his intention of taking the question before the governor and the legislature. The Hawaiian Annual, issued by the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, and the yearly Report of the Governor of Hawaii, trace the progress of the Cure.

For those who have been measurably happy on that verdant cape, and are loth to bid it farewell, how ideal it would be if their homesteads eventually could be chosen from its grasslands, and the yielding valleys of the pali, no longer a barrier to outside intercourse.

But to return:

In a machine, by way of a new boulevard on the coast, we sped to Kalawao, and saw the faithful Brother Dutton, alert as ever among his pupils; then passed on to the imposing Federal Leprosarium on the windswept shore in view of the lordly front of promontories with their feet in the deep indigo sea. This Leprosarium had been built at a cost of $300,000, and was now abandoned and falling into the swift decay of disuse in the tropics. Such a Leprosarium was never known. Jack McVeigh almost wept as he fingered the full equipment of blankets molding in their original wrappings: the beds, the washstands, the endless costly paraphernalia of a hospital, lying inutile and deteriorating, which he was unable to put into needful circulation in the Settlement. Even the fine dynamo, which a caretaker was paid to keep from rusting—“Think how this could furnish my people with electricity!” he mourned. O red, red tape—what a curious institution dost thou create!

Jack London very shortly got himself into trouble by airing his views in the Advertiser, which stirred up a tidy tempest of protest in Washington, D. C.; but he was, after much hot correspondence in the press, the means of Jack McVeigh finally getting his selflessly covetous hands on the outfit of the ambitious edifice.

Eight months after Jack’s death, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser contained a column stating that the Federal Leprosarium would probably be torn down and the material used for building cottages in the Settlement, which, J. D. McVeigh is quoted as saying, “it would be a God-send to secure.” In that column Jack London is mentioned as having been first to suggest such action.

For some reason the edifice has not been touched; and I notice that Dr. Goodhue in 1921, has offered to use it as a hospital for the treatment of patients taking chaulmoogra oil.

By a strange fatality, writes Dr. J. T. McDonald in the Journal of the American Medical Association, of the four principal scientists who have resided and worked in the Settlement, three are dead. But not of the disease which they were investigating. One succumbed to pneumonia, two from nephritis. The fourth, Dr. George W. McCoy, is now director of the Hygienic Laboratory at Washington.

Mr. Thurston had long planned a Japanese sampan trip from Honolulu to the non-leper valleys of windward Molokai, which lie between those stately promentories beyond Kalawao. And so, early on Sunday, “Decoration Day,” according to prearrangement by wireless and telephoned to the Settlement, a smart blue sampan hove in sight around the pali headland, and lying off-shore sent in a coffin-shaped tender with an alarming freeboard that made it appear topheavy. Kakina possessed no permit and therefore did not so much as step on the Kalaupapa breakwater-landing.

Aboard the outlandish power-boat, we found Mr. W. L. Emory, an architect of Honolulu, and his son Kenneth, and, to our hearty delight, Mr. Jack Atkinson, who had not yet decided whether or not he would be seasick. We decided for him, if unwittingly. A rainbow-and-silver sickle of an aku, bonita, was presently seen tripping the wave-tops at the end of the Japanese sailors’ trolling-line. This, promptly dispatched and prepared with Japanese soyu—to Jack and me more toothsome than any raw oysters—proved the last straw, not to mix metaphors, to Mr. Atkinson’s camel of control.

Oh, the rich life we lived on our via regia of happiness! Here were we again, in a small boat, sixty feet over all—“Only five feet longer than the Snark, Mate-Woman!” running before the big coastwise seas that heaved and broke in jeweled fountains almost over the fleeing stern. Again the “stinging spindrift” was in our faces, and I could have cried for joy at being on even so small a portion of “the trail that is always new.”

Skirting the black lava-bound peninsula, with its combing surf, we were soon in calmer water off the mouth of the riotous valley where we had ridden that long-ago day, its walls rising thousands of feet into the blue. It gave us an adventurous, alert feeling to skim the glassy swell under those overtowering somber cliffs, in the passes between shore and the three dark-green abrupt islets, fragments left from old convulsions of the riven island. The largest, Mokapu, over a hundred feet high, is crowned with mosses and shrubs, and a species of stunted palm tree found nowhere else in the world save, perhaps, on Necker, another islet of Hawaii.

The air rustled with wings, around and overhead, and Jack and I thrilled again to the call of the bosun bird, koae, and watched rapt its flight, high, high, and higher, above the pure white waterfalls that, spent in the wind, never reached the sunshot dark-sapphire brine.

Two miles or so beyond the last valley we had known, the sampan rounded into Pelekunu, unknown to the tourist, and visited by no one we had ever met. No vessel can approach the beach of its U-shaped bay, which shelves steeply out of deep water, bluer than the staring-blue sampan. “Why, the valley ran into the ocean,” Kenneth observed.

No possible landing place could we detect, and followed the slant eyes of the Nipponese skipper and his men while the oriental launch chugged steadily into mid-bay, presently making in closer to the beetling cliff on our right. A ledge of volcanic rock, jutting into the ocean-deep water, was indicated as the landing; but slow-surges swept rhythmically across it. “Can’t help being glad we know how to swim,” Jack remarked, every sailor-sense of him on the qui vive. Our problem lay in gauging the leap from the top-heavy marine coffin at the exact right moment. Only in quiet weather can any sort of connection be effected. If it be a trifle rougher than on this day, a basket on a derrick is lowered into the boat for passengers to climb into.

I decided to try both ways, and, once safely on the ledge, indicated to several native youngsters who had run the half mile from the village at the head of the U, to send down the rattan car. Swinging up in the air, the cable manipulated by two mere children, I had a decided if precarious advantage over my companions who clutched their way up a long vertical ladder.

Our slight luggage disappeared villageward in the arms of the natives, and we followed at leisure the tropic trail. It is a story in itself, that night and the next day in the isolate valley of Pelekunu. The sea, and this at rare intervals, is its sole egress, except by way of a precipitous trail that attains to a height of nearly 4500 feet, and it is accessible only to those who have clinging abilities second to none but wild goats. The few inhabitants, living in weather-grayed houses almost as picturesque as their hereditary lauhala huts, welcomed us with wide arms, and, like souls of grace we had known so sweetly in the South Seas, gave us their best. A Hawaiian pastor and a Belgian priest vie in kindness to their limited flocks, and all proffered us the freedom of the place.

Up wet and steaming paths we strove through hot-house plants that shook perfumed raindrops upon us, into the short, mounting vale; and I, while the men went landshell-hunting with and for the eager Kakina, idled in deep grass like that remembered of Iao and Tantalus. I tried hard to realize the earthly actuality of this amphitheater of greenest green swishing with water-courses and long falls, and the intense inshore peacock-green of the precipitously walled bay, turning to intenser peacock-blue outside, clear to the low white wool-packs on the intensest indigo horizon.

“We’ll return here some day, when we needn’t hurry; and then we’ll go into Wailau, too,” Jack, who had been especially happy on this little side-voyage, endeavored to compensate my regret in passing the next lovely rent in the shore Wailau, “four hundred water-falls”—lovely as Pelekunu, with an almost impregnable partition between the two. What we saw from the resumed sampan trip, young Kenneth Emory, in Ford’s Mid-Pacific Magazine, later on described too happily to omit:

Some of the finest scenery in this island, Molokai nui a Hina, “The Lonely Isle,” is to be found in the valley of Halawa. “The traveler,” wrote “A Haole,” in 1854, “stumbled upon its brink unawares.” At a depth of nearly twenty-five hundred feet below, there spreads out a panorama of exquisite beauty. Several large cascades spring hundreds of feet into the valley. These, and scores of taro beds, with a scattering of native dwellings, can all be seen in a sweeping glance. “It seems,” the old writer said, “as if one leap would lodge the visitor at the foot of the enormous walls which bound this earthly Eden.”

He tells how the scenes in Pilgrim’s Progress had stayed in his consciousness since childhood, and how that “matchless allegory” welled up in memory as here on Molokai he came upon the Delectable Mountains, and the Land of Beulah, and explored their wonders.

Halawa is little changed in this day, they say, and is quite accessible. Hawaii is awakening to the possibilities of this island so little known by travelers; and hotels are planned at strategic points to enable the visitor to reach novel sights in the “Paradise of the Pacific” which have so far been unheard-of. I, for one, shall make my pilgrimage to that Molokai, I have not seen; and I shall tarry at leisure until I have known it all.

A correspondent writes me from Pukoo, on the southeast rim of Molokai: “I live here in my house by the sea, as isolated as if I were in Tonga.”

But the years are few ere “the horn of the hunter,” to say nothing of the honk of the gas-car and the strident explosion of aeroplane enginery will daily contest the supremacy of the birds in the utmost fastnesses. Regretfully enough, one must remember that the swarming of the white sojourners means the gradual disappearance of the last indigenes, until now practically undisturbed in their lovely retreats on the edge of the world, by the gruelling march of events outside in that world.

Next we voyaged to Maui. How strange to ascend Haleakala in an automobile!—oh, not to the summit, but even to the Von Tempsky’s and some miles above.

Kahului had fulfilled its promise and become a lively young town. Wailuku remained as if unchangeably serene; and fabulous Iao transcended all recollection of it. Then we heard the voices of the Vons over the telephone from Wreath of Surf, Kaleinalu by the sea, and next from their smart motor car—the same debonair Von, and the two elder girls grown to splendid womanhood. Lorna, thirteen, brought up as a girl in Hawaii may gloriously be, to the free life of saddle and range, could rope cattle with the best. At the races in Kahului, we saw Jubilee’s colt, Wallaby, carry off honors for Gwendolen.

During the weeks spent there, I noticed with surprise and faint misgiving that Jack stayed rather close to the house. “Oh, you girls run along... I thing I won’t ride to-day. There’s so much to read—I can never catch up. Perhaps I’m lazy; I’d rather lie around and read. We’ll do Haleakala next time we come.” But he never looked into Haleakala again. Even then the Shadow was upon him.

The Second Return

Voyaging back to California in time for Jack to attend the High Jinks of the Bohemian Club at their Grove, which is within a few miles of the Ranch, we spent a gay summer and fall, with a continuous house party making merry upon Sonoma mountain-side. Jack’s 7,000,000-gallon reservoir impounded behind his new dam, of summer-warm water encircled by redwood and madrono forest, made it possible to keep up our Waikiki swimming condition. Too often, however, I could not but notice that he sat and watched the rest swim, or, in bathing-suit, paddled guests about in the canvas canoe or the larger skiff—items of Snark outfit that had never got aboard.

As the autumn wore, again he turned to Hawaii. “Why not spend our winters there?” he suggested. “We’ll take the whole household down.” He thereupon set the wires vibrating, to the end that when we arrived in Honolulu, December 23 of the same year, 1915, on the Great Northern, by way of Hilo and the volcano, we went right into a delightful house, 2201 Kalia Road, around the corner from our former cottage on Beach Walk.

Our place at Waikiki, adjoining the grounds of the quiet Hau Tree Hotel of old, now the Halekulani, had once been the property of one of the Castles, and next of Judge Arthur Wilder, cousin of James and Gerrit Wilder, whose suicide at the Beach in the fall of 1916 shocked the Islands. It was now owned by a Chicago millionaire.

Mr. Ford met us at the wharf, but before getting away, we must shake hands and condole with our old friend Mr. Kawewehi, of Keauhou memory, just returning to the Big Island from burying his sweet life-partner.

Jack, so frequently and viciously misrepresented, found he had dived full tilt into a cool wave of hostility in Army and Navy circles, due to the recrudescence of a canard which for years he had vigorously denied, and which had occasioned endless annoyance at most inopportune moments. This canard, “The Good Soldier,” purported to be an address by Jack London to the youth of America who might have a mind to enlist, exhorting such, in no uncertain terms, to avoid military service.

“If the Army and Navy men would only take the trouble to read their own official sheets,” Jack would fume. “But they don’t know their own papers. How am I going to tell them all, separately, that I didn’t write a word of the thing! I deny, and deny, and deny, until I am tired, and what good does it do, when they don’t see the denials?” For in the Army and Navy Register, as well as the Journal, and in the general press, he had repeatedly disclaimed authorship of the canard.

Also I found a silly impression persisting among the Army women:

“Your husband does not like us,” they voiced their belief. “He made derogatory remarks about Army women in ‘The House of Pride.’”

Jack fairly sizzled, with despairing arms flaying the air: “Don’t mind my violence—I always talk with my hands—it’s my French, I guess.—But these people make me tired. If they’d only really read what they think they’re reading. Because I have a bloodless, sexless, misanthropic, misogamistic mysogynist disapprove of décolleté and dancing, and all and every other social diversion and custom, I myself am saddled with these unnatural peculiarities. A merry hell of a lot of interesting characters there would be in fiction if they all talked alike and agreed with one another and their author!—What’s a poor devil of a writer to do, anyway?” he repeated his wail of nine years earlier, at Pearl Lochs when “The Iron Heel” had been rejected of men. “Of course I like Army women—just as I like other women!”

On New Year’s Eve, we attended a reception in the Throne Room of the old Palace, where Queen Liliuokalani sat at Governor Pinkham’s right hand. “And it’s the first time in over twenty years that Her Majesty has received in this room,” he whispered his satisfaction with what he had been able to bring about.

Followed a great military ball in the Armory, dinner and dance at the Country Club, and a wild night of fun at Heinie’s. Nowhere in the world could there be such a New Year as in this subtropical paradise. Rain it did, and bountifully—a tepid torrent of liquid jewels in the many-colored lights of the city streets, which kept no Pierrot nor Pierrette indoors. The very gutters ran colored streams, what of the showers of confetti.

“Can you surpass it?” Jack murmured when, at dawn, the machine threshed hub-deep in water down our long driveway under vine-clambered coco-palms, to the ceaseless rhythmic impact of a big gray surf upon our sea wall.

Carnival Week was in February—a succession of pageantry opening with the Mardi Gras. No one with steamer-fare in pocket should forego Carnival season in Honolulu. It grew originally out of Washington’s Birthday observance, and has become an institution.

Polo, the best in the world, automobile races, equine races, took place at Kapiolani Park, with Diamond Head spilling unwonted waterfalls down the unwontedly green truncations of its steep flanks; and there were aquatic contests at the harborside, where Duke Kahanamoku added more emblems to his shield than he lost, and where Mayor Lane’s slim kinswoman, Lucile Legros, won over Frances Cowells from the Coast. And Jack and I could not refrain from working, with every nerve of desire, on behalf of our Hawaiians in their own waters!

The military reviews were especially imposing. The showing of the national guard, rated as second to none in the union, surpassed that of the regulars; while it was declared that the cadets of the Kamehameha School for Hawaiians, founded by Mrs. Bernice Pauahi Bishop, put both regulars and militia in the shade. The work that had been done with the Boy Scouts was evidenced by the orderly discharge of their Carnival duties in maintaining order. That fabled red hill, Punch Bowl, sprouted with verdure, its shallow crater now become the cradle of Boy Scout encampments, their staunch khaki bringing together unnumbered nationalities into the fine automatic usefulness and courtesy of a discipline one dreams of some day belonging to civil rather than military procedure.

In Punch Bowl, I must say in passing, has been found an excellent potter’s clay; and this, combined with the founding of an Academy of Design in Honolulu lends still a new allure to the Paradise of the Pacific.

Pa’u riders turned out in full panoply, as did floats of wondrous construction and significance; and there were historical pageants at Kapiolani Park that left little to be desired in illustration of old sports. Especially impressive was the spear-throwing done by descendants of warriors, who had not allowed their valorous traditions to rust. And at Aala Park, in another part of the merry metropolis, an excellent “Midway Pleasance” furnished entertainment that was anything but historical, but enjoyable nevertheless.

In train came a succession of balls, civic as well as military, in the enormous Armory. Every moment was filled and packed down, and little did Honolulu sleep that week. Jack relinquished all work and accompanied me throughout the whole gay rout, sitting the long night sipping soft drinks and an occasional “small beer,” while he talked with our many friends and shed his ever benignant, bright approval upon my delight in dancing.

Hawaii’s mixed population, aided and abetted by her romantic climate, are the means of encouraging out-of-door exhibitions of various kinds, bearing upon historic events. Balboa Day, September 25, 1916, observed in many Pacific lands, in Hawaii was combined with the first great Pan-Pacific Union celebration, which lengthened into several days of veritable carnival, with pageantry that surpassed any that Honolulu had ever before carried out. Guests from every country of the western hemisphere attended. And each adopted nationality in its own way of picturesqueness took part in the colorful entertainment. The preponderance of Oriental talent along the lines of decoration insures a magnificence of display in the matter of floats and processions. But of deeper interest, and no less beauty, is the stately resurrection of old-time Hawaiian custom and costuming. These must be correct in every detail, and an afternoon spent in watching the dramatic revival of savage royalty, its ceremonial and its sports, as well as of humbler occupations, is worth a voyage to the Islands.

That their forefathers and the rich old traditions may not be forgotten by descendants and the world at large, associations have been formed, such as Daughters of Hawaii, Daughters and Sons of Hawaiian Warriors, and others. These commemorate certain historic dates or events. The most conspicuous and general of these is Kamehameha Day, a national holiday, when the several native societies join in decorating their mighty hero’s imposing statue, and conducting musical exercises in the palace park, now the executive grounds. A grand parade is a feature. The day is participated in by many other orders, such as the mystic Shriners and the fraternal body of Foresters, to say nothing of the Ad Club and the Rotary Club.

The program of Kamehameha Day also includes an exciting regatta in the harbor, and horse-racing at the park.

Kamehameha’s second son, Kauikeouli, who reigned as Kamehameha III, also has his day, which falls on St. Patrick’s March 17. He is remembered for his unselfish patriotism, the liberal constitution granted his people, and for his gift of the right to hold lands in fee simple. Alexander says: “While there were grave faults in his character, there were also noble traits... He was true and steadfast in friendship. Duplicity and intrigue were foreign to his nature. He always chose men of tried integrity for responsible offices, and never betrayed secrets of state, even in his most unguarded moments.”

I cannot refrain from diverging once in a while, to point out the qualifications of such a man, whole-Hawaiian, of whom one may speak lightly as a savage!

A week in April, 1920, saw the celebration of the Hawaiian Missions Centennial, which was attended by many distinguished guests from the mainland and from foreign countries. On the second day H. R. H. the Prince of Wales dropped in, off the Renown.

Although this memorable week saw all the pageantry and sport that was possible to crowd into it, to many minds the greatest charm of it was in the more specific services devoted to the Centennial itself, one of the most beautiful exercises being the song contests of the churches from the different islands. The Hawaiians take the keenest interest in this expression of themselves.

Lavish entertaining, after the manner of Honolulu, we did that spring and summer in the old house at Waikiki—luncheons, dinners, dances, card-parties, teas under our hau tree, with ever the swimming between whiles. Sometimes, after the day’s round of social events, winding up with dancing, our guests and we trooped out of the spacious, half-open bungalow, through the great detached lanai roofed with a jungle-tangle of blossomy hau trees old in story; across the lawn bordered with young Samoan coco-palms planted by Arthur Wilder; and along the sea-wall right-of-way to a tiny beach two gardens away toward Diamond Head. Here we slipped into the sensuous lapping waters under a rust-gold moon, or the great electric-blue stars, and swam for a wonderful hour.

“The Southern Cross rides low, dear lass... and the old lost stars wheel back,” Jack would paraphrase softly while we timed our strokes for the diving float in the channel. “What shall it be, Twin Brother? The house over there is for sale. Shall I buy you it, now, for the first of our string of island homes?—or a sweet three-topmast schooner after the War, to do it all over again, only better—though never more sweetly than in the dear little old tub—and sail on round the world as we love to plan?”

What other choice for me, who had heard and answered “the beat of the offshore wind”? The three-topmast schooner, by every wish, with all it implied of resumed adventure overseas. Our dreams had been rudely cut midmost by ill health. But those we had realized, instead of seeming true, were still wrapped as in a blue and rose glamor of untried desires. “Which way I feel goes to prove,” I wound up somewhat of the above to Jack, “that the becoming of them, as far as they went, was in excess of the anticipation.” And he, to withhold me from the verge of sentimentality, made the shocking rejoinder: “You mean to say—am I right?—that the young fuzz has not worn off your enthusiasms! Never did I see woman who wanted to go to so many places!”

Ah yes, Jack had learned full well to “loaf” in the tropics. With his comprehensive knowledge, mastery of his implements, and his alert sense of form and color, those inexorable thousand words a day consumed little energy; and there was scant exertion in his habit of life in the palm-furnished, breezy bungalow of wide spaces, and the deep gardens of hibiscus and lilies. Too little exertion. Too seldom was the blue-butterfly kimono changed for swimming-suit or riding togs; too often, from the water, I cast solicitous eyes back to the hammock where, out of the blue-figured robe, a too white arm waved to show that he was watching me put to use the strokes in which he had coached me. “Oh, yes—no—yes—no, I think I’ll hang here and read,” he would waver between two impulsions. Or, “No thank you—I’ll read instead—all this war stuff I want to catch up on. I’m glad you asked me, though,” half-wistfully, “—you forgot, yesterday, and went in alone.” Forgot, no! Never once did I forget. I was avoiding all approach to the “nagging” we still never permitted in our family of two.

And ever the Great War pressed upon spirit and brain and heart. But this is a book on Hawaii, not a biography; and besides, I have written and published the Biography proper, which relates all the inwardness of the last phases of Jack London’s life.

All during those last months, there was in Jack the widening gratification that he was advancing in his conquest of the heart and understanding of Hawaii’s people, Hawaii-born Anglo-Saxon and part-Hawaiian, and the all-Hawaiians themselves.

Then, one day, we met Mary Low—Mary Eliza Kipikane Low—a connection of the Parker family. At a midday luau in a seaside garden at Kahala, on Diamond Head, we came together with Mary and, as if it had been foreordained, were forthwith adopted by her capacious heart. Like a devoted elder sister, she assumed a sort of responsibility for us twain with her people. Only an eighth-Hawaiian, no malihini would be competent to detect her Polynesian affinity. But, to us, the royal arches of the black eyebrows on her broad forehead, and the high aquiline nose and imperious lift of her small, fine mouth, expounded the quintessence of Polynesian aristocracy as we had come to know it here and under the Equator.

Already Jack was in the way of becoming ineffaceably associated with the interests and affections of Hawaii—was there not more than a hint of intention to enshrine him in the inner circle of that seclusively exclusive lodge, Chiefs of Hawaii?—and he was bound in good time to come into his own with them all; but Mary, bless her forever, hastened the day, else he might have faded back from the world ere he had known the “Kamaaina” that had begun to form upon their lips.

At this poi-luncheon, as a noonday luau is now called, demand was made of Jack for a speech. “My Aloha for Hawaii” was his topic, and he gave a glowing brief résumé of the history of that aloha nui in his life. And then Prince Cupid, in a brilliant and logical address, delivered a tribute to the gifts Jack had brought to the Islands with his discerning brain that had interpreted to the world much of the true inwardness of misunderstood aspects of the country and its life and people.

Upon a later occasion, a luau at the home of the Prince and Princess, Mayor Lane humorously declared, to hearty applause, that he should like to nominate Jack London to succeed him in office. For often Jack, rare genius of previsioning, and with the added advantage perspective, had thought a step in advance of the dwellers in the Islands, and had fearlessly expressed his earnest convictions. A few Hawaiian-born Americans have realized this. One or two have even gone the extraordinary length of consulting his opinions upon how best to apply their millions to benefit their sea-girt land which they love better than mere personal gain. In time; as in case of Jack’s protest on the idleness of the Federal Leprosarium, his ideas and protests had been substantiated; and none so ready as these people to proclaim him right.

A Progress Around the Big Island

“Why can we three not go around Hawaii together? I will take you to some Hawaiian homes, and you will love them and they you,” urged Mary Low, perhaps the third time we met.

“Why not?” Jack brightly took her up. “I’m ready as soon as I finish ‘Michael, Brother of Jerry,’ When shall it be? Set the date. Any time you say—eh? Mate?”

So it came to pass that on the Big Island we spent six weeks going from house to house of the Hawaiians, some strangers to us, some old acquaintances, in a round of entertainment and hospitality that set us on tiptoe with the unstudied human beauty and wonder of it all.

“I question—do you really get what this means to you and me, in our present and future relation to Hawaii?” Jack would reiterate with that adorable eagerness that I share in his vision. “I have read more, listened to more, than have you, of the ways of the people in the past generations—of the royal progresses of their princes, their kings, and their queens. This way of ours, led by Mary Low, is of the nature of a royal progress, but with the difference that, not being born into the honor, it is up to us to be worthy of its being thrust upon us. Do you get me?—Oh, pardon my insistence,” he would relax his high, sparkling tension, “but I do so want you, my sharer, to enjoy with me the knowledge of what all this means for you and me.”

Ah, I did, I did. And I do. My own heart and intelligence, further quickened by his still more sensitive divination, lent to the otherwise vastly interesting experience an appreciation that will abide for all my days. The imperishable charm of what it meant and means has come back a thousandfold, pressed down and overflowing, his share and mine together, to me in my singleness.

“Mary Low is a wonder, I tell you!” Thus Jack, elate. “She is a mine of interest and information. Her mind a kingdom is. I haven’t talked with a woman in Hawaii, of whatever nationality or blend of nationalities, whose brain can eclipse Sister Mary’s for vision of the enormous dramatic connotations of the race as it has been and is being lived out right here on this soil which you and I love. Listen here,” breaking off to read me his scribbled notes, “think of the story this will make—why, I want to write a dozen yarns all at once. I become desperate with my inability to do so, when, any hour of the day, Mary chats about say the Parker Ranch history, or, for that matter, almost any big holding on this isle of ranches. She might, with her memory and adjustment of values and her imagination, have been a great writer of fiction.”

In such company, we disembarked one morning before daylight on the wharf at Kailua, Hawaii, where, far cry to the old time Goodhue surrey, in the thick darkness we made our way toward an electric-lighted 1916 motor that had cost its owner, Robert Hind, Mary’s brother-in-law, some eight thousand dollars to land here from the East.

Effortlessly we surmounted the familiar road, to a point where our way turned to the left. In a gray car in a gray-and-silver dawn we passed the home of the Maguires, and with Mauna Kea’s icy peak flushing in our eyes, pursued the drive toward Parker Ranch. Bending off to the right for a remembered sugar-loaf hill, Puuwaawaa, we came to the home of the Hinds, and there spent a fortnight with Robert Hind and his wife, Hannah, whose eyes and smile Jack more than once preserved, for what time may be, in written romances. Their sons and daughters were absent in eastern colleges. Here in terraced gardens of lawns and every flower and plant that will grow at this 2700-foot elevation, we worked and played; and each morning, before breakfast, Jack and I made it a point to attend the toilette of a kingly peacock, whose absorption in the preening of his black-opal plumage was little disturbed by our admiring scrutiny and conversation. And there were horseback rides, and long motoring trips. One of these picnics was to the great heiau of Honaunau, south of Kealakekua Bay.

To reach this Temple of Refuge,—which also served as a court of Justice—one was obliged to leave a vehicle and take to the saddle. There has since been made a good automobile road.

We descended upon horses lent by Miss Ethel Paris, an energetic young woman capable of running her cattle ranch unaided should need arise. She entertained us with the unobtrusive, faultless hospitality of her Hawaiian strain, combined with the Caucasian blood that attains, in this gentle tropic, to something nearly equal in warmth and generousness.

Honaunau is one of the most imposing of Hawaii’s relics, and covers nearly seven acres. Its walls, still intact, measure a dozen feet in height and eighteen in thickness, and in olden times protected uncounted fugitives from the wrath of their fellows. Those of the Tower of London dwindle into comparative insignificance before this savage architectural triumph.

The heiau forms a lordly man-made promontory upon a low cape of lava, relieved by towering coconut palms that wave their plumage at entrancing angles for one who would sketch. It is a mammoth pile of mystery, every stone, small and great, a secret laid by the hands of men who were born of woman and who loved, and fought, and worked, and now are cosmic dust. The Bishop Museum is conducting further investigations into this broken edifice that piques the imagination far beyond its available legend.

Umbilical cords were placed in interstices of the stones and sealed with small rocks. To this day, many a modest Hawaiian maiden of Christian beliefs could admit, if she would, that her parents had dedicated to the huge altar of their forefathers such souvenir of their pride and lingering sense of romance and reverence for hereditary custom. I wonder, left to themselves in this lotus land, how long it would take the Hawaiians to revert. I wonder, equally, how long we dominant white-faces, given that same dreamy environment, would need to attain the same retrogression. Jack London played with this theme in “The Scarlet Plague,” but in California climate. He gave them about a generation.

A racy episode in the pre-Christian stage of Kaahumanu’s career, when she fled the consequences of Kamehameha’s rage following an amorous escapade, is still whispered half-laughingly by hapa-haoles. They point out, in the great inclosure, the tilted, roof-like stone under which the fascinating and capricious lady took sanctuary.

That night we slept at the Tommy Whites’, after a luau at their house. Here, to our joy, we found Mother Shipman, carrying on a little “progress” of her own; and her greeting was: “My own son and daughter!” Next day there was still another luau, mauka at the old Roy place, Wahou, where again we met the Walls. Mrs. Roy, mother of both Mrs. Shipman and Mrs. White, had passed away several years earlier. Her garden remained, more beautiful than ever in its fragrant riot of roses and blumeria and heliotrope, and the begonias had surpassed all promising.

Kiholo, seaside retreat of the Hinds, was enjoyed for a night and a day—miles down-slope over the lava. And again we drove to Parker Ranch, guests of Mary and Hannah’s Aunt Kalili, Mrs. Martin Campbell. The great holding, nearly doubled in acreage, is now the fortune of one part-Hawaiian lad, Richard Smart. For Thelma Parker had sacrificed herself for love in a tragic marriage, and died untimely, survived by but one of her children, who, the father shortly following his child-wife to the grave, became sole heir to the estate. On the side of Mauna Kea, in the family burial ground walled with sepulchral cypresses, rest the ashes of beautiful Thelma, taken there with all fitting pomp, mourned by every Hawaiian heart born on her lands. Standing beside her grave, we tried to vision that long funeral cortège winding up the grassy leagues she had so often galloped wild in her childhood. Poor little maid—one is thankful that at least she had that wonderful maidenhood.

Near the cemetery is Mana, old deserted home of Parkers, rambling in a great courtyard. The main body of the building is called Kapuaikahi; the right wing, Waialeale; the left, Evahale. Mary wept amidst the ruined fountains, for here her early years had been spent with her sisters and cousins, and Princess Kaiulani had been a familiar visitor. An Hawaiian caretaker let us in, and through the koa rooms we wandered, touching almost reverently the treasures of generations—furniture, pianos, china, and moldy albums of photographs. One curio especially appealed to Jack, who uses a similar incident in “Michael, Brother of Jerry”—a whale-tooth, sailor-carven, with an inscription referring to the sinking of the Essex by a cow-whale. Coincidentally, a man, claiming to be a survivor of the Essex, died in Honolulu about this time of our visit to Mana.

It was a distinct pleasure to learn that Frank Woods, of Kohala, had lately bought the old place for his wife, Eva, who is a daughter of the famous Colonel Sam Parker, Minister of Foreign Affairs during the reign of Liliuokalani, bon vivant and familiar of King Kalakaua. Mr. Woods later acquired the house at Waikiki, Honolulu, in which Robert Louis Stevenson once lived and wrote. The early home of the original Parker, Mana Hale, built with his own hands, stands in a corner of the inclosure. One aches with the romance of it all, and would like to write an entire volume upon the history of the Ranch that started on this spot.

At the historic old port, Kawaihae, where the Ranch does its shipping, we were shown Queen Emma’s home, eloquent with decay, still dignified in the age-wreck of its palm gardens. It was off Kawaihae, in a gale, that Captain Cook’s Resolution sprung her foremast, which caused him to put in at Kealakekua Bay for repairs, to his doom. Only the heat prevented us from making an effort to walk to the ruins of the important heiau of Puukohala, erected upon advice of the priests, to secure to Kamehameha the Kingdom of Hawaii.

Upon our final leave-taking of Puuwaawaa, the Hinds’ open-handed hospitality sent us in one of their cars to Hilo. On the way, Mrs. Tommy White ran out with an addition to our lunch—a marvelous cold red fish, the ulaula, baked in ti-leaves, and a huge cake, compounded of fresh-grated, newly plucked coconut and other delicious things we could not guess. Of course we visited the Maguires, as well as the Goodhues down their lovely winding lane. And we must slip in for a moment to the wide unglassed window-ledge, to gaze once more, from that vantage through the needled branches of imported ironwood trees, across the long void of lava, upon the divine Blue Flush.

South we passed beyond the Blue Flush of Kona, and sped over the road traveled by the Congressional party the year before, through the tranquil village of Pahala, and on up Mauna Loa for an all-too-short stopover, which included a sumptuous luau, with Mr. and Mrs. Julian Monsarrat, on Kapapala Ranch in the Kau District, before pushing on to the Volcano.

Different again from other volcanic deserts of the island is this of Kau, made up of flow upon succeeding flow from Mauna Loa, in color black and bluish-gray. Vast fields of cane alternate with arid stretches, and west of Pahala is a sisal plantation and mill, the most extensive on the Island. Mauka of the road one sees a fertile swath of cane growing on a mud-flow of Mauna Loa at an elevation of 1200 feet. This mud-flow was originally a section of clay marshland which, in 1868, was jarred loose by an earthquake from the bluff at the head of a valley. In but a few moments it had swept down three miles in a wet landslide half a mile wide and thirty feet deep. Immediately afterward a tidal wave inundated the entire coast of Kau, while Kilauea, joining the general celebration, disgorged lava through underground fissures toward the southwest.

Full majestic lies Kau under the deep-blue sky, and as majestic moves the deep-blue, white-crested ocean that washes its lava-bound feet. From the Monsarrats’ roof we made a side-trip to the coast, where in the black sands of Ninole beach we gathered the “breeding-stones,” believed by old inhabitants to be reproductive, and which were sought after as small idols. Being full of holes, these large pebbles secrete smaller pebbles, which roll out at odd times, thus furnishing grist for the fancy of simple folk. Jack, immensely taken with the conceit, in no time had several brown urchins earning nickels collecting a supply which, he declared, he was going to turn loose on the Ranch at home to raise stone walls. Another curiosity in the neighborhood is a fresh-water pool just inside the high beach where the Pacific swell breaks. But to the hunter, Kau’s prime attraction is its wide opportunity for plover shooting.

A pretty legend is told of a small fishing place, Manilo, near Honuapo on the coast. A trick of the current eternally brought flotsam of various sorts from the direction of Puna into the little indentation at Manilo. Over and above the driftage of bodies of warriors who had been slain and thrown over the cliffs along the coast, the inlet became famous as a sort of post office for the lovers of Puna, whose messages, in the form of hala or mailé leis, inclosed in calabashes, could dependably be sent to their sweethearts in Kau.

Near Punaluu, the landing place for East Kau, are the remains of a couple of heiaus—Punaluunui and Kaneeleele, said to have been connected in their workings with the great Wahaula heiau, of Puna. Scientists are continually on the hunt for old temples and sites, and in 1921 the total for all of the Islands reached five hundred and seventeen. Dr. T. A. Jaggar, Jr., recently stumbled upon a most interesting discovery—an old heiau in the Pahala section of the Kau district, of which the neighborhood professed to have no knowledge. The ruins differ from all others known, in that the stones bear many rude carvings, or petroglyphs, in crescents and circles, with and without dots. These may be similar to the petroglyphs that may be seen on the rocks of the Kona shore.

And thus we merely glanced through a District rife with treasures for the explorer into the past, making mental notes for a return. That day we were to see evidence of the high attainment of the Hawaiians in the science of massage. An old woman, still handsome, with an antic humor in her black eyes from which the fire was yet to be quenched, noticed that I had a severe headache. Enticing me, with benevolent gestures and moans, to an ancient sofa, she laid rude but shrewd hands upon the tendons of the inner side of the legs below the knees. Nothing availed my shrieks of agony. Those powerful fingers, relentless as the bronze they looked, kneaded and twanged those cords until, lo! in a mere ten minutes or so the headache, accumulated in hours of motoring under the brassy sky, was charmed away—charmed not by any means being the best word for such drastic method. In this manner we thenceforth did away with headaches in our family of two.

The Monsarrats’, on Kapapala Ranch, is another of the homes that quaintly combine the lines and traditions of prim New England architecture with a lavish charm of subtropic treatment of interior and garden compound. In the latter, high-edged aloofly with cypress and eucalyptus from the winds of the surrounding amplitude of far-flung, treeless mountain areas, one feels bewilderingly lifted apart and set aside, amidst an abandon of flowers, from the rest of the kingly island.

Julian Monsarrat, with keen appreciation of Hawaii’s turbulent history, filled Jack with valuable material for fiction.

From this Ranch, one may ride to the summit of Mauna Loa, which is overtopped by its sister peak only by 150 feet height of small cones in Mauna Kea’s immense crater. But Mary Low’s time was limited, and there was still so much ahead of us, that this venture, too, was set forward into the ever receding allure of future returnings.

Still another sumptuous luau, at which we came in contact with some of the Pahala neighbors, and we set out for Kilauea. There, in broad daylight, at last we beheld the bursting, beating wonder of her heart of lava quite as blood-red as all its painted or sculptured imagings. Thus it must have been when a churchman half a century ago wrote: