The following day we sailed from Honolulu for Hawaii, but on separate ships. The Mauna Kea was chartered to take the Congressional party junketing about the Islands, and Jack was bidden to be one of the Entertainment Committee. Owing to the fact that the Mauna Kea was full to overflowing, so that many of the Committee bunked on deck, we resident wives were blandly uninvited. But I, through a timely invitation from the Big Island, was enabled to come in contact with the august picnic party.
And so, with “Aloha nui oe” one to the other, Jack saw me off for Hilo on the Kilauea, sister of the smart Mauna Kea, while twelve hours later he was headed for Maui. My roommate on the crowded steamer was an Englishwoman, busily knitting socks for her brothers fighting in France. She told me how her husband, who had worked on the Snark’s machinery eight years before, when confronted with difficult or unsurmountable obstacles or problems, had ever since declared: “This is as hard as repairing Jack London’s engines!”
On Maui, Jack became much interested in the experiment that had been made in small homesteading on government land; but he did not foresee success in the venture. “You can’t turn the clock back,” he said. But his reasons for his opinion in the matter are set forth in “My Hawaiian Aloha,” his own articles which preface this book of mine.
And so I next saw Jack at Napoopoo, on Kealakekua Bay, with the Blue Flush for background, and we agreed warmly that never anywhere had we seen anything like it, and nothing to surpass. Here the Congressional party disembarked to see the Cook Monument, and from Napoopoo were whirled south and around through the Kau District, over a new, lava highway, to the Volcano House. It was during this day’s ride, at luncheon by the way, that the wires flashed to us the stunning news of the sinking of the Lusitania, and a stricken look was upon the faces of all for a time.
The machine carried a full and very jolly cargo back to Pahoa on the Puna coast, for in addition to its driver, the exuberant Colonel, and us two, there were Senator and Mrs. Warren, Mr. Roderick O. Matheson, long a figure as editor of Kakina’s paper, and “Bob” Breckons, Hawaii’s brilliant attorney and a unique personage in Islands affairs.
Again on the sulphurous brink of Halemaumau, Jack, who cared comparatively little for spectacles of this ilk, remarked to me after a long gazing silence at the increased flow and disturbance of the mountain’s internal forces:
“I’m coming personally to understand your fondness for volcanoes—I myself am getting the volcanic habit. I shall come here every time there is a chance; and in future, if this pot boils up and threatens to boil over, and we’re in California, we’ll take the first steamer down to see it!”
The fame of Mrs. Johnson’s house party the next twenty-four hours, given to her allotment of members of the junketing crowd and their Entertainment Committee, is still talked in Hawaii. Among others from Washington, besides Senator and Mrs. Warren, there were Senator and Mrs. Shafroth and Mrs. Hamilton Lewis. Our two steamers arrived back in Honolulu within an hour of each other. Mr. Thurston, who was aboard mine, carried me up Nuuanu for breakfast on the well-remembered and ideal lanai over the rocky stream; and I was led down into a magnificent fernery connected to the lanai, roofed over a grotto hewn in great bowlders on which the house rests—delightful and feasible arrangement which I can well recommend to new residents. While still at breakfast, we spied the Mauna Kea entering harbor from Kauai 90 miles away, and a taxicab delivered me on the dock exactly as my man, beaming at my precise calculation, descended the gangway.
Shall I ever see Kauai? I had planned to do so; for this 1915 visit to Hawaii I had expected to make alone, returning with my cousin. Meanwhile Jack, for an eastern weekly, was to sail on a battleship with President Wilson, attended by the Atlantic Fleet, through the Panama Canal to the Exposition at San Francisco. But Jack repeatedly complained: “If you knew how much I’d rather go to Hawaii—but I need the money, if I’m to carry out my schemes on the ranch!”
The official cruise being abandoned on account of war developments, he contentedly declared: