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.
| [10] | Report for 1918 showed an export of 20,000,000 cans of pineapple. In March, 1920, the estimated pack for that year was 6,000,000 cases. All this in face of certain discouragements, such as “pineapple wilt,” “Kauai blight,” and the objection of large areas of plants to flourish in manganese soil. |
| [11] | During the World War, for the first time since her abdication, the American flag floated over Washington Place, indicating the Queen’s sympathy with our entry into the fight against Prussianism. On November 11, 1917, Liliuokalani, last sovereign of the Hawaiians, passed away. |
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.