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.