“Look what man has accomplished, and he isn’t shouting very loud about it, either. Do you remember Jorgensen, what a modest, unassuming fellow he was?—and Peter Bluett here—look at him: Anglo-Saxon, big, strong, efficient—you have to draw out such men to learn what they’ve done in making the world a better place to live in.... And yet,” he would lapse sadly, “just such men are devoting their brains to producing destructive machinery for making anarchical chaos out of Europe, where there should be only constructive work ... all because a crazy kaiser and his lot want a place in the sun, and the whole earth to boot, and the rest of the earth objects.”
The story of this Ranch alone, and the old headquarters, Puuhue, of its original owner, James Woods, an Englishman who married a sister of Colonel Sam Parker, is inextricably woven with the golden age of the Parker Ranch. Puuhue is a house of connected as well as detached houses, strung over a terraced green court high-hedged from the Trades and shaded by fine trees. The whole premises are a-whisper with gentle ghosts of the past.
Again is the compulsion strong within me to expatiate upon the place of our blissful tarrying; but my book would needs start a yard-shelf of books—none too long to do the subject justice—were I to let pen stray among the unwritten stories that Mary Low’s active memory, impelled by her untrained sense of artistry, spun for us on the way to and from charming social functions given by the hospitable dwellers of the English countryside, from Kahua and Puuhue to Kohala and beyond.
There was an afternoon in an entrancing British garden on a Hawaiian hillside. And once, after tea in a quaint garden lanai past Kohala, on the beautiful Niulii Plantation, its little gulches choked with ferns and blossoming ginger, we were taken to inspect a less modern ditch, tunnel and all, that still irrigates a large tract of taro—another striking ebullition of the constructive genius of Kamehameha.
There is a prehistoric chart, eloquent of long-forgotten affairs of men, laid upon the long incline of the Woods Ranch. It resembles the map of a vast scheme of town-lots, the rocks, overgrown with green, windrowed into age-leveled partitions. An explanation which has been offered is that this was not a continuously inhabited district, but the chance halting place of chiefs, who, ever migrating with their retainers, were wont to settle down for months and even years, raising their produce as well as depending upon the commoners of the invaded soil. These miles-broad checkerboards of windrowed stones are also to be seen in Kona and Waianea, both sections being, like this portion of Kohala, more or less dry in certain seasons, where sweet potatoes were of old the principal crops, growing abundantly in the wetter months.
This location was the point at which Kamehameha I from time to time converged his great armies, for the invasion of Maui, Molokai, and Oahu. Several years, for example, were consumed in assembling his legion of 18,000 fighting men and a fleet of war canoes to transport them to the conquest of Oahu alone. It is likely that many of these troops practically supported themselves in and around this area, which would account for the large operations in rock-gathering that fenced and divided their myriad plots.
“And they, too, whispered to their loves that life was sweet—and passed,” Jack would muse upon their disappearance from the face of the earth; “and we, too, shall pass, as they passed, from the land they loved.”
Mr. Woods lent me a chestnut horse that had been in training for his wife, absent in Honolulu. She had not yet seen her husband’s surprise gift, and I was the first woman to ride the splendid creature, while the Hawaiian cowboys who had broken him stood about waiting for whatever might happen. For be it known that Eva and Frank Woods are notable specimens of Polynesian “physical aristocracy,” despite their slight Hawaiian blood; and this animal, his dam a cow-pony and his sire a thoroughbred race-horse belonging to Prince Cupid, had been chosen for size and power to carry his Amazonian mistress about the mountain ranch, and trained by heavy men. Little was he held down to the springy earth by my light weight, and we spent much time in mid-air, for he touched ground as seldom as possible in his leaping uphill or down, over the high lush grasses, as if conquering a never ending succession of hurdles. This is a paradise for one who rides.
It was from Mahukona, after a luau, that our truly royal progress around the royal island came to its end. Laden with the leis of our friends, we embarked in boats for the Mauna Kea anchored outside the bight. And while the steamer edged along the southerly coast before squaring for Oahu, stopping off several familiar landings, over again we lived what Jack vowed were six of the happiest weeks he had ever spent in the Islands.
Back at Waikiki, the spreading bungalow seemed home indeed, with our own servants, always adoring of Jack, smiling welcome from the wide lanai.