So it was with quiet gratification that we two set out upon an invitation to the out-of-town retreat of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Macfarlane, members of the same family with whom we have come in contact from time to time, since the day we first shook the Commodore’s hand in Pearl Lochs.
Our way lay over the Pali, and this second view lost none of the glamorous memory of the former. Now that I have seen other parts of Hawaii, I find that no comparison can be made. Nuuanu Pali stands unique.
Descending the zigzags to the main drive, we soon turned off to the left and rolled over the red loops of a branch road to the very base of the Mirrored Mountains, where nestles Ahuimanu, “Refuge of Birds.” It is a beauteous spot, more than faintly Spanish in suggestion, where an old house, in sections connected by arbors, rambles about a court of green lawn that terraces down to the hospitable gate. The Spanish-mission effect of the low architecture is enhanced by the fact that it occupies the site of a Catholic institution, built by the first French Bishop of Honolulu as a place where he might retire for meditation and prayer. A short distance behind the present buildings the precipitous mountain rises until its head is lost in the clouds. Somewhere on its face, reached by a stiff trail, hides a pocket, a small, green solitude, called the Bishop’s Garden. From this the climb is so steep that it is said none but the olden natives could surmount it, and one young priest lost his life making the attempt.
Adown the terraced walk, with this background of romance and stern beauty, stepped our part-Hawaiian hostess with the inimitable stately bearing of her chiefly kind, clad in flowing white holoku; and a little behind walked her daughter, Helen, as stately and graceful if more girlishly slender. Our welcome was of a warmth and courtesy that still further bore out the Spanish air of the place. But Hawaiian manners and hospitality were never patterned upon the Spanish nor any other; they are original, and as natural to these gracious souls as the breath of their nostrils.
In bathing attire we all emerged from our rooms that opened upon a low flagged veranda, and went barefoot along a grassy pathway wet with a fresh rain shot from the near clouds which hid the upstanding heights, to a large cement pool fed from a waterfall. The sun had dropped untimely behind the valley wall, while the air was anything but summery in this nook where daylight is of short duration; but the shock of cold water sent blood and spirit a-tingling. Before we had finished a game of water-tag, there was a merry irruption of young cousins from the city, several of whom we greeted as acquaintances. Boys and girls, in haole swimming suits or muumuus, they turned the tranquil late-afternoon into a rollicking holiday, some making directly for the pool, others playing hand ball, and all wasting no moment of their youth and high spirits while the light lasted.
In the absence of her husband, Mrs. Macfarlane presided at the head of a long table that nearly filled the low-ceilinged, oblong room in a wing of the old house, and the more racket the hungry swarm raised, the more benignly she beamed. The greater the number of guests and their appetite, the greater the content of the Hawaiian-born.
Following dinner, we sat or lay about in the soft-illumined living-room, gone all the bashful reserve that unknowing ones mistake for superciliousness in the Hawaiian. Mrs. Macfarlane we coaxed from smiling confusion to talk of her family’s interesting present and past, members of whom, Cornwells and Macfarlanes, served in honored capacities under the crowned heads of the country, as late as Queen Liliuokalani’s interrupted reign.
In a comprehensive window seat some of the young men sprawled reading magazines, and a quartet at the card-table was oblivious to all comforts of deep easy-chairs, pillowed floor-nooks, and indoor hammocks. One golden-eyed boy on a scarlet hassock strummed an ukulele to a low song to his lady-love. She, from the cushioned recess of a hanging-chair, gazed back langurously out of great soft Hawaiian eyes—lovely as an exotic blossom, in her long, clinging holoku of rose-flowered silken stuff. Oh, we were very Spanish this night—and all-Hawaiian.
And yet, there is but a trace of the Hawaiian stock in any of these—like Jack’s French, or my own Spanish strain—an eighth, perhaps, a sixteenth, a thirty-second; but the modicum of native blood that they are heir to lends them their pleasant lack of sharp edges. Among such one is gentled and loved into thinking well of oneself and all mankind.
“I have Aloha nui loa for them, forever,” Jack murmured as we pattered over the brick pave of the fragrant arbor to the quaint bedroom whose small-paned windows might have looked out upon a New England landscape.