Our ride was upon the lava flank of Hualalai and all within the boundaries of the Maguire possessions, which comprise some 60,000 acres. My steed, like the Welshman on Haleakala showing yonder above the clouds, evidenced his sober years only in judgment of head and hoof. We attacked precarious places of sliding stones and slid down others as steep and uncertain, brushing lehua and great ferns; into deep, green-grown blowholes of prehistoric convulsions we peered; and finally, descending a verdant pinnacle where Mrs. Maguire led for the viewing of broad downward miles of tumultuous lava to the blue sea, we went gingerly on a grassy trail beset with snares of slaty lava that tinkled like glass, over natural bridges of the same brittle-blown substance, then threaded a sparse lehua wood to the main road.
All the while our hostess, younger hearted than any, was the soul of the party, a constant incentive to daring climbs or breathless bursts of speed, just an untired girl in mind and body of her. One could but join in abandon of enjoyment that comes with swift motion, urging to greater effort, whirling around curves, going out of the way to leap obstacles. And which is better, and what constitutes long life: to sit peacefully with folded hands while the rout goes by a-horseback with laugh and love and song, walking carefully all one’s days, or to live in heat of blood and thrill of beauty and every cell of persisting youth, taking high hazard with sea and sail, mountain and horse, and every adventurous desire?
Spinning an abrupt curve, our mounts stopped at a gate like shots against a target, and our gleeful leader spurred at right angles straight up a four-foot stone wall to the next zigzag of road, we following willy-nilly in the mad scramble, marveling how we escaped a spill.
Following the Feast of Horses came the luau—not so-called, for it is the accustomed dinner of these people who, it seems to me, feed upon nectar and ambrosia. Fancy the tender fowl, stewed in coconut cream, and the picked and “lomied” rosy salmon bellies, with rosier fresh tomatoes, and salmon-pink salt like ground pigeon-blood rubies, and—but the entirely Hawaiian dinned, served with all the silver and crystal, napery and formality of a city banquet eludes my pen.
“Do play, Mate,” Jack said in the twilight, where he lounged on the lanai after dining; “I haven’t heard a grand piano for a long time, in this lotus loveland of guitars and ukuleles and their delectable airs.”
And so, high upon a sleeping volcano in the Sandwich Isles I sat me down to Chopin’s and Beethoven’s stately processionals. For once, in this land of spent fires, we all forewent and forgot the lilt of hulas and threnodies of dusky love songs, in the brave, deep music of our own Caucasian blood.
“I haven’t played those things since I studied in Paris,” Mrs. Maguire said with reminiscence in her sobered eyes; and a “Thank you” came through the doorway from a visiting clergyman, while a blithe young judge of the District called for Mendelssohn’s Funeral March while I was about it.
But Jack, with cigarette dead between his pointed fingers, lay in a long chair, his wide eyes star-roving in the purple pit of the night sky; for music always sets him dreaming, and many’s the time I have momentarily wondered, at concert and opera, if he heard aught but the suggestions of the opening measures, so busily did he make notes upon whatever those suggestions had been to his flying brain.
Huehue, to Parker Ranch, August 31.
“The sweetest poi is eaten out of the hau calabash,” “He mikomiko ka ai’na oka poi o loko oka umeke hau,” say the Hawaiians; and our parting gift from the Maguires was a little calabash of polished, light-golden wood, out of their cherished hoard.