Hawaii - James Michener [389]
It was news of this shooting that reached America, where it vitiated much that Micah Hale had been accomplishing, but insofar as Hawaii was concerned, the worst was yet to come, for at the height of the scandal, Wild Whip got married, and this was almost insupportable, for the girl he married--with his left arm in a sling--was Mae Forbes. She was a beautiful girl of twenty, with long black hair, sinewy charm and perfect complexion. She had a soft low voice and was known to be of impeccable reputation, for her father, recognizing her beauty, had brought her up with extra care. Normally, the marriage of a vigorous young man like Wild Whip to a beautiful girl like Mae Forbes would have been acclaimed, especially as it was a love match and there was some hope that Mae might tame the fiery Hoxworth.
Instead, the marriage was so offensive to Hawaii that it overshadowed all of Wild Whip's former behavior, because Mae Forbes sprang from a rather curious parentage. Her grandmother was the daughter of one of the lesser alii families from Maui, and her grandfather, Josiah Forbes, was a strong-minded, able Englishman from Bristol, who had jumped ship on the Big Island to make a small fortune pressing sugar. Later he married his Maui sweetheart, a fine Hawaiian woman, and they had a pert daughter, but she was a headstrong girl who liked to do as she wished, and at the age of nineteen she married a Chinese farmer named Ching, so that her daughter who went by the name of Mae Forbes was really Ching Lan Tsin, Perfect Flower Ching, and her marriage to Whipple Hoxworth was the first example of an Oriental, or part-Oriental, in her case, marrying into a major island family. It was a terrifying foretaste of the future, and Wild Whip was ostracized.
Even though his behavior had damaged Hawaii he would probably have been allowed to remain in the islands except for a public brawl he engaged in with the Hewlett boys. It arose when he found that some of the Committee of Nine had developed second thoughts about the revolution and were now preaching against union with America: "Somebody pointed out that as soon as we come under American law, our contracts for forced labor will be declared void, and we won't be free to import any more Japanese."
"Anything wrong with that?" Whip asked scornfully.
"How can we grow sugar without contract labor?"
"Frankly, and all sentiment aside, what good does contract labor do you?"
"Well, they've got to work where we say, at a fixed wage, and if they don't we can depend on our judges to make them."
"Well, I'll be goddamned!" Whip snorted. "Don't you men ever read the papers? Of course our labor laws will be rejected by America."
"Then we don't want to join America," one of the Hewlett boys said.
"What do you propose?" Whip asked politely.
"Join England. She allows contract labor. Or go it alone."
Whip was stunned. The revolution was slipping away from him. First Cleveland frustrated it and now the original conspirators were talking of union with England. "Look," he said carefully, "you don't need the old labor contracts. For the last eleven years I've not dragged one of my men into court. If they want to leave, okay. I give them good food, a fair deal, a little humor, and they make more sugar for me than they do for all of you put together. Believe me, that's the pattern of the future."
One of the Hewlett boys was offended by this wisdom and added, unwisely, "There's one more thing you do for the men, Whip."
"What?"
"You also sleep with their wives."
Like a volcano about to build a new island, Wild Whip erupted from his chair, lunged at the Hewletts and would have maimed the man who had insulted him had not other committee members pinioned him.
That night Micah Hale summoned Whip to his study on King Street. "You must leave the islands, Whipple."
"But the revolution's falling apart!" Whip protested.
"Revolutions