Hawaii - James Michener [421]
THE YEARS following annexation had not been kind to Wild Whip Hoxworth. In business the more stodgy members of Hoxworth & Hale had kept him from assuming any position of leadership within the company, so that even though his sugar lands irrigated by artesian wells flourished and made him a millionaire several times over, he was denied for moral reasons the command of H & H to which his talents entitled him. So he had come to Kauai.
With driving energy he had imported hundreds of Japanese laborers and had built irrigation ditches, cleared land, and shown Kauai how to grow sugar by the most improved methods. He had erected his own mill and ground his own cane, filling the stubby cargo ships of the H & H line with his product.
With equal energy he had built the mansion at Hanakai, personally placing the croton bushes and the hibiscus. When the cut timbers arrived from China he supervised their erection, and it was he who added the idea of a broad area covered by flagstone through whose chinks grass grew, so that one walked both on the firmness of stone and the softness of grass. When he finished he had a magnificent house, perched on the edge of a precipice at whose feet the ocean thundered, but it was a house that knew no happiness, for shortly after Whip had moved in with his third wife, the Hawaiian-Chinese beauty Ching-ching, who was pregnant at the time, she had caught him fooling around with the brothel girls that flourished in the town of Kapaa. Without even a scene of recrimination, Ching-ching had simply ordered a carriage and driven back to the capital town of Lihue, where she boarded an H & H steamer for Honolulu. She divorced Whip but kept both his daughter Iliki and his yet-unborn son John. Now there were two Mrs. Whipple Hoxworths in Honolulu and they caused some embarrassment to the more staid community. There was his first wife, Iliki Janders Hoxworth, who moved in only the best missionary circles, and there was Ching-ching Hoxworth, who lived within the Chinese community. The two never met, but Hoxworth & Hale saw to it that each received a monthly allowance. The sums were generous, but not so much so as those sent periodically to Wild Whip's second wife, the fiery Spanish girl Aloma Duarte Hoxworth, whose name frequently appeared in New York and London newspapers.
During these early years of the twentieth century, Wild Whip lived alone at Hanakai, a driven, miserable man. Periodically he spent lost days in some back room of the Kapaa brothels, competing with his field hands for the favors of Oriental prostitutes. At other times he would pull himself together and organize the dreamlike sporting events that were a feature of Kauai. For example, he kept a large stable of quarter horses and a fine grassy oval on which to race them at meetings where Chinese and Hawaiian betters went wild and lost a year's wages on one race. Part of Whip's distrust of the Japanese stemmed from the fact that they did not bet madly on his horse races, for he said, "A man who can't get excited about a horse race is really no man at all, and you can have the little yellow bastards." But when it was pointed out that the Japanese enabled him to grow more cane than any other plantation in the islands, he always acknowledged that fact: "Work is their god and I respect them for it. But my love I reserve for men who like horses."
The highlight of any season came when Wild Whip organized one of his polo tournaments, for this was the conspicuous game of the islands, and he maintained a line of thirty-seven