Hawaii - James Michener [422]
Wild Whip played a fine game, and in order to maintain the quality of his team, always hired his lunas personally. Sitting carelessly in a deep chair, he watched the man approach down the long lanai and studied his gait. "Limber, supple, nice walk that one," he would muse. His first question was invariable: "Young man, have you a good seat?" If the man stuttered or failed to understand what a good seat implied, Whip courteously excused him from further consideration. But if the man said, "I've been riding since I was three," Whip proceeded with the interview. Traditionally, on Kauai, lunas were either German immigrants or Norwegians, and among themselves they circulated the warning: "Don't apply at Hanakai unless you're good at polo."
When he hired a man Whip laid down three requirements: "Polished boots that come to the knee, and I want them polished till they gleam. White riding breeches, and I want them white. And finally, lunas at Hanakai never strike the workmen.."
Actually, few of the Germans and Norwegians were good at polo when they first started work, but Whip gave lessons every afternoon at four, and in time even the Japanese became proud when their boss and their lunas defended Hanakai's championship against all comers from Kauai.
But major excitement occurred periodically when a picked team from Honolulu, consisting mostly of Janderses and Whipples and Hewletts who had perfected their game at Yale--for many years in a row the stars of the Yale four came from Hawaii--chartered a boat to bring their ponies and their cheering section on an invasion of Kauai. Then haoles from all the local plantations moved out to Hanakai; enormous beds ten feet square were thrown along the lanai, with eight or ten haphazard people to the bed, and kitchens were set up behind the casuarina trees. In the evening gala dances were held with men in formal dress and women brilliant in gowns from Paris and Canton. Frequently, tournaments were staged with four or five competing teams, and all lived at Hanakai for a week. Then life was glorious, with champagne and flirtations, and often Wild Whip succeeded in sequestering one of the visitors' wives in some darkened bedroom, so that over the polo games at Hanakai there hung always the ominous shadow of potential scandal.
There was another shadow, too, for if the polo field and the croton bushes were made possible only by the protecting rim of silent casuarina trees which kept away the storms and the killing salt, so the life of the haoles was protected by the rim of silent Japanese laborers who lived in the womanless huts and who kept away the sweat, the toil and the work of building the future.
It was curious that when the men of Hawaii returned to Yale for alumni celebrations, and when their former classmates who now lived in respectable centers like Boston and Philadelphia asked, "What holds a brilliant man like you in Hawaii?" the Janderses and the Hales and the Whipples usually replied longingly, "Have you ever seen a polo game at Hanakai? The ocean at your feet. The storms sweeping in with rainbows. When your pony slips, he leaves a bright red scar across the turf. You could live a hundred years in Philadelphia and never see anything like the polo season at Hanakai." The Yale men who had gone to live in Philadelphia never understood, but their former classmates who had played polo along the Hawaii circuit never forgot that Hawaii in those years provided one of the best societies on earth.
When the polo players had departed, when the field kitchens were taken down, and when the patient little Japanese gardeners were