tending each cut in the polo turf as if it were a personal wound, Wild Whip would retire to his sprawling mansion overlooking the sea and get drunk. He was never offensive and never beat anyone while intoxicated. At such times he stayed away from the brothels in Kapaa and away from the broad lanai from which he could see the ocean. In a small, darkened room he drank, and as he did so he often recalled his grandfather's words: "Girls are like stars, and you could reach up and pinch each one on the points. And then in the east the moon rises, enormous and perfect. And that's something else, entirely different." It was now apparent to Whip, in his forty-fifth year, that for him the moon did not intend to rise. Somehow he had missed encountering the woman whom he could love as his grandfather had loved the Hawaiian princess Noelani. He had known hundreds of women, but he had found none that a man could permanently want or respect. Those who were desirable were mean in. spirit and those who were loyal were sure to be tedious. It was probably best, he thought at such times, to do as he did: know a couple of the better girls at Kapaa, wait for some friend's wife who was bored with her husband, or trust that a casual trip through the more settled camps might turn up some workman's wife who wanted a little excitement. It wasn't a bad life and was certainly less expensive in the long run than trying to marry and divorce a succession of giddy women; but often when he had reached this conclusion, through the bamboo shades of the darkened room in which he huddled a light would penetrate, and it would be the great moon risen from the waters to the east and now passing majestically high above the Pacific. It was an all-seeing beacon, brilliant enough to make the grassy lawns of Hanakai a sheet of silver, probing enough to find any mansion tucked away beneath the casuarina trees. When this moon sought out Wild Whip he would first draw in his feet, trying like a child to evade it, but when it persisted he often rose, threw open the lanai screens, and went forth to meet it. He would stand in the shimmering brilliance for a long time, listening to the surf pound in below, and in its appointed course the moon would disappear behind the jagged hills to the west.
It was uncanny, at such moments, how the Hawaiian men who worked for Whip would sense his mood. In twos and threes, they would appear mysteriously with ukuleles, strumming them idly in subtle island harmonies, and Whip would hear them and would cry, "Eh, you! Pupule, you come!" And the men would unostentatiously gather about him, and he would grab a ukulele and begin to chant some long-forgotten song his grandmother had taught him. He became a Hawaiian, moody, distant, hungry for the message of the night; and for hours he would sing with his men, one song after another. A field hand would grunt, "Eh, boss? You got some okolehau?" And Whip would open some whiskey, and the bottle would pass reflectively from mouth to mouth, and the old laments of Hawaii would continue. At dawn the men would inconspicuously shuffle away, one or two at a time, but the man whose ukulele Wild Whip had borrowed would linger on until at last he would have to say, "Mo bettah I go now, boss," and the long night would end.
After such interludes Wild Whip always turned to his pineapples. On a well-protected plateau about the size of two tennis courts, perched at the head of the Hanakai valley and about two hundred yards from the African tulip tree, he had constructed a special field and fertilized it for the propagation of pineapples, for it was Whip's belief that ultimately the growing of this fruit on high fields and sugar on low was the destiny of Hawaii. To anyone who would listen, he was eager to explain his theories.
"Look! The two things are natural partners. Sugar needs water, a ton of water for each pound of sugar. Pineapple doesn't. Sugar thrives on low fields, pineapples on high. At the very point on a hillside where it's no longer profitable to irrigate for sugar, that's where pineapple grows best.