Hawaii - James Michener [428]
It came when Whip's canning manager reported: "Because the Cayennes are so big we can't fit them into the cans, and waste forty per cent of the fruit trimming them down to can size."
"What in hell do you want me to do?" Whip snarled, wearied by the constant battle to keep his fields productive.
"What we've got to have is smaller Cayennes," the manager explained.
So Wild Whip stormed back to Hanakai, shook his English expert into reasonable sobriety, and said, "Dr. Schilling, you've got to make the pineapples smaller."
Through a golden haze that had been accumulating for thirteen months the scraggly Englishman said, "The mind of man can accomplish anything. Draw me the pineapple you want."
Whip went back to the canning manager, and together they drew on paper the specifications of the perfect pineapple. It had to be sufficiently barrel-shaped to leave a good rim of fruit when the core was cut out. It had to be juicy, acid, sweet, small, without barbs on the leaves, solid and golden in color. With a ruler and French curves the two men constructed the desired fruit, and when Whip thrust the paper at Schilling he said, "That's what we want."
Schilling, glad to have an alternative to drunkenness, replied, "That's what you'll get." He inspected every pineapple field on Kauai, comparing the available fruit against the ideal image, and whenever he found something close to the printed specifications, he marked that plant with a flag, and after four years of this infinitely patient work he announced, "We have built the perfect pineapple." When he delivered the first truckload to the cannery, the manager was ecstatic. "Our problems are over," he said.
"Until the next one," Schilling replied.
In 1911 a woman writer from New York, who had once stayed in Honolulu four weeks, wrote a rather scurrilous book about Hawaii in which she lamented three things: the influence of the missionaries who had maliciously killed off the Hawaiians by dressing them in Mother Hubbards; the criminality of companies like Janders & Whipple who had imported Orientals; and the avarice of missionary descendants like those in Hoxworth & Hale who had stolen the lush lands of Hawaii. After her book had created something of a sensation throughout America she returned to the islands and in triumph came to Kauai, where at a splendid polo tournament she was presented to Wild Whip Hoxworth. His team had just defeated Honolulu, and he was flushed with victory and should have been in a gracious mood, but as he was introduced to the lady author he thought he understood who she was and asked coldly, "Are you the good lady who wrote Hawaii's Shame?"
"Yes," she replied proudly, "I am," for she was accustomed to being fawned over. "What do you think of it?"
"Ma'am," Whip said, carefully placing his polo mallet on a rack lest he be tempted to use it in an unorthodox manner, "I thought your book was complete bullshit."
The polo players and their ladies recoiled from Whip's savage comment, and some began to offer the startled lady their apologies, but Whip interrupted. "No, there will be no apologies. Stand where you are, ma'am, and look in every direction. Whatever you see was brought into these islands by men like me. The sugar upon which our economy rests? My Grandfather Whipple, a missionary, brought that in. The pineapples? I'm the grandson of missionaries and I brought them in. The pine trees, the royal palms, the tulip trees, the avocados, the wild plum, the crotons, the