Hawaii - James Michener [467]
He died a Hawaiian, leaving his wild spirit to haunt the places he had loved. He was attended only by a pretty little Filipino girl he had picked up on Kauai. In his last minutes he tried to dictate a note to his seductive, brown-skinned playmate, but to his distress found she could not write, so he bellowed for a nurse, for he wanted to warn his successor: "Hoxworth, best way to keep labor controlled is to keep hand in legislature at all times." But when the nurse arrived to take this message, Wild Whip was dead, the builder of the islands who had been unable to build his own life, and the authorities spirited his little Filipino girl back to Kauai. The glowing sums of money old Whip had promised her she never got.
At twenty-nine Hoxworth Hale assumed control of the vast holdings, and when he first took the chair that Wild Whip had occupied for fifteen years, he realized that he must seem like a boy presuming to do a man's work, but at least he was dressed correctly for his new role: a dark-blue four-button suit with tight vest, an Egyptian-cotton shirt with detachable stiff collar and a heavy blue and red tie. His cuff links were of gold and pearl, and his hair was parted severely on the right-hand side. He was clean-shaven and steady of mind, and he was determined to send forward the fortunes of the family.
He was not unaccustomed to command, for quick upon the heels of his impulsive enlistment in the American Expeditionary Force in 1917, he had become a sergeant, and in France had won a battlefield commission, demobilizing as a captain. His troops had great regard for him; he tried to be a brave, self-contained young leader, willing to assault any objective. His men also found him fun to be with, for he posed as having the insouciance that all young men in uniform like to think they have, and his company was one of the best.
After the war he completed his education at Yale, a quiet young man of twenty-two whose early radicalism had been abandoned somewhere in France, and he never once wandered back to see the notorious Jarves paintings. When he graduated he was already a conservative businessman, eager to make his contribution to Hoxworth & Hale, but in California on his way back to Hawaii he met a lovely girl whose father was a rancher with large land holdings. For a while it looked as if they were going to marry, but one night she spoke disparagingly of Honolulu and suggested that Hoxworth remain in California: "Hoxy! You could have your father assign you to the San Francisco office!”
His reply had been both cold and distant: "We send only nephews who aren't too bright to California." The courtship ended and after that no one ever again called him Hoxy.
When he had been at work for some time in the head office in Honolulu he married his third cousin, Malama Janders, who was Hewie Janders' sister, and within a year he had a son Bromley, whom he prudently registered for both Punahou and Yale. It was true that whenever business took him to San Francisco, he experienced a sense of deep excitement when he first saw the California coastline, and he often wondered what had become of the pretty rancher's daughter; but that was about as errant a thought as he ever had.
Now, in 1927, Hoxworth Hale was these things, and in each he was an almost perfect exemplification of the archetype: he was a Hale, a Punahou graduate, a Yale man, the head of a great island firm, and a man married to his cousin. Therefore, when he spoke at his first meeting of the H & H board, his colleagues listened: "There is an unfortunate spirit of agitation in the world today,