similarly occupied on the other side, and warning Miss Drexel out of the way.
“Oh, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds,” Wemple muttered
aloud, as if in prayer, as he wrestled the car about the narrow area, gaining
sometimes inches in pivoting it, sometimes fetching back up the inner wall
precisely at the spot previously attained, and, once, having the car, with the
surface of the roadbed under it, slide bodily and sidewise, two feet down the road.
The clapping of Miss Drexel’s hands was the first warning Davies received that
the feat was accomplished, and, swinging on to the running board, he found the
car backing in the straight-away up the next zigzag and Wemple still chanting
ecstatically, “Oh, you Merry Olds, you Merry Olds!”
There were no more grades nor zig-zags between them and Tampico, but, so
narrow was the primitive road, two miles farther were backed before space was
DUTCH COURAGE AND OTHER STORIES
78
found in which to turn around. One thing of importance did lie between them and
Tampico—namely the investing lines of the constitutionalists. But here, at noon,
fortune favored in the form of three American soldiers of fortune, operators of
machine guns, who had fought the entire campaign with Villa from the beginning
of the advance from the Texan border. Under a white flag, Wemple drove the car
across the zone of debate into the federal lines, where good fortune, in the guise
of an ubiquitous German naval officer, again received them.
“I think you are nearly the only Americans left in Tampico,” he told them. “About
all the rest are lying out in the Gulf on the different warships. But at the Southern
Hotel there are several, and the situation seems quieter.”
As they got out at the Southern, Davies laid this hand on the car and murmured,
“Good old girl!” Wemple followed suit. And Miss Drexel, engaging both men’s
eyes and about to say something, was guilty of a sudden moisture in her own eyes
that made her turn to the car with a caressing hand and repeat, “Good old girl!”
SOUTH SEA TALES
1
SOUTH SEA TALES
by Jack London
SOUTH SEA TALES
2
CONTENTS
The House of Mapuhi
The Whale Tooth
Mauki
“Yah! Yah! Yah!”
The Heathen
The Terrible Solomons
The Inevitable White Man
The Seed of McCoy
SOUTH SEA TALES
3
THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI
Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the
light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just outside
the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle of
pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and
from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the bottom of the huge and
glassy lagoon was much pearl shell, and from the deck of the schooner, across
the slender ring of the atoll, the divers could be seen at work. But the
lagoon had no entrance for even a trading schooner. With a favoring breeze
cutters could win in through the tortuous and shallow channel, but the
schooners lay off and on outside and sent in their small boats.
The Aorai swung out a boat smartly, into which sprang half a dozen
brown-skinned sailors clad only in scarlet loincloths. They took the oars,
while in the stern sheets, at the steering sweep, stood a young man garbed in
the tropic white that marks the European. The golden strain of Polynesia
betrayed itself in the sun-gilt of his fair skin and cast up golden sheens and
lights through the glimmering blue of his eyes. Raoul he was, Alexandre Raoul,
youngest son of Marie Raoul, the wealthy quarter-caste, who owned and managed
half a dozen trading schooners similar to the Aorai. Across an eddy just
outside the entrance, and in and through and over a boiling tide-rip, the boat
fought its way to the mirrored calm of the lagoon. Young Raoul leaped out upon
the white sand and shook hands with a tall native. The man’s chest and
shoulders were magnificent, but the stump of a right arm, beyond the flesh of
which the age-whitened bone projected several inches, attested the encounter
with a shark that had put an end to his diving days and made him a fawner and
an intriguer for small favors.
“Have you heard, Alec?” were his first words. “Mapuhi has found a pearl–such
a pearl. Never was there one like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor in all the
Paumotus, nor in all the world. Buy it from him. He has it now. And remember
that I told you first. He is a fool and you can get it cheap. Have you any
tobacco?”
Straight up the beach to a shack under a pandanus tree Raoul headed. He was
his mother’s supercargo, and his business was to comb all the Paumotus for the
wealth of copra, shell, and pearls that they yielded up.
He was a young supercargo, it was his second voyage in such capacity, and he
suffered much secret worry from his lack of experience in pricing pearls. But
when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight he managed to suppress the startle
it gave him, and to maintain a careless, commercial expression on his face.
For the pearl had struck him a blow. It was large as a pigeon egg, a perfect
sphere, of a whiteness that reflected opalescent lights from all colors about
it. It was alive. Never had he seen anything like it. When Mapuhi dropped it
into his hand he was surprised by the weight of it. That showed that it was a
good pearl. He examined it closely, through a pocket magnifying glass. It was
without flaw or blemish. The purity of it seemed almost to melt into the
atmosphere out of his hand. In the shade it was softly luminous, gleaming like
a tender moon. So translucently white was it, that when he dropped it into a
glass of water he had difficulty in finding it. So straight and swiftly had it
sunk to the bottom that he knew its weight was excellent.
SOUTH SEA TALES
4
“Well, what do you want for it?” he asked, with a fine assumption of
nonchalance.
“I want–” Mapuhi began, and behind him, framing his own dark face, the dark
faces of two women and a girl nodded concurrence in what he wanted. Their
heads were bent forward, they were animated by a suppressed eagerness, their
eyes flashed avariciously.
“I want a house,” Mapuhi went on. “It must have a roof of galvanized iron and
an octagon-drop-clock. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around. A
big room must be in the centre, with a round table in the middle of it and the
octagon-drop-clock on the wall. There must be four bedrooms, two on each side
of the big room, and in each bedroom must be an iron bed, two chairs, and a
washstand. And back of the house must be a kitchen, a good kitchen, with pots
and pans and a stove. And you must build the house on my island, which is
Fakarava.”
“Is that all?” Raoul asked incredulously.
“There must be a sewing machine,” spoke up Tefara, Mapuhi’s wife.
“Not forgetting the octagon-drop-clock,” added Nauri, Mapuhi’s mother.
“Yes, that is all,” said Mapuhi.
Young Raoul laughed. He laughed long and heartily. But while he laughed he
secretly performed problems in mental arithmetic. He had never built a house
in his life, and his notions concerning house building were hazy. While he
laughed, he calculated the cost of the voyage to Tahiti for materials, of the
materials themselves, of the voyage back again to Fakarava, and the cost of
landing the materials and of building the house. It would come to four
thousand French dollars, allowing a margin for safety–four thousand French
dollars were equivalent to twenty thousad francs. It was impossible. How was
he to know the value of such a pearl? Twenty thousand francs was a lot of
money–and of his mother’s money at that.
“Mapuhi,” he said, “you are a big fool. Set a money price.”
But Mapuhi shook his head, and the three heads behind him shook with his.
“I want the house,” he said. “It must be six fathoms long with a porch all
around–”
“Yes, yes,” Raoul interrupted. “I know all about your house, but it won’t do.
I’ll give you a thousand Chili dollars.”
The four heads chorused a silent negative.
“And a hundred Chili dollars in trade.”
“I want the house,” Mapuhi began.
SOUTH SEA TALES
5
“What good will the house do you?” Raoul demanded. “The first hurricane that
comes along will wash it away. You ought to know.
Captain Raffy says it looks like a hurricane right now.”
“Not on Fakarava,” said Mapuhi. “The land is much higher there. On this
island, yes. Any hurricane can sweep Hikueru. I will have the house on