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SOUTH SEA TALES
by Jack London
SOUTH SEA TALES
104
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
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
SOUTH SEA TALES
105
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.
“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