A thousand deaths by Jack London

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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