On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales by Jack London
Contents:
On the Makaloa Mat
The Bones of Kahekili
When Alice Told her Soul
Shin-Bones
The Water Baby
The Tears of Ah Kim
The Kanaka Surf
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3
ON THE MAKALOA MAT
Unlike the women of most warm races, those of Hawaii age well and
nobly. With no pretence of make-up or cunning concealment of
time’s inroads, the woman who sat under the hau tree might have
been permitted as much as fifty years by a judge competent anywhere
over the world save in Hawaii. Yet her children and her
grandchildren, and Roscoe Scandwell who had been her husband for
forty years, knew that she was sixty-four and would be sixty-five
come the next twenty-second day of June. But she did not look it,
despite the fact that she thrust reading glasses on her nose as she
read her magazine and took them off when her gaze desired to wander
in the direction of the half-dozen children playing on the lawn.
It was a noble situation–noble as the ancient hau tree, the size
of a house, where she sat as if in a house, so spaciously and
comfortably house-like was its shade furnished; noble as the lawn
that stretched away landward its plush of green at an appraisement
of two hundred dollars a front foot to a bungalow equally
dignified, noble, and costly. Seaward, glimpsed through a fringe
of hundred-foot coconut palms, was the ocean; beyond the reef a
dark blue that grew indigo blue to the horizon, within the reef all
the silken gamut of jade and emerald and tourmaline.
And this was but one house of the half-dozen houses belonging to
Martha Scandwell. Her town-house, a few miles away in Honolulu, on
Nuuanu Drive between the first and second “showers,” was a palace.
Hosts of guests had known the comfort and joy of her mountain house
on Tantalus, and of her volcano house, her mauka house, and her
makai house on the big island of Hawaii. Yet this Waikiki house
stressed no less than the rest in beauty, in dignity, and in
expensiveness of upkeep. Two Japanese yard-boys were trimming
hibiscus, a third was engaged expertly with the long hedge of
night-blooming cereus that was shortly expectant of unfolding in
its mysterious night-bloom. In immaculate ducks, a house Japanese
brought out the tea-things, followed by a Japanese maid, pretty as
a butterfly in the distinctive garb of her race, and fluttery as a
butterfly to attend on her mistress. Another Japanese maid, an
array of Turkish towels on her arm, crossed the lawn well to the
right in the direction of the bath-houses, from which the children,
in swimming suits, were beginning to emerge. Beyond, under the
palms at the edge of the sea, two Chinese nursemaids, in their
pretty native costume of white yee-shon and-straight-lined
trousers, their black braids of hair down their backs, attended
each on a baby in a perambulator.
And all these, servants, and nurses, and grandchildren, were Martha
Scandwell’s. So likewise was the colour of the skin of the
grandchildren–the unmistakable Hawaiian colour, tinted beyond
shadow of mistake by exposure to the Hawaiian sun. One-eighth and
one-sixteenth Hawaiian were they, which meant that seven-eighths or
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fifteen-sixteenths white blood informed that skin yet failed to
obliterate the modicum of golden tawny brown of Polynesia. But in
this, again, only a trained observer would have known that the
frolicking children were aught but pure-blooded white. Roscoe
Scandwell, grandfather, was pure white; Martha three-quarters
white; the many sons and daughters of them seven-eighths white; the
grandchildren graded up to fifteen-sixteenths white, or, in the
cases when their seven-eighths fathers and mothers had married
seven-eighths, themselves fourteen-sixteenths or seven-eighths
white. On both sides the stock was good, Roscoe straight descended
from the New England Puritans, Martha no less straight descended
from the royal chief-stocks of Hawaii whose genealogies were
chanted in males a thousand years before written speech was
acquired.
In the distance a machine stopped and deposited a woman whose
utmost years might have been guessed as sixty, who walked across
the lawn as lightly as a well-cared-for woman of forty, and whose
actual calendar age was sixty-eight. Martha rose from her seat to
greet her, in the hearty Hawaiian way, arms about, lips on lips,
faces eloquent and bodies no less eloquent with sincereness and
frank excessiveness of emotion. And it was “Sister Bella,” and
“Sister Martha,” back and forth, intermingled with almost
incoherent inquiries about each other, and about Uncle This and
Brother That and Aunt Some One Else, until, the first tremulousness
of meeting over, eyes moist with tenderness of love, they sat
gazing at each other across their teacups. Apparently, they had
not seen nor embraced for years. In truth, two months marked the
interval of their separation. And one was sixty-four, the other
sixty-eight. But the thorough comprehension resided in the fact
that in each of them one-fourth of them was the sun-warm, love-warm
heart of Hawaii.
The children flooded about Aunt Bella like a rising tide and were
capaciously hugged and kissed ere they departed with their nurses
to the swimming beach.
“I thought I’d run out to the beach for several days–the trades
had stopped blowing,” Martha explained.
“You’ve been here two weeks already,” Bella smiled fondly at her
younger sister. “Brother Edward told me. He met me at the steamer
and insisted on running me out first of all to see Louise and
Dorothy and that first grandchild of his. He’s as mad as a silly
hatter about it.”
“Mercy!” Martha exclaimed. “Two weeks! I had not thought it that
long.”
“Where’s Annie?–and Margaret?” Bella asked.
Martha shrugged her voluminous shoulders with voluminous and
forgiving affection for her wayward, matronly daughters who left
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their children in her care for the afternoon.
“Margaret’s at a meeting of the Out-door Circle–they’re planning
the planting of trees and hibiscus all along both sides of Kalakaua
Avenue,” she said. “And Annie’s wearing out eighty dollars’ worth
of tyres to collect seventy-five dollars for the British Red Cross-
-this is their tag day, you know.”
“Roscoe must be very proud,” Bella said, and observed the bright
glow of pride that appeared in her sister’s eyes. “I got the news
in San Francisco of Ho-o-la-a’s first dividend. Remember when I
put a thousand in it at seventy-five cents for poor Abbie’s
children, and said I’d sell when it went to ten dollars?”
“And everybody laughed at you, and at anybody who bought a share,”
Martha nodded. “But Roscoe knew. It’s selling to-day at twenty-
four.”
“I sold mine from the steamer by wireless–at twenty even,” Bella
continued. “And now Abbie’s wildly dressmaking. She’s going with
May and Tootsie to Paris.”
“And Carl?” Martha queried.
“Oh, he’ll finish Yale all right–”
“Which he would have done anyway, and you KNOW it,” Martha charged,
lapsing charmingly into twentieth-century slang.
Bella affirmed her guilt of intention of paying the way of her
school friend’s son through college, and added complacently:
“Just the same it was nicer to have Ho-o-la-a pay for it. In a
way, you see, Roscoe is doing it, because it was his judgment I
trusted to when I made the investment.” She gazed slowly about
her, her eyes taking in, not merely the beauty and comfort and
repose of all they rested on, but the immensity of beauty and
comfort and repose represented by them, scattered in similar oases
all over the islands. She sighed pleasantly and observed: “All
our husbands have done well by us with what we brought them.”
“And happily . . . ” Martha agreed, then suspended her utterance
with suspicious abruptness.
“And happily, all of us, except Sister Bella,” Bella forgivingly
completed the thought for her.
“It was too bad, that marriage,” Martha murmured, all softness of
sympathy. “You were so young. Uncle Robert should never have made
you.”
“I was only nineteen,” Bella nodded. “But it was not George
Castner’s fault. And look what he, out of she grave, has done for
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me. Uncle Robert was wise. He knew George had the far-away vision
of far ahead, the energy, and the steadiness. He saw, even then,
and that’s fifty years ago, the value of the Nahala water-rights
which nobody else valued then. They thought he was struggling to
buy the cattle range. He struggled to buy the future of the water-
-and how well he succeeded you know. I’m almost ashamed to think
of my income sometimes. No; whatever else, the unhappiness of our
marriage was not due to George. I could have lived happily with
him, I know, even to this day, had he lived.” She shook her head
slowly. “No; it was not his fault. Nor anybody’s. Not even mine.
If it was anybody’s fault–” The wistful fondness of her smile
took the sting out of what she was about to say. “If it was