On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales Read online

  On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales

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  ON THE MAKALOA

  MAT/ISLAND TALES

  by Jack London

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  On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales

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  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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  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

  anybody's fault it was Uncle John's."

  "Uncle John's!" Martha cried with sharp surprise. "If it had to be

  one or the other, I should have said Uncle Robert. But Uncle

  John!"

  Bella smiled with slow positiveness.

  "But it was Uncle Robert who made you marry George Castner," her

  sister urged.

  "That is true," Bella nodded corroboration. "But it was not the

  matter of a husband, but of a horse. I wanted to borrow a horse

  from Uncle John, and Uncle John said yes. That is how it all

  happened."

  A silence fell, pregnant and cryptic, and, while the voices of the

  children and the soft mandatory protests of the Asiatic maids drew

  nearer from the beach, Martha Scandwell felt herself vibrant and

  tremulous with sudden resolve of daring. She waved the children

  away.

  "Run along, dears, run along, Grandma and Aunt Bella want to talk."

  And as the shrill, sweet treble of child voices ebbed away across

  the lawn, Martha, with scrutiny of the heart, observed the sadness

  of the lines graven by secret woe for half a century in her

  sister's face. For nearly fifty years had she watched those lines.

  She steeled all the melting softness of the Hawaiian of her to

  break the half-century of silence.

  "Bella," she said. "We never know. You never spoke. But we

  wondered, oh, often and often--"

  "And never asked," Bella murmured gratefully.

  "But I am asking now, at the last. This is our twilight. Listen

  to them! Sometimes it almost frightens me to think that they are

  grandchildren, MY grandchildren--I, who only the other day, it

  would seem, was as heart-free, leg-free, care-free a girl as ever

  bestrode a horse, or swam in the big surf, or gathered opihis at

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  low tide, or laughed at a dozen lovers. And here in our twilight

  let us forget everything save that I am your dear sister as you are

  mine."

  The eyes of both were dewy moist. Bella palpably trembled to

  utterance.

  "We thought it was George Castner," Martha went on; "and we could

  guess the details. He was a cold man. You were warm Hawaiian. He

  must have been cruel. Brother Walcott always insisted he must have

  beaten you--"

  "No! No!" Bella broke in. "George Castner was never a brute, a

  beast. Almost have I wished, often, that he had been. He never

  laid hand on me. He never raised hand to me. He never raised his

  voice to me. Never--oh, can you believe it?--do, please, sister,

  believe it--did we have a high word nor a cross word. But that

  house of his, of ours, at Nahala, was grey. All the colour of it

  was grey and cool, and chill, while I was bright with all colours

  of sun, and earth, and blood, and birth. It was very cold, grey

  cold, with that cold grey husband of mine at Nahala. You know he

  was grey, Martha. Grey like those portraits of Emerson we used to

  see at school. His skin was grey. Sun and weather and all hours

  in the saddle could never tan it. And he was as grey inside as

  out.

  "And I was only nineteen when Uncle Robert decided on the marriage.

  How was I to know? Uncle Robert talked to me. He pointed out how

  the wealth and property of Hawaii was already beginning to pass

  into the hands of the haoles" (Whites). "The Hawaiian chiefs let

  their possessions slip away from them. The Hawaiian chiefesses,

  who married haoles, had their possessions, under the management of

  their haole husbands, increase prodigiously. He pointed back to

  the original Grandfather Roger Wilton, who had taken Grandmother

  Wilton's poor mauka lands and added to them and built up about them

  the Kilohana Ranch--"

  "Even then it was second only to the Parker Ranch," Martha

  interrupted proudly.

  "And he told me that had our father, before he died, been as far-
>
  seeing as grandfather, half the then Parker holdings would have

  been added to Kilohana, making Kilohana first. And he said that

  never, for ever and ever, would beef be cheaper. And he said that

  the big future of Hawaii would be in sugar. That was fifty years

  ago, and he has been more than proved right. And he said that the

  young haole, George Castner, saw far, and would go far, and that

  there were many girls of us, and that the Kilohana lands ought by

  rights to go to the boys, and that if I married George my future

  was assured in the biggest way.

  "I was only nineteen. Just back from the Royal Chief School--that

  was before our girls went to the States for their education. You

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  were among the first, Sister Martha, who got their education on the

  mainland. And what did I know of love and lovers, much less of

  marriage? All women married. It was their business in life.

  Mother and grandmother, all the way back they had married. It was

  my business in life to marry George Castner. Uncle Robert said so

  in his wisdom, and I knew he was very wise. And I went to live

  with my husband in the grey house at Nahala.

  "You remember it. No trees, only the rolling grass lands, the high

  mountains behind, the sea beneath, and the wind!--the Waimea and

  Nahala winds, we got them both, and the kona wind as well. Yet

  little would I have minded them, any more than we minded them at

  Kilohana, or than they minded them at Mana, had not Nahala itself

  been so grey, and husband George so grey. We were alone. He was

  managing Nahala for the Glenns, who had gone back to Scotland.

  Eighteen hundred a year, plus beef, horses, cowboy service, and the

  ranch house, was what he received--"

  "It was a high salary in those days," Martha said.

  "And for George Castner, and the service he gave, it was very

  cheap," Bella defended. "I lived with him for three years. There

  was never a morning that he was out of his bed later than half-past

  four. He was the soul of devotion to his employers. Honest to a

  penny in his accounts, he gave them full measure and more of his

  time and energy. Perhaps that was what helped make our life so

  grey. But listen, Martha. Out of his eighteen hundred, he laid

  aside sixteen hundred each year. Think of it! The two of us lived

  on two hundred a year. Luckily he did not drink or smoke. Also,