On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1920 Mills and Boon edition.

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

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