ON THE MAKALOA MAT_ISLAND TALES(马克洛岛上的故事)
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2024-12-26
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ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
1
ON THE MAKALOA
MAT/ISLAND TALES
by Jack London
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
2
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
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
3
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 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
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
4
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 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."
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
5
"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 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."
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
6
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 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.
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
7
"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
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
8
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 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, we dressed out of it as well. I made my own dresses.
You can imagine them. Outside of the cowboys who chored the firewood,
I did the work. I cooked, and baked, and scrubbed--"
"You who had never known anything but servants from the time you
were born!" Martha pitied. "Never less than a regiment of them at
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
9
Kilohana."
"Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!" Bella
cried out. "How far I was compelled to make a pound of coffee go! A
broom worn down to nothing before a new one was bought! And beef!
Fresh beef and jerky, morning, noon, and night! And porridge! Never
since have I eaten porridge or any breakfast food."
She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment
with unseeing eyes at the colour-lavish reef while she composed herself.
And she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure, gracious, high-
breasted, noble-headed port of which no out-breeding can ever rob the
Hawaiian woman. Very haole was Bella Castner, fair-skinned, fine-
textured. Yet, as she returned, the high pose of head, the level-lidded
gaze of her long brown eyes under royal arches of eyebrows, the softly set
lines of her small mouth that fairly sang sweetness of kisses after sixty-
eight years--all made her the very picture of a chiefess of old Hawaii full-
bursting through her ampleness of haole blood. Taller she was than her
sister Martha, if anything more queenly.
"You know we were notorious as poor feeders," Bella laughed lightly
enough. "It was many a mile on either side from Nahala to the next roof.
Belated travellers, or storm-bound ones, would, on occasion, stop with us
overnight. And you know the lavishness of the big ranches, then and
now. How we were the laughing-stock! 'What do we care!' George
would say. 'They live to-day and now. Twenty years from now will be
our turn, Bella. They will be where they are now, and they will eat out of
our hand. We will be compelled to feed them, they will need to be fed,
and we will feed them well; for we will be rich, Bella, so rich that I am
afraid to tell you. But I know what I know, and you must have faith in me.'
"George was right. Twenty years afterward, though he did not live to
see it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not know
what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say to George:
'Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty years from now.
I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate coffee that is only two
cents a pound more than the awful stuff we are using. Why couldn't I fry
eggs in butter--now? I should dearly love at least one new tablecloth.
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
10
Our linen! I'm ashamed to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven
knows they dare come seldom enough.'
"'Be patient, Bella,' he would reply. 'In a little while, in only a few
years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep between our sheets,
will be proud of an invitation--those of them who will not be dead. You
remember how Stevens passed out last year--free-living and easy,
everybody's friend but his own. The Kohala crowd had to bury him, for
he left nothing but debts. Watch the others going the same pace.
There's your brother Hal. He can't keep it up and live five years, and he's
breaking his uncles' hearts. And there's Prince Lilolilo. Dashes by me
with half a hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering kanakas in his train
who would be better at hard work and looking after their future, for he will
never be king of Hawaii. He will not live to be king of Hawaii.'
"George was right. Brother Hal died. So did Prince Lilolilo. But
George was not ALL right. He, who neither drank nor smoked, who
never wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of his
lips a second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who was
invariably up before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp had a
tenth emptied itself, and who never thought to die, was dead even more
quickly than Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.
"'Be patient, Bella,' Uncle Robert would say to me. 'George Castner
is a coming man. I have chosen well for you. Your hardships now are
the hardships on the way to the promised land. Not always will the
Hawaiians rule in Hawaii. Just as they let their wealth slip out of their
hands, so will their rule slip out of their hands. Political power and the
land always go together. There will be great changes, revolutions no one
knows how many nor of what sort, save that in the end the haole will
possess the land and the rule. And in that day you may well be first lady
of Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii. It is
written in the books. It is ever so where the haole conflicts with the
easier races. I, your Uncle Robert, who am half-Hawaiian and half-haole,
know whereof I speak. Be patient, Bella, be patient.'
"'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was tender
for me. Thank God, he never told me to be patient. He knew. He was
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