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On the Makaloa Mat Island Tales by Jack London (Paperback / softback, 2013)
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Product Information
Unlike the women of most warm races, those of Hawaii age well and bly. With 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 t look it, despite the fact that she thrust reading glasses on her se 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 ble situation-ble 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; ble 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, ble, 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 Holulu, on Nuuanu Drive between the first and second showers, was a palace. Hosts of guests had kwn the comfort and joy of her mountain house on Tantalus, and of her volca house, her mauka house, and her makai house on the big island of Hawaii. Yet this Waikiki house stressed 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. Ather 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 kwn 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 less straight descended from the royal chief-stocks of Hawaii whose genealogies were chanted in males a thousand years before written speech was acquired.Product Identifiers
PublisherCreateSpace
ISBN-10149449180x
ISBN-139781494491802
eBay Product ID (ePID)189536755
Product Key Features
AuthorJack London
FormatTrade Paperback (Us) ,Unsewn / Adhesive Bound, Paperback / Softback
LanguageEnglish
TopicAnthologies
Additional Product Features
Content NoteBlack & White Illustrations
Date of Publication15/12/2013
Country of PublicationUnited States
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