文档介绍：ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
ON THE MAKALOA
MAT/ISLAND TALES
by Jack London
1
ON THE MAKALOA MAT/ISLAND TALES
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 petent 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-e 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 fortably
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 fort 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