ON THE MAKALOA MAT

Contents

ON THE MAKALOA MAT

Unlike the women of most warmraces, those of Hawaii age well and nobly. With no pretenceof make-up or cunning concealment of time’s inroads, thewoman who sat under the hau tree might have been permitted asmuch as fifty years by a judge competent anywhere over the worldsave in Hawaii. Yet her children and her grandchildren, andRoscoe Scandwell who had been her husband for forty years, knewthat she was sixty-four and would be sixty-five come the nexttwenty-second day of June. But she did not look it, despitethe fact that she thrust reading glasses on her nose as she readher magazine and took them off when her gaze desired to wander inthe 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, sospaciously and comfortably house-like was its shade furnished;noble as the lawn that stretched away landward its plush of greenat an appraisement of two hundred dollars a front foot to abungalow equally dignified, noble, and costly. Seaward,glimpsed through a fringe of hundred-foot coconut palms, was theocean; beyond the reef a dark blue that grew indigo blue to thehorizon, within the reef all the silken gamut of jade and emeraldand tourmaline.

And this was but one house of the half-dozen houses belongingto Martha Scandwell. Her town-house, a few miles away inHonolulu, on Nuuanu Drive between the first and second“showers,” was a palace. Hosts of guests hadknown the comfort and joy of her mountain house on Tantalus, andof her volcano house, her mauka house, and hermakai house on the big island of Hawaii. Yet thisWaikiki house stressed no less than the rest in beauty, indignity, and in expensiveness of upkeep. Two Japaneseyard-boys were trimming hibiscus, a third was engaged expertlywith the long hedge of night-blooming cereus that was shortlyexpectant of unfolding in its mysterious night-bloom. Inimmaculate ducks, a house Japanese brought out the tea-things,followed by a Japanese maid, pretty as a butterfly in thedistinctive garb of her race, and fluttery as a butterfly toattend on her mistress. Another Japanese maid, an array ofTurkish towels on her arm, crossed the lawn well to the right inthe direction of the bath-houses, from which the children, inswimming suits, were beginning to emerge. Beyond, under thepalms at the edge of the sea, two Chinese nursemaids, in theirpretty native

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