On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales | Page 4

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 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."
"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