Angel Island, Inez Haynes Gillmore [the two towers ebook txt] 📗

rest of the afternoon. But they had to get accustomed to

it in the week that followed. Thereafter, some time during the day, the

cry would ring out, “Here’s your girl, Honey!” And Honey, not even

dropping his tools, would smile over his shoulder at the approaching

Lulu.

 

As time went by, she ventured nearer and nearer, stayed longer and

longer. Honey, calmly driving nails, addressed to her an endless,

chaffing monologue. At first, it was apparent she was as much repelled

by the tools as she was fascinated by Honey. For him to throw a nail to

the ground was the signal for her to speed to the zenith. But gradually,

in spite of the noise they made, she came to accept them as dumb,

inanimate, harmless. And one day, when Honey, working on the roof,

dropped a screw-driver, she flew down, picked it up, flew back, and

placed it within reach of his hand. She would hover over him for hours,

helping in many small ways. This only, however, when the other men were

sufficiently far away and only when Honey’s two hands were occupied. If

any one of them - Honey and the rest - made the most casual of

accidental moves in her direction, her flight was that of an arrow. But

nobody could have been more careful than they not to frighten her.

 

They always stopped, however, to watch her approach and her departure.

There was something irresistibly feminine about Lulu’s flight. She

herself seemed to appreciate this. If anybody looked at her, she

exhibited her accomplishments with an eagerness that had a charming

touch of naivete. She dipped and dove endlessly. She dealt in little

darts and rushes, bird-like in their speed and grace. She never flew

high, but, on her level, her activity was marvelous.

 

“The supermanning little imp!” Pete Murphy said again and again. “The

vain little devil,” Ralph Addington would add, chuckling.

 

“How the thunder did we ever start to call her the ‘plain one’?” Honey

was always asking in an injured tone.

 

Lulu was far from plain. She was, however, one of those girls who start

by being “ugly” or “queer-looking,” or downright “homely,” and end by

becoming “interesting” or “picturesque” or “fascinating,” according to

the divagations of the individual vocabulary. She had the beaute

troublante. At first sight, you might have called her gipsy, Indian,

Kanaka, Chinese, Japanese, Korean - any exotic type that you had not

seen. Which is to say that she had the look of the primitive woman and

the foreign woman. Superficially, her beauty of irregularity was of all

beauty the most perturbing and provocative. Eyes, skin, hair, she was

all copper-browns and crimson-bronzes, all the high gloss of satiny

surfaces. Every shape and contour was a variant from the regular. Her

eyes took a bewildering slant. Her face showed a little piquant stress

on the cheekbones. Her hair banded in a long, solid, club-like braid. In

repose she bore a look a little sullen, a little heavy. When she smiled,

it seemed as if her whole face waked up; but it was only the glitter of

white teeth in the slit of her scarlet mouth.

 

Lulu always dressed in browns and greens; leaves, mosses, grasses made a

dim-colored, velvety fabric that contrasted richly with her coppery

satin surfaces and her brilliant orange wings.

 

The excitement of this had hardly died down when Frank Merrill brought

the tale of another adventure to camp. He had fallen into the habit of

withdrawing late in the afternoon to one of the reefs, far enough away

to read and to write quietly. One day, just as he had gone deep into his

book, a shadow fell across it. Startled, he looked up. Directly over his

head, pasted on the sky like a scarlet V, hovered the “dark one.” After

his first instant of surprise and a second interval of perplexity, he

put his book down, settled himself back quietly, and watched. Conscious

of his espionage apparently, she flew away, floated, flew back, floated,

flew up, flew down, floated - always within a little distance. After

half an hour of this aerial irresolution, she sailed off. She repeated

her performance the next afternoon and the next, and the next, staying

longer each time. By the end of the week she was spending whole

afternoons there. She, too, became a regular visitor.

 

She never spoke. And she scarcely moved. She waved her great scarlet

wings only fast enough to hold herself beyond Frank’s reach. But from

that distance she watched his movements, watched closely and

unceasingly, watched with the interest of a child at a moving-picture

show. Her surveillance of him was so intense it seemed impossible that

she could see anything else. But if one of the other four men started to

join them, she became a flash of scarlet lightning that tore the

distance.

 

Frank, of course, found this interesting. Every day he made voluminous

notes of his observations. Every night be embodied these notes in his

monograph.

 

“What does she look like close to?” the others asked him again and

again.

 

“Really, I’ve hardly had a chance to notice yet,” was Frank’s invariable

answer. “She’s a comely young person, I should say, and, as you can

easily see, of the brunette coloring. I’m so much more interested in her

flying than in her appearance that I’ve never really taken a good look

at her. Unfortunately she flies less well than the others. I wish I

could get a chance to study all of them - the ‘quiet one’ in particular;

she flies so much faster. On the other hand, this one seems able to hold

herself motionless in the air longer than they.”

 

“She’s lazy,” Honey Smith said decisively. “I got that right off. She

looks like a Spanish woman and she is a good deal like one in her ways.”

 

Honey was right; the “dark one” was lazy. Alone she always flew low, and

at no time, even in company, did she dare great altitudes. She seemed to

love to float, wings outspread and eyes half closed, on one of those

tranquil air-plateaux that lie between drifting air-currents. She was an

adept, apparently, at finding the little nodule of quiet space that

forms the center of every windstorm. Standing upright in it, flaming

wings erect, she would whirl through space like an autumn leaf.

Gradually, she became less suspicious of the other men. She often passed

in their direction on the way to her afternoon vigil with Frank.

 

“She certainly is one peach of a female,” said Ralph Addington. I don’t

know but what she’s prettier than my blonde. Too bad she’s stuck on that

stiff of a Merrill. I suppose he’d sit there every afternoon for a year

and just look at her.”

 

“I should think she came from Andalusia,” Honey answered, watching the

long, low sweep of her scarlet flight. “She’s got to have a Spanish

name. Say we call her Chiquita.”

 

And Chiquita she became.

 

Chiquita was beautiful. Her beauty had a highwayman quality of violence;

it struck quick and full in the face. She was the darkest of all the

girls, a raven black. As Lulu was all coppery shine and shimmer, all

satiny gloss and gleam, so Chiquita was all dusk in the coloring, all

velvet in the surfaces. Her great heavy-lidded eyes were dusk and

velvet, with depth on depth of an unmeaning dreaminess. Her hair, brows,

lashes were dusk and velvet; and there was no light in them. Her skin, a

dusky cream on which velvety shade accented velvety shadow, was

colorless except where her lips, cupped like a flower, offered a splash

of crimson. Yet, in spite of the violence of her beauty, her expression

held a tropical languor. Indeed, had not her flying compelled a

superficial vigor from her, she would have seemed voluptuous.

 

Chiquita wore scarlet always, the exact scarlet of her wings, a clinging

mass of tropical bloom; huge star-shaped or lilly-like flowers whose

brilliant lustre accentuated her dusky coloring.

 

They had no sooner accustomed themselves to the incongruity of Frank

Merrill’s conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy

developed what Honey called “a case.” It was scarcely a question of

development; for with Pete it had been the “thin one” from the

beginning. Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her

Clara - and Clara she ultimately became. Among themselves, the men

employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with

Pete. To Ralph she was “the cat”; to Billy, “the poser”; to Honey,

“Carrots.”

 

Clara appeared first with Lulu. She did not stay long on her initial

visit. But afterwards she always accompanied her friend, always stayed

as late as she.

 

“I’d pick those two for running-mates anywhere,” Ralph said in private

to Honey. “I wish I had a dollar bill for every time I’ve met up with

that combination, one simple, devoted, self-sacrificing, the other

selfish, calculating, catty.”

 

Clara was not exactly beautiful, although she had many points of beauty.

Her straight red hair clung to her head like a close-fitting helmet of

copper. Her skin balanced delicately between a brown pallor and a golden

sallowness. Her long, black lashes paled her gray eyes slightly; her

snub nose made charming havoc of what, without it, would have been a

conventional regularity of profile. She was really no more slender than

the normal woman, but, compared with her mates, she seemed of elfin

slimness; she was shapely in a supple, long-limbed way. There was

something a little exotic about her. Her green and gold plumage gave her

a touch of the fantastic and the bizarre. Prevailingly, she arrayed

herself in flowers that ran all the shades from cream and lemon to

yellow and orange. She was like a parrot among more uniformly feathered

birds.

 

Clara never flew high. It was apparent, however, that if she made a

tremendous effort, she could take any height. On the other hand, she

flew more swiftly than either Lulu or Chiquita. She seemed to keep by

preference to the middle altitudes. She hated wind and fog; she appeared

only in calm and dry weather. Perhaps this was because the wind

interfered with her histrionics, the fog with the wavy complications of

her red hair. For she postured as she moved; whatever her hurry, she

presented a picture, absolutely composed. And her hair was always

intricately arranged, always decked with leaves and flowers.

 

“By jiminy, I’d make my everlasting fortune off you,” Honey Smith once

addressed her, as she flew over his head, “selling you to the

moving-picture people.”

 

Wings straight up, legs straight out, arms straight ahead, delicately

slender feet, and strong-looking hands dropping like flowers, her only

answer to this remark was an enigmatic closing of her thick-lashed lids,

a twist into a pose even more sensuously beautiful.

 

“Say, I’m tired waiting,” Ralph Addington growled one day, when the

lovely trio flew over his head in a group. “Why doesn’t that blonde of

mine put in an appearance? Oh, Clara, Lulu, Chiquita,” he called, “won’t

you bring your peachy friend the next time you call?”

 

It was a long time, however, before the “peachy one” appeared. Then

suddenly one day a great jagged shadow enveloped them in its purple

coolness. The men looked up, startled. She must have come upon them

slowly and quietly, for she was close. Her mischievous face smiled

alluringly down at them from the wide triangle of her blue wings.

 

Followed an exhibition of flying which outdid all the others.

 

Dropping like a star from the zenith and dropping so close and so

swiftly that the men involuntarily scattered to give her landing-room,

she caught herself up within two feet of their heads and bounded

straight