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

the rest of the day and by firelight far into the night.

He wrote all the next morning. In the middle of the afternoon, a

seashell struck his paper, glanced off.

 

It was Clara again.

 

This time, apparently, she had come from the ocean. Sea-kelp, still

glistening with brine, encased her close as with armor. A little pointed

cap of kelp covered her tawny hair as with a helmet. That gave her a

piquant quality of boyishness. She was flying lower than he had ever

seen her, and as Pete’s eyelids came up she dropped nearer, threw

herself into one of her sinuous poses, arms and legs outstretched close,

hands and feet cupped, wrists, ankles, hips, shoulders all moving. She

looked straight down into Pete’s eyes; and this time she smiled.

 

Pete stared for another long moment. Then as though summoning all his

resolution, he withdrew his eyes, nailed them to his paper. Clara

peppered him with shells and pebbles; but he continued to ignore her. He

did not look up again until a whir-r-r-r-r - loud at first but steadily

diminishing - apprised him of her flight.

 

Pete again wrote the rest of the day and by firelight far into the

night. In the middle of the morning he stopped suddenly, weighted his

paper down with a stone, rolled over on to the pine-needles, and fell

immediately into a deep sleep. He lay for hours, his face down, resting

on his arm.

 

Whir-r-r-r-r!

 

Pete awoke with a start. His manuscript was gone. He leaped to his feet,

stared wildly about. Not far off Clara was flying, almost on the ground.

As he watched, she ascended swiftly. She held his poem in her hands. She

studied it, her head bent. She did not once look up or back; her eyes

still jealously glued to the pencil-scratchings, she drifted out to sea,

disappeared.

 

Pete did not move. He watched Clara intently until she melted into the

sky. But as he watched, his creative mood broke and evaporated. And

suddenly another emotion, none the less fiercely ravaging, sluiced the

blood into his face, filled his eyes with glitter, shook him as though a

high wind were blowing, sent him finally speeding at a maniacal pace

over the reefs.

 

“Say, do you think we’d better organize a search-party?” Honey asked

finally.

 

“Not yet,” said Ralph, “here he comes.”

 

Pete was running down the trail like a deer.

 

“I’ve finished my poem,” he yelled jubilantly.

 

“Every last word of it. And now, boys,” he added briskly before they

could recover their breath, I’m with you on this capture question.”

 

For an instant, the others stared and blinked. “What do you mean, Pete?”

Honey asked stupidly, after an instant.

 

“Well, I’m prepared to go as far as you like.”

 

“But what changed you? ” Honey persisted.

 

“Oh, hang it all,” Pete said and never had his little black, fiery Irish

face so twisted with irritation, so flamed with spirit, “a poet’s so

constituted that he’s got to have a woman round to read his verse to. I

want to teach Clara English so she can hear that poem.”

 

There was a half-minute of silence. Then his listeners broke into roars.

“You damned little mick you!” Honey said. He laughed at intervals for an

hour.

 

They immediately broke the news of Pete’s desertion to Merrill. Frank

received it without any appearance of surprise. But he announced, with a

sudden boom of authority in his big voice, that he expected them all to

stand by their agreement. Billy answered for the rest that they had no

intention of doing anything else. But the four were now in high spirits.

Among themselves, they no longer said, “If we capture them,” but “When

we capture them.”

 

The stress of the situation at once pulled Frank away from his books.

Again he took complete charge of the little group. He was a natural

disciplinarian, as they had learned at the time of the wreck. Now his

sense of responsibility developed a severity that was almost austerity.

He kept them constantly at work. In private the others chafed at his

tone of authority. But in his presence they never failed of respect.

Besides, his remarkable unselfishness compelled their esteem, a shy vein

of innocent, humorless sweetness their affection. “Old Frank” they

always called him.

 

One afternoon, Frank started on one of the long walks which latterly he

had abandoned. He left three of his underlings behind. Pete painted a

water-color; Clara, weaving back and forth, watched his progress. Ralph

worked on the big cabin - they called it the Clubhouse - Peachy whirling

back and forth in wonderful air-patterns for his benefit. A distant

speck of silver indicated Julia; Billy must be on the reef. Honey had

left camp fifteen minutes before for the solitary afternoon tramp that

had become a daily habit with him.

 

Frank’s path lay part-way through the jungle. For half an hour he walked

so sunk in thought that he glanced neither to the right nor the left.

Then he stopped suddenly, held by some invisible, intangible, impalpable

force. He listened. The air hummed delicately, hummed with an alien

element, hummed with something that was neither the susurrus of insects

nor the music of birds. He moved onward slowly and quietly. The hum grew

and strengthened. It became a sound. It divided into component parts,

whistlings, trillings, twitterings, callings. Bird-like they were - but

they could come only from the human throat. Impersonal they were - and

yet they were sexed, female and male. Frank looked about him carefully.

A little distance away, the trail sent off a tiny feeler into the

jungle. It dipped into one of the pretty glades which diversified the

flatness of the island. Creeping slowly, Frank followed the sound.

 

Halfway down the slope, Honey Smith was standing, staring upwards. In

his virile, bronzed semi-nudity, he might have been a god who had

emerged for the first time into the air from the woods at his back. His

lips were open and from them came sound.

 

Above him, almost within reach, Lulu floated, gazing downward. She had a

listening look; and she listened fascinated. She seemed to lie

motionless on the air. It was the first time that Merrill had seen Lulu

so close. But in some mysterious way he knew that there was something

abnormal about her. Her piquant Kanaka face shone with a strange

emotion. Her narrow eyes were big with wonder; her blood-red lips had

trembled open. She stared at Honey as if she were seeing him from a new

angle. She stared, but sound came from her parted lips.

 

It was Honey who whistled and called. It was Lulu who twittered and

trilled. No mating male bird could have put more of entreating

tenderness into his voice. No mating female bird could have answered

with more perplexity of abandon.

 

For a moment Frank stared. Then, with a sudden sense of eavesdropping,

he moved noiselessly back until he struck the main trail.

 

He kept on until he came to the shady side of his favorite reef. He took

from his pocket a book and began to read. To his surprise and

discomfort, he could not get into it. Something psychological kept

coming between him and the printed page. He tried to concentrate on a

paragraph, a sentence, a phrase. It was like eating granite. It was like

drinking dust. He stared at the words, but they seemed to float off the

page.

 

That, then, was what all the other four men were doing while he was

reading and writing, or while, with narrowed, scrutinizing eyes, he

followed Chiquita’s languid flight. He had not seen Chiquita for a week;

he had been so busy getting the first part of his monograph into shape

that he had not come to the reef. And all that week, the other men had

been -. A word from the university slang came into his mind - twosing -

came into it with a new significance. How descriptive that word was! How

concrete! Twosing!

 

He took up his book again. He glued his eyes to the print. Five minutes

passed; he was gazing at the same words. But now instead of floating off

the page, they engaged in little dances, dizzyingly concentric. Suddenly

something that was not of the mind interposed another obstacle to

concentration, a jagged, purple shadow.

 

It was Chiquita.

 

Frank leaped to his feet and stood staring. The quickness of his

movement - ordinarily he moved measuredly - frightened her. She

fluttered, drifted away, paused. Frank stiffened. His immobility

reassured her. She drifted nearer. Something impelled Frank to hold his

rigid pose. But, for some unaccustomed reason, his hand trembled. His

book dropped noiselessly on to the soft grass.

 

Chiquita floated down, closer than ever before.

 

She had undoubtedly just waked up. The dew of dreams still lay on her

luscious lips and in her great black eyes. Scarlet flowers,

flat-petaled, black-stamened, wreathed her dusky hair. Scarlet bands

outlined her dusky shoulders. Scarlet streamers trailed in her wake.

Never had she seemed more lazy and languid, more velvety and voluptuous,

more colorful and sumptuous.

 

Frank stared and stared. Then, following an inexplicable impulse, he

whistled as he had heard Honey whistle; and called as he had heard Honey

call, the plaintive, entreating note of the mating male bird.

 

The same look which had come into Lulu’s face came into Chiquita’s, a

look of wonder and alarm and -. She trembled, but she sank slowly, head

foremost like a diver.

 

Frank continued softly to call and whistle. After an interval, another

mysterious instinct impelled him to stop. Chiquita’s lips moved; from

them came answering sound, faint, breathy, scarcely voiced but

exquisitely musical, exquisitely feminine, the call of the mating female

bird.

 

When she stopped, Frank took it up. He raised his hand to her gently. As

if that gave her confidence, she floated nearer, so close that he could

have touched her. But some new wisdom taught him not to do that. She

sank lower and lower until she was just above him. Frank did not move -

nor speak now. She fluttered and continued to sink. Now he could look

straight into her eyes. Frank had never really looked into a woman’s

eyes before. The depth of Chiquita’s was immeasurable. There were dreams

on the surface. But his gaze pierced through the dreams, through layer

on layer of purple black, to where stars lay. Some emotion that

constantly grew in her seemed to melt and fuse all these layers; but the

stars still held their shine.

 

Slowly still, but as though at the urge of a compelled abandon, Chiquita

sank lower and lower. Nearer she came and nearer. The pollen from the

flowers at her breast sifted on to his face. Now their eyes were level.

And now -.

 

She kissed him.

 

Billy, Ralph, and Pete sat on the sand bantering Honey, who had returned

in radiant spirits from his walk.

 

“Here comes old Frank,” Billy said. “He’s running. But he’s staggering.

By George, I should think he was drunk.”

 

Frank was drunk, but not with wine. When he came nearer, they saw that

his face was white.

 

“You’re right boys,” he said quietly, “and I’m wrong.” For a moment, he

added nothing; but they knew what he meant. “A situation like this is

special; it requires special laws. It’s the masculine right of eminent

domain. I give my consent - I - I - I - I agree to anything you want to

do.”

IV

“The question before the house now is,” said Ralph, “how are we going to

do it? Myself, I’d be strong for winging them sometime