Angel Island Part 17

Mid-morning on Angel Island.

The sun had mounted half-way to the zenith; sky and sea and land glittered with its l.u.s.ter. Like war-horses, the waves came ramping over the smooth, shimmering sand; war-horses with bodies of jade and manes of silver.

Pete floated insh.o.r.e on a huge comber, ran up the beach a little way and sat down. Billy followed.

"I've come out just to get the picture," Pete explained.

"Same here," said Billy.

For an instant, both men contemplated the scene with the narrowed, critical gaze of the artist.

The flying-girls were swimming; and swimming with the same grace and strength with which formerly they flew. And as if inevitably they must take on the quality of the element in which they mixed, they looked like mermaids now, just as formerly they had looked like birds. They carried heads and shoulders high out of the water. Webs of sea-spume glittered on the shining hair and on the white flesh. One behind the other, they swam in rhythmic unison. Regularly the long, round, strong-looking right arms reached out of the water, bowed forward, clutched at the wave, and pulled them on. Simultaneously, the left arms reached back, pushed against the wave, and shot them forward. Their feet beat the water to a lather.

They were headed down the beach, hugging the sh.o.r.e. Swim as hard as they could, Honey and Frank managed but to keep up with them. Ralph overtook them only in their brief resting-periods. Further insh.o.r.e, carried ceaselessly a little forward and then a little back, Julia floated; floated with an unimaginable lightness and yet, somehow, conserved her aspect of a creature cut in marble.

"I have never seen anything so beautiful in any art, ancient or modern,"

Billy concluded. "When those strange draperies that they affect get wet, they look like the Elgin marbles."

"If we should take them to civilization," was Pete's answer, "the Elgin marbles would become a joke."

Billy spoke after a long silence. "It's been an experience that--if I were--oh, but what's the use? You can't describe it. The words haven't been invented yet. I don't mean the fact that we've discovered members of a lost species--the missing link between bird and man. I mean what's happened since the capture. It's left marks on me. I'll bear them until I die. If we abandoned this island--and them--and went back to the world, I could never be the same person. If I woke up and found it was a dream, I could never be the same person."

"I know," Pete said, "I know. I've changed, too. We all have. Old Frank is a G.o.d. And Honey's grown so that--. Even Ralph's a different man.

Changed--G.o.d, I should say I had. It's not only given me a new hold on things I thought I'd lost-morality, ethics, religion even--but it's developed something I have no word for--the fourth dimension of religion, faith."

"It's their weakness, I think, and their dependence." Now it was less that Billy tried to translate Pete's thought and more that he endeavored to follow his own. "It puts it up to a man so. And their beauty and purity and innocence and simplicity--." Billy seemed to be ransacking his vocabulary for abstract nouns.

"And that sense you have," Pete broke in eagerly, "of molding a virgin mind. It gives you a feeling of responsibility that's fairly terrifying at times. But there's something else mixed up with it--the instinct of the artist. It's as though you were trying to paint a picture on human flesh. You know that you're going to produce beauty." Pete's face shone with the look of creative genius. "The production of beauty excuses any method, to my way of thinking." He spoke half to himself. "G.o.d knows,"

he added after a pause, "whatever I've done and been, I could never do or be again. Sometimes a man knows when he's reached the zenith of his spiritual development. I've reached mine. I think they're beginning to trust us," he added after another long interval, in which silently they contemplated the moving composition. Pete's tone had come back to its everyday accent.

"No question about it," Billy rejoined. "If I do say it as shouldn't, I think my scheme was the right one--never to separate any one of them from the others, never to seem to try to get them alone, and in everything to be as gentle and kind and considerate as we could."

"That look is still in their eyes," Pete said. He turned away from Billy and his face contracted. "It goes through me like a knife----. When that's gone----."

"It will go inevitably, Pete," Billy rea.s.sured him cheerfully. Suddenly his own voice lowered. "One queer thing I've noticed. I wonder if you're affected that way. I always feel as if they still had wings. What I mean is this. If I stand beside one of them with my eyes turned away I always get an impression that they're still there, towering above my head--ghosts of wings. Ever notice it?"

"Oh, Lord, yes!" Pete agreed. "Often. I hate it. But that will go, too.

Here they come."

The bathers had turned; they were swimming up the beach. They pa.s.sed Julia, who joined the procession, and turned toward the land. Stretched in a long line, they rode in on a big wave. Billy and Pete leaped forward. a.s.sisted by the men, the girls tottered up the sand, gathered into a little group, talking among themselves. Their wet draperies clung to them in long, sweeping lines; but they dried with amazing quickness.

The sun grew hotter and hotter. Their transient flash of animation died down; their conversation gradually stopped.

Chiquita settled herself flat on the sand, the sunlight pouring like a silver liquid into the blue-black ma.s.ses of her hair, her narrow brows, her thick eyelashes. Presently she fell asleep. Clara leaned against a low ledge of rock and spread her coppery mane across its surface. It dried almost immediately; she divided it into plaits and coils and wove it into an elaborate structure. Her fingers seemed to strike sparks from it; it coruscated. Julia lay on her side, eyes downcast, tracing with one finger curious tangled patterns in the sand. Her hair blew out and covered her body as with a silken, honey-colored fabric; the lines of her figure were lost in its abundance. Peachy sat drooped over, her hand supporting her chin and her knees supporting her elbows, her eyes fixed on the horizon-line. Her hair dried, too, but she did not touch it. It flowed down her back and spread into a pool of gold on the sand. She might have been a mermaid cast up by that sea on which she gazed with such a tragic wistfulness--and forever cut off from it.

A little distance from the rest, Honey sat with Lulu. She was shaking the brown ma.s.ses of her hair vigorously and Honey was helping her.

He was evidently trying to teach her something because, over and over again, his lips moved to form two words, and over and over again, her red lips parted, mimicking them. Gradually, Lulu lost all interest in her hair. She let it drop. It floated like a furry mantle over her shoulders. Into her little brown, pointed face came a look of overpowering seriousness, of tremendous concentration. Occasionally Honey would stop to listen to her; but invariably her recital sent him into peals of laughter. Lulu did not laugh; she grew more and more serious, more and more concentrated.

The other men talked among themselves. Occasionally they addressed a remark to their captives. The flying-girls replied in hesitating flutters of speech, a little breathy yes or no whenever those monosyllables would serve, an occasional broken phrase. Superficially they seemed calm, placid even. But if one of the men moved suddenly, an uncontrollable panic overspread their faces.

Honey arose after a long interval, strolled over to the main group.

"I think they're coming to the conclusion that we're regular fellows,"

he declared cheerfully. "Lulu doesn't jump or shriek any more when I run toward her."

"Oh, it's coming along all right," Frank said.

"It's surprising how quickly and how correctly they're getting the language."

"I'm going to begin reading aloud to them next week," Pete announced.

"That'll be a picnic."

"It's been a long fight," Ralph said contentedly. "But we've won out.

We've got them going. I knew we would." His eyes went to Peachy's face, but once there, their look of triumph melted to tenderness.

"What are we going to read them?" Honey asked idly. He did not really listen to Pete's answer. His eyes, sparkling with amus.e.m.e.nt, had gone back to Lulu, who still sat seriously practising her lesson. Red lips, little white teeth, slender pink tongue seemed to get into an inextricable tangle over the simple monosyllables.

"Leave that to me!" Pete was saying mysteriously. "I'll have them reading and writing by the end of another two months."

"It's curious how long it's taken them to get over that terror of us,"

said Billy. "I cannot understand it."

"Oh, they'll explain why they've been so afraid," said Frank, "as soon as they've got enough vocabulary. We cannot know, until they tell us how many of their conventions we have broken, how brutal we may have seemed."

"And yet," Billy went on, "I should think they'd see that we wouldn't do anything that wasn't for their own good. Well, just as soon as I can put it over with them, I'm going to give them a long spiel on the gentleman's code. I don't believe they'll ever be frightened of us again. h.e.l.lo!"

Lulu had tottered over to their group, supporting herself by the ledge of rock. She pulled herself upright, balancing precariously. She put her sharp little teeth close, parted her lips and produced:

"K-K-K-K-K-K-Kiss-S-S-S-S-S-S Me!"

The men burst into roars of laughter. Lulu looked from one face to the other in perplexity. In perplexity, the other women looked from her to them and at each other.

"Sounds like the Yale yell!" Pete commented.

"But what I can't understand," Billy said, reverting to his thesis, "is that they don't realize instantly that we wouldn't hurt them for any thing--that that's a thing a fellow couldn't do."

C.

Twilight on Angel Island.

The stars were beginning to shoot tiny white, five-pointed flames through the purple sky. The fireflies were beginning to cut long arcs of gold in the sooty dusk. The waves were coming up the low-tide beach with a long roar and retreating with a faint hiss. Afterwards floated on the air the music of the shingle, hundreds of pebbles pattering with liquid footsteps down the sand. Peals of laughter, the continuous ba.s.s roar of the men, an occasional uncertain soprano lilting of the women, came from the group. The girls were reciting their lessons.

"Three little girls from school are we, Pert as schoolgirls well can be, Filled to the brim with girlish glee, Three little maids from school!"

intoned Lulu, Chiquita, and Clara together.

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow?