Angel Island Part 28

On the other side rose the highest hill on the island. The cleared land stretched to the very summit of this hill. Over it lay another chaos, the chaos of confusion; half-completed buildings of log and stone, rectangles and squares of dug-up land where buildings would some day stand, half-finished roadways, ditches of muddy water, hills of round beach-stones, piles of logs, some stripped of the bark, others still trailing a green huddle of leaf and branch, tools everywhere. The jungle rolled like, a tidal wave to the very boundary; in places its green spume had fallen over the border. As the men smoked, their eyes went back to the New Camp again and again. It was obvious that constantly they made mental measurements, that ever in their mind's eye they saw the completed thing.

"Well," said Ralph, reverting without warning to the subject under discussion. His manner tacitly a.s.sumed that the others had also been considering it mentally. "I confess I don't understand women really.

I've always thought that I did. But I see now that I never have."

Addington's rare outbursts of frankness in regard to the other s.e.x were the more startling because they contrasted so sharply with his normal att.i.tude of lordly understanding and contempt. "I've been a good manager and I'm not saying that I haven't had my successes with them. But as I look back upon them now, I realize I followed my intuitions, not my reason. I've done what I've done without knowing why. I have to feel my way still. I can't account for the change that's come over them. For four years now they've been at us to let their wings grow again. And for four years we've been saying no in every possible tone of voice and with every possible inflection. I've had no idea that Peachy would ever get over it. My G.o.d, you fellows have no idea what I've been through with her in regard to this question of flying. Why, one night three months ago, she had an awful attack of hysteria because I told her I'd have to cut Angela's wings as soon as she was grown-up."

"Well, what did she expect?" Honey asked.

"That I'd let her keep them--that I'd let her fly the way Peachy did!

Or--what do you suppose she suggested?--that I cut them off now."

"Well, what was her idea in that?" Billy's tone was the acme of perplexity.

"That as long as I wouldn't let her keep them after she had attained her growth, she might as well not have them at all."

Billy laughed. "That's a woman's reasoning all right, all right. Why, it would destroy half Angela's charm in my eyes. That little fluttering flight of hers, half on the ground, half in the air, is so lovely, so engaging, so endearing----. But of course letting her fly high would be--."

"Absurd," Ralph interrupted.

"Dangerous," Honey interpolated.

"Unwomanly," Pete added.

"Immodest," Billy concluded.

"Well, thank G.o.d it's all over," Ralph went on. "But, as I say, I give up guessing what's changed her, unless it's the principle that constant dropping wears away the stone. Oscar Wilde had the answer. They're sphinxes without secrets. They do anything that occurs to them and for no particular reason. I get along with, them only by laying down the law and holding them to it. And I reckon they've got that idea firmly fixed in their minds now--that they're to stay where we put them."

Honey wriggled as if in discomfort. "Seems to me, Ralph, you take a pretty cold-blooded view of the situation. I guess I don't go very far with you. Not that I pretend to understand women. I don't. My system with them is to give them anything they ask, within reason, of course, to keep them busy and happy, buy them presents, soft-soap them, jolly them along. I suppose that personally, I wouldn't have minded their flying a little every afternoon, as long as they took the proper care.

I mean by that, not to fly too far out to sea or too high in the air and never when we were at home, so long, in short, as they followed the rules that we laid down for them. You fellows seem to have the idea if we let them do that we'd lose them. But if there's one general proposition fixed more firmly in my nut than any other, it is that you can't lose them. But of course I intend always to stand by whatever you-all say."

"I don't know," Billy burst in hotly, "which of you two makes me sickest and which is the most insulting in his att.i.tude towards women, you, Ralph, who treat them as if they were household pets, or you, Honey, who treat them as if they were dolls. In my opinion there is only one law to govern a man's relation with a woman--the law of chivalry. To love her, and cherish her, to do all the hard work of the world for her, to stand between her and everything that is unbeautiful and unpleasant, to think for her, to put her on a pedestal and worship her; to my mind that sums up the whole duty of man to woman."

"They're better than G.o.ddesses on pedestals," Pete said. "They're creatures neither of flesh nor of marble--they're ideals. They're made of stars, sunlight, moonshine. I believe in treating them like beings of a higher world."

"I disagree with all of you," Frank said ponderously, "I don't believe in treating them as if they were pets or dolls, or G.o.ddesses on pedestals or ideals. I believe in treating them like human beings, the other half of the race. I don't see that they are any better or any worse than we--they're about the same. Soon after we captured them, you remember, we entered into an agreement that no one of us would ever let his wife's wings grow without the consent of all the others. One minute after I had given my word, I was sorry for it. But you kept your word to me in the agreement that I forced on you before the capture; and, so, I shall always keep mine to you. But I regret it more and more as time goes on. You see I'm so const.i.tuted that I can't see anything but abstract justice. And according to abstract justice we have no right to hold these women bound to the earth. If the air is their natural habitat, it is criminal for us to keep them out of it. They're our equals in every sense--I mean in that they supplement us, as we supplement them. They've got what we haven't got and we've got what they haven't got. They can't walk, but they can fly. We can't fly, but we can walk. It is as though they compelled us, creatures of the earth, to live in the air all the time. Oh, it's wrong. You'll see it some day."

"I never listened to such sophistry in my life," said Ralph in disgust.

"You'll be telling us next," he added sarcastically, "that we hadn't any right to capture them."

"We hadn't," Frank replied promptly. "On reflection, I consider that the second greatest crime of my existence. But that's done and can't be wiped out. They own this island just as much as we do. They'd been coming to it for months before we saw it. They ought to have every kind of right and freedom and privilege on it that we, have."

"I'd like to hear," Addington said in the high, thin tone of his peevish disgust, "the evidence that justifies you in saying that. What have they ever done on this island to put them on an equality with us? Aren't they our inferiors from every point of view, especially physically?"

"Certainly they are," agreed Honey, not peevishly but as one who indorses, unnecessarily, a self-evident fact. "They've lived here on Angel Island as long as we have. But they haven't made good yet, and we have. Why, just imagine them working on the New Camp--playing tennis, even."

"But we prevented all that," Frank protested. "We cut their wings.

Handicapped as they were by their small feet, they could do nothing."

"But," Honey e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "if they'd been our physical equals, they would never have let us cut their wings."

"But we caught them with a trick," Frank said, "we put them in a position in which they could not use their physical strength."

"Well, if they'd been our mental equals, they'd never let themselves get caught like that."

"Well--but--but--but--" Frank sputtered. "Now you're arguing crazily.

You're going round in a circle."

"Oh, well," Honey exclaimed impatiently, "let's not argue any more. You always go round in a circle. I hate argument. It never changes, anybody.

You never hear what the other fellow says. You always come out of it with your convictions strengthened."

Frank made a gesture of despair. He drew a little book from his pocket and began to read.

"There's one thing about them that certainly is to laugh," Honey said after a silence, a glint of amus.e.m.e.nt in his big eyes, "and that is the care they take of those useless feet of theirs. Lulu's even taken to doing hers up every night in oil or cream. It's their particular vanity.

Now, take that, for instance. Men never have those petty vanities. I mean real men--regular fellows."

"How about the western cowboy and his fancy boots?" Frank shot back over his book.

"Oh, that's different," Ralph said. "Honey's right. That business of taking care of their feet symbolizes the whole s.e.x to me. They do the things they do just because the others do them--like sheep jumping over a wall. Their fad at present is pedicure. Peachy's at it just like the rest of them. Every night when I come home, I find her sitting down with both feet done up in one of those beautiful scarfs she's collected, resting on a cushion. It's rather amusing, though." Ralph struggled to suppress his smile of appreciation.

"Clara's the same." Pete smiled too. "She's cut herself out some high sandals from a pair of my old boots. And she wears them day and night.

She says she's been careless lately about getting her feet sunburned.

And she's not going to let me see them until they're perfectly white and transparent again. She says that small, beautiful, and useless feet were one of the points of beauty with her people."

"Julia's got the bug, too." Billy's eyes lighted with a gleam of tenderness. "Among the things she found in the trunk was a box of white silk stockings and some moccasins. She's taken to wearing them lately.

It always puts a crimp in me to get a glimpse of them--as if she'd suddenly become a normal, civilized woman."

"Now that I think of it," Frank again came out of his book. "Chiquita asked me a little while ago for a pair of shoes. She's wearing them all the time now to protect her feet--from the sun she says."

"It is the most curious thing," Billy said, "that they have never wanted to walk. Not that I want them to now," he added hastily. "That's their greatest charm in my eyes--their helplessness. It has a curious appeal.

But it is singular that they never even tried it, if only out of curiosity."

"They have great contempt for walking," Honey observed. "And it has never occurred to them, apparently, that they could enjoy themselves so much more if they could only get about freely. Not that I want them to--any more than you. That utter helplessness is, as you say, appealing."

"Oh, well," Ralph said contemptuously, "what can you expect of them?

I tell you it's lack of gray matter. They don't cerebrate. They don't co-ordinate. They don't correlate. They have no initiative, no creative faculty, no mental curiosity or reflexes or reactions. They're nothing but an unrelated bunch of instincts, intuitions, and impulses--human nonsense machines! Why if the positions were reversed and we'd lost our wings, we'd have been trying to walk the first day. We'd have been walking better than they by the end of a month."

"I like it just as it is," Pete said contentedly. "They can't fly and they don't want to walk. We always know where to find them."

"Thank G.o.d we don't have to consider that matter," Billy concluded.

"Apparently the walking impulse isn't in them. They might some time, by hook or crook, wheedle us into letting them fly a little. But one thing is certain, they'll never take a step on those useless feet."

"Delicate, adorable, useless little feet of theirs," Pete said softly as if he were reciting from an ode.

"There's something moving along the trail, boys," Frank said quietly.

"I keep getting glimpses of it through the bushes--white--blue--red and yellow."

The others stopped, petrified. They scowled, bending an intent gaze through the brilliant noon sunshine.

"Sure I get it!" Billy answered in a low tone. "There's something there."