Angel Island Part 7

"Fortunately," Frank went on, "it would be impossible for such a situation to arise. Men don't war on women."

"On the contrary," Ralph disagreed, "men always war on women, and women on men. Why, Merrill," he added with his inevitable tone of patronage, "aren't you wise to the fact that the war between the s.e.xes is in reality more bitter and b.l.o.o.d.y than any war between the races?"

But Frank did not answer. He only stared.

"Did you notice," Pete Murphy asked, "what wonderful hair they had?

Loose like that--they looked more than ever like Valkyries."

"Yes, I got that," Ralph answered. He smiled until all his white teeth showed. "And take it from me, that's a point gained. When a woman begins to let her hair down, she's interested."

"Well," said Honey Smith, "their game may be the same as every other woman's you've known, but it takes a d.a.m.ned long time to come down to cases. What I want to know is how many months more will have to pa.s.s before we speak when we pa.s.s by."

"That matter'll take care of itself," Ralph rea.s.sured him. "You leave it to natural selection."

"Well, it's a deuce of a slow process," Honey grumbled.

What hitherto had been devotion to their work grew almost to mania. It increased their interest that the little settlement of five cabins was fast taking shape. The men slept in beds now; for they had furnished their rooms. They had begun to decorate the walls. They re-opened the trunks and made another careful division of spoils. They were even experimenting with razors and quarreling amicably over their merits. At night, when their work was done, they actually changed their clothes.

"One week more of this," commented Honey Smith, "and we'll be serving meals in courses. I hope that our lady-friends will call sometime when we're dressed for dinner. I've tried several flossy effects in ties without results. But I expect to lay them out cold with these riding-boots."

Nevertheless many days pa.s.sed and the flying-girls continued not to appear.

"I don't believe they're ever coming again," Pete Murphy said one day in a tone of despair.

"Oh, they'll come," Ralph Addington insisted. "They think themselves that they're not coming again, after having proved to us that they could fly just as well as ever. But they'll appear sometime when we least expect it. There's something pulling them over here that's stronger than anything they've ever come up against. They don't know what it is, but we do--Mr. G. Bernard Shaw's life-force. They haven't realized yet what put the spoke in their wheel, but it will bring them here in the end."

But days and days went by. The men worked hard, in the main good-naturedly, but with occasional outbreaks of discontent and irritation. "How about that proposition of the life-force?" they asked Ralph Addington again and again. "You wait!" was all he ever answered.

One day, Honey Smith, who had gone off for a solitary walk, came running back to camp. "What do you think?" he burst out when he got within earshot. "I've seen one of them, the little brunette, the one with the orange wings, the 'plain one.' She was flying on the other side of the island all by her lonesome. She saw me first, and as sure as I stand here, she called to me--a regular bird-call. I whistled and she came flying over in my direction. Blamed if she didn't keep right over my head for the whole trip."

"Low?" Ralph questioned eagerly.

"Yes," Honey answered succinctly, "but not low enough. I couldn't touch her, of course. If I stopped for a while and kept quiet as the dead, she'd come much closer. But the instant I made a move towards--bing!--she hit the welkin. But the way she rubbered. And, Lord, how easy scared. Once I waved my handkerchief--she nearly threw a fit.

Strangest sensation I've ever had in my life to be walking calmly along like that with a girl beside me--flying. She isn't so plain when you get close--she does look like a Kanaka, though." He stopped and burst out laughing. "Funny thing! I kept calling her Lulu. After a while, she got it that that was her tag. She didn't exactly come closer when I said 'Lulu,' but she'd turn her head over her shoulder and look at me."

"Well, d.a.m.n you and your beaux yeux!" said Ralph. There was a real chagrin behind the amus.e.m.e.nt in his voice.

"Did you notice the muscular development of her back and shoulders?"

Frank Merrill asked eagerly.

"No," said Honey regretfully, "I don't seem to remember anything but her face."

The next morning when they were working, Pete Murphy suddenly yelled in an excited voice, "Here comes one of them!"

Everybody turned. There, heading straight towards them, an unbelievable orange patch sailing through the blue sky, flew the "plain one."

"Lulu! Lulu! Here I am, Lulu," Honey called in his most coaxing tone and with his most radiant smile. Lulu did not descend, but, involuntarily it seemed, she turned her course a little nearer to Honey. She fluttered an instant over his head, then flew straight as an arrow eastward.

"She's a looker, all right, all right," Ralph Addington said, gazing as long as she was in sight. "I guess I'll trade my blonde for your brunette, Honey."

"I bet you won't," answered Honey. "I've got Lulu half-tamed. She'll be eating out of my hand in another week."

They found this incident exciting enough to justify them in laying off from work the 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 n.o.body 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, j.a.panese, 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, gra.s.ses 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 alt.i.tudes. 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 s.p.a.ce that forms the center of every windstorm. Standing upright in it, flaming wings erect, she would whirl through s.p.a.ce like an autumn leaf.

Gradually, she became less suspicious of the other men. She often pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.s of tropical bloom; huge star-shaped or lilly-like flowers whose brilliant l.u.s.tre 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."