THE KANAKA SURF
The tourist women, under the hau tree arbour that lines the Moana
hotel beach, gasped when Lee Barton and his wife Ida emerged from
the bath-house. And as the pair walked past them and down to the
sand, they continued to gasp. Not that there was anything about
Lee Barton provocative of gasps. The tourist women were not of the
sort to gasp at sight of a mere man's swimming-suited body, no
matter with what swelling splendour of line and muscle such body
was invested. Nevertheless, trainers and conditioners of men would
have drawn deep breaths of satisfaction at contemplation of the
physical spectacle of him. But they would not have gasped in the
way the women did, whose gasps were indicative of moral shock.
Ida Barton was the cause of their perturbation and disapproval.
They disapproved, seriously so, at the first instant's glimpse of
her. They thought--such ardent self-deceivers were they--that they
were shocked by her swimming suit. But Freud has pointed out how
persons, where sex is involved, are prone sincerely to substitute
one thing for another thing, and to agonize over the substituted
thing as strenuously as if it were the real thing.
Ida Barton's swimming suit was a very nice one, as women's suits
go. Of thinnest of firm-woven black wool, with white trimmings and
a white belt-line, it was high-throated, short-sleeved, and brief-
skirted. Brief as was the skirt, the leg-tights were no less
brief. Yet on the beach in front of the adjacent Outrigger Club,
and entering and leaving the water, a score of women, not provoking
gasping notice, were more daringly garbed. Their men's suits, as
brief of leg-tights and skirts, fitted them as snugly, but were
sleeveless after the way of men's suits, the arm-holes deeply low-
cut and in-cut, and, by the exposed armpits, advertiseful that the
wearers were accustomed to 1916 decollete.
So it was not Ida Barton's suit, although the women deceived
themselves into thinking it was. It was, first of all, say her
legs; or, first of all, say the totality of her, the sweet and
brilliant jewel of her femininity bursting upon them. Dowager,
matron, and maid, conserving their soft-fat muscles or protecting
their hot-house complexions in the shade of the hau-tree arbour,
felt the immediate challenge of her. She was menace as well, an
affront of superiority in their own chosen and variously successful
game of life.
But they did not say it. They did not permit themselves to think
it. They thought it was the suit, and said so to one another,
ignoring the twenty women more daringly clad but less perilously
beautiful. Could one have winnowed out of the souls of these
disapproving ones what lay at bottom of their condemnation of her
suit, it would have been found to be the sex-jealous thought: THAT
NO WOMAN, SO BEAUTIFUL AS THIS ONE, SHOULD BE PERMITTED TO SHOW HER
BEAUTY. It was not fair to them. What chance had they in the
conquering of males with so dangerous a rival in the foreground?
They were justified. As Stanley Patterson said to his wife, where
the two of them lolled wet in the sand by the tiny fresh-water
stream that the Bartons waded in order to gain the Outrigger Club
beach:
"Lord god of models and marvels, behold them! My dear, did you
ever see two such legs on one small woman! Look at the roundness
and taperingness. They're boy's legs. I've seen featherweights go
into the ring with legs like those. And they're all-woman's legs,
too. Never mistake them in the world. The arc of the front line
of that upper leg! And the balanced adequate fullness at the back!
And the way the opposing curves slender in to the knee that IS a
knee! Makes my fingers itch. Wish I had some clay right now."
"It's a true human knee," his wife concurred, no less breathlessly;
for, like her husband, she was a sculptor. "Look at the joint of
it working under the skin. It's got form, and blessedly is not
covered by a bag of fat." She paused to sigh, thinking of her own
knees. "It's correct, and beautiful, and dainty. Charm! If ever
I beheld the charm of flesh, it is now. I wonder who she is."
Stanley Patterson, gazing ardently, took up his half of the chorus.
"Notice that the round muscle-pads on the inner sides that make
most women appear knock-kneed are missing. They're boy's legs,
firm and sure--"
"And sweet woman's legs, soft and round," his wife hastened to
balance. "And look, Stanley! See how she walks on the balls of
her feet. It makes her seem light as swan's down. Each step seems
just a little above the earth, and each other step seems just a
little higher above until you get the impression she is flying, or
just about to rise and begin flying . . . "
So Stanley and Mrs. Patterson. But they were artists, with eyes
therefore unlike the next batteries of human eyes Ida Barton was
compelled to run, and that laired on the Outrigger lanais
(verandas) and in the hau-tree shade of the closely adjoining
seaside. The majority of the Outrigger audience was composed, not
of tourist guests, but of club members and old-timers in Hawaii.
And even the old-times women gasped.
"It's positively indecent," said Mrs. Hanley Black to her husband,
herself a too-stout-in-the-middle matron of forty-five, who had
been born in the Hawaiian islands, and who had never heard of
Ostend.
Hanley Black surveyed his wife's criminal shapelessness and
voluminousness of antediluvian, New-England swimming dress with a
withering, contemplative eye. They had been married a sufficient
number of years for him frankly to utter his judgment.
"That strange woman's suit makes your own look indecent. You
appear as a creature shameful, under a grotesqueness of apparel
striving to hide some secret awfulness."
"She carries her body like a Spanish dancer," Mrs. Patterson said
to her husband, for the pair of them had waded the little stream in
pursuit of the vision.
"By George, she does," Stanley Patterson concurred. "Reminds me of
Estrellita. Torso just well enough forward, slender waist, not too
lean in the stomach, and with muscles like some lad boxer's
armouring that stomach to fearlessness. She has to have them to
carry herself that way and to balance the back muscles. See that
muscled curve of the back! It's Estrellita's."
"How tall would you say?" his wife queried.
"There she deceives," was the appraised answer. "She might be
five-feet-one, or five-feet-three or four. It's that way she has
of walking that you described as almost about to fly."
"Yes, that's it," Mrs. Patterson concurred. "It's her energy, her
seemingness of being on tip toe with rising vitality."
Stanley Patterson considered for a space.
"That's it," he enounced. "She IS a little thing. I'll give her
five-two in her stockings. And I'll weigh her a mere one hundred
and ten, or eight, or fifteen at the outside."
"She won't weigh a hundred and ten," his wife declared with
conviction.
"And with her clothes on, plus her carriage (which is builded of
her vitality and will), I'll wager she'd never impress any one with
her smallness."
"I know her type," his wife nodded. "You meet her out, and you
have the sense that, while not exactly a fine large woman, she's a
whole lot larger than the average. And now, age?"
"I'll give you best there," he parried.
"She might be twenty-five, she might be twenty-eight . . . "
But Stanley Patterson had impolitely forgotten to listen.
"It's not her legs alone," he cried on enthusiastically. "It's the
all of her. Look at the delicacy of that forearm. And the swell
of line to the shoulder. And that biceps! It's alive. Dollars to
drowned kittens she can flex a respectable knot of it . . . "
No woman, much less an Ida Barton, could have been unconscious of
the effect she was producing along Waikiki Beach. Instead of
making her happy in the small vanity way, it irritated her.
"The cats," she laughed to her husband. "And to think I was born
here an almost even third of a century ago! But they weren't nasty
then. Maybe because there weren't any tourists. Why, Lee, I
learned to swim right here on this beach in front of the Outrigger.
We used to come out with daddy for vacations and for week-ends and
sort of camp out in a grass house that stood right where the
Outrigger ladies serve tea now. And centipedes fell out of the
thatch on us, while we slept, and we all ate poi and opihis and raw
aku, and nobody wore much of anything for the swimming and
squidding, and there was no real road to town. I remember times of
big rain when it was so flooded we had to go in by canoe, out
through the reef and in by Honolulu Harbour."
"Remember," Lee Barton added, "it was just about that time that the
youngster that became me arrived here for a few weeks' stay on our
way around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time--
one of the kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the
women here were all riding cross-saddle, and that was long before
the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came
around to sitting simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I
learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I
may even have tried body-surfing on the same waves, or I may have
splashed a handful of water into your mouth and been rewarded by
your sticking out your tongue at me--"
Interrupted by an audible gasp of shock from a spinster-appearing
female sunning herself hard by and angularly in the sand in a
swimming suit monstrously unbeautiful, Lee Barton was aware of an
involuntary and almost perceptible stiffening on the part of his
wife.
"I smile with pleasure," he told her. "It serves only to make your
valiant little shoulders the more valiant. It may make you self-
conscious, but it likewise makes you absurdly self-confident."
For, be it known in advance, Lee Barton was a super-man and Ida
Barton a super-woman--or at least they were personalities so
designated by the cub book-reviewers, flat-floor men and women, and
scholastically emasculated critics, who from across the dreary
levels of their living can descry no glorious humans over-topping
their horizons. These dreary folk, echoes of the dead past and
importunate and self-elected pall-bearers for the present and
future, proxy-livers of life and vicarious sensualists that they
are in a eunuch sort of way, insist, since their own selves,
environments, and narrow agitations of the quick are mediocre and
commonplace, that no man or woman can rise above the mediocre and
commonplace.
Lacking gloriousness in themselves, they deny gloriousness to all
mankind; too cowardly for whimsy and derring-do, they assert whimsy
and derring-do ceased at the very latest no later than the middle
ages; flickering little tapers themselves, their feeble eyes are
dazzled to unseeingness of the flaming conflagrations of other
souls that illumine their skies. Possessing power in no greater
quantity than is the just due of pygmies, they cannot conceive of
power greater in others than in themselves. In those days there
were giants; but, as their mouldy books tell them, the giants are
long since passed, and only the bones of them remain. Never having
seen the mountains, there are no mountains.
In the mud of their complacently perpetuated barnyard pond, they
assert that no bright-browed, bright-apparelled shining figures can
be outside of fairy books, old histories, and ancient
superstitions. Never having seen the stars, they deny the stars.
Never having glimpsed the shining ways nor the mortals that tread
them, they deny the existence of the shinning ways as well as the
existence of the high-bright mortals who adventure along the
shining ways. The narrow pupils of their eyes the centre of the
universe, they image the universe in terms of themselves, of their
meagre personalities make pitiful yardsticks with which to measure
the high-bright souls, saying: "Thus long are all souls, and no
longer; it is impossible that there should exist greater-statured
souls than we are, and our gods know that we are great of stature."
But all, or nearly all on the beach, forgave Ida Barton her suit
and form when she took the water. A touch of her hand on her
husband's arm, indication and challenge in her laughing face, and
the two ran as one for half a dozen paces and leapt as one from the
hard-wet sand of the beach, their bodies describing flat arches of
flight ere the water was entered.
There are two surfs at Waikiki: the big, bearded man surf that
roars far out beyond the diving-stage; the smaller, gentler,
wahine, or woman, surf that breaks upon the shore itself. Here is
a great shallowness, where one may wade a hundred or several
hundred feet to get beyond depth. Yet, with a good surf on
outside, the wahine surf can break three or four feet, so that,
close in against the shore, the hard-sand bottom may be three feet
or three inches under the welter of surface foam. To dive from the
beach into this, to fly into the air off racing feet, turn in mid-
flight so that heels are up and head is down, and, so to enter the
water head-first, requires wisdom of waves, timing of waves, and a
trained deftness in entering such unstable depths of water with
pretty, unapprehensive, head-first cleavage, while at the same time
making the shallowest possible of dives.
It is a sweet, and pretty, and daring trick, not learned in a day,
nor learned at all without many a milder bump on the bottom or
close shave of fractured skull or broken neck. Here, on the spot
where the Bartons so beautifully dived, two days before a Stanford
track athlete had broken his neck. His had been an error in timing
the rise and subsidence of a wahine wave.
"A professional," Mrs. Hanley Black sneered to her husband at Ida
Barton's feat.
"Some vaudeville tank girl," was one of the similar remarks with
which the women in the shade complacently reassured one another--
finding, by way of the weird mental processes of self-illusion, a
great satisfaction in the money caste-distinction between one who
worked for what she ate and themselves who did not work for what
they ate.
It was a day of heavy surf on Waikiki. In the wahine surf it was
boisterous enough for good swimmers. But out beyond, in the
kanaka, or man, surf, no one ventured. Not that the score or more
of young surf-riders loafing on the beach could not venture there,
or were afraid to venture there; but because their biggest
outrigger canoes would have been swamped, and their surf-boards
would have been overwhelmed in the too-immense over-topple and
down-fall of the thundering monsters. They themselves, most of
them, could have swum, for man can swim through breakers which
canoes and surf-boards cannot surmount; but to ride the backs of
the waves, rise out of the foam to stand full length in the air
above, and with heels winged with the swiftness of horses to fly
shoreward, was what made sport for them and brought them out from
Honolulu to Waikiki.
The captain of Number Nine canoe, himself a charter member of the
Outrigger and a many-times medallist in long-distance swimming, had
missed seeing the Bartons take the water, and first glimpsed them
beyond the last festoon of bathers clinging to the life-lines.
From then on, from his vantage of the upstairs lanai, he kept his
eyes on them. When they continued out past the steel diving-stage
where a few of the hardiest divers disported, he muttered vexedly
under his breath "damned malahinis!"
Now malahini means new-comer, tender-foot; and, despite the
prettiness of their stroke, he knew that none except malahinis
would venture into the racing channel beyond the diving-stage.
Hence the vexation of the captain of Number Nine. He descended to
the beach, with a low word here and there picked a crew of the
strongest surfers, and returned to the lanai with a pair of
binoculars. Quite casually, the crew, six of them, carried Number
Nine to the water's edge, saw paddles and everything in order for a
quick launching, and lolled about carelessly on the sand. They
were guilty of not advertising that anything untoward was afoot,
although they did steal glances up to their captain straining
through the binoculars.
What made the channel was the fresh-water stream. Coral cannot
abide fresh water. What made the channel race was the immense
shoreward surf-fling of the sea. Unable to remain flung up on the
beach, pounded ever back toward the beach by the perpetual
shoreward rush of the kanaka surf, the up-piled water escaped to
the sea by way of the channel and in the form of under-tow along
the bottom under the breakers. Even in the channel the waves broke
big, but not with the magnificent bigness of terror as to right and
left. So it was that a canoe or a comparatively strong swimmer
could dare the channel. But the swimmer must be a strong swimmer
indeed, who could successfully buck the current in. Wherefore the
captain of Number Nine continued his vigil and his muttered
damnation of malahinis, disgustedly sure that these two malahinis
would compel him to launch Number Nine and go after them when they
found the current too strong to swim in against. As for himself,
caught in their predicament, he would have veered to the left
toward Diamond Head and come in on the shoreward fling of the
kanaka surf. But then, he was no one other than himself, a bronze.
Hercules of twenty-two, the whitest blond man ever burned to
mahogany brown by a sub-tropic sun, with body and lines and muscles
very much resembling the wonderful ones of Duke Kahanamoku. In a
hundred yards the world champion could invariably beat him a second
flat; but over a distance of miles he could swim circles around the
champion.
No one of the many hundreds on the beach, with the exception of
till captain and his crew, knew that the Bartons had passed beyond
the diving-stage. All who had watched them start to swim out had
taken for granted that they had joined the others on the stage.
The captain suddenly sprang upon the railing of the lanai, held on
to a pillar with one hand, and again picked up the two specks of
heads through the glasses. His surprise was verified. The two
fools had veered out of the channel toward Diamond Head, and were
directly seaward of the kanaka surf. Worse, as he looked, they
were starting to come in through the kanaka surf.
He glanced down quickly to the canoe, and even as he glanced, and
as the apparently loafing members quietly arose and took their
places by the canoe for the launching, he achieved judgment.
Before the canoe could get abreast in the channel, all would be
over with the man and woman. And, granted that it could get
abreast of them, the moment it ventured into the kanaka surf it
would be swamped, and a sorry chance would the strongest swimmer of
them have of rescuing a person pounding to pulp on the bottom under
the smashes of the great bearded ones.
The captain saw the first kanaka wave, large of itself, but small
among its fellows, lift seaward behind the two speck-swimmers.
Then he saw them strike a crawl-stroke, side by side, faces
downward, full-lengths out-stretched on surface, their feet
sculling like propellers and their arms flailing in rapid over-hand
strokes, as they spurted speed to approximate the speed of the
overtaking wave, so that, when overtaken, they would become part of
the wave, and travel with it instead of being left behind it.
Thus, if they were coolly skilled enough to ride outstretched on
the surface and the forward face of the crest instead of being
flung and crumpled or driven head-first to bottom, they would dash
shoreward, not propelled by their own energy, but by the energy of
the wave into which they had become incorporated.
And they did it! "SOME swimmers!" the captain of Number Nine made
announcement to himself under his breath. He continued to gaze
eagerly. The best of swimmers could hold such a wave for several
hundred feet. But could they? If they did, they would be a third
of the way through the perils they had challenged. But, not
unexpected by him, the woman failed first, her body not presenting
the larger surfaces that her husband's did. At the end of seventy
feet she was overwhelmed, being driven downward and out of sight by
the tons of water in the over-topple. Her husband followed and
both appeared swimming beyond the wave they had lost.
The captain saw the next wave first. "If they try to body-surf on
that, good night," he muttered; for he knew the swimmer did not
live who would tackle it. Beardless itself, it was father of all
bearded ones, a mile long, rising up far out beyond where the
others rose, towering its solid bulk higher and higher till it
blotted out the horizon, and was a giant among its fellows ere its
beard began to grow as it thinned its crest to the over-curl.
But it was evident that the man and woman knew big water. No
racing stroke did they make in advance of the wave. The captain
inwardly applauded as he saw them turn and face the wave and wait
for it. It was a picture that of all on the beach he alone saw,
wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the
binoculars. The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever
mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the colours of
the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it. The
green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked.
But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of
rose and gold flashed through it by the sun. On and up, to the
sprouting beard of growing crest, the colour orgy increased until
it was a kaleidoscopic effervescence of transfusing rainbows.
Against the face of the wave showed the heads of the man and woman
like two sheer specks. Specks they were, of the quick, adventuring
among the blind elemental forces, daring the titanic buffets of the
sea. The weight of the down-fall of that father of waves, even
then imminent above their heads, could stun a man or break the
fragile bones of a woman. The captain of Number Nine was
unconscious that he was holding his breath. He was oblivious of
the man. It was the woman. Did she lose her head or courage, or
misplay her muscular part for a moment, she could be hurled a
hundred feet by that giant buffet and left wrenched, helpless, and
breathless to be pulped on the coral bottom and sucked out by the
undertow to be battened on by the fish-sharks too cowardly to take
their human meat alive.
Why didn't they dive deep, and with plenty of time, the captain
wanted to know, instead of waiting till the last tick of safety and
the first tick of peril were one? He saw the woman turn her head
and laugh to the man, and his head turn in response. Above them,
overhanging them, as they mounted the body of the wave, the beard,
creaming white, then frothing into rose and gold, tossed upward
into a spray of jewels. The crisp off-shore trade-wind caught the
beard's fringes and blew them backward and upward yards and yards
into the air. It was then, side by side, and six feet apart, that
they dived straight under the over-curl even then disintegrating to
chaos and falling. Like insects disappearing into the convolutions
of some gorgeous gigantic orchid, so they disappeared, as beard and
crest and spray and jewels, in many tons, crashed and thundered
down just where they had disappeared the moment before, but where
they were no longer.
Beyond the wave they had gone through, they finally showed, side by
side, still six feet apart, swimming shoreward with a steady stroke
until the next wave should make them body-surf it or face and
pierce it. The captain of Number Nine waved his hand to his crew
in dismissal, and sat down on the lanai railing, feeling vaguely
tired and still watching the swimmers through his glasses.
"Whoever and whatever they are," he murmured, "they aren't
malahinis. They simply can't be malahinis."
Not all days, and only on rare days, is the surf heavy at Waikiki;
and, in the days that followed, Ida and Lee Barton, much in
evidence on the beach and in the water, continued to arouse
disparaging interest in the breasts of the tourist ladies, although
the Outrigger captains ceased from worrying about them in the
water. They would watch the pair swim out and disappear in the
blue distance, and they might, or might not, chance to see them
return hours afterward. The point was that the captains did not
bother about their returning, because they knew they would return.
The reason for this was that they were not malahinis. They
belonged. In other words, or, rather, in the potent Islands-word,
they were kamaaina. Kamaaina men and women of forty remembered Lee
Barton from their childhood days, when, in truth, he had been a
malahini, though a very young specimen. Since that time, in the
course of various long stays, he had earned the kamaaina
distinction.
As for Ida Barton, young matrons of her own age (privily wondering
how she managed to keep her figure) met her with arms around and
hearty Hawaiian kisses. Grandmothers must have her to tea and
reminiscence in old gardens of forgotten houses which the tourist
never sees. Less than a week after her arrival, the aged Queen
Liliuokalani must send for her and chide her for neglect. And old
men, on cool and balmy lanais, toothlessly maundered to her about
Grandpa Captain Wilton, of before their time, but whose wild and
lusty deeds and pranks, told them by their fathers, they remembered
with gusto--Grandpa Captain Wilton, or David Wilton, or "All Hands"
as the Hawaiians of that remote day had affectionately renamed him.
All Hands, ex-Northwest trader, the godless, beach-combing,
clipper-shipless and ship-wrecked skipper who had stood on the
beach at Kailua and welcomed the very first of missionaries, off
the brig Thaddeus, in the year 1820, and who, not many years later,
made a scandalous runaway marriage with one of their daughters,
quieted down and served the Kamehamehas long and conservatively as
Minister of the Treasury and Chief of the Customs, and acted as
intercessor and mediator between the missionaries on one side and
the beach-combing crowd, the trading crowd, and the Hawaiian chiefs
on the variously shifting other side.
Nor was Lee Barton neglected. In the midst of the dinners and
lunches, the luaus (Hawaiian feasts) and poi-suppers, and swims and
dances in aloha (love) to both of them, his time and inclination
were claimed by the crowd of lively youngsters of old Kohala days
who had come to know that they possessed digestions and various
other internal functions, and who had settled down to somewhat of
sedateness, who roistered less, and who played bridge much, and
went to baseball often. Also, similarly oriented, was the old
poker crowd of Lee Barton's younger days, which crowd played for
more consistent stakes and limits, while it drank mineral water and
orange juice and timed the final round of "Jacks" never later than
midnight.
Appeared, through all the rout of entertainment, Sonny Grandison,
Hawaii-born, Hawaii-prominent, who, despite his youthful forty-one
years, had declined the proffered governorship of the Territory.
Also, he had ducked Ida Barton in the surf at Waikiki a quarter of
a century before, and, still earlier, vacationing on his father's
great Lakanaii cattle ranch, had hair-raisingly initiated her, and
various other tender tots of five to seven years of age, into his
boys' band, "The Cannibal Head-Hunters" or "The Terrors of
Lakanaii." Still farther, his Grandpa Grandison and her Grandpa
Wilton had been business and political comrades in the old days.
Educated at Harvard, he had become for a time a world-wandering
scientist and social favourite. After serving in the Philippines,
he had accompanied various expeditions through Malaysia, South
America, and Africa in the post of official entomologist. At
forty-one he still retained his travelling commission from the
Smithsonian Institution, while his friends insisted that he knew
more about sugar "bugs" than the expert entomologists employed by
him and his fellow sugar planters in the Experiment Station.
Bulking large at home, he was the best-known representative of
Hawaii abroad. It was the axiom among travelled Hawaii folk, that
wherever over the world they might mention they were from Hawaii,
the invariable first question asked of them was: "And do you know
Sonny Grandison?"
In brief, he was a wealthy man's son who had made good. His
father's million he inherited he had increased to ten millions, at
the same time keeping up his father's benefactions and endowments
and overshadowing them with his own.
But there was still more to him. A ten years' widower, without
issue, he was the most eligible and most pathetically sought-after
marriageable man in all Hawaii. A clean-and-strong-featured
brunette, tall, slenderly graceful, with the lean runner's stomach,
always fit as a fiddle, a distinguished figure in any group, the
greying of hair over his temples (in juxtaposition to his young-
textured skin and bright vital eyes) made him appear even more
distinguished. Despite the social demands upon his time, and
despite his many committee meetings, and meetings of boards of
directors and political conferences, he yet found time and space to
captain the Lakanaii polo team to more than occasional victory, and
on his own island of Lakanaii vied with the Baldwins of Maui in the
breeding and importing of polo ponies.
Given a markedly strong and vital man and woman, when a second
equally markedly strong and vital man enters the scene, the peril
of a markedly strong and vital triangle of tragedy becomes
imminent. Indeed, such a triangle of tragedy may be described, in
the terminology of the flat-floor folk, as "super" and
"impossible." Perhaps, since within himself originated the desire
and the daring, it was Sonny Grandison who first was conscious of
the situation, although he had to be quick to anticipate the
sensing intuition of a woman like Ida Barton. At any rate, and
undebatable, the last of the three to attain awareness was Lee
Barton, who promptly laughed away what was impossible to laugh
away.
His first awareness, he quickly saw, was so belated that half his
hosts and hostesses were already aware. Casting back, he realized
that for some time any affair to which he and his wife were invited
found Sonny Grandison likewise invited. Wherever the two had been,
the three had been. To Kahuku or to Haleiwa, to Ahuimanu, or to
Kaneohe for the coral gardens, or to Koko Head for a picnicking and
a swimming, somehow it invariably happened that Ida rode in Sonny's
car or that both rode in somebody's car. Dances, luaus, dinners,
and outings were all one; the three of them were there.
Having become aware, Lee Barton could not fail to register Ida's
note of happiness ever rising when in the same company with Sonny
Grandison, and her willingness to ride in the same cars with him,
to dance with him, or to sit out dances with him. Most convincing
of all, was Sonny Grandison himself. Forty-one, strong,
experienced, his face could no more conceal what he felt than could
be concealed a lad of twenty's ordinary lad's love. Despite the
control and restraint of forty years, he could no more mask his
soul with his face than could Lee Barton, of equal years, fail to
read that soul through so transparent a face. And often, to other
women, talking, when the topic of Sonny came up, Lee Barton heard
Ida express her fondness for Sonny, or her almost too-eloquent
appreciation of his polo-playing, his work in the world, and his
general all-rightness of achievement.
About Sonny's state of mind and heart Lee had no doubt. It was
patent enough for the world to read. But how about Ida, his own
dozen-years' wife of a glorious love-match? He knew that woman,
ever the mysterious sex, was capable any time of unguessed mystery.
Did her frank comradeliness with Grandison token merely frank
comradeliness and childhood contacts continued and recrudesced into
adult years? or did it hide, in woman's subtler and more secretive
ways, a beat of heart and return of feeling that might even out-
balance what Sonny's face advertised?
Lee Barton was not happy. A dozen years of utmost and post-nuptial
possession of his wife had proved to him, so far as he was
concerned, that she was his one woman in the world, and that the
woman was unborn, much less unglimpsed, who could for a moment
compete with her in his heart, his soul, and his brain. Impossible
of existence was the woman who could lure him away from her, much
less over-bid her in the myriad, continual satisfactions she
rendered him.
Was this, then, he asked himself, the dreaded contingency of all
fond Benedicts, to be her first "affair?" He tormented himself
with the ever iterant query, and, to the astonishment of the
reformed Kohala poker crowd of wise and middle-aged youngsters as
well as to the reward of the keen scrutiny of the dinner-giving and
dinner-attending women, he began to drink King William instead of
orange juice, to bully up the poker limit, to drive of nights his
own car more than rather recklessly over the Pali and Diamond Head
roads, and, ere dinner or lunch or after, to take more than an
average man's due of old-fashioned cocktails and Scotch highs.
All the years of their marriage she had been ever complaisant
toward him in his card-playing. This complaisance, to him, had
become habitual. But now that doubt had arisen, it seemed to him
that he noted an eagerness in her countenancing of his poker
parties. Another point he could not avoid noting was that Sonny
Grandison was missed by the poker and bridge crowds. He seemed to
be too busy. Now where was Sonny, while he, Lee Barton, was
playing? Surely not always at committee and boards of directors
meetings. Lee Barton made sure of this. He easily learned that at
such times Sonny was more than usually wherever Ida chanced to be--
at dances, or dinners, or moonlight swimming parties, or, the very
afternoon he had flatly pleaded rush of affairs as an excuse not to
join Lee and Langhorne Jones and Jack Holstein in a bridge battle
at the Pacific Club--that afternoon he had played bridge at Dora
Niles' home with three women, one of whom was Ida.
Returning, once, from an afternoon's inspection of the great dry-
dock building at Pearl Harbour, Lee Barton, driving his machine
against time, in order to have time to dress for dinner, passed
Sonny's car; and Sonny's one passenger, whom he was taking home,
was Ida. One night, a week later, during which interval he had
played no cards, he came home at eleven from a stag dinner at the
University Club, just preceding Ida's return from the Alstone poi
supper and dance. And Sonny had driven her home. Major Fanklin
and his wife had first been dropped off by them, they mentioned, at
Fort Shafter, on the other side of town and miles away from the
beach.
Lee Barton, after all mere human man, as a human man unfailingly
meeting Sonny in all friendliness, suffered poignantly in secret.
Not even Ida dreamed that he suffered; and she went her merry,
careless, laughing way, secure in her own heart, although a trifle
perplexed at her husband's increase in number of pre-dinner
cocktails.
Apparently, as always, she had access to almost all of him; but now
she did not have access to his unguessable torment, nor to the long
parallel columns of mental book-keeping running their totalling
balances from moment to moment, day and night, in his brain. In
one column were her undoubtable spontaneous expressions of her
usual love and care for him, her many acts of comfort-serving and
of advice-asking and advice-obeying. In another column, in which
the items increasingly were entered, were her expressions and acts
which he could not but classify as dubious. Were they what they
seemed? Or were they of duplicity compounded, whether deliberately
or unconsciously? The third column, longest of all, totalling most
in human heart-appraisements, was filled with items relating
directly or indirectly to her and Sonny Grandison. Lee Barton did
not deliberately do this book-keeping. He could not help it. He
would have liked to avoid it. But in his fairly ordered mind the
items of entry, of themselves and quite beyond will on his part,
took their places automatically in their respective columns.
In his distortion of vision, magnifying apparently trivial detail
which half the time he felt he magnified, he had recourse to
MacIlwaine, to whom he had once rendered a very considerable
service. MacIlwaine was chief of detectives. "Is Sonny Grandison
a womaning man?" Barton had demanded. MacIlwaine had said nothing.
"Then he is a womaning man," had been Barton's declaration. And
still the chief of detectives had said nothing.
Briefly afterward, ere he destroyed it as so much dynamite, Lee
Barton went over the written report. Not bad, not really bad, was
the summarization; but not too good after the death of his wife ten
years before. That had been a love-match almost notorious in
Honolulu society, because of the completeness of infatuation, not
only before, but after marriage, and up to her tragic death when
her horse fell with her a thousand feet off Nahiku Trail. And not
for a long time afterward, MacIlwaine stated, had Grandison been
guilty of interest in any woman. And whatever it was, it had been
unvaryingly decent. Never a hint of gossip or scandal; and the
entire community had come to accept that he was a one-woman man,
and would never marry again. What small affairs MacIlwaine had
jotted down he insisted that Sonny Grandison did not dream were
known by another person outside the principals themselves.
Barton glanced hurriedly, almost shamedly, at the several names and
incidents, and knew surprise ere he committed the document to the
flames. At any rate, Sonny had been most discreet. As he stared
at the ashes, Barton pondered how much of his own younger life,
from his bachelor days, resided in old MacIlwaine's keeping. Next,
Barton found himself blushing, to himself, at himself. If
MacIlwaine knew so much of the private lives of community figures,
then had not he, her husband and protector and shielder, planted in
MacIlwaine's brain a suspicion of Ida?
"Anything on your mind?" Lee asked his wife that evening, as he
stood holding her wrap while she put the last touches to her
dressing.
This was in line with their old and successful compact of
frankness, and he wondered, while he waited her answer, why he had
refrained so long from asking her.
"No," she smiled. "Nothing particular. Afterwards . . . perhaps .
. . "
She became absorbed in gazing at herself in the mirror, while she
dabbed some powder on her nose and dabbed it off again.
"You know my way, Lee," she added, after the pause. "It takes me
time to gather things together in my own way--when there are things
to gather; but when I do, you always get them. And often there's
nothing in them after all, I find, and so you are saved the
nuisance of them."
She held out her arms for him to place the wrap about her--her
valiant little arms that were so wise and steel-like in battling
with the breakers, and that yet were such just mere-woman's arms,
round and warm and white, delicious as a woman's arms should be,
with the canny muscles, masking under soft-roundness of contour and
fine smooth skin, capable of being flexed at will by the will of
her.
He pondered her, with a grievous hurt and yearning of appreciation-
-so delicate she seemed, so porcelain-fragile that a strong man
could snap her in the crook of his arm.
"We must hurry!" she cried, as he lingered in the adjustment of the
flimsy wrap over her flimsy-prettiness of gown. "We'll be late.
And if it showers up Nuuanu, putting the curtains up will make us
miss the second dance."
He made a note to observe with whom she danced that second dance,
as she preceded him across the room to the door; while at the same
time he pleasured his eye in what he had so often named to himself
as the spirit-proud flesh-proud walk of her.
"You don't feel I'm neglecting you in my too-much poker?" he tried
again, by indirection.
"Mercy, no! You know I just love you to have your card orgies.
They're tonic for you. And you're so much nicer about them, so
much more middle-aged. Why, it's almost years since you sat up
later than one."
It did not shower up Nuuanu, and every overhead star was out in a
clear trade-wind sky. In time at the Inchkeeps' for the second
dance, Lee Barton observed that his wife danced it with Grandison--
which, of itself, was nothing unusual, but which became immediately
a registered item in Barton's mental books.
An hour later, depressed and restless, declining to make one of a
bridge foursome in the library and escaping from a few young
matrons, he strolled out into the generous grounds. Across the
lawn, at the far edge, he came upon the hedge of night-blooming
cereus. To each flower, opening after dark and fading, wilting,
perishing with the dawn, this was its one night of life. The
great, cream-white blooms, a foot in diameter and more, lily-like
and wax-like, white beacons of attraction in the dark, penetrating
and seducing the night with their perfume, were busy and beautiful
with their brief glory of living.
But the way along the hedge was populous with humans, two by two,
male and female, stealing out between the dances or strolling the
dances out, while they talked in low soft voices and gazed upon the
wonder of flower-love. From the lanai drifted the love-caressing
strains of "Hanalei" sung by the singing boys. Vaguely Lee Barton
remembered--perhaps it was from some Maupassant story--the abbe,
obsessed by the theory that behind all things were the purposes of
God and perplexed so to interpret the night, who discovered at the
last that the night was ordained for love.
The unanimity of the night as betrayed by flowers and humans was a
hurt to Barton. He circled back toward the house along a winding
path that skirted within the edge of shadow of the monkey-pods and
algaroba trees. In the obscurity, where his path curved away into
the open again, he looked across a space of a few feet where, on
another path in the shadow, stood a pair in each other's arms. The
impassioned low tones of the man had caught his ear and drawn his
eyes, and at the moment of his glance, aware of his presence, the
voice ceased, and the two remained immobile, furtive, in each
other's arms.
He continued his walk, sombred by the thought that in the gloom of
the trees was the next progression from the openness of the sky
over those who strolled the night-flower hedge. Oh, he knew the
game when of old no shadow was too deep, no ruse of concealment too
furtive, to veil a love moment. After all, humans were like
flowers, he meditated. Under the radiance from the lighted lanai,
ere entering the irritating movement of life again to which he
belonged, he paused to stare, scarcely seeing, at a flaunt of
display of scarlet double-hibiscus blooms. And abruptly all that
he was suffering, all that he had just observed, from the night-
blooming hedge and the two-by-two love-murmuring humans to the pair
like thieves in each other's arms, crystallized into a parable of
life enunciated by the day-blooming hibiscus upon which he gazed,
now at the end of its day. Bursting into its bloom after the dawn,
snow-white, warming to pink under the hours of sun, and quickening
to scarlet with the dark from which its beauty and its being would
never emerge, it seemed to him that it epitomized man's life and
passion.
What further connotations he might have drawn he was never to know;
for from behind, in the direction of the algarobas and monkey-pods,
came Ida's unmistakable serene and merry laugh. He did not look,
being too afraid of what he knew he would see, but retreated
hastily, almost stumbling, up the steps to the lanai. Despite that
he knew what he was to see, when he did turn his head and beheld
his wife and Sonny, the pair he had seen thieving in the dark, he
went suddenly dizzy, and paused, supporting himself with a hand
against a pillar, and smiling vacuously at the grouped singing boys
who were pulsing the sensuous night into richer sensuousness with
their honi kaua wiki-wiki refrain.
The next moment he had wet his lips with his tongue, controlled his
face and flesh, and was bantering with Mrs. Inchkeep. But he could
not waste time, or he would have to encounter the pair he could
hear coming up the steps behind him.
"I feel as if I had just crossed the Great Thirst," he told his
hostess, "and that nothing less than a high-ball will preserve me."
She smiled permission and nodded toward the smoking lanai, where
they found him talking sugar politics with the oldsters when the
dance began to break up.
Quite a party of half a dozen machines were starting for Waikiki,
and he found himself billeted to drive the Leslies and Burnstons
home, though he did not fail to note that Ida sat in the driver's
seat with Sonny in Sonny's car. Thus, she was home ahead of him
and brushing her hair when he arrived. The parting of bed-going
was usual, on the face of it, although he was almost rigid in his
successful effort for casualness as he remembered whose lips had
pressed hers last before his.
Was, then, woman the utterly unmoral creature as depicted by the
German pessimists? he asked himself, as he tossed under his reading
lamp, unable to sleep or read. At the end of an hour he was out of
bed, and into his medicine case. Five grains of opium he took
straight. An hour later, afraid of his thoughts and the prospect
of a sleepless night, he took another grain. At one-hour intervals
he twice repeated the grain dosage. But so slow was the action of
the drug that dawn had broken ere his eyes closed.
At seven he was awake again, dry-mouthed, feeling stupid and
drowsy, yet incapable of dozing off for more than several minutes
at a time. He abandoned the idea of sleep, ate breakfast in bed,
and devoted himself to the morning papers and the magazines. But
the drug effect held, and he continued briefly to doze through his
eating and reading. It was the same when he showered and dressed,
and, though the drug had brought him little forgetfulness during
the night, he felt grateful for the dreaming lethargy with which it
possessed him through the morning.
It was when his wife arose, her serene and usual self, and came in
to him, smiling and roguish, delectable in her kimono, that the
whim-madness of the opium in his system seized upon him. When she
had clearly and simply shown that she had nothing to tell him under
their ancient compact of frankness, he began building his opium
lie. Asked how he had slept, he replied:
"Miserably. Twice I was routed wide awake with cramps in my feet.
I was almost too afraid to sleep again. But they didn't come back,
though my feet are sorer than blazes."
"Last year you had them," she reminded him.
"Maybe it's going to become a seasonal affliction," he smiled.
"They're not serious, but they're horrible to wake up to. They
won't come again till to-night, if they come at all, but in the
meantime I feel as if I had been bastinadoed."
In the afternoon of the same day, Lee and Ida Barton made their
shallow dive from the Outrigger beach, and went on, at a steady
stroke, past the diving-stage to the big water beyond the Kanaka
Surf. So quiet was the sea that when, after a couple of hours,
they turned and lazily started shoreward through the Kanaka Surf
they had it all to themselves. The breakers were not large enough
to be exciting, and the last languid surf-boarders and canoeists
had gone in to shore. Suddenly, Lee turned over on his back.
"What is it?" Ida called from twenty feet away.
"My foot--cramp," he answered calmly, though the words were twisted
out through clenched jaws of control.
The opium still had its dreamy way with him, and he was without
excitement. He watched her swimming toward him with so steady and
unperturbed a stroke that he admired her own self-control, although
at the same time doubt stabbed him with the thought that it was
because she cared so little for him, or, rather, so much
immediately more for Grandison.
"Which foot?" she asked, as she dropped her legs down and began
treading water beside him.
"The left one--ouch! Now it's both of them."
He doubled his knees, as if involuntarily raised his head and chest
forward out of the water, and sank out of sight in the down-wash of
a scarcely cresting breaker. Under no more than a brief several
seconds, he emerged spluttering and stretched out on his back
again.
Almost he grinned, although he managed to turn the grin into a
pain-grimace, for his simulated cramp had become real. At least in
one foot it had, and the muscles convulsed painfully.
"The right is the worst," he muttered, as she evinced her intention
of laying hands on his cramp and rubbing it out. "But you'd better
keep away. I've had cramps before, and I know I'm liable to grab
you if these get any worse."
Instead, she laid her hands on the hard-knotted muscles, and began
to rub and press and bend.
"Please," he gritted through his teeth. "You must keep away. Just
let me lie out here--I'll bend the ankle and toe-joints in the
opposite ways and make it pass. I've done it before and know how
to work it."
She released him, remaining close beside him and easily treading
water, her eyes upon his face to judge the progress of his own
attempt at remedy. But Lee Barton deliberately bent joints and
tensed muscles in the directions that would increase the cramp. In
his bout the preceding year with the affliction, he had learned,
lying in bed and reading when seized, to relax and bend the cramps
away without even disturbing his reading. But now he did the thing
in reverse, intensifying the cramp, and, to his startled delight,
causing it to leap into his right calf. He cried out with anguish,
apparently lost control of himself, attempted to sit up, and was
washed under by the next wave.
He came up, spluttered, spread-eagled on the surface, and had his
knotted calf gripped by the strong fingers of both Ida's small
hands.
"It's all right," she said, while she worked. "No cramp like this
lasts very long."
"I didn't know it could be so savage," he groaned. "If only it
doesn't go higher! It makes one feel so helpless."
He gripped the biceps of both her arms in a sudden spasm,
attempting to climb out upon her as a drowning man might try to
climb out on an oar and sinking her down under him. In the
struggle under water, before he permitted her to wrench clear, her
rubber cap was torn off, and her hairpins pulled out, so that she
came up gasping for air and half-blinded by her wet-clinging hair.
Also, he was certain he had surprised her into taking in a quantity
of water.
"Keep away!" he warned, as he spread-eagled with acted
desperateness.
But her fingers were deep into the honest pain-wrack of his calf,
and in her he could observe no reluctance of fear.
"It's creeping up," he grunted through tight teeth, the grunt
itself a half-controlled groan.
He stiffened his whole right leg, as with another spasm, hurting
his real minor cramps, but flexing the muscles of his upper leg
into the seeming hardness of cramp.
The opium still worked in his brain, so that he could play-act
cruelly, while at the same time he appraised and appreciated her
stress of control and will that showed in her drawn face, and the
terror of death in her eyes, with beyond it and behind it, in her
eyes and through her eyes, the something more of the spirit of
courage, and higher thought, and resolution.
Still further, she did not enunciate so cheap a surrender as, "I'll
die with you." Instead, provoking his admiration, she did say,
quietly: "Relax. Sink until only your lips are out. I'll support
your head. There must be a limit to cramp. No man ever died of
cramp on land. Then in the water no strong swimmer should die of
cramp. It's bound to reach its worst and pass. We're both strong
swimmers and cool-headed--"
He distorted his face and deliberately dragged her under. But when
they emerged, still beside him, supporting his head as she
continued to tread water, she was saying:
"Relax. Take it easy. I'll hold your head up. Endure it. Live
through it. Don't fight it. Make yourself slack--slack in your
mind; and your body will slack. Yield. Remember how you taught me
to yield to the undertow."
An unusually large breaker for so mild a surf curled overhead, and
he climbed out on her again, sinking both of them under as the
wave-crest over-fell and smashed down.
"Forgive me," he mumbled through pain clenched teeth, as they drew
in their first air again. "And leave me." He spoke jerkily, with
pain-filled pauses between his sentences. "There is no need for
both of us to drown. I've got to go. It will be in my stomach, at
any moment, and then I'll drag you under, and be unable to let go
of you. Please, please, dear, keep away. One of us is enough.
You've plenty to live for."
She looked at him in reproach so deep that the last vestige of the
terror of death was gone from her eyes. It was as if she had said,
and more than if she had said: "I have only you to live for."
Then Sonny did not count with her as much as he did!--was Barton's
exultant conclusion. But he remembered her in Sonny's arms under
the monkey-pods and determined on further cruelty. Besides, it was
the lingering opium in him that suggested this cruelty. Since he
had undertaken this acid test, urged the poppy juice, then let it
be a real acid test.
He doubled up and went down, emerged, and apparently strove
frantically to stretch out in the floating position. And she did
not keep away from him.
"It's too much!" he groaned, almost screamed. "I'm losing my grip.
I've got to go. You can't save me. Keep away and save yourself."
But she was to him, striving to float his mouth clear of the salt,
saying: "It's all right. It's all right. The worst is right now.
Just endure it a minute more, and it will begin to ease."
He screamed out, doubled, seized her, and took her down with him.
And he nearly did drown her, so well did he play-act his own
drowning. But never did she lose her head nor succumb to the fear
of death so dreadfully imminent. Always, when she got her head
out, she strove to support him while she panted and gasped
encouragement in terms of: "Relax . . . Relax . . . Slack . . .
Slack out . . . At any time . . . now . . . you'll pass . . . the
worst . . . No matter how much it hurts . . . it will pass . . .
You're easier now . . . aren't you?"
And then he would put her down again, going from bad to worse--in
his ill-treatment of her; making her swallow pints of salt water,
secure in the knowledge that it would not definitely hurt her.
Sometimes they came up for brief emergences, for gasping seconds in
the sunshine on the surface, and then were under again, dragged
under by him, rolled and tumbled under by the curling breakers.
Although she struggled and tore herself from his grips, in the
times he permitted her freedom she did not attempt to swim away
from him, but, with fading strength and reeling consciousness,
invariably came to him to try to save him. When it was enough, in
his judgment, and more than enough, he grew quieter, left her
released, and stretched out on the surface.
"A-a-h," he sighed long, almost luxuriously, and spoke with pauses
for breath. "It is passing. It seems like heaven. My dear, I'm
water-logged, yet the mere absence of that frightful agony makes my
present state sheerest bliss."
She tried to gasp a reply, but could not.
"I'm all right," he assured her. "Let us float and rest up.
Stretch out, yourself, and get your wind back."
And for half an hour, side by side, on their backs, they floated in
the fairly placid Kanaka Surf. Ida Barton was the first to
announce recovery by speaking first.
"And how do you feel now, man of mine?" she asked.
"I feel as if I'd been run over by a steam-roller," he replied.
"And you, poor darling?"
"I feel I'm the happiest woman in the world. I'm so happy I could
almost cry, but I'm too happy even for that. You had me horribly
frightened for a time. I thought I was to lose you."
Lee Barton's heart pounded up. Never a mention of losing herself.
This, then, was love, and all real love, proved true--the great
love that forgot self in the loved one.
"And I'm the proudest man in the world," he told her; "because my
wife is the bravest woman in the world."
"Brave!" she repudiated. "I love you. I never knew how much, how
really much, I loved you as when I was losing you. And now let's
work for shore. I want you all alone with me, your arms around me,
while I tell you all you are to me and shall always be to me."
In another half-hour, swimming strong and steadily, they landed on
the beach and walked up the hard wet sand among the sand-loafers
and sun-baskers.
"What were the two of you doing out there?" queried one of the
Outrigger captains. "Cutting up?"
"Cutting up," Ida Barton answered with a smile.
"We're the village cut-ups, you know," was Lee Barton's assurance.
That evening, the evening's engagement cancelled, found the two, in
a big chair, in each other's arms.
"Sonny sails to-morrow noon," she announced casually and irrelevant
to anything in the conversation. "He's going out to the Malay
Coast to inspect what's been done with that lumber and rubber
company of his."
"First I've heard of his leaving us," Lee managed to say, despite
his surprise.
"I was the first to hear of it," she added. "He told me only last
night."
"At the dance?"
She nodded.
"Rather sudden, wasn't it?"
"Very sudden." Ida withdrew herself from her husband's arms and
sat up. "And I want to talk to you about Sonny. I've never had a
real secret from you before. I didn't intend ever to tell you.
But it came to me to-day, out in the Kanaka Surf, that if we passed
out, it would be something left behind us unsaid."
She paused, and Lee, half-anticipating what was coming, did nothing
to help her, save to girdle and press her hand in his.
"Sonny rather lost his . . . his head over me," she faltered. "Of
course, you must have noticed it. And . . . and last night, he
wanted me to run away with him. Which isn't my confession at all .
. . "
Still Lee Barton waited.
"My confession," she resumed, "is that I wasn't the least bit angry
with him--only sorrowful and regretful. My confession is that I
rather slightly, only rather more than slightly, lost my own head.
That was why I was kind and gentle to him last night. I am no
fool. I knew it was due. And--oh, I know, I'm just a feeble
female of vanity compounded--I was proud to have such a man swept
off his feet by me, by little me. I encouraged him. I have no
excuse. Last night would not have happened had I not encouraged
him. And I, and not he, was the sinner last night when he asked
me. And I told him no, impossible, as you should know why without
my repeating it to you. And I was maternal to him, very much
maternal. I let him take me in his arms, let myself rest against
him, and, for the first time because it was to be the for-ever last
time, let him kiss me and let myself kiss him. You . . . I know
you understand . . . it was his renunciation. And I didn't love
Sonny. I don't love him. I have loved you, and you only, all the
time."
She waited, and felt her husband's arm pass around her shoulder and
under her own arm, and yielded to his drawing down of her to him.
"You did have me worried more than a bit," he admitted, "until I
was afraid I was going to lose you. And . . . " He broke off in
patent embarrassment, then gripped the idea courageously. "Oh,
well, you know you're my one woman. Enough said."
She fumbled the match-box from his pocket and struck a match to
enable him to light his long-extinct cigar.
"Well," he said, as the smoke curled about them, "knowing you as I
know you, and ALL of you, all I can say is that I'm sorry for Sonny
for what he's missed--awfully sorry for him, but equally glad for
me. And . . . one other thing: five years hence I've something to
tell you, something rich, something ridiculously rich, and all
about me and the foolishness of me over you. Five years. Is it a
date?"
"I shall keep it if it is fifty years," she sighed, as she nestled
closer to him.
GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
August 17, 1916.
Footnotes:
{1} See Dibble's "A History of the Sandwich Islands."
