Chapter 2

“You betchu!” groaned Honey Smith, and his look became lugubrious. But his instinct to turn to the humorous side of things immediately crumpled his brown face into its attractive smile. “Say, aren’t we going to be the immaculate little lads? I can’t think of a single bad habit we can acquire in this place. No smokes, no drinks, few if any eats - and not a chorister in sight. Let’s organize the Robinson Crusoe Purity League, Parlor Number One.”

“Oh, gee!” Pete Murphy burst out. “It’s just struck me. The Wilmington ‘Blue,’ is lost forever - it must have gone down with everything else.”

Nobody spoke. It was an interesting indication of how their sense of values had already shifted that the loss to the world of one of its biggest diamonds seemed the least of their minor disasters.

“Perhaps that’s what hoodooed us,” Pete went on. “You know they say the Wilmington ‘Blue’ brought bad luck to everybody who owned it. Anyway, battle, murder, adultery, rape, rapine, and sudden death have followed it right along the line down through history. Oh, it’s been a busy cake of ice - take it from muh! Hope the mermaids fight shy of it.”

“The Wilmington ‘Blue’ isn’t alone in that,” Ralph Addington said. “All big diamonds have raised hell. You ought to hear some of the stories they tell in India about the rajahs’ treasures. Some of those briolettes - you listen long enough and you come to the conclusion that the sooner all the big stones are cut up, the better.”

“I bet this one isn’t gone,” said Pete. “Anybody take me? That’s the contrariety of the beasts - they won’t stay lost. We’ll find that stone yet - where among our loot. The first thing we know, we’ll be all knifing each other to get it.”

“Time’s up,” called Frank Merrill. “Sorry to drive you, but we’ve got to keep at it as long as the light lasts. After to-day, though, we need work only at high water. Between times, we can explore the island - “ He spoke as if he were wheedling a group of boys with the promise of play.

“Select a site for our capital city” - Honey Smith helped him out facetiously - “lay out streets - begin to excavate for the church, town-hall, schoolhouse, and library.”

“The first thing to do now,” Frank Merrill went on, as usual, ignoring all facetiousness, “is to put up a signal.”

Under his direction, they nailed a pair of sheets, one at the southern, the other at the northern reef, to saplings which they stripped of branches. Then they went back to the struggle for salvage.

The fascination of work - and of such novel work - still held them. They labored the rest of the morning, lay off for a brief lunch, went at it again in the afternoon, paused for dinner, and worked far into the evening. Once they stopped long enough to build a huge signal fire on the each. When they turned in, not one of them but nursed torn and blistered hands. Not one of them but fell asleep the instant he lay down.

They slept until long after sunrise.

It was Pete Murphy who waked them. “Say, who was it, yesterday, talked about seeing black spots? I’m hanged if I’m not hipped, too. When I woke just before sunrise, there were black things off there in the west. Of course I was almost dead to the world but - ”

“Like great birds?” Billy Fairfax asked with interest.

“Exactly.”

“Bats from your belfry,” commented Ralph Addington. Because of his constant globe-trotting, Addington’s slang was often a half-decade behind the times.

“Too much sunlight,” Frank Merrill explained. “Lucky thing, we don’t any of us have to wear glasses. We’d certainly be up against it in this double glare. Sand and sun both, you see! And you can thank whatever instinct that’s kept you all in training. This shipwreck is the most perfect case I’ve ever seen of the survival of the fittest.”

And in fact, they were all, except for Pete Murphy, big men, and all, even he, active, strong-muscled, and in the pink of condition.

The huge tide had not entirely subsided, but there was a perceptible diminution in the height of the waves. Up beyond the water-line lay a fresh installment of jetsam. But, as before, they labored only to save the flotsam. They worked all the morning.

In the afternoon, they dug a huge trench. Frank Merrill presiding, they buried the dead with appropriate ceremony.

“Thank God, that’s done,” Ralph Addington said with a shudder. “I hate death and everything to do with it.”

“Yes, we’ll all be more normal now they’re gone,” Frank Merrill added. “And the sooner everything that reminds us of them is gone the better.”

“Say,” Honey Smith burst out the next morning. “Funny thing happened to me in the middle the night. I woke out of a sound sleep - don’t know why - woke with a start as if somebody’d shaken me - felt something brush me so close - well, it touched me. I was so dead that I had to work like the merry Hades to open my eyes - seemed as if it was a full minute before I could lift my eyelids. When I could make things out - damned if there wasn’t a bird - a big bird - the biggest bird I ever saw in my life - three times as big as any eagle - flying over the water.”

Nothing could better have indicated Honey’s mental turmoil than the fact that he talked in broken phrases rather than in his usual clear, swift-footed curt sentences.

Nobody noticed this. Nobody offered comment. Nobody seemed surprised. In fact, all the psychological areas which explode in surprise and wonder were temporarily deadened.

“As sure as I live,” Honey continued indignantly, “that bird’s wings must have extended twenty feet above its head.”

“Oh, get out!” said Ralph Addington perfunctorily.

“As sure as I’m sitting here,” Honey went on earnestly. “I heard a woman’s laugh. Any of you others get it?”

The sense of humor, it seemed, was not extinct. Honey’s companions burst into roars of laughter. For the rest of the morning, they joked Honey about his hallucination. And Honey, who always responded in kind to any badinage, received this in silence. In fact, wherever he could, a little pointedly, he changed the subject.

Honey Smith was the type of man whom everybody jokes, partly because he received it with such good humor, partly because he turned it back with so ready and so charming a wit. Also it gave his fellow creatures a gratifying sense of equality to pick humorous flaws in one so manifestly a darling of the gods.

Honey Smith possessed not a trace of genius, not a suggestion of what is popularly termed “temperament.” He had no mind to speak of, and not more than the usual amount of character. In fact, but for one thing, he was an average person. That one thing was personality - and personality he possessed to an extraordinary degree. Indeed, there seemed to be something mysteriously compelling about this personality of Honey’s. The whole world of creatures felt its charm. Dumb beasts fawned on him. Children clung to him. Old people lingered near as though they could light dead fires in the blaze of his radiant youth. Men hob-nobbed with him; his charm brushed off on to the dryest and dullest so that, temporarily, they too bloomed with personality. As for women - His appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless social cataclysm. They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as if an inclined plane had opened under their feet. They fluttered in circles about him like birds around a light. If he had been allowed to follow the pull of his inclination, they would have held a subsidiary place in his existence. For he was practical, balanced, sane. He had, moreover, the tendency towards temperance of the born athlete. Besides all this, his main interests were man-interests. But women would not let him alone. He had but to look and the thing was done. Wreaths hung on every balcony for Honey Smith and, always at his approach, the door of the harem swung wide. He was a little lazy, almost discourteously uninterested in his attitude towards, the individual female; for he had never had to exert himself.

It is likely that all this personal popularity would have been the result of that trick of personality. But many good fairies had been summoned to Honey’s christening; he had good looks besides. He was really tall, although his broad shoulders seemed to reduce him to medium height. Brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired, his skin was as smooth as satin, his eyes as clear as crystal, his hair as thick as fur. His expression had tremendous sparkle. But his main physical charm was a smile which crumpled his brown face into an engaging irregularity of contour and lighted it with an expression brilliant with mirth and friendliness.

He was a true soldier of fortune. In the ten years which his business career covered be had engaged in a score of business ventures. He had lost two fortunes. Born in the West, educated in the East, he had flashed from coast to coast so often that he himself would have found it hard to say where he belonged.

He was the admiration and the wonder and the paragon and the criterion of his friend Billy Fairfax, who had trailed his meteoric course through college and who, when the Brian Boru went down, was accompanying him on his most recent adventure - a globe-trotting trip in the interests of a moving-picture company. Socially they made an excellent team. For Billy contributed money, birth, breeding, and position to augment Honey’s initiative, enterprise, audacity, and charm. Billy Fairfax offered other contrasts quite as striking. On his physical side, he was shapelessly strong and hopelessly ugly, a big, shock-headed blond. On his personal side “mere mutt-man” was the way one girl put it, “too much of a damned gentleman” Honey Smith said to him regularly.

Billy Fairfax was not, however, without charm of a certain shy, evasive, slow-going kind; and he was not without his own distinction. His huge fortune had permitted him to cultivate many expensive sports and sporting tastes. His studs and kennels and strings of polo ponies were famous. He was a polo-player well above the average and an aviator not far below it.

Pete Murphy, the fifth of the group, was the delight of them all. The carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he was made, according to Billy Fairfax’s dictum, of “wire and brass tacks,” and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift in that direction) called “the gift of gab.” He lived by writing magazine articles. Also he wrote fiction, verse, and drama. Also he was a painter. Also he was a musician. In short, he was an Irishman.

Artistically, he had all the perception of the Celt plus the acquired sapience of the painter’s training. If he could have existed in a universe which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe inhabited only by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablest citizen; but he was utterly disqualified to live in a human world. He was absolutely incapable of judging people. His tendency was to underestimate men and to overestimate women. His life bore all the scars inevitable to such an instinct. Women, in particular, had played ducks and drakes with his career. Weakly chivalrous, mindlessly gallant, he lacked the faculty of learning by experience - especially where the other sex were concerned. “Predestined to be stung!” was, his first wife’s laconic comment on her ex-husband. She, for instance, was undoubtedly the blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she had managed to extract a ruinous alimony from him. Twice married and twice divorced, he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muck raking articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last unhappy matrimonial venture.

Physically, Pete was the black type of Celt. The wild thatch of his scrubbing-brush hair shone purple in the light. Scrape his face as he would, the purple shadow of his beard seemed ingrained in his white white skin. Black-browed and black-lashed, he had the luminous blue-gray-green eyes of the colleen. There was a curious untamable quality in his look that was the mixture of two mad strains, the aloofness of the Celt and the aloofness of the genius.

Three weeks passed. The clear, warm-cool, lucid, sunny weather kept up. The ocean flattened, gradually. Twice every twenty-four hours the tide brought treasure; but it brought less and less every day. Occasionally came a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster. But calloused as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it with hasty ceremony and forgot.

By this time an incongruous collection stretched in parallel lines above the high-water mark. “Something, anything, everything - and then some,” remarked Honey Smith. Wood wreckage of all descriptions, acres of furniture, broken, split, blistered, discolored, swollen; piles of carpets, rugs, towels, bed-linen, stained, faded, shrunken, torn; files of swollen mattresses, pillows, cushions, life-preservers; heaps of table-silver and kitchen-ware tarnished and rusty; mounds of china and glass; mountains of tinned goods, barrels boxes, books, suit-cases, leather bags; trunks and trunks and more trunks and still more trunks; for, mainly, the trunks had saved themselves.

Part of the time, in between tides, they tried to separate the grain of this huge collection of lumber from the chaff; part of the time they made exploring trips into the interior. At night they sat about their huge fire and talked.

The island proved to be about twenty miles in length by seven in width. It was uninhabited and there were no large animals on it. It was Frank Merrill’s theory that it was the exposed peak of a huge extinct volcano. In the center, filling the crater, was a little fresh-water lake. The island was heavily wooded; but in contour it presented only diminutive contrasts of hill and valley. And except as the semi-tropical foliage offered novelties of leaf and flower, the beauties of unfamiliar shapes and colors, it did not seem particularly interesting. Ralph Addington was the guide of these expeditions. From this tree, he pointed out, the South Sea Islander manufactured the tappa cloth, from that the poeepooee, from yonder the arva. Honey Smith used to say that the only depressing thing about these trips was the utter silence of the gorgeous birds which they saw on every side. On the other hand, they extracted what comfort they could from Merrill’s and Addington’s assurance that, should the ship’s supply give out, they could live comfortably enough on birds’ eggs, fruit, and fish.

Sorting what Honey Smith called the “ship-duffle” was one prolonged adventure. At first they made little progress; for all five of them gathered over each important find, chattering like girls. Each man followed the bent of his individual instinct for acquisitiveness. Frank Merrill picked out books, paper, writing materials of every sort. Ralph Addington ran to clothes. The habit of the man with whom it is a business policy to appear well-dressed maintained itself; even in their Eveless Eden, he presented a certain tailored smartness. Billy Fairfax selected kitchen utensils and tools. Later, he came across a box filled with tennis rackets, nets, and balls. The rackets’ strings had snapped and the balls were dead. He began immediately to restring the rackets, to make new balls from twine, to lay out a court. Like true soldiers of fortune, Honey Smith and Pete Murphy made no special collection; they looted for mere loot’s sake.

One day, in the midst of one of their raids, Honey Smith yelled a surprised and triumphant, “By jiminy!” The others showed no signs, of interest. Honey was an alarmist; the treasure of the moment might prove to be a Japanese print or a corkscrew. But as nobody stirred or spoke, he called, “The Wilmington ‘Blue’!”

These words carried their inevitable magic. His companions dropped everything; they swarmed about him.

Honey held on his palm what, in the brilliant sunlight looked like a globe of blue fire, a fire that emitted rainbows instead of sparks.

He passed it from hand to hand. It seemed a miracle that the fingers which touched it did not burst into flame. For a moment the five men might have been five children.

“Well,” said Pete Murphy, “according to all fiction precedent, the rest of us ought to get together immediately, if not a little sooner, and murder you, Honey.”

“Go as far as you like,” said Honey, dropping the stone into the pocket of his flannel shirt. “Only if anybody really gets peeved about this junk of carbon, I’ll give it to him.”

For a while life flowed wonderful. The men labored with a joy-in-work at which they themselves marveled. Their out-of-doors existence showed its effects in a condition of glowing health. Honey Smith changed first to a brilliant red, then to a uniform coffee brown, and last to a shining bronze which was the mixture of both these colors. Pete Murphy grew one crop of freckles, then another and still another until Honey offered to “excavate” his features. Ralph Addington developed a rich, subcutaneous, golden-umber glow which made him seem, in connection with an occasional unconventionality of costume, more than ever like the schoolgirl’s idea of an artist. Billy Fairfax’s blond hair bleached to flaxen. His complexion deepened in tone to a permanent pink. This, in contrast with the deep clear blue of his eyes, gave him a kind of out-of-doors comeliness. But Frank Merrill was the surprise of them all. He not only grew handsomer, he grew younger; a magnificent, towering, copper-colored monolith of a man, whose gray eyes were as clear as mountain springs, whose white teeth turned his smile to a flash of light. Constantly they patrolled the beach, pairs of them, studying the ocean for sight of a distant sail, selecting at intervals a new spot on which at night to start fires, or by day to erect signals. They bubbled with spirits. They laughed and talked without cessation. The condition which Ralph Addington had deplored, the absence of women, made first for social relaxation, for psychological rest.

“Lord, I never noticed before - until I got this chance to get off and think of it - what a damned bother women are,” Honey Smith said one day. “Of all the sexes that roam the earth, as George Ade says, I like them least. What a mess they make of your time and your work, always requiring so much attention, always having to be waited on, always dropping things, always so much foolish fuss and ceremony, always asking such footless questions and never hearing you when you answer them. Never really knowing anything or saying anything. They’re a different kind of critter, that’s all there is to it; they’re amateurs at life. They’re a failure as a sex and an outworn convention anyway. Myself, I’m for sending them to the scrap-heap. Votes for men!”

And with this, according to the divagations of their temperaments and characters, the others strenuously concurred.

Their days, crowded to the brim with work, passed so swiftly that they scarcely noticed their flight. Their nights, filled with a sleep that was twin brother to Death, seemed not to exist at all.

Their evenings were lively with the most brilliant kind of man-talk. To it, Frank Merrill brought his encyclopedic book knowledge, his insatiable curiosity about life; Ralph Addington all the garnered richness of his acute observation; Billy Fairfax his acquaintance with the elect of the society or of the art world, his quiet, deferential attitude of listener. But the events of these conversational orgies were Honey Smith’s adventures and Pete Murphy’s romances. Honey’s narrative was crisp, clear, quick, straight from the shoulder, colloquial, slangy. He dealt often in the first person and the present tense. He told a plain tale from its simple beginning to its simple end. But Pete - . His language had all Honey’s simplicity lined terseness and, in addition, he had the literary touch, both the dramatist’s instinct and the fictionist’s insight. His stories always ran up to a psychological climax; but this was always disguised by the best narratory tricks. He was one of those men of whom people always say, “if he could only write as he talks.” In point of fact, he wrote much better than he talked - but he talked better than any one else. The unanalytic never allowed in him for the spell of the spoken word, nor for the fiery quality of his spirit.

As time went on, their talks grew more and ore confidential. Women’s faces began to gleam here and there in narrative. They began to indulge in long discussions of the despised sex; at times they ran into fierce controversy. Occasionally Honey Smith re-told a story which, from the introduction of a shadowy girl-figure, became mysteriously more interesting and compelling. Once or twice they nearly went over the border-line of legitimate confidence, so intimate had their talk become - muffled as it was by the velvety, star-sown dark and interrupted only by the unheeded thunders of the surf. They were always pulling themselves up to debate openly whether they should go farther, always, on consideration, turning narrative into a channel much less confidential and much less, interesting, or as openly plugging straight ahead, carefully disguising names and places.

After a week or two, the first fine careless rapture of their escape from death disappeared. The lure of loot evaporated. They did not stop their work on “the ship-duffle,” but it became aimless and undirected. Their trips into the island seemed a little purposeless. Frank Merrill had to scourge them to patrol the beach, to keep their signal sheets flying, their signal fires burning. The effect upon their mental condition of this loss of animus was immediate. They became perceptibly more serious. Their first camp - it consisted only of five haphazard piles of bedding - satisfied superficially the shiftless habits of their womanless group; subconsciously, however, they all fell under the depression of its discomfort and disorder. They bathed in the ocean regularly but they did not shave. Their clothes grew ragged and torn, and although there were scores of trunks packed with wearing apparel, they did not bother to change them. Subconsciously they all responded to these irregularities by a sudden change in spirit.

In the place of the gay talk-fests that filled their evenings, they began to hold long pessimistic discussions about their future on the island in case rescue were indefinitely delayed. Taciturn periods fell upon them. Frank Merrill showed only a slight seriousness. Billy Fairfax, however, wore a look permanently sobered. Pete Murphy became subject at regular intervals to wild rhapsodical seizures when he raved, almost in impromptu verse, about the beauty of sea and sky. These were followed by periods of an intense, bitter, black, Celtic melancholy. Ralph Addington degenerated into what Honey described as “the human sourball.” He spoke as seldom as possible and then only to snarl. He showed a tendency to disobey the few orders that Frank Merrill, who still held his position of leader, laid upon them. Once or twice he grazed a quarrel with Merrill. Honey Smith developed an abnormality equal to Ralph Addington’s, but in the opposite direction. His spirits never flagged; he brimmed with joy-in-life, vitality, and optimism. It was as if he had some secret mental solace.

“Damn you and your sunny-side-up dope!” Ralph Addington growled at him again and again. “Shut up, will you!”

One day Frank Merrill proposed a hike across the island. Billy Fairfax who, at the head, had set a brisk pace for the file, suddenly dropped back to the rear and accosted Honey Smith who had lagged behind. Honey was skipping stones over the lake from a pocketful of flat pebbles.

“Say, Honey,” Billy began. The other four men were far ahead, but Billy kept his voice low. Do you remember that dream you had about the big bird - the time we joshed you so?