Chapter 4

However, they seemed unable to pull themselves together; they did nothing that day. But the next morning, urged back to work by the harrying monotony of waiting, they began to clear a space among the trees close to the beach. Two of them had a little practical building knowledge: Ralph Addington who had roughed it in many strange countries; Billy Fairfax who, in the San Francisco earthquake, had on a wager built himself a house. They worked with all their initial energy. They worked with the impetus that comes from capable supervision. And they worked as if under the impulse of some unformulated motive. As usual, Honey Smith bubbled with spirits. Billy Fairfax and Pete Murphy hardly spoke, so close was their concentration. Ralph Addington worked longer and harder than anybody, and even Honey was not more gay; he whistled and sang constantly. Frank Merrill showed no real interest in these proceedings. He did his fair share of the work, but obviously without a driving motive. He had reverted utterly to type. He spent his leisure writing a monograph. When inspiration ran low, he occupied himself doctoring books. Eternally, he hunted for the flat stones between which he pressed their swollen bulks back to shape. Eternally he puttered about, mending and patching them. He used to sit for hours at a desk which he had rescued from the ship’s furniture. The others never became accustomed to the comic incongruity of this picture - especially when, later, he virtually boxed himself in with a trio of book-cases.

“Wouldn’t you think he was sitting in an office?” Ralph Addington said.

“Curious about Merrill,” Honey Smith answered, indulging in one of his sudden, off-hand characterizations, bull’s-eye shots every one of them. “He’s a good man, ruined by culturine. He’s the bucko-mate type translated into the language of the academic world. Three centuries ago he’d have been a Drake or a Frobisher. And to-day, even, if he’d followed the lead of his real ability, he’d have made a great financier, a captain of industry or a party boss. But, you see, he was brought up to think that book-education was the whole cheese. The only ambition he knows is to make good in the university world. How I hated that college atmosphere and its insistence on culture! That was what riled me most about it. As a general thing, I detest a professor. Can’t help liking old Frank, though.”

The four men virtually took no time off from work; or at least the change of work that stood for leisure was all in the line of home-making. Eternally, they joked each other about these womanish occupations; but they all kept steadily to it. Ralph Addington and Honey Smith put the furniture into shape, repairing and polishing it. Billy Fairfax sorted out the glass, china, tools, household utensils of every kind.

Pete Murphy went through the trunks with his art side uppermost. He collected all kinds of Oriental bric-a-brac, pictures and draperies. He actually mended and pressed things; he had all the artist’s capability in these various feminine lines. When the others joked him about his exotic and impracticable tastes, he said that, before he left, he intended to establish a museum of fine arts, on Angel Island.

Hard as the men worked, they had always the appearance of those who await the expected. But the expected did not occur; and gradually the sharp edge of anticipation wore dull. Emotionally they calmed. Their nerves settled to a normal condition. The sudden whirr of a bird’s flight attracted only a casual glance. In Ralph Addington alone, expectation maintained itself at the boiling point. He trained himself to work with one eye searching the horizon. One afternoon, when they had scattered for a siesta, his hoarse cry brought them running to the beach from all directions.

So suddenly had the girls appeared that they might have materialized from the air. This time they had not come from the sea. When Ralph discovered them, they were hovering back of them above the trees that banded the beach. The sun was setting, blood-red; the whole western sky had broken away. The girls seemed to be floating in a sea of crimson-amber ether. Its light brought lustre to every feather; it turned the edges of their wings to flame; it changed their smoothly piled hair to helmets of burnished metal.

The men tore from the beach to the trees at full speed. For a moment the violence of this action threw the girls into a panic. They fluttered, broke lines, flew high, circled. And all the time, they uttered shrill cries of distress.

“They’re frightened,” Billy Fairfax said. “Keep quiet, boys.”

The men stopped running, stood stock-still.

Gradually the girls calmed, sank, took up the interweaving figures of their air-dance. If at their first appearance they seemed creatures of the sea, this time they were as distinctively of the forest. They looked like spirits of the trees over which they hovered. Indeed, but for their wings they might have been dryads. Wreaths of green encircled their heads and waists. Long leafy streamers trailed from their shoulders. Often in the course of their aerial play, they plunged down into the feathery tree-tops.

Once, the blonde with the blue wings sailed out of the group and balanced herself for a toppling second on a long, outstretching bough.

“Good Lord, what a picture!” Pete Murphy said.

As if she understood, she repeated her performance. She cast a glance over her shoulder at them - unmistakably noting the effect.

“Hates herself, doesn’t she?” commented Honey Smith. “They’re talking!” he added after an interval of silence. “Some one of them is giving directions - I can tell by the tone of her voice. Can’t make out which one it is though. Thank God, they can talk!”

“It’s the quiet one - the blonde - the one with the white wings,” Billy Fairfax explained. “She’s captain. Some bean on her, too; she straightened them out a moment ago when they got so frightened.”

“I now officially file my claim,” said Ralph Addington, “to that peachy one - the golden blonde - the one with the blue wings, the one who tried to stand on the bough. That girl’s a corker. I can tell her kind of pirate craft as far as I see it.”

“Me for the thin one!” said Pete Murphy. “She’s a pippin, if you please. Quick as a cat! Graceful as they make them. And look at that mop of red hair! Isn’t that a holocaust? I bet she’s a shrew.”

You win, all right,” agreed Ralph Addington. “I’d like nothing better than the job of taming her, too.”

“See here, Ralph,” bantered Pete, “I’ve copped Brick-top for myself. You keep off the grass. See!”

“All right,” Ralph answered. “Katherine for yours, Petruchio. The golden blonde for mine!” He smiled for the first time in days. In fact, at sight of the flying-girls he had begun to beam with fatuous good nature.

Two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-top” said Honey Smith, summing them up practically. “One of those brunettes, the brown one, must be a Kanaka. The other’s prettier - she looks like a Spanish woman. There’s something rather taking about the plain one, though. Pretty snappy - if anybody should fly up in a biplane and ask you!”

“It’s curious,” Frank Merrill said with his most academic manner, “it has not yet occurred to me to consider those young women from the point of view of their physical pulchritude. I’m interested only in their ability to fly. The one with the silver-white wings, the one Billy calls the ‘quiet one,’ flies better than any of the others, The dark one on the end, the one who looks like a Spaniard, flies least well. It is rather disturbing, but I can think of them only as birds. I have to keep recalling to myself that they’re women. I can’t realize it.”

“Well, don’t worry,” Ralph Addington said with the contemptuous accent with which latterly he answered all Frank Merrill’s remarks. “You will.”

The others laughed, but Frank turned on them a look of severe reproof.

“Oh, hell!” Honey Smith exclaimed in a regretful tone; “they’re beating it again. I say, girls,” he called at the top of his lungs, “don’t go! Stay a little longer and we’ll buy you a dinner and a taxicab.”

Apparently the flying-girls realized that he was addressing them. For a hair’s breadth of a second they paused. Then, with a speed that had a suggestion of panic in it, they flew out to sea. And again a flood of girl-laughter fell in bubbles upon them.

“They distrust muh!” Honey commented. But he smiled with the indolent amusement of the man who has always held the master-hand with women.

“Must have come from the east, this time,” he said as they filed soberly back to camp. “But where in thunder do they start from?”

They had, of course, discussed this question as they had discussed a hundred other obvious ones. “I’m wondering now,” Frank Merrill answered, “if there are islands both to the east and the west. But, after all, I’m more interested to know if there are any more of these winged women, and if there are any males.”

Again they talked far into the night. And as before their comment was of the wonder, the romance, the poetry of their strange situation. And again they drew imaginary pictures of what Honey Smith called “the young Golden Age” that they would soon institute on Angel Island.

“Say,” Honey remarked facetiously when at length they started to run down, “what happens to a man if he marries an angel? Does he become angel-consort or one of those seraphim arrangements?”

Ralph Addington laughed. But Billy Fairfax and Pete Murphy frowned. Frank Merrill did not seem to hear him. He was taking notes by the firelight.

The men continued to work at the high rate of speed that, since the appearance of the women, they had set for themselves. But whatever form their labor took, their talk was ever of the flying-girls. They referred to them individually now as the “dark one,” the “plain one,” the “thin one,” the “quiet one,” and the “peachy one.” They theorized eternally about them. It was a long time, however, before they saw them again, so long that they had begun to get impatient. In Ralph Addington this uneasiness took the form of irritation. “If I’d had a gun,” he snarled more than once, “by the Lord Harry, I’d have winged one of them.” He sat far into the night and waited. He arose early in the morning and watched. He went for long, slow, solitary, silent, prowling hikes into the interior. His eyes began to look strained from so minute a study of the horizon-line. He grew haggard. His attitude in the matter annoyed Pete Murphy, who maintained that he had no right to spy on women. Argument broke out between them, waxing hot, waned to silence, broke out again and with increased fury. Frank Merrill and Billy Fairfax listened to all this, occasionally smoothing things over between the disputants. But Honey Smith, who seemed more amused than bothered, deftly fed the flame of controversy by agreeing first with one and then with the other.

Late one afternoon, just as the evening star flashed the signal of twilight, the girls came streaming over the sea toward the island.

At the first far-away glimpse, the men dropped their tools and ran to the water’s edge. Honey Smith waded out, waist-deep.

“Well, what do you know about that?” he called out. “Pipe the formation!”

They came massed vertically. In the distance they might have been a rainbow torn from its moorings, borne violently forward on a high wind. The rainbow broke in spots, fluttered, and then came together again. It vibrated with color. It pulsed with iridescence.

“How the thunder - “ Addington began and stopped. “Well, can you beat it?” he concluded.

The human column was so arranged that the wings of one of the air-girls concealed the body of another just above her.

The “dark one” led, flying low, her scarlet pinions beating slowly back and forth about her head.

Just above, near enough for her body to be concealed by the scarlet wings of the “dark one,” but high enough for her pointed brown face to peer between their curves, came the “plain one.”

Higher flew the “thin one.” Her body was entirely covered by the orange wings of the “plain one,” but her copper-colored hair made a gleamy spot in their vase-shaped opening.

Still higher appeared the “peachy one.” She seemed to be holding her lustrous blonde head carefully centered in the oval between the “thin one’s” green-and-yellow plumage. She looked like a portrait in a frame.

Highest of them all, floating upright, a Winged Victory of the air, her silver wings towering straight above her head, the cameo face of the “quiet one” looked level into the distance.

Their wings moved in rotation, and with machine-like regularity. First one pair flashed up, swept back and down, then another, and another. As they neared, the color seemed the least wonderful detail of the picture. For it changed in effect from a column of glittering wings to a column of girl-faces, a column that floated light as thistle-down, a column that divided, parted, opened, closed again.

The background of all this was a veil of dark gauze at the horizon-line, its foil a golden, virgin moon, dangling a single brilliant star.

“They’re talking!” Honey Smith exclaimed. “And they’re leaving!”

The girls did not pause once. They flew in a straight line over the island to the west, always maintaining their columnar formation. At first the men thought that they were making for the trees. They ran after them. The speed of their running had no effect this time on their visitors, who continued to sail eastward. The men called on them to stay. They called repeatedly, singly and in chorus. They called in every tone of humble masculine entreaty and of arrogant masculine command. But their cries might have fallen on marble ears. The girls neither turned nor paused. They disappeared.

“Females are certainly alike under their skins, whether they’re angels or Hottentots,” Ralph Addington commented. “ That tableau appearance was all cooked up for us. They must have practised it for hours.”

“It has the rose-carnival at Tetaluma, Cal., faded,” remarked Honey Smith.

“The ‘quiet one’ was giving the orders for that wing-movement,” said Billy Fairfax. “She whispered them, but I heard her. She engineered the whole thing. She seems to be their leader.”

“I got their voices this time,” said Pete Murphy. “Beautiful, all of them. Soprano, high and clear. They’ve got a language, all right, too. What did you think of it, Frank?”

“Most interesting,” replied Frank Merrill, “most interesting. A preponderance of consonants. Never guttural in effect, and as you say, beautiful voices, very high and clear.”

“I don’t see why they don’t stop and play,” complained Honey. His tone was the petulant one of a spoiled child. It is likely that during the whole course of his woman-petted existence, he had never been so completely ignored. “If I only knew their lingo, I could convince them in five minutes that we wouldn’t hurt them.”

“If we could only signal,” said Billy Fairfax, “that if they’d only come down to earth, we wouldn’t go any nearer than they wanted. But the deuce of it is proving to them that we don’t bite.”

“It is probably that they have known only males of a more primitive type,” Frank Merrill explained. “Possibly they are accustomed to marriage by capture.”

“That would be a very lucky thing,” Ralph explained in an aside to Honey. “Marriage by capture isn’t such a foolish proposition, after all. Look at the Sabine women. I never heard tell that there was any kick coming from them. It all depends on the men.”

“Oh, Lord, Ralph, marriage by capture isn’t a sporting proposition,” said Honey in a disgusted tone. “I’m not for it. A man doesn’t get a run for his money. It’s too much like shooting trapped game.”

“Well, I will admit that there’s more fun in the chase,” Ralph answered.

“Oh, well, if the little darlings are not accustomed to chivalry from men,” Pete Murphy was in the meantime saying, “that explains why they stand us off.”

It was typical of Pete to refer to the flying-girls as “little darlings.” The shortest among them was, of course, taller than he. But to Pete any woman was “little one,” no matter what her stature, as any woman was “pure as the driven snow” until she proved the contrary. This impregnable simplicity explained much of the disaster of his married life.

“I am convinced,” Frank Merrill said meditatively, “we must go about winning their confidence with the utmost care. One false step might be fatal. I know what your impatience is though - for I can hardly school myself to wait - that extraordinary phenomenon of the wings interests me so much. The great question in my mind is their position biologically and sociologically.”

“The only thing that bothers me,” Honey contributed solemnly, “is whether or not they’re our social equals.”

Even Frank Merrill laughed. “I mean, are they birds,” he went on still in a puzzled tone, “free creatures of the air, or, women, bound creatures of the earth? And what should be our attitude toward them? Have we the right to capture them as ornithological specimens, or is it our duty to respect their liberty as independent human beings?

“They’re neither birds nor women,” Pete Murphy burst out impetuously. “They’re angels. Our duty is to fall down and worship them.”

“They’re women,” said Billy Fairfax earnestly. “Our duty is to cherish and protect them.”

“They’re girls,” Honey insisted jovially, “our duty is to josh and jolly them, to buy them taxicabs, theater-tickets, late suppers, candy, and flowers.”

“They’re females,” said Ralph Addington contemptuously. “Our duty is to tame, subjugate, infatuate, and control them.”

Frank Merrill listened to each with the look on his face, half perplexity, half irritation, which always came when the conversation took a humorous turn. “I am myself inclined to look upon them as an entirely new race of beings, requiring new laws,” he said thoughtfully.

Although the quick appearance and the quick departure of the girls had upset the men temporarily, they went back to work at once. And as though inspired by their appearance, they worked like tigers. As before, they talked constantly of them, piling mountains of conjecture on molehills of fact. But now their talk was less of the wonder and the romance of the situation and more of the irritation of it. Ralph Addington’s unease seemed to have infected them all. Frank Merrill had actually to coax them to keep at their duty of patrolling the beach. They were constantly studying the horizon for a glimpse of their strange visitors. Every morning they said, “I hope they’ll come to-day”; every night, “Perhaps they’ll come to-morrow.” And always, “They won’t put it over on us this time when we’re not looking.”

But in point of fact, the next visit of the flying girls came when they least expected it - late in the evening.

It had been damp and dull all day. A high fog was gradually melting out of the air. Back of it a misty moon, more mature now, gleamed like a flask of honey in a golden veil. A few stars glimmered, placid, pale, and big. Suddenly between fog and earth - and they seemed to emerge from the mist like dreams from sleep - appeared the five dazzling girl-figures.

The fog had blurred the vividness of their plumage. The color no longer throbbed from wing-sockets to wing-tips; light no longer pulsated there. But great scintillating beads of fog-dew outlined the long curves of the wings, accentuated the long curves of the body. Hair, brows, lashes glittered as if threaded with diamonds. Their cheeks and lips actually glowed, luscious as ripe fruit.

“My God!” groaned Pete Murphy; “how beautiful and inaccessible! But women should be inaccessible,” he ended with a sigh.

“Not so inaccessible as they were, though,”

Ralph Addington said. Again the appearance of the women had transformed him physically and mentally. He moved with the nervous activity of a man strung on wires. His brown eyes showed yellow gleams like a cat’s. “They’re flying lower and slower to-night.”

It did seem as though the fog, light as it was, definitely impeded their wings. It gave to their movements a little languor that had a plaintive appealing quality. Perhaps they realized this themselves. In the midst of their aerial evolutions suddenly - and apparently without cause - they developed panic, turned seawards. Their audience, taken by surprise, burst into shouts of remonstrance, ran after them. The clamor and the motion seemed only to add to the girls’ alarm. Their retreating speed was almost frenzied.

“What the - what’s frightened them?” Honey Smith asked. Honey’s brows had come together in an unaccustomed scowl. He bit his lips.

“Give it up,” Billy Fairfax answered, and his tone boiled with exasperation. “I hope they haven’t been frightened away for good.”

“I think every time it’s the last,” exclaimed Pete Murphy, “but they keep coming back.”

“Son,” said Ralph Addington, and there was a perceptible element of patronage in his tone, “I’ll tell you the exact order of events. It threw a scare into the girls to-night that they couldn’t fly so well. But in an hour’s time, they’ll be sore because they didn’t put up a good exhibition. Now, if I know anything at all about women - and maybe I flatter myself, but I think I know a lot - they’ll be back the first thing to-morrow to prove to us that their bad flying was not our effect on them but the weather’s.”

Whether Ralph’s theory was correct could not, of course, be ascertained. But in the matter of prophecy, he was absolutely vindicated. About half-way through the morning five black spots appeared in the west. They grew gradually to bewildering shapes and colors, for the girls came dressed in gowns woven of brilliant flowers. And the torrents of their beautiful hair floated loose. This time they held themselves grouped close; they kept themselves aloof, high. But again came the sinuous interplay of flower-clad bodies, the flashing evolution of rainbow wings, the dazzling interweaving of snowy arms and legs. It held the men breathless.

“They’re like goldfish in a bowl,” Billy Fairfax said. “I never saw such suppleness. You wouldn’t think they had a bone in their systems.”

“I bet they’re as strong as tigers, though,” commented Addington. “I wouldn’t want to handle more than one of them at once.”

“I think I could handle two,” remarked Frank Merrill. He said this, not boastfully, but as one who states an interesting fact. And he spoke as impersonally as though the girls were machines.

Ralph Addington studied Frank Merrill’s gigantic copper-colored bulk enviously. “I guess you could,” he agreed.

“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 sexes is in reality more bitter and bloody 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 damned long time to come down to cases. What I want to know is how many months more will have to pass before we speak when we pass by.”

“That matter’ll take care of itself,” Ralph reassured him. “You leave it to natural selection.”

“Well, it’s a deuce of a slow process,” Honey grumbled.