Chapter 5

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

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

Nevertheless many days passed and the flying-girls continued not to appear.

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

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

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

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

“Low?” Ralph questioned eagerly.

“Yes,” Honey answered succinctly, “but not low enough. I couldn’t touch her, of course. If I stopped for a while and kept quiet as the dead, she’d come much closer. But the instant I made a move towards - bing! - she hit the welkin. But the way she rubbered. And, Lord, how easy scared. Once I waved my handkerchief - she nearly threw a fit. Strangest sensation I’ve ever had in my life to be walking calmly along like that with a girl beside me - flying. She isn’t so plain when you get close - she does look like a Kanaka, though.” He stopped and burst out laughing. “Funny thing! I kept calling her Lulu. After a while, she got it that that was her tag. She didn’t exactly come closer when I said ‘Lulu,’ but she’d turn her head over her shoulder and look at me.”

“Well, damn you and your beaux yeux!” said Ralph. There was a real chagrin behind the amusement in his voice.

“Did you notice the muscular development of her back and shoulders?” Frank Merrill asked eagerly.

“No,” said Honey regretfully, “I don’t seem to remember anything but her face.”

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

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

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

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

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

They found this incident exciting enough to justify them in laying off from work the rest of the afternoon. But they had to get accustomed to it in the week that followed. Thereafter, some time during the day, the cry would ring out, “Here’s your girl, Honey!” And Honey, not even dropping his tools, would smile over his shoulder at the approaching Lulu.

As time went by, she ventured nearer and nearer, stayed longer and longer. Honey, calmly driving nails, addressed to her an endless, chaffing monologue. At first, it was apparent she was as much repelled by the tools as she was fascinated by Honey. For him to throw a nail to the ground was the signal for her to speed to the zenith. But gradually, in spite of the noise they made, she came to accept them as dumb, inanimate, harmless. And one day, when Honey, working on the roof, dropped a screw-driver, she flew down, picked it up, flew back, and placed it within reach of his hand. She would hover over him for hours, helping in many small ways. This only, however, when the other men were sufficiently far away and only when Honey’s two hands were occupied. If any one of them - Honey and the rest - made the most casual of accidental moves in her direction, her flight was that of an arrow. But nobody could have been more careful than they not to frighten her.

They always stopped, however, to watch her approach and her departure. There was something irresistibly feminine about Lulu’s flight. She herself seemed to appreciate this. If anybody looked at her, she exhibited her accomplishments with an eagerness that had a charming touch of naivete. She dipped and dove endlessly. She dealt in little darts and rushes, bird-like in their speed and grace. She never flew high, but, on her level, her activity was marvelous.

“The supermanning little imp!” Pete Murphy said again and again. “The vain little devil,” Ralph Addington would add, chuckling.

“How the thunder did we ever start to call her the ‘plain one’?” Honey was always asking in an injured tone.

Lulu was far from plain. She was, however, one of those girls who start by being “ugly” or “queer-looking,” or downright “homely,” and end by becoming “interesting” or “picturesque” or “fascinating,” according to the divagations of the individual vocabulary. She had the beaute troublante. At first sight, you might have called her gipsy, Indian, Kanaka, Chinese, Japanese, Korean - any exotic type that you had not seen. Which is to say that she had the look of the primitive woman and the foreign woman. Superficially, her beauty of irregularity was of all beauty the most perturbing and provocative. Eyes, skin, hair, she was all copper-browns and crimson-bronzes, all the high gloss of satiny surfaces. Every shape and contour was a variant from the regular. Her eyes took a bewildering slant. Her face showed a little piquant stress on the cheekbones. Her hair banded in a long, solid, club-like braid. In repose she bore a look a little sullen, a little heavy. When she smiled, it seemed as if her whole face waked up; but it was only the glitter of white teeth in the slit of her scarlet mouth.

Lulu always dressed in browns and greens; leaves, mosses, grasses made a dim-colored, velvety fabric that contrasted richly with her coppery satin surfaces and her brilliant orange wings.

The excitement of this had hardly died down when Frank Merrill brought the tale of another adventure to camp. He had fallen into the habit of withdrawing late in the afternoon to one of the reefs, far enough away to read and to write quietly. One day, just as he had gone deep into his book, a shadow fell across it. Startled, he looked up. Directly over his head, pasted on the sky like a scarlet V, hovered the “dark one.” After his first instant of surprise and a second interval of perplexity, he put his book down, settled himself back quietly, and watched. Conscious of his espionage apparently, she flew away, floated, flew back, floated, flew up, flew down, floated - always within a little distance. After half an hour of this aerial irresolution, she sailed off. She repeated her performance the next afternoon and the next, and the next, staying longer each time. By the end of the week she was spending whole afternoons there. She, too, became a regular visitor.

She never spoke. And she scarcely moved. She waved her great scarlet wings only fast enough to hold herself beyond Frank’s reach. But from that distance she watched his movements, watched closely and unceasingly, watched with the interest of a child at a moving-picture show. Her surveillance of him was so intense it seemed impossible that she could see anything else. But if one of the other four men started to join them, she became a flash of scarlet lightning that tore the distance.

Frank, of course, found this interesting. Every day he made voluminous notes of his observations. Every night be embodied these notes in his monograph.

“What does she look like close to?” the others asked him again and again.

“Really, I’ve hardly had a chance to notice yet,” was Frank’s invariable answer. “She’s a comely young person, I should say, and, as you can easily see, of the brunette coloring. I’m so much more interested in her flying than in her appearance that I’ve never really taken a good look at her. Unfortunately she flies less well than the others. I wish I could get a chance to study all of them - the ‘quiet one’ in particular; she flies so much faster. On the other hand, this one seems able to hold herself motionless in the air longer than they.”

“She’s lazy,” Honey Smith said decisively. “I got that right off. She looks like a Spanish woman and she is a good deal like one in her ways.”

Honey was right; the “dark one” was lazy. Alone she always flew low, and at no time, even in company, did she dare great altitudes. She seemed to love to float, wings outspread and eyes half closed, on one of those tranquil air-plateaux that lie between drifting air-currents. She was an adept, apparently, at finding the little nodule of quiet space that forms the center of every windstorm. Standing upright in it, flaming wings erect, she would whirl through space like an autumn leaf. Gradually, she became less suspicious of the other men. She often passed in their direction on the way to her afternoon vigil with Frank.

“She certainly is one peach of a female,” said Ralph Addington. I don’t know but what she’s prettier than my blonde. Too bad she’s stuck on that stiff of a Merrill. I suppose he’d sit there every afternoon for a year and just look at her.”

“I should think she came from Andalusia,” Honey answered, watching the long, low sweep of her scarlet flight. “She’s got to have a Spanish name. Say we call her Chiquita.”

And Chiquita she became.

Chiquita was beautiful. Her beauty had a highwayman quality of violence; it struck quick and full in the face. She was the darkest of all the girls, a raven black. As Lulu was all coppery shine and shimmer, all satiny gloss and gleam, so Chiquita was all dusk in the coloring, all velvet in the surfaces. Her great heavy-lidded eyes were dusk and velvet, with depth on depth of an unmeaning dreaminess. Her hair, brows, lashes were dusk and velvet; and there was no light in them. Her skin, a dusky cream on which velvety shade accented velvety shadow, was colorless except where her lips, cupped like a flower, offered a splash of crimson. Yet, in spite of the violence of her beauty, her expression held a tropical languor. Indeed, had not her flying compelled a superficial vigor from her, she would have seemed voluptuous.

Chiquita wore scarlet always, the exact scarlet of her wings, a clinging mass of tropical bloom; huge star-shaped or lilly-like flowers whose brilliant lustre accentuated her dusky coloring.

They had no sooner accustomed themselves to the incongruity of Frank Merrill’s conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy developed what Honey called “a case.” It was scarcely a question of development; for with Pete it had been the “thin one” from the beginning. Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her Clara - and Clara she ultimately became. Among themselves, the men employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with Pete. To Ralph she was “the cat”; to Billy, “the poser”; to Honey, “Carrots.”

Clara appeared first with Lulu. She did not stay long on her initial visit. But afterwards she always accompanied her friend, always stayed as late as she.

“I’d pick those two for running-mates anywhere,” Ralph said in private to Honey. “I wish I had a dollar bill for every time I’ve met up with that combination, one simple, devoted, self-sacrificing, the other selfish, calculating, catty.”

Clara was not exactly beautiful, although she had many points of beauty. Her straight red hair clung to her head like a close-fitting helmet of copper. Her skin balanced delicately between a brown pallor and a golden sallowness. Her long, black lashes paled her gray eyes slightly; her snub nose made charming havoc of what, without it, would have been a conventional regularity of profile. She was really no more slender than the normal woman, but, compared with her mates, she seemed of elfin slimness; she was shapely in a supple, long-limbed way. There was something a little exotic about her. Her green and gold plumage gave her a touch of the fantastic and the bizarre. Prevailingly, she arrayed herself in flowers that ran all the shades from cream and lemon to yellow and orange. She was like a parrot among more uniformly feathered birds.

Clara never flew high. It was apparent, however, that if she made a tremendous effort, she could take any height. On the other hand, she flew more swiftly than either Lulu or Chiquita. She seemed to keep by preference to the middle altitudes. She hated wind and fog; she appeared only in calm and dry weather. Perhaps this was because the wind interfered with her histrionics, the fog with the wavy complications of her red hair. For she postured as she moved; whatever her hurry, she presented a picture, absolutely composed. And her hair was always intricately arranged, always decked with leaves and flowers.

“By jiminy, I’d make my everlasting fortune off you,” Honey Smith once addressed her, as she flew over his head, “selling you to the moving-picture people.”

Wings straight up, legs straight out, arms straight ahead, delicately slender feet, and strong-looking hands dropping like flowers, her only answer to this remark was an enigmatic closing of her thick-lashed lids, a twist into a pose even more sensuously beautiful.

“Say, I’m tired waiting,” Ralph Addington growled one day, when the lovely trio flew over his head in a group. “Why doesn’t that blonde of mine put in an appearance? Oh, Clara, Lulu, Chiquita,” he called, “won’t you bring your peachy friend the next time you call?”

It was a long time, however, before the “peachy one” appeared. Then suddenly one day a great jagged shadow enveloped them in its purple coolness. The men looked up, startled. She must have come upon them slowly and quietly, for she was close. Her mischievous face smiled alluringly down at them from the wide triangle of her blue wings.

Followed an exhibition of flying which outdid all the others.

Dropping like a star from the zenith and dropping so close and so swiftly that the men involuntarily scattered to give her landing-room, she caught herself up within two feet of their heads and bounded straight up to the zenith again. Up she went, and up and up until she was only a blue shimmer; and up and up and up until she was only a dark dot. Then, without warning, again she dropped, gradually this time, head-foremost like’ a diver, down and down and down until her body was perfectly outlined, down and down and down until she floated just above their heads.

Coming thus slowly upon them, she gave, for the first time, a close view of her wonderful blondeness. It was a sheer golden blondeness, not a hint of tow, or flaxen, or yellow; not a touch of silver, or honey, or auburn. It was half her charm that the extraordinary strength and vigor of her contours contrasted with the delicacy and dewiness of her coloring, that from one aspect, she seemed as frail as a flower, from another as hard as a crystal. She had, at the same time, the untouched, unstained beauty of the virgin girl, and the hard, muscular strength of the virgin boy. Her skin, white as a lily-petal and as thick and smooth, had been deepened by a single drop of amber to cream. Her eyes, of which the sculpturesque lids drooped a little, flashed a blue as limpid as the sky. Teeth, set as close as seed-pearls, gleamed between lips which were the pink of the faded rose. The sunlight turned her golden hair to spun glass, melted it to light itself. The shadow thickened it to fluid, hardened it to massy gold again. The details of her face came out only as the result of determined study. Her chief beauty - and it amounted to witchery, to enchantment - lay in a constant and a constantly subtle change of expression.

During this exhibition the men stood frozen in the exact attitudes in which she found them. Ralph Addington alone remained master of himself. He stood quiet, every nerve tense, every muscle alert, the expression on his face that of a cat watching a bird. At her second dip downward, he suddenly jumped into the air, jumped so high that his clutching fingers grazed her finger-tips.

That frightened her.

Her upward flight was of a terrific speed - she leaped into the sky. But once beyond the danger-line her composure came back. She dropped on them a coil of laughter, clear as running water, contemptuous, mischievous. Still laughing, she sank again, almost as near. Her mirth brought her lids close together. Her eyes, sparkling between thick files of golden lash, had almost a cruel sweetness.

She immediately flew away, departing over the water. Ralph cursed himself for the rest of the day. She returned before the week was out, however, and, after that, she continued to visit them at intervals of a few days. The sudden note of blue, even in the distance it seemed to connote coquetry, was the signal for all the men to stop work. They could not think clearly or consecutively when she was about. She was one of those women whose presence creates disturbance, perturbation, unrest. The very sunshine seemed alive, the very air seemed vibrant with her. Even when she flew high, her shadow came between them and their work.

“She sure qualifies when it comes to fancy flying,” said Honey Smith. “She’s in a class all by herself.”

Her flying was daring, eccentric, temperamental, the apotheosis of brilliancy - genius. The sudden dart up, the terrifying drop down seemed her main accomplishment. The wonder of it was that the men could never tell where she would land. Did it seem that she was aiming near, a sudden swoop would bring her to rest on a far-away spot. Was it certain that she was making for a distant tree-top, an unexpected drop would land her a few feet from their group. She was the only one of the flying-girls who touched the earth. And she always led up to this feat as to the climax of what Honey called her “act.” She would drop to the very ground, pose there, wavering like an enormous butterfly, her great wings opening and shutting. Sometimes, tempted by her actual nearness and fooled by her apparent weakness, the five men would make a rush in her direction. She would stand waiting and drooping until they were almost on her. Then in a flash came the tremendous whirr of her start, the violent beat of her whipping progress - she had become a blue speck.

She wore always what seemed to be gossamer, rose-color in one light, sky-color in another; a flexible film that one moment defined the long slim lines of her body and the next concealed them completely. Near, it could be seen that this drapery was woven of tiny buds, pink and blue; afar she seemed to float in a shimmering opalescent mist.

She teased them all, but it was evident from the beginning that she had picked Ralph to tease most. After a long while, the others learned to ignore, or to pretend to ignore, her tantalizing overtures. But Ralph could look at nothing else while she was about. She loved to lead him in a long, wild-goose chase across the island, dipping almost within reach one moment, losing herself at the zenith in another, alighting here and there with a will-o’-the-wisp capriciousness. Sometimes Ralph would return in such an exhausted condition that he dropped to sleep while he ate. At such times his mood was far from agreeable. His companions soon learned not to address him after these expeditions.

One afternoon, exercising heroic resolution, Ralph allowed Peachy to fly, apparently unnoticed, over his head, let her make an unaccompanied way half across the island. But when she had passed out of earshot he watched her carefully.

“Say, Honey,” he said after half an hour’s fidgeting, “Peachy’s settled down somewhere on the island. I should say on the near shore of the lake. I don’t know that anything’s happened - probably nothing. But I hope to God,” he added savagely, “she’s broken a wing. Come on and find out what she’s up to, will you?”

“Sure!” Honey agreed cheerfully. “All’s fair in love and war. And this seems to be both love and war.”

They walked slowly, and without talking, across the beach. When they reached the trail they dropped on all fours and pulled themselves noiselessly along. The slightest sound, the snapping of a twig, the flutter of a bird, brought them to quiet. An hour, they searched profitlessly.

Then suddenly they got sound of her, the languid slap of great wings opening and shutting. She had not gone to the lake. Instead, she had chosen for her resting-place one of the tiny pools which, like pendants of a necklace, partially encircled the main body. She was sitting on a flat stone that projected into the water. Her drooped blue wings, glittering with moisture, had finally come to rest; they trailed behind her over the gray boulder and into a mass of vivid green water-grasses. One bare shoulder had broken through her rose-and-blue drapery. The odor of flowers, came from her. Her hair, a braid over each breast, oozed like ropes of melted gold to her knees. A hand held each of these braids. She was evidently preoccupied. Her eyelids were down. Absently she dabbled her white feet in the water. The noise of her splashing covered their approach. The two men signaled their plans, separated.

Five minutes went by, and ten and fifteen and twenty. Peachy still sat silent, moveless, meditative. Not once did she lift her eyelids.

Then Addington leaped like a cat from the bushes at her right. Simultaneously Honey pounced in her direction from the left.

But - whir-r-r-r - it was like the beating of a tremendous drum. Straight across the pond she went, her toes shirring the water, and up and up and up - then off. And all the time she laughed, a delicious, rippling laughter which seemed to climb every scale that could carry coquetry.

The two men stood impotently watching her for a moment. Then Honey broke into roars of delight. “Oh, you kid!” he called appreciatively to her. “She had her nerve with her to sit still all the time, knowing that we were creeping up on her, didn’t she?” He turned to Ralph.

But Ralph did not answer, did not hear. His face was black with rage. He shook his fist in Peachy’s direction.

Of the flying-girls, there remained now only one who held herself aloof, the “quiet one.” It was many weeks before she visited the island. Then she came often, though always alone. There was something in her attitude that marked her off from the others.

“She doesn’t come because she wants to,” Billy Fairfax explained. “She comes because she’s lonely.”