Chapter 6
The “quiet one” habitually flew high and kept high, so high indeed that, after the first excitement of her tardy appearance, none but Billy gave her more than passing attention. Up to that time Billy had been a hard, a steady worker. But now he seemed unable to concentrate on anything. It was doubtless an extra exasperation that the “quiet one” puzzled him. Her flying seemed to be more than a haphazard way of passing the time. It seemed to have a meaning; it was almost as if she were trying to accomplish something by it; and ever she perfected the figure that her flight drew on the sky. If she soared and dropped, she dropped and soared. If she curved and floated, she floated and curved. If she dipped and leaped, she leaped and dipped. All this he could see. But there were scores of minor evolutions that appeared to him only as confused motion.
One thing he caught immediately. Those lonely gyrations were not the exercise of the elusive coquetry which distinguished Peachy. It was more that the “quiet one” was pushed on by some intellectual or artistic impulse, that she expressed by the symbols, of her complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life, that she traced out some artless design, some primary pattern of beauty.
Julia always seemed to shine; she wore garments of gleamy-petalled, white flowers, silvery seaweeds, pellucid marsh-grasses, vines, golden or purple, that covered her with a delicate lustre. Her wings were different from the others; theirs flashed color, but hers gave light; and that light seemed to have run down on her flesh.
“What the thunder is she trying to do up there?” Ralph asked one day, stopping at Billy’s side. Ralph’s question was not in reality begotten so much of curiosity as of irritation. From the beginning the “quiet one” had interested him least of any of the flying-girls as, from the beginning, Peachy had interested him most.
“I don’t know, of course.” Billy spoke with reluctance. It was evident that he did not enjoy discussing the “quiet one” with Ralph. “At first my theory was that flying was to her what dancing is to most girls. But, somehow, it seems to go deeper than that - as if it were art, or even creation. Anyway, there’s a kind of bi-lateral symmetry about everything she does.”
Billy fell into the habit, each afternoon, of strolling away from the rest, out of sound of their chaff. On the grassy top of one of the reefs, he found a spot where he could lie comfortably and watch the “quiet one.” He used to spin long day-dreams there. She looked so remote far up in the boiling blue, and so strange, that he had an inexplicable sensation of reverence.
Now it was as though, in watching that aerial weaving and interweaving, he were assisting at a religious rite. He liked it best when the white day-moon was afloat. If he half-shut his eyes, it seemed to him that she and the moon made twin crescents of foaming silver, twin bubbles of white fire, twin films of fairy gossamer, twin vials that held the very essence of poetry. Somehow he had always connected her with the moon. Indeed, in her whiteness, her coldness, her aloofness, she seemed the very sublimation of virginity. His first secret names for her were Diana and Cynthia. But there was another quality in her that those names did not include - intellectuality. His favorite heroes were Julius Caesar and Edwin Booth - a quaint pair, taken in combination. In the long imaginary conversations which he held with her he addressed her as Julia or Edwina.
Days and days went by and he could discover no sign that she had noticed him. It was typical of the “damned gentleman” side of Billy that he did not try to attract her attention. Indeed, his efforts were ever to efface himself.
One afternoon, after a long vigil in which, unaccountably, Julia had not appeared, he started to return to camp. It was a late twilight and a black, velvety one. The trees against a darkening curtain of sky had turned to bunches of tangled shadow, the reefs and rocks against the papery white of the sand to smutches and blobs of soot. Suddenly - and his heart pounded at the sound - the air began to vibrate and thrill.
He stopped short. He waited. His breath came fast; the vibration and thrill were coming closer.
He crystallized where he stood. It scarcely seemed that he breathed. And then - .
Something white and nebulous came floating out of the dusk towards him. It became a silver cloud, a white sculptured spirit of the air. It became an angel, a fairy, a woman - Julia. She flew not far off, level with his eyes and, as she approached, she slowed her stately flight. Billy made no movement. He only stood and waited and watched. But perhaps never before in his life had his eyes become so transparently the windows of his soul. Quite as intently, Julia’s eyes, big, gray, and dark-lashed, considered him. It seemed to Billy that he had never seen in any face so virginally young such a tragic seriousness, nor in any eyes, superficially so calm, such a troubled wonder.
He did not stir until she had drifted out of earshot, had become again a nebulous silver cloud drifting into the dusk, had merged with that dusk.
“What makes your eyes shine so?” said Honey, examining him keenly when he reached camp.
It was the first time Billy had known Julia to fly low. But he discovered gradually that only in the sunlight did she haunt the zenith. At twilight she always kept close to the earth. Billy took to haunting the reefs at dusk.
Again and again, the same thing happened.
Suddenly - and it was as if successive waves of electricity charged through his body - the quiet air began to purr and vibrate and drum. Out of the star-shot dusk emerged the speeding whiteness of Julia. Always, as she approached, she slowed her flight. Always as she passed, her sorrowing gray eyes would seek his burning blue ones. Billy could bring himself to speak of this strange experience to nobody, not even to Honey. For there was in it something untellable, unsharable, the wonder of the vision and the dream, the unreality of the apparition.
The excitement of these happenings kept the men entertained, but it also kept them keyed up to high tension. For a while they did not notice this themselves. But when they attempted to go back to their interrupted work, they found it hard to concentrate upon it. Frank Merrill had given up trying to make them patrol the beach. Unaided, day and night he attended to their signals.
“Well,” said Honey Smith one day and, for the first time, there was a peevish note in his voice, “that ‘natural selection’ theory of yours, Ralph, seems to have worked out to some extent - but not enough. We seem to be comfortably divided, all ten of us, into happy couples, but hanged if I’m strong for this long-distance acquaintance.”
“You’re right there,” Ralph Addington admitted; “we don’t seem to be getting any forwarder.”
“It’s all very pretty and romantic to have these girls flying about,” Honey continued in a grumbling tone, “but it’s too much like flirting with a canary-bird. Damn it all, I want to talk with them.”
Ralph made a hopeless gesture. “It is a deadlock, I admit. I’m at my wits’ end.”
Perhaps Honey expressed what the others felt. At any rate, a sudden irascibility broke out among them. They were good-natured enough while the girls were about, but over their work and during their leisure, they developed what Honey described as every kind of blue-bean, sourball, katzenjammer and grouch.” They fought heroically against it - and their method of fighting took various forms, according to the nature of the four men. Frank Merrill lost himself in his books. Pete Murphy began the score of an opera vaguely heroic in theme; he wrote every spare moment. Billy Fairfax worked so hard that he grew thin. Honey Smith went off on long, solitary walks. Ralph Addington, as usual, showed an exasperating tendency towards contradiction, an unvarying contentiousness.
And then, without warning, all the girls ceased to come to the island. Three days went by, five, a week, ten days. One morning they all passed over the island, one by one, an hour or two between flights; but they flew high and fast, and they did not stop.
Ralph Addington had become more and more irascible. That day the others maintained peace only by ignoring him.
“By the gods!” he snarled at night as they all sat dull and dumb about the fire. “Something’s got to happen to change our way of living or murder’ll break out in this community. And we’d better begin pretty quick to do something about it. What I’d like to know is,” and he slapped his hand smartly against a flat rock, “coming down to cases - as we must sooner or later - what is our right in regard to these women.”
III
“I don’t exactly like your, use of the word right, Ralph,” said Billy. “You mean duty, don’t you?”
“And he’d better change that to privilege,” put in Pete Murphy, scowling.
“Shut up, you mick,” Honey interposed, flicking Pete on the ear with a pebble. “What do you know about machinery?”
Pete grinned and subsided for a moment. Honey could always placate him by calling him a mick.”
“No,” Ralph went on obstinately, addressing himself this time to Billy, “I mean right. Of course, I mean right,” he went on with one of his, gusty bursts of, irritation. “For God’s sake, don’t be so high-brow and altruistic.”
“How about it, Frank?” Billy said, turning to Merrill.
“Well,” said Frank slowly, “I don’t exactly know how to answer that question. I don’t know what you mean by the word - right. I take it that you mean what our right would be if these flying-maidens permitted themselves to become our friends. I would say, that, in such a case, you would have the only right that any man ever has, as far as women are concerned - the right to woo. If he wins, all well and good. If he loses, he must abide by the consequences.”
“You’re on, Frank,” said Billy Fairfax.
You’ve said the last word.”
“In normal condition, I’d agree with you,” Ralph said. “But in these conditions I disagree utterly.”
“How?” Frank asked. “Why?” He turned to Ralph with the instinctive equability that he always presented to an opponent in argument.
“Well, in the first place, we find ourselves in a, situation unparalleled in the world’s history.” Ralph had the air of one who is saying aloud for the first time what he has said to himself many times. At any rate, he proceeded with an unusual fluency and glibness. “Circumstances alter cases. We can’t handle this situation by any of the standards we have formerly known. In fact, we’ve got to throw all our former standards overboard. There are five of these girls. There are five of us. Voila! Following the laws of nature we have selected each of us the mates we prefer. Or, following the law that Bernard Shaw discovered, the ladies have selected, each of them, the mates that they prefer. They are now turning themselves inside out to prove to us that we selected them. Voila! The rest is obvious. If they come to terms, all right! If they don’t - “ He paused. “I repeat that we are placed in, a situation new in the history of the world. I repeat the bromidion - circumstances alter cases. We may have to stay on this island as long as we live. I am perfectly willing to confess that just now I’d rather not be rescued. But it’s over our months that we’ve been here. We must think of the future. The future justifies anything. If these girls don’t come to terms, they must be made to come to terms. You’ll find I’m right.”
“Right!” exclaimed Billy hotly. “What are you talking about? Those are the principles of an Apache or a Hottentot.”
“Or a cave-man,” Pete added.
“Well, what are we under our skins but Hottentots and Apaches and cave-men?” said Ralph. “Now, I leave it to you. Look facts in the face. Use your common sense. Count out civilization and all its artificial rules. Think of our situation on this island, if we don’t capture these women soon. We can’t tell when they’ll stop coming. We don’t know what the conditions of their life may be. The caprice may strike them to-morrow to cut us out for good. Maybe their men will discover it - and prevent them from coming. A lot of things may happen to keep them away. What’s to become of us in that case? We’ll go mad, five men alone here. It isn’t as though we could tame them by any gentle methods. You can’t catch eagles by putting salt on their tails. In the first place, we can’t get close enough to them, because of their accursed wings, to prove that we wouldn’t harm them. They’ve sent us a challenge - it’s a magnificent one. They’ve thrown down the gage. And how have we responded? I bet they think we’re a precious lot of molly-coddles! I bet they’re laughing in their sleeves all the time. I’d hate to hear what they say about us. But the point I’m trying to make is not that. It’s this: we can’t afford to lose them. This place is a prison now. It will be worse than that if this keeps up - it’ll be a madhouse.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you’re advocating marriage by capture?” Billy asked in an incredulous voice.
“I mean to tell you I’m arguing capture,” Ralph said with emphasis. “After that, you, can trust the marriage question to take care of itself.”
Argument broke out hydra-headed. They wrangled the whole evening. Theory at first guided them. In the beginning, names like Plato, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer preceded quotation; then, came Shaw, Havelock-Ellis, Kraft-Ebing, Weininger. Sleep deadened their discussion temporarily but it burst out at intervals all the next day. In fact, it seemed to possess eternal vitality, eternal fascination. Leaving theory, they went for parallels of their strange situation, to history, to the Scriptures, to fiction, to drama, to poetry.
Honey ended every discussion with a philosophic, “Aside from the question of brutality, this marriage by capture isn’t a sporting proposition. It’s like jacking deer. I’m not for it. And, O Lord, what’s the use of chewing the rag so much about it? Wait a while. We’ll get them yet, I betchu!”
All of Honey’s sex-pride flared in this buoyant assurance. It had apparently not yet occurred to him that he would not conquer Lulu in the end and conquer her by merely submitting to her wooing of him.
And in the meantime, the voiceless tete-a-teteing of the five couples continued.
“Say, Ralph,” Honey said one day in a calm interval, “it’s just occurred to me that we haven’t seen those girls, flying in a bunch for quite some time. Don’t suppose they’ve quarrelled, do you?”
Everybody stopped work to stare at him. “I bet that’s the answer,” Ralph exclaimed. His voice held the note of one for whom a private mystification has at last broken.
“But what do you suppose they’ve quarrelled about?” Pete Murphy asked.
“Me,” Honey said promptly.
Ralph laughed absent-mindedly. “It’s a hundred to one shot that they’re quarrelling about us, though,” he said. For some mysterious reason this theory raised his spirits perceptibly.
“But - to get down to brass tacks,” Pete asked in a puzzled tone, “what have we done to make them quarrel?”
“Oh, we’ve done nothing,” Ralph answered with one of his lordly assumptions of a special knowledge. It’s just the disorganization that always falls on women when men appear on their horizon. They’re absolutely without sex-loyalty, you know. They seem to have principle enough in regard to some things, a few things. But the moment a man appears, it’s all off. West of Suez, they’ll lie and steal; east of Suez, they’ll betray and murder as easy as breathe.”
“Cut that out, Addington,” Pete Murphy commanded in a dangerous voice. “I won’t stand for that kind of talk.”
Ralph glared. “Won’t stand for it?” he repeated. “I’d like to know how the hell you’re going to help yourself?”
“I’ll find a way, and pretty damned quick,” Pete retorted.
It was the closest approach to a quarrel that had yet occurred. The other three men hastily threw themselves into the breach. “Shut up, you mick,” Honey called to Pete. “Remember you came over in the steerage.”
Pete grinned and subsided.
“As sure as shooting,” Honey said, “those girls have quarrelled. I bet we never see them again.”
It was a long time before they saw any of them; but, curiously enough, the next time the flying-girls visited the island they came in a group.
It had been sultry, the first of a long series of sticky, muggy days. What threatened to be a thunderstorm and then, as Honey said, failed to “make good,” came up in the afternoon. Just as the sky was at its blackest, Honey called, “Hurroo! Here they come!”
The effect of the approach of the flying-maidens was so strange as to make them unfamiliar. There was no sun to pour a liquid iridescence through their wings. All the high lights of their plumage had dulled. Painted in flat primary colors, they looked like paper dolls pasted on the inky thundercloud. As usual, when they came in a group, they wove in and out in a limited spherical area, achieving extraordinary effects in close wheeling.
As the girls made for the island, a new impulse seized Honey. He ran down the beach, dashed into the water, swam out to meet them.
“Come back, you fool!” Frank yelled.
There may be sharks in that water.
But Honey only laughed. He was a magnificent swimmer. He seemed determined to give, in an alien element, an exhibition which would equal that of the flying-girls. The effect on them was immediate; they broke ranks and floated, watching every move.
To hold their interest, Honey nearly turned himself inside out.
At first he tore the water white with the vigor of his trudgeon-stroke. Then turning from left to right, he employed the side-stroke. From that, he went to the breast-stroke. Last of all, he floated, dove, swam under water so long that the girls began uneasily to fly back and forth, to twitter with alarm.
Finally he emerged and floated again.
“He swims like a motor-boat!” said Ralph admiringly.
Suddenly Lulu fluttered away from her companions, dropped so low that she could have touched Honey with her hand, and flew protectingly above him.
The men on the beach watched these proceedings with a gradual diminution of their alarm, with the admiration that Honey in the water always excited, with the amusement that Lulu’s fearless display of infatuation always developed.
“Oh, my God!” Frank called suddenly. “There’s a shark!”
Simultaneously, the others saw what he saw - a sinister black triangle swiftly shearing the water. They ran, yelling, down to the water’s edge and stood there trying to shout a warning over the noise of the surf.
Honey did not get it at once. He was still floating, his smiling, up-turned face looking into Lulu’s smiling, down-turned one. Then, rolling over, he apparently caught a glimpse of the black fin bearing so steadily on him. He made immediately for the shore but he had swum far and fast.
Lulu was slower even than he in realizing the situation. For a moment, obviously piqued at his action, she dropped and hung in the rear. Perhaps her mates signaled to her, perhaps her intuition flashed the warning. Suddenly she looked back. The scream which she emitted was as shrill with terror as any wingless woman’s. Swooping down like an eagle, she seized Honey under the shoulders, lifted him out of the water. His weight crippled her. For though the first impulse of her terror carried her high, she sank at once until Honey hung just above the water.
And continuously she screamed.
The other girls realized her plight in an instant. They dropped like stones to her side, eased her partially of Honey’s weight. Julia alone did not touch him. She floated above, calling directions. The group of girls arose gradually, flew swiftly over the water toward the beach. The men ran to meet them.
“Don’t go any further,” Billy commanded in a peremptory voice unusual with him. “They’ll not put him down if we come too near.”
The men hesitated, stopped.
Immediately the girls deposited Honey on the sand.
“Did you notice the cleverness of that breakaway?” said Pete. “He couldn’t have got a clinch in anywhere.”
But to do Honey justice, he attempted nothing of the sort. He lay flat and still until his rescuers were at a safe height. Then he sat up and smiled radiantly at them. “Ladies, I thank you,” he said.
“And I’ll see that you get a Carnegie medal if it takes the rest of my life. I guess,” he remarked unabashed, as his companions joined him, “it will be fresh-water swimming for your little friend hereafter.”
Nobody spoke for a while. His companions were still white and Billy Fairfax even shook.
“You looked like an engraving that used to hang over my bed when I was a child,” said Ralph, with an attempt at humor that had, coming from him, a touching quality, “a bunch of, angels lugging a dead man to heaven. You’d have been a ringer for it if you’d had a shave.”
“Well, the next time the girls come, I’m going to swim out among the pretty sharks,” said Pete, obviously trying to echo Ralph’s light note. “By Jove, hear them chatter up there. They’re talking all at once and at the top of their lungs just like your sisters and your cousins and your aunts.”
“They’re as pale as death, too,” observed Billy. “Look at that!”
The flying-maidens had come together in a compact circular group, hands over each other’s shoulders, wings faintly fluttering. Perceptibly they clung to each other for support. Their faces had turned chalky; their heads drooped. Intertwined thus, they drifted out of sight.
“Lord, they are beautiful, close-to!” Honey said. “You never saw such complexions! Or such eyes and teeth! And - and - by George, such an effect of purity and stainlessness. I feel like a - and yet, by - .” He fell into an abstraction so deep that it was as though he had forgotten his companions.
For several days, the girls did not appear on Angel Island. All that time, the capture argument lay in abeyance. Even Ralph, who had introduced the project, seemed touched by the gallantry of Honey’s rescue. Honey, himself, was strangely subdued; his eternal monologue had dried up; he seemed preoccupied. Nevertheless, it was he, who, one night, reopened the discussion with a defiant flat: “Well, boys, I might as well tell you, I’ve swung over to Ralph’s side. I’m for the capture of those girls, and capture as soon as we can make it.”
“Well, I’ll be - “ said Billy. “After they saved your life! Honey, I guess I don’t know you any more.”
“What’s changed you?” Pete asked in amazement.
“Can’t tell you why - don’t know myself why when you get the answer tell me. Only in the ten minutes that those girls packed me through the air, I did some quick thinking, I can’t explain to you why we’ve got the right to capture them. But we have. That’s all there is to it.”
War broke out with a new animosity; for they had, of course, now definitely divided into sides. Their conversation always turned into argument now, no matter how peaceably and innocently it began.
The girls had begun to visit the island again, singly now, singly always. Discussion died down temporarily and the wordless tete-a-teteing began again. Lulu hovered ever at Honey’s shoulder. Clara postured always within Pete’s vision. Chiquita took up her eternal vigil on Frank’s reef. Peachy discovered new wonders of what Honey called “trick flying.” Julia became a fixed white star in their blue noon sky.
A day or two or three of this long-distance wooing, and argument exploded more vehemently than ever. Honey and Ralph still maintained that, as the ruling sex of a man-managed world, they had the right of discovery to these women. Frank still maintained that, as a supra-human race, the flying-girls were subject to supra-human laws. Billy and Pete still maintained that, as the development not only of the race but of the individual depended on the treatment of the female by the male, the capture of these independent beings at this stage of civilization would be a return to barbarism.