Chapter 6

Well, we made a kind of cloth and cut it into shapes, and knotted the shapes together with more fibre; then we folded up our best and only Sunday-go-to-meeting suits and put the fibre things on; and then we went down to the cove to look at ourselves in the water. And Ivy laughed.

"We're not clothed," she said; "we're thatched; and yet--and yet--it's accident, of course, but this skirt has got a certain hang that----"

"Whatever that skirt's got," I said, "these pants haven't; but if you're happy I am."

Well, there's worse situations than desert-islanding it with the one woman in the world. I even know one man who claims he was cast away with a perfect stranger that he hated the sight of at first--a terribly small-minded, conventional woman--and still he had the time of his life. They got to like each other over a mutual taste for cribbage, which they played for sea-shells, yellow with a pink edge, until the woman went broke and got heavily in debt to the man. He was nice about it and let her off. He says the affair must have ended in matrimony, only she took a month to think it over; during that month they were picked up and carried to Honolulu; then they quarrelled and never saw each other again.

"Ivy," said I one day, "we'll be picked up by a passing steamer some day, of course, but meanwhile I'd rather be here with you than any place I can name."

"It's Eden," she said, "and I'd like to live like this always. But----"

"But what?"

"But people grow old," she said, "and one dies before another. That's what's wrong with Eden."

I laughed at her.

"Old! You and I? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, Ivy Bower."

"Right Bower," says she, "you don't understand----"

"How not understand?"

"You don't understand that Right Bower and Ivy Bower aren't the only people on this island."

She didn't turn a fiery red and bolt--the way young wives do in stories. She looked at me with steady, brave, considering eyes.

"Don't worry, dear," she says after a time; "everything will be all right. I know it will."

"I know it too." I lied.

Know it? I was cold with fright.

"Don't be afraid," said she. "And--and meanwhile there's dinner to be got ready--and you can have a go at your firesticks."

It was my ambition to get fire by friction. Now and then I got the sticks to smoke and I hoped that practice would give me the little extra speed and cunning that makes for flame. I'd always been pretty good at games, if a little slow to learn.

VI

You'd think anxiety about Ivy'd have been the hardest thing to bear in the life we were living; and so it would have been if she'd showed any anxiety about herself. Not she. You might have thought she was looking forward to a Christmas-box from home. If she was ever scared it was when I wasn't looking. No--it was the beasts that made us anxious.

At first we'd go for long walks and make explorations up and down the island. The beasts hid from us according to the wild nature that's in them. You could only tell from fresh tracks in damp places that they hadn't utterly disappeared. Now and then we saw deer and antelopes far off; and at night, of course, there was always something doing in the way of a chorus. Beasts that gave our end of the island the go-by daytimes paid us visits nights and sat under the windows, you may say, and sang their songs.

It seemed natural after a time to be cooped up in a big green prison with a lot of loose wild things that could bite and tear you to pieces if they thought of it. We were hard to scare. What scared me first was this: When we got to the island it was alive with goats. Well, these just casually disappeared. Then, one morning, bright and early, I came on the big python in the act of swallowing a baby antelope. It gave me a horrid start and set me thinking. How long could the island support a menagerie? What would the meat-eaters do when they'd killed off all the easy meat--finished up the deer and antelopes and all? Would they fight it out among themselves--big tiger eat little tiger--until only the fittest one survived? And what would that fittest one do if he got good and hungry and began to think that I'd make a square meal for him--or Ivy?

I reached two conclusions--and the cave about the same time. First, I wouldn't tell Ivy I was scared. Second, I'd make fire by friction or otherwise--or bust. Once I got fire, I'd never let it go out. I set to work with the firesticks right off, and Ivy came and stood by and looked on.

"Never saw you put so much elbow-grease into anything," she said. "What's the matter with you, anyway?"

"It's a game," I grunted, "and these two fellows will have me beat if I don't look lively."

"Right Bower," she says then, slow and deliberate, "I can see you're upside down about something. Tell Ivy."

"Look," says I--"smoke! I never got it so quick before." I spun the pointed stick between the palms of my hands harder than ever and gloated over the wisp of smoke that came from where it was boring into the flat stick.

"Make a bow," says Ivy. "Loop the bowstring round the hand-piece and you'll get more friction with less work."

"By gorry!" says I; "you're right. I remember a picture in a geography--'Native Drilling a Conch Shell.' Fool that I am to forget!"

"Guess you and I learned out of the same geography," said Ivy.

"Only I didn't learn," said I. "I'm off to cut something tough to make the bow."

"Don't go far," she says.

"Why not?" said I--the sporty way a man does when he pretends that he's going to take a night off with the boys and play poker.

"Because," she says smiling, "I'm afraid the beasts will get me while you're gone."

"Rats!" says I.

"Tigers!" says she. "Oh, Right, you unplumbable old idiot! Do you think you can come into this cave and hide anything from me under that transparent face of yours? The minute you came in and hemmed and hawed, and said as you had nothing to do you guessed you'd have a go with the firesticks--I knew. What scared you?"

I surrendered and told her.

"... And then," she said, "you think maybe they'll hurt--us?"

I nodded.

"Why, it's war," she said. "I've read enough about war to know that there are two safe rules to follow. First, declare war yourself while the other fellow's thinking about it; and then strike him before he's even heard that you have declared it. That sounds mixed, but it's easy enough. We'll declare war on the dangerous beasts while I'm still in the months of hop, skip, and jump."

"A certain woman," said I, "wouldn't let the beasts go down in the old _Boldero_, as would have been beneficial for all parties."

"This is different," she said. "This island's got to be a safe place for a little child to play in or Ivy Bower's got to be told the reason why."

"You're dead right, Ivy dear," I says, "and always was. But how? I'm cursed if I know how to kill a tiger without a rifle.... Let's get fire first and put the citadel in a state of siege. Then we'll try our hand at traps, snares, and pitfalls. I'm strong, but I'm cursed if I want to fall on a tiger with nothing in my hands but a knife or an axe."

"All I care about," said Ivy, "is to get everything settled, so that when the time comes we can be comfortable and plenty domestic."

She sat in the mouth of the cave and looked over the smooth cove to the rolling ocean beyond; and she had the expression of a little girl playing at being married with a little boy friend in the playhouse that her father had just given her for her birthday.

I got a piece of springy wood to make a bow with, and sat by her shaping it with my knife. That night we got fire. Ivy caught some fish in the cove and we cooked them; and--thanks, O Lord!--how good they were! We sat up very late comparing impressions, each saying how each felt when the smoke began to show sparks and when the tinder pieces finally caught, and how each had felt when the broiled smell of the fish had begun to go abroad in the land. We told each other of all the good things we had eaten in our day, but how this surpassed them all. And later we told each other all our favorite names--boy names in case it should be a boy and girl names in case it shouldn't.

Then, suddenly, something being hunted by something tore by in the dark--not very far off. The sweat came off me in buckets, and I heaped wood on the fire and flung burning brands into the night, this way and that, as far as I could fling them. Ivy said I was like Jupiter trying to hurl thunder-bolts, after the invention of Christianity, and not rightly understanding why they wouldn't explode any more.

VII

The pines of the island were full of pitch and a branch would burn torch-like for a long time. I kept a bundle of such handy, the short ends sharpened so's you could stick 'em round wherever the ground was soft enough and have an effect of altar candles in a draughty church. If there was occasion to leave the cave at night I'd carry one of the torches and feel as safe as if it had been an elephant rifle.

We made a kind of a dooryard in front of the cave's mouth, with a stockade that we borrowed from Robinson Crusoe, driving pointed stakes close-serried and hoping they'd take root and sprout; but they didn't. Between times I made finger-drawings in the sand of plans for tiger traps and pitfalls. I couldn't dig pits, but I knew of two that might have been made to my order, a volcano having taken the contract. They were deep as wells, sheer-sided; anything that fell in would stay in. I made a wattle-work of branches and palm fibre to serve as lids for these nature-made tiger jars. The idea was to toss dead fish out to the middle of the lids for bait; then for one of the big cats to smell the fish, step out to get it, and fall through. Once in, it would be child's work to stone him to death.

Another trap I made was more complicated and was a scheme to drop trees heavy enough to break a camel's back or whatever touched the trigger that kept them from falling. It was the devil's own job to make that trap. First place, I couldn't cut a tree big enough and lift it to a strategic position; so I had to fell trees in such a way that they'd be caught half-way to the ground by other trees. Then I'd have to clear away branches and roots so that when the trees did fall the rest of the way it would be clean, plumb, and sudden. It was a wonderful trap when it was finished and it was the most dangerous work of art I ever saw. If you touched any of a dozen triggers you stood to have a whole grove of trees come banging down on top of you--same as if you went for a walk in the woods and a tornado came along and blew the woods down. If the big cats had known how frightfully dangerous that trap was they'd have jumped overboard and left the island by swimming. I made two other traps something like it--the best contractor in New York wouldn't have undertaken to build one just like it at any price--and then it came around to be the seventh day, so to speak; and, like the six-day bicycle rider, I rested.

"Days," is only a fashion of speaking. I was months getting my five death-traps into working order. I couldn't work steadily because there was heaps of cavework to do besides, fish to be caught, wood to be cut for the fire, and all; and then, dozens of times, I'd suddenly get scared about Ivy and go running back to the cave to see if she was all right. I might have known better; she was always all right and much better plucked than I was.

Well, sir, my traps wouldn't work. The fish rotted on the wattle-lids of the pitfalls, but the beasts wouldn't try for 'em. They were getting ravenous, too--ready to attack big Bahut even; but they wouldn't step out on those wattles and they wouldn't step under my balanced trees. They'd beat about the neighborhood of the danger and I've found many a padmark within six inches of the edge of things. I even baited with a live kid. It belonged to the Thibet goats and I had a hard time catching it; and after it had bleated all night and done its baby best to be tiger food I turned it loose and it ran off with its mammy. She, poor soul, had gone right into the trap to be with her baby and, owing to the direct intervention of Providence, hadn't sprung the thing.

The next fancy bait I tried was a chetah--dead. I found him just after his accident, not far from the cave. He was still warm; and he was flat--very flat, like a rug made of chetah skin. He had some shreds of elephant-hide tangled in his claws. It looked to me as if he'd gotten desperate with hunger and had pounced on big Bahut--pshaw! the story was in plain print: "Ouch!" says big Bahut. "A flea has bitten me. Here's where I play dead," and--rolls over. Result: one neat and very flat rug made out of chetah.

I showed the rug to Ivy and then carried it off to the woods and spread it in my first and fanciest trap. Then I allowed I'd have a look at the pitfalls, which I hadn't visited for a couple of days--and I was a fool to do it. I'd told Ivy where I was going to spread the chetah and that after that I'd come straight home. Well, the day seemed young and I thought if I hurried I could go home the roundabout way by the pitfalls in such good time that Ivy wouldn't know the difference. Well, sir, I came to the first pitfall--and, lo and behold! something had been and taken the bait and got away with it without so much as putting a foot through the wattling. I'd woven it too strong. So I thought I'd just weaken it up a little--it wouldn't take five minutes. I tried it with my foot--very gingerly. Yes, it was too strong--much too strong. I put more weight into that foot--and bang, smash, crash--bump! There I was at the bottom of the pit, with half the wattling on top of me.

The depth of that hole was full twenty-five feet; the sides were as smooth as bottle-glass; dusk was turning into dark. But these things weren't the worst of it. I'd told Ivy that I'd do one thing--and I'd gone and done another. I'd lied to her and I'd put her in for a time of anxiety, and then fright, that might kill her.

VIII

I wasted what little daylight was left trying to climb out, using nothing but hands and feet. And then I sat down and cursed myself for a triple-plated, copper-riveted, patent-applied-for fool. Nothing would have been easier, given light, than to take the wattling that had fallen into the pit with me to pieces, build a pole--sort of a split-bamboo fishing-rod on a big scale--shin up and go home. But to turn that trick in the dark wasn't any fun. I did it though--twice. I made the first pole too light and it smashed when I was half-way up. A splinter jabbed into my thigh and drew blood. That complicated matters. The smell of the blood went out of the pit and travelled around the island like a sandwich man saying: "Fine supply of fresh meat about to come out of Right Bower's pet pitfall; second on the left."

When I'd shinned to the top of the second pole I built and crawled over the rim of the pit--there was a tiger sitting, waiting, very patient. I could just make him out in the starlight. He was mighty lean and looked like a hungry gutter-cat on a big scale. Some people are afraid to be alone in the dark. I'm not. Well, I just knelt there--I'd risen to my knees--and stared at him. And then I began to take in a long breath--I swelled and swelled with it. It's a wonder I didn't use up all the air on the island and create a vacuum--in which case the tiger would have blown up. I remember wondering what that big breath was going to do when it came out. I didn't know. I had no plan. I looked at the tiger and he looked at me and whined--like a spoiled spaniel asking for sugar. That was too much. I thought of Ivy, maybe needing me as she'd never needed any one before--and I looked at that stinking cat that meant to keep me from her. I made one jump at him--'stead of him at me--and at the same time I let out the big breath I'd drawn in a screech that very likely was heard in Jericho.

The tiger just vanished like a Cheshire cat in a book I read once, and I was running through the night for home and Ivy. But the fire at the cave was dying, and Ivy was gone.

Well, of course she'd have gone to look for me.... It was then that I began to whimper and cry. I lit a pine-torch, flung some wood on the embers, and went out to look for her--whimpering all the time. I'd told her that I was going out to bait a certain trap and would then come straight home. So of course she'd have gone straight to that trap--and it was there I found her.

The torch showed her where she sat, right near the dead chetah, in the very centre of the trap--triggers all about her--to touch one of which spelt death; and all around the trap, in a ring--like an audience at a one-ring circus--were the meat-eaters--the tigers--the lions--the leopards--and, worst of all, the pigs. There she sat and there they sat--and no one moved--except me with the torch.

She lifted her great eyes to me and she smiled. All the beasts looked at me and turned away their eyes from the light and blinked and shifted; and the old he-lion coughed. They wouldn't come near me because of the torch--and they wouldn't go near Ivy because of the trap. They knew it was a trap. They always had known it and so had Ivy. That was why she had gone into it when so many deaths looked at her in so many ways--because she knew that in there she'd be safe. All along she'd known that my old traps and pitfalls wouldn't catch anything; but she'd never said so--and she'd never laughed at them or at me. I could find it in my heart to call her a perfect wife--just by that one fact of tact alone; but there are other facts--other reasons--millions of them.

Suddenly from somewhere near Ivy there came a thin, piping sound.

"It's your little son talking to you," says Ivy, as calm as if she was sitting up in a four-poster.

"My little son!" I says. That was all for a minute. Then I says:

"Are you all right?"

And she says:

"Sure I am--now that I know you are."

I turned my torch fire-end down and it began to blaze and sputter and presently roar. Then I steps over to the lion and he doesn't move; and I points the torch at his dirty face--and lunges.

Ever see a kitten enjoying a fit? That was what happened to him. Then I ran about, beating and poking and shouting and burning. It was like Ulysses cleaning the house of suitors and handmaids. All the beasts ran; and some of 'em ran a long way, I guess, and climbed trees.

I stuck the torch point-end in the ground, stepped into the trap, and lifted my family out. All the time I prayed aloud, saying: "Lord on high, keep Right Bower from touching his blamed foot against any of these triggers and dropping the forest on top of all he holds in his arms!" Ivy, she rubbed her cheek against mine to show confidence--and then we were safe out and I picked up the torch and carried the whole kit and boodle, family, torch, happiness--much too big to tote--and belief in God's goodness, watchfulness, and mercy, home to our cave.

Right Bower added some uneventful details of the few days following--the ship's boat that put into the island for water and took them off, and so on. Then he asked me if I'd like to meet Mrs. Bower, and I went forward with him and was presented.

She was deep in a steamer-chair, half covered with a somewhat gay assortment of steamer-rugs. I had noticed her before, in passing, and had mistaken her for a child.

Bower beamed over us for a while and then left us and we talked for hours--about Bower, the children, and the home in East Orange to which they were returning after a holiday at Aix; but she wouldn't talk much about the island. "Right," she said, "was all the time so venturesome that from morning till night I died of worry and anxiety. Right says the Lord does just the right thing for the right people at the right time--always. That's his creed.... Sometimes," she said, "I wonder what's become of big Bahut. He was such a--white elephant!"

Mrs. Gordon-Colfax took me to task for spending so much of the afternoon with Mrs. Bower.

"Who," said she, "was that common little person you were flirting with?--and why?"

"She's a Mrs. Bower," I said. "She has a mission."

"I could tell that," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "from the way she turned up her eyes at you."

"As long as she doesn't turn up her nose at me--" I began; but Mrs. Gordon-Colfax put in:

"The Lord did that for her."

"And," I said, "so she was saying. She said the Lord does just the right thing for the right person at the right time.... Now, your nose is beautifully Greek; but, to be honest, it turns up ever so much more than hers does."

"Oh, well," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "I hate common people--and I can't help it. Let's have a bite in the grill."

"Sorry," I said; "I'm dining with the Bowers."

"You have a strong stomach," said she.

"I have," I said, "but a weak heart--and they are going to strengthen it for me."

And there arose thenceforth a coolness between Mrs. Gordon-Colfax and me, which proves once more that the Lord does just the right thing for the right people at the right time.

SAPPHIRA

Mr. Hemingway had transacted a great deal of business with Miss Tennant's father; otherwise he must have shunned the proposition upon which she came to him. Indeed, wrinkling his bushy brows, he as much as told her that he was a banker and not a pawnbroker.

Outside, the main street of Aiken, broad enough to have made five New England streets, lay red and glaring in the sun. The least restless shifting of feet by horses and mules tied to hitching-posts raised clouds of dust, immense reddish ghosts that could not be laid. In the bank itself, ordinarily a cool retreat, smelling faintly of tobacco juice deposited by some of its clients, the mercury was swelling toward ninety. It was April Fools' day, and unless Miss Tennant was cool, nobody was. She looked cool. If the temperature had been 40 deg. below zero she would have looked warm; but she would have been dressed differently.

It was her great gift always to look the weather and the occasion; no matter how or what she really felt. On the present occasion she wore a very simple, inexpensive muslin, flowered with faint mauve lilacs, and a wide, floppy straw-hat trimmed with the same. She had driven into town, half a mile or more, without getting a speck of dust upon herself. Even the corners of her eyes were like those of a newly laundered baby. She smelled of tooth-powder (precipitated chalk and orris root), as was her custom, and she wore no ring or ornament of any value. Indeed, such jewels as she possessed, a graceful diamond necklace, a pearl collar, a pearl pendant, and two cabochon sapphire rings, lay on the table between her and Mr. Hemingway.

"I'm not asking the bank to do this for me," she said, and she looked extra lovely (on purpose, of course). "I'm asking you----"

Mr. Hemingway poked the cluster of jewels very gingerly with his forefinger as if they were a lizard.

"And, of course," she said, "they are worth twice the money; maybe three or four times."

"Perhaps," said Mr. Hemingway, "you will take offence if I suggest that your father----"

The muslin over her shoulders tightened the least in the world. She had shrugged them.

"Of course," she said, "papa would do it; but he would insist on reasons. My reasons involve another, Mr. Hemingway, and so it would not be honorable for me to give them."

"And yet," said the banker, twinkling, "your reasons would tempt me to accommodate you with the loan you ask for far more than your collateral."

"Oh," she said, "you are a business man. I could give you reasons, and be sure they would go no further--even if you thought them funny. But if papa heard them, and thought them funny, as he would, he would play the sieve. I don't want this money for myself, Mr. Hemingway."

"They never do," said he.

She laughed.