by Leslie Ford
“It’s not customary to go around explaining things like that,” I said. I was curious nevertheless.
“I know. And there’s really nothing to explain. It was just over, that’s all. I guess it was too . . . well, too swell to last.”
I looked around at her quickly. The note in her low velvety-throated voice was too warm and too wistfully tender not to be arresting, especially in view of Tommy Dawson’s derisive “the little Cather.” She was still looking down at the tip of her shoe poking the edge of the woven mat.
“I thought I was all over it,” she said. “All the . . . the hurt part of it, anyway. But I guess I’m not. I thought getting home, away from running into his aunt all the time, and seeing places that reminded me of him, I’d get him out of my head. But it doesn’t seem to work that way.”
She looked around at me and smiled. “It doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
Not to me it didn’t, certainly. There was obviously something very wrong somewhere. That might just possibly be the spot where the she-buzzard came in—but I didn’t know. I still couldn’t think of Alice Cather in such terms.
“Every time I think I see him it all comes back with a wallop, and of course I know it’s because there are so many flyers around, and they do sort of look alike.”
“Do you want to see him, Mary?” I asked.
She drew her breath quickly.
“Oh, no!” she said. “Oh, I couldn’t bear it. I’d do something crazy that I’d regret the rest of my life. No, it’s not that.”
She stopped short then, looking at me oddly. “But of course, it is that, isn’t it? I mean, I wouldn’t always be thinking I see him if I didn’t really want to, would I?”
“I guess not,” I agreed.
She hesitated.
“I suppose I was just awful young,” she said slowly. “I’d never been in love with anybody else before. It hit me too hard, I suppose. I just didn’t stop to use my head. I can see it now, but it’s a bit late, and it doesn’t help very much. If I’d been . . . older, or been around more, I’d have known it was just an exciting game—for all four of them. I guess maybe I should have asked for a copy of the ground rules before I got so much involved.”
She tried to laugh, but it wasn’t very successful.
“And I’m not blaming them at all. Don’t think that. It’s myself I’m blaming. After all, I’d known Swede only ten days, and that’s not very long when you’re signing up for life, I suppose. So when he got away and got to thinking it over he realized it didn’t make sense. And he couldn’t very well write and tell me so, I suppose. But I wish he had. It’s just never hearing at all that made it sort of . . . sort of tough.”
She rested both hands behind her on the rail and bent her body forward a little so that I couldn’t see her face.
“And it’s not that so much either, really. I’ve tried to figure it out. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to keep on with it when he didn’t care about me any more. I’d rather know beforehand than afterwards it wasn’t going to work out. That would be worse. That’s what made my Aunt Norah what she is, and she’s grim. It simply wrecked her pride—and that’s what really happened to me, I think, if I’d be honest about it.”
She straightened up abruptly.
“Oh, dear, if I’d just taken it and shut up!” she said quickly. “That’s what makes it so painful. If I’d only listened to Mother—but I didn’t. I just didn’t believe it. I thought his letters were lost, or they’d gone astray, or something, so I kept on writing. Even when I knew. I couldn’t believe it. I wrote one awful job—I could die when I think of it! I poured the old broken heart stuff all over the paper, reams of it. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror when I think about it. I adored him, and he was wonderful, and I worshipped him, and so on and so on. He must have been bored sick, or maybe he thought it was funny. I don’t know.”
She turned her back to the soft glow from the living room and stood looking down over the black slope of the hills to the gleaming lights of the city.
“I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter,” she said quietly, after a moment. “That I should just chalk it up to experience, so it never happens again. But——”
“That’s not very easy to do,” I said, as gently as I could. “People have been telling themselves that since the beginning of time.”
“I know. But that doesn’t help any either. It’s harder to get over anything when you’ve made it worse by being a terrible fool along with all the rest of it. If I’d written the letters I did and then burned them up, I wouldn’t care so much. But I sent them. If I just hadn’t been so . . . so naked about it—that’s what makes it so . . . humiliating. And Mother’s been elegant. She really has. Never a single ‘Well, if you’d only listened to me, darling!’ nor any business about ‘You can’t go on like this forever, dear.’ Heaven knows there are plenty of men around here now, but she hasn’t once tried to stick one of them down my throat or say how attractive any of them are. And that’s self-control.”
Her laugh was a sort of spontaneous bubbling-up that was gone as quickly as it came.
“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” she said softly. “It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, really.”
5
THE SILENCE AND THE EERIE BROODING DARKNESS stretching to black invisibility above and around us down to the gay and garish brilliance of the million lights of the city made it seem more poignant and lonely and intense as she stood there, slim and lovely, trying to teach her reluctant heart the wisdom that hearts, for centuries, have been unwilling to learn.
I looked down at the white glow of the city again. Swede Ellicott was down there somewhere . . . with Corinne, no doubt. If Mary’s pride as well as her heart was hurt at this point, I wondered which would be hurt the more if and when she knew. I hoped intensely just then that she would never have to know at all. I hadn’t myself entirely got over the shock of learning Corinne was Ben Farrell’s widow. I could imagine without a great deal of trouble the shock it would be to Mary to find out that Swede was going to marry her next. It was all completely beyond me. The naïvely romantic notion I’d had at some point—it seemed a thousand light years away just then—that it would be nice to bring Mary and Swede together again gave me cold chills up and down my spine when I thought of it. This was much too serious a business.
“—Here’s Dad with your book,” Mary said. “Let’s go in. I wonder where Mother’s got to?”
I’d been wondering about her mother too, only on a different level. In spite of what Mary had said about her, I still had what Tommy Dawson said, with conviction and no wavering ifs or buts, in the background of my mind. I wondered if what Mary thought was self-control was more than that. It might easily have been a sense of guilt, if, for instance, it had been her own fine Italian hand interfering with the due process of the United States mails. I wouldn’t for an instant have put it past her. That’s the trouble, perhaps, with perfect surfaces. They always conceal something, and it’s very easy to suspect the worst.
She was in the entrance hall, actually, just coming up out of the stairway from the lower floor. I took Harry Cather’s book and the three of us waited until Alice switched off the lights and closed the stairway door.
“I was just looking around, it’s so lovely out there at night. I thought you were all going to bed. Good night.”
She kissed her daughter lightly on the cheek.
“Kumumato’ll turn out the lights, Harry. We’re down this way, Grace. You must be exhausted. I’m going to give you a pill to make you sleep like an angel. The doctor gave them to me and they’re wonderful. It takes a little time to get used to the climate out here.”
That was puzzling, I thought, the climate being their basic claim to an earthly paradise out there. It was as puzzling as the quick barrage of words she was throwing out around us.
“Come along, Grace.”
I said good night to Mary and Harry Cather and went with her.
“I’ll get it for you now,” she said.
She went into her room and came back with an orange capsule, and handed it to me before she turned on the light in my room across the passage from hers, at the end of the wing against the mountains. If either of us needed the sleeping pill it was her, I thought. In the brighter lights of the bedroom she looked drawn and curiously bloodless. Her eyes were drained and her cheeks drooped in two heavy lines along her nostrils. She looked nervously around the room.
“I think you’ll find everything. It’s cold up here at night. You’ve got a blanket. Good night, dear.”
She started for the door, and stopped.
“Grace,” she said. She hesitated for an instant. “Is it true Swede Ellicott is here, in Honolulu?”
“Yes, it is,” I said.
She leaned her head against the door panel a moment and closed her eyes. Her cheeks were gray, and the lines drooped more heavily. She pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling.
“Swede Ellicott, Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer,” I said. “They’re all here . . . all except Ben Farrell, and he’s dead.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
She moved away from the door and came and sat down on the side of the bed. She sat there a long time, her eyes fixed sightlessly on the floor.
“Grace,” she said then. “I want to see Swede. It . . . it isn’t true that he’s interested in Corinne, is it? It can’t be. I don’t believe it.”
“It seems to be what they say,” I said. “It probably is true.”
I was surprised at the way she spoke of her. “Do you know her?”
“Yes. I know her. At least I know who she is. I don’t know her to speak to.”
“Well, who is she?” I asked. I wanted to know.
She didn’t answer at once. Then she said, “Oh, she’s just a girl in Honolulu, that’s all. Not any Mata Hari that I know of. It’s hardly sporting to call her that. I think she’s just one of a great many young women here who’d like to marry an American boy—being of mixed ancestry herself.”
She lapsed into silence again.
“I was very foolish,” she said abruptly after a moment. “I should have let Mary marry Swede, I suppose. I wonder. . . . Perhaps if I talked to Tommy, or Dave . . .”
She got up and started over to the lanai to get out of the light and away a little. I suppose I was looking at her without a great deal of sympathy. I was feeling pretty grim about her, as a matter of fact. I also knew it wasn’t going to help matters for her to talk to Tommy or Dave Boyer.
She stopped short on the threshold.
“I’m going to draw your blind down, dear. It really gets cold up here at night.”
It looked like an afterthought, or something, to me, as I watched her roll down the heavy woven matting until it covered the opening onto the lanai.
“That’s better,” she said. “The light won’t annoy you in the morning.”
She tied the cord down to the hook in the wood door frame. I watched her with a vague uneasiness.
She came back to the foot of the bed and stood there uncertainly. “Oh, it’s no use, I guess,” she said. Then she turned abruptly and looked directly at me for the first time. I was appalled at the sudden passion ravaging her face, blazing in her eyes.
“I’ve got to get Mary away from here, Grace! I’ve got to! I can’t just sit and watch her life being ruined this way—it’s too horrible! I thought if she and Swede . . . oh, but it’s no use. Not now. Not if Corinne has stepped in. That would be ghastly for her—simply ghastly. And I won’t have her hurt that way. That’s more than I can stand. Oh, Grace, it’s such a mess! I wish I were dead, I wish none of us had ever been born!”
I’ve seen people have hysterics and wish they were dead, but Alice Cather wasn’t hysterical in any possible sense of the word. She was trembling with passion, but she was dry-eyed and controlled, with none of the ashen-gray terror she’d shown earlier, hearing the red-bird’s call from across the ravine. She stood for a moment and then went slowly across to the door.
“I’m afraid I’m being rather difficult this evening,” she said. “I’m still tired, I guess. And it was such a shock to find out about Ben, and to find Swede here after I thought we’d seen the last of him. I guess I weakened for a moment.—But only a moment,” she added. She managed to smile. “Don’t say anything to Mary, please. I don’t want her to know. Maybe they’ll be sent somewhere else. I know a good many of the officers at Hickam.”
She put her hand on the door knob.
“Do take that pill and get some rest—and be sure to keep the blind drawn. I haven’t had the pool cleaned out, and there may be mosquitoes. There’s malaria, you know, and dengue fever.”
I knew there wasn’t, but I knew before that that she wasn’t telling the truth. She’d had some other shock. The reaction from hearing about Ben Farrell and Swede couldn’t have been that long delayed. It was something else. I wondered. There’s no malaria in the Island of Oahu. Mosquitoes live in lowland marshes, not in mountain swimming pools. And that was not all. It came to me with a chilling uneasiness that made me look skeptically at the orange capsule in my hand and take it to the bathroom and put it quietly down the drain. Redbirds don’t call in the middle of the night and faces don’t move in trees without bodies to go with them . . . not in Oahu or anywhere else. Or if they did, I decided I didn’t want to be so sound asleep I wouldn’t know it.
It took me a long time to get to sleep without the capsule, however. My mind was like a blindfolded beast of burden, going around an interminable treadmill of confusion and bewildering cross-currents, and the face in the trees kept creeping closer and closer until I thought I was seeing it in every shifting shadow in the room. But I must have gone to sleep finally, because suddenly with a horrible abruptness I was awake, sharply and instantly, stiff with apprehension and absolutely frigid, my heart an aching motionless weight inside me.
There was some one in my room. Where the woven lau-hala mat was that Alice Cather had drawn down was an open luminous space. Framed in it was a tall figure, groping to fasten the cord to hold it up that Alice Cather had tied to hold it down.
I lay on my side, my eyes open, staring, terrified, my throat constricted in a tortured knot.
The figure moved suddenly, silent and lithe as a great cat, flattening itself against the wooden frame of the opening, motionless then as a part of it. Some one else was on the lanai. I could hear a soft swish of steps on the matting. I saw the man’s hand move toward his hip and rest there and move forward again. The long naked blade of a knife glinted in his hand. If I could have screamed then I would have, but I was sick and paralyzed with fear and no sound would come. Yet I knew I had to, had to warn whoever was coming . . . and then the cry I was forcing from my throat died before I ever uttered it.
“—Roy! Oh, God, not that room! Here—come quickly!”
It was Alice Cather. In the faint glow of the light from her room around the lanai I could see her. And she knew him, was calling him by name.
The man flashed forward onto the lanai. He was tall and very thin. His forehead was white and he was unshaven. His head was covered with leaves, his suit pale and spotted, like the camouflage suits the marines wear in the jungle . . . and I knew then, as he moved away, like something out of the jungle, swiftly and without effort or sound, why I had seen only the face against the trees.
Then the lanai was empty. The cold air from the mountains swept through the door and rustled over the straw mats on the floor. I didn’t dare, at first, to move or more than breathe. And as I did, silently and more painfully than I can say, there was some one else on the lanai. The soft slipping tread of footsteps came like a horrible whisper to my tense sharpened hearing, coming closer and closer, until they were there at my door. A white coat glistened for an instant in the dim suffused glow of light, and a silver tray glistened. It was the Japanese house servant Kumumato, taking food to the man who had crept silen
tly, like an animal, out of the wilderness in the night.
6
“OH, MY DEAR, I’M SORRY—DID I WAKE YOU?”
Alice Cather came in from the hall. And she did wake me. I hadn’t been asleep more than a couple of hours, however, and seeing her there, amazingly fresh in a white piqué dress, her hair damp around the edges from a dip in the pool, I blinked my eyes and thought perhaps it was all a nightmare. In the brilliant clarity of the early morning it was hard to believe it really had happened. Dreams can have such intense reality. But I knew it wasn’t a dream as soon as I sat up in bed. Alice Cather had crossed the room too quickly. She bent over at the threshold of the lanai, picked something up off the floor and thrust it into the pocket of her skirt. I saw before she did it that it was a short strand of cord, and I looked quickly up at the curtain rolled unevenly and fastened to the top of the door frame. Where the loop in the cord had been were two clean-cut ends. It wasn’t a dream, and in particular the murderous-looking steel blade I’d seen wasn’t a dream either.
“Did our prowler disturb you last night?” she said.
“Prowler?”
My surprise at the word was so genuine that she misunderstood it. Her relief was very definite. She moved over to the dressing table and went through an elaborately casual business of pressing the wave deeper into her hair. In the mirror I saw she wasn’t as fresh-looking as I’d thought, first waking. She should have taken the advice she’d given me about rouge.
“Yes, we had a prowler.” She smiled at me. “They have a jungle training school the other side of the Island. Whether the man really got lost, which is possible, of course, or was AWOL I don’t know. He got up here on the lanai, but I was awake. I must say he was more frightened than I was, poor lad. I woke Kumumato and we fed him and put him out on the Pali road. I hope he got back all right. He was homesick more than anything else, I think. He’s been out here thirty-three months. Can you imagine that?”
She got up and went over to the lanai. She’d explained the man in the jungle suit—except for the knife, and except for her frantic half-stifled “Roy! My God, not that room!”—and Kumumato’s tray, but she hadn’t explained why the curtain with the loop cut clean from the cord was rolled up instead of down the way she’d left it. And I had a feeling that she was working on that one now.
