He disappeared. Holmes smoked, gazing off across the lagoon.
INSIDE the house there was the clink of glasses. Then a sudden pause. An indescribable sound, like fierce whispering. Holmes jerked his head about, and his lips twisted oddly. But he did not rise. The clinking of glasses resumed. Manning came back with drinks. Holmes took one of them and smiled without mirth.
“If you were the Manning I’m looking for,” he observed, “it wouldn’t be safe to drink this. Wronged husband, and all that.”
He tilted the glass as Manning’s face grew dark and savage.
“I assure you,” said Manning angrily, “the drink’s all right!”
“I’ve drunk it,” said Holmes. He put down the nearly empty glass. “If I act queerly, it’s because I’m disappointed. I’m in a very awkward position, you see. A deceived husband is ridiculous. A complaisant one is despicable. My status isn’t yet clear. My wife met this Manning—in fact, she fell in love with him—while I was away from home for several months. When I was due back they ran off. A compliment, perhaps. But it’s not one of those things that can be left there!”
Manning said angrily, “There’s such a thing as a divorce!”
Holmes nodded. “Oh, yes! But that wouldn’t have ended the thing. A hundred years ago it could have been handled very neatly. We’d have fought a duel. I’d have killed him, or he’d have killed me. There would have been a decent solution to the thing. Now-a-days …”
He shrugged again. He finished the drink and thrust the glass aside. “Am I boring you?” he asked ironically.
“Not at all,” said Manning with elaborate politeness. “Go ahead!”
“I’ve got to find them,” said Holmes. “I don’t know what will happen when I do. If he wants to fight me, I’ve a revolver for the purpose. If he wants to crawl, I’ll kill him—because for that sort to steal my wife would be an insult I couldn’t endure. A place like this—when I thought you were the Manning I was after—seemed like an ideal spot for either purpose. A man could kill another and get away with it very nicely, eh? With no servants around, and so on?”
MANNING said coldly, “A man from boat was coming back for him, he could be beyond tracing before the murder was discovered.”
Holmes looked up sharply. His host’s eyes were defiant.
“Now, I like that,” said Holmes coolly. “Really I do. But a man on shore could kill a man from a schooner too, eh? He’d dump the corpus delicti overboard for the sharks, of course. And if the man from the schooner had expected someone to be killed, there wouldn’t be any inquiry. I expected that, you know. I thought I’d find my wife here, and I rather liked the idea of a duel. It would end the affair neatly, with everyone’s self-respect intact.”
Manning said, with burning eyes, “Everyone’s but the woman’s.”
Holmes flicked his cigarette over the veranda rail and looked meditatively out over the lagoon. “Queer conversation we’re having,” he observed. “Let’s change the subject. How are you with a pistol? Ever do any target-shooting? I brought along a box of shells. What say we fire them away?”
He reached into his pocket and brought out a revolver. Manning tensed, and his eyes glowed furiously. But Holmes reached over lazily and offered it to him, butt-first.
“Pick out a target and see what you can do,” he suggested. “It throws a bit high and a shade to the left. Six shots. I’ll try the same target. If I beat you, we have another drink.”
Manning’s hand trembled a little as he took the weapon. He glanced around and said shortly, “That bit of coral rock there. You see it?”
The pistol roared. There was a queer gasping cry inside the house. There was a rushing of feet. Holmes—from the schooner—did not turn his head. He stared fixedly at the rock.
“A miss,” he said coolly. “Try again.”
Manning—of the island—fired again and again and again. His face was pale and his lips were compressed.
“You hit it twice,” said Holmes calmly. “Shall I try now?”
Manning handed the revolver back. Holmes reloaded it with an air of complete absorption. Manning stood doggedly in the clear light. He was a perfect target.
Holmes stood up, negligently pointed the revolver at the landscape, and pulled the trigger six times. Then he tossed the weapon over the veranda rail.
“You win,” he said dryly, “and there’s my schooner on the way back. I’ll walk down to meet the small boat.”
But he reached into the pocket of his coat and drew out a thick envelope. He plucked out a pencil and scribbled. He tossed the envelope in the chair he had just vacated, nodded, and walked solidly down the steps. He did not look back.
Manning picked up the envelope. His hand shook a little and his brow was dark. But then there was someone beside him, sobbing a little with relief from terror—and something else.
The scribbled words wert, few:
“Here’s a certified copy of the divorce decree. You two can be married now. After all, it was a sort of duel. In some sense we stood each other’s fire. And that permits a decent ending.”
Manning, on the veranda, stared out at the schooner heading for the inlet of the lagoon. His face was a battleground of emotions, on which shame and a reluctant admiration fought.
“The devil!” he said slowly. “The—devil !”
But the woman beside him sobbed joyously.
Manning stared at the schooner heading for the inlet of the lagoon. “The devil!” he said slowly. “The—devil!” But the woman beside him sobbed joyously
GEORGE IS A NOBLE GUY
THIS George is a good guy, as guys go, but he is so serious-minded that at times he verges on nobility. I drag him along as the unknown soldier on a double date, because my sugar ration’s mamma says double date or no date at all. She used to go out with soldiers in the last war, and she’s got a memory like a elephant. And on the way back to barracks, George tells me never no more.
“How come?” I ask. “You and this Carrie gal seemed to thrive!”
“Yeah,” says George. “I had fun. But it’s wrong for me to have fun on a date. It ain’t the right thing for me to do.”
He lets down his hair. He’s engaged to a girl named Gertrude, he says, and they were gonna get married, only his outfit got shifted and his furlough canceled. Gertrude was much upset. She’s still upset. In fact, she’s got him biting his left ankle because he ain’t heard from her in two weeks, and he don’t know whether she’s been run over by a jeep or whether she’s married Albert.
Albert’s a sort of human worm who gets a 4F classification after being Gertrude’s ideal from the sixth grade up. He has always been scornful of Gertrude until she announces her engagement to George, but then he shows interest. He is a worm in wolf’s clothing, in George’s view.
“Yeah,” I say, comforting, “but if a girl marries a guy named Albert in 4F, it plumb serves her right.”
“Usual it would,” says George, “but Gertrude’s alone in the world. There’s nobody cares what happens to her but me. So I’m honor bound to look after her.”
“Okay,” I says, indifferent. “Constancy is its own reward, and if a worm named Albert gets Gertrude, it ain’t ray funeral.”
SO I kinda write him off my list. In the next few days I notice he’s suffering plenty. He don’t get any mail. But I am noticing symptoms in myself, too. So when they get insupportable, I call up my half-pint of heaven. I’m sort of delirious, talking to her, and when I hang up, I’ve made another double date and absentmindedly I’ve agreed that Carrie shall be the other party. So I hunt up George and tell him.
“No!” he howls, when I stop talking.“I told you no! I’m goin’ crazy! If somethin’s happened to Gertrude, I’ll never forgive myself for bein’ mad like this! But if that guy Albert—”
He starts swearing, and I listen admiringly. But I say, “What you need, George, is competent advice.”
“You mean the chaplain?” he says.
“I mean a girl,” I t
ell him. “One woman understands another and why they like to give guys trouble. You come along and tell your stuff to Carrie, and she’ll straighten you out.”
“Maybe that’s an idea,” says George.
So he parts his hair careful and puts on bay rum and we go pick up the girls. I am somewhat nervous, because I have something on my mind, but we go to the amusement park and I take my hunka curves to the Tunnel of Love and we ride around four or five or twenty-eight times and I explain the most polite part of the emotions she rouses in me, and ask will she like to have my insurance made out to her and get all my posthumous medals. And presently we are interrupted and get out, surrounded by a large pink cloud, and George and Carrie are waiting and look very peculiar. And we break the news, and George swallows, and Carrie bursts into tears.
On the way back to barracks, I feel pretty swell, but when I start to say something, George snarls that he would like to break my neck.
“You introduced me to Carrie!” he says, bitter. “And I have fell for her and she has fell for me. In fact, we love each other.”
“Ain’t nature grand!” I say cheerfully.“Okay, guy! But remember, about halfway through the Tunnel of Love, there’s a place where it comes out into the light. You wanna watch out for that.”
“I’m engaged!” says George, frantic.“To Gertrude! Except for an accident, I’d ha’ been a married man two months ago!”
“But she ain’t written for three weeks now,” I object. “She’s dropped her option!”
“I don’t know!” he groans. “That’s it!I don’t know!”
Then he explains that Carrie is going to write to Gertrude as a friend, saying that worry is upsetting George’s Army career, and he would hkely be a private first class by now if it wasn’t for worrying about not hearing from her. Which, says George gloomily, will fix everything as it should be.
Four days later, he comes busting in on me while I am putting on my cap at a fetching angle. He waves a envelope like it is a grenade with the pin pulled out.
“Look!” he says, appalled. “From Gertrude! I ain’t got the nerve to open it! Listen! I’m coming along with you.”
“Not with me and my girl!” I says. “We are engaged. We got private business.”
“But Carrie’ll be there!” he says, hoarse.“She ain’t got a telephone at her house, and she said I could call her there tonight to say if I’d heard from Gertrude. She said she still retains a sisterly interest in me—”
“Save us!” I says. Then I says, “If you must, guy, maybe you must. But don’t blame me for what happens!”
He comes along. On the way, all haggard and despairing, he explains that he is going to show Carrie the letter, still unopened, and tell her that he loves her so desperate that he will tear it up unread and therefore jilt Gertrude if she will marry a skunk who’d do so foul a thing.
I LISTEN with my mouth open. The guy don’t realize that the worst insult you can offer a girl is to think about acting like a gentleman to another one!
He marches into the house with me, looking pale and sunk-cheeked and glassyeyed. Carrie is there, and he just flips that letter into her lap and blurts out the whole thing. He don’t have any technique at all. And Carrie stares at him, and then a funny light comes into her eyes. She smooths out the letter and feels a lump in it. She jumps.
Then, very slow and deliberate, she opens the letter. He’s given it to her, so that’s all right. She looks, and reads aloud: “ ‘Dear George: When you read this, Albert and I will be married—’”
So I take my hunka curves to the Tunnel of Love and we ride around four or five or twenty-eight times
Then a engagement ring drops out of the letter to the floor. George jumps. He howls. He’s the maddest man I ever saw as he grabs the letter and starts to tear it to bits, shouting “The double-crosser! The dirty double-crosser! There’s a woman—”
Carrie says gently, “Are you sorry?”
He blinks. Then he grabs her. Bliss reigns. Me and my girl friend retire with dignity to another room. After a minute or two, George comes out.
“She’s a wonderful woman,” he says reverently. “She’s beautiful and mysterious. She’s the essence of purity and spirituality, and she’s the one woman who is noble all the way through.”
“Sure,” I says, soothing, “and she don’t look bad in a sweater, neither. How about a movie?”
“No-o-o,” he says, noble. “We won’t bother you. We have things to talk over. Our whole future to settle, in fact. I guess we’ll go over to the amusement park, where we can talk. I’ve heard,” he says,“nice things spoken of the quieter rides over there. Especial,” he says, “the Tunnel of Love. We can talk in there.”
He goes to get his hat, and Carrie comes in. And what do you think she says? Well, she says, for heaven’s sake, somebody get the pieces of that letter and burn them. She says she does not want George to know Gertrude’s reaction to a letter which said that George already had two wives and had he, by any chance, married Gertrude, too?
SIDE BET
THERE was a vast blue bowl which was the sky. Across it, with agonizing slowness, there marched a brazen sun which poured down light to dazzle and burn out the man’s eyes, and heat to broil the brains in his skull. At intervals the blue bowl grew dark and was dotted with stars, which ranged them-selves in pairs like the eyes of snakes—unwinking and cold and maliciously amused—and watched through the night while the man recovered strength to endure the torture of another day. There was a sea of infinite blueness, which heaved slowly up and down and up and down and alternately reflected the blue bowl and the monstrous aggregation of star eyes. And there was the island, which was not more than fifty by fifteen yards in extent.
Also, there was the rat, with which the man played a game with rather high stakes, and in which life was a side bet.
The man and the rat were not friends. No. When huge waves flung the man scornfully upon the island he thought himself the sole survivor of his ship, and for twenty-four hours he disregarded every other thought or observation in trying to salvage as much of the wreckage as he could. He could not do much. During all that day and night colossal combers beat upon the shore, overwhelming two thirds of its length in sputtering spume. There was then no sky or sea or any other thing but hurtling masses of water and foam plunging upon and over and past the island. And the island was only rock. There was no vegetation. There was no shelter. There was barely more than a foothold behind a steep upcropping of wet and slippery stone. But now and again some fragment of the ship was pounded senselessly upon that up-crop by the sea, and the man tried desperately to salvage it.
He saved but little. A dozen crates of fruit broke open and all their contents went to waste upon rockery so continuously wave-swept as to be past clinging to. Four separate times he saw masses of cargo—some of which must have been edible—surge past the island, infuriatingly near yet impossibly distant. And a life raft, floating high in the water, was deliberately smashed and maliciously pounded before his eyes into splintered wood and crumpled metal—and then the sea took that away too.
Before the waves abated the man made sure of some bits of wood and some cordage, and from the life raft as it went to pieces he rescued a keg of water and a canvas bag of hard sea bread—biscuit. But there was nothing on which he could hope to leave the island, nor canvas to make a shelter, and he had not even a stick long enough to make a mast on which to fly his confession of helplessness and distress for the sea to look at.
But he did have a companion: the rat.
The rat was huge. It was a wise and resourceful ship rat and had all the cunning and ferocity of its race. Its body was almost a foot long. It had come ashore without help from the man; he never knew how. Perhaps clinging man-fashion to one of the two masses of spars and cordage now lodged securely on the island. Perhaps in some fashion only a rat could even imagine. But it had reached the island and it knew of the man’s presence, and it knew exactly what the island offered of sustenance w
hen the seas went down and the long, agonizing procession of days began in which the sky was a vast blue bowl and a brazen sun marched slowly across it.
WHEN that happened, the man took account of his prospects, which were not bright. He counted his stores. He had twenty-two biscuits, all tainted with salt water, and a small keg of fresh water. There was a fairly impressive mass of lumber, mostly splintered and none suitable even for the manufacture of a raft if the man had possessed tools, which he did not. There was some rope, attached to shattered spars. In a money belt, the man had sixty dollars. That was all. He prepared to make the best and most of what he had.
He had no matches but he found that with a small spike extracted from the wreckage he could strike a spark from the rock of the island. He had nothing to cook, and therefore a fire was needless. But he picked cordage into oakum for tinder, and he arranged his stock of wood in a great pyre, the smaller splinters lowest, so that from a single spark he could send up a roaring beacon of flame and smoke to summon any ship he might sight from the island. His stock of food and water was so trivial that he rationed himself strictly. He could not actually live on such infinitesimal portions as he allotted himself for each day, but he would starve very slowly. He would live longer—and suffer longer. The will to live is not a matter of reason. And then the days of waiting began as separate Gehennas of heat and thirst and hopelessness.
The sun by day was horrible. There was no shade. There was no shelter. There was no soil. There was only fissured, tumbled rock. The man scorched, panting in the baking heat, and gazed with smarting eyes at the horizon. He looked for a ship, though he could not really hope for one. In the morning he ate his strictly allotted ration and prepared to endure the day. In the evening he drank a little, a very little, water, and during the night he gathered strength to suffer through another day. From the amount of food and drink he possessed, he had calculated exactly how long he could live upon the island. He did not ask himself why he should wish to.
The Fourth Murray Leinster Page 10