Honolulu Story

by Leslie Ford

  “Corinne must be a pretty fascinating girl,” I said.

  “She’s had a rotten break from so-called white people,” he said quietly. “There’s some old guy here that was decent to her and her family when they were practically outcasts, I guess. Anything I can do to help her help him . . . okay.”

  “Okay, Sir Galahad,” I said. I got up. “I think it’s wonderful. Now if I were you, what I’d do is go up and tell Colonel Primrose all about it. Maybe if you’ll tell him somebody was here, he’ll believe you. He’s cased the joint and he says nobody’s been here. If Corinne knows better, why don’t you get her to come and talk to him?”

  Swede got up too.

  “I always thought you were a friend of mine, Grace,” he said quietly. “Can’t you give me a break just once? Corinne has to live here until the war’s over. The Cathers are big shots. She’d have one hell of a time if anybody thought she was trying to pull a fast one on her betters. You can see that yourself, Grace. She hasn’t got a chance. That’s why she didn’t speak to Mrs. Cather at once. You can see that.”

  I could certainly see something—through a glass darkly—and it was a very good guy who was ready to believe whatever Corinne Farrell told him because his pride was still raw and hurt. Mary’s unexpected presence when he was trying to forget her, far from healing it at all, was salt being heavily rubbed in.

  “You go talk to Colonel Primrose, then,” I said. “He’ll probably decide you’re psychoneurasthenic too, and then you can stay in Honolulu.”

  “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I’ll do just that, right now.”

  15

  OUT ON THE TERRACE, ASSUMING I WAS GOING to the house Swede started toward the pool, and changed his course abruptly. Mary was standing on the rim of the pool, her back to me. I must have come very quietly over the grass, because I was almost at her side before she was aware of me. She gave a violent start and turned. Her eyes were very wide, and she was as waxen white as the pale broken spray of butterfly orchids she’d picked and was holding in her hand.

  It was too late for her to turn and run, though I thought that was the only too evident impulse written in every line of her body. She stood looking at me silent and so white-faced for a moment. Then she moistened her lips and put her hand out and touched my arm.

  “Look, Grace,” she whispered. “Down there. Don’t say anything. Just look.”

  Her voice was so constricted it was hardly audible.

  “Straight down. Be careful.”

  She held on to me. I leaned forward a little, past the edge of the pool there, and looked. The dark scum on the face of the rock that marked the path of the drain water from the pool was like a long green worm writhing down, ending, where a tree growing out of a cleft half-way to the bottom caught and held it, in a pale-white blob. And it was only the grace of God that kept me, even when she was holding on to me, from hurtling down the rock to meet it.

  It wasn’t a white blob. It was a face. It was a human face, rigid and white and terrible, staring up at us out of the leaves of the tree coming out of the rock. It was the face I’d seen in the trees beyond across the ravine, but clean shaven now and all deadly white. It was the face in the shadows on the lanai. And it was again just a face. The body was invisible, still camouflaged in the spotted jungle suit that mingled with the leaves and branches holding it caught there, suspended, half-way down to the tumbling stream at the bottom of the narrow gorge. It was unbelievably like the head of a thin monstrous snake slipping down the face of the rock.

  Mary was tugging at my arm, pulling me back.

  “It’s him,” she whispered. “He’s dead. They . . . they’ve killed him. Come back. Don’t look any more. He’s dead—he’s dead.”

  We moved back onto the grass and sat down. My knees were too weak to hold me up, and I guess hers were too. Behind us was the empty shelter. The spray of orchids in Mary’s hand must have been broken, I thought, as somebody dragged his body under the shadow of the bank to the pool and around it, to the one path the overflow kept open, where his body would go down without leaving a telltale trail behind it. The tree that caught him and held him was Fate stepping in again. If he’d gone on into the bottom of the chasm, he might have been hidden forever.

  Mary sat beside me silently, staring at the broken spray of orchids. Suddenly as if she were thinking what I was, she threw it away and stared at it, her eyes wider still. Then, just as abruptly, she got to her feet, went over to the bank and bent down. She lifted a small square of redwood set in the grass, and before I realized what she was doing, as she reached into the hole she’d uncovered I heard the slush of rushing water as the main vent of the pool opened. The water in it went down inch after inch, rapidly, leaving the blue painted surface an expanding empty border.

  I looked at her open-mouthed.

  From below, quite audible above the sound of the falling water, there was a soft crashing thud. Roy Cather’s body had gone the rest of its grim journey.

  “Mary!” I said again.

  She waited quietly, still very white-faced, her eyes fixed steadily on the emptying pool. The last inch drew into a thin stream hurrying to the outlet and disappearing in silence before she bent down and closed the vent. I saw the water creeping in again, building itself up slowly. She put the redwood block back and came over to me.

  “We didn’t see anything, Grace,” she said steadily. “There’s nothing there now. That means there never was anything there. Same like the shelter.”

  I got up. I don’t know whether it was that face at the end of the trail of green slime, or Mary’s calm and deliberate turning of Colonel Primrose’s argument against him so ruthlessly, or whether it was being in the position—and really, now—of accessory after the fact, that was the most disturbing. Maybe it was just all three together.

  “You can’t do that, Mary,” I said weakly.

  “I’ve done it. You can go tell Colonel Primrose if you want to. I won’t try to stop you. He’s dead. He can’t hurt anything any more. That’s what’s really important. It doesn’t matter who . . . who killed him. Or . . . maybe he just slipped. Maybe he was going for a swim and slipped over the side.”

  “In that case it would have been better to leave him where he was, wouldn’t it?” I asked.

  “—People don’t go swimming with their clothes on,” she said calmly. She stopped and put her hand to the bank to steady herself.

  “It’s horrible, it’s simply horrible,” she said. “But he can’t do anything now. He shouldn’t ever have come here. He should have stayed in Japan. He was a traitor, Grace—he deserved to die. But how ghastly!”

  She turned, listening, her eyes widening again.

  “Grace—they’re coming! They’re going to find him. Listen!”

  I listened. I could hear the roar of planes, coming closer and closer. Then I saw them . . . two small silver ships coming over the top of the mountain range, banking down sharply to sweep along so close over our heads that we could almost reach up and touch them.

  Mary’s face as she looked at me was bewildered and as blank as a sheet of writing paper.

  “Let’s go in,” she said quickly.

  She looked back up at the two planes searching the mountainside.

  “I . . . I’ve got to see my mother.”

  The garden was empty as we crossed over it to the house. Harry Cather was up on the lanai, still reading his paper. Aunt Norah was with him, but neither Alice Cather nor Colonel Primrose was in sight. Sergeant Buck had disappeared, so had Swede. Behind us was the pool quietly filling up to the brim again, and below it, deep in the dark gorge of rock and fern and trees growing out of the fissures in its rugged sides, was Roy Cather.

  Mary didn’t look back. Whatever the turmoil of doubt and suspicion and fear inside her, it wasn’t visible . . . not until we’d gone up the steps from the game room into the hall and started out to go through the living room to the lanai. Then she did falter. She stopped just before we got to the two steps leadi
ng down into the living room.

  Her aunt’s voice, high-pitched and harsh and curiously nagging, came through to us.

  “. . . all I asked was what he’s talking to Alice so long about,” she was saying. “Why isn’t it you he’s talking to, Harry? I should think he’d talk to a man, not a woman, if he wants information. It’s very inconsiderate, I think.”

  A sudden pain drained all the blue out of Mary Cather’s eyes. There were white lines around her lips that the scarlet red of her lipstick only made a sharper white.

  “You’ll have to do what you think right, Grace,” she said. “—Let’s wait till she shuts up.”

  —If ever, I thought. The voice kept up an incessant flow. It stopped then, but only for a moment.

  “Harry,” it said then. “Who is this Ellicott boy? I’ve heard that name before.”

  Mary closed her eyes and leaned her head against the door frame.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Now it’s coming. I knew she’d remember it was him I was engaged to. I don’t think I can stand any more.”

  It was coming, but it was not what either of us would ever have guessed.

  “Ellicott, Ellicott,” Aunt Norah said. “I know, Harry. Put down your paper and listen. It was last night at dinner some one brought his name up. In connection with that girl you sent to school. Corinne. You remember her, Harry. Well . . .”

  Mary had opened her eyes and raised her head abruptly, her body then quite motionless.

  “They applied for a marriage license yesterday, Corinne and this boy Ellicott. His commanding officer couldn’t do anything about it . . . or wouldn’t, for some reason or other. It seems——”

  The girl standing by me moved then, and it must have taken all the strength she had left. And I couldn’t do a thing. She went over to the door, not very steadily. Her face was as pale as ashes.

  “I’m going to my room,” she said. “Do what you want to about——”

  That was all she got out. She was gone then, out of the front door so she wouldn’t be seen by her father and her aunt.

  I stood looking after her. She seemed so fragile and vulnerable, her head bent forward a little, moving across the sundrenched driveway, that when she stopped abruptly I started to go out to her. But I stopped too. She’d turned her head and was standing stock-still, looking across the road. She was looking at Swede. He’d stopped too, on his way to the cottage or back to the house to see Colonel Primrose, I couldn’t tell. He was looking across at her. I don’t know what impulse it was that moved him, but he took an abrupt step forward to cross over to her.

  And he stopped again. She was running down into the gully, the back way to her room. Swede stood there looking after her a long time before he turned and cut off slowly down into the lane that led through the trees to the cottage. I saw him stop again and stand there looking up at the planes, still sweeping low over the mountainside. He was still standing there watching them when I turned and went through the passage to my own room and closed the door.

  I didn’t see Colonel Primrose before he left. I heard him leave Alice Cather’s sitting room, and maybe what I felt was a sharp twinge of good old-fashioned jealousy. Or maybe it was just pique, a childish annoyance that he hadn’t felt it important to bother about consulting me. Whatever it was, I heard him leave her sitting room, and her voice, as light and confident as ever, assuring him that mistakes were bound to happen and it was really quite all right, she understood perfectly. After a little I heard a car leave the driveway.

  I lay down and closed my eyes. I was tired, among other things, but I was only pretending I was asleep when Alice opened my door and looked in. She closed it quietly and tip-toed down the passage to her room, and then I did go to sleep. It was almost lunch time when I woke. Outside Tommy and Dave were making a terrific racket coming out of the pool, but as I listened the rest of the house seemed preternaturally quiet. It may have been the lull before the storm about to break.

  I changed my dress and went out by way of the passage. I intended to find Mary and say whatever I could to her, which certainly was not very much.

  “Grace—is that you, dear? Do come in.”

  Alice called me through her open door. She was in her bedroom. I waited in the sitting room.

  “I’ll be ready in just a moment. The boys are coming down for lunch. I’m so sorry you were upset about all this. Colonel Primrose is charming really, isn’t he?”

  I didn’t think so, at the moment, but I let it pass.

  “He left a message for you, dear. He’s going to send a car this evening. He wants you to have dinner with him somewhere.”

  I said, “Oh, really?” What I thought was just a plain quiet “Nuts,” which is the vernacular effect my sons have had on my speech in the course of years.

  I’d wandered over to the lanai waiting for her to come out.

  “I wonder where Mary’s got to?” she said through the door, “I haven’t seen her since morning.”

  I turned back, thinking I’d better tell her where Mary had got to, but I didn’t get that far. I stared up at the portrait of Roy Cather over the mantelpiece. At least I stared at where the portrait of Roy Cather had been. It was gone. In its place was a portrait of a Chinese vase with a single stalk of shell ginger in it. It was a very nice picture, but it wasn’t Roy Cather. I looked away quickly as Alice came out.

  She was smiling and superbly at ease. She put her arm affectionately through mine.

  “You must have thought I was very wicked yesterday,” she said. “Putting poor old Norah out of the house the way I did. She really means well, and she’s had a wretched life, over on that ranch. Works like a horse. I oughtn’t to begrudge her a little pleasure here. After all, the place really is half hers.”

  It had been a third hers the morning before. I wondered if I knew what Alice meant. And I think I did, perhaps, and she did mean what I thought, until just a very little later.

  We were all in the living room having a cocktail, with a buffet lunch waiting out on the lanai. And we were all there. Whether Harry Cather had told Aunt Norah to pipe down about Swede’s marriage license I don’t of course know, but she was talking to Tommy and Dave about horses, and they didn’t look as if they’d heard the other yet. Swede was there, to my surprise, unless he figured being there was closer to the trail he was apparently bent on following by himself, without Colonel Primrose’s help. From a distance in the cool shaded room Mary looked lovely, finely drawn but self-controlled and self-contained. She wasn’t looking at Swede or Swede at her.

  Outside the planes were still flying very low.

  “—Are we all here?” Alice Cather said, smiling around the room.

  I shall never forget that line. It was a cue for the little gods waiting, prompting, in the wings. It couldn’t have been neater if it had been written in the original book. The front door opened. There was no knocking, and no bell ringing. Just the door opening.

  We turned as one man and looked.

  Corinne Farrell walked in. She walked in smiling, white teeth, black hair, red lips, dark shining eyes, slim and lithe and quite unabashed, the situation hers and completely in control. She came to the archway and stopped at the top of the two steps. She looked around at the frozen dumfounded faces staring blankly back at her.

  “Where shall they put my bags, Aunt Alice?” she inquired. “I have come to stay. My father tells me the house is ours too. One-third ours. I think so.”

  She looked around the long silvery cool room.

  “It is very nice. I think we will change the sofas. Otherwise it is very nice. I think I will like it here. Yes, I think so.”

  She looked back at Alice Cather.

  “Where shall they put my bags did you say, Aunt Alice?”

  16

  “WHERE DO THEY PUT MY BAGS, AUNT ALICE?”

  Corinne repeated it again, still standing, bland and smiling, at the top of the steps that came down into the living room.

  I wondered, as I’ve wonder
ed many times since, what she really felt like just then . . . whether inside she was as blandly confident as she looked . . . whether in announcing her legal right to a share in the house near the Pali she had any sudden curdling emotion of fear. I would have had it. I would have taken one look at the faces in that room and I would have run like a rabbit. She didn’t understand, I suppose, that occidentals when put to it can be as impassively oriental as the best oriental of them all. Perhaps it was because nobody turned so much as a hair of the varied assortment of yellow, gray, gold, black, red and white hair in the room that she didn’t see there was dynamite, and how intensely hot the fuse was. But the silence and the total lack of expression that so instantly blotted out the dumfounded amazement everybody felt seeing her walk in should have been enough to warn her.

  I don’t know how to describe the overall picture. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Whatever the emotions—and highly varied they must have been, with Swede Ellicott, his application to marry the gal in his pocket, at one pole and Alice Cather at the other, and all the rest of them in between, including Dave Boyer who’d threatened to kill her before she married Swede—there was no evidence of them on a single face turned toward her. And the Cathers were superb. That in particular is why, if I’d been Corinne, I’d have been afraid, suddenly very much afraid, and I’d have left then and there.