On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales

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by On The Makaloa Mat


  join Lee and Langhorne Jones and Jack Holstein in a bridge battle

  at the Pacific Club--that afternoon he had played bridge at Dora

  Niles' home with three women, one of whom was Ida.

  Returning, once, from an afternoon's inspection of the great dry-

  dock building at Pearl Harbour, Lee Barton, driving his machine

  against time, in order to have time to dress for dinner, passed

  Sonny's car; and Sonny's one passenger, whom he was taking home,

  was Ida. One night, a week later, during which interval he had

  played no cards, he came home at eleven from a stag dinner at the

  University Club, just preceding Ida's return from the Alstone poi

  supper and dance. And Sonny had driven her home. Major Fanklin

  and his wife had first been dropped off by them, they mentioned, at

  Fort Shafter, on the other side of town and miles away from the

  beach.

  Lee Barton, after all mere human man, as a human man unfailingly

  meeting Sonny in all friendliness, suffered poignantly in secret.

  Not even Ida dreamed that he suffered; and she went her merry,

  careless, laughing way, secure in her own heart, although a trifle

  perplexed at her husband's increase in number of pre-dinner

  cocktails.

  Apparently, as always, she had access to almost all of him; but now

  she did not have access to his unguessable torment, nor to the long

  parallel columns of mental book-keeping running their totalling

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  balances from moment to moment, day and night, in his brain. In

  one column were her undoubtable spontaneous expressions of her

  usual love and care for him, her many acts of comfort-serving and

  of advice-asking and advice-obeying. In another column, in which

  the items increasingly were entered, were her expressions and acts

  which he could not but classify as dubious. Were they what they

  seemed? Or were they of duplicity compounded, whether deliberately

  or unconsciously? The third column, longest of all, totalling most

  in human heart-appraisements, was filled with items relating

  directly or indirectly to her and Sonny Grandison. Lee Barton did

  not deliberately do this book-keeping. He could not help it. He

  would have liked to avoid it. But in his fairly ordered mind the

  items of entry, of themselves and quite beyond will on his part,

  took their places automatically in their respective columns.

  In his distortion of vision, magnifying apparently trivial detail

  which half the time he felt he magnified, he had recourse to

  MacIlwaine, to whom he had once rendered a very considerable

  service. MacIlwaine was chief of detectives. "Is Sonny Grandison

  a womaning man?" Barton had demanded. MacIlwaine had said nothing.

  "Then he is a womaning man," had been Barton's declaration. And

  still the chief of detectives had said nothing.

  Briefly afterward, ere he destroyed it as so much dynamite, Lee

  Barton went over the written report. Not bad, not really bad, was

  the summarization; but not too good after the death of his wife ten

  years before. That had been a love-match almost notorious in

  Honolulu society, because of the completeness of infatuation, not

  only before, but after marriage, and up to her tragic death when

  her horse fell with her a thousand feet off Nahiku Trail. And not

  for a long time afterward, MacIlwaine stated, had Grandison been

  guilty of interest in any woman. And whatever it was, it had been

  unvaryingly decent. Never a hint of gossip or scandal; and the

  entire community had come to accept that he was a one-woman man,

  and would never marry again. What small affairs MacIlwaine had

  jotted down he insisted that Sonny Grandison did not dream were

  known by another person outside the principals themselves.

  Barton glanced hurriedly, almost shamedly, at the several names and

  incidents, and knew surprise ere he committed the document to the

  flames. At any rate, Sonny had been most discreet. As he stared

  at the ashes, Barton pondered how much of his own younger life,

  from his bachelor days, resided in old MacIlwaine's keeping. Next,

  Barton found himself blushing, to himself, at himself. If

  MacIlwaine knew so much of the private lives of community figures,

  then had not he, her husband and protector and shielder, planted in

  MacIlwaine's brain a suspicion of Ida?

  "Anything on your mind?" Lee asked his wife that evening, as he

  stood holding her wrap while she put the last touches to her

  dressing.

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  This was in line with their old and successful compact of

  frankness, and he wondered, while he waited her answer, why he had

  refrained so long from asking her.

  "No," she smiled. "Nothing particular. Afterwards . . . perhaps .

  . . "

  She became absorbed in gazing at herself in the mirror, while she

  dabbed some powder on her nose and dabbed it off again.

  "You know my way, Lee," she added, after the pause. "It takes me

  time to gather things together in my own way--when there are things

  to gather; but when I do, you always get them. And often there's

  nothing in them after all, I find, and so you are saved the

  nuisance of them."

  She held out her arms for him to place the wrap about her--her

  valiant little arms that were so wise and steel-like in battling

  with the breakers, and that yet were such just mere-woman's arms,

  round and warm and white, delicious as a woman's arms should be,

  with the canny muscles, masking under soft-roundness of contour and

  fine smooth skin, capable of being flexed at will by the will of

  her.

  He pondered her, with a grievous hurt and yearning of appreciation-

  -so delicate she seemed, so porcelain-fragile that a strong man

  could snap her in the crook of his arm.

  "We must hurry!" she cried, as he lingered in the adjustment of the

  flimsy wrap over her flimsy-prettiness of gown. "We'll be late.

  And if it showers up Nuuanu, putting the curtains up will make us

  miss the second dance."

  He made a note to observe with whom she danced that second dance,

  as she preceded him across the room to the door; while at the same

  time he pleasured his eye in what he had so often named to himself

  as the spirit-proud flesh-proud walk of her.

  "You don't feel I'm neglecting you in my too-much poker?" he tried

  again, by indirection.

  "Mercy, no! You know I just love you to have your card orgies.

  They're tonic for you. And you're so much nicer about them, so

  much more middle-aged. Why, it's almost years since you sat up

  later than one."

  It did not shower up Nuuanu, and every overhead star was out in a

  clear trade-wind sky. In time at the Inchkeeps' for the second

  dance, Lee Barton observed that his wife danced it with Grandison--

  which, of itself, was nothing unusual, but which became immediately

  a registered item in Barton's mental books.

  An hour later, depressed and
restless, declining to make one of a

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  bridge foursome in the library and escaping from a few young

  matrons, he strolled out into the generous grounds. Across the

  lawn, at the far edge, he came upon the hedge of night-blooming

  cereus. To each flower, opening after dark and fading, wilting,

  perishing with the dawn, this was its one night of life. The

  great, cream-white blooms, a foot in diameter and more, lily-like

  and wax-like, white beacons of attraction in the dark, penetrating

  and seducing the night with their perfume, were busy and beautiful

  with their brief glory of living.

  But the way along the hedge was populous with humans, two by two,

  male and female, stealing out between the dances or strolling the

  dances out, while they talked in low soft voices and gazed upon the

  wonder of flower-love. From the lanai drifted the love-caressing

  strains of "Hanalei" sung by the singing boys. Vaguely Lee Barton

  remembered--perhaps it was from some Maupassant story--the abbe,

  obsessed by the theory that behind all things were the purposes of

  God and perplexed so to interpret the night, who discovered at the

  last that the night was ordained for love.

  The unanimity of the night as betrayed by flowers and humans was a

  hurt to Barton. He circled back toward the house along a winding

  path that skirted within the edge of shadow of the monkey-pods and

  algaroba trees. In the obscurity, where his path curved away into

  the open again, he looked across a space of a few feet where, on

  another path in the shadow, stood a pair in each other's arms. The

  impassioned low tones of the man had caught his ear and drawn his

  eyes, and at the moment of his glance, aware of his presence, the

  voice ceased, and the two remained immobile, furtive, in each

  other's arms.

  He continued his walk, sombred by the thought that in the gloom of

  the trees was the next progression from the openness of the sky

  over those who strolled the night-flower hedge. Oh, he knew the

  game when of old no shadow was too deep, no ruse of concealment too

  furtive, to veil a love moment. After all, humans were like

  flowers, he meditated. Under the radiance from the lighted lanai,

  ere entering the irritating movement of life again to which he

  belonged, he paused to stare, scarcely seeing, at a flaunt of

  display of scarlet double-hibiscus blooms. And abruptly all that

  he was suffering, all that he had just observed, from the night-

  blooming hedge and the two-by-two love-murmuring humans to the pair

  like thieves in each other's arms, crystallized into a parable of

  life enunciated by the day-blooming hibiscus upon which he gazed,

  now at the end of its day. Bursting into its bloom after the dawn,

  snow-white, warming to pink under the hours of sun, and quickening

  to scarlet with the dark from which its beauty and its being would

  never emerge, it seemed to him that it epitomized man's life and

  passion.

  What further connotations he might have drawn he was never to know;

  for from behind, in the direction of the algarobas and monkey-pods,

  came Ida's unmistakable serene and merry laugh. He did not look,

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  being too afraid of what he knew he would see, but retreated

  hastily, almost stumbling, up the steps to the lanai. Despite that

  he knew what he was to see, when he did turn his head and beheld

  his wife and Sonny, the pair he had seen thieving in the dark, he

  went suddenly dizzy, and paused, supporting himself with a hand

  against a pillar, and smiling vacuously at the grouped singing boys

  who were pulsing the sensuous night into richer sensuousness with

  their honi kaua wiki-wiki refrain.

  The next moment he had wet his lips with his tongue, controlled his

  face and flesh, and was bantering with Mrs. Inchkeep. But he could

  not waste time, or he would have to encounter the pair he could

  hear coming up the steps behind him.

  "I feel as if I had just crossed the Great Thirst," he told his

  hostess, "and that nothing less than a high-ball will preserve me."

  She smiled permission and nodded toward the smoking lanai, where

  they found him talking sugar politics with the oldsters when the

  dance began to break up.

  Quite a party of half a dozen machines were starting for Waikiki,

  and he found himself billeted to drive the Leslies and Burnstons

  home, though he did not fail to note that Ida sat in the driver's

  seat with Sonny in Sonny's car. Thus, she was home ahead of him

  and brushing her hair when he arrived. The parting of bed-going

  was usual, on the face of it, although he was almost rigid in his

  successful effort for casualness as he remembered whose lips had

  pressed hers last before his.

  Was, then, woman the utterly unmoral creature as depicted by the

  German pessimists? he asked himself, as he tossed under his reading

  lamp, unable to sleep or read. At the end of an hour he was out of

  bed, and into his medicine case. Five grains of opium he took

  straight. An hour later, afraid of his thoughts and the prospect

  of a sleepless night, he took another grain. At one-hour intervals

  he twice repeated the grain dosage. But so slow was the action of

  the drug that dawn had broken ere his eyes closed.

  At seven he was awake again, dry-mouthed, feeling stupid and

  drowsy, yet incapable of dozing off for more than several minutes

  at a time. He abandoned the idea of sleep, ate breakfast in bed,

  and devoted himself to the morning papers and the magazines. But

  the drug effect held, and he continued briefly to doze through his

  eating and reading. It was the same when he showered and dressed,

  and, though the drug had brought him little forgetfulness during

  the night, he felt grateful for the dreaming lethargy with which it

  possessed him through the morning.

  It was when his wife arose, her serene and usual self, and came in

  to him, smiling and roguish, delectable in her kimono, that the

  whim-madness of the opium in his system seized upon him. When she

  had clearly and simply shown that she had nothing to tell him under

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  their ancient compact of frankness, he began building his opium

  lie. Asked how he had slept, he replied:

  "Miserably. Twice I was routed wide awake with cramps in my feet.

  I was almost too afraid to sleep again. But they didn't come back,

  though my feet are sorer than blazes."

  "Last year you had them," she reminded him.

  "Maybe it's going to become a seasonal affliction," he smiled.

  "They're not serious, but they're horrible to wake up to. They

  won't come again till to-night, if they come at all, but in the

  meantime I feel as if I had been bastinadoed."

  In the afternoon of the same day, Lee and Ida Barton made their

  shallow dive from the Outrigg
er beach, and went on, at a steady

  stroke, past the diving-stage to the big water beyond the Kanaka

  Surf. So quiet was the sea that when, after a couple of hours,

  they turned and lazily started shoreward through the Kanaka Surf

  they had it all to themselves. The breakers were not large enough

  to be exciting, and the last languid surf-boarders and canoeists

  had gone in to shore. Suddenly, Lee turned over on his back.

  "What is it?" Ida called from twenty feet away.

  "My foot--cramp," he answered calmly, though the words were twisted

  out through clenched jaws of control.

  The opium still had its dreamy way with him, and he was without

  excitement. He watched her swimming toward him with so steady and

  unperturbed a stroke that he admired her own self-control, although

  at the same time doubt stabbed him with the thought that it was

  because she cared so little for him, or, rather, so much

  immediately more for Grandison.

  "Which foot?" she asked, as she dropped her legs down and began

  treading water beside him.

  "The left one--ouch! Now it's both of them."

  He doubled his knees, as if involuntarily raised his head and chest

  forward out of the water, and sank out of sight in the down-wash of

  a scarcely cresting breaker. Under no more than a brief several

  seconds, he emerged spluttering and stretched out on his back

  again.

  Almost he grinned, although he managed to turn the grin into a

  pain-grimace, for his simulated cramp had become real. At least in

  one foot it had, and the muscles convulsed painfully.

  "The right is the worst," he muttered, as she evinced her intention

  of laying hands on his cramp and rubbing it out. "But you'd better

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  keep away. I've had cramps before, and I know I'm liable to grab

  you if these get any worse."

  Instead, she laid her hands on the hard-knotted muscles, and began

  to rub and press and bend.

  "Please," he gritted through his teeth. "You must keep away. Just

  let me lie out here--I'll bend the ankle and toe-joints in the

  opposite ways and make it pass. I've done it before and know how

  to work it."

  She released him, remaining close beside him and easily treading

  water, her eyes upon his face to judge the progress of his own

  attempt at remedy. But Lee Barton deliberately bent joints and

 

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