Angel Island - Inez Haynes Gillmore (novels to improve english .TXT) 📗
- Author: Inez Haynes Gillmore
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“Hates herself, doesn’t she?” commented Honey Smith. “They’re talking!”
he added after an interval of silence. “Some one of them is giving
directions - I can tell by the tone of her voice. Can’t make out which
one it is though. Thank God, they can talk!”
“It’s the quiet one - the blonde - the one with the white wings,” Billy
Fairfax explained. “She’s captain. Some bean on her, too; she
straightened them out a moment ago when they got so frightened.”
“I now officially file my claim,” said Ralph Addington, “to that peachy
one - the golden blonde - the one with the blue wings, the one who tried
to stand on the bough. That girl’s a corker. I can tell her kind of
pirate craft as far as I see it.”
“Me for the thin one!” said Pete Murphy. “She’s a pippin, if you please.
Quick as a cat! Graceful as they make them. And look at that mop of red
hair! Isn’t that a holocaust? I bet she’s a shrew.”
You win, all right,” agreed Ralph Addington. “I’d like nothing better
than the job of taming her, too.”
“See here, Ralph,” bantered Pete, “I’ve copped Brick-top for myself. You
keep off the grass. See!”
“All right,” Ralph answered. “Katherine for yours, Petruchio. The golden
blonde for mine!” He smiled for the first time in days. In fact, at
sight of the flying-girls he had begun to beam with fatuous good nature.
Two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-top” said Honey Smith, summing
them up practically. “One of those brunettes, the brown one, must be a
Kanaka. The other’s prettier - she looks like a Spanish woman. There’s
something rather taking about the plain one, though. Pretty snappy - if
anybody should fly up in a biplane and ask you!”
“It’s curious,” Frank Merrill said with his most academic manner, “it
has not yet occurred to me to consider those young women from the point
of view of their physical pulchritude. I’m interested only in their
ability to fly. The one with the silver-white wings, the one Billy calls
the ‘quiet one,’ flies better than any of the others, The dark one on
the end, the one who looks like a Spaniard, flies least well. It is
rather disturbing, but I can think of them only as birds. I have to keep
recalling to myself that they’re women. I can’t realize it.”
“Well, don’t worry,” Ralph Addington said with the contemptuous accent
with which latterly he answered all Frank Merrill’s remarks. “You will.”
The others laughed, but Frank turned on them a look of severe reproof.
“Oh, hell!” Honey Smith exclaimed in a regretful tone; “they’re beating
it again. I say, girls,” he called at the top of his lungs, “don’t go!
Stay a little longer and we’ll buy you a dinner and a taxicab.”
Apparently the flying-girls realized that he was addressing them. For a
hair’s breadth of a second they paused. Then, with a speed that had a
suggestion of panic in it, they flew out to sea. And again a flood of
girl-laughter fell in bubbles upon them.
“They distrust muh!” Honey commented. But he smiled with the indolent
amusement of the man who has always held the master-hand with women.
“Must have come from the east, this time,” he said as they filed soberly
back to camp. “But where in thunder do they start from?”
They had, of course, discussed this question as they had discussed a
hundred other obvious ones. “I’m wondering now,” Frank Merrill answered,
“if there are islands both to the east and the west. But, after all, I’m
more interested to know if there are any more of these winged women, and
if there are any males.”
Again they talked far into the night. And as before their comment was of
the wonder, the romance, the poetry of their strange situation. And
again they drew imaginary pictures of what Honey Smith called “the young
Golden Age” that they would soon institute on Angel Island.
“Say,” Honey remarked facetiously when at length they started to run
down, “what happens to a man if he marries an angel? Does he become
angel-consort or one of those seraphim arrangements?”
Ralph Addington laughed. But Billy Fairfax and Pete Murphy frowned.
Frank Merrill did not seem to hear him. He was taking notes by the
firelight.
The men continued to work at the high rate of speed that, since the
appearance of the women, they had set for themselves. But whatever form
their labor took, their talk was ever of the flying-girls. They referred
to them individually now as the “dark one,” the “plain one,” the “thin
one,” the “quiet one,” and the “peachy one.” They theorized eternally
about them. It was a long time, however, before they saw them again, so
long that they had begun to get impatient. In Ralph Addington this
uneasiness took the form of irritation. “If I’d had a gun,” he snarled
more than once, “by the Lord Harry, I’d have winged one of them.” He sat
far into the night and waited. He arose early in the morning and
watched. He went for long, slow, solitary, silent, prowling hikes into
the interior. His eyes began to look strained from so minute a study of
the horizon-line. He grew haggard. His attitude in the matter annoyed
Pete Murphy, who maintained that he had no right to spy on women.
Argument broke out between them, waxing hot, waned to silence, broke out
again and with increased fury. Frank Merrill and Billy Fairfax listened
to all this, occasionally smoothing things over between the disputants.
But Honey Smith, who seemed more amused than bothered, deftly fed the
flame of controversy by agreeing first with one and then with the other.
Late one afternoon, just as the evening star flashed the signal of
twilight, the girls came streaming over the sea toward the island.
At the first faraway glimpse, the men dropped their tools and ran to
the water’s edge. Honey Smith waded out, waist-deep.
“Well, what do you know about that?” he called out. “Pipe the
formation!”
They came massed vertically. In the distance they might have been a
rainbow torn from its moorings, borne violently forward on a high wind.
The rainbow broke in spots, fluttered, and then came together again. It
vibrated with color. It pulsed with iridescence.
“How the thunder - ” Addington began and stopped. “Well, can you beat
it?” he concluded.
The human column was so arranged that the wings of one of the air-girls
concealed the body of another just above her.
The “dark one” led, flying low, her scarlet pinions beating slowly back
and forth about her head.
Just above, near enough for her body to be concealed by the scarlet
wings of the “dark one,” but high enough for her pointed brown face to
peer between their curves, came the “plain one.”
Higher flew the “thin one.” Her body was entirely covered by the orange
wings of the “plain one,” but her copper-colored hair made a gleamy spot
in their vase-shaped opening.
Still higher appeared the “peachy one.” She seemed to be holding her
lustrous blonde head carefully centered in the oval between the “thin
one’s” green-and-yellow plumage. She looked like a portrait in a frame.
Highest of them all, floating upright, a Winged Victory of the air, her
silver wings towering straight above her head, the cameo face of the
“quiet one” looked level into the distance.
Their wings moved in rotation, and with machine-like regularity. First
one pair flashed up, swept back and down, then another, and another. As
they neared, the color seemed the least wonderful detail of the picture.
For it changed in effect from a column of glittering wings to a column
of girl-faces, a column that floated light as thistle-down, a column
that divided, parted, opened, closed again.
The background of all this was a veil of dark gauze at the horizon-line,
its foil a golden, virgin moon, dangling a single brilliant star.
“They’re talking!” Honey Smith exclaimed. “And they’re leaving!”
The girls did not pause once. They flew in a straight line over the
island to the west, always maintaining their columnar formation. At
first the men thought that they were making for the trees. They ran
after them. The speed of their running had no effect this time on their
visitors, who continued to sail eastward. The men called on them to
stay. They called repeatedly, singly and in chorus. They called in every
tone of humble masculine entreaty and of arrogant masculine command. But
their cries might have fallen on marble ears. The girls neither turned
nor paused. They disappeared.
“Females are certainly alike under their skins, whether they’re angels
or Hottentots,” Ralph Addington commented. ” That tableau appearance was
all cooked up for us. They must have practised it for hours.”
“It has the rose-carnival at Tetaluma, Cal., faded,” remarked Honey
Smith.
“The ‘quiet one’ was giving the orders for that wing-movement,” said
Billy Fairfax. “She whispered them, but I heard her. She engineered the
whole thing. She seems to be their leader.”
“I got their voices this time,” said Pete Murphy. “Beautiful, all of
them. Soprano, high and clear. They’ve got a language, all right, too.
What did you think of it, Frank?”
“Most interesting,” replied Frank Merrill, “most interesting. A
preponderance of consonants. Never guttural in effect, and as you say,
beautiful voices, very high and clear.”
“I don’t see why they don’t stop and play,” complained Honey. His tone
was the petulant one of a spoiled child. It is likely that during the
whole course of his woman-petted existence, he had never been so
completely ignored. “If I only knew their lingo, I could convince them
in five minutes that we wouldn’t hurt them.”
“If we could only signal,” said Billy Fairfax, “that if they’d only come
down to earth, we wouldn’t go any nearer than they wanted. But the deuce
of it is proving to them that we don’t bite.”
“It is probably that they have known only males of a more primitive
type,” Frank Merrill explained. “Possibly they are accustomed to
marriage by capture.”
“That would be a very lucky thing,” Ralph explained in an aside to
Honey. “Marriage by capture isn’t such a foolish proposition, after all.
Look at the Sabine women. I never heard tell that there was any kick
coming from them. It all depends on the men.”
“Oh, Lord, Ralph, marriage by capture isn’t a sporting proposition,”
said Honey in a disgusted tone. “I’m not for it. A man doesn’t get a run
for his money. It’s too much like shooting trapped game.”
“Well, I will admit that there’s more fun in the chase,” Ralph answered.
“Oh, well, if the little darlings are not accustomed to chivalry from
men,” Pete Murphy was in the meantime saying, “that explains why they
stand us off.”
It was typical of Pete to refer to the flying-girls as “little
darlings.” The shortest among them was, of course, taller than he. But
to Pete any woman was “little one,” no matter what her stature, as any
woman was “pure as the driven snow” until she proved the contrary. This
impregnable simplicity explained much of the disaster of his married
life.
“I am convinced,” Frank Merrill said meditatively, “we must go about
winning their confidence with the utmost care. One false step might be
fatal. I know what your impatience is though - for I can hardly school
myself to wait - that extraordinary phenomenon of the wings interests me
so much. The great question in my mind is
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