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
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