Angel Island by Inez Haynes Gillmore (read novel full .txt) 📖

put

that off.”

 

“Has it ever occurred to you fellows,” Billy asked, “that just as soon

as the boys are big enough for us to leave the women in their care, we

can build a boat and visit the other four islands?”

 

“Gee!” Honey said. “Now you’re shouting. I never thought of that. Lord,

how I would like to get away from this place for a while. Being shut in

in any way always gets on my nerves.”

 

Ralph drew a long breath. “I never thought of it,” he admitted. “But it

gives me a new lease of life.”

 

“I shall feel like Columbus,” Pete acknowledged, “and then some. Why

it’s like visiting the moon - or Mars. And God knows we’ll need an other

island or two in our business - provided we stay here for two or three

generations more. We’ll be a densely populated world-center before we

know it.”

 

“I was thinking,” Billy suddenly relapsed to the previous subject. “How

about the women tonight? They always hate to have us leave them when

we’ve been away all day, - and we’ve been here two days, remember.”

 

“Oh, that’s all right,” Honey answered. “I’m sure Lulu’ll be all right.

There’s been the greatest change in her in the last few months.”

 

“Peachy won’t mind,” said Ralph. “She told me the other night to go to

the Clubhouse as often as I wanted and stay as late.”

 

“Clara says practically the same.” Pete wrinkled his forehead in

perplexity. “It took my breath away. How do you account for it?”

 

“Oh, that’s all right,” Honey answered. stopping to dash the sweat from

his forehead, “I should say it was just a matter of their getting over

their foolishness. I suppose all young married women have it - that

instinct to monopolize their husbands. And when you think it over, we do

sort of give them the impression while we’re courting them that they are

the whole cheese. But that isn’t all. They’ve come to their senses on

some other matters. I think, for instance, they’re beginning to get our

point of view on this flying proposition. Lulu hasn’t hinted that she’d

like to fly for three months. She’s never been so contented since, we

captured them. To do her justice, though, she always saw, when I pointed

it out to her, that flying was foolish, besides being dangerous.”

 

“Well,” Ralph said, “what between holding them down from the clouds and

keeping them away from the, New Camp, managing them has been some job.

But I guess you’re right, Honey. I think they’re reconciled now to their

lot. If I do say it as shouldn’t, Peachy seems like a regular woman

nowadays. She’s braced up in fine style in the last two months. Her

color is much better; her spirits are high. When I get home at night,

she doesn’t want to go out at all. If I say that I’m going to the

Clubhouse, she never raises a yip. In fact, she seems too tired to care.

She’s always ready now to turn in when I do. For months and months, you

know, she sat up reading until all hours of the night and morning. But

now she falls asleep like a child.”

 

“Then she’s gotten over that insomnia?” Pete asked this casually and he

did not look at Ralph.

 

“Entirely,” Ralph replied briefly, and in his turn he did not look at

Pete. “She’s a perfectly healthy woman now. She gets her three squares

every day and her twelve hours every night - regular. I never saw such

an improvement in a woman.”

 

“Well, when it comes to sleeping,” Pete said, “I don’t believe she’s got

anything on Clara. I often find her dead to the world when I get home at

night. I jolly her about that - for she has always thought going to bed

early indicated lack of temperament. And as for teasing to be allowed to

fly, or to be taken out swimming, or to call on any of you, or to let

her tag me here - why, that’s all stopped short. She keeps dozing off

all the evening. Sometimes in the midst of a sentence, she’ll begin to

nod. Never saw her looking so well, though.”

 

“Chiquita, on the contrary, isn’t sleeping as much as she did,” Frank

said. “She’s more active, though - physically, I mean. She’s rejoicing

at present over the fact that she’s lost twenty-five, pounds in the last

three months. She said last night that she hadn’t been so slim since she

was a girl.”

 

“Twenty-five pounds!” exclaimed Honey. “That’s a good deal to lose. How

the hell - how do you explain it!”

 

“Increased household activity,” Frank replied vaguely. “And then

mentally, I think she’s more vigorous. She’s been reading a great deal

by herself. Formerly I found that reading annoyed her - even when I read

aloud, explaining carefully as I went along.”

 

“I haven’t noticed an increased activity on Julia’s part,” Billy said

thoughtfully. “But she’s always been extraordinarily active, considering

everything. The way she gets about is marvelous. But of course she’s

planned the placing of her furniture with that in view. She’s as quick

as a cat. I have noticed, however, that she seems much happier. They

certainly are a changed lot of women.”

 

“The twelve o’clock whistle has just blown,” Honey announced. “Let’s

eat.”

 

The five men dropped their tools. They gathered their lunches together

and fell to a voracious feeding. At last, pipes appeared. They stretched

themselves to the smoker’s ease. For a while, the silence was unbroken.

Then, here and there, somebody dropped an irrelevant remark. Nobody

answered it.

 

They lay in one corner of the big space which had been cleared from the

jungle chaos. On one side rippled the blue lake carving into many tiny

bays and inlets and padded with great green oases of matted lily-leaves.

On the other side rose the highest hill on the island. The cleared land

stretched to the very summit of this hill. Over it lay another chaos,

the chaos of confusion; half-completed buildings of log and stone,

rectangles and squares of dug-up land where buildings would some day

stand, half-finished roadways, ditches of muddy water, hills of round

beach-stones, piles of logs, some stripped of the bark, others still

trailing a green huddle of leaf and branch, tools everywhere. The jungle

rolled like, a tidal wave to the very boundary; in places its green

spume had fallen over the border. As the men smoked, their eyes went

back to the New Camp again and again. It was obvious that constantly

they made mental measurements, that ever in their mind’s eye they saw

the completed thing.

 

“Well,” said Ralph, reverting without warning to the subject under

discussion. His manner tacitly assumed that the others had also been

considering it mentally. “I confess I don’t understand women really.

I’ve always thought that I did. But I see now that I never have.”

Addington’s rare outbursts of frankness in regard to the other sex were

the more startling because they contrasted so sharply with his normal

attitude of lordly understanding and contempt. “I’ve been a good manager

and I’m not saying that I haven’t had my successes with them. But as I

look back upon them now, I realize I followed my intuitions, not my

reason. I’ve done what I’ve done without knowing why. I have to feel my

way still. I can’t account for the change that’s come over them. For

four years now they’ve been at us to let their wings grow again. And for

four years we’ve been saying no in every possible tone of voice and with

every possible inflection. I’ve had no idea that Peachy would ever get

over it. My God, you fellows have no idea what I’ve been through with

her in regard to this question of flying. Why, one night three months

ago, she had an awful attack of hysteria because I told her I’d have to

cut Angela’s wings as soon as she was grown-up.”

 

“Well, what did she expect?” Honey asked.

 

“That I’d let her keep them - that I’d let her fly the way Peachy did!

Or - what do you suppose she suggested? - that I cut them off now.”

 

“Well, what was her idea in that?” Billy’s tone was the acme of

perplexity.

 

“That as long as I wouldn’t let her keep them after she had attained her

growth, she might as well not have them at all.”

 

Billy laughed. “That’s a woman’s reasoning all right, all right. Why, it

would destroy half Angela’s charm in my eyes. That little fluttering

flight of hers, half on the ground, half in the air, is so lovely, so

engaging, so endearing - - . But of course letting her fly high would be

- .”

 

“Absurd,” Ralph interrupted.

 

“Dangerous,” Honey interpolated.

 

“Unwomanly,” Pete added.

 

“Immodest,” Billy concluded.

 

“Well, thank God it’s all over,” Ralph went on. “But, as I say, I give

up guessing what’s changed her, unless it’s the principle that constant

dropping wears away the stone. Oscar Wilde had the answer. They’re

sphinxes without secrets. They do anything that occurs to them and for

no particular reason. I get along with, them only by laying down the law

and holding them to it. And I reckon they’ve got that idea firmly fixed

in their minds now - that they’re to stay where we put them.”

 

Honey wriggled as if in discomfort. “Seems to me, Ralph, you take a

pretty cold-blooded view of the situation. I guess I don’t go very far

with you. Not that I pretend to understand women. I don’t. My system

with them is to give them anything they ask, within reason, of course,

to keep them busy and happy, buy them presents, soft-soap them, jolly

them along. I suppose that personally, I wouldn’t have minded their

flying a little every afternoon, as long as they took the proper care. I

mean by that, not to fly too far out to sea or too high in the air and

never when we were at home, so long, in short, as they followed the

rules that we laid down for them. You fellows seem to have the idea if

we let them do that we’d lose them. But if there’s one general

proposition fixed more firmly in my nut than any other, it is that you

can’t lose them. But of course I intend always to stand by whatever

you-all say.”

 

“I don’t know,” Billy burst in hotly, “which of you two makes me sickest

and which is the most insulting in his attitude towards women, you,

Ralph, who treat them as if they were household pets, or you, Honey, who

treat them as if they were dolls. In my opinion there is only one law to

govern a man’s relation with a woman - the law of chivalry. To love her,

and cherish her, to do all the hard work of the world for her, to stand

between her and everything that is unbeautiful and unpleasant, to think

for her, to put her on a pedestal and worship her; to my mind that sums

up the whole duty of man to woman.”

 

“They’re better than goddesses on pedestals,” Pete said. “They’re

creatures neither of flesh nor of marble - they’re ideals. They’re made

of stars, sunlight, moonshine. I believe in treating them like beings of

a higher world.”

 

“I disagree with all of you,” Frank said ponderously, “I don’t believe

in treating them as if they were pets or dolls, or goddesses on

pedestals or ideals. I believe in treating them like human beings, the

other half of the race. I don’t see that