Читать книгу Honolulu Story - Leslie Ford - Страница 8

SHE LED THE TWO OF US TO A STAIRWAY OFF the entrance hall. It wasn’t quite dark yet outside, but it was dusk and the grass was already silvered with dew. We went down winding stone steps at the side facing Ewa, as they say here—northeast as opposed to Waikiki. Around the terrace above us, facing the mountains, mauka as opposed to makai, toward the sea, was the lanai where Alice Cather had stood listening to the redbird’s evening call. The swimming pool was cut out of the rock, and I could hear the water splashing from it down into the ravine.

All I could think of, however, was Ben Farrell, and Swede, and the half-caste girl that Ben had married and that Swede Ellicott was going to marry now. I wanted to ask the captain more about it, but I was afraid to start him again and not be able to shut him off when we got back to the house. And anyway he was not particularly sympathetic—in fact he was rather superior and irritating.

“This must have cost plenty,” he remarked. “I guess Cather’s family were missionaries. They’re the ones who cleaned up out here. You’ve heard about the Big Five?”

“The Cathers happened not to be,” I said. I didn’t know anything else about them, but Alice had told me that. “They were unsuccessful California Forty-niners and came on out here. And they aren’t Big Five either.”

We were going around the terrace toward the mountain side. It was unbelievably lovely, with the bank spilling showers of orchids growing out of moist tree fern wired to the rock.

“This is their air-raid shelter—it’s a honey. Absolutely complete from soup to nuts.”

He pointed at a low redwood door set in the bank. It looked much more like the entrance to an enchanted cavern in a fairy tale, with its ornamental iron hinges and lock and the fern growing around it on the mossy rocks, and pale-green and lemon-yellow orchids hanging over it. I’d started to say so, when behind us, out of the brooding silence of the twilight against the hills, came the single note followed by the long sliding see-saw of the redbird’s call. It was so close and clear that remembering Alice Cather on the lanai I stopped and looked around, trying to locate it. And I stood, motionless at first and then rigid, just staring.

A man’s face was there against the trees. It was nothing else, it was just a face . . . and it was not in the trees, it was against them. It stood out, plain and visible and perfectly motionless, as I stared, not really believing I was seeing it and yet unable to believe I wasn’t.

In the curious visual quality of the dusk it was very white around the forehead under an indefinite hair-line, with cheeks that shaded into a dark stubble. I blinked my eyes quickly. It was still there, fixed and stationary in mid-air against the dense growth of green and dun-colored foliage. I couldn’t see any eyes, but I had the feeling that they were there, fixed on me, piercing and unwavering. And it was there. I could see it.

“Look,” I said. “Over there, in the trees.”

The captain turned from the air-raid shelter door. I started to point, and had an instant queer feeling that it might be wiser not to.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

I didn’t either. There was nothing there. The face had gone. I was looking exactly where I’d been looking before. There was nothing there but the leaves.

“—I saw a face,” I said. “A man’s face.”

He looked around at me. “A spy,” he said gravely. Then he laughed. “Lady, don’t start that around here . . . everybody’ll just laugh at you. There’s nothing here the Japs are interested in—they’re too busy at home. Let’s go get a drink.”

I was still looking for the face, or for the formation of leaves and light and shade that had looked so extraordinarily like one. If it had been an hallucination it was a very vivid and solid one, and I knew it hadn’t. It was a man’s face. I had seen it, and the image in my mind was as sharply positive as if I saw it still. If it had been any one else with me, or if the face had had a torso and arms and legs, I’d have insisted on waiting. But I gave up too and moved reluctantly along.

There were more steps toward the house where it faced the mountains, and we went up them to the garden level. At the top I looked back. The face was there again, and this time I had no possible doubt about it. But it was there just an instant. It wasn’t against the leaves this time so much as in them, and it blotted out sharply, as if a leafy branch had been drawn across it. It was still nothing but a face, chalky-white and stubbly-dark. In the half-light of the exotic twilight it made my flesh creep.

“What’s the matter now, Mrs. Latham?”

“Nothing at all,” I said pleasantly. I followed the captain across the lawn to the downstairs room where the bar was. At the end of the terrace I stopped again, but there was nothing back there, or nothing that I could see. And maybe, I thought for a moment, there hadn’t been anything there at all, really; it could have been a trick of the light and my imagination. Or perhaps it was an Hawaiian custom for disembodied heads to float around against the trees. It was darker now, as if a curtain had been drawn down as the shafts of the dying sun made tangible plains of shadow slanting up to the top of the ridge, leaving it dark and sombre in the ravine.

Yet all the time I knew that the face in the woods was still there. I knew it was hidden in the shadowy trees, a face without a body, rigid and poised, watching. It kept coming in and fading out of my mind, disturbing all the more because, I found myself giving it eyes, in my mind, and a kind of stealthy intentness.—And then there came into my mind again the sight of those two white searching planes, flying very low, circling, that Swede Ellicott had pointed out from the window of the Moana lobby—and the short conversation that the major and I had had on the Pali. And once when I heard the redbird’s call again, long after Stateside redbirds would have been asleep, I started so that my partner thought he’d trumped my trick. I looked over toward Alice, thinking again that it could have been the contagion of her panic on the lanai that was responsible. But she’d gone out of the room and they were settling accounts at her table.

When the guests left I stood for a moment on the lanai looking over the dark rim of wilderness down onto the myriad lights of the city by the sea. Pearl Harbor was a vast white glow off to the right, beyond it the darkness of spreading cane fields and the ragged outlines of mountains against the sky. Behind me, moving noiselessly around the room, the Japanese house man was folding the bridge tables and clearing up for the night. The two little maids in their blue kimonos had disappeared. I suppose it was because Pearl Harbor glowed so brilliantly, itself and as a symbol, that I unconsciously turned and watched the man, intent on his job inside.

He was short and stocky, with thick straight black hair and a broad flat face, with nothing about him to indicate his age to me. I suppose I must at some point or other have read in the papers that a large percentage of the population of the Hawaiian Islands was Japanese, either alien or native born, but I hadn’t really been prepared for the shock of seeing so many of them everywhere. It seemed to me I saw practically nothing else, but that was no doubt because I wasn’t used to them and was so conscious of them as a people we were fighting a few thousand miles forward over the Pacific.

When a voice spoke beside me I started. Harry Cather and Mary had come back on the lanai from seeing their guests off. And what I was thinking must have been pretty evident in my face.

“Now, now, Grace,” Harry said, laughing. “Don’t start a spy hunt, will you? Servants are hard to get. I assure you Kumumato’s all right. He’s been around for years.”

Mary Cather laughed too.

“You’re all right, aren’t you, Kumumato?” she called across the lanai.

He had probably heard his name anyway. He stopped with his tray of glasses, grinned broadly and nodded, and went on.

“It must be sort of tough, when they’re loyal,” Mary said, “being eyed by everybody. It’s crazy, really. Kumumato’s as much an American as we are. He was born here in Honolulu and he’s got two sons in the A. J. Battalion in Italy. And he had a daughter killed on the 7th. You know the bombs the Japs dropped on the city didn’t hit anything but Japanese property. Of course, people who don’t know them and aren’t used to them the way we are out here are always sort of shocked.”

“Mainlanders don’t quite see the picture,” Harry Cather said. “It would be a little hard to put that many people in concentration camps, in the first place, and it would play hob with every kind of labor. Except in the defense plants. They’re not allowed on military jobs. I don’t say there aren’t some black sheep. It wouldn’t be human nature if there weren’t a few, out of the hundred and fifty thousand right here on Oahu. But they’re a practical people. Only forty families went back to their emperor, when they were all given the chance, at the beginning of the war. Not very many, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. “Not out of a hundred and fifty thousand.”

“And we’re all pretty well tabbed here, by Internal Security. They’ve got us all fingerprinted and we carry civilian identification cards—every man, woman and child in the Islands. The curfew wasn’t anything anybody took lightly—blackout at sundown, at first, and after the war moved out, off the streets at ten.”

“I wish I’d been here all the time,” Mary said. “Everything wouldn’t have been so different if I’d seen it gradually. You can’t imagine how different it looks now.”

We’d moved along to the corner of the lanai where we could look down over the dark valley to the jewelled brilliance of the city, and up to the dark mountains, stretching in an endless chair against the sky.

“It’s funny how an Islander feels strange when there’s nothing but flat land and buildings everywhere,” she said. “It smells different, here, and it feels different. Even if they have made a fortress out of it, it’s still Oahu, and I love it. Did you know, Mrs. Latham, that in the early days in California the wealthy people used to send their children here to school? It was shorter than sending them across the plains or around the Horn. It seems odd, doesn’t it, when you can get from here to Washington in thirty-six hours now. It’s going to be a funny world, isn’t it, when we’re all under each other’s feet and you can’t get away from anybody very far.”

She laughed suddenly.

“Remember how glad we were, Dad, when Aunt Norah moved just over to Maui, because it was eighty-eight miles away and it made her seasick to ride on boats? Now she can take a plane and be here in half an hour.—I hope she doesn’t, as soon as she sees in the papers we’re back home again.”

“I believe we’re safe,” her father said, I thought rather dryly.

Mary laughed again. “Do you have relatives too, Mrs. Latham?”

“A few,” I said.

“Well, it’s wonderful to be back home, anyway,” she went on. “Are you turning in, Dad?”

Harry Cather stopped a few steps off. “No, I’m going to get a book for Grace. Hawaii, Off Shore Territory, it’s called. I think it’s a very intelligent picture of the situation here.”

Mary watched him until he disappeared around the angle of the living room . . . a little covertly, I thought at first. And in an instant I was sure of it.

She turned to me quickly when he’d gone.

“—Mrs. Latham,” she said, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “Do you mind if I ask you something? Did . . . did I hear the captain talking to you about . . . Swede Ellicott?”

My heart sank a little. If she’d heard that much I didn’t see how she could have helped hearing the rest of it, including the fact that the old gang was there in Honolulu and the bit about the slant-eyed Mata Hari. I didn’t know what to say to her, and I must have hesitated much longer than seemed natural under the circumstances, because she looked away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked, should I? But I . . . I thought I heard his name. I wasn’t sure. I seem to hear it a lot even when the room’s empty and nobody could possibly be saying it.”

She turned her head and gave me a quick smile.

“Crazy, isn’t it? Maybe it’s the atmosphere. The Hawaiians hear things—music, and drums. . . . They see things too. Maybe it’s catching. I’ve seen Swede a dozen times since I got here—only it’s always somebody else when I get up to him.”

She stood there, her body resting lightly against the rail behind us, poking at the lau-hala mat with the silver toe of her slipper.

“I always thought I ought to explain to you what happened,” she said quietly. “About me and Swede, I mean. You were so sweet to us both, it seemed a little . . . abrupt, just to have Mother call and say it was over, without . . . without anything else.”

“It’s not customary to go around explaining things like that,” I said. I was curious nevertheless.

“I know. And there’s really nothing to explain. It was just over, that’s all. I guess it was too . . . well, too swell to last.”

I looked around at her quickly. The note in her low velvety-throated voice was too warm and too wistfully tender not to be arresting, especially in view of Tommy Dawson’s derisive “the little Cather.” She was still looking down at the tip of her shoe poking the edge of the woven mat.

“I thought I was all over it,” she said. “All the . . . the hurt part of it, anyway. But I guess I’m not. I thought getting home, away from running into his aunt all the time, and seeing places that reminded me of him, I’d get him out of my head. But it doesn’t seem to work that way.”

She looked around at me and smiled. “It doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

Not to me it didn’t, certainly. There was obviously something very wrong somewhere. That might just possibly be the spot where the she-buzzard came in—but I didn’t know. I still couldn’t think of Alice Cather in such terms.

“Every time I think I see him it all comes back with a wallop, and of course I know it’s because there are so many flyers around, and they do sort of look alike.”

“Do you want to see him, Mary?” I asked.

She drew her breath quickly.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Oh, I couldn’t bear it. I’d do something crazy that I’d regret the rest of my life. No, it’s not that.”

She stopped short then, looking at me oddly. “But of course, it is that, isn’t it? I mean, I wouldn’t always be thinking I see him if I didn’t really want to, would I?”

“I guess not,” I agreed.

She hesitated.

“I suppose I was just awful young,” she said slowly. “I’d never been in love with anybody else before. It hit me too hard, I suppose. I just didn’t stop to use my head. I can see it now, but it’s a bit late, and it doesn’t help very much. If I’d been . . . older, or been around more, I’d have known it was just an exciting game—for all four of them. I guess maybe I should have asked for a copy of the ground rules before I got so much involved.”

She tried to laugh, but it wasn’t very successful.

“And I’m not blaming them at all. Don’t think that. It’s myself I’m blaming. After all, I’d known Swede only ten days, and that’s not very long when you’re signing up for life, I suppose. So when he got away and got to thinking it over he realized it didn’t make sense. And he couldn’t very well write and tell me so, I suppose. But I wish he had. It’s just never hearing at all that made it sort of . . . sort of tough.”

She rested both hands behind her on the rail and bent her body forward a little so that I couldn’t see her face.

“And it’s not that so much either, really. I’ve tried to figure it out. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to keep on with it when he didn’t care about me any more. I’d rather know beforehand than afterwards it wasn’t going to work out. That would be worse. That’s what made my Aunt Norah what she is, and she’s grim. It simply wrecked her pride—and that’s what really happened to me, I think, if I’d be honest about it.”

She straightened up abruptly.

“Oh, dear, if I’d just taken it and shut up!” she said quickly. “That’s what makes it so painful. If I’d only listened to Mother—but I didn’t. I just didn’t believe it. I thought his letters were lost, or they’d gone astray, or something, so I kept on writing. Even when I knew. I couldn’t believe it. I wrote one awful job—I could die when I think of it! I poured the old broken heart stuff all over the paper, reams of it. I can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror when I think about it. I adored him, and he was wonderful, and I worshipped him, and so on and so on. He must have been bored sick, or maybe he thought it was funny. I don’t know.”

She turned her back to the soft glow from the living room and stood looking down over the black slope of the hills to the gleaming lights of the city.

“I keep telling myself it doesn’t matter,” she said quietly, after a moment. “That I should just chalk it up to experience, so it never happens again. But——”

“That’s not very easy to do,” I said, as gently as I could. “People have been telling themselves that since the beginning of time.”

“I know. But that doesn’t help any either. It’s harder to get over anything when you’ve made it worse by being a terrible fool along with all the rest of it. If I’d written the letters I did and then burned them up, I wouldn’t care so much. But I sent them. If I just hadn’t been so . . . so naked about it—that’s what makes it so . . . humiliating. And Mother’s been elegant. She really has. Never a single ‘Well, if you’d only listened to me, darling!’ nor any business about ‘You can’t go on like this forever, dear.’ Heaven knows there are plenty of men around here now, but she hasn’t once tried to stick one of them down my throat or say how attractive any of them are. And that’s self-control.”

Her laugh was a sort of spontaneous bubbling-up that was gone as quickly as it came.

“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” she said softly. “It just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, really.”