And then the room seemed to fill with tears that ended in laughter, and laughter that ended in tears.

VI

"They won't be home until very late tonight," announced Lulu. "The work they're doing now is hard and irritating and fussy. Honey says that they want to get through with it as soon as possible. He said they'd keep at it as long as the light lasted."

"It seems as if their working days grew longer all the time," Clara said petulantly. "They start off earlier and earlier in the morning and they stay later and later at night. And did you know that they are planning soon to stay a week at the New Camp--they say the walk back is so fatiguing after a long day's work."

The others nodded.

"And then the instant they've had their dinner," Lulu continued, "off they go to that tiresome Clubhouse--for tennis and ball and bocci. It seems, somehow, as if I never had a chance to talk with Honey nowadays.

I should think they'd get enough of each other, working side by side all day long, the way they do. But no! The moment they've eaten and had their smoke, they must get together again. Why is it, I wonder? I should think they would have said all they had to say in the daytime."

"Pete is worse than any of them," Clara went on. "After he comes back from the Clubhouse, he wants to sit up and write for an hour or two. Oh, I get fairly desperate sometimes, sitting there listening to the eternal scratching of his pen. I cannot understand his point of view, to save my life. If I talk, it irritates him. My very breathing annoys him; he cannot have me in the same room with him. But if I leave the cabin, he can't write a word. He wants me near, always. He says it's the knowing I'm there that makes him feel like writing. And then Sundays, if he isn't writing, he's painting. I don't mind his not being there in the daytime in a way because, of course, there's always Peterkin. But at night, when I've put Peterkin to bed I do want something different to happen. As it is, I have to make a scene to get up any excitement. I do it, too, without compunction. When it gets to the point that I know I must scream or go crazy, I scream. And I do a good job in screaming, too."

"What would you like him to do, Clara?" Julia asked.

The petulant frown between Clara's eyebrows deepened. "I don't know,"

she said wearily. "I don't know what it is that I want to do; but I want to do something. Peterkin is asleep and perfectly safe--and I feel like going somewhere. Now, if I could fly, it would rest me so, to go for a long, long journey through the air." As she concluded, some new expression, some strange hardness of her maturity, melted; her face was for an instant the face of the old Clara.

Julia made no comment.

It was Chiquita who took it up.

"My husband talks enough. In fact, he talks all the time. But if I tire of his voice, I let myself fall asleep. He never notices. That is why I've grown so big. Sometimes"--discontent dulled for an instant the slow fire of her slumberous eyes--"sometimes my life seems one long sleep. If it weren't for junior, I'd feel as if I weren't quite alive."

"Ralph talks a great deal," Peachy said listlessly, "by fits and starts, and he takes me out when he comes home, if he happens to feel like walking himself. He says, though, that it exhausts him having to help me along. But it isn't that I want particularly. Often I want to go out alone. I want to soar. The earth has never satisfied me. I want to explore the heights. I want to explore them alone, and I want to explore them when the mood seizes me. And I want to feel when I come back that I can talk about it or keep silent as he does. But I must make my discoveries and explorations in my own way. Ralph sometimes gives me long talks about astronomy--he seems to think that studying about the stars will quiet me. One little flight straight up would mean more to me than all that talk. Ralph does not understand it in me, and I cannot explain it to him. And yet he feels exactly that way himself--he's always going off by himself through unexplored trails on the island. But he cannot comprehend how I, being a woman, should have the same desire.

Do you remember when our wings first began to grow strong and our people kept us confined, how we beat our wings against the wall--beat and beat and beat? At times now, I feel exactly like that. Why, sometimes I envy little Angela her wings."

The five women reclined on long, low rustic couches in the big, cleared half-oval that was the Playground for their children. It began--this half-oval--in high land among the trees and spread down over a beach to the waters of a tiny cove. Between the high tapering boles of the pines at their back the sky dropped a curtain of purple. Between the long ledges of tawny rock in front the sea stretched a carpet of turquoise.

And between pines and sea lay first a rusty mat of pine-needles, then a ribbon of purple stones, then a band of glittering sand. In the air the resinous smell of the pines competed with the salty tang of the ocean.

High up, silver-winged gulls curved and dipped and called their creaking signals.

At the water's edge four children were playing. Honey-Boy had waded out waist-deep. A st.u.r.dy, dark, strong-bodied, tiny replica of his father, he stood in an exact reproduction of one of Honey's poses, his arms folded over his little pouter-pigeon chest, lips pursed, brows frowning, dimples inhibited, gazing into the water. Just beyond, one foot on the bottom, Peterkin pretended to swim. Peterkin had an unearthly beauty that was half Clara's coloring--combination of tawny hair with gray-green eyes--and half Pete's expression--the look, doubly strange, of the Celt and the genius. Slender and beautifully formed, graceful, he was in every possible way a contrast to virile little Billy-Boy; he was even elegant; he had the look of a story-book prince. Far up the beach, cuddled in a warm puddle, naked, sat a fat, redheaded baby, Frank Merrill, junior. He watched the others intently for a while. Then breaking into a grin which nearly bisected the face under the fiery thatch, he began an imitative paddle with his pudgy hands and feet.

Flitting hither and yon, hovering one moment at the water's edge and another at Junior's side, moving with a capricious will-o'-the-wisp motion that dominated the whole picture, flew Angela.

Beautiful as the other children were, they sank to commonplaces in contrast with Angela.

For Angela was a being of faery. Her single loose garment, serrated at the edges, knee-length, and armless, left slits at the back for a pair of wings to emerge. Tiny these wings were, and yet they were perfect in form; they soared above her head, soft, fine, shining, delicate as milkweed-down and of a white that was beginning, near the shoulders, to deepen to a pale rose. Angela's little body was as slender as a flower-stem. Her limbs showed but the faintest of curves, her skin but the faintest of tints. Almost transparent in the sunlight, she had in the shadow the coloring of the opal, pale rose-pinks and pale violet-blues. Her hair floated free to her shoulders; and that, more than any other detail, seemed to accent the quality of faery in her personality. In calm it clung to her head like a pale-gold mist; in breeze it floated away like a pale-gold nimbus. It seemed as though a shake of her head would send it drifting off--a huge thistle-down of gold. Her eyes reflected the tint of whatever blue they gazed on, whether it was the frank azure of the sky or the mysterious turquoise of the sea. And yet their look was strangely intent. When she pa.s.sed from shadow to sunshine, the light seemed to dissolve her hair and wing-edges, as though it were gradually taking her to itself.

"Oh, yes, Peachy," Lulu said, "Angela's wings must be a comfort to you.

You must live it all over again in her."

"I do!" answered Peachy. "I do." There was tremendous conviction in her voice, as though she were defending herself from some silent accusation.

"But it isn't the same. It isn't. It can't be. Besides, I want to fly with her."

The ripples in the cove grew to little waves, to big waves, to combers.

The women talked and the children played. Honey-Boy and Peterkin waded out to their shoulders, dipped, and pretended to swim back. Angela flew out to meet a wave bigger than the others, balanced on its crest. Wings outspread, she fluttered back, descended when the crash came in a shower of rainbow drops. She dipped and rose, her feathers dripping molten silver, flew on to the advancing crest.

"Oh," Lulu sighed, "I do want a little girl. I threatened if this one was a boy to drown it." "This one" proved to be a bundle lying on the pine-needles at her side. The bundle stirred and emitted a querulous protest. She picked it up and it proved to be a baby, just such another st.u.r.dy little dark creature as Honey-Boy must have been. "Your mother wouldn't exchange you for a million girls now," Lulu addressed him fondly. "I pray every night, though, that the next one will be a girl."

"I want a girl, too," Clara remarked. "Well, we'll see next spring."

Clara had not been happy at the prospect of her first maternity, but she was jubilant over her second.

"It will be nice for Angela, too," Peachy said, "to have some little girl to play with. Come, baby!" she called in a sudden access of tenderness.

Angela flew down from the tip of a billow, came fluttering and flying up the beach. Once or twice, for no apparent reason, her wings fell dead, sagged for a few moments; then her little pink, sh.e.l.l-like feet would pad helplessly on the sand. Twice she dropped her pinions deliberately; once to climb over a big root, once to mount a boulder that lay in her path. "Don't walk, Angela!" Peachy called sharply at these times. "Fly!

Fly!" And obediently, Angela stopped, waited until the strength flowed into her wings, started again. She reached the group of mothers, not by direct flight, but a complicated method of curving, arching, dipping, and circling. Peachy arose, balanced herself, caught her little daughter in midair, kissed her. The women handed her from one to the other, petting and caressing her.

Julia received her last. She sat with Angela in the curve of her arm, one hand caressing the drooped wings. It was like holding a little wild bird. With every breeze, Angela's wings opened. And always, hands, feet, hair, feathers fluttered with some temperamental unrest.

The boys tiring of the waves, came scrambling in their direction.

Half-way up the beach, they too came upon the boulder in the path. It was too high and smooth for them to climb, but they immediately set themselves to do it. Peterkin pulled himself half-way up, only immediately to fall back. Junior stood for an instant imitatively reaching up with his baby hands, then abandoning the attempt waddled off after a big b.u.t.terfly. Honey-Boy slipped and slid to the ground, but he was up in an instant and at it again.

Angela fluttered with baby-violence. Julia opened her arms. The child leaped from her lap, started half-running, half-flying, caught a seaward going breeze, sailed to the top of the boulder. She balanced herself there, gazing triumphantly down on Billy-Boy who, flat on his stomach, red in the face, his black eyes bulging out of his head, still pulled and tugged and strained.

"Honey-Boy's tried to climb that rock every day for three months," Lulu boasted proudly. "He'll do it some day. I never saw such persistence. If he gets a thing into his head, I can't do anything with him."

"Angela starts to climb it occasionally," Peachy said. "But, of course, I always stop her. I'm afraid she'll hurt her feet."

Above the rock stretched the bough of a big pine. As she contemplated it, a look of wonder grew in Angela's eyes, of question, of uncertainty.

Suddenly it became resolution. She spread her wings, bounded into the air, fluttered upwards, and alighted squarely on the bough.

"Oh, Angela!" Peachy called anxiously. Then, joyously, "Look at my baby.

She'll be flying as high as we did in a few years. Oh, how I love to think of that!"

She laughed in glee--and the others laughed with her. They continued to watch Angela's antics, their faces growing more and more gay. Julia alone did not smile; but she watched the exhibition none the less steadily.

Three years had brought some changes to the women of Angel Island; and for the most part they were devastating changes. They were still wingless. They wore long trailing garments that concealed their feet.

These garments differed in color and decoration, but they were alike in one detail-floating, wing-like draperies hung from the shoulders.

Chiquita had grown so large as to be almost unwieldy. But her tropical coloring retained its vividness, retained its breath-taking quality of picturesqueness, retained its alluring languor. She sat now holding a huge fan. Indeed, since the day that Honey had piled the fans on the beach, Chiquita had never been without one in her hand. Scarlet, the scarlet of her lost pinions, seemed to be her color. Her gown was scarlet.

Lulu had not grown big, but she had grown round. That look of the primitive woman which had made her strange, had softened and sobered.

Her beaute troublante had gone. Her face was, the face of a happy woman.

The maternal look in her eyes was duplicated by the married look in her figure. She was always busy. Even now, though she chattered, she sewed; her little fingers fluttered like the wings of an imprisoned bird.

Indeed, she looked like a little sober mother-bird in her gray and brown draperies. She was the best housewife among them. Honey lacked no creature comfort.

Clara also had filled out; in figure, she had improved; her elfin thinness had become slimness, delicately curved and subtly contoured.

Also her coloring had deepened; she was like a woman cast in gold.

But her expression was not pleasant. Her light, gray-green eyes had a petulant look; her thin, red lips a petulant droop. She was restless; something about her moved always. Either her long slender fingers adjusted her hair or her long slender feet beat a tattoo. And ever her figure shifted from one fluid pose to another. She wore jewels in her elaborately arranged hair, jewels about her neck, on her wrists, on her fingers. Her green draperies were embroidered in beads. She was, in fact, always dressed, costumed is perhaps the most appropriate word.

She dressed Peterkin picturesquely too; she was always, studying the ill.u.s.trations in their few books for ideas. Clara was one of those women at whom instinctively other women gaze--and gaze always with a question in their eyes.

Peachy was at the height of her blonde bloom; all pearl and gold, all rose and aquamarine. But something had gone out of her face--brilliance.

And something had come into it--pathos. The look of a mischievous boy had turned to a wild gipsy look of strangeness, a look of longing mixed with melancholy. In some respects there was more history written on her than on any of the others. But it was tragic history. At Angela's birth Peachy had gone insane. There had come times when for hours she shrieked or whispered, "My wings! My wings! My wings!" The devoted care of the other four women had saved her; she was absolutely normal now. Her figure still carried its suggestion of a potential, young-boy-like strength, but maternity had given a droop, exquisitely feminine, to the shoulders. She always wore blue--something that floated and shimmered with every move.