hagen’s island—a tiny realm of wonder and suspense.... there it lay, lost in a warm and dreaming sea, a blue on all sides of uncompromising intensity. yes, the island, saturated with sunshine, often richly agleam with pearls from a swift, brief downpour of rain, appeals to the eye as not quite real, with its murmurs of palm and giant fern, its ruined docks, its broken derrick once painted red and standing now against the lush bloom like a spectre ruling in an empire of everlasting silence. “quite capable once—h’m?—of bringing on a war somewhere”—yet now such a spot of smiling, dreaming quiet. (“oh, the laughter behind it all....”)
except when tempest sweeps, furious and black, across the world, whipping the sea into a churning fury and tearing through the close fabric of the jungle like an offended offspring of cerberus, the island sleeps and broods under a sky tenderly blue and lofty; while restless along the comb of the inner reefs is ever a rustling fringe of white, “a necklace with conscience of lead....” there is foam on the lap of the yellow beach. a place—yes, a place not unhaunted, and bringing sometimes, by the sheer charm of its drowsy hush, a little throb to the throat. and silence—so white and enthralling, whether at noon or lighted by luminous spheres of southern midnight: a silence such as one may encounter in some little lonely church among the hills of italy....
but all suddenly, within a house cleverly constructed of palm trunks, the silence was broken; a woman stood tacking[102] something against the wall. a man in riding breeches, pongee coat, and white shirt open at the throat, was just in the act of draining a little glass of amber coloured liquor in an adjoining room. he sang out to her:
“stella! what are you up to? you sound like a whole army of carpenters!”
she laughed with an effect of coyness and stepped back. “you’d never guess, ferd!”
“what is it?”
“no, you’ll have to come in and see.”
he came, his handsome face a little more flushed than usual, perhaps, and his eyes supremely blue and round.
“aha!” he exclaimed in the doorway of the room they humorously called their parlour.
“i didn’t know anything about it,” laughed the girl, “till i came across it at the very bottom of the trunk. i certainly would never have thought of bringing a calendar! maud must have slipped it in—she was always raving about that picture—isn’t it beautiful?” stella laughed derisively, though without bitterness, for the past was all behind her. “it used to hang in the dining room,” she explained. “i guess maud thought it might look cheerful to us a long way from home. it gives you a sort of feeling of being still in touch with the world, doesn’t it?”
“it does,” he agreed, and, with a faint smile, beheld a large mercantile calendar, a bright-coloured print filling the upper half. the picture showed a sailor just returned to his little home nest after hazardous voyages. all the colours were too gaudy, and the sailor’s dog was absurdly foreshortened; but it was a joyous tableau, within its frame of coiled and knotted ropes; and across the hearthrug, in energetic gold, one read:
oaks, ferguson & whitley,
ships’ chandlers
the soft, scented breath of the jungle outside crooned a little through the rustle of palm and fern fronds, just now and[103] then audible; and it stirred the mats at the windows and sometimes made the doors creak hauntingly on their jungle-vine hinges.
“what’s today?” asked king, lighting a cigarette. and he added, with a faint note of restlessness behind the laugh: “already it’s beginning not to matter much!”
stella glanced at the calendar gayly. “today is thursday—the fourteenth.” then, clasping her hands with some excitement, she exclaimed: “why, isn’t that st. valentine’s day?”
“by jove, you’re right, stella.”
she seemed quite delighted over the discovery, though it was with a trace of seriousness she mused: “doesn’t it seem strange to think of valentine’s day with nobody but ourselves within hundreds of miles who ever heard of st. valentine?”
she glanced around her at the primitive surroundings. a great, lustrous butterfly with heavy wings alighted on one of the sills and drooped there, poised.
king looked at his wife with half quizzical amusement. “can’t we celebrate some way, even so?”
“oh, yes—let’s!” she cried, eager to make the most of an unexpected fête day.
“i simply must step around to the florist’s and order you some orchids. shall i, little girl?”
“please do!” she laughed. “i’m sure you’ll find orchids in abundance just now—and so cheap! really yours for the picking!”
“you must admit,” he reminded her, “that living in a jungle possesses some advantages.”
“yes, even if not quite all the comforts of home!”
she liked these little flashes of “repartee,” for they always carried her back to the wonderful night at the ball; yet in the midst of it, oddly enough, she remembered the frilled paper-lace valentine jerome had sent her a year ago. she had found it, thick with cupids, tied to the doorknob; and it had proved really the beginning of their dull little courtship. “poor jerome,” she thought, “would have to do the conventional thing. such magnificence as orchids....”
king held out his arms romantically, and she ran to him. his look was at once dazzling and tender.
“give me a kiss, little girl!”
she raised her face happily.
“now another.”
“oh, ferd—i never dreamed of being so happy!”
“let me steal one on the tip of your nose,” he requested. “there!”
she laughed softly, and he asked: “how much do you love me, lady-bird?”
could any one doubt he had fallen in love with her as he might fall in love with irmengarde?
