"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 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 remainedimmobile, 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, 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, wherethey found him talking sugar politics with the oldsters when the dance began to break up.
