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, where
they found him talking sugar politics with the oldsters when the
dance began to break up.
Quite a party of half a dozen machines were starting for Waikiki,
and he found himself billeted to drive the Leslies and Burnstons
home, though he did not fail to note that Ida sat in the driver’s
seat with Sonny in Sonny’s car. Thus, she was home ahead of him
and brushing her hair when he arrived. The parting of bed-going
was usual, on the face of it, although he was almost rigid in his
successful effort for casualness as he remembered whose lips had
pressed hers last before his.
Was, then, woman the utterly unmoral creature as depicted by the
German pessimists? he asked himself, as he tossed under his reading
lamp, unable to sleep or read. At the end of an hour he was out of
bed, and into his medicine case. Five grains of opium he took
straight. An hour later, afraid of his thoughts and the prospect
of a sleepless night, he took another grain. At one-hour intervals
he twice repeated the grain dosage. But so slow was the action of
the drug that dawn had broken ere his eyes closed.
At seven he was awake again, dry-mouthed, feeling stupid and
drowsy, yet incapable of dozing off for more than several minutes
at a time. He abandoned the idea of sleep, ate breakfast in bed,
and devoted himself to the morning papers and the magazines. But
the drug effect held, and he continued briefly to doze through his
eating and reading. It was the same when he showered and dressed,
and, though the drug had brought him little forgetfulness during
the night, he felt grateful for the dreaming lethargy with which it
possessed him through the morning.
It was when his wife arose, her serene and usual self, and came in
to him, smiling and roguish, delectable in her kimono, that the
whim-madness of the opium in his system seized upon him. When she
had clearly and simply shown that she had nothing to tell him under
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
109
their ancient compact of frankness, he began building his opium
lie. Asked how he had slept, he replied:
“Miserably. Twice I was routed wide awake with cramps in my feet.
I was almost too afraid to sleep again. But they didn’t come back,
though my feet are sorer than blazes.”
“Last year you had them,” she reminded him.
“Maybe it’s going to become a seasonal affliction,” he smiled.
“They’re not serious, but they’re horrible to wake up to. They
won’t come again till to-night, if they come at all, but in the
meantime I feel as if I had been bastinadoed.”
In the afternoon of the same day, Lee and Ida Barton made their
shallow dive from the Outrigger beach, and went on, at a steady
stroke, past the diving-stage to the big water beyond the Kanaka
Surf. So quiet was the sea that when, after a couple of hours,
they turned and lazily started shoreward through the Kanaka Surf
they had it all to themselves. The breakers were not large enough
to be exciting, and the last languid surf-boarders and canoeists
had gone in to shore. Suddenly, Lee turned over on his back.
“What is it?” Ida called from twenty feet away.
“My foot–cramp,” he answered calmly, though the words were twisted
out through clenched jaws of control.
The opium still had its dreamy way with him, and he was without
excitement. He watched her swimming toward him with so steady and
unperturbed a stroke that he admired her own self-control, although
at the same time doubt stabbed him with the thought that it was
because she cared so little for him, or, rather, so much
immediately more for Grandison.
“Which foot?” she asked, as she dropped her legs down and began
treading water beside him.
“The left one–ouch! Now it’s both of them.”
He doubled his knees, as if involuntarily raised his head and chest
forward out of the water, and sank out of sight in the down-wash of
a scarcely cresting breaker. Under no more than a brief several
seconds, he emerged spluttering and stretched out on his back
again.
Almost he grinned, although he managed to turn the grin into a
pain-grimace, for his simulated cramp had become real. At least in
one foot it had, and the muscles convulsed painfully.
“The right is the worst,” he muttered, as she evinced her intention
of laying hands on his cramp and rubbing it out. “But you’d better
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
110
keep away. I’ve had cramps before, and I know I’m liable to grab
you if these get any worse.”
Instead, she laid her hands on the hard-knotted muscles, and began
to rub and press and bend.
“Please,” he gritted through his teeth. “You must keep away. Just
let me lie out here–I’ll bend the ankle and toe-joints in the
opposite ways and make it pass. I’ve done it before and know how
to work it.”
She released him, remaining close beside him and easily treading
water, her eyes upon his face to judge the progress of his own
attempt at remedy. But Lee Barton deliberately bent joints and
tensed muscles in the directions that would increase the cramp. In
his bout the preceding year with the affliction, he had learned,
lying in bed and reading when seized, to relax and bend the cramps
away without even disturbing his reading. But now he did the thing
in reverse, intensifying the cramp, and, to his startled delight,
causing it to leap into his right calf. He cried out with anguish,
apparently lost control of himself, attempted to sit up, and was
washed under by the next wave.
He came up, spluttered, spread-eagled on the surface, and had his
knotted calf gripped by the strong fingers of both Ida’s small
hands.
“It’s all right,” she said, while she worked. “No cramp like this
lasts very long.”
“I didn’t know it could be so savage,” he groaned. “If only it
doesn’t go higher! It makes one feel so helpless.”
He gripped the biceps of both her arms in a sudden spasm,
attempting to climb out upon her as a drowning man might try to
climb out on an oar and sinking her down under him. In the
struggle under water, before he permitted her to wrench clear, her
rubber cap was torn off, and her hairpins pulled out, so that she
came up gasping for air and half-blinded by her wet-clinging hair.
Also, he was certain he had surprised her into taking in a quantity
of water.
“Keep away!” he warned, as he spread-eagled with acted
desperateness.
But her fingers were deep into the honest pain-wrack of his calf,
and in her he could observe no reluctance of fear.
“It’s creeping up,” he grunted through tight teeth, the grunt
itself a half-controlled groan.
He stiffened his whole right leg, as with another spasm, hurting
his real minor cramps, but flexing the muscles of his upper leg
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
111
into the seeming hardness of cramp.
The opium still worked in his brain, so that he could play-act
cruelly, while at the same time he appraised and appreciated her
stress of control and will that showed in her drawn face, and the
terror of death in her eyes, with beyond it and behind it, in her
eyes and through her eyes, the something more of the spirit of
courage, and higher thought, and resolution.
Still further, she did not enunciate so cheap a surrender as, “I’ll
die with you.” Instead, provoking his admiration, she did say,
quietly: “Relax. Sink until only your lips are out. I’ll support
your head. There must be a limit to cramp. No man ever died of
cramp on land. Then in the water no strong swimmer should die of
cramp. It’s bound to reach its worst and pass. We’re both strong
swimmers and cool-headed–”
He distorted his face and deliberately dragged her under. But when