IV

In the dense sun-flooded noon of next day a spot in the sea

before them resolved casually into a green-and-gray islet,

apparently composed of a great granite cliff at its northern end

which slanted south through a mile of vivid coppice and grass to

a sandy beach melting lazily into the surf. When Ardita, reading

in her favorite seat, came to the last page of The Revolt of the

Angels, and slamming the book shut looked up and saw it, she

gave a little cry of delight, and called to Carlyle, who was

standing moodily by the rail.

"Is this it? Is this where you're going?"

Carlyle shrugged his shoulders carelessly.

"You've got me." He raised his voice and called up to the acting

skipper: "Oh, Babe, is this your island?"

The mulatto's miniature head appeared from round the corner of

the deck-house.

"Yas-suh! This yeah's it."

Carlyle joined Ardita.

"Looks sort of sporting, doesn't it?"

"Yes," she agreed; "but it doesn't look big enough to be much of

a hiding-place."

"You still putting your faith in those wirelesses your uncle was

going to have zigzagging round?"

"No," said Ardita frankly. "I'm all for you. I'd really like to

see you make a get-away."

He laughed.

"You're our Lady Luck. Guess we'll have to keep you with us as a

mascot--for the present anyway."

"You couldn't very well ask me to swim back," she said coolly.

"If you do I'm going to start writing dime novels founded on that

interminable history of your life you gave me last night."

He flushed and stiffened slightly.

"I'm very sorry I bored you."

"Oh, you didn't--until just at the end with some story about how

furious you were because you couldn't dance with the ladies you

played music for."

He rose angrily.

"You have got a darn mean little tongue."

"Excuse me," she said melting into laughter, "but I'm not used to

having men regale me with the story of their life

ambitions--especially if they've lived such deathly platonic

lives."

"Why? What do men usually regale you with?"

"Oh, they talk about me," she yawned. "They tell me I'm the

spirit of youth and beauty."

"What do you tell them?"

"Oh, I agree quietly."

"Does every man you meet tell you he loves you?"

Ardita nodded.

"Why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward, and

then a recession from, one phrase--'I love you.'"

Carlyle laughed and sat down.

"That's very true. That's--that's not bad. Did you make that up?"

"Yes--or rather I found it out. It doesn't mean anything

especially. It's just clever."

"It's the sort of remark," he said gravely, "that's typical of

your class."

"Oh," she interrupted impatiently, "don't start that lecture on

aristocracy again! I distrust people who can be intense at this

hour in the morning. It's a mild form of insanity--a sort of

breakfast-food jag. Morning's the time to sleep, swim, and be

careless."

Ten minutes later they had swung round in a wide circle as if to

approach the island from the north.

"There's a trick somewhere," commented Ardita thoughtfully. "He

can't mean just to anchor up against this cliff."

They were heading straight in now toward the solid rock, which

must have been well over a hundred feet tall, and not until they

were within fifty yards of it did Ardita see their objective.

Then she clapped her hands in delight. There was a break in the

cliff entirely hidden by a curious overlapping of rock, and

through this break the yacht entered and very slowly traversed a

narrow channel of crystal-clear water between high gray walls.

Then they were riding at anchor in a miniature world of green and

gold, a gilded bay smooth as glass and set round with tiny

palms, the whole resembling the mirror lakes and twig trees that

children set up in sand piles.

"Not so darned bad!" cried Carlyle excitedly. "I guess that little

coon knows his way round this corner of the Atlantic."

His exuberance was contagious, and Ardita became quite jubilant.

"It's an absolutely sure-fire hiding-place!"

"Lordy, yes! It's the sort of island you read about."

The rowboat was lowered into the golden lake and they pulled to

shore.

"Come on," said Carlyle as they landed in the slushy sand, "we'll

go exploring."

The fringe of palms was in turn ringed in by a round mile of

flat, sandy country. They followed it south and brushing through

a farther rim of tropical vegetation came out on a pearl-gray

virgin beach where Ardita kicked of her brown golf shoes--she

seemed to have permanently abandoned stockings--and went wading.

Then they sauntered back to the yacht, where the indefatigable

Babe had luncheon ready for them. He had posted a lookout on the

high cliff to the north to watch the sea on both sides, though he

doubted if the entrance to the cliff was generally known--he had

never even seen a map on which the island was marked.

"What's its name," asked Ardita--"the island, I mean?"

"No name 'tall," chuckled Babe. "Reckin she jus' island, 'at's

all."

In the late afternoon they sat with their backs against great

boulders on the highest part of the cliff and Carlyle sketched

for her his vague plans. He was sure they were hot after him by

this time. The total proceeds of the coup he had pulled off and

concerning which he still refused to enlighten her, he estimated

as just under a million dollars. He counted on lying up here

several weeks and then setting off southward, keeping well

outside the usual channels of travel rounding the Horn and

heading for Callao, in Peru. The details of coaling and

provisioning he was leaving entirely to Babe who, it seemed, had

sailed these seas in every capacity from cabin-boy aboard a

coffee trader to virtual first mate on a Brazillian pirate craft,

whose skipper had long since been hung.

"If he'd been white he'd have been king of South America long

ago," said Carlyle emphatically. "When it comes to intelligence

he makes Booker T. Washington look like a moron. He's got the

guile of every race and nationality whose blood is in his veins,

and that's half a dozen or I'm a liar. He worships me because I'm

the only man in the world who can play better ragtime than he

can. We used to sit together on the wharfs down on the New York

water-front, he with a bassoon and me with an oboe, and we'd

blend minor keys in African harmonics a thousand years old until

the rats would crawl up the posts and sit round groaning and

squeaking like dogs will in front of a phonograph."

Ardita roared.

"How you can tell 'em!"

Carlyle grinned.

"I swear that's the gos---"

"What you going to do when you get to Callao?" she interrupted.

"Take ship for India. I want to be a rajah. I mean it. My idea is

to go up into Afghanistan somewhere, buy up a palace and a

reputation, and then after about five years appear in England

with a foreign accent and a mysterious past. But India first. Do

you know, they say that all the gold in the world drifts very

gradually back to India. Something fascinating about that to me.

And I want leisure to read--an immense amount."

"How about after that?"

"Then," he answered defiantly, "comes aristocracy. Laugh if you

want to--but at least you'll have to admit that I know what I

want--which I imagine is more than you do."

"On the contrary," contradicted Ardita, reaching in her pocket

for her cigarette case, "when I met you I was in the midst of a

great uproar of all my friends and relatives because I did know

what I wanted."

"What was it?"

"A man."

He started.

"You mean you were engaged?"

"After a fashion. If you hadn't come aboard I had every intention

of slipping ashore yesterday evening--how long ago it seems--and

meeting him in Palm Beach. He's waiting there for me with a

bracelet that once belonged to Catherine of Russia. Now don't

mutter anything about aristocracy," she put in quickly. "I liked

him simply because he had had an imagination and the utter

courage of his convictions."

"But your family disapproved, eh?"

"What there is of it--only a silly uncle and a sillier aunt. It

seems he got into some scandal with a red-haired woman name Mimi

something--it was frightfully exaggerated, he said, and men don't

lie to me--and anyway I didn't care what he'd done; it was the

future that counted. And I'd see to that. When a man's in love

with me he doesn't care for other amusements. I told him to drop

her like a hot cake, and he did."

"I feel rather jealous," said Carlyle, frowning--and then he

laughed. "I guess I'll just keep you along with us until we get

to Callao. Then I'll lend you enough money to get back to the

States. By that time you'll have had a chance to think that

gentleman over a little more."

"Don't talk to me like that!" fired up Ardita. "I won't tolerate

the parental attitude from anybody! Do you understand me?"

He chuckled and then stopped, rather abashed, as her cold anger

seemed to fold him about and chill him.

"I'm sorry," he offered uncertainly.

"Oh, don't apologize! I can't stand men who say 'I'm sorry' in

that manly, reserved tone. Just shut up!"

A pause ensued, a pause which Carlyle found rather awkward, but

which Ardita seemed not to notice at all as she sat contentedly

enjoying her cigarette and gazing out at the shining sea. After a

minute she crawled out on the rock and lay with her face over

the edge looking down. Carlyle, watching her, reflected how it

seemed impossible for her to assume an ungraceful attitude.

"Oh, look," she cried. "There's a lot of sort of ledges down

there. Wide ones of all different heights."

"He joined her and together they gazed down the dizzy height."

"We'll go swimming to-night!" she said excitedly. "By moonlight."

"Wouldn't you rather go in at the beach on the other end?"

"Not a chance. I like to dive. You can use my uncle's bathing

suit, only it'll fit you like a gunny sack, because he's a very

flabby man. I've got a one-piece that's shocked the natives all

along the Atlantic coast from Biddeford Pool to St. Augustine."

"I suppose you're a shark."

"Yes, I'm pretty good. And I look cute too. A sculptor up at Rye

last summer told me my calves are worth five hundred dollars."

There didn't seem to be any answer to this, so Carlyle was

silent, permitting himself only a discreet interior smile.

V

When the night crept down in shadowy blue and silver they

threaded the shimmering channel in the rowboat and, tying it to a

jutting rock, began climbing the cliff together. The first shelf

was ten feet up, wide, and furnishing a natural diving platform.

There they sat down in the bright moonlight and watched the

faint incessant surge of the waters almost stilled now as the

tide set seaward.

"Are you happy?" he asked suddenly.

She nodded.

"Always happy near the sea. You know," she went on, "I've been

thinking all day that you and I are somewhat alike. We're both

rebels--only for different reasons. Two years ago, when I was

just eighteen and you were---"

"Twenty-five."

"---well, we were both conventional successes. I was an utterly

devastating débutante and you were a prosperous musician just

commissioned in the army---"

"Gentleman by act of Congress," he put in ironically.

"Well, at any rate, we both fitted. If our corners were not

rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was

something that made us require more for happiness. I didn't know

what I wanted. I went from man to man, restless, impatient,

month by month getting less acquiescent and more dissatisfied. I

used to sit sometimes chewing at the insides of my mouth and

thinking I was going crazy--I had a frightful sense of

transiency. I wanted things now--now--now! Here I

was--beautiful--I am, aren't I?"

"Yes," agreed Carlyle tentatively.

Ardita rose suddenly.

"Wait a second. I want to try this delightful-looking sea."

She walked to the end of the ledge and shot out over the sea,

doubling up in mid-air and then straightening out and entering to

water straight as a blade in a perfect jack-knife dive.

In a minute her voice floated up to him.

"You see, I used to read all day and most of the night. I began

to resent society---"

"Come on up here," he interrupted. "What on earth are you doing?"

"Just floating round on my back. I'll be up in a minute. Let me

tell you. The only thing I enjoyed was shocking people; wearing

something quite impossible and quite charming to a fancy-dress

party, going round with the fastest men in New York, and getting

into some of the most hellish scrapes imaginable."

The sounds of splashing mingled with her words, and then he heard

her hurried breathing as she began climbing up side to the

ledge.

"Go on in!" she called

Obediently he rose and dived. When he emerged, dripping, and

made the climb he found that she was no longer on the ledge, but

after a second frightened he heard her light laughter from another shelf

ten feet up. There he joined her and they both sat quietly for a

moment, their arms clasped round their knees, panting a little

from the climb.

"The family were wild," she said suddenly. "They tried to marry

me off. And then when I'd begun to feel that after all life was

scarcely worth living I found something"--her eyes went skyward

exultantly---"I found something!"

Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush.

"Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to

cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in

myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some

manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that

attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of

life. All sorts of courage--the beaten, bloody prize-fighter

coming up for more--I used to make men take me to prize-fights;

the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at

them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like

always; the utter disregard for other people's opinions--just to

live as I liked always and to die in my own way-- Did you bring

up the cigarettes?"

He handed one over and held a match for her gently.

"Still," Ardita continued, "the men kept gathering--old men and

young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but

all intensely desiring to have me--to own this rather

magnificent proud tradition I'd built up round me. Do you see?"

"Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized."

"Never!"

She sprang to the edge, poised for a moment like a crucified

figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked

without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.

Her voice floated up to him again.

"And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist

that comes down on life--not only overriding people and

circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of

insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient

things."

She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the

damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back appeared on his

level.

"All very well," objected Carlyle. "You can call it courage, but

your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You

were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage

is one of the things that's gray and lifeless."

She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing

abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like

a grotesque god into a niche in the rock.

"I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she began, "but you

haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith--faith in the eternal

resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and

spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my

lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide--not necessarily any

silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite

often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male."

"But supposing," suggested Carlyle, "that before joy and hope and

all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?"

Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty

to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above.

"Why," she called back "then I'd have won!"

He edged out till he could see her.

"Better not dive from there! You'll break your back," he said

quickly.

She laughed.

"Not I!"

Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan-like, radiating a

pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in Carlyle's

heart.

"We're going through the black air with our arms wide and our

feet straight out behind like a dolphin's tail, and we're going

to think we'll never hit the silver down there till suddenly

it'll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing

waves."

Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involuntarily held his

breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet.

It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as

she reached the sea.

And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery

laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious

ears that he knew he loved her.