Angel Island | Page 4

waves
flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an
iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high;
but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew
bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into
the sky, deepened - and the sea reflected it, Suddenly the world was one
huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and
half the burnished azure sea. None of the five men looked at the sea and
sky now. The other four were considering Frank Merrill's words and he
was considering the other four.

"Lord, God!" Ralph Addington exclaimed suddenly. "Think of being in
a place like this six months or a year without a woman round! Why,
we'll be savages at the end of three months." He snarled his words. It
was as if a new aspect of the situation - an aspect more crucially
alarming than any other - had just struck him.
"Yes," said Frank Merrill. And for a moment, so much had he
recovered himself, he reverted to his academic type. "Aside from the
regret and horror and shame that I feel to have survived when every
woman drowned, I confess to that feeling too. Women keep up the
standards of life. It would have made a great difference with us if there
were only one or two women here."
"If there'd been five, you mean," Ralph Addington amended. A feeble,
white-toothed smile gleamed out of his dark beard. He, too, had pulled
himself together; this smile was not muscular contraction. "One or two,
and the fat would be in the fire."
Nobody added anything to this. But now the other three considered
Ralph Addington's words with the same effort towards concentration
that they had brought to Frank Merrill's. Somehow his smile - that
flashing smile which showed so many teeth against a background of
dark beard - pointed his words uncomfortably.
Of them all, Ralph Addington was perhaps, the least popular. This was
strange; for he was a thorough sport, a man of a wide experience. He
was salesman for a business concern that manufactured a white
shoe-polish, and he made the rounds of the Oriental countries every
year. He was a careful and intelligent observer both of men and things.
He was widely if not deeply read. He was an interesting talker. He
could, for or instance, meet each of the other four on some point of
mental contact. A superficial knowledge of sociology and a practical
experience with many races brought him and Frank Merrill into
frequent discussion. His interest in all athletic sports and his firsthand
information in regard to them made common ground between him and
Billy Fairfax. With Honey Smith, he talked business, adventure, and
romance; with Pete Murphy, German opera, French literature,
American muckraking, and Japanese art. The flaw which made him

alien was not of personality but of character.
He presented the anomaly of a man scrupulously honorable in regard to
his own sex, and absolutely codeless in regard to the other. He was
what modern nomenclature calls a "contemporaneous varietist." He was,
in brief, an offensive type of libertine. Woman, first and foremost, was
his game. Every woman attracted him. No woman held him. Any new
woman, however plain, immediately eclipsed her predecessor, however
beautiful. The fact that amorous interests took precedence over all
others was quite enough to make him vaguely unpopular with men. But
as in addition, he was a physical type which many women find
interesting, it is likely that an instinctive sex-jealousy, unformulated but
inevitable, biassed their judgment. He was a typical business man; but
in appearance he represented the conventional idea of an artist. Tall,
muscular, graceful, hair thick and a little wavy, beard pointed and
golden-brown, eyes liquid and long-lashed, women called him
"interesting." There was, moreover, always a slight touch of the
picturesque in his clothes; he was master of the small amatory ruses
which delight flirtatious women.
In brief, men were always divided in their own minds in regard to
Ralph Addington. They knew that, constantly, he broke every canon of
that mysterious flexible, half-developed code which governs their
relations with women. But no law of that code compelled them to
punish him for ungenerous treatment of somebody's else wife or sister.
Had he been dishonorable with them, had he once borrowed without
paying, had he once cheated at cards, they would have ostracized him
forever. He had done none of these things, of course.
"By jiminy!" exclaimed Honey Smith, "how I hate the unfamiliar air of
everything. I'd like to put my lamps on something I know. A ranch and
a round-up would look pretty good to me at this moment. Or a