Angel Island | Page 8

wit. Also it gave his fellow
creatures a gratifying sense of equality to pick humorous flaws in one

so manifestly a darling of the gods.
Honey Smith possessed not a trace of genius, not a suggestion of what
is popularly termed "temperament." He had no mind to speak of, and
not more than the usual amount of character. In fact, but for one thing,
he was an average person. That one thing was personality - and
personality he possessed to an extraordinary degree. Indeed, there
seemed to be something mysteriously compelling about this personality
of Honey's. The whole world of creatures felt its charm. Dumb beasts
fawned on him. Children clung to him. Old people lingered near as
though they could light dead fires in the blaze of his radiant youth. Men
hob-nobbed with him; his charm brushed off on to the dryest and
dullest so that, temporarily, they too bloomed with personality. As for
women - His appearance among them was the signal for a noiseless
social cataclysm. They slipped and slid in his direction as helplessly as
if an inclined plane had opened under their feet. They fluttered in
circles about him like birds around a light. If he had been allowed to
follow the pull of his inclination, they would have held a subsidiary
place in his existence. For he was practical, balanced, sane. He had,
moreover, the tendency towards temperance of the born athlete.
Besides all this, his main interests were man-interests. But women
would not let him alone. He had but to look and the thing was done.
Wreaths hung on every balcony for Honey Smith and, always at his
approach, the door of the harem swung wide. He was a little lazy,
almost discourteously uninterested in his attitude towards, the
individual female; for he had never had to exert himself.
It is likely that all this personal popularity would have been the result
of that trick of personality. But many good fairies had been summoned
to Honey's christening; he had good looks besides. He was really tall,
although his broad shoulders seemed to reduce him to medium height.
Brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired, his skin was as smooth as
satin, his eyes as clear as crystal, his hair as thick as fur. His expression
had tremendous sparkle. But his main physical charm was a smile
which crumpled his brown face into an engaging irregularity of contour
and lighted it with an expression brilliant with mirth and friendliness.

He was a true soldier of fortune. In the ten years which his business
career covered be had engaged in a score of business ventures. He had
lost two fortunes. Born in the West, educated in the East, he had
flashed from coast to coast so often that he himself would have found it
hard to say where he belonged.
He was the admiration and the wonder and the paragon and the
criterion of his friend Billy Fairfax, who had trailed his meteoric course
through college and who, when the Brian Boru went down, was
accompanying him on his most recent adventure - a globe-trotting trip
in the interests of a moving-picture company. Socially they made an
excellent team. For Billy contributed money, birth, breeding, and
position to augment Honey's initiative, enterprise, audacity, and charm.
Billy Fairfax offered other contrasts quite as striking. On his physical
side, he was shapelessly strong and hopelessly ugly, a big,
shock-headed blond. On his personal side "mere mutt-man" was the
way one girl put it, "too much of a damned gentleman" Honey Smith
said to him regularly.
Billy Fairfax was not, however, without charm of a certain shy, evasive,
slow-going kind; and he was not without his own distinction. His huge
fortune had permitted him to cultivate many expensive sports and
sporting tastes. His studs and kennels and strings of polo ponies were
famous. He was a polo-player well above the average and an aviator
not far below it.
Pete Murphy, the fifth of the group, was the delight of them all. The
carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he
could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he
was made, according to Billy Fairfax's dictum, of "wire and brass
tacks," and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean
gift in that direction) called "the gift of gab." He lived by writing
magazine articles. Also he wrote fiction, verse, and drama. Also he was
a painter. Also he was a musician. In short, he was an Irishman.
Artistically, he had all the perception of the Celt plus the acquired
sapience of the painter's training. If he could have existed in a universe
which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe inhabited only

by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablest citizen; but he