Angel Island | Page 9

was utterly disqualified to live in a human world. He was absolutely
incapable of judging people. His tendency was to underestimate men
and to overestimate women. His life bore all the scars inevitable to
such an instinct. Women, in particular, had played ducks and drakes
with his career. Weakly chivalrous, mindlessly gallant, he lacked the
faculty of learning by experience - especially where the other sex were
concerned. "Predestined to be stung!" was, his first wife's laconic
comment on her ex-husband. She, for instance, was undoubtedly the
blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she had managed to
extract a ruinous alimony from him. Twice married and twice divorced,
he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muck raking
articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last unhappy
matrimonial venture.
Physically, Pete was the black type of Celt. The wild thatch of his
scrubbing-brush hair shone purple in the light. Scrape his face as he
would, the purple shadow of his beard seemed ingrained in his white
white skin. Black-browed and black-lashed, he had the luminous
blue-gray-green eyes of the colleen. There was a curious untamable
quality in his look that was the mixture of two mad strains, the
aloofness of the Celt and the aloofness of the genius.
Three weeks passed. The clear, warm-cool, lucid, sunny weather kept
up. The ocean flattened, gradually. Twice every twenty-four hours the
tide brought treasure; but it brought less and less every day.
Occasionally came a stiffened human reminder of their great disaster.
But calloused as they were now to these experiences, the men buried it
with hasty ceremony and forgot.
By this time an incongruous collection stretched in parallel lines above
the high-water mark. "Something, anything, everything - and then
some," remarked Honey Smith. Wood wreckage of all descriptions,
acres of furniture, broken, split, blistered, discolored, swollen; piles of
carpets, rugs, towels, bed-linen, stained, faded, shrunken, torn; files of
swollen mattresses, pillows, cushions, life-preservers; heaps of
table-silver and kitchen-ware tarnished and rusty; mounds of china and

glass; mountains of tinned goods, barrels boxes, books, suit-cases,
leather bags; trunks and trunks and more trunks and still more trunks;
for, mainly, the trunks had saved themselves.
Part of the time, in between tides, they tried to separate the grain of this
huge collection of lumber from the chaff; part of the time they made
exploring trips into the interior. At night they sat about their huge fire
and talked.
The island proved to be about twenty miles in length by seven in width.
It was uninhabited and there were no large animals on it. It was Frank
Merrill's theory that it was the exposed peak of a huge extinct volcano.
In the center, filling the crater, was a little fresh-water lake. The island
was heavily wooded; but in contour it presented only diminutive
contrasts of hill and valley. And except as the semi-tropical foliage
offered novelties of leaf and flower, the beauties of unfamiliar shapes
and colors, it did not seem particularly interesting. Ralph Addington
was the guide of these expeditions. From this tree, he pointed out, the
South Sea Islander manufactured the tappa cloth, from that the
poeepooee, from yonder the arva. Honey Smith used to say that the
only depressing thing about these trips was the utter silence of the
gorgeous birds which they saw on every side. On the other hand, they
extracted what comfort they could from Merrill's and Addington's
assurance that, should the ship's supply give out, they could live
comfortably enough on birds' eggs, fruit, and fish.
Sorting what Honey Smith called the "ship-duffle" was one prolonged
adventure. At first they made little progress; for all five of them
gathered over each important find, chattering like girls. Each man
followed the bent of his individual instinct for acquisitiveness. Frank
Merrill picked out books, paper, writing materials of every sort. Ralph
Addington ran to clothes. The habit of the man with whom it is a
business policy to appear well-dressed maintained itself; even in their
Eveless Eden, he presented a certain tailored smartness. Billy Fairfax
selected kitchen utensils and tools. Later, he came across a box filled
with tennis rackets, nets, and balls. The rackets' strings had snapped
and the balls were dead. He began immediately to restring the rackets,

to make new balls from twine, to lay out a court. Like true soldiers of
fortune, Honey Smith and Pete Murphy made no special collection;
they looted for mere loot's sake.
One day, in the midst of one of their raids, Honey Smith yelled a
surprised and triumphant, "By jiminy!" The others showed no signs, of
interest. Honey was an alarmist; the treasure of the moment might
prove to be a Japanese print or a corkscrew. But as nobody stirred or
spoke, he called, "The Wilmington 'Blue'!"