The four men virtually took no time off from work; or at least the
change of work that stood for leisure was all in the line of
home-making. Eternally, they joked each other about these womanish
occupations; but they all kept steadily to it. Ralph Addington and Honey
Smith put the furniture into shape, repairing and polishing it. Billy
Fairfax sorted out the glass, china, tools, household utensils of every
kind.
Pete Murphy went through the trunks with his art side uppermost. He
collected all kinds of Oriental bric-a-brac, pictures and draperies. He
actually mended and pressed things; he had all the artist's capability
in these various feminine lines. When the others joked him about his
exotic and impracticable tastes, he said that, before he left, he
intended to establish a museum of fine arts, on Angel Island.
Hard as the men worked, they had always the appearance of those who
await the expected. But the expected did not occur; and gradually the
sharp edge of anticipation wore dull. Emotionally they calmed. Their
nerves settled to a normal condition. The sudden whirr of a bird's
flight attracted only a casual glance. In Ralph Addington alone,
expectation maintained itself at the boiling point. He trained himself
to work with one eye searching the horizon. One afternoon, when they had
scattered for a siesta, his hoarse cry brought them running to the beach
from all directions.
So suddenly had the girls appeared that they might have materialized
from the air. This time they had not come from the sea. When Ralph
discovered them, they were hovering back of them above the trees that
banded the beach. The sun was setting, blood-red; the whole western sky
had broken away. The girls seemed to be floating in a sea of
crimson-amber ether. Its light brought lustre to every feather; it
turned the edges of their wings to flame; it changed their smoothly
piled hair to helmets of burnished metal.
The men tore from the beach to the trees at full speed. For a moment the
violence of this action threw the girls into a panic. They fluttered,
broke lines, flew high, circled. And all the time, they uttered shrill
cries of distress.
"They're frightened," Billy Fairfax said. "Keep quiet, boys."
The men stopped running, stood stock-still.
Gradually the girls calmed, sank, took up the interweaving figures of
their air-dance. If at their first appearance they seemed creatures of
the sea, this time they were as distinctively of the forest. They looked
like spirits of the trees over which they hovered. Indeed, but for their
wings they might have been dryads. Wreaths of green encircled their
heads and waists. Long leafy streamers trailed from their shoulders.
Often in the course of their aerial play, they plunged down into the
feathery tree-tops.