“Insomnia2 has been a handicap all my life,” she said, while she tickled3 The Fop with a spur in order to check a threatened belligerence4. “But I early learned to keep the irritation5 of it off my nerves and the weight of it off my mind. In fact, I early came to make a function of it and actually to derive6 enjoyment7 from it. It was the only way to master a thing I knew would persist as long as I persisted. Have you—of course you have—learned to win through an undertow?”
“Yes, by never fighting it,” Graham answered, his eyes on the spray of color in her cheeks and the tiny beads8 of sweat that arose from her continuous struggle with the high-strung creature she rode. Thirty-eight! He wondered if Ernestine had lied. Paula Forrest did not look twenty-eight. Her skin was the skin of a girl, with all the delicate, fine-pored and thin transparency of the skin of a girl.
“Exactly,” she went on. “By not fighting the undertow. By yielding to its down-drag and out-drag, and working with it to reach air again. Dick taught me that trick. So with my insomnia. If it is excitement from immediate9 events that holds me back from the City of Sleep, I yield to it and come quicker to unconsciousness from out the entangling10 currents. I invite my soul to live over again, from the same and different angles, the things that keep me from unconsciousness.
“Take the swimming of Mountain Lad yesterday. I lived it over last night as I had lived it in reality. Then I lived it as a spectator—as the girls saw it, as you saw it, as the cowboy saw it, and, most of all, as my husband saw it. Then I made up a picture of it, many pictures of it, from all angles, and painted them, and framed them, and hung them, and then, a spectator, looked at them as if for the first time. And I made myself many kinds of spectators, from crabbed11 old maids and lean pantaloons to girls in boarding school and Greek boys of thousands of years ago.
“After that I put it to music. I played it on the piano, and guessed the playing of it on full orchestras and blaring bands. I chanted it, I sang it-epic, lyric12, comic; and, after a weary long while, of course I slept in the midst of it, and knew not that I slept until I awoke at twelve to-day. The last time I had heard the clock strike was six. Six unbroken hours is a capital prize for me in the sleep lottery13.”
As she finished, Mr. Hennessy rode away on a cross path, and Dick Forrest dropped back to squire14 his wife on the other side.
“Will you sport a bet, Evan?” he queried15.
“I’d like to hear the terms of it first,” was the answer.
“Cigars against cigars that you can’t catch Paula in the tank inside ten minutes—no, inside five, for I remember you’re some swimmer.”
“Oh, give him a chance, Dick,” Paula cried generously. “Ten minutes will worry him.”
“But you don’t know him,” Dicked argued. “And you don’t value my cigars. I tell you he is a swimmer. He’s drowned kanakas, and you know what that means.”
“Perhaps I should reconsider. Maybe he’ll slash16 a killing17 crawl-stroke at me before I’ve really started. Tell me his history and prizes.”
“I’ll just tell you one thing. They still talk of it in the Marquesas. It was the big hurricane of 1892. He did forty miles in forty-five hours, and only he and one other landed on the land. And they were all kanakas. He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the last kanaka of them—”
“I thought you said there was one other?” Paula interrupted.
“She was a woman,” Dick answered. “He drowned the last kanaka.”
“And the woman was then a white woman?” Paula insisted.
Graham looked quickly at her, and although she had asked the question of her husband, her head turned to the turn of his head, so that he found her eyes meeting his straightly and squarely in interrogation. Graham held her gaze with equal straightness as he answered: “She was a kanaka.”
“A queen, if you please,” Dick took up. “A queen out of the ancient chief stock. She was Queen of Huahoa.”
“Was it the chief stock that enabled her to out-endure the native men?” Paula asked. “Or did you help her?”
“I rather think we helped each other toward the end,” Graham replied. “We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in. We made the land at sunset—that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf bursting sky-high. She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to get some sense in me. You see, I wanted to go in, which would have meant finish.
“She got me to understand that she knew where she was; that the current set westerly along shore and in two hours would drift us abreast18 of a spot where we could land. I swear I either slept or was unconscious most of those two hours; and I swear she was in one state or the other when I chanced to come to and noted19 the absence of the roar of the surf. Then it was my turn to claw and maul her back to consciousness. It was three hours more before we made the sand. We slept where we crawled out of the water. Next morning’s sun burnt us awake, and we crept into the shade of some wild bananas, found fresh water, and went to sleep again. Next I awoke it was night. I took another drink, and slept through till morning. She was still asleep when the bunch of kanakas, hunting wild goats from the next valley, found us.”
“I’ll wager20, for a man who drowned a whole kanaka crew, it was you who did the helping,” Dick commented.
“She must have been forever grateful,” Paula challenged, her eyes directly on Graham’s. “Don’t tell me she wasn’t young, wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t a golden brown young goddess.”
“Her mother was the Queen of Huahoa,” Graham answered. “Her father was a Greek scholar and an English gentleman. They were dead at the time of the swim, and Nomare was queen herself. She was young. She was beautiful as any woman anywhere in the world may be beautiful. Thanks to her father’s skin, she as not golden brown. She was tawny22 golden. But you’ve heard the story undoubtedly—”
He broke off with a look of question to Dick, who shook his head.
Calls and cries and splashings of water from beyond a screen of trees warned them that they were near the tank.
“You’ll have to tell me the rest of the story some time,” Paula said.
“Dick knows it. I can’t see why he hasn’t told you.”
She shrugged23 her shoulders.
“Perhaps because he’s never had the time or the provocation24.”
“God wot, it’s had wide circulation,” Graham laughed. “For know that I was once morganatic—or whatever you call it—king of the cannibal isles25, or of a paradise of a Polynesian isle26 at any rate.—’By a purple wave on an opal beach in the hush27 of the Mahim woods,’” he hummed carelessly, in conclusion, and swung off from his horse.
“‘The white moth21 to the closing vine, the bee to the opening clover,’” she hummed another line of the song, while The Fop nearly got his teeth into her leg and she straightened him out with the spur, and waited for Dick to help her off and tie him.
“Cigars!—I’m in on that!—you can’t catch her!” Bert Wainwright called from the top of the high dive forty feet above. “Wait a minute! I’m coming!”
And come he did, in a swan dive that was almost professional and that brought handclapping approval from the girls.
“A sweet dive, balanced beautifully,” Graham told him as he emerged from the tank.
Bert tried to appear unconscious of the praise, failed, and, to pass it off, plunged28 into the wager.
“I don’t know what kind of a swimmer you are, Graham,” he said, “but I just want in with Dick on the cigars.”
“Me, too; me, too!” chorused Ernestine, and Lute29, and Rita.
“Boxes of candy, gloves, or any truck you care to risk,” Ernestine added.
“But I don’t know Mrs. Forrest’s records, either,” Graham protested, after having taken on the bets. “However, if in five minutes—”
“Ten minutes,” Paula said, “and to start from opposite ends of the tank. Is that fair? Any touch is a catch.” Graham looked his hostess over with secret approval. She was clad, not in the single white silk slip she evidently wore only for girl parties, but in a coquettish imitation of the prevailing30 fashion mode, a suit of changeable light blue and green silk—almost the color of the pool; the skirt slightly above the knees whose roundedness he recognized; with long stockings to match, and tiny bathing shoes bound on with crossed ribbons. On her head was a jaunty31 swimming cap no jauntier32 than herself when she urged the ten minutes in place of five.
Rita Wainwright held the watch, while Graham walked down to the other end of the hundred-and-fifty-foot tank.
“Paula, you’ll be caught if you take any chances,” Dick warned. “Evan Graham is a real fish man.”
“I guess Paula’ll show him a few, even without the pipe,” Bert bragged33 loyally. “And I’ll bet she can out-dive him.”
“There you lose,” Dick answered. “I saw the rock he dived from at Huahoa. That was after his time, and after the death of Queen Nomare. He was only a youngster—twenty-two; he had to be to do it. It was off the peak of the Pau-wi Rock—one hundred and twenty-eight feet by triangulation. And he couldn’t do it legitimately34 or technically
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