_ From the colt pasture to the swimming tank Graham talked with his
hostess and rode as nearly beside her as The Fop's wickedness
permitted, while Dick and Hennessy, on ahead, were deep in ranch
business.
"Insomnia has been a handicap all my life," she said, while she
tickled The Fop with a spur in order to check a threatened
belligerence. "But I early learned to keep the irritation 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 derive enjoyment 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 beads 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 immediate events that holds me back from the City of Sleep, I
yield to it and come quicker to unconsciousness from out the
entangling 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 crabbed
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, lyric, 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 lottery."
As she finished, Mr. Hennessy rode away on a cross path, and Dick
Forrest dropped back to squire his wife on the other side.
"Will you sport a bet, Evan?" he queried.
"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 slash a killing 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
abreast 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 noted 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 wager, 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 tawny
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 shrugged her shoulders.
"Perhaps because he's never had the time or the provocation."
"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
isles, or of a paradise of a Polynesian isle at any rate.--'By a
purple wave on an opal beach in the hush of the Mahim woods,'" he
hummed carelessly, in conclusion, and swung off from his horse.
"'The white moth 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, plunged 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 Lute, 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 prevailing 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 jaunty swimming cap no jauntier 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 bragged
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 legitimately or technically with
a swan-dive, because he had to clear two lower ledges while he was in
the air. The upper ledge of the two, by their own traditions, was the
highest the best of the kanakas had ever dared since their traditions
began. Well, he did it. He became tradition. As long as the kanakas of
Huahoa survive he will remain tradition--Get ready, Rita. Start on the
full minute."
"It's almost a shame to play tricks on so reputable a swimmer," Paula
confided to them, as she faced her guest down the length of the tank
and while both waited the signal.
"He may get you before you can turn the trick," Dick warned again. And
then, to Bert, with just a shade of anxiety: "Is it working all right?
Because if it isn't, Paula will have a bad five seconds getting out of
it."
"All O.K.," Bert assured. "I went in myself. The pipe is working.
There's plenty of air."
"Ready!" Rita called. "Go!"
Graham ran toward their end like a foot-racer, while Paula darted up
the high dive. By the time she had gained the top platform, his hands
and feet were on the lower rungs. When he was half-way up she
threatened a dive, compelling him to cease from climbing and to get
out on the twenty-foot platform ready to follow her to the water.
Whereupon she laughed down at him and did not dive. "Time is passing--
the precious seconds are ticking off," Ernestine chanted.
When he started to climb, Paula again chased him to the half-way
platform with a threat to dive. But not many seconds did Graham waste.
His next start was determined, and Paula, poised for her dive, could
not send him scuttling back. He raced upward to gain the thirty-foot
platform before she should dive, and she was too wise to linger. Out
into space she launched, head back, arms bent, hands close to chest,
legs straight and close together, her body balanced horizontally on
the air as it fell outward and downward.
"Oh you Annette Kellerman!" Bert Wamwright's admiring cry floated up.
Graham ceased pursuit to watch the completion of the dive, and saw his
hostess, a few feet above the water, bend her head forward, straighten
out her arms and lock the hands to form the arch before her head, and,
so shifting the balance of her body, change it from the horizontal to
the perfect, water-cleaving angle.
The moment she entered the water, he swung out on the thirty-foot
platform and waited. From this height he could make out her body
beneath the surface swimming a full stroke straight for the far end of
the tank. Not till then did he dive. He was confident that he could
outspeed her, and his dive, far and flat, entered him in the water
twenty feet beyond her entrance.
But at the instant he was in, Dick dipped two flat rocks into the
water and struck them together. This was the signal for Paula to
change her course. Graham heard the concussion and wondered. He broke
surface in the full swing of the crawl and went down the tank to the
far end at a killing pace. He pulled himself out and watched the
surface of the tank. A burst of handclapping from the girls drew his
eyes to the Little Lady drawing herself out of the tank at the other
end.
Again he ran down the side of the tank, and again she climbed the
scaffold. But this time his wind and endurance enabled him to cut down
her lead, so that she was driven to the twenty-foot platform. She took
no time for posturing or swanning, but tilted immediately off in a
stiff dive, angling toward the west side of the tank. Almost they were
in the air at the same time. In the water and under it, he could feel
against his face and arms the agitation left by her progress; but she
led into the deep shadow thrown by the low afternoon sun, where the
water was so dark he could see nothing.
When he touched the side of the tank he came up. She was not in sight.
He drew himself out, panting, and stood ready to dive in at the first
sign of her. But there were no signs.
"Seven minutes!" Rita called. "And a half! ... Eight!... And a half!"
And no Paula Forrest broke surface. Graham refused to be alarmed
because he could see no alarm on the faces of the others.
"I lose," he announced at Rita's "Nine minutes!"
"She's been under over two minutes, and you're all too blessed calm
about it to get me excited," he said. "I've still a minute--maybe I
don't lose," he added quickly, as he stepped off feet first into the
tank.
As he went down he turned over and explored the cement wall of tank
with his hands. Midway, possibly ten feet under the surface he
estimated, his hands encountered an opening in the wall. He felt
about, learned it Was unscreened, and boldly entered. Almost before he
was in, he found he could come up; but he came up slowly, breaking
surface in pitchy blackness and feeling about him without splashing.
His fingers touched a cool smooth arm that shrank convulsively at
contact while the possessor of it cried sharply with the startle of
fright. He held on tightly and began to laugh, and Paula laughed with
him. A line from "The First Chanty" flashed into his consciousness--
"_Hearing her laugh in the gloom greatly I loved her._"
"You did frighten me when you touched me," she said. "You came without
a sound, and I was a thousand miles away, dreaming..."
"What?" Graham asked.
"Well, honestly, I had just got an idea for a gown--a dusty, musty,
mulberry-wine velvet, with long, close lines, and heavy, tarnished
gold borders and cords and things. And the only jewelery a ring--one
enormous pigeon-blood ruby that Dick gave me years ago when we sailed
the _All Away_."
"Is there anything you don't do?" he laughed.
She joined with him, and their mirth sounded strangely hollow in the
pent and echoing dark.
"Who told you?" she next asked.
"No one. After you had been under two minutes I knew it had to be
something like this, and I came exploring."
"It was Dick's idea. He had it built into the tank afterward. You will
find him full of whimsies. He delighted in scaring old ladies into
fits by stepping off into the tank with their sons or grandsons and
hiding away in here. But after one or two nearly died of shock--old
ladies, I mean--he put me up, as to-day, to fooling hardier persons
like yourself.--Oh, he had another accident. There was a Miss
Coghlan, friend of Ernestine, a little seminary girl. They artfully
stood her right beside the pipe that leads out, and Dick went off the
high dive and swam in here to the inside end of the pipe. After
several minutes, by the time she was in collapse over his drowning, he
spoke up the pipe to her in most horrible, sepulchral tones. And right
there Miss Coghlan fainted dead away."
"She must have been a weak sister," Graham commented; while he
struggled with a wanton desire for a match so that he could strike it
and see how Paula Forrest looked paddling there beside him to keep
afloat.
"She had a fair measure of excuse," Paula answered. "She was a young
thing--eighteen; and she had a sort of school-girl infatuation for
Dick. They all get it. You see, he's such a boy when he's playing that
they can't realize that he's a hard-bitten, hard-working, deep-
thinking, mature, elderly benedict. The embarrassing thing was that
the little girl, when she was first revived and before she could
gather her wits, exposed all her secret heart. Dick's face was a study
while she babbled her--"
"Well?--going to stay there all night?" Bert Wainwright's voice came
down the pipe, sounding megaphonically close.
"Heavens!" Graham sighed with relief; for he had startled and clutched
Paula's arm. "That's the time I got my fright. The little maiden is
avenged. Also, at last, I know what a lead-pipe cinch is."
"And it's time we started for the outer world," she suggested. "It's
not the coziest gossiping place in the world. Shall I go first?"
"By all means--and I'll be right behind; although it's a pity the
water isn't phosphorescent. Then I could follow your incandescent heel
like that chap Byron wrote about--don't you remember?"
He heard her appreciative gurgle in the dark, and then her: "Well, I'm
going now."
Unable to see the slightest glimmer, nevertheless, from the few sounds
she made he knew she had turned over and gone down head first, and he
was not beyond visioning with inner sight the graceful way in which
she had done it--an anything but graceful feat as the average swimming
woman accomplishes it.
"Somebody gave it away to you," was Bert's prompt accusal, when Graham
rose to the surface of the tank and climbed out.
"And you were the scoundrel who rapped stone under water," Graham
challenged. "If I'd lost I'd have protested the bet. It was a crooked
game, a conspiracy, and competent counsel, I am confident, would
declare it a felony. It's a case for the district attorney."
"But you won," Ernestine cried.
"I certainly did, and, therefore, I shall not prosecute you, nor any
one of your crooked gang--if the bets are paid promptly. Let me see--
you owe me a box of cigars--"
"One cigar, sir!"
"A box! A box!" "Cross tag!" Paula cried. "Let's play cross-tag!--
You're IT!"
Suiting action to word, she tagged Graham on the shoulder and plunged
into the tank. Before he could follow, Bert seized him, whirled him in
a circle, was himself tagged, and tagged Dick before he could escape.
And while Dick pursued his wife through the tank and Bert and Graham
sought a chance to cross, the girls fled up the scaffold and stood in
an enticing row on the fifteen-foot diving platform. _