Swede Ellicott turned back to me.
“How’s Washington, Grace? And how’s the ancient and honorable, my aunt?”
Up to that point none of the three had so much as mentioned Washington, not even in asking what kind of a flight I’d had and when I started on it. Since it was in Washington I’d seen them last, and had met them in the first place, when the three of them and a boy named Ben Farrell were keeping what is sometimes called bachelor hall at Swede’s aunt’s place next door to mine, I’d assumed they were avoiding the whole subject with reason. I was avoiding it with what I thought was tact.
The reason was a girl named Mary Cather. The tact was because I’d never been very sure as to what had happened. I knew they’d all been in love with her and that Swede Ellicott had been engaged to marry her. It was one of those things that happen with the speed and brilliance of light, for Swede and Mary. The enchantment she wore like a star in her shining gold hair that night wasn’t visible to me, but it was devastating magic to the three young men who’d just got their wings, and to Ben Farrell newly commissioned in the Marine Corps. It wasn’t a full two days later before Swede told me they were going to be married. Right away, he said, but I knew Mary’s mother would see to that, and probably Swede’s aunt, because Mary was a stranger in Washington. She was there with her mother as a reluctant evacuée from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, resenting it silently but bitterly. That may, of course, have been part of the magic glamor she had for the four boys that night. It was definitely part of the situation there that moment when we were sitting in the lobby of the Moana Hotel, because Mary Cather was back in Honolulu.
Her engagement to Swede hadn’t lasted very long. It was about three months, in fact, from the night they met at my house, that Mrs. Cather called on me and told me it was broken. She didn’t say why, except that Swede had acted very badly. She also said Mary was being very difficult. It had been too sudden to last, anyway, she thought, and she’d been opposed to it from the beginning—which I think was not quite correct. She was genuinely disturbed about Mary, there was no doubt of that, though why again she didn’t say. Chiefly what she said was she was determined their paths should not cross again. If I ever heard from Swede’s aunt next door that Swede was coming back, she wanted me to let her know so she could take Mary to New York until he left. She didn’t want them ever to meet again. Swede’s aunt, on the other hand, a very rigid Washington cave-dweller of the old and almost extinct species, maintained a tight-lipped silence about the whole thing, including Swede, even when I asked her how and where he was.
So it was a peculiarly ironic full turn of the wheel for Swede Ellicott to be here in Honolulu when Mary had just returned from the Mainland, their paths converging at the crossroads of the Pacific. Whether they were going to do more than converge and actually cross was in a sense in my hands just then . . . and I’d been thinking about it, not too happily, ever since I’d taken down the phone that afternoon and heard Swede’s voice at the other end. All three of them had avoided mentioning Mary Cather, but I wasn’t sure that now they’d got around to Washington and Swede’s aunt they wouldn’t get around to her.
“Washington’s fine,” I said. I went on for a moment about the ghastly winter and about Swede’s aunt. Then I stopped, aware that neither he nor either of the other two was hearing a word I was saying. None of them had moved, but their attention was fixed, intense and concentrated, out of the open window. There was a curious light in Swede’s eyes that neither of the others had. All three of them were staring at a girl coming quickly along, out there, through a barrage of quite uninhibited public admiration.
I glanced back at Tommy Dawson, expecting to hear a really heartfelt “Jeepers!” this time. The girl didn’t have a hibiscus in her hair, but she had a carnation lei around her neck and she was certainly the type. She had dark, almond-shaped eyes and high, full cheekbones and her lips were very red, and she came through the uniformed stag line that opened and formed again behind her with the smiling assurance of a veteran, slim and lithe and quite unabashed. But Tommy Dawson was silent, his lips tight. Dave Boyer’s eyes burned with a sharp antagonism that he looked down abruptly to conceal.
Swede Ellicott took one foot down slowly from the sofa, then the other, and got up, not looking at either of them.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got to shove.” He put on his cap and pulled it down in back. “Nice seeing you, Mrs. Latham. I’ll give you a call. So long. So long, you guys.”
“So long,” Tommy said. It was clipped off so short that Swede hesitated an instant. He turned and made his way deliberately across the lounge and toward the main entrance and the girl with the carnation lei.
It wasn’t hard to see where she was. Being a woman in a practically womanless hotel lobby she was where everybody was looking. Even the men waiting with duffel bags and blue and khaki canvas gripsacks at the elevator brightened up and looked as long as she was alone. As she spotted Swede Ellicott all heads turned in unison to look at him. It was a curious pantomime, and so was her meeting with Swede. It was obviously prearranged and she was perfectly aware of Tommy Dawson and Dave Boyer in our corner. She glanced over and turned back, laughing up at Swede. He didn’t look around, not even when they got into a taxi outside and passed directly by the open window where we were sitting, the silence between the two men about as grim as silence can be.
I was silent too. Any idea I’d had of mentioning Mary Cather I decided to put quietly away until I knew what was going on. Where Swede Ellicott’s interest was at the moment was all too clear, and something I would never for an instant have thought of. The fact that Tommy and Dave were taking it as they did was a relief to me. I’d have hated to think I was shocked at anything they would take for granted.
When Dave Boyer spoke his voice was abrupt and bitter, and he had to make an effort to keep it steady.
“I told you to lay off.”
“Nuts,” Tommy said. “She’s got him hooked. He hasn’t got a prayer—not a whisper. I wish to——”
He turned to look at Dave and stopped.
“Steady!” he said quietly. “Come on—take it easy, boy. Come on, David—snap!”
Dave Boyer was quite white and his hands holding his pipe were shaking.
“She hasn’t got him,” he whispered. “It’s not going to happen—not again. She’s not going to marry Swede.”
His voice rose. “By God I’ll kill her first.”
“—Easy, boy.”
I don’t suppose I actually repeated the words “marry Swede,” but they were certainly framed on my lips. I couldn’t believe I’d heard them. It wasn’t possible. Swede Ellicott must be out of his mind to think of marrying a girl . . . I hesitated. I knew nothing about her, only that regardless of everything else she was of an alien race. I looked blankly at the two boys.
Tommy Dawson glanced around us. The strangled intensity of Dave Boyer’s voice had carrying power. Only the mynah birds and the traffic and the general din of too many people in too small a space had kept what he’d said from being a public declaration.
“—I wouldn’t,” he said quietly. “It isn’t Corinne’s fault. She’d never have got to first base by herself. It’s that she-buzzard in Washington.”
It hardly seemed to me the way to speak of my next door neighbor, though I did have a sneaking feeling there was something to be said for the point of view. But inasmuch as Swede had at least politely referred to her as the ancient and honorable his aunt, I couldn’t see what she had to do with the situation this far out in the Pacific. She would certainly be the last person in the world to approve of the girl with the carnation lei.
Dave Boyer looked at him. “You’re right,” he said slowly. “You’re right.”
Tommy Dawson pulled in his long legs and got up. “I guess I