She took him firmly by the arm. “You know the way, Captain.”
I was sure then she didn’t know his name either. That’s the nice thing about the uniform; all you have to do is tell silver from gold, eagles from leaves and stars from both.
4
SHE LED THE TWO OF US TO A STAIRWAY OFF the entrance hall. It wasn’t quite dark yet outside, but it was dusk and the grass was already silvered with dew. We went down winding stone steps at the side facing Ewa, as they say here—northeast as opposed to Waikiki. Around the terrace above us, facing the mountains, mauka as opposed to makai, toward the sea, was the lanai where Alice Cather had stood listening to the redbird’s evening call. The swimming pool was cut out of the rock, and I could hear the water splashing from it down into the ravine.
All I could think of, however, was Ben Farrell, and Swede, and the half-caste girl that Ben had married and that Swede Ellicott was going to marry now. I wanted to ask the captain more about it, but I was afraid to start him again and not be able to shut him off when we got back to the house. And anyway he was not particularly sympathetic—in fact he was rather superior and irritating.
“This must have cost plenty,” he remarked. “I guess Cather’s family were missionaries. They’re the ones who cleaned up out here. You’ve heard about the Big Five?”
“The Cathers happened not to be,” I said. I didn’t know anything else about them, but Alice had told me that. “They were unsuccessful California Forty-niners and came on out here. And they aren’t Big Five either.”
We were going around the terrace toward the mountain side. It was unbelievably lovely, with the bank spilling showers of orchids growing out of moist tree fern wired to the rock.
“This is their air-raid shelter—it’s a honey. Absolutely complete from soup to nuts.”
He pointed at a low redwood door set in the bank. It looked much more like the entrance to an enchanted cavern in a fairy tale, with its ornamental iron hinges and lock and the fern growing around it on the mossy rocks, and pale-green and lemon-yellow orchids hanging over it. I’d started to say so, when behind us, out of the brooding silence of the twilight against the hills, came the single note followed by the long sliding see-saw of the redbird’s call. It was so close and clear that remembering Alice Cather on the lanai I stopped and looked around, trying to locate it. And I stood, motionless at first and then rigid, just staring.
A man’s face was there against the trees. It was nothing else, it was just a face . . . and it was not in the trees, it was against them. It stood out, plain and visible and perfectly motionless, as I stared, not really believing I was seeing it and yet unable to believe I wasn’t.
In the curious visual quality of the dusk it was very white around the forehead under an indefinite hair-line, with cheeks that shaded into a dark stubble. I blinked my eyes quickly. It was still there, fixed and stationary in mid-air against the dense growth of green and dun-colored foliage. I couldn’t see any eyes, but I had the feeling that they were there, fixed on me, piercing and unwavering. And it was there. I could see it.
“Look,” I said. “Over there, in the trees.”
The captain turned from the air-raid shelter door. I started to point, and had an instant queer feeling that it might be wiser not to.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
I didn’t either. There was nothing there. The face had gone. I was looking exactly where I’d been looking before. There was nothing there but the leaves.
“—I saw a face,” I said. “A man’s face.”
He looked around at me. “A spy,” he said gravely. Then he laughed. “Lady, don’t start that around here . . . everybody’ll just laugh at you. There’s nothing here the Japs are interested in—they’re too busy at home. Let’s go get a drink.”
I was still looking for the face, or for the formation of leaves and light and shade that had looked so extraordinarily like one. If it had been an hallucination it was a very vivid and solid one, and I knew it hadn’t. It was a man’s face. I had seen it, and the image in my mind was as sharply positive as if I saw it still. If it had been any one else with me, or if the face had had a torso and arms and legs, I’d have insisted on waiting. But I gave up too and moved reluctantly along.
There were more steps toward the house where it faced the mountains, and we went up them to the garden level. At the top I looked back. The face was there again, and this time I had no possible doubt about it. But it was there just an instant. It wasn’t against the leaves this time so much as in them, and it blotted out sharply, as if a leafy branch had been drawn across it. It was still nothing but a face, chalky-white and stubbly-dark. In the half-light of the exotic twilight it made my flesh creep.
“What’s the matter now, Mrs. Latham?”
“Nothing at all,” I said pleasantly. I followed the captain across the lawn to the downstairs room where the bar was. At the end of the terrace I stopped again, but there was nothing back there, or nothing that I could see. And maybe, I thought for a moment, there hadn’t been anything there at all, really; it could have been a trick of the light and my imagination. Or perhaps it was an Hawaiian custom for disembodied heads to float around against the trees. It was darker now, as if a curtain had been drawn down as the shafts of the dying sun made tangible plains of shadow slanting up to the top of the ridge, leaving it dark and sombre in the ravine.
Yet all the time I knew that the face in the woods was still there. I knew it was hidden in the shadowy trees, a face without a body, rigid and poised, watching. It kept coming in and fading out of my mind, disturbing all the more because, I found myself giving it eyes, in my mind, and a kind of stealthy intentness.—And then there came into my mind again the sight of those two white searching planes, flying very low, circling, that Swede Ellicott had pointed out from the window of the Moana lobby—and the short conversation that the major and I had had on the Pali. And once when I heard the redbird’s call again, long after Stateside redbirds would have been asleep, I started so that my partner thought he’d trumped my trick. I looked over toward Alice, thinking again that it could have been the contagion of her panic on the lanai that was responsible. But she’d gone out of the room and they were settling accounts at her table.
When the guests left I stood for a moment on the lanai looking over the dark rim of wilderness down onto the myriad lights of the city by the sea. Pearl Harbor was a vast white glow off to the right, beyond it the darkness of spreading cane fields and the ragged outlines of mountains against the sky. Behind me, moving noiselessly around the room, the Japanese house man was folding the bridge tables and clearing up for the night. The two little maids in their blue kimonos had disappeared. I suppose it was because Pearl Harbor glowed so brilliantly, itself and as a symbol, that I unconsciously turned and watched the man, intent on his job inside.
He was short and stocky, with thick straight black hair and a broad flat face, with nothing about him to indicate his age to me. I suppose I must at some point or other have read in the papers that a large percentage of the population of the Hawaiian Islands was Japanese, either alien or native born, but I hadn’t really been prepared for the shock of seeing so many of them everywhere. It seemed to me I saw practically nothing else, but that was no doubt because I wasn’t used to them and was so conscious of them as a people we were fighting a few thousand miles forward over the Pacific.
When a voice spoke beside me I started. Harry Cather