Jack London On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales

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a swimming, somehow it invariably happened that Ida rode in Sonny's
car or that both rode in somebody's car. Dances, luaus, dinners,
and outings were all one; the three of them were there.
Having become aware, Lee Barton could not fail to register Ida's
note of happiness ever rising when in the same company with Sonny
Grandison, and her willingness to ride in the same cars with him,
to dance with him, or to sit out dances with him. Most convincing
of all, was Sonny Grandison himself. Forty-one, strong,
experienced, his face could no more conceal what he felt than could
be concealed a lad of twenty's ordinary lad's love. Despite the
control and restraint of forty years, he could no more mask his
soul with his face than could Lee Barton, of equal years, fail to
read that soul through so transparent a face. And often, to other
women, talking, when the topic of Sonny came up, Lee Barton heard
Ida express her fondness for Sonny, or her almost too-eloquent
appreciation of his polo-playing, his work in the world, and his
general all-rightness of achievement.
About Sonny's state of mind and heart Lee had no doubt. It was
patent enough for the world to read. But how about Ida, his own
dozen-years' wife of a glorious love-match? He knew that woman,
ever the mysterious sex, was capable any time of unguessed mystery.
Did her frank comradeliness with Grandison token merely frank
comradeliness and childhood contacts continued and recrudesced into
adult years? or did it hide, in woman's subtler and more secretive
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ways, a beat of heart and return of feeling that might even out-
balance what Sonny's face advertised?
Lee Barton was not happy. A dozen years of utmost and post-nuptial
possession of his wife had proved to him, so far as he was
concerned, that she was his one woman in the world, and that the
woman was unborn, much less unglimpsed, who could for a moment
compete with her in his heart, his soul, and his brain. Impossible
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
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104
of existence was the woman who could lure him away from her, much
less over-bid her in the myriad, continual satisfactions she
rendered him.
Was this, then, he asked himself, the dreaded contingency of all
fond Benedicts, to be her first "affair?" He tormented himself
with the ever iterant query, and, to the astonishment of the
reformed Kohala poker crowd of wise and middle-aged youngsters as
well as to the reward of the keen scrutiny of the dinner-giving and
dinner-attending women, he began to drink King William instead of
orange juice, to bully up the poker limit, to drive of nights his
own car more than rather recklessly over the Pali and Diamond Head
roads, and, ere dinner or lunch or after, to take more than an
average man's due of old-fashioned cocktails and Scotch highs.
All the years of their marriage she had been ever complaisant
toward him in his card-playing. This complaisance, to him, had
become habitual. But now that doubt had arisen, it seemed to him
that he noted an eagerness in her countenancing of his poker
parties. Another point he could not avoid noting was that Sonny
Grandison was missed by the poker and bridge crowds. He seemed to
be too busy. Now where was Sonny, while he, Lee Barton, was
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playing? Surely not always at committee and boards of directors
meetings. Lee Barton made sure of this. He easily learned that at
such times Sonny was more than usually wherever Ida chanced to be--
at dances, or dinners, or moonlight swimming parties, or, the very
afternoon he had flatly pleaded rush of affairs as an excuse not to
join Lee and Langhorne Jones and Jack Holstein in a bridge battle
at the Pacific Club--that afternoon he had played bridge at Dora
Niles' home with three women, one of whom was Ida.
Returning, once, from an afternoon's inspection of the great dry-
dock building at Pearl Harbour, Lee Barton, driving his machine
against time, in order to have time to dress for dinner, passed
Sonny's car; and Sonny's one passenger, whom he was taking home,
was Ida. One night, a week later, during which interval he had
played no cards, he came home at eleven from a stag dinner at the
University Club, just preceding Ida's return from the Alstone poi
supper and dance. And Sonny had driven her home. Major Fanklin
and his wife had first been dropped off by them, they mentioned, at
Fort Shafter, on the other side of town and miles away from the
beach.
Lee Barton, after all mere human man, as a human man unfailingly
meeting Sonny in all friendliness, suffered poignantly in secret.
Not even Ida dreamed that he suffered; and she went her merry,
careless, laughing way, secure in her own heart, although a trifle
perplexed at her husband's increase in number of pre-dinner
cocktails. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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