Authors: Irving Wallace
He had sat for over an hour in the shade of the dense acacia, mulberry and kukui trees, a few feet from the path Rasmussen must take, nervously awaiting the bearer of his fate. Rasmussen had not appeared in that time, and Marc had restlessly left the cool rows of trees to rove the baking cliff nearby.
Now, he had been moving about the precipice for twenty minutes, wondering if there would be a letter, if it would fulfill what he daydreamed, if he would have the nerve to reply with the letter in his pocket, until he realized that this exposure to the rising sun was unbearable.
Slowly, wiping his face and neck with his handkerchief, he retraced his steps up the trail to the trees. The sloping path that led to the sea was still devoid of Rasmussen’s figure. Momentarily, Marc worried whether he had miscalculated the day or, if he had not, whether Rasmussen had been delayed or had postponed his mercy flight. Then he decided that he was being unduly anxious. Of course, Rasmussen would appear.
Standing beside the path, Marc felt the bulk in his right trouser pocket. He extracted the unsealed envelope addressed to Garrity, and his spirits revived, and he slid the envelope back into its place. He squinted off once more—the path was still empty of life, except for two scrawny goats in the distance—and finally, he walked back to the coolest cubicle of shade he could find and dropped to the grass. He took out a cigar, and was hardly aware of preparing it and lighting it, as his mind returned to Tehura and what he had written Garrity of her and of her possible role in the decisive days to come.
When next he looked at his wrist watch, it was nearly noon and he had been on his lookout for three hours. He lapsed back into his thoughts, and then into flabbier daydreaming, and had no idea how much more time had elapsed before he was aroused by the harsh, off-key sounds of someone whistling a seaman’s chanty.
Marc scrambled to his feet—his watch told him it was past twelve-fifteen—and ran into the path. Twenty yards away, approaching him, was the glorious visitation of Captain Ollie Rasmussen, marine hat tilted back from his warped, stubbled Goteborg face, attire consisting of open worn blue shirt, filthy denims, tennis shoes as shabby as ever, and the mail pouch slung over his left shoulder.
Drawing closer, Rasmussen recognized Marc, and waved his free hand. “Hiya, Doc. You the reception committee?”
“How are you, Captain?” Marc waited nervously until Rasmussen had come abreast, and then he added, “I was up here hiking, and I remembered you’d be along today, so I thought I’d hang around and get a quick peek at my mail. I’m expecting something important to my work.”
Rasmussen threw the pouch off his shoulder and dropped it to the path. “Sure somethin’s so important it can’t wait? Mail ain’t sorted.”
“Well, I just thought—”
“Never mind, there ain’t much to sort through anyways.” He dragged the pouch through the dirt to the grass, sat wide-legged on a coconut log, straightening the pouch between his knees. “Guess I could use a second’s breather.” He opened the pouch, as Marc hovered over it. Rasmussen sniffed and looked up. “You got another of them stogies, Doc?”
“Sure thing, absolutely.” Quickly, Marc extracted a fresh cigar from his shirt pocket, and handed it to Rasmussen, who accepted it with a belch, and placed it beside him on the log. While Marc watched fretfully, Rasmussen dug his horny hand into the pouch, and produced a packet of letters bound tightly by a leather strap. He unbuckled the strap, then, muttering Marc’s full name, he went through the mail.
At last, he proffered three envelopes. “That’s all there is, there ain’t no more for you, Doc—‘cept maybe some of the bigger pieces—but you don’t want them now.”
“No, this’ll do,” said Marc quickly, accepting the envelopes.
While Marc fanned open the envelopes, like a gin rummy hand, to note the return addresses, Rasmussen dropped his packet into the mail pouch, and concentrated on unwrapping and lighting the cigar. The first letter, Marc saw, was from a faculty colleague at Ray nor College; the second, addressed to Claire and himself, was from married friends in San Diego; and the third was from “R.G., Busch Artist and Lyceum Bureau, Rockefeller Center, New York City.” The last was Rex Garrity writing from his lecture agency offices, and Marc tightened with anticipation. Yet, he was reluctant to open the envelope before Rasmussen. The Captain still remained seated, sucking the cigar, bleary, alcoholic eyes observing Marc.
“Get what you want, Doc?”
“Dammit, no,” Marc lied. “Only some personal letters. Maybe it’ll come your next mail day.”
“Hope so.” Rasmussen took a grip on the pouch, and came to his feet. “I better get crackin’. Wanna clean up an’ fill my belly an’ be sharp for the festival. Starts today for the comin’ week, you know.”
“What? Oh, yes, the festival, I’d forgotten—I guess it does start today.”
Rasmussen eyed Marc meditatively a moment. “Matter of fact, I’m rememberin’—Huatoro an’ some of the native lads met us down the beach when we come in—they’re cartin’ the supplies the short route—he said somethin’ about you—guess you’re the one—you enterin’ the swim competition today. Is that bull or the truth?”
The festival swimming match, scheduled for three o’clock, had been the farthest thought from Marc’s mind. He was surprised by this reminder of it.
“Yes, Captain, it’s true. I’ve promised to enter it.”
“Why?”
“Why? For the exercise, I guess,” said Marc lightly.
Rasmussen pulled the pouch over his shoulder. “Want an old-timer’s advice? You can get better exercise bangin’ some of those Sirens broads, Doc—meanin’ no disrespect to the Mrs., understand—but that’s the real fireworks of the festival. I’m givin’ you the advice in the interests of scientific research. Jus’ keep it in mind if one of the maidens hands you a festival shell.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s what unties the grass skirt, Doc.” He laughed in a hoarse bark, coughed, removed the cigar, choking, and stuffed the cigar back between his discolored teeth. “Yeh, that’s what does it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Captain,” Marc said weakly.
“You bet your life, that’s what does it,” said Rasmussen. He started into the path. “You comin’ down with me?”
“I—no, thanks, I think I’ll walk a little more.”
Rasmussen had started moving away. “Well, jus’ don’t wear yourself out before the swim an’ you know what.” He barked his laugh again, and went trudging off toward the precipice.
Briefly disconcerted by the Captain’s reference to the festival, Marc remained standing, looking after him. By the time Rasmussen had gone through the rows of acacia and kukui trees and reached the precipice, and then disappeared around the stone bend that led down into the village, Marc’s mind had returned to Garrity’s long, flimsy envelope.
Hurrying off the path, into the shade across the way, Marc folded two of the envelopes and stuffed them into his hip pocket. Uneasily, he turned the Garrity envelope around, picked at the glued flap, and almost reluctantly tore at it, slitting it open with his forefinger.
Carefully, he unfolded the four typewritten onionskin pages. With restraint, like a gourmet who would disdain bolting a long-awaited delicacy, he read the letter, word by word.
There was the informal salutation, “My dear Marc.” There was the pleased acknowledgement of Marc’s hasty inquiry from Papeete. Then, there was the business at hand. Before reading it, and learning what his future could or could not be, Marc closed his eyes and tried to fix in his mind a portrait of the letter’s author. Time and distance and wish diffused memory’s picture: Garrity, blond, tall, lean, with his refined patrician Phillips Exeter-Yale features, the youngest juvenile of fifty on earth, the doer, the idol, the succeeder, the glamorous man of action, the on-the-heels-of-Hannibal adventurer—he—the one—in some lofty tower of Rockefeller Center, at a golden typewriter, writing, “My dear Marc”!
Marc opened his eyes, and read Garrity’s definitive statement of the business at hand:
I want to remark straight off that I doubly appreciate hearing from you so promptly because I think I, alone, am attuned to your sensitivity, personality, and position. I know you are hobbled by innumerable restrictions. For one thing, your renowned mother, God bless her, who, for all her genius, has a narrow and pedantic view of the living, commercial world. Her rejection of me, her undoubted aversion to those of us in public communications and entertainment, is based on an outdated code of ethics. For another thing, you have been handicapped by being imprisoned so long in your mother’s world, the so-called “scientific” world of pedants. But you are of a new, more sophisticated generation, and, forgive me, Marc, but for such as you there is hope, nay not hope alone but vistas of glory. From my one private conversation with you at your home in Santa Barbara, for your championing of me before your mother and wife and the nearsighted Hackfeld, and, indeed, for your letter from Papeete that revives my faith in you and our relationship and future, for all of these reasons I see in you a New Hayden, a strong individual with his own ideas and ambitions, ready to go before the world and conquer it at last.
As best I can interpret your few careful paragraphs, you speculate on the propriety of putting before the vast, general public the information you are garnering on The Three Sirens. You wonder if the material might not be misused and oversensationalized in the wrong hands. You wonder if any scientists, or anthropologists, have ever presented their findings to the nation in “the Rex Garrity manner.” You wonder about the true economics of the lecture circuit today, and you say, somewhat skeptically, you are certain I was jesting at your house when I remarked that proper presentation of The Three Sirens investigation and adventure could earn both of us “a million dollars.”
After careful consideration of your letter, I have decided to take your interest seriously, absolutely seriously. I was doing a lecture in Pittsburgh when your letter was forwarded to me, and immediately, I canceled an engagement in Scranton to hurry to New York and visit with my agents in Rockefeller Center. In confidence, I told them what little I knew of your current field trip, of the Sirens itself, and I asked them what all of this could add up to in practical terms, “the true economics” of it, as you put it, and after two days here, I have all the real answers. It is, believe me, Marc, with a sense of high excitement that I write you now. I hope my excitement will transmit itself to you in that incredible faraway place where now you work, wherever it is, exactly.
At the outset, let me allay any fears you may possess as to the propriety of communicating The Three Sirens adventure to the public. Also, any fears you may have that the material would be misused. I know your mother accused me of being a successful popularizer who might exploit the Sirens material in a way that would be damaging both to anthropology and the hidden islanders. Marc, your mother is wrong. Forgive me again, but she reflects the outmoded thinking of prewar social scientists, a closed group or cult who kept what was valuable to themselves. In fact, the reputation your mother and father built was based on their breaking out of this eggshell, somewhat, and presenting their books in a more popular way. But, I contend, they did not go far enough. Their findings, those of others in the field, have not really gone out to the masses, have not been valuable or beneficial to the millions who could profit most. If what you are seeing on The Three Sirens is useful to America, why should it not be disseminated widely to help Americans? If what you are seeing is of no value to anyone, only curious or different, what harm in showing your fellow countrymen how foolishly others live and how happy your countrymen should be with their own lots? Remember, the great movers of our time, Darwin, Marx, Freud, shook no worlds until their findings came into hands like yours and mine and were popularized. When you question me about propriety, I question you about the right of any group to withhold or censor information that will enrich minds. No, Marc, fear not, only good can come from putting this material into the hands of men who understand the masses of people.
And how could your material be misused or sensationalized? If we went ahead, it would be together, as collaborators. You would have control of editing and presenting the material with me. You know my work, my reputation of long standing which is based on good taste. Members of both sexes, of all ages, of varied social strata, have been my devoted followers for years. The sales of my books, the cities that have turned out to applaud me, the endless fan mail that flows across my desk, the huge sums I annually pay Internal Revenue, all are testaments to my conservatism, universality of judgment, and taste. Finally, we would serve under the auspices of the Busch Artist and Lyceum Bureau, founded in 1888, a firm of highest distinction that has had, variously, on its roster, such names as Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Henry George, Maxim Gorki, Carveth Wells, Sarah Bernhardt, Lily Langtry, Richard Halliburton, Gertrude Stein, Dr. Arthur Eddington, Dylan Thomas, Dr. William Bates, Count Alfred Korzybski, Wilson Mizner, Queen Marie of Rumania, Jim Thorpe—and, forgive me a third time, yours truly, Rex Garrity.
As to your concern about anthropologists going out before the lay public, put it aside. I have documentary evidence that dozens of your colleagues, from Robert Briffault to Margaret Mead, have done this, and have enhanced rather than harmed their professional standing.
So at last we come to my talks with the Busch people, and the “true economics” of what insiders call “the chicken a la king circuit.” I have analyzed the most successful platform artists, and the most successful were those who were Big Names (Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, etc.) or those who had something timely or unusual to say (Henry M. Stanley, General Chennault, etc.). The Busch people assure me that we could not fail, for between us we possess both elements of potential success. I have the reputation. You have at your fingertips the material that is both timely and unusual. Between us, we could make The Three Sirens a household name like Shangri-La—yes, the Shangri-La of love and marriage.
In return for arranging our bookings, transportation, hotels, meals, guidance, the Busch agency would take 33 percent of our gross earnings. That would leave each of us 33½ percent free and clear of expenses. If your findings are as electric as I promised them they would be, they believe it possible that in a ten-month period (lecturing combined with radio and television, exclusive of writings) our gross could be $750,000 minimum! Think of it, Marc, in ten months you could have a quarter of a million dollars free and clear, and a national reputation to boot!