Children of the Desert Part 4

"Pagans are people who don't believe in G.o.d. I am not speaking of the G.o.d of the churches, exactly. I mean a good influence."

"Don't they believe in their own G.o.ds?"

"No doubt. But you might call their own G.o.ds bad influences, as often as not."

"Ah--perhaps they're just simple folk who believe in their own experiences."

He had the troubled feeling that her intuitions, her fatalistic leanings, were giving her a surer grasp of the subject than his, which was based upon a rather nebulous, logical process that often brought him to confusion.

"I only know that I am free," he declared doggedly.

The sun had warmed her to an almost vagrant mood. Her smile was delicate enough, yet her eyes held a gentle taunt as she responded: "Not a bit of it; you have a wife."

"A wife--yes; and that gives me ten times the freedom I ever had before. A man is like a bird with only one wing--before he finds a wife. His wife becomes his other wing. There isn't any height beyond him, when he has a wife."

She placed her hands on her cheeks. "Two wings!" she mused.... "What's between the wings?"

"A heart, you may say, if you will. Or a soul. A capacity. Words are fashioned by scholars--dull fellows. But you know what I mean."

From the hidden depths of the _cuartel_ a silver bugle-note sounded, and Sylvia looked to see if the soldiers sitting out in front would go away; but they did not do so. She arose. "Would you mind going into the church a minute?" she asked.

"No; but why?"

"Oh, anybody can go into those churches," she responded.

"Anybody can go into _any_ church."

"Yes, I suppose so. What I mean is that these old Catholic churches seem different. In our own churches you have a feeling of being--what do you say?--personally conducted. As if you were a visitor being shown children's trinkets. There is something impersonal--something boundless--in churches like this one here. The silence makes you think that there is n.o.body in them--or that perhaps ... G.o.d isn't far away."

He frowned. "But this is just where the trinkets are--in these churches: the images, the painted figures, the robes, the whole mysterious paraphernalia."

"Yes ... but when there isn't anything going on. You feel an influence. I remember going into a church in San Antonio once--a Protestant chapel, and the only thing I could recall afterward was a Yankee clock that ticked too fast and too loud. I never heard of anything so horribly inappropriate.

Time was what you thought of. Not eternity. You felt that the people would be afraid of wasting a minute too much--as if their real concerns were elsewhere."

Harboro was instinctively combating the thought that was in her mind, so far as there was a definite thought, and as far as he understood it. "But why shouldn't there be a clock?" he asked. "If people feel that they ought to give a certain length of time to worship, and then go back to their work again, why shouldn't they have a clock?"

"I suppose it's all right," she conceded; and then, with a faint smile: "Yes, if it didn't tick too loud."

She lowered her voice abruptly on the last word. They had pa.s.sed across the doorless portal and were in the presence of a group of silent, kneeling figures: wretched women whose heads were covered with black cotton _rebozos_, who knelt and faced the distant altar. They weren't in rows. They had settled down just anywhere. And there were men: swarthy, ill-shapen, dejected. Their lips moved noiselessly.

Harboro observed her a little uneasily. Her sympathy for this sort of thing was new to him. But she made none of the customary signs of fellowship, and after a brief interval she turned and led the way back into the sunshine.

He was still regarding her strangely when she paused, just outside the door, and opened a little hand-bag which depended from her arm. She was quite intently devoted to a search for something. Presently she produced a coin, and then Harboro observed for the first time that the tortured figure of a beggar sat in the sun outside the church door.

Sylvia leaned over with an impa.s.sive face and dropped the coin into the beggar's cup.

She chanced to glance at Harboro's face an instant later, and she was dismayed a little by its expression: that of an almost violent distaste.

What did it mean? Was it because she had given a coin to the beggar? There could have been no other reason. But why should he look as if her action had contaminated her in some fashion--as if there had been communication between her and the unfortunate _anciano_? As if there had been actual contact?

"You wouldn't have done that?" she said.

"No, I shouldn't have done it," he replied.

"I can't think why. The wretched creature--I should have felt troubled if I'd ignored him."

"But it's a profession. It's as much a part of the national customs as dancing and drinking."

"Yes, I know. A profession ... but isn't that all the more reason why we should give him a little help?"

"A reason why you should permit yourself to be imposed upon?"

"I can't help thinking further than that. After all, it's he and his kind that must have been imposed upon in the beginning. It's being a profession makes me believe that all the people who might have helped him, who might have given him a chance to be happy and respectable, really conspired against him in some way. You have to believe that it's the rule that some must be comfortable and some wretched."

"A beggar is a beggar," said Harboro. "And he was filthy."

"But don't you suppose he'd rather be the proprietor of a wine-shop, or something of that sort, if he had had any choice?"

"Well.... It's not a simple matter, of course. I'm glad you did what you felt you ought to do." It occurred to Harboro that he was setting up too much opposition to her whims--whims which seemed rooted in her principles as well as her impulses. It was as if their minds were of different shapes: hers circular, his square; so that there could be only one point of contact between them--that one point being their love for each other.

There would be a fuller conformity after a while, he was sure. He must try to understand her, to get at her odd point of view. She might be right occasionally, when they were in disagreement.

He touched her lightly on the shoulder. "I'm afraid we ought to be getting on to the madame's," he said.

CHAPTER VI.

Harboro would have made you think of a bear in a toy-shop when he sat down in the tiny front room of Madame Boucher's millinery establishment. He was uncomfortably, if vaguely, conscious of the presence of many hats, displayed on affairs which were like unfinished music-racks.

He had given Madame Boucher certain instructions--or perhaps liberties would be a better word. Mrs. Harboro was to be shown only the best fabrics, he told her; and no pains were to be spared to make a dress which would be a credit to madame's establishment. Madame had considered this, and him, and had smiled. Madame's smile had impressed him curiously. There had been no co-operation between lips and eyes. The eyes had opened a little wider, as if with a stimulated rapaciousness. The lips had opened to the extent of a nicely achieved, symmetrical crescent of teeth. It made Harboro think of a carefully constructed Jack-o'-Lantern.

Sylvia had asked him if he wouldn't help in making a choice, but he had looked slightly alarmed, and had resolutely taken a seat which afforded a view of the big _Casa Blanca_ across the way: an emporium conducted on a big scale by Germans. He even became oblivious to the discussion on the other side of the part.i.tion, where Sylvia and madame presently entered upon the preliminaries of the business in hand.

The street was quite familiar to him. There had been a year or so, long ago, when he had "made" Piedras Negras, as railroaders say, twice a week.

He hadn't liked the town very well. He saw its vice rather than its romance. He had attended one bullfight, and had left his seat in disgust when he saw a lot of men and women of seeming gentility applauding a silly fellow whose sole stock in trade was an unblushing vanity.

His imagination travelled on beyond the bull-pen, to the shabby dance-halls along the river. It was a custom for Americans to visit the dance-halls at least once. He had gone into them repeatedly. Other railroaders who were his a.s.sociates enjoyed going into these places, and Harboro, rather than be alone in the town, had followed disinterestedly in their wake, and had looked on with cold, contemplative eyes at the disorderly picture they presented: unfortunate Mexican girls dancing with cowboys and railroaders and soldiers and nondescripts. Three Mexicans, with harp, violin, and 'cello had supplied the music: the everlasting national airs. It seemed to Harboro that the whole republic spent half its time within hearing of _Sobre las Olas_, and _La Paloma_, and _La Golondrina_. He had heard so much of the emotional noises vibrating across the land that when he got away from the throb of his engine, into some silent place, it seemed to him that his ears reverberated with flutes and strings, rather than the song of steam, which he understood and respected.

He had got the impression that music smelled bad--like stale wine and burning corn-husks and scented tobacco and easily perishable fruits.

He remembered the only woman who had ever made an impression upon him down in those dance-halls: an overmature creature, unusually fair for a Mexican, who spoke a little English, manipulating her lips quaintly, like a child. He recalled her favorite expression: "My cla.s.s is very fine!" She had told him this repeatedly, enunciating the words with delicacy. She had once said to him, commiseratingly: "You work very hard?" And when he had confessed that his duties were onerous, she had brightened. "Much work, much money," she had said, with the avidity of a boy who has caught a rabbit in a trap. And Harboro had wondered where she had got such a monstrously erroneous conception of the law of industrialism.

The picture of the whirling figures came back to him: the vapor of dust in the room, the loud voices of men at the bar, trying to be heard above the din of the music and the dancing. There came back to him the memory of a drunken cowboy, nudging the violinist's elbow as he played, and shouting: "Give us _Dixie_--give us a white man's tune"--and the look of veiled hatred in the slumbrous eyes of the Mexican musician, who had inferred the insult without comprehending the words.

He recalled other pictures of those nights: the Indian girls who might be expected to yell in the midst of a dance if they had succeeded in attracting the attention of a man who usually danced with some one else.

And there were other girls with a Spanish strain in them--girls with a drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with the shepherd lovers of Andalusia.

If you danced with one of them you paid thirty cents at the bar and got a drink, while the girl was given a check good for fifteen cents in the trade of the place. The girls used to cash in their checks at the end of a night's work at fifty cents a dozen. It wasn't quite fair; but then the proprietor was a business man.

"My cla.s.s is very fine!" The words came back to Harboro's mind. Good G.o.d!--what had become of her? There had been a railroad man, a fellow named Peterson, who was just gross enough to fancy her--a good chap, too, in his way. Courageous, energetic, loyal--at least to other men. He had occasionally thought that Peterson meant to take the poor, pretentious creature away from the dance-halls and establish her somewhere. He had not seen Peterson for years now.