Margarita's Soul Part 25

CHAPTER XXIV

OUR SECOND SUMMER IN EDEN

That winter had been my introduction to Egypt. I have never since let more than three winters, at most, go by without revisiting the strange, haunted place; next to Nippon the fairy country it is dearest to me of all the warm corners of the earth--and I have dragged my twinging, tortured muscles to them all. Only last winter--for many months have pa.s.sed since I copied those last letters into my ma.n.u.script, and I paid dear for a last attempt at a February in New York--I strolled through Cairo streets, drew gratefully into my nostrils the extraordinary mixture of odours that differentiates Cairo from every place in the world (how the great cities are stamped indelibly each with her own nameless atmosphere, by the way! And yet not quite nameless, for London's is based on street mud and flower-trays, Rome is garlic and incense, Paris is watered asphalt, New York is untended horses and tobacco-smoke, and Tokyo is rice straw) and as I strolled, a strange thing happened to me.

I was pa.s.sing by a street-seller of scarabs, a treacherous-looking wretch, whose rolling eyes glanced covetously at the scarab--better than any of his--that I wore at my scarf-knot, and pressed against him to avoid a great black with a tray of bra.s.s bowls and platters on his head. Just ahead of me a lemonade-merchant uttered his wailing, minor cry, and as the crowd jostled in the narrow, dirty lane, my eye was caught by a coffee-coloured woman, a big Juno, with flashing teeth and a neck like a bronze tower. Across her shoulders sat a naked baby who held his balance by his two chubby hands buried in her thick black hair, one leg dropping over each splendid breast. She caught my eye, and laughed outright as the child kicked out with one fat foot and struck the bra.s.ses on the tray so that it tipped and swayed dangerously.

I stood there, lost in a maze of Cairo streets, and the babel of the shrieking, blue-clad donkey-boys was the scream of gulls to my ears and the sun on the swaying bra.s.s platters was the reflection of a polished sun-dial. The turquoises on the scarab-seller's tray were turquoises about Margarita's waist, the lemonade was borne by Caliban, and the child that rode astride those strong shoulders had hair like corn-silk burned in the sun and eyes as blue as any turquoise! For so had she held her baby, walking with that free, n.o.ble stride, and so she had laughed and met my eyes, and so the child had clutched her hair, in the summer just pa.s.sed.

So vivid was the impression that I stood, as I say, in a maze, and the scarab-seller and he of the bra.s.s tray cursed me heartily as they struggled for balance in the pushing, screaming, reeking crowd. How meaningless that phrase, "real life!" Years and years of actual happenings in my life have been less real than those seconds in the Cairo streets, when down the alley-ways of sound and sight, across the intricate network of that spongy, grey tissue in my skull, this tiny, deathless, unimportant memory led my soul away from the present and left me, an unconscious, stupid, mechanical toy, to block the Cairo traffic, while I--the real I--lived far away. Truly the poets and the children are our only realists, and Time and s.p.a.ce have fooled the rest of us unmercifully.

I find that trivial recollections of this sort interest me far more in the recording than my sensations as a wealthy man. These last were, indeed, strikingly few. Beyond the pleasure of buying old Jeanne a Cashmere shawl, the hidden ambition of her life, and giving orders for Harriet's hospital (for I seemed to have brought the natives of North Carolina down on my shoulders, somehow--and that without the faintest interest in them!) my amazing good fortune made less impression upon me, as a matter of fact, than Uncle Winthrop's first legacy. What was there for me to do with it? Roger refused to touch a penny; my mother, beyond a little increase in her charity fund and a pony phaeton, was merely bewildered when asked to make any suggestions, and would have handed purses to every tramp in New England if she had been given the means; my father's people were well-to-do, and the conferring of benefactions has always been difficult for me, anyway. The only way for me would be to drop gold-pieces on needy thresholds by night and run away--a startling occupation for a rheumatic bachelor, surely! I do not know how to receive thanks--they embarra.s.s me frightfully. To stand smugly with a philanthropic smile while the widow and the orphan weep around my knees, is something I should be forever unable to achieve. Harriet's hospital was not a charity--it was something to keep the ridiculous creature busy--her yacht, her picture gallery, her stud-farm, if you will.

As for me, I had none of these tastes. I bought the one or two pictures I had always wanted, that were within my means (most of them weren't within anybody's!) I put a piano in my new rooms, laid in a little wine for my appreciative friends, bespoke the unshared services of Hodgson, who was unfortunately necessary to me now that every sudden damp day crippled my right shoulder (he came to me wearing one of my old suits, by the way) and put a new steam-launch into Roger's concealed boat-house. I presented Margarita with another and a larger gift of pearls, it is true, but without one-tenth of the choking excitement with which I had clasped that first single one upon her neck.

The lady herself, however, balanced this equation; she was greatly delighted, and if she had not, perhaps, perfectly appreciated the first offering, more than atoned by her rapturous recognition of the second.

"And how they must have cost!" she cried. "Jerry, you are too generous--but I do love them!"

To think of Margarita's estimating the value of a gift!

We had famous talks that August, while Roger sweated at his new task--making an island for us, no less!--and _pet.i.te Marie_ gathered sh.e.l.ls and buried them in tiny, wave-washed graves.

She took to reading that summer, and I read _Pendennis_ and _David Copperfield_ aloud and she embroidered great grey b.u.t.terflies all over her grey gown for _Faust_, and the big brindled hound slept at our feet near the beehives.

"Which do you like best?" I asked her curiously.

"Oh, the one about Mr. Pendennis is the prettiest," she answered promptly, "I should have liked the man that made that book the best.

But Mr. d.i.c.kens knows about more things. He makes more different kinds of people."

"Thackeray has been called cynical," I suggested.

"What is that, Jerry?"

I explained, and she shook her head.

"O no, that is not cynical. That is the way things are, Jerry. Only everybody does not say so."

"Do you think," I asked, "that people really talk the way Mr. Micawber talks? I never heard anybody. And certainly n.o.body ever talked like his wife."

"No," she said thoughtfully, "I never did, either. But there must be a good many people _like_ them, Jerry, I am sure. And if they knew as many long words as Mr. d.i.c.kens, that is the way they _would_ talk, I think."

I have never heard a better criticism of the literary giant of the nineteenth century.

She never made the slightest secret of her affection for me nor of our thorough comprehension of each other and our similarity of tastes.

Quiet always, or almost always, with Roger, with me she chattered like a bird, and I could give her opinion on many matters of which he knew nothing.

"Jerry and I like Botticelli and caviar sandwiches and street songs and Egypt, and Roger does not," she told Clarence King once--I can hear him roar now.

"I can talk better to you than to Roger," she confided to me one day on the rocks; "if it were the custom to have two husbands, Jerry, I should like you for the other--but it is not," she added mournfully.

I agreed to this with regret and she went on thoughtfully.

"You see, Roger would not like it, even if it _was_ the custom, so I could not, anyway."

"That is very amiable of you," I said.

"It is strange how I always think of what he would like," she added, with perfect sincerity, I am sure. "One day when he would not let me have any more bread--it was so bad for my voice, you know--I got very angry and spoke crossly to him, but still he would not, and I told him that since he did not want me to sing he had better let me spoil my voice, if I wanted to--and you would think he would, would you not, Jerry?"

"No," I answered soberly, "no, Margarita, I wouldn't. He knew you really wanted your voice more than the bread, so he gave you what you wanted."

"Yes. But that day I was so angry, I planned how much more free I should be if he were to die--was it not terrible, Jerry?--and then I got so interested I could not stop, and I made a dying sickness for him like my father's, and Miss Buxton came, and then I got a black frock like Hester when my father died, and then we--you and I--made a grave for him with my father's grave on the little point, and then (this was all in my mind, you see, Jerry) I was so sad I cried and cried--as I do in _Marguerite_, all over my cheeks, and then, what do you think?"

"Heavens, child, what can I think? I don't know," I said unsteadily, revolving G.o.d knows what of possibilities in my presumptuous and selfish heart.

"Why," she said simply, "I felt so badly that I went to Roger (in my mind) to tell him about it and show him the beautiful grave we had made and my black frock (I had a little pointed bonnet with white under the front, like the widows in Paris) and suddenly I remembered that I could not show him--he would be dead! You see that would have been very bad, for I had been planning all the time that he would be there to--to--well, _that he would be there_! You see what I mean, don't you, Jerry? Roger has to be there."

"Yes, I see," I said, very low, filled with sickening shame, "he has to be there, my dear."

"And so I stopped all that dying sickness directly," she continued comfortably, "because it was too silly, if I could not tell him about it afterwards, you see.

"And yet he was very cross to me about the bread," she burst out childishly. "Why do I think he has to be there, Jerry? He cannot talk to me nearly so nicely as you can--he does not understand. Why must he be there?"

I choked and laughed at once.

"Because you love him, you silly Margarita!" I declared.

"That must be it," she agreed, with a serious, long look at me out of those deep-sea coloured eyes.

Ah, me!

How we worked at that ca.n.a.l! Caliban and two swarthy Italians and Roger and I--for I marked out the course of it in an artfully natural curve and put in the stakes. There were eighty-odd feet across the part of the peninsula we selected, and it bade fair to wear us all out and last forever, till I seized the occasion of a business trip that took Roger away for four days and hired a great gang of labourers who finished it all up, so that he walked into his island home across a foot-bridge, to his great and boyish delight. What a big boy he was, after all! Not that I did not share his pleasure in the Island: it gave me a delicious feeling of security and distance from the rest of the world. With the help of the gang I had been able to widen our channel considerably and it took a very respectable bridge indeed to span the gap. We had made plans for a regular drawbridge, but later we abandoned them, and chopped even the old one down. The water has washed and washed and worn away since, on the island side, and now one must be bent upon a swim indeed who cares to venture among the jagged ledges and mill-races that my blasting made.

We piped our spring too--a beauty--up through the dairy cellar to the kitchen, and Caliban was saved many a weary trip. Some years afterward I took my chance during another absence of the lord of the Island, and a hurried and astonished set of plumbers installed a luxurious bathroom in either ell of the cottage--a surprise for his birthday.

Profiting by a winter in Bermuda, I copied their roof reservoirs, allowing one to each ell, sanded without, whitewashed within, an architectural measure which made the skyline even more rocky and wild, in appearance, from the water. Before we left, that autumn, we planted fifty evergreens, pines, hemlocks and spruces, in a broad belt just opposite the Island, masking it completely from the sh.o.r.e, and hardly a year pa.s.sed after that without thickening and lengthening that concealing wall. Oh, we guarded our jewel, I can tell you!

It was that summer, I think, that Whistler came to us and drew that series of sepia sketches that frames the big fireplace. They are on the plaster itself--a sort of exquisite fresco--and Venice sails, Holland wind-mills and London docks cl.u.s.ter round the faded bricks with an indescribably fascinating effect. At my urgent request I was allowed to protect them with thin tiles of gla.s.s riveted through the corners into the plaster: how the collectors' mouths water at the sight of them!

Stevenson came a few years later: all the quaint comforts and intimate beauties hidden away behind the boulders plainly caught his elfish, childlike fancy--it was he who made the little grotto beyond the asparagus bed, lined the pool in it with unusual sh.e.l.ls and coloured pebbles, fitted odd bits of looking-gla.s.s here and there, and wrote a poem on a smooth stone at the door for little Mary, to whom he dedicated it.

"The purple pool of mussel sh.e.l.ls, All full of salty ocean smells, The coral branches in the wall-- And you the mermaid queen of all ..."

She used to recite it all very charmingly. Roger never wanted it printed in the _Child's Garden of Verses_, where it properly belongs--one of the best of them, in my opinion.

He and Margarita talked together by the hour and I have seen his dog-like brown eyes fixed on her an hour at a time. I asked him once if he intended to "put her in a story"--the quaint query of the layman, so strangely irritating to the book-man--and he shook his loose-locked head slowly.

"They say I can't do women, you know," he said, "and n.o.body would believe her if I put her in, she's too artistically effective."