The Breath of the Gods Part 8

"Certainement!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Pierre, who was beginning to feel at home.

"It is transplanted Paris. Why not Sunday night, better than another?

All persons have been to ma.s.s, except our naughty selves. The piety of the others may chance to include us. G.o.d is good! Allons! The opera is Faust, with the full ballet and music. Time means little here! Vive New Orleans!" After a laughing glance into Mrs. Todd's still dubious countenance he whispered, insinuatingly, "It is never to be known in Washington or--Tokio--dear Madame."

In the end he carried his point and his party. Never had he been in such spirits. Yuki could scarcely keep her eyes from his radiant face. Mr.

Todd declared him a mineral spring that had just blown its way through a boulder. He stopped turbaned mammies or wondering children on the banquets,--which in New Orleans means sidewalks,--that he might elicit, by his correct Parisian French, answers in the delicious native patois.

At each success he hugged himself anew.

"c'est ca, meme! Mo pas geignin l'argent pour butin ci lala!" he murmured ecstatically. "Geignin plein!" Pa.s.sing the cathedral, Pierre asked of a lounging, large-hipped negress: "Est-ce qu'il y a la messe a la Cathedrale demain?" to receive the impudent answer:

"Sainte Pitie! Est-ce que vous croire que le va leve apres so' bon diner au poisson pou' vini donner nous autres la sainte messe? Bon Dieu la Sainte Vierge! Ha! Ha!"

"Holy Mother! But it is French, en glace,--crushed, with the cream swimming and the flavor heightened!"

Todd alone stared out across the dim, majestic river through De Soto's eyes. He tried to feel himself the man, to prophesy as that seer had prophesied. The great city and the long levees were builded in that vanished mind, before the first adobe brick was moulded, or the first dark cedar hewn. Now in himself, as Todd the new American minister, he felt the country of his dreams creep nearer, lured by the magnet of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Within his own life, should G.o.d be pleased to spare him to a fair old age, new craft would thread the Mississippi delta, small merchantmen at first, and sailing vessels, each with the banner of the red sun on its mast. Asiatic labor, silent, skilful, insidious, would contest for preeminence with the saturnine Dago, the "cayjin," the Quadroon, and the established African.

Each moment, westward from the city, held a novelty and a delight. The sugar-fields of Louisiana, stretching for leaden-colored miles, and soon to be pierced by myriad tiny spears of awakening green, appeared to Yuki a giant sort of rice-field from her own land.

"If it were cut up into many small piece, all of different shape and size, with little crooked baby-levees binding the edges,--it would be exacterlee the winter rice-fields of Nippon."

Sometimes, in an island of higher ground, the white-columned house of a sugar-planter gleamed, and near it rose mammoth live oaks, huge tumuli of green, the underbranches swaying with grizzled moss. In the open country, such trees crouched low above stealthy creeks, or blotted widening lagoons.

While in the city, they had read and heard of recent heavy rains to the West, flooding a wide agricultural district. On the borderland of Texas, they knew they had reached the threatened fields. Cypress, magnolia, sweet gum, and bay trees stood knee deep in a sea of dull chrome, churned from roads of clay. It seemed a lake of yellow onyx. Between the trunks writhed a tropical disorder of vines, palmetto, and undergrowth.

In wide, clear s.p.a.ces, drifting fence rails or half-submerged buildings told of ruin already accomplished. Now the whole unstable sea was covered by a carpet of the floating "water-hyacinth," which, in later months, was to turn the bayous and lagoons into veins of amethyst. It seemed incredible to the little party, staring solemnly from train windows, that they were in temperate America at all. Every floating spar of wood became an alligator's head, every springing tuft of white swamp flower a meditative stork.

Night fell swiftly upon the watery forest, sucked down into it as to a familiar lair. With the next morning, the world had changed to a dry desert, above which arched an unrelated sky.

"Can we really be on the same planet?" asked Gwendolen; "or in the night, did this little measuring-worm of a train reach up and pull itself to Mars?"

Before, behind, everywhere, stretched s.p.a.ces of exhausted gray sand, rising now and again into nerveless hills. For vegetation were set innumerable rosettes of the spiked yucca, with small heaps of the p.r.i.c.kly pear, a cactus bush built up of fleshy bulbs, leaf out of leaf, like inflated green coral. On some of the th.o.r.n.y ridges perched star-like, yellow blooms. On others were stuck thick, purple fingers, known politely by the name of "figs." Dodge remarked sententiously that it was a very interesting plant; though, by raisers of cattle, not considered desirable. "Stock won't eat it a little bit," he explained cherubically. "Get stickers into their noses."

"Do you call that thing a plant?" cried Gwendolen, pointing. "It may grow, but it is no more a plant than a canary is a crab."

Dodge smiled again, the irritating smile of the well-informed. "Wait till to-morrow in Arizona, if you want to know how it feels to be struck dumb."

Gwendolen tossed her head. Her tendency during these initial days was to overact indifference.

"I rather think I shall not undergo the humiliation of incapacity to speak! Life heretofore has brought no crises in which I could not command a fairly adequate linguistic expression of my visual experiences."

"Whew,--how did you remember it all?" said Dodge under his breath. Yuki turned her intense face from the window. At sight of the absorbed, half-dazed expression, Gwendolen gave a little laugh, crying, "Here is one already nearing the borders of silence! That is Yuki's way. When she begins to feel things, she draws back in her sh.e.l.l, and puts sealing-wax on the door. What is it now, Yuki,--lack of English,--that keeps you so dumb?"

"No, not exacterlee," said Yuki, flushing a little at the turning of all eyes. "I have not good English, of course; but I could not say to myself all that I see, even in Nipponese. When too many new thing come, it is like fat people trying to squeeze together through a door,--all get mashed, and none come through."

Dodge gazed at the speaker in quizzical admiration. "Miss Onda, I long for a phonograph record. That is a masterly exposition of a profound psychological truth!"

Yuki cast a laughing, half-pathetic glance toward Pierre. "Is it very bad names that he is calling me, M. Le Beau?"

In spite of Gwendolen's hyperbolic boast, Arizona, next day, came near to fulfilling Dodge's prophecy. The world stretched bigger and broader, as though here, instead of at the Arctic poles, the "flattening-like-an-orange" of our globe took place. The sky, immeasurably remote and tangibly arched, was a thin crystal dome soldered to earth by the lead-line of the horizon. The red sand was hot to look at. The hills, though of vaster proportions, had more of helplessness and degeneracy in their sprawling curves. Yucca grew very closely now, marching up and down the slopes like fierce explosive little soldiers with bayonets too long for them. The objectionable p.r.i.c.kly pears vanished. In their places rose a stranger order of being, cacti in tangled bunches, as of green serpents, sometimes with the licking red tongue of a blossom,--hunched woolly lambs of growth on high, thin stilts of s.h.a.ggy black,--huge green melons, ribbed, spiked, and lazy, that seemed strangely at ease on their burning couches of sand. Far off, against the rim of nothingness, dry, blue mountain shapes emerged, mere tissue filaments of hue. And now, as part of the unreal perspective, giant cacti rose, at first no more than scratches and cross-marks on a window-pane, but coming steadily close. The first that flashed, tall, stark, and tangible, into the very faces of those who watched, brought small exclamations of wonder and distaste. It pa.s.sed instantaneously, fleeing backward into nothingness,--a herald to proclaim the coming horde. In a few moments, imagination, the sunshine, and the day became mere mediums for the aggressive race. This scorched eternity was made for them. Isolated and defiant, their laws were to themselves. It seemed a deliberate a.s.sumption that they should mock reality, taking on the evil forms of crucifix, gallows, skeleton-trees, and mile-posts, where nothing but a famished death was to be pointed.

The desert might have been a vast sea-bottom, set with grim coral trees and hardened polyps.

"They are a race of evil spirits, petrified," whispered Gwendolen. "I feel their sinister a.s.sociation with our human life. See what shapes they have chosen!"

"Yes," said Yuki in return, and caught Gwendolen's hand as if for comfort. "You are right, Gwendolen. I think it is a Buddhist h.e.l.l of trees."

"But what could cause this doom to befall an innocent tree, little sister?"

"It must be evil karma," said Yuki, with wide yet shrinking eyes upon the desert. "Perhaps a tree where a blameless man was hanged, perhaps the tree of a martyr's sacrifice,--perhaps even,--" here her voice fell to an intense and dramatic whisper which chilled her listeners while it stirred them, "perhaps that terrible--terrible tree whereon our--Saviour--See--see! now, over there--there--where on top of a hill three great crosses, the middle one so great and black and high,--is it not Gethsemane?" She pointed with a shaking finger, unable to utter more.

"Come, Yuki, do not look--I forbid it!" cried Pierre, vehemently. In a moment, with a shudder, he added, "Albrecht Durer might have dreamed them in a nightmare, had he killed his own child and slept afterward!

Mother of G.o.d! I shall look no more!"

"Nor I either, Pierre," cried Mrs. Todd, in great relief. "You are right to correct Yuki,--she does have such morbid fancies. I've heard her tell stories of ghosts, and incarnations, and those scary things that would make the flesh creep on your bones. Thank heaven, this day is nearly done! Ugh! See how the lengthening shadows spread them on the sand!"

Deliberately she pulled down the small window-shade, leaned back, and closed her eyes.

"What's the matter, dear? Are you faint?" asked Mr. Todd, bending over her.

"No, but I'm thirsty. Ring for some lemonades, Cy. This dust has made my throat as dry as a lime-burner's wig!"

Gwendolen rose. "Well, you can have your lemonades, but I am going to watch the desert until night drives down the last black cactus-peg. It's a thing to remember!"

"Voila! It's a thing to forget," challenged Pierre. "Nay, Yuki-ko, you must not follow. Tears are on your cheeks. Stay here, and let us talk of your beautiful land, forgetting the harsh ugliness outside."

He, too, leaned over, and pulled down a shade. Yuki made a slight motion of protest, then submitted. "Yes, let us talk of the ume-flowers," she whispered. "They are the first."

Gwendolen had taken a seat to herself at the far end of the open compartment. Here, alone, she watched the red sands smoulder into gray.

For a brief half-hour the plant shadows stretched elastically into a network of black. Suddenly they sank, as water, into the sand. The upright stalks themselves began to waver and lose shape. An instant more and they would have vanished like their shadows; but now, in the western sky, just where the heated disc of copper had been lowered, an aftermath of glory mocked the night. The cactus forms, against the gleam, acquired new menace and fresh exaggeration. The brightness shut down quickly, like a box-lid, and a universe of stars sprang out. Tangled in their beams, again loomed up the cacti.

"Fair maid, thy summons to the lemonade!" said Dodge, close behind her.

"By Jove! I almost committed a rhyme! Fair maid,--lemonade,--good combination, think I'll write it on my cuff."

At last the girl turned from her desert.

Next day, to the outspoken satisfaction of Mrs. Todd, aridity had begun to retreat before civilization. Even the small spot called Yuma seemed, with its station garden of green, a bit of Paradise. Before reaching it, Dodge had carefully printed a large notice, using the top of one of Gwendolen's florist boxes. This he hung in full view of all, at the end of the car.

"We approach YUMA. No puns aloud. First offence, one bottle. Second offence, five bottles. Third offence, a whole case. By Order of the General Manager."

The few other travellers destined for the long California journey were, by this time, all on friendly terms. No one could have resisted the combined gayeties of Gwendolen, Dodge, and Pierre Le Beau. Yuki, though less responsive, was, as usual, an object both of interest and admiration.

In lower California Mrs. Todd averred that at last she was in America.

The trip up the coast, with glimpses of Narragansett surf springing up in dazzling whiteness between rows of eucalyptus, pepper, and live-oak trees, or over the roofs of tiled adobe houses, could not turn her from the belief.

Near San Jose, cottages peered out from arching vines of rose. Gwendolen was distressed and surprised to find that roses, here, did not bloom continuously, and always in abundance. "They must show like glaciers, when they do come," she admitted.

With San Francisco, modern life, society, stress, began, anew. Old acquaintances sent in cards. Gwendolen began a whole volume of new admirers, while Yuki, with Pierre as escort, found certain j.a.panese friends and acquaintances, one the child of an old family servant of her father's house.

To many thousands of voyagers, San Francisco is but a stopping place, a bird-rest for preening. As a fact it is a city which possesses an unusual share of individuality, of "atmosphere," in the sense that writers use. No where else are to be seen such gray and wind-swept streets, where houses stand sidewise, as if mounting flights of stairs, the parlor windows of one house looking through the chimney-pots of its neighbor. Nowhere else are perched palaces like those of San Francisco, or a growth, as huge and strange in its exotic coloring, as Chinatown.

The great, round, shimmering bay and Golden Gate are as a loom, and ships of the harbor, shuttles weaving together the nations of East and West.

On sailing day, new friends and new flowers gave the little party of the Todds "bon voyage."