The Locusts' Years Part 10

Martin shrugged his shoulders. Kingsnorth laughed. "It would be dangerous on British soil," he said, "but not under the great republic. Who is going to tack back and forth across this channel in a lorcha or a parao, because a j.a.p got kicked? His nearest magistrate is a Filipino juez de paz on the Antique coast. I wish him joy of all the law he can get there. When it comes to the island of Maylubi, Martin, Mac, and I are the law. 'L'etat, c'est nous.'"

Mrs. Collingwood smiled discreetly at the French, and pushed her chair back. Kingsnorth often threw a phrase of French into his speech, and she felt that it was aimed directly at her, and implied an exclusion of the others from their superior plane of conversation. It was not an act characteristic of an Englishman of his cla.s.s, and she realized that only the intensity of his desire to establish himself on a footing of intimacy could induce him to use such methods.

They all walked down to the beach together, and after Charlotte had watched their row-boat pull alongside the launch, she sat down on a bit of sand gra.s.s beneath a cocoanut tree and revelled in the morning breeze. It was a "four man breeze" as they say when four men are needed on the outriggers of the paraos; and more than one deep-sea fishing craft swept by with its four naked squatting outriders sitting at ease on their well sprayed stations with the great sail bellying above them. As the tide went out, troops of children wandered up the beach, digging skilfully with their toes for clams, or pouncing with shrieks of delight on some stranded jelly fish. From the field beyond the house, their gardener could be heard hissing at their one draft animal, and once in awhile Mrs. Maclaughlin's voice arose in a rain of pigeon Spanish as she bent over her garden beds, or ranged through her poultry yards.

It was very lonely, but Charlotte did not mind it. Barring the discomforts of their experiences in the early days with Mrs. Maclaughlin's food, and the difficulty of holding John Kingsnorth in his place without betraying her feelings about him to Martin, she might have said that her island life hardly boasted of the crumpled rose leaf. Even Kingsnorth's evident determination to be accepted as an intimate, did not imply a desire to establish any sentimental relation to herself, nor could she explain to her whole satisfaction just why she so vigorously thwarted him. She was only conscious of feeling that to accept his tacit offer of good fellowship was a clearly defined step downward, an open throwing over of standards which, if she had endangered them by her marriage, she had still high hopes of maintaining, and to which she hoped ultimately to win her husband.

On the whole, her thoughts were very sweet and wholesome as she sat there in the growing warmth. More than once a sense of housekeeping responsibility urged her to rise and betake herself indoors, but she could not bring herself to disturb her reverie till a respectful cough attracted her attention.

An old man and a young girl, carrying a child in her arms, stood a few feet away. The man was dressed in spotless white trousers with a Chinese shirt of white muslin. One sleeve was decorously adorned with a black mourning band, and his white bamboo plaited hat was also wreathed in sable. The girl was dressed in the deepest of Filipino mourning--black calico skirt, black alpaca tapis, or ap.r.o.n, and a camisa of thin barred black net, shiny and stiff with starch. Through its gauzy texture her white chemise, trimmed with scarlet embroidery, showed garishly, while the immense sleeves made no pretence of hiding her plump, gold-colored arms. Her face, of a very Malaysian type, was decidedly pretty, and the haughty column of her neck and a wealth of jetty hair lent still further charm. As she caught Charlotte's eye, she stepped forward, throwing back, as she did so, the black veil which had hidden the child's face.

Charlotte's first exclamation of surprise and pity was followed by an indignant flush. The child, which was evidently dying of anaemia, was a mestizo. Its blue eye, its almost fair hair above a pasty skin and something indefinably British in the stamp of its expression betrayed its paternity at once.

The man spoke neither Spanish nor English, and the girl had only a few phrases of each; but with Charlotte's command of the vernacular she managed to get a few facts in some sort of sequence. For brevity and to spare the reader an elliptical conversation in three languages they can be set down as Charlotte summed them up afterwards.

The man was the child's grandfather; the girl, its aunt. Its mother had died a week or so before at a village on the Antique coast. The woman and her people had lived with Kingsnorth openly in his house up to the morning of the senora Americana's arrival. At that time Kingsnorth had come in in great excitement, had bundled them all off in short order, and had established them in the coast village. As he was their only source of income, they accepted his mandate without question.

But the mother had died, of what they could not make quite clear, though the girl pressed her hands upon her heart and repeated "muy, muy triste" more than once. After the mother's death, the baby lacked nourishment, though its father gave money to buy milk. They had come over on a fish parao to show it to its father, and had received orders to keep out of Mrs. Collingwood's way; but hearing from the villagers of that lady's skill in curing the sick and of her willingness to use it, they could not forbear bringing the child to her. But with tears, they besought her to keep the secret. The old man made a very fair representation of bestowing a hearty kick, and the girl, weeping, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed "Pega, pega mucho," many times.

Charlotte had been interested during her hospital experience in a series of experiments made by one of the surgeons in infant-feeding. The mortality among Filipino children is enormous, and much attention is given to infant care. It happened that she had been trying the food process on one or two babies in the village, and it was doubtless the news of that fact which had induced the people to risk Kingsnorth's anger and appeal to her.

She led them homeward, gave the child some nourishment, and set to work to show the girl how to prepare the canned milk for future use. It was not till they had departed that she realized that they had not said whether or not the mother had been legally married. Later she decided that the fact was immaterial, but she was inclined to believe the child illegitimate.

For the next ten days the girl presented herself with the child for treatment. She watched carefully to see that the fishers had gone each day, and that Mrs. Maclaughlin was not around. The child thrived, and with returning health showed a somewhat engaging appearance.

Charlotte could never be quite certain of her reasons for keeping silence to her husband on the subject. At first undoubtedly she desired to avoid making trouble for the old man and the girl; but later, when Mrs. Maclaughlin had met the girl face to face on Charlotte's veranda steps, and she knew the fact had been retailed to Maclaughlin and to the other men, she was still wordless. For a few days the sullen demeanor of Kingsnorth showed that he dumbly resented her knowledge; but in the end his proteges established themselves in the village, and when Charlotte walked that way she often saw his taffy-colored son, in a single garment, staring with incongruous blue eyes from the floor of a nipa shack.

What was stranger, even, than anything else, Mrs. Maclaughlin showed an eager desire to avoid the subject. Charlotte had antic.i.p.ated, with some dread, that the lady would break forth garrulously once the cat was out of the bag; but she was most pleasantly disappointed. Between herself and Martin the matter was never mentioned. There were times when she would have liked to ask him what he had really expected her to do before Kingsnorth saved the situation by packing off his impedimenta; but she was afraid that, if the subject were ever opened up between them, she would express herself too frankly, and she was too thoroughly happy with her husband to care to risk disturbing their satisfaction in each other. As time went on, she ceased to give the matter any thought at all. After all, she reflected, had she not known it all potentially the first time she ever saw Kingsnorth? What did the addition of a few specific data matter? At that time all her will was bent to the determination to make the best of her romance, to be happy at any cost, and to postpone indefinitely, if not ultimately, any hour of settlement.

CHAPTER VIII

"Want a paseo, Charlotte?" Martin called from his deck chair on the vine-shaded veranda one Sunday afternoon. "It's not so very hot. I feel like walking myself."

Mrs. Collingwood, who was dabbing a powder puff across her face as a finish to her afternoon toilet, responded at once, from the adjoining bedroom, that she was longing for a walk. In a few minutes, she appeared, tying the strings of a great sun hat, and handed her umbrella to Martin.

"Have I got to lug this thing?" he groaned; but even as he spoke, he opened it and held it tenderly over her.

Kingsnorth, smoking on his own veranda, nodded and asked them where they were going.

"Most anywhere. Up the hill, probably. Charlotte likes to go there. Will you come along?"

Mrs. Collingwood did not second the invitation, though she had time to do so before Kingsnorth replied. "I'm too lazy. I'll leave hill-climbing to you adventurous young persons." To himself he added, "You don't want me. You want to go up there and spoon. Oh, Lord! to be young again!" He did not add, "and to love and be loved"; but the words were bitter in his thoughts as he watched the young couple go along the clean beach.

When they came to a path leading across the cocoanut grove to a spur of hill on the eastern side of the island, they took it, followed it through the shadowed green arcades, climbed a rather stiff hill, and, at length, found themselves in the shade of a bamboo clump at the head of a cleft filled with undergrowth. An outcropping of rock made a sort of natural seat for Charlotte, and Collingwood stretched himself at her feet. On the ridge above them a line of cocoanut trees drooped their great leaves, while over their heads the long bamboo stems swayed to every breath of air. Although the elevation was low--not more than fifty or sixty feet above the water--it gave the loungers an extended view. The sea rolled in long swells of deepest sapphire. Far away to the north, the great plateau mountain of Tablas was a violet shadow in the sky; but on the east the insistent sun searched out every ravine and spur of the Antique coast range. From that grim mountain king which lords it over them on the north to the far distance of the south their weathered sides lay outlined in long lines of pink and mauve, and in great patches of smoky-blue, where cloud shadows lay soft upon them. Here and there a distant sail gleamed, a mere speck of pearl against the l.u.s.tre of sea and sky, and, in the north, a steamer's smudge was plainly visible, though the vessel was hull down.

"May be a tramp freighter going north, which slipped through the channel without our noticing her," said Martin. "This is not the time for the Puerta Princesa steamer." Boats were always a source of conversation at the island. They were charged with almost a romantic significance, coming and going, ever the mute reminders that, beyond the shining horizon line, people still lived and toiled, still built and populated the great cities of which Martin loved to speak.

"I can't see a line of smoke without a pang of homesickness," he said. "Let's see. We are thirteen hours ahead of Chicago time. It is now about four o'clock; it's quiet enough in those empty streets now. But about the time we were eating lunch, the theatres were just emptying. I can see the carriages drive up, and the women with their beautiful dresses showing under their opera cloaks; and the other kind, the kind that don't go in carriages, hurrying off to catch a car, b.u.t.toning up their jackets as they come out into the cool--it's just frosty weather there now--and the lights in the big restaurants, and the lamps flashing on carriages and automobiles. Meanwhile, we are here frizzling, and here we bid fair to stay till we make money enough to go home in style. I shall take you to the theatre some time that way, Charlotte. You'll be in a low-necked dress with diamonds--do you think you'll like diamonds?--and you shall have one of those long coats with the hoods, and I'll be in my swallow-tail. We'll spin up in an electric brougham, and rustle into our box. Then, after the performance, we'll have a supper, and then I'll say 'Home' kind of careless to the chauffeur. How does that strike your imagination?"

He lay at her feet, smiling, and Charlotte hardly knew what to reply. How could she say to him that the experience on which his whole imagination had fastened was a matter of fact detail of her past? She had rarely entered a theatre except under the circ.u.mstances which had made it a picture of delight to him. She did not deny that it would be pleasant to go again, and she did not, for an instant, underrate the pleasure which comes of knowing oneself among the envied few. But how could she take from him the pleasure of antic.i.p.ating for her as well as for himself? Indeed, would not it make a perceptible rift in his present joy if he knew that his innocent outburst could find no echo in her breast? Would he not feel a little ridiculous? And how uncomfortable it was that that coil of misunderstanding always was most perceptible at Martin's most exalted moments! Why had he chosen to a.s.sume that she was a stranger to luxury, and why had her good taste so resolutely declined to give him even a hint, until suddenly she found herself in a position where a hint would seem like an insult? She would have liked to tell him, then and there, a string of reminiscences, and to share half a hundred memories with him, but it was too late. To say anything then would be to pour cold water by the bucket over his enthusiasms. What she did say was:

"I shall enjoy that immensely if it ever comes; but until it does come, I want you to understand that I am not discontented with our life here; and that if it never comes, I shall not let myself repine over it."

"Thank G.o.d for that," he replied earnestly. And as she smiled at him faintly, puzzled by his emphasis, he added, "I took my chances when I brought you here, and there is no doubt that you are an unusual woman to have stood it as you have done. The queer part of it is that I knew what risks I was taking, but until it was too late to back out, I couldn't own them to myself. One of the reasons that I wanted you so badly was that I hated it so here, and it was so all-fired lonely. But I kept on saying to myself that it wouldn't be lonely for you because I would be here."

"Well," she conceded, willing to gloss over the selfishness of which he stood ready to accuse himself, "so long as you are willing to believe that you would not be lonely because I would be here, that seems a fair exchange."

"No, it wasn't fair at any point, because I knew exactly what the place was like and you were going into it blindfold. But a man can't stop to look at things that way. If we did, n.o.body would ever get anything in the world that he wanted. My mother used to say to me that G.o.d helps those who help themselves. I've come to the conclusion that He doesn't do anything of the kind, but that He sits back and doesn't interfere with those who take."

After this burst of unusual eloquence, Mr. Collingwood closed his eyes and puffed luxuriously at his cigar. But for the rhythm of the surf, nature seemed steeped in afternoon slumber. In the accentuated silence the voices of children digging clams far up the beach came to them like drowsy music.

Collingwood smoked on, content with his own a.n.a.lysis of his conduct and delighting in his wife's soft hand on his brow. Charlotte thought he was going to sleep, and smiled tenderly at his closed eyes. Martin not infrequently displayed his enjoyment of her society by a willingness to nap in it; but she was not petty enough to grudge him the indulgence. Besides, many of her tenderest thoughts, her best inspirations had come to her as she mused, on lazy afternoons, with his handsome profile in her lap. There seemed, at such times, to be a reversal of their ordinary relations. She leaned tremendously on Martin, not by making him a sharer in her domestic difficulties or by wearying him, already weary with toil, by that demand for petty services by which some women delight to vaunt their possession of a slave. As far as she could be a buffer between him and all the little cares and burdens of their daily life, Charlotte had kept her promise to herself to make Martin Collingwood a good wife. And though she measured his hourly joy in the pride of having her undivided affection, she felt herself meanly stinting him of that secret h.o.a.rd of grat.i.tude which lay so warm in her heart. Was he fairly treated, she asked herself, in being denied the knowledge that he alone of all the world had made her feel herself welcome in it? He thought her strong, when, in reality, all her strength came from him. Deprived of that crown and sceptre with which he had endowed her, would she be more than a poor shrinking outcast again, a creature at bay, ready to snap without discrimination at pa.s.sing curiosity or at pa.s.sing kindness. But pride was still strong in her heart--love had not subdued that; and there were some explanations that she could not force herself to make. When he lay supine, as on that afternoon, his pagan beauty even more markedly defined by a slumber that was like a child's, she had an intuition of his unexpressed dependence on her. Was it possible that Martin had reservations also? The thought bred another. Is it possible for any soul to unbosom itself completely to another? Does not the very wealth of confidence entrain some final reservations, the inner sanctuary of that self-dignity with which the-gentlest spirit is reluctant to part? She decided that, freely as he revealed himself to her, Martin must carry deep in his heart, some feelings jealously guarded from her--thoughts and feelings perhaps that he had recklessly revealed to the young girls who at times had fired his imagination. It is the instinct of the human soul to guard those weaknesses of which it is self-conscious from those natures which cannot understand them, and, not understanding, cannot sympathize. Of what weakness did she make Martin self-conscious? She knew only too well the weaknesses of which he made her self-conscious; knew, too, her desperate fear that full cognizance of them might shake the foundations of his pride in her. They had been married eight months, and in that time they had hardly touched a jar in their lives. He had told her a thousand times that she was all the world to him, and she had replied a thousand times that she asked nothing more, and that, so long as she could be that, she was willing to bear solitude, and endure even privation. Was all her happiness hinged upon the chance dropping of a curtain in his speech or hers? upon the revelation of another self hidden away behind his merriment, behind her silence? She sighed and moved impatiently, trying to shake off her thoughts. Then she remembered that he was sleeping and glanced down to find him gazing at her quizzically.

"I've been awake all the while," he said, "watching your face. You have been doing a sight of thinking all to yourself. You thought I had dropped off, didn't you?"

"I've had reason to believe you capable of it, Martin."

"What I have done and what I am going to do this afternoon are two distinct things, Mrs. C."

"Oh, Martin, I hate 'Mrs. C.' It sounds like d.i.c.kens."

"Do you mean the d.i.c.kens?"

"No: if it comes to that, I'll use the other word--the one you are so fond of using."

Mr. Collingwood almost sat up. "Say, you're coming on," he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "You'd never have said that when we were first married."

"That's true." Mrs. Collingwood's tone left open an inference which her husband must have perceived, for he laughed contentedly.

"You were mealy-mouthed," he stated, with a genial retrospect in his voice.

Charlotte looked at him demurely. "I was brought up to observe the conventional limitations of feminine speech, dear; but if your heart is set upon my enlarging upon them--"

"Heaven forbid!" Martin e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed piously, as she came to her suggestive little pause. He added after a moment, "But I had a girl once that used to swear. It never sounded bad in her. It was just funny and cute."

If there was one habit of Martin Collingwood's that came near rousing a visible resentment in his wife, it was his easy-going references to his "girls." She knew that the term, as he used it, implied no disrespect, that it was his equivalent for innamorata, and that each affair with a girl had represented one of his tentative ventures toward matrimony. She was not jealous of her predecessors in his affections, for there was an overwhelming sincerity in his invariable rea.s.surance that none of them "came up to specifications"; that is, conformed to his ideal of womanhood, as she herself did. Nor did he hesitate to reveal that, in most cases, the breaking of sentimental ties was largely the result of his own initiative. If his frankness in these revelations had contained one element of personal vanity, it would have strained dangerously his wife's respect for him. But although he had a happy self-confidence, Collingwood was utterly without self-conscious vanity. Charlotte realized, also, that his good looks and his personal charm which she, with her critically developed faculties, had been unable to withstand, must have made him an exceedingly popular swain with the type of young woman whom he had previously affected. But it was irritating to have him lump her with them so carelessly. It implied that, though she was the only perfect jewel according to his taste, the matter was, after all, one of taste and not of kind. She was human enough, however, to suffer some pangs of curiosity concerning her erstwhile rivals, and though she would not have asked a question, she was not dissatisfied when Martin went on:

"It's funny what differences there are in people. You are not glum, but you don't laugh much. Even when you seem happiest, you are rather grave and quiet. But that girl giggled from morning till night, and she made me laugh too. She saw the funny side of everything that happened, and she was no fool either. She was quick as a flash. The last time I saw her was at the close of the Spanish War. It was about ten days before I enlisted. The Government sent a gunboat up the Mississippi River just to show the backwoods people what a real live gunboat that had been in the war looked like; and those blamed officers were making love to every pretty girl on both banks of the river wherever the boat lay long enough to have a reception for the officers or a smoker for the men. This girl was dancing with a sandy-haired little ensign, and he was piling it on thick as mola.s.ses on a hot cake. All of a sudden, she began to giggle. He wanted to know why. "I'll bet a horse you're married," she said over his shoulder; and the fellow, like to split himself laughing, vowed he wasn't. But when he got to St. Louis, there it was in the papers, how his wife had come out to join him for that week. When his boat went back down the river the next week, all the girls gave him the laugh. That little devil had told it on him, and all the talk he had given her."

"I like that girl," said Charlotte. "What became of her? How did it happen that you didn't make the best of your opportunities in her case?"

"I did. She had me mighty anxious. But she played just a little too bluff a game. She got hold of a long-legged sergeant of volunteers and she let on that she didn't have a minute to give me after he came along. I used to walk home from church with her pretty regularly, but the first Sunday after she picked up with him, she turned me down. I had to come along behind with her best friend: she was one of those girls that always have neglected women friends and run 'em in and make you be civil to 'em. I hated this other girl, and I was the maddest man that ever tagged up the street after his girl and another man. All of a sudden, I saw that every time she took a step, she turned the hem of her skirt with her heel. You know I just came to myself. I got to wondering if I wanted to marry a girl with a jay-bird heel like that, and I decided I didn't. I enlisted, came out here, served my country in China, and took back talk from a lot of West Point popinjays for two years--d.a.m.n their souls--and that was all the patriotism I had. She married her volunteer and he served his three years and got a commission. I saw by a paper not very long ago that they are in Samar now. She was a good fellow, that girl. I should like to see her again. If the fool killer tried to kill her, the gun wouldn't go off, sure."