The Locusts' Years Part 8

Martin was staring at Charlotte, who began to color with embarra.s.sment. Her view-point had seemed to her so natural and so simple that she was quite unprepared for the comment it evoked.

"I'll have to coach you up before I turn you loose on people," he said. "Why, I never thought it of you."

Lieutenant Snodgra.s.s a.s.sumed the air of a man, the length of whose matrimonial experience justifies him in extensive allusions to feminine peculiarities.

"Oh, if she doesn't startle you any worse than that," he hinted darkly.

After dinner, Charlotte was left to a long hour of Mrs. Snodgra.s.s's company while their husbands reviewed war experiences and discussed that never-ending theme of exiles, the Government's Philippine policy. It was ten o'clock when the Collingwoods bade good-bye to their hosts, with the usual promise of an exchange of visits. They found Maclaughlin waiting for them at the landing with the boat. He asked Mrs. Collingwood if she could steer and, being told that she could, vacated his place in the stern for her.

The night was dark but not cloudy, like the previous one. The moon would not rise till later, but the night azure of the sky was unclouded, and all the constellations of the tropic belt were glittering in its peaceful depths. The Southern Cross was there, and the so-called False Cross, while, in the north, the "Big Dipper"

hung low and out of place. The water was phosph.o.r.escent, the oars turning in green fire, which sent a million p.r.i.c.kles flashing away in the waves. When, now and then, a banca crept past them, its shape was outlined in the same lurid radiance, and the noiseless paddles dripped smears of unearthly flame. Charlotte pulled her tiller ropes in silence, keeping a wary eye out for unlighted craft, and watching the huddle of lights that was their launch. The coastguard cutter had left half an hour before. She was a faint glimmer of dots on the vague horizon; her smoke still lay a wavering, dark line across the night sky.

Suddenly a tremor of deadly fear shook Charlotte. There went the chain by which she had felt herself linked to the world and civilization. She had put herself at the mercy of a man of whom she knew, after all, next to nothing. Once aboard the launch, once out of Cuyo harbor, she was as utterly in his power as any prisoner in a dungeon is in the power of his captors. A wife may have rights and privileges in the eye of the law, but they avail her little on an island where no one of her own race save her husband's friends steps foot.

Her crowding thoughts sickened her, though she had enough will and strength to guide the boat alongside the launch. Collingwood threw away his cigar and held out his hands. "Up with you," he cried gayly.

The answer was a half movement and a groan as she dropped back with her face in her hands.

"Charlotte, are you sick? My G.o.d! What's the matter?"

His vehemence and the fear in his voice rea.s.sured her. With indomitable pride she raised herself. "My ankle turned; it was sickening pain for an instant. It is all right, I think. The pain is growing less."

She hated herself for the lie. She despised herself for the little pretence she still made at lameness as her husband would have picked her up bodily. "I can walk," she said, and stepped over the thwarts.

Maclaughlin had clambered aboard ready to receive her as Martin lifted her. They put her in the steamer chair which was to serve her as a stateroom, and Martin hovered over, chafing her hands, offering her brandy from his pocket flask. Mr. Maclaughlin, after making certain that she was not seriously hurt, tactfully removed himself. Martin called to him to wait a minute before pulling out; that it might be necessary to get a doctor. Charlotte's face burned. She was grateful for the darkness that hid it.

"It is not even sprained," she said truthfully. "There--see how I can move it. It didn't amount to anything, only I am such a coward."

"You are sure now?" said Martin. She was only too glad to say that she was.

An hour later, a waveless sea was gurgling musically as the launch cut through it, and a tropical moon was scattering a pathway of brilliants into which the little craft seemed desirous of plunging herself, but which she could never quite attain. The Filipino steersman shifted from foot to foot, a dim moving shape at his shadowed post. Mysterious clanks and groans issued at intervals from the engine-room below. There was no longer a wavering dark line across the night sky, though the light on Cuyo was still visible. And in the exquisite peace a woman, reared to luxury and social exclusiveness, lay in her deck chair and listened to the talk of men who had known most of the shadows of life and some of its pits of evil, took their homage, too, and found it tasty.

Each had drawn up one of the three-legged, rattan stools which are so common in the Philippines and they were seated one on each side of her. Their talk wandered over many themes, but was always terse and vivid. They agreed in d.a.m.ning the Government. All civilian non-employees do that continually. They spoke of affairs on the island, and discussed the administration of local justice with the simplicity of men who do not quibble over political doc.u.ments, but who have a strong conviction that the powerful must rule the weak. One of the j.a.panese divers was making trouble with the launch crew, preaching the inferiority of the white race and the drubbing one part of it was destined to receive. "I guess he's right on the Russians," said Collingwood. "I believe the j.a.ps will thrash them into the middle of kingdom come; but if he goes to putting on any airs around me, I'll kick him into the China Sea."

"No need," said Maclaughlin cheerily, "I did it for him last week. It did him a world of good."

"How are findings?"

"None too good. We'll not make our fortunes this year, but we'll make our keep, and a little to spare." The smile on the keen face told Charlotte that the speaker was not dissatisfied.

"How's Kingsnorth?"

"Just himself."

"Poor devil," said Martin feelingly. Maclaughlin broke into a hearty laugh. "Hear the married man," he cried, "an' if you could ha' heard him six months gone, Mrs. Collingwood!"

"I probably shouldn't have liked it," said Charlotte dryly.

"Kingsnorth will snort when he hears that Mrs. Snodgra.s.s asked us to dinner," said Martin. "They don't like each other," he explained to his wife. "I can't say I ever thought she liked me much till this trip. She thinks I'm likelier to be a respectable member of society, now I'm married. She thinks that because I was a soldier I went about sowing wild oats by the cavan."

It happened that at the moment he finished the remark, Charlotte's glance rested on Maclaughlin, whose face was fair in the moonlight. In a flash--in just the instant's time that it took him to change his expression--she read the man's judgment that Collingwood owed thanks to his wife for any civility received from Mrs. Snodgra.s.s. A man brought up in the British empire has some sources of knowledge denied the citizens of our great republic. Thirty years of kicking over American frontiers had robbed the Scotchman of many a national trait. They had not obscured his firm fixed impressions of gentility. He knew Martin's wife for a gentlewoman.

"How did you like Mrs. Snodgra.s.s?" Martin asked his wife.

Charlotte cast about for something truthful and non-committal. "I thought she was very prettily dressed," she replied, "and that she showed very good taste in her home. It was cosy, and the dinner was excellent."

"Good heavens, Charlotte! I didn't ask you that. I asked you how you liked her."

"She told you," said Maclaughlin with a short laugh.

"Of course I did," echoed Charlotte. "I put it in the most forcible way I could. Don't pretend you did not understand."

"I understood well enough. I just wanted you to come out and out with what you mean. Why don't you like her?"

"She is too commonplace and too a.s.suming."

"What do you mean by commonplace?"

"I mean--I mean--" exasperation brought her to the point of unguarded speech--"a woman who says 'Don't you know?' with every other breath, or tacks on a sweet 'Isn't it so?' or 'Don't you think?' to qualify every word she utters. I mean a woman of exactly Mrs. Snodgra.s.s's type."

"Commonplace always means a woman then?"

But by that time Charlotte was laughing, partly at her flash of temper, partly at the odd confusion of her definition, which Martin had so quickly pointed out with his uncompromising finger.

"It doesn't mean a man like you," she said. "You are not commonplace, but unique."

"The only one of my kind," said Martin yawning. She could see, under his jocularity, his pride and pleasure in her (as he considered) audacity. Her criticisms of the lady meant little to him, except as they were the gauntlet thrown down, the laudable declaration that Martin Collingwood's wife was not going to stand any patronizing from the regular army. But she realized also that he was flattered by the invitation they had received. To him Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgra.s.s were people that counted. A pang of contrition shot through her that what had been a sort of social triumph to him had been an unmitigated bore to her. Then a sense of humor came uppermost. The boredom she might conceal. But as well attempt to make water run up hill as to make Charlotte Collingwood regard an acquaintance with Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgra.s.s as a social triumph. Maclaughlin, who was to take the first watch, went forward, and Collingwood curled himself up, native fashion, on a mat at his wife's feet. Long after his deep respirations told her that he was fast asleep, she lay with wide open eyes, staring into the silvered pathway ahead of them, her thoughts a blending of regret and of exquisite joy. When, at three o'clock, Maclaughlin came to wake up Martin, she pretended to be asleep, and shortly after she did fall into a slumber, from which she was awakened by her husband's voice and the word "home."

She sprang to her feet with an instinctive movement of bewilderment, and then caught her breath for sheer delight in what she saw.

The launch was riding a mile or more off the sh.o.r.e of a wedge-shaped island perhaps three miles in length. Its backbone was a line of hills which rose precipitously from the sea on the eastern side (as she later discovered) but which, on the west sloped gently down to a level coast plain, a quarter of a mile or more broad. The plain and the hills were one huge cocoanut grove. In the foreground, the columned boles and the graceful plumes made a great haunt of emerald shade, a dream place of cool recesses and long cathedral aisles. Its rich, unvarying greenness seemed the more vivid by contrast with the changing hues of the shallow water, with the gleaming whiteness of the beach, and the occasional overtopping of a wave like the dip of a sea-gull's wings.

At the northern apex of the island, situated where they not only commanded the western sea, but looked eastward over a channel to the coast line of Panay and a scarped mountain rearing its cloud-hung flanks against a l.u.s.tering sky, three steep nipa-roofed cottages nestled among the palms. Southward, the beach line ran straight till it curved out into a sharp point in front of one of the hills. There stood a small nipa village.

Dawn flushes played across the sky behind the distant mountain, and pearled the shining sea. A great fishing banca manned by at least twelve oarsmen swept boldly past them. The naked backs were made of rippling bronze. A lorcha, almost on the western horizon line, showed in faint lines and in gleaming spots of mother of pearl. The morning breeze was almost chill.

It came, a crowding of perceptions and sensations, but Charlotte's pleasure was almost ecstatic.

"Beautiful, beautiful!" she murmured. "It is a veritable paradise."

"Is it?" said Maclaughlin's knowing voice behind her. "I'm glad you think so, Mrs. Collingwood. My wife has been doubting you'd find it dull. Martin and I will take ours with a bandstand and a few trolley-cars and a chop-house thrown in, eh, Collingwood?"

"Oh, shut up, Mac, don't pour cold water on my wife's enthusiasms. Besides, she's got a poetic soul, and you and I haven't."

Charlotte stared. "What will you endow me with next?" she asked. "A poetic soul! Martin, who has been talking about poetry for the last two months?"

"I don't mind admitting," said Mr. Collingwood shamelessly, "that I have, or, at least, I've been dwelling on the poetry of love and I found you responsive. Therefore I deduced a poetic soul--sort of Sherlock Holmes. Sabe?"