Chapter VI
It was well on in the afternoon of the next day when they anchored off Cuyo, which, with its squat lighthouse and low shore, impressed Charlotte as a dreary, lonesome spot. A launch, which was lying abreast the lighthouse, saluted them with vociferous toots, and Collingwood waved his hat in joyous response.
“That’s Mac, all right,” he said. “He’ll be aboard directly. It’s a wonder he didn’t hire the town band to welcome us.”
Charlotte winced and secretly rejoiced that for once Mr. Maclaughlin’s initiative had failed to come up to its reputation. Yet when a boat came alongside, and a grizzled Scotch-American stepped up the short ladder, her greeting was warm enough to fully satisfy her husband.
“My soul!” said Mr. Maclaughlin, giving her a lengthy handshake and a look of unqualified admiration, “but you could ha’ knocked us down with a feather the day the letter came saying that Martin would bring back a wife. Kingsnorth nigh took to his bed on it.”
Consternation was plainly written on Mrs. Collingwood’s face. Her sensitiveness was a-flutter, fearing a cold welcome from her husband’s friends.
“I’m sorry,” she began, and then came to an awkward stop.
“No offence, I hope,” said Maclaughlin, reading the signs, “He’s well over it by now. Kingsnorth is just one of those poor bodies we call a woman-hater; and you’ll notice, Mrs. Collingwood, that they always begin life just the opposite. He thought he’d found a bunkie for life in Martin, an’ the lad fooled him! I don’t say but we were all surprised, but you’ll find a hearty welcome at the island.”
“Can we get out to-night?” asked Collingwood.
“Get out in an hour if we can get our freight transhipped, unless Mrs. Collingwood is in a mind to stay and see the city by gaslight.” He jerked a derisive thumb in the direction of the iron and nipa roofs ashore.
“All the light stuff is on deck now,” said Martin whose instincts to accomplish whatever was to be done mastered any tendency toward conversation. He pointed, as he spoke, to a tarpaulin-covered heap forward. “The heavy cases are stored where they can be hauled up in a minute. I’ll see the captain at once. He won’t try to delay us, not he. Get alongside right away, with the launch, can’t you?”
“I doubt you’ve gone broke,” remarked Maclaughlin, contemplating the heap and smiling at Charlotte, who laughed.
“Not so had as that, I hope,” she responded, “but some of the credit is due me that he hasn’t.”
“That’s a fact,” her husband supplemented. “I wanted to buy out Manila and wire additional supplies from Hong Kong. However, we can talk about that later. Thank the Lord, there isn’t any sea on. We would have the devil’s own time transhipping, if there were.”
He dashed off, and Maclaughlin jumped into his boat with an order to the native rowers to hurry. For an instant, Charlotte was annoyed by their unceremonious departure, but her good sense soon rose superior to her training. Martin alert, talking business, with his hat on the back of his head, a long pencil emphasizing his gestures, was a very different figure from the insouciant young pagan, alternately jocose and pleading, that had wooed her. How quickly, too, the easy speech of the husband had possessed him. “Devil’s own time” came ripping out with unconscious force. At first, Charlotte’s fastidiousness revolted from it. Then she decided that it was virile and that she liked it. Still, she mused, if he felt the need of emphatic embellishment to point the assertion of so simple a fact as that, what might he not do when an occasion out of the ordinary arose?
Her question was answered before their goods and commissaries were aboard the launch, and, for a time, she could not tell whether she wanted to laugh or to cry. While she was still in doubt, her husband came back, red and perspiring, with his coat off. He held out a collar and necktie.
“Just look out for these things for me, won’t you?” he said. “My! I’m pretty well cussed out. Hope I didn’t shock you, pet.”
“You did, but it didn’t matter; or rather, it passed the point of shocking. You have the towering imagination in profanity, Martin, of an architect of sky-scraping buildings.”
Collingwood was able to extract a compliment from this, and looked grateful, though he was evidently impressed by the form of its expression. “I may have said a little too much,” he apologized, “but a man would have to be a saint not to lose his temper—Here!” he roared, as three of the crew, having mounted to the upper deck and having armed themselves with a flower pot apiece, started brazenly off with their burdens, “take two of those at a time. How many trips do you plan to make with this flower garden, anyway? You see that everything is right in the stateroom, won’t you?” he threw over his shoulder as he darted off.
“Certainly,” she replied, adding to herself, “for I shouldn’t like you to ‘cuss’ me.”
She felt quite safe from any such dire possibility, or she could not have joked about it even with herself. Nevertheless, she was very thoughtful as she gathered up their belongings and put them in the valises, leaving, however, the strapping and the pulling to be done by Martin.
When she had done all that there was to be done, and had put on her hat, she sank down on a locker, still holding her husband’s discarded collar, and let her thoughts dwell rosily on the part she could play in the island life. A guilty conscience urged her to acts of reparation. All that she could do to bring order and system and beauty into her husband’s home she was resolved to do. He had told her enough to let her know that he had lived in an unlovely fashion, and that he had aspirations for something better, though he could not define what he objected to in the past, or just what he wanted in the future. He was bent on making money, chiefly because he seemed to feel that there was no way of obtaining his ideal without large expenditures; and yet he was not ostentatious. He had been very liberal—extravagant, she had laughingly told him—in the purchase of household belongings; and she had told the truth when she said that she deserved the credit of restraining him. He was going to become the typical American husband, who labors unceasingly that his womankind may be decked in finery and may represent him in the whirl of society; but his wife could see that, until such a time as their prosperity should be at flood tide, he would expect her to administer wisely and economically. He gave much—as far as he was conscious of her needs—and he would ask proportionally in return. Charlotte’s head reared proudly to meet the thought. She would not fail him. And then she vowed for the hundredth time, that his unstinted devotion should meet with its just due, and that never, never should Martin suspect how she had had to battle with herself before she could conquer the feeling that her love was a shame to her.
Martin, coming to seek her in order to introduce her to the wife of a local military officer, found her sunk in reverie with his crumpled neck-wear pressed against her cheek. He put on a clean tie and collar and they went on deck together.
The military officer’s wife was a young woman, plainly of village origin, who was carrying the wide-spreading sail which many Americans in the Philippines elect to display in the exuberance of having journeyed to foreign lands. Her appearance jarred on Mrs. Collingwood, and her conversation, which was frivolous and full of assumption, reinforced the unfavorable impression.
The lady had met Collingwood three or four times before, and had treated him with scant courtesy, because he had been an enlisted man. But when she heard that he was married, and that his wife was aboard ship, her curiosity got the better of her exclusiveness—that and her eagerness to hear the sound of her own voice, for there were few Americans in Cuyo, and she was already on bad terms with several families. She threw a gushing condescension into her manner of greeting Charlotte, which put that young woman’s nerves on edge at once. But Mrs. Snodgrass (“What a name!” thought Charlotte, “I never expected to meet it out of books!”) was determined to make the best of the conversational opportunity. After a somewhat ingenuous scrutiny, she invited the Collingwoods to dinner. Charlotte was about to decline, when Martin interrupted and said that their being delayed an hour or so was of no importance; that it was evidently going to be a clear night, and they had time enough to make the run over before dawn. Charlotte supposed that some affection for Lieutenant Snodgrass—who had been a captain of volunteers in the war, and Martin’s officer—was the cause of her husband’s eagerness, and she accepted the invitation at once. She went ashore with the Lieutenant’s wife, while Martin remained to see to a few last details, and to make some arrangements with Maclaughlin.
Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass (he had not been able to secure entrance to the regular army with his volunteer rank) were comfortably domiciled, and the meal was a good one, though Charlotte was made uncomfortable by the hostess’s repeated apologies both for her food and her service. “The servants are such impossible creatures here, don’t you think?” fluttered the little woman who, before her marriage, had been a stenographer working for twelve dollars a week, and who had never enjoyed the luxury of a servant in her life till she came to the Philippines.
Charlotte glanced at her in surprise. “I had not thought so,” she replied. “They need a great deal of training, of course, but I fancied them ideal servants, so truly of the servant class, believing that God ordained us to be masters, and them to serve. At home, I feel that servants do not acquiesce in the situation, and the more intelligent they are, the more sensitive I am to the undercurrent.”
It was evident that Mrs. Snodgrass regarded this remark as verbiage. “How funny!” she said. “I never felt that way.”
“In other words,” remarked Lieutenant Snodgrass, who was a self-made man, but who was taking on his army training with great quickness, “Mrs. Collingwood prefers an aristocratic social system to a democratic one.”
“I suppose so,” Charlotte assented, “though theoretically I stand for democracy like all good Americans. You inferred a condition of my mind of which I was hardly conscious myself. But I suppose you are right.”
“Do you hear that, Collingwood? You are the most rabid democrat I know. Are you going to bring your wife over to your way of thinking?”
Martin was staring at Charlotte, who began to color with embarrassment. 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 Snodgrass assumed 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. Snodgrass’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 phosphorescent, the oars turning in green fire, which sent a million prickles 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 God! What’s the matter?”
His vehemence and the fear in his voice reassured 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 damning 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 documents, but who have a strong conviction that the powerful must rule the weak. One of the Japanese 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 Japs 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. Snodgrass 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. Snodgrass. 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. Snodgrass?” 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 assuming.”
“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. Snodgrass’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. Snodgrass 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. Snodgrass 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 shore 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 lustering 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?”
She made no reply beyond one of those reproachful head shakes which indicate the compromise between duty and inclination. Martin grinned. He knew when she tried to be severe, but was yet secretly pleased with him.
Charlotte did what she could to repair the dishevelled appearance caused by sleeping dressed in the steamer chair. A few minutes later, they were all in the boat, speeding straight for the nipa cottages. Martin explained that the launch could go in no further on account of the coral reef; but, he said, a mile or more to the southward, where the hill jutted out, there was a channel cut through the reef, and the launch could come close in and find anchorage in a pool which lay under the cliff. A rude pier had been constructed there, and there their freight would be landed and then dragged up to them along the beach in a carabao cart; for they had one draft animal. He further informed her that the launch lay down at the anchorage every night, and came up abreast the cottages every morning to pick up the fishers, for it was easier to be rowed out than to trudge down the mile of sand.
As they drew near the shore, Charlotte perceived that, in spite of the steep roofs, the cottages had something of an American air, having broad verandas in front; while one, which she imagined must be the Maclaughlin home, was covered with morning glory vines. The houses sat back about fifty yards from the beach, just where the cocoanut grove came to an end, and it was evident that the sea breeze made them deliciously cool.
A man was pacing up and down the beach, and, as the boat grounded, a woman emerged from the vine-wreathed cottage, and came swiftly on, flapping a kitchen apron which she was wearing, and making other gestures of welcome. Charlotte had little time to observe either closely, for her attention was quite taken up with the novel preparations for landing her and her companions. Full thirty feet of water intervened between them and the dry sand, not deep enough to drown in, but quite enough to spoil dress and shoes. The Filipino oarsmen met the difficulty, however, by rolling up their trousers and going overboard. They made a chair of their clasped hands, and Charlotte, seating herself therein, was carried ashore and set down in front of Mrs. Maclaughlin.
Mrs. Maclaughlin was tall and bony with iron-gray hair and a large featured, strong face, characteristic of the pioneer. She was not shy, and she seized Mrs. Collingwood by both hands and kissed her, then held her off for inspection.
“Well, Martin Collingwood’s a fool for luck,” she remarked. “I never thought he’d get a nice, peart, stylish girl like you to follow him off to a place like this. You’re either mad—and you don’t look it—or you’re worse in love than any woman ever was before you.”
The informality of the greeting took Charlotte’s breath. As she stood blushing, a large, brown, and well-made hand was extended to her.
“How do you do, Mrs. Collingwood?” said a voice in the refined accents of the upper class Englishman. “I don’t need to introduce myself, do I? Martin has told you all about us, and there are not enough of us to confuse. Don’t let Mrs. Mac’s plainness of speech annoy you. When you are well acquainted, you’ll rather like it. It breaks the monotony of things.”
She tried to make some trivial, laughing rejoinder; but the words faltered on her lips, for, as she glanced up into his eyes, she saw there the instant recognition of all that she was, the interrogation flashing into quickly throttled life, as to why she was Martin Collingwood’s wife, and what she could possibly have to do with a colony of fisher folk composed of one insouciant blade of fortune, two typical bits of western flotsam, and a renegade from decent society.