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 lustre 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, buttoning 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 circumstances 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 anticipating 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 assume 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 God 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, nobody would ever get anything in the world that he wanted. My mother used to say to me that God 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 analysis 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 hoard of gratitude 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 passing curiosity or at passing 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 Dickens.”
“Do you mean the dickens?”
“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 ejaculated. “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 ejaculated 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 reassurance 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 molasses 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—damn 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.”
“That is quite so,” Charlotte replied gravely, and then, as Martin relapsed into laziness again, she remained studying him and pondering the somewhat irrelevant motives which had influenced his life.
“A jay-bird heel!” She looked with amused scrutiny at his somewhat emphasized masculine beauty. What magnificence, what unconscious arrogance of self-esteem lay unrebuked in this innocent youth; for in spite of the fact that he had known sin as she had never known it, that his unrestrained instincts had reached forth into experiments with life from which not only her sex, but the inheritance of tradition and of environment had eternally debarred her—in spite of these facts, Charlotte had always a sense of cynical and satiated age beside his debonair innocence. It had been her lot to be both player and onlooker in that melodrama where the possession of ample means and the development of critical and æsthetic faculties have frowned upon the expression of a direct and creative ambition; and yet, where all that is subtly ambitious, and all that is meanly jealous, and all that is secretly arrogant, deprived of a natural and healthy expression, underlie and taint the whole body of society. She had come to realize that, in that world in which money must not be mentioned, money is the most indispensable necessity; that every instinct tabooed as vulgar has been so tabooed, because, when it is no longer recognized in speech, it may be the more successfully pursued in action. She had discovered that the exquisite charm of manner which is called high-bred unconsciousness is the result of a self-consciousness so unflagging that its possessor is incapable of losing herself utterly in any emotion; and that the final result of the developing process is an individuality whose utter selfishness and nullity are not patent simply because all the arts of society and all the material advantages of wealth are bent to the concealment of the truth. Collingwood was, as he had said of his sweetheart, “no fool.” He had a keen interest in life, a rather broad knowledge of men and affairs as they are judged by concrete results; but of that sense of social values which amounts almost to a cult with our so-called aristocratic classes, Martin was as ignorant as his primeval parents were of sin. Suddenly, as she looked at him, a quotation flashed into Charlotte’s mind. She formed the words with her lips as her memory groped for them:
The ancients set no value on that half feminine delicacy, that nervous sensibility which we call distinction, and on which we pride ourselves. For the distingué man of the present day, a salon is necessary; he is a dilettante and entertaining with ladies; although capable of enthusiasms, he is inclined to scepticism; his politeness is exquisite; he dislikes foul hands and disagreeable odors, and shrinks from being confounded with the vulgar. Alcibiades had no apprehension of being confounded with the vulgar.
Martin opened his eyes as she was breathing the words to herself, but she did not stop. He stared at her, and when she paused, he asked:
“What kind of hoodoo was that?”
“That, O my Alcibiades, was a charm.” She leaned forward and kissed him—a half repentant, wholly tender little caress. It pleased him, for while she was ready enough to be petted, Charlotte was slow to offer endearments. Lifelong habit was stronger even than the impulses of a naturally demonstrative nature.
“Who are you hoodooing? Me?”
“No: myself. It was I that needed the charm.”
“Now you are getting mysterious again. Tell me what it was about.” Collingwood had, when he desired to wheedle, not only a child’s persistency but a child’s alluringness. Charlotte had had experience in plenty with him, and knew her own weakness in resisting him. She cast a hasty glance around and perceived the steamer, the smoke of which had been visible when they gained the hill. They had, in seating themselves, half turned their backs in her direction, and she had crept very close to the island.
“Martin, that boat seems to be coming nearer. She would not come this close if she were heading for Cuyo.”
“Eh! Here?” Collingwood raised himself alertly and stared. “That’s strange. Coastguard. She isn’t making Iloilo, or she would not be cutting across our bows; but it is a queer route for Cuyo. Why didn’t she cut over to the west after leaving Romblon?”
“You’ll have to signal her for information, Martin.”
“Information be blanked. I’ll signal her for fresh beef if she gets close enough. We may be able to exchange a bit of fish. Have you seen the fish parao go in yet?”
“It went by a few minutes ago.”
“That’s good. Maybe we had better go down and be ready to trade if she comes near enough. I’ll send out a note with the launch. It looks, though, as if she were heading straight for us.”
“Would a coastguard steamer drop mail here?”
“No: catch a Government captain dropping an anchor to oblige anybody. If she is coming in, it is either with somebody interested in pearl fishery statistics, or some sort of survey, or—” he turned suddenly, a teasing smile melting all his handsome features to winningness—“your friend Barton. Didn’t he promise us a visit sometime?”
Martin had assumed a marital jocularity on the subject of the Judge. Charlotte had honestly but vainly tried to dispel from his mind his strong conviction that Judge Barton was a rival who had hardly been allowed to approach the tentative stages of worship. Her quick frown and “Impossible!” only made her husband grin more broadly. “That was a mere civility at parting,” she insisted. “Judge Barton hasn’t a particle of interest in us.”
“He hasn’t any in me, certainly; and he would be justified in not having any in you. Snapped his nose off, you did, every time he opened his mouth.”
“Martin, you do not understand. I tried my best to be agreeable to Judge Barton, just as any nurse ought to be to any patient; and every time I ‘snapped his nose off’ as you express it, I did it in self-defence. He was very often impertinent to me.”
“Why Charlotte, I heard pretty near every word he ever said to you, and I never heard anything out of the way.”
They were going down hill by that time, Martin ahead, picking the trail; and Charlotte made a quaintly affectionate grimace behind his sturdy back. There were various reasons why she was unwilling to make any effort to enlighten Martin’s denseness. There was no earthly danger of his appreciating unaided the delicate flavor of Judge Barton’s impertinence.
“Anyway,” she remarked, deftly slipping from the discussion of facts upon which disagreement was certain, “he will have forgotten both of us completely by this time, and there is not one chance in a hundred of his being on that boat if it does stop here.” But Martin had time to correct her. He was willing to admit that there was not much certainty of the Judge’s being on the boat unless she stopped; and then he stood ready to back his judgment. By the time they had crossed the cocoanut grove and had gained the beach, it was evident that the boat was making for the island. Kingsnorth had sighted her, and had sent out the launch, which was puffing busily toward her. “Kingsnorth’s got as good a nose for fresh beef as I have,” Collingwood grunted approvingly. The Maclaughlins were on their veranda with a pair of binoculars, and some excitement could be perceived even in the distant village.
The steamer slowed up in reply to signals from the launch, and evidently awaited advice about dropping anchor. When she did come to a halt, however, and put a boat out, Martin counted the persons who descended into it.
“Distinguished passengers,” he remarked concisely. “The captain would not put out the gang-way for his own use in that sea. Three men in white suits; three rowers; and the skipper is coming along. We’re in for visitors, Charlotte. What is there for dinner?”
Charlotte was away on the instant. He heard her despatching boys—one to the village, bidding him secure the very best of the afternoon’s catch; another to the poultry yard with orders to bring up the two fattest capons, but not to slay them till further orders. Complaining shrieks of the storeroom door, the hinges of which were exceedingly rusty, bore testimony to repeated openings; and the voice of old Pedro was audible, cursing the ice-machine.
By the time the boat was close in, the sun was fairly low and seemed to be sucking up the whole Visaya Sea is shafts of splendor. As soon as the narrowing distance permitted the little crafts’ passengers to be recognized, Collingwood cocked a humorous eye upon his wife and went into silent ecstasies of laughter, much to the amazement of Kingsnorth and the Maclaughlins. Charlotte blushed, bit her lips and then she laughed also, at first in helpless embarrassment, and finally with a sheer burst of merriment. She had barely time to recover her gravity when the boat grounded, and Judge Barton, as an acquaintance, took precedence of his fellow-passengers, and was carried ashore in time to introduce them as they landed. All had to avail themselves of the primitive transporting process by which Charlotte herself had made her landing, and it was in no hateful spirit that she admitted that dignity and such a progress are almost incompatible.