“At all events,” said the Administrator, with an ugly smile, “that name is not sacred to one person!”
CHAPTER VI
“La femme qui n’a que son mari est une femme déserte.”—French Proverb.
Behind the Lewins’ bungalow the rich hillside ran up yellow with cane, for their garden joined the boundaries of Mr. Denver’s estate, and save for a fringe of logwood and guava the sugar spread all about his many acres. If Mrs. Lewin crossed the gravel paths among the rose trees, and pushed her way through a tangle of debatable ground, she found herself out among the waving blades that rose above her height and almost kissed over her head. She had an insistent love of the early morning, when the languid air was at least cooled with the dawn, and full of faint scent; and when her husband was still sleeping off the healthy effects of two hours’ hard tennis, she would get up and go out, whereby she gained a very irradicable impression of the sugar industry in all its phases, from the flat-footed natives strolling up to work, to the grinding and heaving of the sugar factories, for she strayed as far as the actual buildings where it was carried on, and came back to breakfast with an English appetite, and a Key Island thirst. Ally called it restlessness.
On the morning after the Whites’ dinner, the spirit woke her early. She rose and dressed, insisting on a bath at an hour which confirmed the Arabs’ impression of British insanity, and went out into the blue day. There were clouds over Maitso, but the gracious morning was very hushed and calm. Chum threaded the garden, and invaded the brushwood beyond, where the blue-gum and eucalyptus trees marked the boundary of her own territory, and the dew lay heavy on her white skirts. A meerkat jumped across her feet, as she pushed out into the fields of cane, and then the slope of the mountain rose before her, pure green with sugar, a delight to look upon. This land belonged to Mr. James Denver, the father of the young lady whose name was connected in every Key Island mouth with Hamilton Gurney’s, and the ugly chimneys of his factory rose half-way up the hill, above the long, grey sugar works. The men had gone to their labour half-an-hour since, and Mrs. Lewin pushed her way boldly in between the ridges where the cane grew, and sauntered along, feeling that life was very good, and that Earth smelt like Heaven, as indeed it did if Heaven is a combination of hothouse and conservatory. In a land where every other tree flowers, and where gardenias riot in the hedges, it seems as if the essence of all the honey that was ever gathered was resolved back into its original elements within one’s immediate surroundings.
Last night’s success was really the satin lining to Mrs. Lewin’s mood, for there is no factor so conducive to physical pleasure as a gentle mental stimulant. She had made the worn-out discovery that a man is best reached through his emotions, and that his reason is a secondary line of attack, and it amused her. But she was really not thinking of the object of her success so much as generalising over the frailty of his sex, when suddenly she saw him coming towards her.
A swell of ground, and a cross track through the cane, had hidden the Administrator until they were only a few yards distant from each other. Without a suspicion of his nearness, any more than she had been when Gurney sang, Chum came through the dancing morning, while the great green cane bowed over her head and made a royal avenue for her as she passed, as of sunshine dripping through clear emeralds—so liquid yellow was the light through the blades. She had grown to love the cane, from the light emphatic patches of it in distance, to the near waving blades so suggestive of sweet taste in their very colour. There was a little Nigger song that Hamilton Gurney sang in a voice as luscious as the sugar; she hummed it as she passed—
“All the world am singing this refrain—
Sweeter than the sugar from the cane!...
You are the sweetest girl around,