When he came back she had the pigeons plucked and spitted on willow wands. While he broiled them over hot coals she made the coffee and served the frijoles on golden husks of corn from Pedro’s garden. Nature supplied the other utensils—fingers for forks, their sharp young teeth for knives, bits of tortilla to scoop up the stew. Both in its preparation and when, sitting side by side, they ate this, the first meal of their wedded life, they were very quiet, lived in a dream; a dream too happy for speech, in which the message of eye to eye was all sufficient. There was little clearing away to do, but when he essayed to help she took him by the shoulders and made him sit down.
“Like a good hunter, you provided the meat. This is my work. You can watch and smoke.”
Fishing his papers and sack out of his shirt pocket, she rolled him a cigarette with dexterity that demanded explanation.
“I used to do it for my father. Not that I haven’t tried.” The confession was nullified by a little sigh. “But it always makes me sick. You don’t know how I envy Maria and Teresa!” Lighting it, she took a couple of small puffs, then passed it on. “I always tried to get Bull and the boys to smoke in the house, but they seemed to prefer their own quarters. I liked it even as a child. I would curl up in my father’s den and watch the smoke from his pipe while he read or wrote. Once, when he went away for some weeks on a hard trip without me, I used to go into his room and bury my face in his old smoking-jacket; it smelled so tobaccery and strong and—manny. It gave me the oddest sense of comfort and protection.”
Unconsciously, she had touched on the most powerful motive of sex, the attraction of opposite qualities; the same that drew his gaze when, rolling her sleeves above dimpled elbows, she began cleansing the few utensils. He watched the fluttering small hands that invested even a squat and grimy coffee-pot with esthetic values; the graceful bend of the fair head as she peered into its depths to make sure it was really clean; the soft flexures of her waist; the ease with which she rose or relaxed like a small girl-child on widespread knees. Lastly, most powerful of all, a certain shy quiet, the more noticeable because so entirely different from her usual confidence. Her smile, catching his eye, had a new grace, was set in flooding color. When, after cleansing her hands at the stream, she came and stood looking down at the fire, he rose with sympathetic understanding, holding out his hands.
She came on a little run and thereafter—it was as she had wished it in her girl’s dreams—as far as dawn and dark from the conventional marriage. Here only the ancient law prevailed—the law older than theologies, custom, judicial sanctions, and the blessings of the church. In the bubble and chatter of the stream through its worn brown boulders, in the whisper of the wind among the grasses, in the lazy drift of pink cloud toward the sunset behind the rim, in bird call and the evening song of the insects, its sanctions were recited.
In their absorption in each other, blind belief in the goodness of all things, they were, no doubt, a scoff for the misogynist, spectacle for a cynic. A scoff in their utter ignorance of the fact that all this glory, supreme bliss, was merely an illusion, a rainbow mirage spread by Nature to lure her human creatures on to perpetuate themselves in a world of pain! A spectacle in their unconscious innocence of the blasé modern viewpoint that examines Cupid through a microscope, tears away his roseate veils, exposing him for a small licentiate. Surely a pair of young fools! yet happy with that joy which cynic and misogynist may never know; and—your real philosopher will admit it—most divinely in accord with the scheme of things.
Yes, perfectly unconscious of the fact that Nature, the cunning fowler, had caught their feet in her lime, enmeshed them in her webs, they sat, her fair head pillowed on his shoulder, watching while the crimson lights faded through pink to steel gray; watched the first pale stars wax and increase and lay their pattern of fire across the darkening vault above; watched till night closed her doors and locked them in from the rest of the world.
Life and Death, the two great Mysteries, each inscrutable as the other! “In the midst of one we are in the other,” and the friendly night that wrapped the lovers in its dark bosom was troubled, far away, by the roar of the fleeing trains. As these dribbled their foul freight in trickles whose course across the land was marked as though by acid blight, incendiary fires blossomed in the darkness. Rising, later, the moon dropped a checker of dew-light down through the oak on the sleepers. It also lit the march of Gonzales’s bandits across the desert.
Life and Death! Evil and Good! Inextricably mixed and, above it all, the stars shedding their dear, cold light. Dawn broke with its customary splendors of crimson and gold. Later the sun raised a red, friendly face and peeped over the mountain rim at Lee and Gordon, happy in the preparation of their breakfast.