“Well.... It’s not a simple matter, of course. I’m glad you did what you felt you ought to do.” It occurred to Harboro that he was setting up too much opposition to her whims—whims which seemed rooted in her principles as well as her impulses. It was as if their minds were of different shapes: hers circular, his square; so that there could be only one point of contact between them—that one point being their love for each other. There would be a fuller conformity after a while, he was sure. He must try to understand her, to get at her odd point of view. She might be right occasionally, when they were in disagreement.
He touched her lightly on the shoulder. “I’m afraid we ought to be getting on to the madame’s,” he said.
CHAPTER VI
Harboro would have made you think of a bear in a toy-shop when he sat down in the tiny front room of Madame Boucher’s millinery establishment. He was uncomfortably, if vaguely, conscious of the presence of many hats, displayed on affairs which were like unfinished music-racks.
He had given Madame Boucher certain instructions—or perhaps liberties would be a better word. Mrs. Harboro was to be shown only the best fabrics, he told her; and no pains were to be spared to make a dress which would be a credit to madame’s establishment. Madame had considered this, and him, and had smiled. Madame’s smile had impressed him curiously. There had been no co-operation between lips and eyes. The eyes had opened a little wider, as if with a stimulated rapaciousness. The lips had opened to the extent of a nicely achieved, symmetrical crescent of teeth. It made Harboro think of a carefully constructed Jack-o’-Lantern.
Sylvia had asked him if he wouldn’t help in making a choice, but he had looked slightly alarmed, and had resolutely taken a seat which afforded a view of the big Casa Blanca across the way: an emporium conducted on a big scale by Germans. He even became oblivious to the discussion on the other side of the partition, where Sylvia and madame presently entered upon the preliminaries of the business in hand.
The street was quite familiar to him. There had been a year or so, long ago, when he had “made” Piedras Negras, as railroaders say, twice a week. He hadn’t liked the town very well. He saw its vice rather than its romance. He had attended one bullfight, and had left his seat in disgust when he saw a lot of men and women of seeming gentility applauding a silly fellow whose sole stock in trade was an unblushing vanity.
His imagination travelled on beyond the bull-pen, to the shabby dance-halls along the river. It was a custom for Americans to visit the dance-halls at least once. He had gone into them repeatedly. Other railroaders who were his associates enjoyed going into these places, and Harboro, rather than be alone in the town, had followed disinterestedly in their wake, and had looked on with cold, contemplative eyes at the disorderly picture they presented: unfortunate Mexican girls dancing with cowboys and railroaders and soldiers and nondescripts. Three Mexicans, with harp, violin, and ’cello had supplied the music: the everlasting national airs. It seemed to Harboro that the whole republic spent half its time within hearing of Sobre las Olas, and La Paloma, and La Golondrina. He had heard so much of the emotional noises vibrating across the land that when he got away from the throb of his engine, into some silent place, it seemed to him that his ears reverberated with flutes and strings, rather than the song of steam, which he understood and respected. He had got the impression that music smelled bad—like stale wine and burning corn-husks and scented tobacco and easily perishable fruits.
He remembered the only woman who had ever made an impression upon him down in those dance-halls: an overmature creature, unusually fair for a Mexican, who spoke a little English, manipulating her lips quaintly, like a child. He recalled her favorite expression: “My class is very fine!” She had told him this repeatedly, enunciating the words with delicacy. She had once said to him, commiseratingly: “You work very hard?” And when he had confessed that his duties were onerous, she had brightened. “Much work, much money,” she had said, with the avidity of a boy who has caught a rabbit in a trap. And Harboro had wondered where she had got such a monstrously erroneous conception of the law of industrialism.
The picture of the whirling figures came back to him: the vapor of dust in the room, the loud voices of men at the bar, trying to be heard above the din of the music and the dancing. There came back to him the memory of a drunken cowboy, nudging the violinist’s elbow as he played, and shouting: “Give us Dixie—give us a white man’s tune”—and the look of veiled hatred in the slumbrous eyes of the Mexican musician, who had inferred the insult without comprehending the words.