The Locusts' Years

by Mary H. Fee

An ironical sense of his wife’s power to baffle him tempered more than one of the affectionate glances he cast upon her as he strolled back and forth beside her chair. The consciousness of her mental superiority, of her obedience to perceptions and convictions which were only half formulated in his own mind, was literally seeping through Collingwood’s brain. He was inordinately proud of her. Her excellence was a proof of his own good taste. He felt that she was a credit to him. He did not associate her intelligence and her grace with a class distinction. On the contrary, it was one of his sources of joy that he would take her out of the masses and make her of the classes, only Martin did not use those terms. In his simple philosophy, people with money were important, and people without it were not. Miss Ponsonby had been poor. She had earned her own living. Ergo, she was nobody. But he, Martin Collingwood, would make her somebody, and when he had done so, she would fill the position to his entire satisfaction. He did not ask himself if he would come up to her expectations. He did not understand that a woman can ask for more in a husband than for a lover, a master, and a provider of the world’s goods. In spite of his public-school education, Martin Collingwood’s philosophy of life was a very primitive one, based upon a sense of sex superiority. He could realize that a woman can be a man’s inferior; but he supposed that the mere fact of his sex makes any man the equal of the proudest woman who lives.

So Collingwood continued to walk the deck in a fool’s paradise, and his wife lounged away her day, if not in his blissful state of ignorance, a happy and contented woman, nevertheless. There was a soundness in that primitive philosophy of her husband’s which she was proving. If Collingwood did not have all the requisites of a woman’s ideal of her husband, he had at least three-fourths of them; and Mrs. Collingwood was enough of a philosopher (little as she liked being told so) not to cavil at the missing quarter when they were hurrying away from the conditions that made that quarter vital.

The coastguard steamer skirted the coast of Mindoro and then turned her nose westward. The next day, she crept up under the pinnacled heights of Peñon de Coron in a jade-green sea, and entered the channel between Coron and Bushuanga. There the water was like purple glass, save where a rush of porpoises parted it in swift pursuit of the flying-fish. Fairy islets dotted its dazzling surface while the land masses on either hand were clothed in amethystine haze.

The boat lay half a day off the curving beach of Culion, and the travellers stared up at the nipa houses of the leper colony, clinging to the hillsides, and at the gray old church and the fort on the left, speaking of the day when Moro paraos were no strangers to the peaceful locality. On the third night, it anchored in Halsey Harbor, “which is,” said Collingwood, “the last place on earth except the one we are going to live in.”

To this somewhat discouraging remark, Mrs. Collingwood, who was leaning over the rail, staring into darkness and the massed bulk of land near, made no reply. Immediately after the dropping of the anchor, the captain, accompanied by his third officer and the two hospital corps men, had gone ashore to call upon the single American family which was holding Halsey Harbor. He did not invite the Collingwoods to go, glad apparently to be out of their sight for a time. They laughed at their power to arouse his distaste, and agreed that they were the gainers by his dislike. The fiery cigar tip of the officer on watch was the only reminder that the boat was not wholly in their hands.

Collingwood, throwing away his cigar, slipped an arm around his wife, who never objected to petting.

“It’s wonderful,” she said dreamily; “I never knew before that tree toads made silence. I thought they made noise.”

The night was one of those cloudy ones which occur so frequently in the tropics, when the vapors hang low at dusk, to dissipate later. The boat seemed to be at anchor in a bay shut in by low hills, for, at one point, a rift in the clouds showed the pallor of the sky and a single star, below which the solid blackness loomed in relief, and against which a clump of bamboo teased the eye with its phantom outline. A faint chorus of insects and tree toads and the insistent cry of an iku lizard suggested that the boat must be fairly close to the shore, but, as Mrs. Collingwood had said, the sounds only emphasized the stillness. Low down in the gloom—so low as to suggest a valley between the hills—a light burned steadily with a sweet and human significance in the tremendous vagueness about them.

There was almost trepidation in Collingwood’s inquiry if she found it lonesome.

“Not in the least. Or rather, I find it tremendously lonely, and enjoy it. Are you worrying about me when it is too late? Do not do so. I shall find plenty to occupy me on the island.”