“What do you mean by commonplace?”
“I mean—I mean—” exasperation brought her to the point of unguarded speech—“a woman who says ‘Don’t you know?’ with every other breath, or tacks on a sweet ‘Isn’t it so?’ or ‘Don’t you think?’ to qualify every word she utters. I mean a woman of exactly Mrs. Snodgrass’s type.”
“Commonplace always means a woman then?”
But by that time Charlotte was laughing, partly at her flash of temper, partly at the odd confusion of her definition, which Martin had so quickly pointed out with his uncompromising finger.
“It doesn’t mean a man like you,” she said. “You are not commonplace, but unique.”
“The only one of my kind,” said Martin yawning. She could see, under his jocularity, his pride and pleasure in her (as he considered) audacity. Her criticisms of the lady meant little to him, except as they were the gauntlet thrown down, the laudable declaration that Martin Collingwood’s wife was not going to stand any patronizing from the regular army. But she realized also that he was flattered by the invitation they had received. To him Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass were people that counted. A pang of contrition shot through her that what had been a sort of social triumph to him had been an unmitigated bore to her. Then a sense of humor came uppermost. The boredom she might conceal. But as well attempt to make water run up hill as to make Charlotte Collingwood regard an acquaintance with Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass as a social triumph. Maclaughlin, who was to take the first watch, went forward, and Collingwood curled himself up, native fashion, on a mat at his wife’s feet. Long after his deep respirations told her that he was fast asleep, she lay with wide open eyes, staring into the silvered pathway ahead of them, her thoughts a blending of regret and of exquisite joy. When, at three o’clock, Maclaughlin came to wake up Martin, she pretended to be asleep, and shortly after she did fall into a slumber, from which she was awakened by her husband’s voice and the word “home.”
She sprang to her feet with an instinctive movement of bewilderment, and then caught her breath for sheer delight in what she saw.
The launch was riding a mile or more off the shore of a wedge-shaped island perhaps three miles in length. Its backbone was a line of hills which rose precipitously from the sea on the eastern side (as she later discovered) but which, on the west sloped gently down to a level coast plain, a quarter of a mile or more broad. The plain and the hills were one huge cocoanut grove. In the foreground, the columned boles and the graceful plumes made a great haunt of emerald shade, a dream place of cool recesses and long cathedral aisles. Its rich, unvarying greenness seemed the more vivid by contrast with the changing hues of the shallow water, with the gleaming whiteness of the beach, and the occasional overtopping of a wave like the dip of a sea-gull’s wings.
At the northern apex of the island, situated where they not only commanded the western sea, but looked eastward over a channel to the coast line of Panay and a scarped mountain rearing its cloud-hung flanks against a lustering sky, three steep nipa-roofed cottages nestled among the palms. Southward, the beach line ran straight till it curved out into a sharp point in front of one of the hills. There stood a small nipa village.
Dawn flushes played across the sky behind the distant mountain, and pearled the shining sea. A great fishing banca manned by at least twelve oarsmen swept boldly past them. The naked backs were made of rippling bronze. A lorcha, almost on the western horizon line, showed in faint lines and in gleaming spots of mother of pearl. The morning breeze was almost chill.