BY
HERMAN WHITAKER
Reprinted from The Blue Mule A Western Magazine of Stories, of February, 1906 by permission
HE WAS a Tewana of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman, round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's brink, wringing her tresses after the morning bath, it were justifiable to mistake her for some beautiful bronze. Moreover, it were easy to see her, for, in Tehuantepec, innocence is thoughtless as in old Eden. When Paul Steiner passed her one morning, she gave him the curious open-eyed stare of a deer, bade him a pleasant "Buenos días, Señor!" and would have proceeded, undisturbed, with her toilet, but that he spoke. In this he was greatly mistaken. Gringos there are—praise the saints!—who can judge Tehuantepec by the insight of kindred purity, but Paul had to learn by the more uncomfortable method of a stone in the face.
He ought not, however, to be too severely handled for his dulness. Though a mining engineer, nature had endowed him with little beyond the algebraic qualities necessary to the profession; a German-American, a dull birth and heredity had predestined him for that class which clothes its morality in fusty black and finds safety in following its neighbor in the cut of its clothes and conduct. As then, he was not planned for original thinking, it is not at all surprising that he should—when pitchforked by Opportunity into the depths of tropical jungles—lose his moral bearings, fail to recognize a virtue that went in her own golden skin, and so go down before a temptation that, of old, populated the sexless desert.
That his error continued in the face of Andrea's stone is certainly more remarkable, though this also should be charged rather against her mismarksmanship than to the wearing quality of his electro-plate morality. It is doubtful if even the ancient Jews had found "stoning" as efficacious a "cure for souls" had they thrown wide as she. Anyway, Paul stood "unconvicted," as the revivalists have it, and being moved to chagrin instead of shame, he carried the story of Andrea's surprising modesty to Bachelder.
Here was a man of other parts. An artist, he had traced the spinning meridians over desert and sea, following the fluttering wing of the muse till she rewarded his deathless hope by pausing for him in this small Indian town. Expecting to stay a week, he had remained fifteen years, failing to exhaust in that long time a tithe of its form and color. Screened by tropical jungle, a mask of dark palms laced with twining bejucas, it sat like a wonderfully blazoned cup in a wide green saucer that was edged with the purple of low environing hills—a brimming cup of inspiration. Save where some oaken grill supplied an ashen note, its adobe streets burned in smoldering rose, purple and gold—the latter always predominant. It glowed in the molten sunlight, shone in the soft satin of a woman's skin; the very dust rose in auriferous clouds from the wooden-wheeled ox-carts. But for its magenta tiling, the pillared market stood, a huge monochrome, its deep yellows splashed here and there with the crimson of the female hucksters' dresses. This was their every-day wear—a sleeveless bodice, cut low over the matchless amplitudes and so short that the smooth waist showed at each uplift of the round, bronze arms; a skirt that was little more than a cloth wound about the limbs; a shawl, all of deep blood color. Small wonder that he had stayed on, and on, and on, while the weeks merged into months, and months into years.
He lived in the town's great house, an old feudal hacienda with walls two yards thick, recessed windows oaken grilled, and a pleasant patio where the hidalgo could take his ease under cocoanut palms and lemon trees while governments went to smash without. Here Bachelder was always to be found in the heat of the day, and here he listened with huge disgust to Paul's story. Because of their faith, strength and purity—according to their standards—he had always sworn by the Tewana women, setting them above all others, and though a frank sinner against accepted moral codes, he would never have confused nudity with vice.