CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
Harboro adopted the plan, immediately after his marriage, of walking to his work in the morning and back to his home in the evening. It was only a matter of a mile or so, and if you kept out of the sun of midday, it was a pleasant enough form of exercise. Indeed, in the morning it was the sort of thing a man of varied experiences might have been expected to enjoy: the walk through Eagle Pass, with a glimpse of the Dolch hotel bus going to meet the early train from Spofford Junction, and a friendly greeting from an occasional merchant, and then the breezy passage across the Rio Grande bridge, spanning the meandering waters which never bore vessels of any sort to the far-off sea, and finally the negotiation of the narrow street in Piedras Negras, past the plaza and the bull-ring, and countless little wine-shops, and the market, with its attractively displayed fruits and vegetables from nobody knew where.
But it is not to be denied that his practice of making this journey to and fro afoot was not without its prejudicial result. The people of quality of either side of the river rarely ever set foot on the bridge, or on those malodorous streets of Piedras Negras which lay near the river. Such people employed acocheroand drove, quite in the European style, when business or pleasure drew them from their homes. There was an almost continuous stream ofpeoneson the bridge in the mornings and evenings: silent, furtive people, watched closely by the customs guard, whose duties required him on occasion to examine a suspicious-appearing Mexican with decidedly indelicate thoroughness. And all this did not tend to make the bridge a popular promenade.
But Harboro was not squeamish, nor did he entertain slavish thoughts of how people would feel over a disregarded custom. He liked simplicity, and moreover he felt the need of exercise now that his work kept him inactive most of the time. He was at an age when men take on flesh easily.
Nevertheless, people weren’t favorably impressedwhen they looked down from their old-fashioned equipages on their ride between the two republics, and caught a glimpse of the chief clerk marching along the bridge railing—often, as likely as not, in company with some chance laborer or wanderer, whose garb clearly indicated his lowly estate.
And when, finally, Harboro persuaded Sylvia to accompany him on one of these walks of his, the limits of his eccentricity were thought to have been reached. Indeed, not a few people, who might have been induced to forget that his marriage had been a scandalous one, were inclined for the first time to condemn him utterly when he required the two towns to contemplate him in company with the woman he had married, both of them running counter to all the conventions.
The reason for this trip of Harboro’s and Sylvia’s was that Harboro wanted Sylvia to have a new dress for a special occasion.
It happened that two or three weeks after his marriage Harboro came upon an interesting bit of intelligence in the Eagle PassGuide, the town’s weekly newspaper. It was a Saturday afternoon (the day of the paper’spublication), and Harboro had gone up to the balcony overlooking the garden. He had carried the newspaper with him. He did not expect to find anything in the chronicles of local happenings, past or prospective, that would interest him. But there was always a department of railroad news—consisting mainly of personal items—which had for him the quality of a letter from home.
Sylvia was down-stairs at work in the dining-room, directing the efforts of old Antonia. Perhaps I should say that she was extraordinarily happy. I doubt very much if she had come to contemplate the married state through Harboro’s eyes; but she seemed to have feared that an avalanche would fall—and none had fallen. Harboro had manifested an unswerving gentleness toward her, and she had begun to “let down,” as swimmers say, with confidence in her ability to find bottom and attain the shore.
When at length she went up to the balcony to tell Harboro that supper was ready, she stood arrested by the pleasantly purposeful expression in his eyes. She had learned, rather creditably, to anticipate him.
“You are to have a new dress,” he announced.
“Yes.... Why?”
“I see here”—he tapped the paper on his knee—“that they’re getting ready for their first dance of the winter at the Mesquite Club.”
She forgot herself. “Butwe’renot invited!” she said, frankly incredulous.
“Why no, not yet. But we shall be. Why shouldn’t we be?”
Her hand went to her heart in the old wistful way. “I don’t know ... I just thought we shouldn’t be. Those affairs are for ... I’ve never thought they would invite me to one of their dances.”
“Nonsense! They’ve invited me. Now they’ll inviteus. I suppose the best milliners are across the river, aren’t they?”
She seemed unwilling to meet his eyes. “I believe some women get their dresses made over there, and wear them back to this side—so they needn’t pay any duty. That is, if they’re to be handsome dresses.”
“Well, this is going to be a handsome dress.”
She seemed pleased, undeniably; yet shechanged the subject with evident relief. “Antonia will be cross if we don’t go right down. And you must remember to praise theenchalades. She’s tried with them ever so hard.” This wasn’t an affectation on Sylvia’s part. She was a good-hearted girl.
“It’s to be a handsome dress,” repeated Harboro an hour later, when they had returned to the balcony. It was dusk now, and little tapers of light were beginning to burn here and there in the desert: small, open fires where Mexican women were cooking their suppers of dried goat’s meat andfrijoles.
Said Sylvia: “If only.... Does it matter so much to you that they should invite us?”
“It matters to me on your account. Such things are yours by right. You wouldn’t be happy always with me alone. We must think of the future.”
Sylvia took his hand and stroked it thoughtfully. Thereweremoments when she hungered for a bit of the comedy of life: laughter and other youthful noises. The Mexicanbailesand their humble feasts were delightful; and the song of the violins, and theodor of smoke, and the innocent rivalries, and the night air. But the Mesquite Club....
“If only we could go on the way we are,” she said finally, with a sigh of contentment—and regret.
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
Harboro insisted upon her going across the river with him the next day, a Sunday. It was now late in October, but you wouldn’t have realized it unless you had looked at the calendar. The sun was warm—rather too warm. The air was extraordinarily clear. It was an election year and the town had been somewhat disorderly the night before. Harboro and Sylvia had heard the noises from their balcony: singing, first, and then shouting. And later drunken Mexicans had ridden past the house and on out the Quemado Road. A Mexican who is the embodiment of taciturnity when afoot, will become a howling organism when he is mounted.
Harboro had telephoned to see if an appointment could be made—to a madame somebody whose professional card he had found in theGuide. And he had been assured that monsieur would be very welcome on a Sunday.
Sylvia was glad that it was not on a weekday, and that it was in the forenoon, whenshe would be required to make her first public appearance with her husband. The town would be practically deserted, save by a few better-class young men who might be idling about the drug-store. They wouldn’t know her, and if they did, they would behave circumspectly. Strangely enough, it was Sylvia’s conviction that men are nearly all good creatures.
As it fell out it was Harboro and not Sylvia who was destined to be humiliated that day—a fact which may not seem strange to the discerning.
They had got as far as the middle of the Rio Grande bridge without experiencing anything which marred the general effect of a stage set for a Passion Play—but with the actors missing; and then they saw a carriage approaching from the Mexican side.
Harboro knew the horses. They were the General Manager’s. And presently he recognized the coachman. The horses were moving at a walk, very slowly; but at length Harboro recognized the General Manager’s wife, reclining under a white silk sunshade and listening to the vivacious chatter of a youngwoman by her side. They would be coming over to attend the services in the Episcopal church in Eagle Pass, Harboro realized. Then he recognized the young woman, too. He had met her at one of the affairs to which he had been invited. He recalled her as a girl whose voice was too high-pitched for a reposeful effect, and who created the impression that she looked upon the social life of the border as a rather amusing adventure.
You might have supposed that they considered themselves the sole occupants of the world as they advanced, perched on their high seat; and this, Harboro realized, was the true fashionable air. It was an instinct rather than a pose, he believed, and he was pondering that problem in psychology which has to do with the fact that when people ride or drive they appear to have a different mental organism from those who walk.
Then something happened. The carriage was now almost at hand, and Harboro saw the coachman turn his head slightly, as if to hear better. Then he leaned forward and rattled the whip in its place, and the horses set off at a sharp trot. There was a ruleagainst trotting on the bridge, but there are people everywhere who are not required to observe rules.
Harboro paused, ready to lift his hat. He liked the General Manager’s wife. But the occupants of the carriage passed without seeing him. And Harboro got the impression that there was something determined in the casual air with which the two women looked straight before them. He got an odd feeling that the most finely tempered steel of all lies underneath the delicate golden filigree of social custom and laws.
He was rather pleased at a conclusion which came to him: people of that kind reallydidsee, then. They only pretended not to see. And then he felt the blood pumping through the veins in his neck.
“What is it?” asked Sylvia, with that directness which Harboro comprehended and respected.
“Why, those ladies ... they didn’t seem quite the type you’d expect to see here, did they?”
“Oh, there’s every type here,” she replied lightly. She turned her eyes away from Harboro.There was something in his face which troubled her. She could not bear to see him with that expression of wounded sensibilities and rebellious pride in his eyes. And she had understood everything.
She did not break in upon his thoughts soon. She would have liked to divert his mind, but she felt like a culprit who realizes that words are often betrayers.
And so they walked in silence up that narrow bit of street which connects the bridge with Piedras Negras, and leads you under the balcony of what used to be the American Consul’s house, and on past thecuartel, where the imprisoned soldiers are kept. Here, of course, the street broadens and skirts the plaza where the band plays of an evening, and where the town promenades round and round the little square of palms and fountains, under the stars. You may remember that a little farther on, on one side of the plaza, there is the immense church which has been building for a century, more or less, and which is still incomplete.
There were a few miserable-looking soldiers, with shapeless, colorless uniforms, loiteringin front of thecuartelas Harboro and Sylvia passed.
The indefinably sinister character of the building affected Sylvia. “What is it?” she asked.
“It’s where the republic keeps a body of its soldiers,” explained Harboro. “They’re inside—locked up.”
They were both glad to sit down on one of the plaza benches for a few minutes; they did so by a common impulse, without speaking.
“It’s the first time I ever thought of prisoners having what you’d call an honorable profession,” Sylvia said slowly. She gazed at the immense, low structure with troubled eyes. Flags fluttered from the ramparts at intervals, but they seemed oddly lacking in gallantry or vitality.
“It’s a barbarous custom,” said Harboro shortly. He was still thinking of that incident on the bridge.
“And yet ... you might think of them as happy, living that way.”
“Good gracious! Happy?”
“They needn’t care about how they are to be provided for—and they have their duties.”
“But they’reprisoners, Sylvia!”
“Yes, prisoners.... Aren’t we all prisoners, somehow? I’ve sometimes thought that none of us can do just what we’d like to do, or come or go freely. We think we’re free, as oxen in a treadmill think of themselves as being free, I suppose. We think we’re climbing a long hill, and that we’ll get to the top after a while. But at sundown the gate is opened and the oxen are released. They’ve never really gotten anywhere.”
He turned to her with the stanch optimism she had grown accustomed to in him. “A pagan doctrine, that,” he said spiritedly.
“A pagan doctrine.... I wonder what that means.”
“Pagans are people who don’t believe in God. I am not speaking of the God of the churches, exactly. I mean a good influence.”
“Don’t they believe in their own gods?”
“No doubt. But you might call their own gods bad influences, as often as not.”
“Ah—perhaps they’re just simple folk who believe in their own experiences.”
He had the troubled feeling that her intuitions, her fatalistic leanings, were giving hera surer grasp of the subject than his, which was based upon a rather nebulous, logical process that often brought him to confusion.
“I only know that I am free,” he declared doggedly.
The sun had warmed her to an almost vagrant mood. Her smile was delicate enough, yet her eyes held a gentle taunt as she responded: “Not a bit of it; you have a wife.”
“A wife—yes; and that gives me ten times the freedom I ever had before. A man is like a bird with only one wing—before he finds a wife. His wife becomes his other wing. There isn’t any height beyond him, when he has a wife.”
She placed her hands on her cheeks. “Two wings!” she mused.... “What’s between the wings?”
“A heart, you may say, if you will. Or a soul. A capacity. Words are fashioned by scholars—dull fellows. But you know what I mean.”
From the hidden depths of thecuartela silver bugle-note sounded, and Sylvia lookedto see if the soldiers sitting out in front would go away; but they did not do so. She arose. “Would you mind going into the church a minute?” she asked.
“No; but why?”
“Oh, anybody can go into those churches,” she responded.
“Anybody can go intoanychurch.”
“Yes, I suppose so. What I mean is that these old Catholic churches seem different. In our own churches you have a feeling of being—what do you say?—personally conducted. As if you were a visitor being shown children’s trinkets. There is something impersonal—something boundless—in churches like this one here. The silence makes you think that there is nobody in them—or that perhaps ... God isn’t far away.”
He frowned. “But this is just where the trinkets are—in these churches: the images, the painted figures, the robes, the whole mysterious paraphernalia.”
“Yes ... but when there isn’t anything going on. You feel an influence. I remember going into a church in San Antonio once—a Protestant chapel, and the only thing Icould recall afterward was a Yankee clock that ticked too fast and too loud. I never heard of anything so horribly inappropriate. Time was what you thought of. Not eternity. You felt that the people would be afraid of wasting a minute too much—as if their real concerns were elsewhere.”
Harboro was instinctively combating the thought that was in her mind, so far as there was a definite thought, and as far as he understood it. “But why shouldn’t there be a clock?” he asked. “If people feel that they ought to give a certain length of time to worship, and then go back to their work again, why shouldn’t they have a clock?”
“I suppose it’s all right,” she conceded; and then, with a faint smile: “Yes, if it didn’t tick too loud.”
She lowered her voice abruptly on the last word. They had passed across the doorless portal and were in the presence of a group of silent, kneeling figures: wretched women whose heads were covered with black cottonrebozos, who knelt and faced the distant altar. They weren’t in rows. They had settled down just anywhere. And there were men:swarthy, ill-shapen, dejected. Their lips moved noiselessly.
Harboro observed her a little uneasily. Her sympathy for this sort of thing was new to him. But she made none of the customary signs of fellowship, and after a brief interval she turned and led the way back into the sunshine.
He was still regarding her strangely when she paused, just outside the door, and opened a little hand-bag which depended from her arm. She was quite intently devoted to a search for something. Presently she produced a coin, and then Harboro observed for the first time that the tortured figure of a beggar sat in the sun outside the church door.
Sylvia leaned over with an impassive face and dropped the coin into the beggar’s cup.
She chanced to glance at Harboro’s face an instant later, and she was dismayed a little by its expression: that of an almost violent distaste. What did it mean? Was it because she had given a coin to the beggar? There could have been no other reason. But why should he look as if her action had contaminated her in some fashion—as if therehad been communication between her and the unfortunateanciano? As if there had been actual contact?
“You wouldn’t have done that?” she said.
“No, I shouldn’t have done it,” he replied.
“I can’t think why. The wretched creature—I should have felt troubled if I’d ignored him.”
“But it’s a profession. It’s as much a part of the national customs as dancing and drinking.”
“Yes, I know. A profession ... but isn’t that all the more reason why we should give him a little help?”
“A reason why you should permit yourself to be imposed upon?”
“I can’t help thinking further than that. After all, it’s he and his kind that must have been imposed upon in the beginning. It’s being a profession makes me believe that all the people who might have helped him, who might have given him a chance to be happy and respectable, really conspired against him in some way. You have to believe that it’s the rule that some must be comfortable and some wretched.”
“A beggar is a beggar,” said Harboro. “And he was filthy.”
“But don’t you suppose he’d rather be the proprietor of a wine-shop, or something of that sort, if he had had any choice?”
“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
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 bigCasa Blancaacross 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 intothese 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 ofSobre las Olas, andLa Paloma, andLa 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 littleEnglish, 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 usDixie—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.
He recalled other pictures of those nights:the Indian girls who might be expected to yell in the midst of a dance if they had succeeded in attracting the attention of a man who usually danced with some one else. And there were other girls with a Spanish strain in them—girls with a drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with the shepherd lovers of Andalusia.
If you danced with one of them you paid thirty cents at the bar and got a drink, while the girl was given a check good for fifteen cents in the trade of the place. The girls used to cash in their checks at the end of a night’s work at fifty cents a dozen. It wasn’t quite fair; but then the proprietor was a business man.
“My class is very fine!” The words came back to Harboro’s mind. Good God!—what had become of her? There had been a railroadman, a fellow named Peterson, who was just gross enough to fancy her—a good chap, too, in his way. Courageous, energetic, loyal—at least to other men. He had occasionally thought that Peterson meant to take the poor, pretentious creature away from the dance-halls and establish her somewhere. He had not seen Peterson for years now.
... Sylvia emerged from behind the thin partition, sighing and smiling. “Did it seem very long?” she asked. “It’s hard to make up your mind. It’s like taking one color out of the rainbow and expecting it to look as pretty as the whole rainbow. But I’m ready now.”
“Remember, a week from Wednesday,” called Madame Boucher, as Harboro and Sylvia moved toward the door.
Harboro looked at Sylvia inquiringly.
“For the try-on,” she explained. “Yes, I’ll be here.” She went out, Harboro holding the door open for her.
Out on the sidewalk she almost collided with a heavy man, an American—a gross, blond, good-natured creature who suddenly smiled with extreme gratification.“Hello!—Sylvia!” he cried. He seized her by the hand and drew her close.
Harboro stood on the door-step and looked down—and recognized Peterson.
PART IITHE TIME OF FLAME
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
Peterson felt the dark shadow of Harboro immediately. He looked up into the gravely inquiring face above him, and then he gave voice to a new delight. “Hello!—Harboro!” He dropped Sylvia’s hand as if she no longer existed. An almost indefinable change of expression occurred in his ruddy, radiant face. It was as if his joy at seeing Sylvia had been that which we experience in the face of a beautiful illusion; and now, seeing Harboro, it was as if he stood in the presence of a cherished reality. He grasped Harboro’s hand and dragged him down from the step. “Old Harboro!” he exclaimed.
“You two appear to have met before,” remarked Harboro, looking with quiet inquiry from Sylvia to Peterson, and back to Sylvia.
“Yes, in San Antonio,” she explained. It had been in Eagle Pass, really, but she did not want Harboro to know.
The smile on Peterson’s face had becomecuriously fixed. “Yes, in San Antonio,” he echoed.
“He knew my father,” added Sylvia.
“A particular friend,” said Peterson. And then, the lines of mirth on his face becoming a little less rigid and the color a little less ruddy, he added to Sylvia: “Doesn’t your father occasionally talk about his old friendPeterson?”
Harboro interrupted. “At any rate, you probably don’t know that she is Mrs. Harboro now.”
Peterson appeared to be living entirely within himself for the moment. He might have made you think of the Trojan Horse—innocuous without, but teeming with belligerent activity within. He seemed to be laughing maliciously, though without movement or noise. Then he was all frank joyousness again. “Good!” he exclaimed. He smote Harboro on the shoulder. “Good!” He stood apart, vigorously erect, childishly pleased. “Enjoying a holiday?” he asked.
And when Harboro nodded he became animated again. “You’re both going to take dinner with me—over at theInternacional.We’ll celebrate. I’ve got to take my train out in an hour—I’ve got a train now, Harboro.” (Harboro had noted his conductor’s uniform.) “We’ll just have time. We can have a talk.”
Harboro recalled a score of fellows he had known up and down the line, with most of whom he had gotten out of touch. Peterson would know about some of them. He realized how far he had been removed from the spontaneous joys of the railroad career since he had been in the office. And Peterson had always been a friendly chap, with lots of good points.
“Should you like it, Sylvia?” he asked.
She had liked Peterson, too. He had always been good-natured and generous. He had seemed often almost to understand.... “I think it would be nice,” she replied. She was afraid there was a note of guilt in her voice. She wished Harboro had refused to go, without referring the matter to her.
“I could telephone to Antonia,” he said slowly. It seemed impossible to quicken his pulses in any way. “She needn’t get anything ready.”
“I could do it,” suggested Sylvia. She felt she’d rather not be left alone with Peterson. “I could use Madame Boucher’s telephone.”
But Harboro had already laid his hand on the door. “Better let me,” he said. “I can do it quicker.” He knew that Antonia would want to remonstrate, to ask questions, and he wanted Sylvia to enjoy the occasion whole-heartedly. He went back into the milliner’s shop.
“Peterson,” said the man who remained on the sidewalk with Sylvia.
“I remember,” she replied, her lips scarcely moving, her eyes avoiding his burning glance. “And ... in San Antonio.”
They were rather early for the midday meal when they reached theInternacional; indeed, they were the first to enter the dining-room. Nevertheless the attitudes of the Mexican waiters were sufficient assurance that they might expect to be served immediately.
Peterson looked at his watch and compared it with the clock in the dining-room. “The train from Spofford is late,” he said. “It’s due now.” He pitched his head up like adog. “There she is!” he exclaimed. There was the rumble of a train crossing the bridge. “They’ll be coming in right away.” He indicated the empty tables by a glance.
Harboro knew all about the train schedules and such matters. He knew that American tourists bound for Mexico would be coming over on that train, and that they would have an hour for dinner while their baggage was passing through the hands of the customs officials.
They had given their orders and were still waiting when the train pulled in at the station, close at hand, and in a moment the dining-room became noisy.
“Travel seems pretty light,” commented Peterson. He appeared to be trying to make conversation; he was obviously under some sort of constraint. Still, he had the genuine interest of the railroader in the subjects he mentioned.
Harboro had not observed that there was not even one woman among the travellers who entered; but Peterson noted the fact, mentioning it in the tone of one who has been deprived of a natural right. And Harborowondered what was the matter with a man who saw the whole world, always, solely in relation to women. He sensed the fact that Peterson was not entirely comfortable. “He’s probably never grown accustomed to being in the company of a decent woman,” he concluded. He tried to launch the subject of old associates. It seemed that Peterson had been out in Durango for some time, but he had kept in touch with most of the fellows on the line to the City. He began to talk easily, and Harboro was enjoying the meeting even before the waiter came back with their food.
Sylvia was ill at ease. She was glad that Harboro and Peterson had found something to talk about. She began to eat the amber-colored grapes the waiter had placed before her. She seemed absent-minded, absorbed in her own thoughts. And then she forgot self in the contemplation of a man and a child who had come in and taken a table at the other end of the dining-room. The man wore a band of crape around his arm. The child, a little girl of five or six, had plainly sobbed herself into a condition verging upon stupor.She was not eating the dinner which had been brought to her, though she occasionally glanced with miserable eyes at one dish or another. She seemed unable to help herself, and at intervals a dry sob shook her tiny body.
Sylvia forgot the grapes beside her plate; she was looking with womanly pity at that little girl, and at the man, who seemed sunk into the depths of despair.
Peterson followed her compassionate glance. “Ah,” he explained, “it’s a chap who came up from Paila a little while back. He had his wife with him. She was dying, and she wanted to be buried in Texas. I believe he’s in some sort of business down in Paila.”
The spirit of compassion surrounded Sylvia like a halo. She had just noted that the little girl was making a stupendous effort to conquer her sobs, to “be good,” as children say. With a heroic resolve which would have been creditable to a Joan of Arc, the little thing suddenly began to try to eat from one of the dishes, but her hands trembled so that she was quite helpless. Her efforts seemed about to suffer a final collapse.
And then Sylvia pushed her chair back and arose. There was a tremulous smile on her lips as she crossed the room. She paused by that man with crape on his sleeve. “I wonder if you won’t let me help,” she said. Her voice would have made you think of rue, or of April rain. She knelt beside the child’s chair and possessed herself of a tiny hand with a persuasive gentleness that would have worked miracles. Her face was uplifted, soft, beaming, bright. She was scarcely prepared for the passionate outburst of the child, who suddenly flung forth eager hands with a cry of surrender. Sylvia held the convulsed body against her breast, tucking the distorted face up under her chin. “There!” she soothed, “there!” She carried her charge out of the room without wasting words. She had observed that when the child came to her the man had seemed on the point of surrender, too. With an effort he had kept himself inert, with a wan face. He had the dubious,soundingexpression of one who stands at a door with his back to the light and looks out into the dark.
Before she had brought the child back,washed and comforted, to help her with her food, Peterson had forgotten the interruption entirely. Taking advantage of Sylvia’s absence (as if she had been an interfering factor in the meeting, but scarcely a third person), he turned keen eyes upon Harboro. “Old Harboro!” he said affectionately and musingly. Then he seemed to be swelling up, as if he were a mobile vessel filled with water that had begun to boil. He became as red as a victim of apoplexy. His eyes filled with an unholy mirth, his teeth glistened. His voice was a mere wheeze, issuing from a cataclysm of agonized mirth.
“And so you’ve come to it at last!” he managed to articulate.
“Come to what?” inquired Harboro. His level glance was disconcerting.
Peterson was on the defensive immediately. “You used not to care for women—or you claimed you didn’t.”
“Oh! I didn’t understand. I used not to care for—a certain class of women. I don’t yet.”
The threatened boiling-over process was abruptly checked, as if a lid had been lifted.“Oh!” said Peterson weakly. He gazed at a fragment of roast beef on his plate. It might have been some sort of strange insect. He frowned at it. And then his eyes blazed steadily and brightly. He did not look at Harboro again for a long time.
Sylvia came back, moving a little shyly, and pushing a strand of hair back into its place. She looked across the dining-room to where the child was talking with old-fashioned sedateness to her father. She had forgotten her tragedy—for the moment. The man appeared to have forgotten, too.
But Peterson’s dinner turned out to be a failure, after all. Conversation became desultory, listless.
They arose from their places at last and left the room. On the street they stood for a moment, but nothing was said about another meeting. Harboro thought of inviting Peterson over to the house; but he fancied Sylvia wouldn’t like it; and besides, the man’s grossness was there, more patent than ever, and it stood between them.
“Well, good-by,” said Peterson. He shook hands with Harboro and with Sylvia. Butwhile he shook hands with Sylvia he was looking at Harboro. All that was substantial in the man’s nature was educed by men, not by women; and he was fond of Harboro. To him Sylvia was an incident, while Harboro was an episode. Harboro typified work and planning and the rebuffs of the day. Sylvia meant to him only a passing pleasure and the relaxation of the night or of a holiday.
As he went away he seemed eager to get around a corner somewhere. He seemed to be swelling up again. You might have supposed he was about to explode.
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
Sylvia’s dress made its appearance in due course in the house on the Quemado Road.
Sylvia could not understand why Harboro should have arranged to have it delivered according to routine, paying the duty on it. It seemed to her a waste of money, a willingness to be a victim of extortion. Why should the fact that the river was there make any difference? It was some scheme of the merchants of Eagle Pass, probably, the purpose of which was to compel you to buy from them, and pay higher prices, and take what you didn’t want.
The dress was a wonderful affair: a triumph of artful simplicity. It was white, with a suggestion of warmth: an effect produced by a second fabric underlying the visible silk. It made Sylvia look like a gentle queen of marionettes. A set of jewelry of silver filigree had been bought to go with it: circles of butterflies of infinite delicacy forbracelets, and a necklace. You would have said there was only wanting a star to bind in her hair and a wand for her to carry.
But the Mesquite Club ball came and went, and the Harboros were not invited.
Harboro was stunned. The ball was on a Friday night: and on Saturday he went up to the balcony of his house with a copy of theGuideclutched in his hand. He did not turn to the railroad news. He was interested only in the full-column, first-page account of the ball at the Mesquite Club. There was the customary amount of fine writing, including a patent straining for new adjectives to apply to familiar decorations. And then there was a list of the names of the guests. Possibly Piedras Negras hadn’t been included—and possibly he was still regarded as belonging to the railroad offices, and the people across the river.
But no, there were the names: heads of departments and the usual presentable clerks—young Englishmen with an air. The General Manager, as Harboro knew, was on a trip to Torreon; but otherwise the list of names was sufficient evidence that this firstball of the season had been a particularly ambitious affair.
Sylvia was standing alone in the dining-room while Harboro frowned darkly over the list of names before him. The physical Sylvia was in the dining-room; but her mind was up on the balcony with Harboro. She was watching him as he scowled at the first page of theGuide. But if chagrin was the essence of the thing that bothered Harboro, something far deeper caused Sylvia to stand like a slim, slumbering tree. She was frightened. Harboro would begin to ask why? And he was a man. He would guess the reason. He would begin to realize that mere obscurity on the part of his wife was not enough to explain the fact that the town refused to recognize her existence. And then...?
Antonia spoke to her once and again without being heard. Would the señora have the roast put on the table now, or would she wait until the señor came down-stairs? She decided for herself, bringing in the roast with an entirely erroneous belief that she was moving briskly. An ancient Mexican womanknows very well what the early months of marriage are. There is a flame, and then there are ashes. Then the ashes must be removed by mutual effort and embers are discovered. Then life is good and may run along without any annoyances.
When the señor went up-stairs with scarcely a word to the señora, Antonia looked within, seeming to notice nothing. But to herself she was saying: “The time of ashes.” The bustle of the domestic life was good at such a time. She brought in the roast.
Harboro, with the keen senses of a healthy man who is hungry, knew that the roast had been placed on the table, but he did not stir. TheGuidehad slipped from his knee to the floor, and he was looking away to the darkening tide of the Rio Grande. He had looked at his problem from every angle, and now he was coming to a conclusion which did him credit.
... They had not been invited to the ball. Well, what had he done that people who formerly had gone out of their way to be kind to him should ignore him? (It did not occur to him for an instant that the causelay with Sylvia.) He was not a conceited man, but ... an eligible bachelor must, certainly, be regarded more interestedly than a man with a wife, particularly in a community where the young women were blooming and eligible men were scarce. They had drawn him into their circle because they had regarded him as a desirable husband for one of their young women. He remembered now how the processes of the social mill had brought him up before this young woman and that until he had met them all: how, often, he had found himself having atête-à-têtewith some kindly disposed girl whom he never would have thought of singling out for special attention. He hadn’t played their game. He might have remained a bachelor and all would have been well. There would always have been the chance of something happening. But he had found a wife outside their circle. He had, in effect, snubbed them before they had snubbed him. He remembered now how entirely absorbed he had been in his affair with Sylvia, and how the entire community had become a mere indistinct background during those days when he walked with herand planned their future. There wasn’t any occasion for him to feel offended. He had ignored the town—and the town had paid him back in his own coin.
He had conquered his black mood entirely when Sylvia came up to him. She regarded him a moment timidly, and then she put her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her with the alert kindliness which she had learned to prize.
“I’m afraid you’re fearfully disappointed,” she said.
“I was. But I’m not now.” He told her what his theory was, putting it into a few detached words. But she understood and brightened immediately.
“Do you suppose that’s it?” she asked.
“What else could it be?” He arose. “Isn’t Antonia ready?”
“I think so. And there are so many ways for us to be happy without going to their silly affairs. Imagine getting any pleasure out of sitting around watching a girl trying to get a man! That’s all they amount to, those things. We’ll get horses and ride. It’s ever so much more sensible.”
She felt like a culprit let out of prison as she followed him down into the dining-room. For the moment she was no longer the fatalist, foreseeing inevitable exposure and punishment. Nothing had come of their meeting with Peterson—an incident which had taken her wholly by surprise, and which had threatened for an instant to result disastrously. She had spent wakeful hours as a result of that meeting; but the cloud of apprehension had passed, leaving her sky serene again. And now Harboro had put aside the incident of the Mesquite Club ball as if it did not involve anything more than a question of pique.
She took her place at the end of the table, and propped her face up in her hands while Harboro carved the roast. Why shouldn’t she hope that the future was hers, to do with as she would—or, at least, as she could? That her fate now lay in her own hands, and not in every passing wind of circumstance, seemed possible, even probable. If only....
A name came into her mind suddenly; a name carved in jagged, sinister characters. If only Fectnor would stay away off there in the City.
She did not know why that name should have occurred to her just now to plague her. Fectnor was an evil bird of passage who had come and gone. Such creatures had no fixed course. He had once told her that only a fool ever came back the way he had gone. He belonged to the States, somewhere, but he would come back by way of El Paso, if he ever came back; or he would drift over toward Vera Cruz or Tampico.
Fectnor was one of those who had trod that path through the mesquite to Sylvia’s back door in the days which were ended. But he was different from the others. He was a man who was lavish with money—but he expected you to pick it up out of the dust. He was of violent moods; and he had that audacity—that taint of insanity, perhaps—which enables some men to maintain the reputation of bad men, of “killers,” in every frontier. When Fectnor had come he had seemed to assume the right of prior possession, and others had yielded to him without question. Indeed, it was usually known when the man was in town, and during these periods none came to Sylvia’s door save one. Heeven created the impression that all others were poachers, and that they had better be wary of him. She had been afraid of him from the first; and it had seemed to her that her only cross was removed when she heard that Fectnor had got a contract down in the interior and had gone away. That had happened a good many months ago; and Sylvia remembered now, with a feeling as of an icy hand on her heart, that if her relationships with many of the others in those old days were innocent enough—or at best marred only by a kindly folly—there had been that in her encounters with Fectnor which would forever damn her in Harboro’s eyes, if the truth ever reached him. He would have the right to call her a bad woman; and if the word seemed fantastic and unreal to her, she knew that it would not seem so to Harboro.
If only Fectnor....
She winked quickly two or three times, as if she had been dreaming. Antonia had set her plate before her, and the aroma of the roast was in her nostrils. Harboro was regarding her serenely, affectionately.