CHAPTER VI

“La femme qui n’a que son mari est une femme déserte.”—French Proverb.

Behind the Lewins’ bungalow the rich hillside ran up yellow with cane, for their garden joined the boundaries of Mr. Denver’s estate, and save for a fringe of logwood and guava the sugar spread all about his many acres. If Mrs. Lewin crossed the gravel paths among the rose trees, and pushed her way through a tangle of debatable ground, she found herself out among the waving blades that rose above her height and almost kissed over her head. She had an insistent love of the early morning, when the languid air was at least cooled with the dawn, and full of faint scent; and when her husband was still sleeping off the healthy effects of two hours’ hard tennis, she would get up and go out, whereby she gained a very irradicable impression of the sugar industry in all its phases, from the flat-footed natives strolling up to work, to the grinding and heaving of the sugar factories, for she strayed as far as the actual buildings where it was carried on, and came back to breakfast with an English appetite, and a Key Island thirst. Ally called it restlessness.

On the morning after the Whites’ dinner, the spirit woke her early. She rose and dressed, insisting on a bath at an hour which confirmed the Arabs’ impression of British insanity, and went out into the blue day. There were clouds over Maitso, but the gracious morning was very hushed and calm. Chum threaded the garden, and invaded the brushwood beyond, where the blue-gum and eucalyptus trees marked the boundary of her own territory, and the dew lay heavy on her white skirts. A meerkat jumped across her feet, as she pushed out into the fields of cane, and then the slope of the mountain rose before her, pure green with sugar, a delight to look upon. This land belonged to Mr. James Denver, the father of the young lady whose name was connected in every Key Island mouth with Hamilton Gurney’s, and the ugly chimneys of his factory rose half-way up the hill, above the long, grey sugar works. The men had gone to their labour half-an-hour since, and Mrs. Lewin pushed her way boldly in between the ridges where the cane grew, and sauntered along, feeling that life was very good, and that Earth smelt like Heaven, as indeed it did if Heaven is a combination of hothouse and conservatory. In a land where every other tree flowers, and where gardenias riot in the hedges, it seems as if the essence of all the honey that was ever gathered was resolved back into its original elements within one’s immediate surroundings.

Last night’s success was really the satin lining to Mrs. Lewin’s mood, for there is no factor so conducive to physical pleasure as a gentle mental stimulant. She had made the worn-out discovery that a man is best reached through his emotions, and that his reason is a secondary line of attack, and it amused her. But she was really not thinking of the object of her success so much as generalising over the frailty of his sex, when suddenly she saw him coming towards her.

A swell of ground, and a cross track through the cane, had hidden the Administrator until they were only a few yards distant from each other. Without a suspicion of his nearness, any more than she had been when Gurney sang, Chum came through the dancing morning, while the great green cane bowed over her head and made a royal avenue for her as she passed, as of sunshine dripping through clear emeralds—so liquid yellow was the light through the blades. She had grown to love the cane, from the light emphatic patches of it in distance, to the near waving blades so suggestive of sweet taste in their very colour. There was a little Nigger song that Hamilton Gurney sang in a voice as luscious as the sugar; she hummed it as she passed—

“All the world am singing this refrain—Sweeter than the sugar from the cane!...You are the sweetest girl around,Just the sweetest girl I know——”

“All the world am singing this refrain—

Sweeter than the sugar from the cane!...

You are the sweetest girl around,

Just the sweetest girl I know——”

She broke off to throw up her head and catch another footstep for the first time, then sauntered on to meet it with the last line—

“And the sugar—sugar—sugar—from the cane!”

“Good-morning, Mr. Gregory!”

“Good-morning, Mrs. Lewin!”

They were conscious eyes this time, that looked down in their penetration at every feminine attraction presented to him. The secretary’s wife stood the inspection with the unconscious serenity of last night.

“How very unofficial of you to be out like this! One dispenses with outriders and a flourish of trumpets in Key Island, but one does expect to think of the Administrator breakfasting in languid dignity while other people are already abroad!”

He made a wry face. “We are very unofficial here, thank Heaven! It is one of the few advantages of our diminutiveness. Where are you going, to Denver’s?”

“No, I was trespassing on his ground, merely for a stroll.”

“You have seen the factory?”

“Not yet, though I have ventured as far as the door.”

“Come along,” he said unceremoniously. “It is just up the hill—I’ll take you round.”

Mrs. Lewin smiled inwardly, and picking up her spotless skirts stepped into the next furrow. Here the cane had been cut, but a little further on the golden green blades drove them into the draining ditch until they struck the road which cut the field in two. There were rough tram-lines running along it, and a small engine was hauling the trucks up and down the hillside to the factory. Gregory stopped the man who was just starting the load, and there was a brief colloquy. Then he turned to the last truck, which, unlike its fellows, was not open to the sky and loaded with the cane, but resembled a waggon without ends, and had rough seats running down each side of it. This was the riding truck, and throwing a piece of matting over a seat he put his hand under Mrs. Lewin’s arm and lifted rather than helped her in, for the step was steep. In the midst of her amused excitement she was conscious of his unceremonious strength, and with the instinctive feminine compliment to it her own weakness and helplessness seemed suddenly to have increased.

“We shall have time to go round before that breakfast you insist on my eating in my official capacity,” he said, and his lips smiled, while his lidless eyes never narrowed from their intense stare at her. It began to give her a sense of weariness, a feeling that he had never ceased looking at her since the night before, when he was first conscious of her presence. Perhaps he had been doing it in his own mind all the night.

The movement of the trucks was surprisingly smooth, but they were all worked on springs. They swept up through the furrowed fields, and came to a clinking standstill before the gaping mouth of the factory. It seemed to Mrs. Lewin a zinc building with a whirr of machinery inside too large for its frail shell, and the impression increased, rather than otherwise, when she entered. All the world was suddenly transformed to sugar—the rich smell of it was in the air, the dark stream of it falling from the pipes to the big teaches and the cooler, the very floor sticky with it, so that she stepped aside from the pools of hot liquid. After the increasing glare outside the dark of the place was grateful, and through the dark were visible bronzed forms, stripped and dripping with sweat, guiding the machinery, shovelling down the waste for fuel, and chopping at the congealed masses of the later stages of the sugar with some pronged instrument. There was labour on every hand, and the restless tide of human life seemed gathered into an ordered groove of industry.

Gregory led his companion up steep ladders and over wet stones without consideration for her fresh skirts, explaining the process as they went on. It was wonderful how his forceful whispers carried through the whirr of the flying wheels, and he took it off-handedly for granted that Mrs. Lewin would miss no detail on account of her clothes. He knew the work as well as its owner, and dipped the testing-tube into the refining sugar to show her how the lime had purified the dirty liqueur to a pure gold like honey. Further on, at the end of the building, were the great vats where rum was fermenting, and an odour like rich wine rose in Chum’s nostrils as he lifted the lid and showed her the frothy, muddy contents.

“Dip in your finger—it’s warm,” he said, stirring it with his own. Mrs. Lewin, balancing on a precarious plank, with her dainty skirts held high, was conscious of an inward shudder as her long white hand touched the strong-smelling stuff, and yet it never occurred to her to disobey, or so much as enter a protest.

“Is this what the nativesdrink?” she said, in mild surprise.

“Yes—by-and-by, when it’s cleared. Filthy stuff!” he said shortly. “It’s better than hemp, though. Can you get down? Better let me lift you——”

But she laid her cool hands in his and jumped, landing safely at his side, and again conscious of his physical as well as mental power. Then the sight-seeing was over, and he led the way out by another door and round to the waiting trucks to ride back. Here Gregory paused a minute, and looked over the waving crops and the flourishing scene of labour with an expression that Mrs. Lewin did not at the moment understand. When he had come to Key Island the sugar-planters were sullen and depressed; they wanted encouragement from the Home Government, and they regarded the change of administration in Key Island as no benefit to themselves. The oldrégimehad been a bad one, and had ended in disaster; but they knew at least what they had to expect, and the first “spring cleaning” of the Imperial Government had alarmed them with grave prognostications for the future of the island. Gregory had already made them change their opinions during the short time he had been in possession. He had thrown himself heart and soul into the industries of the island, and so assured the planters that Port Victoria would not be merely a coaling-station. Because he was in earnest he gained their confidence, and worked with them to make the land prosperous again. The humming factories were a proof of his success; he saw his schemes fulfilling themselves actually before him, and his hard eyes brightened with the strange look over which Mrs. Lewin pondered all the way home. It was, in a degree, the same look that makes a young mother most ineffably, justifiably proud—the look that is but a reflex of God’s when, His work spread before Him, He saw that it was very good. For there is no joy like the joy of creation.

“What is he thinking about?” said Leoline Lewin to herself, with awakened interest, her eyes on the Administrator’s reserved face.

“Denver employs six hundred on his estate alone,” was all Gregory remarked aloud. “I wish all the planters took as many.”

“Why?”

“If there were no idlers, there would be less likelihood of a rising. When the Key’landers begin to sit in the gutter and jaw through the Miroro (sleep hour) in a snarly sing-song, then look out. It began that way last time.”

“Ah!—Mr. Gregory, what would happen if you burnt the hemp-crops?”

“I don’t know.” But he looked at her in some surprise for the audacity of her question. It had been tacitly understood that such an extreme measure might be attempted by this Administrator only; but no one had even broached such a subject to himself. Gregory thought of the unlikelihood of his secretary even speculating on such an idea, and smiled even more broadly. Decidedly this girl ought to have been the boy!

“It might bring matters to a head, and I don’t know that I should be sorry,” he admitted after a moment. “There is a lot of underhand discontent, and the population is like a silly child who overestimates its own importance and power to be naughty. A sharp lesson might clear the air—see?”

It is wonderful how indiscreet men will be to a pretty woman. Mrs. Lewin knew how to listen; also as Evelyn Gregory talked he could see himself reflected in the big pupils of her eyes, and his mental attitude reflected in the equally receptive calibre of her mind. He was not very used to sympathy in his schemes, because he rarely confided them to any one, and he fancied Mrs. Lewin the more exceptional on this account, whereas she was merely more adroit in drawing him on. She was, besides, really interested, and he saw that, and saw also that she was a woman, which touched his senses, and ended by driving the more serious side of the conversation out of his head. For Chum, with a flash of genius, dropped the political standpoint at her own gate, and held out her hand with a merely social attractiveness.

“My husband will be ravenous, and I shall get scolded,” she said, with a smile in the changing colours of her eyes. “But I was very interested—it was your fault!”

The curve of her lips was not a pout, but Mr. Gregory suddenly saw himself as a successful rival to Captain Lewin as regarded his wife’s time—the masculine cause of a scolding too, for a more subtle suggestion than a late breakfast lay in the words. He smiled a little also, and the blood beat with a small pleased triumph in the hand that held hers.

“He must like me, if he is to like Ally!” said Chum to herself in vague excuse, as she went into her room to change her soiled skirt and shoes. “And that is the only way to attract him, as yet.... What a harsh, ugly face he has!—Been waiting long, Ally?”

Fresh from her encounter with the Administrator, her husband’s good looks struck her with a sudden pride in possession. She paused behind his chair, and laying her hands on his shoulders bent down to kiss him and talk tender nonsense.

“Dear thing! how nice it looks in its beautiful white clothes!” she said softly, her arm round the broad shoulders under the cool linen coat.

“Where have you been, old girl?” Ally returned, pushing his chair back from the table to return the caress heartily. “I’ve been dressed half-an-hour.”

“Up to Denver’s Works, and all round them with—who do you think? Three guesses!”

“Halton!”

“Wrong!—Silly boy! as if I didn’t love my beautiful husband better than hundreds of Mr. Haltons!”

“I know you do!—I should think it very bad taste if you didn’t,” said Ally, calmly. “Brissy, then?”

“No,—why, he is orderly officer this week!”

“Which is all that lies between me and the Divorce Court evidently! Well, I don’t think you have another mash, Chum—unless it’s Churton?”

“All wrong. I fly at higher game. Now then!”

“Not——”

“The Administrator!”

Ally whistled. “You don’t say so!” he said. “How the deuce did it happen?”

“He met me trespassing on the estate and asked me to go. Now I think of it, he never said whyhewas there, but he seemed like a second owner.”

“Oh, he is well in with all the Planters. Well?”

“He asked me to go, as I say, and I went. Listen, Ally”—and she left him and walked round to her end of the table—“he became almost confiding about the natives. I shall know his schemes yet, and then I can tell you, and knowledge is power! He will think you have divined his mind.”

“Catch me divining his mind! It would be like groping in a fusty roomful of blue-books! Oh, by the way, Chum, Gurney wants to sell that grey pony of his—I think we might as well have another.”

“No, but do listen, Ally! At present the native question is so hopeless because of the mixed races and opposing interests, but if a good breed predominated—the Hovas, for instance—and we could get them to come over and leaven the lump——”

A big hard-backed beetle had floundered on to the table right in front of Alaric’s plate, and instinctively he had set his glass of iced water on it. The glass being nearly empty the beetle was walking away with it, and with Alaric’s attention at the same time. Chum stopped abruptly.

“You don’t care!” she said, with a sudden blank feeling upon her. “You are much more interested in playing school-boy tricks!”

“I beg your pardon, really! But I’m so sick of Gregory’s importation and emigration schemes.” Ally’s eyes were affectionate and apologetic too. He looked like a big dog accustomed to petting, and very unaccustomed to being chidden. “I say, Chum, do look at this fellow though! The other night at mess we got a lot,—every one of us had a beetle, and laid odds as to whose would fly off first. You know if you turn them on their backs, ten to one they can’t get up, and if you even touch them——”

But now it was Chum’s attention which had wandered, nor was she very concerned with the intellectual pursuits of the Wessex mess. She felt that the racing of hard-backed beetles was the limit of their capacity: and then reproached herself for self-conscious superiority. The question of Key Island and its possible improvements dropped to pieces, nor was it revived successfully on other occasions. But Captain Alaric Lewin escaped from work early that day, and rode out to Maitso with his wife, where from four o’clock to six they played at Go-one-better, which is a very instructive game needing nothing but five handkerchiefs and a Panama hat, and affords some amusement if you cannot play tennis. The grass was wet, but they laughed themselves thirsty over Go-one-better, and then sat on the stoep of the mess and drank cého, and when the Administrator’s A.D.C. and Mrs. Lewin left, Ally was conscious of no flaw in his domestic bliss. Key Island was a beastly hole, and he must really look up all the influence he could to get a decent Station—for Chum’s sake, of course—but in the meantime one could have a very pleasant time if there were people like the Churtons and old Bristles round. To-morrow they would play Polo of sorts—Gurney must learn not to cross, though!—and Wednesday was gymkana. If only he had been more of an A.D.C. and less of a secretary, even work would not have been so irksome. But the Administrator chafed at entertainments, and when he was forced into some formality at Government House he usually managed to be summoned away, and left Halton to represent him and Mrs. White to entertain. It was a saying in Key Island that he paid the Town Wardens of Port Albert and China Town an extra stipend to telephone for him on such occasions, and only when a Government House dinner was unavoidable did Mr. Gregory appear as a host. Since Ally had been out there had been no entertainment at Government House, and his social gifts were wasted. It would have been dull enough, no doubt, but still something to do, he thought, and better than all clerical work, and he yawned over the morrow’s monotony as he laid his handsome, empty head on the pillow that night.

What Mrs. Lewin thought of the last twenty-four hours’ experiences she no longer tried to make him understand.

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