pillars when Paul entered next morning, but though it was hard to single
one person from the red confusion, luck led him almost immediately to
where Andrea stood, a basket of tortillas at her feet. Lacking
customers, just then, she leaned against a pillar, her scarlet flaming
against its chrome, thoughtful, pensive, as Bachelder painted her for
"The Enganchada," the girl sold for debt. Her shawl lay beside her
basket, so her hair, that had flown loose since the morning bath, fell
in a cataract over the polished amplitudes of bosom and shoulders. Save
when feeling shot them with tawny flashes--as waving branches filter
mottled sunlight on brown waters--her eyes were dark as the pools of
Lethe, wherein men plunge and forget the past. They brought
forgetfulness to Paul of his moral tradition, racial pride, the
carefully conned apology which he did not remember until, an hour later,
he fed her entire stock in trade to his dog. It was better so. Black,
brown or white women are alike sensitive to the language of flowers, and
the lilies he left in her basket served him more sweetly than could his
stammering tongue. Next morning, curiosity replaced hostility in her
glance, and when he left the market, her brown gaze followed him beyond
the portals. Needs not, however, to linger over the courtship.
Sufficient that color of skin does not affect the feminine trait that
forgiveness comes easier when the offense was provoked by one's own
beauty; the story goes on from the time that Andrea moved into his house
with a stock of household gear that extorted musical exclamations from
all her girl friends.
To their housekeeping Andrea contributed only her handsome body with a
contained cargo of unsuspected qualities and virtues that simply
dazzled Paul as they cropped out upon the surface. In public a Tewana
bears herself staidly, carrying a certain dignity of expression that of
itself reveals how, of old, her forbears came to place limits to the
ambition of the conquering Aztec and made even Spanish dominion little
more than an uncomfortable name. Though, through courtship, Andrea's
stern composure had shown no trace of a thaw, it yet melted like snow
under a south wind when she was once ensconced in their little home.
Moreover, she unmasked undreamed of batteries, bewildering Paul with
infinite variety of feminine complexities. She would be arch, gay,
saucy, and in the next breath fall into one of love's warm silences,
watching him with eyes of molten bronze. She taught him the love of the
tropics without transcending modesty. Also she astonished him,
negatively, by the absence of those wide differences of nature and
feeling between her and the cultured women of his own land that reading
in the primal school of fiction had led him to expect. He learned from
her that woman is always woman under any clime or epoch. The greater
strength of her physique lessened, perhaps, the vine-like tendency, yet
she clung sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she
displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating,
with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm,
however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the
birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one
of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull
his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother gives her
son.
Yet, under even this mood, her laughter lay close to the surface, and
nothing tapped its merry flow quicker than Paul's Spanish. Picking up
the language haphazard, he had somehow learned to apply the verb
_tumblar_ to describe the pouring out of coffee, and he clung to it
after correction with a persistence that surely inhered in his dogged
German blood. "_Tumbarlo el café_!" he would say, and she would repeat
it, faithfully mimicking his accent.
"Tumble out the coffee!" following it with peals of laughter. Or,
turning up a saucy face, she would ask, "Shall I tumble out more
coffee?" and again the laughter which came as readily at her own misfit
attempts at English.
These, few and simple, were learned of Bachelder's woman, and sprung on
Paul as surprises on his return from visiting the mining properties,
which required his frequent presence. For instance, slipping to his knee
on one such occasion, with the great heart of her pulsing against him,
she sighed: "I love thee, lovest thou me?"
A lesson from Bachelder pleased him less. Knowing Paul's pride in his
German ancestry, and having been present when, in seasons of swollen
pride, he had reflected invidiously in Andrea's presence on Mexico and
all things Mexican, the artist, in a wicked moment, taught her to lisp
"_Hoch der Kaiser_!" _lèse-majesté_ that almost caused Paul a
fainting-fit.
"You shouldn't have taught her that," he said to Bachelder. But the
mischief was done. Whenever, thereafter, through torment of insect or
obsession of national pride, he animadverted on her country, she
silenced him with the treasonable expression.
She learned other than English from Bachelder's woman, sweating out the
dog days in Rosa's kitchen, experimenting with the barbaric dishes
Gringos love. She slaved for his comfort, keeping his linen, her house
and self so spotlessly clean that as Paul's passion waned, affection
grew up in its place--the respectful affection that, at home, would have
afforded a permanent basis for a happy marriage. When, a year later,
their baby came, no northern benedict could have been more proudly
happy.
Watching him playing with the child, Bachelder would wonder if his union
also would terminate like all the others of his long experience. In her,
for it was a girl baby, Paul's fairness worked out, as she grew, in
marvelous delicacies of cream and rose, weaving, moreover, a golden woof
through the brown of her hair. From her mother she took a lithe
perfection of form. At two she was well started for a raving beauty, and
as much through his love for her as for Andrea, Paul had come, like
Bachelder, to swear by the Tewana women.
He might have been swearing by them yet, but his company's business
suddenly called him north, and no man could have bidden a white wife
more affectionate farewell or have been more sure of his own return. "It
is a comfort to know that your woman won't go gadding while you are
away, and that is more than a fellow can make sure of at home." These
were his last words to Bachelder.
He was to be absent two months, but after he had reported adversely on a
mine in Sonora, he was ordered to expert a group in far Guerrera, where
the mountains turn on edge and earth tosses in horrible tumult. Then
came a third order to report in New York for personal conference. Thus
the months did sums in simple addition while Andrea waited, serenely
confident of his return. Not that she lacked experience of deserted
wives, or based hope on her own attractions. Her furious mother love
simply could not form, much less harbor, the possibility of Paul's
deserting their pretty Lola.
And, barring her loneliness, the year was kind to her, feeding her
mother love with small social triumphs. For one, Lola was chosen to sit
with three other tots, the most beautiful of Tewana's children, at the
feet of the Virgin in the Theophany of the "Black Christ" at the eastern
fiesta. From morning to mirk midnight, it was a hard vigil. By day the
vaulted church reeked incense; by night a thousand candles guttered
under the dark arches, sorely afflicting small, weary eyelids; yet Lola
sat it out like a small thoroughbred, earning thereby the priest's
kindly pat and her mother's devoted worship.
Then, on her third saint day, the small girl donned her first fiesta
costume, a miniature of the heirlooms which descend from mother to
daughter, each generation striving to increase the magnificence of the
costume just as it strove to add to the gold pieces in the chain which
did triple duty as hoard, dowry and necklace. Andrea subtracted several
English sovereigns from her own to start Lola's, and, with the American
gold eagle, the gift of Bachelder, her _padrino_, godfather, they made
an affluent beginning for so small a girl. As for the costume? Its silk,
plush, velours, were worked by Andrea's clever fingers curiously and
wondrously, even when judged by difficult Tewana standards. Bachelder
painted the small thing, kneeling by her mother's side before the great
gold altar. Her starched skirt, with its band of red velours, stands of
itself leveling her head, so that she looks for all the world like a
serious cherub peering out from a wonderfully embroidered bath-cabinet.
But ah! the serious devotion of the faces! The muse Bachelder had
followed so faithfully was hovering closely when his soul flamed out
upon that canvas. It ranks with his "Enganchada." Either would bring him
fame, yet they rest, face to face, in a dusty locker, awaiting the day
when time or death shall cure the ache that a glimpse of either brings
him.
Two months after that canvas was put away, eighteen counting from the
day of his departure, Bachelder walked, one day, down to the primitive
post-office to see if the mail that was due from the little fishing port
of Salina Cruz contained aught for him. _Waded_ would better describe
his progress, for it was the middle of the rains; water filled the air,
dropping in sheets from a livid sky; the streets were rivers running
full over the cobble curbs. Such white planters as came in occasionally
from the jungle country had been housefast upon their plantations for
this month, and, having the town pretty much to himself, the artist's
thought turned naturally to Paul, who used to bring doubtful mitigation
to his isolation.
He had written the artist twice, but now six months had elapsed since
the last letter. "He'll never come back," the artist muttered. "Poor
Andrea! But it is better--now."
Warm with the pity the thought inspired, he turned the corner into the
street that led to the post-office, and was almost run down by the first
mule of a train that came driving through the rain.
"Bachelder!" the rider cried.
It was surely Paul. Pulling up his beast, he thrust a wet hand from
under his rain poncha, then, turning in his saddle, he spoke to the
woman who rode behind him, "Ethel, this is Mr. Bachelder."
The alternative had happened! As a small hand thrust back the hood of
mackintosh, Bachelder found himself staring at a sweet face, while an
equally sweet greeting was drowned by echoing questions in his mind.
"Good God!" he first thought. "Why did he bring her here?" And upon that
immediately followed, "How ever did he get her?"
An evening spent with the pair at the small Mexican hotel increased his
wonder. Pleasant, pretty, of a fine sensibility and intellectual without
loss of femininity, the girl would have been fitly mated with a man of
the finest clay. How could she have married Paul? Bachelder thought, and
correctly, that he discerned the reason in a certain warmth of romantic
feeling that tinged her speech and manner. Daughter of an Episcopal
clergyman in Paul's native town, she had sighed for something different
from the humdrum of small teas, dinners, parochial calls, and when Paul
came to her with the glamour of tropical travel upon him, she married,
mistaking the glamour for him.
"She loved me for the dangers I had passed!" the artist mused, quoting
Shakespeare, on his way home. "What a tragedy when she discovers him for
a spurious Othello!"
Dropping into the studio next morning, Paul answered the other question.
"Why not?" he asked, with a touch of ancestral stolidity. "My work is
here. Andrea?" His next words plainly revealed that while his moral
plating had cracked and peeled under tropical heat, the iron convention
beneath had held without fracture. He began: "It was a beastliness that
we committed----"
"That _you_ committed," Bachelder sharply corrected. "And what of the
child?"
Blinking in the old fashion, Paul went on, "I was coming to that. She
cannot be allowed to grow up a little Mexican. I shall adopt her and
have her properly educated." Here he looked at Bachelder as though
expecting commendation for his honorable intention, and, receiving none,
went on, dilating on his plans for the child as if resolved to earn it.
Yet, setting aside this patent motive, it was easy to see as he warmed
to his subject that Andrea had not erred in counting on Lola to bring
him back. With her beauty she would do any man proud! The whole United
States would not be able to produce her rival! She should have the best
that money could give her!
Wondering at the curious mixture of class egotism, paternal tenderness
and twisted morality, Bachelder listened to the end, then said, "Of
course, Mrs. Steiner approves of a ready-made family?"
Paul's proud feathers draggled a little, and he reddened. "Well--you
see--she thinks Lola is the daughter of a dead mining friend. Some day,
of course, I'll tell her. In fact, the knowledge will grow on her. But
not now. It wouldn't do. She couldn't understand."
"No?" But the quiet sarcasm was wasted on Paul, and the artist
continued, "Aren't you leaving Andrea out of your calculations?"
Paul ruffled like an angry gobbler. His eyes took on an ugly gleam, his
jaw stuck out, his expression incarnated Teutonic obstinacy. "Oh, she'll
have to be fixed. Luckily it doesn't take much to buy these savage
women; their feelings are all on the surface. I'll give her the house,
furniture, and a hundred dollars cash. That should make up for the loss
of----"
"----a husband?" Bachelder's face darkened. Throughout the conversation
he had worn an air of suppression, as though holding, by an effort,
something back. Now he straightened with a movement that was analogous
to the flexure of a coiled spring. His lips opened, closed again, and he
went on with his quiet questioning. "For a husband, yes. They are easy
stock to come by. But not for the child of her labor. Supposing she
refuses?"
Paul's eyes glinted under his frown. "Then the Jefe-Politico earns the
hundred dollars and the law gives her to me."
The spring uncoiled. "Never! She died a month ago of yellow fever."
Under Teuton phlegm lies an hysteria that rivals that of the Latin
races. Paul's flame died to ashes and he burst out sobbing, throwing his
hands up and out with ungainly gestures. Looking down upon his awkward
grief, Bachelder half regretted the just anger that caused him to slip
the news like a lightning bolt; he would have felt sorrier but that he
perceived Paul's sorrow rooted in the same colossal egotism that would
have sacrificed the mother on the altars of its vast conceit. He knew
that Paul was grieving for himself, for lost sensations of pride, love
and pleasure that he could never experience again. When the ludicrous
travesty had partly spent itself, he stemmed the tide with a question.
"If you don't care to see Andrea, I can make the settlements you hinted
at."
Paul glanced up, stupidly resentful, through his tears. "The child is
dead. That is all off."
"You will do nothing for her?" As much to prop an opinion of human
nature that was already too low for comfort as in Andrea's interest,
Bachelder asked the question.
"She has the house furnishings," Paul sullenly answered. "That leaves
her a sight better off than she was before she knew me."
Rising, the artist walked over to the window. "The river is rising," he
said, when he could trust himself to speak. "Another foot, and away goes
the bridge. When do you go to the mine?"
"Tomorrow."
"Mrs. Steiner goes with you?"
"No, too wet."
Bachelder hesitated. "I'd offer you my quarters, but--you see I am
neither married nor unmarried."
"No!" Paul agreed with ponderous respectability. "It would never do.
Besides, I've hired a house of the Jefe-Politico; the one that crowns
the Promontory. When the rain slacks we'll move out to the mine."
"There is one thing I should like," he added as he rose to go. "If you
would have a stone put over the child's grave--something nice--you're a
better judge than me,--I'll----"
"Too late," the artist interrupted. "Andrea broke up her necklace; put
savings of eighteen generations into the finest tomb in the cemetery."
He looked curiously at Paul, but his was that small order of mind which
persistently fixes responsibility for the most inevitable calamity upon
some person. To the day of his death he would go on taxing the child's
death against Andrea; he did not even comment on this last proof of her
devoted love.
After he was gone, Bachelder returned to his window, just in time to see
the bridge go. A thin stream in summer, meandering aimlessly between
wide banks, the river now ran a full half-mile wide, splitting the town
with its yeasty race. An annual occurrence, this was a matter of small
moment to the severed halves. Each would pursue the even tenor of its
way till the slack of the rains permitted communication by canoe and the
rebuilding of the bridge. But it had special significance now in that
Andrea lived on the other bank.
He wondered if the news of Paul's return had crossed, muttering: "Poor
girl, poor girl!" Adding, a moment later: "But happier than the other.
Poor little Desdemona!"
* * * * *
How melancholy is the voice of a flood! Its resurgent dirge will move a
new-born babe to frightened wailing, and stirs in strong men a vague
uneasiness that roots in the vast and calamitous experience of the race.
Call of hungry waters, patter of driving rain, sough of the weird wind,
it requires good company and a red-coal fire to offset their moanings of
eternity. Yet though the fireless tropics could not supply one, and she
lacked the other, the storm voices were hardly responsible for Ethel
Steiner's sadness the third morning after her arrival.
Neither was it due to the fact that Paul had failed to come in the
preceding night from the mine. Seeming relieved rather than distressed,
she had gone quietly to bed. No, it was neither the storm, his absence,
nor any of the small miseries that afflict young wives. Poor Desdemona!
The curtain was rising early on the tragedy which Bachelder foresaw.
Already the glamour was falling from Paul to the tropics, where it
rightfully belonged; this morning she was living her bitter hour,
fighting down the premonition of a fatal mistake.
What with her thoughtful pauses, she made but a slow toilet, and when
the last rebellious curl had been coaxed to its place behind her small
ear, she turned, sighing, to the window. One glance, and she started
back, pale, clutching her hands. A rocky snout, thrusting far out into
the belly of the river's great bow, the Promontory stood high above the
ordinary flood level. Once, in far-away Aztec times, a Tewana tradition
had it that a cloudburst in the rains had swept it clear of houses, and
now Time's slow cycle had brought the same deadly coincidence. Where,
last night, a hundred lights had flickered below her windows, a boil of
yellow waters spread, cutting off her house, the last and highest, from
the mainland. Black storm had drowned the cries of fleeing householders.
The flood's mighty voice, bellowing angrily for more victims as it
swallowed house after house, had projected but a faint echo into her
dreams. Now, however, she remembered that Carmencita, her new maid, had
failed to bring in the morning coffee.
Wringing her hands and loudly lamenting the deadly fear that made her
forget her mistress, Carmencita, poor girl, was in the crowd that was
helping Paul and Bachelder to launch a freight canoe. When Paul--who had
ridden in early from the little village, where he had been
storm-stayed--had tried to impress a crew, the peon boatman had sworn
volubly that no pole would touch bottom and that one might as well try
to paddle the town as a heavy canoe against such a flood. But when
Bachelder stepped in and manned the big sweep, a half-dozen followed.
Notwithstanding, their river wisdom proved. Paddling desperately, they
gained no nearer than fifty yards to the pale face at the window.
"Don't be afraid!" Bachelder shouted, as they swept by. "We'll get you
next time!"
If the walls did not melt? Already the flood was licking with hungry
tongues the adobe bricks where the plaster had bulged and fallen, and an
hour would fly while they made a landing and dragged the canoe back for
another cast. The boatmen knew! Their faces expressed, anticipated that
which happened as they made the landing half a mile below. Paul saw it
first. Through the swift passage he sat, facing astern, helplessly
clutching the gunwale, and his cry, raucous as that of a maimed animal,
signaled the fall of the house. Sobbing, he collapsed on the bank.
Bachelder looked down upon him. Momentarily stunned, his thought
returned along with a feeling of relief that would have framed itself
thus in words: "Poor Desdemona! Now she will never know!"
"_Señor! Señor! Mira!_" A boatman touched his shoulder.
Two heads were swirling down the flood, a light and a dark. Bachelder
instantly knew Ethel, but, as yet, he could not make out the strong
swimmer who was at such infinite pains to hold the fair head above
water. Though, time and again, the dark head went under for smotheringly
long intervals, Ethel's never once dipped, and, up or down, the swimmer
battled fiercely, angling across the flood. She--for long hair stamped
her a woman--gained seventy yards shoreward while floating down two
hundred. Three hundred gave her another fifty. So, rising and sinking,
she drifted with her burden down upon Paul and Bachelder. At fifty yards
the artist caught a glimpse of her face, but not till she was almost
under their hands did Paul recognize the swimmer.
"Andrea!" he shouted.
* * * * *
Reassured by Bachelder's cheery shout, Ethel had busied herself
collecting her watch and other trinkets from the bureau till a smacking
of wet feet caused her to turn, startled. A woman stood in the door, a
woman of matchless amplitudes, such as of old tempted the gods from
heaven. Stark naked, save for the black cloud that dripped below her
waist, her bronze beauty was framed by the ponderous arch.
"I don't know who you are," Ethel said, recovering, "but you are very
beautiful, and, under the circumstances, welcome. Under ordinary
conditions, your advent would have been a trifle embarrassing. I must
find you a shawl before the canoes come. Here, take this blanket."
She little imagined how embarrassing the visitation might have proved
under very ordinary conditions. Though the news of Paul's return did
cross before the bridge was carried away, Andrea did not hear it till
that morning, and she would never have had it from a Tewana neighbor.
They pitied the bereavement to which widowhood in the most cruel of
forms was now added. But among them she unfortunately counted a peon
woman of the upper Mexican plateau, one of the class which took from the
Conquest only Spanish viciousness to add to Aztec cruelty. Jealous of
Andrea's luck--as they had deemed it--in marriage, Pancha had thirsted
for the opportunity which came as they drew water together that morning
from the brink of the flood.
"'Tis the luck of us all!" she exclaimed, malevolently ornamenting her
evil tidings. "They take their pleasure of us, these Gringos, then when
the hide wrinkles, ho for a prettier! They say Tewana hath not such
another as his new flame, and thy house is a hovel to that he fits up
for her on the Promontory."
Here the hag paused, for two good reasons. That the barbed shaft might
sink deep and rankle from Andrea's belief that her supplanter was a girl
of her tribe, but principally because, just then, she went down under
the ruins of her own _olla_. A fighter, after her kind, with many a
cutting to her credit, she cowered like a snarling she-wolf among the
sharp potsherds cowed by the enormous anger she had provoked; lay and
watched while the tall beauty ripped shawl, slip and skirt from her
magnificent limbs, then turned and plunged into the flood. Pancha rose
and shook her black fist, hurling curses after.
"May the alligators caress thy limbs, the fishes pluck thine eyes, the
wolves crack thy bleached bones on the strand."