It was well on in the afternoon of the next day when they anchored
off Cuyo, which, with its squat lighthouse and low shore, impressed
Charlotte as a dreary, lonesome spot. A launch, which was lying abreast
the lighthouse, saluted them with vociferous toots, and Collingwood
waved his hat in joyous response.
"That's Mac, all right," he said. "He'll be aboard directly. It's a
wonder he didn't hire the town band to welcome us."
Charlotte winced and secretly rejoiced that for once Mr. Maclaughlin's
initiative had failed to come up to its reputation. Yet when a boat
came alongside, and a grizzled Scotch-American stepped up the short
ladder, her greeting was warm enough to fully satisfy her husband.
"My soul!" said Mr. Maclaughlin, giving her a lengthy handshake and
a look of unqualified admiration, "but you could ha' knocked us down
with a feather the day the letter came saying that Martin would bring
back a wife. Kingsnorth nigh took to his bed on it."
Consternation was plainly written on Mrs. Collingwood's face. Her
sensitiveness was a-flutter, fearing a cold welcome from her husband's
friends.
"I'm sorry," she began, and then came to an awkward stop.
"No offence, I hope," said Maclaughlin, reading the signs, "He's
well over it by now. Kingsnorth is just one of those poor bodies we
call a woman-hater; and you'll notice, Mrs. Collingwood, that they
always begin life just the opposite. He thought he'd found a bunkie
for life in Martin, an' the lad fooled him! I don't say but we were
all surprised, but you'll find a hearty welcome at the island."
"Can we get out to-night?" asked Collingwood.
"Get out in an hour if we can get our freight transhipped, unless
Mrs. Collingwood is in a mind to stay and see the city by gaslight." He
jerked a derisive thumb in the direction of the iron and nipa roofs
ashore.
"All the light stuff is on deck now," said Martin whose instincts
to accomplish whatever was to be done mastered any tendency toward
conversation. He pointed, as he spoke, to a tarpaulin-covered heap
forward. "The heavy cases are stored where they can be hauled up in
a minute. I'll see the captain at once. He won't try to delay us,
not he. Get alongside right away, with the launch, can't you?"
"I doubt you've gone broke," remarked Maclaughlin, contemplating the
heap and smiling at Charlotte, who laughed.
"Not so had as that, I hope," she responded, "but some of the credit
is due me that he hasn't."
"That's a fact," her husband supplemented. "I wanted to buy out Manila
and wire additional supplies from Hong Kong. However, we can talk
about that later. Thank the Lord, there isn't any sea on. We would
have the devil's own time transhipping, if there were."
He dashed off, and Maclaughlin jumped into his boat with an order to
the native rowers to hurry. For an instant, Charlotte was annoyed by
their unceremonious departure, but her good sense soon rose superior
to her training. Martin alert, talking business, with his hat on the
back of his head, a long pencil emphasizing his gestures, was a very
different figure from the insouciant young pagan, alternately jocose
and pleading, that had wooed her. How quickly, too, the easy speech of
the husband had possessed him. "Devil's own time" came ripping out with
unconscious force. At first, Charlotte's fastidiousness revolted from
it. Then she decided that it was virile and that she liked it. Still,
she mused, if he felt the need of emphatic embellishment to point the
assertion of so simple a fact as that, what might he not do when an
occasion out of the ordinary arose?
Her question was answered before their goods and commissaries were
aboard the launch, and, for a time, she could not tell whether she
wanted to laugh or to cry. While she was still in doubt, her husband
came back, red and perspiring, with his coat off. He held out a collar
and necktie.
"Just look out for these things for me, won't you?" he said. "My! I'm
pretty well cussed out. Hope I didn't shock you, pet."
"You did, but it didn't matter; or rather, it passed the point of
shocking. You have the towering imagination in profanity, Martin,
of an architect of sky-scraping buildings."
Collingwood was able to extract a compliment from this, and looked
grateful, though he was evidently impressed by the form of its
expression. "I may have said a little too much," he apologized,
"but a man would have to be a saint not to lose his temper--Here!" he
roared, as three of the crew, having mounted to the upper deck and
having armed themselves with a flower pot apiece, started brazenly
off with their burdens, "take two of those at a time. How many trips
do you plan to make with this flower garden, anyway? You see that
everything is right in the stateroom, won't you?" he threw over his
shoulder as he darted off.
"Certainly," she replied, adding to herself, "for I shouldn't like
you to 'cuss' me."
She felt quite safe from any such dire possibility, or she could not
have joked about it even with herself. Nevertheless, she was very
thoughtful as she gathered up their belongings and put them in the
valises, leaving, however, the strapping and the pulling to be done
by Martin.
When she had done all that there was to be done, and had put on her
hat, she sank down on a locker, still holding her husband's discarded
collar, and let her thoughts dwell rosily on the part she could
play in the island life. A guilty conscience urged her to acts of
reparation. All that she could do to bring order and system and beauty
into her husband's home she was resolved to do. He had told her enough
to let her know that he had lived in an unlovely fashion, and that he
had aspirations for something better, though he could not define what
he objected to in the past, or just what he wanted in the future. He
was bent on making money, chiefly because he seemed to feel that there
was no way of obtaining his ideal without large expenditures; and yet
he was not ostentatious. He had been very liberal--extravagant, she
had laughingly told him--in the purchase of household belongings; and
she had told the truth when she said that she deserved the credit of
restraining him. He was going to become the typical American husband,
who labors unceasingly that his womankind may be decked in finery and
may represent him in the whirl of society; but his wife could see that,
until such a time as their prosperity should be at flood tide, he would
expect her to administer wisely and economically. He gave much--as
far as he was conscious of her needs--and he would ask proportionally
in return. Charlotte's head reared proudly to meet the thought. She
would not fail him. And then she vowed for the hundredth time, that
his unstinted devotion should meet with its just due, and that never,
never should Martin suspect how she had had to battle with herself
before she could conquer the feeling that her love was a shame to her.
Martin, coming to seek her in order to introduce her to the wife of
a local military officer, found her sunk in reverie with his crumpled
neck-wear pressed against her cheek. He put on a clean tie and collar
and they went on deck together.
The military officer's wife was a young woman, plainly of village
origin, who was carrying the wide-spreading sail which many Americans
in the Philippines elect to display in the exuberance of having
journeyed to foreign lands. Her appearance jarred on Mrs. Collingwood,
and her conversation, which was frivolous and full of assumption,
reinforced the unfavorable impression.
The lady had met Collingwood three or four times before, and had
treated him with scant courtesy, because he had been an enlisted
man. But when she heard that he was married, and that his wife was
aboard ship, her curiosity got the better of her exclusiveness--that
and her eagerness to hear the sound of her own voice, for there
were few Americans in Cuyo, and she was already on bad terms with
several families. She threw a gushing condescension into her manner
of greeting Charlotte, which put that young woman's nerves on edge at
once. But Mrs. Snodgrass ("What a name!" thought Charlotte, "I never
expected to meet it out of books!") was determined to make the best of
the conversational opportunity. After a somewhat ingenuous scrutiny,
she invited the Collingwoods to dinner. Charlotte was about to decline,
when Martin interrupted and said that their being delayed an hour or so
was of no importance; that it was evidently going to be a clear night,
and they had time enough to make the run over before dawn. Charlotte
supposed that some affection for Lieutenant Snodgrass--who had been
a captain of volunteers in the war, and Martin's officer--was the
cause of her husband's eagerness, and she accepted the invitation
at once. She went ashore with the Lieutenant's wife, while Martin
remained to see to a few last details, and to make some arrangements
with Maclaughlin.
Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass (he had not been able to secure entrance
to the regular army with his volunteer rank) were comfortably
domiciled, and the meal was a good one, though Charlotte was made
uncomfortable by the hostess's repeated apologies both for her food
and her service. "The servants are such impossible creatures here,
don't you think?" fluttered the little woman who, before her marriage,
had been a stenographer working for twelve dollars a week, and who
had never enjoyed the luxury of a servant in her life till she came
to the Philippines.
Charlotte glanced at her in surprise. "I had not thought so," she
replied. "They need a great deal of training, of course, but I fancied
them ideal servants, so truly of the servant class, believing that
God ordained us to be masters, and them to serve. At home, I feel that
servants do not acquiesce in the situation, and the more intelligent
they are, the more sensitive I am to the undercurrent."
It was evident that Mrs. Snodgrass regarded this remark as
verbiage. "How funny!" she said. "I never felt that way."
"In other words," remarked Lieutenant Snodgrass, who was a self-made
man, but who was taking on his army training with great quickness,
"Mrs. Collingwood prefers an aristocratic social system to a democratic
one."
"I suppose so," Charlotte assented, "though theoretically I stand for
democracy like all good Americans. You inferred a condition of my mind
of which I was hardly conscious myself. But I suppose you are right."
"Do you hear that, Collingwood? You are the most rabid democrat I
know. Are you going to bring your wife over to your way of thinking?"
Martin was staring at Charlotte, who began to color with
embarrassment. Her view-point had seemed to her so natural and so
simple that she was quite unprepared for the comment it evoked.
"I'll have to coach you up before I turn you loose on people," he
said. "Why, I never thought it of you."
Lieutenant Snodgrass assumed the air of a man, the length of whose
matrimonial experience justifies him in extensive allusions to
feminine peculiarities.
"Oh, if she doesn't startle you any worse than that," he hinted darkly.
After dinner, Charlotte was left to a long hour of Mrs. Snodgrass's
company while their husbands reviewed war experiences and discussed
that never-ending theme of exiles, the Government's Philippine
policy. It was ten o'clock when the Collingwoods bade good-bye to
their hosts, with the usual promise of an exchange of visits. They
found Maclaughlin waiting for them at the landing with the boat. He
asked Mrs. Collingwood if she could steer and, being told that she
could, vacated his place in the stern for her.
The night was dark but not cloudy, like the previous one. The
moon would not rise till later, but the night azure of the sky
was unclouded, and all the constellations of the tropic belt were
glittering in its peaceful depths. The Southern Cross was there,
and the so-called False Cross, while, in the north, the "Big Dipper"
hung low and out of place. The water was phosphorescent, the oars
turning in green fire, which sent a million prickles flashing away
in the waves. When, now and then, a banca crept past them, its shape
was outlined in the same lurid radiance, and the noiseless paddles
dripped smears of unearthly flame. Charlotte pulled her tiller ropes
in silence, keeping a wary eye out for unlighted craft, and watching
the huddle of lights that was their launch. The coastguard cutter
had left half an hour before. She was a faint glimmer of dots on the
vague horizon; her smoke still lay a wavering, dark line across the
night sky.
Suddenly a tremor of deadly fear shook Charlotte. There went the chain
by which she had felt herself linked to the world and civilization. She
had put herself at the mercy of a man of whom she knew, after all,
next to nothing. Once aboard the launch, once out of Cuyo harbor,
she was as utterly in his power as any prisoner in a dungeon is in
the power of his captors. A wife may have rights and privileges in
the eye of the law, but they avail her little on an island where no
one of her own race save her husband's friends steps foot.
Her crowding thoughts sickened her, though she had enough will and
strength to guide the boat alongside the launch. Collingwood threw
away his cigar and held out his hands. "Up with you," he cried gayly.
The answer was a half movement and a groan as she dropped back with
her face in her hands.
"Charlotte, are you sick? My God! What's the matter?"
His vehemence and the fear in his voice reassured her. With indomitable
pride she raised herself. "My ankle turned; it was sickening pain
for an instant. It is all right, I think. The pain is growing less."
She hated herself for the lie. She despised herself for the little
pretence she still made at lameness as her husband would have picked
her up bodily. "I can walk," she said, and stepped over the thwarts.
Maclaughlin had clambered aboard ready to receive her as Martin lifted
her. They put her in the steamer chair which was to serve her as a
stateroom, and Martin hovered over, chafing her hands, offering her
brandy from his pocket flask. Mr. Maclaughlin, after making certain
that she was not seriously hurt, tactfully removed himself. Martin
called to him to wait a minute before pulling out; that it might be
necessary to get a doctor. Charlotte's face burned. She was grateful
for the darkness that hid it.
"It is not even sprained," she said truthfully. "There--see how I
can move it. It didn't amount to anything, only I am such a coward."
"You are sure now?" said Martin. She was only too glad to say that
she was.
An hour later, a waveless sea was gurgling musically as the launch cut
through it, and a tropical moon was scattering a pathway of brilliants
into which the little craft seemed desirous of plunging herself, but
which she could never quite attain. The Filipino steersman shifted
from foot to foot, a dim moving shape at his shadowed post. Mysterious
clanks and groans issued at intervals from the engine-room below. There
was no longer a wavering dark line across the night sky, though the
light on Cuyo was still visible. And in the exquisite peace a woman,
reared to luxury and social exclusiveness, lay in her deck chair
and listened to the talk of men who had known most of the shadows of
life and some of its pits of evil, took their homage, too, and found
it tasty.
Each had drawn up one of the three-legged, rattan stools which
are so common in the Philippines and they were seated one on each
side of her. Their talk wandered over many themes, but was always
terse and vivid. They agreed in damning the Government. All civilian
non-employees do that continually. They spoke of affairs on the island,
and discussed the administration of local justice with the simplicity
of men who do not quibble over political documents, but who have a
strong conviction that the powerful must rule the weak. One of the
Japanese divers was making trouble with the launch crew, preaching
the inferiority of the white race and the drubbing one part of it
was destined to receive. "I guess he's right on the Russians," said
Collingwood. "I believe the Japs will thrash them into the middle
of kingdom come; but if he goes to putting on any airs around me,
I'll kick him into the China Sea."
"No need," said Maclaughlin cheerily, "I did it for him last week. It
did him a world of good."
"How are findings?"
"None too good. We'll not make our fortunes this year, but we'll
make our keep, and a little to spare." The smile on the keen face
told Charlotte that the speaker was not dissatisfied.
"How's Kingsnorth?"
"Just himself."
"Poor devil," said Martin feelingly. Maclaughlin broke into a hearty
laugh. "Hear the married man," he cried, "an' if you could ha' heard
him six months gone, Mrs. Collingwood!"
"I probably shouldn't have liked it," said Charlotte dryly.
"Kingsnorth will snort when he hears that Mrs. Snodgrass asked us
to dinner," said Martin. "They don't like each other," he explained
to his wife. "I can't say I ever thought she liked me much till this
trip. She thinks I'm likelier to be a respectable member of society,
now I'm married. She thinks that because I was a soldier I went about
sowing wild oats by the cavan."
It happened that at the moment he finished the remark, Charlotte's
glance rested on Maclaughlin, whose face was fair in the moonlight. In
a flash--in just the instant's time that it took him to change his
expression--she read the man's judgment that Collingwood owed thanks to
his wife for any civility received from Mrs. Snodgrass. A man brought
up in the British empire has some sources of knowledge denied the
citizens of our great republic. Thirty years of kicking over American
frontiers had robbed the Scotchman of many a national trait. They
had not obscured his firm fixed impressions of gentility. He knew
Martin's wife for a gentlewoman.
"How did you like Mrs. Snodgrass?" Martin asked his wife.
Charlotte cast about for something truthful and non-committal. "I
thought she was very prettily dressed," she replied, "and that she
showed very good taste in her home. It was cosy, and the dinner
was excellent."
"Good heavens, Charlotte! I didn't ask you that. I asked you how you
liked her."
"She told you," said Maclaughlin with a short laugh.
"Of course I did," echoed Charlotte. "I put it in the most forcible
way I could. Don't pretend you did not understand."
"I understood well enough. I just wanted you to come out and out with
what you mean. Why don't you like her?"
"She is too commonplace and too assuming."
"What do you mean by commonplace?"
"I mean--I mean--" exasperation brought her to the point of unguarded
speech--"a woman who says 'Don't you know?' with every other breath, or
tacks on a sweet 'Isn't it so?' or 'Don't you think?' to qualify every
word she utters. I mean a woman of exactly Mrs. Snodgrass's type."
"Commonplace always means a woman then?"
But by that time Charlotte was laughing, partly at her flash of temper,
partly at the odd confusion of her definition, which Martin had so
quickly pointed out with his uncompromising finger.
"It doesn't mean a man like you," she said. "You are not commonplace,
but unique."
"The only one of my kind," said Martin yawning. She could see, under
his jocularity, his pride and pleasure in her (as he considered)
audacity. Her criticisms of the lady meant little to him, except as
they were the gauntlet thrown down, the laudable declaration that
Martin Collingwood's wife was not going to stand any patronizing from
the regular army. But she realized also that he was flattered by the
invitation they had received. To him Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass
were people that counted. A pang of contrition shot through her that
what had been a sort of social triumph to him had been an unmitigated
bore to her. Then a sense of humor came uppermost. The boredom she
might conceal. But as well attempt to make water run up hill as to
make Charlotte Collingwood regard an acquaintance with Lieutenant
and Mrs. Snodgrass as a social triumph. Maclaughlin, who was to take
the first watch, went forward, and Collingwood curled himself up,
native fashion, on a mat at his wife's feet. Long after his deep
respirations told her that he was fast asleep, she lay with wide open
eyes, staring into the silvered pathway ahead of them, her thoughts
a blending of regret and of exquisite joy. When, at three o'clock,
Maclaughlin came to wake up Martin, she pretended to be asleep,
and shortly after she did fall into a slumber, from which she was
awakened by her husband's voice and the word "home."
She sprang to her feet with an instinctive movement of bewilderment,
and then caught her breath for sheer delight in what she saw.
The launch was riding a mile or more off the shore of a wedge-shaped
island perhaps three miles in length. Its backbone was a line of hills
which rose precipitously from the sea on the eastern side (as she later
discovered) but which, on the west sloped gently down to a level coast
plain, a quarter of a mile or more broad. The plain and the hills
were one huge cocoanut grove. In the foreground, the columned boles
and the graceful plumes made a great haunt of emerald shade, a dream
place of cool recesses and long cathedral aisles. Its rich, unvarying
greenness seemed the more vivid by contrast with the changing hues of
the shallow water, with the gleaming whiteness of the beach, and the
occasional overtopping of a wave like the dip of a sea-gull's wings.
At the northern apex of the island, situated where they not only
commanded the western sea, but looked eastward over a channel to the
coast line of Panay and a scarped mountain rearing its cloud-hung
flanks against a lustering sky, three steep nipa-roofed cottages
nestled among the palms. Southward, the beach line ran straight till
it curved out into a sharp point in front of one of the hills. There
stood a small nipa village.
Dawn flushes played across the sky behind the distant mountain, and
pearled the shining sea. A great fishing banca manned by at least
twelve oarsmen swept boldly past them. The naked backs were made
of rippling bronze. A lorcha, almost on the western horizon line,
showed in faint lines and in gleaming spots of mother of pearl. The
morning breeze was almost chill.
It came, a crowding of perceptions and sensations, but Charlotte's
pleasure was almost ecstatic.
"Beautiful, beautiful!" she murmured. "It is a veritable paradise."
"Is it?" said Maclaughlin's knowing voice behind her. "I'm glad you
think so, Mrs. Collingwood. My wife has been doubting you'd find
it dull. Martin and I will take ours with a bandstand and a few
trolley-cars and a chop-house thrown in, eh, Collingwood?"
"Oh, shut up, Mac, don't pour cold water on my wife's
enthusiasms. Besides, she's got a poetic soul, and you and I haven't."
Charlotte stared. "What will you endow me with next?" she asked. "A
poetic soul! Martin, who has been talking about poetry for the last
two months?"
"I don't mind admitting," said Mr. Collingwood shamelessly, "that
I have, or, at least, I've been dwelling on the poetry of love and
I found you responsive. Therefore I deduced a poetic soul--sort of
Sherlock Holmes. Sabe?"
She made no reply beyond one of those reproachful head shakes
which indicate the compromise between duty and inclination. Martin
grinned. He knew when she tried to be severe, but was yet secretly
pleased with him.
Charlotte did what she could to repair the dishevelled appearance
caused by sleeping dressed in the steamer chair. A few minutes
later, they were all in the boat, speeding straight for the nipa
cottages. Martin explained that the launch could go in no further
on account of the coral reef; but, he said, a mile or more to the
southward, where the hill jutted out, there was a channel cut through
the reef, and the launch could come close in and find anchorage in a
pool which lay under the cliff. A rude pier had been constructed there,
and there their freight would be landed and then dragged up to them
along the beach in a carabao cart; for they had one draft animal. He
further informed her that the launch lay down at the anchorage every
night, and came up abreast the cottages every morning to pick up the
fishers, for it was easier to be rowed out than to trudge down the
mile of sand.
As they drew near the shore, Charlotte perceived that, in spite of the
steep roofs, the cottages had something of an American air, having
broad verandas in front; while one, which she imagined must be the
Maclaughlin home, was covered with morning glory vines. The houses
sat back about fifty yards from the beach, just where the cocoanut
grove came to an end, and it was evident that the sea breeze made
them deliciously cool.
A man was pacing up and down the beach, and, as the boat grounded,
a woman emerged from the vine-wreathed cottage, and came swiftly
on, flapping a kitchen apron which she was wearing, and making
other gestures of welcome. Charlotte had little time to observe
either closely, for her attention was quite taken up with the novel
preparations for landing her and her companions. Full thirty feet of
water intervened between them and the dry sand, not deep enough to
drown in, but quite enough to spoil dress and shoes. The Filipino
oarsmen met the difficulty, however, by rolling up their trousers
and going overboard. They made a chair of their clasped hands, and
Charlotte, seating herself therein, was carried ashore and set down
in front of Mrs. Maclaughlin.
Mrs. Maclaughlin was tall and bony with iron-gray hair and a large
featured, strong face, characteristic of the pioneer. She was not
shy, and she seized Mrs. Collingwood by both hands and kissed her,
then held her off for inspection.
"Well, Martin Collingwood's a fool for luck," she remarked. "I never
thought he'd get a nice, peart, stylish girl like you to follow him
off to a place like this. You're either mad--and you don't look it--or
you're worse in love than any woman ever was before you."
The informality of the greeting took Charlotte's breath. As she stood
blushing, a large, brown, and well-made hand was extended to her.
"How do you do, Mrs. Collingwood?" said a voice in the refined accents
of the upper class Englishman. "I don't need to introduce myself,
do I? Martin has told you all about us, and there are not enough
of us to confuse. Don't let Mrs. Mac's plainness of speech annoy
you. When you are well acquainted, you'll rather like it. It breaks
the monotony of things."
She tried to make some trivial, laughing rejoinder; but the words
faltered on her lips, for, as she glanced up into his eyes, she saw
there the instant recognition of all that she was, the interrogation
flashing into quickly throttled life, as to why she was Martin
Collingwood's wife, and what she could possibly have to do with a
colony of fisher folk composed of one insouciant blade of fortune, two
typical bits of western flotsam, and a renegade from decent society.