Now they were married and moved into their house, a cool bungalow on
the green hills. Love and passion abode with them, silent and strong
and clean as the winds on the great bridge below. Above them of nights
was the immense mosaic of the stars--the stars of the North, and the
stars Northerners knew not; the Southern Cross, the false cross and the
True, and an infinity of little worlds to southward yet unnamed, and
which mariners had marked with quaint Greek letters in their charts.
When the moon arose it was tremendously near, as near as Africa, so
they could distinguish the immense blue mountains and the dips and
whorls of her to whom poets had given fanciful, colorful names: the Bay
of Rainbows, the Green Lagoon. And all about them at night were
movement and mystery,--the screeching of parakeets, the chattering and
whistling of monkeys,--and in the dark green jungle there was rustling,
as of pied serpents, and crackling, as of jaguars with limbs of flame.
And then the dawn would come, and the earth, a mysterious womanhood by
night, would enter with the sun as a gracious lady. Clothed in
glistening green, and jeweled with humming-birds and the sheen of
parrots, she was like some barbaric princess of ancient days, such as
Balkis, Queen of Sheba, must have been when she went forth from Arabia
Felix to view the magnificence of Solomon the king.
There was mystery at night and there was majesty in the daytime, and
that all of nature, and then a little path of the mountainside, a
little turn, a pace a big man could make, and there arose suddenly
concentration and genius, the bridge. One felt stunned at seeing it; a
man might catch his breath and swear, a woman might cry, so great was
its drama. Arch by white arch it spanned the tropic gulf, and above
it, straight as an arrow, ran the line of roadway. Superb and splendid
and slender, it joined the green-clad mountains, as the web of a master
spider joins two branches of a tree. Very high it was, "so high that
it was dreadful," the words of Ezekiel came to one's mind, and beneath
it now swirled, now weltered the tropic river, on its way to join the
Amazon, greatest of waters.
And yet somehow the bridge loitered, refused to be finished, brooded,
sulked. So much did it fight against him that had it not been for his
wife Cecily, time and time again Lovat would have lost heart.
But she was there with him, and in some hidden mystical way she had to
do with the bridge. One look at her, one touch of her, and he regained
courage and patience. Silently and strong she moved by his side, by
day in her man's breeches and gaiters and sport coat, by night in her
dark-blue garment with its rolling collar of white, somehow like a
monk's but of line and beauty. Very like a flower she was, a Northern
flower, straight and slender and supple and velvety, and strong. Yes,
she had to do with the bridge, for he had only to look into her serious
smiling eyes, and to him, through her, out of somewhere, flowed
strength and wisdom.
Yes, she had to do with the bridge, he knew. Her being here was not
fortuitous. That she was a young bride on her honeymoon in an
enchanted land, was not, as it is to most women, the only thing in the
world. They were two lovers, but they were oblivious of all things,
sympathized with by all things. The bridge was there. And between him
and her and the bridge there existed some strange link of destiny.
There were three of them. Two of them were happy, but the bridge was
sullen. Two of them were uncertain, but the bridge was sure.