Kitabı oku: «Over the Border: A Novel», sayfa 10
XVII: – BUT TWENTY CANNOT MAKE HIM DRINK
When they rode in to the rancho that afternoon, the “wind” – that is, Ramon – had not yet “blown in”; so there were no complications to interfere with the widow’s first attempts at diagnosis of the “case.” She noticed at once that, instead of springing down and taking her and Betty in one hug according to her fashion, Lee swung one leg over the pommel, then sat, quietly waiting, till Gordon reached up and lifted her across to the veranda.
“Promising,” she inwardly commented.
A cold shower, that followed greetings and introductions, interfered temporarily with the diagnosis, but after Lee had emerged, all pink and white and cool, and had sat down to make her toilet in the widow’s bedroom, that lady pursued her investigations with the abrupt remark:
“Ramon is coming.”
“Yes? Isabel too?”
An imperceptible nod marked Mrs. Mills’s belief that the indifference was not assumed. She went on to mask her plot. “No, it was quite accidental. I wrote some time ago to ask just where my line ran along their eastern boundary, and Ramon replied that he would come over and show me to-day.”
“Oh, I hope he does. Ramon is such a nice boy.”
She was now powdering her nose. The widow made mental comment. “Never missed a dab. William Benson’s a fool – though, of course, she may have changed her mind.” This she proceeded to find out. “Your new man seems nice?”
“He is.” Followed a long description of Gordon’s night vigil with the child. She concluded with a characteristic reservation, “But – ”
“But what?”
“He’s been going to see Felicia at the fonda. Sliver took him there, one day, and he says that he has never been again. But – she’s wearing his watch-fob in her bosom – Yes, yes! I know! A peona will beg the shoes off any man’s feet. She might easily have got it at one sitting. But – ”
Her nod conveyed her feeling that, allowances having been generously made, young men whose watch-fobs are found in peonas’ bosoms, will bear watching. “Of course that is nothing to me, and, as you say, he is very nice. I like Bull better than any of them. Dear me! why isn’t he twenty years younger? Then I could marry him. Oh – ”
She paused, gazing at the widow, for, though the latter was exceedingly subtle, the subtlety of one woman is plain print for another. A little smile, sudden lighting of the eye! The widow stood betrayed.
Lee jumped an enormous distance to her conclusion. “Oh, wouldn’t that be just too lovely! Is it – settled?”
The widow, of course, shook her head.
“But it will be.”
“How do you know?” She was quite willing to be convinced.
“How do I know?” The words issued, delicately scented, from dabs of powder. “Just as if it depended on him. Just as if any woman – who hasn’t a harelip – can’t marry any man she wants.”
Thus turned, in a twinkling, from a diagnostician into a “case,” Mrs. Mills tried to cover her confusion with a little laugh. But it was so self-conscious she might as well have made oral confession. Being an honest person, she owned up with a hug.
Meanwhile, having been captured by Betty as he emerged from his bedroom dressed and refreshed by a cooling shower, Gordon was being subjected to an equally keen if less discreet examination.
Betty’s major premise agreed marvelously with Lee’s and was stated with the startling directness of childhood after a prolonged survey of the subject from different distances and points of view. “I like you – only not so well as Bull. You’re nicer-looking, but – ” A long pause emphasized more powerfully than words how woefully he fell short in other ways. “I’m going to marry him when I grow up – that is, if mother doesn’t beat me to it!”
“Any danger of that?” Gordon laughed.
“You bet there is. Bull’s dead in love with her, and she – of course, she doesn’t admit it, but I know.”
“Well, well, isn’t that fine!” Gordon really meant it. “Congratulations, I suppose, are not yet in order.”
“I should say not!” Betty’s blue eyes widened with horror. “Don’t youdare! I’m not too big, yet, to be spanked” – she wriggled, reminiscently – “and when mother’s real mad she goes the limit. Nevertheless, it’s true.” After a second calculating survey, she concluded, “But if she grabs Bull, I might marry you.”
“If you only will,” he pleaded, “I’ll be so-o good! Can’t we consider ourselves engaged?”
After a moment’s thought she doubtfully shook her blond head. “No, I’m afraid not.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because doesn’t answer anything. If you reject me, I must know why.”
“Because I’d only be disappointed again.” She added, with a little sigh: “All the nice men are sure to be married before I grow up. You’ll fall in love with Lee.”
“I? With Lee?” His real surprise showed how little that contingency had occurred in his thought. Curiosity mingled with a touch of apprehension colored his accent. “Now how do you figure that?”
“Because you’d be a fool if you didn’t.”
The answer, in its dread plainness, caused him to stare. “But – but, you know, I am only her hired man?”
“That wouldn’t count – if she liked you.” After another examination: “And she might do worse. Gee! if I were only a man!”
“Yes?” he prompted. “If you were a man?”
“I’d love her so hard she’d just have to give in. I’d – ”
But further revelations were just then cut off. Back in the bedroom her mother had remembered the possibilities of that small, frank tongue. Answering her call, Betty ran off, leaving Gordon, however, with plentiful food for thought.
During the last two months he had seen Lee – riding the range, a pretty lad; presiding at meals, a still prettier girl, excessively feminine in her care for himself and the Three; mothering her brown retainers; a girl clean of mind, clear-eyed, wholesome as a breath of wind off the sage. Yet, somehow, she had not stirred his pulses. He acknowledged it with a touch of shame. What the deuce could be the matter? Was there something wrong with his head?
Presently he gained an inkling – he had been wearing another’s colors! She whom adventure claims has eyes for none else. The color and romance of this land had fired his imagination, opened a whole world to his view. Coral isles of the Pacific, palm-fringed and begirt with thundering surf; copra and pearls, magic words; the head-hunters of the Solomons; deep forests, quaint grass villages of Java and Borneo; the inland rivers of China; Siberian steppes; rock temples of Tibet – these and a thousand other names and places had juggled their terms in his brain. Some day he would see them all, following adventure’s trail!
He had calculated to go it alone, but now began to wonder if that were really necessary. A sympathetic companion doubles one’s joy in beautiful things! Come to think of it – Lee would fit very nicely in a Java forest! He saw her fair hair, a golden aureole, shining in the dusk under giant tropical fronds. She looked well, too, at the tiller of the gasolene-launch in which he was wont to explore, in imagination, the upper waters of the Hoang-ho! Now she was clasping her hands and holding her breath in pleasure and awe at first sight of the Chinese Wall dragging its massive stone coils over mountain and plain. Indeed, in the course of the next half-hour they two explored the major part of the earth’s fair surface, and not a place in it all where Lee did not belong.
Subconsciously, propinquity and isolation had worked their customary effects. If not actually in love, the young man was in a highly dangerous, not to say inflammable, state of mind when, in the midst of his dreamings, the weathered-oak door at the end of the corredor swung in and there, framed in its golden arch, bathed and powdered and fresh, stood that flower of the ages, a modern girl!
It cannot be denied that, given a decent superstructure, it’s the feathers that make the bird. Lines that not only stood the test of, but actually triumphed over, Lee’s severe man’s riding-clothes, took a billowy softness from a pretty voile gown. The silk orange stockings under the ruffle harmonized with a narrow orange and black stripe in the dress. The riband that bound her yellow curls in a girlish coiffure rhymed again with a silk sweater of peacock-blue. A pair of white pumps, that ran like frightened mice under the skirt completed a costume which, without understanding, Gordon knew to be in excellent taste.
“Why, Sister!” he returned her greeting of the morning. “What killing clothes!”
“Right, Brother!” she answered, in kind. “That’s what they’re for.”
Of course he threw up his hands. And of course she laughed. And of course there was more of the perfectly foolish, but perfectly necessary, badinage with which callow youth imitates its elders’ wit. But under all, behind his glow of admiration, Lee sensed new feeling. And she reacted to it – though not altogether in a way that suited the widow, who had followed her out. For if her color heightened, the dangerous gleam still sparkled in her eye.
“I wonder what she’s up to?” The thought formed in Mrs. Mills’s mind.
She soon found out, for just then the “wind,” alias Ramon, “blew in.”
“Oh! I’m so glad to see you!”
With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along thecorredor, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, aunts, cousins – goodness knows! the category might have embraced every one of his peones if she had not been warned by the deepening of the young fellow’s rich color that it was about time to let go.
“Just a bit too effusive,” the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, “You are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” But the glint in her eye took it back and she managed the introductions with malicious skill. “Ramon, this is Mr. Nevil, our latest acquisition.”
“Just as if he’d been a horse,” the widow inwardly commented. To prevent further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table.
On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-lacedsombrero; the charro suit of soft leather that so finely displayed his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle – made such a figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage.
Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from Gordon’s impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point of view.
“I do not know of myself,” Ramon replied to his question concerning the outcome, “but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, without forming some opinions. No, señor, we shall never settle our troubles ourselves – because, first, it isn’t in us; second, we do not try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside – but that we should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, señor” – he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug – “we should fight any attempt on your part to limit our ‘God-given right’ – as your political speakers would say – to cut one another’s throats and run off with one another’s women as we have been doing for thousands of years. We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have done our best to make up the arrears.”
So quietly was the analysis made, Gordon could not but laugh. “I think your father must be a bit of a cynic.”
“No, señor.” Ramon repeated the gentle shrug. “He merely knows us. In your schools – I know this, for I spent a couple of years in one of your big military academies – you teach that every American boy has a chance to be President. This, of course, is foolish. In the average life of your one hundred of millions, there can only be ten Presidents, so forty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand others of your men have no chance at all. Now we do not teach that. We are simply born with the belief that each one of us is going to be president, if he has to kill all the others. Moreover, in actual practice, we cut without scruple the throats of those who come between us and again what your political speakers would call ‘our God-appointed place.’ As there are many millions of us ingrained with this belief, some bloodshed is bound to result.
“Also my father knows you Yankees. You desire peace, not because it is right, but in order that you may pursue your commercial wars. Between our wars we are good friends, visit and love one another till the time comes for another killing. But you pursue your commerce with absolute ruth. Nothing, to you, the ruin of a competitor; nothing the crushing of children’s and women’s lives in your sweat-shops and factories; no principle of morality or humanity can stem the tide of your greed. Your warfare is far more inhuman than ours; slays its tens of thousands to our thousands; starves your children, debauches your women in a way that is unknown with us. For when they are not hacking one another to pieces our peones live in rude comfort on the haciendas with enough to eat and drink, no more work than they feel like doing, merriment enough in their bailes and fiestas. No, we prefer our own wars; do not in the least desire the slums, sweat-shops, rapacity, and greed that go with your system.”
“In other words,” Gordon suggested, “‘you prefer the frying-pan to the fire’?”
For a moment Ramon looked mystified. Then, as he grasped the application of the strange proverb, he laughed. “Exactly, señor. Why trade devils?”
“So that is how you Mexicans feel?” Gordon commented on these strange ideas after a thoughtful pause. “Then why did you ever let the foreigners in? Now that a hundred thousand of them have invested billions here under guarantees from Mexico to their respective countries, you can never turn them out.”
Ramon’s nod conceded the fact. Not now were the hands of time to be set back. The evolutionary process which was sweeping his country from its ancient foundations, laid in a pastoral age, into the vortex of a detested commercialism, was not to be stayed.
“Why did we do it? We did not. It was the work of Porfirio Diaz. Lerdo de Tejada, whom he overthrew, held to the Mexican idea, and would have built a Chinese Wall around the country to keep the foreigners out. But after him – Diaz, the Flood!” Flicking the ash carelessly from his cigarette, he concluded, with a shrug: “No, we cannot throw them out – now. Some day you gringos will swallow us up even as you swallowed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alta California. But in the mean time – we shall fight.”
From these lines the talk turned to more intimate things and, if let alone, they would undoubtedly have become friends. But just then Lee returned and plunged again into family gossip, cutting Gordon out. In fact, she did it so completely that he looked up, surprised, when she addressed him half an hour later.
“We are going for a little walk. You may come – if you choose.”
He didn’t choose! As the blue sweater and orange stockings moved off alongside the charro suit and jingling silver spurs, however, his face displayed that mixture of exasperation and bewilderment that is common to two creatures under the sun – to wit, a bull being played with thecapa by a skilful matador and a man under torture by a woman.
When they disappeared around the corner, wrath surged within him. Here the creature whom, less than an hour ago, he had elected to wander with him through Java forests and on a personally conducted tour of China had first flouted him openly, and was now throwing herself at the head of a – well, a blanked, blanked Mexican! It was hard to swallow, and yet under his wrath the “wind” was fanning another flame into quite a respectable blaze.
If he could have seen the celerity with which Lee replaced their relations on the usual basis after she and Ramon passed from sight, Gordon might have felt better. But he did not, and when they returned almost an hour later she behaved just as badly, if not worse. Until the going down of the sun, in biblical phrase, and then some, she flirted shamelessly while Gordon exhibited, on his part, the customary phases. In lack of another girl of flirting age, he concentrated his attentions, at first, on Betty. But growing desperate as the evening wore on, he started a flirtation with the widow, whose looks and years brought her well within the limit. Being neither prim nor prudish, she, on her part, threw herself into the fray with a certain enjoyment and helped him out. But never for a moment was she deceived.
“Flirting their young heads off against each other,” she summed the situation.
With secret amusement she observed the dignity of Gordon’s good-night at the close of the evening, and the excessive cordiality of Lee’s answer; also the stiffness of the bows between the young men.
A certain restraint in the girl’s good-night to herself caused her inward laughter. Nevertheless, she observed the scriptural injunction not to let the sun go down on one’s offense. She entered with Lee into her bedroom, and, judging by the low laughter that escaped under the door, she quickly removed it. Nevertheless, she was not prevented, thereby, from a correct judgment of results.
“On the whole honors were even,” she mused while making her toilet. “I wonder who will score to-morrow?”
It was Lee.
“I’m coming home later,” she gave Gordon his orders, after breakfast. “You can go now. Mr. Icarza will ride with me.”
There was nothing for it, of course, but to obey. Saddling up, he rode away, but not before the widow had handed him a hastily scribbled note that contained – at least so she said – the recipe for a liniment Terrubio used on their horses which he had promised to Bull.
Going back into the bedroom, she caught Lee watching Gordon behind the curtains. “That’s downright cruelty,” she scolded.
“Well?” Lee shrugged. “Didn’t he say, yesterday morning, that he didn’t take any interest in girls after they grew up?”
“But he does.”
Very illogically, but quite naturally, Lee answered, with a little laugh, “I know it.”
Nevertheless her eyes softened as she watched the lonely figure – that is, they softened until it turned from the beaten trail and headed on the path by which they had come in. Then they flashed. “Oh, he’s going back by the fonda!”
“Ah-ha!” the widow mused. “Now we shall see.”
She did, for having given Gordon barely time to pass from sight, Lee routed out Ramon from a comfortable smoke, mounted, and rode after.
XVIII: THE “WIND” BLOWS CONTRARY
In the fundamentals of feeling poor humans are very much alike.
A university training confers no immunity from jealousy, and as he rode into the hills Gordon’s thoughts exhibited all of the phases customary with plowboys and professors who have been flouted and flirted and flurried till they can hardly say whether they are standing on their heads or their heels. He assured himself, of course, that he “didn’t give a damn”! and smoked a pipe to prove it. But after a few puffs the pipe burned out in his hand, wasting its fragrance on the desert air.
The flashes that fitfully broke his brooding again marked sudden impulses to go back, punch Ramon’s head, and lead Lee away by one pretty ear. Mentally he twisted it till she cried out; whereupon he would let go with the admonition, “There! that will teach you to behave!”
Once he even turned to go back. But sanity intervened. He rode on – madder than ever. Also – but, as before said, his thoughts and feelings conformed to the universal type. Let it suffice that when, hours later, he saw thefonda lying like a cup of gold in the ravine below he was in a highly reckless state.
Up to that moment it is safe to say that no thought of Felicia had been in his mind. But when suffering from injured pride, vanity, or love, plowman and professor alike proceed to “take a hair of the dog that bit them” by turning to the nearest maid. Of husbands that have been so caught on the rebound, wives obtained, as it were, on a ricochet, the number shall never be told!
In accordance with this natural law, Felicia’s pretty face now flashed up before Gordon’s eyes. His exclamation, “Aw, take a drink and forget it!” might, metaphorically, be applied to the fonda’s liquors less than to her.
A peona’s life gravitates between her grinding at the metate and laundering on the river boulders, with spells of “drawnwork” between. Having put out her “wash” and bathed herself in the stream, Felicia was making her toilet before two inches of cracked mirror she had propped on the lintel against the wooden bar shutter when Gordon came riding down from above.
From her smooth forehead, her cloud-black hair fell in dark waves around a spotless chemisette whose low cut and lack of sleeves revealed the satin-gold of her shoulders. Under the same circumstances a white girl would, of course, have fled. But at the sight of him, alone, she spat out a mouthful of hair-pins that interfered with her welcoming smile, led his horse in under the shady ramada, then proceeded calmly with her toilet.
Toward both Sliver and Lee she had displayed a certain sullenness, the dull resentment born of racial oppression, but now while she combed and arranged her hair she flooded Gordon with smiles. And how she talked! eyes, hands, body, shoulders, and tongue going together in a way that would have given the most loquacious of white girls twenty yards start out of a hundred and beaten her to the tape.
The tongue Gordon could not understand. But the big eyes, small hands, golden shoulders told in the language of the universe that she was exceedingly glad! To a young man who had been recently flouted and flattened, the nose of him held down, as it were, on the grindstone of a girl’s contempt, it was very soothing. He bathed in the subtle flattery. Like a spring tonic, it percolated, a healing oil, through every pore of his wounded vanity, restoring, revigorating his self-esteem. So he looked on approvingly; even made admiring note of the perfect arms and shoulders.
Her toilet concluded, Felicia surveyed it a few inches at a time in the cracked bit of mirror. Then letting down the wooden shutter, she filled two copas of anisette and, leaning on one shapely elbow, pledged him in Spanish.
“Salud y pesitos, señor!” (Health and a little money!)
In clinking glasses, she touched his hand, but he did not find the contact unpleasant; neither took alarm when she refused a pesonote – even after he had filled and drunk again.
A peona refusing money? It was contrary to instinct and tradition! Had he known that, or her private mind, he would have moved on; for he was not only naturally shy with girls, but also responsible beyond his years. But being absolutely ignorant of peona nature, and in fine fettle for sympathetic philandering, he leaned against the bar and chatted as best he could, with his little Spanish helped out by signs.
When she suggested that he would learn more quickly if he had adiccionario with “long hair” he laughed, but failed to catch the personal application. Again, if, as on the former occasion, she had repeated the offer made through Sliver, he would also have laughed. But now that she was sure, or thought she was, of her game, she enwrapped herself in a savage modesty; masked advances under alluring retreats.
To tell the truth, as the anisette fulfilled its ordained purpose and burned up his shyness in its consuming flame, he found the flirtation so delightful that an hour slipped by unnoticed. During that time the “long-haired diccionario” was in constant use. While her father and mother dozed under the ramada he consulted it about the scenery and natural objects, trees, chickens, pigs; the path, stream, and hills. But when, irresistibly, the range of his questions narrowed to nearer objects – fingers, eyes, hair – the lesson passed the boundaries of etymology into the domain of love.
He was well over that border before he realized it – how far he did not guess until, when he had asked playfully the Spanish for “kiss,” thediccionario answered swiftly, not with the word, but with the action to illustrate it.
