Five Nights Part 38

She was trembling so much she could hardly walk up the stairs to our room, and when we got there I made her go to bed while I sat by her putting cold compresses on her head. She complained of such pain in it, I was afraid that the fright and shock would do her serious harm.

I sat up with her through the night, and towards morning she fell into a tranquil sleep.

I paced up and down the quiet room lighted only by the night light, thinking over the horrid scene of the afternoon, and when it grew to be day I was hungering so for a companion to speak to and to feel with me, that I drew out my writing-case and wrote a long letter to Viola.

CHAPTER XI

THE WAY OF THE G.o.dS

"But, Treevor, I am so very dull when you go out, and when you are working it is as bad. I do miss my baby so to play with."

"You did not strike me as a very devoted mother when I saw you at Sitka," I answered.

"Oh, Treevor, he was a very fine boy, and I took so much care of him.

Was he not a very large child?"

"Yes, he certainly was, and with a dreadful voice and a furious temper. It's no use worrying me, Suzee, about the matter. I dislike children very much, and I do not wish nor intend to have any of my own."

Suzee began to cry in the easy way she had. She seemed able to commence and leave off just when she chose.

"You are a little goose," I said jestingly. "You don't know when you are well off. For months and months you would be ill and disfigured, unable to come about with me or be my companion, unable to sit to me for my painting, and afterwards the child would be an unendurable tie and burden. Besides, as I say, I have an intense dislike to children and could never live with one anywhere near me. I am afraid, if you want them, you must go away from me, to some one who has your views."

Suzee came over to where I was sitting and knelt beside my chair, clasping both hands round my arm.

"Treevor," she said, almost in a whisper, "you are so beautiful with your straight face, every line in it is so straight, quite straight; and your black hair and your dark eyes and your dark eyebrows. I want that for my baby. I want a son just like you; he must be just like you, and then I should be so happy."

As she spoke, the lines of a poetess flashed across me, indistinctly remembered--"beauty that women seek after ... that they may give to the world again."

Was this the reason of woman's love of beauty in men? Ah, not with all women! Viola loved beauty, as I did, as all artists do, as they love their art, for itself alone.

I stroked her smooth s.h.i.+ning hair, gently, and shook my head, smiling down upon her.

"Do you not value my love for you?" I asked.

"Oh yes, yes; you know I do."

"Well, then understand this: you would utterly and entirely lose it if you became a mother."

Suzee shrank away from me.

"But why, Treevor? Hop Lee was so pleased with me...."

"Men have different tastes. And it is well they have, or the world would be worse than it is. Some men like children and domesticity and sick-nursing and childish companions.h.i.+p; I don't. I like health and beauty, and love and intellect about me, and women who are straight and slim and can inspire my pictures. That's why, Suzee, and I don't see any reason why I shouldn't gratify my tastes as they do theirs.

There are plenty of men in the world who like being fathers of families; the world can well allow an artist to give it his art instead."

"Oh yes, Treevor, of course; but I am so sorry. I am so dull without a baby."

We were sitting together in a light balcony of one of the hotels at Tampico, and the subject of our conversation was one which had come up many times between us lately.

Some months had slipped by since the accident in the bull-ring. Suzee had recovered from the shock with a few day's rest and care, and as soon as she was better we had started on a tour through the country places of Mexico, and as it grew colder we had worked downwards to the gulf of Vera Cruz in the Tierra Caliente, or Hot Lands, and now were making a stay here on the coast, caught by the beauty of palm and sea and sh.o.r.e.

Suzee, though apparently she had all that most young women covet, had been for some time restless and dissatisfied, and the reason soon appeared in conversations like that of to-day.

"Come along," I said, getting up; "see what a lovely evening it is, let's go for a walk along the seash.o.r.e."

Suzee looked round at the translucent green bell of the sky that hung over us, disapprovingly.

"It's always fine weather," she said, rather sulkily; "and there's nothing to see on that old sh.o.r.e."

"Nothing to see!" I exclaimed in sheer amazement. Then I stopped short, remembering her indifference to all I valued, and added: "There are most beautiful sh.e.l.ls of every shape and colour, wouldn't you like to get some of those?"

Suzee's face brightened immediately. This idea took her fancy at once.

It appealed to her keen love of material things. Beauty in air and sky was nothing to her; but something she could pick up and handle, become possessed of, like the sh.e.l.ls, deeply interested her. She rose at once.

"I had better take a basket, Treevor," she said, "to carry them back in." And while she went to get it, I leant over the balcony-rail musing on that great difference in character between woman and woman, man and man. Humanity might almost be divided into those two great parts--those who love and live in ideas; and those who love, and are wholly concerned with, material things.

She came back in a moment with a basket swinging in her hand. It had not seemed so necessary here in Mexico that she should dress in Western clothes, so she had gradually relapsed into her gaily coloured silks and embroidered muslins and Zouave jackets. This style of dressing suited the tropical climate, and the convenances of Europe and America were too far off for anything to matter much here. It gave her constant occupation, too, the making of her costumes; for she was marvellously quick and dexterous with her needle, and if I gave her the silks she fancied she made them into dainty forms and embroidered them with the greatest skill. As she came back now with her basket the light fell softly on her lilac silk, all worked with gold thread, and on her pretty bare head with its block of black s.h.i.+ning hair.

We started for the sh.o.r.e, Suzee all animation now and chattering on the possibility of sewing sea-sh.e.l.ls into gold tissue or muslin.

The sky all round and overhead was palest green and strangely luminous, the sea before us stretched to the far horizon in tones of gentlest mauve and violet, beneath our feet was the firm brown sand for miles and miles unrolled like a glossy, sepia carpet. On one side broke the tiny waves in undulating lines of white; on the other, the wild sand-dunes, grown over with rough gra.s.s and waving cocoanut palms, came down towards the sea.

We walked on, both contented. I, in the strange colouring and the warm salt breath in the air, that stirred the palm leaves till they tossed joyfully in it; she, in the absorbing pursuit of the sh.e.l.ls which lay along the sand, positively studding it, like jewels, with colour. The tide had recently gone down over the sh.o.r.e where we walked and left them radiant, gleaming with moisture in the low light of the sun, pink and scarlet, deepest purple and gold. She ran ahead of me, picking them up and filling her basket rapidly. I walked on slowly, thinking, while my eyes wandered over that s.h.i.+ning, palpitating, gently heaving violet sea. She had given herself to me entirely--and what beauty she had to give! And yet she had failed to chain me to her in any way, greatly though she pleased my senses. It is, after all, something in the soul of a woman, in her inner self, that has the power of throwing an anchor into our soul and holding it captive. Mere beauty throws its anchor into the flesh, and after a time the flesh gives way.

In a little while Suzee came running back to me; her basket was full to overflowing: she was quite happy.

"Take me up in your arms and kiss me," she said. "Look, Treevor, we are all alone. What a great, great beach it is here, with not another soul to see anywhere."

As she said, the firm brown plain of glistening sand stretched behind us and before us with not another footfall to disturb its silence, the wide white sand-dunes were deserted, the palms tossed their greeting to the sea through the glory of calm evening light.

"Let us lie under those palms now; I am tired," she said as I kissed her. And we went together and lay down under the palms on a ragged tussock of gra.s.s, and the light fell and grew deeper in tone round us and the amethystine sea, flushed with colour, swayed and heaved, murmuring its low eternal song by our side.

A great vulture flapped heavily by and perched on a sand-hill not far from us, eyeing us somewhat askance, and some sea-gulls circled over us--otherwise we were undisturbed.

The following day we planned to come down the river Tamesi, which flows out at Tampico. We could not go up by boat, as the river was in flood and nothing could make headway against it, but the natives were adepts at steering a boat down with the rapid current, and knew how to handle it on the top of the flood.

We took the train some distance up the line, and alighted at a place where the river flowed by between high banks and where boats could be had from the villagers.

It was a perfect, cloudless day, and we reached our destination in the sweet fresh early hours of the morning. A walk through the tiny Mexican village brought us to the bank of the river where the Tamesi flowed by, heavily, grandly, in all the majesty of its flood.

The waters were brown and discoloured, but the sun glinting on its ripples turned them into gold, and the tamarisk on the bank drooped over it, letting its long strands float on the gliding water.

A little way down the bank, moored to the side, rocked a boat, of which the outline delighted me, and, to Suzee's annoyance, I stood still and drew out my note-book to make a sketch of it.