Читать книгу Fate Knocks at the Door - Will Levington Comfort - Страница 11

Andrew Bedient did not call at all these Asiatic and insular ports and continue to meet only men. Indeed, he did not fail to encounter those white women who follow men to disrupted places, where blood is upon the ground—nor those native women inevitably present. A man fallen to the dregs usually finds a woman to keep him company, but it is equally true that man never climbs so high that, looking upward, he may not see a woman there.

A little before the Truxton's last voyage, the clipper had remained in port for a fortnight at Adelaide, New South Wales. A woman in that city was destined to mean a great deal to the boy of seventeen. … It would be very easy to say that here was a creature whose way is the way of darkness. The striking thing is that Adelaide (in the thoughts of Bedient afterward, she gradually appropriated the name of her city) did not know she was evil. … Such a woman, it is curious to note, has appeared in the boyhood of many men of power and eminent equipment.

Adelaide was small and fragrant. Though formerly married, she was true to her kind in being childless. All her interests were in senses of her own; or in the senses of men and women who fell beneath her eye; pale, narrow temples were hers, but crowded with what sensational memories! A hundred and a few odd pounds, every ounce vivid with health and rhythmic with desire; every thought a kiss loved, missed, or hoped for; a frail little flame that needed only time to destroy an arena of gladiators. Curving, pearly nails with flecks of white in them, a light low laugh, a sweet low voice! Perhaps this was her charm, a sort of samosen tone—low lilting minors that have to do with dusk and gardens and starlight. …

There is not even a laughing pretense here that Adelaide was a real woman; but real women, even in this era of woman, often fail to remember what pure attractions to man, are their silences and their minor tones.

Just a fortnight—but what a tearing it was to leave her! Old Mother Nature must have writhed at this parting—groaned at the sight of the boy staring back from the high stern of the Truxton, at the stars lowering over the city and the woman, Adelaide. Possibly she retained something from the depth of his individuality. … Bedient would not have said so; but there is no doubt that her importance in his life was that of a mannequin upon which to drape his ideals. Had he seen her, in the later years, he would have met the dull misery of disillusionment. Adelaide was a boy's sensational trophy. Her distant beauty and color was the art and pigment of his own mind.

A soul rudiment, a mental bud, and a beautiful prophylactic body—such was her equipment. He dreamed of her as a love flower of inextinguishable sweetness. The mere abstraction of her sex—colorless enough to most grown men—was a sort of miracle to the boy. He made it shining with his idealism. … Frail arms held out to him; cool arms that turned electric with fervor. Unashamed, she took him as her own. …

Exquisite devourer, yet she had much to do in bringing forth from the latent, one of the rarest gifts a boy can have—lovelier than royalty and fine as genius—the blue flower of fastidiousness. Adelaide, all unconcerned, identified herself with this, and it lived in the foreground of his mind. She became his Southland, his isle of the sea. Winds from the South were her kisses—almost all the kisses he knew for years afterward. Living women were less to him than her memory. Facing the South, through many a hot-breathed night, he saw her—and the little house. … And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her for that! … A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like—yet she held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea—and this, through those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick and despicable with excess.

Bedient often questioned himself—why he had not given up his berth on the Truxton and remained longer in Adelaide. There were a dozen ships in the harbor to take him forth when he cared. This thought had not come to him at the time. Quite as remarkable was the formidable something which arose in his brain at the thought of going back. This was not to be fathomed then—nor willed away. The roots of his integrity were shaken at the thought of return. Andrew Bedient at thirty-four understood. His was a soul that could thrive on dreams and denials. Even half-formed, this soul was the source of a strange antagonism, against which the fleshly desire to return was powerless. Poise, indeed, for a cook among sailors and packers.

The time came when he heard other women—blessed women—speak of the Adelaide type of sister as the crowning abomination; he watched their eyes harden and glitter as only a mother-bird's can, in the circling shadow of a hawk; he lived to read in the havoc of men's faces that the ways of such women were ways of death; he believed all this—yet preserved something exquisite. Ten years afterward, winds from the South brought him the spirit of fragrance from her shoulders and hair. From his own ideals, he had focussed upon that Emptiness, the beauty and dimension of a Helen.

Other experiences, up to the real romance—and these were surprisingly few—were episodes, brief quickenings of the old flame … When the first American soldiers were being lightered ashore in Manila harbor, in fact, shortly after the cannonading in the harbor, a certain woman came over from the States and took a house in Manila. It was known as the Block-House. Some months afterward, and just before the long trip of the Train in which Cairns featured, Bedient met this woman on the Escolta. It was at dusk, and she was crossing the narrow pavement from the post-office entrance to her carriage-door. Their eyes met frankly. She was wise, under thirty, very slender, perfectly dressed; pretty, of course, but more than that; her little perfections were carried far beyond the appreciation of any but women physically faultless as herself.

Bedient was impressed with something passionate and courageous, possibly dangerous. He could not have told the source of this impression. It was not in the contour, in the white softness of skin, in the full brown eyes, fair brow, nor in the reddened arch of her lips. It was something from the whole, denoted possibly in the quick dilation of her delicate nostrils or in the startling discovery of such a woman in Manila. … She lowered her eyes, started for her carriage—then turned again to the tall figure of Bedient in fresh white clothing. Or it may have been that her deep nature found delight in the excellent boyishness of the tanned face.

"Wouldn't you like to drive with me on the Luneta?" she asked pleasantly, and there was a low tone in her voice which made her instantly different.

"Why, yes, I should like to."

Her carriage was a victoriette, small to match the ponies—black stallions, noteworthy for style and spirit even in Manila, where one's equipage is the measure of fortune. … Bedient found that he could be silent without causing an abatement of her pleasure. And, indeed, she seemed a little embarrassed, too, although he did not accept this. Vaguely he was ruffled by the thought that he had merely been chosen as the principal of a nightly adventure. … This was untrue.

It was before the time of native concerts on the sea-drive, but in the night itself, and in the soft undertone from the sea, there was ardent atmosphere—with this woman beside him. The deeper current of his thoughts rushed with memories, but upon the surface played the adorable present, swift with adjustments as her swiftly-moving arms. The wonder of Womanhood was ever-new to him. Mighty gusts of animation surged through his body. He spoke from queer angles of consciousness, and did not remember. She could laugh charmingly. … To her, the Hour uprose. Here was clear manhood of twenty (and such an unhurt boy he had proved to be)—to make her very own! … She had taught herself to live by the hour; had forfeited the right to be loved long. She knew the time would soon come, when she could not hold nor attract men. It comes always to women who dissipate themselves among the many. Yet she loved the love of an hour; was a connoisseur of the love-tokens of men to her; no material loss was counted in the balance against a winning such as this promised to be. Here was a big intact passion which she called unto herself with every art; her developed senses felt it pouring upon her; this was a drug to die for. It made her brave and filled her mind with dreams—as wine does to some men. Already he was giving her love—of a sort that older men withhold from her kind. She put her hand upon his wrist—and told the native to drive them home.

… They sat in a hammock together on the rear balcony of the Block-House. It had been a dangerous moment passing through the house. There had been embarrassments, the telltale artifices of the establishment, but she would not suffer the work of the ride to be torn down. She held him in enchantment by sheer force of will; and now they were alone, and she was building again. There was wine. Over the balcony rail, they watched the Pasig running wickedly below; and across, stretching away to where the stars lay low in the rim of the horizon, the wet teeming rice-lands brooded in the night-mist. … The piano, which had seemed unstrung from the voyage, as he passed through the house, sounded but faintly now through several shut doors. The fragments were mellifluous. …

She knew he was a civilian from his dress, and asked his work in Luzon. He told her he was cook of Pack-train Thirteen, just now quartered in the main corral. She laughed, but didn't believe. He was not the first to conceal his office from her. It was unpleasant; apt to be dangerous. She did not ask a second time. … There was just one other perilous moment. They had been together on the balcony but a half-hour, when she turned her face to him, her eyes shut, and said:

"You're a dear boy! … I haven't kissed anyone like that—oh, in long, long! … It makes me feel like a woman—how silly of me!"

Her face and throat looked ghastly white for a moment in the sheltered candles. "Isn't it silly of me—isn't it—isn't it?" she kept repeating, picking at his fingers, and touching his cheeks in frightened fashion. … She was reaching amazing deeps of him. The best of her was his, for she could give greatly. It was wonderful, if momentary. He felt the terrific strength of his hands, as if his fingers must strike sparks when he touched her flesh. The need of her flamed high within him. She was delight in every movement and expression; and so slender and fervent and sweet-voiced. … She had banished the one encroachment of sordidness. The high passion of this moment was builded upon basic attractions, as with children. Some strong intuition had prevailed upon her so to build. They had come to an end of words. …

A knock at the door broke the notturno appassionato. She had left word not to be called for any reason. Furiously now she rushed across the room. … Bedient did not see the female servant at the door, but heard the frightened voice uttering the word, "Brigadier——." The answer from the woman who had left his arms was mercifully vague, but the voice at the door whimpered, "Only it was the General——!" …

It was all hideously clear. Bedient was left sterile, polar. The door slammed shut; the woman faced him—and understood. There was no restoring this ruin. … She now damned military rank and her establishment in a slow, dreadful voice. Her knuckles seemed driven into her temples. She wanted to weep, to be soothed and petted—to have her Hour brought back, but she saw that her beauty was gone from him—and all the mystery which had been in their relation a minute before. … Her rebellion, so far hard-held, now became fiendish. It was not against him, but herself. So vivid and terrible was her concentration of hatred upon the cause, that Bedient caught the picture of the Brigadier in her mind. He saw the man afterward—a fat and famous soldier. … She spat upon the floor. Her lower lip was drawn in and the small white teeth snapped upon it.

There was nothing in the Block-House ever to bring him back. Her last vestige of attraction for him had disintegrated. Bedient had nothing to say; he caught up her clenched hand and kissed it. … And in the street he heard feminine voices rising to the pitch of hysteria. A servant rushed forth for a surgeon. The woman had fallen into "one of her seizures." …

Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward. Bedient was not at all himself. … In all the months that followed meeting David Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible for words—though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a hundred other matters.

There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by rumors of uprising. Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in service—was just a name. Bedient was delighting in the thought of hunting up Cairns in China. … It was dusk again, that redolent hour. Bedient had just dined. So sensitive were his veins—that coffee roused him as brandy might another. His health was brought to such perfection, that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and senses. Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a Filipino woman was novel. Strange, forbidding woman of the river-banks—yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point of the shoulder—a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head—was enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not desire—but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world, to find the Woman—somewhere.