Margarita's Soul Part 2

"It was a terrible thing that he did to me," replied Margarita composedly.

"Nonsense," said Roger, "perfect nonsense! The man meant you no harm.

He brought you only what I had ordered for you."

"You! You told him to try to kill me?" cried this unbelievable Margarita, and turning in her seat with the swiftness of a panther she slapped him, a stinging, biting blow, flat across his cheek. A tornado of answering rage whirled him out of himself and seizing her wrists, he bent them behind her back.

If I seem to be unwarrantably acquainted with Roger's emotions at this crisis, it is only because I understand them from experience, not because he a.n.a.lysed them at length for me. I too have been in conflict, real physical conflict, with Margarita. I too have felt that old unpitying frenzy, that unreasonable delight in vanquis.h.i.+ng her furious strength. Something in Roger--I know how suddenly, how amazingly--strained and snapped; the old bonds of civilisation (which with the Anglo-Saxon has always been feminisation) burst and dropped away, and the l.u.s.t of physical ascendency caught him and swept the pretty legends of moral control and chivalrous forbearing into the dust bins and kitchen middens of nature's great domestic economy. What was it in Margarita that drew that old, primitive pa.s.sion, that ancient world-stuff out of its decorous grave, all planted with orchids and maiden-hair, that woke it with a rough shout in us and offered us at the same time its natural gratification--a fierce fight and a certain victory? G.o.d knows and knows better, perhaps, than the Devil that Roger's ancestors would have been quick to credit with the exclusive knowledge.

Civilisation and her mysterious daughter whom we call nowadays Culture have tried to teach us that golf and lawn tennis and, for the l.u.s.tiest, fencing, or the control of a spirited horse, must best translate in your house-broken citizen of forty the heat that surged up in Roger then; but to most of us it becomes once or twice apparent in our sidewalk career, our delicate journey from mahogany sideboards to mahogany beds, that this teaching is idiotic to the last degree, however strictly the police have enforced it; and we know that only the man that forged with clenched teeth after Atalanta, tenderly hungry for all her uncaptured whiteness, brutally driving the pace till her heart burst in her side if need be, tasted the supremest ecstasy of the fighting that lifts us that one tantalising step above the savage--the fight for joy. I am convinced that it is after some one of those red glimpses that a certain proportion of us every year of the world's life throws his chest weights out of window, settles his tailor's bill, and is off for Africa or Greenland with a hatchet and a cartridge belt. We become thus inscrutable to our maiden aunts and it may be to ourselves, a little, when we discover that it was not quite exactly the struggle for food and shelter, the fight against the cliffs and elements and animals that we went out into the wilderness to seek. But we are in any event less unreasonable than those belated and blindfolded ones among us who translate the implacable desire too literally and lose its meaning utterly in the garbled text of the midnight city streets.

Roger literally fell upon this vixenish, beautiful creature with the perfectly definite intention of shaking her until her teeth chattered in her head, but he did not achieve this result, for the reason that Margarita fought like a demon; fought, her hands being pinioned, with her supple back, her strong shoulders and her rigid knees. It was like struggling with a malicious little girl of six and a stubborn boy of sixteen rolled into one. She did not cry nor chatter but set her teeth and directed all her superb energy to the actual business in hand. His idea of grasping both her wrists with one hand was out of the question; for two or three delicious, angry moments he essayed this, enraged, amused, breathing hard, while she strained and bent with all her magnificent youth against him, and the years and the rust of the years fell off from him in the heartsome contest, with victory certain but not easy, her submission sure--but not yet! Some subterranean spring welled up in him, some trickle from the everlasting caves that will only be completely levelled over when humanity, decadent, crumbles into them and returns to the primal clay, and he knew that for these few gleaming seconds, s.n.a.t.c.hed from the rest of the greyish hours and weeks, he had been made and destined.

You will, of course, perceive that all this is what I felt when my little turn came; Roger never talked this sort of thing in his life.

But unless I am vastly mistaken, he lived it, in those galloping quick-breathed minutes, before he pinioned Margarita, her hands behind her back, with one arm, and held her fast about the knees with the other. Crushed against him, dead weight, she lay, her unconquered eyes sea black now, flat against his, her heart labouring heavily, under his relentless, banding arm.

"Will you be good, you absurd little wildcat? Will you?" he demanded, his voice shaking with laughter and triumph. (And you need not be too ready, O exponent of tolerant hearthstone chivalry, to smile at the triumph! V--l, whom Margarita detested, practically refused to sing _Siegfried_ to her _Brunhilde_, because, he said, she made him ridiculous with her virginal strugglings and got him out of breath besides! And he could lift and carry Lilli Lehmann.)

"Will you?" Roger repeated, not loosening his hold of her, for he felt her muscles tense as wire under the soft flesh.

"No, I will not," said Margarita. "I hate you. I will die before I will obey you."

And at this foolish and melodramatic remark, Roger Bradley, descendant of all the Puritans (Whistler used to say that he was by Plymouth Rock out of Mayflower--alas, dear Jimmie!), a respected bachelor, of exemplary habits and no entanglements, deliberately, and with a happy, heartfelt oath, kissed Margarita, at length and somewhat brutally, I fear, in a hired four-wheeler at the junction of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. And of his sensations at this point I cannot speak, because I never had them. I never kissed Margarita but once and then very quickly, because I was convinced that upon my subsequent speed depended my ever seeing her alive again. And she did not struggle at all, because, as a matter of fact, it was perfectly immaterial to her whether I kissed her or not. But that was not the case with Roger's kiss.

CHAPTER III

AS THE TWIGS WERE BENT

The day that Roger and I first met is as clear in my mind as if, in the current phrase, it were but yesterday. I was a slender little lad of ten and he a great, strapping fifteen-year-old. I was trundling my hoop about the part of the schoolyard usually given over to the little fellows, as blue as indigo, homesick for my mammy-O, and secretly ashamed of the French school-boy cape I had worn at Vevay, which all my mates derided, but she in her woman's thrift had thought too good to throw aside. No doubt she was right, but oh, what you make us suffer, you gentle widow mothers! You would give us the hearts out of your fervent bodies for footb.a.l.l.s, you will nurse at our sick beds without rest and deny yourself the comforts of existence, if need be, to start us fairly in the world with a gentle training and schools of the best, but you cannot comprehend that we would far rather go without a meal in private than be the mock of our schoolmates in public. I would have lived on bread and water for a week could I have buried that French cloak at the end of it.

The very sport in which I was engaged was not in use among the other boys of my age, but inconsistently enough, though I was eager to conform as far as the cloak was concerned, wild horses could not have dragged me from my wooden hoop, and I trundled it sulkily up and down the flagged paths.

To me, an odd figure enough to young American eyes, advanced and spoke Monsieur Duval, in whose regard I was the most homelike and natural figure in the landscape, I have no doubt. It was with a real kindness that he called out some cheery nothing, some "_Ah! Ah! ca va bien--vous vous amusez, n'est-ce pas?_" or such like, and with an equal and unconscious amiability that I replied in like manner. The language was perfectly familiar to me, especially in its present routine connection, and I took off my cap instinctively, as I should have done at Vevay, and probably said something about my being _joliment bien amuse_, which was purely perfunctory of course, because I wasn't. He pa.s.sed by and I trundled my hoop along, but only during the s.p.a.ce of time required for his complete exit from the scene, for at the precise ending of that time I was violently set upon by three or four boys, dragged, protesting and frightened, to a private retreat, and there informed that my nauseating familiarity with the French language and consequent "showing off" therein must cease incontinently, and that the event of my refusing this ultimatum would be a perilous and not easily forgotten one for a little sneak like me.

Now our school at Vevay had been entirely under the influence, in its secret and really important life, of a circle of English boys, cruelly banished from their natural educational facilities, who made up for this banishment by a careful and systematic insistence on as much as possible of their native school atmosphere, and we little ones were bred up in this very strictly. The word "sneak" was too much for me, and I flew at the offender, which was, I suppose, what he wanted.

It would have gone hard indeed with me had not a tall, broad-shouldered boy, glorious in a jersey enriched with the initials of the school, swung suddenly upon us and twitched me out of the bandit crew by my coat collar.

"What's all this? What are you up to?" he asked briskly.

He had a baseball bat with him--I regarded baseball at that time as a sort of cricket gone mad--and a round visored cap on his thick fair hair. His chin was deeply cleft, his eyes grey-blue, his skin very fair. To me he was an upper-form demi-G.o.d and I, seeing nothing odd in his actions, for he was what I called the c.o.c.k of the school, voiced my trembling plea.

"If you please, sir," I began, whereat he blushed and my captors burst into derisive shouts and capered around us, and thoroughly embarra.s.sed and frightened, I began to snivel into my elbow.

"We don't talk that way over here," he admonished me shortly, "go ahead without any sirs, can't you?"

Well, it all came out finally and he settled it very easily, though not, I am sure, in the way he had at first intended to. I saw his fingers tighten around the bat, I saw him warily measuring his chances against four twelve-year-olds, and realised suddenly that this was not Albion the long desired of some of us at Vevay, but free America, and that this was not really the head boy nor had he any rights in particular beyond any knight's who chooses to ride a-rescuing.

Nevertheless I was and am sure he could have punished them all and that without the bat. Suddenly, however, a reflective look came across his face, he stroked the cleft in his chin thoughtfully--a trick he never lost--and said in a quiet, convincing tone:

"You always were an awful fool, Judson," this to the bully. "If you had the sense of a cat you wouldn't haze this little fellow for what he can't help, but instead you'd use him. Why, if _I_ had him in _my_ French cla.s.s, I'd make him do most of the reciting and keep old Duval busy--he'd never see through it. Think it over. Come on, shaver!"

This he said to me and I trotted off his slave--his f.a.g, I hoped, but vainly, as it proved.

I tell this at length because it ill.u.s.trates Roger's character so perfectly. Not that he couldn't fight, but he preferred not if a little practical arbitration could be made to do the work of battle.

And yet he was rather tactless in a social sense: this was his professional att.i.tude, you understand.

"You're the little French boy," he said, as I followed him. "What's your name, anyhow? I'm Roger Bradley." As if I didn't know!

"If you pl--I mean, mine is Winfred Jerrolds," I said shyly.

"You're not really French, are you?"

It was the first time I had ever been proud of my American blood. I told him about my American mother and my English father, his tragic death and her return to her own country after twelve years of absence; of the acquisition of my wonderful French, which was only the work of two years, of my violin lessons, strictly concealed from the other boys, of my old Swiss nurse, now our cook, of my French poodle, and a score of other secrets never breathed before.

He was deeply interested, inquired the brave details of my father's death, shook hands heartily, and expressed his intention of inviting me to his home some time during the vacation. We parted the best of friends and shall be, I trust, till we part for good and all.

I did not visit him, however, that vacation. Some slight injury, received during a game of his favourite baseball, affected his eyes, and for six months he could not use them at all, so he did not return to school until the next autumn. When we met again it was on a different basis, for I had made good use of my time and had mounted rapidly in my cla.s.ses. Whether it was because I kept the habit of vacation study (the entire lazy freedom of American school children during the long vacation was very shocking to my mother) or whether my habit of application and concentration, the fact that I had really been taught to study, not merely turned loose with a book in my hands, gave me an advantage over my mates, I do not know, but when Roger came back he found me only three cla.s.ses below him and graduated from the little boys' playground forever.

That summer he took me home with him and I gazed with deep respect upon the portraits of his ancestors, fading against the dark wainscots of the respectable Boston mansion; played my violin obediently for his mother, who presented me with a volume of Emerson's essays; hung upon the lips of his soldier-uncle, one-armed since Gettysburg, who in his turn listened gravely to my tales of my father; and sedulously avoided his cousin Sarah, who, even then, a fresh-faced girl of eighteen, had begun to feel those responsibilities toward the human race which have since so consistently distinguished her, and pursued me with hideous bits of paper bearing a mocking resemblance to blank cheques, which she called "pledges," by means of which she urged me to begin in the days of my youth the practice of total abstinence, with the result that she has become hopelessly involved in my mind with that revolting practice. They were Unitarians, a doctrine then fas.h.i.+onable in those regions, oddly enough, and greatly to the puzzlement of my dear mother, who could not understand how dissent could ever be so, and who was firmly convinced that "your Bradleys" as she called them, were addicted to ranting prayers on all occasions. In vain I described to her old Madam Bradley with a sc.r.a.p of frosty lace on her white hair, a terrifying ear trumpet and the manners of a countess; in vain I a.s.sured her that Uncle Winthrop would no more be guilty of a ranting prayer than my father would have been: she shook her head gently and urged me to recall my confirmation vows!

My dear mother! To write of her even so slightly is to see her in her neat black dress with its web-like bands of lawn at neck and wrists, directing old Jeanne, _bonne-a-tout-faire_ now in our small establishment, watering our window geraniums from a quaint, long-nosed copper pot, drilling Mr. Boffin, the poodle, in his manners, and, when the early dinner was out of the way, sitting in all simplicity with Jeanne at work upon my s.h.i.+rts--the only example of really democratic inst.i.tutions that I ever saw in this irascible democracy. I should like to have seen Madam Bradley sewing with the cook and innocently gossiping over the old days!

Well, well, even to have invented so inhumanly possible an ideal as democracy is a great feat and a wonderful exhibition of the powers of our minds on this planet, I suppose. And I am not sure that it is a greater proof of sincerity to practice it while denying it in theory, as they do in the old countries, than to reverse the process in the new ones. Americans are such incurable idealists! And if Plato is right and the idea is the really important part of the matter, then the idea of seventy--or is it eighty, now?--millions of equal lords of creation is really more to the point than the fact that they don't exist. But why, oh why, must equality produce such bad manners? They must have been very bad to make such an impression upon a little lad of ten. And who can explain its extraordinary effect upon the voice?

Why does it kill all modulation, all tone-color, all delicate shades of thought and pa.s.sion equally, and resolve that great gift, which I sometimes think the greatest difference between me and my dog, into a toneless, mumble-chopped grunting?

That was the glory of Margarita's voice: if she but informed you that she would like more bread, your ear relished that series of unimportant syllables precisely as the tongue relishes a satisfying dish; with her, pleading, commanding, refusing, admiring, were four perfectly different tonal processes; a blind man, an Eskimo or a South Sea Islander would have understood that voice perfectly. And even now, merely a shadow of what it once was, it is a lesson to all about her.

When Roger was seventeen and I but twelve he lost two years out of his school-life, and this brought us closer together ultimately, as will be seen. In some more than usually violent game of his favourite baseball at this time he managed to fall so heavily on his chest as slightly to bruise the lung, and a teasing cough that resulted from this terrified his mother, over whom, like so many of her pure-blooded countrywomen, the White Scourge hung threateningly, never very far away. Good luck sent them just then an invitation from a distant cousin, skipper of a large schooner that plied in Southern waters, and she thankfully sent Roger off for a long cruise with him.

It was a fine experience, and oh, how bitterly I longed to share it, as the skipper cousin urged me to do! But I was the only son of my mother and she a widow, and so I swallowed my grief and contented myself with writing. It had long been a great grief to me that I must follow him so far behind at college--he had of course decided me on his own university--and one of my contentments at this period was the hope of winning ahead a year and leaving only two between us. This would enable me to enter Yale when he was but half way in his course, which as a matter of fact, I accomplished, to my mother's great pride.

She liked Roger, but always found him a little heavy and slow, and secretly cherished my greater facility and more rapid mental development with a fond and wholly female short-sightedness.

Our correspondence was very characteristic at this time: I have specimens of both sides of it. My letters are long and detailed, almost school-diaries. Roger's are few, short and immensely impressive. He had a straightforward, utterly unimaginative style that strikes the heart like Defoe's. He gave the strongest sense of great events always happening, of high seas, bright, strange coasts, racy, vital talk--and all in few, short words.

"We have been rolling hard for three days now," he says in one letter, "and the s.h.i.+p's dog died of colic, which is about the worst sign there is, they say. It may be we shall be wrecked. I wish you were here, Jerry, you would enjoy it. They have stopped trying to coddle me now and I live rough, like the rest. The food is not so very good, but we all eat hard. I hardly ever cough at all now. The captain says I am as handy as the next man."

The oldest of four, he had been looked up to and respected from the nursery. A powerful influence at school, a prince regent at home, wealthy in his own right, he stood in some danger of being spoiled, I suppose. But the bluff skipper cousin, representative of that strange New England _Wanderl.u.s.t_, so little exploited in the anemic fiction that so ridiculously caricatures New England life, stamped Roger at this most impressionable age with the clean, downright simplicity, the manly humility so signally characteristic of men who must always be ready to perish in the elements; the ability to hold his tongue and wait. Few families really rooted in that Old England that made the New but can count in some generation their skipper cousin; in these the whitecaps, the tall masts, the spices and hot nights, the scarlet tropics and the dusky, startled natives tip with flame the quiet chronicles of the sisters left at home; and gorgeous peac.o.c.k fans, rosy, enamelled sh.e.l.ls, strings of sandalwood beads, riotous, bloomy embroideries and supple folds of exotic muslin weave their scents and suggestions through the sober-coloured stuff of everyday. Indeed, New England as I have known her, both as a child in her chief and representative city, and as a man in her farthest, least-spoiled hamlets has always seemed to me far more complicated and mysterious, far more vital and suggestive than her too-exclusively-spinsterly chroniclers can comprehend.

I look to see the country turn back to New England, not only with historic pride, but with a rich appreciation of its artistic mother-land--not mistaking her for its bleak and apprehensive maiden aunt!

I am far from her now, that old breeding ground of great, incisive sons, that nest of pa.s.sions so strong that only a grip of granite--like her sea line--could master them (do you fancy, O languorous, faded South, do you bellow, O strident, bustling West, that because she neither sighed them nor trumpeted them, she had no pa.s.sions? _Allez, allez!_) but I can close my eyes at any moment and smell the challenge of her Atlantic winds here on the Mediterranean or feel the heady languor of her miraculous "Indian Summer" there in a London drizzle. It is strange that I, who have said many unhandsome things of her country as a whole, should thus rush into apologia for my mother's birthplace. And yet to think of never having known Margarita!

But of course I should have met her. She would have come to me walking lightly out of the dim Algerian evening or b.u.mped into me some morning in Piccadilly or peered curiously through my leaded pane at Oxford, whither I should undoubtedly have returned, one day, to muse away my middle age. I idled for a happy year there, twenty-odd years ago, while Roger was grinding away at the fantastic matter he called the Law, and liked it well. But fate had not decreed me for a conventional Englishman, which I should doubtless have been, for as a boy I was malleable to a degree, but had reserved me instead for the ends of the earth--and Margarita.