The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 8
VIII
PRESENTLY the promoter drew on Tilita's arm and moderated what was a flight down to a walk. He could not hurry so fast; his head was aching too badly. The girl slowed up trembling and glanced back through the jungle. Her breast rose and fell sharply under her green bodice.
“H-He is a terrible man, primo,” she panted.
Lassiter glanced down at his companion. The struggle with Nunes had left red welts on her neck and breast and cheeks. One of her ears was crimson where his beard had scraped. Such tangibilia of her outrage renewed Lassiter's fury. The pressure in his aching head increased.
“I—I ought to have killed him!” he gasped remorsefully. “I—I wonder why I didn't kill him”
He tried to think. The fight was blurred in his mind. He plodded on trying to reconstruct it, trying to discover why he had failed to kill the Colombian.
Tilita moved at his side through splotches of shade and sunshine. Presently it gave her the appearance of moving under some some sort of luminous tapestry that rose and fell with her gliding progress. She gave Lassiter brief side glances and presently said, quite unexpectedly—
“I mean, primo, that Señor Birdsong is a terrible man.”
Lassiter looked around, quite taken aback.
“Birdsong!”
“Si, I hate him!” she accented the word with a narrowing of her black eyes.
“And not Nunes!”
“O-h—no”
She shrugged and evidently dismissed the Colombian's case with slight concern.
“After what he's done”
“The-poor fellow could not help himself.”
“Couldn't help himself!”
“He said he couldn't help himself, primo—” defensively.
A foolish feeling came over Lassiter. Apparently he had been attempting murder over a foible, over mere bad manners—such as the Stendill typists used when they buffed their finger-nails in public. Lassiter felt trifled with.
“Tilita,” he said grimly, “if you didn't object to his”
“I did object, and fight every time!” defended the girl sharply.
The number of times implied left Lassiter blank and simple. Tilita proceeded with some embarrassment:
“He said he couldn't help—er—the way he did. He said every time he looked at me, a—a sort of—well, I—I don't know, primo, I don't understand it— He said a sort of wild fury”
“Oh, good Lord!” groaned the promoter, “has he been telling you that sort of stuff—and you believing it”
“Well, primo, he acted as if it were true—” Her voice tilted up in a clear note on “true,” which signified that while she deferred to Lassiter's wider experience, to the best of her knowledge and belief, an amorous mania certainly seized Dom Pedro Balthasar Nunes when he came into her presence.
Lassiter was utterly disgusted, and yet somehow obscurely pleased with her innocent stupidity.
“Tilita,” he remonstrated, “you can't believe what a man says—no pretty girl can. Good Lord, I can hear him now, buzzing away, working himself up, explaining how he has been dreaming, yearning, burning for a beautiful arbol-de-vaca gatherer, and how the sight of you causes a madness to rush upon him—then I suppose he made a dive at you for a stranglehold”
A chastened nodding affirmed these deductions.
“Well, take it from me, Tilita, no man ever gets so far but what he can turn around and walk off if he wants to—just turn around and walk off—like that—” he snapped his fingers—“they can all do it—if they want to. The trouble is, getting them to want to”
Here he broke off. His head throbbed too badly for talk. He kicked out of his path a scarlet and purple orchid which he could have sold for a thousand or two to the New York greenhouses as an unknown variety.
Tilita rolled her black eyes around at him, and he was unable to tell whether his counsel had impressed her or not. It irritated him.
“Look here,” he burst out, “how many times has he—no—don't answer that—It's none of my affair— We'll drop the subject.”
“Two times.”
Lassiter drew an easier breath. It eased his head somewhat. But nevertheless he wondered why women would listen to such piffle. It was amazing in a girl of Tilita's intelligence! It seemed to him that the most inexperienced female could penetrate so impudent an
He became aware that the girl was smiling to herself. The whiteness of her teeth lit up her black eyes and scarlet lips in a lovely way. The smile somehow vexed the dignified Stendill agent.
“Tilita,” he suggested, “it seems to me after what has occurred”
She became serious again—almost serious.
The girl had a fruity look. Her skin absorbed sunlight like a ripe pear and then glowed gently at the New Yorker. She looked as if she had soaked from the jungle its fulgor, its intensity of color, its pressure of vitality. Undoubtedly man is the modest sex. Men spend much cleverness in trying to veil their women, and women spend much more cleverness in getting unveiled.
Lassiter fumbled through his clothing and found a pin; he handed it to her.
“Your jacket is torn,” he suggested briefly.
The girl took the pin, tested its strength curiously. Evidently it was the first she had ever seen.
“How small and strong it is,” she admired.
“Fasten your jacket with it,” said the promoter.
The man studied the fall of light through the jungle while she fixed the rent.
“How old are you, Tilita?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Thirteen, primo.”
Lassiter was thunderstruck.
“Thirteen!”
“Si, primo— Why?”
Lassiter was constrained to make another calculation in regard to old Prymoxl's age. She was probably not over twenty-six or eight.
“I just wanted to know. You seem older.”
The girl looked at him anxiously.
“Do I look old?”
“No-o—not the way you mean—you look developed.”
“Oh—y-es—” She colored faintly.
Lassiter appraised her, unable to understand it. How was it possible in thirteen little years to fashion such a creature? Then, too, her swift flowering foretold her swift decay. He thought of Prymoxl—that rag. Only a little time ago she must have been as beautiful as her daughter. The promoter pursued his queer calculations. When he himself was thirteen years old, the ancient Prymoxl was born.
When he was studying Spanish in the Stendill offices, Tilita came into this world. Now here he was at thirty-nine on a love stroll with the girl through the jungle— The thought gave him a queer feeling of being a sort of human mountain and watching flowers bloom and perish on its slopes.
It cast a sort of pathos over the girl. Her beauty would be so brief. It was the grace of a swallow sailing against the evening sky, that vanished in the making. Lassiter looked at her and wondered if she were up north would the higher latitudes preserve her volatile loveliness?
He thought of Maine—a Maine coast cottage in the Summer, and—say the Carolinas for the Winter. If he were married to Tilita and could escape this human hothouse of Motobatl, he would domicile her in—say Charleston—one of those old mansions down on the Battery. A sun-worshiper in the remote conservatism of Charleston's Battery!
The incongruity of such an idea set the promoter laughing. The girl was surprized and wanted to know the reason. The promoter could not hope to explain his mental meanderings to the girl, so he asked—
“How came you to be so angry at Birdsong, Tilita?”
THE smile on the girl's face vanished abruptly, and Lassiter discovered that her countenance had that extraordinary quality of seeming to look its best in whatever mood it wore. About one woman out of three or four million possesses this charm.
“He—but he is your friend, primo.”
“In a way.”
“Then let's not talk of it.”
A grotesque suspicion filtered through Lassiter's brain.
“You don't mean that he—and Nunes both”
“Oh no-o-o!” cried Tilita, outraged at the thought of Birdsong caressing her. “I know what he said to you this morning.”
The promoter stared at her.
“To me?” he asked blankly.
Tilita's lips quivered.
“He was talking about me”
The promoter looked at the girl trying to think back to the morning.
“Señor Nunes told me,” she added.
Just then Lassiter recalled Birdsong's Biblical discussion.
“Oh—that”
The girl nodded sharply, searching his face.
“That was nothing.”
“He said evil things against me,” declared Tilita hotly. “He said you were wicked even to know me.”
From her wrath it was evident that Nunes had informed her fully of the conversation and all its implications. It embarrassed the promoter.
“Why did you let him say such things of me?” she pressed.
“Really, Tilita, you—you can't very well tell what a man's going to say till he says it”
“You let him talk on.”
“I couldn't stop him.”
“Why?”
“He's a sort of preacher.”
“A preacher”
“Yes, a—a preacher is a man you pay to say disagreeable things; you can't take offense at a fellow, you know, when he's on his job.”
Lassiter hoped this little skit would make her smile. Instead she grew angrier, opened her eyes wider and seemed taller.
“If you pay him to say such things of me,” she declared passionately, “you believe him!”
“Why, I don't pay him!” cried the promoter astonished.
“You said you did.”
Lassiter was upset.
“Believe what? I was talking in a general way about preachers, a sort of joke. What do I believe? What are you talking about?”
“You believe it!” cried the girl curiously moved. “He said I was a strange woman—a wicked woman—that your God forbid our marriage—that I would be a strange wife—strange—strange— What is there strange, about me?”
She flung out her arms in a passion of self-revelation. She was on the verge of sobbing. The pin he had given her pulled loose.
The word “marriage” on Tilita's lips set up a surprizing emotional resonance in the white man. It amazed him that she held the same thought that he had just indulged. A sudden hammering filled his chest.
“Why—Tilita—” he said, shakenly, “I—I don't think you are strange”
“But that man said”
“It makes no difference—” His voice was cut off by a sort of stricture in his throat. “My little prima,” he said huskily. He reached out toward her. At the touch of her flesh, a sort of languor flowed up his aims and filled his body.
The notion that she was “strange,” that any atom of her was “strange” to him! With his lips to her ear, he whispered shakily—
“Tilita, carissima, the blood in my heart is not more”
He wavered into silence as her warmth and softness filled his arms. He could feel her trembling. He, himself, was so shaken he could hardly stand. The smell of milk on her lips and throat was headier than wine.
“I was so afraid I would be a strange wife”
Heaven only knew what construction she placed upon the word “strange.”
They remained clinging to each other. To stand became a burden. By common impulse they moved across to a tree.
By glancing down the man could see her black lashes outlined against her cheek and the irregular lift and fall of her bosom. A sun splotch fell through a rent in her bodice and filled it with half lights.
Because he meant to marry her, Lassiter fumbled, trying to close the tear. At touch of her a great weakness seized him. It beat in his chest, it throbbed in his neck, it swam in his brain. And yet it was a kind of rest.
HOW long Lassiter experienced this transfiguration, he never knew. It was a moment; it was an eternity. It had no connection with Time. Time was a pipe organ chanting its processional and its recessional, but in its midst, Time ceased.
It came vaguely to Lassiter that such ecstasy was the goal of life; that all life was like an ocean and this wave of divinity moved through its floods. For an instant it lifted all men and all women to its iridescent crest. Then passed on. Other droplets would take their places, but that man and that woman would never again know ecstasy.
Yet the wave was perpetual. It rode on and on through existence, leaping at the sky, shot with rainbows, scattering jewels, a delirious immortality, composed of instants, a Buddha of bliss, composed of fading entities.
Very slowly the jungle reformed about the lovers. The trees dripped with light. The silhouette of a monkey passed across their luminous background. A little bird flung out a triumphant phrase over the capture of a worm.
The promoter watched the little gladiator idly. It was a striped bird with a yellow breast. Lassiter had seen such songsters in Central Park. Such tiny creatures drift from the arctic to the tropics with the shifting seasons, a migration of jewels.
His musing brought the promoter a notion of tying a message to one of these birds and communicating with the outside world. If he should send numbers of these messages out year after year, surely some one would salvage one and learn the strange secret of Motobatl.
Tilita moved as if conscious that their two thought currents had separated one from the other. She sat up, drew a little way from Lassiter, blinked her eyes and smiled at him as if aroused from a deep sleep. They began talking of their marriage. The girl told Lassiter of the wedding ceremony in Motobatl. When they were married, Lassiter would have to run after her and catch her against the combined efforts of all her kinspeople.
“All of them?”
“Oh, yes,” she nodded brightly.
“Will they try hard to stop me?”
Tilita broke into the most decorative laughter.
“Indeed they will! Oh, it's exciting! You'll get knocks with sticks and stones; you'll be tripped—” Then she noticed his lengthening face and comforted him, “Oh, it will make no difference to you, carissima. You will feel nothing. No groom does. Once a man came out with his head all bloody, but he felt nothing at all—absolutely nothing. He-said he felt nothing at all—and you are so tall and strong”
Tilita evidently anticipated a great social triumph.
But unfortunately, nature had bestowed upon Lassiter the dignity of a Portuguese. That was why he had succeeded so well in South America. He realized the respect due from one human being to another. Temperamentally he was akin to the inhabitants of Rio Janeiro, who never touch each other even in crowded streets.
Now the thought of marriage with this orchid of a girl in the hurly burly of football utterly dismayed the South American agent. He sat looking at her.
“Can't we live together without that, Tilita, somehow?”
The girl's eyes widened. A slow crimson flooded her face and throat.
“Live together without being married—” she gasped.
She made a movement, evidently about to jump up and run away. Lassiter reached for her with a sharp fear of loss. She was as offended as an American girl at an improper proposal.
“Wait—wait—hold on—it's all right—any sort of marriage, slapstick or grand opera”
“Then what made you say—” began Tilita about to weep.
The promoter was afraid now even to criticise the form.
“Oh—I—of course I didn't mean”
The girl searched his face and at last asked slowly—
“Perhaps Señor Birdsong will not allow you to marry me?”
The promoter broke into unaccustomed expletives. Birdsong had nothing to do with him. Nothing whatever. Birdsong was simply a fellow traveler and a fanatic and a fool
“But don't you pay him?”
No, no, that was a sort of joke—just a little joke to put her in a good humor. When they were married, and living in a tree, she would have to watch these little bursts of wit and take no offense. He was quite a wag—in his way.
In saying all this Lassiter was under the imprssion he was steering away from dangerous ground into the broad safe highway of humor. Tilita sat nodding faintly. At last she asked—
“But doesn't his God forbid our marriage?”
Lassiter broke off his discourse on humor. He thought over the girl's question. He really didn't know whether the Bible forbade his marriage with Tilita or not. He supposed Birdsong was right. The fellow seemed to know a lot about the Book.
“Why—perhaps it does, Tilita—but”
“Isn't his God your God?”
For some time the promoter sat considering how to answer her. He did not want to tell her of his fundamental lack of all religious faith; that God was to him a mere apprehension of a Something behind this cinema of existence, and that he felt this only occasionally; the greater part of the time he sensed only vacuity. It was no faith at all. It held no concrete creed. It was merely a vague emotion directed toward nothing.
But Lassiter was far from admitting such nihilism to Tilita. The artist in him loved a pretty faith in a woman. Somehow it harmonized with a woman's affection and sweetness like a flower in her hair. He looked upon an agnostic woman as he did upon the bearded lady. It made no difference to him what faith they confessed; Christianity, Mohammedanism, the pretty ancestor worship of Shintoism, or the worship of the Sun—anything with a lilt to it.
When Tilita repeated her question he came to himself with a little start.
“To tell you the truth, Tilita,” he said by way of preface to his divarication, “in America, my country, the women attend to—er—believing in God and—er—all that sort of thing. It's our national custom.”
The girl stared at him in amazement.
“The women!”
“Yes, the men, of course—back 'em up in it, and—ah—pay the bills”
Tilita was amazed at such a custom. She leaned forward and sank her chin in the corolla of her fingers. In this pretty attitude she thought it over, staring away through the sun-soaked jungle.
“I wish it were that way in Motobatl,” she mused wistfully, “then we women would keep all our babies.”
She was so alluring, sitting thus, musing on her religion, and on their children yet to be, that a great melting filled Lassiter. He was constrained to fondle her again.
He felt that he understood her perfectly.