Chapter 5

Harboro insisted upon her going across the river with him the next day, a Sunday. It was now late in October, but you wouldn't have realized it unless you had looked at the calendar. The sun was warm--rather too warm. The air was extraordinarily clear. It was an election year and the town had been somewhat disorderly the night before. Harboro and Sylvia had heard the noises from their balcony: singing, first, and then shouting. And later drunken Mexicans had ridden past the house and on out the Quemado Road. A Mexican who is the embodiment of taciturnity when afoot, will become a howling organism when he is mounted.

Harboro had telephoned to see if an appointment could be made--to a madame somebody whose professional card he had found in the _Guide_. And he had been assured that monsieur would be very welcome on a Sunday.

Sylvia was glad that it was not on a weekday, and that it was in the forenoon, when she would be required to make her first public appearance with her husband. The town would be practically deserted, save by a few better-class young men who might be idling about the drug-store. They wouldn't know her, and if they did, they would behave circumspectly. Strangely enough, it was Sylvia's conviction that men are nearly all good creatures.

As it fell out it was Harboro and not Sylvia who was destined to be humiliated that day--a fact which may not seem strange to the discerning.

They had got as far as the middle of the Rio Grande bridge without experiencing anything which marred the general effect of a stage set for a Passion Play--but with the actors missing; and then they saw a carriage approaching from the Mexican side.

Harboro knew the horses. They were the General Manager's. And presently he recognized the coachman. The horses were moving at a walk, very slowly; but at length Harboro recognized the General Manager's wife, reclining under a white silk sunshade and listening to the vivacious chatter of a young woman by her side. They would be coming over to attend the services in the Episcopal church in Eagle Pass, Harboro realized. Then he recognized the young woman, too. He had met her at one of the affairs to which he had been invited. He recalled her as a girl whose voice was too high-pitched for a reposeful effect, and who created the impression that she looked upon the social life of the border as a rather amusing adventure.

You might have supposed that they considered themselves the sole occupants of the world as they advanced, perched on their high seat; and this, Harboro realized, was the true fashionable air. It was an instinct rather than a pose, he believed, and he was pondering that problem in psychology which has to do with the fact that when people ride or drive they appear to have a different mental organism from those who walk.

Then something happened. The carriage was now almost at hand, and Harboro saw the coachman turn his head slightly, as if to hear better. Then he leaned forward and rattled the whip in its place, and the horses set off at a sharp trot. There was a rule against trotting on the bridge, but there are people everywhere who are not required to observe rules.

Harboro paused, ready to lift his hat. He liked the General Manager's wife. But the occupants of the carriage passed without seeing him. And Harboro got the impression that there was something determined in the casual air with which the two women looked straight before them. He got an odd feeling that the most finely tempered steel of all lies underneath the delicate golden filigree of social custom and laws.

He was rather pleased at a conclusion which came to him: people of that kind really _did_ see, then. They only pretended not to see. And then he felt the blood pumping through the veins in his neck.

"What is it?" asked Sylvia, with that directness which Harboro comprehended and respected.

"Why, those ladies ... they didn't seem quite the type you'd expect to see here, did they?"

"Oh, there's every type here," she replied lightly. She turned her eyes away from Harboro. There was something in his face which troubled her. She could not bear to see him with that expression of wounded sensibilities and rebellious pride in his eyes. And she had understood everything.

She did not break in upon his thoughts soon. She would have liked to divert his mind, but she felt like a culprit who realizes that words are often betrayers.

And so they walked in silence up that narrow bit of street which connects the bridge with Piedras Negras, and leads you under the balcony of what used to be the American Consul's house, and on past the _cuartel_, where the imprisoned soldiers are kept. Here, of course, the street broadens and skirts the plaza where the band plays of an evening, and where the town promenades round and round the little square of palms and fountains, under the stars. You may remember that a little farther on, on one side of the plaza, there is the immense church which has been building for a century, more or less, and which is still incomplete.

There were a few miserable-looking soldiers, with shapeless, colorless uniforms, loitering in front of the _cuartel_ as Harboro and Sylvia passed.

The indefinably sinister character of the building affected Sylvia. "What is it?" she asked.

"It's where the republic keeps a body of its soldiers," explained Harboro. "They're inside--locked up."

They were both glad to sit down on one of the plaza benches for a few minutes; they did so by a common impulse, without speaking.

"It's the first time I ever thought of prisoners having what you'd call an honorable profession," Sylvia said slowly. She gazed at the immense, low structure with troubled eyes. Flags fluttered from the ramparts at intervals, but they seemed oddly lacking in gallantry or vitality.

"It's a barbarous custom," said Harboro shortly. He was still thinking of that incident on the bridge.

"And yet ... you might think of them as happy, living that way."

"Good gracious! Happy?"

"They needn't care about how they are to be provided for--and they have their duties."

"But they're _prisoners_, Sylvia!"

"Yes, prisoners.... Aren't we all prisoners, somehow? I've sometimes thought that none of us can do just what we'd like to do, or come or go freely. We think we're free, as oxen in a treadmill think of themselves as being free, I suppose. We think we're climbing a long hill, and that we'll get to the top after a while. But at sundown the gate is opened and the oxen are released. They've never really gotten anywhere."

He turned to her with the stanch optimism she had grown accustomed to in him. "A pagan doctrine, that," he said spiritedly.

"A pagan doctrine.... I wonder what that means."

"Pagans are people who don't believe in God. I am not speaking of the God of the churches, exactly. I mean a good influence."

"Don't they believe in their own gods?"

"No doubt. But you might call their own gods bad influences, as often as not."

"Ah--perhaps they're just simple folk who believe in their own experiences."

He had the troubled feeling that her intuitions, her fatalistic leanings, were giving her a surer grasp of the subject than his, which was based upon a rather nebulous, logical process that often brought him to confusion.

"I only know that I am free," he declared doggedly.

The sun had warmed her to an almost vagrant mood. Her smile was delicate enough, yet her eyes held a gentle taunt as she responded: "Not a bit of it; you have a wife."

"A wife--yes; and that gives me ten times the freedom I ever had before. A man is like a bird with only one wing--before he finds a wife. His wife becomes his other wing. There isn't any height beyond him, when he has a wife."

She placed her hands on her cheeks. "Two wings!" she mused.... "What's between the wings?"

"A heart, you may say, if you will. Or a soul. A capacity. Words are fashioned by scholars--dull fellows. But you know what I mean."

From the hidden depths of the _cuartel_ a silver bugle-note sounded, and Sylvia looked to see if the soldiers sitting out in front would go away; but they did not do so. She arose. "Would you mind going into the church a minute?" she asked.

"No; but why?"

"Oh, anybody can go into those churches," she responded.

"Anybody can go into _any_ church."

"Yes, I suppose so. What I mean is that these old Catholic churches seem different. In our own churches you have a feeling of being--what do you say?--personally conducted. As if you were a visitor being shown children's trinkets. There is something impersonal--something boundless--in churches like this one here. The silence makes you think that there is nobody in them--or that perhaps ... God isn't far away."

He frowned. "But this is just where the trinkets are--in these churches: the images, the painted figures, the robes, the whole mysterious paraphernalia."

"Yes ... but when there isn't anything going on. You feel an influence. I remember going into a church in San Antonio once--a Protestant chapel, and the only thing I could recall afterward was a Yankee clock that ticked too fast and too loud. I never heard of anything so horribly inappropriate. Time was what you thought of. Not eternity. You felt that the people would be afraid of wasting a minute too much--as if their real concerns were elsewhere."

Harboro was instinctively combating the thought that was in her mind, so far as there was a definite thought, and as far as he understood it. "But why shouldn't there be a clock?" he asked. "If people feel that they ought to give a certain length of time to worship, and then go back to their work again, why shouldn't they have a clock?"

"I suppose it's all right," she conceded; and then, with a faint smile: "Yes, if it didn't tick too loud."

She lowered her voice abruptly on the last word. They had passed across the doorless portal and were in the presence of a group of silent, kneeling figures: wretched women whose heads were covered with black cotton _rebozos_, who knelt and faced the distant altar. They weren't in rows. They had settled down just anywhere. And there were men: swarthy, ill-shapen, dejected. Their lips moved noiselessly.

Harboro observed her a little uneasily. Her sympathy for this sort of thing was new to him. But she made none of the customary signs of fellowship, and after a brief interval she turned and led the way back into the sunshine.

He was still regarding her strangely when she paused, just outside the door, and opened a little hand-bag which depended from her arm. She was quite intently devoted to a search for something. Presently she produced a coin, and then Harboro observed for the first time that the tortured figure of a beggar sat in the sun outside the church door.

Sylvia leaned over with an impassive face and dropped the coin into the beggar's cup.

She chanced to glance at Harboro's face an instant later, and she was dismayed a little by its expression: that of an almost violent distaste. What did it mean? Was it because she had given a coin to the beggar? There could have been no other reason. But why should he look as if her action had contaminated her in some fashion--as if there had been communication between her and the unfortunate _anciano_? As if there had been actual contact?

"You wouldn't have done that?" she said.

"No, I shouldn't have done it," he replied.

"I can't think why. The wretched creature--I should have felt troubled if I'd ignored him."

"But it's a profession. It's as much a part of the national customs as dancing and drinking."

"Yes, I know. A profession ... but isn't that all the more reason why we should give him a little help?"

"A reason why you should permit yourself to be imposed upon?"

"I can't help thinking further than that. After all, it's he and his kind that must have been imposed upon in the beginning. It's being a profession makes me believe that all the people who might have helped him, who might have given him a chance to be happy and respectable, really conspired against him in some way. You have to believe that it's the rule that some must be comfortable and some wretched."

"A beggar is a beggar," said Harboro. "And he was filthy."

"But don't you suppose he'd rather be the proprietor of a wine-shop, or something of that sort, if he had had any choice?"

"Well.... It's not a simple matter, of course. I'm glad you did what you felt you ought to do." It occurred to Harboro that he was setting up too much opposition to her whims--whims which seemed rooted in her principles as well as her impulses. It was as if their minds were of different shapes: hers circular, his square; so that there could be only one point of contact between them--that one point being their love for each other. There would be a fuller conformity after a while, he was sure. He must try to understand her, to get at her odd point of view. She might be right occasionally, when they were in disagreement.

He touched her lightly on the shoulder. "I'm afraid we ought to be getting on to the madame's," he said.