Every night we got off the train to sleep in some village for fear of the marauding bandits, and after the engine had been put to rights we pulled in at our station.
The streets were unlit and unpaved, only once did we come to a glimmer of light on the wayside. It was shining through the serried chinks of a bamboo structure. I loitered against it, and watched the shadowy pantomime of a small girl swinging a baby to sleep in a grocery box hung from the roof-beam. The petroleum light threw out its infinitesimal gossamer circles of hazy gold, and the streaks of the bamboos interposed their black notes or dissolved, as I moved my face from or toward the nebulous lullaby in silhouette.
As if he had sprung out of the mud beneath our feet, a male form now accompanied us; he had performed some ceremony of etiquette with my companion, and undertook to pick our steps for us to gain the eating house.
As he swept the broken flies from the table-cloth he eyed us with a Spanish cajolery, and when we were served he fell upon his food with the oversatisfaction of a man who has chanced on more than one good thing at once.
A repulsive complacence spread his fat face to a sensuous rhapsody; he looked a low creature, and the wares he was travelling with one surmised to be of inferior quality, but his behaviour as with even the spawn of the Latin races was suave and somewhat entertaining, and the Mexican woman warmed to it.
The apothecary, warned of our approach, opened his door to let the light fall across our path to guide us. His guest chambers were a couple of boarded partitions which had been knocked together casually and did not reach to the ceiling. Two little beds covered with horse blankets furnished the one I was to share with the seamstress.
She lay where the general light pouring over the top marked a new aspect of elation on her face, as she continued in her womanly way, the epic of her virtue.
The last banalities are enriched by an unfamiliar language, and it was a shimmering impression she engraved for me in her peon Spanish, of her girlhood spent in her father’s bar-room. Of stacks of cut glass, coloured syrups, of gardenias, camellias. Of a Count with side whiskers, his phaeton and his Mexican horse of Greek proportions.
Far into the night my drowsiness was punctuated by the sting of a mosquito or a crisis in the seamstress’ drama. For the whiskered Count who was sometimes a Baron, sometimes a deputy, seemed to fling himself into the story and out again through a clattering glass door.
There were entreaties, vows, objurgations, temptation by diamonds, and levelled pistols. And persistently, behind some sort of a carved white counter the seamstress marooned her virtue.
Through the following day we would stop at platforms where objects of ingenuous grace were brought to be sold, such things as willow canes gashed with patterns in the tradition of the Aztecs — — And bronze girls offered their architectural bouquets from the white fields of tuber-roses shrining their coloured centres of tinfoil. Beauties that flew in at the window, and were spirited away as soon as bought.
Sometimes a surprise of nature would curvet past the window to the flying perspective of the passing train. Flat on the stubbly land — — a pond — — a white sheet of sunlight sowed with frail and leafless flushed convolvuli stared at the colourless blaze of sky it reflected, in dazzling innocence — — like a heavenly mirror studded with angelic eyes — — cutting my breath with pure light.
But after noon the sky of the rainy seasons darkened and poured itself onto the earth, and when we came to our pitch black resting place we leapt from the foot board into a deep river of mud; the rain beat us onward to invisible retreats, and the damp voices of extinguished will-o’-the-wisps led us to travellers’ inns.
I found myself in a high foul room where the dust cried out from the horrible stagnation of the ewers and basins of cheap hostelries; alone with the echoes of the planed corridors, the glassy eyes of the host, and the fearful iron of his bunch of keys. For in the black rain I had lost my seamstress who had engaged to house me as safely on this night as on the last; and now she might be scuttling about with her virtue seeking me in the night.
I plunged again into the deluge, and other invisible couriers preceded me to a second rooming house which I supposed must be the one my companion had indicated.
Here under a flickering lamp there huddled a maze of wooden stalls with strange darkness peering over the low partitions.
I insisted that another woman had got off the train and had been anxious for me to join her. But the native hostess disagreed with my arguments — — I described her striped shirt waist — — “Oh don’t trouble yourself, I know who you mean, only,” she neighed with shrilling irony, “she came here with a man.”
I was overwhelmed with the indiscretion, for whichever wooden love-nest had been assigned to them, over its truncated walls, the accusative neighing of the hostess must strike the seamstress’ ear. For I felt forlorn for her hours of protested proprieties which must now appear to her so wasteful. And I crept to my stall wishing that an insistent silence could somehow obliterate my unintentional meddling.
Next morning I met her crawling along the lean planks that across the meadow upon the rain-laden flowers bore their heavier burden of humanity — — there passed us a great couple of spouses like Gothic gods side by side — — and the seamstress as I bid her good-day — — shuffled confusedly before me hiding her key spasmodically in her skirts like a symbol.
With the snobbishness of those who understanding all things forgive all things — — I endeavoured with the perfect sang-froid of tact to put her at her ease. But a righteous change had come over my story teller, and she hated me now with the just and bitter hatred of women who know each other to be at last but women.
For the rest of the journey she shunned me with the triumphant reproach of a legitimate criminal caught red-handed by the detective of social convention. She flung me for what it was worth, the fictitious chastity of her nocturnal anecdotes, like a superfluous trimming she had considered fitting for my unprofitable companionship.
And so I watched her on the train when she was not looking.
On awakening from the travelling salesman’s embraces she had opened her meagre valise and taken from it a kerchief of shining silk, and had changed to an open-necked bodice of soft stuff.
Reanimated by the man’s cajoling evocations of her consumed adolescence for his convenience, from under the copper gleam of the kerchief which she had draped about her head, her mummied face reappeared in an indescribable richness of transformation. Her shrapnel eyes had softened to a velvet tranquillity and from the battered pores of her skin a warm disclosing radiance flowed.
She sat pondering; glowing and blossoming with that essential virginity of the spirit which women reconquer only in the arms of those illusions they call their lovers.
Regally as a Madonna she breathed the incense of their initial innocence of Nature’s salute. And the unfading pollen of love, broadcast on the universe, dusted her reviving flesh as she sidled, something wild that had been tamed, against her huckster of a night.
She kept so close to him as if she had found her home after bewildering wanderings. With the gesture of possession and the abandonment of rebirth she nestled in the shadow of the fat man of commerce who was shrugging away from her in his disgusted relief.
That which had been her transfiguration seemed to have coated her consciousness with a final filth. His ugly eyes polluted her with occasional lewd and downward looks of dismissal while he argued cost prices with a man seated on his other side.