CHAPTER XI
THE WHOLE DUTY OF WOMAN
Joan waited for Holliwell and, waiting, began inevitably to regain herstrength. One evening as Wen Ho was spreading the table, Prosperlooked up from his writing to see a tall, gaunt girl clinging to thedoor-jamb. She was dressed in the heavy clothes, which hung loose uponher long bones, her throat was drawn up to support the sharpened andhollowed face in which her eyes had grown very large and wistful. Herhair was braided and wrapped across her brow, her long, strong hands,smooth and only faintly brown, were thin, too, and curiouslyexpressive as they clung to the logs. She was a moving figure,piteous, lovely, rather like some graceful mountain beast, its spirithalf-broken by wounds and imprisonment and human tending, but ready toleap into a savagery of flight or of attack. They were wild, thosegreat eyes, as well as wistful. Prosper, looking suddenly up at them,caught his breath. He put down his book as quietly as though she hadindeed been a wild, easily startled thing, and, suppressing theimpulse to rise, stayed where he was, leaning a trifle forward, hishands on the arms of his chair.
Joan's eyes wandered curiously about the brilliant room and came tohim at last. Prosper met them, relaxed, and smiled.
"Come in and dine with me, Joan," he said. "Tell me how you like it."
She felt her way weakly to the second large chair and sat down facinghim across the hearth. The Chinaman's shadow, thrown strongly by thelamp, ran to and fro between and across them. It was a strange scenetruly, and Prosper felt with exhilaration all its strangeness. This wasno Darby and Joan fireside; a wizard with his enchanted leopardess,rather. He was half-afraid of Joan and of himself.
"It's right beautiful," said Joan, "an' right strange to me. I neverseen anything like it before. That"--her eyes followed Wen Ho'sdeparture half-fearfully--"that man and all."
Prosper laughed delightedly, stretching up his arms in full enjoymentof her splendid ignorance. "The Chinaman? Does he look so strange toyou?"
"Is that what he is? I--I didn't know." She smiled rather sadly andashamedly. "I'm awful ignorant, Mr. Gael. I just can read an' I'veonly read two books." She flushed and her pupils grew large.
Prosper saw that this matter of reading trod closely on her pain.
"Yes, he's a Chinaman from San Francisco. You know where that is."
"Yes, sir. I've heard talk of it--out on the Pacific Coast, a bigcity."
"Full of bad yellow men and a few good ones of whom let's hope Wen Hois one. And full of bric-a-brac like all these things that surpriseyou so. Do you like bright colors, Joan?"
She pondered in the unself-conscious and unhurried fashion of theWest, stroking the yellow, spotted skin that lay over the black arm ofher chair and letting her eyes flit like butterflies in a garden on azigzag journey to one after another of the flowers of color in theroom.
"Well, sir," she said, "I c'd take to 'em better if they was more oneat a time. I mean"--she pushed up the braid a little from wrinklingbrows--"jest blue is awful pretty an' jest green. They're sort ofcool, an' yeller, that's sure fine. You'd like to take it in yourhands. Red is most too much like feelin' things. I dunno, it mosthurts an' yet it warms you up, too. If I hed to live here--"
Prosper's eyebrows lifted a trifle.
"I'd--sure clear out the whole of this"--and she swept a ruthlesshand.
Again Prosper made delighted use of that upward stretching of hisarms. He laughed. "And you'd clear me out, too, wouldn't you?--if youhad to live here."
"Oh, no," said Joan. She paused and fastened her enormous, grave lookupon him. "I'd like right soon now to begin to work for you."
Again Prosper laughed. "Why," said he, "you don't know the first thingabout woman's work, Joan. What could you do?"
Joan straightened wrathfully. "I sure do know. Sure I do. I can cookfine. I can make a room clean. I can launder--"
"Oh, pooh! The Chinaman does all that as well--no, better than youever could do it. That's not woman's work."
Joan saw all the business of femininity swept off the earth. Profoundastonishment, incredulity, and alarm possessed her mind and so herface. Truly, thought Prosper, it was like talking to a grave,trustful, and most impressionable child, the way she sat there, ratheron the edge of her chair, her hands folded, letting everything he saiddisturb and astonish the whole pool of her thought.
"But, Mr. Gael, sweepin', washin', cookin',--ain't all that a woman'swork?"
"Men can do it so much better," said Prosper, blowing forth a cloud ofblue cigarette smoke and brushing it impatiently aside so that hecould smile at her evident offense and perplexity.
"But they don't do it better. They're as messy an' uncomfortable asthey can be when there ain't no woman to look after 'em."
"Not if they get good pay for keeping themselves and other peopletidy. Look at Wen Ho."
"Oh," said Joan, "that ain't properly a man."
Prosper laughed out again. It was good to be able to laugh.
"I've known plenty of real white men who could cook and wash betterthan any woman."
"But--but what is a woman's work?"
Prosper remained thoughtful for a while, his head thrown back alittle, looking at her through his eyelashes. In this position he wasextraordinarily striking. His thin, sharp face gained by the slightforeshortening and his brilliant eyes, keen nose, and high brow didnot quite so completely overbalance the sad and delicate strength ofmouth and chin. In Joan's eyes, used to the obvious, clear beauty ofPierre, Gael was an ugly fellow, but even she, artistically untrained,caught at the moment the picturesqueness and grace of him, themysterious lines of texture, of race; the bold chiselings of thoughtand experience. The colors of the room became him, too, for he wasdark, with curious, catlike, greenish eyes.
"The whole duty of woman, Joan," he said, opening these eyes upon her,"can be expressed in just one little word--charm."
And again at her look of mystification he laughed aloud.
"There's--there's babies," suggested Joan after a pause during whichshe evidently wrestled in vain with the true meaning of his speech.
"Dinner is served," said Prosper, rising quickly, and, getting back ofher, he pushed her chair to the table, hiding in this way a silentparoxysm of mirth.
At dinner, Prosper, unlike Holliwell, made no attempt to draw Joaninto talk, but sipped his wine and watched her, enjoying her composedsilence and her slow, graceful movements. Afterwards he made a couchfor her on the floor before the fire, two skins and a golden cushion,a rug of dull blue which he threw over her, hiding the ugly skirt andboots. He took a violin from the wall and tuned it, Joan watching himwith all her eyes.
"I don't like what you're playin' now," she told him, impersonally andgently.
"I'm tuning up."
"Well, sir, I'd be gettin' tired of that if I was you."
"I'm almost done," said Prosper humbly.
He stood up near her feet at the corner of the hearth, tucked theinstrument under his chin and played. It was the "Aubade Provencale,"and he played it creditably, with fair skill and with some of thewizardry that his nervous vitality gave to everything he did. At thefirst note Joan started, her pupils enlarged, she lay still. At theend he saw that she was quivering and in tears.
He knelt down beside her, drew the hands from her face. "Why, Joan,what's the matter? Don't you like music?"
Joan drew a shaken breath. "It's as if it shook me in here, somethingtrembles in my heart," she said. "I never heerd music before, jestwhistlin'." And again she wept.
Prosper stayed there on his knee beside her, his chin in his hand.What an extraordinary being this was, what a magnificent wilderness.The thought of exploration, of discovery, of cultivation, filled himwith excitement and delight. Such opportunities are rarely given to aman. Even that other most beautiful adventure--yes, he could thinkthis already!--might have been tame beside this one. He looked long atJoan, long into the fire, and she lay still, with the brooding beautyof that first-heard melody upon her face.
It was the first music she had ever hear
d, "except whistlin'," but therehad been a great deal of "whistlin'" about the cabin up Lone River;whistling of robins in spring--nothing sweeter--the chordlike whistlingsof thrush and vireo after sunset, that bubbling "mar-guer-ite" withwhich the blackbirds woo, and the light diminuendo with which thebluebird caressed the air after an April flight. Perhaps Joan's musicalfaculty was less untrained than any other. After all, that "AubadeProvencale" was just the melodious story of the woods in spring. Everynote linked itself to an emotional, subconscious memory. It filledJoan's heart with the freshness of childhood and pained her only becauseit struck a spear of delight into her pain. She was eighteen, she hadgrown like a tree, drinking in sunshine and storm, but rooted to asolitude where very little else but sense-experience could reach hermind. She had seen tragedies of animal life, lonely death-struggles,horrible flights and more horrible captures, she had seen joyouswooings, love-pinings, partings, and bereavements. She had seen maternalfickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of matedbliss and its--renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes ofstorm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sadbeautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These hadall been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistractedheart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There wasno morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of completesuspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, "Judgenot." She knew that the sun shone on the evil and on the good, but sheknew also that frost fell upon the good as well as upon the evil nor wasthe evil to be readily distinguished. Her father prated of only oneoffense, her mother's sin. Joan knew that it was a man's right to killhis woman for "dealin's with another man." This law was human; itevidently did not hold good with animals. There was no bitterness,though some ferocity, in the traffic of their loves.
While she pondered through the first sleepless nights in this strangeshelter of hers, and while the blizzard Prosper had counted on drovebayoneted battalions of snow across the plains and forced them,screaming like madmen, along the narrow canyon, Joan came slowly andfully to a realization of the motive of Pierre's deed. He had beenjealous. He had thought that she was having dealings with another man.She grew hot and shamed. It was her father's sin, that branding on hershoulder, or, perhaps, going back farther, her mother's sin. Carverhad warned Pierre--of the hot and smothered heart--to beware of Joan's"lookin' an' lookin' at another man." Now, in piteous woman fashion,Joan went over and over her memories of Pierre's love, altering themto fit her terrible experience. It was a different process from thatsimple seeing of pictures in the fire from which she had been startledby Pierre's return. A man's mind in her situation would have beenintensely occupied with thoughts of the new companion, but Joan,thorough as a woman always is, had not yet caught up. She was stillheld by all the strong mesh of her short married life. She had simplynot got as far as Prosper Gael. She accepted his hospitality vaguely,himself even more vaguely. When she would be done with her passionategrief, her laborious going-over of the past, her active and tormentinganger with the lover whom Prosper had told her was dead, then it wouldbe time to study this other man. As for her future, she had no plansat all. Joan's life came to her as it comes to a child, unsullied bycuriosity. At this time Prosper was infinitely the more curious, themore excited of the two.