PAGE 14
A Touch Of Sun
by
“I can give you no idea of the effect that Tolstoi, combined with Fraeulein’s music, had upon me. My heart hung upon the pauses in her song; it beat, as I read, as if I had been running. I would forget to breathe between the pages. One day Fraeulein came in and found me in the back chapters of ‘Anna Karenina.’ She had been playing one of Lizst’s rhapsodies–the twelfth. Waves of storm and passion had been thundering through the house, with keen little rifts of melody between, too sweet almost to be endured. She was very negligee, as the weather obliged us to be. Her great white arms were bare above the elbow, and as wet as if she had been over the wash-tub.
“‘That is not a book for a jeune fille,’ she said.
“I was in a rapture of excitement; the interruption made me wild. ‘All the books are for me,’ I told her. ‘I will read what I please.’
“‘You will go mad!’
“I went on reading.
“‘You have no way to work it off. You will not study, you cannot sing, you write no letters, the mother does not believe’–
“‘Do go away!’ I cried.
“‘–in the duty to the neighbor. Ach! what will you do with the whole of Tolstoi and Turgenieff shut up within you?’
“‘I can ride,’ I said. ‘If you don’t want me to go mad, leave me in the evenings to myself. Take my place in the carriage with Aunt Isabel, and let me ride alone.’
“Fraeulein had lived in bonds herself, and she had the soul of an artist. She knew what it is, for days together, to have barely an hour to one’s own thoughts; never to step out alone of a summer night, after a long, hot, feverish day. She let me go with old Manuel, the head groom, as my escort. He was no more hindrance to solitude than a pine-tree or a post.
“The reading and the music and the heat went on. I was in a fever of emotion such as I had never known. Fraeulein perceived it. She recommended ‘My Religion’ as an antidote to the romances. I did not want his religion. I wanted his men and women, his reading of the human soul, the largeness of incident, the sense of time and space, the intricacy of family life, the problems of race, the march of nations across the great world-canvas.
“I rode–not alone, but with the high-strung beings that lived between the pages of my books: men and women who knew no curb, who stopped at nothing, and who paid the price of their passionate mistakes. Old Manuel, standing by the horses, looked strange to me. I spoke to him dramatically, as the women I read of would have spoken. Nothing could have added to or detracted from his own manner. He was of the old Spanish stock, but for the first time I saw his picturesqueness. I liked him to call me ‘the Nina,’ and address me in the third person with his eyes upon the ground.
“All this was preparatory. It is part of my defense; but do not forget the heat, the imprisonment, the sense of relief when the sun went down, the wild, bounding rapture of those night rides.
“One evening it was not Manuel who stood by the horses in the white track between the laurels. It was a figure as statuesque as his, but younger, and the pose was not that of a servant. It was the stand-at-ease of a soldier, or of an Indian wrapped in his blanket in the city square. This man was conscious of being looked at, but his training, of whatever sort, would not permit him to show it. Plainly the training had not been that of a groom. I was obliged to send him to the stables for his coat, and remind him that his place was behind. He took the hint good-humoredly, with the nonchalance of a big boy condescending to be taught the rules of some childish game. As we were riding through the woods later, I caught the scent of tobacco. It was my groom smoking. I told him he could not smoke and ride with me. He threw away his cigarette and straightened himself in the saddle with such a smile as he might have bestowed on the whims of a child. He obeyed me exactly in everything, with an exaggerated ironical precision, and seemed to find amusement in it. I questioned him about Manuel. He had gone to one of the lower ranches, would not be back for weeks. By whose orders was he attending me? By Manuel’s, he said. He must then have had qualifications.