CHAPTER XI
Notwithstanding Strawbridge's apt and well-timed quotation from one of the best of the American business poets, still, he left the cathedral on his way to the presidencia in a shilly-shally mood. He went out at the side entrance, as the most direct route. The glare of sunshine struck his eyes rather uncomfortably after the gloom of the church. Just outside the door a dense flowering hedge delimited the plaza from the garden on the other side.
The drummer felt for his case and drew out a cigar to settle his thoughts on his proposed interview with the dictator. He stopped to scratch a match, when he heard voices talking just inside the garden. They were low voices, a man's and a woman's, but their passionate undertones caught the salesman's attention. He could understand little of what they were saying, but occasionally the woman lost her poise, or her caution, and he would get a phrase or two; then he could hear the man mumbling. Once the woman whipped out, "You are mad, you are insane, Pancho!" The voice of the man seemed to admit this. Later she gasped: "But you can't do that. He's alive!" and after another interval, she cried: "What a monster! I despise you as I do him. You are a bribon!"
This speech was stopped abruptly, as if a hand were laid over the woman's mouth. Came sounds of some guarded physical struggle, then a slap, a little cry, and the sound of running. The woman's restrained cry went through Strawbridge with a queer effect. He tried to peer through the dense hedge, but could make out nothing more than the fact of movement on the other side. A moment's reflection told him the man and the woman had separated.
The incident gripped the salesman in a strange way. He reasoned that if the two had separated one must have gone back into the church and the other toward the small postern at the end of the garden. So he walked briskly in the direction of the latter. Just as he stepped into the thoroughfare between garden and palace, he saw a woman in a nun's costume hurry out at the little gate, cross the road, and pass in at the side entrance of the big state house. With a breath of surprise, Strawbridge recognized Señora Fombombo. He found it difficult to attribute such an adventure to this small, quiet woman in her severe religious garb. And yet she had almost run from the garden gate to the palace. The American pondered this, but at last decided that the señora had been coming from her music practice in the cathedral and some quarreling, fighting couple in the garden had frightened her. The drummer walked quickly to the little postern and looked into the garden for the disturbing couple, but, of course, they had had time to escape.
Strawbridge loitered outside the palace for a few minutes, finishing his cigar and thinking over the incident. Then he walked up to the side door. His intention to ask for the señora at once was somewhat disturbed by the fact that the griffe girl admitted him when he rang the bell.
As the American stepped into the entrance, a little leather-colored soldier in uniform came briskly forward, with his rifle at attention. A word from the girl established Strawbridge's right to enter.
"The señora," she said, giving Strawbridge her knowing look, "is in the music-room." She paused a moment and added, "That's her, now."
The thing which she called the señora was the chromatic scale, played with great velocity.
The maid was so insinuating that Strawbridge thought of denying he had meant to see the chatelaine at all, but he changed this to something about believing he would go and hear the music. Instead of producing the casual effect he had hoped for, this statement lit a brightly intelligent smile on the griffe girl's copper-colored face. As Strawbridge walked down the transverse passage to the main corridor, to turn up toward the music-room, he could feel the eyes of both maid and guard watching his back.
The drummer passed two more guards in the main corridor, and presently paused before the door whence issued the runs and cadenzas. As he was about to tap, he was again seized with the inexplicable hesitancy which afflicted him whenever he came near the señora. It was an odd thing. He knew that she was just inside the dull mahogany panels, but somehow the door seemed to shut him out completely. He felt he would not get in. He tapped uncertainly, with a conviction that it would accomplish nothing. But it did accomplish something: it stopped the music so suddenly that it startled him. Then he waited in a profound silence.
Strawbridge imagined that the señora knew that it was he, and that by the long silence she was showing him that she did not want him in the music-room. A painful humility came over him. After all, he thought, she had a right to dislike him. Every time she saw him he was dull and embarrassed. Queer how she crabbed his style. Now, at home, back in Keokuk, he was rather popular with the ladies, but here.... The drummer's good-natured face sagged in a mirthless quirk. Well, ... he might as well go away. The señora would never know what a jolly friend she was missing, for he was jolly when one took him right; he simply was jolly. And he would never know her, either. It was the fault of neither of them; he saw that. He couldn't help it, she couldn't help it. A faint sense of pathos floated through the drummer's mind, and he turned away from the door.
At that moment it opened and the señora stood before him. Since he tapped she had just had time to walk across the room.
The man and the woman looked at each other in utter surprise, but in an instant this expression vanished from the señora's face and she asked him if he would like to come in and hear her play.
The drummer moistened his lips with his tongue and explained vaguely that he had just been passing and had heard the piano....
He was so painfully ill at ease that the girl said she too had been lonely that forenoon and was wishing some one would come in. She indicated a chair near a barred window, then, wearing the faint, unamused smile of a hostess, she went back to the piano and asked what he would have her play. Mr. Strawbridge said, "Just anything lively."
The señora pondered and began a mazurka. It was a trifle of thematic runs. She began rather indifferently, but presently her fingers or her mood warmed and she did it with dash and brilliancy.
At first Strawbridge's mental state prevented him from listening at all, but gradually the richly furnished room, the murals on the ceiling, the black ebony piano, and the slender nun-like player all re-formed themselves out of original confusion. Then he became aware of the music.
He did not care much for it. The señora did not jazz the piano as Strawbridge craved that it should be jazzed. It should be explained, perhaps, that the drummer's contact with music had been confined almost exclusively to the Keokuk dance-halls. He was, one might say, a musical bottle baby, who had waxed fat on the electric piano. Now he missed that roaring double shuffle in the bass and that grotesque yelping in the treble which he knew and admired and was moved by. He at once classified the señora as a performer who lacked pep.
The girl continued to fill the stately room full of dancing fairies; presently these exquisite little creatures rippled away into the distance; the last faraway fairy gave a last faraway pirouette, and the music ceased. The señora turned with a faint smile and waited a moment for her guest to say he liked the mazurka, but finally was forced to ask if he did.
"Well, y-e-s," he agreed dubiously, he liked it; then, with animation, "Señora, do you play 'Shuffle Along'?"
She repeated the title after him, evidently trying to translate it into intelligible Spanish.
"Who wrote it, señor?" She turned to a big music-rack which apparently held the music of the world.
"I don't know," said the drummer, naïvely. "Maybe you've got 'My Ding-Dong Baby'?"
Señora Fombombo began going through the huge music-cabinet uncertainly.
"You don't know the composer of that, either?"
"No. How about 'Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes'? Or have you got the 'Haw-Hee Haw-Hee Toddle'?"
The señora, who was a methodical woman, began alphabetically with Brahms and looked for the "Haw-Hee Haw-Hee Toddle." Strawbridge got up from his chair and came to assist.
"Let me help you," he volunteered. "I know the backs of those pieces just as well as I do my own face."
The señora glanced at him.
"Do you play?"
"A little," admitted the drummer. "I have been known to ripple my fingers over the elephants' tusks." Strawbridge laughed pleasantly at this tiny jest. It was the first time he had been able to speak a single sentence in a natural way, to the señora. Now this small success pleased him.
"Play me the kind of music you like," invited the señora, at once. "I don't recognize the English titles. Perhaps I have them, after all."
"Oh, all right." He smiled and sat down on the old-fashioned piano stool. With a pleased expression on his handsome, good-natured face he looked at the señora. Then he popped his left fist into his right palm and his right fist into his left palm, to warm up his finger action.
"Now, this is the rage," he explained with a faint patronage in his voice; "this is what runs 'em ragged in New York," and, lifting his hands high, he boomed into the "Haw-Hee Haw-Hee Toddle."
Strawbridge did not see the señora's face during the opening bars of his jazz, and therefore had no means of determining her mood. When, presently, he looked about at her, she was much as usual; her black eyes a trifle wider, perhaps, her smile a little less mechanical.
"I've seen a thousand people on the floor at one time, toddling to this," he called to her loudly above his demonstration.
The señora pressed her lips together, her eyes seemed fairly to dance, and she nodded at this bit of information.
Strawbridge realized that he was entertaining the señora highly. He had never seen her look so amused. He had not thought her especially pretty, before, but just at this moment she gave him the impression of a ruby with the dust suddenly polished off and held in the sunshine.
The drummer was very proud of the fact that he could play the piano and talk at the same time, and he always did this.
"Say, I like the tone of this machine," he called out in a complimentary way; "she's hitting on all six cylinders now."
The señora laughed outright, in little gusts, with attempts at suppression. It was as if she had not laughed in a long, long time.
Strawbridge wagged his blond head to the clangor and syncopation of his own making.
"Coming down the home stretch!" he yelled, pounding louder and faster. "Giving her more gas and running up her timer!" He threw his big shoulders into the uproar. "Going to win the all-comers' sweepstakes! Go on, you little old taxi! Go to it! Wow! Bang! You're it, kid! The fifty-thousand-dollar purse is yours!"
He stopped as suddenly as he had begun, reached into his vest pocket, fished out a cigar band, and, with a burlesque curtsy, offered it to the señora as the sweepstakes prize he had just captured.
The señora produced a handkerchief and wiped her eyes, then drew a long breath. With her face dimpled and ready to laugh again, she looked at the drummer.
"I knew you'd like me if we ever got acquainted," confided Strawbridge; "nothing like music to get folks together."
"Yes," acquiesced the señora, smiling, "it is one of the shibboleths of culture."
"Why, ... yes, I suppose so," agreed Strawbridge. The phrase "shibboleths of culture" sobered him somewhat. It was not the sort of phrase an American girl would have flung into a gay conversation, at least not without making some sort of face, or saying it in a burlesque tone to show it was meant to be humorous. It plunked into the drummer's careless mood like a stone through a window. "By the way," he said, on this somewhat soberer plane, "let me tell you why I followed you here into this music-room."
"Did you follow me?"
"Yes."
"Where from?" she asked in a different voice.
"From the garden."
The mirth vanished from the señora's face as if some one had turned down a lamp. It left her pale, delicately engraved, and not very pretty.
"May I ask why you followed me?" she questioned.
"Sure!" said Strawbridge with a protective impulse stirring in him. "I was coming out of the cathedral and I heard some rough-neck couple raising a row over in the garden. I came on to the palacio and saw you running out of the gate. I knew they had frightened you with their yelping, and it made me mad. So when you go to the cathedral again, just tip me off, please, and I'll go along with you."
The señora stood leaning over the end of the piano, studying him intently.
"That is very kind, and ... and it's a very unexpected kindness, Señor Strawbridge. I am grateful."
"Don't thank me at all.... Do the same for any woman. And, say, that reminds me what I was balled up about."
"'Balled up'? What do you mean—'balled up'?"
"Oh!—" with little gesture—"I don't know what to do. It's a matter of business."
"Are you bringing me a matter of business?"
"Sure! Why not? You've got your ideas."
She continued to look at him curiously.
"Well, what is it?"
"It's about your husband. I consider that he runs this country on the most unbusinesslike basis I ever heard of."
The Spanish girl opened her eyes still wider at this astonishing turn.
"Unbusinesslike?"
"Sure, it's like this," and Strawbridge proceeded to explain what he knew of the dictator's methods; who had told him, and that he thought the general was losing money.
During the recital he was surprised to see the señora's pale face grow paler still. Finally she gasped:
"And does he take property, too?"
"Why, good God!" cried the drummer, in amazement, "didn't you know that?"
After a long pause the Spanish girl said almost inaudibly, "No, I didn't know ... that."
"Huh!" ejaculated Strawbridge, growing very much embarrassed. "I'm sorry I mentioned it, I ... I...." He looked at her, moistening his lips, and broke out with a desperate note of remorse, "Well, I swear I hate mentioning that!"
The señora shrugged wearily.
"Oh, ... that doesn't matter."
She kept accenting her "thats" as if other things preyed more deeply on her thoughts.
At this moment a big French motor-car murmured past the window of the music-room. It happened that both the drummer and the señora saw it, were looking straight at it. The car contained General Fombombo, and in the seat beside him Strawbridge recognized the peon girl Madruja, the little bride whom the dictator continued to detain in the palace until he could come to some judicial decision as to what to do with her.