CHAPTER XXI
There are certain moments in the lives of men when the only course of action morally possible lies along immoral lines. By dint of hard necessity such moments lose the reproach of bad faith and assume the simple pathos of misfortune. Perhaps three-fourths of the crimes committed because of women fall into this unhappy class.
Long before convention softened the rape to its symbol, the marriage ceremony, men abducted the women they loved. There must have been a time when the highest social virtue was for a passionate swain to steal a girl from her jealous guardians. Upon this broad corner-stone of passion have arisen daring, stalwart, and reproductive generations, and that is the final word of approbation with which life lauds conduct.
Since that simpler era, minor moral obligations hinging on property, society, friendship, nationality, and former marriages have confused but have not transformed the issue. To-day, when any of these obstacles are swept aside by passionate lovers, one feels its pathos but not its sin.
It was precisely in this dilemma that Strawbridge labored. The little gold medal fastened on his lapel by the dictator reproached him continually as he worked in his room, packing in a canvas roll those of his belongings which were absolutely indispensable. He meant to carry them inconspicuously to the river. General Fombombo was his host; he had been a prospective customer until the capture of the rifles at San Geronimo, and he still was a trusting friend. And now he, Thomas Strawbridge, was about to steal the general's wife! The big American sickened at the thought of it, but the complementary idea of resigning Dolores never once presented itself to his mind. This would have been a desertion of something exquisitely more dear and intimate than his own flesh. Since the señora's embraces, her body seemed more native to him than his own. There was something shrine-like about her.
With Hebraic simplicity the Bible says of a man and wife, "Ye are one," and this was meant for lovers. Strawbridge tingled and thrilled with this amazing oneness. Some miracle had occurred within him to extend his sentiency into the señora. As he worked, she rushed upon him at intervals with such poignancy that he would lay down his packing and sigh and tremble at the sudden and sweet transfiguration. He was not himself any more. Body and soul were impermeated, somehow, with the sweetness of Dolores.
In the midst of one of these epiphanies came a tap at his door. The drummer had a sense of being waked out of a sleep. He saw his canvas pack under his hands and made an effort to conceal it by thrusting it hastily into an open cabinet drawer. Some of his toilet articles and clothes lay scattered about, and he tried to cover them under the sheets of his disordered bed. It seemed to him that his jumble of packing must advertise to the world his intention of eloping with the señora. When the American had concealed enough to give his room an aspect of innocence, he went over and opened the door. The griffe girl stood in the hallway. Her freckled face seemed screwed up with some internal tension. Her black eyes sparkled.
"Ola, señor!" she whispered, and stepped inside with her air of excitement and her glittering eyes. Strawbridge looked at her in dismay. Plainly she knew his plans, and he thought to himself that they might as well have been published in the "Correo."
The maid burst into ejaculations:
"Caramba! How well you look! You have been cured by magic!" She reached out and gave his arm a sudden squeeze, giggled, then, with an effect of legerdemain, thrust into his hand a little green-gold watch.
The American looked at it blankly.
"What the hell?" he asked in a low tone.
His profanity shook the girl into a hysteria of choked giggles; then she produced, also apparently out of nothingness, a blue envelop directed to himself. Instantly Strawbridge knew that it was from the señora, and his heart began to beat. His fingers trembled so that he could not get into the envelop with his one good hand. He was forced to ask the girl to open it.
The half-breed went at the matter in her own way, moistening an edge with her little red tongue and picking open the damp crease with a hair-pin. The big American stood with his good hand gripping her plump shoulder and delaying the operation by his impatience.
The note was exceedingly brief. It said simply:
Set my watch with yours. Piazza, 11 P.M. to-morrow.
Dolores Juana Avilon y Bustamente.
The implication of the señora's maiden name written in full moved Strawbridge with a delicate tenderness. He looked at the letter, then at the watch. It was an old-fashioned timepiece, carved on the obverse side with a faint landscape which was worn smooth in places; on the reverse was an antique coat of arms with its quarterings colored by a worn but exquisite enamel. The drummer did not know that he was looking at an heirloom of centuries; he had no idea that on the back of this watch he saw the combined coats of arms of two of the most ancient houses of Spain. A sense of pathos moved him at its evident age.
"Poor little girl!" he thought to himself. "The first thing I'll do when we get to New York will be to go to Tiffany's and get her a wrist-watch." He set the timepiece, with care, and returned it to the griffe girl.
In the afternoon Strawbridge went down to the native market to lay in provisions against his voyage down the river. Among the little market stalls the only prepared food he could find were the cart-wheels of cassava bread. The sick man looked at this bread dubiously. He knew that at one stage in the making of cassava it is a rank poison, and he wondered if the Indians in making this bread had extracted all its bane. The sight of the loaves which had once been poison filled him with foreboding. He imagined himself and the señora going down the river in a small boat and becoming poisoned on this bread. What a horrible end to their romance!
The possibility depressed him. However, he purchased a loaf, had it wrapped in a palm-leaf, and recalled wistfully the little delicatessen shops in Keokuk where he could order a lunch with a word. He wished keenly for them, as he bought some wood-like yammi and two or three big plantains shaped like rough bananas. When he started back home with his bundle, a dozen porters besieged him begging to be allowed to carry it.
Later in the afternoon he went to the fish-wharf, to bargain for a boat. He found clumsy crafts, each one carved out of a single log, leaky, greasy, and smelling overpoweringly of fish. The drummer walked slowly from one end of the quay to the other. The notion of embarking Dolores in one of these vile boats filled him with disgust. At last he chose the least loathly of the dugouts, and began dickering with its fishy owner, to buy it. The fisherman was a barefooted, chocolate-colored peon, who carried a paddle about with him as a sign of his calling. He was naked from waist to sombrero. His legs were thin, but his torso rippled with muscles developed by his boating. His face, his inch of forehead, and his coarse hair were just a few centuries this side of the pithecanthropus. He could scarcely believe the caballero could want to buy his fish-boat. He stared and scratched his head at the marvel.
"You are no poor man, señor. Why should you fish?"
"I fish for sport."
"Caramba! sport! Do you think it is sport to bake in the sun, to be flung into the rapids, to fight the crocodiles that eat your catch? Do you call it sport to pack a tonelada of fish on your back, trying to vend them when no one will buy?"
Some fellow fishermen drew about the two at this curious conversation. One of them interposed:
"Perhaps el caballero is going to fish as a penance, Simon. Perhaps he has committed some grievous sin and el padre has imposed—"
"Basta! Are you blind, Alessandro? Do you not see this hombre is an Americano, and not a Christian at all? The padre is nothing to him."
Another voice in the fish-scented crowd took up the argument:
"An Americano! Perhaps he does fish for sport. They do the maddest things for sport; they run and walk and jump and fight for sport. This one went to the battle of San Geronimo and won a ribbon. There it is; you can see it for yourself on his coat."
One of the older fishers shrugged a naked shoulder:
"Sport never sent the Americano into the battle, brothers. I was talking to an hombre named Lubito, a bull-fighter, and what he said ... what Lubito said about this Americano...." The old peon nodded, and thumped the butt of his paddle on the ground.
"What did he say?" asked Alessandro.
The ancient lifted a shoulder, pulled down his wrinkled lips, nodded at the palace up the river and at the gloomy bulk of La Fortuna down the river, made a clicking sound with his tongue, and went silent.
These clicks and glances seemed to explain something. Simon, who owned the boat, looked at Strawbridge, with his small black Indian eyes stretched wide.
"Cá! Then you don't want to fish, after all?"
"Look here!" rapped out the drummer, feeling very uncomfortable. "Do I get that boat or not?"
Simon shrugged, and mentioned a price which no doubt was grotesquely exorbitant, according to his peon sense of value. The drummer reached into his pocket and drew out a roll of Venezuelan bills.
"I'll take it provided you'll scrub the damn thing with sand and get it clean."
The whole crowd stared at this amazingly swift trade. Here and there came a sharp intake of breath at such an amount paid for such a boat. Only the peon who owned the boat kept his head, but his excitement was shown by the sharp dints in the sides of his sun-blacked nose.
"Señor," he jockeyed, breathing heavily and staring at the bills, "it is impossible for me to clean the boat at such a price. Already I have given the boat away; I have pushed it into the rapids. I am a poor man, señor, and I cannot possibly clean the boat for less than ... for less than—" he stared fishily at Strawbridge, fearing to name too small a sum—"t-t-two, t-three ... sí ... t-t-three more bolivars, señor, and it will be cheap as mangos, at that!"
The drummer drew out the three extra bolivars and tossed them to the fellow. Three bolivars are sixty cents.
"Scrub it with sand, and hitch it below the palacio when you finish."
One of the fishermen shook his fist violently in the air, a peaceable Spanish gesture to work off unusual excitement. The oldish peon leaned forward on his paddle.
"No one must speak of this unless all of us want to...." He drew his finger across his throat, made a clicking sound, and nodded toward La Fortuna.
It was sundown when Strawbridge returned to the palace. In coming up the river bank the drummer took a short route behind the cathedral. As he came closer he saw that a nest of little adobe houses were built like lean-tos against the sides of the church. These little mud huts clinging humbly to the soaring walls of the great fane, and the whole illuminated in the deep yellow of sunset, formed a picture which arrested even the drummer. It drove away for a moment the permeating thought of the señora. It extinguished his desire and his sense of hurry, in the timelessness of beauty.
Beyond him on his left lay the wide vacuity of the river. The terrain on which Strawbridge walked was high above the river and was grown with patches of thistles, cactus, and a thin, harsh grass. Through this wound a number of paths leading to this or that little hut. The scene was animated with a scattering of naked brown youngsters who played silently and seriously after the manner of Latin children. They almost blended with their background of sand and adobe.
As the drummer walked through this quaint place, an old woman, with her apron full of charcoal, came out of a little shop. She hobbled along a path, evidently meaning to intercept the American. Her intention became so obvious that he stopped and waited for her.
"Can I do anything for you, vieja?" he inquired, running a hand into his pocket.
The old creature crossed herself with her free hand.
"May the Holy Virgin guard you, señor!"
The sick man got out a centavo, but to his surprise the crone did not extend her palm.
"Señor Americano" she whispered, "when do I get my Josefa back!"
The question sounded so pointless that Strawbridge thought she must be slightly unbalanced.
"Your Josefa, señora?"
She pointed with a trembling hand.
"The poor joven you sent to La Fortuna, señor."
The drummer was nonplussed. She seemed to be rational; indeed, she had shrewd wrinkled eyes and a high-bridged, aristocratic nose. She might have been a kind of dowdy dowager.
"I sent a youth to La Fortuna, señora!"
She glanced up at the yellow-green sky.
"Holy San Pablo! Has he forgot! Is it so little to him, that he forgets my poor boy Josefa, the dependiente in 'Sol y Sombra,' whom he loaded with irons and hid away in La Fortuna!"
The drummer regarded the old creature with troubled surprise to find that she was connected with the unhappy clerk in "Sol y Sombra." Indeed, he had almost forgot the incident of the little monkey-eyed clerk; or at least it no longer disturbed him. The battle of San Geronimo had somehow cut a gap in his life, and all things antecedent to it seemed in a remote past. Now this woman had abruptly crossed the gap, and had bound one of the keenest indiscretions of his old life with his new. Somewhere under the black hulk of La Fortuna, which glowered against the sunset, Josefa still existed. Strawbridge felt that thrill of discomfort which a sportsman feels when a quail flutters in his coat hours after it should have died. He hardly knew what to say. Finally he asked:
"Are you Josefa's mother!"
"His grandmother, señor. He lived with me, but when he fell into misfortune, I had to give up my house, and Father Benicio found me a place here in the cathedral, to scrub the brasses. I live in the third casa yonder, under the transept." She pointed it out, and, from her tone, the little hut seemed part of her griefs.
She stood looking at Strawbridge expectantly, evidently waiting for him to do or say something. He grew more and more uncomfortable. He put his hand irresolutely into his pocket and drew out some coins, regarded them doubtfully, and made a suggestive movement toward the crone. She held out an old hand, raw in places from her unaccustomed work in the cathedral.
"When do I get my boy back, señor!" she repeated in a low tone.
"Señora, ... I don't know."
"You do not know when you are going to sack La Fortuna!" Her whisper was astonished.
"I ... sack La Fortuna!"
"Seguramente, señor! Lubito said you had all your plans laid. He said you had men everywhere, ready to leap upon Canalejos at a word from you; that you would set all the prisoners free and put the tyrants in their own dungeons. But he said you were a North American, and that when you gained power you would not oppress the people as General Miedo and General Fombombo did."
Strawbridge was annoyed and a little anxious at this continual bobbing up of the bull-fighter's gossip.
"Look here," he said. "Lubito is going to get me into serious trouble, spreading that sort of rumor."
"Oh, no, señor! the peons never betray the hombre who comes to fight their battles. No one spoke a word when General Miedo marched against Canalejos. He was in the city before he"—she nodded toward the palace—"knew a breath of it. No one will speak against you. Lubito has arranged everything. The whole town will rise up when you lift your sword. I shall be happy, señor, when you stand him—" another nod at the palace—"in front of the rifles."
Strawbridge was shocked at her bloodthirstiness. And he saw that nothing he could say would shake her in her delusion. And why should he shake her? Why not let her draw any comfort she could from an imaginary revenge? He promised to do what he could for Josefa, and started on for the palace.
That evening Strawbridge did not sit with the señora on the piazza. Their plan to elope had made the lovers chary of being seen together. The drummer sat in his room and from his window watched the vestiges of sunset darken into night. He was ill, and the reaction after all of his walking and talking and love-play with the señora made him weary and despondent. Thoughts of Josefa and the old charwoman bedeviled him. Through his window he could see the dark reproach of La Fortuna blotting out the residual umber in the east. Somewhere in that pile Josefa lay manacled because he, Thomas Strawbridge, had conceived a hardware display for "Sol y Sombra." The salesman got up and moved about his room in weary restlessness. In his thoughts he cursed the country. He recalled Rosales standing before the firing-squad; the little Austrian operator whom Saturnino had corrupted; the centaurism of General Fombombo. It was the country: there was something about this country that got a man. Then there insinuated itself into his reverie the fact that he himself was planning to elope with the dictator's wife.
Strawbridge's thinking stopped abruptly and he stood staring at nothingness, with widened eyes. He did not want to yield to wickedness. He wanted to stay decent. And even as he was thinking these things a profound justification arose in his mind. It was his duty to deliver an unhappy woman from such a mad, immoral land. It was his duty and his deepest desire. He had the widest license to protect her that any man could possess: he loved her.
But as to the others—there was something about this country that got a man.