Fombombo

by T. S. Stribling

CHAPTER XXIII

Father Benicio had, as men say, convinced the head of Thomas Strawbridge but not his heart. As the drummer moved about his room in the palace, packing his belongings, the thought of resigning Dolores, on whatever moral grounds, filled him with a sense of ghastly loss. The thing seemed impossible. It seemed unbelievable that Dolores was in an adjoining room, and that presently he would go away and they would never see each other again.

He went on with his packing, mechanically, with a kind of shocked sensation at this impossible thing. His hands did their work with the meticulous care of a traveling salesman, a part of whose trade is to pack well. He folded each tie, shirt, sock precisely so, arranging them in his suitcases in smooth layers, with their accessibility determined by their frequency of use.

At Father Benicio's suggestion, Strawbridge was moving his quarters from the palace to the priests' house in the rear of the cathedral. It would save the lovers the pain and stress of seeing each other daily, so the father explained, and Strawbridge was going. He would remain with the ecclesiastic until the flotilla arrived, and then he would embark for Rio with the gold and barter which had been conscripted in San Geronimo.

The griffe girl helped him in his packing. She assisted where his wounded hand failed. She knelt on his bags and pulled home their straps. For some time the two worked silently, then the servant broke into sounds that resembled low, quick laughter. The drummer looked at her with a feeling of dull reproach, when he perceived that this was her method of sobbing. Her sympathy unmanned the convalescent. He touched her shoulder as she worked beside him, and said in uncertain tones:

"Don't cry, chica; it's all right; it's for the best; it's all for the best." And his sympathy, reacting on her, drove the little creature into more uncontrollable outbursts than ever.

Half an hour later the porters came for his bags. He possessed five bags, and five men were conscripted to carry them. They filed into the palace and stood for a moment looking at the room, at Strawbridge, at the bags, evidently speculating on the size of their gratuities. Then they hoisted the bags atop their dirty red caps and moved single file out through the corridor, down the transverse gallery, and so through the side entrance toward the plaza.

As one of the palace guards closed the door behind them, Strawbridge lingered a moment, looking back at it. His mood invested the door with something unusual. It seemed to have developed a personality of its own. It closed him out definitely. It shut in Dolores. Its finality swamped an irrational hope which, until that moment, Strawbridge was not conscious had existed in his heart. Until that very moment he had hoped for some unexpected event to occur which would prevent his final departure. He did not know what he had expected, but something, somehow, a softening, an amelioration.... The bolts of the palace door rattled noisily into place.

The porters moved slowly away, single file, through the sunshine. The drummer turned and followed them. He thought of the priest, of the priest's homily, but nevertheless as he walked along there grew in his mind a feeling of guilt, of some sort of basal unrighteousness. He ought not to do this thing—walk away and leave Dolores like this. It was a kind of desertion. During his stay at the palace both he and the girl had come to base their whole structure of future happiness upon their mutual relations. Now he was judging and condemning them both, the half judging the whole.

And it was more than Dolores whom he was banning. The Spanish girl had come to imply to him a home. He was deserting that, too. It was no such home as the salesman had ever known. As child and boy he had been reared in the hurly-burly of a middle-class home in Keokuk, wherein he found the bustle of a market stall. It was a place of endless work and tasks and runnings to and fro. He had supposed homes to be by nature rattling and bustling, until Dolores and her Latin surroundings brought to him intimations of a place of quietude and sweetness such as he had never imagined.

Strawbridge had been, as they say, in love before. But his American sweethearts always suggested to him comrades in sport, partners at a dance, fellow enthusiasts over moving pictures and jazz; they did not suggest quietude, or homes, or babies. Indeed, their hotly pursued pleasures made babies seem rather the absurd accidents of dual living than the end of matrimony.

With Dolores Fombombo, Strawbridge felt the continual implication of motherhood. In the tenderer moments of his passion, he built a sort of romance home about this dark-haired woman who could read Spanish plays and talk with curious wisdom about marriage, life, and art. These were minor charms. In the heart of his vision always shone a picture of Dolores with a baby at her bosom. He always saw, as clearly as in a hallucination, the soft contours of her breast yearning to its little pink mouth, and the bend of her dark crowned head above its dimpled tininess. It was this and all the long covenant of grandchildren and great-grandchildren which Strawbridge was abandoning as he passed through the side exit of the palace, and the doors shut to and the bolts shot fast, after him.

The salesman walked slowly after his porters, around the public gardens, to the priests' house. He was a drummer again. Once more he had lapsed into the raw, nomadic life of a traveling salesman, with its hurry, its careless and casual acquaintances, its mechanical optimism, its worn jests, its empty routine, its devastating dullness, and its petty obscenities. In point of fact, he was a wealthy drummer, one who at a lucky stroke had sold a large order and had gained a swollen commission. He was rich enough now to buy the home and the motor and the woman which he had described to Dolores.

The priests' house was the largest and finest of that proliferation of buildings which clung about the skirts of the cathedral. It was two stories in height, and built of stone. Its flat roof reached to about one third of the height of the cathedral walls. The motif of the green carving over the big double door was a cross. A horse and cab always stood in the sunshine before the house, for the use of his Grace the Bishop, Father Honario. Almoners and donors came and went, all day long, to and from the priests' house. Here the bishopric received fees from the rents of ecclesiastical properties, tithes, the church taxes, endowments for masses, and what not. It was a clearing-house for the ghostly ministrations which the priests performed in the parish; it was the go-between twixt the market-place and the millennium.

The look of the house managed to convey an impression of this dual service. Its façade was a flat, dignified stone, plastered in yellow and relieved by the single dull-green carving over the door. The windows were small, barred, and as unrevealing as the face of the priests themselves. The place had, somehow, a look of wealth and penance. One felt that dignitaries and beggars, pain and pleasure, death and riches were received with an equal hand in this imperturbable house. The most casual glance told that no woman lived within its walls.

Strawbridge rang the bell, and his porters lined up patiently in the sunshine. An old man with a twist in his neck opened the door, glanced obliquely at the visitors, and inquired what was wanted. Strawbridge gave the name of Father Benicio. The wry-necked one nodded, and closed the door, and Strawbridge could hear him shuffling down the hall. The sick man stood silently in the heat outside the enigmatic façade. At a faint clinking he looked around and saw the cab-horse swinging its head for a momentary riddance of flies. The drummer continued gazing vacantly at the swarming pests as they resettled in the corners of the horse's eyes and on the sag of its tremulous lips.

The door opened and Father Benicio stood to one side to allow the file to enter. The porters got under way patiently. The priest spoke to Strawbridge, in the tones one uses to a man who has suffered some great calamity. He told him his room was ready and that he hoped the drummer would feel that the bishopric was his own home.

The priest led the way through a short passage, to an interior doorway. This gave on a large, hot room screened off from a patio. Through an open door on the left, Strawbridge saw a large, somberly furnished room with an altar occupying one end and on the side walls old-fashioned paintings of men in ecclesiastical garb. He followed the priest past this door and along a very narrow passage flanked on both sides by small monastic cubicles. Into one of these the father ushered the drummer. Its interior was finished in roughly dressed stone covered with plaster. An iron bed, an unpainted table, bowl, pitcher, and an extra calabash of water for bathing furnished the cubicle. Over the bed hung a little bronze crucifix with a half-burned candle in a sconce under it. One narrow window, set high and deeply recessed in the stone wall, and with the flat iron bars of a prison across it, furnished light and air.

As the porters set down the bags, they crossed themselves, and they reverently bowed and kissed the father's hand as they passed out. When they were gone the American stood in the middle of the floor, looking grayly at his new quarters. He smiled faintly at the priest.

"This is a funny place for me to come to, Father Benicio."

"I hope you may find peace here, my son."

"Why, ... ye-e-s ..." assented Strawbridge, vaguely. The words lingered in his thoughts a moment. "Find peace...." The phrase really held no signification for him. Weary from his exertions, the sick man sat down on the side of the bed. When he touched the mattress he was surprised to find it stuffed with straw.

"That," explained his host, gravely, "is to remind us of One who was born in a manger, my son." He glanced toward the crucifix and bowed his head.

The drummer looked at the little bronze carving and the half-burned candle below it. The world of thought and emotion which the image symbolized was utterly foreign to him. Now this supporting symbol of the straw in his bed aroused in him a faint curiosity. He put a question to the priest, with the simplicity of his kind:

"You talking about this bringing me peace.... How can it bring anybody peace? What's the idea?"

Father Benicio answered him just as simply and fundamentally:

"You must know that Christ died for your sins, my son."

"M—y-e-s," admitted the American, without conviction. He had heard that phrase all his life, from Salvation Army workers, from revivalists, from country preachers. It seemed to him to be something they interjected into their homilies at intervals, which meant nothing at all.

Father Benicio stood studying the drummer. He went on carefully:

"Now that you are so deeply hurt, my son, you can carry your wounds to Him in meditation and have them healed. You remember that He healed the maimed, the halt, and the blind on the shores of Galilee. He forgave the woman of Samaria. He is just as great and merciful at this moment, my son, here in this cubicle, as He was two thousand years ago. If you will only break your heart before Him, if you will acknowledge yourself sinful and unworthy, then the blessed saints will take away your griefs, and into your heart will descend the dove."

To Strawbridge this mysticism was simple confusion. Doves and broken hearts—they conveyed no idea whatever. He said to the priest:

"I don't see what my sinfulness has to do with the señora. Anyway, I am not particularly sinful. Outside of smoking and cursing ... I do curse a good deal, but it is just a way I have. I don't mean anything by it."

"I know you do not steal nor commit perjury, Señor Strawbridge, and your profanity is perhaps venial, but you were about to commit a mortal sin; and, to judge from your state of mind, I believe you have already."

"I have already what?"

"Surrendered yourself to the desires of your body."

The drummer's voice became instantly angry:

"With the señora?"

Father Benicio held up a hand.

"I should loathe to think that. In fact, it would be impossible for me to think it. I have known Dolores for years, as her confessor. God in His providence has seen fit to visit her sweetness and gentleness with great distresses...." The priest's voice wavered. For a moment he ceased talking, and then explained simply: "I meant you had received other women into your life, Señor Strawbridge."

Strawbridge laid his hands down in his lap and moistened his lips. The silence became uncomfortable.

"Well, ... yes ... naturally."

"You have persistently sinned."

"Oh, I ... I haven't been so bad about women," defended the drummer, earnestly; "just one now and then. I'm willing to put my record against most men's. I think you'd say I was a pretty decent sort of chap."

The priest looked at him.

"You seduced a woman now and then—and don't think you have sinned...."

Strawbridge had an uncomfortable feeling that his face was growing hot.

"They were not the sort you seduce," he accented in annoyance; "they were the sort you pay. I wouldn't seduce any girl who ... who was a virgin. That ... that would be a little too bad."

He was trembling internally. Under the priest's questioning there gradually compiled within him a sense of guilt. It was an extraordinary feeling. For years at a stretch he had never once thought of his goodness or his badness. Now, in Strawbridge's ache for the señora, the priest brought up this utterly irrelevant and painful experience. The ascetic, however, continued to regard the drummer gravely.

"It seems to me, my son, if you thought your acts were harmless heretofore, yet surely, in the light of your affection for Doña Dolores Fombombo, you must see that you have lived sinfully. Do you not know that at heart these women whom you paid were much like the señora, only they were weaker, and tread bitterer paths? Is there any real difference between giving a woman her first stain, and giving her the last pollution that destroys her! If you can imagine the señora flung about the streets, defiled, mocked, and paid for, do you think she would be any more pitiful than any other woman? A human soul is a human soul, my dear son."

A distressful feeling arose in Strawbridge at this renaissance of his transgressions. For some reason the priest's words aroused with painful distinctness the memory of his first impurity. It had been with a hoyden, boyish girl with whom he had been skating at dusk on the cement walks in the park. He recalled the heavy syringa bushes, and how suddenly she had begun to cry, and how frightened and ashamed he had been. He remembered how he took off his skates because they made too much noise, and hurried silently home by back alleys, under a profound sense of shame and guilt. And that girl had been a virgin. He had deceived the priest. Now, as he sat on his bed in the cubicle, he felt a renewal of all the shame and guiltiness occasioned by that distant act of his boyhood. He wondered fearfully what had become of Daisy. He could see her distinctly, sitting on the grass, twisting her hands together and sobbing heartbrokenly for the evil which had befallen her.

Father Benicio stood watching his face during these melancholy memories.

"When you reflect on these transgressions, my son, then you will thank God a hundred times that you escaped leading the woman you love into a life of adultery."

"But, Father," asked Strawbridge, unsteadily, "what is going to become of her!"

"What do you mean!"

"I mean, in this land of murder and crime what will become of Dolores?"

"Ah, my son, that lies with God." The priest crossed himself.

"Yes, I know, but...." To Strawbridge the priest's phrase meant it lay with chance, that nothing watched over the Spanish girl, but he could not profess such a sentiment to Father Benicio.

"She will be safe, my son."

"Are you sure, Father?"

"I am quite sure, my son."

"But something could so easily happen to her. Everything is so uncertain here. You continually feel that it is all going to ruin. Why, in San Geronimo I saw women shot—shot down. I saw a girl killed in her window. How in God's name am I going away and leave Dolores where—"

"Stop! Do you think yourself more powerful than God? Do you doubt He can protect her body if it pleases Him? Or if He chose to lay her body aside, would she not be still more safe?"

The priest's earnestness and simplicity brought Strawbridge a brief illusion that life did not end with his body, but that it stretched out in some mysterious sunshine beyond the physical facts of Canalejos, of Rio Negro, and, indeed, of the whole world. The bodies of men and women had an appearance of shells which contained reality and timelessness. And as for Dolores's body, that was a small and a passing thing.

Father Benicio moved toward the door, and again invoked Strawbridge to meditation and repentance. When the priest had vanished, the drummer's apprehension of the other world lingered a few minutes like a mirage; then it too disappeared. The sins which Father Benicio had recalled so vividly and which he had counseled Strawbridge to meditate upon presently faded into subconsciousness as having no connection with his present life, and his thoughts came back to Dolores.

For some time these thoughts held no definition, but formed a vague, miserable mood, with the señora as the central association.

The American restlessly pulled his straw bolster to the foot of the bed, lay back on it with his legs hanging off, and gave himself up to staring at the little bronze Christ and the candle. The crucifix held dull high lights which focused his gaze.

Presently he found himself reconstructing his whole intercourse with the señora, from the very first night they had met. He wondered what he could have done to save their relations from this shattering wreck. It all appeared natural and inevitable.

It seemed to Strawbridge that their undoing really began with Dolores, when she confessed their plans to the priest. The American had had an idea that a priest merely heard a confession and remained entirely inactive; just as one might drop a note in a letter-box, that would end the matter; but Father Benicio had acted promptly and with extraordinary insight. He had seized on exactly the implement to persuade the drummer. Only now did Strawbridge realize how astute the priest had been in hitting on the rifles. The drummer pulled his bolster, to give his head a cool place to lie on. He drew a deep sigh, and began once more at his point of departure, searching for a flaw in his conduct. The meeting ... the breakfast ... the piazza.... Here his brain skipped an interval, and he wondered if he could not have eloped with the señora and still have obtained the order for rifles. He took the point up carefully. The dictator needed the arms; Dolores was a matter of indifference to the dictator. He would hardly have allowed her abduction to stand in the way of a trade.

The drummer began casting about in his mind for a safe way in which he might have abducted the señora and still have sold the rifles. The Tollivers might have helped him. If he and Dolores had been able to reach the English ranch, they could have slipped into federal territory while George Tolliver negotiated the trade. Strawbridge moved his pillow restlessly, and wondered why he had not done that. He lay thinking hard, with his eyes fixed on the shining points of the crucifix.

Lubito had been a possibility. If Strawbridge had explained everything to Lubito, with the bull-fighter's help he could have pushed the whole matter through during the afternoon before, instead of waiting over-night and allowing Dolores to trap them by a confession to the priest. With Lubito they could have fled to San Geronimo, and the torero could have brought back a letter arranging the order for rifles. But because he had not thought of these simple expedients, he would have to travel to the ends of the earth, while she, the woman he loved and who loved him, would be kept by the dictator to shame, or to use, as he saw fit.

The drummer writhed and clutched an edge of the straw mattress. He stared with a suffering face at the crucifix. Out of the depth of his soul he was repenting his sins. For what are sins but the mistakes which have worked pain in a man's life? And what is repentance but grief and a turning away from those mistakes? The only difference between the repentance of a saint and the chagrin of a cutpurse caught in the toils of the law, is the class of mistakes in their lives which brings them pain, and from which, in spirit, they turn.

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