CHAPTER XXV
The novitiate of Dolores Fombombo was Fortune's shrewdest thrust at Thomas Strawbridge. After that he stayed on at the priests' house because it ceased to make any difference to him where he domiciled. He spent most of his days there with the priests, sitting in the patio or lying on his straw bed in the cubicle. Now and then, when he saw his bags, he would think to himself, "I ought to take some samples and my order-book and canvass this town again." At other times he would think, "I ought to write a report to my house." But his feeling of "oughtness" applied to a perfectly empty motor-impulse for execution. It was precisely as if he were a figure without any will whatsoever.
Strangely, he did not think over-much of Dolores. Occasionally, when his mind made a movement toward her, he had a terrifying feeling as if some chasm were opening before him. Then, almost immediately, it seemed as if his brain closed gently shut, the chasm vanished, and with it all thought of the girl. To say that he grieved for her would be untrue. He had been numbed.
The most trifling things were sufficient to catch the drummer's unanchored attention. His eyes would follow the priests' cat across the patio, or he would watch the slow march of the cathedral's shadow over the flagstones in the calle.
He became acquainted with the priests who were domiciled in the building. These were his Grace the Bishop, Father Honario, a big, sleek, solemn man with swinging jowls that were bluish from a closely shaved beard. Father Roberto was a close-lipped man with a disapproving expression. Then there was Father Pedro, a fat, unaspiring priest, who drank enough wine at his noon meal to make him sleepy all the afternoon. There was still a fifth priest at the house who was not attached to the cathedral at all. This was Father Jaíme, a sort of itinerant guest who had come to the Canalejos cathedral from a Trappist monastery on Lake Titicaca in Peru. The bishop allowed Father Jaíme a few pittances for holding mass at the funerals of his humbler parishioners, and this was the only stipend he received. When Strawbridge knew him he was trying to save sufficient money to purchase the churchman's half-fare passage from Canalejos to Port au Spain in Trinidad, where the Benedictines had a monastery. As far as Strawbridge could gather, Father Jaíme was a sort of ecclesiastical tramp.
The man who rang the cathedral bells, an office which occurred at almost every hour of the day, was called the "Cock." His nickname came, perhaps, from a thin, beak-like nose protruding from under the dirty visor of an old cap. He had a Jewish appearance. He was the only object which aroused to wrath the lethargic children of the cathedral settlement. When the Cock appeared, the children spat at him and called him "bloodsucker" and all manner of insulting epithets. The reason for this contumely was that the Cock lent money in a small way, and the hatred poor people have for a parsimonious money-lender was reflected in their children.
The Cock lived with a very industrious Indian wife, in one of the adobes at the back of the cathedral. He seldom spoke to any one, but moved gloomily on his way to and from his bells. However, once Strawbridge did observe a visitor in the bell-ringer's hut. One day as the salesman was walking slowly along one of the paths on the terrain of the river, a gay figure stepped out from the blackness of the hut, drew off his sombrero, and bowed to the American with undeniable grace. As he bowed he exhibited a knot of hair at the back of his head.
"How goes el señor, mi General!" he called warmly. "Be assured Lubito knows your unhappiness, señor, and that you have but to lift a finger and the sword of a bull-fighter will leap from its scabbard." He went through the pantomime of drawing his sword, and his bold figure, set against the darkness of the doorway, formed a picture.
The sick man looked at him, thought of his walk with Lubito in the plaza, Esteban's attack on General Fombombo in the palace, Madruja. Such reminiscences were leading him straight to the señora, when some involuntary check in his mind softly closed that stream of thought and left the drummer staring emptily at the torero's posturing. He turned away along the path, vaguely disturbed and unhappy. The bull-fighter looked around and nodded knowingly to some one inside the hut.
"Caramba!" he praised. "What did I tell you? Deep! Why, you can't tell by his face that he even knows me, and yet ... we are as brothers! What a dictator that hombre will make!"
The cathedral itself was a kind of labyrinth through which Strawbridge sometimes wandered with a sort of dulled attention. He understood little of the ecclesiastical symbolism in the chapels and on the high altar, or the allegorical frescoes in the dome and pendentive. He did peruse the fourteen stations of the passion which spaced the interior walls of the church, and while he could not follow the details of some of the cartoons he understood their general purport. He never entered the chapel of the Last Supper. Something warned him from the place where he had stood with Dolores under Michelena's great masterpiece.
This, unfortunately, was the only worthy canvas which the cathedral of Canalejos contained. The other chapels held staring images of one saint or another, and near the entrance of the pile, on the right side, was a crude picture of souls in purgatory. It was so badly done it was not even hideous.
The altars of the more popular saints were piled with ex-voto offerings. These were all manner of little images, made of tin, silver, or gold, and not much larger than a tobacco-tag. They were images of legs, hearts, arms, feet, a little tin mule, or a tiny house. Each one commemorated a miracle performed by the saint on whose altar it lay. A little silver leg was probably the gift of some rheumatic whom the good saint had cured; a mule would illustrate the gratitude of a peon for finding a strayed burro. The simplicity and childishness of these little gifts touched even Strawbridge; and, moreover, such an accumulation of testimonials lent a certain air of credibility to the power of the images in the chapels.
Besides these offerings of gratitude, on each altar were piles of letters asking the saint for further interventions. Once, as Strawbridge was looking at the missives, he wondered if any real power lay back of these stiff images of saints. Could it be that behind them was ranged some sort of spiritual reality, with a power and a will to soften human unhappiness? The thought stirred the benumbed heart of the American. He stood staring up at the wooden effigy, with a notion of adding a petition of his own to the pile on the altar.
The thought moved him. He walked out at the side entrance of the cathedral, into the priests' house. His legs trembled with his idea. In his cubicle he got out pen and paper and sat down to write, when a strange thing stopped him. All of his stationery bore the letter-head of the Orion Arms Corporation. It struck the drummer as somewhat incongruous to write a note to Saint John in heaven on New York letter-heads. And now that he had started to use his own envelops, he could not go out deliberately and purchase the big, square Latin-American envelops such as the peons used in writing a letter to Saint John. In brief, the sight of his matter-of-fact American paper shattered his transitory mysticism and made it impossible. However, the dying of this hope left the drummer grayer than ever.
The wood-carving in the cathedral next offered itself to Strawbridge's faint interest. The circular balustrade which led up and around one of the columns of the nave, to the pulpit, and the canopy over the pulpit were carved out of mahogany with the motif of pineapples and yucca-palm. The wood was black with the centuries. Strawbridge thought this was a defect, but when he recognized the two plants intertwined in the carving, his discovery gave him a childish joy. It led him to look at other work—the choir-stalls, which were not half so well done as the pulpit; the reredos; the altar panels; the pyx. Everywhere his eye fell he saw the labor of generations. Some were the carvings of the Spanish artisans who came to the New World not long after Columbus; others were the work of the Indian and negro apprentices of those original wood-carvers. The whole rise and decline of a folk-art was epitomized in the cathedral at Canalejos.
About a week after Strawbridge came to the priests' house he was walking in the cathedral one afternoon and wandered through an open door into an anteroom full of the images which the priests used in their processionals. It was a strange sight—the Madonnas with dust on their gilt halos; Saint Peter holding up a tarnished key; Saint Thomas reaching a broken finger toward the far-off wounds of Christ. These and perhaps a dozen other dusty figures, all as large as life, were placed helter-skelter in the storeroom, some facing one direction, some another. Over in a corner lay three or four litters on which the images were borne. One had a glass frame, another was draped in silks.
The drummer stood looking curiously about him, when he heard a rustling among the images. He moved toward the sound, and after a moment saw an old woman dusting the statues with a brush. A second glance showed him it was Josefa's grandmother. This dusting no doubt was a part of her labor as a charwoman in the cathedral.
Presently the old crone observed Strawbridge. She recognised the American, and put down her duster.
"Cá! It is you, señor. I thought it was Filipe, come in to help me. Have you come to tell me something?"
Strawbridge explained that he was merely idling in the cathedral; then he asked her how she liked her quarters by this time.
"It keeps the rain away. Then you have nothing to tell me of poor Josefa?"
"No, Doña Consolacion—at least not yet," he added, in order to give some crumbs of hope.
The old woman mumbled her wrinkled mouth with nervousness.
"But you will soon?"
"I hope so, Doña Consolacion."
"Very soon?"
"I hope so."
She nodded.
"Sí, sí, I hope so. I pray so every night, señor, at my oraciones." She gave a Virgin a stroke with her brush, then added in a whisper, forming the words very plainly with her thin wrinkled lips, "Who—was—it—the—soldiers—dropped—in—the—river—the—other—night?"
The question brought the drummer a wave of surprise and revived pain.
"I ... I don't know, señora!"
The old woman gave up her dusting and came nearer, so she could talk in a whisper.
"You don't think—you don't believe i-it could h-have b-been—?" She gasped and cut off her sentence.
"You mean...."
She nodded mutely, with a terrified expression in her old eyes.
"Why, no, Doña Consolacion, I am sure it was not ... not your grandson!"
But Doña Consolacion was peering at him, and his face was too full of apprehension to reassure her. On the contrary, with the suspicion of the aged she read tragedy there. She suddenly dropped her duster and her face screwed up into the tearless grimacing which stands for weeping with the aged.
"Oh, Dios mio! my Josefa, my poor little Josefa is gone!" She rocked to and fro with her hands crossed over her dried breast. Suddenly something flared up in her and she pointed at Strawbridge: "And you did it! You killed him! It makes no difference to me if it was all a part of a plan to free this country. I would rather have my little Josefa than free a thousand countries!"
Strawbridge made a gesture.
"But listen, señora; there is no reason to think it was Josefa! He was young and strong. He wouldn't have succumbed so quickly. There must be hundreds of other prisoners in that jail. It is more likely one of them has died than ... than your grandson.... Some old man whose strength had broken down!"
The old woman grew quieter at this reasoning, and stood looking at Strawbridge, with her toothless lips moving in and out with her agitated breathing.
"Holy Mary! I hope you are right! If I only knew he was alive! But he was young and strong, as you say.... Cá! but I don't see why you should have chosen him, Señor Strawbridge, to cast into prison, even if it is all a part of your terrible plans."
"But, dear Doña Consolacion," remonstrated the drummer, "it was no part of a plan. There was no plan to it. It was simply an unfortunate move, an accident."
The old charwoman shook her head.
"Cá! señor! there is no use deceiving me! I am not a spy but an old woman cast down by a tyrant. And my family have always been lovers of freedom. My father was a Rosales." Her old voice gathered dignity at this reference to her family, and then, nodding her head to accent her words, she added, "And poor Ricardo, whom you had shot, Señor Strawbridge—he was my grandnephew."
The American stared in amazement.
"Ricardo ... whom I had shot!"
"Sí, señor—Lieutenant Rosales, whom you ordered shot in San Geronimo. Pues, you need not stare so. I understand all. Lubito has explained your deep and mysterious plans that reach all over the world. And also Lubito explained that one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. Napoleon first said that, señor; all cruel men say it. But I do not complain. I was born a Rosales, and more than one of us has given himself to die."
The old woman's persistent delusion that he was some sort of arch-plotter, assigning this and that man to his fate, filled the drummer with dismay.
"But señora," he began hopelessly, "how many times have I said that I have nothing, nothing whatever to do with all this butchery! I would not harm a soul in Rio Negro—no, not for the whole government. I would not—"
But the old creature shook her head, with her mouth quirked in withered satire.
"Ola, señor!" She wagged a finger. "I know, I know." She started to stoop for her brush, but the drummer forestalled her. "I know one little thing that tells me all, no matter what you admit or deny."
Strawbridge looked at her.
"What's that?"
"I refer to...." She wagged her head vaguely and looked at the American with narrowed and disapproving eyes.
"What are you talking about, Doña Consolacion?"
"I was down at the riverside on the night when the soldiers flung the body of the dead man into the water."
The salesman stared at her, with his brows drawn in a faint frown.
"Well ... what of that?"
"Oh, what of that! I was at the riverside just below the palacio, Señor Strawbridge, where the white boat lay. I went down because the Cock told me I could find some driftwood there, and I had no money to buy charcoal...."
The phrase "white boat" moved some memory that was battened down in Strawbridge's heart. It gave him a ghastly sensation, as if an arm were reaching out of a grave. And there was something disconcerting in the rancor in the crone's voice, in the circumstantiality with which she began her account. He stood looking at her, wondering and rather fearing what she was about to say.
"What's the point to this?" he hesitated at last. "What if you were at the river—under the palacio?"
The charwoman found enough spirit to shrug.
"No matter how grand your final object may be, señor, I think that was going a little too far. There are certain things a Spanish caballero will not do, señor—no, not though he gain all Venezuela by it!"
The drummer took a step nearer the old woman, and looked hard at her.
"Look here, Consolacion," he uttered in a strained voice, "what—in—the—hell—are—you—talking—about?"
The ancient shrugged again, and the nostrils of her hatchety old nose dilated momentarily, then she burst out:
"Dios mio! I am talking about the señora, poor Doña Dolores, whom I found down there—poor lamb!—frightened almost to death, and weeping. She started to fly as I came up, but I called to her and she knew I was a woman...."
A horripilation went over Strawbridge. He clutched the old creature's arm.
"The señora!" he whispered, staring with distended eyes. "My God! you can't mean Dolores was down there that night, on the river!"
The hag broke into sardonic, clacking laughter.
"No, you didn't know that! You didn't know you had a poor frightened girl go down to the river bank and wait and pray for your coming until it grew so light she was forced back into the palacio! No, you didn't know that! Oh, to be sure, I explained to her your plans. I told her that she was just a tiny little part; that you had killed my grandnephew and my grandson, and now for some reason you had flung her down in the river mud, like an old rag—you, and your great plans!"
The old crone's tirade seemed to break loose something hot and seething in Strawbridge's brain. The enormity of his delinquence, the pitifulness of the girl, the rapture which might have been his! His legs shook so that he caught at the effigy of the Blessed Virgin. But all that remained of his mutilated hand were two fingers. These gave way instantly, he staggered against the wooden figure, and the thing swung slowly over and crashed on the tiles.
The ancient shifted from the dowager back to the servant again.
"Look! Look!" she squealed. "Oh, look what you've done! You've broken her head!"
The American neither saw nor heard the fall of the effigy.
"But, señora," he stuttered, with a salty taste in his mouth, "he ... he told me ... Father Benicio told me that she ... she had gone to a convent!"
The hag came out of her servant's concern for the statue and fell to lashing again:
"A priest told you! Diantre! You believed a priest in a case like that! Poor little dove! She did join the sisterhood, Señor Strawbridge, but it was on the afternoon after your cruel desertion of her. What else could she do—poor little dove!"