CHAPTER XII
The passing of General Fombombo with the peon girl, Madruja, will call to the philosophical mind one of the sharpest distinctions between North American chastity and Venezuelan laxity. In America, no man, not even the most degraded specimen of our race, would think of parading his mistress before his wife. Such a thing is not done in America. Where the Latin flaunts his dalliances openly, the puritanical North American invariably makes an effort to conceal his shortcomings and to present to the world an innocuous and inoffensive front.
Spanish-American moralists are prone to ascribe this flowering of the great Anglo-Saxon cult of concealment to hypocrisy. Nothing could be shorter of the truth. Hypocrisy is an effort to deceive, but the best English and American types deceive no one. Their intention is not to deceive but to keep life clean, pure, and enjoyable for their fellow-men. For here is the peculiar thing about vice: A man's own shortcomings never appear censure-worthy, whereas the sins of other men are hideous. To be seen openly sinning is to make of oneself a public nuisance.
The genius of the Anglo-Saxon realizes this, and he avoids paining and distressing others by performing his dalliances as privately as possible. This secrecy is each man's private contribution to the comfort and reassurance of his fellow-citizens. Taking us all in all, perhaps America's greatest gift to the world is the peccadillo of low visibility.
As an instance of the deplorable effect of being seen, observe how the passing of General Fombombo and Madruja completely destroyed Mr. Thomas Strawbridge's pleasure in the society of Señora Fombombo. Yet all the time he had known from Lubito the actual state of the case. It had seemed humorous when Lubito told the story, but the sight of the dictator and the peon girl passing in the car was not humorous at all. On the contrary, it was oppressive and painful. It ended abruptly his tête-à-tête with the señora. Indeed, it hung about him for days, popping up every little while with disagreeable iteration.
The incident upset Strawbridge's own code. It caused him to doubt the rightness of any husband deceiving any wife. He had never before thought even of questioning such a situation. He had known many drummers, married men, who when they got to a city would take a little flyer. It had seemed perfectly all right, a sort of joke. Now, abruptly, it all seemed wrong, and he was vaguely angry and ill at ease.
And the personal end of the affair puzzled him. He could not understand how any sane man would run away from so delightful a girl as Dolores Fombombo, to the over-accented and uncultivated charms of a Madruja.
He tried to put himself in the general's place, to fancy himself the husband of Dolores. Would he betray her? Would he deceive the confidence of so dainty a creature? Indeed no! The very thought filled him with a most unusual and tremulous tenderness. Why, before he would break faith with Dolores ... before he would do that.... He got out a cigar, bit off the nib with a snap, and lighted it in vague anger. He continued pacing up and down his room from one barred window to another, looking out at the river, at the gloomy prison called "La Fortuna," at the back of the cathedral.
Then his thoughts veered away from the general's infidelity, and he began thinking about a strange thing which had happened to him a day or two before, when he called on the proprietor of "Sol y Sombra." He decided he would mention it to Dolores; perhaps she could explain it.