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.