At ten o’clock in the morning Ramon was hard at work in the office of
James B. Green. He worked efficiently and with zest as he always did after
one of his trips to the mountains. He got out of these ventures into
another environment about what some men get out of sprees—a complete
change of the state of mind. Archulera and his daughter were now
completely forgotten, and all of his usual worries and plans were creeping
back into his consciousness.
But this day he had a feeling of pleasant anticipation. At first he could
not account for it. And then he remembered the girl—the one he had seen on
the train and had met again at the Montezuma ball. It seemed as though the
thought of her had been in the back of his mind all the time, and now
suddenly came forward, claiming all his attention, stirring him to a
quick, unwonted excitement. She had said he might come to see her. He was
to ’phone first. Maybe she would be alone.…
In this latter hope he was disappointed. She gave him the appointment, and
she herself admitted him. He thought he had never seen such a dainty bit
of fragrant perfection, all in pink that matched the pink of her strange
little crinkled mouth.
“I’m awfully glad you came,” she told him. (Her gladness was always
awful.) She led him into the sitting room and presented him to the tall
emaciated sick man and the large placid woman who had watched over her so
carefully on the train.
Gordon Roth greeted him with a cool and formal manner into which he
evidently tried to infuse something of cordiality, as though a desire to
be just and broad-minded struggled with prejudice. Mrs. Roth looked at him
with curiosity, and gave him a still more restrained greeting. The
conversation was a weak and painful affair, kept barely alive, now by one
and now by another. The atmosphere was heavy with disapproval. If their
greetings had left Ramon in any doubt as to the attitude of the girl’s
family toward him, that doubt was removed by the fact that neither Mrs.
Roth nor her son showed any intention of leaving the room. This would have
been not unusual if he had called on a Mexican girl, especially if she
belonged to one of the more old-fashioned families; but he knew that
American girls are left alone with their suitors if the suitor is at all
welcome.
He knew a little about this family from hear-say. They came from one of
the larger factory towns in northern New York, and were supposed to be
moderately wealthy. They used a very broad “a” and served tea at four
o’clock in the afternoon. Gordon Roth was a Harvard graduate and did not
conceal the fact. Neither did he conceal his hatred for this sandy little
western town, where ill-health had doomed him to spend many of his days
and perhaps to end them.
The girl was strangely different from her mother and brother. Whereas
their expressions were stiff and solemn, her eyes showed an irrepressible
gleam of humour, and her fascinating little mouth was mobile with mirth.
She fidgeted around in her chair a good deal, as a child does when bored.
Mrs. Roth decorously turned the conversation toward the safe and reliable
subjects of literature and art.
“What do you think of Maeterlinck, Mr. Delcasar?” she enquired in an
innocent manner that must have concealed malice.
“I don’t know him,” Ramon admitted, “Who is he?”
Mrs. Roth permitted herself to smile. Gordon Roth came graciously to the
rescue.
“Maeterlinck is a great Belgian writer,” he explained. “We are all very
much interested in him.…”
Julia gave a little flounce in her chair, and crossed her legs with a
defiant look at her mother.
“I’m not interested in him,” she announced with decision. “I think he’s a
bore. Listen, Mr. Delcasar. You know Conny Masters? Well, he was telling
me the most thrilling tale the other day. He said that the country
Mexicans have a sort of secret religious fraternity that most of the men
belong to, and that they meet every Good Friday and beat themselves with
whips and sit down on cactus and crucify a man on a cross and all sorts of
horrible things … for penance you know, just like the monks and things in
the Middle Ages.… He claims he saw them once and that they had blood
running down to their heels. Is that all true? I’ve forgotten what he
called them.…”
Ramon nodded.
“Sure. The _penitentes_. I’ve seen them lots of times.”
“O, do tell us about them. I love to hear about horrible things.”
“Well, I’ve seen lots of _penitente_ processions, but the best one I ever
saw was a long time ago, when I was a little kid. There are not so many of
them now, and they don’t do as much as they used to. The church is down on
them, you know, and they’re afraid. Ten years ago if you tried to look at
them, they would shoot at you, but now tourists take pictures of them.”
Gordon Roth’s curiosity had been aroused.
“Tell me,” he broke in. “What is the meaning of this thing? How did it get
started?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Ramon admitted. “My grandfather told me that they
brought it over from Spain centuries ago, and the Indians here had a sort
of whipping fraternity, and the two got mixed up, I guess. The church used
to tolerate it; it was a regular religious festival. But now it’s
outlawed. They still have a lot of political power. They all vote the same
way. One man that was elected to Congress—they say that the _penitente_
stripes on his back carried him there. And he was a gringo too. But I
don’t know. It may be a lie.…”
“But tell us about that procession you saw when you were a little boy,”
Julia broke in. She was leaning forward with her chin in her hand, and her
big grey eyes, wide with interest, fixed upon his face.
“Well, I was only about ten years old, and I was riding home from one of
our ranches with my father. We were coming through _Tijeras_ canyon. It
was March, and there was snow on the ground in patches, and the mountains
were cold and bare, and I remember I thought I was going to freeze. Every
little while we would get off and set fire to a tumble-weed by the road,
and warm our hands and then go on again.…
“Anyway, pretty soon I heard a lot of men singing, all together, in deep
voices, and the noise echoed around the canyon and sounded awful solemn.
And I could hear, too, the slap of the big wide whips coming down on the
bare backs, wet with blood, like slapping a man with a wet towel, only
louder. I didn’t know what it was, but my father did, and he called to me
and we spurred our horses right up the mountain, and hid in a clump of
cedar up there. Then they came around a bend in the road, and I began to
cry because they were all covered with blood, and one of them fell down.…
My father slapped me and told me to shut up, or they would come and shoot
us.”
“But what did they look like? What were they doing?” Julia demanded
frowning at him, impatient with his rambling narrative.
“Well, in front there was _un carreta del muerto_. That means a wagon of
death. I don’t think you would ever see one any more. It was just an
ordinary wagon drawn by six men, naked to the waist and bleeding, with
other men walking beside them and beating them with blacksnake whips, just
like they were mules. In the wagon they had a big bed of stones, covered
with cactus, and a man sitting in the cactus, who was supposed to
represent death. And then they had a Virgin Mary, too. Four _penitentes_
just like the others, with nothing on but bloody pants and black bandages
around their eyes, carried the image on a litter raised up over their
heads, and they had swords fastened to their elbows and stuck between
their ribs, so that if they let down, the swords would stick into their
hearts and kill them. And behind that came the _Cristo_—the man that
represented Jesus, you know, dragging a big cross. Behind him came twenty
or thirty more _penitentes_, the most I ever saw at once, some of them
whipping themselves with big broad whips made out of _amole_. One was too
weak to whip himself, so two others walked behind him and whipped him.
Pretty soon he fell down and they walked over him and stepped on his
stomach.…”
“But did they crucify the man, the whatever-you-call-him?” Gordon
demanded.
“The _Cristo_. Sure. They crucify one every year. They used to nail him.
Now they generally do it with ropes, but that’s bad enough, because it
makes him swell up and turn blue.… Sometimes he dies.”
Julia was listening with lips parted and eyes wide, horrified and yet
fascinated, as are so many women by what is cruel and bloody. But Gordon,
who had become equally interested, was cool and inquisitive.
“And you mean to tell me that at one time nearly all the—er—native people
belonged to this barbaric organization, and that many of them do yet?”
“Nearly all the common _pelados_,” Ramon hastened to explain. “They are
nearly all Indian or part Indian, you know. Not the educated people.” Here
a note of pride came into his voice. “We are descended from officers of
the Spanish army—the men who conquered this country. In the old days,
before the Americans came, all these common people were our slaves.”
“I see,” said Gordon Roth in a dry and judicial tone.
The _penitentes_, as a subject of conversation, seemed exhausted for the
time being and Ramon had given up all hope of being alone with Julia. He
rose and took his leave. To his delight Julia followed him to the door. In
the hall she gave him her hand and looked up at him, and neither of them
found anything to say. For some reason the pressure of her hand and the
look of her eyes flustered and confused him more than had all the coldness
and disapproval of her family. At last he said good-bye and got away, with
his hat on wrong side before and the blood pounding in his temples.