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!"