correspondent didn't know it, but he was bringing a good temporal fame
to Thirteen and himself in these nights. He had a boy's energy and
sentiment; also a story to tell for every ride and wound and shot in
the dark. The States were attuned to boyish things, as a country always
is in war, and a boy was better than a man for the work.... Often
Bedient would bring him a cup of coffee and arrange a blanket to keep
the wind from the sputtering candles. The two bunks were invariably
spread together; and Bedient was ever ready for a talk in the dark,
when Cairns' brain dulled and refused to be driven to further work,
even under the whip of bitter-black coffee.... They were never to
forget these passionate nights--the mules, the mountains, nor the
changing moon. Cairns was tampering with a drug that is hard to give
up, in absorbing the odor and color of the oriental tropics. It filled
his blood, and though, at the time, its magic was lost somewhat in the
great loneliness for the States, and his mother and sisters--still, he
was destined to know the craving when back on consecrated ground once
more, and the carnal spirit of it all, died from his veins.
The most important lesson for Cairns to grasp was one that Andrew
Bedient seemed to know from the beginning. It was this: To make what
men call a good soldier means the breaking down for all time of that
which is thrillingly brave and tender in man.
Healy is a type--a gamester, a fiend, a catapult. With a yell of
"Hellsfire!" like a bursting shell, he would rowel his saddle-mule and
lead the Train through flood or flame. His was a curse and a blow. He
seemed a devil, condemned ever to pound miles behind him--bloody miles.
Sometimes, there was a sullen baleful gleam in the black eye, shaded by
a campaign hat, but more often it was wide-open and reckless like a man
half-drunk. Rousingly picturesque in action, a boy would exclaim, "Oh,
to be a man like that!" but a _man_ would look at him pityingly and
murmur, "God forbid!"... No other had the racy oaths of this
boss-packer. Here was his art. Out of all his memories of Healy and the
Train, one line stands out in the mind of Cairns, bringing the picture
of pictures:
Again, it was a swift twilight among the gorges between Silang and
Indang. It was after the suicide of the farrier, and there were sores
and galls under the packs. If one cannot quickly start the healing by
first intention, a sore back, in this climate, will ruin a mule. In a
day or two, one is all but felled by the stench and corruption of the
worm-filled wound--when the _aparejo_ is lifted.... Just before the
halt this night, an old gray mule, one of the tortured, had strayed
from the bell; sick, indeed, when that jangle failed to hold her to the
work. Something very strange and sorrowful about these mighty
creatures. If they can but muzzle the flanks of the bell-mare once in
twenty-four hours, often stopping a jolt from the heels of this
temperamental monster--the mules appear morally refreshed for any fate.
Miraculous toilers, sexless hybrids--successful ventures into Nature's
arcanum of cross-fertilization--steady, humorous, wise, enduring, and
homely unto pain! The bond of their whole organization is the bell. It
is the source inseparable in their intelligence from all that is lovely
and of good report--not the sound, but what the sound represents. And
this is the mystery: mare or gelding doesn't seem to matter, nor age,
color, temper; just something set up and smelling like a horse.
Thirteen's crest-jewel was an old roan Jezebel that smothered with
hatred at the approach of the least or greatest of her slaves. She had
a knock-out in four feet--but Beatrice, she was, to those mules.
When Healy found the old gray missing, he remembered she was badly off
under the packs. It was an ordeal to halt and search, for Silang meant
supper and pickets. But the boss led the way back--and his eye was
first to find her.... There she was, silhouetted against the sunset as
poor Benton had been--seventy or eighty feet above the trail. Her head
was down, her tongue fallen. The old burden-bearer seemed to have
clambered up the rocks--through some desperate impulse for a breeze--or
to die! She lifted her head as the hoofs rang below--but still looked
away toward some Mecca for good mules. You must needs have been there
to get it all--the old gray against the red sky--and know first-hand
the torture of the trails, the valor of labor, the awfulness of Luzon.
To Cairns and Bedient there was something deep and heady to the
picture, as they followed the eyes of Healy--and then his yell that
filled the gorges for miles:
"Come down here--you scenery-lovin' son of----"
That was just the _vorspiel_. Mother Nature must have fed color to
Healy. He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse
dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla. Prisms of English
flashed with terrible attraction. It was a Homeric curse of all
nations. Parts of it were dainty, too, as a butterfly dip. Cairns was
hot and courageous under the spell. The whole train of mules huddled
and fell to trembling. A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took on a
sudden obsession, and went howling heinously dawn the gorge. Healy
rolled a cigarette with his free hand, and the old gray let herself
down, half-falling....
And then--the end of campaigning. The rains began gradually that
season, so that the last days were steamy and sickening with the heavy
sweet of tropical fragrance. Between clouds at night, the stars broke
out more than ever brilliant and near, in the washed air. There were
moments when the sky appeared ceiled with phosphor, which a misty cloud
had just brushed and set to dazzling. Something in the soil made them
talk of girls--and Bedient drew forth for Cairns (to see the hem of her
garment)--a certain hushed vision named Adelaide.... At last, the Train
made Manila, wreck that it was, after majestic service; and the great
gray mantle, a sort of moveless twilight, settled down upon Luzon and
the archipelago. Within its folds was a mammoth condenser, contracting
to drench the land impartially, incessantly, for sixty days or more.
And now the fruition of the rice-swamps waxed imperiously; the carabao
soaked himself in endless ecstasy; the rock-ribbed gorges of Southern
Luzon filled with booming and treachery. Fords were obliterated.
Hundreds of little rivers, that had not even left their beds marked
upon the land, burst into being like a new kind of swarm; and many like
these poured into the Pasig, which swelled, became thick and angry with
the drain of the hills, the overflow of the rice-lands, and the filth
and fever-stuff of the cities. At last, the constant din of the rain
became a part of the silence.
FOURTH CHAPTER
THAT ADELAIDE PASSION
Andrew Bedient did not call at all these Asiatic and insular ports and
continue to meet only men. Indeed, he did not fail to encounter those
white women who follow men to disrupted places, where blood is upon the
ground,--nor those native women inevitably present. A man fallen to the
dregs usually finds a woman to keep him company, but it is equally true
that man never climbs so high that, looking upward, he may not see a
woman there.
A little before the _Truxton's_ last voyage, the clipper had remained
in port for a fortnight at Adelaide, New South Wales. A woman in that
city was destined to mean a great deal to the boy of seventeen.... It
would be very easy to say that here was a creature whose way is the way
of darkness. The striking thing is that Adelaide (in the thoughts of
Bedient afterward, she gradually appropriated the name of her city) did
not know she was evil.... Such a woman, it is curious to note, has
appeared in the boyhood of many men of power and eminent equipment.
Adelaide was small and fragrant. Though formerly married, she was true
to her kind in being childless. All her interests were in senses of her
own; or in the senses of men and women who fell beneath her eye; pale,
narrow temples were hers, but crowded with what sensational memories! A
hundred and a few odd pounds, every ounce vivid with health and
rhythmic with desire; every thought a kiss loved, missed, or hoped for;
a frail little flame that needed only time to destroy an arena of
gladiators. Curving, pearly nails with flecks of white in them, a light
low laugh, a sweet low voice! Perhaps this was her charm, a sort of
_samosen_ tone--low lilting minors that have to do with dusk and
gardens and starlight....
There is not even a laughing pretense here that Adelaide was a real
woman; but real women, even in this era of woman, often fail to
remember what pure attractions to man, are their silences and their
minor tones.
Just a fortnight--but what a tearing it was to leave her! Old Mother
Nature must have writhed at this parting--groaned at the sight of the
boy staring back from the high stern of the _Truxton_, at the stars
lowering over the city and the woman, Adelaide. Possibly she retained
something from the depth of his individuality.... Bedient would not
have said so; but there is no doubt that her importance in his life was
that of a _mannequin_ upon which to drape his ideals. Had he seen her,
in the later years, he would have met the dull misery of
disillusionment. Adelaide was a boy's sensational trophy. Her distant
beauty and color was the art and pigment of his own mind.
A soul rudiment, a mental bud, and a beautiful prophylactic body--such
was her equipment. He dreamed of her as a love flower of
inextinguishable sweetness. The mere abstraction of her sex,--colorless
enough to most grown men,--was a sort of miracle to the boy. He made it
shining with his idealism.... Frail arms held out to him; cool arms
that turned electric with fervor. Unashamed, she took him as her
own....
Exquisite devourer, yet she had much to do in bringing forth from the
latent, one of the rarest gifts a boy can have--lovelier than royalty
and fine as genius--the blue flower of fastidiousness. Adelaide, all
unconcerned, identified herself with this, and it lived in the
foreground of his mind. She became his Southland, his isle of the sea.
Winds from the South were her kisses--almost all the kisses he knew for
years afterward. Living women were less to him than her memory. Facing
the South, through many a hot-breathed night, he saw her--and the
little house.... And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the
morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out
impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She
had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her
for that!... A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected
cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like,--yet she
held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or
no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea--and this, through
those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick
and despicable with excess.
Bedient often questioned himself--why he had not given up his berth on
the _Truxton_ and remained longer in Adelaide. There were a dozen ships
in the harbor to take him forth when he cared. This thought had not
come to him at the time. Quite as remarkable was the formidable
_something_ which arose in his brain at the thought of going back. This
was not to be fathomed then--nor willed away. The roots of his
integrity were shaken at the thought of return. Andrew Bedient at
thirty-four understood. His was a soul that could thrive on dreams and
denials. Even half-formed, this soul was the source of a strange
antagonism, against which the fleshly desire to return was powerless.
Poise, indeed, for a cook among sailors and packers.
The time came when he heard other women--blessed women--speak of the
Adelaide type of sister as the crowning abomination; he watched their
eyes harden and glitter as only a mother-bird's can, in the circling
shadow of a hawk; he lived to read in the havoc of men's faces that the
ways of such women were ways of death; he believed all this--yet
preserved something exquisite. Ten years afterward, winds from the
South brought him the spirit of fragrance from her shoulders and hair.
From his own ideals, he had focussed upon that Emptiness, the beauty
and dimension of a Helen.
Other experiences, up to the real romance--and these were surprisingly
few--were episodes, brief quickenings of the old flame...When the first
American soldiers were being lightered ashore in Manila harbor, in
fact, shortly after the cannonading in the harbor, a certain woman came
over from the States and took a house in Manila. It was known as the
Block-House. Some months afterward, and just before the long trip of
the Train in which Cairns featured, Bedient met this woman on the
_Escolta_. It was at dusk, and she was crossing the narrow pavement
from the post-office entrance to her carriage-door. Their eyes met
frankly. She was wise, under thirty, very slender, perfectly dressed;
pretty, of course, but more than that; her little perfections were
carried far beyond the appreciation of any but women physically
faultless as herself.
Bedient was impressed with something passionate and courageous,
possibly dangerous. He could not have told the source of this
impression. It was not in the contour, in the white softness of skin,
in the full brown eyes, fair brow, nor in the reddened arch of her
lips. It was something from the whole, denoted possibly in the quick
dilation of her delicate nostrils or in the startling discovery of such
a woman in Manila.... She lowered her eyes, started for her
carriage--then turned again to the tall figure of Bedient in fresh
white clothing. Or it may have been that her deep nature found delight
in the excellent boyishness of the tanned face.
"Wouldn't you like to drive with me on the _Luneta_?" she asked
pleasantly, and there was a low tone in her voice which made her
instantly different.
"Why, yes, I should like to."
Her carriage was a _victoriette_, small to match the ponies--black
stallions, noteworthy for style and spirit even in Manila, where one's
equipage is the measure of fortune.... Bedient found that he could be
silent without causing an abatement of her pleasure. And, indeed, she
seemed a little embarrassed, too, although he did not accept this.
Vaguely he was ruffled by the thought that he had merely been chosen as
the principal of a nightly adventure.... This was untrue.
It was before the time of native concerts on the sea-drive, but in the
night itself, and in the soft undertone from the sea, there was ardent
atmosphere--with this woman beside him. The deeper current of his
thoughts rushed with memories, but upon the surface played the adorable
present, swift with adjustments as her swiftly-moving arms. The wonder
of Womanhood was ever-new to him. Mighty gusts of animation surged
through his body. He spoke from queer angles of consciousness, and did
not remember. She could laugh charmingly.... To her, the Hour uprose.
Here was clear manhood of twenty (and such an unhurt boy he had proved
to be)--to make her very own!... She had taught herself to live by the
hour; had forfeited the right to be loved long. She knew the time would
soon come, when she could not hold nor attract men. It comes always to
women who dissipate themselves among the many. Yet she loved the love
of an hour; was a connoisseur of the love-tokens of men to her; no
material loss was counted in the balance against a winning such as this
promised to be. Here was a big intact passion which she called unto
herself with every art; her developed senses felt it pouring upon her;
this was a drug to die for. It made her brave and filled her mind with
dreams--as wine does to some men. Already he was giving her love--of a
sort that older men withhold from her kind. She put her hand upon his
wrist--and told the native to drive them home.
... They sat in a hammock together on the rear balcony of the
Block-House. It had been a dangerous moment passing through the house.
There had been embarrassments, the telltale artifices of the
establishment, but she would not suffer the work of the ride to be torn
down. She held him in enchantment by sheer force of will; and now they
were alone, and she was building again. There was wine. Over the
balcony rail, they watched the Pasig running wickedly below; and
across, stretching away to where the stars lay low in the rim of the
horizon, the wet teeming rice-lands brooded in the night-mist.... The
piano, which had seemed unstrung from the voyage, as he passed through
the house, sounded but faintly now through several shut doors. The
fragments were mellifluous....
She knew he was a civilian from his dress, and asked his work in Luzon.
He told her he was cook of Pack-train Thirteen, just now quartered in
the main corral. She laughed, but didn't believe. He was not the first
to conceal his office from her. It was unpleasant; apt to be dangerous.
She did not ask a second time.... There was just one other perilous
moment. They had been together on the balcony but a half-hour, when she
turned her face to him, her eyes shut, and said:
"You're a dear boy!... I haven't kissed anyone like that--oh, in long,
long!... It makes me feel like a woman--how silly of me!"
Her face and throat looked ghastly white for a moment in the sheltered
candles. "Isn't it silly of me--isn't it--_isn't it_?" she kept
repeating, picking at his fingers, and touching his cheeks in
frightened fashion.... She was reaching amazing deeps of him. The best
of her was his, for she could give greatly. It was wonderful, if
momentary. He felt the terrific strength of his hands, as if his
fingers must strike sparks when he touched her flesh. The need of her
flamed high within him. She was delight in every movement and
expression; and so slender and fervent and sweet-voiced.... She had
banished the one encroachment of sordidness. The high passion of this
moment was builded upon basic attractions, as with children. Some
strong intuition had prevailed upon her so to build. They had come to
an end of words....
A knock at the door broke the _notturno appassionato_. She had left
word not to be called for any reason. Furiously now she rushed across
the room.... Bedient did not see the female servant at the door, but
heard the frightened voice uttering the word, "Brigadier----." The
answer from the woman who had left his arms was mercifully vague, but
the voice at the door whimpered, "Only it was _the General_----!"...
It was all hideously clear. Bedient was left sterile, polar. The door
slammed shut; the woman faced him--and understood. There was no
restoring _this_ ruin.... She now damned military rank and her
establishment in a slow, dreadful voice. Her knuckles seemed driven
into her temples. She wanted to weep, to be soothed and petted--to have
her Hour brought back, but she saw that her beauty was gone from
him--and all the mystery which had been in their relation a minute
before.... Her rebellion, so far hard-held, now became fiendish. It was
not against him, but herself. So vivid and terrible was her
concentration of hatred upon the cause, that Bedient caught the picture
of the Brigadier in her mind. He _saw_ the man afterward--a fat and
famous soldier.... She spat upon the floor. Her lower lip was drawn in
and the small white teeth snapped upon it.
There was nothing in the Block-House ever to bring him back. Her last
vestige of attraction for him had disintegrated. Bedient had nothing to
say; he caught up her clenched hand and kissed it.... And in the street
he heard feminine voices rising to the pitch of hysteria. A servant
rushed forth for a surgeon. The woman had fallen into "one of her
seizures."...
Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward. Bedient was
not at all himself.... In all the months that followed meeting David
Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible
for words--though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a
hundred other matters.
There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the
first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by
rumors of uprising. Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in
service--was just a name. Bedient was delighting in the thought of
hunting up Cairns in China.... It was dusk again, that redolent hour.
Bedient had just dined. So sensitive were his veins--that coffee roused
him as brandy might another. His health was brought to such perfection,
that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and
senses. Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a
Filipino woman was novel. Strange, forbidding woman of the
river-banks--yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young
manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point
of the shoulder--a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head--was
enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not
desire--but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon
full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic
visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world,
to find the Woman--somewhere.
Bedient did not know at this time of the heart emptiness of the world's
women--a longing so vast, so general, that interstellar space is needed
to hold it all. Still, he had so much to give, it seemed that in the
creative scheme of things there must be a woman to receive and ignite
all these potentials of love.... In this mood his mind reverted to that
isle of the sea--the woman, and the room that was her house.... He was
sitting in the plaza before the _Hotel d'Oriente._ A little
bamboo-table was before him and a long glass of claret and fruit-juice.
The night was still; hanging-lanterns were lit, though the darkness was
not yet complete. There was a mingling of mysterious lights and shadows
among the palm-foliage that challenged the imagination--like an
unfinished picture.... Only a few of the tables were occupied. The
native servants were very quiet. Bedient heard a girlish voice out of
the precious and perilous South.
... It was not Adelaide. He had only started to turn, when his
consciousness told him that. But the voice was much like hers--the same
low and lazy loveliness in the formation of certain words. The appeal
was swift. Bedient did not turn, though he sat tingling and
attentive.... At this time not a few of the American officers had been
joined by their wives in Manila, and most of these were quartered at
the _Oriente_.... He knew the man's voice, too, but in such a different
way--the voice of a soldier heard afield.
What was said had little or no significance--a man's tolerant,
sometimes laughing monosyllables; and silly, cuddling, unquotable
nothings from his companion. It was the ardor in her tones--the sort of
completion of sensuous happiness--and the strange kinship between her
and the woman he had known--these, that brought to Bedient a sudden
madness of hunger to hear such words for his own....
The man had but recently come in from field-work. The woman was fresh
from a transport voyage from the States. He talked laughingly of the
"niggers" his company had met--of small, close fighting and surprises.
She wanted to hear more, more,--but alone. She was pressing him, less
with words than manner, to come into the hotel and relate his
adventures, where they could be quite alone.... She had been so
passionately lonely without him--back in Washington ... and the long
voyage.... Her voice enthralled Bedient.
They were married. The man laughed often. The tropics had enervated
him, though he made no such confession. He wanted drink and lights. To
him, the present was relishable. Their chairs scraped the tiles before
Bedient turned.... They had not risen. She caught his eyes. Hers were
not eyes of one who would be lonely in Washington nor during a long
transport voyage. She was very young, but a vibrant feminine, her
awakening already long-past. There was just a glimpse of light hair, a
red-lipped profile and slow, shining dark eyes. She was not even like
Adelaide, but a blood sister in temperament. Bedient saw this in her
hands, wrists, lips and skin, in the pure elemental passion which came
from her every tone and motion. One of the insatiate--yet frail
and lovely and scented like a carnation; a white flower,
red-tipped--sublimate of earthy perfume.
Bedient had seen the man in the field, a young West Point product, with
a queer, rabbit face, lots of men friends, the love of his company, and
a remarkable kind of physical courage--a splendid young chap, black
from the heats, who was being talked about for his grisly humor under
fire. This officer had seen his men down--and stayed with them.... His
was a different and deeper love. He did not hurry. It seemed as if she
would take his hand, after all, and lead him into the hotel. Just a
little girl--little over twenty.