were made of calico-print, with a design of little black skulls
sprinkled over a yellow background. Some parts hung flat and limp as if
upon a scarecrow; others pulsed, like a fire-hose in action, with the
pressure of flesh compressed beneath, while at other points they bulged
pneumatically in little foot-balls. The right leg dropped to the ankle;
the left stopped discouraged, a few inches below the knee. The seams
looked like the putty mountain chains of the geography class. As the
Maestro strode along he threw rapid glances at his handiwork, and it was
plain that the emotions that moved him were somewhat mixed in character.
His face showed traces of a puzzled diffidence, as that of a man who has
come in sack-coat to a full-dress function; but after all it was
satisfaction that predominated, for after this heroic effort he had
decided that Victory had at last perched upon his banners.
And it really looked so for a time. Isidro stayed at school at least
during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later
in the forenoon paid a visit to the annex, he found the Assistant in
charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant
and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding
to his side of the argument with his customary energy.
Isidro was trouserless. Sitting rigid upon his bench, holding on with
both hands as if in fear of being removed, he dangled naked legs to the
sight of who might look.
"Que barbaridad!" murmured the Assistant in limp dejection.
But Isidro threw at him a look of black hatred. This became a tense,
silent plea for justice as it moved up for a moment to the Maestro's
face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid
accusation.
"Where are your trousers, Isidro?" asked the Maestro.
Isidro relaxed his convulsive grasp of the bench with one hand, canted
himself slightly to one side just long enough to give an instantaneous
view of the trousers, neatly folded and spread between what he was
sitting with and what he was sitting on, then swung back with the
suddenness of a kodak-shutter, seized his seat with new determination,
and looked eloquent justification at the Maestro.
"Why will you not wear them?" asked the latter.
"He says he will not get them dirty," said the Assistant, interpreting
the answer.
"Tell him when they are dirty he can go down to the river and wash
them," said the Maestro.
Isidro pondered over the suggestion for two silent minutes. The prospect
of a day spent splashing in the lukewarm waters of the Ilog he finally
put down as not at all detestable, and getting up to his feet:
"I will put them on," he said gravely.
Which he did on the moment, with an absence of hesitation as to which
was front and which was back, very flattering to the Maestro.
That Isidro persevered during the next week, the Maestro also came to
know. For now regularly every evening as he smoked and lounged upon his
long, cane chair, trying to persuade his tired body against all laws of
physics to give up a little of its heat to a circumambient atmosphere of
temperature equally enthusiastic; as he watched among the rafters of the
roof the snakes swallowing the rats, the rats devouring the lizards, the
lizards snapping up the spiders, the spiders snaring the flies in
eloquent representation of the life struggle, his studied passiveness
would be broken by strange sounds from the dilapidated hut at the back
of his house. A voice, imitative of that of the Third Assistant who
taught the annex, hurled forth questions, which were immediately
answered by another voice, curiously like that of Isidro.
Fiercely: "Du yu ssee dde hhett?"
Breathlessly: "Yiss I ssee dde hhett."
Ferociously: "Show me dde hhett."
Eagerly: "Here are dde hhett."
Thunderously: "Gif me dde hhett."
Exultantly: "I gif yu dde hhett."
Then the Maestro would step to the window and look into the hut from
which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which
looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling
itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was
not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. And the pupil was
not Isidro, but the witless old man who was one of the many sharers of
the abode. In the voice of the Third Assistant, Isidro was hurling out
the tremendous questions; and, as the old gentleman, who represented
Isidro, opened his mouth only to drule betel-juice, it was Isidro who,
in Isidro's voice, answered the questions. In his role as Third
Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in
his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench
before responding. The sole function of the senile old man seemed that
of representing the pupil while the question was being asked, and
receiving, in that capacity, a sharp cut across the nose from
Isidro-the-Third-Assistant's switch, at which he chuckled to himself in
silent glee and druled ad libitum.
For several nights this performance went on with gradual increase of
vocabulary in teacher and pupil. But when it had reached the "Do you see
the apple-tree?" stage, it ceased to advance, marked time for a while,
and then slowly but steadily began sliding back into primitive
beginnings. This engendered in the Maestro a suspicion which became
certainty when Isidro entered the schoolhouse one morning just before
recess, between two policemen at port arms. A rapid scrutiny of the
roll-book showed that he had been absent a whole week.
"I was at the river cleaning my trousers," answered Isidro when put face
to face with this curious fact.
The Maestro suggested that the precious pantaloons which, by the way,
had been mysteriously embellished by a red stripe down the right leg and
a green stripe down the left leg, could be cleaned in less than a week,
and that Saturday and Sunday were days specially set aside in the
Catechismo of the Americanos for such little family duties.
Isidro understood, and the nightly rehearsals soon reached the stage of:
"How menny hhetts hev yu?"
"I hev _ten_ hhetts."
Then came another arrest of development and another decline, at the end
of which Isidro again making his appearance flanked by two German
needle-guns, caused a blush of remorse to suffuse the Maestro by
explaining with frigid gravity that his mother had given birth to a
little pickaninny-brother and that, of course, he had had to help.
But significant events in the family did not stop there. After birth,
death stepped in for its due. Isidro's relatives began to drop off in
rapid sequence--each demise demanding three days of meditation in
retirement--till at last the Maestro, who had had the excellent idea of
keeping upon paper a record of these unfortunate occurrences, was
looking with stupor upon a list showing that Isidro had lost, within
three weeks, two aunts, three grandfathers, and five
grandmothers--which, considering that an actual count proved the house
of bereavement still able to boast of seventeen occupants, was plainly
an exaggeration.
Following a long sermon from the Maestro in which he sought to explain
to Isidro that he must always tell the truth for sundry philosophical
reasons--a statement which the First Assistant tactfully smoothed to
something within range of credulity by translating it that one must not
lie to _Americanos_, because _Americanos_ do not like it--there came a
period of serenity.
_III--The Triumph_
There came to the Maestro days of peace and joy. Isidro was coming to
school; Isidro was learning English. Isidro was steady, Isidro was
docile, Isidro was positively so angelic that there was something
uncanny about the situation. And with Isidro, other little savages were
being pruned into the school-going stage of civilization. Helped by the
police, they were pouring in from barrio and hacienda; the attendance
was going up by leaps and bounds, till at last a circulative report
showed that Balangilang had passed the odious Cabancalan with its less
strenuous school-man, and left it in the ruck by a full hundred. The
Maestro was triumphant; his chest had gained two inches in expansion.
When he met Isidro at recess, playing cibay, he murmured softly: "You
little devil; you were Attendance personified, and I've got you now." At
which Isidro, pausing in the act of throwing a shell with the top of his
head at another shell on the ground, looked up beneath long lashes in a
smile absolutely seraphic.
In the evening, the Maestro, his heart sweet with content, stood at the
window. These were moonlight nights; in the grassy lanes the young girls
played graceful Spanish games, winding like garlands to a gentle song;
from the shadows of the huts came the tinkle-tinkle of serenading
guitars and yearning notes of violins wailing despairing love. And
Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an
independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song
given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls,
and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed
character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon
full of obscure melancholy of a race that dies.
"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh
loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies-ies," he
repeated and repeated, over and over again, till the Maestro's soul
tumbled down and down abysses of maudlin tenderness, and Isidro's chin
fell upon his chest in a last drawling, sleepy note. At which he shook
himself together and began the next exercise, a recitation, all of one
piece from first to last syllable, in one high, monotonous note, like a
mechanical doll saying "papa-mama."
"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-she
look-like-a-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-she-was-smalleyre-on-joos
like-a-bow-boot-now-she-ees-biggerr-on-rrraon-like-an-O."
Then a big gulp of air and again:
"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre,----" etc.
An hour of this, and he skipped from the lyric to the patriotic, and
then it was:
"I-loof-dde-name-off-Wash-ing-ton,
I-loof-my-coontrrree-tow,
I-loof-dde-fleg-dde-dear-owl-fleg,
Off-rridd-on-whit-on-bloo-oo-oo!"
By this time the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor
of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes
fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his
"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies."
These were days of ease and beauty to the Maestro, and he enjoyed them
the more when a new problem came to give action to his resourceful
brain.
The thing was this: For three days there had not been one funeral in
Balangilang.
In other climes, in other towns, this might have been a source of
congratulation, perhaps, but not in Balangilang. There were rumors of
cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as president of the
Board of Health, was on the watch for it. Five deaths a day, experience
had taught him, was the healthy average for the town; and this sudden
cessation of public burials--he could not believe that dying had
stopped--was something to make him suspicious.
It was over this puzzling situation that he was pondering at the morning
recess, when his attention was taken from it by a singular scene.
The "batas" of the school were flocking and pushing and jolting at the
door of the basement which served as stable for the municipal caribao.
Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance,
gravely taking up an admission of five shells from those who would
enter. Business seemed to be brisk; Isidro had already a big bandana
handkerchief bulging with the receipts which were now overflowing into a
great tao hat, obligingly loaned him by one of his admirers, as one by
one, those lucky enough to have the price filed in, feverish curiosity
upon their faces.
The Maestro thought that it might be well to go in also, which he did
without paying admission. The disappointed gate-keeper followed him. The
Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box,
frilled with paper rosettes.
"What have you in there?" asked the Maestro.
"My brother," answered Isidro sweetly.
He cast his eyes to the ground and watched his big toe drawing vague
figures in the earth, then appealing to the First Assistant who was
present by this time, he added in the tone of virtue which _will_ be
modest:
"Maestro Pablo does not like it when I do not come to school on account
of a funeral, so I brought him (pointing to the little box) with me."
"Well, I'll be----" was the only comment the Maestro found adequate at
the moment.
"It is my little pickaninny-brother," went on Isidro, becoming alive to
the fact that he was a center of interest, "and he died last night of
the great sickness."
"The great what?" ejaculated the Maestro who had caught a few words.
"The great sickness," explained the Assistant. "That is the name by
which these ignorant people call the cholera."
For the next two hours the Maestro was very busy.
Firstly he gathered the "batas" who had been rich enough to attend
Isidro's little show and locked them up--with the impresario himself--in
the little town-jail close by. Then, after a vivid exhortation upon the
beauties of boiling water and reporting disease, he dismissed the school
for an indefinite period. After which, impressing the two town
prisoners, now temporarily out of home, he shouldered Isidro's pretty
box, tramped to the cemetery and directed the digging of a grave six
feet deep. When the earth had been scraped back upon the lonely little
object, he returned to town and transferred the awe-stricken playgoers
to his own house, where a strenuous performance took place.
Tolio, his boy, built a most tremendous fire outside and set upon it all
the pots and pans and caldrons and cans of his kitchen arsenal, filled
with water. When these began to gurgle and steam, the Maestro set
himself to stripping the horrified bunch in his room; one by one he
threw the garments out of the window to Tolio who, catching them,
stuffed them into the receptacles, poking down their bulging protest
with a big stick. Then the Maestro mixed an awful brew in an old
oil-can, and taking the brush which was commonly used to sleek up his
little pony, he dipped it generously into the pungent stuff and began an
energetic scrubbing of his now absolutely panic-stricken wards. When he
had done this to his satisfaction and thoroughly to their discontent, he
let them put on their still steaming garments and they slid out of the
house, aseptic as hospitals.
Isidro he kept longer. He lingered over him with loving and strenuous
care, and after he had him externally clean, proceeded to dose him
internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything--the
terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his
pantaloons--with wonder-eyed serenity.
When all this was finished the Maestro took the urchin into the
dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously
offered him a fine, dark perfecto.
The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation.
For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the little
man had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled
with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a queer softness had
risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up
and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed
through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little
lump in his throat.
"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro quietly. "We're only
a child after all; mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to
school?"
"Senor Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still
perspiring visage, "Senor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school
because of the great sickness?"
"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long
time."
Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and suddenly throwing
himself full-length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within
him a long, tremulous wail.
JAMES MERLE HOPPER
James Merle Hopper was born in Paris, France. His father was American,
his mother French; their son James was born July 23, 1876. In 1887 his
parents came to America, and settled in California. James Hopper
attended the University of California, graduating in 1898. He is still
remembered there as one of the grittiest football players who ever
played on the 'Varsity team. Then came a course in the law school of
that university, and admission to the California bar in 1900. All this
reads like the biography of a lawyer: so did the early life of James
Russell Lowell, and of Oliver Wendell Holmes: they were all admitted to
the bar, but they did not become lawyers. James Hopper had done some
newspaper work for San Francisco papers while he was in law school, and
the love of writing had taken hold of him. In the meantime he had
married Miss Mattie E. Leonard, and as literature did not yet provide a
means of support, he became an instructor in French at the University of
California.
With the close of the Spanish-American War came the call for thousands
of Americans to go to the Philippines as schoolmasters. This appealed to
him, and he spent the years 1902-03 in the work that Kipling thus
describes in "The White Man's Burden":
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
His experiences here furnished the material for a group of short stories
dealing picturesquely with the Filipinos in their first contact with
American civilization. These were published in _McClure's_, and
afterwards collected in book form under the title _Caybigan_.
In 1903 James Hopper returned to the United States, and for a time was
on the editorial staff of _McClure's_. Later in collaboration with Fred
R. Bechdolt he wrote a remarkable book, entitled "_9009_". This is the
number of a convict in an American prison, and the book exposes the
system of spying, of treachery, of betrayal, that a convict must
identify himself with in order to become a "trusty." His next book was a
college story, _The Freshman_. This was followed by a volume of short
stories, _What Happened in the Night_. These are stories of child life,
but intended for older readers; they are very successful in reproducing
the imaginative world in which children live. In 1915 and 1916 he acted
as a war correspondent for _Collier's_, first with the American troops
in Mexico in pursuit of Villa, and later in France. His home is at
Carmel, California.
THEY WHO BRING DREAMS TO AMERICA
_"No wonder this America of ours is big. We draw the brave ones from
the old lands, the brave ones whose dreams are like the guiding sign
that was given to the Israelites of old--a pillar of cloud by day, a
pillar of fire by night." "The Citizen" is a story of a brave man who
followed his dream over land and sea, until it brought him to America, a
fortunate event for him and for us._
THE CITIZEN
BY
JAMES FRANCIS DWYER
The President of the United States was speaking. His audience comprised
two thousand foreign-born men who had just been admitted to citizenship.
They listened intently, their faces, aglow with the light of a new-born
patriotism, upturned to the calm, intellectual face of the first citizen
of the country they now claimed as their own.
Here and there among the newly-made citizens were wives and children.
The women were proud of their men. They looked at them from time to
time, their faces showing pride and awe.
One little woman, sitting immediately in front of the President, held
the hand of a big, muscular man and stroked it softly. The big man was
looking at the speaker with great blue eyes that were the eyes of a
dreamer.
The President's words came clear and distinct:
_You were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by
some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some
expectation of a better kind of life. You dreamed dreams of this
country, and I hope you brought the dreams with you. A man enriches the
country to which he brings dreams, and you who have brought them have
enriched America._
The big man made a curious choking noise and his wife breathed a soft
"Hush!" The giant was strangely affected.
The President continued:
_No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us, but remember this,
if we have grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with
you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man
does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of
us have forgotten what America believed in, you at any rate imported in
your own hearts a renewal of the belief. Each of you, I am sure, brought
a dream, a glorious, shining dream, a dream worth more than gold or
silver, and that is the reason that I, for one, make you welcome._
The big man's eyes were fixed. His wife shook him gently, but he did not
heed her. He was looking through the presidential rostrum, through the
big buildings behind it, looking out over leagues of space to a
snow-swept village that huddled on an island in the Beresina, the
swift-flowing tributary of the mighty Dnieper, an island that looked
like a black bone stuck tight in the maw of the stream.
It was in the little village on the Beresina that the Dream came to Ivan
Berloff, Big Ivan of the Bridge.
The Dream came in the spring. All great dreams come in the spring, and
the Spring Maiden who brought Big Ivan's Dream was more than ordinarily
beautiful. She swept up the Beresina, trailing wondrous draperies of
vivid green. Her feet touched the snow-hardened ground, and armies of
little white and blue flowers sprang up in her footsteps. Soft breezes
escorted her, velvety breezes that carried the aromas of the far-off
places from which they came, places far to the southward, and more
distant towns beyond the Black Sea whose people were not under the sway
of the Great Czar.
The father of Big Ivan, who had fought under Prince Menshikov at Alma
fifty-five years before, hobbled out to see the sunbeams eat up the snow
hummocks that hid in the shady places, and he told his son it was the
most wonderful spring he had ever seen.
"The little breezes are hot and sweet," he said, sniffing hungrily with
his face turned toward the south. "I know them, Ivan! I know them! They
have the spice odor that I sniffed on the winds that came to us when we
lay in the trenches at Balaklava. Praise God for the warmth!"
And that day the Dream came to Big Ivan as he plowed. It was a wonder
dream. It sprang into his brain as he walked behind the plow, and for a
few minutes he quivered as the big bridge quivers when the Beresina
sends her ice squadrons to hammer the arches. It made his heart pound
mightily, and his lips and throat became very dry.
Big Ivan stopped at the end of the furrow and tried to discover what had
brought the Dream. Where had it come from? Why had it clutched him so
suddenly? Was he the only man in the village to whom it had come?
Like his father, he sniffed the sweet-smelling breezes. He thrust his
great hands into the sunbeams. He reached down and plucked one of a
bunch of white flowers that had sprung up overnight. The Dream was born
of the breezes and the sunshine and the spring flowers. It came from
them and it had sprung into his mind because he was young and strong. He
knew! It couldn't come to his father or Donkov, the tailor, or Poborino,
the smith. They were old and weak, and Ivan's dream was one that called
for youth and strength.
"Ay, for youth and strength," he muttered as he gripped the plow. "And I
have it!"
That evening Big Ivan of the Bridge spoke to his wife, Anna, a little
woman, who had a sweet face and a wealth of fair hair.
"Wife, we are going away from here," he said.
"Where are we going, Ivan?" she asked.
"Where do you think, Anna?" he said, looking down at her as she stood by
his side.
"To Bobruisk," she murmured.
"No."
"Farther?"
"Ay, a long way farther."
Fear sprang into her soft eyes. Bobruisk was eighty-nine versts away,
yet Ivan said they were going farther.
"We--we are not going to Minsk?" she cried.
"Aye, and beyond Minsk!"
"Ivan, tell me!" she gasped. "Tell me where we are going!"
"We are going to America."
"_To America?_"
"Yes, to America!"