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Caybigan
BY JAMES HOPPER
NEW YORK
MCCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
MCMVI
_Copyright, 1906 by_
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.
Published, September, 1906
Copyright, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, by The S. S. McClure Company
[Illustration: "_The subsequent walk across the plaza with the hard-won
bundle, beneath the appreciative eyes of the whole town, had been
humiliating_"]
CONTENTS
I. THE JUDGMENT OF MAN 3
II. THE MAESTRO OF BALANGILANG 27
III. HER READING 52
IV. THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF
ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS 74
V. THE FAILURE 98
VI. SOME BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION 124
VII. A JEST OF THE GODS 153
VIII. THE COMING OF THE MAESTRA 178
IX. CAYBIGAN 202
X. THE CAPTURE OF PAPA GATO 226
XI. THE MANANGETE 257
XII. THE PAST 267
XIII. THE PREROGATIVE 277
XIV. THE CONFLUENCE 289
XV. THE CALL 331
CAYBIGAN
I
THE JUDGMENT OF MAN
We were sitting around the big centre table in the sala of the "House of
Guests" in Ilo-Ilo. We were teachers from Occidental Negros. It was near
Christmas; we had left our stations for the holidays--the cholera had
just swept them and the aftermath was not pleasant to contemplate--and
so we were leaning over the polished narra table, sipping a sweet, false
Spanish wine from which we drew, not a convivial spirit, but rather a
quiet, reflective gloom. All the shell shutters were drawn back; we
could see the tin-roofed city gleam and crackle with the heat, and
beyond the lithe line of coconuts, the iridescent sea, tugging the heart
with offer of coolness. But, all of us, we knew the promise to be Fake,
monumental Fake, knew the alluring depths to be hot as corruption, and
full of sharks.
Somebody in a monotonous voice was cataloguing the dead, enumerating
those of us who had been conquered by the climate, by the work, or
through their own inward flaws. He mentioned Miller with some sort of
disparaging gesture, and then Carter of Balangilang, who had been very
silent, suddenly burst into speech with singular fury.
"Who are you, to judge him?" he shouted. "Who are you, eh? Who are we,
anyway, to judge him?"
Headlong outbursts from Carter were nothing new to us, so we took no
offence. Finally someone said, "Well, he's dead," with that tone that
signifies final judgment, the last, best, most charitable thing which
can be said of the man being weighed.
But Carter did not stop there. "You didn't know him, did you?" he asked.
"You didn't know him; tell me now, _did_ you know him?" He was still
extraordinarily angry.
We did not answer. Really, we knew little of the dead man--excepting
that he was mean and small, and not worth knowing. He was mean, and he
was a coward; and to us in our uncompromising youth these were just the
unpardonable sins. Because of that we had left him alone, yes, come to
think of it, very much alone. And we knew little about him.
"Here, I'll tell you what I know," Carter began again, in a more
conciliatory tone; "I'll tell you everything I know of him." He lit a
cheroot.
"I first met him right here in Ilo-Ilo. I had crossed over for supplies;
he was fresh from Manila and wanted to get over to Bacolod to report to
the Sup. and be assigned to his station. When I saw him he was on the
muelle, surrounded by an army of bluffing cargadores. About twelve of
them had managed to get a finger upon his lone carpet-bag while it was
being carried down the gang-plank, and each and all of them wanted to
get paid for the job. He was in a horrible pickle; couldn't speak a word
of Spanish or Visayan. And the first thing he said when I had extricated
him, thanks to my vituperative knowledge of these sweet tongues, was:
'If them niggahs, seh, think Ah'm a-goin' to learn their cussed lingo,
they're mahtily mistaken, seh!'
"After that remark, coming straight from the heart, I hardly needed to
be told that he was from the South. He was from Mississippi. He was
gaunt, yellow, malarial, and slovenly. He had 'teached' for twenty
years, he said, but in spite of this there was about him something
indescribably rural, something of the sod--not the dignity, the
sturdiness of it, but rather of the pettiness, the sordidness of it. It
showed in his dirty, flapping garments, his unlaced shoes, his stubble
beard, in his indecent carelessness in expectorating the tobacco he was
ceaselessly chewing. But these, after all, were some of his minor
traits. I was soon to get an inkling of one of his major ones--his
prodigious meanness. For when I rushed about and finally found a lorcha
that was to sail for Bacolod and asked him to chip in with me on
provisions, he demurred.
"'Ah'd like to git my own, seh,' he said in that decisive drawl of his.
"'All right,' I said cheerfully, and went off and stocked up for two. My
instinct served me well. When, that evening, Miller walked up the
gang-plank, he carried only his carpet-bag, and that was flat and
hungry-looking as before. The next morning he shared my provisions
calmly and resolutely, with an air, almost, of conscious duty. Well, let
that go; before another day I was face to face with his other flaming
characteristic.
"Out of Ilo-Ilo we had contrary winds at first; all night the lorcha--an
old grandmother of a craft, full of dry-rot spots as big as woodpeckers'
nests--flapped heavily about on impotent tacks, and when the sun rose we
found ourselves on the same spot from which we had watched its setting.
Toward ten o'clock, however, the monsoon veered, and wing-and-wing the
old boat, creaking in every joint as if she had the dengue, grunted her
way over flashing combers with a speed that seemed almost indecent.
Then, just as we were getting near enough to catch the heated glitter of
the Bacolod church-dome, to see the golden thread of breach at the foot
of the waving coconuts, the wind fell, slap-bang, as suddenly as if God
had said hush--and we stuck there, motionless, upon a petrified sea.
"I didn't stamp about and foam at the mouth; I'd been in these climes
too long. As for Miller, he was from Mississippi. We picked out a
comparatively clean spot on the deck, near the bow; we lay down on our
backs and relaxed our beings into infinite patience. We had been thus
for perhaps an hour; I was looking up at a little white cloud that
seemed receding, receding into the blue immensity behind it. Suddenly a
noise like thunder roared in my ears. The little cloud gave a great leap
back into its place; the roar dwindled into the voice of Miller, in
plaintive, disturbed drawl. 'What the deuce are the niggahs doing?' he
was saying.
"And certainly the behaviour of that Visayan crew was worthy of
question. Huddled quietly at the stern, one after another they were
springing over the rail into the small boat that was dragging behind,
and even as I looked the last man disappeared with the painter in his
hand. At the same moment I became aware of a strange noise. Down in the
bowels of the lorcha a weird, gentle commotion was going on, a
multitudinous 'gluck-gluck' as of many bottles being emptied. A breath
of hot, musty air was sighing out of the hatch. Then the sea about the
poop began to rise,--to rise slowly, calmly, steadily, like milk in a
heated pot.
"'By the powers,' I shouted, 'the old tub is going down!'
"It was true. There, upon the sunlit sea, beneath the serene sky,
silently, weirdly, unprovoked, the old boat, as if weary, was sinking in
one long sigh of lassitude. And we, of course, were going with it. A few
yards away from the sternpost was the jolly-boat with the crew. I looked
at them, and in my heart I could not condemn them for their sly
departure; they were all there, arraiz, wife, children, and crew, so
heaped together that they seemed only a meaningless tangle of arms and
legs and heads; the water was half an inch from the gunwale, and the one
man at the oars, hampered, paralysed on all sides, was splashing
helplessly while the craft pivoted like a top. There was no anger in my
heart, yet I was not absolutely reconciled to the situation. I searched
the deck with my eyes, then from the jolly-boat the arraiz obligingly
yelled, 'El biroto, el biroto!'
"And I remembered the rotten little canoe lashed amidships. It didn't
take us long to get it into the water (the water by that time was very
close at hand). I went carefully into it first so as to steady it for
Miller, and then, both of us at once, we saw that it would hold only
one. The bottom, a hollowed log, was staunch enough, but the sides,
made of pitched bamboo lattice, were sagging and torn. It would hold
only one.
"'Well, who is it?' I asked. In my heart there was no craven panic, but
neither was there sacrifice. Some vague idea was in my mind, of deciding
who should get the place by some game of chance, tossing up a coin, for
instance.
"But Miller said, 'Ah cain't affawd to take chances, seh; you must git
out.'
"He spoke calmly, with great seriousness, but without undue emphasis--as
one enunciating an uncontrovertible natural law. I glanced up into his
face, and it was in harmony with his voice. He didn't seem particularly
scared; he was serious, that's all; his eyes were set in that peculiar,
wide-pupilled stare of the man contemplating his own fixed idea.
"'No, seh; Ah cain't affawd it,' he repeated.
"The absurdity of the thing suddenly tingled in me like wine. 'All
right!' I shouted, in a contagion of insanity; 'all right, take the
darned thing!'
"And I got out. I got out and let him step stiffly into the boat, which
I obligingly sent spinning from the lorcha with one long, strong kick.
Then I was alone on the deck, which suddenly looked immense, stretched
on all sides, limitless as loneliness itself. A heavy torpor fell from
the skies and amid this general silence, this immobility, the cabin
door alone seemed to live, live in weird manifestation. It had been left
open, and now it was swinging and slamming to and fro jerkily, and
shuddering from top to bottom. Half in plan, half in mere irritation at
this senseless, incessant jigging, I sprang toward it and with one
nervous pull tore it, hinge and all, from the rotten woodwork. I heaved
it over the side, went in head first after it, took a few strokes and
lay, belly-down, upon it. Just then the lorcha began to rise by the
head; the bowsprit went up slowly like a finger pointing solemnly to
heaven; then, without a sound, almost instantaneously, the whole fabric
disappeared. Across the now unoccupied space Miller and I rushed
smoothly toward each other, as if drawn by some gigantic magnet; our
crafts bumped gently, like two savages caressingly rubbing noses; they
swung apart a little and lay side by side, undulating slightly.
"And we remained there, little black specks upon the flashing sea. Two
hundred yards away was the lorcha's boat; they had reshuffled themselves
more advantageously and were pulling slowly toward land. Not twenty feet
from me Miller sat upright in his canoe as if petrified. I was not so
badly off. The door floated me half out of water, and that was lukewarm,
so I knew that I could stand it a long time. What bothered me, though,
was that the blamed raft was not long enough; that is, the upper part
of my body being heavier, it took more door to support it, so that my
feet were projecting beyond the lower edge, and every second or so the
nibbling of some imaginary shark sent them flying up into the air in
undignified gymnastics. The consoling part of it was that Miller was
paying no notice. He still sat up, rigid, in his canoe, clutching the
sides stiffly and looking neither to right nor left. From where I lay I
could see the cords of his neck drawn taut, and his knuckles showing
white.
"'Why the deuce don't you paddle to shore?' I shouted at length, taking
a sudden disgust of the situation.
"He did not turn his head as he answered. 'Ah--Ah,' he stammered, the
words coming hard as hiccoughs out of his throat; 'Ah don't know haow.'
"'Drop the sides of your boat and try,' I suggested.
"He seemed to ponder carefully over this for a while. 'Ah think it's
safer to stay this-a-way,' he decided finally.
"'But, good lord, man,' I cried, angry at this calm stupidity; 'if
that's what you're going to do, you'd better get on this door here and
let me take the boat. I'll paddle ashore and come back for you.'
"He turned his head slowly. He contemplated my raft long, carefully,
critically.
"'Ah think Ah'll be safer heyah, seh,' he decided. 'It's a little bit o'
old door, and Ah reckon they's a heap of sharks around.'
"After that I had little to say. Given the premises of the man his
conclusions were unquestionable. And the premises were a selfishness so
tranquil, so ingenuous, so fresh, I might say, that I couldn't work up
the proper indignation. It was something so perfect as to challenge
admiration. On the whole, however, it afforded a poor subject for
conversation; so we remained there, taciturn, I on my door,
half-submerged in the tepid water, my heels flung up over my back, he in
his dug-out, rigid, his hands clutching the sides as if he were trying
to hold up the craft out of the liquid abyss beneath.
"And thus we were still when, just as the sun was setting sombrely, a
velos full of chattering natives picked us up. They landed us at
Bacolod, and Miller left me to report to the Sup. I departed before
sun-up the next morning for my station. I didn't want to see Miller
again.
"But I did. One night he came floundering through my pueblo. It was in
the middle of the rainy season. He wasn't exactly caked with mud;
rather, he seemed to ooze it out of every pore. He had been assigned to
Binalbagan, ten miles further down. I stared when he told me this.
Binalbagan was the worst post on the island, a musty, pestilential hole
with a sullenly hostile population, and he--well, inefficiency was
branded all over him in six-foot letters. I tried to stop him over
night, but he would not do it, and I saw him splash off in the darkness,
gaunt, yellow, mournful.
"I saw little of him after that. I was busy establishing new
barrio-schools which were to give me excuses for long horseback rides of
inspection. I felt his presence down there in that vague way by which
you are aware of a person behind your back without turning around.
Rumours of his doings reached me. He was having a horrible time. On the
night of his arrival he had been invited to dinner by the Presidente, a
kind old primitive soul, but when he found that he was expected to sit
at the table with the family, he had stamped off, indignant, saying that
he didn't eat with no niggers. As I've said before, the town was
hostile, and this attitude did not help matters much. He couldn't get
the school moneys out of the Tesorero--an unmitigated rascal--but that
did not make much difference, for he had no pupils anyhow. He couldn't
speak a word of Spanish; no one in the town, of course, knew any
English--he must have been horribly lonely. He began to wear camisas,
like the natives. That's always a bad sign. It shows that the man has
discovered that there is no one to care how he dresses--that is, that
there is no longer any public opinion. It indicates something subtly
worse--that the man has ceased looking at himself, that the _I_ has
ceased criticising, judging, stiffening up the _me_--in other words,
that there is no longer any conscience. That white suit, I tell you, is
a wonderful moral force; the white suit, put on fresh every morning,
heavily starched, buttoned up to the chin, is like an armour,
ironcladdlng you against the germ of decay buzzing about you,
ceaselessly vigilant for the little vulnerable spot. Miller wore
camisas, and then he began to go without shoes. I saw that myself. I was
riding through his pueblo on my way to Dent's, and I passed his school.
I looked into the open door as my head bobbed by at the height of the
stilt-raised floor. He was in his camisa and barefooted; his long neck
stretched out of the collarless garment with a mournful, stork-like
expression. Squatting on the floor were three trouserless,
dirt-incrusted boys; he was pointing at a chart standing before their
eyes, and all together they were shouting some word that exploded away
down in their throats in tremendous effort and never seemed to reach
their lips. I called out and waved my hand as I went by, and when I
looked back, a hundred yards farther, I saw that he had come out and
was standing upon the bamboo platform outside of the door, gaping after
me with his chin thrown forward in that mournful, stork-like way--I
should have gone back.
"With him, I must say, the camisa did not mean all that I have
suggested, not the sort of degradation of which it is the symbol in
other men. The most extravagant imagination could not have linked him
with anything that smacked of romance, romance however sordid. His
vices, I had sized it, would come rather from an excess of calculation
than from a lack of it. No, that camisa was just a sign of his meanness,
his prodigious meanness. And of that I was soon given an extraordinary
example.
"I had with me a young fellow named Ledesma, whom I was training to be
assistant maestro. He was very bright, thirsty to learn, and extremely
curious of us white men. I don't believe that the actions of one of
them, for fifty miles around, ever escaped him, and every day he came to
me with some talk, some rumour, some gossip about my fellow-exiles which
he would relate to me with those strange interrogative inflections that
he had brought from his native dialect into English--as if perpetually
he were seeking explanation, confirmation. One morning he said to me:
'The maestro Miller, he does not eat.'
"'No?' I answered, absent-mindedly.
"'No, he never eats,' he reiterated authoritatively, although that
peculiar Visayan inflection of which I have spoken gave him the air of
asking a question.
"'Oh, I suppose he does,' I said, carelessly.
"'He does not eat,' he repeated. 'Everyone in Binalbagan say so. Since
he there, he has not bought anything at the store.'
"'His muchachos bring him chicken,' I suggested.
"'No, senor; he very funny; he has no muchachos, not one muchacho has
he.'
"'Well, he probably has canned provisions sent him.'
"'No, senor; the cargadores they say that never, never have they carried
anything for him. He does not eat.'
"'Very well,' I concluded, somewhat amused; 'he does not eat.'
"The boy was silent for a minute, then, 'Senor Maestro,' he asked with
suspicious ingenuousness, 'can Americans live without eating?'
"So that I was not able to drop the subject as easily as I wished. And
coming to a forced consideration of it, I found that my anxiety to do so
was not very beautiful after all. A picture came to me--that of Miller
on his bamboo platform before his door, gazing mournfully after me, his
chin thrown forward. It did not leave me the day long, and at sundown I
saddled up and trotted off toward Binalbagan.
"I didn't reach the pueblo that night, however. Only a mile from it I
plunged out of the moonlight into the pitch darkness of a hollow lane
cutting through Don Jaime's hacienda. Banana palms were growing thick to
right and left; the way was narrow and deep--it was a fine place for
cutthroats, but that evocation had lost much of its romantic charm from
the fact that, not three weeks before, an actual cutthroating had taken
place, a Chinese merchant having been boloed by tusilanes. Well, I was
trotting through, my right hand somewhat close to my holster, when from
the right, close, there came a soft, reiterated chopping noise. I pulled
up my pony. The sound kept up--a discreet, persistent chopping; then I
saw, up above, the moonlit top of a palm shuddering, though all about it
the others remained motionless, petrified as if of solid silver. It was
a very simple thing after all: someone in there was cutting down a palm
to get bananas, an occupation very common in the Philippines, and very
pacific, in spite of the ominous air given to it by the gigantic bolo
used. However, something prompted me to draw the midnight harvester
out.
"'Heh, ladron, what are you doing there?' I shouted in dialect.
"There was a most sudden silence. The chopping ceased, the palm stopped
vibrating. A vague form bounded down the lane, right up against my
horse's nose, rolled over, straightened up again, and vanished into the
darkness ahead. Unconsciously I spurred on after it. For a hundred yards
I galloped with nothing in sight. Then I caught a rapid view of the
thing as it burst through a shaft of moonlight piercing the glade, and
it showed as a man, a grotesque figure of a man in loose white
pantaloons. He was frightened, horribly frightened, all hunched up with
the frenzy to escape. An indistinct bundle was on his right shoulder.
Like a curtain the dark snapped shut behind him again, but I urged on
with a wild halloo, my blood all a-tingle with the exultation of the
chase. I gained--he must have been a lamentable runner, for my poor
little pony was staggering under my tumultuous weight. I could hear him
pant and sob a few yards in advance; then he came into sight, a dim,
loping whiteness ahead. Suddenly the bundle left his shoulder; something
rolled along the ground under my horse's hoofs--and I was standing on my
head in a soft, oozy place. I was mad, furiously mad. I picked myself
up, went back a few yards and, taking my pony by the nose, picked _him_
up. A touch of his throbbing flanks, however, warned me as I was putting
my foot into the stirrup. I left him there and thundered on foot down
the lane. I have said I was mad. 'Yip-yip-yah-ah, yip-yip-yah-ah,' I
yelled as I dashed on--a yell I had heard among California cattlemen. It
must have paralysed that flying personage, for I gained upon him
shockingly. I could hear him pant, a queer, patient panting, a sigh
rather, a gentle, lamenting sighing, and the white camisa flapped
ghostily in the darkness. Suddenly he burst out of obscurity, past the
plantation, into the glaring moonlight. And I--I stopped short, went
down on my hands and knees, and crouched back into the shadow. For the
man running was Miller; Miller, wild, sobbing, dishevelled, his
shoulders drawn up to his ears in terrible weariness, his whole body
taut with fear, and scudding, scudding away, low along the ground, his
chin forward, mournful as a stork. Soon he was across the luminous
space, and then he disappeared into the darkness on the other side,
flopped head first into it as if hiding his face in a pillow.
"I returned slowly to my horse. He was standing where I had left him,
his four legs far apart in a wide base. Between them was the thing cast
off by Miller which had thrown us. I examined it by the light of a box
of matches. It was a bunch of bananas, one of those gigantic clusters
which can be cut from the palms. I got on my horse and rode back home.
"I didn't go to see him any more. A man who will steal bananas in a
country where they can be bought a dozen for one cent is too mean to be
worth visiting. I had another reason, too. It had dawned on me that
Miller probably did not care to see any of us, that he had come down to
a mode of life which would not leave him appreciative of confrontations
with past standards. It was almost charity to leave him to himself.
"So I left him to himself, and he lived on in his pestilential little
hole, alone--lived a life more squalid every day. It wasn't at all a
healthy life, you can understand, no healthier physically than morally.
After a while I heard that he was looking bad, yellow as a lemon
and the dengue cracking at his bones. I began to think of going to
him after all, of jerking him out of his rut by force, if necessary,
making him respect the traditions of his race. But just then came
that Nichols affair, and flaring, his other bad side--his abject
cowardice--reappeared to me. You remember the Nichols thing--boloed in
the dark between my town and Himamaylan. His muchacho had jumped into
the ditch. Afterward he got out and ran back the whole way, fifteen
miles, to my place. I started down there. My idea was to pick up Miller
as I passed, then Dent a little further down, find the body, and perhaps
indications for White of the constabulary to whom I had sent a messenger
and who could not reach the place till morning. Well, Miller refused to
go. He had caught hold of some rumour of the happening; he was
barricaded in his hut and was sitting on his bed, a big Colt's revolver
across his knees. He would not go, he said it plainly. 'No, seh; Ah
cain't take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' He said this without much
fire, almost tranquilly, exactly as he had, you remember, at the time of
our shipwreck. It was not so amusing now, however. Here, on land, amid
this swarming, mysterious hostility, at this crisis, it seemed a
shocking betrayal of the solidarity that bound us all white men. A red
rage took possession of me. I stood there above him and poured out
vituperation for five good minutes. I found the most extraordinary
epithets; I lowered my voice and pierced him with venomous thrusts. He
took it all. He remained seated on his bed, his revolver across his
knees, looking straight at some spot on the floor; whenever I'd become
particularly effective he'd merely look harder at the spot, as if for
him it contained something of higher significance--a command, a rule, a
precept--I don't know what, and then he'd say, 'No, Ah cain't; Ah cain't
affawd it.'
"I burst out of there, a-roar like a bombshell. I rode down to Dent; we
rode down to the place and did--what there was to be done. Miller, I
never wanted to see again.
"But I did. Some three weeks later a carrier came to me with a note--a
pencilled scrawl upon a torn piece of paper. It read:
"'I think I am dying. Can you come see me?
"'MILLER.'
"I went down right away. He was dead. He had died there, alone, in his
filthy little hut, in that God-forsaken pueblo, ten miles from the
nearest white man, ten thousand miles from his home. He had died there
all alone.
"I'll always remember our coming in. It was night. It had been raining
for thirty-six hours, and as we stepped into the unlighted hut, my
muchacho and I, right away the floor grew sticky and slimy with the mud
on our feet, and as we groped about blindly, we seemed ankle-deep in
something greasy and abominable like gore. After a while the boy got a
torch outside, and as he flared it I caught sight of Miller on his cot,
backed up into one corner. He was sitting upright, staring straight
ahead and a little down, as if in careful consideration. As I stepped
toward him the pliable bamboo floor undulated; the movement was carried
to him and he began to nod, very gently and gravely. He seemed to be
saying: 'No, Ah cain't affawd it.' It was atrocious. Finally I was by
his side and he was again motionless, staring thoughtfully. Then I saw
what he was considering. In his hands, which lay twined on his knees,
were a lot of little metallic oblongs. I disengaged them. The muchacho
drew nearer, and with the torch over my shoulder I examined them. They
were photographs, cheap tintypes. The first was of a woman, a poor
being, sagging with overwork, a lamentable baby in her arms. The other
pictures were of children--six of them, boys and girls, of all ages from
twelve to three, and under each, in painful chirography, a name was
written--Lee Miller, Amy Miller, Geraldine Miller, and so on.
"You don't understand, do you? For a moment I didn't understand. I
stared stupidly at those tintypes, shuffled and reshuffled them; the
torch roared in my ear. Then, suddenly, understanding came to me; it
came sharp as a pang. He had a wife and children--seven children.
"A simple fact, wasn't it, a commonplace one, almost vulgar, you might
say. And yet what a change of view produced by it, what a dislocation of
judgment! I was like a man riding through a strange country, in a storm,
at night. It is dark, he cannot see, he has never seen the country, yet
as he rides on he begins to picture to himself the surroundings, his
imagination builds for him a landscape--a mountain there, a river here,
wind-streaming trees over there--and right away it exists, it _is_, it
has solidity, mass, life. Then suddenly comes a flash of lightning, a
second of light, and he is astounded, absolutely astounded to see the
real landscape different from that indestructible thing that his mind
had built. Thus it was with me. I had judged, oh, I had judged him
thoroughly, sized him up to a certainty, and bang, came the flare of
this new fact, this extremely commonplace fact, and I was all off, all
off. I must begin to judge again, only it would never do that man any
good.
"A hundred memories came back to me, glared at me in the illumination of
that new fact. I remembered the camisa, the bare feet. I saw him running
down the lane with his bunch of stolen bananas. I recalled that absurd
scene on the waters; I heard him say: 'No, seh; Ah cain't affawd to take
chances; Ah cain't affawd it.'
"Of course he couldn't afford it. Think--a wife and seven children!
"That night I went through his papers, putting things in order, and from
every leaf, every scrap, came corroboration of the new fact. It was
easy enough to patch up his life. He was one of those pitiful
pedagogues of the rural South, shiftless, half-educated, inefficient. He
had never been able to earn much, and his family had always gently
starved. Then had come the chance, the golden chance--the Philippines
and a thousand a year. He had taken the bait, had come ten thousand
miles to the spot of his maximum value. Only, things had not gone quite
right. Thanks to the beautiful red-tape of the department, three months
had gone before he had received his first month's pay. Then it had come
in Mex., and when he had succeeded in changing it into gold it had
dwindled to sixty dollars. Of course, he had sent it all back, for even
then it would take it six more weeks to reach its destination, and sixty
dollars is hardly too much to tide over five months for a family of
eight. These five months had to be caught up in some way, so every month
his salary, depreciated ten per cent. by the change, had gone across the
waters. He wore camisas and no shoes, he stole bananas. And his value,
shoeless, camisa-clothed, was sixty dollars a month. He was just so much
capital. He had to be careful of that capital.
"'Ah cain't affawd to take chances; Ah cain't affawd it.' Of course he
couldn't.
"And so he had fought on blindly, stubbornly, and, at last, with that
pitiful faculty we have, all of us, of defeating our own plans, he had
killed himself, he had killed the capital, the golden goose.
"Yes, I found confirmation, but, after all, I did not need it. I had
learned it all; understanding had come to me, swift, sharp, vital as a
pang, when in the roaring light of the torch I had looked upon the pale
little tintypes, the tintypes of Lee and Amy and Jackson and
Geraldine."
II
THE MAESTRO OF BALANGILANG
The Maestro of Balangilang opened the door of his nipa-hut and started
down the crazy bamboo ladder on his way to the school. It was early. The
sun was pumping back the water that had fallen through the night, and
the grass-dishevelled common, the palm-groves about, the musty mountains
to the east, the whole landscape, steamed like one great cauldron.
Caribaos were wallowing in the mudholes, a dozen dogs were fighting at
the church portals, a stream of brownies were pouring into the
schoolhouse, and, in front of the cuartel, the company of native scouts
were going through scientific evolutions.
The Maestro stopped at the bottom of the steps and took in the scene
with a wistful attempt at admiration. A vague discouragement oozed into
his soul, but he shook himself vigorously and started across. Through
the viscid atmosphere he cut his way in sprightly fashion. His long legs
snapped back and forth like springs. At regular intervals his chest
swelled; it remained puffed out like that of a pouter-pigeon while he
took twenty steps, then collapsed with the hollow report of an air gun.
He was finishing up his morning calisthenics.
As he reached the centre of the plaza an unfamiliar object stopped him
abruptly. It was only a cross, a rough cross made of two pieces of
bamboo fastened at right angles with bejuca and stuck into the ground,
but it seemed to have meaning to the Maestro. He walked up close to it
and examined it carefully. He was disappointed for a moment; then his
fingers, passing along the horizontal piece, touched a thorn stuck like
a nail in the axis of the cross. Holding his breath, for it was not yet
time to exhale, he nodded knowingly and his eyes searched the ground
about him. They soon lit upon what he wanted. He pounced upon a bunch of
wild palay, stooped, and was up again with something white in his hand.
It was a piece of paper, limp and bespattered with the night's rain, but
on which characters in native Visayan were still visible. The Maestro
pored over it closely, then his pent-up breath exploded.
"Papa Isio," he exclaimed gaily. "The Mad Pope is coming to see us."
He stopped, with thought upon his brow.
"I lost my home and punching-bag at it once," he said, musingly. "Well,
we'll give him a scrimmage this time."
After which somewhat incoherent remark he folded the sodden bit of
paper carefully into his pocket, took a new deep breath, and walked on.
As he approached the drilling company of scouts he saw with pleasure
that Lieutenant Roberts was back from his tour of inspection and was at
their head.
"Hello, Roberts," he shouted, with easy cordiality, as he came within
hearing distance. "Hello, Roberts, old man; putting the boys through
signal-practice, eh?"
The officer, who had just assumed a fine attitude--arms folded at the
height of the chin, legs glued together in a gracefully curved column,
chest projected forward till it threw a shadow upon the ground--did not
respond with effusion.
"Present--Hums!" he said. "Carr-ie-ie--Hums! Shoulder--Hums!"
The Maestro took off his cap and, raising his freckled face to heaven,
shook his head vigorously. A wealth of carrot-red hair parted at the
crown and cascaded down the temples; and with the thus restored vision
of two green eyes he observed the performance of the little brown
soldiers critically.
"Pretty fine, Lieut," he said, encouragingly. "Very fair team-work;
they'll do. You ought to see what _I_'ve taught them, though. I'll show
you after drill. It's something scrumptious."
"Parade--Rest! Attentio-ion! Port--Hums! Shoulder--Hums!" said the
officer.
"Yes, they'll do for signal-practice all right," resumed the youth, in
soothing, patronising tones. "But," he went on, with a little of
suggestive criticism in his voice, "what about the real thing, Lieut?
What about their shooting, eh? I'm blest if I've ever seen them
discharge anything except blanks, have you?"
"Fours right--March! Column left!"
"Hep, hep, hep," came the column straight for the schoolmaster. The
Lieutenant was muttering something in his mustache that sounded like a
benediction. For a long six months, since the organisation of the
company, a prudent government had denied his pleadings for permission to
give his men target practice. The Scouts were an experiment, and there
was a vague feeling that they should not be taught too much.
"Why is that, Roberts?" persisted the Maestro, calmly dodging the
advancing phalanx and dropping into the confidential manner. "Why don't
you let them shoot? Are you afraid that they might begin on your broad
back? Are you----"
A sudden start of pain closed his mouth. The Lieutenant had quietly
planted his heel, in passing, upon the Educational toe, crushing down
upon it with all the enthusiasm of two hundred pounds a-thrill with
long-suppressed rage.
The Maestro's eyes followed the officer, marching at the side of his
company. His mouth opened in a broad grin that displayed a startling
vacuum where once had been two good teeth, now lying peacefully on the
sod of the old Berkeley gridiron.
"Guess it's school-time," he said.
He sprinted fifty yards, leaped an eighteen-foot ditch, hurdled a little
goat, bucked a carabao around till its tail was where its head had been,
and bounded into the schoolroom.
Two hundred brown ninos sprang to their feet.
"Guda morrneen," they howled, in unison.
"Good-morning," answered the Maestro, briskly. "Come, let's get at this.
No shirking, quick! Arm exercise! One, two; one, two."
He led them through a furious set of exercises in which he himself took
part enthusiastically, the perspiration cascading down his nose.
"You poor, scrawny weaklings," he said, at last, beaming upon the
breathless little assemblage. "Never you mind; I'll make men of you."
Then he started to go. "Give them reading," he shouted to his native
assistant from the door, "and breathing exercises every half hour."
But he came back, on an after-thought, and placed under the nose of his
faithful colleague the piece of sodden paper he had picked up on the
plaza.
The man's skin went yellow beneath the brown. "Papa Isio," he whispered.
"Just, what I thought," said the Maestro, nodding to himself. "And he
says he is coming here, doesn't he?"
"Yes, sir. He will come and burn the pueblo. That is the way he burned
Cabayan last year."
"Gol darn it, don't I know it?" ejaculated the pedagogue, fiercely. "And
didn't I lose my brand-new seven-dollar Spalding punching-bag? Well,
we'll set him on his head this time."
"Yes, sir," meekly answered the assistant, who had not caught the full
import of the explosive questions.
But the maestro did not hear him. He was out already and making his way
to the cuartel. Roberts was dismissing the company when he arrived.
"Hello, you take them now," said the officer, as he saw the
Maestro--Professor of Military Gymnastics also, by common consent--near
him. "And, by the way," he added, with suppressed glee, "how's the toe?"
The Maestro did not answer. He was working at the inside of his khaki
jacket. With some trouble he drew out a flat, oblong box. From this he
took a piece of yellow leather and a shining object that looked like a
bicycle pump. He inserted the mouth of the pump into a hole in the
leather and worked the handle up and down in rapid movement. The thing
began to swell and take shape. Finally it looked like a great leather
egg. He threw it on the ground, toward one of the loafing soldiers, and
the latter, as an automaton worked by some powerful spring, hurled
himself headfirst at it, grasped it inside of both arms, and lay on it,
while the rest of the company poured upon him in an avalanche.
"How's that, eh?" asked the schoolmaster, turning upon the Lieutenant an
eye that winked.
He did not wait for an answer. At a signal the company had formed into a
long, crouching line. He placed himself behind it, took a quick step,
and booted the pigskin a resounding whack. At the sound the whole line
galloped off in ferocious pursuit, and when, after describing a
beautiful parabola, the ball bumped along the ground, it was smothered
at the second bounce beneath the gross weight of the company.
"And how's that?" asked the Maestro, in tone still more compelling.
He turned to his men. "The 'Varsity," he called, a trifle pompously.
Eleven men stood out from the rest and lined up in a team.
"Six, eight, fifteen!" he shouted.
The team went through the pantomime of a fierce mass on centre.
"Four, fifteen, twenty-two."
The team swirled around in an end-run.
Then he hurled signals at them, and, in quick succession, with a tangle
here and there, it is true, they went through an entire repertory--cross
tackle bucks, straight openings, tandems, kangaroos, revolving masses,
double and delayed passes, fake kicks. They massed and bucked the air
about as if it offered no resistance. It was beautiful to see.
"And now, behold!" said the engineer of this fine performance, pausing
solemnly.
He drew a line in the earth with his heel and placed the ball upon it.
The quarterback took his position near the ball and the rest of the team
gathered some twenty yards away.
"Five, twenty-four, six X!" barked the Maestro.
There was a rapid movement among the men, and then they shot out in a
long V. On the walk at first, then on the trot, then at full gallop the
V swept down toward the line. The quarterback stooped, picked up the
ball, and dexterously passed it as the formation thundered down upon
him. The ball disappeared, swallowed up within the V, which, passing
the line with tremendous impetus, rumbled on like a battering-ram to a
glorious touch-down.
"The flying wedge," announced the Maestro, in the tone of the
knickerbockered flunkey ushering his Grace, the Lord Hunter of the
Billion Mark, into the Reception Hall. "Barred out in the States, but,
lordy, we're so far way, and it's such a good one, that I thought I'd
give it to them anyhow. Well, what do you think of _my_ team-work, eh?"
The Lieutenant pondered a moment in silent malevolence.
"Yes," he said, "pretty fair for signal-practice. But what about the
_real_ thing, eh? Why don't they _get_ at each other? I don't see them
_scrimmage_, do you?"
A cloud obscured the radiance of the Maestro's visage.
"Well," he said, ruefully, "we're in the Philippines. My team can run
signals, but you can't expect them to play. And," he added, in sudden
consolation, "your Scouts can drill, but they won't fight."
The situation had become tense beyond words, and the Maestro gracefully
evoluted.
"Papa Isio is coming," he said. "I picked up his announcement this
morning in the middle of the plaza."
"Papa Isio is a common carabao thief," said the Lieutenant. "Besides,
our troops have killed him already five distinct times and he doesn't
exist. And it's not up to me, anyhow. Go see Hafner."
So the Maestro went off to see Hafner. Leopold Joseph Hafner, First
Lieutenant of Scouts, U. S. A., Commandant of the Post of Balangilang,
was reclining in an easy-chair on his veranda, a bottle of gin under his
nose. He greeted his visitor with a blank stare. The Commandant
disapproved of pedagogues, and, in fact, of civilians in general.
"Hello, Lieut," shouted the Maestro, with an irreverence that would have
sent a shudder along the spine of a neutral witness. "Here's a piece of
paper for you."
The Commandant examined the paper.
"Well?" he said, at length, with an indifference calculated to crush.
"Oh, nothing. Only that Papa Isio is coming. That's the way he announced
his visit when I was at Cabayan last spring, and he burned the town down
and my punching bag, and made hash of the----"
He stopped with a little gurgle of dismay. Hafner had risen from the
ranks by a Teutonic adhesion to regulations, and rumour, supported by
his mannerisms, had it that his debut in the army had been culinary. The
remark about the fate of the inhabitants of Cabayan was harmless; the
little gurgle was not.
"And what business is that of yours?" asked the Commandant, with a
snort.
"Not much. Thought you'd like to know, so as to get ready----"
"Sir," interrupted the Commandant, pompously, "the American Army is
always ready."
"I was speaking of your Scouts, sir," the Maestro corrected, suavely.
He had been maneuvering toward the door during the latter part of the
dialogue, and with the last word he waved an airy good-by and
hop-skipped-jumped down the stairs.
* * * * *
The next day Papa Isio was in town.
The Commandant and his Second Lieutenant were aware of the fact at the
same time. For, startled out of their morning slumbers by a screeching
tumult, they sprang to their windows to see the whole population of
Balangilang driving past as if the demon were after them--men, women,
children, half-dressed, dishevelled, their eyes bursting out of their
sockets, carrying bundles of hastily snatched goods or squalling babies.
And from this multitude, flying by like nightmare creatures, there came
one long, wailing cry: "Papa Isio! Papa Isio!"
Against the black-blue background of the mountains, over which one
golden ray of sun was just sliding like a long rapier lunging toward the
heart of the city, volutes of smoke were rising heavily in the
water-logged air. Beneath, spiteful red tongues leaped up and out again
with explosive cracklings. The whole eastern part of the pueblo was
burning.
The officers ran to the cuartel. The men were in an uproar. With the
force of habit, acquired through the countless parade drills which had
been their sole military experience, they had made a concerted rush and
were ferociously fighting among themselves for the combs and brushes and
shoe-blacking.
"Here, here," thundered Roberts, while Hafner fumbled at the iron door
of the storeroom where was the carefully guarded ammunition; "here,
here, you don't need to comb your hair. Get your guns and
cartridge-belts."
His additional persuasion was physical and evidently potent, for when
the men filed past Hafner to get their ammunition they all had their
rifles in hand and their belts around their waists, though some had not
had time to don other garments generally regarded, in more social crises
at least, as indispensable. They poured out, were rapidly formed in
front of the cuartel, and, as they deployed across the plaza, from the
smoke ahead Papa Isio's mad mountaineers emerged in convulsive charge. A
drainage ditch cut the town transversely and the Scouts dropped neatly
into it; then their rifles slid out between the grass tufts like
venomous things.
"Fire at will!" bellowed the Commandant.
Here the Regulations, which hitherto had unwaveringly rewarded Hafner
for his respect of them, suddenly went faithless.
"During the final rush of the attacking party," they say, categorically,
"firing should be at will, for then the rapidity of fire and the
flatness of trajectory are more to be relied upon than accuracy."
But--alas!--the peculiar moral characteristics of the Balangilang Scouts
had not been considered when the Regulations were elaborated.
The flatness of trajectory worked poorly. At first pop the majority of
the Scouts emptied their magazines like bunches of firecrackers. Most of
the bullets sped towards the rising sun, to whisper the story of their
masters' unsteady nerves to the trees in the hills. To be just, however,
it must be recorded that some ploughed up the ground directly beneath
the marksmen's noses. Even then the mere noise--which was positively
tremendous--might have checked the advance of the attackers had they not
been Papa Isio's own Dios-Dios crew of mad, weird fellows, hurled on by
that religious spirit which kills so finely. Their Mad Pope was sending
them to everlasting glory, and Death would only expedite the voyage. On
they came, howling, mouth-distorted, muscles convulsively tense, a
foaming, maniacal band. At their head a big black man with rolling
eyeballs bounded, waving a long lance ending in a blood-dipped standard.
The war drums hummed in rhythm.
The Scouts were not at ease. Some were still peppering at the sun, but
the majority were fighting their rifles, trying to reload them with
stiff, clutching fingers that did not work expeditiously, or pounding at
them with a rage that told of something jammed. Running up and down
behind the line, the two officers were waving their swords, shouting and
cursing in an attempt to reinstill in their men that automatic
regularity which had been their fond pride. But the strings were broken
and the puppets worked spasmodically. The incoming rush was only a
hundred yards away. Suddenly, with a wonderful burst of speed, the big
standard-bearer spurted ahead of his companions. A Scout rose from the
trench and aimed his rifle, when the blood-dripping rag described a
rapid parabola and was sticking flaccidly on the soldier's khaki, the
handle quivering behind. Hafner saw the hands go up, clutching at the
sun.
"With the bayonet--charge," he bellowed.
"Hold on," screamed Roberts, in frenzied warning; "they haven't had that
yet!"
And then he found himself surrounded, pushed, jostled, swept away in a
furious stampede. Though they "hadn't had it," the men were charging,
but it was in the wrong direction. Across the plaza they avalanched,
toward the stone church, and when Roberts flowed in with the tumultuous
current, he had a vision of the Commandant, purple and spitting with
rage, at his elbow. The heavy doors clanged shut behind them.