schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite
like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite
of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his
spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious
manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his attitude
something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California
campus one morning after the big game, won three minutes before the
blowing of the final whistle by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt, had he
been in that posture--at once pleasant and difficult--in which one's
vital concern is to wear a humility sufficiently convincing to obtain
from friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.
A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing
quite easy.
Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously
expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his
native assistant to obtain the information necessary to a full
matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a deadlock.
The boy did not know his name.
"In Spanish times," the Assistant suggested, modestly, "we called them
'de los Reyes' when the father was of the army, and 'de la Cruz' when
the father was of the church; but now, we can never know _what_ it is."
The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said, cheerily. "I
caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him--Isidro de los
Maestros."
And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on
the records of life afterward.
Now well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in
such state, sought for further enjoyment.
"Ask him," he said, teasingly, pointing with his chin at the
newly-baptised but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of
the ditch."
"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the
Assistant, after some linguistic sparring.
"Eh?" ejaculated the surprised Maestro.
And in his mind there framed a picture of himself riding along the road
with a string between his fingers; and, following in the upper layers of
air, a buzzing kite; and, down in the dust of the highway, an urchin
trudging wistfully after the kite, drawn on irresistibly, in spite of
his better judgment, on and on, horrified but fascinated, up to the
yawning school-door.
It would have been the better way. "I ought to go and soak my head,"
murmured the Maestro, pensively.
This was check number one, but others came in quick succession.
For, the morning after this incident, the Maestro did not find Isidro
among the weird, wild crowd gathered into the annex (a transformed
sugar storehouse) by the last raid of the Municipal Police.
Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till
a week had passed that the Maestro discovered, with an inward blush of
shame, that his much-longed-for pupil was living in the little hut
behind his own house. There would have been nothing shameful in the
overlooking--there were seventeen other persons sharing the same
abode--were it not that the nipa front of this human hive had been blown
away by the last baguio, leaving an unobstructed view of the interior,
if it might be called such. As it was, the Municipal Police was
mobilised at the urgent behest of the Maestro. Its "cabo," flanked by
two privates armed with old German needle-guns, besieged the home and,
after an interesting game of hide-and-go-seek, Isidro was finally caught
by one arm and one ear, and ceremoniously marched to school. And there
the Maestro asked him why he had not been attending.
"No hay pantalones," (there are no pants), Isidro answered, dropping his
eyes modestly to the ground.
This was check number two, and unmistakably so, for was it not a fact
that a civil commission, overzealous in its civilising ardour, had
passed a law commanding that everyone should wear, when in public, "at
least one garment, preferably trousers"?
Following this, and an unsuccessful plea to the town tailor, who was on
a three weeks' vacation on account of the death of a fourth cousin, the
Maestro shut himself up a whole day with Isidro in his little nipa
house; and behind the closely-shut shutters engaged in some mysterious
toil. When they emerged again the next morning, Isidro wended his way to
the school at the end of the Maestro's arm, trousered!
The trousers, it must be said, had a certain cachet of distinction. They
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 footballs. 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 a sack-coat to a full-dress affair; 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 and liquid joy.
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
rollbook 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 civilisation. 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, dropped into a wailing minor, an endless croon full
of the 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-mamma."
"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-she-look-like-a
-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-shewas-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-rrid-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: 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 rumours 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 carabao.
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 it might be well to go in also, which he did without
paying admission. The disappointed gatekeeper followed him. The Maestro
found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box, frilled
with 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 centre 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 cauldrons 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 oilcan,
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 boy
had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled with
such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a 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, a 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.
V
THE FAILURE
Out of the deadly stupor that encased him as a leaden coffin, Burke
started with a gurgling cry. He thought that somebody was driving a
red-hot poker into his eyeballs. He found only that the flaming globe of
the rising sun had just emerged over the lorcha's bow bulwarks and was
burrowing his face with its feverish rays. He rolled clumsily down the
sloping deck to a spot where a flap of dirty sail gave shade and there
he lay weakly on his back, motionless.
The change gave him little comfort. His eyes throbbed hotly, his throat
was as if scraped raw, and his mouth was fevered. A circle of iron
seemed riveted around his head and his whole body vibrated to a mad
dance of all his nerves. At last he could stand it no longer. He sat up
and looked about him desperately, then crawled to the scuppers and
picked up a flask lying there. He held it up against the sun. It was
empty. With a curse he hurled it into diamond-dust against the bulwarks.
He sat there a moment, glassy-eyed, then rose with a trembling effort
and groped aft to the cabin. He had to kick a mangy dog out of the way
and to step over a squalid baby, but finally he fell on his knees in a
corner and eagerly searched beneath the bamboo bench that followed the
wall on three sides. He rolled a dirty bundle out of the way and pulled
a demijohn toward him. He lowered the mouth tentatively till a few drops
of the fiery white beno wet the palm of his hand, then, with a cry
between a sob and a snarl, like that of a starving dog closing in on a
bone, he raised the jug to his lips and drained the dregs in four big
gulps. His trembling fingers opened and the demijohn fell to the floor
with a crash.
A faint colour came to his cheeks and his body straightened. He searched
his pockets with feverish fingers and drew out a soiled cigarette paper
and a pinch of tobacco. He rolled a cigarette, lit it, and went out on
the deck. A breath of wind, sweet with the fruity smell of crude sugar,
struck him in the face, and he noticed for the first time what had been
true since his awakening--that the lorcha had come to a standstill and
that the white roofs of Manila were glistening before him.
The sight did not seem to quicken him into action. He strolled down the
deck and sat on the bulwarks, his legs dangling above the quay. He
inhaled the smoke deeply two or three times, then his back humped and
his eyes narrowed like those of a purring cat.
This lethargy of bliss did not last long. Slowly something forced itself
into it with the insistence of a question mark. On the quay almost
beneath his feet, there were four long, black boxes, ranged
symmetrically in a row, each with its long, black cover by its side. At
first they said nothing to his half-stupid contemplation, but gradually
they took on something mysterious and awesome. They were so regular, so
oblong, so respectable; they stood so gapingly, so alertly open, that
suddenly a little shudder thrilled up along his spine. Ten feet away,
rigid and alert, a big Met. policeman stood, looking along the quay with
patiently expectant eyes. Burke was on the point of calling out a
question when his attention was drawn by another scene.
A little rosy pig trotted squealing down the deck with a fierce little
boy after it. It bumped the bulwark beneath Burke, and the vibration
caused him to look down. The boy had the pig by the tail. The boy was
pulling one way and the pig the other; they were of equal strength, so
that for a second they were fixed in a plastic group. Struggling
impotently, the boy turned his big black eyes up to the man in mute
appeal, and the big black eyes suddenly recalled to Burke two other such
eyes in just such a little brown face, and these big black eyes became
a measure of the road that Burke had travelled the last three years, a
road he liked not to contemplate. So he was turning from the unpleasant
scene when the boy let go the tail and fell back, rigid.