unshaken in her marital determination; and in symbol of that state of
mind she was having built a little palm hut on the spot where she had
camped in Ledesma's cane fields. Three taos, impressed by her from her
father's dependents, were working night and day; the four corner posts,
the bamboo-strip floor, the nipa roof, were already up, and only the
thatch walls remained to be put on. From behind the closed shutters of
his father's mansion, Ledesma saw the fort arise above his sugar-canes,
and he cowered in dark corners, studying a Civil Service pamphlet with
vague projects of escaping to Manila to study typewriting and enter a
government office. Also, he had sent an urgent note to his father, off
in one of their other haciendas, bidding him to come back quick to
protect him. The absence of Ledesma from the boys' school was bad
enough, but much worse was the realisation that the truce arranged with
the Maestra was fast becoming impossible. When the Maestro had bearded
Senorita Constancia's mother and had returned triumphant with the
objects that were to enable the young lady to make decent appearance at
school, he had forgotten that, in the Philippines, clothes are of the
kind that must be washed often; so that, when two days later he had to
repeat the performance, and saw before him a future filled with the same
monotonous prospect, his ardour had undergone several degrees' cooling.
This very morning the struggle to obtain a few shreds of presentable
clothing from the irate mother had been so violent, and the subsequent
walk across the plaza with the hard-won bundle, beneath the appreciative
eyes of the whole town, had been so self-conscious that the Maestro had
sworn that it was the end of _that_. A better solution, a final
solution, must be quickly found.
Out of his bitter reflections the Maestro was suddenly startled by a
drumming of hoofs and a shout outside. He went to the window, and a
white man in khaki, cork-helmeted, was pulling up his horse before the
steps.
"Huston!" shouted the Maestro, in delighted tones. He hop-skipped across
the room, dashed down the stairs, and whacked the newcomer, just
dismounting, a tremendous slap on the back. "You old son-of-a-gun," he
drawled, tenderly, seizing his hand and moving it up and down like a
pump-handle.
The man's eyes gleamed, and a flush of pleasure came to his tanned
cheeks. "Here, here, old man," he said, deprecatingly, "you don't seem
alive to the--er--dignity of my profession."
"Sky-pilot, eh?" shouted the Maestro. "Gospel-sharp; stuck up about it,
eh? Darn-if-I-care; you're still a good fellow. Golly, but I'm glad to
see you," he cried, nearly knocking him down with a dig in the short
ribs. "Gee, but I'm glad to see you----" and he shook him till his teeth
rattled. "How long're you going to stay?"
"Three days," answered Huston; "want to start a mission here."
Tolio, the Maestro's muchacho, was unsaddling the pony. The two friends
climbed the steps into the house. Unbuckling his belt, the missionary
threw his long Colt's upon the table and dropped into a chair, and then
they began to talk. It was a strange performance. The words swept out of
their mouths in an uninterrupted, turgid, furious stream; they shouted,
stammered, giggled; they laughed like artillery thunder, gesticulated
like windmills, a hectic flush upon their cheeks, their brains awhirl,
mad with the madness that seizes the man of lone stations when at last
he can communicate his thoughts, pour out what has been dammed in so
long, free himself of the stagnant burden of never-expressed feeling,
emotion, inspiration, theories.
But after a half-hour of this, the Maestro began to subside. Huston
still talked, told of the cholera in Manapla, the mud between Bago and
Jinagaran, the palay famine in Oriental Negros, the anti-fraile mob in
Silay, the embezzlement of the Provincial Treasurer. But the Maestro was
silent, his eyes upon his feet.
"What the deuce are you thinking about?" at last exclaimed the
missionary, suddenly very much aware of his loquacity.
"By Jove, I've got it," said the Maestro, rising to his feet like an
automaton, his eyes fixed as if he saw written in space the solution of
some sore world-problem. He took three great strides across the room,
wheeled, and stopped before the missionary. "Yes, sir, I've got it," he
repeated, enthusiasm beginning to thrill in his voice.
"For goodness' sake," asked the missionary, "got what?"
"I've got--well, something for you to do," answered the Maestro,
enigmatically; "yes, sir, I've a job for you, Huston."
He sat down at the table and scribbled two notes. "Tolio," he called.
The boy appeared at the door. "Take this," ordered the Maestro, giving
the boy the first note, "to Maestro Ledesma. Tell him to come right
away. Tell him to come around by the river so that the Maestra cannot
see him."
"Si, Senor," said the faithful servant.
"And after Maestro Ledesma has entered the house here, not before, mind
you, Tolio, you go to Senorita Constancia and give her this note," went
on the Maestro, giving the boy the second slip of paper.
"Si, Senor," said the boy, carefully taking one note in his left hand
and the other in the right.
The two friends were again left alone, but the spell had been broken and
they did not renew their outpourings. The Maestro was the prey of a
fixed idea. He paced back and forth like a lion in his cage, full of the
fever of resolve. At intervals he punched his left palm with his right
fist, then varied the performance by punching his right palm with his
left fist; incoherent exclamations growled in his throat: "He's got to,
that's all; things are going to smash; I'll make him; it's the only
way!"
Huston looked on curiously. He had been scrub on the football team when
the Maestro had been captain and star; and the relation had left
indelible marks upon him in an unreasoning, instinctive respect, a
subtle sense of inferiority which no achievement in after-life would
ever enable him to overcome. Now, however, this sense of fealty was
being rudely put to proof. A horrible suspicion was setting his heart
a-pound.
The shrinking appearance of Ledesma at the door broke the painful
silence. He was a slim, limp young man, with pomaded hair, clad in a
white suit generously sprinkled with cologne water, and, in spite of the
cigarette held delicately between his fingers, was evidently ill at
ease.
And little chance he had to recover from his emotion. "Ah, Ledesma,"
said the Maestro, frigidly. "I want to talk to you, my boy, and
seriously, too. Come into my room."
And, placing a heavy hand upon the young fellow's shoulder, he steered
him into an interior chamber, closing the door behind them.
To Huston, left alone, there came sounds of a furious altercation--that
is, furious from one party; for from one weak voice there seemed to come
only mild expostulation, faint denials, pathetic pleas, negatived by the
cold, incisive tones of the Maestro. Little by little, however, the
begging voice rose, grew rebellious, squealed, trembled with an
indignation that seemed almost righteous. The Maestro began to thunder.
"You've got to; you've got to," he shouted. "I'll make you do it!" "No,
no, I won't," answered the other voice, settling down to hopeless,
stubborn denial; "I won't, I won't!"
The door opened and the Maestro dashed out. He gave a wild look around
the room, and his eyes lit upon the missionary's revolver upon the
table. He pounced upon it, snapped it open, and the cartridges fell
out. After a rapid examination, to make sure that the cylinder was
empty, the Maestro snapped the weapon shut again and bounded back into
the interior room, closing the door after him. Then his voice became icy
and menacing. There was a sharp click; the protesting voice weakened
into a faint wail, and there was silence.
"Huston," shouted the Maestro, "let me know when Senorita Constancia
comes in."
But at the sound of the sweet name there was a scuffle inside. The door
burst open, and Ledesma dived head first across the threshold; but a
long muscular arm went out after him, grabbed him by the trousers, and
jerked him back inside.
Again the Maestro's voice rose in a few crisp sentences, and there was
no answer to them, only a faint snivelling, which diminished gradually.
The door reopened slowly, and the Maestro and Ledesma came in together,
arm in arm--that is, the Maestro's arm was twined flexibly but
inexorably about Ledesma's limp member. Ferocious triumph beamed upon
the face of the gentle pedagogue; Ledesma was wilted, tear-stained, and
despairing. At the same moment, radiant, smiling, alert as a kitten,
Senorita Constancia appeared at the outer door. She wore a long-train
blue-silk skirt, a cream-coloured camisa through whose shimmering,
puffing sleeves her arms glowed like frosted gold; over her bare
shoulders a jusi panuelo was lightly laid, the two ends meeting upon her
breast in a golden brooch. She swept gracefully through the room, her
bracelets clinking on her wrists, toward Huston, whom she had met
before, shook hands with him Anglo-Saxon style, bowed to the Maestro,
calmly ignored Ledesma, and whirred down into the depths of a cane
chair.
"Huston," said the Maestro, gravely, "I want you to marry these two
people."
But the missionary, so far petrified with wonder, suddenly rebelled.
"Look here, Paul," he burst out, "what kind of a thing are you getting
me into? To me it looks--well, at least irregular, very irregular. To
tell the truth, old fellow, your actions seem to me--er--well, singular,
very singular. I--you----"
"You just leave this thing to me," interrupted the Maestro, with an
authoritative nod toward the poor churchman, whose protesting attitude
was fast oozing away in the subtle sense of inferiority still sticking
to him from the days when the Maestro was gridiron captain and star and
he a humble "scrub"; "you just leave that to me. Go ahead with the
ceremony; that's all you have to do!"
But, with the courage of the meek, Huston fought on. "I at least must
know," he said, firmly, "whether these two people consent to
this--er--union." He turned to the Maestra. "Do you want to marry this
young man?" he asked, pointing to the snivelling Ledesma.
"Oh, yes," answered the Maestra, suavely, "he must marry me."
"And you," went on Huston, turning to Ledesma, "do you wish to take this
maid to wife?"
Ledesma opened his mouth like a carp, then shut it again. He looked
fearfully toward the Maestro. The Maestro glared significantly.
Ledesma's hands began to wring each other; beads of perspiration
appeared about his lips. "I--I----" he stammered.
"Look a-here," thundered the Maestro, impatiently; "what the deuce is
the need of all this fuss? He's got to marry her, that's all. He's got
to marry her, do you understand?" he repeated, a vision of his ruined
schools aflame in his mind; "it's the kind of marriage that's _got_ to
be, catch on?"
It is the misfortune of us humans that our speech is, after all, but a
poor instrument for the expression of our thoughts. The same words, the
same phrases, are capable of diverse interpretation. For instance, to
the Maestro, the kind of marriage that _has_ to be was merely the
marriage that would settle the crisis of his schools. For the missionary
there was only one species of marriage that has to be--not at all that
in the Maestro's mind.
"Oh," said the missionary; "oh, _that's_ the way it is, is it?" He
turned to Ledesma and, pointing to him a long finger trembling with
righteous indignation, "Stand up and be married, young man," he said,
icily.
As Ledesma was already on his feet, the command was hardly necessary;
but it dashed out of that youth's heart the last spark of hope that had
flamed up at the missionary's intervention. Taking Senorita Constancia's
arm, the Maestro led her to the groom.
"Take her hand," said the missionary, sternly.
Tremblingly the groom obeyed, and was bound for better or for worse.
It cannot be said that the ceremony was followed by the usual joyous
whirr of congratulations. The bride calmly turned her back upon the
groom and engaged Huston in a lively conversation. The Maestro, suddenly
turned craven, went out into the kitchen on the pretext of seeking
refreshments, and meanwhile Ledesma quietly but hurriedly slunk out of
the house. The Maestra, from the window, saw him running along the
street, but she only laughed. She alone was at ease. The Maestro,
returning with a bottle of Spanish wine and a plate of bananas, seemed
to have lost all his assurance; the missionary's virtuous indignation
was fast leaving him, in spite of his efforts, and doubt again was
disturbing his spirit. There was something ominous in the air.
Nor was this presentiment to prove a false one. Perhaps half an hour
later, as the Maestra was saying good-by, Isidro pattered in with a note
to the Maestro. It was from Ledesma.
SENOR MAESTRO, TYRANT AND DARKEST DESPOT:--When you will receive
this note I will be gone and out of the reach of your most unjust,
tyrannic and unholy arm. I am embarking at the present time upon a
banca, I will take a lorcha at the dismouthing of the Ilog River to
Ilo-Ilo and from that charming city I will go to Manila to study
typewriting and thus enable me to enter the Administration of the
Government of this my sore-tried and much in the past tyrannized
and devastated country which will rise like the phenix bird from
its cinders, blooming afresh from the long-sleeping volcano when it
awakes and lights up the world with the blessings of Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity which to my ignorant countrymen I will
teach like the swallow which none die without God on High knowing
it feed his little young one that do not know how to flie above the
dark ignorance at the all-around of them. It gives me great
pleasure, oh, sir, to proclamate to you that the unholy union in
which you like the blackest czar of despotic Russia forced upon my
palpitating heart is null. My father who has returned from his
hacienda tells me that according to the law I cannot marry without
his permission until I am twenty-five. I am only twenty and my
father--Oh, sir, how sweetly paternal is a father--will not permit
me to marry Senorita Constancia de la Rama y Lacson, so my
so-called marriage is a void.
Hoping sir, that Remorse will soon cause your heart to weep I am
No longer your pupil and assistant-maestro
MAURO LEDESMA Y GOLES.
"Thunder!" exclaimed the Maestro, suddenly again belligerent. "Let's get
after him!"
But the Maestra had picked up the letter and was reading it.
"Oh," she said, when she had finished; "oh, that is very nice. Now I
can--what you call?--ah, divorce; I can divorce--just like an American
girl!"
And thus it is that the Girls' School of Balangilang is still the envy
of the maestros for leagues around.
VII
A JEST OF THE GODS
It was rather a disreputable place, and really we were there by chance,
a dance upon the British warship anchored near Cavite and the breakdown
of the returning launch leaving us upon the stone quay of the Binondo
_estero_ at a shameful hour. The time spent bobbing upon the waters
while with fervent ejaculations the engineer experimented with the
frivolous gasoline engine had been ecstatically cool. Now the city
exhaled upon us her feverish breath, in a short time the sun would pour
down its blistering rays, and we could not bear thought of room and bed.
So we sat around the big narra table at Timke's, clinking with straws
the ice in our glasses.
There was a scuffle in an obscure corner of the room; then, carried by
muchachos, there passed beneath the light a limp, dangling corpse. They
were not over-careful, the muchachos. Two were at the legs, two at the
arms, so that the head hung down, lamentable, with mouth open. They
crossed the room and vanished through a door into the rear apartment;
and our last glimpse was of the opalescent reflection of a lamp upon a
cranium astonishingly bald.
"Old man Dickson," somebody said, significantly; "paralysed, as usual."
"That man," said Courtland, with a vague gesture toward the door just
slammed; "that man is the victim of a most atrocious and absurd
tragedy."
And he told it to us thus:
* * * * *
I first knew him through his newspaper work. Every morning he shuffled
gently into my office and asked if there was anything new. He did this
with a want of assurance strange in a reporter, and yet not at all with
humility; but rather in a dreamy, detached manner, as if he really did
not care if there was anything new, and would probably not remember it
if there were; as if the thing of importance, after all, were the
internal problem upon which he was pondering, pondering with a discreet
intensity that left his arms to hang in uncouth limpness, his feet to
drag, his head to sink sideways toward his right shoulder, his whole
body to appear as if abandoned, utterly abandoned, of the spiritual
being--to hang, loose, limp, ungoverned, like a scarcrow which lives,
gesticulates, postures only with the caprices of the wind. His whole
body, I said; I should except the eyes. They were magnificent eyes,
large, limpid, serenely blue. They were not abandoned; they were fixed.
But it was not at anything outside. It was at something within. As you
sought them you became aware of that. You were not seen--you were not of
importance. The sun, the sky, men, women, were not seen--they were not
of importance. These eyes were looking inside. As you examined them, you
realised that it was the back of them that was turned toward you, the
reflective back wall of them, and that their working, searching,
penetrating part was turned inward, poring there in the shifting gloom
at--I don't know what vision.
Don't think that I noted all this at first. It came slowly, by degrees.
No, the first thing that impressed me was his baldness, his
extraordinary baldness. It seems nothing to tell you that on his head
there was not a suspicion of hair; that's common enough, doesn't express
it at all. Likewise to explain that there were no brows, that the lashes
were gone, that, of course, his whole face was hairless--this is
prattle, mere childish, puerile prattle. Usual expressions, the
ordinarily adequate figures--comparisons with knees, with billiard
balls--sink into impotence, are sacrilege before the Awfulness of the
thing. Nothing usual can express it. It was something appalling. It was
a curse, a visitation. It was as if God's lightning had struck his
pate, blasted it clean--No, that does not express it. There was
something solid, established, immutable about the thing that cannot be
explained by visions of accidents, of cataclysms, however potent. It
savoured rather of some law of Nature, of the patient, irrevocable work
of obscure Forces through the ages--say like the glacier-polishing of
granite domes such as I've seen in the California Sierra, something
geologic and eternal. Yes, that was it: that man's pate must have been
polished and repolished with malevolent earnestness for years, for ages,
through inconceivable aeons. His father, his grandfather, his ancestors
after and before the deluge, from the first day of creation, nay, back
into the reign of chaos, must have been bald, abominably bald, to
explain that mournful head there before me. As a matter of fact, I
should have been surprised at something else; for, at the sight of a
volume lying open upon my desk, he had launched upon a dissertation on
Keats, something absolutely precious in quaint insight, in subtlety of
appreciation. But I was fascinated with the head; that baldness held me
in its toils, froze my eyes, tugged my heart, drugged my brains. And it
was not till he had gone that I realised I had been listening to
exquisite discourse.
Do not be too much surprised. Such a thing is to be accepted, almost
expected, from a Manila newspaper man. The Manila newspaper man is a
singular genus. Always he has talent; sometimes more than that. But of
course there's always something the matter. This something is what makes
him so interesting. And it leads, also, to a certain conventionality in
intercourse with him. For instance, to a Manila newspaper man you never
mention the Past. There _is_ no past. He is supposed to have sprung like
Venus from the sea, full-panoplied--with his education, his talent, his
gentle scepticism--right on the Escolta. That's the rule.
I knew the rule; so if I broke it, it shows merely that my awakened
curiosity was too much for my _savoir faire_. I wanted to know, that's
all. I searched for and found his haunt.
Every evening, after his work, he crossed over to the Metropole. He had
a queer, apologetic way of progressing, with his right side ahead of his
left, as if ceaselessly jostled by an imaginary crowd. Gently, with that
sideways motion, he shuffled into the big room and made for a table in
the corner of the veranda. He was always very cleanly dressed in white,
unstarched, which I suspected was the result of his own industry in his
little back room; but his shoes were down by the heels, which added
greatly to the general humility of his appearance. Carefully he placed
his chair at a certain distance, known of him only, from the table;
then he sat down slowly, folded his arms upon the table, his body
inclined a little forward. Without a movement of the folded arms he
raised one finger of the right hand, in a gesture almost heraldic in its
sobriety, and the boy, attentive by his side, immediately brought him a
small glass of cloudy green liquid. This he sipped slowly. A gray,
opalescent cloud came over his eyes; his head fell slightly toward his
right shoulder in an attitude of careful consideration. When he had
finished, he remained thus a long time, immovable, petrified in his
gentle brooding; then up would go his finger in that strange gesture,
almost imperceptible, but infinitely commanding, as if it came not from
himself, but as a manifestation of some superior power--and the boy,
attentive, immediately brought another glass of the cloudy-green stuff,
which he sipped to the dregs, motionless and fatal like some hierarchic
figure. Two hours, three hours, he kept this up, then suddenly he moved.
Both his arms went up and around in a wide, noble gesture; his
hands--long, fine-veined hands--settled upon his head, his absurd bald
head, as if in protection, in vague protest at possible levity; he
leaned forward and was asleep. He slept there, upon the table, his hands
upon his head, his cheek upon his arms; his face, turned to the light,
was relaxed in infinite lassitude, as a child's after crying; his
mouth, slightly open, let pass his breathing, faint, like a babe's--and
once in a while he sighed, a sigh not deep, not peevish, not rebellious,
but resigned, rather, patient and unhappy. There was something
incredibly babyish about the whole thing--the sleep, the sigh, the
posture, even that extraordinary bald head gleaming between the fingers,
pudgy with shadow--something that would have drawn the heart of woman in
tenderness, tugged at it with the pang-desire to console, to cherish, to
kiss. Yes, a woman would have kissed that absurd bald head, would have
smothered that gentle sigh. A woman would have, I tell you! And he
didn't know, didn't know, the fool baby-man!