revolution two years before and had never returned. So the coffin was
laid on the ground at the great barred doors, a naive little object
begging for a mite of the holy emanation that still clung about the
great building as some vague odour of incense. The mother let tallow
drip upon the frame, then stuck the candle upright into it. She opened
the big umbrella and set it down so that the stinging sun-rays of noon
should not shine through the thin cloth of the coffin into the closed
eyes of Carnota. The man crouched down against the church wall, the boy
sat on the shovel, and the woman squatted on her heels by her husband.
It was noon, and the perpendicular sun dripped molten lead upon the
land. The tin roof of the church crackled, white with heat; the tin roof
of the school crackled back to it; the heat, reverberated from one to
the other, fell into the space between, and the pink-and-blue rosettes
on the coffin shrunk like sensitive things.
A big fly buzzed near and the woman wafted it away. A little fly struck
the candle and boiled to death in the molten tallow. From a hole in the
church wall a big gee-kaw lizard uttered his hoarse, spasmodic cry three
times, then stopped, smothered by the heat. Ten feet away a carabao
plumped into a mud hole with a cool, squashy sound. A heavy silence fell
upon the plaza, punctuated only by the raucous breathing of a big
American cavalry-horse, dying of the surra by the cuartel.
The door of the schoolhouse opened, and the Maestro came out. Almost at
the same time the Lieutenant stepped out of the cuartel. He stopped to
look at the horse and the Maestro joined him.
The animal, a big gray, was standing with his four legs wide apart, like
the tripod of a camera. His ribs stood out like the ribs of a
long-stranded derelict; his legs were puffed up as big as barrels, and a
viscous fluid oozed from his nostrils. A cloud of flies buzzed about
this already half-carrion flesh.
The Maestro looked into the patient, bulging, blood-shot eyes.
"He will die?" he asked.
"Yes, they all die," said the officer.
"Why don't you have it shot?"
The officer smiled, a trifle embarrassed.
"Well," he said, "you know they're great on red-tape in the army. If the
horse dies naturally, the post-surgeon can fill out a comparatively
brief report; if he orders it shot, he will have to write out some five
foolscap pages. The Doc, you know, is pretty lazy; so he chooses the
short report."
"I see," said the Maestro.
They separated. The forlorn group at the church door drew a shrug of the
shoulders from the officer. The Maestro stopped and approached it.
The woman nudged the man with her elbow. "The Maestro!" she whispered,
awestruck.
They scrambled to their feet and stood respectfully before him. Their
downcast eyes peered at him half-anxious, half-wondering. For he was a
strange person, the Maestro. Carnota had often told about him.
The first day he had come to school he had been very angry because,
turning around upon the crash of a chart, upset by one of the boys in a
sly antic, he had found all the index-fingers converging dutifully upon
the abashed culprit.
He was very queer. He did not like the boys to tell on each other.
Every morning he made them go through violent movements with their arms,
their legs, their bodies; and they were very tired, for the palay crop
had failed and they had little in their stomachs.
But if he was queer at school, he was still more queer at home.
One Saturday afternoon, Carnota, peering with his brother into the
Maestro's house, had retreated suddenly, very much awed and astonished.
For the Maestro, in his shirt sleeves, was insanely pounding away at a
big, round ball that hung from the ceiling by a string. He hit and hit
and hit, and the ball rebounded from his fist to the ceiling so fast
that it sounded like the escribiente beating a bandillo upon his drum,
only much louder.
The man and the woman stood before the Maestro, thinking of these
things. And he stood before them, also thinking. He was before a result,
and he wondered if it was good.
* * * * *
He thought of the little boy. He saw him again as he had seen him on his
first day as Teacher of Balangilang--a little nino with a big round head
sunk in between sharp shoulders, and big brown eyes that looked up into
his own, half-scared, half-loving. He was a very little boy, Carnota,
and his peculiar uncertainty of movement made him still more babyish.
His face was dirty and his nose needed a handkerchief. His camisa was
open in front, and the abdomen projected over the trouser-band in a soft
roll of fat. Somehow that was what remained the most vividly in the
Maestro's memory--the vision of that roll of baby-flesh that had
suddenly filled his heart with unmanly softness.
That was the day of the "my" and "your" struggle.
"Do you see the hat?" the Maestro had asked.
"Yiss, I ssee dde hhett," staccattoed the class in answer.
"My hat," said the Maestro, pointing to his cap; "your hat," he said,
pointing to the reduced version of a dilapidated nipa roof which served
to cover Carnota's head. "Now, [pointing to his own], do you see my
hat?"
"Yiss, I sse my hett," answered the urchin confidently.
"No, no," said the Maestro. "This is my hat, not your hat; it is my hat.
Do you see my hat, my, my hat?"
"Yiss, I see my, my hhett," answered Carnota, his eyes alight with sweet
obedience.
The Maestro paused and wiped his brow with his handkerchief.
"Now, let us begin again," he went on with determination in his eye. "My
hat, your hat; your hat, my hat. This is my hat; this is your hat. Now,
show me your hat."
"Your hat," said Carnota, pointing to his own.
"No, no, that is not my hat; that is your hat; this is my hat, that is
your hat. Now, show me my hat, my hat."
"My hat, my hat!" shouted Carnota, triumphantly pointing to the
Maestro's.
"Oh, Lordy," muttered the Maestro. He looked down half-angrily. Two
brown eyes and an uplifted nose were turned up toward him in absolute,
admiring confidence, and his annoyance flew away as by enchantment. But
he could not bear to disillusion the child with further elucidation, so
it was many days before Carnota ceased mixing his pronouns with calm
unconcern.
* * * * *
He forced his thoughts onward to later and less pleasant memories.
First had come the cattle-pest, which had killed all the carabaos; then
the surra, which had killed all the horses; then the drought, just at
palay-sowing, baking the ground so hard that the wooden plows made only
derisive scratches. Now, it is true, the cholera was coming down the
coast to restore the balance. But it should have come first. The palay
crop had failed and there was nothing to eat.
There had been little to eat for weeks, and the children had begun to
droop and wither. Every morning the Maestro cursed under his breath as
he looked upon his waning audience. He could do little more than swear,
for it would have taken a hundred times his salary to feed them all, and
half of that went home religiously every month to a younger brother who
was playing end on the Yale team. So, not being able to help them all,
he had come to the determination to feed none. Which did not prevent him
from smuggling little Carnota into his house every morning, to send him
forth again with grains of mush sticking to his nose.
But this did not stop Carnota's head from sinking daily deeper between
his shoulders nor the peculiar uncertainty of movements to gain and gain
on him till, sometimes, when walking, he would fall suddenly without
cause, as if he had stepped into a hole.
The attendance dropped and dropped, and the Maestro did not like to look
at his reports. At last, one morning, Carnota himself failed to come to
school. He did not come the next day, nor the next. The Maestro went to
the tumble-down nipa shack by the river. He found the boy lying on a
mat, on the bamboo floor. He could not move.
"Yiss, I ssee dde hhett," he murmured when the Maestro asked him how he
felt.
The Maestro went to see the Post-Surgeon. But the Post-Surgeon had been
in the Philippines four years. That is, his ideal of life now was to
slop about his room all day in a kimona, smoking cigarette after
cigarette and drinking whiskey-and-soda after whiskey-and-soda. To go
out and see a sick child, especially when that sick child happened to
have a brown skin, demanded an effort absolutely colossal for the
corroded shreds of his moral strength. It took several days of begging,
remonstrance, appeal, almost threats to galvanize the dead fibres. At
last the Doctor slipped into a khaki and walked a hundred yards with the
Maestro to the hut by the river.
He examined the boy with a vague, returning ghost of professional
interest.
"Curvature of the spine," he said at length.
"No cure?" asked the Maestro.
"No, he'll die; it may take several years."
"Will he suffer?"
The surgeon pointed to the child. The little body was vibrating in
exquisite torture and cold beads of sweat were welling up on the stoical
Malay face.
That night the Maestro went to the Post Hospital and asked the steward
for some morphine.
"The dose is----" the steward started to say, giving him the pellets.
"I know, I know," the Maestro broke out hastily. "I've used it often."
He did not know the dose, but he did not want to know it.
He went back to Carnota. He found him with his sharp knees pressed tight
against his chin.
He gave him several pellets. He did not know what was the proper dose,
but he knew that this one was surely a highly improper one, and that is
all he wanted to know.
The little boy had gone to sleep with a deep, restful sigh.
And now he was there, beneath the pink-and-blue rosettes.
The man and the woman were becoming uneasy beneath the vacant-eyed
scrutiny of the Maestro. Finally the father stooped, wound his arms
about the coffin, and looked up questioningly into the Maestro's face.
"Yes," nodded the Maestro, "I will go with you."
The man heaved the coffin to his shoulder. The boy took the shovel, the
woman the candle, and they started in a file. The Maestro followed and
took the shovel from the boy.
At the cemetery the father began to dig in the black ooze, but the
Maestro stopped him. He led them to a little knoll close by beneath a
giant mango tree. The soil was dry there, and, taking off his jacket,
the Maestro toiled till a little hole was ready.
They lowered the paper-frilled box into it, then they scraped back the
earth. The father went into the jungle and came back with a cross made
of two bamboo sticks. He planted the cross and the Maestro placed a few
stones about it.
Then they walked back to the pueblo.
"Are you very sad?" asked the Maestro of the woman.
"Oho," she answered, "muy triste."
But she had not understood the question. She had had nine children, and
eight were buried. As far back as she could remember Death had never let
by a year without entering her hut. She had long ceased feeling.
They came to the plaza. The old cavalry horse was still standing as
before, his swollen legs spread in a wide base, his head dropped to the
ground, his patient, bulging eyes red with blood. His rattling, dolorous
breath, above the humming undertone of carrion-flies, was the only break
in the heated silence.
The Maestro looked at the animal. His chin dropped to his chest.
He raised his head with a sharp movement and walked on.
"I have done well," he said.
XIV
THE CONFLUENCE
It was a mistake from the first. The post was not at all for a woman,
but Miss Terrill was unaware of that. She had just come to Bacolod _via_
San Francisco, Manila, and Ilo-Ilo, by means, successively, of a big
white army transport full of other ingenuous pedagogues; a wheezy but
impudent little Spanish steamer, which aggressively shoved its nose
under every ripple of the inter-island seas; a languid-sailed lorcha,
loaded with pigs, dogs, and brownies, and finally a dizzy banca, which,
perched upon the tip-foam of a curling comber, outriggers spread out
like wings, landed her high up on a golden beach--fresh, dainty, and
composed like a coloured album picture. So, when out of the hat in which
the Division Superintendent was thoughtfully shuffling little slips of
paper representing the towns of his terra incognita, she drew the name
of Barang, she took it as much of a lark. Immediately she ran to a map,
found the little black dot down in the southern part of Negros, and
pronounced it "cute." She seemed prone, it must be said, to take things
that way. She was a very young girl, so young that the officers of the
Post raised their eyebrows and muttered under their breaths when they
learned where she was going. A certain second lieutenant, Saunders by
name, and very fresh from West Point, went so far in fact as to offer to
arrange it so that she should stay in Bacolod, at least as long as he
were there, and afterwards--any place where he might be. But she laughed
sweetly at this proffer, and put it from her promptly and decisively,
though her blue eyes, at the young fellow's sudden show of despair,
shone a moment with a tenderness--maternal he called it afterward--that
somehow left him without bitterness and full of reverence.
Here it must be explained for future understanding that Rumour, a most
vigorous Dame in the Philippines, forthwith pounced upon this little
incident and made off with it north and south. North the development of
the tale was rapid indeed; by the time it reached Escalante it dealt
with the marriage of Miss Terrill to the fat old colonel of the Post.
South, progress was more modest; at Himamaylan and Cantalacan, towns
nearest to Barang, it gave merely the news of the formal engagement of
Miss Terrill to Lieutenant Saunders. Which freak of Dame Rumour was
precious indeed, in that it led to the complications that make this
story.
The affair of her assignment continued to be much of a lark during the
two weeks spent in Bacolod awaiting transportation. It was still a lark
when the launch came and her trunk, in the loading, fell into the surf
and the hombres in charge of it kept dry by the simple expedient of
standing upon it. And the long, hard trip in the launch, laden to the
gunwales with supplies for a military post still further than her own
town, also was a lark, although at sunset the sky drew down in a black
vault beneath which the little steamer seemed very small and very lone,
and a wind arose which sent her plunging beneath tons of swirling water,
and later, when the sea had calmed, the Tagal pilot got lost in the
blinding downpour of rain and ran her gently into a perpendicular wall
from which they backed with a poignant feeling that it was only the
superstructure backing thus away, that the bottom was still on the
rock--a feeling which proved baseless, but which kept them tense the
night long, speaking in whispers and treading the deck a-tiptoe. The
world was still joyous when they crashed through a fish-corral and her
chair, caught by one of the poles, whisked her instantaneously from bow
to stern. But when they anchored beyond the edge of a long reef, and the
sun rose glaringly upon the shore, it must be admitted that her heroic
little heart sank a bit. On the other side of the reef the waters ended
in rippling purple shallows; and then there emerged a low bank of mud--a
livid yellow mud, flaccid and spongy, corroded with trickly streams that
ran ink. At the upper end of this bank, flanked by four leafless leprous
palms, there rose a long building, askew upon its rotting piles, with
torn tin roof and shutters fallen outward. In front, very white against
the gray facade, the blue sky, the yellow mud, a pole sprang up with a
faded American flag wrapped dejectedly about its top. Embracing the
bank, the two curved arms of a river came down in slow gurgitation of
liquid ooze between screens of black-green vegetation.
"This is Himamaylan, little mother," said the young lieutenant (he had
fallen rather easily into the relation imposed by her). "This is
Himamaylan. Wish it were your station; you've twelve more miles
overland."
Now this thoughtful preference for Himamaylan (seeing what Himamaylan
was) hardly promised for her own station. But she resolutely gulped down
a certain tightening of the throat. "How jolly!" she said.
Saunders looked at her rather long. "What a darling you are!" he
murmured. And the tone was hardly filial.
Which caused her to hurry her preparations for landing. A native
standing to his knees in the mud, after a good deal of vocalising from
the lieutenant, listlessly strolled to a decrepit banca, bottom up in
the shallows, flopped it over, baled it out with a coconut shell, tied
up the shaky outriggers with bejuca, and paddled leisurely, with an air
of supreme indifference, to the counter of the launch. "I'll go ahead
and reconnoitre," said the lieutenant, springing into it; "it's only
six, and Wilson (the American teacher of the station) is probably not up
yet." Miss Terrill saw him paddled to the shore, saw him land and go up
the rude causeway. At each step the stone under him sank as in a jelly
and his foot whisked out in a spatter of mud; at each step her heart
followed the stone in its sinking movement. He disappeared into the
great ruined building. She waited, it seemed a long time. The padron of
the launch began a muttered discourse upon the sin of delay with an
ebbing tide. The sun rose higher, poured its accusing glare upon the
squalor of the scene. The hombre in the banca pulled his wide-brimmed
straw hat over his eyes, curled in the bow, and went to sleep. The mud
began to crawl with little black crabs. "Cheer up!" she said to herself
in a crisp intonation, like the note of a bird.
The Lieutenant reappeared at the head of a dozen villainous duplicates
of the man in the banca. He paddled up. "All right," he said. "I have
cargadores. Wilson will arrange things to get you to your town. We'll
land your stuff first; by that time he'll be presentable."
One by one her boxes were thrown into the banca, paddled ashore, and
carried to the door of the big building, the convento of the friars
before the revolution had driven them out. Then very ceremoniously,
while the padron warned about further delay, Saunders handed her into
the little canoe, like a princess into her gondola, out again on shore,
and helped her over the first and worst part of the causeway.
"I must go now," he said. "Wilson is waiting for you at the door and
that launch is beginning to thump bottom. And please, once more; won't
you come back to Bacolod?"
She lifted her clear eyes to him and shook her head gently. "But you are
a dear good boy," she said.
To the subtle maternal tone of this, there was no replying. He bowed low
over her hand and turned back.
She started up right away. A great loneliness exhaled itself from the
land. She did not look behind, but toiled stolidly toward the building.
Tied to one of the verandah posts, a native pony, short-necked, compact,
muscular, was pawing the ground. She stopped and looked at it, gaining
from it the first comfort received of things since her arrival. It was
carefully groomed. The bay flanks shone like silk; the mane, parted,
fell fluffily on each side of the curved neck, the forelock dangling
roguishly between the eyes. Beneath the polished saddle a red blanket
added a touch of colour, almost of coquetry. The little animal stood
there like a protest against the ambient discouragement.
But a white-garbed man was at the door. "Good-morning, Mr. Wilson," she
said gaily; "what a nice horse you have there!"
"Good-morning, Miss Terrill," he answered, a gleam of approval in his
pale, tired eyes; "but that's not my horse. Mine--well, it's like
everything else about here"--and in a heavy gesture he passed his hand
over the musty landscape.
She met the owner upstairs.
He was a young man with slender waist and broad shoulders.
Leather-gaitered, buttoned to the chin in khaki, a big Colt hanging to
his loose belt, he gave Miss Terrill an impression of elastic efficiency
very pleasing. But still more pleasing, she thought very secretly, were
his eyes, golden-brown, soft and rather grave. He was horribly reticent
though. He let Wilson do the talking; leaning against the window-sill,
he contented himself with short remarks dropped at long intervals like
the sudden toning of a deep bell, and also with a consideration of her,
serious and thorough like the pondering of a problem. It was something
entirely different from that to which she was accustomed. She was not
vain; but still, she had often seen herself, mirrored, as it were, in
the eyes of men; and she knew that in her short khaki skirt, her long,
tawny leggins, her wide-collared blouse, her soft felt hat beneath which
her hair fluffed, light and golden as sun-kissed vapour, she was--well,
picturesque at least. But here was a judgment that reserved itself, an
admiration very much under check. His very position as he stood there,
his glances downward upon her, gave him a subtle strategic superiority.
It was rather irritating; and when he bowed and excused himself out of
the room, her return salute was stiff with a stiffness foreign to her
sweet nature. But immediately she found herself listening intently,
oblivious of Mr. Wilson, listening to the steps springing down the
stairs, stamping upon the flagging of the court, stopping beneath the
verandah. There was a short silence, then a sudden clatter of hoofs.
Unconsciously she was up and at the window--and he was gliding rapidly
along the palm-lined road leading away from the sea, erect in the
saddle, his waist giving flexibly to the pace of the pony.
"Oh," she ejaculated; "is he going away?"
"Yes," said Mr. Wilson; "back to his station at Cantalacan. It's ten
miles beyond yours. He'll arrange things for you at Barang."
Then, strangely enough, the desolation of the surrounding landscape
brusquely whelmed her again. She felt very much alone with this Mr.
Wilson, with his stoop of the shoulders, his weary eyes, his attitude of
profound lassitude.
"I must start off for my station," she said decidedly.
II