and she was a-thrill with a fierce desire for action. "To my home,
quick, quick!" she cried to the men. They took up the litter and started
toward the house. But they were inconceivably slow. They jostled him.
She pushed one of the carriers aside and herself took a pole. Finally
he lay upon her little cot.
She tore open the khaki blouse with its spot of rust above the heart.
The blue shirt beneath was soggy and dripping. With her scissors she cut
off both garments, then washed the bared flesh. But there was something
which would not wash off--a little bluish spot from which, constantly
reforming, red lines radiated like the cracks of a broken pane.
He opened his eyes just then; they glared wild for a moment, settled
upon her, softened, then with a sharp intake of breath he was
unconscious again. She noticed that his right shoulder had a strange,
caved-in appearance. She felt the joint lightly. The shoulder was
dislocated.
Her lips tightened. That first must be set, for from it he suffered. She
had heard of it as something very difficult. She was a girl, weak, lone,
ignorant, and yet it must be done.
She called Vincente and together they tried to draw the arm back into
its socket. It was sickening work. At every effort the strong shoulder
muscles contracted in reflex resistance, and they were helpless as
babes.
She desisted and thought, with an exasperated concentration of all her
faculties. A snatch of chance knowledge came back to her. In her trunk
she had a little medicine chest given to her by loving friends when she
had started on her long voyage. She had laughed at the time; she pounced
upon it now like a wild animal upon food. She looked into it in
anguished questioning. Yes, there it was--a phial labeled chloroform.
She sent Vincente out for Benito. He was a manangete, and very strong.
He came, stood upon his immense bare feet before her, his straw hat in
his hand, and she looked with thankfulness upon the bull-like neck, at
the arms, bulging in ridges beneath the camisa. Once she had cared for
his sick baby-girl, and now he adored her.
They moved the cot against three of the roof-sustaining posts and
fastened it tight to them. They strapped the unconscious man to the cot.
The crucial moment came now. Right here she might murder him with
criminal ignorance. She accepted the hazard.
She uncorked the little bottle, spilled some of its contents upon a wad
of cotton, and applied this to the pinched nostrils. He struggled; his
left arm tugged at the strap holding it till the muscles were tense to
breaking. She persisted--and suddenly his effort collapsed; with a
shuddering sigh his whole body relaxed liquidly.
She made use of Benito now. At her command he took between his iron
fingers the wounded man's wrist. She placed her soft hands upon the
tao's corded arms. He tugged; she directed. From her tapering fingers
there flowed into the stolid muscle of the machine-man a subtle fluid of
tender intelligence. In the commonness of their work they became as one:
he the body, she the soul. The chloroform had had its effect; the
shoulder muscle loosened, elastic, to the steady pull. The arm
lengthened, almost dismeasurably. She panted. Beneath the suggestion of
her fingers Benito gave a sudden sharp movement up and to the left.
There was a resounding click--and then Benito, Vincente, the man in the
cot, the whole room floated slowly upward, leaving her in a lone black
hole.
But from this weakness she emerged to the urgent call of what there was
yet to do. She wrapped tape about both shoulders to keep the set member
in place. Then she turned to the wound.
She saw with relief that the stagnant red lake which had covered it at
first had not returned. But there was still the little blue hole with
its radiation as of cracked glass. She fingered it lightly. In there was
a bullet, and it must be gotten out.
Pale, with eyes closed, she gently inserted her little finger into the
warm flesh. It was as if she were digging into her own heart. After a
while she felt a hard, rough-edged object. She gasped in a strange
mingling of physical horror and spiritual ecstasy. The bullet had sunk a
bare inch.
She looked through the chest, but there was nothing for the necessary
extraction. She tried the scissors; they slipped and revolved about the
leaden slug without seizing it. She wrapped twine thick about the
blades. This time they caught. There was a momentary resistance; she
tugged firmly, it seemed at the very core of her being. Slowly at first,
then faster, the distorted bit of lead slid through the flesh, then
popped out and rolled upon the floor. A little ruby foam came to the
surface of the wound.
The whole world floated away gently, except a Voice, a thundering,
all-filling Voice; "Senora, Senora," it crashed and reverberated through
the infinity of Time and Space. It fell gradually into a call, gentle
but insistent, that she must obey; and she opened her eyes upon the face
of Vincente, yellow with fear; and it was he that was calling "Senora,
Senora."
She sprang to her feet at the command of her purpose. From the torn
wound, little red drops were arising like bubbles one by one--the drops
of his life. She dressed the wound carefully. A great weariness fell
about her like a pall; she sat down at the head of the bed. Something
soft and delicious entered her soul.
She remained there till dawn, a sweet content singing at her heart. The
oppression of Things that had crushed her for so many months had lifted;
her being distended in ecstatic repose. He slept, still in the torpor of
exhaustion, calm like a statue; she watched him, watched the white
forehead with the black curls damp upon it, the eyes, closed in the
shadow of the long lashes; watched this helplessness with a gentle
feeling of maternal possession. His features were relaxed in lassitude;
the corners of the mouth drew down slightly, in an expression a little
tremulous, as that of a child who has cried and is not yet quite
consoled. A great tenderness dissolved her being.
Toward morning, however, his cheeks flushed dull red and he began to
toss restlessly upon the narrow couch. She placed her hand upon his
forehead and found it burning. She redressed the wound, placed fresh
bandages about the shoulder; but the fever did not abate. All day she
fought it, handicapped by her poverty of means. And then as the sun had
set in black-and-blood-portent and the night fell like a great velvet
cloak from the sky, Fear crept into the little hut; and all night as she
sat there by the cot, it was at her elbow, spectral, dilated-eyed, and
cold.
He tossed and tossed in convulsive starts till the cane bed creaked and
cried. He muttered incessantly, words without end, rapid as the tick of
a telegraphic receiver. At times she could understand.
"The silence!" he would say; "the silence!"
He stopped a moment, his brows frowned, then the words came again, slow,
as in painful mental analysis. "Their ways are different," he said;
"their language incomprehensible. It is silence--God, what silence!"
He rose to a sitting posture and listened long, intently. "Nothing," he
said, falling back, discouraged; "silence," he whispered.
Then, "And the mountain, the musty mountain, how it weighs!"
He was quiet for a long while. Then he spoke one word.
"Lone"--and the word drawled like a plaint.
A great wonder possessed her. So he also had felt what she had felt, had
suffered what she had suffered. Through the armour of efficiency, of
alertness, had penetrated the oppression of the Land. He, the strong,
the vigorous, the self-reliant, had suffered as she, the weak, lonely
girl. She passed her hand softly over his hot forehead; she bent down in
an impulse to kiss. But he was talking again, one sentence repeated in
swinging sing-song.
"Saunders, Saunders, may he make her happy; Saunders, Saunders, may he
make her happy." He fell into a rhythmic beat, like the marching cadence
of a drum. "Saunders, Saunders, may he make her happy," he repeated,
over and over again, in ceaseless sequence.
She drew back, afraid. Saunders--that was the young lieutenant at
Bacolod. But who was the mysterious "Her" that out of the mechanical
rise and fall of the sentence rose distinct in an emphasis of wistful
tenderness--a sense of profanation whelmed her; she should not listen to
that.
She left the room and went below to rouse Vincente. But he was in the
death-like stupor that is the sleep of the native. She could not wake
him, make him understand what she wanted--that he should watch over his
master. She had to go back, and as she re-entered the room he was still
murmuring, but with slowing cadence, like a clock that runs down:
"Saunders, Saunders, may he make her happy."
When finally the thing had died upon his lips, he was quiet a long time,
and she remained there, listening to the beat of her own heart. The dawn
was entering cracks and windows in grayish humid flow. She shivered a
little; a great discouragement dissolved her strength. She moved to the
window and looked out upon the misty landscape. After a while the sun
appeared, a red ball of fire on the top cone of Canlaon. It rose, freed
itself of the enveloping net of vapour, shone down, white, clear,
inexorable; the mountain slopes began to steam.
A movement behind her made her turn.
He had risen and was sitting upright, his free arm raised high toward
heaven, and in impassioned accents he was declaiming:
"Star of my Life," he cried; "Star of my Life, cold in the black sky,
far, ah, how far! Star of my Life, in spite of all, in spite of thee,
thou art _my_ Star, _my_ Star!"
He sank back as if broken with the effort. She placed her hand upon his
brow and beneath it she felt the heat slowly recede; soon he was
sleeping peacefully like a child.
"Star of my Life!" she murmured wonderingly.
VI
She was very happy that day. He slept heavily, broken with fatigue and
loss of blood; she hovered about him like a butterfly, finding a
thousand little precious things to do. In the afternoon she decided that
she must rest. She had improvised with screens a room in the sala; but
she slept only in snatches. She woke often with a delicious feeling of
duty to perform; and then she would glide to the door and from the sill
watched him sleeping calmly within. She was no longer lonely. All night
he slept thus; then, as in the morning she flitted about the room
touching things here and there, suddenly she knew that he had awakened.
She did not turn toward him, but she could feel his eyes, softly
luminous, following her gravely. She slid out of the room. He had not
spoken.
But outside the world was dull. She returned. As she entered, the eyes
were still on the door, wistful; but immediately, like a veil there came
over them the old stubborn reserve.
"I must go," he said. "I suppose I got laid up in that fool fracas over
there. You've been very good to me. I must go."
He tried to raise himself; but a gray pallour sprang to his face.
"Sh-sh-sh," she hissed gently. "You must be a good little boy and do as
I say. You must not move."
A great weariness was upon him; his bones were as water; and beneath the
soft "sh-sh-sh" this weakness became a dreamy and very pleasant feeling
indeed. "I'll be a good boy," he murmured obediently. Suddenly she
realised that he was very young after all; which gave her a very
maternal tone as she said, "Drink this; it will give you strength."
The days that followed had a taste of honey. A dreamy passiveness held
him in its thrall and she was about him always like a sweet despotism.
But slowly, as he grew stronger, came the change she dreaded. A corselet
of reserve drew about him; the old subtle reservation again veiled his
eyes. He spoke often of going.
On the fourth day the call of a bugle drew her to the window, and a
troop of cavalry was sweeping into the plaza. At its head was young
Saunders. Rumours of ladrone raids reaching Bacolod had caused the
sending of a detachment; it was to garrison Barang indefinitely.
She learned this from Saunders; for he called that evening and together
they sat at the bedside of the wounded man. She smiled upon the young
fellow a slightly malicious smile, for he seemed very much consoled
indeed. Later, as he left her at the head of the stairs, he confided
that the colonel's niece was now at the post, and that she was--gee!--a
queen!
"Sure _you_ won't?" he asked in smiling apology.
"Sure I won't," she answered with responsive gaiety, but reiteration of
intention.
"Good-night, little mother," he said.
He came every evening after that, and the man propped up on the pillows
listened with wonder to their light and impersonal prattle.
The last day came. Early in the morning the Maestro called Vincente, and
with his help put on the khaki, the leather puttees, the belt with its
burden loose along the thigh. The pony, all saddled, was standing
outside. He meant to slip out unnoticed.
But once in the sala a sudden remorse detained him in hesitation. For
the good of his soul, he knew he must not see her. And yet, it seemed
black ingratitude, this sneaking departure. His eyes wandered over the
table with a vague idea of leaving a written good-by----
A gliding swish behind him made him turn. She stood in the frame of the
door, looking at him. She was wrapped in a loose gown, mauve-tinted,
that stopped in a square before reaching the neck. Her hair fell in two
braids behind her, leaving a haze of gold shimmering before the eyes;
and her eyes shone through, calm, wondering, and blue. A vestige of
pure, white sleep still hung about her cloyingly, and she was adorable.
"You are going?" she asked--and the words floated slowly, as if held
back by some indefinable regret.
"Yes," he said; "I must go back."
She stood looking slightly past him at something very far, into an
infinity that was desolate; her eyes widened, purpled.
"I shall be lonely," she said, impersonally, as if reading into that
distance.
He started a little. After a while he said, hesitatingly: "The troop are
here now; the lieutenant----"
But she stood there, very still, staring at the future, stretching long
ahead as the past mirrored, the lone, inexorable future reflecting the
lone, hard past. She moved forward a step, and that step was very weary.
"I shall be lonely," she repeated.
A tremulous wonder came into his eyes.
But suddenly she had crumpled upon the long wicker chair, her face
hidden in her arms, and her shoulders began to rise and fall softly.
He stood there, stupefied, watching the gentle swell and ebb, and slowly
the wonder in his eyes grew to the light ineffable. He moved forward. He
touched her timidly.
"Girl!" he said in awed murmur, as if in the hush of a cathedral, "Girl,
can it be!"
But she remained gently weeping. He took her arms and raised her slowly;
and they stood before each other, their twined hands hanging loose
between them, their eyes into each other's, gravely reading.
"Girl!" he said again, and this time the tone held the ecstasy of
revelation.
"Boy!" she smiled back through the sacred dew of her tears.
He drew her to him, and she wept upon his shoulder in sweet abandonment,
and his heart swelled within him in immense tenderness.
"Star of my Life!" he murmured.
XV
THE CALL
Delaroche told me the thing himself immediately after it had happened;
and no one has been able to get a word of it from him since. At the time
he was much overwrought; in fact, to an Anglo-Saxon, was somewhat of a
sight (he has French blood in him, and it's apt to crop out when he
least expects it); but if ever I saw Truth manifested, it was in that
choking, panting, sobbing utterance of the man.
Delaroche was one of the thousand pedagogues which the American
government sent to flood these benighted isles with the lime light of
civilisation. His post was Cabancalan. You don't know Cabancalan, do
you? Southern part of Negros, twenty miles from the mouth of the Hog. I
rode through there once--God, a lonely, desolate place! A thousand
tumble-down nipa shacks, a crumbling church, musty mountains to the
east, not a white man within thirty miles, and the natives themselves
away below the average--on the edge of savagery.
Well, Delaroche stood it for six months, then went daffy and sent for
the girl he loved in the States. And she came, the ten thousand miles,
and he met her in Ilo-Ilo and they were married, and he took her across
on a prao to her new home--God!
And then one night, some two months after, she began to die. "She began
to die." That's the way he told it to me.
As he came back from a ride to one of his barrio schools he found her
weeping, with her face in her pillow. She gently refused to tell him the
reason (poor little girl, he probably would not have understood!); but
later she was saying small incoherent things, and then he knew she was
in a fever. Then she began to groan gently with each exhaling breath,
and a great fear started to gnaw at his heart.
It was one of these nights when the heat weighs upon you like the tomb.
The blinds were all raised, and strange, incongruous insects flopped in
and buzzed about the lamp, while outside the beasts of humidity vibrated
in endless shrill cry; and rhythming this clamour, to the man watching
there, came that low, gentle groaning. And he feared.
You don't understand. He told me, and I also, probably, did not
understand. She was a gentle, soft creature, made all for love and
sacrifice, and with something childish in her that drew the hearts of
men in great tenderness. He was a somewhat gloomy fellow, with great
asperities in his character and a flaming will. He craved for
sacrifice, and she gave it all to him, and yet with her little baby ways
created in him the illusion that _he_ was the protector.
And now, as he sat beneath the oppression of the heated night, by her
side, with that continuous, soft plaint in his ears, he began to see, he
began to see,--ah, many little things that he should have seen, that he
had not seen, that,--yes,--that he had refused to see.
When he would return from his long rides to far barrios after leaving
her all day face to face with the poignant loneliness of her life, he
was wont to pick up a book and plunge into it for the evening. Several
times he had seen tears come to her eyes as he did this, and then, with
laughing, false, lying surprise, would ask her what was the matter, at
which she smiled and shook her head gently.
There were many other things like that, but, he told me, this was the
picture which tortured him in endless repetition that night. He saw
himself returning from his barrio-ride; he picked up a book and read,
and then tears started in her eyes. At intervals he raised the
mosquito-bar and looked at her and spoke to her, a great tenderness in
his throat; but she did not answer, merely lay with her head on her left
arm, and softly with each breath came the little plaint, patient and
submissive, and it tore his heart. Then he sat down again at his vigil,
with a great muffled fear a-pound in his breast, and then again he saw
the picture:--He came back from his barrio-ride, picked up a book and
read, and tears started in her eyes.
That's how he passed the night. At dawn, a great longing to do something
took hold of him, and, leaving her, he went out into the pueblo. There
was not a physician within fifty miles; it was the rainy season and each
mile was ten. He knew it, yet he searched madly for what he knew he
could not find. Finally he returned, and as he looked upon her she
gripped his arm. "Don't, don't," she said, and he burst into tears. She
had felt his absence.
Then people, the poor lowly folk of the village, began to troop in with
many "pobrecitas" and pitying exclamations and rude, naive gifts. Among
them were two little girls who stood awed at the door. He remembered
them. When his wife had first come and they strolled in the evening
together, the little girls would follow them at a distance; then,
encouraged by her gracious presence, they had come nearer and nearer
night after night, till finally she had found what they longed for. They
wanted to touch her hand. And after that the husband and the wife had
had to steal out on their evening walks; for, if seen by the little
girls, the lady had to give one hand to each, leaving the man to follow
behind alone.
They were poor, dirty little things, but when they stood there, one with
a soiled, over-ripe banana, the other with a tobacco leaf, that they had
probably stolen at the market, he stooped down and kissed them on the
forehead.
Then he padlocked the door to be alone and took his station by the side
of the little cot; and the morning passed as the night had, and he felt
himself slowly becoming mad. In the afternoon a thought made his heart
thump.
At Sibalay, twenty miles below the mouth of the Hog, there was then a
post of native constabulary, and once every two months a launch from
Ilo-Ilo came to stock it with provisions. He had made a note of the
dates the boat was to come. He looked among his papers and found it. It
was due that very day. Since morning, while he sat stupid there, the
boat had been discharging cargo; that very evening it would leave for
Ilo-Ilo, and in Ilo-Ilo there were Americans, doctors, hospitals, hope!
And there was still a chance. The boat, in its course back to Ilo-Ilo,
must cross the mouth of the Hog. There might be time to intercept it.
He ran out of the house and down to the river; and the best he could
find after an hour's search were two old bancas, mouldy and full of
water and each with an outrigger broken; but he lashed them together,
with the remaining outriggers on the outside. Then he stormed at the
Casa Popular till they gave him the town prisoners, a villainous six. He
then had his wife carried on her cot to the boat, and they started down
the river.
From the beginning everything went wrong. He had counted upon the
swollen river-current; he found that the sea tide was on the flood and
backing it up. The impressed prisoners were sullen, and after he saw
that promises of reward had no effect, he made them work with his
revolver at their backs. The river wound interminably, and then another
obstacle confronted them. The wind rose, and every time the turn of the
river made it head on, they had to slow up, for the short, choppy waves
dashed into the boats, threatening to swamp them. The men grew more
defiant, and once he was obliged to fire over their heads to keep them
at their paddles. Thus they went down the river, between the high
palm-lined banks, the boats leaking, the tide purring against them, the
men straining, with Fear upon them, and he standing at the stern, tense
as a maniac, feeling Hope slowly and inexorably slipping from him. And
all the time, from the cot at the bottom of the boat, came the soft,
continuous, patient plaint.
When they reached the mouth of the river, the surf was booming on the
bar and they could not cross. It was dark, and in the distance a red and
a green light were passing slowly.
They paddled back five miles up the river to the pueblo of Hog and
camped in the deserted convent. Toward midnight, White, the constabulary
officer, came along. He was on his way to Sibalay, but the mud had
killed his horse and he had had to stop.
The two men had a conference. Then White impressed two carabaos from the
presidente and started off in a drizzling rain. There was an army wagon,
with two American horses, at Sibalay, and he was going after them. With
the wagon, Delaroche could perhaps make Pulupondan, sixty miles to the
north, and catch the little steamer that plied between that town and
Ilo-Ilo.
All night Delaroche sat by the bed of his wife, in the big, empty,
ruined convent. The rain drummed fiercely upon the tin roof, giant rats
scurried to and fro in the darkness, and the night long there came from
the cot the desolate plaint. Once, toward dawn, she started up suddenly
and he caught her. "Laddie, laddie!" she cried, with a great joy in her
voice as she felt his presence. Then she fell back into the stupor.