Westerner. The cot was placed upon it and fastened, and they started. It
was in the midst of the rainy season; the roads were bottomless, and
progress was fearfully slow. Twice, before reaching Jimamaylan, the
wagon dropped into a hole and could not be budged. The men went out into
the fields and captured carabaos, and after countless efforts unmired
it. At Jimamaylan, fifteen miles from the start, the horses were so
plainly given out that they had to stop. They passed the night in the
hut of the Presidente. The driver cooked their food and Delaroche filled
the canteens with boiled water for the morrow, for they were on the edge
of the cholera district. His wife was in the same condition.
They started early the next morning, but calamities began to overtake
them. They were mired for an hour soon after the start. Then the tree
carried away and they had to improvise a new one. Near Binalbagan the
off horse dropped, foundered. They stole carabaos from the fields and
went on. Darkness overtook them at Jinagaran, and they had gone only ten
miles.
All night long Delaroche listened to the gentle wail, and by morning it
had grown very weak. And then, as the sun rose a few miles from
Jinagaran, she died.
"She died." That's the way he said it.
And the wagon went on with the dead woman, and Delaroche kneeling with
his head on her pillow, close to hers. And after a while he began
calling her, first softly, with gentle insistence, "Girlie! Girlie!"
Then louder and louder as she did not answer, in a long, agonised cry,
"Girlie! Girlie!"
They were going through the cholera district now, and they passed
deserted barrios with great, white crosses painted across the doors and
windows of the emptied huts; and now and then thin, cadaverous, weird
beings looked at them pass from caved-in eyes, looked at the labouring,
sobbing carabaos; at the driver on the seat of the lurching wagon,
urging with cry and gesture; at the cot, with its rigid form faintly
outlined beneath the blankets, and the man kneeling by it; and, above
the shouts of the driver, the panting of the animals, the creaking of
the wagon, they heard that great ceaseless agonised cry:
"Girlie! Girlie!"
All day, and the next, and the next, they went on thus, a spectral
sight. I asked the driver about it later.
"Yes," he said. "I kept a-going because I knew that he just couldn't
bury her there. And all that day and all night, and all the next day and
the next night, and the next and the next he just called her and called
her and called her. I don't want to go through another thing like that,
you can be sure. And she was dead, sir; she was dead, I tell you."
"But of course, she wasn't, you know she wasn't," I said: "You know she
must have been alive. What makes you think she was dead?"
"She was dead, sir," he repeated stubbornly.
And Delaroche, when he told me, that one time his lips were unsealed in
a burst of hysteria, said the same thing.
"She was dead, Romer," he said; "she was dead, I tell you. But I called
her, called her. And I tell you I _called_ her back. You see, it was
impossible; I couldn't let her go like that. I called her back to me,
_called_ her back, I tell you!"
THE END