The dawn of a new day broke white and glistering upon the ancient
_pueblo_. From their hard beds of palm, and their straw mats on the
dirt floors, the provincial dwellers in this abandoned treasure house
of Old Spain rose already dressed to resume the monotonous routine of
their lowly life. The duties which confronted them were few, scarce
extending beyond the procurement of their simple food. And for all,
excepting the two or three families which constituted the shabby
aristocracy of Simití, this was limited in the extreme. Indian corn,
_panela_, and coffee, with an occasional addition of _platanos_ or
rice, and now and then bits of _bagre_, the coarse fish yielded by the
adjacent lake, constituted the staple diet of the average citizen of
this decayed hamlet. A few might purchase a bit of lard at rare
intervals; and this they hoarded like precious jewels. Some
occasionally had wheat flour; but the long, difficult transportation,
and its rapid deterioration in that hot, moist climate, where swarms
of voracious insects burrow into everything not cased in tin or iron,
made its cost all but prohibitive. A few had goats and chickens. Some
possessed pigs. And the latter even exceeded in value the black, naked
babes that played in the hot dust of the streets with them.
Josè was up at dawn. Standing in the warm, unadulterated sunlight in
his doorway he watched the village awaken. At a door across the
_plaza_ a woman appeared, smoking a cigar, with the lighted end in her
mouth. Josè viewed with astonishment this curious custom which
prevails in the _Tierra Caliente_. He had observed that in Simití
nearly everybody of both sexes was addicted to the use of tobacco, and
it was no uncommon sight to see children of tender age smoking heavy,
black cigars with keen enjoyment. From another door issued two
fishermen, who, seeing the priest, approached and asked his blessing
on their day's work. Some moments later he heard a loud tattoo, and
soon the Alcalde of the village appeared, marching pompously through
the streets, preceded by his tall, black secretary, who was beating
lustily upon a small drum. At each street intersection the little
procession halted, while the Alcalde with great impressiveness
sonorously read a proclamation just received from the central
Government at Bogotá to the effect that thereafter no cattle might be
killed in the country without the payment of a tax as therein set
forth. Groups of _peones_ gathered slowly about the few little stores
in the main street, or entered and inspected for the thousandth time
the shabby stocks. Matrons with black, shining faces cheerily greeted
one another from their doorways. Everywhere prevailed a gentle decorum
of speech and manners. For, however lowly the station, however pinched
the environment, the dwellers in this ancient town were ever gentle,
courteous and dignified. Their conversation dealt with the simple
affairs of their quiet life. They knew nothing of the complex
problems, social, economic, or religious, which harassed their
brethren of the North. No dubious aspirations or ambitions stirred
their breasts. Nothing of the frenzied greed and lust of material
accumulation touched their child-like minds. They dwelt upon a plane
far, far removed, in whatever direction, from the mental state of
their educated and civilized brothers of the great States, who from
time to time undertake to advise them how to live, while ruthlessly
exploiting them for material gain. And thus they have been exploited
ever since the heavy hand of the Spaniard was laid upon them, four
centuries ago. Thus they will continue to be, until that distant day
when mankind shall have learned to find their own in another's good.
As his eyes swept his environment, the untutored folk, the old church,
the dismally decrepit mud houses, with an air of desolation and utter
abandon brooding over all; and as he reflected that his own complex
nature, rather than any special malice of fortune, had brought this to
him, Josè's heart began to sink under the sting of a condemning
conscience. He turned back into his house. Its pitiful emptiness smote
him sore. No books, no pictures, no furnishings, nothing that
ministers to the comfort of a civilized and educated man! And yet,
amid this barrenness he had resolved to live.
A song drifted to him through the pulsing heat of the morning air. It
sifted through the mud walls of his poor dwelling, and poured into the
open doorway, where it hovered, quivering, like the dust motes in the
sunbeams. Instantly the man righted himself. It was Carmen, the child
to whom his life now belonged. Resolutely he again set his wandering
mind toward the great thing he would accomplish--the protection and
training of this girl, even while, if might be, he found his life
again in hers. Nothing on earth should shake him from that purpose!
Doubt and uncertainty were powerless to dull the edge of his efforts.
His bridges were burned behind him; and on the other side of the great
gulf lay the dead self which he had abandoned forever.
A harsh medley of loud, angry growls, interspersed with shrill yelps,
suddenly arose before his house, and Josè hastened to the door just in
time to see Carmen rush into the street and fearlessly throw herself
upon two fighting dogs.
"Cucumbra! Stop it instantly!" she exclaimed, dragging the angry brute
from a thoroughly frightened puppy.
"Shame! shame! And after all I've talked to you about loving that
puppy!"
The gaunt animal slunk down, with its tail between its legs.
"Did you ever gain anything at all by fighting? You know you never
did! And right down in your heart you know you love that puppy. You've
_got_ to love him; you can't help it! And you might as well begin
right now."
The beast whimpered at her little bare feet.
"Cucumbra, you let bad thoughts use you, didn't you? Yes, you did; and
you're sorry for it now. Well, there's the puppy," pointing to the
little dog, which stood hesitant some yards away. "Now go and play
with him," she urged. "Play with him!" rousing the larger dog and
pointing toward the puppy. "Play with him! You _know_ you love him!"
Cucumbra hesitated, looking alternately at the small, resolute girl
and the smaller dog. Her arm remained rigidly extended, and
determination was written large in her set features. The puppy uttered
a sharp bark, as if in forgiveness, and began to scamper playfully
about. Cucumbra threw a final glance at the girl.
"Play with him!" she again commanded.
The large dog bounded after the puppy, and together they disappeared
around the street corner.
The child turned and saw Josè, who had regarded the scene in mute
astonishment.
"_Muy buenos dias, Señor Padre_," dropping a little courtesy. "But
isn't Cucumbra foolish to have bad thoughts?"
"Why, yes--he certainly is," replied Josè slowly, hard pressed by the
unusual question.
"He has just _got_ to love that puppy, or else he will never be happy,
will he, Padre?"
Why would this girl persist in ending her statements with an
interrogation! How could he know whether Cucumbra's happiness would be
imperfect if he failed in love toward the puppy?
"Because, you know, Padre," the child continued, coming up to him and
slipping her hand into his, "padre Rosendo once told me that God was
Love; and after that I knew we just had to love everything and
everybody, or else He can't see us--can He, Padre?"
He can't see us--if we don't love everything and everybody! Well! Josè
wondered what sort of interpretation the Vatican, with its fiery
hatred of heretics, would put upon this remark.
"Can He, Padre?" insisted the girl.
"Dear child, in these matters you are teaching me; not I you," replied
the noncommittal priest.
"But, Padre, you are going to teach the people in the church," the
girl ventured quizzically.
Ah, so he was! And he had wondered what. In his hour of need the
answer was vouchsafed him.
"Yes, dearest child--and I am going to teach them what I learn from
_you_."
Carmen regarded him for a moment uncertainly. "But, padre Rosendo says
you are to teach _me_," she averred.
"And so I am, little one," the priest replied; "but not one half as
much as I shall learn from you."
Doña Maria's summons to breakfast interrupted the conversation.
Throughout the repast Josè felt himself subjected to the closest
scrutiny by Carmen. What was running through her thought, he could
only vaguely surmise. But he instinctively felt that he was being
weighed and appraised by this strange child, and that she was finding
him wanting in her estimate of what manner of man a priest of God
ought to be. And yet he knew that she embraced him in her great love.
Oftentimes his quick glance at her would find her serious gaze bent
upon him. But whenever their eyes met, her sweet face would instantly
relax and glow with a smile of tenderest love--a love which, he felt,
was somehow, in some way, destined to reconstruct his shattered life.
Josè's plans for educating the girl had gradually evolved into
completion during the past two days. He explained them at length to
Rosendo after the morning meal; and the latter, with dilating eyes,
manifested his great joy by clasping the priest in his brawny arms.
"But remember, Rosendo," Josè said, "learning is not _knowing_. I can
only teach her book-knowledge. But even now, an untutored child, she
knows more that is real than I do."
"Ah, Padre, have I not told you many times that she is not like us?
And now you know it!" exclaimed the emotional Rosendo, his eyes
suffused with tears of joy as he beheld his cherished ideals and his
longing of years at last at the point of realization. What he, too,
had instinctively seen in the child was now to be summoned forth; and
the vague, half-understood motive which had impelled him to take the
abandoned babe from Badillo into the shelter of his own great heart
would at length be revealed. The man's joy was ecstatic. With a final
clasp of the priest's hand, he rushed from the house to plunge into
the work in progress at the church.
Josè summoned Carmen into the quiet of his own dwelling. She came
joyfully, bringing an ancient and obsolete arithmetic and a much
tattered book, which Josè discovered to be a chronicle of the heroic
deeds of the early _Conquistadores_.
"I'm through decimals!" she exclaimed with glistening eyes; "and I've
read some of this, but I don't like it," making a little _moue_ of
disgust and holding aloft the battered history.
"Padre Rosendo told me to show it to you," she continued. "But it is
all about murder, you know. And yet," with a little sigh, "he has
nothing else to read, excepting old newspapers which the steamers
sometimes leave at Bodega Central. And they are all about murder, and
stealing, and bad things, too. Padre, why don't people write about
good things?"
Josè gazed at her reverently, as of old the sculptor Phidias might
have stood in awe before the vision which he saw in the unchiseled
marble.
"Padre Rosendo helped me with the fractions," went on the girl,
flitting lightly to another topic; "but I had to learn the decimals
myself. He couldn't understand them. And they are so easy, aren't
they? I just love arithmetic!" hugging the old book to her little
bosom.
Both volumes, printed in Madrid, were reliques of Spanish colonial
days.
"Read to me, Carmen," said Josè, handing her the history.
The child took the book and began to read, with clear enunciation, the
narrative of Quesada's sanguinary expedition to Bogotá, undertaken in
the name of the gentle Christ. Josè wondered as he listened what
interpretation this fresh young mind would put upon the motives of
that renowned exploit. Suddenly she snapped the book shut.
"Tell me about Jesus," she demanded.
The precipitation with which the question had been propounded almost
took his breath away. He raised his eyes to hers, and looked long and
wonderingly into their infinite depths. And then the vastness of the
problem enunciated by her demand loomed before him. What, after all,
did he know about Jesus? Had he not arrived in Simití in a state of
agnosticism regarding religion? Had he not come there enveloped in
confusion, baffled, beaten, hopeless? And then, after his wonderful
talk with Rosendo, had he not agreed with him that the child's thought
must be kept free and open--that her own instinctive religious ideas
must be allowed to develop normally, unhampered and unfettered by the
external warp and bias of human speculation? It was part of his plan
that all reference to matters theological should be omitted from
Carmen's educational scheme. Yet here was that name on her lips--the
first time he had ever heard it voiced by her. And it smote him like a
hammer. He made haste to divert further inquiry.
"Not now, little one," he said hastily. "I want to hear you read more
from your book."
"No," she replied firmly, laying the volume upon the table. "I don't
like it; and I shouldn't think you would, either. Besides, it isn't
true; it never really happened."
"Why, of course it is true, child! It is history, the story of how the
brave Spaniards came into this country long ago. We will read a great
deal more about them later."
"No," with a decisive shake of her brown head; "not if it is like
this. It isn't true; I told padre Rosendo it wasn't."
"Well, what do you mean, child?" asked the uncomprehending priest.
"It is only a lot of bad thoughts printed in a book," she replied
slowly. "And it isn't true, because God is _everywhere_."
Clearly the man was encountering difficulties at the outset; and a
part, at least, of his well-ordered curriculum stood in grave danger
of repudiation at the hands of this earnest little maid.
The girl stood looking at him wistfully. Then her sober little face
melted in smiles. With childish impulsiveness she clambered into his
lap, and twining her arms about his neck, impressed a kiss upon his
cheek.
"I love you, Padre," she murmured; "and you love me, don't you?"
He pressed her to him, startled though he was. "God knows I do, little
one!" he exclaimed.
"Of course He does," she eagerly agreed; "and He knows you don't want
to teach me anything that isn't true, doesn't He, Padre dear?"
Yea, and more; for Josè was realizing now, what he had not seen
before, that _it was beyond his power to teach her that which was not
true_. The magnitude and sacredness of his task impressed him as never
before. His puzzled brain grappled feebly with the enormous problem.
She had rebuked him for trying to teach her things which, if he
accepted the immanence of God as fact, her logic had shown him were
utterly false. Clearly the grooves in which this child's pure thought
ran were not his own. And if she would not think as he did, what
recourse was there left him but to accept the alternative and think
with her? For he would not, even if he could, force upon her his own
thought-processes.
"Then, Carmen," he finally ventured, "you do not wish to learn about
people and what they have done and are doing in the big world about
you?"
"Oh, yes, Padre; tell me all about the good things they did!"
"But they did many wicked things too, _chiquita_. And the good and the
bad are all mixed up together."
"No," she shook her head vigorously; "there isn't any bad. There is
only good, for God is everywhere--isn't He?"
She raised up and looked squarely into the priest's eyes. Dissimulation,
hypocrisy, quibble, cant--nothing but fearless truth could meet that
gaze.
Suddenly a light broke in upon his clouded thought. This girl--this
tender plant of God--why, she had shown it from the very beginning!
And he, oh, blind that he was! he could not see nor accept it. The
secret of her power, of her ecstasy of life--what was it but
this?--_she knew no evil!_
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the
garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."
Oh, great God! It was the first--the very first--lesson which Thou
didst teach Thy child, Israel, as the curtain rose upon the drama of
human life! And the awful warning has rung down through the corridors
of time from the mouths of the prophets, whom we slew lest they wake
us from our mesmeric sleep! Israel forgot Thy words; and the world has
forgotten them, long, long since. Daily we mix our perfumed draft of
good and evil, and sink under its lethal influence! Hourly we eat of
the forbidden tree, till the pangs of death encompass us!
And when at last the dark angel hovered over the sin-stricken earth
and claimed it for his own, the great Master came to sound again the
warning--"As a man thinketh in his heart, _so is he_!" But they would
have none of him, and nailed him to a tree!
Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, ye incarnate human mind! Even the unique Son of God
wept as he looked with yearning upon you! Why? Because of your
stubborn clinging to false ways, false beliefs, false thoughts of God
and man! Because ye would not be healed; ye would not be made whole!
Ye loved evil--ye gave it life and power, and ye rolled it like a
sweet morsel beneath your tongue--and so ye died! So came death into
this fair world, through the heart, the brain, the mind of man, _who
sought to know what God could not_!
"Padre dear, you are so quiet." The girl nestled closer to the awed
priest. Aye! And so the multitude on Sinai had stood in awed quiet as
they listened to the voice of God.
This child knew no evil! The man could not grasp the infinite
import of the marvelous fact. And yet he had sought to teach her
falsities--to teach her that evil did exist, as real and as potent
as good, and that it was to be accepted and honored by mankind! But
she had turned her back upon the temptation.
"Padre, are you going to tell me about Jesus?"
The priest roused from his deep meditation.
"Yes, yes--I want to know nothing else! I will get my Bible, and we
will read about him!"
"Bible? What is that, Padre dear?"
"What! You don't know what the Bible is?" cried the astonished
priest.
"No, Padre."
"But have you never--has your padre Rosendo never told you that it is
the book that tells--?"
"No," the girl shook her head. "But," her face kindling, "he told me
that Jesus was God's only son. But we are all His children, aren't
we?"
"Yes--especially you, little one! But Jesus was the greatest--"
"Did Jesus write the Bible, Padre?" the girl asked earnestly.
"No--we don't know who did. People used to think God wrote it; but I
guess He didn't."
"Then we will not read it, Padre."
The man bent reverently over the little brown head and prayed again
for guidance. What could he do with this child, who dwelt with
Jehovah--who saw His reflection in every flower and hill and fleecy
cloud--who heard His voice in the sough of the wind, and the ripple of
the waters on the pebbly shore! And, oh, that some one had bent over
him and prayed for guidance when he was a tender lad and his heart
burned with yearning for truth!
"God wrote the arithmetic--I mean, He told people how to write it,
didn't He, Padre?"
Surely the priest could acquiesce in this, for mathematics is purely
metaphysical, and without guile.
"Yes, _chiquita_. And we will go right through this little book. Then,
if I can, I will send for others that will teach you wonderful things
about what we call mathematics."
The child smiled her approval. The priest had now found the only path
which she would tread with him, and he continued with enthusiasm.
"And God taught people how to talk, little one; but they don't all
talk as we do. There is a great land up north of us, which we call the
United States, and there the people would not understand us, for we
speak Spanish. I must teach you their language, _chiquita_, and I must
teach you others, too, for you will not always live in Simití."
"I want to stay here always, Padre. I love Simití." "No, Carmen; God
has work for you out in His big world. You have something to tell His
people some day, a message for them. But you and I have much work to
do here first. And so we will begin with the arithmetic and English.
Later we will study other languages, and we will talk them to each
other until you speak them as fluently as your own. And meanwhile, I
will tell you about the great countries of the world, and about the
people that live in them. And we will study about the stars, and the
rocks, and the animals; and we will read and work and read and work
all day long, every day!" The priest's face was aglow with animation.
"But, Padre, when shall I have time to think?"
"Why, you will be thinking all the time, child!"
"No, you don't understand. I have to think about other things."
Josè looked at her with a puzzled expression. "What other things do
you have to think about, _chiquita_?"
"About all the people here who are sick and unhappy, and who quarrel
and don't love one another."
"Do you think about people when they are sick?" he asked with
heightened curiosity.
"Yes, always!" she replied vigorously "When they are sick I go where
nobody can find me and then just think that it isn't so."
"_Hombre!_" the priest ejaculated, his astonishment soaring Then--
"But when people are sick it is really so, isn't it, _chiquita_?"
"No!" emphatically. "It can't be--not if God is everywhere. Does He
make them sick?" The child drove the heart-searching question straight
into him.
"Why--no, I can't say that He does. And yet they somehow get sick."
"Because they think bad things, Padre. Because they don't think about
God. They don't think He is here. And they don't care about Him--they
don't love Him. And so they get sick," she explained succinctly.
Josè's mind reverted to what Rosendo had told him. When he lay tossing
in delirium Carmen had said that he would not die. And yet that was
perfectly logical, if she refused to admit the existence of evil.
"I thought lots about you last week, Padre."
The soft voice was close to his ear, and every breath swept over his
heartstrings and made them vibrate.
"Every night when I went to sleep I told God I _knew_ He would cure
you."
The priest's head sank upon his breast.
Verily, I have not seen such faith, no, not in Israel! And the faith
of this child had glorified her vision until she saw "the heavens open
and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."
"Carmen"--the priest spoke reverently--"do the sick ones always get
well when you think about them?"
There was not a shade of euphemism in the unhesitating reply--
"They are never really sick, Padre."
"But, by that you mean--"
"They only have bad thoughts."
"Sick thoughts, then?" he suggested by way of drawing out her full
meaning.
"Yes, Padre--for God, you know, really _is_ everywhere."
"Carmen!" cried the man. "What put such ideas into your little head?
Who told you these things?"
Her brown eyes looked full into his own. "God, Padre dear."
God! Yes, of a verity she spoke truth. For nothing but her constant
communion with Him could have filled her pure thought with a deeper,
truer lore than man has ever quaffed at the world's great fountains of
learning. He himself, trained by Holy Church, deeply versed in
letters, science, and theology, grounded in all human learning, sat in
humility at her feet, drinking in what his heart told him he had at
length found--Truth.
He had one more question to ask. "Carmen, how do you know, how are you
sure, that He told you?"
"Because it is true, Padre."
"But just how do you know that it is true?" he insisted.
"Why--it comes out that way; just like the answers to the problems in
arithmetic. I used to try to see if by thinking only good thoughts
to-day I would be better and happier to-morrow."
"Yes, and--?"
"Well, I always was, Padre. And so now I don't think anything but good
thoughts."
"That is, you think only about God?"
"I always think about Him _first_, Padre."
He had no further need to question her proofs, for he knew she was
taught by the Master himself.
"That will be all for this morning, Carmen," he said quietly, as he
put her down. "Leave me now. I, too, have some thinking to do."
When Carmen left him, Josè lapsed into profound meditation. Musing
over his life experiences, he at last summed them all up in the vain
attempt to evolve an acceptable concept of God, an idea of Him that
would satisfy. He had felt that in Christianity he had hold of
something beneficent, something real; but he had never been able to
formulate it, nor lift it above the shadows into the clear light
of full comprehension. And the result of his futile efforts to this
end had been agnosticism. His inability conscientiously to accept
the mad reasoning of theologians and the impudent claims of Rome had
been the stumbling block to his own and his family's dearest earthly
hopes. He knew that popular Christianity was a disfigurement of truth.
He knew that the theological claptrap which the Church, with such
oracular assurance, such indubitable certainty and gross assumption
of superhuman knowledge, handed out to a suffering world, was a
travesty of the divinely simple teachings of Jesus, and that it had
estranged mankind from their only visible source of salvation, the
Bible. He saw more clearly than ever before that in the actual
achievements of popular theology there had been ridiculously little
that a seriously-minded man could accept as supports to its claims
to be a divinely revealed scheme of salvation. Yet there was no
vital question on which certainty was so little demanded, and
seemingly of so little consequence, as this, even though the
joints of the theologians' armor flapped wide to the assaults of
unprejudiced criticism.
But if the slate were swept clean--if current theological dogma were
overthrown, and the stage set anew--what could be reared in their
stead? Is it true that the Bible is based upon propositions which can
be verified by all? The explorer in Cartagena had given Josè a new
thought in Arnold's concept of God as "the Eternal, not ourselves,
that makes for righteousness." And it was not to be denied that, from
first to last, the Bible is a call to righteousness.
But what is righteousness? Ethical conduct? Assuredly something vastly
more profound, for even that "misses the mark." No, righteousness was
right conduct until the marvelous Jesus appeared. But he swept it at
once from the material into the mental; from the outward into the
inward; and defined it as _right-thinking_!
"Righteousness!" murmured Josè, sitting with head buried in his hands.
"Aye, the whole scheme of salvation is held in that one word! And the
wreck of my life has been caused by my blind ignorance of its
tremendous meaning! For righteousness is salvation. But Carmen, wise
little soul, divined it instinctively; for, if there is one thing that
is patent, it is that if a thing is evil it does not exist for her.
Righteousness! Of course it means _thinking no evil_! Jesus lived his
thorough understanding of it. And so does Carmen. And so would the
world, but for the withering influence of priestly authority!"
At that moment Carmen reappeared to summon him to lunch.
"Come here, little girl," said Josè, drawing her to him. "You asked me
to tell you about Jesus. He was the greatest and best man that ever
lived. And it was because he never had a bad thought."
"Did he know that God was everywhere?" The little face turned lovingly
up to his.
"He did, sweet child. And so do I--now; for I have found Him even in
desolate Simití."