WHERE THERE IS NO TURNING
Again the swaying lamps burned dim above us, and the priestess of
Lal, all trembling, looked up at me with terror-haunted eyes.
"Poor little child," she whispered. "Poor little life-mocked child!
That is the bitter fate which women fear, to be sucked dry of their
fresh sweetness, of their life, and then be tossed aside. Oh, I have
seen it many times. We give our all, and it is wasted because men--"
"Not all men," I said. "Not all men are like Okimi's warrior
sweetheart."
"They are all alike," cried the priestess of Lal vehemently. "In
their hearts they are all alike, lighter than air, unstabler than
water, more fickle than nectar-seeking butterflies. They love our
beauty, and when that is gone-- Look you," she cried. "This is the
tragedy of a woman, to be beautiful, to be loved, and to grow old.
Look," she said. "I will show you."
Once again the light of the silver lamps was quenched, and silent,
side by side, the priestess of Lal and I looked far down the weary
path which Eastern women travel not knowing where an end shall be.
In all the ride from Segovia along the beach, Hazlitt met only three
living things, three women staring at him out of the folds of dingy
calico which shielded their faces from the glare of sun and sea. One
was young and very graceful; another was not so young, a comely,
ox-like thing, laden with comfortable fat. The third was old and
bent, with a hideously wrinkled, hopeless face, the mask of that
impatient death which shrivels away the women of the hot Eastern
world, outside and in. For a moment they startled him. They were
like phantoms risen to confront him on the lifeless beach, for the
youngest was but a memory of what the eldest had been a little time
before, and the eldest only a prophecy of what the youngest soon
would be. As they stood and watched him passing by, shifting their
worn feet uneasily on the blistering sand, Hazlitt felt a mild
stirring of pity at the familiar sight.
"Hoy, friends," he hailed them. "Can one of you tell me the way to
the plantation of Don Raymundo?"
The girl looked at him shyly under lowered lids; the grandmother,
squatting on her haunches, puffed at a ragged fragment of cigar she
carried and gazed out to sea; but the mother clutched volubly at the
opportunity of speech.
"Go on till you come to the mango which blew down in the typhoon of
ten years ago," she said, "and the road is there. It is called the
'Trail that has no Turning.' Don Raymundo is a Castilian of the
noblest, and he is the richest _haciendero_ in the world. Each year
he loads a hundred ships with sugar. The plantation is called the
'Hacienda without a Name.' Don Raymundo has a daughter whose name is
Señorita Dolores. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. His
wife is Doña Ceferina." For a moment a look of dislike crossed the
broad, good-natured face. "They call her Doña, and she is very
proud, but after all she is just a mestizo, almost a Filipina like
us. She--"
Hazlitt broke into her chatter with his thanks, flipped a coin in the
air, and jogged on till he had left them far behind, three moving
dots on the waste, plodding the way of Malay womenfolk.
Hidden in the green-shrouded wilderness of the lower hills, the
Hacienda without a Name lay under the sunset enchanting as a lost
fragment of some old world, where labor next the soil was the
happiest thing in life. And up in the _sala_ of the great house on
the hill, the mistress of the _hacienda_ stared at Hazlitt over her
cup. She was a beautiful woman, but under the Caucasian mold of her
features another face was beginning to show dimly, the face of a race
whose very heat and strength of life fuses all lines down to mere
shapelessness of flesh. A part of Doña Ceferina had been overtaken
by the unrelenting advance of middle age.
"You say my husband is a prince, Señor?" Doña Ceferina echoed
doubtfully over her cup, and her soft forehead wrinkled in
bewilderment. This strange young visitor had puzzling notions of
what constitutes conversation, a diversion of which Doña Ceferina was
extremely fond. "Without doubt," she said, "I think that is a
mistake."
Hazlitt looked at her in mingled amusement and vexation. In all his
wonderful day of discovery, this talkative, commonplace woman had
been the sole jarring note. But Doña Ceferina, oblivious to his
emotions, sat in the cool twilight of the big room and poised her
cup, like some hybrid goddess of justice about to render a decision.
"Beyond doubt, it is a mistake," said Doña Ceferina. "Don Raymundo's
family is one of the oldest in Spain, but it has never married with
royalty. There are few princes in Spain not of the royal blood; it
is not like Russia." The word gave her a clue to a topic of real
interest, and she brightened. "When I was a girl, back at school, I
met a Russian prince, one summer at Biarritz--"
Over _his_ cup, Don Raymundo's tiny Mephistophelian moustache lifted
slightly in the mocking smile which was his extremest expression of
emotion, and Hazlitt rushed to the righting of his false lead.
"Of course I did not mean that Don Raymundo was a prince in name," he
explained, "but in fact, you know."
Doña Ceferina raised her cup and sipped her chocolate resignedly, but
Hazlitt did not heed her.
"The startling, the wonderful thing to an American like me is that he
is not only a prince in power, but a prince of another age. The
people here on the plantation are his, belong to him personally.
Take that thing we saw just now, for example, all those hundreds of
people coming in to the plantation kitchen for their suppers--"
Doña Ceferina rose to her opportunity. "If you only knew," she said,
"how much rice it takes to feed five thousand people--"
Hazlitt, brimming with the enthusiasm the day had brought him, swept
on. "Think of having a jail of your own, and putting people in it
when you like, being their law! Why, I dare say they'd follow him to
war if he told them to, and--and sack the next plantation.
It's--it's positively feudal, you know. That's the only word; all
this doesn't belong to our day at all. And yet they say there's no
romance left in trade!"
He stopped abruptly, for Doña Ceferina was gazing at him with round
eyes. If one could picture the eyes of a ruminative cow, watching
with mild curiosity a serpent which sought to charm her, one would
have seen the eyes of Doña Ceferina just then. Don Raymundo smiled
inscrutably, and the pause grew awkward.
Suddenly a soft voice came to Hazlitt's relief. "You remember
'feudal,' mama," it said reassuringly. "Ever so long ago, when they
had knights and squires and--and _gens-d'armes_, and people lived in
castles, and they had the Inquisition in Spain, and the friars,
and--and everything. That was 'feudal.'"
Doña Ceferina sighed with relief and sipped: "Dolores has just come
back from school, so she remembers all those things," she explained
to Hazlitt. "I learned them once, of course, but one forgets, out
here. And so you think we're feudal? I don't know, I'm sure. Of
course there aren't any knights any more, or castles, but we _do_
have the friars. Listen, señor," and she set her cup on a little
table, to give freedom to her hands, and plunged into the story of
the latest exaction by the local representative of the hierarchy of
the Philippines.
No one minded her much. Her husband sat with half-closed eyes and
puffed at his cigarette, Dolores turned to her window and gazed down
on her little world as it went to sleep, and Hazlitt's eyes persisted
in wandering to the girlish figure, glowing in a belated, ruddy shaft
of light. Decidedly, the talkative woman on the beach had shown some
discrimination in placing Señorita Dolores on the pinnacle of beauty.
Suddenly Hazlitt became aware that Doña Ceferina's tale was told, and
that her talk had taken a more personal turn.
[Illustration: "_Dolores gazed down on her little world as it went to
sleep._"]
"It's so good to have one from our own world to talk to again," she
said enthusiastically. "One gets lonely here, with only natives for
neighbors. I tremble to think what my existence would have been,
after I came back from school, if Don Raymundo had not been here to
rescue me." She smiled radiantly at her black and white spouse, as
if to include him in the conversation, but he only drew long on his
cigarette and puffed the smoke very deliberately toward the ceiling.
Hazlitt's eyes wandered to the window again, and Doña Ceferina's
followed them.
"Isn't she beautiful?" she whispered.
"Yes," said Hazlitt, half to himself. "She's like a Madonna, a
Madonna whom some great man dreamed of painting and gave up in
despair."
"Exactly," Doña Ceferina agreed hastily. "That's just it. She's
beautiful as the Virgin herself, and good! Poor child, after three
years of Paris and Madrid, to come back to this!" She swept an
over-jeweled hand at the great, simple, dignified room. "No wonder
she's lonely, poor little dear. Go and talk to her, Señor Hasleet."
Hazlitt accepted his permission with alacrity. As he approached,
Doña Dolores glanced timidly at him across the gulf of sex, which
tradition and training had fixed between her and all male things not
of her blood, and retreated into herself. Her shyness was part of
her attraction, Hazlitt thought, and did not find the silence awkward
as he stood beside her and looked down with her on the _hacienda_.
In the shaggy village clustered about the squat stone chimney of the
mill, groups of girls and young men were laughing and splashing about
the wells; from the little groves which embowered the houses, the
evening fires glowed red; the light breeze carried, even to that
distance, a hint of the pungent wood-smoke. As Hazlitt watched the
peaceful scene, all the love of the open which had led him wandering
through life rolled over him in a wave.
"Jove, it's a good old world, after all," he said.
The girl glanced up at him quickly. "After all?" she echoed
plaintively. "Tell me, señor. The Sisters always said that the
world was bad, and we must be afraid of it. When you speak so,
_saying_ that it is good, I wonder if you also do not think it is
bad. Why isn't it good, if we are happy in it?"
Hazlitt smiled down into her puzzled eyes. Decidedly they were
matter-of-fact, these women of the _hacienda_. "It is good," he
assured her, with the calm philosophy of his thirty years behind him.
"Of course it's good." Still she looked up at him, forgetting her
shyness, and a gust of protectiveness and elder-brotherly affection
for this tender, budding woman-thing took hold of him. "It's good,"
he urged, "and you will always be happy in it."
Back in the dimness Doña Ceferina was sipping her third cup of
chocolate, while Raymundo smoked with half shut eyes and smiled
inscrutably.
Like Dorcas or Abigail or whoever she was of old, Doña Ceferina sat
among her maidens. There were half a dozen of them on the floor,
sewing and spinning and chattering in subdued voices, while the
mistress of the _hacienda_ sat enthroned in the midst of them. But
unlike whoever she was of old, Doña Ceferina had a card-table before
her, and on the other side of the table Hazlitt sat, and the two
smiled companionably across at each other as they sorted fat bundles
of cards.
They were playing _panguingui_. One plays _panguingui_ with six
packs of cards and much patience. Doña Ceferina and Hazlitt had
played a good deal of it since they first met, six months before, and
Hazlitt's patience had never wearied. Neither had the patience of
Señorita Dolores, which is more to the point, for she had to stand
behind Hazlitt's chair and help him with the unfamiliar cards. She
was standing there now.
"Hazleet, it is your lead," said Doña Ceferina, gathering up her
hand. It was a sign of the fellowship established between them that
she called him Hazlitt in the good, round, Spanish way, without any
fuss over titles. It was a stronger sign that she sat with her feet
tucked up in her chair, native-fashion. "One gets used to it," she
had explained, the first time she ventured it in his presence, "and
it's much more comfortable."
"Hazleet, I shall beat you again," said Doña Ceferina. "Lead!"
Hazlitt laid his finger inquiringly on a card, and looked back over
his shoulder, where a pair of interested eyes signalled approval.
Suddenly he spied a forgotten card down in the corner of his fistful.
Señorita Dolores gave a small wail of dismay as he played it, and
Doña Ceferina smiled in pleasant derision.
"I mistook it for a King," said Hazlitt in apology.
"It is a mistake," said the remorseless Doña Ceferina, "which costs
you a _media peseta_. Now play again."
Hazlitt played again and again, and lost each time, and enjoyed Doña
Ceferina's little triumph almost as much as she did. She wasn't half
bad, if she was not exciting, this plump good-natured Doña Ceferina,
with her eternal cigarette and her cards or novel or conversation.
Hazlitt smiled whimsically at that last thought. "What are you
laughing at, Hazleet?" his opponent demanded.
He had been thinking of the Frenchwoman who was famed for having such
a marvellous gift for conversation, and none at all for dialogue, but
he couldn't very well tell Doña Ceferina that. "At the way I'm
playing," he replied.
"You couldn't well play worse," said Doña Ceferina good-humoredly,
taking toll of her bit of silver. "Lead again."
Hazlitt _could_ play worse, and promptly did it. There are infinite
possibilities of badness, even in _panguingui_. Not at all a bad
person to share a secret with, this simple, matter-of-fact Doña
Ceferina. And he believed they were sharing one. In Doña Ceferina's
placidly romantic bosom, he guessed, had grown a vision of a young
prince come out of the West to rescue her imprisoned princess from
this tropical Castle of Indolence. A vision had come to him, too, a
vision which made him lean back and forget his cards. Six months ago
a beach-comber, gilded and respectable, of course, but still a
beach-comber, an adventurer, without a country; and now, perhaps, a
man whom many a petty prince might envy. Fancy ruling undisputed
with Señorita Dolores over the quiet domain of the "Hacienda without
a Name!" Jove, what a queen she'd make.
A hand stole down over his and pityingly pointed out the proper card,
and Hazlitt sternly repressed an impulse to fling away the cards and
take the hand, and keep it. The time was drawing near when he must
put his fortune to the test.
The cards ran out, and Doña Ceferina glowed triumphant. "Another
game, Hazleet?" she asked.
Hazlitt laughingly turned his pocket out to show that the modest sum
allotted for the stakes of the day was exhausted, and Doña Ceferina
swept up her little heap of silver. "You play worse than ever, I
think," she said frankly.
"Still, I may learn _panguingui_ before I die," said Hazlitt. A
sudden impulse seized him. He leaned forward and fixed the mistress
of the _hacienda_ with his eye. "I rather think, Doña Ceferina," he
said, with slow emphasis, "that I shall have to stay out here till I
die. There seems to be no escape. I shall have to stay and--learn
to play _panguingui_. What do you think?"
In the heavy eyes of Doña Ceferina a small glow kindled, as of the
surviving remnants of a very tiny fire. Hazlitt had seen them light
that way before, when Doña Ceferina reached the climax of a novel.
The glow deepened, and she looked at his understandingly. Her hand
trembled a little on the table. "Why not, Hazleet?" she said.
"It--it would be very pleasant for all of us. I--" She rose
hastily. "I shall have to leave you for a minute. I hope you and
Dolores can amuse yourselves till luncheon," she said with elaborate
innocence, and went away.
Hazlitt followed poor unsuspecting Dolores, thus left as a ewe lamb
to the wolf, over to the window, and stood looking down with her,
while the half-dozen maidens let needle and spindle fall, and
exchanged knowing glances.
The rains had come and gone, and the tropical world was thrilling
with the swift rush of its springtime. The black fields were mistily
green with the new-set spikes of cane, the sky was fleecy with white
banks of cloud, the very air was sweet and full of life. Hazlitt
drew a deep breath of it. "God!" he said, "what a good old place
this old world is to live in."
Dolores glanced up at him. No one would have called her a Madonna
now. The spring-tide had entered into her, and she was vibrant with
a thrill of living of which no monkish painter ever dreamed. "Why do
you talk like that?" she demanded. "Of course it's a good world."
Hazlitt gazed down into the upturned eyes. "And you are happy in it,
Dolores?" he asked.
At his tone Dolores flushed rosy and turned away, and her hand
gripped the edge of the broad sill with little, helpless, useless
fingers. Hazlitt laid his hand over it protectingly, and it did not
draw away. "You are happy, Dolores?" he repeated.
"Of course," said Dolores faintly. "Why shouldn't I be, when
everything is--so beautiful and--and good?"
"Happy Dolores," said Hazlitt. And then Don Raymundo rode round the
turn in the shrubbery below and swung from the saddle. Dolores
shrank back, but Don Raymundo only smiled up inscrutably. If he had
seen the little comedy, he gave no sign. "I'll join you in a
minute," he called to them.
A flash of anger swept over Hazlitt at this man whose mere approach
took all the witchery from life. He pressed Dolores' hand before he
released it. "She shall be happy," he muttered defiantly, to Don
Raymundo and the world. "She shall be happy always."
"There seems to be a great deal of unnecessary time in the world,"
Don Raymundo observed with his perverse triviality. He and Hazlitt
had run across each other in the _sala_ after their siesta, and now
they were sitting with their long chairs drawn up before a window,
waiting for the end of the day.
"Perhaps there is," Hazlitt agreed, slowly gathering resolution for
his plunge. "And yet, with agreeable companionship, and perhaps a
wife--Don Raymundo, we Americans are blunt. I want to marry Doña
Dolores."
Don Raymundo smoked placidly for a moment. "I have been expecting
this," he said at last. "I have--shall _I_ be blunt?--been fearing
this."
Hazlitt flushed. "I know it seems presumptuous," he said. "People
will call me a climber. And yet-- We have no aristocracy in my
country, no recognized aristocracy, as perhaps you know. But of such
families as we have, mine is not the worst. For five generations--"
"I care little about families," said Don Raymundo coolly.
The tone was courteous, but the words stung Hazlitt. "I am not a
rich man," he said, "but I have enough. I was afraid at first that
it was the _hacienda_ I cared for, not the wealth of it, but the
power and romance of the life here. That was what took me at first,
but now it's Doña Dolores herself. I know it. I had hoped--" he
hesitated. After six months of almost daily intercourse it was as
impossible to break through Don Raymundo's smiling reserve as it had
been at first. "I had hoped that you might find the company of
another white man not disagreeable, that we might perhaps even become
friends, but--all that doesn't matter, but simply this: it isn't the
_hacienda_ I want."
Don Raymundo spread out his hands with a gesture of utter weariness.
"I care so little for the _hacienda_ and who has it and what becomes
of it," he said, "that if the burden of it could be lifted from me I
should be almost happy, I think." And while scorn for the eternal
posing of the man was setting Hazlitt's lips, he went on: "My friend,
and I call you friend because I feel a friendliness for you, I am
going to tell you a story I never thought to tell to any one." Don
Raymundo's momentary energy dropped from him. "If you care to
listen," he amended, in his most uninterested manner.
"Go on, please," said Hazlitt impatiently.
"It is a story of a young man in Spain," said Don Raymundo, "a boy
who had a mama and a sister and a name, all of them associated with a
rambling stone house that perched on a sunburnt hill. He also had a
somewhat lively and energetic brain, and a very moderate education.
All he lacked was an income. I hope I do not bore you more than
usual?"
Hazlitt moved restlessly, and Don Raymundo continued: "Observe the
sequence. The wealth of dreams is traditionally Oriental, and the
Philippines lie in the Orient. So the boy, lying there beneath the
broken roof of the gaunt stone house, and being sadly in need of an
income, dreams of a journey over sunny seas to a region where
Spaniards dwell in palaces and gain untold gold, living like little
gods together on broad acres where cane rustles and coffee-blossoms
gleam and the hemp sends up its never-dying stalk. Demonio!" said
Don Raymundo, with a mocking lightness bitter as it well could be, "I
seem to be falling into the mood of that boy who dreamed."
Don Raymundo's silence seemed expectant, somehow, and Hazlitt asked:
"He came?"
"He came," said Don Raymundo, "and he awoke. They say that he found
the rustling cane and the gleaming blossoms a bit monotonous, even
while they turned to gold beneath his touch. His environment, I take
it, must have been rather like--" He motioned toward the window and
the world that lay outside it, the fields stretching away in the
burning light to the dim edge of the forest, the endless sweep of the
jungle, the distant glow of the sleeping sea, all the untamable world
that pressed around the "Hacienda without a Name."
"Like this," Hazlitt assented reluctantly.
"Like this," Don Raymundo agreed. "People say he said at last that
proper companionship, and perhaps a wife--_Diós mio_, I grow stupid.
His nearest neighbor, who was half a native, was--blessed, I believe
the proper word is--blessed with a daughter. A most charming young
woman in those days, they tell me, very gay, very gentle, very
affectionate, most accomplished; she had spent many years on the
Continent, I believe. In short, she was an unusually beautiful and
attractive young person, very like--"
"Like--" Hazlitt began unwillingly, and stopped.
"Like Dolores," Don Raymundo assented for him. "And this interesting
young woman naturally felt ill at ease among her homestaying
half-countrymen, and naturally had much in common--but all that is
easily understood. They were married. And that," Don Raymundo said
with languid brutality, "seems to have been the ending of the young
man's second dream. Since then he has lived with open eyes."
Hazlitt felt a twinge of shame come over him at listening. After
all, the law which establishes a neutral strip of silence between men
is based on something deeper than mere convention.
"Don't you think," Hazlitt asked at last--he had to say
something--"that this young man took himself too seriously, too
tragically? If he had given more to life, had gone about among
people--"
"I understand," Don Raymundo interrupted him, "that he declined to go
out among his countrymen, where his wife was received only as a favor
to himself and his name. He was a somewhat Quixotic young man, you
see. And his Filipino friends, though worthy people doubtless, were
somewhat unattractive and dull to both the young man and his wife.
So in the end he was restricted to the joys of home. And his wife
grew old more rapidly than he. There seemed to be something in her
blood that made her grow old quickly."
For a moment Hazlitt felt a gleam of pity for the lonely man beside
him. Then his back stiffened.
"I do not think," said Hazlitt, and for his life could not keep the
vibration of scorn from his voice, "that I love Doña Dolores merely
because she is young and beautiful. What I want is to make _her_
happy. We can grow old together."
Don Raymundo smiled, and for once his smile was patient instead of
mocking. "You are like that young man of mine now," he said gently.
"You remind me very much of him. When you are older, you will judge
less harshly. And aren't you overlooking something? Is it my
happiness that counts, or yours, or even Dolores', though it's hard
that she should suffer for the mistake her father made." He drew
himself up in his chair and looked at Hazlitt with a new light in his
eyes.
"Have you any right to marry her?" he asked almost sternly. "What of
your children? And their children? A hundred years from now, will
they be--_white_? Or must they go on forever belonging nowhere,
despised by half the brothers of their blood, and themselves
despising the other half? Where will it end?"
Enlightenment burst on Hazlitt in a flash. This was no lover's
obstacle, to be surmounted by theatric leaps and bounds. He had come
face to face with one of the truths of life, Nature's unescapable law
of blood. He saw them coming, the slow generations, men of no race
and country. "My God!" he said, and gripped the arms of his chair
till the cane splintered.
A door opened at the other end of the big room. "Our companions are
coming," said Don Raymundo quietly, and rose with punctilious
courtesy.
After the greetings Doña Ceferina went directly to the gleaming tray
which bore the chocolate and biscuits which buoy one from the dead
languor of the siesta to the full tide of evening life. Hazlitt sank
back in his chair again. Suddenly a soft voice asked over his
shoulder: "You haven't forgotten to save this day week for our
_baile_, have you? You must come, you know, because then," Dolores
hesitated at her boldness but rattled on, "because then I sha'n't
have to dance so often with these stupid native boys."
Hazlitt gripped the arms of his chair again. The moment for decision
had come. All those unborn generations were waiting for his answer.
Dolores was waiting too, poor, helpless, innocent Dolores. He looked
to Don Raymundo for relief, but Don Raymundo, at a window, had turned
his back and was puffing at his eternal cigarette. The pause grew
long. Then slowly Hazlitt straightened in his chair, and as he
looked up at the wondering face behind him, the law and the prophets
were swept away in a gush of pitying affection. Pitying, and then?
She seemed so rarely, wonderfully beautiful to him, rare and precious
as some golden flower from supernal gardens. He could not let her
go, could not give up her surpassing loveliness. "Yes," he said very
firmly, "yes, I will come."
"_Lalalá!_" Doña Ceferina laughed from her place behind the cups.
"He speaks as seriously as if he made a vow to Our Lady. It's only a
ball, you know, Hazleet. Give the men their chocolate, Dolorcita."
She raised her cup and sipped happily. "After all," she said, in a
tone of deep content, "there are few things in life more delightful
than one's chocolate and cigarette."
Don Raymundo was gazing from his window off into the distance, where
the gathering shadows were blending forest and cane-field.
"Chocolate is very good," he said thoughtfully.
Three women tramped in the glare of endless Segovia beach. One was
young and graceful; another was a comely, ox-like thing of middle
age; the third was at the end of life. They halted for a moment to
rest, and the grandmother squatted on her haunches and gazed,
unseeing, out over the water.
"There will be a wedding at the _hacienda_ next month," said the girl.
"Yes," said her mother, "the young American will marry Señorita
Dolores. They say he is very rich, richer than Don Raymundo."
"He is very big and handsome," said the girl wistfully. "And Doña
Dolores--she is very beautiful and kind."
A flash of jealousy crossed the mother's broad, good-natured face.
"Yes," she said, "she is beautiful. But after all she is only a
_mestiza_, almost a Filipina like the rest of us. And she will grow
old."
Then, having halted a moment, they tramped on along their path like
phantoms risen on the lifeless beach, for the youngest was but a
memory of what the eldest had been a little time before, and the
eldest was only a prophecy of what the youngest soon would be.