MCGENNIS'S PROMOTION
My third adventurer was of still another type, a young man, a boy, if
you like, who was fresh and unsullied in body and mind and heart,
with life all before him. The opponents he fought with were all
inside himself, and of the worth of what he won you shall judge for
yourselves.
Within a minute or two of six o'clock that morning the sun rose, and
it was broad, staring day. One instant the world was smothered in a
damp, impenetrable, almost tangible grayness; the next, its nakedness
lay discovered in a glare of light.
There was a sea of limpid lukewarm water heaving slowly; a ribbon of
beach, metallic-white; a tangle of untended, unproductive vegetation;
a village equally untended and unproductive, except of unnecessary
babies, where listless brown people moved without much purpose, or,
lacking the ambition even to make a show of activity, lolled where
they were.
The tropical sun had no magic of half-lights to tinge it all with
romance or stir it into fugitive beauty. Such as Sicaba was at
heart, it stood revealed.
When the sun rose, John McGennis rose too, and stood for a moment,
unshivering in the lukewarm air, to look down on the poverty of his
town, before he turned to pour water over himself out of an old
tomato-can.
Like the morning and the sea and the air, the water had no tang in
it, and McGennis, drying himself slowly and methodically, felt no
fresher for his bath. When a youthful and well-tempered body fails
to respond to the caress of sluicing water, there is generally
something wrong with the mind which inhabits it. There was with the
mind of McGennis.
The trouble lay outside his window. That compound of staring sky and
sea and stared-at village which the day revealed had overwhelmed him.
As mere geological and botanical facts, Sicaba, Pagros, the Tropics,
had proved too big for him. They made of him just a spot of life,
meaningless as an ant toiling unendingly in the forest of the
grass-stems. Tiny dot of intelligence that he found himself, in the
midst of those triumphant physical forces, McGennis had come to
wonder whether anything he could do among them mattered much.
Slowly and methodically, as he had bathed, he dressed--right sock,
left sock, right shoe, left shoe, right puttee, left puttee, put the
strap twice round, haul it through the buckle and tuck the end back
neatly--and when he was trim in his khaki and yellow leather he stood
for a moment with the irresolution of inertia on him. Then he pulled
his knife from his pocket, strode across to the thick corner-post of
his room, stooped, and with elaborate care cut a notch in the tough,
dense wood.
The post, from the upward limit of his reach to well down toward his
knees, was jagged with such notches lying in groups of seven, six
side by side, and another cut diagonally across them. They were a
calendar of more than ordinary significance, in the mind of its
maker. Each of them represented a day of "Grin, gabble, gobble,"
each checked off twenty-four hours in which he had stuck by his
traditions, greeting every comer with that contortion of the lips
which, conventionally at least, expresses pleasure, eating sufficient
food to keep his body in repair--McGennis reverenced his body
unthinkingly as an ancient Greek--and in which he had, both in his
office and in the primitive society of Sicaba, "waggled his jaw," and
thereby overcome a growing disposition to speechlessness.
With the fierce enthusiasm of an ascetic, he cut these records,
ineffaceably deep, on the mornings of the days for which they stood.
Thus there could be no going back. Staring at him from the
undecaying wood, they warned him that for one more stretch, at least,
he must grin, gobble, and gabble, or be a quitter.
They served a more immediately practical purpose also. McGennis had
found that it was the first grimace, the first nibble at the food his
Occidental stomach loathed, the first burst of inane chatter, which
came hard. Once fairly started, the grin became a veritable
smile--how boyish and appealing he had never guessed--the chatter
became animated question and answer, and his stomach, more
fundamentally human than Occidental, found even the food Sicaba
afforded preferable to emptiness. But somehow the quiet of the
evenings and the stillness of the long nights and the flatness of the
dawns brought back continually the question: "What's the use?" and he
would have his fight to make all over, with his notch.
On this particular morning, he stood for a while staring at the
jagged post which was at once a cenotaph to his departed days and an
altar prepared for the sacrifice of days to come. Without counting,
McGennis knew that his latest notch rounded out a tale of three
hundred and sixty-five. The possibilities of that one post were not
exhausted yet, and his house held a dozen other posts, virgin still,
and smooth. And even if he should endure to notch all the posts in
all the houses of Sicaba and all the fringing palms along the beach,
and all the trees in the primeval forest round about, it would result
in--what?
McGennis had met a man once, down in Bacolot, who made a practice of
getting as drunk as possible once each month, once and no more. It
gave one something definite to look forward and back to, and hope for
and regret, he had explained without embarrassment, and that was an
achievement for a white man in the tropics. McGennis, staring glumly
at the record of his featureless year, felt that perhaps that man was
as reasonable as any other.
Then, impulsively, he stooped again and the knife-blade flashed with
mimic fierceness as he hacked at his post. When he rose there were
fourteen new notches in it. He had mortgaged a fortnight of his new
year. There was no sense in it, very likely, but it was done, and
irrevocable, and therefore comforting in a way. He stood back, and
the first smile of the day curled his lips. The fool part of him
amused the rest, and he turned to the _sala_ and breakfast with some
cheerfulness.
He was making his last few conscientious pecks at that meal, when the
Municipal Secretary, exalted and short-winded personage, climbed his
stairs puffingly and stood blinking in the door. McGennis set his
cup down and uttered the sound which trustful Sicaba interpreted as
the outburst of uncontrollable joy.
"Well, Secretario!" he cried, in his atrocious and unfaltering
Spanish. "You're just in time for chocolate. Milicio!" he shouted
to his cook.
The Secretary raised a pudgy hand in deprecation, the dignity of an
official mission being on him. "It iss dhe lattair, Mr. Magheenis,"
he announced, holding out a crumpled official envelope. "Dhe
Supervisor Provincial sends it wiv a man to running."
Smiling the contented smile of a fat man whose exertion is over, the
Secretary sank into a chair and fanned himself with his hat. "_Sena
muy importante_," he explained more familiarly. "The courier cost
two _pesos_. I brought it over at once."
"A letter by courier and two _pesos_!" McGennis cried, knowing that
surprise was expected. "We're getting up in the world. Excuse me if
I read it, Secretario?"
"With pleasure," the Secretary murmured, but McGennis did not hear
him. He heard nothing, saw nothing, but those surprising words in
the crabbed writing of his chief, which changed life in a flash and
settled that tormenting question once for all.
Twice he read the letter through greedily, before he dropped it to
stare out through the open window. A kaleidoscopic change had
overtaken Botany and Geology. The corner of the weedy _plaza_ on
which his house fronted now lay fresh and clean under the early
sunshine and the salty breeze. Beyond it rose a grove of
cocoa-palms, with brown-thatched houses nestled in their shade, and
between the tall columns of the tree-trunks shot the crisp sparkle of
the blue Visayan Sea. All at once, even Sicaba was exuberant with
life, youthful in beauty, friendly. Half noting the change, McGennis
raced along beside his thronging thoughts.
What the chief said was true. He _had_ thought he was forgotten and
stranded in Sicaba. Hastily his mind swept back over the dragging
year he was just finishing. Again he saw himself an enthusiastic
pilgrim with a work to do. Again he went through the disenchantment;
felt the vastness and wildness of the Islands, triumphant Geology and
Botany, burst upon him, reminding him for the first time that even an
Engineer is only a man at bottom. And once again he felt his
disappointment in the people, the simple, childlike, obstinately
pliant folk who listened so interestedly, and opposed the inertia of
dead centuries to every improvement. How was one to teach them
anything? And why should a deputy provincial supervisor, placed in
charge of the roads and bridges and harbors of the whole North Coast,
with headquarters at Sicaba, try to create roads and harbors and
bridges to supervise? That had become the question finally.
But he had kept on trying, and now a year was up and he had
accomplished something, even in hopeless Sicaba. The town was a
little cleaner for his having lived there. A few people had come to
trust "America." And there _were_ roads and bridges and harbors, on
the blue-prints in his office. Perhaps it had paid after all. At
any rate the people liked him, and he liked them. The fat old
Secretario, now--
Just then that patient man interrupted him with the most suppressed
of coughs. "Well, Secretario," said McGennis, rousing, "let's drink
our chocolate. I must have been dreaming. I hope I haven't kept you
waiting long?"
"Only a moment," the visitor assured him, though the Deputy
Supervisor's day-dream had lasted long for any dream, "only a moment.
I hope," he added, curiosity struggling with courtesy, "that I did
not bring bad news."
"Bad news!" McGennis beamed on him. "You brought the best little
old news _you'll_ ever tote. Secretario, if you never promulgate
worse news than that, you'll boost your circulation a thousand a day.
It was red news with green edges."
The Secretary could understand the tone, if the words were beyond
him, and his smile matched McGennis's own. "I could almost believe,"
he hinted with elephantine archness, "that the Government has
increased your salary."
"Secretario," said McGennis approvingly, "you hit the truth in the
eye that time. But that isn't the best of it."
"Ah," said the Secretary promptly, "then you are also to be married."
"Not on your life!" McGennis shouted scornfully. "Not on your life,
Secretario. They've raised me."
"Raised you," the Secretary murmured uncomprehendingly. Most of
McGennis's conversation was half incomprehensible to him, and all the
more entertaining just for that. It brought him into touch with
words he had never heard of.
"Sure," McGennis repeated. "Raised me. Shoved me up a peg.
Promoted me."
"Ah, promoted!" said the Secretary, catching at the flying tails of a
word he knew.
"In the eye again," McGennis applauded. "Secretario," he began
impressively, smoothing out the crumpled letter, "the Old Man,"--so
he spoke of his chief, the engineer in charge of the battle with
Botany and Geology in the two great provinces of _Pagros Oriental y
Occidental_--"the Old Man has had his eye on me, so he says. And I
reckon he means it. Yes, sir, the old telescope has had a sight on
yours respectfully clear up here in Sicaba."
"Yes?" murmured the Secretary, heroically sipping his detestable,
lukewarm chocolate.
"And he says," McGennis quoted freely, "that I haven't made good so
worse, and that having watered and weeded the banana tree I shall now
open my mouth and let something drop therein. And what, Secretario,"
McGennis demanded excitedly, "_what_ do you suppose is going to drop?"
"Yes," the Secretary agreed placidly, "I comprehend. It is a very
good idea."
"You bet it is," McGennis shouted. "But you don't comprehend enough
to notice. Look here, Secretario. You know they're building a road
up in the Igorrote country, and the Igarooters won't work, and
they're going to put me in charge of the worst section of it and see
if I can make 'em work. Will I _make_ them?" he demanded,
rhetorically. "_Will_ I? I'm sorry for them already yet."
"Yes," murmured the Secretary. "It is a very good idea. I
comprehend with clearness, and up to a certain point I agree--"
"I don't believe it," said McGennis flatly. "Listen, Secretario.
I'm going away, _sabe_? No more Sicaba in mine! No more bridges and
harbors in a cat's eye, but some real live Igaroots and a bunch of
picks and shovels and a road you can _see_! And _dynamite_! Lord,
Secretario, you don't know how good it'll seem to hear a real noise
again, and--"
McGennis stopped suddenly, for something in his words had at last
penetrated to the Secretary's understanding. Slowly the worthy
officer put down his cup. Slowly he got to his feet, and over his
broad, dull face a little procession of emotions made its slow way.
Jovial interest gave place to surprise, surprise to dismay, and at
last a heavy hopelessness settled on it. "You go away from Sicaba,
Magheenis?" he asked. And then he plumped down into his chair again
and sat there, an embodiment of chuckle-headed woe.
"Lord," said McGennis to himself, looking at his victim contritely,
"I ought not to have tossed it out at him that way."
It was a relief that just at that moment a white-clad native teacher
should come to the door of the schoolhouse on the far side of the
_plaza_ and ring a bell with nervous, insistent strokes. McGennis
jerked out his watch, and realized that for the first time in Sicaba
he was late in beginning his day. "Stay as long as you want to,
Secretario," he called back, rushing for the stairs. The Secretary
sat motionless, and McGennis, plunging out into the sunshine, felt a
second pang of contrition for having tossed it out so suddenly.
But his regret was only momentary. Somehow the morning sparkled as
never morning had outside God's own country, and the Deputy
Supervisor, pushing across the _plaza_ with long, boyish strides,
responded to it. "Going away, going away," was the refrain his feet
patted out. Away from Sicaba, away from isolation and obscurity, out
to the big, big chance which waited him. And the chief had been
watching him, canny old Stewart who said so little and saw so much
with those narrowed gray eyes of his; hard-mouthed Stewart, who
handled his forces for the overthrow of Botany and Geology, down
there in Bacolot, as a general handles his troops. And Stewart,
whose approval was a grunt, had said in so many words that he,
McGennis, had made good. Truly, it paid to cut your notches and let
the Stewarts look out for the meaning of them.
His eager, keen face was so bright, as he cut across the angle where
church and convent wall a corner of the _plaza_, that the men who had
been puttering there with stones and cement dropped their work to
sing out cheery "_Maayong agas_" a dozen of them in a volley.
"_Maayong aga, amigos_," returned McGennis, and hesitated. He was
already late for school, but then school is not one of the duties of
an engineer in charge of half a province. One of the few duties that
isn't his, McGennis had thought sometimes. Still, this school of
Sicaba, in a way--
Somehow McGennis's mind was working in quick flashes, and even as he
hung there on his heel he saw again just how that school had become
one of his duties, and laughed grimly to think of it.
There had been a Maestro in Sicaba once, a bespectacled American from
an East effete beyond words, but chronic indigestion--coupled with a
coldness in the feet equally chronic, thought McGennis, with light
scorn--had caused his early departure. And then the school, in the
hands of four warring native teachers, male and female, had been
going to the dogs, until McGennis, with his inherent dislike for
seeing anything go to the dogs uncombatted, had, with a deft jerk of
the wrist, straightened those four warring pedagogues into their
collars and kept them there, till a Deputy Superintendent of Schools
had come riding up from Bacolot to see what was to be done about it.
McGennis still remembered that trim, slim, innocent-eyed Deputy with
regretful admiration.
"I reckon," McGennis had remarked, with the impersonal contempt of an
Engineer speaking to a Teacher, "you'll be sending up another
glass-eyed Dictionary to snarl 'em all up--"
"I don't know," the Deputy Superintendent had said thoughtfully.
"You've done surprisingly well with them yourself."
"That," McGennis retorted, with huge sarcasm, "is because I've got
nothing else to do."
"In that case," the Deputy had said, looking at him with smiling
innocence, "I'll let you keep the school, just to fill up the time."
And then, unexpectedly, he had swung to his saddle and flicked a
spurred heel, and gone galloping away, his big Colt's swinging at his
trim waist, and left McGennis wrathful yet admiring.
"I say, Mr. McGennis," had been his parting shot, "try to keep their
accent and vocabulary back as close to the Mississippi as you can,
won't you?"
Rather than quit, McGennis had taken the school and kept the restive
teachers in line by counsel and admonition, and had even, when he was
in town, taught for an hour each morning himself, smiling with lofty
contempt for his womanish occupation as he revealed to his pupils an
accent and vocabulary which had never been east of the Missouri. In
a way it was his school, but the work those men were doing at the
angle of the _plaza_ was infinitely more his work, and, late or not,
he swung on his heel for a look at it.
Of all his schemes for the redemption of Sicaba, that culvert and its
tributary ditches was his pet. It had been a nice problem in
drainage in a town whose highest ridge rose only a meter above high
water, and which yet seemed to have an inexhaustible capacity for
getting wet and staying wetter. The water had lain two feet deep all
over the _plaza_, the last rains, and a score of men, fathers of
families, had wrapped their faces in their clammy cotton blankets and
died stolidly of fever, to say nothing of the women and the babies.
The babies had been the worst of it. It made him growl out ugly
curses to see the tiny coffins borne out of the church, two and three
and four a day, with their tawdry draperies of pink calico draggled
and beaten by wind and rain. He had made up his mind that it must
stop. And it was stopped now, if Yankee ingenuity counted for
anything, McGennis thought, as he looked down at the clean green
mortar of his culvert.
"Is it good?" the foreman of the masons asked anxiously.
The Deputy Supervisor surveyed the work with puckered brows. "Fine,
Miguel," he said genially. "Couldn't be better," and the workmen
smiled at each other like pleased children.
"Two, three, four days, it will be done," Miguel said proudly.
"Great!" cried his ruler. "You're a hustler. You and I've got a
little Irish in us, I reckon, hey?" And then, chuckling over the
bewilderment his speech had caused, he resumed his light-hearted way
to school.
The big, sunny boys' room, where blackboards were fastened
incongruously and perilously to nipa walls and bright-eyed,
white-frocked Oriental youngsters sat at American desks when they
must, and drew their legs up to squat comfortably at other times, was
very cheerful ordinarily, far and away the homiest place in Sicaba.
But as McGennis entered, he met a chilly air. For eleven months he
had been impressing the beauty of punctuality on his charges, and now
he had his reward. The children stared with round-eyed disapproval.
The teachers greeted him with frosty courtesy.
With twinkling eyes, McGennis marched to the desk. "I am late," he
reported meekly, "and--I will let Alejandro Angel name my punishment."
That was an inspiration. The angelic Alexander turned stiff with
responsibility. "I sink," he announced at last, "we s'all all estay
after eschool an' Meestair Magheenis s'all tell dhe estory of dhe
Princesa who wass esleepy." A stir of approval greeted his
pronouncement. The Sleeping Beauty was dear to the hearts of younger
Sicaba.
Having made his peace, McGennis passed on to his own little room.
And there, while detachments advanced to storm under his leadership
the rough terrain of English speech, he fell to thinking again of his
wonderful fortune. He would make those Igorrotes work, and he would
learn all their legends and crafts and games, and they would be his
people. Just as the people of Sicaba were.
McGennis, glancing down at the long bench where a platoon of his
people sat with the impishly angelic Alexander at one end--the lower
one--and the wan-faced village hunchback at the other, felt a sudden
pang. For the first time he realized that some professional
pedagogue, some glass-eyed Dictionary, some heavy-handed, solemn
fellow, might have those boys he had made his. If any one must come,
he hoped it might be--McGennis ransacked his fancy for the sort of
man he wanted. And he could not find one! At that he laughed
outright. "You're getting green-eyed," he said to himself, in
humorous surprise.
"Teacher, what is green-eye?" demanded the hunchback, and McGennis
knew that he had spoken his thought.
"Green-eyed means a gazabo that thinks he's It," he explained
promptly; and "What is gazabo, Teacher?" demanded the tireless
pursuer after knowledge.
"Time's up," said McGennis laughing. "Rush along the next gang,
Alejandro, and if I catch you chewing _bunga_ in school again I'll
wring your neck, _sabe_?"
When the one hour of his unmanly work was done and the last
detachment had departed, McGennis lingered for a moment in the little
room, looking out on the _plaza_, and his eyes were very thoughtful,
almost wistful. "I reckon," he muttered, "a fellow'd hate to leave
the Hot Place if he'd been there long enough to get acquainted," and
he seized his hat and hurried over to his office in the big,
half-ruinous convent which served Sicaba for municipal headquarters.
His step was not so wholly buoyant as it had been in the morning, and
the world was not quite so youthfully exuberant. Not that it was
dead, as he had seen it so often from his window at sunrise. It was
simply--homelike.
And in his office, too, buoyancy was lacking. Instead of taking up
the work he had laid aside the night before, and it was work which
must be finished quickly if he meant to leave his house in order, he
sat stupidly for a while, and then, half unconsciously, he reached up
to a shelf and took down some blue-prints of work which could not be
done for years. Not till all those roads and bridges had some
habitation more local than a cat's eye. There was the swamp, Manapla
way, a hundred good square miles of rich black mud where cacao would
grow like a weed, and only a thousand cubic meters of drainage canal
were needed, twelve hundred at the outside--
There was the growing bar at the mouth of Cadiz Viejo river. One
jetty, placed knowingly, would scoop that out, and there was an ideal
place for a dock--McGennis's short brown hand smoothed the curling
blue-prints lovingly, as he fell to thinking again of an unescapable
successor. Whom could Stewart send? There was Haskins. Haskins had
the education, McGennis admitted reverently, and could draw like a
ruling-machine and figure like a comptometer. But Haskins couldn't
make a monkey catch fleas, and the North Coast needed a driver, a
hard-handed--and yet not too hard. Brown could make 'em hustle all
right, but he would have a new fight on every day. What the North
Coast needed was a jollier--like Henry? No, Henry was a good fellow
all right, but he made things cost like contract work in Frisco, and
the North Coast was pitifully poor. What it needed was a contriver
like--like--well, like--
"Oh, hell!" said McGennis profanely. Suddenly he stood very straight
above his draughting-table, for his door had opened.
The Municipal Secretary and the Municipal Presidente came in. They
seemed to radiate an air of funerals, and McGennis's boisterous
greeting died in his throat. The Secretary halted just inside the
door and stood looking down, a lumpish statue of grief. The
Presidente, a spare, eager-faced young native, came forward to
McGennis's table.
"Damn!" said McGennis softly, looking at him.
"Señor Magheenis," said the Presidente, "the Señor Secretario says
that you will go away. Assure me that he is mistaken."
McGennis started a light answer, and cut it short. "It's true,
Presidente," he said briefly.
"But," said the Presidente, "where go all our plans which we made
together? Remember how we talked? You shall teach me how the good
Presidentes--the Mayors--in America do, and so shall even Sicaba be
made American also."
"I'm sorry, Presidente," said McGennis, "but you see--"
"I comprehend," said the Presidente. "We are too little, too poor,
too worthless, to take the strength, the teaching, of a man like
you--"
"Oh, cut it out!" McGennis begged.
"It is not to be expected, and I do not expect it, now that I
comprehend." There was a simple and impressive dignity in the little
Presidente. "But what comes to Sicaba, and to me? Excuse me,
_Magheenis amigo_. I can not talk more now. Before you go I shall
see you and thank you, but excuse me now."
"Damn!" said McGennis savagely, looking after the two silent figures
as they went out. "What right have they got," he demanded sharply of
Some One, "to expect me to drool away my whole life up here in this
God-forsaken hole? Here, you," he shouted roughly to the
man-of-all-work about his office, "get my horse saddled up, quick.
I've got to ride out and take a look at that cut on the Segovia road."
And so he rode away and escaped a day of unwonted excitement in
Sicaba as the news spread. People told it to each other as they
stood in twos and threes before the little _tiendas_, and the greater
men of the town, gathered in the earthen-floored café, drank cognac
in unusual and dangerous quantities, three and four thimblefuls, some
of them; and the school children talked of it, tearfully, and the
monkeyish little constabulary soldiers in their lime-washed
barrack--McGennis had given _them_ a touch of that pliant
mule-driver's wrist of his, once or twice, when their inspector had
been absent riding along the eighty miles of ladrone-harried coast
which was his charge.
In all Sicaba only the Municipal Secretary, sitting in his office
with an unlighted cigar between his pudgy fingers, and the young
Presidente pacing up and down somewhere in his big house beside
Sicaba River, did not speak of McGennis's going.
It was toward the end of the afternoon when the Deputy Supervisor
rode back, himself again. Out there in the open, with the sun and
wind about him, his brain had cleared. These people had no mortgage
on his future. It was a wrench breaking old ties, but not to do it
in this case would be a piece
of--back-beyond-the-foot-hills--sentimentality.
So when he turned into the first street of the little city and a man
stepped out from a tienda and asked: "You go away, Señor Magheenis?"
McGennis, jogging along with a smile on his face, was ready for him.
"Sure," he said carelessly.
But he was not ready for what followed. For the man put a hand to
his mouth and called shrilly: "It is true," and from every _tienda_
down the length of that long street, men and women came out and stood
looking up at him, silently, sorrowfully, questioningly, as if there
were something they wanted to understand, and couldn't. Before
McGennis was half-way to the _plaza_, his smile was a savage grin,
and he had kicked the big horse into a thundering gallop. And so he
rode down between the rows of silent people, looking straight ahead.
He had reached the _plaza_, and was swinging his horse for the corner
where his house was, when the sight of the schoolhouse on the farther
side checked him. This hour, just before sunset, had come to be the
one playtime hour of his busy days, and he spent it at the school.
Not as a teacher, nor among the boys who were his unofficial pupils.
At the other end of the school from the boys' room was another
equally big room crowded full of girls, and it was there, oddly
enough, that McGennis spent the one happy hour when he did not have
to be a Deputy Supervisor.
Oddly, for, as McGennis put it, he "had no use for skirts." In his
short, tempestuous life he had seen many good men wasted for love of
women, and far from being curious at their fate and the causes of it,
he had drawn back into himself till he regarded the softer half of
humankind with a suspicion which bordered on hatred.
But there were women of another sort. Tiny things whose little
clinging fingers could hardly circle one of his stubby ones. Wee
things of such primal innocence that, as they stood unclad at the
village wells, with their plump little brown bodies shining in the
sun, and their wisps of black hair hanging all draggled about their
faces, while their mothers poured water over them, they looked up
unabashed if he came riding by, and smiled up friendlily, and lisped
"Good-a-mornin'."
Of such women McGennis had no fear, and so it had come about, very
gradually, that after all the others were gone, these little ones
waited in the big room till McGennis came with a wonderfully colored
book, and then, with shining eyes and tiny gurgles of excited
laughter, they closed about him and wormed their warm little selves
inside his arms and balanced precariously on his shoulders, steadying
themselves by his hair, and lay piled, a heap of eager heads and
forgotten arms and legs, on the big table where the book was, while
the Deputy Supervisor revealed to them the thrilling difference
between a peach and an apple, and the astonishing unlikeness of
either to a violet. And any one who had come unseen on McGennis
then, would hardly have known him for a Deputy Supervisor.
McGennis, at the _plaza_ corner, felt suddenly that these friends of
his were waiting for him then, and he could not bear to disappoint
them. So he swung the big horse and galloped across and rolled from
his saddle at the schoolhouse door and pushed it open and took one
step inside, and stopped.
For from the benches and the crowded table there rose a wail of
infantile despair, so shrill and queerly, pipingly minor, so very
manifestly the outpouring of very tiny broken hearts, that it was
like a toy wail, almost ludicrous in its imitation of the real thing.
But McGennis did not smile at it. For an instant he stood, and then
he turned and closed the door with fumbling fingers, and took the few
steps to his horse stumblingly, and climbed heavily into his saddle,
and with loose reins rode off to his house and went up to his _ssla_
and sat down there, looking blindly out on Sicaba.
[Illustration: "_With loose reins rode off to his house._"]
The sunset came, brightened, and faded, and passed away, and night
shut down over Sicaba, and still he sat there. His muchacho came to
light a lamp, and McGennis sent him away. Later his cook came,
speaking authoritatively of dinner, and McGennis sent his cook away,
too, and sat on in the dark.
At last it was the hour when even Sicaba, for a little while, must
seem beautiful to the most hostile critic. It is the hour when the
full power of night descends upon the world, when the wind dies away
to the merest murmur, and the drone of the surf becomes deep and
solemn, and the great yellow stars burn very steadily against the
soft velvet of the sky.
When that hour came, McGennis stirred, and stood up suddenly, and
laid his hands on the broad sill of his window and looked down at
Sicaba and up to the stars. "Of course I'm going to stay," he
muttered impatiently, as if Some One had asked him a question. "But
it's up to You. You butted into this game, and now You've got to
play the cards. Pedro," he called, in quite another voice, "bring a
light."
When the light was brought, he sat down at his table and drew pen and
paper to him and began to write.
"Donald G. Stewart, C.E.," he wrote, tracing the magic initials with
reverent care. McGennis would never write C.E. after his own name,
unless some day he did the big, big thing which would lead a college
to give him the right, _honoris causa_. He had not the education, he
knew that.
"DONALD G. STEWART, C.E.
"_Supervisor in Charge
"Provinces Pagros Oriental y Occidental._
"SIR:--I have the honor to request that I do not be transferred to
Luzon, because there are some jobs here which are not done yet."
His eyes lighted with whimsical amusement as he thought of those
"jobs"; teaching a presidente how to be straight, teaching brown,
monkeyish soldiers not to run away, teaching the children--
"The fact is, Mr. Stewart," he wrote with less formality, "that I
cannot leave the school which the Dep. Super. Schools kindly gave me
to occupy my time. I am the best teacher he has got now, I think.
You can ask him."
Then formality returned:
"I have the honor to thank you for the kind words you say about me
making good. Of course I know they are not so.
"Very respectfully,
"JOHN McGENNIS."
"There," said McGennis, looking down thankfully at his completed
letter, for he hated letter-writing, did McGennis, "I reckon that
cinches it. When the Old Man reads that, he'll sabe I'm loco enough
to let alone. Anyway," he added, "Haskins'll never get the chance to
blow about draining Manapla swamp. Haskins has got the education all
right, but he couldn't make a bald monkey catch his own fleas."
As he entered his bedroom, holding his chimneyless lamp high that the
reek of it might not draw into his nostrils, his eye lighted on the
jagged post in the corner. "Well," said McGennis, looking at it,
"she's all notched up for a couple of weeks, anyhow. I'm that much
ahead." The boyish smile curled his firm young lips once more, as
the fool part of him began to amuse the other parts. And then,
contentedly, he turned to his canvas cot, with the heavy, blue-gray
blankets spread upon it.
It is hard and narrow and monkish, that couch which the world
provides for so many of her fighting men and pioneers, but to
McGennis it seemed a Place of Rest.
So may they find it, all my far-wandering friends, when to-night they
stretch themselves on the rasping canvas and draw the honest,
blue-gray blankets over them.
EPILOGUE
_That is the East which called me with all its old familiar voices,
with all the glamour and color of its pulsating life. And now,
having relived that life for an hour, I have come back again to the
old house which stands so quiet among the frost-bitten New England
woods and fields where sober-living men are providing cannily against
the coming winter, in full faith that their precautions will avail,
that a Great God rules who permits no Little Gods to turn His world
topsyturvy. I am not sorry to be back. The East for the tasting of
life, the West for living it._
_I feel, regretfully, as you must have felt accusingly or
uninterestedly, that these stories are far from pleasant. That is
because they are true. Each of them was taken raw from Life. The
people of the mimic dramas you have watched are no puppets of my
imagination; there is no bit of tragedy or of comedy written here,
however dingy, that some man or woman has not lived. Whether you
accept that old heathen man's hypothesis of Little Gods or not, you
have looked on at Games which were played by Some One, or by blind
Fate. The East you have seen is the real East, stripped of its
glamour and its color, a land where nothing is sacred, where there
are indeed no Ten Commandments--no Commander, it seems sometimes--a
land of uncertainty and empty Fatalism._
_Better, it seems to me, a little less of zest and color, and a
little more of ballasting Hope._
THE END.