Caybigan Part 27

The Maestro went to see the Post-Surgeon. But the Post-Surgeon had been in the Philippines four years. That is, his ideal of life now was to slop about his room all day in a kimona, smoking cigarette after cigarette and drinking whiskey-and-soda after whiskey-and-soda. To go out and see a sick child, especially when that sick child happened to have a brown skin, demanded an effort absolutely colossal for the corroded shreds of his moral strength. It took several days of begging, remonstrance, appeal, almost threats to galvanize the dead fibres. At last the Doctor slipped into a khaki and walked a hundred yards with the Maestro to the hut by the river.

He examined the boy with a vague, returning ghost of professional interest.

"Curvature of the spine," he said at length.

"No cure?" asked the Maestro.

"No, he'll die; it may take several years."

"Will he suffer?"

The surgeon pointed to the child. The little body was vibrating in exquisite torture and cold beads of sweat were welling up on the stoical Malay face.

That night the Maestro went to the Post Hospital and asked the steward for some morphine.

"The dose is----" the steward started to say, giving him the pellets.

"I know, I know," the Maestro broke out hastily. "I've used it often."

He did not know the dose, but he did not want to know it.

He went back to Carnota. He found him with his sharp knees pressed tight against his chin.

He gave him several pellets. He did not know what was the proper dose, but he knew that this one was surely a highly improper one, and that is all he wanted to know.

The little boy had gone to sleep with a deep, restful sigh.

And now he was there, beneath the pink-and-blue rosettes.

The man and the woman were becoming uneasy beneath the vacant-eyed scrutiny of the Maestro. Finally the father stooped, wound his arms about the coffin, and looked up questioningly into the Maestro's face.

"Yes," nodded the Maestro, "I will go with you."

The man heaved the coffin to his shoulder. The boy took the shovel, the woman the candle, and they started in a file. The Maestro followed and took the shovel from the boy.

At the cemetery the father began to dig in the black ooze, but the Maestro stopped him. He led them to a little knoll close by beneath a giant mango tree. The soil was dry there, and, taking off his jacket, the Maestro toiled till a little hole was ready.

They lowered the paper-frilled box into it, then they sc.r.a.ped back the earth. The father went into the jungle and came back with a cross made of two bamboo sticks. He planted the cross and the Maestro placed a few stones about it.

Then they walked back to the pueblo.

"Are you very sad?" asked the Maestro of the woman.

"Oho," she answered, "muy triste."

But she had not understood the question. She had had nine children, and eight were buried. As far back as she could remember Death had never let by a year without entering her hut. She had long ceased feeling.

They came to the plaza. The old cavalry horse was still standing as before, his swollen legs spread in a wide base, his head dropped to the ground, his patient, bulging eyes red with blood. His rattling, dolorous breath, above the humming undertone of carrion-flies, was the only break in the heated silence.

The Maestro looked at the animal. His chin dropped to his chest.

He raised his head with a sharp movement and walked on.

"I have done well," he said.

XIV

THE CONFLUENCE

It was a mistake from the first. The post was not at all for a woman, but Miss Terrill was unaware of that. She had just come to Bacolod _via_ San Francisco, Manila, and Ilo-Ilo, by means, successively, of a big white army transport full of other ingenuous pedagogues; a wheezy but impudent little Spanish steamer, which aggressively shoved its nose under every ripple of the inter-island seas; a languid-sailed lorcha, loaded with pigs, dogs, and brownies, and finally a dizzy banca, which, perched upon the tip-foam of a curling comber, outriggers spread out like wings, landed her high up on a golden beach--fresh, dainty, and composed like a coloured alb.u.m picture. So, when out of the hat in which the Division Superintendent was thoughtfully shuffling little slips of paper representing the towns of his terra incognita, she drew the name of Barang, she took it as much of a lark. Immediately she ran to a map, found the little black dot down in the southern part of Negros, and p.r.o.nounced it "cute." She seemed p.r.o.ne, it must be said, to take things that way. She was a very young girl, so young that the officers of the Post raised their eyebrows and muttered under their breaths when they learned where she was going. A certain second lieutenant, Saunders by name, and very fresh from West Point, went so far in fact as to offer to arrange it so that she should stay in Bacolod, at least as long as he were there, and afterwards--any place where he might be. But she laughed sweetly at this proffer, and put it from her promptly and decisively, though her blue eyes, at the young fellow's sudden show of despair, shone a moment with a tenderness--maternal he called it afterward--that somehow left him without bitterness and full of reverence.

Here it must be explained for future understanding that Rumour, a most vigorous Dame in the Philippines, forthwith pounced upon this little incident and made off with it north and south. North the development of the tale was rapid indeed; by the time it reached Escalante it dealt with the marriage of Miss Terrill to the fat old colonel of the Post.

South, progress was more modest; at Himamaylan and Cantalacan, towns nearest to Barang, it gave merely the news of the formal engagement of Miss Terrill to Lieutenant Saunders. Which freak of Dame Rumour was precious indeed, in that it led to the complications that make this story.

The affair of her a.s.signment continued to be much of a lark during the two weeks spent in Bacolod awaiting transportation. It was still a lark when the launch came and her trunk, in the loading, fell into the surf and the hombres in charge of it kept dry by the simple expedient of standing upon it. And the long, hard trip in the launch, laden to the gunwales with supplies for a military post still further than her own town, also was a lark, although at sunset the sky drew down in a black vault beneath which the little steamer seemed very small and very lone, and a wind arose which sent her plunging beneath tons of swirling water, and later, when the sea had calmed, the Tagal pilot got lost in the blinding downpour of rain and ran her gently into a perpendicular wall from which they backed with a poignant feeling that it was only the superstructure backing thus away, that the bottom was still on the rock--a feeling which proved baseless, but which kept them tense the night long, speaking in whispers and treading the deck a-tiptoe. The world was still joyous when they crashed through a fish-corral and her chair, caught by one of the poles, whisked her instantaneously from bow to stern. But when they anch.o.r.ed beyond the edge of a long reef, and the sun rose glaringly upon the sh.o.r.e, it must be admitted that her heroic little heart sank a bit. On the other side of the reef the waters ended in rippling purple shallows; and then there emerged a low bank of mud--a livid yellow mud, flaccid and spongy, corroded with trickly streams that ran ink. At the upper end of this bank, flanked by four leafless leprous palms, there rose a long building, askew upon its rotting piles, with torn tin roof and shutters fallen outward. In front, very white against the gray facade, the blue sky, the yellow mud, a pole sprang up with a faded American flag wrapped dejectedly about its top. Embracing the bank, the two curved arms of a river came down in slow gurgitation of liquid ooze between screens of black-green vegetation.

"This is Himamaylan, little mother," said the young lieutenant (he had fallen rather easily into the relation imposed by her). "This is Himamaylan. Wish it were your station; you've twelve more miles overland."

Now this thoughtful preference for Himamaylan (seeing what Himamaylan was) hardly promised for her own station. But she resolutely gulped down a certain tightening of the throat. "How jolly!" she said.

Saunders looked at her rather long. "What a darling you are!" he murmured. And the tone was hardly filial.

Which caused her to hurry her preparations for landing. A native standing to his knees in the mud, after a good deal of vocalising from the lieutenant, listlessly strolled to a decrepit banca, bottom up in the shallows, flopped it over, baled it out with a coconut sh.e.l.l, tied up the shaky outriggers with bejuca, and paddled leisurely, with an air of supreme indifference, to the counter of the launch. "I'll go ahead and reconnoitre," said the lieutenant, springing into it; "it's only six, and Wilson (the American teacher of the station) is probably not up yet." Miss Terrill saw him paddled to the sh.o.r.e, saw him land and go up the rude causeway. At each step the stone under him sank as in a jelly and his foot whisked out in a spatter of mud; at each step her heart followed the stone in its sinking movement. He disappeared into the great ruined building. She waited, it seemed a long time. The padron of the launch began a muttered discourse upon the sin of delay with an ebbing tide. The sun rose higher, poured its accusing glare upon the squalor of the scene. The hombre in the banca pulled his wide-brimmed straw hat over his eyes, curled in the bow, and went to sleep. The mud began to crawl with little black crabs. "Cheer up!" she said to herself in a crisp intonation, like the note of a bird.

The Lieutenant reappeared at the head of a dozen villainous duplicates of the man in the banca. He paddled up. "All right," he said. "I have cargadores. Wilson will arrange things to get you to your town. We'll land your stuff first; by that time he'll be presentable."

One by one her boxes were thrown into the banca, paddled ash.o.r.e, and carried to the door of the big building, the convento of the friars before the revolution had driven them out. Then very ceremoniously, while the padron warned about further delay, Saunders handed her into the little canoe, like a princess into her gondola, out again on sh.o.r.e, and helped her over the first and worst part of the causeway.

"I must go now," he said. "Wilson is waiting for you at the door and that launch is beginning to thump bottom. And please, once more; won't you come back to Bacolod?"

She lifted her clear eyes to him and shook her head gently. "But you are a dear good boy," she said.

To the subtle maternal tone of this, there was no replying. He bowed low over her hand and turned back.

She started up right away. A great loneliness exhaled itself from the land. She did not look behind, but toiled stolidly toward the building.

Tied to one of the verandah posts, a native pony, short-necked, compact, muscular, was pawing the ground. She stopped and looked at it, gaining from it the first comfort received of things since her arrival. It was carefully groomed. The bay flanks shone like silk; the mane, parted, fell fluffily on each side of the curved neck, the forelock dangling roguishly between the eyes. Beneath the polished saddle a red blanket added a touch of colour, almost of coquetry. The little animal stood there like a protest against the ambient discouragement.

But a white-garbed man was at the door. "Good-morning, Mr. Wilson," she said gaily; "what a nice horse you have there!"

"Good-morning, Miss Terrill," he answered, a gleam of approval in his pale, tired eyes; "but that's not my horse. Mine--well, it's like everything else about here"--and in a heavy gesture he pa.s.sed his hand over the musty landscape.

She met the owner upstairs.

He was a young man with slender waist and broad shoulders.