Fate Knocks at the Door Part 2

"For Christ's sake--don't!" they heard from behind.

Wheeling, they found that the man had seen the end--as he had called out in that horrible echoing voice. He was not more than fifty yards behind the rear packer--and pinned to the trail. A bolo had been hammered with a stone--through the upper lip and the base of the brain, two or three inches into the earth.... He had been butchered besides.

At the end of a terrific ten days, Thirteen was crawling at nightfall into the large garrison at Lipa. Men and mules had been lost in the recent gruelling service. The trails and the miles had been long and hard; much hunger and thirst, and there was h.e.l.l in the hearts of men this night. Even Bedient was shaking with fatigue; and Cairns beside him, felt that there wasn't the brain of a babe in his skull. His saddle seemed filled with spikes. His spur was gone, and for hours he had kept his half-dead, lolling-tongued pony on the way, by frequent jabbing from a broken lead-pencil.... And here was Lipa at last, the second Luzon town, and a corral for the mules. As they pa.s.sed a nipa-shack, at the outer edge, a sound of music came softly forth. Some native was playing one of the queer Filipino mandolins. The Train pushed on, without Cairns and Bedient. All the famine and foulness and fever lifted from these two. They forgot blood and pain and glaring suns. The early stars changed to lily-gardens, vast and white and beautiful, and their eyes dulled with dreams.

They did not guess, at least Cairns did not, that the low music brought tears that night--because they were in dreadful need of it, because they were filled with inner agony for something beautiful, because they had been spiritually starved. And all the riding hard, shooting true and dying game--those poor ethics of the open--had not brought a crumb, not a crumb, of the real bread of life. Nor could mountains of mere energy nor icebergs of sheer nerve! In needing the bread of life--they were different from the others, and so they lingered, unable to speak, while a poor little Tagal--"one of the n.i.g.g.e.rs"--all unconsciously played. "Surely," they thought, "his soul is no dead, dark thing when he can play like that."

... So often, Bedient watched admiringly while Cairns wrote. The correspondent didn't know it, but he was bringing a good temporal fame to Thirteen and himself in these nights. He had a boy's energy and sentiment; also a story to tell for every ride and wound and shot in the dark. The States were attuned to boyish things, as a country always is in war, and a boy was better than a man for the work.... Often Bedient would bring him a cup of coffee and arrange a blanket to keep the wind from the sputtering candles. The two bunks were invariably spread together; and Bedient was ever ready for a talk in the dark, when Cairns' brain dulled and refused to be driven to further work, even under the whip of bitter-black coffee.... They were never to forget these pa.s.sionate nights--the mules, the mountains, nor the changing moon. Cairns was tampering with a drug that is hard to give up, in absorbing the odor and color of the oriental tropics. It filled his blood, and though, at the time, its magic was lost somewhat in the great loneliness for the States, and his mother and sisters--still, he was destined to know the craving when back on consecrated ground once more, and the carnal spirit of it all, died from his veins.

The most important lesson for Cairns to grasp was one that Andrew Bedient seemed to know from the beginning. It was this: To make what men call a good soldier means the breaking down for all time of that which is thrillingly brave and tender in man.

Healy is a type--a gamester, a fiend, a catapult. With a yell of "h.e.l.lsfire!" like a bursting sh.e.l.l, he would rowel his saddle-mule and lead the Train through flood or flame. His was a curse and a blow. He seemed a devil, condemned ever to pound miles behind him--b.l.o.o.d.y miles.

Sometimes, there was a sullen baleful gleam in the black eye, shaded by a campaign hat, but more often it was wide-open and reckless like a man half-drunk. Rousingly picturesque in action, a boy would exclaim, "Oh, to be a man like that!" but a _man_ would look at him pityingly and murmur, "G.o.d forbid!"... No other had the racy oaths of this boss-packer. Here was his art. Out of all his memories of Healy and the Train, one line stands out in the mind of Cairns, bringing the picture of pictures:

Again, it was a swift twilight among the gorges between Silang and Indang. It was after the suicide of the farrier, and there were sores and galls under the packs. If one cannot quickly start the healing by first intention, a sore back, in this climate, will ruin a mule. In a day or two, one is all but felled by the stench and corruption of the worm-filled wound--when the _aparejo_ is lifted.... Just before the halt this night, an old gray mule, one of the tortured, had strayed from the bell; sick, indeed, when that jangle failed to hold her to the work. Something very strange and sorrowful about these mighty creatures. If they can but muzzle the flanks of the bell-mare once in twenty-four hours, often stopping a jolt from the heels of this temperamental monster--the mules appear morally refreshed for any fate.

Miraculous toilers, s.e.xless hybrids--successful ventures into Nature's arcanum of cross-fertilization--steady, humorous, wise, enduring, and homely unto pain! The bond of their whole organization is the bell. It is the source inseparable in their intelligence from all that is lovely and of good report--not the sound, but what the sound represents. And this is the mystery: mare or gelding doesn't seem to matter, nor age, color, temper; just something set up and smelling like a horse.

Thirteen's crest-jewel was an old roan Jezebel that smothered with hatred at the approach of the least or greatest of her slaves. She had a knock-out in four feet--but Beatrice, she was, to those mules.

When Healy found the old gray missing, he remembered she was badly off under the packs. It was an ordeal to halt and search, for Silang meant supper and pickets. But the boss led the way back--and his eye was first to find her.... There she was, silhouetted against the sunset as poor Benton had been--seventy or eighty feet above the trail. Her head was down, her tongue fallen. The old burden-bearer seemed to have clambered up the rocks--through some desperate impulse for a breeze--or to die! She lifted her head as the hoofs rang below--but still looked away toward some Mecca for good mules. You must needs have been there to get it all--the old gray against the red sky--and know first-hand the torture of the trails, the valor of labor, the awfulness of Luzon.

To Cairns and Bedient there was something deep and heady to the picture, as they followed the eyes of Healy--and then his yell that filled the gorges for miles:

"Come down here--you scenery-lovin' son of----"

That was just the _vorspiel_. Mother Nature must have fed color to Healy. He did not paint, play nor write, but the rest of that curse dropped with raw pigment, like a painting of Sorolla. Prisms of English flashed with terrible attraction. It was a Homeric curse of all nations. Parts of it were dainty, too, as a b.u.t.terfly dip. Cairns was hot and courageous under the spell. The whole train of mules huddled and fell to trembling. A three-legged pariah-dog sniffed, took on a sudden obsession, and went howling heinously dawn the gorge. Healy rolled a cigarette with his free hand, and the old gray let herself down, half-falling....

And then--the end of campaigning. The rains began gradually that season, so that the last days were steamy and sickening with the heavy sweet of tropical fragrance. Between clouds at night, the stars broke out more than ever brilliant and near, in the washed air. There were moments when the sky appeared ceiled with phosphor, which a misty cloud had just brushed and set to dazzling. Something in the soil made them talk of girls--and Bedient drew forth for Cairns (to see the hem of her garment)--a certain hushed vision named Adelaide.... At last, the Train made Manila, wreck that it was, after majestic service; and the great gray mantle, a sort of moveless twilight, settled down upon Luzon and the archipelago. Within its folds was a mammoth condenser, contracting to drench the land impartially, incessantly, for sixty days or more.

And now the fruition of the rice-swamps waxed imperiously; the carabao soaked himself in endless ecstasy; the rock-ribbed gorges of Southern Luzon filled with booming and treachery. Fords were obliterated.

Hundreds of little rivers, that had not even left their beds marked upon the land, burst into being like a new kind of swarm; and many like these poured into the Pasig, which swelled, became thick and angry with the drain of the hills, the overflow of the rice-lands, and the filth and fever-stuff of the cities. At last, the constant din of the rain became a part of the silence.

FOURTH CHAPTER

THAT ADELAIDE Pa.s.sION

Andrew Bedient did not call at all these Asiatic and insular ports and continue to meet only men. Indeed, he did not fail to encounter those white women who follow men to disrupted places, where blood is upon the ground,--nor those native women inevitably present. A man fallen to the dregs usually finds a woman to keep him company, but it is equally true that man never climbs so high that, looking upward, he may not see a woman there.

A little before the _Truxton's_ last voyage, the clipper had remained in port for a fortnight at Adelaide, New South Wales. A woman in that city was destined to mean a great deal to the boy of seventeen.... It would be very easy to say that here was a creature whose way is the way of darkness. The striking thing is that Adelaide (in the thoughts of Bedient afterward, she gradually appropriated the name of her city) did not know she was evil.... Such a woman, it is curious to note, has appeared in the boyhood of many men of power and eminent equipment.

Adelaide was small and fragrant. Though formerly married, she was true to her kind in being childless. All her interests were in senses of her own; or in the senses of men and women who fell beneath her eye; pale, narrow temples were hers, but crowded with what sensational memories! A hundred and a few odd pounds, every ounce vivid with health and rhythmic with desire; every thought a kiss loved, missed, or hoped for; a frail little flame that needed only time to destroy an arena of gladiators. Curving, pearly nails with flecks of white in them, a light low laugh, a sweet low voice! Perhaps this was her charm, a sort of _samosen_ tone--low lilting minors that have to do with dusk and gardens and starlight....

There is not even a laughing pretense here that Adelaide was a real woman; but real women, even in this era of woman, often fail to remember what pure attractions to man, are their silences and their minor tones.

Just a fortnight--but what a tearing it was to leave her! Old Mother Nature must have writhed at this parting--groaned at the sight of the boy staring back from the high stern of the _Truxton_, at the stars lowering over the city and the woman, Adelaide. Possibly she retained something from the depth of his individuality.... Bedient would not have said so; but there is no doubt that her importance in his life was that of a _mannequin_ upon which to drape his ideals. Had he seen her, in the later years, he would have met the dull misery of disillusionment. Adelaide was a boy's sensational trophy. Her distant beauty and color was the art and pigment of his own mind.

A soul rudiment, a mental bud, and a beautiful prophylactic body--such was her equipment. He dreamed of her as a love flower of inextinguishable sweetness. The mere abstraction of her s.e.x,--colorless enough to most grown men,--was a sort of miracle to the boy. He made it shining with his idealism.... Frail arms held out to him; cool arms that turned electric with fervor. Unashamed, she took him as her own....

Exquisite devourer, yet she had much to do in bringing forth from the latent, one of the rarest gifts a boy can have--lovelier than royalty and fine as genius--the blue flower of fastidiousness. Adelaide, all unconcerned, identified herself with this, and it lived in the foreground of his mind. She became his Southland, his isle of the sea.

Winds from the South were her kisses--almost all the kisses he knew for years afterward. Living women were less to him than her memory. Facing the South, through many a hot-breathed night, he saw her--and the little house.... And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her for that!... A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like,--yet she held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea--and this, through those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick and despicable with excess.

Bedient often questioned himself--why he had not given up his berth on the _Truxton_ and remained longer in Adelaide. There were a dozen ships in the harbor to take him forth when he cared. This thought had not come to him at the time. Quite as remarkable was the formidable _something_ which arose in his brain at the thought of going back. This was not to be fathomed then--nor willed away. The roots of his integrity were shaken at the thought of return. Andrew Bedient at thirty-four understood. His was a soul that could thrive on dreams and denials. Even half-formed, this soul was the source of a strange antagonism, against which the fleshly desire to return was powerless.

Poise, indeed, for a cook among sailors and packers.

The time came when he heard other women--blessed women--speak of the Adelaide type of sister as the crowning abomination; he watched their eyes harden and glitter as only a mother-bird's can, in the circling shadow of a hawk; he lived to read in the havoc of men's faces that the ways of such women were ways of death; he believed all this--yet preserved something exquisite. Ten years afterward, winds from the South brought him the spirit of fragrance from her shoulders and hair.

From his own ideals, he had focussed upon that Emptiness, the beauty and dimension of a Helen.

Other experiences, up to the real romance--and these were surprisingly few--were episodes, brief quickenings of the old flame...When the first American soldiers were being lightered ash.o.r.e in Manila harbor, in fact, shortly after the cannonading in the harbor, a certain woman came over from the States and took a house in Manila. It was known as the Block-House. Some months afterward, and just before the long trip of the Train in which Cairns featured, Bedient met this woman on the _Escolta_. It was at dusk, and she was crossing the narrow pavement from the post-office entrance to her carriage-door. Their eyes met frankly. She was wise, under thirty, very slender, perfectly dressed; pretty, of course, but more than that; her little perfections were carried far beyond the appreciation of any but women physically faultless as herself.

Bedient was impressed with something pa.s.sionate and courageous, possibly dangerous. He could not have told the source of this impression. It was not in the contour, in the white softness of skin, in the full brown eyes, fair brow, nor in the reddened arch of her lips. It was something from the whole, denoted possibly in the quick dilation of her delicate nostrils or in the startling discovery of such a woman in Manila.... She lowered her eyes, started for her carriage--then turned again to the tall figure of Bedient in fresh white clothing. Or it may have been that her deep nature found delight in the excellent boyishness of the tanned face.

"Wouldn't you like to drive with me on the _Luneta_?" she asked pleasantly, and there was a low tone in her voice which made her instantly different.

"Why, yes, I should like to."

Her carriage was a _victoriette_, small to match the ponies--black stallions, noteworthy for style and spirit even in Manila, where one's equipage is the measure of fortune.... Bedient found that he could be silent without causing an abatement of her pleasure. And, indeed, she seemed a little embarra.s.sed, too, although he did not accept this.

Vaguely he was ruffled by the thought that he had merely been chosen as the princ.i.p.al of a nightly adventure.... This was untrue.

It was before the time of native concerts on the sea-drive, but in the night itself, and in the soft undertone from the sea, there was ardent atmosphere--with this woman beside him. The deeper current of his thoughts rushed with memories, but upon the surface played the adorable present, swift with adjustments as her swiftly-moving arms. The wonder of Womanhood was ever-new to him. Mighty gusts of animation surged through his body. He spoke from queer angles of consciousness, and did not remember. She could laugh charmingly.... To her, the Hour uprose.

Here was clear manhood of twenty (and such an unhurt boy he had proved to be)--to make her very own!... She had taught herself to live by the hour; had forfeited the right to be loved long. She knew the time would soon come, when she could not hold nor attract men. It comes always to women who dissipate themselves among the many. Yet she loved the love of an hour; was a connoisseur of the love-tokens of men to her; no material loss was counted in the balance against a winning such as this promised to be. Here was a big intact pa.s.sion which she called unto herself with every art; her developed senses felt it pouring upon her; this was a drug to die for. It made her brave and filled her mind with dreams--as wine does to some men. Already he was giving her love--of a sort that older men withhold from her kind. She put her hand upon his wrist--and told the native to drive them home.

... They sat in a hammock together on the rear balcony of the Block-House. It had been a dangerous moment pa.s.sing through the house.

There had been embarra.s.sments, the telltale artifices of the establishment, but she would not suffer the work of the ride to be torn down. She held him in enchantment by sheer force of will; and now they were alone, and she was building again. There was wine. Over the balcony rail, they watched the Pasig running wickedly below; and across, stretching away to where the stars lay low in the rim of the horizon, the wet teeming rice-lands brooded in the night-mist.... The piano, which had seemed unstrung from the voyage, as he pa.s.sed through the house, sounded but faintly now through several shut doors. The fragments were mellifluous....

She knew he was a civilian from his dress, and asked his work in Luzon.

He told her he was cook of Pack-train Thirteen, just now quartered in the main corral. She laughed, but didn't believe. He was not the first to conceal his office from her. It was unpleasant; apt to be dangerous.

She did not ask a second time.... There was just one other perilous moment. They had been together on the balcony but a half-hour, when she turned her face to him, her eyes shut, and said:

"You're a dear boy!... I haven't kissed anyone like that--oh, in long, long!... It makes me feel like a woman--how silly of me!"

Her face and throat looked ghastly white for a moment in the sheltered candles. "Isn't it silly of me--isn't it--_isn't it_?" she kept repeating, picking at his fingers, and touching his cheeks in frightened fashion.... She was reaching amazing deeps of him. The best of her was his, for she could give greatly. It was wonderful, if momentary. He felt the terrific strength of his hands, as if his fingers must strike sparks when he touched her flesh. The need of her flamed high within him. She was delight in every movement and expression; and so slender and fervent and sweet-voiced.... She had banished the one encroachment of sordidness. The high pa.s.sion of this moment was builded upon basic attractions, as with children. Some strong intuition had prevailed upon her so to build. They had come to an end of words....

A knock at the door broke the _notturno appa.s.sionato_. She had left word not to be called for any reason. Furiously now she rushed across the room.... Bedient did not see the female servant at the door, but heard the frightened voice uttering the word, "Brigadier----." The answer from the woman who had left his arms was mercifully vague, but the voice at the door whimpered, "Only it was _the General_----!"...

It was all hideously clear. Bedient was left sterile, polar. The door slammed shut; the woman faced him--and understood. There was no restoring _this_ ruin.... She now d.a.m.ned military rank and her establishment in a slow, dreadful voice. Her knuckles seemed driven into her temples. She wanted to weep, to be soothed and petted--to have her Hour brought back, but she saw that her beauty was gone from him--and all the mystery which had been in their relation a minute before.... Her rebellion, so far hard-held, now became fiendish. It was not against him, but herself. So vivid and terrible was her concentration of hatred upon the cause, that Bedient caught the picture of the Brigadier in her mind. He _saw_ the man afterward--a fat and famous soldier.... She spat upon the floor. Her lower lip was drawn in and the small white teeth snapped upon it.

There was nothing in the Block-House ever to bring him back. Her last vestige of attraction for him had disintegrated. Bedient had nothing to say; he caught up her clenched hand and kissed it.... And in the street he heard feminine voices rising to the pitch of hysteria. A servant rushed forth for a surgeon. The woman had fallen into "one of her seizures."...

Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward. Bedient was not at all himself.... In all the months that followed meeting David Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible for words--though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a hundred other matters.

There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by rumors of uprising. Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in service--was just a name. Bedient was delighting in the thought of hunting up Cairns in China.... It was dusk again, that redolent hour.

Bedient had just dined. So sensitive were his veins--that coffee roused him as brandy might another. His health was brought to such perfection, that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and senses. Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a Filipino woman was novel. Strange, forbidding woman of the river-banks--yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point of the shoulder--a pa.s.sing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head--was enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not desire--but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world, to find the Woman--somewhere.

Bedient did not know at this time of the heart emptiness of the world's women--a longing so vast, so general, that interstellar s.p.a.ce is needed to hold it all. Still, he had so much to give, it seemed that in the creative scheme of things there must be a woman to receive and ignite all these potentials of love.... In this mood his mind reverted to that isle of the sea--the woman, and the room that was her house.... He was sitting in the plaza before the _Hotel d'Oriente._ A little bamboo-table was before him and a long gla.s.s of claret and fruit-juice.

The night was still; hanging-lanterns were lit, though the darkness was not yet complete. There was a mingling of mysterious lights and shadows among the palm-foliage that challenged the imagination--like an unfinished picture.... Only a few of the tables were occupied. The native servants were very quiet. Bedient heard a girlish voice out of the precious and perilous South.