The response slid in falsetto semitones from a Mongolian tongue. "Got plenty worl-luk this side," it said sullenly. "No can do."
"Sure can do," said the master. "Got to do,sabe? Come along, you beggars, before I tie your pigtails together."
Then gradually all the tumult ceased, and restful quiet enveloped the Tin-Roofed House and endured so long that Schrofft craftily opened his eyes a crack, and gazed about his chamber. It was quite empty. The heavy lids drooped once more, and he fell into a deep, untroubled sleep. And as he slept, the cooling sweat bathed his worn body. Together, the quinine and the excitement of the day had conquered his disease; the fever was broken.
The first impression borne in on Schrofft's consciousness when he woke next morning, sufficiently clear in mind, but weak beyond belief in body, was that Bagalayag was uncommonly quiet, even for Bagalayag. The droning saw was silent; there was no rustle of bare feet on the grassy ways, no low murmur of gossip from sleepy tongues, no straw-muffled booming of rice mortars, no whine of carabao or shriek of wooden axle-boxes as the tuba was brought in from the palm-grove. For a moment he lay with an empty mind. Then Memory returned. "Himmel!" he muttered. "I did not dream itall!"
At the sound, a doddering old man rose from the corner and approached the cot. "Does the señor want anything?" he asked.
"Where is everybody?" Schrofft demanded. "Where is Juan?"
"They are all gone," the old man replied. "Only I am left behind. The Señor Duque took them all."
"The Señor Duque took them all!" Schrofft echoed. Dukes are rare in Mindoro.
"Si, señ-o-or. El Duque de la Calle Milochentaitres in America. He took them all, the men, the boys, the Chinese pigs who saw; all Bagalayag but me—because I am very old. Only I am left, and the women and children who hide in the houses to pray. They go to cut down trees, all the trees in Mindoro, I think. It is an order from Ouashingtone. The Señor Duque says so."
The Duke of 1083rd Street in America! Decidedly, if Schrofft had been delirious, all Bagalayag now outdid him in delusion.
"Does the señor want anything?" the old man repeated. "If we had guessed that the señor had el Duque de la Calle Milochentaitres for a friend, we would not have left him alone to be sick. It was very wicked, but the Duque says he will forgive us if we get the trees."
At the mention of trees, Schrofft's lips had contracted. But his mind, as unstrung as his body, was at the mercy of every emotional catspaw that ruffled it, and the childlike awe and faith in the voice of the old man brought a long-forgotten sensation clutching at his diaphragm. "We have been very wicked; but the Duke says he will forgive us if we get the trees." For all his weakness, Schrofft chuckled a little at the audacity of it. An unwonted feeling of dependence took hold of the self-reliant little man. He combated it feebly. "He cannot do it; he is only a bum," Reason urged. But the protest of Reason was purely formal, and triumphant Cheerfulness retorted, "He can do anything—when he wishes to."
"What would the señor like for breakfast?" the old man's voice broke in. "He may have six little oysters, or two eggs passed through water, or a cup of milk with one egg in it, or a very small fish not fried—the Duque says to fry is not good for sick ones—but cooked on a sharp stick, as He Himself taught me."
Once more Schrofft relaxed in the new and comfortable sense of utter dependence. "Oysters," he murmured unctuously, and gave himself up to the anticipation of the plump, brassy-flavored morsels which were soon to cool his throat.Deus ex Machina!A God from the Machine of Things had taken his affairs in hand.
As the days wore on, the words became more than a mere phrase. In the long, lazy, roseate hours which a convalescent knows, Schrofft thought much, and the well-timed arrival of the mysterious Mr. Richard Roe at the crisis of his illness and his fortunes, the unbelievable eccentricity of the man, the nonchalant confidence with which he had undertaken a task in which he had no part either by interest or training, all combined to rouse in Schrofft's mind that superstition which is so fundamental an element in all us Aryans. The manifestation took the guise of Hero-Worship. An unreasoning faith in Mr. Richard Roe got hold of him.
The atmosphere in which he lived strengthened the conviction. Mr. Roe was absent only in the body; the power of his masterful personality still moulded life and thought in Bagalayag. The blear-eyed, tottering attendant he had left for Schrofft, anxious, fussy, mentally helpless, had one warrant for all his load of troublesome attentions: "The Señor Duque told me to do it."
As Schrofft grew stronger, and strolled out into the village, he found its people under the same spell. Women and children had gradually stolen out from the shacks; one by one they took up their daily occupation; the patter of their anxious prayers was no longer one of the street-sounds of Bagalayag; they asked Schrofft trustingly, "When will the Duque bring our husbands back?"
And Schrofft answered just as trustingly, "On the eighteenth."
Dimly he felt the thrill of the contrast, saw primeval Nature and the lean, sardonic American face each other, and felt no doubt of the outcome. Many times, as the slow days passed, he looked away to the black mantle of forest which clothed all the land to the south, close-fitting and unbroken up to the rough crest of Mount Bagalayag itself. "He'll do it," he repeated continually.
And Mr. Richard Roe did do it. On the evening of the seventeenth, a shrill clamor of women's voices ran through the town, and their owners gathered on the river bank to meet an unwieldy raft that was warping in on the brown and sluggish current. The huge sullen logs seemed bound to sink, in spite of the bulk of chambered bamboo which buoyed them, but standing springily erect on their backs, Mr. Richard Roe dominated the raft as he did all things else. When it grounded, he swung himself to the shoulders of two of his men and was borne triumphantly ashore.
"By Jove, Schrofft," was his greeting, "glad to see you looking that way." He flipped a hand behind him, and added casually, "There are your trees," and that was all of the little epic of the forest which Schrofft ever heard from his lips, except for fragments which he tossed out to laugh at. But from the tales which the restored husbands and fathers of Bagalayag chattered to their families, he gathered a picture of heart-breaking toil and endurance, and cheerful, laughing resourcefulness which filled him with a yearning admiration for its central figure.
That night, had Mr. Richard Roe so chosen, he might have become hereditary lord of Bagalayag in Mindoro, and laughed at the law, the Constitution and the flag, schoolhouses, benevolent assimilation, and human progress. Like a travel-worn, unshaven monarch, he sat in Schrofft's long cane chair, puffing contentedly at Schrofft's cherished china pipe, while the unfaithful servant Juan knelt at his feet and revived the tarnished glories of the shining boots, and his primitive worshippers poured in a stream of tribute, herbs of the field and fruits, fish and flesh and fowl, indigestible sweets and death-dealing drinks of home manufacture. On all alike he smiled kindly yet wearily, with the affable condescension of one who by divine right might be severe, yet chooses to be kind. But once his smile broadened into feeling.
"You won't find Lame Duck and Gouty Hen bringing me any thanks for stringing 'em that way," he remarked to Schrofft, who sat in the background, as proud as the mother of one chicken.
"Lame Duck and Gouty Hen?" Schrofft echoed, puzzled.
"My untamed Chinks," the Duke of 1083rd Street explained. "That was a stroke of genius, taking them. They did the work, while the Filipinos did the kicking. We sawed the trees down, you know—may not be the way to do it, but wedidit—and we three took turns—"
"Lame Duck and Gouty Hen!" Schrofft spluttered with delight. "Himmel!Such names!" Then he became serious. "How can I pay you! When you come I say to you, 'I would gif a hundert dollars for a man,' and youarea man, the finest I efer—"
"That's all right," said Mr. Richard Roe benevolently. "It was good sport. I wouldn't work that hard for money."
"Of course there's the—the other side too—" Schrofft stumbled over his words, bashful as a maiden with her lover. "I cannot thank you. You save my life, you save my reputation, you—"
"Cut out the thanks, Schrofft," Mr. Roe interrupted, with a touch of smiling haughtiness. "I don't like 'em. You'd better be clearing out now," the weary monarch added to his thronging admirers. "You're nice little brown men enough, but I'm sleepy.Sigue Dagupan, the whole bunch."
Two mornings later, after breakfast, Herr Schrofft again brought up the subject of Mr. Richard Roe's reward. In the intervening day theSarstoonhad come and gone with her hard-won load, and Schrofft's admiration for his miraculous helper had grown exceedingly. With the passion for work still on him, Mr. Richard Roe had been everywhere, and everywhere had been effective, on the beach, in the canoes, on theSarstoon'sdeck and in her hold, even on her bridge.
Mingled with the boundless admiration, was another feeling which filled Schrofft with confusion, while it opened a vista to the sky-line of his lonely life. Since young Erich Schmidt was killed before his eyes, twenty years gone in Africa, he had wanted no friend, no bunkie,kein Kamerad.But now—Mr. Richard Roe sat across his table irresistibly reminiscent of some wandering,rouégod, who needed but a whiff of Olympian air to refreshen his eternal youth. Sun and wind and work had erased the signs of dissipated strength, sleep had rubbed out the aging lines of work, and now he sat in thesalaof the Tin-Roofed House lean, brown, and hard, with his rumpled yellow hair and trace of yellow beard, and sparkling eyes half smiling at Life and Fate—not defiantly or deprecatingly, but with the faint amusement one may find in the vagaries of equals one knows well.
Mingled emotions made expression difficult for Schrofft, and he gave speech its most practical form. "Here is the hundert," he said gruffly, and pushed a chunky little bag across. "It don't pay you, nothin' efer can—"
"The hundred?" Mr. Richard Roe stared at the bag as if surprised, but he drew it to him. "Oh, yes. I'll take it if you like, Schrofft, of course. Much obliged." As he weighed it in his hand, his eyes darkened suddenly, and the under lids drew tight, as if he were gazing at something far away over the blue water which lay before him. Almost unconsciously he untied the cord that bound it, and a little stream of gold ran chinking out. "Yellow ones," Mr. Roe muttered.
"It's not much," Schrofft said apologetically, "but— What are you going to do now?"
Still unconsciously, Mr. Roe's long supple fingers had arranged the heap into four little orderly piles, and he was shoving them back and forth, like counters in some game. "Four stacks of blue ones," he muttered.
"What will you do now?" Schrofft repeated.
"Eh?" said Mr. Richard Roe. "Oh, yes. What'll I do? Well, Schrofft, I never bother to plan that out far ahead."
"I'll tell you," said Schrofft, gathering head for a flood of speech, "you stay with me. I—I called you a bum once. I take it back. You're all right. The quickness to decide, the way to make everything do what you want, the good luck, you have it all!"
"If Ididhave luck," Mr. Roe muttered thoughtfully, "that'd be enough to clean out Rafferty's bank. By Jove, I'll do it. I'll play the twelve."
"You come with me," Schrofft urged. "You are young, you have had your fling; now it's time to settle down. I'll help you, I'll be—what-you-call?—the balance w'eel. I teach you all I know, and in two three year you'll be the boss of us all. You'll have a chob better'n mine."
He hesitated, for Mr. Roe was gazing at him with a whimsical smile. "Go ahead, Schrofft," he said. "What kind of a jobisyours? What do you get out of it?"
"Ten thousand mark a year, und expenses," said Schrofft, uneasy for some mockery to come.
"Ten thousand marks! That's twenty-five hundred dollars," Mr. Roe commented. "Andexpenses. That's a lot of money, Schrofft. But I live simply; my expenses wouldn't be high enough to make it pay. So I'll just go back to Batangas and play the twelve. Twelve trees, you know."
Desperately, imploringly, Schrofft argued with him, dangled larger and juicier bait before his eyes. "You might be a partner in the House!" he cried. But Mr. Roe remained unmoved, even at that dazzling prospect, and at last Schrofft lost his temper.
"You are a bum," he shouted angrily. "It's chust what I say before. You haf no home, no food, no chob, no money, and—" he finished helplessly, "Mein Gott!You do not care!"
"Money could not buy the glorious uncertainty I enjoy," Mr. Roe replied pleasantly. "Calm down, Schrofft. I'm going out to tell 'em to get a canoe ready for me."
Late that afternoon he left, with his tattered clothing and his shining boots and his little bag of gold, and his smile, which he shed benignantly on the worshippers who thronged the beach. Only three residents of all Bagalayag were missing. Down the street Lame Duck and Gouty Hen stolidly made up lost time—Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh!And up in thesalaof the Tin-Roofed House a shaggy little man, his back resolutely turned to the window and the leave-taking, puffed savagely at a big china pipe, and exploded every now and then: "Chust a bum! A good-for-nothin' bum!" But when the sun was gone and all the shadows on the mountain had thickened into one, he laid down the pipe and went to the window and gazed out long over the darkening sea. "My poor little bum god from the machine," he said wistfully. "Now I must forget him."
It was not so easy to forget Mr. Richard Roe. The memory of him clung to Schrofft even after his work was done in Mindoro, and he had bidden Bagalayag an everlasting farewell. In Manila, Mr. Richard Roe's image dogged his busy footsteps, and when at last he climbed the side of theRosetta Maru, bound for Hongkong and home, Mr. Roe was at the surface of his thoughts. "Mein Gott!" Schrofft mused, as he leaned on the rail that first night out and saw Bolinao looming faintly in the gulf of blackness, far to leeward, "he saved my life, and now I leave him in the Philippines."
He leaned there, absorbed in a vision of the companionship which could never be, till the last shadow of the islands had faded in the night. Then brusquely, as if he awakened himself, he turned forward to the smoking-room and the nightcap of rum and lime-juice which was his concession to the luxury of rest. "My poor little bum god," he muttered, "if he was here, I'd buy him a drink. He's had too many drinks already, though, poor deffel."
At the door of the smoking-room he stopped abruptly. "Butterflies," he grunted in disgust, and turned aside to a settee which stood near in the shadow, to wait for his drink till they were done. And then, suddenly, he leaned forward and gazed into the brightly lighted room, for a voice there had set all his nerves aquiver. "So?" he muttered incredulously. "Kann nicht sein!"
Inside the room three men were sitting at a little table with a bottle between them, all dressed alike in spotless and unrumpled linen. Their likeness ended with their dress. One was a boy, the down still soft on his chin, but his cheeks were pasty and he had the dead eyes of an evil old man. The second was a flabby man of middle age, whose red face was an expressionless mask, from behind which he looked out watchfully. And the third, brilliant, flashing, shedding a glow of life and strength around him, was Mr. Richard Roe in a new guise.
"How'd you clean up over here this time, Billy?" asked the boy in a dry, professional tone.
"Well enough," Mr. Richard Roe answered. "Went on my uppers once, down in Mindoro."
"I travel on 'em all the time," said the wan youth. "Never saw such luck as I have."
"Get a mascot, Mike," Mr. Richard Roe advised mockingly. "That's what I did. Finest little mannikin of a mascot the Luck Machine ever ground out. Found a little Dutchman down there—down on his luck, sick, almost crying for some trees he'd got to cut or lose his job or his reputation or something. I got 'em for him. The little beggar was so glad he gave me a hundred, and I played it on the twelve at Rafferty's—there were twelve trees—and the twelve came. They wouldn't let me bet again, so I came up to Manila."
"Hell," said the aged young man apathetically, "what's thirty-six hundred? I could cash up that myself."
"And," said the other man, speaking through motionless lips, "the lucky devil struck Manila just when that tin-horn Haines had sold a mine down Mindanao way. Haines got to working his bellows out to the Country Club, wanting to back the wheel, no limit, and Billy took him up and played the twelve, and the twelve came up—twice running. That's all."
The aged young man stared at Mr. Richard Roe with dropped jaw. "Good Lord!"—his voice was an awe-struck whisper—"that's over a million!"
"Considerably over, theoretically," Mr. Richard Roe agreed, smiling coolly at the disconcerted young man. "Unfortunately, Mr. Haines couldn't cash it all, so I took his notes for everything but a goodly number of thou's. You may have the notes if you'd like 'em, Mike. I've got all I want. And get a mascot."
The aged young man went off into a stream of oaths. "Where are you goin' now, Billy?" he asked at last. "Goin'—home?" His voice dropped as he spoke the tabooed word, and for a moment, through the lines with which greed and cunning and indulgence had marked him, the face of a wistful, heart-sick youngster came out dimly.
"Anda wife,anda baby?" said Mr. Roe, smiling whimsically. "No, thank you, Mike. I'm going over to Siam and buy a small tin-mine. It's a thing I've always wanted. I may breed a line of white elephants on the side." Abruptly, as if a sudden thought had come to him, he rose and filled the glasses, emptying the bottle. "Gentlemen," he cried, holding his glass aloft, "I ask for bottoms up. To the Señor Ess-soffti, the prince of mascots. May he live long and die busy." The glasses clinked and were emptied. Mr. Roe set his on the table. "Good night, gentlemen," he said, and departed.
But his progress was soon interrupted. Blinded by the sudden darkness of the deck, he lost his way, and was nearly sent sprawling by the legs of a man who sat huddled on a settee, a shabby little man, even in the dark. "What the devil," Mr. Roe began, with lofty displeasure. He checked himself. "I beg your pardon, I'm sure," he said with the elaborate courtesy of one who, having the divine right to be insolent, yet chooses to be kind.
Shrinking as at a blow, the shabby little man drew in his legs. Even in the gloom the movement had an appealing humbleness about it that went to the ready sympathy of Mr. Richard Roe. "It's all right, old chap," he said. "No harm done. Good night."
The shabby little man mumbled something inarticulate, and Mr. Roe, immaculate, self-sufficient, free from care, strode on and left his mascot staring blindly out at the dim, jumbled waters flashing by. "What luck!" the mascot mumbled to the waters, after a long time. And then again, "What luck!"
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 thesalaand 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 twopesos. I brought it over at once."
"A letter by courier and twopesos!" 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 weedyplazaon 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. Hehadthought 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 therewereroads 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 newsyou'llever 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 ofPagros 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, "whatdo 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 Imakethem?" he demanded, rhetorically. "WillI? 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 cansee! Anddynamite! 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 theplazaand 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 theplazawith 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 theplaza, 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 theplazawas 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 theplaza, 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 chewingbungain 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 theplaza, 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 littletiendas, 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 giventhema 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 everytiendadown 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 theplaza, 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 theplaza, 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 theplazacorner, 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 hissslaand sat down there, looking blindly out on Sicaba.
"With loose reins rode off to his house.""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.
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.