Caybigan Part 8

By this time the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his "Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies."

These were days of ease and beauty to the Maestro, and he enjoyed them the more when a new problem came to give action to his resourceful brain.

The thing was: For three days there had not been one funeral in Balangilang.

In other climes, in other towns, this might have been a source of congratulation, perhaps, but not in Balangilang. There were rumours of cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as President of the Board of Health, was on the watch for it. Five deaths a day, experience had taught him, was the healthy average for the town; and this sudden cessation of public burials--he could not believe that dying had stopped--was something to make him suspicious.

It was over this puzzling situation that he was pondering at the morning recess, when his attention was taken from it by a singular scene.

The "batas" of the school were flocking and pus.h.i.+ng and jolting at the door of the bas.e.m.e.nt, which served as stable for the munic.i.p.al carabao.

Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance, gravely taking up an admission of five sh.e.l.ls from those who would enter. Business seemed to be brisk; Isidro had already a big bandana handkerchief bulging with the receipts, which were now overflowing into a great tao hat, obligingly loaned him by one of his admirers, as one by one those lucky enough to have the price filed in, feverish curiosity upon their faces.

The Maestro thought it might be well to go in also, which he did without paying admission. The disappointed gatekeeper followed him. The Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box, frilled with rosettes.

"What have you in there?" asked the Maestro.

"My brother," answered Isidro, sweetly.

He cast his eyes to the ground and watched his big toe drawing vague figures in the earth, then, appealing to the First a.s.sistant, who was present by this time, he added, in the tone of virtue which _will_ be modest:

"Maestro Pablo does not like it when I do not come to school on account of a funeral, so I brought him [pointing to the little box] with me."

"Well, I'll be----," was the only comment the Maestro found adequate at the moment.

"It is my little pickaninny brother," went on Isidro, becoming alive to the fact that he was a centre of interest; "and he died last night of the great sickness."

"The great what?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the Maestro, who had caught a few words.

"The great sickness," explained the a.s.sistant. "That is the name by which these ignorant people call the cholera."

For the next two hours the Maestro was very busy.

Firstly he gathered the "batas" who had been rich enough to attend Isidro's little show and locked them up--with the impresario himself--in the little town jail close by. Then, after a vivid exhortation upon the beauties of boiling water and reporting disease, he dismissed the school for an indefinite period. After which, impressing the two town prisoners, now temporarily out of home, he shouldered Isidro's pretty box, tramped to the cemetery, and directed the digging of a grave six feet deep. When the earth had been sc.r.a.ped back upon the lonely little object, he returned to town and transferred the awe-stricken playgoers to his own house, where a strenuous performance took place.

Tolio, his boy, built a most tremendous fire outside and set upon it all the pots and pans and cauldrons and cans of his kitchen a.r.s.enal, filled with water. When these began to gurgle and steam, the Maestro set himself to stripping the horrified bunch in his room; one by one he threw the garments out of the window to Tolio, who, catching them, stuffed them into the receptacles, poking down their bulging protest with a big stick. Then the Maestro mixed an awful brew in an old oilcan, and, taking the brush which was commonly used to sleek up his little pony, he dipped it generously into the pungent stuff and began an energetic scrubbing of his now absolutely panic-stricken wards. When he had done this to his satisfaction and thoroughly to their discontent, he let them put on their still steaming garments, and they slid out of the house, aseptic as hospitals.

Isidro he kept longer. He lingered over him with loving and strenuous care, and after he had him externally clean proceeded to dose him internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything--the terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his pantaloons--with wonder-eyed serenity.

When all this was finished, the Maestro took the urchin into the dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously offered him a fine, dark perfecto.

The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation.

For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the boy had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a a queer softness had risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little lump in his throat.

"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro, quietly. "We're only a child, after all, a mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to school?"

"Senor Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still perspiring visage, "Senor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school because of the great sickness?"

"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long time."

Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and, suddenly throwing himself full length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within him a long, tremulous wail.

V

THE FAILURE

Out of the deadly stupor that encased him as a leaden coffin, Burke started with a gurgling cry. He thought that somebody was driving a red-hot poker into his eyeb.a.l.l.s. He found only that the flaming globe of the rising sun had just emerged over the lorcha's bow bulwarks and was burrowing his face with its feverish rays. He rolled clumsily down the sloping deck to a spot where a flap of dirty sail gave shade and there he lay weakly on his back, motionless.

The change gave him little comfort. His eyes throbbed hotly, his throat was as if sc.r.a.ped raw, and his mouth was fevered. A circle of iron seemed riveted around his head and his whole body vibrated to a mad dance of all his nerves. At last he could stand it no longer. He sat up and looked about him desperately, then crawled to the scuppers and picked up a flask lying there. He held it up against the sun. It was empty. With a curse he hurled it into diamond-dust against the bulwarks.

He sat there a moment, gla.s.sy-eyed, then rose with a trembling effort and groped aft to the cabin. He had to kick a mangy dog out of the way and to step over a squalid baby, but finally he fell on his knees in a corner and eagerly searched beneath the bamboo bench that followed the wall on three sides. He rolled a dirty bundle out of the way and pulled a demijohn toward him. He lowered the mouth tentatively till a few drops of the fiery white beno wet the palm of his hand, then, with a cry between a sob and a snarl, like that of a starving dog closing in on a bone, he raised the jug to his lips and drained the dregs in four big gulps. His trembling fingers opened and the demijohn fell to the floor with a crash.

A faint colour came to his cheeks and his body straightened. He searched his pockets with feverish fingers and drew out a soiled cigarette paper and a pinch of tobacco. He rolled a cigarette, lit it, and went out on the deck. A breath of wind, sweet with the fruity smell of crude sugar, struck him in the face, and he noticed for the first time what had been true since his awakening--that the lorcha had come to a standstill and that the white roofs of Manila were glistening before him.

The sight did not seem to quicken him into action. He strolled down the deck and sat on the bulwarks, his legs dangling above the quay. He inhaled the smoke deeply two or three times, then his back humped and his eyes narrowed like those of a purring cat.

This lethargy of bliss did not last long. Slowly something forced itself into it with the insistence of a question mark. On the quay almost beneath his feet, there were four long, black boxes, ranged symmetrically in a row, each with its long, black cover by its side. At first they said nothing to his half-stupid contemplation, but gradually they took on something mysterious and awesome. They were so regular, so oblong, so respectable; they stood so gapingly, so alertly open, that suddenly a little shudder thrilled up along his spine. Ten feet away, rigid and alert, a big Met. policeman stood, looking along the quay with patiently expectant eyes. Burke was on the point of calling out a question when his attention was drawn by another scene.

A little rosy pig trotted squealing down the deck with a fierce little boy after it. It b.u.mped the bulwark beneath Burke, and the vibration caused him to look down. The boy had the pig by the tail. The boy was pulling one way and the pig the other; they were of equal strength, so that for a second they were fixed in a plastic group. Struggling impotently, the boy turned his big black eyes up to the man in mute appeal, and the big black eyes suddenly recalled to Burke two other such eyes in just such a little brown face, and these big black eyes became a measure of the road that Burke had travelled the last three years, a road he liked not to contemplate. So he was turning from the unpleasant scene when the boy let go the tail and fell back, rigid.

Burke looked down upon the stark little form with a frown of perplexity and distrust. He slid himself along the bulwark till a few feet away, then ran his eyes up along the mainmast.

At the peak, a yellow flag was smacking in the wind.

His eyes dropped to the boxes on the quay. They were coffins.

He understood. The cholera had crept upon the lorcha before it had left Vigan, and all the way down the coast it had been doing its dread work about him, plunged in the oblivion of his solitary orgy.

There had been seventy people on the lorcha when it had left Vigan; and there were still a half-hundred. They were huddled forward, a squalid, rancid, and coloured group, their eyes wistfully set upon a black pot vibrating upon a fire of small sticks. They were from the famine district of Vigan and had not eaten for a long time, but their attention was not solely upon the vessel holding their handful of rice. At times they threw black looks toward the quay. Fear was upon them; fear, not of the impalpable Death hovering about them, but fear of the White Man's Quarantine as represented by the big, pa.s.sive policeman standing there like a menace; the White Man's Quarantine, ready to clutch them at the first sign of disease and tear them off to its den, to a fearful and ever-mysterious fate.

Burke looked at them, then pointed at the boy at his feet, but they seemed to see nothing. He sprang to the deck and he shouted. They turned their heads, scowled indifferently at the little stretched body, then their eyes returned to the black kettle quivering on the fire.

"Here, here, that won't do," cried Burke, all the maudlin softness out of his face, as he marched upon the group. "Get up, you hound!" he thundered, kicking the nearest man. "Get up, there! And you, too," he added, cuffing another. "Get up and take care of the kid!"

He laid about him furiously for a moment, then his rage oozed out of him and he stood silent and at loss. For the resistance offered him was unlike any he had ever met. The men did not budge; they took the blows like blocks of wood, remaining as they were, without a tremor, their eyes glowing sullenly at the deck between their knees; and the pa.s.siveness of that resistance was so monstrously powerful that Burke felt his throat tighten in a rageful, childish impulse to break out weeping.

On a box, a little apart from the crowd, there sat a fat, sleek, pale-yellow personage. He observed the scene through his narrow eyes with the arrogantly skeptical air of the Chino mestizo. His falsetto voice now broke the silence.

"Porque no Usted?" he said, suavely, while his eyes narrowed to a line with a gleam in it. "Why not you?"

Burke opened his mouth, left it open for a good second, then shut it again with a grinding of teeth.

"By G.o.d, I'll do it," he muttered, as he turned away.