The Five Arrows Part 51

"I will do anything you ask, _companero_."

"Excuse me, then." Simon left the library.

"Don Anibal is not going to live," Gonzales said when the boy left. "Not even a miracle can save his life."

The doctor was tearing the stopper from a small vial of adrenalin. He held the open mouth of the vial to his nose and breathed deeply.

"Adrenalin?" Hall asked.

"It is nothing, _companero_. Say nothing to Simon, please." A corner of his blue underlip was growing purple in tiny spots. "I hear him now, Mateo."

The boy carried his shoulders proudly when he returned to the library.

"My father is sitting up in bed," he said. "He is preparing a radio speech to the entire Republic."

Dr. Gonzales was incredulous. "Are you sure, _chico_?"

Simon touched his right eye with his index finger. "I have seen it at this moment. My father is a great and a brave man. He says that we should bring _Companero_ Hall in at once."

The door leading to Tabio's room was opened by an armed army sergeant.

"The President will see you now," he said.

Hall followed Simon and Gonzales through the small corridor which took them to the sick room. The shutters were opened, and the sun streamed into the chamber, bathing everyone and everything in its gentle light.

Anibal Tabio was sitting up in bed, his hand raised in a familiar gesture as he dictated to a secretary who sat on a stool near his pillows.

"Neutrality," he was dictating, "neutrality is either abject surrender to Hitler or an open admission of complicity with the fascist Axis or a sinful combination of both..."

The swarthy Esteban Lavandero was, as always, at Tabio's side, his fierce Moorish face twisted with pain and love. He stood behind the girl secretary, one black hairy hand resting on the carved headboard of the ancient bed, his ears c.o.c.ked for every word which came from Tabio's pale lips.

Tabio's wife and two doctors in white coats stood on the other side of the bed. The prim white collar of her dark dress matched the streaks of white in her long black hair. Her luminous _mestiza's_ eyes, swollen from quiet weeping, were now bright and clear, and when Anibal Tabio looked to his wife after turning a particularly telling phrase in his speech her generous lips parted and she smiled at him the way she had smiled to reward his earliest writings three decades ago.

"The great North American martyr to freedom, Don Abraham Lincoln, a man of great dignity whose humor was the humor of the people from whose loins he sprang, was a man who many years ago described such neutrality.

Lincoln was not a neutral in the struggle between slavery and freedom.

And when some fool insisted that most Americans were neutral in this struggle, Lincoln replied with the anecdote of the American woman who went for a walk in the woods and found her husband fighting with a wild bear. Being a neutral, this woman stood by and shouted, 'Bravo, Husband.

Bravo, Bear.'

"And then, Lincoln said ..."

"Don Anibal," one of the doctors said, gently, "I must implore you ..."

The restraining hand of Tabio's wife made him stop.

"It is no use, doctor," Tabio smiled. "At a time like this, if a President can speak at all, he must speak to his people. Tonight you will type my speech, and tomorrow you can bring the microphone right into this room, and right from my bed I shall talk to the people. If I am to die in any event, it will not matter much. And if I am to live, doctor, the speech will not kill me."

Simon, who was standing next to Hall in the doorway, whispered that Tabio's eyes were too weak to distinguish them at that distance. They started to walk toward the bed on their toes, and Hall, glancing at Tabio sitting up in the old bed in a white hospital gown surrounded by the burly Lavandero and his wife and son, was suddenly struck by the similarity of the scene which was before him and the Dore engraving of the death of Don Quixote. It was all there, even to the faithful Sancho Panza figure of Lavandero, and at that moment Hall knew why Spanish savants had for hundreds of years written scores of books on the true significance of Cervantes' cla.s.sic. Here were the two great impulses of the Hispanic world, the fragile, gentle, trusting dreamer of great new horizons and at his side the broad-backed practical man of earth who threw his strength into the effort of implementing the dreams and making them the new realities. Here was the visionary Juarez and the young soldier Porfirio Diaz, when the warrior was still a man untainted by his own betrayal of a people's dream. Here was the romantic poet Jose Marti and one of his durable guerrilla generals, Maximo Gomez or Antonio Maceo, whose white and black skins, blended, would have yielded a skin the color of Lavandero's. (Was it any wonder, then, Hall thought in those fleeting seconds before Tabio recognized him, that Tabio as a young exile went to Cuba to write a biography of Marti while his faithful fellow-exile spent the same months in Havana writing an equally good study of Maceo?)

At that moment Tabio saw Hall. "_Viejo!_" he said, happily. "Mateo Hall, a good friend and thank G.o.d never a neutral. Senorita, give him your stool. Come, sit down, Mateo."

Hall took his hand, tenderly, for fear of hurting him. It was a thin hand, bony and fleshless; cold, as though Death had already touched it.

"_Viejo_," Tabio said. He might have been genially scolding a favorite child. "Say something, old friend, and don't sit there staring at me as if I were already a corpse. Tell me about yourself, Mateo. We've come a long way since Geneva and Madrid and the day they fished you out of the ocean, eh?"

"It has been a long time," Hall said. "A very long time, Don Anibal. A century."

Tabio smiled. "Time is of no matter. It is the present and the future which counts, eh, _viejo_?"

"Of course, _il.u.s.tre_."

"My family and my good friends are afraid that I am dying," Tabio said, smiling as if at some secret joke he wanted to share with Hall. "I am an old dog. An old prison dog. Tell them, _viejo_, tell them that our breed doesn't die so easily, no?"

Hall could only nod and pat the sick man's hand.

"Do I sound like a dying man?"

Hall swallowed hard, managed to grin. "You? What nonsense, Don Anibal! I was at the Congress the other day. I watched you and listened to you speak. It was a great speech, Anibal."

"It was not a great speech. But it was good because I spoke the truth.

And do you know, Mateo, that the truth is better than any great speech?"

Tabio was breathing with increased difficulty. He slumped back against the pillows, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the doctors quicken, and he turned to them and winked. "Not yet," he smiled. Meekly, he allowed one of the doctors to hold a tumbler of colored liquid under his mouth. He sipped some of it through a bent gla.s.s tube, then turned to Hall again.

"Where were you sitting?" he asked.

"In the diplomatic box with Duarte and the Mexican Amba.s.sador. Don't try to talk to me, Anibal. Save your strength. I'll be here for a long time, and when you're out of bed and on your feet again, perhaps we can have a real visit and sit up all night talking as we used to talk."

"Mateo! You talk like a child. I will never be on my feet again. But just the same," and he winked impishly at his wife, "I'm a long way from dying."

"Of course you are," Hall insisted.

"There, you see?" Tabio said to everyone in the room. "Mateo can tell you. He knows how tough our breed is. Tell me, Mateo, is it true that the American Amba.s.sador considers me to be the most violent Bolshevik outside of Russia?"

Lavandero laughed, and Hall laughed, and when Tabio, laughing, turned to his wife and son, they laughed too.

"He is such a pompous fool, that Amba.s.sador. Oh, I am being terribly undiplomatic, _viejo_, but to think of an old-fas.h.i.+oned bourgeois reformer like me being compared to Lenin and Stalin! It is the height of confusion. But if you ever meet him you can tell him that I admire Stalin and the Russian people. Your Amba.s.sador and I were together at a State dinner the day the n.a.z.is invaded Russia and he said that the Soviets would be crushed in a month and that he was glad. I told him then that the Red Army would destroy the n.a.z.i war machine and I told him that before the war was over the United States would be fighting on the side of Russia and that therefore it was dangerous of him to say he was glad so many Red Army soldiers were being killed. And you can tell him that some day when I speak to Mr. Roosevelt again I will tell him what the American Amba.s.sador to our country said openly in June of 1941."

"Please, Don Anibal," one of the doctors begged, "you must save your strength."

"For the speech," Lavandero added, quickly, motioning to Hall that it was time for everyone but the doctors to leave the room.

Hall stood up, again patted the blue-veined hand of the President. He watched Tabio, pausing to gain strength, mutely protesting with glazed eyes the obvious stage directions of the doctors who ended this visit.

"I must go now, Don Anibal," Hall said, softly. "If you wish, I will be back tomorrow or the next day."

"Matthew," Tabio said, and he began to address Hall in English, "you were in Spain. You saw. Tell them it does not matter if one man lives or dies. I have no fears for truth. I have come a long way on truth. Tell them, _viejo_, tell them what a miracle truth is in the hands of the people. You have but"--the words were coming with great difficulty--"you have but to make this truth known...."

Tabio's jaw sagged open. He fell forward against his knees. The doctors took him by the shoulders and moved him into a p.r.o.ne position. His eyes, still open, stared at everything and nothing, gla.s.s now.

"_Carino mio!_" his wife sobbed, but at an unspoken order from one of the doctors Simon led his mother to a chair in the corner and kept her still. Lavandero, Gonzales and Hall left the chamber for the library.

"What happened to Anibal?" Lavandero asked Gonzales.