Caybigan Part 6

"I was there. That part he did not tell me. I came in behind him (I was following him with I don't know what notion of comfort). I saw him stop suddenly. A woman stood before him.

"It was She. I knew her right away, the pale, sweet girl, the girl of the roses. She was standing before him; and her eyes, the eyes with the sea-glint in them, were plunging into his soul. He did not shrink; he stood there before her, his eyes in hers, his shoulders thrown back, his arms hanging limp down his sides, with palms turned outward in a gesture of utter surrender. Long, gravely she read the soul laid bare before her. Suddenly she started back, one, two steps, heavy, falling steps; as at the same higher command he also backed, one, two steps, heavy, falling steps. His head dropped to his chest, his eyes closed. I panted.

"With an imperceptible movement she glided forward again. His eyes opened. She laid her right hand upon his shoulder.

"'You have suffered,' she said.

"And there you are!"

The darkness had deepened; Courtland was invisible; but we could picture the gesture--a wide sweep of the arm outward, ending in a discouraged droop. "I've explained nothing, pointed out nothing, merely retold it to you as I repeat and repeat it to myself, merely to have at which to stare and stare. And it always ends in this: I see her again, always; I see her glide to him, note the sweet gravity of her gesture, the tremulous profundity of her glance. I hear that phrase, that holy, incomprehensible phrase. And I wonder, I wonder, that's all; and an awe seizes me, bends me down low, as if before something big, terrible, and infinitely sacred."

IV

THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPH OF ISIDRO DE LOS MAESTROS

I--FACE TO FACE WITH THE FOE

Returning to his own town, after a morning spent in "working up" the attendance of one of his far and recalcitrant barrio-schools, the Maestro of Balangilang was swaying with relaxed muscle and half-closed eyes to the allegretto trot of his little native pony, when he pulled up with a start, wide awake and all his senses on the alert. Through his somnolence, at first in a low hum, but fast rising in a fiendish crescendo, there had come a buzzing sound, much like that of one of the sawmills of his California forests, and now, as he sat in the saddle, erect and tense, the thing ripped the air in ragged tear, shrieked vibrating into his ear, and finished its course along his spine in delicious irritation.

"Oh, where am I?" murmured the Maestro, blinking; but between blinks he caught the flas.h.i.+ng green of the palay fields and knew that he was far from the sawmills of the Golden State. So he raised his nose to heaven, and there, afloat above him in the serene blue, was the explanation. It was a kite, a great locust-shaped kite, darting and swooping in the hot monsoon, and from it, dropping plumb, came the abominable clamour.

"Aha!" exclaimed the Maestro, pointing accusingly at the thin line vaguely visible against the skyline in a diagonal running from the kite above him to a point ahead in the road. "Aha! there's something at the end of that; there's Attendance at the end of that!"

With which significant remark he leaned forward in the saddle, bringing his switch down with a whizz behind him. The pony gave three rabbit leaps and then settled down to his drumming little trot. As they advanced, the line overhead dropped gradually. Finally the Maestro had to swerve the horse aside to save his helmet. He pulled up to a walk, and, a few yards further, came to the spot where string met earth in the expected Attendance.

The Attendance was sitting on the ground, his legs spread before him in an angle of forty-five degrees, each foot arched in a secure grip of a bunch of cogon gra.s.s. These legs were bare as far up as they went, and, in fact, no trace of clothing was reached until the eye met the lower fringe of an indescribable unders.h.i.+rt modestly veiling the upper half of a rotund little paunch; an indescribable unders.h.i.+rt, truly, for observation could not reach the thing itself, but only the dirt incrusting it so that it hung together, rigid as a knight's iron corselet, in spite of monstrous tears and rents. Between the teeth of the Attendance was a long, thick cheroot, wound about with hemp fiber, at which he pulled with rounded mouth. Hitched around his right wrist was the kite string, and between his legs a stick spindled with an extra hundred yards. At intervals he hauled hand-over-hand upon the taut line, and then the landscape vibrated to the buzz-saw song which had so compellingly recalled the Maestro to his eternal pursuit.

As the shadow of the horse fell upon him, the Attendance brought his eyes down from their heavenly contemplation, and fixed them upon the rider. A tremor of dismay, mastered as soon as born, flitted over him; then, silently, with careful suppression of all signs of haste, he reached for a big stone with his little yellow paw, then for a stick lying farther off. Using the stone as a hammer, he drove the stick into the ground with deliberate stroke, wound the string around it with tender solicitude, and then, everything being secure, just as the Maestro was beginning his usual embarra.s.sing question:

"Why are you not at school, eh?"

He drew up his feet beneath him, straightened up like a jack-in-the-box, took a hop-skip-jump, and, with a flourish of golden heels, flopped head first into the roadside ditch's rank luxuriance.

"The little devil!" exclaimed the disconcerted Maestro. He dismounted and, leading his horse, walked up to the side of the ditch. It was full of the water of the last baguio. From the edge of the cane-field on the other side there cascaded down the bank a mad vegetation; it carpeted the sides and arched itself above in a vault. Within this natural harbour a carabao was soaking blissfully. Only its head emerged, flat with the water, the great horns wreathed incongruously with the floating lilies, the thick nostrils exhaling ecstasy in shuddering riplets.

Filled with a vague sense of the ridiculous, the Maestro peered into the recess. "The little devil!" he murmured: "He's somewhere in here; but how am I to get him, I'd like to know? Do you see him, eh, Mathusalem?"

he asked of the stolid beast.

Whether in answer to this challenge or to some other irritant, the animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronising wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from below and spread on the surface. Then, in the silence, there rose a significant sound--a soft, repeated snapping of the tongue:

"Cluck, cluck."

"Aha!" shouted the Maestro, triumphantly, to his invisible audience. "I know where you are, you scamp; right behind the carabao; come out of there, _p.r.o.nto, dale-dale_!"

But his enthusiasm was of short duration. To the commanding tongue-click the carabao had stopped dead-still and a silence heavy with defiance met the too-soon exultant cries. An insect in the foliage began a creaking call, and then all the creatures of humidity hidden there among this fermenting vegetation joined in mocking chorus.

The Maestro felt a vague blush welling up from the innermost recesses of his being.

"I'm going to get that kid," he muttered, darkly, "if I have to wait till--the coming of Common Sense to the Manila office! By gum, he's the Struggle for Attendance personified!"

He sat down on the bank and waited. This did not prove interesting. The animals of the ditch creaked on; the carabao bubbled up the water with his deep content; above, the abandoned kite went through strange acrobatics and wailed as if in pain. The Maestro dipped his hand into the water; it was lukewarm. "No hope of a freeze out," he murmured, pensively.

Behind, the pony began to pull at the reins.

"Yes, little horse, I'm tired, too. Well," he said, apologetically, "I hate to get energetic, but there are circ.u.mstances which----"

The end of his sentence was lost, for he had whisked out the big Colt, dissuader of ladrones, that hung on his belt, and was firing. The six shots went off like a bunch of firecrackers, but far from at random, for a regular circle boiled up around the dozing carabao. The disturbed animal snorted, and again a discreet "cluck-cluck" rose in the sudden, astounded silence.

"This," said the Maestro, as he calmly introduced fresh cartridges into the chambers of his smoking weapon, "is what might be called an application of Western solutions to Eastern difficulties."

Again he brought his revolver down, but he raised it without shooting and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the carabao's rotund belly, below the surface, an indistinct form shot out; cleaving the water like a polliwog, it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged at the feet of the Maestro.

"All right, bub; we'll go to school now," said the latter, nodding to the dripping figure as it rose before him.

He lifted the sullen brownie and straddled him forward of the saddle, then proceeded to mount himself, when the Capture began to display marked agitation. He squirmed and twisted, turned his head back and up, and finally a grunt escaped him.

"El velador."

"The kite, to be sure; we mustn't forget the kite," acquiesced the Maestro, graciously. He pulled up the anchoring stick and laboriously, beneath the hostilely critical eye of the Capture, he hauled in the line till the screeching, resisting flying-machine was brought to earth. Then he vaulted into the saddle.

The double weight was a little too much for the pony; so it was at a dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite pa.s.sed over his left arm like a knightly s.h.i.+eld, made his triumphal entry into the pueblo.

II--HEROISM AND REVERSES

When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Was.h.i.+ngton Street to the schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his att.i.tude something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California campus one morning after the big game, won three minutes before the blowing of the final whistle by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt, had he been in that posture--at once pleasant and difficult--in which one's vital concern is to wear a humility sufficiently convincing to obtain from friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.

A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing quite easy.

Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his native a.s.sistant to obtain the information necessary to a full matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a deadlock.

The boy did not know his name.

"In Spanish times," the a.s.sistant suggested, modestly, "we called them 'de los Reyes' when the father was of the army, and 'de la Cruz' when the father was of the church; but now, we can never know _what_ it is."

The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said, cheerily. "I caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him--Isidro de los Maestros."

And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on the records of life afterward.

Now well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in such state, sought for further enjoyment.

"Ask him," he said, teasingly, pointing with his chin at the newly-baptised but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of the ditch."

"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the a.s.sistant, after some linguistic sparring.