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, sexless 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 butterfly 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 PASSION
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 sex—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