Read Ebook: Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel by Comfort Will Levington

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1416 lines and 113541 words, and 29 pages

Cairns saw the old woman's face. It was sullen, haggard. The eyes were no strangers to hunger nor hatred. She watched the two Americans, as might a crippled tigress, that had learned at last how weak was her fury against chains. He saw that same look many times afterward in the eyes of these women of the riverbanks--as the white troops moved past. There was not even a sex-interest to complicate their hatred.

One day Thirteen overtook a big infantry column making a wide ford in the river before Bamban. It was high noon, but they found during the hold-up, a bit of shade and breeze on a commanding hill. Cairns and Bedient kicked off their shoes into the tall, moist grass, and luxuriously poked their feet into the coolness; and presently they were watching unfold a really pretty bit of action.

A thin glittering cloud of smoke across the river showed where the trenches of the natives were. The Americans in the river, held their rifles and ammunition-belts high, and wriggled their hips against the butting force of the stream. It all became very business-like. The battalion first across, set out to flank the native works; a rapid-fire gun started to boom from an opposite eminence, and the infantry took to firing at the emptying trenches. The Tagals were poked out of their positions, and in a sure leisurely way that held the essence of attraction.

After all, it was less the actual bits of fighting that cleared into memories of permanence, than certain subtleties of the campaign: a particular instant of one swift twilight, as in the plaza at Alphonso; a certain moment of a furious mid-day, when the sun was a python pressure, so that the scalp prickled with the congested blood in the brain, and men lifted their hats an inch or two as they rode, preserving the shade, but permitting the air to circulate; some guttural curse from a packer who could not lift his voice in the heat, nor think, but only curse, and grin in sickly fashion....

There were moments, reminders of which awoke Cairns in a sweat for many nights afterward: One day when he was badly in need of a fresh mount, he saw just ahead of the Train--a perfect little sorrel stallion fastened to the edge of the trail. He dismounted to change saddles. The Train was straggling along under an occasional fire. Cairns found that the pony was held by a tough wire, that led into the jungle. Such was the braiding at the throat, that only a sapper could have handled it. The correspondent started to follow the wire into the thicket--when Bedient caught him by the shoulder and half-lifted him from the ground. There was strength in that slim tanned hand that had nothing to do with the ordinary force of men. The cook smiled, but disdained explanation. It all dawned upon Cairns a second later. He would have followed the wire to the end in the jungle--where the trap of knives would spring.... The bolo-men need but a moment.... It was only two or three days later that one of the packers dropped behind the Train to tighten a cinch. No one had noticed, and Thirteen filed on.

"For Christ's sake--don't!" they heard from behind.

Wheeling, they found that the man had seen the end--as he had called out in that horrible echoing voice. He was not more than fifty yards behind the rear packer--and pinned to the trail. A bolo had been hammered with a stone--through the upper lip and the base of the brain, two or three inches into the earth.... He had been butchered besides.

At the end of a terrific ten days, Thirteen was crawling at nightfall into the large garrison at Lipa. Men and mules had been lost in the recent gruelling service. The trails and the miles had been long and hard; much hunger and thirst, and there was hell in the hearts of men this night. Even Bedient was shaking with fatigue; and Cairns beside him, felt that there wasn't the brain of a babe in his skull. His saddle seemed filled with spikes. His spur was gone, and for hours he had kept his half-dead, lolling-tongued pony on the way, by frequent jabbing from a broken lead-pencil.... And here was Lipa at last, the second Luzon town, and a corral for the mules. As they passed a nipa-shack, at the outer edge, a sound of music came softly forth. Some native was playing one of the queer Filipino mandolins. The Train pushed on, without Cairns and Bedient. All the famine and foulness and fever lifted from these two. They forgot blood and pain and glaring suns. The early stars changed to lily-gardens, vast and white and beautiful, and their eyes dulled with dreams.

They did not guess, at least Cairns did not, that the low music brought tears that night--because they were in dreadful need of it, because they were filled with inner agony for something beautiful, because they had been spiritually starved. And all the riding hard, shooting true and dying game--those poor ethics of the open--had not brought a crumb, not a crumb, of the real bread of life. Nor could mountains of mere energy nor icebergs of sheer nerve! In needing the bread of life--they were different from the others, and so they lingered, unable to speak, while a poor little Tagal--"one of the niggers"--all unconsciously played. "Surely," they thought, "his soul is no dead, dark thing when he can play like that."

... So often, Bedient watched admiringly while Cairns wrote. The correspondent didn't know it, but he was bringing a good temporal fame to Thirteen and himself in these nights. He had a boy's energy and sentiment; also a story to tell for every ride and wound and shot in the dark. The States were attuned to boyish things, as a country always is in war, and a boy was better than a man for the work.... Often Bedient would bring him a cup of coffee and arrange a blanket to keep the wind from the sputtering candles. The two bunks were invariably spread together; and Bedient was ever ready for a talk in the dark, when Cairns' brain dulled and refused to be driven to further work, even under the whip of bitter-black coffee.... They were never to forget these passionate nights--the mules, the mountains, nor the changing moon. Cairns was tampering with a drug that is hard to give up, in absorbing the odor and color of the oriental tropics. It filled his blood, and though, at the time, its magic was lost somewhat in the great loneliness for the States, and his mother and sisters--still, he was destined to know the craving when back on consecrated ground once more, and the carnal spirit of it all, died from his veins.

The most important lesson for Cairns to grasp was one that Andrew Bedient seemed to know from the beginning. It was this: To make what men call a good soldier means the breaking down for all time of that which is thrillingly brave and tender in man.

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:

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 --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.

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.

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 were less to him than her memory. Facing the South, through many a hot-breathed night, he saw her--and the little house.... And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her for that!... A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like,--yet she held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea--and this, through those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick and despicable with excess.

The time came when he heard other women--blessed women--speak of the Adelaide type of sister as the crowning abomination; he watched their eyes harden and glitter as only a mother-bird's can, in the circling shadow of a hawk; he lived to read in the havoc of men's faces that the ways of such women were ways of death; he believed all this--yet preserved something exquisite. Ten years afterward, winds from the South brought him the spirit of fragrance from her shoulders and hair. From his own ideals, he had focussed upon that Emptiness, the beauty and dimension of a Helen.

Bedient was impressed with something passionate and courageous, possibly dangerous. He could not have told the source of this impression. It was not in the contour, in the white softness of skin, in the full brown eyes, fair brow, nor in the reddened arch of her lips. It was something from the whole, denoted possibly in the quick dilation of her delicate nostrils or in the startling discovery of such a woman in Manila.... She lowered her eyes, started for her carriage--then turned again to the tall figure of Bedient in fresh white clothing. Or it may have been that her deep nature found delight in the excellent boyishness of the tanned face.

"Why, yes, I should like to."

It was before the time of native concerts on the sea-drive, but in the night itself, and in the soft undertone from the sea, there was ardent atmosphere--with this woman beside him. The deeper current of his thoughts rushed with memories, but upon the surface played the adorable present, swift with adjustments as her swiftly-moving arms. The wonder of Womanhood was ever-new to him. Mighty gusts of animation surged through his body. He spoke from queer angles of consciousness, and did not remember. She could laugh charmingly.... To her, the Hour uprose. Here was clear manhood of twenty --to make her very own!... She had taught herself to live by the hour; had forfeited the right to be loved long. She knew the time would soon come, when she could not hold nor attract men. It comes always to women who dissipate themselves among the many. Yet she loved the love of an hour; was a connoisseur of the love-tokens of men to her; no material loss was counted in the balance against a winning such as this promised to be. Here was a big intact passion which she called unto herself with every art; her developed senses felt it pouring upon her; this was a drug to die for. It made her brave and filled her mind with dreams--as wine does to some men. Already he was giving her love--of a sort that older men withhold from her kind. She put her hand upon his wrist--and told the native to drive them home.

... They sat in a hammock together on the rear balcony of the Block-House. It had been a dangerous moment passing through the house. There had been embarrassments, the telltale artifices of the establishment, but she would not suffer the work of the ride to be torn down. She held him in enchantment by sheer force of will; and now they were alone, and she was building again. There was wine. Over the balcony rail, they watched the Pasig running wickedly below; and across, stretching away to where the stars lay low in the rim of the horizon, the wet teeming rice-lands brooded in the night-mist.... The piano, which had seemed unstrung from the voyage, as he passed through the house, sounded but faintly now through several shut doors. The fragments were mellifluous....

She knew he was a civilian from his dress, and asked his work in Luzon. He told her he was cook of Pack-train Thirteen, just now quartered in the main corral. She laughed, but didn't believe. He was not the first to conceal his office from her. It was unpleasant; apt to be dangerous. She did not ask a second time.... There was just one other perilous moment. They had been together on the balcony but a half-hour, when she turned her face to him, her eyes shut, and said:

"You're a dear boy!... I haven't kissed anyone like that--oh, in long, long!... It makes me feel like a woman--how silly of me!"

There was nothing in the Block-House ever to bring him back. Her last vestige of attraction for him had disintegrated. Bedient had nothing to say; he caught up her clenched hand and kissed it.... And in the street he heard feminine voices rising to the pitch of hysteria. A servant rushed forth for a surgeon. The woman had fallen into "one of her seizures."...

Pack-train Thirteen took the field a day or two afterward. Bedient was not at all himself.... In all the months that followed meeting David Cairns in Alphonso, the Block-House incident was too close and horrible for words--though Bedient spoke of Adelaide and the great wind and a hundred other matters.

There was another slight Manila experience, which took place after the first parting with David Cairns, the latter being called to China by rumors of uprising. Pack-train Thirteen had rubbed itself out in service--was just a name. Bedient was delighting in the thought of hunting up Cairns in China.... It was dusk again, that redolent hour. Bedient had just dined. So sensitive were his veins--that coffee roused him as brandy might another. His health was brought to such perfection, that its very processes were a subtle joy, which sharpened the mind and senses. Bedient had been so long in the field, that the sight of even a Filipino woman was novel. Strange, forbidding woman of the river-banks--yet in the twilight, and with the inspired eyes of young manhood, that dusk-softened line from the lobe of the ear to the point of the shoulder--a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head--was enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not desire--but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world, to find the Woman--somewhere.

What was said had little or no significance--a man's tolerant, sometimes laughing monosyllables; and silly, cuddling, unquotable nothings from his companion. It was the ardor in her tones--the sort of completion of sensuous happiness--and the strange kinship between her and the woman he had known--these, that brought to Bedient a sudden madness of hunger to hear such words for his own....

The man had but recently come in from field-work. The woman was fresh from a transport voyage from the States. He talked laughingly of the "niggers" his company had met--of small, close fighting and surprises. She wanted to hear more, more,--but alone. She was pressing him, less with words than manner, to come into the hotel and relate his adventures, where they could be quite alone.... She had been so passionately lonely without him--back in Washington ... and the long voyage.... Her voice enthralled Bedient.

They were married. The man laughed often. The tropics had enervated him, though he made no such confession. He wanted drink and lights. To him, the present was relishable. Their chairs scraped the tiles before Bedient turned.... They had not risen. She caught his eyes. Hers were not eyes of one who would be lonely in Washington nor during a long transport voyage. She was very young, but a vibrant feminine, her awakening already long-past. There was just a glimpse of light hair, a red-lipped profile and slow, shining dark eyes. She was not even like Adelaide, but a blood sister in temperament. Bedient saw this in her hands, wrists, lips and skin, in the pure elemental passion which came from her every tone and motion. One of the insatiate--yet frail and lovely and scented like a carnation; a white flower, red-tipped--sublimate of earthy perfume.

Bedient had seen the man in the field, a young West Point product, with a queer, rabbit face, lots of men friends, the love of his company, and a remarkable kind of physical courage--a splendid young chap, black from the heats, who was being talked about for his grisly humor under fire. This officer had seen his men down--and stayed with them.... His was a different and deeper love. He did not hurry. It seemed as if she would take his hand, after all, and lead him into the hotel. Just a little girl--little over twenty.

For the first time it struck Bedient that he must leave. He was startled that he had not left. His only palliation for such a venture into two lives--was the memories her voice roused. His lips tightened with scorn of self. And yet the thought became a fury as he walked rapidly through the dark toward the river--what it would mean to have a woman want him that way!.... His thoughts did not violate the soldier's domain. Quite clean, he was, from that; yet she had shown him afresh what was in the world. It was nearing midnight; sentries of the city, still under martial law, ordered him off the streets before he realized passing time.... And the hours did not bring to his mind the woman of the Block-House, nor anyone of those flaming desert-women who love so fiercely and so fruitlessly; whose relations with men do not weave, but only bind the selvage of the human fabric....

Bedient was glad to get away to sea.... David Cairns, overtaken in China, had changed a little. It appears that the very best of young men must change when they begin to wear their reputation. Riding with Thirteen had made easily the best newspaper fodder which the Luzon campaigns furnished, and the sparkling wine of recognition eventually found its own. It must be repeated that only a boy-mind can depict war in a way that fits into popular human interest.

Bedient was farther from such things now, but he could not avoid noting that Japan is an old and easy shoe for the passions. The women of Japan are but finished children, preserving a sense of innocence in their bestowals. Many little Adelaides in fragrance, without will, without high hopes, only momentary and baby hopes--children happy in the little happinesses they give and take. This is the extraordinary feature of an empire of dangerous half-grown men. Moreover, above the delicate charm of sex, these little creatures are so remote and primitive in race and idea, so intrinsically foreign and undeveloped--that one leaves the fairest with a mitigated pang...

Bedient never repeated an action which once had brought home to him the sense of his own evil. The emotions here narrated are but moments in years. He accounted them quite as legitimate in the abstract as the strange visionings of his higher life, as yet untold. These latter have to do with his maturity, as wars and passions have to do with the approach to maturity in the life of men. To Bedient, evil concerned itself with the unclean. Wherever uncleanness revealed itself there was a balance of power in his nature which turned him from it, despite any concomitant attraction. The original Adelaide was a superb answer to the more earthy of his three natures; so utterly confined to her one plane as to be innocent of others. In the two Manila twilights which saw the dominance of his physical being, it was the Adelaide element which roused; and the scars they left behind marked the scorch of memories.

FIFTH CHAPTER

A FLOCK OF FLYING SWANS

"Will this little book stand reading more than once, sir?" Bedient asked.

"Ja--but vat a little-boy question! Ven you haf read sefen times the year for sefen years--you a man vill haf become."

Northward, he made his leisure way almost to the borders of Kashmir, before he found his place of abode--Preshbend, a little town of many Sikhs, which clung like a babe to the sloping hip of a mountain. He was taken on by the English of the forestry service, and liked the ranging life; liked, too, the rare meetings with his fellow-workers and superiors, quiet, steady-eyed men, quick-handed and slow of speech. With all his growth and knowledge of the finer sort, Bedient carried no equipment for earning a living--except through his hands. There was no hesitation with him in making a choice--between patrolling a forest, and the columns of a ledger. All the indoor ways of making money that intervene between the artisan and artist were to him out of the question. When asked his occupation, he had answered, "Cook."

One week in each month he spent in the town, and he came to love Preshbend and the people; the tall young men, many taller than he, and the great lean-armed, gaunt-breasted Sikh women. The boys were so studious, so simple and gentle, compared with the few others he had known, and the women such adepts at mothering! Then the shy, slender girls, impassable ranges between him and any romantic sense; yet, he was glad to be near them, glad to hear their voices and their laughter in the evenings.... He loved the long shadow of the mountains, the still dusty roads where the cattle moved so softly that the dust never rose above their knees; the smell of wood-smoke in the dusk, the legends of the gods, scents of the high forest, the thoughts which nourished his days and nights, and the brilliant stars, so steady and eternal, and so different from the steaming constellations of Luzon;--he loved it all, and saw these things, as one home from bitter exile.

And then with the cool dark and the mountain winds, after the long, pitiless day of fierce, devouring sunlight, the moon glided over the fainting world with peace and healing--like an angel over a battle-field.... The two are mystic in every Indian ideal of beauty, and alike cosmic--woman and the moon.

And another night it came to him that he had something to say to the women of his people. This thought emerged clean-cut from the deeps of abstraction, and he trembled before it, for his recent life had kept him far apart from women. And now, the thought occurred that he was better prepared to inspire women--because of this separateness. He had preserved the boyish ideal of their glowing mystery, their lovely cosmic magnetism. India had stimulated it. All the lights of his mind had fallen upon this ideal, all the colors of the spectrum and many from heaven--certain swift flashes of glory, such as are brought, in queer angles of light, from a butterfly's wing. He had been mercifully spared from moving among the infinitudes of small men who hold such a large estimate of the incapacity and commonness of women.... Even among the Sikh mothers his ideal was strengthened. He found among the mothers of the Punjab a finer courage than ever the wars had shown him--the courage that bends and bears--and an answering sweetness for all the good that men brought to their feet....

Gobind must not be forgotten--old Gobind, who appeared in Preshbend at certain seasons, and sat down in the shade of a camphor-tree, old and gnarled as he; but a sumptuous refuge, as, in truth was Gobind in the spirit. The natives said that the austerities of Gobind were the envy of the gods; that he could hold still the blood in his veins from dusk to dawn; and make the listener understand many wonderful things about himself and the meaning of life.

The language had come to Bedient marvellously. Literally it flowed into his mind, as in the rains a rising river finds its old bed of an earlier season.

This was the substance of many talks. It was always the same when Gobind shut his eyes.

"You say I shall come back here, good Gobind?" Bedient asked.

"Alone?"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet