The sons of the sun had builded well.
While the Crusades had stirred Europe to holy, fanatic zeal, tall, bronzed men in tunics of vicuna wool and gaudy robes of feathers had set up an empire in the Andean highlands, tamed rivers to water their fields, and with shrewdness, superstition, and clever cruelty bound together a dozen tribes into the proud realm of the Inca.
Mike Paull, walking through the ancient stony streets of Cuzco, found himself walking on tiptoe and moving his fingers over the polished stones of the walls ages old, as reverently as he might have touched the face of one dead.
For a thousand years those stones had lain one upon another, fitted without mortise or mortar, and no parchment, no chiseled tablet kept a record of the men who had squatted in the sun, year after year, chipping, grinding, rasping away bit by bit the deathless Cordilleran rock, achieving a perfect piece of construction that neither time, nor frost, nor earthquakes, nor enemies had been able to lay low.
The spell of the place was on Mike Paull. Over his head, built on the Inca walls, loomed the monastery that the priests of Pizarro had erected to their newer saints. But this structure wore the apologetic air of the interloper. Beneath it the ancient wall—monument to men who, without steel, with crude weapons of copper and stone, had enslaved the people of these highlands—reared itself in aloof silence, in contempt of the gimcrack superstructure.
Looking up at that looming curve of stone, it was Rocca, the Boy-God, that Mike Paull saw, rather than the Moorish arches, the broken lattices, the weather-worn carvings of Spain.
A dozen llamas passed, herded by an Indian in a flat felt hat with wool ear-laps. On the backs of the small, proud beasts, joggled baskets of potatoes no bigger than golf balls; clay pots swung on leather thongs; little bundles of firewood. Just this way, in the year 1225, a Quichua might have driven his beasts past these stone barriers, carrying his tribute to Yupanqui.
The past had Mike Paull. He was a little drunk on it. He forgot that not far away, in the old city of Lima, men sat at mahogany desks, with telephones and tickers bringing in the news of the world. He forgot that there were newspapers and smart cars, and radios blaring out modern dance tunes; he forgot Bill Foster and his room at the Gran Hotel Bolivar, where his razor and his mother’s picture on the dresser indicated that Mike Paull had moved in.
He forgot that he had come to this land in a clipper ship that had spanned in a night the oceans where Pizarro’s ships had tossed for weeks. But he did not forget Virginia.
She had come with him all the way, wrapped around his heart as the Crusaders of old had wrapped their lily banners. She walked with him now, along this narrow little street which led into a square where the Church of the Company of Jesus lifted twin towers not greatly changed, though students lugged notebooks, through carved doors where formerly pale nuns had gone, soft-footed, to pray.
He caught himself saying, “Look, Ginny!” He caught himself measuring with his eye, the rough steps up to ancient Manchu Picchu, up to the temple where a sundial counted the unrelenting years. Ginny, his whimsy told him, would be plenty tired when she got to the top of that, where once Hiram Bingham had wrested history from wilderness, and where goatherds now dozed in the sun.
He had shown Ginny the coral rainbows lying in the green shallows where the shadow of the plane slipped, small as a homing gull. And at night, while Aymara pipes and the thud of a big skin drum made strange music in the square of old Cuzco, he reached to wake her, and then knew the hurting jerk of separation because Ginny was so far away.
And he knew, too, the guilty feeling of omission because he had not written yet.
But the days were a rush of time over his head. Dead men’s time, old, forgotten time. Feathered canopies moving in ghostly splendor. Naked men running barefooted with the knotted string records—the quipus—in their hands, or on their shoulders clay-lined baskets in which live fish were carried to the table of the Inca.
Spanish mail glittered and fire signals burned on the lonely peaks, and Huayna’s frustrated heart was carried to rest in Quito. Atahualpa, grave and majestic, went to the garrote, and the heel of Spain came down, till glory was no more.
At night Mike’s typewriter leaped, red-hot with the burning words into which his brain translated what he had seen, but chiefly with what he had dreamed and conjured out of the past. And when it was finished and the words counted, he was tired with a weariness that went deeper than aching leg muscles and eyes stung from long hours in the high, thin air—that went as deep as his soul.
Then he was too spent to write a coherent letter though he made up loverly passages in his mind as he drifted into exhausted sleep. And then in the morning the rush began again, a car waiting, a guide squatting on his heels in a doorway, the past catching at him again, and again he did not write.
The mail came with Virginia’s brief letter—odd, Mike thought that she was somewhere on this ragged backbone of the continents, too. Mike read the single page a dozen times, shot a sheet of paper into Elvira’s maw, then remembered that he hadn’t any address, that he hadn’t an idea where Ginny was going from Denver, that he would have to wait for another mail that might be a week away.
He carried her letter up mountain roads and into old towns where women haggled in ancient, odorous markets, bartering a haunch of goat meat for shoes made in Massachusetts.
“Sunday, I’ll write—a long letter. If only Ginny could see this—”
The letter got creased very flat from lying in his pocket. And very worn from being read over and over. Sometime he would bring her, see these dead stones come alive through her eyes, see the gold-clad priests hold up offerings to the sun, where now the herders lay slumbering.
But on Sunday, very early, he woke on fire with the impulse to write a book. He would write about this Inca civilization. Other people had done it, but his book would be different. He saw things the academic fellows missed—that was his heritage from his mother again, the fey thing she had brought with her from the bog country, where men still knew the Little People, still heard wild bugles blowing.
He wrote till late afternoon, forgetting his lunch, and the New York boys who were in Lima selling road machinery to the Peruvians came beating at the door. There was a game on downstairs. It was one o’clock in the morning when Mike returned to his room, having drunk too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes. He fell across his bed wearily and went to sleep. Not much use writing anyway, he told himself, till he knew where she was.
Mike had been in Lima a week when a sea mist came in, wet and cold, to water that coastal land where rain so rarely fell. Mike had been up in the hills with a Quichua guide, and even the goatskin poncho the guide had loaned him had failed to keep the dampness out of his bones.
“No wonder,” he grumbled, as he stripped and got under a hot shower, “that those old boys worshiped the sun!”
There was no heat on, for mid-October was the beginning of summer in that equatorial country, but the water was hot and the towels supplied by the Gran Bolivar were soft and luxurious. He wrapped himself in one of them and sat down at his typewriter. Before a line went off to Bill Foster, he was writing a long letter to Ginny.
He was a little aghast when he looked back and counted the days since he had kissed her goodbye in the dark drizzle of the Newark Airport. But he told himself comfortably that Ginny would understand. Very firmly, to silence the faint stirrings of unease under his bland confidence, he told himself that Ginny was swell. She’d know that he had had to work.
He shot a sheet of paper around Elvira’s platen, and looking at the Lima paper to be sure of the date, began “Darling Ginny:”
Off to a start, at least. Ginny would have loved the things he had seen last night. That Andean village—its market women and angry, spitting llamas, children wearing sandals made of old automobile tires, hats of felt beaten into shape with paddles, children who carried loads of brush an
d weeds for firewood on their backs.
He told her about it, the keys flying, the light table teetering. Of the Indian concert in the moonlit square, on instruments that went back a thousand years. Panpipes, clay trumpets, drums. Of the knots of people who had gathered and were presently dancing, treading an antique measure, whirling skirts and ponchos, colorful, strange, a dance old before Columbus, old before Spain sailed her dark ships to conquer the western world.
He was deep in the spell of it, starting his fourth age when there came a banging on the door.
Mike yelled, “Come in!” but did not look around till a slow voice behind him said, “Well, you darned old son of a gun!”
“Dave Martin!”
Mike jumped up, almost upsetting the table.
“Dave—where the devil did you come from?”
Dave Martin strode in, tall and red-headed and arrogant, Dave of the trenchant and deadly pen, who had flown with him over the turbulent Polish Corridor, who had eaten goat meat with him in a straw-roofed hut on the salty marshes of Darbenut, who had stolen a jug of dark beer from under the bed of a Lithuanian cobbler—beer that had saved their lives the day an oil line broke and the plane had been grounded for a day and a night in a desolate stretch along the Baltic.
“Just blew in.” Dave threw his hat across the room. “Been running down some kind of wild story about mysterious air bases in the Argentine. Very interesting yarn—now when I get it, the State Department says hands off. Got anything around to drink?”
“I’ll get something up right away. Gosh, old man, I’ve been wondering where you were. See your stuff sometimes. What do you know?”
“Not much. Nobody talks. Canny lot of politician down here. That the native costume you’re sporting?’
“Been up in the hills. Cold up there. I was just writing—” almost he had said, “to my wife.” Then he remembered that Ginny had wanted nothing said “Not till we can live like people,” she had said. “Just writing some stuff I got up there,” he went on. “Ah here’s the liquor. Say when.”
They talked long and late, beating each other on the back as men do, who have been through danger together and can laugh about it. They had dinner sent up and they ate, Mike in his pajamas and bathrobe the coffee pot wrapped in a towel to keep it warm, dousing steaks with hot, unfamiliar sauces, recalling meals they had eaten in strange places.
“Remember that pot of soup we finagled off the old goat farmer that time in the Pyrenees, Mike? And after we’d eaten it, we found out the meat in it, was an old nanny goat that had died?”
“Yeah, I remember. You got sick. But I was so hungry I didn’t care what had died—till he told us his idiot boy was dying of some kind of growth in his head—then we left.”
Dave Martin stretched his legs and lighted a thin, brown Paraguayan cigarette.
“By the way, Mike, what became of that girl you used to send cables to every day? The one whose picture you pasted in the top of your hat?”
Involuntarily Mike glanced toward his hat. It was a new hat—he had thrown the other one away, after making a futile attempt to scrape a photograph from the inner felt with a razor blade—a day or two after he had met Virginia.
“Oh, you mean Harriet? I guess she’s still on the paper. I see some stuff now and then that reads like hers. Haven’t seen her for a long time.” Not since August. But he was dismissing the fine details of the truth. In August he had been sent to Washington, had met Ginny. After that, for him, all other women had become merely ghostly phases of an adolescent past. Like silly old songs and hoarded pennants, like paper hats from forgotten parties and the other sappy affections men recover from and remember afterward with slightly nostalgic indulgence.
“Get your ring back—that one the customs officer tried to take away from me in Memel?” asked Dave. “I mailed it for you in Paris, I remember. You had three months’ pay in it.”
“No—I didn’t want it back,” Mike edged awkwardly around this. “It was—just a present. It didn’t mean a thing.”
“Funny—I was under the impression that it meant a lot, once. I was distinctly under that impression when you bought it from that old Jew in Orküt. He knew that it had been stolen from the nobility, and so did the police. You might have gotten stuck over there in one of their lousy prison camps, waiting for red tape to unwind and get you out, on account of that ring. But you had to have it.”
“It didn’t mean a thing,” Mike repeated, flatly “Anyway—it was a lot too big. I doubt if she even wore it. Likely she sold it to some antique place. It wasn’t a lucky ring—she had nervous feelings about it, a fortune-teller told her there was blood on it.”
He wanted an end of hearing about Harriet Hillery. And that ring. Harriet knew that all that was ended—if, indeed, Mike told himself in his bland arrogance there had been anything to be ended. People changed, drifted apart. Now even reminders of his past irritated him. He hated to have recalled to him any part of his life that hadn’t included Ginny. If only he could tell Dave about Ginny—but he’d promised, not quite sure why—he shouldn’t have given in, he should have stood on his pride as a husband—a man made a mistake to start by giving in.
At midnight, Mike remembered suddenly that he had to get off some copy to Bill Foster. So he cut out the beginning of the letter to Ginny, crossed out part of it with x’s and z’s, sent it down, with a new lead written on it, stamped and sealed and addressed to Bill.
Tomorrow he would write a long letter. Pages and pages, with crosses at the bottom of every page.
“Positively, I’ll write. Positively!”
Chapter 8
Teresa Harrison went home from the hospital at her own insistence at the end of the week in which Ginny returned.
“If I have to be miserable, at least I can be miserable where I can have a cigarette when I need it,” she told Virginia, “and I can keep an eye on things without being cramped by a lot of ridiculous rules and visiting hours. I think you’d better move over to my place, Virginia. You’ll have to sleep on the couch because the nurse will have the guest room, but it’s fairly comfortable. The nurse is stupid, but I picked her on purpose, so she won’t annoy me. One bright person at a time is all I can endure—and sometimes I think you’re not so terribly bright. At least you’re only clever in spots. Heard from that galloping ghost of a newshound yet?”
“He’s quite far back in the interior—the mail is very slow—” Virginia hedged.
“Humph!” sniffed Teresa.
Virginia did not relish sharing Teresa’s apartment very much. She knew what it would be like. No privacy, people around till all hours of the night, people she didn’t care for at all. But there was no help for it, so she packed a bag and took a taxi and arrived at Teresa’s to find three men there already. A young doctor was banging on the piano, an attaché from the French legation was chipping ice in the pantry, and a newspaperman named Hinchey, who was more or less a friend of Mike’s, sat beside Teresa’s chaise longue, flipping dice on the blanket.
“You know Sam, Virginia,” Teresa said. “Those other fiends out there don’t count. Chase them out, will you, before the maid quits? She’s new, and she looks as though she’d be light-fingered, but I can’t be bothered hunting another one now. Sam, go on home. I’ve got a business to run between six o’clock and two a.m., though it never seems to occur to anyone that I need a minute to myself.”
Sam Hinchey pocketed his dice. He was in his thirties and had a lazy and insolent eye. He grinned at Virginia coolly.
“Red hair. I remember you.”
“I’m quite easily identified. Now and then I’m mistaken for a fire hydrant—but one grows accustomed to weird experiences in our business.”
“Remember now where I saw you. Having lunch in the Press Building with Mike Paull. Trust that lad to snag all the good-looking women.”
“Please get out of here, Sam,” prodded T
eresa. “Get on out and take those other two abominations with you. And don’t come back—not for years. Virginia, send that nurse in here. I want a sign put on my door—a quarantine sign—bubonic plague, or leprosy, or something.”
The nurse, who was a washed-out virgin with thick ankles and spectacles, herded the guests out with nervous apologies.
“Hang up your clothes somewhere—though I don’t know where,” Teresa said to Virginia. “And tell that creature in the kitchen not to put pepper in my soup. I want sherry in it—plenty of sherry.”
“The doctor said no intoxicants till your blood pressure comes down,” the nurse suggested timidly. “Would you like me to rub your back now?”
“No, I wouldn’t. And I’m used to my blood pressure. I’ve had it forever. Why the top of my head hasn’t blown off before this, is a mystery. Virginia—about that foul outfit at Carlsbad—”
“This,” sighed Virginia, seeking seclusion in the bathroom where she sat on the edge of the tub and rested her aching head in her palms, “is going to be just lovely! This is going to be a wild nightmare. But what can I do?”
There was no place in Teresa’s jammed wardrobes for another frock. So Virginia’s suitcase, still packed was shoved under the nurse’s bed. In spite of Teresa’s tirades and the nurse’s remonstrances people kept on coming, crashing in with wild whoops, mixing drinks in the kitchen, smoking Teresa’s cigarettes. Virginia could not go to bed till the last one had been maneuvered out, and the chain put on the door. The maid washed glasses interminably, banging them down resentfully on the drainboard. Teresa demanded hot tea in the middle of the night, and lights went on everywhere; there was no rest, no peace.
On the third night, Virginia heard gulping sobs in the kitchen after midnight, and investigating, found the nurse there, looking wan and young and small in cotton pajamas, her back hair rolled on tin curlers, crying into a dish towel.
“I can’t stand it,” wailed the pale girl, when Virginia came in. “She does everything against orders, and then the doctor blames me. Now she wants a Scotch and soda. At one in the morning. And I’ll have to put it on the chart—and I don’t even know how to make a Scotch and soda!”
The Mulberry Bush Page 6