“Yes, ma’am.”
“Once in a while we play cards in the smoking room. We play for money. I don’t want the Fonda to be known as a gambling hell, so I’ve made a rule: no player can win more than twenty dollars. Any profits he makes above that must go into the jar for my hospital. Do you play dos pícaros?”
“Yes.”
“We’re playing tonight at midnight.”
At last Ashley could play without dissembling his skill. There were some rich men at the table—world travelers, landowners in the valley, and nitrate and copper men. He took their money. He took Mrs. Wickersham’s money. A slate hung on the wall. At the end of the evening she wrote on it the sum accruing to the hospital. Her eyes glittered. A hundred and eighty dollars! A Roentgen-ray machine cost six hundred dollars.
A few days later:
“Mr. Tolland, do you take your breakfast on the roof?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come on up on the roof after dinner. I have some good rum. We’ll talk.”
So began the late conversations under the stars. They sat facing the mountains, with the jug on a low table between them. The peaks—sightless, noble, and long enduring—seemed to await their next event, to be leveled, or riven and folded. It was spring. At intervals from the distance could be heard a susurrus, a faint thunder, and a plop—some avalanche of ten thousand tons. With the moonrise glory suffused heaven and earth. The peaks came alive; they seemed to sway and sing, serene fields between black pinnacles. (“Beata should see this! The children should see this!”) The conversations were about Chile, about the early days of mining, about the hospitals and schools, about men and women. Ashley, fatigued by the hard day’s work, rejoiced in grateful friendship, but Mrs. Wickersham was wretched and angry. Curiosity devoured all other emotions. Who was he? What was his story? The more she loved him the more she resented his refusal to talk about himself. She had visited his room in his absence and examined his possessions. She had come upon some faded blue photographs—in one a tall young woman was standing by a pond holding a baby in her arms; three young children sat at her feet. Even in the worn print she could read health, beauty, and harmony. She studied it a long time with something near to bitterness. To anyone else in the world she—the “dragon,” the “tartar”—would have put direct questions (“What are you doing down here without your family?” “Why did you lie to me?”), but she was a little afraid of Ashley. At moments she was so filled with enraged frustration that she was on the point of ordering him out of the hotel. She had had a long experience of fugitive men; it never occurred to her that he might be of their number. On the fifteenth night of Ashley’s stay there was a long discussion at the dinner table of the “rat list”—its celebrities past and present, the money that could be earned at rat catching, and the unremitting attention necessary for the hunt.
Toward seven in the evening on that day an unaccustomed bustle and noise had been heard in the corridors of the Fonda, laughter from the houseboys and smothered shrieks from the girls. A favorite guest of the house had arrived, the famous Mr. Wellington Bristow, a businessman, owner of an import-export office in Santiago de Chile. He was an American citizen, he said, born in Rome of an English father and a Greek mother, but he had been heard to describe his origins differently. He carried a score of business cards in his pockets announcing that he was sole representative in Chile of certain American pharmaceuticals, of Scotch woolens, of a French perfume, a Bavarian beer, and so on. He was a general favorite and a liar, cheat, and finagler. His small head was covered with short curls and was set on the wide shoulders of an athlete. Around the card tables at midnight he looked thirty, at dinner forty, but at noon he could have passed for sixty, for his face then appeared anxious and tired, etched by innumerable small lines, not all of them the gift of laughter. He was dressed in the height of the London fashion of thirty years ago, favoring brightly colored vests and checkered trousers. He had restless jeweled hands that attracted aces. His linen was not always snowy; his cuffs were frayed. He was ceaselessly occupied in making money and often hungry. He was the best company in the world.
Wellington Bristow was every inch a businessman and a genius at it, but he loved negotiation more than money; he was of a generous nature; and he was joyous. Hence he had three strikes against him. He had to complicate a transaction, draw in third parties, bury it under provisos and “riders.” He loved to accelerate a negotiation with the hint of a bribe or to threaten the recalcitrant with an intimation of blackmail. Inflating promises and concealing risks were a pleasure. He sacrificed his very commissions to render the deal more exciting. He loved business for its own sake. What little money he had he could not keep. He was constantly giving presents he could not afford, which is the soul of generosity. On each of his visits to the Fonda he brought Mrs. Wickersham something new and delightful from the great world—the first typewriter seen in Manantiales, the first fountain pen, the first caviar, an evening cloak by Worth. On this trip he arrived with ten bottles of champagne; there were holes in his shoes and socks. No one has ever seen a successful businessman who is joyous, for joy is praise of the whole and cannot exist where there are ulterior aims. His joy was of the purest sort; it stole its gaiety from dejection and danger. What a talker he was, what a persuader! All appearance took on whatever coloring he imposed upon it. The great persuaders are those without principles; sincerity stammers.
The first Ashley knew of Mr. Bristow’s presence in the house was the sound of Mrs. Wickersham’s voice, raised in indignation, from the hall below: “No, Mr. Bristow, I will not have a coffin! I don’t care whether it’s made of ebony or not, I will not have it in the house!”
But that was merely one of Mr. Bristow’s jokes. The ten bottles of champagne had been brought into the Fonda in a long narrow box, yet . . . ? yet it was not entirely a joke. Mr. Bristow’s thoughts ran on deathbeds, coffins, and funerals. In these matters he was not only serious, but of a high calming gravity. He haunted the dwellings of the moribund. He eased their passage and awoke a longing for the farther shore. He stepped aside for the viaticum, tapping his foot impatiently, but on many fading eyes the last image was that of a beautiful youth guiding them through flowering orchards. The people of Santiago, of all classes, would knock at his door at any hour and beg him to write words to be inserted in the newspapers with the announcement of a death. Some of them have passed into proverbial lore: “Strangers, only those who have known great joy can know our grief. Family of Casilda Romero Valdés,” “Stranger, pause: death is not bitter to those who have watched the suffering of their child. Family of Mendo Cásares y Castro.”
Wellington Bristow came to Manantiales three or four times a year. Manantiales was a “little Amsterdam” of the Andes, a market and outlet, mostly clandestine, for emeralds which found their way, westward bound, over the passes. An underground route to the capitals of the world passed through a number of squalid huts at the edge of the town. Mr. Bristow picked up emeralds at Manantiales, before climbing higher for chinchilla pelts. Mrs. Wickersham looked forward to his visits. He brought the gossip of the coast; he stimulated the play at the card tables; and he teased and left unsatisfied her abounding curiosity concerning himself. Who was he? Who was he, really? He published his news for her at table on the first evening. She seated him at a distance from her so that the whole company could enjoy his chronicles: trials, bankruptcies, deaths and funerals (“I don’t want to hear about funerals, Mr. Bristow!”), imprisonments, hurried marriages (“Orange blossoms will burst into bloom prematurely, Mrs. Wickersham, if you light a fire under them.” “I know that, Mr. Bristow”), guns fired in bedrooms, forged wills, leper wins lottery, deaths and funerals (“I don’t want to hear about funerals, Mr. Bristow!”), miraculous cures before suburban altars, Inca princess unmasked as Miss Beatrice Campbell of Newark, New Jersey, the newest modes (cartwheel hats and knuckle-length sleeves), deaths and funerals (“Stop it right now!”). No wonder she charged him a mere dollar a day.
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br /> “Have you caught any rats lately, Mr. Bristow?”
“No ma’am, but a friend of mine caught a big one in Lima a few months ago.”
“Mr. Tolland, do you know what the ‘rat list’ is?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s this story about Lima, Mr. Bristow?”
“Just my bad luck, Mrs. Wickersham. He’d have come south soon. I’ve been watching out for him for two years. He was vice president of a Kansas City bank—blue eyes, round face, pink complexion, about forty years old. He’d run off with several hundred thousand dollars and a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“What’s the cauliflower?”
“There’ll be four or five thousand from the bank and as much from the girl’s family. It was the carbuncle scars on the back of his neck that gave him away. My friend put some pills in his liquor and pulled his scarf off.—They found the Bishop.”
“What Bishop was that?”
“They found him in Alaska where he was cooking in a hotel. Happy as an eel in a pie—that’s what they said. He’d always wanted to cook. His wife wouldn’t pay the cauliflower. She didn’t want him back. She already had a cook, she said.”
“How many names are on your list now?”
“Oh, hundreds, Mrs. Wickersham. Some of them go back thirty years. We’re only interested in the big prizes. It keeps you on your toes. Like the man who kidnaped Mrs. Beecham in ninety-nine. He was thirty years old, then, and looked like Pete Dondrue, the jockey, they said.”
“Any marks?”
“Just a little peculiarity I can’t mention here, Mrs. Wickersham.”
“Well, you keep your eyes open. You’ll pick up some cauliflower yet.”
Mr. Bristow was at his happiest at the card tables, and would have won his twenty dollars nightly but for the fact that he played neither for money nor for victory, but to circumvent the rules of the game. Ashley left it to the others to expose his cheating. Caught, Mr. Bristow would merely laugh—“I wondered if you’d see that!” All faces turned toward Mrs. Wickersham, the “dragon,” who would have sent any other guest flying from the house.
“Oh, he’s a rascal! I’ve known it for years. Play the game correctly, Mr. Bristow, or out you go!”
Mr. Bristow took a decided fancy to Ashley, who liked him in the guarded and flattered way we often do those invested with qualities opposite to our own.
Four days later Wellington Bristow left on a brief trip up in the hills. He hoped to pick up some chinchilla pelts. He looked forward to passing an evening with his old friend Dr. MacKenzie at Rocas Verdes. A departure is a pretext for a party and there was drinking and storytelling in the bar after Mrs. Wickersham had gone to bed. Ashley had never heard such storytelling. They were true stories—all of them had befallen Mr. Bristow in various parts of the world. For the first hour they had to do with narrow escapes from death. They turned on wonders and coincidences. He had escaped drowning and burning houses; he had been rescued in the nick of time from murder at the hands of brigands. Ashley was the sole listener, for the others had fallen asleep—the nitrate merchant, the botanist, and Mrs. Hobbes-Jones (author of A Child’s Asia, A Child’s Africa, and so on).
Finally, Mr. Bristow asked him in a low voice, “Have you ever been close to death, Mr. Tolland?”
“No,” said Ashley, “I can’t say I have.”
Bristow then went on to stories of deaths he had witnessed that arrived opportunely, at some right moment—deaths that beautifully crowned an enterprise or averted disgrace, or that lifted an intolerable burden. His eyes glowed, he appeared younger.
“Every death is a right death. We did not choose the day of our birth; we may not choose the day of leavetaking. They are chosen.”
Ashley had given little thought to death. He listened absorbedly—as his children had listened to him tell stories about Little Ib’s adventures at the North Pole and Little Susanna’s Trip to the Moon—and, like his children, he fell asleep.
The next morning when Bristow was leaving the Fonda, Mrs. Wickersham stopped him at the door.
“What were you doing in Mr. Tolland’s room yesterday afternoon, Mr. Bristow?”
“I? I?—I don’t even know where his room is!”
“I asked you what you were doing in his room.”
“Oh, I remember. Was that Tolland’s room? I just wanted to borrow some ink.”
“What did you take from his room?”
“Nothing.”
“I was told you were there twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes! I wasn’t there a second.”
“I don’t like my guests disturbed.—How many days will you be away?”
“Five days, six at the most.”
She turned away without saying goodbye. As soon as he was gone she called Tomás. “Did Mr. Bristow leave some luggage in the storeroom?”
“Yes, Padrona.”
“I want to be sure it’s safe. Put it upstairs in my room.”
It was not the first time Mrs. Wickersham had gone through Mr. Bristow’s luggage. She found a copy of the rat list. On the last page there was an entry underscored by a red crayon.
“ASHLEY, JOHN B. Born Pulley’s Falls, New York, about 1862. Five feet eight—180 lbs. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Vertical scar on right jaw. Educ. Type; Eastern accent. Mining engineer, Coaltown, Ill. Wife and 4 ch. Shot Breckenridge Lansing, his employer, in the back of the head, May, 1902. Sentenced—Escaped from guards on way to execution at Joliet, July 22. Dangerous character, connected with criminal associates. Reward, State’s Attorney’s Office, Springfield, Illinois, 3000. Additional reward, 2000, J. B. Levitt, Brockhurt, Levitt, and Levitt, P.O. Box 64, Springfield, Ill.”
Mrs. Wickersham leaned long over this material. She closed her eyes, as though overcome by a great weariness. It was not the first time she had asked herself the question to which she could furnish several answers—“Why are good men stupider than bad men?” During that hour she erased from her memory and her heart a speech that she had been preparing. She laid it away as some girl—hearing that her future husband had been killed—would carry a wedding dress to the attic. The speech had been shaped and embellished by many rehearsals. She had intended delivering it that night, beside the jug of rum on the roof of her hotel.
“Mr. Tolland, leave Rocas Verdes and come to Manantiales to work for me. Help me with the Fonda and with my interests in the town. You’re a blessing to the schools and hospitals already. We don’t know how we’ll get on without you. Besides, with you I could do a great many things I haven’t had the time or the wits to do by myself. The water from the Santa Catalina spring has extraordinary properties. We could bottle it and sell it by the trainload. In addition, we could build a great sanatorium. People should come and bathe here. Manantiales could be a small city of healing and happy industry.”
The speech went on, even more swelling, more visionary, at each rehearsal.
“Since I’ve been here we’ve taught more than a thousand children. They marry; they have children; they open stores and inns and stables throughout the whole province. They farm. But that’s not enough. What we need is a school to prepare teachers. The mixture of Spanish and Indian blood makes a very fine stock. By themselves, the Indians are crushed, resigned and suspicious, but they have a keen psychological intelligence and a readiness to help one another. The colonials are active, but they are vain and non-cooperative. Both are at their best—when they’re mixed—in this climate and at this altitude. Come, Mr Tolland, let us make a college, a medical school, and a city of healing. Let us build for the future when Manantiales will be an example and a model for all the provinces in Chile and in the Andes.”
That was the speech she never delivered.
Presently she rose, replaced the rat list in Mr. Bristow’s luggage, ordered her horse to be brought to the door, put on her black Spanish hat, and pinned a red rose on her lapel. She rode into town and was closeted for an hour with Dr. Martínez of the hospital. She directed him to order a co
ffin generously designed for a man five feet and eight inches tall, to be placed in the farthest hut reserved for contagious patients. She had shaken off her air of weariness. Something hard and resolute had come into her voice and manner. From the doctor’s office she went to that of the Mother Directress. From there she caught a glimpse of Ashley and his crew at work on the new laundry, but she stayed out of his field of vision. She had nothing, for the present, to say to him. Sister Geronima began describing to her how Don Jaime was raising the level of the troughs, “so the girls won’t have back aches. And, Padrona, he lowered the desks of the lace makers. He has such a feeling for the right height!” But Mrs. Wickersham cut these praises short and talked of more important matters.
At the Fonda the guests were informed that dinner would be delayed until nine-thirty. Mrs. Wickersham dressed with more than her usual care. She wore her opal earrings and a dress which few of her guests had seen before. It was white. She had worn it on the occasion when the President of her country had conferred a decoration upon her. She wore the decoration. Her close friends (but what close friends had she? They were dead; her daughter was in India) would have known that this uncalled-for “dressing-up” was a sign of dejection—her wearing the decoration pointed to despair. She directed Ashley to sit opposite her at the foot of the table, between a Finnish botanist and his wife. Her eyes rested on him from time to time as from a great distance. At dessert the guests were served Mr. Bristow’s champagne. She gave her attention intermittently to an eminent German geographer at her right. The conversation about the table became more animated. Ashley and his Finnish friends were enjoying themselves.
“What are you young people talking about down there?” she called.
“Mrs. Wickersham,” said Ashley, “Dr. and Mrs. Tihonen have some splendid ideas for the trees we should plant all up and down the valley. They’re going to give me a list and a map.”
The table fell silent at this sound of jubilation.
“Yes, yes,” cried the German geographer, clapping his hands. “There are few satisfactions greater than the planting of trees.”
The Eighth Day Page 20