Читать книгу Pícaro - Charles Bernard Nordhoff - Страница 4

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Pícaro’s room was at the back of the house—a square, high-ceilinged apartment, with plastered walls and a floor of old red tiles. A pair of windows, protected by gratings of wrought iron on the outside, gave on a view of the upper valley and the distant San Benito Hills. A bedstead with lacings of rawhide under the mattress and posts of carved wood blackened with age, stood in one corner, and beside it a worn bearskin took the place of a rug. The windows were open to admit the warm spring sunshine, and young Langhorne was at work between them, bending over a desk littered with a drawing board, squares, and a case of draftsman’s instruments.

The room had been his for nearly twenty years, and it had become a kind of museum, filled with relics of his boyhood—the dusty treasures of youth which betray the tastes of the man. There was a gun rack on the wall above the head of the bed; it supported a pair of repeating rifles and a fowling-piece—the latter a fine English double gun. Mounted heads looked down from the walls: Pícaro’s first buck, stalked on the ranch when he was only eleven years old; a brace of antelope with bulging glass eyes, killed with a splendid bighorn ram on a trip across the border into Mexico. Hanging in pairs from the picture rail were specimens of the waterfowl which visited the marshes of La Balsa—mounted during a stage of enthusiasm for taxidermy. Widgeon, teal, mallard, and canvasback were there, with other native fowl which had fallen to his gun, and here and there among them a sportsman might have discerned the forms of rarer visitors—a brace of European widgeon, stragglers from the Old World; a tree-duck strayed north from the swamps of Central America; an Emperor goose from far-off arctic lands. Two framed photographs hung above the desk: one of the handsome dark-eyed mother as she had been a few years before her death, and the other of Rita Du Quesne—a child of ten, smiling and bareheaded, mounted on the spirited pony he had trained for her. There were other pictures on the walls—Major Langhorne in his Confederate uniform; Blaise, the vaquero, astride a rearing horse; views of the ranch, of the bay, with Pícaro’s sailboat at anchor a stone’s-throw from the beach, of old Julius carrying the major’s gun and loaded with a great double bunch of duck.

A bookcase was ranged along one wall, and in it Doña Margarita had preserved her son’s books, from the early readers, arithmetics, and collections of fairy tales. Many times, when he was away at school, she had come alone to this room to dust and set her boy’s possessions in order; it had been her delight, knowing herself unobserved, to turn the worn pages, and to linger, with an emotion known to mothers, over the childish drawings and graffiti with which his school books were adorned. Preserved in this way from the days when he had learned to read, Pícaro’s books made an oddly assorted little library—King Arthur, Roland, Robin Hood, the Chronicles of the Cid; María in Spanish, the classic novel of Latin-America, and beside its worn back a row of titles concerned with natural history and sport. Another shelf was occupied by bound volumes of the Scientific American, covering many years, and there were technical books by dozens—textbooks and treatises on physics, on mechanics, on electricity.

Pícaro pushed back his chair with a sigh and lit a pipe. His work was not going well this morning; it seemed impossible to concentrate on the problem he had set himself. His mother’s death, a week before, had shaken his world to the foundations, and as yet he had been unable to adjust his thoughts to a life in which she had no part. He had seen little of her during the years of his absence at school and college, but a week had never passed without an exchange of letters—his written as he wrote to no one else, full of his hopes, his plans, his small successes; hers concerned with the details of a tranquil life, and breathing a steadfast love and confidence. When the summer vacation came, and he crossed the continent to spend two months at home, it was to her that he returned, to the strong, quiet woman about whom his father’s life and the life of the house revolved. And now she was gone.

Gone? Dead? Certainly, for the time being, she had vanished, but her son could not accustom his mind to the thought that she would never return. She was as much a part of the place as the old house, or the unchanging San Benito Hills. He glanced through the open door to the court beyond, laid out in beds of flowers she had tended every day. At this time of the morning she would have been there on the sunny western side, bareheaded, sleeves rolled up, and hands protected by heavy gloves—followed by a girl with a basket as she moved among the roses and chrysanthemums. It seemed to Pícaro that if he held his breath, he might hear the faint snip of her shears and her light, deliberate footsteps on the path....

While his heart, moved by an emotion common to all mankind, attempted to deny the fact of death, his cool reason of an engineer warned him that the attempt was in vain. What remained of his mother lay in the earth beside the bones of older De la Torres, in the fenced-in plot of consecrated ground behind the house. He had stood there with his father and Blaise and Rita, in the midst of a silent group of friends, while they had lowered the coffin into the deep new grave. Rita had broken down when Domingo, the old foreman, had let fall the first shovelful of earth, and the major, standing there with a face of iron, had stretched out an arm to the girl and drawn her to him. That was the moment of realization. The service had been unreal, like some harassing dream of a fever patient, aware all the time that the awakening was at hand. The narrow chapel, into which he had peeped so many times in years gone by, had seemed an unfamiliar place—a vast dim cavern where the air reverberated faintly with the priest’s words of hollow consolation, of unconvincing faith in an eternal life beyond the grave. The ceiling, supported on blackened beams, had seemed immensely remote, retreating in the shadows when the candles flickered in a draught; above the altar, containing a relic of a Franciscan saint, the jeweled monstrance spread its rays like an unlighted sun; the statues of the Blessed Virgin, of Saint Joseph, of the Saviour, had almost terrified him with their stern rigidity, seeming to gaze at him with no trace of the kind expression he remembered from the days of his childhood.

On that day, for the first time, Pícaro had come face to face with death. From childhood he had observed the forms of the church, but, as in the case of other Americans of his generation, religion had never been a living issue in his eyes. The belief in God—in the rewards and punishments of a life to come—was a possession shared by all respectable men, like honor, truth, or loyalty. Now, since he had heard the hollow sound of the black clay falling on Doña Margarita’s coffin, his mind was struggling to formulate a flood of bewildering thoughts—old as the human race and new as its last-born child. In his new loneliness he clung to his love of Rita; she grew more indispensable with each day that passed, but there were times when even her form melted into the background of everyday life, and he felt himself utterly alone with his barren and disturbing thoughts. His mind, trained to analyze, to classify, to draw conclusions from palpable facts, examined for the first time a subject which had baffled better intellects than his. Little by little his thoughts traveled the path to which every young man of intelligence must come. The Church taught that God had created this world as a dwelling place for man—that God was Love—that all of His actions, however inscrutable they might seem, were for man’s ultimate good. Man was two-fold—a mortal body, an immortal soul. In the light of Christian doctrine, each individual life, the world, the entire universe, was progressing—insensibly, perhaps, but infallibly, nevertheless—toward some ultimate goal. But Pícaro was beginning to doubt. He knew that this world was no more than a mote of dust, revolving—quite by chance, perhaps—about one of the less important of a million suns; and science had taught him that all of the other suns, all of the invisible planets in the enormous stretches of space, were made up of the same elements forming the earth on which he lived. Was it conceivable, then, that God had created the earth for man, had set the stars in their places to light the heavens by night? What reason was there for believing in the existence of God at all? If the hairs of man’s head were numbered, if God were Love, and if His actions were all for man’s ultimate good, why had He taken away the mother whose presence on earth had surely done no harm? Pícaro smiled sadly at the childishness of the thought. As for the life of the spirit, what basis was there for the belief that man possessed a soul? No man had ever seen one, touched one, spoken with one, weighed one, measured one. Man was the highest of the animals, but an animal, nevertheless. Why should he possess a soul any more than a monkey, a dog, or a jellyfish? No ... the earth was only an accumulation of interstellar dust, and its life no more than the blind stirring of the elements. Nature was cruel, indifferent, without purpose and without order; Christianity was only a development of the savage animism which once peopled the land, the sea, and the sky with beings of human form. Nothing remained but beauty and scientific truth—both impersonal and even terrible—unless one’s eyes were closed.

He thought of his mother. She had possessed beauty—personal and warm, a beauty which could only be defined as spiritual. Was it possible that such a being could be blotted out? In spite of his chilling doubts he felt a conviction, at once profound and unsupported by his intellect, that somewhere, in some new and radiant form, Doña Margarita lived....

There was a knock at the open door and Pícaro rose as he heard his father’s voice. The major maintained with his sons the same slightly formal courtesy he observed toward friends of his own age.

“May I come in?” he asked, in his pleasant voice, which still retained the soft accent of his native state. “I’m sorry to interrupt your work, but I want to have a talk with you in private.”

“Come in, sir—please. It’s not often you pay me a visit.”

Old Langhorne closed the door behind him and seated himself in the chair his son moved to face away from the light. He offered his case to Pícaro, chose a cigar, cut the end, and lit it deliberately before he spoke.

“You’re wise, my boy,” he remarked, with a glance at the desk, littered with drafting instruments. “Work is good for us just now. I’ve been out with young Julius since six o’clock, measuring the land on the mesa where we’re going to try limas next year. There’ll be a lot of fencing to do.... Let’s be grateful that we can work. I don’t know what I should do these days without the ranch!”

Pícaro was startled and touched at his father’s words; for the major this was an extraordinary admission, an unprecedented confession of weakness. He looked at the old man with sympathy in the gaze of his steady eyes. Here perhaps was a man who missed Doña Margarita more keenly than her son.

“Your mother’s death has hit me hard,” old Langhorne went on. “Sometimes I’m grateful that I haven’t much longer to live. I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking lately. The time has come to talk over what you are going to do when I’m gone. I have my own ideas on the subject and I hope I’ll be able to make you see my point of view. You’ll have to be patient with me; I’m not much of a talker, sometimes it’s hard for me to put my thoughts into words.”

Pícaro had been standing by the wall, but now, without taking his eyes from his father’s face, he seated himself in a Morris chair, struck a match, and held it to the cold bowl of his pipe.

“First of all,” the major began, “try to put yourself in my place so as to understand my feeling about family. It’s not a popular idea nowadays, but life has taught me that blood counts in men as surely as it does in stock. And there’s good blood in you boys—on both sides. My people were men of some note in South Carolina before the war, and as for your mother, the first of her ancestors to cross the sea was old Enrique de la Torre del Pino, a grandee of Spain, who called the king ‘my cousin’ and kept his hat on in the presence of royalty. But you’ll find all this in my journal if you’re ever interested enough to look it up.

“Whether or not you believe in the teachings of the Church, there’s one kind of immortality that most men can count on—the spark of life we receive from our fathers and pass on to our sons after us. If the inheritance is good, it’s a joy to hand it on and to do everything in one’s power to insure its survival. Some day you’ll find this out for yourself. The finest thing about our Republic is its equality of opportunity; its worst feature is the standard of money as the measure of a man. That’s wrong, my boy, and don’t ever lose sight of what I say. I reckon money-making is a talent like any other talent, and if a man hasn’t got it, that’s nothing against his character. My father was a moneymaker and I was an only son; all I’ve ever done is to keep what your mother and I had. Two or three generations may pass before any more money crops up in the family, and meanwhile I’d hate to see things go to pieces. You see what I’m driving at—an idea hundreds of years old.

“There are three of you—you two boys and Rita. I hope that you or Blaise will marry her some day; it’s what your mother would have liked. But that’s for you to decide. We’re not rich. If I divide what we have into three parts, the ranch would be split up in the end, and none of you would have enough to keep the family going. The other alternative seems hard, but I reckon it’s the only way. Rita will have a small income, in case of need; one of you will take the ranch and all we have, and the other will set out to fend for himself. You’re the elder, and it’s right that I should come to you first. Think it over, and don’t cloud your mind with unselfish thoughts. Remember—the family comes first!”

The major rose from his chair, as if to indicate that the conversation was at an end and that he did not wish for an immediate reply.

“You understand me, I think,” he said, as Pícaro rose and stood facing him; “I hope that you agree with me. But in this case, even though our opinions differed, I should feel justified in exercising my rights as head of the family.” The father’s grave and kindly smile disarmed his words.

“Yes, sir,” replied the younger man, “I understand quite well what you mean, and I agree that the Guadalupe should go to a single owner. As for my own decision, I’ll let you know in a day or two, if I may have a little time to think it over.”

“By all means,” the major said, cordially, as he turned to open the door. “Take as much time as you want. I’ll leave you now. You must pardon me for interrupting your work.”

It was the first time that Pícaro had been admitted to discussion of family affairs, and, though he had given no sign, his mind was at work on a hundred new possibilities opening before him as the result of his father’s words. Somehow, without definite grounds for the belief, he had taken it for granted that he—the engineer, the professional man trained at his father’s expense—was to be the one to go out into the world, and that Blaise would succeed his father on the ranch. His silence with Rita, his hesitation to reveal his love for her, had been based, in part at least, on the uncertainties of the future. Now, if he wished, he was free to ask her to be his wife—doubly free, since the father’s blessing was sure. Though he felt for Blaise the affection engendered by a stock of common memories, he had no illusions as to his brother’s character and knew in his heart that Blaise was not the man to carry out the father’s dream. He knew also that if he decided to assume the rôle of head of the family, there would be no cause for worry over Blaise’s future; the boy had a sure instinct where worldly matters were concerned. He was almost self-supporting now, thanks to his shrewdness and to the help of his rich friends. The car had been bought with his own money; Pícaro still remembered the father’s pride when a turn in oil stocks had made Blaise the possessor of several thousand dollars at once. There was no need of worry about Blaise.

The very fact that the easy and pleasant way seemed the right path made Pícaro hesitate, to examine from every angle the results of such a decision. He loved the ranch, and long experience had given him an understanding of the soil and of his father’s dependents. His own mechanical work could be carried on here as well as anywhere else; his little laboratory was well equipped, and the city, with its shops and foundries, was not far off. And there would be ample time to fit his hours of work into the easy-going routine of the ranch.

It was an alluring vision that filled his mind as he sat smoking after the elder man had gone. For the time being his comfortless speculations were replaced by personal thoughts. He realized now that the thought of parting from the Guadalupe had been with him for years, a shadow on the future. He had accepted—not without twinges of conscience—his father’s offer of a year of leisure to develop his own ideas, but he had known that this was only putting off the day of parting, that sooner or later he must bid the ranch farewell and go out into the world to put his training to use. Pícaro was not a practical man; his attitude toward his work contained little thought of fame and less of material reward. He was a creator, and like an artist inspired to express in form and color a new vision of beauty, he worked because there was in him something which must come out. In the realm of mechanics he felt the thrill of a significance akin to beauty itself—austere, orderly, aloof from the concerns of men.

He had only to signify his wish; a word would make him free to spend the rest of his days on the ranch, to devote himself to his work unhampered by economic necessity. And Rita ... he saw himself growing old on the Guadalupe with her at his side ... a boy, perhaps, who would be brought up as the major would have wished, to love the land on which his father and grandfather had lived. For a time, until the sound of the bell told him that it was time for lunch, Pícaro sat by the window in the warm spring air, permitting his thoughts to wander into one of those iridescent futures known to all young men.

An hour later he was sitting with Rita on the gallery. Blaise lay in a hammock near by, with a novel which descended gradually until it rested face downward on his chest, as he closed his eyes to take his customary nap. The Guadalupe kept hours of its own, unchanged since the days of colonial Spanish rule. Early in the morning, long before daylight in the winter months, lights began to appear in the thatched houses of the vaqueros along the river; women were stirring, fires were lit, and the air carried the scent of wood smoke and a sound of rhythmic slapping as the day’s tortillas were patted into shape. At six the men rode out to work, and at eleven those who had not ridden to distant parts of the ranch returned to lunch and a siesta till one. Major Langhorne observed the old custom of the country—he had gone to his room to sleep until Domingo’s vigorous strokes on the bell by the corrals announced that it was one o’clock.

The rains had been bountiful that year and the hills sloping toward the sea were still green with mustard and wild oats, still carpeted with the rich verdure of alfilería. A few gauzy clouds floated at a great height against the soft blue of the sky, and the sea was of the deep ruffled blue which comes with a northwest breeze. Pícaro stood up, taking a deep breath as he gazed out on the view of land and sea. He turned to the girl.

“The wind will hold all afternoon,” he said. “What do you say to a sail?”

She smiled up at him, laying aside the hoop of embroidery on which she had been at work. “I was thinking of the same thing,” she answered; “but I was afraid you couldn’t get away from your work. Let’s start now. I’ll be ready in a moment.”

A quarter of an hour’s walk brought them to the paved state road, which followed the coast line—rising, falling, and turning in long gentle curves. Then Pícaro led the way over a trail of their own, along the inner beach of Toros Point, past the creeks and the pale-green sedge and pickleweed of the marsh, to where his boat lay at her moorings in the cove beyond the dunes. He dragged the dinghy from its shelter under a thick green sumac bush, launched it in the gentle wash of the sea, and sprang in beside Rita, who held their shoes and stockings in her hands. When the dinghy was moored and the sails of the cutter shivering in the breeze, Pícaro cast off. “Take the tiller, if you don’t mind,” he remarked; “I feel lazy to-day.” He backed the jib till it caught the wind and swung the bow about, and lay back to watch the girl at the helm, perched by the weather rail as the lively little vessel lay over and began to cut the water with a crisp rippling sound.

Rita’s cheeks were flushed and her hair in an attractive disarray; her brown eyes sparkled as she gazed eagerly ahead, judging whether they would fetch the entrance. The man’s eyes rested affectionately on the slender hand at the tiller—delicately browned by the sun; on the slim bare foot flexed gracefully as she leaned against the pull of the helm. He knew her far better than he knew his brother, yet at that moment Rita seemed more remote, more unattainable than ever before.

He glanced ahead and saw that they were close to the rocky southern shore. He heard her shout, “Hard alee!” and next moment the cutter was on the port tack and heading out into the open sea. The swing of the ground swell caught them, and Pícaro stood up to face the fresh salt wind. Suddenly he felt confident, sure of himself. He went aft to slack away the sheet as they turned and headed southward along an endless panorama of coast—gray-green hills above low bluffs with a line of white at their base.

“Rita,” he said, seating himself opposite the helmsman, “I’ve been talking with father this morning, and now I want to have a talk with you. You don’t mind if I have something serious to say?”

She had smiled at him as he came aft, but now the smile vanished and a grave expression replaced the sparkle in her eyes. Instinct warned her of the declaration that was coming, but she perceived that the words Pícaro was about to speak were inevitable—that the hour she dreaded had come at last.

“What is it, Píc?” she asked, quietly.

Pícaro had never appeared to better advantage than at that moment. His fair hair was ruffled by the wind; the collar of a soft shirt set off his ruddy tan; the lines of his face—a little harsh at other times—were softened by anxiety and love. Rita was thinking that of the young men she had known, this one was easily the finest, from every point of view; and wondering, in spite of the calm affection she had always felt for him, why it was that his presence did not quicken her breath or cause her a flutter of the pulse.

Now that the time had come, Pícaro found it difficult to speak. His hand, resting on the coaming beside him, trembled a little, and his heart was beating so that he could scarcely breathe. He felt that the words he would presently blurt out would be abrupt, uncouth, ill chosen, enough to ruin his case in themselves. He longed for a gift of fluent and persuasive speech, to express the emotion, the yearning, that was stifling him. All his future, it seemed, depended on a flow of words which would not come.

“I can’t wait any longer,” he broke out abruptly, after a moment’s pause; “I must tell you now. I might have been able to wait if mother were not gone. Rita—you are dearer to me than anyone else in the world; I’ve loved you since you were a child, the little girl I used to take riding and sailing with me—and I’ll go on loving you until I die. If you could marry me, it would make me very happy. We could live here on the old Guadalupe—I know you love the ranch.” His voice was trembling as he ceased to speak and gazed anxiously into her eyes, which were slowly filling with tears. She turned away, shaking her head.

“Dear old Píc,” she said in a low voice, reaching across the cockpit to lay her hand on his knee. “If only I could. I love you so dearly, but in another way! I’m sorry—dreadfully sorry—but you must give up the thought of our marrying.”

His face paled as she spoke. “Why?” he asked, with the simplicity of a child.

“Because there’s only one man I could marry,” she answered, gravely. “Perhaps I’d better tell you ... it’s Blaise.”

Pícaro attempted to speak and, failing, turned away his head. Blaise ... so she loved his brother, who scarcely gave her a thought from one week to the next. She was only eighteen, yet in character she was a woman, and not a woman of the changing kind. If she loved Blaise, the poor child would have her own tragedy to live out, whether or not she ever married him. What a cruel tangle—a snarl of needless pain! ...

“You are quite sure of yourself, Rita?” he asked, quietly, at the end of a long silence.

“Yes.”

He managed to smile as he rose to his feet, swaying with the motion of the cutter, and bent over to kiss her forehead gravely. She motioned him to take the tiller, and went forward blindly to the hatch.

Rita did not come in to dinner that evening, and Pícaro said scarcely a word throughout the old-fashioned, slightly formal meal. The major may have had his own thoughts concerning his son’s mood and the girl’s unusual absence, but if so, he gave no sign. He seemed to be regaining a little of his old manner—speaking with Blaise about the affairs of the ranch and smiling kindly at the old negro, who muttered an apology for the trembling hand which filled his master’s glass with wine.

“We’re not so young as we were, eh, Julius?”

Blaise, who danced till four and rose at ten in the city, kept the hours of a farm hand at home, and at nine o’clock, when the three men were smoking in the major’s study, he excused himself and went off yawning to bed. Pícaro laid down the technical journal he had been trying to read.

“I have something to tell you, sir,” he said, “if you’re not tired this evening.”

The older man looked up from his book. “Yes? What is it, old fellow?” he asked, kindly. His ear had caught the faint note of dejection in Pícaro’s voice.

“You remember our talk this morning, father? Well, I’ve made up my mind. Blaise is the man to carry on with the ranch—not I. I love the place, as you know, but I’m an engineer by training and by taste, and a man can’t serve two masters well. I’ve thought it over from all angles, and I believe I’m doing the right thing.”

Major Langhorne, looking gravely at his elder son, felt a slight throb of exultation, succeeded by shame at an unworthy thought. What a fine chap Pícaro was, to be sure; more of a man than Blaise, no doubt. This unselfish decision meant that the younger boy, who held the first place in his heart, would be always near him, would follow him as patrón of the Guadalupe!

“Are you sure,” he asked, “that you have taken time enough to think it over? You are the elder, and if you want it, the place is yours by right. You seem a little upset to-night. Isn’t it possible that another day or two might change your mind? Don’t decide too hastily; haste sometimes leads to regret.”

Pícaro shook his head with a smile. “No, father. I’ve decided once and for all, so you can make your plans accordingly. Blaise is the man for the ranch; I’ll keep on with the work that interests me most. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I have a lot of confidence—a feeling that I may be able to do something worth while.”

The major nodded as he cut a fresh cigar. “It is for you to say,” he said, “and you know best. We’ll call that settled, then. Would you mind giving me an idea of your plans? I shall insist on giving you what help I can at the start.”

“Not at all, sir,” answered Pícaro, with an alacrity that showed his relief at the change of subject. “As you know, I have a lot of faith in the future of flying, and I’ve been trying for a year to design a motor lighter and better than anything now known. I think I’m on the right track. In France, the engineers have gone far along these lines. I want to go there, have a look at what their designers are doing, find work which will support me, and settle down to build my motor in what time I can spare.”

The old man nodded again. It grieved him to think that Pícaro’s work would take him so far away. He rose from his chair, took up the lamp, and walked to his desk. When he returned, a moment later, he handed his son a slip of paper before he set down the lamp. It was a freshly blotted cheque.

“That will tide you over,” the father remarked, “till you’re settled and under way. I wish it were more, but it’s all I can spare just now. I’m giving it to you now so that you can make your plans with a quiet mind. I hope you’ll stay on at least a few months more. I reckon I’ll miss you a lot, my boy ... we all shall.”

Pícaro smiled. “I hate to leave the old place, father. Don’t tempt me to stop on longer than I should. And thank you for the money. You’re too generous—I could do with half as much.”

The major rose again and held out his hand. “Good night, Henry,” he said, gravely. The use of the almost forgotten name proved that the old man was deeply moved.