Читать книгу Beau Ideal - Percival Christopher Wren - Страница 4

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The heat in the silo was terrific, and the atmosphere terrible.

A whimsical remark from the man they called Jacob the Jew, to the effect that he wondered whether this were heat made black, or blackness made hot, remained unanswered for some minutes, until a quiet voice observed in good French, but with an English accent:

“It is the new heat, Jacob. Red hot and white hot, we know. We are now black hot.... And when I have to leave this quiet retreat I shall take a chunk of the atmosphere ... a souvenir ... keep it in my haversack.”

The man spoke as one who talks against time—the time when sanity or strength shall have departed.

“Good idea,” mused another voice with a similar accent. “Send a bit to one’s National Museum, too.... You an Englishman?”

“Yes,” replied the other. “Are you?”

“No ... American,” was the reply.

Silence.

The clank of irons and a deep groan.

“Oh, God,” moaned the wounded Spaniard, “do not let me die in the grave.... Oh, Mother of God, intercede for me. Let me die above ground.”

“You are not going to die, Ramon,” said the Englishman.

“No indeed,” observed Jacob the Jew. “Certainly not, good Ramon. No gentleman would die here and now.... You would incommode us enormously, Ramon.... I go the length of stating that I absolutely do prefer you alive—and that’s the first time you’ve heard that, Ramon.... Worth being put in a silo for.”

“That’s enough, Jacob,” said the Englishman; “hold your tongue.”

The irons clanked again, as though the sick man turned in the direction of the last speaker.

“You’ll keep your promise, Señor Caballero?” moaned the dying man. “You have forgiven me?... Truly?... You’ll keep your promise?... And the Mother of God will come Herself and tend your death-bed.... If you don’t, my dying curse shall blast ...”

“I’ll see to it, Ramon,” said the Englishman quietly. “Don’t bother about cursing and blasting....”

“You’ll see that I die kneeling!... You won’t let me die until I kneel up?... You’ll hold my hands together in prayer ... my head low bowed upon my breast?... And then you’ll lay me flat and cross my hands and make the Sign of the Cross upon my forehead....”

“As I promised, Ramon.”

“You’ll let God see that I fear Him.... He wouldn’t mistake me for my brother?... He wouldn’t visit my brother’s sins on me?”

“God is just,” said the Englishman.

“Yes, my poor Ramon,” observed Jacob the Jew, “I greatly fear that you’ll find God just.... But don’t say that you have a brother, Ramon?”

“Nombre de Dios, but I have, hombre!...” gabbled the Spaniard. “And he is in Hell ... Seguramente.... He was an enemy of God.... He hated God.... He defied God.... And God took him and broke him.... Caramba! It is not fair the way God ... Yes.... Yes.... Yes.... It is fair, and God is good, kind, loving and—er—just.”

“Yes. Just—Ramon,” said Jacob.

“If I could find your nose, my friend,” said the American, turning in the direction of the last speaker, “I would certainly pull it.”

“I will strike a match for you later,” replied Jacob, a man famous among the brave for his courage; brilliantly clever, bitterly cynical, and endowed with a twofold portion of the mental, moral and physical endurance of his enduring race.

“God will not punish me for my brother’s sins, will He, Señor Smith?” continued the Spaniard.

“No,” replied the Englishman, “nor him for his own.”

“Meaning him, or Him?” inquired Jacob softly.

“We punish ourselves, I think,” continued the Englishman, “quite sufficiently.”

“Mon Dieu!” said a cultured French voice, “but you are only partly right, mon ami. Woman punishes Man, or we punish ourselves—through Woman.”

“Bless ourselves, you mean,” said the Englishman and the American immediately and simultaneously.

“The same thing,” replied the Frenchman. And the utter stillness that followed was broken by a little gasping sigh that seemed to shape a name—“Véronique.”

“Basta!... My brother!... My brother!...” babbled the Spaniard and sobbed, “God will distinguish between us.... Gracias a nuestra Madre en el cielo! Gracias a la Virgen Inmaculada.... Un millón de gracias....”

“And what of this accursed brother? Surely no brother of yours committed an interesting sin?” inquired Jacob.

“Cá! It was the priest’s fault,” continued the Spaniard, unheeding. “We were good enough boys.... Only mischievous.... Fonder perhaps of the girls and the sunshine and the wine-skin and the bull-ring than of religion and work.... My brother was a good boy, none better from Pampeluna to Malaga—if a little quick with his knife and over-well acquainted with the smuggler track—until that accursed and hell-doomed priest ... No! No! No!... I mean that good and holy man of God—cast his eye upon Dolores....

“Oh, Mother of God! He killed a priest.... And he defied and challenged God.... And I am his twin brother!... God may mistake me for him.”

“God makes no mistakes, Ramon,” said the Englishman. “Excuse my playing the oracle and Heavy Father, but—er—you can be quite sure of that, my lad.”

“Yes, yes, yes—you’re right. Of course you are right! How should God make mistakes?... Besides, God knows my brother, well. He followed him.... He warned him.... When he swore he would never enter a church again, God flung him into one.... When he swore he would never kneel again, God struck him to his knees and held him there.... Because he swore that he would never make the Sign of the Cross, God made a Sign of the Cross, of him.”

“Quite noticed the little man, in fact,” observed Jacob the Jew. “Tell us.”

“My brother caught the priest and Dolores.... In the priest’s own church.... My brother married them before the altar ... and their married life was brief!... But of course, God knew he was mad.... As he left that desecrated church, he cried, ‘Never will I enter the House of God, again!...’

“And that very night the big earthquake came and shattered our village with a dozen others. As we dashed through the door—the old mother in my brother’s arms, my crippled sister on my back—the roof caved in and the very road fell from before our little posada, down the hillside. My brother was in front and fell, my mother still in his arms.... And where did he recover consciousness? Tell me that!... Before the altar, upon the dead body of his victim, the murdered priest—who thus saved my brother’s life, for he had fallen thirty feet from the half-destroyed church-roof, through which he had crashed.... Yes, he had entered the House of God once more!...

“It was to South America that he fled from the police—to that El Dorado where so many of us go in search of what we never find. And there he went from worse to worse than worst, defying God and slaying man ... and woman! For he shot his own woman merely because she knelt—just went on her knees to God.... And one terrible night of awful storm, when fleeing alone by mountain paths from the soldiers or guardias civiles, a flash of lightning showed him a ruined building, and into it he dashed and hid.

“It may have been the rolling thunder, the streaming rain, or an avalanche of stones dislodged by the horses of the police who passed along the path above—I do not know—but there was a terrible crash, a heavy blow, a blinding, suffocating dust—and he was pinned, trapped, held as in a giant fist, unable to move hand or foot, or head....

“And, when daylight came, he saw that he was in a ruined chapel of the old conquistadores, kneeling before the altar—a beam across his bowed shoulders and neck; a beam across his legs behind his knees; a mass of stone and rubble as high as his waist.... And there my brother knelt—before the altar of God—in that attitude of prayer which he had sworn never to assume—and thought his thoughts.... For a night and a day and a night, he knelt, his stiff neck bent, but his brave heart unsoftened.... And thus the soldiers found him and took him to the calabozo....

“The annual revolution occurred on the eve of his garroting, and he was saved. Having to flee the country, he returned to Spain, and sought me out.... Owing to a little smuggling trouble, in which a guardia civil lost his life, we crossed into France, and, in order to get to Africa and start afresh, we joined the Legion....

“Válgame Dios! In the Legion we made quite a little name for ourselves—not so easy a thing to do in the Legion, as some of you may know. There they fear nothing. They fear no thing, but God is not a thing, my friends. Diantre! They fear neither man nor devil, neither death nor danger—but they fear God.... Most of them.... When they come to die, anyhow.

“But my brother did not fear God.... And his escouade of devils realized that he was braver than they ... braver by that much.... And always he blasphemed. Always he defied, insulted, challenged God. He had a terrible fight with Luniowski the Atheist, and Luniowski lost an eye in the defence of his No-God. My brother fought with awful ferocity in defence of his God—the God he must have, that he might hate and revile Him—the God Who had sat calmly in His Heaven and watched Dolores and the priest....

“In Africa there was little fear of his finding himself flung into a church, or pinned on his knees before a chapel altar! We aren’t much troubled with chaplains and church-parades in the Legion!

“But one day my brother saw a lad, a boy from Provence, a chubby-faced child, make the Sign of the Cross upon his breast, as we were preparing to die of thirst, lost in a desert sand-storm.... My brother, with all his remaining strength, struck him upon the mouth.

“‘Sangre de Cristo! If I see you make that Sign again,’ he croaked, ‘I’ll do it on you with a bayonet.’...

“‘If we come through this, I will make the Sign of the Cross on you with a bayonet,’ gasped the boy hoarsely, and my brother laughed.

“‘Try,’ said he. ‘Try when I’m asleep. Try when I’m dying.... Try when I’m dead.... Do you not know that I am a devil? Why, your bayonet would melt.... Me! The Sign of the Cross!... God Himself could not do it!’

“And next day my brother was lost in that sand-storm, and the Touareg band who found him, took him to the Sultan of Zeggat.... And the Sultan of Zeggat crucified him in the market-place, ‘as the appropriate death for a good Christian!’... Wasn’t that humorous!...”

Silence.

“Yes, God made a Sign of my brother,” said Ramon the Spaniard, and added, “Help me to my knees, Señor Smith, and keep each word of your promise, for I think I am dying.”

Silence....

And then a cry of “Dios aparece” from the dying man.

Jacob the Jew, great adept at concealment, produced matches and struck one.

The flare of the match illumined a deep-dug pit, its floor hard-beaten, its walls sloping to a small aperture, through which a star was visible. It had been dug and shaped, for the storing of grain, by Arabs following a custom and a pattern which were old in the days when Carthage was young.

It was now stored, not with grain, but with men^[1] sentenced to punishment beyond punishment, men of the Disciplinary Battalions, the Compagnies de Discipline, the “Joyeux,” the “Zephyrs,” the Bataillion d’Infanterie Légère d’Afrique—convicted criminals.

The light from the burning match revealed a picture worthy of the pencil of the illustrator of Dante’s Inferno—a small group of filthy, unshorn, emaciated men, clad in ragged brown canvas uniforms which, with the grime upon their flesh, gave them the appearance of being already part of the earth to which they were about to return, portions of the living grave in which they were entombed.

Some lay motionless as though already dead. One or two sat huddled, their heads upon their clasped knees, the inward-sloping sides of the silo denying them even the poor comfort of a wall against which to lean.

Beside a large jug which held a little water, a man lay upon his face, his tongue thrust into the still-damp earth where a few drops of water had been spilt. He had drunk his allowance on the previous day.

Another looked up from his blind search, with sensitive finger-tips, for grains of corn among the dirt.

As Jacob held the match aloft, the Englishman and the American gently raised the body of Ramon the Spaniard from the ground. It was but a body, for the soul had fled.

“Too late,” said Jacob softly. “But perhaps le bon Dieu will let him off with eight days’ salle de police in Hell, as it wasn’t his fault that he did not assume the correct drill-position for dying respectfully....

“No use heaving him up now,” he added, as the head rolled loosely forward.

Without reply, the Englishman and American lifted the dead man to his knees, and reverently did all that had been promised.

And when the body was disposed as Ramon had desired, Jacob spoke again.

“There are but five matches,” he said, “but Ramon shall have two, as candles at his head and feet. It would please the poor Ramon.”

“You’re a good fellow, Jacob,” said the Englishman, “... if you’ll excuse the insult.”

Jacob struck two matches, and the Englishman and the American each taking one, held it, the one at the head, the other at the feet, of the dead man.

All eyes were turned to behold this strange and brief lying-in-state of the Spanish smuggler, court-martialled from the Legion to the Zephyrs.

“Pray for the soul of Ramon Gonzales, who died in the fear of God—or, at any rate, in the fear of what God might do to him,” said Jacob the Jew.

The Frenchman who had observed that Man’s punishment was Woman, painfully dragged himself into a sitting posture and crawled toward the body.

“I have conducted military funerals,” said he, “and remember something of the drill and book-of-the-words.”

But what he remembered was not available, for, after the recital of a few lines of the burial-service, he fainted and collapsed.

“This is a very nice funeral,” said Jacob the Jew, “but what about the burial?”

[1]	A prohibited and illegal form of punishment.