The Flowering Stone

by Achmed Abdullah

 

The Flowering Stone

“Then He created the stone which bears a flower”

by Achmed Abdullah

IT did not take her more than twenty-four hours to find out all about him. An army transport is very much like a middle-class boarding house. He had only just been transferred to the regiment as captain-surgeon but his reputation had preceded him.

So Delia Montgomery heard from the officers about his first uniform, and from their wives about his first love ... two records with a stain on each.

Even Tommy Rockway of the Tenth, who squirmed periodically through courts-martial and colonel's wiggings because he had an uncle who sat enthroned in the Senatorial committee which decides on the war budget, spoke about him in a holier-than-thou key. He said that Captain Burbank was too fast for him. And it must be remembered that Rockway himself was fairly speedy ... at least that's how he described his life, though the doctors called it slow death.

Delia could not avoid meeting the Captain. But she kept away from him. It was not that she was intolerant or prudish. She was a healthy and sensible girl, army born and bred, and thus in familiar sympathy with the worldly wisdom and comparative tolerance which is learned in army posts the world over. But there was a reserve corner in her soul, inoculated with a certain unselfish love for pure and young and tender things. So the tales which she heard about the Captain disgusted her. There was no doubt of their truth. Even her father, the Colonel of the regiment, mentioned them in a casual way.

“I'm sorry you had to meet Burbank, my dear. Couldn't be helped. He belongs to the regiment. But I'll see that he gets a detail away from barracks as soon as we make our post. Brutal, objectionable beast ... keep away from him.”

Still, considering that silence is the only weapon which civilization has left to man in his battles with the other sex, she should not have drawn her skirts so tightly about her when the Captain passed her chair on his eternal pacings around the promenade deck. He noticed the gesture, but he could not speak or act in reply. But even her cruel, savage virginity would have received a shock if just then she could have looked into the man's heart.

It was on the day before the transport made Manila, that she got a glimpse of the volcano which seared the man's soul. And it frightened her.

There had been a concert, and after the last steward had mercifully concluded his last imitation of Harry Lauder, the officers and their wives stood about in impromptu groups, laughing and gossiping. Major Kane was speaking about a former Governor of the Islands.

“Capital fellow,” he said. “Typical New Englander.” He turned to Burbank who was walking toward the door. “Very much like your father was, Captain. I served under him in the Eleventh.”

Burbank stopped. He laughed.

“Liked the old man, Major, I take it?... I guess you're right. My father was a typical New Englander ... more than that: he was a regular old-time Puritan .... and you all know what they are, don't you?”

His voice rose to a challenging pitch, and his eyes swept the circle of people until they rested on Delia Montgomery. She spoke, acting on a half-conscious impulse.

“And what are they, Captain?”

Burbank stared at her in that impersonal and altogether arrogant manner which was habitual with him.

“I will tell you what they are, Miss Montgomery. They are swaggering, bullying champions of made-to-order morality, top-heavy with self-righteousness, and greasy with the oil of purity. Their theory of life is complete ... and Heaven help the unfortunate sons on whom they practice it.”

And he bowed in a negligent manner and turned on his heels.

The next morning, before breakfast, she was strolling up and down the deserted deck, when Captain Burbank came from belowstairs and joined her unceremoniously.

She wished him a curt “Good Morning,” and tried to walk rapidly away. But Burbank spoke to her, and she stopped.

“I should like to talk to you.”

Her color rose at the bluntness of the demand.

“I beg your pardon, Captain, but I do not care to...”

“You do not care to talk to me. I understand perfectly. But it's rather early. There's nobody about. And so my presence won't compromise you so very much. I must talk to you.” He paused, and then he continued with a forced laugh. “You know what the Moros say: 'What shall talkers do when there are no listeners?'”

She stood still, facing him like an animal at bay. She looked at him, and, even in the flash of the angry, nervous moment, she said to herself that he was a fine-looking man, with his square, high forehead, short upper lip, thin, aquiline nose, and purple-black eyes sharp with intelligence.

“I suppose they told you all about me.” He spoke with a soft, mocking drawl. “I suppose they told you how I devote my hours of leisure to the breaking of the Decalogue. But, do you know, there are a few virtues not contained in the Ten Commandments, and they're the very ones which stamp a chap as a gentleman if he practices them.”

She looked straight at him. All her timidity was gone.

“I don't care to discuss the point.”

“Quite so. You don't care to discuss it. And one of the virtues not included in the Ten Commandments ... but never mind, Miss Montgomery. I beg your pardon for forcing my undesirable company on you.”

He bowed and turned to go. Perhaps he had played his cards with conscious skill. Perhaps he had counted on that very mixture of feminine sympathy and feminine curiosity which now forced her to speak.

“What were you going to tell me, Captain Burbank?”

“I was only going to mention one of the strange virtues which they forgot when they compiled the Decalogue.”

“Yes?”

“It's this: 'Do not play around other people's Calvary.'” His voice rose with suppressed excitement, and his nostrils quivered.

She made an instinctive denial.

“But I didn't ...”

“Oh yes, you did! You've claimed the usual wretched privilege of decently good people. I'm not altogether a fool. I've seen you draw your skirts about you whenever I happened to pass close to your deck chair. I've overheard stray remarks ... how could I help it? ... even if that little cad of a Rockway had not told me...”

She was horribly embarrassed and did not know what to say. There was something just in Burbank's indignation, and she knew it. Then she decided to brave it out.

“I don't know what gives you the right to tell me all this.”

“What gives me the right? You ask what gives me the right, the right, the right?” His voice rose. But at once he controlled himself. He continued in a lower key. “You are all so good and honest and helpful, you God-fearing people. You're always so ready to forgive and to assist the erring, the sinners. Let a man commit murder or robbery or some other crime, and then you go to work and discover that he was born and bred in the slums, in the gutter ... couldn't help his criminal instincts ... his early surroundings are to blame. And so you call Judge Lindsey and Mr. Stokes and a few more reformers to your spiritual aid, and you forgive the sinner, and pat him on the back, and weep over him, and give him another chance, what? But when a man of your own class, of your own surroundings, makes a mistake...”

“Do you call it a mistake to ... to ...”

“To drink and gamble and go about with the wrong sort of women and lead kids fresh from West Point astray, and finally crown my fiendish career by beating a Filipino boy half to death?... That's a few of the things you were going to mention. I know. Well, call them sins, crimes, black wrongs if you prefer. Call 'em what you please. But I say that when a man born in the same class you were born in goes back on the code which is your Bible, when he does a wretched, wicked, horrible wrong ... but not the least bit worse than that of the robber or the murderer whom you forgive and over whom you weep salt tears of Christian pity and compassion...”

She interrupted him heatedly.

“That's exactly it, Captain Burbank. You insisted on forcing me to talk to you. It's your own fault if we are getting personal. But the others you mentioned, the gutter-bred people, they could not help themselves ... they were brought up in an atmosphere which reeked with the germs of vice and crime. But you ... you were born and bred in clean surroundings ... your father was a gentleman ... there's no excuse for such as you!”

“You are right. My father was a gentleman. He was also a very good man. He was so good that he could not understand why his own son, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, should have been born with a grain of original sin. He was so good that he was positively venomous and inhuman, wrapped, as he was, in his mantle of sniveling, devilish self-righteousness. His purity was so complete that it screamed with its hideous perfection. The whole of life was nothing to him but a continuous and emphatic moral action. And so he brought me up. So he strained my young soul to such a horrible pitch of decency and idealism that it threatened to snap and recoil. And finally it did recoil.”

She wanted to speak, to say something, anything to stop this terrible confession. But he lifted his hands in a sweeping, circular gesture. He continued.

“Yes ... it did snap and recoil. And then came the crimes, the sins, the wrongs which brand me with the mark of Cain. My father choked my soul with his inhuman goodness ... and to-day my soul is nothing but a fat and bloated thing, of a dull, opaque red ... like the red of dead men's sins...”

There was a tense pause. She was fascinated, interested in spite of herself. She looked into those purple-black eyes, and her words came rapidly, feverishly, as if compelled by an unknown force.

“I am sorry, Captain Burbank, so very, very sorry. But why do you tell me all this? I hardly know you, and you hardly know me.”

He stared at her in utter amazement.

“Why do I tell you?... Surely the fact that I do tell you ought to show you the reason. Good God, Miss Montgomery, haven't you guessed yet that I love you? Haven't you guessed yet that it is my punishment to love without hope? Haven't you guessed yet that I'm trying to be good ... yes, to be good that old-fashioned, banal, and very foolish good ... that if ever I do find a golden bead at the bottom of that blackened crucible which is my soul, it shall be for love of you?”

And he bowed deeply and left her.

{[dhr]} Late that afternoon the transport docked.

There was such bustle and excitement; there were so many new, vivid things to be seen and duly exclaimed over, that the strange interview which the Captain had forced on her faded from her girlish mind. The very next day the regiment received marching orders for Mindanao.

It was her first trip to the Islands, and so her father, who had been stationed there before, decided that she should stay with an aunt of hers in Manila for a few months ... “to get a little climatic and social seasoning” as he expressed it. Later on she could come down to Mindanao and join him in cantonments.

She was very busy during the next few days, very busy and happy and contented. There were the ancient streets of the town to be explored. There was the fashionable world of the Luneta, and the gorgeous stores of the Escolta, overflowing with the barter and spoil of the Seven Seas, from Birmingham to Jolo, from Vladivostok to Singapore. There were the thousand and one little Chinese shops of the Rosario simply screaming to be bought up wholesale. And so she bought and bought and bought, to the great amusement of her aunt who had passed through the same experience three years before. She bought camesas and pañuelos she did not like, and many yards of piño cloth she did not need. She bought loads of fruit because it was cheap.

And inside of two weeks she learned to hate all tropical fruit, from durien to manostan, and to long for a cool, frosted, red-cheeked Oregon apple which smelt cleanly of home. By the end of one changeable April month she felt as weary as some old major of native constabulary who has not seen home in seven years.

She experienced that curious loathing of the tropics which is the curse of the blonde races ... that vindictive, and altogether personal loathing and hatred, which embraces the climate, the vegetation, the animals, and all the soil-bred inhabitants, from the highest, green-eyed Castilian to the lowest, mud-colored Chinese mestizo.

She had been five months in Manila now, but it seemed like the gray burden of years.

One day the Filipino maid pinched her while she was hooking her into her evening frock. She turned round, about to express her hatred of the tropics in a blow. And at that very moment the thought of Burbank came back to her. She had forgotten him. Now, suddenly, she seemed to hear his drawling voice .. “and crown my fiendish career by beating a Filipino boy...”

She sent the maid from the room. She walked over to the window and looked into the gathering dusk. Dawn was coming up from the river, amid a foggy bank of grayish-rose clouds, like a scarf upon the blue.

She was ashamed of herself. She had nearly struck a servant in anger. It must be the fretful loneliness of the tropics, she decided. She must see her father. So she sent him an impatient telegram, and left for Mindanao on the next steamer.

 

The army post was another disappointment.

She knew the clean, orderly posts of the Western and Northwestern States—Fort Logan, Fort George Wright, the Presidio—the neat, little bungalows of the married lines, the bachelors' quarters, the officers' club, the gymnasium, the solid brick buildings which housed the half-companies, the well-kept parade ground...

But here, in this yellow land streaked with heat and snakes and cockroaches, this land which dying Spain had palmed off in its last lucid moment on a greedy and credulous young democracy, even the men in olive-drab withered under the curse of the tropics. And so the post was just a reeking abomination, a mixture of broken soda-water bottles, Standard Oil cans, burst provision tins, and fifteen assorted crawling and flying horrors. And over it all the naked, red, metallic sun, like a disk of hot, glaring copper.

But then her loneliness would be over, she thought. There were her father and Major Kane, his fat, good-natured wife, the Chaplain and all the others.

That first night they gave her a rousing reception. She was very popular with the regiment, beside being the C.O.'s daughter. Everybody dropped in during the evening. There was an impromptu dance, and even the officer of the day muffled his clanking saber and sneaked in for a stolen minute.

News?... Why, of course, there was news, ever so much. Williams got his majority at last, and Scofield had been ordered up for a medical examination. Oh yes, and hadn't she heard about the row between Mrs. Kane and Terry Lanyer's wife?... The Colonel had straightened it out with his usual kindly, soothing diplomacy...

And now for the greatest bit of gossip, perfectly incredible, my dear...

“Imagine,” it was Mrs. Kane who spoke. “Captain Burbank, that horrid doctor of ours, has got religion, religion! He's a reformed character, just like in a novel. That Filipino boy whom he beat so brutally ... I'm sure you must have heard the story, my dear ... well, somehow or other he found ... him and now he's with him again ... and they do say that he simply worships his master...”

Rockway cut into the conversation.

“Burbank a reformed character! Funny, isn't it? I guess there's some woman at the other end of it, some fool girl he's trying to impress with his new-found goodness. I tell you, Miss Montgomery, old Burbank uses his reform only as a fork to scratch his back with.”

And while the rest had their laugh, Major Kane summed up what seemed to be the opinion of the whole regiment.

“Yes, yes. If Captain Burbank has reformed, then there's hope for the Devil himself.”

Delia stepped out on the porch. She hated herself for thinking of the Captain. What was he to her?... But there were those sneering words of Rockway, and she could not banish the echo of their message.

“... There must be some woman at the other end of it, some fool girl he's trying to impress with his new-found goodness...”

She looked into the distance, at the pale, dim outlines of the native village, bathed in the dead sheen of the moon which stared down like a white sheet.

What was he to her? What could he ever be to her? she asked herself over and over again. No, no, she thought, it wasn't she who would be that fool girl...

Suddenly two outlines rose flush against the sky line ... a tall, soldierly figure, and at his heels, trotting like a dog, a short, squat native...

“There they are now, Delia.” The Chaplain had stepped out on the porch. “There they are ... Captain Burbank and his faithful retainer.”

She turned round. She had known the Chaplain since she was a small child, and she was very fond of him.

“Yes, Padre. I just saw him come from the village. I wonder what he does there at night.”

“Looking after the sick. I suppose our friends in there spoke the truth, Delia. Burbank has found ... shall I say Salvation?... You must forgive my phraseology, child. You see, I can't help being a theologian.” And there was a fine, white smile on his kindly old face.

“Tell me more about him, Padre.”

The Chaplain looked at her, keenly, questioningly. But the girl was not looking at him. She was staring into the distance.

So he told her.

It appeared that the regiment had been in excellent health since they reached Mindanao, and the Colonel had lent Burbank to the civil authorities. He was now the doctor of the district. At first, everybody had expressed sympathy for the poor natives who would come under his medical sway. There were those ugly, old tales of his dissipations and brutalities. Then stories had drifted up, gossip from the servants' quarters; also one or two civilians who were not familiar with the Captain's previous record had talked...

It seemed that Burbank worked eighteen hours a day, and that, ill-content to count the evil of each day sufficient thereto, he even considered the evils of to-morrow and the day after; that instead of booting sorrow and suffering from his doorstep, as everybody had expected him to do, he actually hunted it up to relieve it according to the strength of his craft and the sincerity of his heart.

“Why, my dear,” the Chaplain continued, “Burbank is the only man I ever saw in the tropics who does not play the part of a blustering demi-god, a White Man, with the accent on the White. He actually observes the etiquette of the natives. Quite incredible, isn't it? He never disparages their customs nor pours contempt on their sanitary atrocities ... and you must remember that he is a doctor. He has tried to learn the standpoint from which these simple children of the tropics regard things and men, and then gradually, softly, to suggest his own standpoint for their consideration. And so, slowly, very gently, he has improved the sanitation of the villages in his district. He is still doing it. He is well satisfied with producing the smallest effect. He never loses his temper. They say that the natives worship him. Above all, he never abuses anything or anybody ... except himself...”

“Except himself?”

The Chaplain smiled at the recollection.

“Yes. Except himself ... and possibly myself. You see, my dear, I am the Chaplain of the regiment, and I am also an old busybody, as you know. So when I heard of the good he is doing, I thought it my foolish Christian duty to call on him, to congratulate him, to talk to him in a manner befitting my cloth and my calling.” He smiled again. “But I am afraid it was not a success, my dear.”

“What happened?”

“I suppose I really shouldn't repeat what he said. It would sound perfectly terrible in the mouth of an ordained priest. But I'll tell you, my child. I guess I was a little tactless when I spoke to him. I often am. I spoke to him about the splendid work he was doing, and I must have given him to understand, unconsciously, quite unconsciously, that it was such a refreshing, clean, good change from his former life. He looked me up and down with those dark eyes of his, and said: 'Look here, Padre. If you think that I am a reformed character, chuck-full of Christian virtues and ready to be prayed and sniveled over, you're jolly well mistaken. If you think that I am playing a heroic part, with a choir of white-robed virgins and haloed saints ready with a hymn in the back of the stage, you're also mistaken. The Annunciation of my soul is not yet. Kindly leave me alone.'” The Chaplain laughed. “So I have left him alone.”

During the next few weeks she saw Burbank several times. Once or twice she saw him alone, when she went on expeditions to the Moro village. But it seemed that he was always in and out among the huts, curing the sick, and helping the sufferings of those who, with the fatalism of the faith of Islam, did not sorrow for their own sufferings, accepting them patiently and uncomplainingly as the decrees of inexorable Fate.

The thought that the Captain's new-found goodness was a performance got up for her benefit, vanished soon. For he never mentioned the interview he had forced on her the night before they reached Manila. His occasional remarks were impersonal, and his shafts of cynicism as jeering and as bitter as ever.

No, no, she said to herself, he was not playing to the galleries. He made it quite clear to her one day.

She met him just as he was coming out of a hut in the village, carrying a little, sick native girl whom he was taking to the hospital he had improvised in his quarters. The child was in high fever, neck and face covered with evil, brown, malarial spots. But she clung to the Captain's neck with all the strength of her puny arms, and when she saw Delia she exclaimed in a shrill, falsetto voice.

“Friend ... friend ... him big friend ... very damn good ...”

The Captain stopped and looked at Delia. There was an unmistakable sneer playing around the corners of his lips.

“You see, Miss Montgomery, I've always been an adherent of that remarkable animal which is called 'The Whole Hog.' Used to go the whole hog in rotten badness, and now I'm trying the other extreme ... shining and freshly-laundered goodness, guaranteed to be non-infectious.” He smiled. “Behold in me the father and mother and protecting deity of two thousand dirty, evil-smelling, treacherous Moros!. Can you not see the wings sprouting on my shoulders? Can you not see a halo gilding my head?”

And he laughed mockingly and walked away, while the sick child prattled excitedly and hugged him as close as she could.

 

Then, following unusually heavy rains, fever stalked through the district, and heaped corpse on corpse, black and bloated and stinking.

Delia volunteered to act as nurse. Her father remonstrated. He wanted to send her back to Manila. But she carried her point.

“You are a soldier, father dear, and I am a soldier's daughter. Would. you like me to be a coward and run away?”

Major Kane's wife also volunteered; and so, every day, the two women, accompanied by the Chaplain, set out to carry help to the villages. And every day they met Burbank and acted under his short, gruff orders.

He was more sharp and cynical than usual. He worked day and night, trying to stem the tide of the disease. His face was haggard and ill-shaven, his cheeks were hollow so that his aquiline nose stood out at a fiercely Semitic angle, his riding breeches and puttees were stained and torn, his ragged mustache had not known the scissors for weeks.

But Delia was blind to the grotesqueness of the man's appearance. She saw him in a new light, and she understood suddenly what he had called his Calvary. She saw and felt the heavy, gray burden of his former years, the white purity of his present daily work. She saw the shining bead at the bottom of the blackened crucible.

And it was then that the golden mist of love came to her.

One day they visited a small village outside of his official district. It was a primitive hamlet, built in a sort of clearing. All around it was a fever-spotted jungle, where the trees made up for their motley, flowering beauty by sucking and exhaling miasmic poison from the sodden, putrid ground, where orchids crept in writhing masses, and where the blotchy, orange sun was an evil, leering thing to be avoided and cursed.

The fame of Burbank's craft had not spread to this distant village. So the people received his offers and those of the women and of the Chaplain with apathy and suspicion. Of course they took the pills he gave them. For the word “Quinine” is known even to the most primitive tribes in the Islands. But all his entreaties to be allowed to inject the drug in the most severe cases was brusquely refused.

In a little hut at the outskirts of the village, they found a wasted man, his own eyes bright with fever, sitting with a small boy clasped to his bosom, a sheet around them both, trying with the warmth of his own body to warm away the child's shivering fit.

The Captain stopped. He offered his services and his craft, speaking in the native dialect.

The Moro looked at the American as though he would read his very heart. Ancient prejudice and bigotry fought hard with his anxiety for the boy's welfare which called on him not to lose a chance. His love won, and he held forth the fever-worn scrap of humanity to the doctor.

Carefully and tenderly Burbank examined the child. Then he gave his verdict.

“From eating the quinine balls there can come no good to the child. He is near death. Only with the means which I shall show to you is there a chance for life. Even then there is grave doubt of his becoming better. But without it he will assuredly die.”

And he explained his desire to inject the quinine into the child's body. At length, grudgingly, distrustingly, despairingly, the native submitted his son to the experiment.

Early the next morning they returned to the village, Tulawee, the Captain's Filipino boy, accompanying them as usual. Burbank had taken his gun along to shoot a pigeon or two, and as they approached the village he had the gun under his arm.

There were loud shoutings and howlings as they came nearer. Excitement was in the air. And so the Captain ordered the two women and the Chaplain to remain at the outskirts of the village.

Nervously, Delia watched him go down the street. Directly he appeared the father of the sick child rushed at him, pouring out a torrent of abuse, so frenzied and rapid that Burbank could not understand him. The other villagers gathered around, all talking in high-pitched, threatening voices.

“The boy has died,” interpreted Tulawee. “Be pleased to come away quickly. These people have gone crazy.”

“Enough, enough,” said the Captain quietly. “I will talk to them.”

But they were in no mood for hearing.

Delia could hear their mad cries where she watched from the outskirts of the village. Twice she tried to run after the Captain, but the others restrained her.

“Of necessity, he poisoned the lad,” screamed one of the Moros. “Within an hour after his squirting the poison, the boy died.”

“Beat him,” cried several voices,

And then they rushed in. Delia tore herself loose from the Chaplain's grip. She ran down the street. But even as she ran, the father of the child struck the first blow, a cruel, swinging, downward blow with a barong. It cut open the Captain's forehead and sent a trickle of blood over his dazed face.

The girl screamed.

“Shoot, shoot, Captain Burbank! For God's sake, shoot! Shoot before it is too late!”

But the smitten man, unconsciously quoting, only said:

“They do not know what they do.”

Then the crowd closed. The end was inevitable. For when Orientals lose their heads, they only regain them after the catastrophe has occurred. When his assailants drew off, there was but a semblance of a man left within the old patched khaki uniform worn bleached in the service of their kith and kin.

The villagers ran away, frightened at what they had done.

Delia had gained the side of the stricken man. He was not dead! Thank God, he was not dead! His eyes were wide open, and he tried to smile through the blood which ran from half a dozen wounds.

By this time the Chaplain and Mrs. Kane had reached them.

As they came nearer, they heard Delia saying:

“Promise me, promise me that you won't die. I love you. I love you.”

So she chose her fate.

And the Padre smiled as he saw the answering gleam of love and happiness in the wounded man's eyes.