The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 13
XIII
FOR upward of an hour, perhaps two hours, Birdsong's men remained near the hillock, moving about aimlessly, talking in whispers, staring at the net wherein their leader had disappeared. Some wept. The sun arose and stretched long fingers of light through the smoke. At last, tired out with fighting, marching, and lack of sleep, apprehensive of the priests, and leaderless, the colporteur's disciples began to dribble away by twos and threes. The last to stay by the mound were three women—Motobatl's Mary Magdalene, Mary and Joanna— And so Birdsong's mission ended.
The promoter watched them go with gray thoughts. Although he had never liked the colporteur; although throughout their adventure together, he had felt the revivalist was a fanatic, following the craziest cosmogony, still, his abrupt taking off left the Stendill agent troubled and shaken and somehow aimless.
A breeze sprang up out of the east and cleared away much of the smoke. It stirred lines of silver over the blue water and blurred the reflections of the peaks. The sunshine grew warm. Lassiter got slowly to his feet and walked down the beach toward the great piazza. Lying in front of the immense pavement, he saw Nunes' bolsa with its queer top. It was a discarded little battleship that would never fight for its designer. It still lay half-drawn out on the sand where Quiz-Quiz had pulled it. Little waves broke against its stern with a continual sobbing.
The great piazza lay cool in the morning shadows. It was entirely deserted. From the north came a barely heard sucking and choking of the distant whirlpool. Lassiter thought of Birdsong, a gray cadaver, spinning round and round and taking a last plunge. Perhaps the body was spinning at this moment, or would soon, or had. The promoter felt profoundly weary, old, burned out.
He was turning south, with some vague intention of going back to his paddlewood and lying down, when he saw the bulk of Gogoma push out of the jungle toward the north. The high priest carried a basket on his great arm and Lassiter knew it held birds.
The Stendill agent was about to turn on away when the behemoth made a gesture asking him to wait. Lassiter walked over and leaned against one of the vast pilasters. The fat man waddled toward him with his breech clout entirely concealed in rolls of flesh. The blue heron feather fluttered in the breeze.
A disgust came over Lassiter at the thought of waiting and talking with the priest so soon after Birdsong's murder. He was about to go on after all, but a second thought came and told him that it had been war, that Gogoma was again in power, that he, Lassiter, was doomed to spend the remainder of his life on some sort of terms with the murderer— It was simply a question of policy. After all, the whole of life was a question of policy
So Lassiter remained leaning against the pilaster, one foot cocked up against its cylindrical surface which was flat in relation to so tiny an object as a human figure.
The fat man came up sweating profusely. He stopped with a slight gesture of salutation.
“A very pretty morning,” he puffed and gave his head a shake that sent down a little rain.
“You have a lot of birds.”
“I got them off your limes, señor. You chose an admirable place.” He looked up at the rim of the crater high above, “I wonder if your message will ever bring help?”
Lassiter did not look up.
“I don't know— It doesn't make much difference.”
The behemoth regarded him gravely out of pin-point eyes set in the expanse of brown face.
“You are thinking of your friend, señor.”
“Certainly.”
Gogoma meditated.
“Well—it is true. It makes little difference who comes or goes— We are but scum caught in the Web of the Sun—” He paused a time and finally added—
“Still we try to hold our places”
The promoter stood moving his foot against the surface of the pilaster with a slight nervousness. The movement made about as much sound as the murmur of the whirlpool to the north. At last the New Yorker asked the question forever nibbling in his mind,
“How did you kill Birdsong in the net, Gogoma?”
The wide face was unmoved by so much as a quiver.
“I did not kill him, señor.”
“Your men, then?”
“They had nothing to do with it, señor.”
Lassiter saw the priest meant to reveal nothing of the terrific mechanism of the net. There was no need trying to probe by indirection, for Lassiter already sensed the behemoth's mind was subtler than his own. To his surprize the priest proceeded.
“If Señor Birdsong had greased his hands and feet he could have walked on the net without fear of sticking. That is the method we priests use in collecting our alms—it is a great miracle. The people flock to see it. It refreshes their faith in other things they know nothing about.”
Lassiter was moved to smile, but his smile flickered out in the aura of Birdsong's death.
“It really helps prove those things, señor," proceeded the priest gravely. “Belief in the Sun is the truth for my people; without it they could not exist.”
Lassiter leaned against the pilaster musing and presently said:
“I dare say that's right. Religious truth is any theory with sufficient coherence to satisfy man's inquisitiveness, and yet at the same time offer him sufficient inducement to bear the ills of life.”
The behemoth opened his slit-like eyes. Like all men, he was vastly impressed with the promoter's wisdom because he had repeated his own theory in slightly different words.
“Señor, you are the man I have been praying to come to Mototbatl.”
Lassiter regarded him curiously.
“You must become high priest in the temple of the Sun.”
Lassiter did not know whether this were a jest or not.
“I am in earnest, señor. I have prayed for such a man. None of my acolytes can take my place. Neither Jagala nor Quiz-Quiz. They do not comprehend that the temple is for man and not man for the temple. Until you came, I was the only skeptic, the only disbeliever in Motobatl. I alone could administer the holy rites purely for the benefit of my people, without the corruption of faith or credulity or idolatry or useless sacrifice.”
“You really want me to become high priest?”
“Indeed I do!”
Lassiter stood staring at this monstrous proposal, and yet as he thought it over, he perceived that its monstrosity was really superficial. Back of it lay a genuine love for his people.
NOR were Gogoma's motives entirely without parallel in-Lassiter's own experience. In America Lassiter recalled conversations with ministers who frankly admitted that while, personally, they did not accept all the tenets of their churches, still they preached them to their congregations, because the business man, the professional, the man around town were not prepared to receive the recondite learning of the study.
Also he had heard laymen admit that they could not allow their minister to know exactly what they believed because he led too secluded a life to receive the full glare of truth such as they found in the market place. Such stewardship of spiritual values always impressed Lassiter as a beautiful and a thoughtful attitude.
Now he was a little surprized to find himself shocked over the same condition in Motobatl. Moreover, the notion began to appeal to him. It touched the streak of romance, of play-acting that had always lain at his heart. It promised his life a certain dramatic completion—high priest, hierophant in the hugest and most ornate temple of the earth.
“Would it be necessary for me to become an acolyte until your death?”
The high priest raised a pulpy protesting hand.
“You would be installed at once, within a week. I wish to devote the remainder of my life to my own immortality, brother.”
The promoter looked at him curiously.
The high priest touched the brightly colored birds in his basket.
“Immortal—the birds?”
“Señor,” intoned the high priest solemnly, “only one thing is immortal on earth, and that is beauty. Our philosophies change with the years, history is a forgetting, science is man's last guess, but a work of beauty, señor, lives on and on. It is immortal”
Lassiter had never before seen the high priest aroused.
“What do you do?” he asked curiously.
“I paint with feathers.”
“Did you do the tapestry in your audience chamber?”
“That was my master Vaihue's work. If you love color and form, Señor Lassiter, if the rainbow bent over your mother's couch when you were foaled, then come”
He started moving his bulk impulsively toward the great entrance, then hesitated and stopped. It was the only impulsive movement Lassiter ever saw him commit.
He reconsidered.
“No, there will be time after you become the high priest, brother. We will hurry and ordain you high priest tomorrow or next day, but, señor, to look at my picture, you should have preparation, you should fast—and pray.”
Sweat dripped from Gogoma under his emotion. A condition of the priesthood suddenly came into the promoter's mind.
“Didn't you tell me, Gogoma,” he asked suddenly, “that priests were not allowed to marry?”
“Si, señor.”
Then the fat man interpreted the look that crossed Lassiter's face and went on persuasively:
“Señor, what a man loves in a woman is her loveliness. Touch it, and it wilts like a flower, but, señor, if—if you could hold the woman you love in perpetual youth, then—then—” the behemoth held up his finger and spread his pin-point eyes—“then, your love becomes immortal. She becomes part of your immortal idea, and the sense of sight is the sense of touch infinitely refined”
This last, uttered in a tone of revelation, meant nothing at all to the promoter. He took his foot down from the pilaster and moved southward toward Tilita.
“After all, I can not become high priest, Gogoma. I shall marry. Not immediately, not so soon after Birdsong's death, but I shall marry.”
Signs of animation faded from Gogoma's bulk. He fell in at Lassiter's side and waddled in unison to his step. Dwarfed by their surroundings, the two men moved southward across the vast piazza.
On his homeward walk Birdsong's tragedy reenveloped Lassiter. The promoter attempted to free himself of it. He told himself he had not loved the colporteur. They were hardly friends; they had never agreed on any point, and finally had quarreled and separated. But his sense of personal loss continued. Somehow Birdsong's taking away changed the whole atmosphere of Motobatl for him. The colporteur had some how spread an air of ordinariness, a feeling of the conventional moral values over the whole crater. Now Lassiter felt adrift.
As he approached the baobab the odor of garlic and pepper drifted to his nostrils through the jungle. When he stepped into the clearing he saw old Prymoxl stirring at a huge pot on her oven, while near by lay heaps of plantains, guavas, palm cabbages and red bananas. On the other side stood calabashes of palm wine and cow-tree milk. The tang of wine, fruit and pepper smelled like a banquet.
Lassiter stood in the edge of the open space looking at these preparations when the crone saw him. She proved in the height of good spirits. All her bedraggled gaiety had returned. She gave a little croak of pleasure at seeing Lassiter, dropped her work and bundled over to embrace and kiss her future son-in-law. The embrace was close and pervasive. Lassiter could feel the dry wrinkles of her lips, her flaccid dugs and her protuberant abdomen. Her breath stank of wine and garlic.
For the first time, the promoter realized that his mother-in-law was merely an old Indian slattern living in a tree. Birdsong's death, somehow, had given her this new objectivity. The colporteur was no longer in existence to rate the old slattern as an immortal soul on equality with Lassiter and himself.
Prymoxl patted the promoter gleefully on the back.
“Well, yerno (son-in-law), he is dead!”
The Stendill agent nodded mechanically.
“Wasn't it droll—died on the very spot where my niñas were lifted to the sun—after he had worried my heart out of me—well, it proves Pachacamac is stronger than his God and my niñas are safe.”
She cackled maliciously at this vindication of her faith.
The promoter released himself gently.
“Your niñas are quite safe, señora.”
“And he will no longer oppose your marriage with my Tilita?”
“No— He is gone.”
“And good riddance!” The grimalkin paddled back to her work well content. Her babies were safe; her daughter was about to be married; her religion had triumphed; old Prymoxl's universe was again pat. She took a gourd of palm wine and sipped it with a smacking.
“Well—” she soliloquized, “he who mocks the gods mocks himself. Old Gogoma taught me that when I was a muchacha.”
Here she smacked complacently and recalled another cliché—
“The gods give us life, and if we do not serve them they take our life away, eh, yerno”
She drained off her gourd, and began a great stirring.
There was something supremely ironic in this old baggage repeating with such gusto the high priest's veiled cynicisms. By good fortune she dropped into her more usual strain.
“Ah, well, I shall have a fine yerno, and he will get me a fine grandson to hold on my knees—as white as a Spaniard—perhaps two—perhaps three—perhaps the priests will allow all of Tilita's niñas to remain here in Motobatl—They have enough in the Sun, señor, quite enough”
The palm wine was making her optimistic. She looked around at Lassiter in the midst of her garrulity.
“Why, what is the matter?” she cried amazed. “This is a fine way for my yerno to look when he is about to be married”
The promoter realized that his face betrayed the horror with which the old woman's words had filled him. Only her gabbling had brought to him personally the abomination of the sun-worship, that his own children, the fruit of his and Tilita's love would be
“What is it? What is it?” cried the ancient in growing alarm. She dipped her gourd and shuffled toward him, spilling wine as she came. She watched him drink it with satisfaction.
“Holy Pachacamac, but you are not at all gay for a novio (bridegroom), señor. You are not ill?”
He denied all illness, and when she pressed him to know what was the matter, he hesitated for an explanation that would conceal his thoughts.
“Gogoma has asked me to become the high priest.”
The old woman stepped back. Her mouth dropped open.
“The high priest!”
“Si, señora."
“But—but a priest can not marry”
Her voice was an aspirate.
“No”
“Then—then my daughter—my little Tilita”
Her words wavered off. Lassiter saw that she was about to fall into the shocking grief of the aged. He put an arm around her.
“It's just an offer, señora—just a proposition”
The old baggage stood staring up at him, drawing short uneven breaths.
“Oh, señor, my daughter—my little hija”
Her fine old eyes grew dark and fear-struck.
“Merely a proposal, señora, a tender, an overture,” he repeated emptily.
The old woman looked around her with dazed eyes at the boiling pot, piles of fruit and jars of drink. The Stendill agent stood for a space and then, in exquisite discomfort, he touched his sombrero, wished her a “buenas dias” and moved away toward his paddlewood on self-conscious legs.
When a turn in the jungle mercifully shielded him from Prymoxl's eyes, the Stendill agent paused to wipe his face. He was surprized at the finality the old woman had construed into his first hint that he should become priest of the Sun. He had not realized how mandatory in the lives of the Incans was the slightest suggestion from the temple.
As he walked slowly toward his tree home, a curious thought came to him— Had Birdsong lived and completed his revolution, he could have married Tilita with a clear heart. He began to suspect that he had lost far more than the rebel army in the colporteur's death.
WHEN Lassiter reached the paddlewood, he saw Nunes seated just out side his cubicle on one of the little benches cleaning his automatic. The Colombian had the firearm in pieces beside him wiping each piece with a greasy rag. As he wiped, he whistled daintily and now and then he lifted and squinted through the barrel to admire the shine of its rifling. His wrists were still ringed with blue bruises where he had been tied.
The promoter nodded to the gallant without speaking and walked on into Birdsong's cubicle. The Colombian watched him and called after him cheerfully.
“I've taken everything Señor Birdsong had of value, Señor Lassiter—to pay for my mules.”
Sure enough the colporteur's packs lay scattered here and there in the cubicle, quite gutted. Bibles and his private papers were flung over the nipa matting. Among this wreckage, Lassiter saw the bundle of letters which Birdsong had written to his wife. The promoter picked these up together with one of the Testaments.
Nunes continued talking cheerfully through the thin partition.
“You can't fancy my surprize, señor, when I looked down and saw he was gone. I was quite startled, and I assure you, señor, it requires no small thing to startle Dom Pedro Balthasar Nunes.”
The promoter slipped these keepsakes of the dead man into his pockets with some vague idea of forwarding them to Mollie Birdsong. There was something pathetic in the worn little Testament which Birdsong had toiled to bring to Motobatl.
“And do you know, señor, I've wondered what could have whisked a man away like that when he was stuck so tight; and think, there was absolutely nowhere for him to go—and he went so quick—I'm a hard man to puzzle, señor, but this puzzles me”
Lassiter came' out buttoning the flaps of his pockets. The muleteer looked up curiously.
“It's a Bible and a package of letters.”
The muleteer nodded.
“The reason I took everything, Señor Birdsong had,” reexplained Nunes apologetically, “is because I need it and you don't, Señor Lassiter. As a rule I act generously, but now I can not. In the war you played the wise part—a friend to both sides, but I made enemies—of both sides—” he shrugged lightly—“quite declassé.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Lassiter curiously.
The Colombian began reassembling the firearm with the expertness of much practise.
“I will try to get what I want, señor,” he glanced at Lassiter with a smile that lifted his glossy mustache and showed his thick red lips. He arose, drew some greasy cartridges from his greasy pockets and clicked them into the automatic.
“Nunes,” said Lassiter gloomily, “you are going to get yourself thrown into the net after all.”
The muleteer laughed aloud.
“My dear camarado, to hear us talk any one would think I was the bridegroom and you the unhappy suitor. I swear you haven't the face of a man who will act as novio to the sweetest girl in Motobatl to night.”
“I'm not.”
“Not what?”
“Not going to marry Tilita tonight.”
Balthasar paused in addressing his pistol.
“You are not going to marry Tilita tonight?”
“No.”
“You—are-not-going-to-marry-Tilita-tonight?” he spaced his words with blank incredulity.
The New Yorker made a gesture.
“Why?”
The promoter stood looking at his muleteer.
“Well, I'll tell you— You're the only man I can tell since he's gone. It's this—this sun-worship stuff— It's merely a system of infanticide. Why, Nunes, this place is simply a huge baby farm— It's hellish, it's diabolical— It's—” He broke off with a shudder and stood staring.'
The Colombian was nodding a courteous, “Si, señor,” at each of these denunciations. Now at the interruption he waited a moment and finally prompted amiably.
“But you haven't said why you weren't going to marry, señor?”
Lassiter looked at him, came to himself.
“What?”
“Why aren't you going to marry?”
“Good , do you think I could marry in such a hole as this?”
The mule driver stared blankly, but presently ejaculated—
“Oh—no—no—certainly not”
“You wouldn't, would you?”
“If—if somebody else—er—killed the babies?”
“Somebody else”
“The priests, didn't you say?”
The two men stood staring at each other, both completely at sea. The Colombian finally said—
“Anyway, you are not going to marry Tilita tonight?”
“No, I am going to the temple.”
Nunes nodded solemnly.
“We are much alike, Señor Lassiter, that is what I would do.” He pondered a moment; then for some reason drew out his pistol again and carefully removed the cartridges from the chamber, one by one. He placed the automatic in one pocket, the cartridges in another, touched his sombrero and moved off toward the baobab. Before he was out of sight, he broke into his airy whistling again and did a little skip-step, like a boy impatient for some sport.
WHILE Lassiter talked to Nunes he had decided to become a priest of the Sun. Something within the man had determined upon cloistration in the teocalla. What it was that determined, when it had determined, the promoter did not know. The decision had come to pass in the blind alleys of his subconsciousness.
The first hint the man received was when he spoke tentatively to old Prymoxl. Now he had announced a definite decision to Nunes. He walked back into his cubicle and began packing his bags with a kind of thirst for the quiet and abnegation of the temple.
As he packed, the surroundings of the paddlewood brought Birdsong before his mind. He thought of how he had run after the little man for their last talk, of how Birdsong had warned him against idolatrous women, and had prayed that he should never marry Tilita. His present action and that prayer were a last strange coincidence.
Just around in the southern cubicle lay scattered Birdsong's Bibles where they would lie and mold until time and insects reduced them to dust. This was the outcome of the price of land advancing in Arkansas, and a squatter's gratitude to God for the law of adverse possession—this pitiful sacrifice for a callous muleteer.
Lassiter was stowing away the last of his things when he heard a step outside, and then a little gasp. He straightened with the deliberation of thirty-nine years and saw Tilita standing with his dinner in the sunlight of the entrance. She seemed breathless from hurrying, and now stood looking at him with frightened eyes. She put the platter on the table mechanically, and then stood mute, regarding first the man, then his packed bags.
The promoter remained motionless with the peculiar outspread, hanging hands of a man who is caught under suspicious circumstances. Mentally he blasphemed that he had packed his bags so hastily. He should have let the girl come and go. They advertised his decision. They shouted it without finesse. He had meant to consult with Tilita, to win her over gently, but his packed bags damned him.
She moistened her lips.
“My madre told me th-that perhaps”
Her composure which depended on her silence failed on this sentence. She began another—
“I r-ran all the way. I—I was afraid you would b—be g”
Suddenly she dropped to her knees with her arms across the platter—
“Oh—oh, primo!” she sobbed. “Th-this was our w-wedding supper”
She lay sobbing violently with her arms stretched among the fruits and wine and bowls that were meant to grace her wedding feast.
Lassiter crossed to her with a melting pity. He wrapped her in his arms.
“Oh, Tilita, beautiful, hush, don't cry, sweetheart”
He was patting her cheek; he lifted her blue-black hair and pressed his lips to the whiteness of her neck. The smell of her hair, the spice of the wine and the soft rondures of her form filled Lassiter with the vastness of his resignation.
One lobe of his brain set up a desperate pleading for this luscious woman; another began framing some excuse that would protect her from the devastating knowledge that had come to him. The old excuse of religion came to his mind, that mental buffer to interpose before the edge of reality. It was the first and last use Lassiter ever made of the science.
“Tilita, a man's religious duty should come first of all
“Tilita, both of us owe our lives to Pachacamac who made us
“Tilita, both of us will live forever as bride and groom in the bright mansions of the Sun”
With long sighs, the man mouthed the old, old clichés. The ashes, the emptiness of it filled his mouth with salt. He circled her breast and face with his arms and pressed his face to hers. He could feel her wet cheeks against his.
“Oh, Tilita, Tilita—” he shuddered.
His pain brought the girl some self control. She began mothering him and lifted herself, and partially lifted him. She stood with wet face, with one arm about his neck, and one hand on his breast. She glanced down at her platter, and lowered an arm to offer him some wine.
Her arm bent a little backward and dimpled at the elbow, with the soft flexibility of a woman's arm. Every move she made wrought upon the priest. He wondered desperately if it would be possible for them to live childlessly in Motobatl, but her very wealth of charm jeered at him. Her babies would be as dimpled and lovely as she. He could not touch the wine. They went together slowly to the hammock and sat.
SHE was so wretched that Lassiter prevailed upon her to lie at full length and he sat at the slenderness of her waist. They remained thus in silence, and presently the strange comfort that lovers give each other crept slowly over them both. It dulled their sadness. It hushed the trickle of minutes in a pool of timelessness.
The man looked sadly at the shadows about her eyes, at the little hollow at the base of her throat. Her hair seemed dark as if she were sick, and her eyes remained steadfastly on his.
Presently she whispered with a faint smile that she had prayed every evening since they first knelt by the web of the sun that he should come to believe in Pachacamac—and now he had.
“I shall become a vestal of the Sun,” she told him.
Their mood fell into a sort of adagio. The flattery of the cloister came to Lassiter pensively. He thought of himself as high priest, and of vestals, unused, holding a sort of faint violet sweetness. The possibility of a sort of happiness began to limn itself even on the murderous background of Motobatl. No doubt that mood laid hold of the girl even more strongly, for she was a child with a child's dreaminess.
He sat looking down at her, holding her hands, filled with her sweetness. A ray of the declining sun sifted through the paddlewood and its pool of light wore slowly across the floor. The perfume of the jungle breathed in upon them. A fly droned above the cordage of the hammock, and a last, when it settled on the strange rope of which the bed was made, it zinged away as if again the devil of insects were in pursuit.
The girl's gaze grew dreamy. Her breathing became quite regular. Her eyes drooped. Her anxieties of the preceding days, the torments of a girl's first love, the sleepless and terrible night she had spent in the temple, all rushed upon her as she lay relaxed and at peace with the man she loved.
She looked dewy in her sleep. Her eyes were like pale blue water-lilies above the crimson flowering of her lips. Now and then her fingers clutched Lassiter's at some impulse of her nerves.
The promoter realized that now was the painless time for him to go. He loosed his fingers gently from her hand; he lifted his weight carefully from the hammock and stood clear. It swung the hammock a little, but she slept with the limp soundness of thirteen.
The promoter stood looking down at her. The little cubicle seemed filled with light and perfume emanating from the sleeping girl. A great sadness came over the man. Had Birdsong lived, in this sweet flower garden he would have found rest and peace, the sweet communion of long nights and tenderness by day
He picked up his packs guardedly and for another moment hung looking at her with his burden. He was doing her a great, great kindness to preserve her beauty from the pain and murder of child-bearing in Motobatl; he was doing her a great, great goodness to preserve her faith and to resign her heavy bosom to the chill purity of the temple. This was the great kindness and the great goodness of Charles Lassiter's life.
On his way out, his eyes rested a moment on his untouched portion of the marriage feast.