The Eighth Day (25 page)

She never joined her guests at lunch. She descended at nine o'clock wearing long trailing black dresses of silk or lace, no longer in their first youth, decked out with bugles of jet and scarlet velvet bows. The first three evenings she placed Ashley far from her at the lower end of the table. She watched him and was sorry that she had asked him into the house. He spoke very little. He listened to Swiss botanists and Swedish archaeologists and Baptist missionaries, to businessmen and engineers (including a compatriot from Canada) and those eternal professional world travelers already composing their chapter on the “Land of the Condor.” She placed him beside the Chilean doctor at her hospital and the mayor of Manantiales. He wasn't a man's man. Men merely tried to impress him with their wealth or position. Women liked him, but women like any man who will give them his whole attention. She would let him stay out the week. On the fourth night she seated him at her left and there he remained.

“Mr. Tolland, what were you doing in my kitchen today?”

“It was on fire, ma'am.”

“And what did you do?”

“I put it out. I want your permission to go into the kitchen and laundry every day until they're in order. These earthquakes have shaken up your pipes and flues and boilers. I saw some places that could be dangerous.”

“In Chile gentlemen don't soil their hands, Mr. Tolland. I have repairmen and plumbers of my own.”

He looked her in the eye. “Yes, I've seen their work. . . . ? Mrs. Wickersham, I'm a tinker. And I'm miserable when I haven't anything to do. I want you to show me your orphanages and hospitals—all those parts that the visitors don't see. Before the boilers blow up and the drains overflow.”

“Gosh!”

He changed to his workingman's clothes. He collected some assistants and tools. He was introduced to the sisters and the teachers and the cooks and the doctors. By the end of the week there was a sawing and a hammering, soldering and ditchdigging. By the end of the second week partitions were removed and partitions were installed. The sisters were particularly delighted when he made them shelves, dozens of shelves. He cleaned fireplaces and wells and latrines.

He sang “‘Nita, Juanita” and “No gottee tickee, No gettee shirtee, At the Chinee laundryman's.”

To himself he said, “This is for Sophia.”

He looked younger every day. He was greeted with blushes and laughter when he arrived in the morning, “Don Jaime, el canadiense.” The wards knew him. The schoolchildren knew him. The blind girls were directed to rise and sing to him. The astonishment increased that so obviously important a personage spoke their language so well and that he deigned to labor. In the wards and on the sun terrace he would stop and talk to the amputated young and to the aged. He seemed to have a genius for remembering names. Early, before his hands and clothes were dirty, he would pick up the smallest orphans as though he had held children before. He belonged to that order of human beings from whom come hope and reassurance. What particularly struck Mother Superintendent was his deference to girls and women, an indefinable homage that was like something remembered from old legends and ballads.

Mrs. Wickersham defended her heart as best she could. The old are slow to believe that the young can repose a real friendship in them. At best the young can be polite, but are in a hurry to rejoin their coevals. Besides, they—the old—draw back from the demands that a new friendship might exact; they have seen so many fade, have begun to forget the valued ones. It may be that friendship is little more than a fatigued and fatiguing word. What then was the energy in the glance that Ashley turned toward her? Was that, really, friendship? Moreover, Ashley arrived at the Fonda at the moment when Mrs. Wickersham was losing control of her life's rudder. She had begun to weary of well doing. All those girls she had collected and trained and married—the blind whom she had taught lacemaking and weaving. Aïe, Aïe, Aïe! The times she had been awakened at four in the morning for one thing or another—to save a boy from the brutality of the police, or a member of the police force from the resentment of the workers. She was a citizen of Chile and had received ribbons of recognition from a grateful republic. She had appealed to the President himself to extend clemency to some half-mad worker who had desecrated a church or some distraught girl who had hurled her baby into a cistern. Doers of good have their seasons of weakness. They know that there is no spiritual vulgarity equal to that of expecting gratitude and admiration, but they allow themselves to be seduced by the sweet fantasies of self-pity. “No one has ever done anything for me, spontaneously.” She had lost touch with the emotion which had first prompted her to these works. Sorriest of all, she had grown weary of women and woman talk, of their way of seizing on the hopeful or the alarming—exaggerating both—of their helplessness when confronting a choice between two evils. And, like all persons of resolute mind and long experience, she had become impatient at the presence of independence in others. She had become bad company to herself. She had invited cynicism into her thought; her tongue had become malicious. She had decided to devote what few years remained to her to enjoying herself—to the only enjoyments left to her: to trying to rule others' lives and to making of herself a “character.” She was fashioning a mask for her face—Mrs. Wickersham, amusing, a little frightening, and always right, wise, and admirable. Some go forward and some go back. A sort of insolence in regard to the opinions of others expressed itself in her wearing, in the evening, a décolleté that had gone out of fashion for half a century and in a free application of the rabbit's foot and rouge.

And then John Ashley arrived at the Fonda and proffered his friendship.

“Mr. Tolland, do you play cards?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Once in a while we play cards in the smoking room. We play for money. I don't want the Fonda to be known as a gambling hell, so I've made a rule: no player can win more than twenty dollars. Any profits he makes above that must go into the jar for my hospital. Do you play
dos pícaros?
”

“Yes.”

“We're playing tonight at midnight.”

At last Ashley could play without dissembling his skill. There were some rich men at the table—world travelers, landowners in the valley, and nitrate and copper men. He took their money. He took Mrs. Wickersham's money. A slate hung on the wall. At the end of the evening she wrote on it the sum accruing to the hospital. Her eyes glittered. A hundred and eighty dollars! A Roentgen-ray machine cost six hundred dollars.

A few days later:

“Mr. Tolland, do you take your breakfast on the roof?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Come on up on the roof after dinner. I have some good rum. We'll talk.”

So began the late conversations under the stars. They sat facing the mountains, with the jug on a low table between them. The peaks—sightless, noble, and long enduring—seemed to await their next event, to be leveled, or riven and folded. It was spring. At intervals from the distance could be heard a susurrus, a faint thunder, and a plop—some avalanche of ten thousand tons. With the moonrise glory suffused heaven and earth. The peaks came alive; they seemed to sway and sing, serene fields between black pinnacles. (“Beata should see this! The children should see this!”) The conversations were about Chile, about the early days of mining, about the hospitals and schools, about men and women. Ashley, fatigued by the hard day's work, rejoiced in grateful friendship, but Mrs. Wickersham was wretched and angry. Curiosity devoured all other emotions. Who was he? What was his story? The more she loved him the more she resented his refusal to talk about himself. She had visited his room in his absence and examined his possessions. She had come upon some faded blue photographs—in one a tall young woman was standing by a pond holding a baby in her arms; three young children sat at her feet. Even in the worn print she could read health, beauty, and harmony. She studied it a long time with something near to bitterness. To anyone else in the world she—the “dragon,” the “tartar”—would have put direct questions (“What are you doing down here without your family?” “Why did you lie to me?”), but she was a little afraid of Ashley. At moments she was so filled with enraged frustration that she was on the point of ordering him out of the hotel. She had had a long experience of fugitive men; it never occurred to her that he might be of their number. On the fifteenth night of Ashley's stay there was a long discussion at the dinner table of the “rat list”—its celebrities past and present, the money that could be earned at rat catching, and the unremitting attention necessary for the hunt.

Toward seven in the evening on that day an unaccustomed bustle and noise had been heard in the corridors of the Fonda, laughter from the houseboys and smothered shrieks from the girls. A favorite guest of the house had arrived, the famous Mr. Wellington Bristow, a businessman, owner of an import-export office in Santiago de Chile. He was an American citizen, he said, born in Rome of an English father and a Greek mother, but he had been heard to describe his origins differently. He carried a score of business cards in his pockets announcing that he was sole representative in Chile of certain American pharmaceuticals, of Scotch woolens, of a French perfume, a Bavarian beer, and so on. He was a general favorite and a liar, cheat, and finagler. His small head was covered with short curls and was set on the wide shoulders of an athlete. Around the card tables at midnight he looked thirty, at dinner forty, but at noon he could have passed for sixty, for his face then appeared anxious and tired, etched by innumerable small lines, not all of them the gift of laughter. He was dressed in the height of the London fashion of thirty years ago, favoring brightly colored vests and checkered trousers. He had restless jeweled hands that attracted aces. His linen was not always snowy; his cuffs were frayed. He was ceaselessly occupied in making money and often hungry. He was the best company in the world.

Wellington Bristow was every inch a businessman and a genius at it, but he loved negotiation more than money; he was of a generous nature; and he was joyous. Hence he had three strikes against him. He had to complicate a transaction, draw in third parties, bury it under provisos and “riders.” He loved to accelerate a negotiation with the hint of a bribe or to threaten the recalcitrant with an intimation of blackmail. Inflating promises and concealing risks were a pleasure. He sacrificed his very commissions to render the deal more exciting. He loved business for
its own sake.
What little money he had he could not keep. He was constantly giving presents he could not afford, which is the soul of generosity. On each of his visits to the Fonda he brought Mrs. Wickersham something new and delightful from the great world—the first typewriter seen in Manantiales, the first fountain pen, the first caviar, an evening cloak by Worth. On this trip he arrived with ten bottles of champagne; there were holes in his shoes and socks. No one has ever seen a successful businessman who is joyous, for joy is praise of the whole and cannot exist where there are ulterior aims. His joy was of the purest sort; it stole its gaiety from dejection and danger. What a talker he was, what a persuader! All appearance took on whatever coloring he imposed upon it. The great persuaders are those without principles; sincerity stammers.

The first Ashley knew of Mr. Bristow's presence in the house was the sound of Mrs. Wickersham's voice, raised in indignation, from the hall below: “No, Mr. Bristow, I will not have a coffin! I don't care whether it's made of ebony or not, I will not have it in the house!”

But that was merely one of Mr. Bristow's jokes. The ten bottles of champagne had been brought into the Fonda in a long narrow box, yet . . . ? yet it was not entirely a joke. Mr. Bristow's thoughts ran on deathbeds, coffins, and funerals. In these matters he was not only serious, but of a high calming gravity. He haunted the dwellings of the moribund. He eased their passage and awoke a longing for the farther shore. He stepped aside for the viaticum, tapping his foot impatiently, but on many fading eyes the last image was that of a beautiful youth guiding them through flowering orchards. The people of Santiago, of all classes, would knock at his door at any hour and beg him to write words to be inserted in the newspapers with the announcement of a death. Some of them have passed into proverbial lore: “Strangers, only those who have known great joy can know our grief. Family of Casilda Romero Valdés,” “Stranger, pause: death is not bitter to those who have watched the suffering of their child. Family of Mendo Cásares y Castro.”

Wellington Bristow came to Manantiales three or four times a year. Manantiales was a “little Amsterdam” of the Andes, a market and outlet, mostly clandestine, for emeralds which found their way, westward bound, over the passes. An underground route to the capitals of the world passed through a number of squalid huts at the edge of the town. Mr. Bristow picked up emeralds at Manantiales, before climbing higher for chinchilla pelts. Mrs. Wickersham looked forward to his visits. He brought the gossip of the coast; he stimulated the play at the card tables; and he teased and left unsatisfied her abounding curiosity concerning himself. Who was he? Who was he, really? He published his news for her at table on the first evening. She seated him at a distance from her so that the whole company could enjoy his chronicles: trials, bankruptcies, deaths and funerals (“I don't want to hear about funerals, Mr. Bristow!”), imprisonments, hurried marriages (“Orange blossoms will burst into bloom prematurely, Mrs. Wickersham, if you light a fire under them.” “I know that, Mr. Bristow”), guns fired in bedrooms, forged wills, leper wins lottery, deaths and funerals (“I don't want to hear about funerals, Mr. Bristow!”), miraculous cures before suburban altars, Inca princess unmasked as Miss Beatrice Campbell of Newark, New Jersey, the newest modes (cartwheel hats and knuckle-length sleeves), deaths and funerals (“Stop it right now!”). No wonder she charged him a mere dollar a day.