The Gun-Runner: A Novel/Chapter 33
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE LAST WORD
McKinnon was very happy. It was six long days since they had dug the bullet out of his arm and told him to lie quiet for a while and rest up and make blood. But on this particular morning President Duran's own glimmering state-coach had carried him away from the Hospital, and he had been given prompt and official permission to go to the Palace roof, where Aikens, the Boston youth who acted as the Guariqui operator, was still struggling over his half-renovated wireless apparatus.
So McKinnon had been carried to the roof in a chair, by two of Duran's own body-guard, and the white sunlight and the many-tinted city and the companionship of the lonely and garrulous boy from Boston went to his head, like wine, and left him foolishly and wistfully happy.
He laughed at the idea of a corrugated-iron wireless station on the roof of a Palace; it seemed as incongruous to him, he told Aikens, as a Crusader smoking a Pittsburg stogie, or a monastery with mail-chutes, or a cathedral with a cash-register. Then Aikens led him to the battlemented edge of the flat roof and showed him the arc-lights that swung in Avenida Sacramento and Calle Florida, and the new power house toward Paraiso Hill, and the statuary that gleamed through the green palms of the Parque Nacional, and the Asilo Chapai and the roof of the new Boynton Hospital, and the columned front of the Theatro Locombio. Then he drew himself up and protested that Guariqui wasn't such a one-horse town, after all.
McKinnon continued to look down at Guariqui, after Aikens had gone back to his work. He could see the iron-fenced Palace gardens, cool and shadowy and secluded-looking. In the Plaza beyond he could see the splash of water from a frond-hidden fountain, and the white statue of some unknown hero who had died in some unknown war for Locombian liberty. He could see the yellow front of the cathedral and the sun-steeped Prado white with dust. He could see the American bluejackets, from the Princeton, who were still picketing the streets, and a bullock-cart that crawled noisily over the cobblestones.
At the head of Avenida Sacramento he could, see another detachment of white-helmeted marines clustered about one of the Princeton's machine guns. He could make out a scattered group of Ulloa's mounted Irregulars crawling in toward Guariqui, across the undulating, flat-shadowed plain of burnt grass. He could see rows of flat houses and red-tiled roofs, and tame buzzards perched on ridge-poles, and a lonely and high-standing royal palm or two. And beyond the sun-bathed town and the burnt plain lay the gray-green hills and the lonely blue peaks of the Cordilleras.
Then the sound of cheering floated up to him, and to the east, advancing along Calle Nacional toward the Plaza, was a long line of infantry headed by a mounted band that broke into shrill and stirring music as they détoured in past the turreted barracks. He could see the gathering street crowds, the men in linen and duck, the bareheaded women in mantillas, the Princeton's midshipmen in tight-fitting tunics, pretending to ignore the heat, the marching lines of barefooted men in grotesquely soiled and ragged uniforms.
He knew that De Brigard's movement had been crushed, that the revolution was already a thing of the past. There was a smouldering province or two on the lower Pacific slope, but a week or two of gun-seizing by Arturo Boynton's mounted police would stifle all that was left of Ganley's coup d'état. And Ganley himself? He knew that Ulloa was still patrolling the coast to cut off Ganley's escape. He wondered, with a strange sense of detachment, just where between the blue peaks of the Cordilleras and the Caribbean's pulsing surf-line that man of destiny was skulking and hiding. He wondered where under that unpitying and high-arching tropical sky the lonely fugitive was still scheming and plotting and battling for his ultimate prerogative, for his mortal right to live.
Yes, it was all over and done, McKinnon told himself, wearily, as a comprehension of the solitudes that enisled him began to creep like a slowly rising tide through every fibre of his being. They meant nothing to him, these outlandish soldiers in ragged uniform, this sun-baked city among its lonely hills, these denim-clad peons with long-bladed machetes, these red-tiled homes of a people who were foreign to him, this over-gaudy Latin palace with its second-rate statuary and its gilding and mirrors that would be an affront to a Hudson River steamboat's cabin. It was a land of strangers to him. He suddenly knew that he was home sick for the North.
He was possessed with a longing for the older and more austere ways of life, for more tranquil and muffled and orderly days, for the crowded and companionable cities of his own kind. There seemed something barbaric to him in the very music of the band that brayed and shrilled from the streets below. In the men who followed that band he could make out the narrow shoulders and the protruding cheek bones of Carib-Indian blood. They seemed more than outlanders to him; they were scarcely white men. And he was tired of them and their foolish little wars; he was homesick.
He heard a movement at his side, and he looked up from the embrasure over which he leaned to see Alicia Boynton standing almost within reach of his hand. She seemed nearly ghost-like, to his first startled glance, for she was dressed in white linen, and the things through which she had passed and many days and nights of anxiety had left her face still colourless. The strong sunlight, too, accentuated the wistful little hollow that had crept into her cheek. The touch of tragedy which this shadow in some way gave to her face was contradicted, though, by the deep and happy look in her eyes.
Yet as she stood there at McKinnon's side the strangeness and the loneliness of Guariqui seemed almost to fade away. She humanised it and brought it nearer to him. Then his eyes fell on the figure of an officer in full uniform, passing in through the Palace gates, with his scabbard in his gauntleted hand. He was as gilded and as ornamental as a character from a Broadway musical comedy. But he served to bring a wayward surge of misery over the soul of the American.
McKinnon sighed, openly and audibly. He could recall, only too easily, the beginning of that vague unhappiness. It had first come to birth in the Hospital, when General Alcantara, as Alicia had called him, accompanied her to the bed in the little blue-walled ward. He was a dapper and dashing officer, and in explaining that he had once studied at West Point, Alicia suggested that the two of them might have much in common. But McKinnon had resented that youthful officer's presence at her side, from the first. From the first, too, he had despised the over-ready and white-toothed smile, the padded and punctilious little figure, the fawn-like eyes of Latin brown, as soft as a woman's. He had even more resented the panther-like grace of the scrupulously uniformed little figure, and the tropic-born cadences of the light-noted and carefully modulated voice as the two of them chatted and laughed together. It made McKinnon think of himself as awkward and ungainly, as raw and raucous in his address to women. He had maintained the pretence, to himself, that it did not matter, that it never could or would matter. But he knew, at last, that this was not true, that it mattered more than he dared admit.
"You mustn't do this," the girl was saying, reprovingly, as she drew closer beside him, so that her tinted parasol threw its shadow over his head.
"But it's so good to be out again," he said. "And they're giving Ulloa's Irregulars an ovation down there.”
"But you're not strong yet," she warned him, looking up into his face with anxious eyes.
"Strong!" he laughed. "Why, I feel like a shorthorn in from the range!"
"But that is a tropical sun you are standing in."
"It isn’t the sun that makes me feel so bad," he confessed. "It's being so far away from—from home, from—oh, from everything!"
There was a minute or two of silence as they stood gazing down over Guariqui.
"I know," she said at last, comprehendingly. He looked down at her, a little surprised at the humility in her voice. She had seemed a little aloof from him during the last few days; he had not been able to guess at the source of that aloofness. Guariqui and its official life, he felt, had flung a bar between them. It seemed to have drawn and shut her in as one of its own. He had grown almost afraid of her, since the morning he had seen her from his window, sitting up so slender and fragile in Duran's flashing official landau as it swept out through the Palace gates surrounded by galloping and gorgeous cuirassiers with brazen breastplates and horsetail helmets. And the consciousness of this alienation brought a touch of bitterness into his voice as he went on.
"No; I don't believe you do know. This is the life you were born to. This is your home. It means everything to you!"
"Not everything," she corrected him, very quietly. He could not see her face, for she was gazing out over Paraiso Hill.
"But I know you would never be happy away from it, from everything here that has been making me feel so lost and miserable, any more than I would be happy away from the things that would make you feel lost and miserable."
She glanced up with a little look of surprise.
"I'm not a Locombian," she said, laughing a little.
It was his turn to laugh, though there was little mirth in it.
"No; but you are the sister of Dr. Arturo Boynton, Minister of War for the Republic of Locombia, Member of the Federal"
She looked up at him again, and met his gaze without hesitation.
"And you are the man who saved the Republic of Locombia from—well, you know what from!"
He threw up his hand with a gesture of protest.
"I was thinking hanged little about the Republic of Locombia," he retorted, with his cheery and companionable laugh. "I wanted to get you out of that Ganley mess.”
"Then you saved me," she protested.
"When I happened as a primary consideration to be fighting to save my own precious neck!" he deprecated.
He noticed the silent reproof in her eyes, and as he saw it a new courage began to grope upward out of the darkness of his heart. He thought, a little enviously, of the days when she had been so close to him, when the arm of no intervening convention had stretched out between them. Then he thought of the blood and dust and grime of his battle, of the blood and dust and grime that lay over so many of his years. And all his life suddenly seemed an empty and aimless and wasted life to him. It seemed an affront to her, even to tell her how unworthy he was, yet the growing hunger and ache in his heart forbade him to keep silent. He watched a condor wheeling above the gray-green hilltops until it became a drifting black speck in the turquoise sky.
The glare of open light made his eyes ache. He remembered a certain sentence of Ganley's: "It's not what you'd call a white man's country." The thought of that brought his troubled gaze back to the woman at his side.
"Have you always been happy here?" he demanded, audaciously.
"Are we ever always happy?" she asked, after a silence.
"But do you expect to be happy, humanly happy, here?"
She shook her head, slowly, from side to side.
"Not now," she answered.
Again a mocking flame of hope shot through him. But he did not speak. Her hand lay on the embrasure beside him. He reached out his arm and quietly covered the white fingers with his own. His mournful glance met hers, and for the first time the full significance of her nearness came home to him. She drew back a little, frightened, and slowly raised her head. The touch of her hand on his had turned his very blood to fire.
"I love you," he said, without moving. She swayed a little beside the embrasure; but she did not speak. He reached out his unbandaged arm, as she still stood gazing at him, and made a movement, a hungry and pleading movement, as though to draw her closer to him. "I love you," he repeated, inadequately.
A soft and luminous beauty crept into her face with its tragic little hollow under either cheek-bone; it seemed to suffuse and renew and transform it as spring itself transforms the world. She raised her hands slowly, almost mournfully, as though it cost her a great effort, until they rested on his shoulders.
"I am not worthy of it," she said, with a break in her voice that was almost a sob. She would have said more, but her speech was silenced by his movement, a movement which brought her trembling into his arms.
"I have always loved you," she whispered, weakly.
"And you would go back with me?" he pleaded.
"Anywhere," she answered, as she raised her wistfully smiling lips to his. "To the end of the world!"
Some wordless languor of surrender left the suddenly saddened lips still parted, and caused her heavy eyelids to droop over unquestioning and capitulating eyes. It was an elemental and absolute relinquishment, as quiet and yet as complete as the surrender to Death itself, touched with sorrow only as all things that fringe on the Infinite are so touched. It was love, the deep love that lives only in deep souls.
They were alone under the high-arching tropical sun. The condor wheeled back over Paraiso Hill unnoticed; barefooted soldiers in ragged denim marched by under the Palace unseen; Ulloa's mounted band brayed itself into the distance unheard.