The Valley of Adventure/Chapter 11
JUAN did not overtake the men from Los Angeles. They appeared to have no relish for his company; the moment they saw him following, his long legs quickly discounting the advantage of their start, they hastened on as if walking for a prize. Juan arrived in time to see Magdalena returning from the public entrance, which she had barred behind them as if she distrusted their return.
"What rascals! That Vincente Felix looks like he would steal sheep, and his companions are not much better." Magdalena wiped her hands on her apron, as if she had touched something unclean, putting her thoughts into simple words that Juan could understand.
"One of them has stolen more than sheep, Doña Magdalena," he told her.
"The one with mustaches like pin-feathers on a goose; that would be the man, Don Juan."
"Sebastian Alvitre, the robber of the road. You have good judgment of men's faces, doña."
"Alvitre! Now, I let him go without hearing him speak, notable brigand that he is!" Magdalena hastened to the door, as if to repair her over sight for an opportunity of picking up a cheap souvenir, as it might be said, which she could have boasted of in future times.
There was nothing in the road but the dust of the visitors' going, and an ox-cart coming from the field with white onions that looked like a load of snow.
"Brigand no more, as you have heard," Juan laughed, diverted by the ingenuous woman's outspoken disappointment. "You can stop at his tavern the first time you go to the pueblo, and hear him talk by the hour."
Magdalena gave him a look of reproof, drawing her finely traced brows in a frown.
"As if I would put my foot into a robber's den, Don Juan! Alvitre in his tavern will rob twenty men where he used to rob one on the road."
"Yes, I think a traveler would be about as safe with him in one place as another."
"You learn our speech fast, Don Juan; already it spins from your tongue like a thread from the wheel."
"It is a good place for learning many things, this mission San Fernando. Would to God, Doña Magdalena, I could stay here forever."
"You would not leave us? No, there is no ship goes to your country."
"I must leave soon, doña; across the land, the way I came."
"The poor Indians would weep to see you go, Juan, and Cristóbal—Cristóbal could not be held in iron."
"There would not be a river of tears, the walls of San Fernando would stand," Juan laughed, but uneasily, with a poor pretense.
Doña Magdalena studied him in silence a moment, tender sympathy in her soft dark eyes.
"A man like you should have a wife, and little-ones around his knee," she said. "What injustice in laws which condemn a kind stranger, and let Sebastian Alvitre walk free!"
"But it is that way, doña. A man does not want to be shot for being nothing worse than a stranger."
"I heard Padre Ignacio tell Don Geronimo that he had sent to the capital to get a paper for you, something that will make you a free man, Juan. Stay at the mission until it comes, then you can find a wife without looking far, and make a home. There was a grant of land to Don José Sinova, father of our little Tula, which now comes to her. She has gold in a box, too, plenty of it. When the day comes, and you have your paper, Juan, Padre Ignacio will give her to you for the asking."
"Doña Magdalena, she wouldn't have me for the taking, or at any price, no matter how cheap," said Juan, seeming to despise himself, his words were so pointed with disdain.
"That's what a man always thinks when he adores a woman," Magdalena returned, superior by reason of her inner knowledge. "Go now, little Juan, about your business and let me do mine. But look in at the door as you pass, and speak to her. If your eyes are in the right place, you will see a color rush up her throat and spread in her face like measles. It will be nothing worse than her heart trying to jump out where you can see it, great simpleton that you are, Don Juan."
Gertrudis Sinova, affectionately called Tula by her equals at the mission, sat where she could see the fountain through the open door. Near by stood a long table on which patterns of garments cut of cheerful blue and white cotton cloth were orderly spread. Along the sides of the table, ranged on benches, the sewing class was at work, advanced students guiding the hands of beginners, a happy chatter filling the immense room, spacious enough to have seated a class of four times the number.
As it was, there were fifty or more girls under Tula's gentle hand, from seven to twenty years of age, eager to learn the one art of civilization that seemed to have a great allurement for them, and in which they displayed astonishing aptitude. Two windows, small for the great depth of room, fended by strong hand-beaten bars, were set the height of a man in the thick adobe wall. These, with the wide open door, gave light for the labors that were going forward there. It was sufficient in those long, cloudless white days of summer and autumn, although the farther corners of the apartment were in gloom.
The mission padres were sparing of their windows, probably owing to the scarcity of glass, perhaps due to some more remote reason of their own. Their interiors were gloomily melancholy, out of keeping with their airy arches and white-plastered outer walls. The Mission San Fernando was an over-built establishment; it never had developed up to the plans made for it by Padre Lasuen, its founder. The western end of the long building, impressive in dimensions even in comparison with the great structures of the modern city which has grown out of the old pueblo where Comisionado Felix strutted his brief day, was at this time used for the storage of grain, and other products of the fields, At an early period the women neophytes had been locked there at night to keep them from temptation: later the king's soldiers had been quartered in the vast apartment where Tula Sinova held her sewing classes; the marks of their heavy boots were in the soft red tiling of the floor.
This bright autumn morning, when the scarred hills seemed to have drawn so near that one could have called greeting to the shepherds in the little green canyons with their flocks, the old barracks room was as cheerful as sunlight and youth could make it, and there is no illumination in all the devices of men that can reach so far into the heart as these. Juan Molinero felt the gushing of a great happiness, when he stood looking in at the open door.
Tula Sinova was all in white, like an evening primrose. There was a little spray of fragrant jasmine blossoms in her rippling hair above her ear. Her head was bent slightly over the work upon which her hands lay idle; one sandalled foot was thrust out a little, as if it started toward the open door to follow her dreams away. She was pensive, and seemed oppressed; there was a shadow in her cheek as of a face that sorrow had held between its hands.
Juan had stopped a little way beyond the door, his feet quiet on the dusty earth that bordered the tile-paved path. He knew that Doña Magdalena was watching him, and laughing at his timid heart. Gertrudis seemed to feel his shadow in the path, as one feels a cloud before closed eyes. He removed his low-crowned hat as she turned her face, greeting him with a smile.
It might have been a Castilian gentleman from the very shadow of the Alhambra whom she beheld standing between her and the fountain, the sun glinting in his bright hair, striking in little metallic gleams as she had seen it glint and glisten in the sands of Santa Monica, wet in the racing seas. The tailor of San Fernando had done credit to his craft and justice to the frame of his customer. Padre Mateo had seen to that. Denied the pleasure of fine raiment himself, the honest padre had no small enjoyment in the example of elegance and grace that this adopted son of the mission presented.
Juan's limbs carried the garments of a strange race with gentlemanly ease that was equaled only by the facility with which he acquired the speech to harmonize with them. He stood before Tula in a fine suit of silver-gray velvet, lacings of gold on his short jacket, tasselings of gold on the green sash. His own skin was not tighter on his thighs than his pantaloons, cut with flaring bottoms which almost covered his boots and strapped under the instep, in the fashion that was best suited to men who lived more than half their time in the saddle. A little trickling-down of hair from the temple made a narrow band of beard, which was cut square-ended midway of his cheek, in the true Castilian way. He was a supple, sinewy, brown and comely man.
Tula laid aside the linen that she had held in her lap, and came to the door, a thimble on her finger, scissors hanging like a crucifix on a black braid about her neck.
"You would look in at my class, Don Juan?" said she.
How could Doña Magdalena ever think of so gross a comparison for the delicate tint that ran, like a shadow over a fair land, from throat to cheeks as she spoke. Measles! scorned Juan. It was the impalpable pigment of sunset above the hills; the elusive beauty of the sweetest bloom.
"I will include the class," said he, but he could not have sworn, on the word of a true man, that Tula was keeping a class that day. There was Tula in the door. A man's vision fused upon her radiance; it faltered like a dying beam at the window of her eyes.
"Will you enter, Don Juan, and see the class at work?"
"I am only passing, Miss Gertrudis, there is a new liberty for my feet today. You have heard that the soldiers are gone?"
"I saw them ride away at sunrise, thank God!"
"So I can cross the road now, without fear of the dogs," he laughed, shifting his feet like a bashful swain, his eyes now on the path, now on her face, now on the hills, varying as the seed of an alamo blown on its feathery wings.
"Be watchful, Don Juan! How can you go with a laugh when there is so much peril? They may be waiting for you to appear, as before."
"No, there is no pretense this time; they are gone."
"Doña Magdalena says it is a plot to humble the padres. They believe the Indians will rise."
"Never against the padres."
"Against the soldiers themselves, or perhaps against the authority of Don Geronimo?"
"Who knows?" Juan returned her the Spanish answer, making an exposition of entire neutrality of mind with his outspread hands, facile as he was in that mode of expression from long use of sign language among savage neighbors and foes in the forests of Kentucky.
"But why will you cross the road this morning, Don Juan? Captain del Valle is a man who will not accept defeat; he may be waiting around the wall."
"I want to see the field of the two palms, where the melons grow," said Juan. "Captain del Valle is in the pueblo, but I believe with you that he is waiting his day."
"Then you must not go out of the mission bounds, Don Juan."
"The mission is only a few miles square, Miss Tula; just a little place for a man who has roamed a continent."
"Your heart is eager to be away, Don Juan. Home is dearer than friends in a distant place."
Juan turned his head to see if Doña Magdalena had gone into her kitchen. She was standing where he had left her, watchful duenna that she was, for all her bantering.
"I will pass on," he said, turning his hat in his hands.
"Until the next meeting, Don Juan," she returned, gravely courteous as if that time stood far away.
"They say the rains will come in six weeks," said Juan, as if a messenger had come with the news that morning, and politeness constrained him to repeat it. But he did not advance a foot upon his way.
"We must close the door and light candles in the daytime, then," Tula sighed. "I would keep these bright days."
"There is no thunder here, I have been told."
"That will be a blessing to a coward such as I. When thunder crashes, I shrivel like a snail."
Magdalena was standing with hands on her hips, in posture of impatience, rather severe and wholly imperious to behold, although Juan was certain that she was smiling, as an indulgent mother smiles when her small son strains and struggles to reach a fruit far over his head.
"I will pass on, Miss Tula," said Juan. But not convincingly; more in a way that seemed to plead for a detaining word.
"Until the next sight, Don Juan," she murmured, filling her breast with a quick breath that escaped again at once, a sigh. Tula was fingering the scissors on the tape; she looked up, her eyes hesitant, timid, yet governed by a curiosity that was not to be denied.
Juan was trapped; he felt hot blood in his face as he turned his glance away, withdrawing it like a hand caught pilfering. Padre Ignacio was returning from the mill; there was a sound of the cargo of onions being unloaded from the cart.
"There is a pomegranate tree in the field of two palms, and I never have seen such a tree," said Juan, sighing as if pomegranate trees bore fruit of misery. He shifted from foot to foot; his gaze was on the brick-red tiles of the garden walk, his flat hat was crumpled in his hand.
"It is a sour fruit," she said; "when it bursts in the sun it is red like garnets."
What a sad thing to bear fruit that burst red in the sun! What a misfortune for the melancholy pomegranate tree! What a tremendous sigh!
"Now, I am going," said Juan. He put his hat on his head; he moved his foot in the path.
"Go with God, Don Juan," said she, low, like a benediction. And after that word he could not stay.
There were wonders to be seen in the field of the two palms, where the grey adobe wall ran in line as true as transit could draw it. First of all, there was the wonder of the wall itself, not less than eight feet thick at the bottom, where it stood on a foundation of round stones brought from the river bed, tapering to three feet at the top. It was nine or ten feet high, and enclosed at least two hundred acres. Juan stood at the gate admitting to this fruitful enclosure, struck with astonishment by the evidence of so much labor so unwisely spent.
It seemed as if the padres had expected the mastodons and camels to rise up out of the bismuth pits which held their bones in the valley crossed by the harbor road. Padre Mateo had pointed out the melancholy place where wild creatures of a past age had walked into this viscous lake. The people of the Pueblo de Los Angeles used the material now to make their roofs waterproof. They found the bones of these ancient monsters, immense past belief, sound as the day they had mired and wallowed down to their miserable end. It seemed, indeed, as if the padres had expected these prodigious beasts to come again to the valleys of California and invade their fields.
Hundreds of hands had toiled through many months to raise that wall, brick upon brick of sun-dried adobe bound with a mortar of mud; savage hearts must have rebelled at the enforced task, which must have appeared unreasonable even in their slow and groping minds; savage hearts must have been broken, savage pride fallen crushed to rise no more, driven by lash and bayonet to this labor of lifting a rampart strong enough to stop an army, against no greater enemy than domestic cattle and murmuring flocks of sheep.
Juan looked at this very Chinese wall of a fence in amazement. It was the first evidence of waste and extravagance he had seen in the building and economy of San Fernando. What a needless expenditure of human force had gone into that wall! What an unfeeling disregard for men driven to labor to this fatuous end! A wall half as high, with a foundation a fourth as broad, would have turned the wildest animal in the mission herds, and there were no others ranging that country that would have any desire to break into a field.
Borromeo had repeated to him Don Geronimo's saying that there was nothing in the world so plentiful and so cheap as human labor, which Juan's devices were all designed to conserve. It required the illustration of this thick broad wall to give him the true valuation of the mayordomo's argument, an unquestionable interpretation of his social and economic ethics. Untempered cruelty was the foundation of that belief, insatiable greed its distorted genius. The padres were blind to its monstrous barbarity in their zeal of building to the glory of Christ.
Many Indians, young and old, were at work in the big field where the two palms grew, some of them harvesting the onions, of which there were several acres, picturesque groups of them, their long hair about their ears, loading sheaves of grain upon carts. Others with hoes and spades were letting the water from the ditches in among the little fields of turnips, cabbages, beets and green things, the luxuriance of which proved the strength of the soil.
Close by the gate there grew a field of maize, green and flourishing this late November day as Juan ever had seen it in midsummer in his own clime. Young Indians were gathering the green ears, with a great amount of laughter and happy calling to each other from the jungle of tall stalks. An ox-cart was being heaped with the ears to be taken to the Indian village. That amount would make only one meal, and a scanty one as measured by the neophytes' desire for this delectable food.
Padre Ignacio had told Juan how the Indians had come to value maize after a patient and slow persuasion to induce them to accept it. Like all cultivated vegetables and grains, maize was strange to the California Indians when the padres brought it there. These Indians knew nothing about agriculture in their primitive state; they were roaming, homeless animals; their sustenance was gathered from the bounty of nature, the bitter acorns of the encina, or live oak, forming the principal item of their food. Juan remembered this as he stood viewing the fields abundant in the ripe and ripening crops. The Indians had advanced marvelously in two generations under the padres' hands.
There was a pleasant smell rising from the ground where the water spread between rows of growing cabbages and beets, as if it breathed the incense of its humble thanks for this blessing. With deft strokes of hoe and spade the Indians led little streams, which went crawling hungrily, eager in the way of water, whether it rushes in beneficence or roars in destruction. It left a little beading of foam on the ditch sides as it sank, the plants, growing on little ridges, leaning almost imperceptibly at the touch of it, as if they relaxed from the strain of waiting, famished in the ardent sun.
The greater part of the field within the strong adobe wall had been sown to grain, the stubble of which was still standing almost knee-high to a man, proof of the prodigious leavening that land contained. Juan calculated that the ripe grain must have been as high as the heads of the reapers who went to gather it with their primitive sickles andbind it into little sheaves no thicker than a man's thigh.
These sheaves were being carted to a circular enclosure over against that part of the wall nearest the mission buildings, whence there rose a confusion of dust and voices. Cattle were being driven around and around inside this fenced circle; Juan knew it was the threshing floor, where the grain was being trampled from the husk under the feet of oxen. He was filled with a compelling curiosity to witness this operation.
This threshing pen was about fifty feet in diameter. In the center of it sheaves of untrampled grain were thrown, from which point they were distributed under the oxen's feet as required. Two teams of oxen yoked four abreast, were being driven around the circle, prodded out of their ordinarily leisurely gait by young men who trotted beside them with goads. The cattle were dripping sweat, their tongues were lolling, apparently at the utter bound of endurance. Dust rose thick from the dry straw, and from the un-covered ground where the grain was beaten out under the tortured creatures' feet.
The Indians, not far enough advanced yet to feel compassion for a suffering beast, seemed altogether unconscious of their cruelty. Here, as elsewhere when they worked without the direct superintendence of Don Geronimo, there was singing and laughter and merry light words among the young men who had been born and bred under the mission régime. Only the older men, the true neophytes, or converts from the state of heathen, were silent as they moved slowly, apathetically, perhaps unwillingly, about their appointed tasks.
These men, some of them shrivelled of skin and grey, seemed dulled by a heavy melancholy. Maybe they were thinking of the days before the padres came, when they were unrestrained and free. In those times it was the custom, at this season of the year when the rains were approaching, to set the grass afire to drive the rabbits out. There was more pleasure in standing along the line of fire and whacking rabbits with a club, than toiling here to beat out this grain of the padres, superior as it was to acorns when boiled in a kettle with the cracked bones of sheep.
In this time of year the acorns were ripe. There was far more pleasure, indeed, in lying aside under a tree, watching the women beat them between stones and put them to soak in water to withdraw the evil that made the bowels knot and gripe, than to be carrying sheaves of wheat on one's shoulders, or tossing the grain in the wind to clean it of chaff and dirt. Perhaps they had thoughts such as these, the old men who went silently, with sad faces, at this labor which they never came to love.
Juan watched the threshing with a feeling over him that he had been shifted from the present into the far past. It might have been that he stood at the edge of the field where Boaz bent with his sickle, and Ruth came with timid feet far behind him, gleaning the scattered ears of grain. For surely this was not the method of modern men.
Here, on one hand, lay the grain already threshed, whether yesterday or today he did not know. It was heaped on the bare ground, filled with chaff and dirt which certain old men labored with indifferent success to remove by tossing the grain in the wind for the lighter particles to blow away. Close beside this heap of grain the trampled, broken straw was thrown, carelessness, uncleanliness, disorder, over the whole that made the thought of bread repellent.
As Juan looked on this clumsy, ineffective operation the thought of the pomegranate tree went out of his mind, and of its fruit that burst in the sun and is like the red of the garnet stone. He lifted a handful of straw, finding it filled with fragments of unthreshed heads; he stirred it with his foot, to see whole grains, broken grains, fall in a shower. At least a tenth of the grain appeared to be wasted in this ancient, ignorant method of threshing. In its twenty centuries of history, Spain had not thought of a better way.
For months this threshing had been in progress at the mission, Juan knew; it must continue two or three weeks longer, calculating from the amount of grain still in the shock in that field, which was the largest and the last. Juan turned back to the mission, leaving all that he had not seen of the field of the two palms to another day. The sharp cries of the young men who drove the weary oxen in their staggering round, followed him over the high adobe wall.