The Web of the Sun (Adventure Magazine, 1922)/Chapter 15
XV
AT SOME time during the night the solution of his whole career in Motobatl became clear to Charles Lassiter. The promoter paused in his pacing to and fro in front of the air-shaft in gray relief. It was very simple.
The shaft itself was now a small circular blur in the utter blackness of his cell. As Lassiter paused at the end of the intake, the wet smell of rain breathed in upon him.
For a moment the agent stood reckoning the position of his bags, but as he started to move toward them, he remembered that he would not need them again. The thought brought a passing sense of queerness. Always he had carried his bags; now he was deserting them. It seemed strange to think that he was about to walk away and never come back for the leather cases stacked in the corner of his crypt.
He moved carefully toward the door, holding out his arms, fingers spread. When finally he touched the wall, he did not find the door where he thought it should be. But at last he found it, passed through and began feeling his way down the long curving passage of the hypogeum.
The turn of the corridor was at a greater distance than he had expected, but after that he got quickly to the door. His management of the bolts a few hours before aided him in the blackness and a few moments later he drew the great shutters a little apart. A current of spray drifted in out of the night, and the rain whispered in the black ear of the teocalla. Inviernillo, little Winter, had descended on Motobatl at last.
Lassiter shivered at the thought of exposing himself to the rain at night. He felt an impulse to return to his cell for his poncho and sombrero, and then he reflected that he would remove both before he entered the water, and that they would lie on the edge of the piazza all night in the rain. Oddly enough, the thought of leaving a soaked coat and a shapeless hat was distasteful to the agent.
He closed the portals softly behind him, paused for a moment in the recessed arch of the entrance, and then stepped out into the slow cold rain.
The drizzle chilled Lassiter, but it brought him a certain composure and sequence of thought that he had not known in his cell. The wide murmur of the rain filled the night, and through it he could hear the suck and gasp of the whirlpool in the north. That lullaby should soothe away his too constant thoughts. Beyond the piazza toward the west, he could see the sheen of the lake and the pale narrowing of the river as it swung in toward the teocalla. He could even make out the shimmer of the sand where he and Tilita had—the thought broke into the old trickle of pain.
The strangeness of what he was about to do gradually grew on Lassiter. It seemed amazing that presently he, by his own will, would flicker out like a picture on a screen. It seemed fantastic that his own legs, his own eyes would guide themselves to nothingness. They had served him so long—and now they would turn traitor to themselves—
The lift and fall of his feet over the wet pavement; the play of his muscles under his soggy clothes; the trickle of water through his hair; the very functioning of his eyes in the gray night took on a sort of marvel. How strange that all this elaboration that moved and breathed and grieved could, in a moment, by its own will, become a stringing of mud and a blowing of dust!
His death would be the strangest, the most enigmatic gesture of his life. Then a queer thought came
Would blotting out despair ease it? In the shimmer of the lake he would find neither peace nor pain—he would find nothing. Could becoming nothing rectify his wrong to Tilita? His remorse was a kind of unbalanced force, and forces cannot be blotted; they can only be counteracted. Was it possible for his sin toward Tilita somehow to escape his body? It was a sick man's notion, absurd, feverish. A shiver went over him.
THE dark blur of Nunes' bolsa still lay at the foot of the piazza; as Lassiter approached it, he heard a scraping and presently saw a movement in the mass of the boat. As he came closer, he saw it was a man bailing out the boat with an oar. The promoter walked on past the stranded bolsa into the water when Nunes' voice called, “Is it you, señor?”
The promoter answered and paused at the depth of his knees.
“Mio Dios!” gasped the Colombian. “And you escaped the spider! You escaped—I heard shots”
The promoter agreed wearily.
“You see I'm out.” And he waded on into the river.
There was a pause; the muleteer came to the edge of the water and peered after the vanishing man. He cleared his throat, then called with a certain politeness through the rain.
“If you will wait a moment, señor, I am going your way. We have been camarados all the way through, señor—” The promoter peered at him through the gloom.
“Do you mean”
“Si, señor,” and the whirlpool will be more dashing than still water, more fitting for caballeros”
“It's all the same, Nunes.”
“But—but, señor,” pleaded the muleteer in a queer voice, “I hate going down alone—I hate it— I was standing here thinking— I will tell you
“I meant to take the girl down with me in this bolsa. Ah, Señor Lassiter, that would have been a death! To be sucked down the whirlpool in her arms. Madre de Dios! What a death for a caballero! Kissing her scarlet lips, pressing her soft body! What a death!”
He broke off shuddering in the drizzle. Lassiter watched his frustration with detached eyes. Suddenly the Colombian broke out in a sort of rage.
“Mother of God! You Norte Americanos feel nothing! You are stones! I loved the girl! She hated me just enough to be fire—flame! May the fiends”
He shook his oar at the dripping skies, flung it into the bolsa, seized the prow and heaved at the clumsy vessel. It grated a few inches on the sand.
The muleteer heaved again, damning himself, the world, the girl; as he damned, he worked the bolsa into the river. When it floated he left off his cursing with his pushing and swung up on its gunwale. As he floated past Lassiter he reached down a hand.
“Come on, camarado,” he said in the dull backwash of his violence. “Let us perish like caballeros in the maelstrom, not drown like pigs in a pool—” As he heaved the promoter aboard, he panted between heaves—
“It is true—I meant to murder you—on your bridal couch, Don Carlos—and seize your bride—but not as an enemigo—not so, mi amigo—but as one dear friend—who murders—for the woman they love”
Lassiter got himself into the stern of the bolsa. The smallness, the triviality of the Colombian's lust, this final melodramatic gesture, this assertion of his entity—how pigmy-ish it stood against the impersonal drizzle of the skies, the rising wail of the maelstrom and the vast blankness of death.
The Colombian pulled down the cover of his bolsa which he had designed to protect him and Tilita for a little space. It shut out the rain and the gray night. Then Lassiter heard him crawling along the sides adjusting some sort of fastenings.
The promoter shifted his seat on the reed bottom until he had gained some sort of repose. The little nerves of his body demanded their due attention on the eve of extinction. They were like tiny burghers functioning, unconscious and unalarmed while a tornado rushed upon their dwelling.
Presently the Colombian said quietly:
“I watched you when you left her in the paddlewood, Don Carlos. I went in at once and waked her and yet—I let her be—there was something so terrible in her eyes—I could not do it. You can well imagine my amazement, Don Carlos, when I found that I, Dom Pedro Porforio Balthasar Nunes, a muleteer and a caballero, was really so weak as to hold off my hands, to let her go— Do you think, señor, that He—He Who looks down upon us and reads the good and evil of our hearts—do you think that in a moment He will say to me, 'My son, Porforio, for this great renunciation you shall have the highest seat in'”
The bolsa touched a stone and jarred heavily. The coughing and sucking of the whirlpool overcame the muleteer's voice. The increasing clamor of the waters brought back with a last despair Lassiter's days with Tilita at the bird limes. Against the intense darkness, the girl arose before him with the intensity of tropical sunlight, her sweetness, her eagerness, her rich earnest of love and children—the odor of milk suddenly filled the bolsa
The roaring of the water drowned every thought but the image. The bolsa swung up on the piled water and swung round and round with narrowing and increasing spin. Came a vast sucking in Lassiter's ears. The front of the bolsa tipped up crazily. Lassiter, in the stern, felt himself being drawn down backward. Water came squirting down on him through a hundred interstices of the top. It covered the spuming figure of the man with a swishing sound.
The promoter suddenly began struggling for air. He strove to pull himself up. His chest made spasmodic efforts to inhale the water roaring about his head. The form of Tilita flamed brighter, then flickered—a deep gratitude filled the brain of the drowning man. He knew beyond the maelstrom lay nothing.