The Blood of the Conquerors

by Fergusson, Harvey

“For Heaven’s sake, say something!” she demanded. “We can’t sit here and make eyes at each other all evening. Besides I’m compromising my priceless reputation. It’s after ten o’clock. [pg 241] I’ve got to go.” She rose, and held out her hand, which he took without saying anything.

  “Good night,” she said. “I think you were mean to come and camp on me this way … dumb as ever, I see … well, good night.”

  She went to the door, stopped and looked back, smiled and disappeared.

  Ramon went down to the lobby and roamed all over the two floors which constituted the public part of the hotel. He looked at everything and smoked a great many cigarettes, thus restlessly whiling away an hour. Then he went to a writing room. He collected some telegrams and letters about him and appeared to be very busy. When a bell boy went by, he rapped sharply on the desk with a fifty-cent piece, and as the boy stopped, tossed it to him.

  “Get me the key to 207!” he ordered sharply; then turned back to his imaginary business.

  “Yes sir,” said the boy. He returned in a few minutes with the key.

  Ramon sat for a long moment looking at it, tremulous with a great anticipation. He was divided between a conviction that she expected him and a fear that she did not.… His fear proved groundless.

  * * *

  [pg 242]

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  The next day they met for dinner at a little place near Washington Square where it was certain that none of Julia’s friends ever went. Julia was a singularly contented-looking criminal. Never, Ramon thought had her skin looked more velvety, her eyes deeper or more serene. He was a trifle haggard, but happy, and both of them were hungry.

  “Do you know?… I’ve made a discovery,” she told him. “I haven’t any conscience. I slept peacefully nearly all day, and when I waked up I considered the matter carefully … I don’t believe that I have any proper appreciation of the enormity of what I’ve done at all. I have always thought that if anything like this ever happened to me I would go off and chloroform myself, but as a matter of fact I have no such intention … of course, though, it was not my fault in the least. You’re so terrible!… I simply couldn’t help myself, and I don’t see what I can do now … that’s comforting. But one thing is certain. We’ve got to be awfully careful. Thank Heaven, mother and Gordon are still in Florida and they won’t dare to come North on Gordon’s account [pg 243] until it gets a good deal warmer. But we must be careful. I’m not sorry, like I should be, but I sure am scared.…”

  They sat for a long time after the meal, Ramon smoking a cigar, their knees touching under the table. He was filled with a vast contentment. He thought nothing of the troubled past, nor did he look into the obviously troubled future. He merely basked in the consciousness of a possession infinitely sweet.

  Now began for them a life of clandestine adventure. Julia had a good many engagements, but she managed to give him some part of every day. They never met in the hotel, but usually took taxicabs separately and met in out-of-the-way parts of that great free wilderness of city. Ramon spent most of the time when he was not with her exploring for suitable meeting places. They became patrons of cellar restaurants in Greenwich Village, of French and Italian places far down town, of obscure Brooklyn hotels. If the regular fare at these establishments was not all they desired, Ramon would lavishly bribe the head waiter, call the proprietor into consultation if necessary, insist on getting what Julia wanted. He spent his money like a millionaire, and usually created the general impression that he was a wealthy foreigner. Every morning he had flowers sent to Julia’s room. Often they would [pg 244] take a taxi and spend hours riding about the streets with the blinds drawn, locked in each others’ arms.

  For a week they were keenly, excitedly happy, living wholly in the joy of the moment. Then a flaw appeared upon the glowing perfect surface of their happiness.

  “When is your husband coming back?” he enquired once, when they were riding through Central Park.

  “I don’t know. In a week or two. Why?”

  “Because we must decide pretty soon what we’re going to do.”

  “Do? What can we do?”

  “We must decide where we’re going. You must go with me somewhere. I’m not going to let you get away from me again … not even for a little while.”

  “But Ramon, how can we? I’m married. I can’t go anywhere with you.…”

  He seized her fiercely by the shoulders and held her away from him, looking into her eyes.

  “Don’t you love me, then?” he demanded.

  “Ramon! You know I do!”

  “Then you’ll go. We can go to Mexico City, or South America … I’ll sell out at home.…”

  “O, Ramon … I can’t. I haven’t got the courage. Think of the fuss it would raise. And it would kill Gordon, I know it would.…”

  [pg 245] “Damn Gordon!” he exclaimed, “he’s not going to get in the way again! You’re mine and I’m going to keep you. You will go. I’ll take you!”

  He had seized her in his arms, was holding her furiously tight. She put her arms around him, caressed his face with soft fluttering hands.

  “Please, Ramon! Please don’t make me miserable. Don’t spoil the only happiness I ever had! I will go with you if ever I can, if I can get a divorce or something. But I can’t run off like that. I haven’t got it in me … please let me be happy!”

  Her touch and her voice seemed to overcome his determination, seemed to sheer him of his strength. Weaker she was than he, but her charm was her power. It dragged him away from his thoughts and purposes, binding him to her and to the moment.… She drew his head down to her breast, found his lips with hers and so effectively cut his protests short.

  The cream of his happiness was gone. Always when he was alone, he was thinking and planning how he could keep her. All of his possessiveness was aroused. He wanted her to have a baby. Somehow he felt that then his conquest would be complete, that then he would be at peace.…

  He said nothing more to Julia because he saw [pg 246] that it was useless. He began to understand her a little. It was futile to ask her to make a decision, to take any initiative. She could hold out forever against pleas which involved an effort of the will on her part. And yet as he knew she could yield charmingly to pressure adroitly applied. If he had asked her to meet him in New York this way, he reflected, she would have been horrified, she would never have consented. But when he came, suddenly, that had been different. So it was now. If he could only form a really good plan, and then put her in a cab and take her … that would be the only way. The difficulty was to form the plan. He had capacity for sudden and decisive action. He lacked neither courage nor resolution. But when it came to making a plan which would require much time and patience, he found his limitations.

  What could he do? he asked himself, not realizing that in formulating the question he acknowledged his impotence. If he went away and left her while he settled his affairs, she was lost as surely as a bird released from a cage. The idea of Mexico City allured him. But he had hardly enough money to take them there. How could he raise money on short notice? It would take time to settle his estate in New Mexico and get anything out of it.…

  Two unrealized facts lay at the root of his [pg 247] difficulty. One was that he had no capacity for large and intricate plans, and the other was that he felt bound as by an invisible tether to the land where he had been born.

  As he struggled with all these conflicting considerations and emotions, his head fairly ached with futile effort. He was glad to lay it upon Julia’s soft bosom, to forget everything else again in the sweetness of a stolen moment.

  * * *

  [pg 248]

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  He had been in New York about ten days when he awoke one morning near noon. An immense languor possessed him. He had been with Julia the night before and never had she been more charming, more abandoned.… He ordered his breakfast to be sent up, and then stretched out in bed and lit an expensive Russian cigarett
e. He had that love of sensuous indolence, which, together with its usual complement, the capacity for brief but violent action, marked him as a primitive man—one whom the regular labors and restraints of civilization would never fit.

  His telephone bell rang, and when he took down the receiver he heard Julia’s voice. It was not unusual for her to call him about this time, but what she told him now caused a blank and hapless look to come over his face. She was not in her room, but in another hotel.

  “My husband got in this morning,” she explained in a voice that was thin with misery and confusion. “I got his message last night, but I didn’t tell you because I knew it would spoil our last time together, and I was afraid you would do something foolish.… Please say you’re not [pg 249] angry. You know there was nothing for it. We couldn’t have done any of those wild things you talked about. I’ll always love you, honestly I will. Won’t you even say goodby?…”

  He at last did say goodby and hung up the receiver and went across the room and sat in an armchair. It suddenly struck him that he was very tired. He had not realized it before … how tired he was. There was none of the mad rebellion in him now that had filled him when first she had run away from him. Although he had never acknowledged it to himself he had been more than half prepared for this. He had told himself that he was going to do something bold and decisive, but he had procrastinated; he had never really formed a plan.

  Weariness was his leading emotion. He was spent, physically and emotionally. He wanted her almost as much as ever. While she was no longer the remote and dazzling star she had been, the bond of flesh that had been created between them seemed a stronger, a more constant thing than blinding unsatisfied desire. But a great despair possessed him. There was so obviously nothing he could do. Just as his other disappointment had given him his first stinging impression of the irony of life, that cunningly builds a hope and then smashes it; so now he felt for the first time something of the helplessness of man in the [pg 250] current or his destiny, driven by deep-laid desires he seldom understands, and ruled by chances he can never calculate. From love a man learns life in quick and painful flashes.

  Through the open window came the din of the New York street—purr and throb of innumerable engines, rumble and clatter of iron wheels, tapping of thousands of restless feet, making a blended current of sound upon which floated and tossed the shrillness of police whistles and newsboys’ voices and auto horns. It had been the background of his life during memorable days. Once it had stirred his pulses, seeming a wild accompaniment to the song of his passion. Now it wearied him inexpressibly; it seemed to be hammering in his ears; he wanted to get away from it. He would go home that day.

  As always on his trips across the continent he sat apathetically smoking through the wide green lushness of the middle west. Only when the cultivated lands gave way to barren hills and faint blue mountains peeping over far horizons did he turn to the window and forget his misery and his weariness. How it spoke to his heart, this country of his own! He who loved no man, who had gone to women with desire and come away with bitterness, loved a vast and barren land, baking in the sun. The sight of it quickened [pg 251] his pulses, softened and soothed his spirit. Like a good liquor it nursed and beautified whatever mood was in him. When he had come back to it a year before, it had spoken to him of hope, its mysterious distances had seemed full of promise and hidden possibility. And now that he came back to it with hopes broken, weary in mind and body, it seemed the very voice of rest. He thought of long cool nights in the mountains and of the lullaby that wind and water sing, of the soothing monotony of empty sunlit levels, of the cool caress of deep, green pools, of the sweet satisfaction that goes with physical weariness and a full belly and a bed upon the ground.

  But when on the last morning of his journey he waked up within a hundred miles of home, and less than half that far from his own mountain lands, his new-found comfort quickly changed to a keen anxiety. For he saw at a glance that the country was under the blight of drought. The hills that should have borne a good crop of gramma grass at this time of the year, if the rains had been even fair, were nothing but bare red earth from which the rocks and the great roots of the pinion trees stood out like the bones of a starving animal. Here and there on the hillsides he could see a scrubby pine that had died, its needles turned rust-red—the sure sign of a serious drought.

  [pg 252] During the half month that he had been gone he had thought not once of his affairs at home. The moment had absorbed him completely. Now it all came back to him suddenly. When he had left, the promise of the season had been good. It had not rained for more than a week, but everyone had been expecting rain every day. It was clear to him that the needed rain had never come. And he knew just what that meant to him. It meant that he had lost lambs and ewes, that he would have no money this year with which to meet his notes at the bank. He sank deep in despair and disgust again. Not only was the assault on his fortunes a serious one, but he felt little inclined to meet it. He was weary of struggle. He saw before him a long slow fight to get on his feet again, with the chance of ultimate failure if he had another bad year.

  The Mexicans firmly believe, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that seven wet years are always followed by seven dry ones. He had heard the saying gravely repeated many times. He more than half believed it. And he knew that for a good many years, perhaps as many as six or seven, the rains had been remarkably good. He was intelligent, but superstition was bred in his bones. Like all men of a primitive type he had a strong tendency to believe in [pg 253] fortune as a deliberate force in the affairs of men. It seemed clear to him now, in his depressed and exhausted condition, that bad luck had marked him for its prey.

  * * *

  [pg 254]

  CHAPTER XXXV

  His forebodings were confirmed in detail the next morning when Cortez came into his office, his face wrinkled with worry and darkened by exposure to the weather. He was angry too.

  “Por Dios, man! To go off like that and not even leave me an address. If I could have gotten more money to hire men I might have saved some of them … yes, more than half of the lambs died, and many of the ewes. There is nothing to do now. They are on the best of the range, and it has begun to rain in the mountains. But it is too bad. It cost you many thousands … that trip to New York.”

  Ramon gave Cortez a cigar to soothe his sensibilities, thanked him with dignity for his loyal services, and sent him away. Then he put on his hat and went outside to walk and think.

  The town seemed to him quiet as though half-deserted. This was partly by contrast with the place of din which he had just left, and partly because this was the dull season, when the first hot spell of summer drove many away from the town and kept those who remained in their houses most of the day. The sandy streets caught the [pg 255] sun and cherished it in a merciless glare. They were baked so hot that barefoot urchins hopped gingerly from one patch of shade to the next. In the numerous vacant lots rank jungles of weeds languished in the dry heat, and long blue-tailed lizards, veritable heat-sprites, emerged to frolic and doze on deserted sidewalks. The leaves of the cottonwoods hung limp, and the white downy tufts that carried their seeds everywhere drifted and swam in the shimmering air. The river had shrunk to a string of shallow pools in a sandy plain, the irrigation ditches were empty, and in Old Town the Mexicans were asking God for rain by carrying an image of the Virgin Mary about on a litter and firing muskets into the air.

  Quickly wearied, Ramon sat down on a shaded bench in the park and tried to think out his situation and to decide what he should do. The easy way was to sell out, pay his debts, provide for his mother and sister and with what was left go his own way—buy a little ranch perhaps in the mountains or in the valley where he could live in peace and do as he pleased. Wearied as he was by struggle and disappointment, this prospect allured him, and yet he could not quite accept it. He felt vaguely the fact that in selling his lands, he would be selling out to fate, he would be surrendering
to MacDougall, to the gringos, he would be renouncing all his high hopes and dreams. [pg 256] His mountain lands, with their steadily increasing value, the power they gave him, would make of his life a thing of possibilities—an adventure. Settled on a little ranch somewhere, his whole story would be told in one of its years.

  This he did not reason clearly, but the emotional struggle within him was therefore all the stronger. It was his old struggle in another guise—the struggle between the primitive being in him and the civilized, between earth and the world of men. Each of them in turn filled his mind with images and emotions, and he was impotent to judge between them.

  His being was fairly rooted in the soil, and the animal happiness it offered—the free play of instinct, the sweetness of being physically and emotionally at peace with environment—was the only happiness he had ever known. Vaguely yet surely he had felt the world of men and works, the artificial world, to contain something larger and more beautiful than this. Julia Roth had been to him a stimulating symbol of this higher, this more desirable thing. His love for her had been the soil in which his aspirations had grown. That love had turned to bitterness and lust, and his aspirations had led him among greeds and fears and struggles that differed from those of the wild things only in that they were covert and [pg 257] devious, lacking the free beauty of instinct fearlessly followed and the dignity of open battle. Of civilization he had encountered only the raw and ugly edge, which is uglier than savagery. He knew no more of the true spirit of it than a man who has camped in a farmer’s back pasture knows of the true spirit of wildness. It had treated him without mercy and brought out the worst of him. And yet because he had once loved and dreamed he could not go back to the easy but limited satisfactions of the soil and be wholly content.