The Eighth Day
Page 18
“Why?”
“She never wins the golden apple. It’s Aphrodite who wins the golden apple and starts making trouble. But Aphrodite often gets discouraged too, poor girl.” Here Dr. MacKenzie was shaken by his silent laughter and had to down a whole cup of tea. Tea is inebriating at high altitude.
“Why should Aphrodite get discouraged?”
“Why, because she thinks that love is the whole of life—the beginning and the ending, and the answer to everything. She can make her gentlemen friends think so, also—for a short time. But after a while her gentlemen friends go off to build cities or fight wars or to dig for copper. She gets furious. She tears her pillow into strips. Poor Aphrodite! She can find some consolation in her mirror. Do you know why I think Venus came from the sea?”
“No.”
“Because a calm sea is a mirror.—She came ashore in a shell. Do you see the connection? Pearls. Venus is obsessed with jewels. That’s why she married Hephaestus. He could bring her diamonds out of the mountains.”
More laughter. Ashley was beginning to have a headache. What good is conversation if it isn’t serious?
“What type are you?” asked Dr. MacKenzie abruptly.
“What, sir?”
“Which of the gods do you take after?” Ashley had no opinion. “Oh, you’re one of them, Tolland. You can’t get away from that.”
“Which are you, Doctor?”
“Oh, that’s easy. I’m Hephaestus, the blacksmith. All we miners are diggers and blacksmiths. Always getting inside mountains, preferably volcanoes.—Now which are you? You’re not one of us miners. You only play at it. Are you Apollo? Eh? Healing, poetry, prophecy?”
“No!”
“Are you Ares, the warrior? I guess not. Are you Hermes!—businessman, banker, lawyer, liar, cheat, newspaperman, god of eloquence, guide and companion to the dying? No, you’re not merry enough.”
Ashley was losing interest, but for politeness’ sake he found a question or two.
“Dr. MacKenzie, how could a liar and a thief be of any use to people who are dying?”
“Greek, Greek. Very Greek. Each of these gods and goddesses had two sides. Even Pallas Athene can be a raging fury when she’s aroused. Hermes was the god of roads and journeys and milestones. Mischievous though he was, he liked to conduct people to their destinations. Look at this picture. It’s an engraved gem. See him there? He’s holding his staff in the air and leading that veiled woman by the hand. Isn’t that beautiful?”
Yes, it was beautiful.
“My father was a Saturn. Wise. Gave advice all day—on the street, in the home, and on Sundays from the pulpit. Bad advice, perfectly awful advice. My mother was a Hera—hearth and home, nestbuilding. But a ruler—yes, indeed. Terrible woman. I had two brothers, both Apollos. Saturns tend to beget Apollos, have you noticed that?”
“No, sir.”
“Maybe I imagine it. One of them is serving a long sentence. His light—his illumination—took the form of being an anarchist. My sister was a Diana. Never grew up. Still a schoolgirl! Had three children, but marriage and motherhood couldn’t touch her.—But to get back to you, Tolland. Maybe you take after a god in some other religion. The Greeks didn’t know everything. There are types of personality that the Greeks hadn’t observed. They were rare in Greece so they weren’t elevated to gods. Take Christianity, for instance. Christianity is a Jewish religion. Most un-Greek thing in the world. Maybe that’s where you come in. You Hebrews came along and tossed us off our thrones. You brought in that unhappy conscience of yours—all that damned moral anxiety. Maybe you’re a Christian. Always denying yourselves any enjoyment, always punishing yourselves. Is that it?”
Ashley made no answer.
“The rest of us are fallen. We’re shorn. We’re decayed. It’s an awful thing, Mr. Tolland, to be robbed of one’s divinity—awful! There’s nothing left for us to do but enjoy ourselves in our miserable way. Saturns without wisdom, like my father; Apollos without joy, like my brothers. We become tyrants and troublemakers. Or cranky and erratic, like Mrs. Wickersham.”
“Dr. MacKenzie, what’s the matter with those . . . ? those ‘nestbuilders’?”
“Those Heras, those Junos? Why, they treat all their men as though they were boys—their husbands, their sons, and their fathers. Once they’ve produced a few babies they think they know everything. They think all the problems of the human race have been solved. Their aim is to soothe. They call it ‘keeping everybody happy.’ They try to rob their menfolk of sight and hearing and thought. Beware of the word ‘happy’ in Hera’s mouth; it means ‘dozing.’”
An all but insupportable pang rent Ashley’s headache. He rose to say good night.
“But, Dr. MacKenzie, you don’t believe . . . ? all this, do you?”
“No, of course not. But, Mr. Tolland, in Edinburgh we have a philosophers’ club. At our dinners we talk a great deal about what others believe and have believed; but if any member uses the verb in the first or second person of the present tense, he has to pay a fine. He has to put a shilling in a skull on the mantel. We soon get out of the habit.”
Time did what Ashley asked of it—it sped.
The company ruled that at the end of every eight months each engineer should descend for a month to lower altitudes to give his heart and lungs a rest. On the eve of his departure Ashley shook hands with his fellow engineers. They were unexpectedly cordial. Many persons are at their most amiable when saying goodbye. He shrank from taking formal leave of the villagers, but a deputation of men, wrapped to their noses, stood waiting for him outside the door of the club room. They gave him presents. They kissed his hands.
He called on Dr. MacKenzie.
“I hope you can stay at Mrs. Wickersham’s hotel. Wait a moment! I’ll write a letter to introduce you.”
“Thank you, Doctor. I’m going to Santiago. I’ll stop in Manantiales next time.”
As Ashley was leaving the room the managing director called him back. “Tolland, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you brought back a little companion?”
“What, sir?”
“A little ‘hillwife.’ You know what I mean. The company approves of it, makes provision for it.”
Dr. MacKenzie was born to blunder. The friendship had been cooling; he killed it. In that realm no man gives advice to a man over twenty-five—asked or unasked—and Dr. MacKenzie knew it.
A dozen of the engineers, like Dr. van Domelen, had installed “native” women in the Chilean or Indian villages. The men never went into the villages; they did not take their hill wives to the lower altitudes on their vacations; they seldom saw their children. There was a general pretense that the system did not exist.
Dr. MacKenzie had blundered worse than he knew. Ashley, in his own eyes, was a family man and little else. Yet he was a family man who, for reasons beyond his control, had proved to be a total failure. Was Beata protected against insult? Did the family have enough to eat? Did the children have adequate clothing in winter? He was saving his money; he would see them again in seven years. In the meantime there was one thing he could do—one absurd impassioned thing: he could remain faithful to his wife. This was what he thought of as “holding up the walls.”
Many men and women can live out their lives without any resort to superstition, magic, prayer, or fetish. They remember no anniversaries, salute no flags, and bind themselves by no oaths. They submit themselves totally to blind Circumstance, who takes away without thought what it gave without plan. Ashley’s fidelity was not supported by any vow undertaken before church or state, for—as we shall see later—John and Beata Ashley were never married. The truest virtues are supererogatory: compassion not toward the good but toward the wicked, generosity to the ungrateful, fidelity without formal commitment. Continence, for Ashley, was a deprivation like blindness or immobility. He maintained it by rigorous strategy. It was to this end that he so organized his life that he went nightly to bed “dog-tired,” “log-tired.” He governed shar
ply what our ancestors called his “conversation.” But any resolute person can conquer the demands of the flesh; he had a harder battle to win. He had known only one woman; he had had no experience of disassociating love from its train of attendants—companionship, courage, consolation, unfolding knowledge, and—in parenthood—creation. Time and time again on his trips southward these fair promises had been extended to him. Women had seen these expectations in his eyes. He remembered hearing in Coaltown that Dr. Gillies was accustomed to say to patients addicted to alcoholism, “Don’t deprive yourself of anything until you find something better to put in its place.” Ashley felt his deprivation keenly; in its place he put this absurd superstition—if he failed, the walls of “The Elms” would sway, totter, and collapse. The continent—that is, the resolute and dedicated ones, not the pining continent—have a way of recognizing one another. Later, when Ashley worked himself “dog-tired,” repairing and reinforcing and embellishing Mrs. Wickersham’s hospital and schools, what friendships arose with the sisters!—what laughter, what complicity—yes, what airy courtships, what coquetry!
So Dr. MacKenzie blundered. He knew he had blundered and his contempt for Ashley turned to hate—one of those hatreds nourished by self-hatred.
“Thank you,” said Ashley, “I’ll think it over.”
In Antofagasta he changed trains without calling on Mr. Andrew Smith of the Kinnairdie Mining Company. His first task in Santiago de Chile was to find work. His appearance had altered during the eight months. He had aged—that is, he now looked his age, which was forty-two. He was blackened by the sun to the degree so rapidly acquired at high altitudes. His hair had darkened and had lost its youthful curls. The pitch of his voice was lower. He was taken for a Chilean of the Irish or German admixture so frequent in the country. He applied without success for work as a nursery gardener, a stable hand, a gravedigger, a handyman at the “Eden” pleasure park. Finally he was hired to work on the new road toward the north, toward Valparaíso and Antofagasta. When his vacation drew to an end he left the road with regret; he had contributed to mixing and pouring the cement for twenty culverts. Again he changed trains in Antofagasta and spent the night in the inn he had known. The next morning he called on Mr. Andrew Smith, who did not at first recognize him and who was displeased at seeing a responsible engineer of his company wearing the clothes of a laborer. He had much to talk over with Mr. Tolland, however. Whatever the company did it did cautiously and, as far as possible, secretly. Mr. Smith and the mysterious Board of Directors would have suffered untold agonies if they had learned that loose idle talkers were spreading the rumor that Rocas Verdes was running into ever richer seams of ore, and that there were plans for large expansion. Ashley was directed to draw up designs and estimates for many more miners’ huts. In fact large quantities of lime and timber were already ascending the mountains. The problems of housing were discussed at length. When Ashley prepared to take his leave, Mr. Smith’s manner acquired a measure of warmth. He expressed a guarded commendation of the young man’s work. He intimated that the Board of Directors might soon give concrete expression to their appreciation.
Ashley sat down again abruptly and said, “Mr. Smith, there are two things that I’d like to propose to you.”
“Indeed?”
“I think that it would be a very wise measure to announce an increase in the miners’ pay—even though it be a very small one.” Mr. Smith stared at him angrily. “You know how many hours are lost every week because of illness.”
“I do. That is malingering, Mr. Tolland. The miner is incorrigibly lazy. Dr. van Domelen has a constant struggle with them.”
“No, this is different. These men are not lazy. When they are working with me on some project for their own village, it is hard to make them stop. All they need is some sign that they are respected as human beings. The Indian, sir, is subject to spells in which his mind and will ‘go blank’—that’s the only way I know how to put it.”
“That’s the way to put it—incorrigible laziness.”
“His whole life stretches before him, working underground, without possibility of change. The monotony is bad enough; the loss of hope is worse. But”—and here Ashley rose—“the lack of human consideration is killing. Mining engineers, Mr. Smith, have no blood in their veins. The Indians do fall ill. This sense of being shut off and despised takes the form of an illness.”
Mr. Smith opened and shut his lips several times; finally he said, “A man has to earn his living on this earth, Mr. Tolland, just as you and I do. A raise in their wages is none of your concern. They’d spend it in drink. They somehow manage to smuggle it in, I don’t know how.”
Ashley walked about the room. He approached Mr. Smith’s desk and said, in a lowered voice: “Chicha is not the only thing that is smuggled in. Information finds its way in, too. I don’t know how. Our miners have heard of the wages at La Reina and San Tomás and Dos Cumbres—especially our Bolivian Indians, who are our best workers. You are building new huts; you may have trouble filling them. The best investment in a mine is the self-respect and well-being of the miner. They have a saying, ‘Ore does not come to the surface by itself.’”
Mr. Smith swallowed. He shifted the pen and inkwell on his desk. He coughed. “You said you had a second suggestion.”
“There should be a priest living at Rocas Verdes. Those irregular visits aren’t right.”
“What do they want with their wretched priests? The priest charges them so much for a wedding and a christening that most of the miners aren’t even married. They hate their priests. A visit once a month’s good enough for them. Mr. Tolland, let me tell you something: Roman Catholicism is childish superstition at best; in Chile it’s beneath contempt.”
“I think we’re all bad judges of what goes on in other people’s minds about God, Mr. Smith. It’s a bad thing to force a God on a man who doesn’t want one. It’s worse to stand in the way of a man who wants one badly. I know them! I live there!”
Suddenly Ashley was seized by a splitting headache. He closed his eyes and almost fell from his chair. Again Mr. Smith stared at him as though he had been struck. If there was to be any moralizing, Mr. Smith was accustomed to doing it. It’s what he did best. Scotland is heavily populated with Saturns. No young whipper-snapper from Canada could tell him anything about religious matters.
“Are you ill, Mr. Tolland?”
“Might I have a glass of water, please.”
Mr. Smith watched him drink. At last he said, “How would we get a priest there? Everybody knows there aren’t enough in Chile to go round. They have to ship them over from Spain.”
Ashley had given no thought to this. To his own surprise he heard himself saying offhandedly—“I suppose you write to the Bishop. Maybe you give him a present. You promise to pay the priest’s salary for the first five years—something like that.” Mr. Smith stared at him somberly. Ashley went on: “Ask for a young one. Give me permission to build him a hut; and give me permission to enlarge the chapel. It looks like a pigsty. And I think it’d be useful in the long run if you gave me permission to stay one more day in Antofagasta so that I could look at some churches and talk to some priests.”
Mr. Smith struggled with himself. When he spoke, his Scots speech, which I have omitted to reproduce, returned pronouncedly: “I give you that permission. But don’t be getting too many fancies, Mr. Tolland.”
At the door Ashley—totally recovered, ten years younger—turned with a smile. “Rocas Verdes could be as beautiful inside as it is—outside.” He flung his hand into the air as though describing a coronet of peaks.
Two weeks after his return to Rocas Verdes it was announced that the miners were to receive an increase in their monthly pay. The news was received with doubt and distrust; the men awaited the calamity that would surely accompany it. After the second payment, by ones and twos, they thanked Ashley. They connected it with his visit to the lowlands.
Ashley said to himself, “That’s for Coaltown!”
Four months later Don Felipe arrived.
Ashley kept out of sight. He had suggested to Dr. MacKenzie that it would be very well received if the managing director were the first to welcome the padre and to conduct him to his house. Dr. MacKenzie shrugged his shoulders—Christians, Mohammedans, and Buddhists were all one to him, all groveling before idols, seeking unmerited rewards. Ashley sat beside Don Felipe at dinner. He could scarcely lift his fork to his mouth. It was Roger—not a feature alike, with no resemblance in voice, but Roger—perhaps six years older, like him a little stiff, unsmiling, taciturn, intensely alive in eye and ear, concentrated; above all, independent. Like Roger he didn’t want advice, he didn’t want help, he didn’t want friendship. (Friendship, it seems, was another of the things that can be dispensed with, when one finds something better to replace it.) Like Roger, he was of an exemplary politeness.