The Eighth Day (21 page)

He understood her now.

He lay on the roof of his inn and gazed up at the constellations. He was dog-tired and slept.

The moment in his growth arrived when he felt the need to admire someone. His thoughts kept returning to that Mrs. Wickersham. He visited her hospital, her orphanage, her lace-making school for the blind. These first two were municipal institutions, but the town, the sisters, and the patients had no doubt that all were hers. He had not called with Andrew Smith's letter at “the best hotel in South America”; that was rat catchers' country. He saw her riding her black horse through the streets of the town—erect, authoritative, her iron grey hair pulled back to a low bun under her wide-brimmed Spanish hat, a red rose in her lapel—doing her marketing and visiting her institutions. Storekeepers and shopgirls rushed out into the street to kiss her hand; men stood with lowered attentive heads while she harangued them. She spoke the language of the working people even better than he did. She laughed. Everyone around her laughed. Ashley seldom laughed; he did not despise laughter, but it seemed to him to be prompted by unimportant digressions that delayed the sober occupations of life. His curiosity was aroused by Mrs. Wickersham and he was ready to admire her. He came to know the hours when she was absent from her hotel. One morning he went to the door of the Fonda and asked to see her. He was told she was out. He walked by the house boy into the reception room and said that he would wait.

A number of the Conquistadores chose to end their days in the new world. It is hard to believe that they did not wish to return to that Spain of powerful compulsion—to Vizcaya, mother of seamen, even to Estremadura, whose beauties are not revealed to the hasty. They settled down in America, built themselves houses, and begot broadnosed children. But they had left a realm that was even closer to them than their birthplace and their land of adoption—the oceans which they had crossed and recrossed so many times. Their new homes were white without and within, with one exception. The walls of their reception rooms were painted blue from the floor to the level of a standing man's eyes: the lower portion of the four walls was sea-blue, the sea on a day of sun and light breeze. Mrs. Wickersham had also brought the sea and the horizon into her reception room. From the ceiling above a center table hung the model of a sixteenth-century galleon. On the wall—embattled Presbyterian though she was—she had placed an enormous time-faded crucifix. Through the open door and windows the wealth of the garden threatened to inundate the room in a many-colored tide. For Ashley the function of a room was to be serviceable; it had never occurred to him that it could be beautiful. He who lacked so many qualities—humor, ambition, vanity, reflection—had never distinguished a category of the beautiful. Some pictures on grocers' calendars had pleased him. At school he had been praised for the “beauty” of his mechanical drawings. We remember how on his flight through Illinois he had been overwhelmed by the beauty of dawn, and later of Chimborazo, and of his Chilean peaks. He sat down in a high-backed chair and looked about him. He became aware of an odd sensation in his throat: he sobbed. His eyes rested on the exhausted and submissive head on the wall before him. The world was a place of cruelty, suffering, and confusion, but men and women could surmount despair by making beautiful things, emulating the beauty of the first creation.

He rested between sleeping and waking. He was abruptly aroused by a sharp voice. Mrs. Wickersham was standing at the door looking at him. She spoke with military truculence: “Who are you?”

He rose quickly. “Is James Tolland here?” he asked.

“James Tolland? I don't know the name.”

“I hoped he'd be here, Mrs. Wickersham. I'll call later. Thank you, ma'am. Good morning.”

The next day he continued his journey. He had his first nosebleed at nine thousand feet. He lay down on the floor of the train. He kept laughing quietly and the laughter hurt him. At the junction for Rocas Verdes he was met by two Spanish-speaking Indians. The connecting line had been interrupted by an avalanche; they must proceed on muleback. He rode five hours, half asleep, and spent the night in a hut by the road. He arrived at the mines at noon on the following day and was put to bed for twenty-four hours by the Dutch doctor.

Several times he awoke and smelled violets or lavender. His mother's clothes had been redolent of the sachets of violet that her husband had unfailingly given her at Christmas. Beata had cultivated beds of lavender at “The Elms”; her clothes and the household linen breathed lavender. It cost nothing. At times Ashley's room was filled with people. His mother and his wife stood at either side of his bed and firmly tucked the ends of the blanket under him. They had never met, but seemed now to have entered into a close understanding. The blanket pressed upon his chest. Their faces were grave.

“You're not going to school tomorrow,” his mother said in a low voice. “I shall write a note to Mr. Shattuck.”

He pulled at the blanket to free himself. “Mama, I'm not a mummy.”

“Sh, dear, sh!”

“I think we're going to like it here,” said Beata.

“You always say that!”

“Go to sleep, dear.”

“Where are the children?”

“They were here a minute ago. I don't know where they've gone.”

“I want to see them.”

“Sh, sh! Go to sleep now.”

He awoke later at the moment when Eustacia Lansing entered the room. She was wearing one of those outrageous dresses of plum color and red, suggesting tropical flowers and fruits set in deep green foliage. There was the fascinating mole under her right eye. He verified for the thousandth time that one of her eyes was green-to-blue and the other was hazel-to-dark brown. As so often she seemed scarcely able to contain herself; some merriment, some reprehensible joke was about to convulse her.

John Ashley had made it a rule in life not to permit his thoughts to dwell on Eustacia Lansing. At most he allowed his mind in delight, to glance toward her, to brush her. But altitudes play strange tricks on a man.

“Stacey!” he cried and began to laugh until his sides hurt.

“This isn't high,” she said in Spanish. “The children want to go much higher.”

“Stacey, you can't speak Spanish! Where'd you learn Spanish?—What children? Whose children?”

“Our children, Juanito. Ours.”

“Whose?”

“Yours and mine.”

He was laughing so he almost fell out of bed. His fingertips touched the floor. “We have no children, Stacey.”

“Donkey! How can you say a thing like that! We have
so many
and you know it!”

Suddenly hushed, he asked hesitantly, “Have we? I only kissed you once and Breck was standing right beside you.”

“Really?” she said, a strange smile on her face. “Really?” and she went out the closed door.

In this history there has been some discussion of hope and faith. It is too early to treat of love. The last appearing of the graces is still emerging from the primal ooze. Its numerous aspects are confusedly intermingled—cruelty with mercy, creativity with havoc. It may be that after many thousands of years we may see it “clarify”—as is said of turbid wine.

His colleagues were embittered men. They had left their countries and kin—they had left home life itself—and come thousands of miles to live in a barely supportable climate—all to make their fortunes. But fortunes in the field had been made in the seventies and eighties; now the fortunes from the mines were being made by men who ate steak every night beside the white shoulders of bejeweled women (these were the images that obsessed the stertorous dreamers of Rocas Verdes). The principle of the economy of energy prevailed on the mountain, including utterance. Their very card games were conducted in grunts and finger gestures. This was not entirely due to the rarity of the air; their very natures partook of ore. Sloth is like a viscous mineral. Under Dr. MacKenzie's eye they were all (except the mines' doctor) excellent workers, but sloth is not incompatible with a circumscribed diligence. Sloth breeds self-hatred and hatred; these hatreds hung in the air of the club room. Under the necessity to conserve energy they seldom reached expression. Once or twice a year a man would suddenly screech with rage at another, or would go out of his mind, biting his fists and rolling on the ground. Dr. van Domelen would administer sedatives. Dr. MacKenzie, called from his hut, would save the wretched man's face: “The fact is we've all been working too hard, especially you, Wilson. You've been doing splendid work, splendid. Why don't you go down to Manantiales for a week? Maybe Mrs. Wickersham will put you up. Even if she hasn't got a room free, she'll let you come to dinner.”

Ashley, except for Dr. van Domelen, was the youngest in the club room. It gave the twenty-two engineers pleasure to look down on his youth, to raise their eyebrows knowingly at his beginner's enthusiasm and enterprise, and to sneer at the duties he performed. They regarded him as the “housekeeper.” He was one degree above the Chinese cook.

Why did the men remain at Rocas Verdes? At the turn of the century mines all over the world were advertising frantically for engineers. Nineteen months later, when the great friendship had begun, Ashley put the question to Mrs. Wickersham.

“Well, mining engineers are an odd lot. They love ore and nothing else. They may think that they love the wealth that it promises to bring them, but no! they love the metal. They love the act of extracting it from the groaning, shrieking mountain. Now, Rocas Verdes is a small mine; it's at a killing altitude,
but
. . . ? the copper there is the best quality in all the Andes. Your friends up there are sour men, Mr. Tolland, but they're proud in their very guts to be working in a mine that produces beautiful stuff. Everyone in the world strains to be associated with what's best in its kind. It's a miners' mine. Dr. MacKenzie is known throughout the Andes as having a wonderful sense for knowing where the bloody copper is hidden and how to get it out. He could be governor of El Teniente, if he wanted to be; but he likes it at Rocas Verdes. Mining engineers are an odd lot; they like it to be difficult. Mr. Tolland, at my own table I've seen men behave in Dr. MacKenzie's presence as though they were self-conscious schoolboys in their first corduroy pants—and they were earning four and five times what he does. They work in vast millionaires' mines. They have wives and children with them, and butlers, and hot shower baths—”

“We have hot shower baths now, Mrs. Wickersham.”

“And whiskey-and-sodas. But they're not really miners any more. They're merely bookkeepers. Their mines run like shoe factories. A true miner is taciturn, unsocial, single-minded. Generally, their wives have left them, as Dr. MacKenzie's did. Mind you, they don't know all these things. They think they're like other men, only better. Just as they deceive themselves about the money in it. Notice how clever your company is—automatically raising a man's salary every four years. It's like a bundle of hay in front of a donkey's nose. It gives him the illusion of getting rich. In my opinion, the real reason why the men stay there is because it's the aristocrat of mines; it's so damned unendurable, detestable, and impossible; and the copper's first class.”

There was everywhere evidence of his predecessor's sloth. By the end of the second week he had cleaned the kitchen and improved the system supplying hot water. He made a friend of the cook and interested himself in the peculiarities of kitchen chemistry at high altitudes. He busied himself with doors and windows in the engineers' huts. He was again improvising as he had done in Coaltown. He turned over old lumber and broken chairs and perforated saucepans and rejected blankets. Presumably his predecessor had been shy of requesting material from the Antofagasta office. No Ashley was ever shy. John Ashley's monthly letters to Andrew Smith were filled with varied demands and the material began ascending the mountains. The men had been fed on salt pork and corned beef. He obtained permission to order meat and vegetables from Manantiales—a possibility that had not presented itself to sloth. Apples and pineapples appeared on the table. Araucanian rugs replaced Manchester drugget.

He was happiest in the miners' villages, the Chilean and the Indian. The assistants assigned to him were Bolivian Indians. He was invited to the christening of a daughter. After the banquet he asked to see the mother and child again. This was not in the customs of the tribe, but the mother and baby were brought before him. He had not held an infant in his arms for fifteen years, but his fatherhood was patent.

Dr. van Domelen was seldom called to the native villages, least of all to the Indians'. They were stoical by nature and possessed their own means of relieving extreme pain. Illness and death were less intimidating than his potions, his gleaming instruments, the brandy on his breath, and the contempt in his eyes. He had two children in the Indian village; their mother glided into his hut when he hung a lamp over his door.

Ashley saw signs of rickets. Though it was not in his province, he ordered cod liver oil from Andrew Smith by telegraph. He received permission—Indian life is surrounded with all the formality of a Spanish court—to enter their homes. He pondered ventilation, diet, and sanitation. He recommended and rebuked. In the lanes:

“Buenos, Antonio!”

“Buenos, Don Jaime!”

“Buenos, Tecla!”

“Buenos, Don Jaime!”

“Ta-hili, Xebu!”

“Ta-hili, Clez-u!”

“Ta-hili, Bexa-Mi!”

“Ta-hili, Clez-u!”

Time did what Ashley asked of it: It sped. Mrs. Hodge had said, “Seven years.”

The engineers hated him. No word of appreciation was ever expressed for the improvements he had brought about in their living conditions. He was undermining the somber pleasure they derived from the rigor of their existence. They begrudged the hours when he descended into the mines in his effort to learn their profession. He seldom joined their card games after dinner, nor did Dr. MacKenzie. The managing director rose from table, bowed formally to the men, wished them good night, and went to his hut. He alone on the mountain had a hobby. He was a reader and read far into the night. He ordered the books from Princes Street, Edinburgh; they came to him around the Horn or were carried by railroad across the fens of Panama. He was interested in the religions of the ancient world. He read the Bible in Hebrew,
The Book of the Dead
in French, the
Koran
in German. He knew some Sanskrit. His days were filled with thoughts of copper, his nights with the comforting or terrifying visions of mankind. He was old and ugly, but on closer view and longer acquaintance less old and ugly than he first appeared to be. His nose had been broken, perhaps several times; he limped; his eyes and mouth were severe, but occasionally surprised the observer with some expression of deeply buried mirth or irony. He watched all the men; he watched Ashley.