Section 3

“T come, sehora, to make sure that you could not have misunderstood anything I said on the evening that Your Grace did me the honour to visit my theatre.”
“Misunderstood? Misunderstood?” said the Marquesa.
“Your Grace might have misunderstood and
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THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR thought that my words were intended to be disre- spectful to Your Grace.”
“To me?”
“Your Grace is not offended at her humble servant? Your Grace is aware that a poor actress in my position may be carried beyond her inten- tions . . . that it is very difficult . . . that everything. . . .”
“How can I be offended, señora? All that I can remember is that you gave a beautiful per- formance. You are a great artist. You should be happy, happy. My handkerchief, Pepita. . . .”
The Marquesa brought out these words very rapidly and vaguely, but the Perichole was con- founded. A piercing sense of shame filled her. She turned crimson. At last she was able to mur- mur:
“Tt was in the songs between the acts of the comedy. I was afraid Your Grace . . .”
“Yes, yes. 1 remember now. I left early. Pepita, we left early, did we not? But, señora,
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY you are good enough to forgive my leaving early, yes, even in the middle of your admirable per- formance. I forget why we left. Pepita . . . oh, some indisposition. . . .”
It was impossible that anyone in the theatre could have missed the intention of the songs. Ca- mila could only assume that the Marquesa, out of a sort of fantastic magnanimity, was playing the farce of not having noticed it. She was al- most in tears: “But you are so good to overlook my childishness, señora,—I mean Your Grace. I did not know. I did not know your goodness. señora, permit me to kiss your hand.”
Doña María held out her hand astonished. She had not for a long time been addressed with such consideration. Her neighbors, her tradespeo- ple, her servants—for even Pepita lived in awe of her,—her very daughter had never approached her thus. It induced a new mood in her; one that must very likely be called maudlin. She became loquacious:
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“Offended, offended at you, my beautiful, . . . my gifted child? Who am I, a... an unwise and unloved old woman, to be offended at you? I felt, my daughter, as though I were—what says the poet?—surprising through a cloud the con- versation of the angels. Your voice kept finding new wonders in our Moreto. When you said:
‘Don Juan, si mi amor estimas, Y la fe segura es necia, Enojarte mis temores Es no querarme discreta.
9,
¿Tan seguros. . . .
and so on,—that was true! And what а gesture you made at the close of the First Day. There, with your hand so. Such a gesture as the Virgin made, saying to Gabriel: How is it possible that I shall have a child? No, no, you will begin to have resentment at me, for I am going to tell you about a gesture that you may remember to use some day. Yes, it would fit well into that scene 55
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where you forgive your Don Juan de Lara. Per- haps I should tell you that I saw it made one day by my daughter. My daughter is a very beautiful woman . . . everyone thinks. Did . . . did you know my Doña Clara, Señora?”
“Her Grace often did me the honour of visit- ing my theatre. I knew the Condesa well by sight.”
“Do not remain so, on one knee, my child.— Pepita, tell Jenarito to bring this lady some sweet- cakes at once. Think, one day we fell out, I forget over what. Oh, there is nothing strange in that; all we mothers from time to time. . . . Look, can you come a little closer? You must not be- lieve the town that says she was unkind to me. You are a great woman with a beautiful nature and you can see further than the crowd sees in these matters.—It is a pleasure to talk to you. What beautiful hair you have! What beautiful hair!—She had not a warm impulsive nature, I know that. But, oh, my child, she has such a
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THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR store of intelligence and graciousness. Any mis- understandings between us are so plainly my fault; is it not wonderful that she is so quick to forgive me? This day there fell one of those little moments. We both said hasty things and went off to our rooms. Then each turned back to be for- given. Finally only a door separated us and there we were pulling it in contrary ways. But at last sher took в... асе... thuUS, In Der two white hands. So! Look!”
The Marquesa almost fell out of her chair as she leaned forward, her face streaming with happy tears, and made the beatific gesture. I should say the mythical gesture, for the incident was but a recurring dream.
“I am glad you are here,” she continued, “for now you have heard from my own lips that she is not unkind to me, as some people say. Listen, sehora, the fault was mine. Look at me. Look at me. There was some mistake that made me the
mother of so beautiful a girl. I am difficult. I am 57
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY trying. You and she are great women. No, do not stop me: you are rare women, and I am only a nervous ...a foolish ... a stupid woman. Let me kiss your feet. I am impossible. I am im- possible. I am impossible.”
Here indeed the old woman did fall out of her chair and was gathered up by Pepita and led back to her bed. The Perichole walked home in consternation and sat for a long time gazing into her eyes in the mirror, her palms pressed against her cheeks.
But the person who saw most of the difficult hours of the Marquesa was her little companion, Pepita. Pepita was an orphan and had been brought up by that strange genius of Lima, the Abbess Madre Maria del Pilar. The only occasion upon which the two great women of Peru (as the perspective of history was to reveal them) met face to face was on the day when Dofia Maria called upon the directress of the Convent of Santa Maria Rosa de las Rosas and asked if she might
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borrow some bright girl from the orphanage to be her companion. The Abbess gazed hard at the grotesque old woman. Even the wisest people in the world are not perfectly wise and Madre Maria del Pilar who was able to divine the poor human heart behind all the masks of folly and defiance, had always refused to concede one to the Mar- quesa de Montemayor. She asked her a great many questions and then paused to think. She wanted to give Pepita the worldly experience of living in the palace. She also wanted to bend the old woman to her own interests. And she was filled with a sombre indignation, for she knew she was gazing at one of the richest women in Peru, and the blindest.
She was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries be- fore its appointed appearance in the history of civilization. She hurled herself against the obsti- nacy of her time in her desire to attach a little
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY dignity to women. At midnight when she had finished adding up the accounts of the House she would fall into insane vision of an age when women could be organized to protect women, women travelling, women as servants, women when they are old or ill, the women she had dis- covered in the mines of Potosi, or in the work- rooms of the cloth-merchants, the girls she had collected out of doorways on rainy nights. But al- ways the next morning she had to face the fact that the women in Peru, even her nuns, went through life with two notions: one, that all the misfortunes that might befall them were merely due to the fact that they were not sufficiently at- tractive to bind some man to their maintenance and, two, that all the misery in the world was worth his caress. She had never known any coun- try but the environs of Lima and she assumed that all its corruption was the normal state of mankind. Looking back from our century we can see the whole folly of her hope. Twenty such
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THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR women would have failed to make any impression on that age. Yet she continued diligently in her task. She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhil- aration from the sneers of the bystanders. “How queerly they dress!” we cry. “How queerly they dress!”
Her plain red face had great kindliness, and more idealism than kindliness, and more general- ship than idealism. All her work, her hospitals, her orphanage, her convent, her sudden journeys of rescue, depended upon money. No one har- bored a fairer admiration for mere goodness, but she had been obliged to watch herself sacrificing her kindliness, almost her idealism, to general- ship, so dreadful were the struggles to obtain her subsidies from her superiors in the church. The
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THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY Archbishop of Lima, whom we shall know later in a more graceful connection, hated her with what he called a Vatinian hate and counted the cessation of her visits among the compensations for dying.
Lately she had felt not only the breath of old age against her cheek, but a graver warning. A chill of terror went through her, not for herself, but for her work. Who was there in Peru to value the things she had valued? And rising one day at dawn she had made a rapid journey through her hospital and convent and orphanage, looking for a soul she might train to be her successor. She hurried from empty face to empty face, occasion- ally pausing more from hope than conviction. In the courtyard she came upon a company of girls at work over the linen and her eyes fell at once upon a girl of twelve who was directing the others at the trough and at the same time recounting to them with great dramatic fire the less probable miracles in the life of Saint Rose of Lima. So
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THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR it was that the search ended with Pepita. The education for greatness is difficult enough at any time, but amid the sensibilities and jealousies of a convent it must be conducted with fantastic indi- rection. Pepita was assigned to the most disliked tasks in the House, but she came to understand all the aspects of its administration. She accom- panied the Abbess on her journeys, even though it was in the capacity of custodian of the eggs and vegetables. And everywhere, by surprise, hours would open up in which the Directress suddenly appeared and talked to her at great length, not only on religious experience, but on how to man- age women and how to plan contagious wards and how to beg for money. It was a step in this edu- cation for greatness that led to Pepita’s arriving one day and entering upon the crazy duties of being Doña Maria’s companion. For the first two years she merely came for occasional afternoons, but finally she came to the palace to live. She never had been taught to expect happiness, and the 63
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY inconveniences, not to say terrors, of her new posi- tion did not seem to her excessive for a girl of fourteen. She did not suspect that the Abbess, even there, was hovering above the house, herself es- timating the stresses and watching for the mo- ment when a burden harms and not strengthens.
A few of Pepita’s trials were physical: for ex- ample, the servants in the house took advantage of Dona Maria’s indisposition; they opened up the bedrooms of the palace to their relatives; they stole freely. Alone Pepita stood out against them and suffered a persecution of small discomforts and practical jokes. Her mind, similarly, had its distresses: when she accompanied Doña Maria on her errands in the city, the older woman would be seized with the desire to dash into a church, for what she had lost of religion as faith she had replaced with religion as magic. “Stay here in the sunlight, my dear child; I shall not be long,” she would say. Dona Maria would then forget her- self in a reverie before the altar and leave the
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THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR church by another door. Pepita had been brought up by Madre Maria del Pilar to an almost mor- bid obedience and when after many hours she ventured into the church and made sure that her mistress was no longer there, still she returned to the street-corner and waited while the shadows fell gradually across the square. Thus waiting in public she suffered all the torture of a little girl’s self-consciousness. She still wore the uniform of the orphanage (which a minute’s thoughtfulness on the part of Doña Maria could have altered) and she suffered hallucinations wherein men seemed to be staring at her and whispering—nor were these always hallucinations. No less her heart suffered, for on some days Doña Maria would suddenly become aware of her and would talk to her cordially and humorously, would let appear for a few hours all the exquisite sensibility of the Letters; then, on the morrow she would withdraw into herself again and, while never harsh, would become impersonal and unseeing.
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The beginnings of hope and affection that Pepita had such need to expend would be wounded. She tiptoed about the palace, silent, bewildered, cling- ing only to her sense of duty and her loyalty to her “mother in the Lord,” Madre Maria del Pilar, who had sent her there.
Finally a new fact appeared that was to have considerable effect on the lives of both the Mar- quesa and her companion: “My dear mother,” wrote the Condesa, “the weather has been most ex- hausting and the fact that the orchards and gar- dens are in bloom only makes it the more trying. I could endure flowers if only they had no per- fume. I shall therefore ask your permission to write you at less length than usual. If Vicente re- turns before the post leaves he will be delighted to finish out the leaf and supply you with those tiresome details about myself which you seem to enjoy so. I shall not go to Grignan in Provence
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THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR as I expected this Fall, as my child will be born in early October.”
What child? The Marquesa leaned against the wall. Dona Clara had foreseen the exhausting importunities that this news would waken in her mother and had sought to mitigate them by the casualness of her announcement. The ruse did not succeed. The famous Letter XLII was the answer.
Now at length the Marquesa had something to be anxious about: her daughter was to become a mother. This event, which merely bored Dona Clara, discovered a whole new scale of emotions in the Marquesa. She became a mine of medical knowledge and suggestion. She combed the city for wise old women and poured into her letters the whole folk-wisdom of the New World. She fell into the most abominable superstition. She practiced a degrading system of taboos for her child’s protection. She refused to allow a knot in the house. The maids were forbidden to tie up their hair and she concealed upon her person
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ridiculous symbols of a happy delivery. On the stairs the even steps were marked with red chalk and a maid who accidentally stepped upon an even step was driven from the house with tears and screams. Doña Clara was in the hands of malignant Nature who reserves the right to in- flict upon her children the most terrifying jests. There was an etiquette of propitiation which gen- erations of peasant women had found comforting. So vast an army of witnesses surely implied that there was some truth in it. At least it could do no harm, and Perhaps it did good. But the Marquesa did not only satisfy the rites of paganism; she studied the prescriptions of Christianity as well. She arose in the dark and stumbled through the streets to the earliest Masses. She hysterically hugged the altar-rails trying to rend from the gaudy statuettes a sign, only a sign, the ghost of a smile, the furtive nod of a waxen head. Would all be well? Sweet, sweet Mother, would all be well? 70
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At times, after a day’s frantic resort to such in- vocations, a revulsion would sweep over her. Na- ture is deaf. God is indifferent. Nothing in man’s power can alter the course of law. Then on some street-corner she would stop, dizzy with despair, and leaning against a wall would long to be taken from a world that had no plan in it. But soon a belief in the great Perhaps would surge up from the depths of her nature and she would fairly run home to renew the candles above her daugh- ter’s bed.