# Bennington's Lemons

Extracted from the Blue Book magazine, April 1920, pp. 47–59. Title illustration may be omitted.
Bennington’s Lemons
by
George Allan England
REMEMBER Bartholomew Bennington, who undertook to install a shower-bath contraption and got into such deep, deep trouble? Poor Bartholomew—he seems to have a genius for difficulties! Just read what happened to him when he bought a Caribbean lemon-farm!
WHEN Bartholomew Bennington, from under the sun-soaked awning of the crazy little Cristóbal Cólon, first gazed at Los Cerditos, his heart misgave him. Los Cerditos, on the Rio Pútrido in the República de Chivo, did not appreciably resemble its portrait in the Citras Fruit Sales Company’s prospectus.
All Bennington could see, strung along the mud-and-mangrove bank of the Rio, was a weary aggregation of dubious ’dobies, prone peons, mangy mongrels, grave goats and blasé buzzards badly in need of chloride of lime, the ensemble simmering in a haze of heat and hayhennies. Hayhennies are those microscopical, tropical flies that set up their derricks and drill for oil on any exposed portion of the anatomy, preferably the shining dome.
As the steamer warped up to the slimy bank and the plank was shoved ashore by ebon arms, a suspicion crossed Bennington’s mind that perhaps Mrs. Bennington had, after all, been right—that possibly he ought not to have purchased a fruit-finca in Los Cerditos without first having given it the once-over; that conceivably the prospectus, showing a rose-embowered villa, with a magnificent avenue of royal palms and surrounded by vast graves of orange and lemon trees, might have exaggerated a trifle. Bennington swabbed eight thousand hayhennies off his perspiring brow, and went ashore.
Los Cerditos revealed itself as a muddy smear of mañana, with a jail, a rurales’ barracks and an Ayuntamiento or town hall grouped round a plaza that seemed to have gone out of the plaza-ing business quite a while ago. Los Cerditos needed an undertaker. Inquiry developed a posada, or inn, coyly tucked in among some shacks that stood up by leaning against each other. This inn was run—no, walked—by a Swede who, some claimed, had had a bath and a shave twenty-one years ago. Others said twenty-two.
BENNINGTON had his steamer-trunk transferred to the posada by a brace of maroon mariners, and felt more marooned than they. His first look-in at Los Cerditos posada was not jovial. Live-stock from the patio seemed too intimate with his cell; the torn netting over the little iron rack-of-torture that the Swede called a bed looked as if would strain out only the largest of the mosquitoes; certain red blotches on the leprous, whitewashed walls bore witness to midnight entomological massacres.
Despite all, however, Bennington bucked up. No matter about the town. The fruit-finca—Finca Rica, its name was—ah, that would be different! Didn’t the prospectus prove it? Bennington unpacked, dolled himself in white ducks and pith helmet, and felt better. He had been a tame office-squirrel long enough, running round and round in a revolving cage. Now he was going in for the landed-proprietor stuff, citrus fruits, peon servants, hammocks in the shade of palms, with the Missus in a rocking-chair on a broad piazza under the roses Oh, boy, that would be the life! (Any tropic prospectus will prove it! )
“When I get the finca all jazzed up, right,” said Bennington, I’ll send for Beatrice, and she’ll have to admit I was right!”
Bennington gazed out over the patio at the shimmering plain, the range of the Sierra Hedionda, the buzzards volplaning far aloft. He felt all manner of exotic things. One just bit him under the shirt.
His enthusiasm dropped into an air-pocket, at dinner, and fell from five thousand meters altitude to three hundred and fifty meters. Over the rice, fish and malangas—there was no meat, milk or butter—in the comedor of the inn, where the flies were holding a caucus, he heard two Englishmen at the next table discussing the República de Chivo.
“Bally hole!” ejaculated one. “Why, you cawn’t even get a title to a piece of land. Long lease—that’s the best you can do.”
“And even that holds good only as long as you pay your blinkin’ taxes,” put in the other. “If you don’t, they jolly well confiscate you.”
“It took me three y’ars to get even my lease, on my finca down Suciedad way. I had to grease everybody, from the alcalde up to the dog-poisoner.”
“No wonder these blighters have a proverb that the imports of the country are investors and bottled beer, and the exports are broke investors and empty bottles!”
“You simply cawn’t get anythin’ done, here. You cawn’t hurry these blighters!”
“Nothing hurries, in Chivo. Even the lightning gets tired and quits before it hits the ground. There was a boit of it got stuck that way, lawst week, on Armstrong’s Lago Viscoso finca. Stuck, sir, twenty feet above his house. Armstrong had to make an hombre go up on the blinkin’ roof and lasso it. Burned up seven ropes before they got it down. Oh, a bally hole!”
BENNINGTON wiped sweat and flies from his worried brow and departed in quest of the agent for the property, one Smeady by name. Him he discovered, red, unshaven, innocent of soap, in a gaping undershirt and a haze of cigarette-smoke, making out freight-receipts in what the sign on the door said was an office. He exhaled a rummy aroma, and had blear eyes.
“Things is a bit depressed, just now,” admitted Smeady, “but they’ll do better, soon. The cyclone set us back some.”
“Cyclone? What cyclone?”
“The big blow of last September. Aint you heard?”
“Heard nothing!”
“Oh, that was before you purchased.” And Smeady fell to picking his teeth with a still-inky pen, which did not perceptibly blacken them.
“It didn’t—hm—affect my estate, did it?”
“No-o-o-o. But o’ course, there’s that suit pendin’.”
“Suit?”
“For damages to the Campos Secos, adjoinin’ Jaffray’s finca. Old man Jaffray claims his boniatos are growin’ in your cellar.”
“In my cellar?”
“Well, that is, your house bein’ moved over on his land, you see, an’ some of his crops comin’ up under it, that sort of makes ’em te your cellar. He’s entered suit, at the Ayuntamiento, to make you move your house back, or else buy what land of hisn it’s onto.”
“My house on another man’s land!” gulped Bennington, aghast.
“All but one corner. When the water went down, that’s where it dropped her.”
“Water? What water?”
“Oh, aint you heard? No, prob’ly not. Well, you see, that there cyclone jest natchally blowed the Caribbean right up the Rio, here, an’ flooded the town. But things is lookin’ up again. Several owners has begun replantin’ already.”
“Replanting? What?”
“Oh, all citrus fruits, an’ pineapples. It was sait water, you see. You can’t expect citrus fruit-trees to live, after they been under sait water. But besides them an’ the pines, it didn’t kill nothin’ much, except the banana-palms an’ the avocado-pears an’ the guavas an’ the sapodillos an’ the—”
“Oh, is that all?” interrupted Bennington with fine sarcasm. He scratched himself and demanded: “Anything left alive—except bugs?”
“Well, yes,” answered Smeady with weariness. He looked a hookworm’s picnic-ground. “There’s a few coconuts left. They’re quite hardy, you know.”
“Yes, like finca salesmen!”
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing. Much obliged. I’ll just take a walk down to my—er—my place, and look it over. That is, if it hasn’t floated away, or anything.”
“No, it’s still there.” Smeady turned a vague thumb in a southerly direction. “You go down Calle Fango past the slaughter-house. Don’t bother the buzzards there. There’s a heavy fine for botherin’ buzzards. They’re part o’ the police. Then you keep out in the country, a piece, by the pest-house an’ the graveyard—”
“Cheerful locality, eh?”
“Yes, kind of. An’ then you pass the execution-ground where they garrote people, or shoot ’em if they’ve got pull enough to dodge the twister. Then you reach Jaffray’s place, next to youm. Jaffray’s fences is bad. Look out for his bull. That’s some bull he’s got.”
“I should worry about Jaffray’s bull, after a finca-salesman’s!”
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing. Good day.” And Bennington started for the door.
“Hey, wait a minute!”
“Well, what now? I haven’t been indicted for high treason, arson, murder or anything, have I?”
“No—not yet. But there’s them back taxes.”
“Back taxes?”
“Yes, since 1907. Them has got to be made up before you can get your deed.”
BEDDENING ominously, Bennington returned.
“You mean to tell me—”
“Yes. But it aint over about two hundred pesos. Sorry if the Citrus Sales Company didn’t tell you, but I can show you the papers. An’ there’s that insurance, too.”
“What insurance?”
“On the house.”
“Oh, to Halifax with that! I don’t want any insurance—wont pay it!”
“It’s the law, here. The Ayuntamiento makes you take it, and if you don’t pay, they charge it on the tax-bill. That’ll come to—”
“Well, nothing, but a hundred for phosphate, sixty for plowing and mulching, and whatever the goat-bill comes to.”
“For cheese’ sake. Goat-bill? What goat-bill?”
“Well, last year, you see, a goat got onto your land and ate something that killed it.”
“Thank God, that’s one less! Must have eaten some of the Citrus Sales Company’s literature!”
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing! Proceed!”
“They found it dead, there. So you were sued for damages, with arrears and int’rest.”
“Oh, I was, was I?”
“Yes. It went by default. I don’t just remember the amount due. Int’rest keeps makin’ it a little more all the time, you see. An’ then there’s the int’rest on the back taxes an’ insurance, too.”
“So? Well, about this goat, now, I wont pay it!”
“Yes,” said Smeady, an anxious look in his eyes, which were both rheumy and rummy. “Yes, but this here goat belonged to Pablo Sanchez.”
“I don’t care if it belonged to all inferno!”
“But hombre, this here Sanchez is one o’ the rurales, here. He keeps his own private cemetery. He’s mighty proud of seein’ it grow. Last year a Tignosos man grabbed one of Sanchez’s goats that was eatin’ the wire off his fence, an’ said he’d butcher it if Sanchez didn’t pay damages. Sanchez waited till he had business down that way, and then shot him through the head.”
“That didn’t hurt the Tignosos man, did it?”
“No, but it kind of damaged a nearly new sombrero he was wearing. I wouldn’t dare go up against this Sanchez!”
“You’ve got nothing to fear. No bullet would ever go through your bean! You can just tell this Sanchez, with my compliments—”
“Well, suit yourself, hombre. But he told your tenant, the other day—”
“Whose tenant?”
“Yours. Why?”
"My tenant?” demanded Bennington, staring. “But I’ve got no tenant on my finca!”
“Oh, sure you have! Didn’t they tell you? Well, no matter. It’s all right, anyhow.”
“Oh, it is, eh? Well, say—”
“You see, I didn’t want to let the place stand idle, as the insurance is higher, that way, and also as the house is mostly on Jaffray’s finca, and if there was no one living in it, to protect it—’cause there’s a law you can’t move a house with a live tenant in it an’ it wouldn’t do to kill this one—why, Jaffray might pull the house all the way over on his land, or shove his land under the corner that’s still on yours, and then he’d own the house.”
“Oh, he would, would he?”
“Huh? Oh, yes, yes. That’s law, in Chivo. Houses left layin’ round on other people’s propitty more than thirty days belongs to ’em. Folks are so kind of careless, like, about their houses, down here, you’ve got to have a law like that to keep the place from gettin’ all cluttered up So I figger this here tenant of yours is a good investment, Mr. Bennington. You see, she—”
“Oh, it’s a she, is it?”
“Yep. A widow. Says she’s a widow, anyhow. Search me!”
“If I did, I know what I’d find, same as on me,” said Bennington, scratching again.
“She’s got no husband, anyhow,” continued Smeady, unmoved. “So that prob’ly makes her a widow. She’s an all-right party, even if she is a little back on her rent, that’s four pesos a month.”
“Back on her rent, is she? How far back?”
“From now, continuous. Back to when she moved in. That’s seven months ago, the third of last August.” '
“Great business! Why the devil don’t you get a tenant that’ll at least pay enough to keep up the taxes and insurance and goat-bills?”
SMEADY went after a little of yesterday’s lunch, with his pen, before answering.
“Well, I would, only I can’t get this here one out.”
“Why not?”
“She’s sick, every time I try. And there’s a law, down here, you can’t turn a sick tenant out in the Street.”
“How can you, where there are no streets?” queried Bennington.
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing. She’s sick, is she? What’s the matter with her?”
“I dunno! Just sick, that’s all.”
“I’ll make her a dam sight sicker, by ginger!”
“Wait a minute, hombre!”
“You go where my mother-in-law said she hoped I would!” snarled Bennington. Out into the blinding glare and heat of the dog-and-buzzard-infested pueblo he sallied. Toward Finca Rica he directed his purposeful footsteps.
And Fate, walking beside him, laughed up its rune-embroidered sleeve.
THE widow gave Bennington a severe A shock. In fact, she overshadowed everything else, and for the moment made him quite forget everything. Bennington was a very respectable married man; but a Spanish widow may be, and often is, the grandest little memory-eraser known to genus homo. It was a blessing to Bennington that something could make him forget, if only temporarily, the short-arm jolt handed out to him by his first sight of Finca Rica.
Bennington reached the finca after a blistering walk past all the attractions mentioned by Smeady, and then some, including a hut where he inquired the way. Inside the hut a citizen was dining, with wife and offspring. Two chickens, on the table, likewise dined. One dog, lying on the earthen floor, likewise dined on bones flung down. One chick, standing on said dog, likewise dined, entomologically. There were pigs, too. Bennington hastened on.
Without the widow to overcome the effect of Finca Rica, the blow—after that lathering, blistering walk—would have put Bennington to the mat.
Item: One sketchily fenced area of what looked like a bit of Death Valley, with no more of a growth of guinea-grass than any good safety-razor could have got away with.
Item: The stumps of many ex-fruit-trees. Nothing alive but two coco-palms afflicted with sleeping-sickness and one lemon-tree groaning under the weight of three lemons.
Item: A fleet of internal-combustion-engined goats gnawing at whatever buds still labored to spring up round the roots of the trees.
Item: One burro, considerably extinct, with a buzzards’ convention in plenary session.
Item: One pig-pen, with the balmy trade-wind in the wrong direction.
Item: At the far end of the estates, one mangrove swamp, with a glimpse of scum marking the course of the Rio Pütrido.
Item: Under one of the palms, a distorted shack set down carelessly, as it were, with only one corner on Finca Rica.
That’s all.
If it hadn’t been for the widow, Bennington would have poured dust on his head, and without any undue commotion would have curled himself neatly in a fence-corner and rendered up the ghost.
Not so, however. And it was the widow who made all the difference.
The widow (in parenthesis be it whispered) would have run the thermometer up on a far less impressionable hombre than Bartholomew Bennington. Dearly as he loved his Beatrice, wife of his 34-inch bosom, it profoundly disconcerted him to discover himself the landlord of a real, live, very young, near-Spanish widow.
To be the landlord of any widow whatsoever is liable to disturb a nervous man. How much more so, when that widow turns out to be like the one now looming up over the horizon of Bennington’s apperception?
Hardly had Bennington, dejectedly enough, trekked on to his property,—rather, the property that might be his,—when a figure appeared at the door of the shack.
Bennington reached that door. He stopped, blinking.
“Buenos dias, señor!”
A soft, kitchy-coo voice lisped it at him endearingly. He found himself looking down into a pair of large, brown, liquid, innocent Castilian eyes of incalculable seduction—eyes that gleamed with lights such as never, surely, sparkled north of the Tropic of Cancer—Southern lights, if you please, far more subversive of the soul of man than any northem lights whatsoever.
Bennington felt slightly dizzy. His self-assurance and his intention of blowing-up the non-paying tenant did a nose-dive, looped the loop and flattened out hardly fifty-seven meters from the ground. Still, he kept hold of the Controls, and observed the widow. The widow observed Bennington. Business of mutual observation.
“Buenos dias!” again.
“How do?”
Then they both fell silent.
Here is what she saw: One rather prim, flustered, close-shaven Americano, slightly under medium height, with eyeglasses and an office stoop, white linen suit, pith helmet, dusty white canvas shoes—one exceedingly touristic Americano; one Americano who, by right of a somewhat tenuous purchase, held the powers of landlordship over her; one Americano whose arrival, by means best known to the Los Cerditos people, had already been for several hours known to her.
Here is what he saw: One mighty luscious little bunch of the Eternal Feminine, albeit a trifle café-au-lait—but café-au-lait with more lait than café, by a long shot. Glossy black hair, with just the suspicion of a wave, parted in the middle, decked with a magnificent, genuine, hawk’s-bill comb, and drawn down over two (2) ears that—were I a poet, and very original—I might describe as delicately chiseled sea-shells. He beheld a crimson Japanese hibiscus trailing its delicate lacery down over this hair, at the right side of the shapely head. Also a very, oh, very low-cut little dress of simple white cotton, that (it’s a cinch) had no lingerie whatever underneath it.
Bennington’s eyeglassed eyes fell down along the lines of this femininity, lines that would have made Venus ill. Bennington’s soul blushed, but his eyes continued to observe. He beheld slim brown ankles and bare feet tucked into a pair of the rope-soled alparcatas of the country. He beheld two hands, likewise slim, set on two well-ripened hips. In the fingers of the right hand smoldered a brown-paper cigarette. Oh, boy!
He beheld, now, a white-toothed smile, trimmed with lips that you can fit adjectives to by looking in Roget’s “Thesaurus,” §829 (edition of 1857), where it gives synonyms for delicious. The smile was also of the eyes. (Also see Roget.) Then the right hand rose to the full, ripe, red, moist lips, the cigarette was set between them; the widow took a deep chestful of smoke and let it drift from those lips, as per above, all round Bennington’s dizzy head. The smoke enveloped him like Circean censers on the Isle of What’s-Its-Name, when Ulysses and his men had the Big Picnic. You know—it tells all about that in Bullfinch.
There was mockery, insinuation, invitation, coquetry, defiance, seduction and femininity-plus in that inimitable tilt of the head, that angle of the cigarette, the slow drift of that smoke on the gentle tropic breeze wafting from the hog-pen. There was witchery in it, magic, yea, that eclipsed the lopsided dislocation of the shack, the extinct burro and its undertaking corps down yonder, the pigs. Bennington could not swim, but his head could, and did. He lifted his pith helmet, no doubt to let the perfumed breezes waft against his super-heated brain-box, and cleared his throat.
“Are you the widow who don’t pay—hm!—nice day, isn’t it? How d’ye do?”
“No very good,” the widow answered brokenly, looking suddenly wistful. “No espeak mucho Inglés, señor. Me seeck!”
“Sick, eh? That’s too bad!” commiserated Bennington, sparring for wind—going into a clinch, as it were. (Figurative use of words.) “What seems to be the matter?”
“You Señor Bennin’ton?” the widow cooed, her eyes languishing. “Sí?”
“Sí, señora,” Bennington admitted. He pronounced it “Say-nora.” Somehow he felt he was about to be put on the witness-stand.
“Ah!” she sighed. “So seeck!” She pressed a hand to her full-rounded, uncorseted bosom, and rolled up the dark eyes. “Oh, w’at pain! So seeck, me!”
“Sorry,” said Bennington, getting his second wind, “but I own this house.” He spoke sternly. “I’m going to move this house back on my land, sabe? House, move ’em, there—allí!” He pointed toward what had evidently been foundations. With the idea, hope revived. Perhaps, after all, the house could be moved, the trees replanted, something made out of this ghastly mockery of the prospectus—some way found to avoid telling Beatrice he had been stung again. “Me, move my house, sabe? Fix ’em up. Make ’em all good, you know. Then rent ’em! Alquilar!”
“To me, no?” the widow smiled, charmingly. She laid a slim hand on his white duck sleeve. “You good hombre, feex my leetle house for me. Veree good hombre! Muchas gracias! You rent it to me, no?”
“If you pay, say-nora!” Bennington got quite imposing. “Mr. Smeady tells me you haven’t paid anything at all, yet. No dînero!”
“Oh, señor! Me, seeck widow; no have hombre!”
“Sorry, Mrs.—Mrs.—”
“Hernandez. That me. You have match, eh? My cigarrillo, he go out.”
Bennington fished, found a match, struck it. The widow leaned against him, her hand on his as she lighted up. Bennington was perspiring more freely than even the thermometer could justify. He glanced about, thankful that the hot red road was deserted and that no other house, no other human, was in sight.
He threw away the match, gently repulsed the widow, and looked sternly at her through his tortoise-rimmed glasses.
“Sorry, say-nora,” he repeated. “but you see, naturalmente, you no pay, you no can live in my house, sabe?”
“Pay? Me, pay? But señor, me, widow, no money, how can pay? How can work, w’en seeck all the time? So seeck?”
“Pardon me, say-nora, but you don’t look very sick. Not very!”
“Ah, no look, maybe. But w’at pains! Oh, terrible! Some days I. faint myself—here the pain, there the pain!” She touched her head, her throat, and blew nonchalant smoke on the balmy, sweet air. “If I no smoke, señor, to take away pain, I maybe faint myself any time!”
“Don’t—don’t faint now, please, say-nora!” exclàimed Bennington in great alarm.
“I faint myself, if I get excite’! An’ oh, señor, how I loove los Americanos! So handsome, brave, strong!” Her eyes melted at him. “How I get excite’, when Americano come near! I maybe faint myself, maybe die!”
“For heaven’s sake, say-nora! Calm yourself!”
“It is terrible, señor!” Her look yearned. “So lonesome, me. Tan solitaria, ay de mi! No man! An’ my leetle ones! How I go away from my leetle home, with my leetle ones?”
“Little what?”
“My leetle babies, señor! No house, no home. How? Dios mio!”
“Ah, say-nora, so you have children, eh?” Bennington suddenly felt a sense of guilt.
The widow turned, called:
“Ven aca, chicot Ven, chiquita mia!”
Bennington, looking past her, saw the interior of his house—his tropic bungalow, rose-embowered, into which he never yet had stepped foot and into which he certainly would never dare step foot so long as this Spanish Circe remained there. The house, he observed, was reasonably clean—far cleaner than most, in Los Cerditos. It was simply furnished, homelike. There was the usual charcoal-burner, the blue-painted little carbide-lamp hung against the whitewashed wall, the porron or water-cooler of porous ware hung to a beam by a braided goat-hide thong.
Before he could notice anything more, pat-pat-pat came naked feet toddling, and two offspring heaved in sight. The boy was perhaps four, the girl three. They were both dressed exactly alike, Eden summer style. Summer—that’s before-thè-fall— get it? (Pretty good, I’ll say.) One was lemon yellow—more lemon! The other was chocolate. Both sucked thumbs, directing round, expressionless eyes at Bennington.
“Both yours?” inquired B., wondering at the chromatic variation, but feeling that any personal inquiries might be indelicate.
“Si, si, sehor! Both mine! Beautiful, pretty, bonito, sweet, mono, magneefico, no?”
“No is right, say-nora.”
“Ah, que simpâtico!”
“Some family, say-nora!”
“I have another one, too, not here.”
“So? Congratulations!”
“Gracias!” She smiled bewitchingly, shooting the vamp stuff right over the foot-lights in Bara style. The children couldn’t have been barer, possibly, and the widow was next door to it.
“señor,” vamped the widow, “you beeg, strong, reech, handsome Americano, you no put poor seeck leetle Espanish widow an’ nihitos out of house, because no have dinero?”
Bennington gasped. He drew a cigar from his pocket and lighted it, for self-assurance. The widow cast longing eyes thereon.
“Good tobacco,” she smiled. “You have two, no?”
Bennington stood and delivered. The widow flipped her cigarette away and bit the end off the cigar with perfectly pearly, even, strong teeth. For a minute their eyes met. Overhead the breeze rustled the dry leaves of the coco-palm. A thin drift of smoke from burning guinea-grass, somewhere out on the plain, crossed the sky. The slow-wheeling shadow of a buzzard, far aloft, bisected the estate—the estate where now one lemon-tree alone was bearing fruit. A goat blatted; a hog became vocal; it was all exotic, plus. Bennington's pulses stirred. Here was adventure; here was life. He felt himself slipping; the Wheeler Avenue Church, in which he was a junior deacon, seemed (and was) more than two thousand miles away; so was Mrs. B. Bennington blushed. The words of Emerson came to him: “High living and low thinking.” After all, when one is in Rome, one should roam. Bennington lifted his hand, to lay it on the widow’s arm—but the hand only sought his watch-pocket.
He hauled out his watch, glanced at it, said:
“Well, say-nora, I—I guess I’ve got to be getting back to town. Hope you’ll—be better, soon.”
“No, never better, me.” She smiled sadly. “My heart, so sad, so lonely! No hombre!”
“Oh, no hombre, eh?” asked Bennington, trying to be matter-of-fact. “What happened to your hombre?”
“He get keel by Chivistas, in last revolution. Now we suffer. Oh, señor Bennin’ton, you cannot see my babies hungry, no clothes? You geeve me one, two pesos, eh? No?”
“No is right, again, say-nora.” The naked eye did not detect that the pot-bellied babies were oppressed by famine. Nor did the widow appear at all haggard. In fact, she had altogether too much feminine pulchritude for B.’s peace of mind. Now she was smiling up at him, with the crimson hibiscus tilted over on one side. Bennington tried to back away. But she detained him with the slim hand on his
“Give to me one light, señor?” begged she.
“Here’s a match,” he answered.
“No like match! I light my cigar with yours, eh?”
A-tiptoe in the rope-soled alpargatas, she raised her cigar—and mouth—to his. Bennington stood pat. By the gods, not now would he hoist the white flag! She pressed a little closer. Her hand, her arm slid to his shoulder as she steadied herself. Her eyes half closed; the hibiscus almost tickled Bennington’s left ear.
For the first time in all his white-collared, 34-inch chested, junior-deaconed, much-married life, Bartholomew Bennington realized that—
“Lord!” thought he. “I’d better be going!”
The widow, her cigar alight, sank back and away, contented. She was surely getting on quite well.
“You stay here, have some café with me, señor?” invited she. The infants had silently departed. “Me, no dinero. Very poor, an’ seeck. But I am of Espanish blood!” Her dark, lustrous eyes gleamed with sudden pride of a race dominant across the pages of time, of history. “The Americano is welcome! My house shall be to heem like hees own house! Pase usted!”
“Thanks, no,” declined B. “It’s awfully good of you, say-nora, to tell me this house is like my own, and all that, but really I’ve got to be getting back to Los Cerditos. I—I’ll see you later, say-nora.”
“No call me señora!” she flashed at him with" a wonderful, arch look. “Call me Angelita—your leetle Angelita!”
“Oh, no, no, really, I couldn’t think of that, say-nora!” objected Bennington hastily. He realized he was being vamped, and vamped hard. This was the nearest he had ever come to being vamped; all his previous experience had been at the movies. He knew he liked it, but it was naughty, naughty—mustn’t touch! So he backed away, one hand raised, palm-out. “See you later. Good day!”
“Váyase con Dios, atnigo mio!” she gave him affectionate adieu. “You will come again, very soon? Pronto, no?”
“Well—yes, yes, of course!”
“Oh, felicidad!” she breathed. Then to the babes and sucklings, in Spanish:
“Say good-by to the handsome, brave Americano!”
“Adios!” obeyed the urchin, unmoved, like some chubby, mechanical toy.
“Adios, papá!” lisped the girl, and smiled bewitchingly.
The widow blew a ribbon of smoke from those red lips into the sunlit air under the palm-tree, kissed her slim hand at Benninglon, and laid that hand on her heart.
“Good night!” gulped Bennington, and fled.
BENNINGTON spent three weeks of toils and complications incredible to one who knoweth not the ways and customs of folk in the spig belt. He wrote, however, enthusiastic letters home to Beatrice, all about the land flowing with milk and honey. In case something might yet be salvaged from the wreck, he might never have to own the awful truth. In case all were lost, he was at any rate delaying the day of reckoning when Beatrice, as in times of yore when he had bought that shower-bath, could point the finger of contumely with an “I told you so!”
Yes, Bennington had troubles. This is not a book I am writing, and so I shall only catalogue those troubles, not describe them. There were troubles at the posada, re nothing much to eat and re the room being an entomological museum; there was prickly beat and there were continuous hot and cold hayhennies; there was trouble about the H. C. L. and not any decent L. to have H. C. about; there was trouble with the Ayuntamiento anent the deeds, taxes, goat-damages and insurance; there was trouble with the notary about drawing and stamping infinitudes of papers, none of which ever got finished, signed, sealed and delivered; there was trouble re:
Interpreters; all kinds of brown and maroon people all the time showing up with bills for alleged plowing, mulching, setting out trees, furnishing phosphate, none of which was now visible.
Jaffray, who insisted the house should be moved.
The alcalde, who wouldn’t permit it, while a sick tenant dwelt therein.
The bank, that wouldn’t cash U. S. checks.
The cable-company, that wouldn’t take messages collect.
The rurales, that pastured their goats and cows on the finca and then kicked because there wasn’t feed enough for them.
The Sanidad, that objected to the location of the piggery.
The consul, that had a bill against the property for transferring something or other, once upon a time.
The goats, attacking the lemon-tree.
The dogs, reported to be attacking the goats, it being a penal offense for anyone’s dog to bite anyone’s goat on your land.
The mañana habit, that kept anything from getting done.
The climate, water, buzzards, laws, customs, manners, habits, rules, regulations, army, navy, judicature and constitution of the República de Chivo.
Bennington grew groggy. Life was now spelled T-r-o-u-b-l-e. Capital T, please. Bennington didn’t quite know what was happening, or why, because the heat had got into his brains and turned them to whipped cream; also he was getting thin from living on malangas, rice and fish; also he was pale where he wasn’t sunblistered and prickly-heated and hayhennied. He thought the universe had gone wrong and the terrestrial axis had got un- hooked from the pole-star, whereas all the matter really was this, that he was trying for the first time to do business with people between the latitude of Cancer, which means the Crab, and Capricorn, which means the Goat.
Bennington, when a tame squirrel in his spinning-cage of business, had made enormous progress compared to Bennington, a waltzing mouse in the glass case of tropic life. He waltzed and waltzed, and got nowhere. All he understood was that nothing ever really happened, in spite of the fact that he was continually busier than a one-armed painter with the hives.
In despair Bennington appealed to the nonchalant, tooth-picking rum-hound Smeady.
“My Lord, man, what am I going to do?” demanded he, at the last gasp of patience. “Here I’ve been sticking around this back-alley of misery for three double-blanked weeks, and nothing done—”
“l’ve been here ten years, an’ nothin’ done!”
“No deed, no moving, no trees, no rent, no repairs, no nothing but taxes and stamps and insurance and laws and being batted round from one mongrel official to another, and lawsuits and bugs and starvation and bills and interpreters and widows and lemons—”
“Keep your B. V. D.’s on,” advised Smeady. “You aint no worse off than all Americanos down here. That’s the way these Chivos do biz. There’s sixty-five clerks on every one-man job, an’ they’ve all got the manana fever an’ the itchin’ palm. You’re goin’ as good as any Americano. You’ll git results in another six months or so.”
“Six months! By ginger! Say, I—I’m through with this manana stuff! I’m going to get action, how, or bust!”
“You’ll bust, Mister.”
“Bust, nothing! Something’s got to be done, damn quick!”
“Damn quick has put lots of hombres in the cemetery, here.”
“I should worry about the cemetery! I’m going to get something done!”
“Look out it aint yourself.”
“I’m going to begin on that widow!”
“Huh?”
“She’s the stumbling-block to the whole proposition. Isn’t there any way to get her out, so I can move that house?”
Smeady shook his uncombed head and scratched his unshaven chin with unmanicured nails.
“Not legally,” he answered. “But you might try moral persuasion.”
“As how?”
“Oh, a coupla print dresses an’ about five pesos.”
“What? You mean, after she’s had all that rent for nothing, I’ve got to bribe her to get out of my own property?”
“Yes, somethin’ like that.”
“It’s an outrage!”
“It may be an outrage, Mister, but it’s practical Chivo politics. It’s your one chancet. If you don’t work it some such way, she can squat there till Los Cerditos freezes over, which will be the Saturday p. m. after hell does. And she can tell you to wait for that frost, too.”
“I wont do it! I wont be held up that way!”
“All right, hombre. Good day,” remarked Smeady; and once more he bent over his task of making out freight-receipts.
BENNINGTON thought it over, twenty-four busy, scratchy hours, and knew himself beaten. He saw he hadn’t even a Chinaman’s chance to get the place free from trouble and wish it on some other citrus-maddened sucker till that widow was out of the way and the house moved off Jaffray’s malangas. He purchased, therefore, two simple gowns—a plain red one and a yellow, with green stripes—at the best tienda in Cerditos, and with these gowns and some cash once more repaired to his place. It was a “place,” now—no longer a finca or an estate.
The lovely Angelita greeted him with smiles. Today her lustrous hair was hanging in thick black masses down her sinuous back. The flower in her tresses was a jasmine. Her raiment was a camisa above, a petticoat below, and a cigar. No babes were visible. Bennington kept his mind firmly fixed on Mrs. B. and the fWheeler Avenue Church, and remained discreetly about two yards from the door of the palm-shaded shack.
Bennington made a little talk—videlicet: The Americano heart was sad because of the widow’s misfortunes. The Americano would assist the suffering widow. Accept, then, these two simple gowns, also these five pesos. And when would it be convenient for the widow to seek another lodgment?
Angelita smiled sweetly, blew smoke round B.’s ears, came close, laid the slim hand on his lapel and with childish ingenuosity looked up into his horn-spectacled eyes.
“I weel go, Mr. Bennin’ton, since you weesh it,” she lisped. “I weel do anythin’ in this worl’ for my dear Mr. Bennin’ton. I am only one esmall, leetle widow. Hè ees one beeg, estrong, brave man.. I weel obey heem. But—it cost me more than five pesos to move away forever from my leetle home!”
“So?” demanded Bennington. The lure of the brown eyes, the slim hand, was not very strong on him now. Prickly heat and hayhennies, hunger and complications had got him peeved; he' didn’t feel quite so romantic. The jasmine in the glossy black hair no longer vamped him; the cigar- smoke no longer cast as it were a haze over his eyes, his memories, his conscience, dimming Beatrice and his deaconship. Even as, at the time of the shower-bath episode, Bennington had resolved to master fate or die right there in the tub, so now he made up his mind for victory or annihilation.
“How much do you want?” he demanded brusquely.
“Oh, señor! You espik so to me? To your leetle Angelita? Well” (deep sigh), “it cost me fifteen pesos, at least.”
“Ten, and the dresses, to beat it!”
“Ay de mí! My leetle Borne! My babies, an’ no place to esleep! An’ me so seeckl But—I go for twelve pesos, fifty centavos!”
“I said ten bucks, and ten goes! Take it or leave it!”
“Well, I take it. Geeve me el dinero!” The slim hand went out. “I go then—mañana.”
“You go today! Now!”
She looked appealing.
“Today, I go?”
“Fil say you do!”
“Well, then geeve me five pesos now. When I gone, other five!”
“That’s fair, I suppose,” admitted Bennington. He handed over a V. The widow tucked it down into her bosom.
“I go,” said she. “But my heart—he is broke!”
SHE leaned on Bennington and wept. u Bennington, ardently thankful for the two thousand miles between him and Bea trice, broke loose and fled, leaving the widow in possession of five pesos, two dresses and a house.
She would, however, undoubtedly clear out. The lure of the other five would dislodge her. Then matters would progress. In spite of prickly heat, hayhennies and all complications, Bennington returned to Los Cerditos eminently happy.
That happiness lasted only a brief space. Night came, and with it news that the widow had not yet moved. Bennington learned this from a rancher who came riding in from down San Sucio way. Ben nington tried to locate Smeady, for advice, but Smeady was not discoverable. He therefore passed an unusually peeved evening in the posada bar, his heart filled with un-Lincolnian “malice toward all and charity toward none”—least of all toward café-au-lait widows with hibiscuses and jasmines in their hair.
Bennington retired early to theoretical rest under the ragged mosquito-bar in his white-walled cell off the patio. He was poison-mad. His sleep was a nightmare of heat, bugs, peevishness.
All at once, out of the black of the tropic, stewing night, a rough hand seized him. A rummy voice growled at him.
Bennington sat up suddenly, dazed.
“What the—”
A vague dark figure was beside him, shaking him back to consciousness. Bennington shook an involuntary shimmy, and fully awoke.
“SH-H-H-H!” cautioned the dark figure.
A familiar odor of more than 2.75% and a certain hoarse quality of the dark figure’s voice assured Bennington that this was no disembodied spirit, but a spiritized body of only too well-known name and habits.
“What the devil d 'you want, now?” demanded Bennington irately. “What you doing here?”
“Sh-h-h-h!” warned Smeady again. “He’s after you!”
“Who is?”
“Get on your things and beat it!” whispered Smeady. “You got about five minutes. After that—”
“W-w-w-what?”
“If you’re here when he eventuates, your life wont be worth a plugged counterfeit Chivo centavo!”
“You crazy, or what?”
“No, I aint crazy, but you’ll be dead, if you’re here ten minutes from now! Sanchez, the rural—he’s wise to you. He’s full o’ vino an’ mescal, an’ the jealousy-bug has bitten him in nine thousand places. I got a tip from down the line. Well, do you get up an’ vamoose, or do you treat Los Cerditos to a first-class Americano funeral?”
Bennington climbed out onto the dirty, tiled floor, regardless of the possibility of scorpions that so dearly love to lurk in unexpected places and caress bare tootsies.
“Who’s he jealous of, and why?” demanded he. “Is this a joke?”
“You’ll think it’s a joke when Sanchez arrives with a cannon in one mitt an’ some mucho knife in the other, an’ begins to climb up an’ down your quiverin’ carcass. It’s that widow, you—”
“You told me to do it!”
“I didn’t tell you to shoot the love-stuff at her!”
“I never!”
“Well, maybe you didn’t; but Sanchez thinks you did, an’ it’ll be all the same to your corpse! Get a pronto move on, you paralytic snail! Jump into some rags, grab what you can, an’ fut! Doggone it, how did I know she was Sanchez’s private property? You’ve got one chance in eighty-seven thousand! Next minute, it’ll be one in eighty-eight thousand! For the love o’ Pete, hombre, pronto on the fade-away!”
Smeady shook him again, so that Bennington’s teeth did a bolero with castanet accompaniment. Yes, it must have been the shake that caused the chatter. Surely, who could have suspected that Bennington would be afraid? Even if he were, it must have been fear of hurting Sanchez that made Bennington’s Angers tremble so that he could hardly fasten his buttons or tie his shoes. Howbeit, he dressed in record time. No commuter ever did better. This too was commuting—probably com-muting a sentence of death to one of banishment.
SMEADY, meantime—still making no light—was dumping everything movable into B.’s steamer-trunk, hit or miss. Just as Bennington Anished dressing, he shut the lid, jumped on it and cinched up the strap.
“For Gawd’s sake, grab the other end, hombre,” he whispered, “and vamoose!”
Silently they rustled the trunk out into the patio, under the vague light of the smoke-hazed tropic stars. Smeady veered toward the side gate. They stumbled down a walk bordered with beer-bottles driven. into the earth, upside-down, passed through a ’dobe wall and reached a crooked little alley that led toward the river. A bat staggered dimly across the sky. Some cricket Heifetz was doing an obbligato in Q-minor. Darkness and mystery, emptiness, heat and the terror of a sudden, violent death brooded. How easy an ambuscade in the night, from behind any wall—a knife-thrust—a body slid into the river! Then the alligators would take charge of the undertaking-job. Mysterious disappearance of one Americano. No one would ever know, but Smeady—and fear would seal his lips. Bennington gulped dryly and stumbled on.
“The steamer’s been gone an hour,” whispered Smeady as they reached the bank of mud all sieved by innumerable little lairs of Addler-crabs. “But I got my motorboat. We can shoot up the Rio, eut into Lago Podrido and try to get through the swamp to La Fiebre, where she ties up for wood. It’s a slim chance, but there aint no other. You’re lucky you got me, hombre. If you hadn’t, you’d sure be pickin’ lemons in hell, some pron to!”
Together they heaved the trunk into the launch, slipping and doing new jazz steps in the slime. Over the gunwale they scrambled. Smeady grabbed a boathook and poled off. He jerked the engine to startled life. With an intermittent bronchial spasm the exhaust began spitting at the gloom, and away upstream the launch slipped. Away forever from Bennington’s existence went sliding the sad settlement of Los Cerditos.
“Now, for the love of the great, crested philly-loo bird,” complained Smeady as they echoed under the rotting bridge and came to the last huts of the town, “who’d ever thought Sanchez would of got so red-eyed over a common, everyday little thing like a landlord payin’ a tenant to get out? I’m in raw. When he Ands out you’ve blew, he’ll be tryin’ to dissect me. 'Cause he knows I’m your agent, an’ he’ll figger I helped you do the pronto sidestep. You’ll get to the States alive, maybe, but what about me?”
Bennington shrugged indifferent shoulders. The fate of Smeady did not alarm him.
“You ought to have told me she had a—a sweetheart, as it were,” he returned bitterly. Wormwood and gall were honey, by comparison.
“How was I to know he’d get sore? What you done was prob’ly all open an’ aboveboard. But when he dropped in an’ seen them there dresses, an’ handed her a few wallops, sheTiad to up an’ spill it about the ten. So now his fav’rite breakfast-food is Americano liver, soufflé. Know how to pray?”
“I’m a junior deacon!”
“Well, do some right Smart deaconin’, Mister. Deak away, for all you’re worth. You can’t deak none too much, this night!”
BENNINGTON refused to deak. Instead, he used some language very unusual to him. Something like a red haze seemed to pass over his eyes. The waters of a great rage flooded his tormented, flea-bitten body and exacerbated soul. With great fluency he consigned the widow, Sanchez, Los Cerditos, fruit-fincas and the Repüblica de Chivo to quite unthinkable torments of extremely long duration.
“I’d sell the whole qualified outfit for a centavo,” he concluded. “I’d give it away—I’d pay any man real coin to take it!”
“I gather from your general line of verbidge,” said Smeady from his place at the wheel—a dim figure, steadily holding the launch upstream between smelly banks a-sprawl with spider-clawed mangroves, “I gather an’ infer, hombre, that you might, for a consideration, dispose of said propitty?”
“Take it an’ be damned!” snarled Bennington, a muddy, crouching, disheveled wreck of what had once been a proud, confident prospectus-eater. “I’m done! Take it!”
“No, I couldn’t do that,” objected Smeady. “Gifts aint legal, in law. An’ I’m honest, too, That’s my main weakness, honesty. You’re laborin’ under excitement, an’ you’d give away the Stand ard Oil Company just now. I wont take it as a gift. But I’ll acquire an’ purchase it for whatever you think it’s wuth as it stands, deed, lease, lemon-tree, goats, taxes, insurance, lawsuits, hayhennies, hog-pen, extinct burro, buzzards, shacks, widow an’ all other complications included. I’ll take ’em all off your hands. How much?”
“Enough to get me back to civilization, out of this superheated annex to where I hope the widow goes!”
“As per how much, cash?”
“One hundred bucks—but I warn you, amigo, you’re committing highway robbery on yourself!”
“A hundred is right!” agreed Smeady. “If we ever get to the steamer alive, which aint by no means likely, we’ll put the deal through, legal enough to hold.”
Bennington, in sudden gratitude, could have wept on the rough, red neck of the rummiferous Smeady.
MUCHO time passed. The launch worked its way through dark lagoons, bubbly, scummy, overhung with gum-trees and distorted, grisly vegetation; lagoons where logs that floated in the slime suddenly came to life and grunted, snuffling, as they opened big-fanged alligator-jaws; lagoons where the mosquitoes and hayhennies came, not in thousands alone, but in dense, shrilling clouds. Bennington wondered what would happen if the engine quit, and shuddered. To him Smeady had now become the sine qua non of salvation and of life. It seemed a pity to take a hundred from such a brave, self-sacrificing altruist; but B. needed the coin, to get home with. Yes, he would accept the hundred.
After a few epochs, eons, and eras, the launch emerged into a dark inlet from the sea. Tiny lights winked and beckoned, far ahead. These lights turned out to be those of the Cristóbal Colón, taking wood at La Fiebre. Smeady brought the launch up under the port bow of the steamer and knotted the painter to the cable-chain. Then he and Bennington scrambled in at an open, black-yawning, freight-port. Smeady gave a handful of loose change to a vague figure there, for silence. Under the gleam of a lantern he scrawled a bill of sale on a wrinkled sheet of paper. Bennington signed it, and the vague figure of the roustabout witnessed the signature. Smeady counted out a hundred, which Bennington’s pocket assimilated. Then they hauled B.’s trunk aboard. Smeady pressed Bennington’s trembling hand.
“Lay low till you’re at sea,” he warned. “The Colón will be pullin’ out o’ this dump o’ misery in about ten minutes. Sorry things come out so rotten for you, old man, but this here tropic stuff is doggone uncertain. There’s too many crimps in this Caribbean cosmos, to play any sure shots. You’re lucky to be goin’ north, with a skin that don’t look like a sheet o’ postage-stamps. It’s me that’s gotta stay here an’ catch it. Here, here’s a souvenir for you.” He slid a shriveled lemon into Bennington’s hand. “You’ll prize it—it’ll prove to your friends that you got somethin’ off your finca, anyhow. Good luck to you. S’iong!”
Bennington pocketed the lemon. He felt grateful for even that. At all events he would have something for Beatrice; he was not going home completely goose-egged. Smeady, meantime, slipped out of the freight-port into the launch, cast off and departed. The put-put-put of his engine faded along the black waters. Bennington, at the end of an imperfect day, was sitting alone with his thoughts. The roustabout, with glowing cigarette in the darkness of the hold, seemed to be regarding him from a distance of great commiseration.
AN hour later, with the Colon well out of the lagoon and safe at sea, Bennington declared himself to the purser, bought a phony passport, paid his passage, got a stateroom and stowed his trunk. Then he returned to the hold, where somehow he felt safer, to sit on a crate of empty bottles—he and the bottles being as it were the regulation exports of Chivo—and smoke a contemplative cigar, and congratulate himself on being alive as well as on having rid himself of his all-too-lively estate.
“Not so bad, at that,” reflected he. “The only thing that worries me is Beatrice handing out the I-told-you-so line of talk. Well—I can fix her, some way. I can frame a good one about a revolution, an earthquake and a tornado, with smallpox on the side. I know I’ve dropped a couple of thousand, but she’ll be so glad to get me back she wont say boo. I didn’t get stung in a business way, anyhow. Fire-eating rurales aren’t business. I calculate that was some smart enough deal, the way I saved a little something, anyhow, out of the wreck!”
Well pleased, he watched the phosphorescence of the dark waters, the mystic Southern stars, the wink of the last tiny lighthouse on the coasts of the República de Chivo.
“How much did Smeady buy it for this time?” asked a dejected voice beside him. Bennington recognized the roustabout. “It was a hundred, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“He had to pay two, last time,” remarked the roustabout, who by his speech was an Americano. “An’ the time before that, one-fifty. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes less. The time he put it over on me—just before I got down and out an’ took this job, which I’ll never get away from now,—it was one seventy-five.”
“What the devil are you talking about?” demanded Bennington, feeling that all was not well. “You say he’s bought that property before?”
“Why, sure—that an’ others. Sometimes it’s one finca, sometimes another. But the Finca Rica, as a steady, once-a-year, sure-shot coin-grabber, bas ’em all skun. It’s good biz, all right. But he’d ought of paid me more for witnessin’ the bill o’ sale. If he treated Angelita that way, she’d divorce him.”
“Divorce him! Angelita would—”
“Sure she would!”
Bennington, grabbing the man’s thin, yielding wrist, looked into vague and sad eyes of the wreck that had once been a hopeful investor.
“D’you mean to say that—that widow—is his wife?”
“Uh-ihuh! That’s her. That’s Mrs. Smeady. He’s been married to her about six, seven year. All that talk about Sanchez—well, there aint no such animal.”
“No Sanchez?”
“No. He’s just part o’ the line o’ tough proposition Smeady uses to shake down suckers, so he can sell fincas back to the company to sell ’em to more suckers.”
“Good night!”
“Good night, Mister. Thanks for the peso.”
Bennington, dazed though he was, took the hint and slid a peso into the roustabout’s hand. The roustabout faded into the gloom of the hold.
One last hayhenny, still lurking in the hold, suddenly lit on Bennington’s neck and sank its red-hot drill there. Bennington never even slapped at it.
“Sting away, pretty pet,” said he. “I’d feel lonesome without you!”
With a bitter laugh Bartholomew Bennington realized that one is born every minute, and that for one minute, at least, he had kept the world’s supply at par.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1936, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 87 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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