The Struggles and Triumph of Isidro de los Maestros

Returning to his own town after a morning spent in rounding up attendance at one of his distant and stubborn barrio schools, the Maestro of Balangilang was swaying with relaxed muscles and half-closed eyes to the gentle trot of his little native pony, when he pulled up with a start, wide awake and all his senses on alert. Through his drowsiness, at first in a low hum but quickly rising to a fiendish crescendo, came a buzzing sound, much like one of the sawmills of his California forests, and now, as he sat in the saddle, erect and tense, the thing ripped the air in ragged tears, shrieked vibrating into his ear, and finished its course along his spine in delicious irritation.

"Oh, where am I?" murmured the Maestro, blinking; but between blinks he caught the flashing green of the rice fields and knew he was far from the sawmills of the Golden State. So he raised his nose to heaven, and there, floating above him in the serene blue, was the explanation. It was a kite, a great locust-shaped kite, darting and swooping in the hot monsoon, and from it, dropping plumb, came the abominable clamor.

"Aha!" exclaimed the Maestro, pointing accusingly at the thin line vaguely visible against the sky, a diagonal running from the kite above him ahead to a point in the road. "Aha! there's something at the end of that; there's Attendance at the end of that!"

With that significant remark he leaned forward in the saddle, bringing his switch down with a whizz behind him. The pony gave three rabbit leaps and then settled into its drumming trot. As they advanced, the line overhead dropped gradually. Finally, the Maestro had to swerve the horse aside to save his helmet. He pulled up to a walk, and a few yards farther came to the spot where string met earth in the expected Attendance.

The Attendance was sitting on the ground, his legs spread before him at an angle of forty-five degrees, each foot arched in a secure grip on a bunch of cogon grass. These legs were bare as far as they went, and in fact, no trace of clothing was reached until the eye met the lower fringe of an indescribable undershirt modestly veiling the upper half of a round little paunch; an indescribable undershirt, truly, for observation could not reach the thing itself, but only the dirt encrusting it so that it hung together, rigid as a knight's iron corset, in spite of monstrous tears and rents. Between the teeth of the Attendance was a long, thick cheroot, wound about with hemp fiber, at which he pulled with rounded mouth. Hitched around his right wrist was the kite string, and between his legs a stick spindled with an extra hundred yards.

At intervals he hauled hand-over-hand upon the taut line, and then the landscape vibrated to the buzz-saw song which had so compellingly recalled the Maestro to his eternal pursuit.

As the shadow of the horse fell upon him, the Attendance brought his eyes down from their heavenly contemplation and fixed them upon the rider. A tremor of dismay, mastered as soon as born, flitted over him; then, silently, with careful suppression of all signs of haste, he reached for a big stone with his little yellow paw, then for a stick lying farther off. Using the stone as a hammer, he drove the stick into the ground with deliberate stroke, wound the string around it with tender solicitude, and then, everything being secure, just as the Maestro was beginning his usual embarrassing question:

"Why are you not at school, eh?"

He drew up his feet beneath him, straightened up like a jack-in-the-box, took a hop-skip-jump, and with a flourish of golden heels, flopped head-first into the roadside ditch's rank luxuriance.

"The little devil!" exclaimed the disconcerted Maestro. He dismounted and, leading his horse, walked up to the side of the ditch. It was full of the water of the last typhoon. From the edge of the cane-field on the other side cascaded down the bank a mad vegetation; it carpeted the sides, arched itself above in a vault, and inside this recess the water was rotting, green-scummed; and a powerful fermentation filled the nostrils with hot fever-smells. In the center of the ditch the broad, flat head of a carabao emerged slightly above the water; the floating lilies made an incongruous wreath about the great horns and the beatifically-shut eyes, and the thick, humid nose exhaled ecstasy in shuddering ripplets over the calm surface.

Filled with a vague sense of the ridiculous, the Maestro peered into the darkness. "The little devil!" he murmured. "He's somewhere in here; but how am I to get him, I'd like to know. Do you see him, eh, Methuselah?" he asked of the stolid beast soaking there in bliss.

Whether in answer to this challenge or to some other irritant, the animal slowly opened one eye and ponderously let it fall shut again in what, to the heated imagination of the Maestro, seemed a patronizing wink. Its head slid quietly along the water; puffs of ooze rose from below and spread on the surface. Then, in the silence there rose a significant sound—a soft, repeated snapping of the tongue:

"Cluck, cluck."

"Aha!" shouted the Maestro triumphantly to his invisible audience. "I know where you are, you scamp; right behind the carabao; come out of there, pronto, dale-dale!"

But his enthusiasm was short-lived. To the commanding tongue-click the carabao had stopped dead-still, and a silence heavy with defiance met the too-soon-exultant cries. An insect in the foliage began a creaking call, and then all the creatures of humidity hidden there among this fermenting vegetation joined in mocking chorus.

The Maestro felt a vague blush welling up from the innermost recesses of his being.

"I'm going to get that kid," he muttered darkly, "if I have to wait till—the coming of Common Sense to the Manila office! By gum, he's the Struggle for Attendance personified!"

He sat down on the bank and waited. This did not prove interesting. The animals of the ditch creaked on; the carabao bubbled up the water with his deep content; above, the abandoned kite went through strange acrobatics and wailed as if in pain. The Maestro dipped his hand into the water; it was lukewarm. "No hope of a freeze-out," he murmured pensively.

Behind, the pony began to pull at the reins.

"Yes, little horse, I'm tired, too. Well," he said apologetically, "I hate to get energetic, but there are circumstances which…"

The end of his sentence was lost, for he had whisked out the big Colt's revolver that hung on his belt and was firing. The six shots went off like a bunch of firecrackers, but far from at random, for a regular circle boiled up around the dozing carabao. The disturbed animal snorted, and again a discreet "cluck-cluck" rose in the sudden, astounded silence.

"This," said the Maestro, as he calmly introduced fresh cartridges into the chambers of his smoking weapon, "is what might be called an application of Western solutions to Eastern difficulties."

Again he brought his revolver down, but he raised it without shooting and replaced it in its holster. From beneath the carabao's round belly, below the surface, an indistinct form shot out; cleaving the water like a polliwog, it glided for the bank, and then a black, round head emerged at the feet of the Maestro.

"All right, bub; we'll go to school now," said the latter, nodding to the dripping figure as it rose before him.

He lifted the sullen urchin and straddled him forward of the saddle, then proceeded to mount himself, when the Capture began to display marked agitation. He squirmed and twisted, turned his head back and up, and finally a grunt escaped him.

"El volador."

"The kite, to be sure; we mustn't forget the kite," acquiesced the Maestro graciously. He pulled up the anchoring stick and laboriously, beneath the hostilely critical eye of the Capture, he hauled in the line till the screeching, resisting flying-machine was brought to earth. Then he vaulted into the saddle.

The double weight was a little too much for the pony; so it was at a dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still defiant prisoner astride in front of him, the captured kite passed over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his triumphant entry into the pueblo.

When Maestro Pablo rode down Rizal-y-Washington Street to the schoolhouse with his oozing, dripping prize between his arms, the kite like a knightly escutcheon against his left side, he found that in spite of his efforts at preserving a modest, self-deprecatory bearing, his spine would stiffen and his nose point upward in the unconscious manifestations of an internal feeling that there was in his attitude something picturesquely heroic. Not since walking down the California campus one morning after the big game won three minutes before the final whistle by his fifty-yard run-in of a punt had he been in that posture—at once pleasant and difficult—in which one's vital concern is to wear a humility sufficiently convincing to obtain from friends forgiveness for the crime of being great.

A series of incidents immediately following, however, made the thing quite easy.

Upon bringing the new recruit into the schoolhouse, to the perfidiously expressed delight of the already incorporated, the Maestro called his native assistant to obtain the information necessary to a full matriculation. At the first question the inquisition came to a deadlock. The boy did not know his name.

"In Spanish times," the Assistant suggested modestly, "we called them 'de los Reyes' when the father was of the army, and 'de la Cruz' when the father was of the church; but now, we can never know what it is."

The Maestro dashed to a solution. "All right," he said cheerily. "I caught him; guess I can give him a name. Call him—Isidro de los Maestros."

And thus it was that the urchin went down on the school records, and on the records of life afterward.

Now, well pleased with himself, the Maestro, as is the wont of men in such a state, sought further enjoyment.

"Ask him," he said teasingly, pointing with his chin at the newly baptized but still unregenerate little savage, "why he came out of the ditch."

"He says he was afraid that you would steal the kite," answered the Assistant, after some linguistic sparring.

"Eh?" ejaculated the surprised Maestro.

And in his mind there framed a picture of himself riding along the road with a string between his fingers; and, following in the upper layers of air, a buzzing kite; and, down in the dust of the highway, an urchin trudging wistfully after the kite, drawn on irresistibly, in spite of his better judgment, on and on, horrified but fascinated, up to the yawning school-door.

It would have been the better way. "I ought to go and soak my head," murmured the Maestro pensively.

This was check number one, but others came in quick succession.

For the morning after this incident the Maestro did not find Isidro among the weird, wild crowd gathered into the annex (a transformed sugar storehouse) by the last raid of the Municipal Police.

Neither was Isidro there the next day, nor the next. And it was not till a week had passed that the Maestro discovered, with an inward blush of shame, that his much-longed-for pupil was living in the little hut behind his own house. There would have been nothing shameful in the overlooking—there were seventeen other persons sharing the same abode—were it not that the nipa front of this human hive had been blown away by the last typhoon, leaving an unobstructed view of the interior, if it might be called such. As it was, the Municipal Police was mobilized at the urgent behest of the Maestro. Its corporal, flanked by two privates armed with old German needle-guns, besieged the home, and after an interesting game of hide-and-go-seek, Isidro was finally caught by one arm and one ear, and ceremoniously marched to school. And there the Maestro asked him why he had not been attending.

"No hay pantalones"—there are no pants—Isidro answered, dropping his eyes modestly to the ground.

This was check number two, and unmistakably so, for was it not a fact that a civil commission, overzealous in its civilizing ardor, had passed a law commanding that everyone should wear, when in public, "at least one garment, preferably trousers"?

Following this, and an unsuccessful plea upon the town tailor who was on a three weeks' vacation on account of the death of a fourth cousin, the Maestro shut himself up a whole day with Isidro in his little nipa house; and behind the closely-shut shutters engaged in some mysterious toil. When they emerged again the next morning, Isidro wended his way to the school at the end of the Maestro's arm, trousered!

The trousers, it must be said, had a certain cachet of distinction. They were made of calico-print, with a design of little black skulls sprinkled over a yellow background. Some parts hung flat and limp as if upon a scarecrow; others pulsed, like a fire-hose in action, with the pressure of flesh compressed beneath, while at other points they bulged pneumatically in little footballs. The right leg dropped to the ankle; the left stopped discouraged, a few inches below the knee. The seams looked like the putty mountain chains of the geography class. As the Maestro strode along he threw rapid glances at his handiwork, and it was plain that the emotions that moved him were somewhat mixed in character.

His face showed traces of a puzzled diffidence, as that of a man who has come in sack-coat to a full-dress function; but after all it was satisfaction that predominated, for after this heroic effort he had decided that Victory had at last perched upon his banners.

And it really looked so for a time. Isidro stayed at school at least during that first day of his trousered life. For when the Maestro, later in the forenoon, paid a visit to the annex, he found the Assistant in charge standing disconcerted before the urchin who, with eyes indignant and hair perpendicular upon the top of his head, was evidently holding to his side of the argument with his customary energy.

Isidro was trouserless. Sitting rigid upon his bench, holding on with both hands as if in fear of being removed, he dangled naked legs to the sight of who might look.

"Qué barbaridad!" murmured the Assistant in limp dejection.

But Isidro threw at him a look of black hatred. This became a tense, silent plea for justice as it moved up for a moment to the Maestro's face, and then it settled back upon its first object in frigid accusation.

"Where are your trousers, Isidro?" asked the Maestro.

Isidro relaxed his convulsive grasp of the bench with one hand, canted himself slightly to one side just long enough to give an instantaneous view of the trousers, neatly folded and spread between what he was sitting with and what he was sitting on, then swung back with the suddenness of a camera shutter, seized his seat with new determination, and looked eloquent justification at the Maestro.

"Why will you not wear them?" asked the latter.

"He says he will not get them dirty," said the Assistant, interpreting the answer.

"Tell him when they are dirty he can go down to the river and wash them," said the Maestro.

Isidro pondered over the suggestion for two silent minutes. The prospect of a day spent splashing in the lukewarm waters of the Ilog he finally put down as not at all detestable, and getting up to his feet:

"I will put them on," he said gravely.

Which he did on the moment, with an absence of hesitation as to which was front and which was back, very flattering to the Maestro.

That Isidro persevered during the next week, the Maestro also came to know. For now regularly every evening as he smoked and lounged upon his long cane chair, trying to persuade his tired body against all laws of physics to give up a little of its heat to a circumambient atmosphere of temperature equally enthusiastic; as he watched among the rafters of the roof the snakes swallowing the rats, the rats devouring the lizards, the lizards snapping up the spiders, the spiders snaring the flies in eloquent representation of the life struggle, his studied passiveness would be broken by strange sounds from the dilapidated hut at the back of his house. A voice, imitative of that of the Third Assistant who taught the annex, hurled forth questions, which were immediately answered by another voice, curiously like that of Isidro.

Fiercely: "Du yu ssee dde hhett?"

Breathlessly: "Yiss I ssee dde hhett."

Ferociously: "Show me dde hhett."

Eagerly: "Here are dde hhett."

Thunderously: "Gif me dde hhett."

Exultantly: "I gif yu dde hhett."

Then the Maestro would step to the window and look into the hut from which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. And the pupil was not Isidro, but the witless old man who was one of the many sharers of the abode. In the voice of the Third Assistant, Isidro was hurling out the tremendous questions; and, as the old gentleman, who represented Isidro, opened his mouth only to drool betel-juice, it was Isidro who, in Isidro's voice, answered the questions. In his role as Third Assistant he stood with legs akimbo before the pupil, a bamboo twig in his hand; as Isidro the pupil, he plumped down quickly upon the bench before responding.

The sole function of the senile old man seemed that of representing the pupil while the question was being asked, and receiving, in that capacity, a sharp cut across the nose from Isidro-the-Third-Assistant's switch, at which he chuckled to himself in silent glee and drooled ad libitum.

For several nights this performance went on with gradual increase of vocabulary in teacher and pupil. But when it had reached the "Do you see the apple-tree?" stage, it ceased to advance, marked time for a while, and then slowly but steadily began sliding back into primitive beginnings. This engendered in the Maestro a suspicion which became certainty when Isidro entered the schoolhouse one morning just before recess, between two policemen at port arms. A rapid scrutiny of the roll-book showed that he had been absent a whole week.

"I was at the river cleaning my trousers," answered Isidro when put face to face with this curious fact.

The Maestro suggested that the precious pantaloons which, by the way, had been mysteriously embellished by a red stripe down the right leg and a green stripe down the left leg, could be cleaned in less than a week, and that Saturday and Sunday were days specially set aside in the Catechism of the Americans for such little family duties.

Isidro understood, and the nightly rehearsals soon reached the stage of:

"How menny hhetts hev yu?"

"I hev ten hhetts."

Then came another arrest of development and another decline, at the end of which Isidro again making his appearance flanked by two German needle-guns, caused a blush of remorse to suffuse the Maestro by explaining with frigid gravity that his mother had given birth to a little baby brother and that, of course, he had had to help.

But significant events in the family did not stop there. After birth, death stepped in for its due. Isidro's relatives began to drop off in rapid sequence—each demise demanding three days of meditation in retirement—till at last the Maestro, who had had the excellent idea of keeping upon paper a record of these unfortunate occurrences, was looking with stupor upon a list showing that Isidro had lost, within three weeks, two aunts, three grandfathers, and five grandmothers—which, considering that an actual count proved the house of bereavement still able to boast of seventeen occupants, was plainly an exaggeration.

Following a long sermon from the Maestro in which he sought to explain to Isidro that he must always tell the truth for sundry philosophical reasons—a statement which the First Assistant tactfully smoothed to something within range of credulity by translating it that one must not lie to Americans, because Americans do not like it—there came a period of serenity.

There came to the Maestro days of peace and joy. Isidro was coming to school; Isidro was learning English. Isidro was steady, Isidro was docile, Isidro was positively so angelic that there was something uncanny about the situation. And with Isidro, other little savages were being pruned into the school-going stage of civilization. Helped by the police, they were pouring in from barrio and hacienda; the attendance was going up by leaps and bounds, till at last a circulative report showed that Balangilang had passed the odious Cabancalan with its less strenuous school-man, and left it in the ruck by a full hundred. The Maestro was triumphant; his chest had gained two inches in expansion. When he met Isidro at recess, playing cibay, he murmured softly: "You little devil; you were Attendance personified, and I've got you now."

At which Isidro, pausing in the act of throwing a shell with the top of his head at another shell on the ground, looked up beneath long lashes in a smile absolutely seraphic.

In the evening, the Maestro, his heart sweet with content, stood at the window. These were moonlight nights; in the grassy lanes the young girls played graceful Spanish games, winding like garlands to a gentle song; from the shadows of the huts came the tinkle-tinkle of serenading guitars and yearning notes of violins wailing despairing love. And Isidro, seated on the bamboo ladder of his house, went through an independent performance. He sang "Good-night, Ladies," the last song given to the school, sang it in soft falsetto, with languorous drawls, and never-ending organ points, over and over again, till it changed character gradually, dropping into a wailing minor, an endless croon full of obscure melancholy of a race that dies.

"Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies; goo-oo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies-ies," he repeated and repeated, over and over again, till the Maestro's soul tumbled down and down abysses of maudlin tenderness, and Isidro's chin fell upon his chest in a last drawling, sleepy note. At which he shook himself together and began the next exercise, a recitation, all of one piece from first to last syllable, in one high, monotonous note, like a mechanical doll saying "papa-mama."

"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre-oh-mudder-she look-like-a-lom-in-de-ayre-lost-night-she-was-smalleyre-on-joos like-a-bow-boot-now-she-ees-biggerr-on-rrraon-like-an-O."

Then a big gulp of air and again:

"Oh-look-et-de-moon-she-ees-shinin-up-theyre,----" etc.

An hour of this, and he skipped from the lyric to the patriotic, and then it was:

"I-loof-dde-name-off-Wash-ing-ton, I-loof-my-coontrrree-tow, I-loof-dde-fleg-dde-dear-owl-fleg, Off-rridd-on-whit-on-bloo-oo-oo!"

By this time the Maestro was ready to go to bed, and long in the torpor of the tropic night there came to him, above the hum of the mosquitoes fighting at the net, the soft, wailing croon of Isidro, back at his "Goo-oo-oo nigh-igh-igh loidies-ies-ies."

These were days of ease and beauty to the Maestro, and he enjoyed them the more when a new problem came to give action to his resourceful brain.

The thing was this: For three days there had not been one funeral in Balangilang.

In other climes, in other towns, this might have been a source of congratulation, perhaps, but not in Balangilang. There were rumors of cholera in the towns to the north, and the Maestro, as president of the Board of Health, was on the watch for it. Five deaths a day, experience had taught him, was the healthy average for the town; and this sudden cessation of public burials—he could not believe that dying had stopped—was something to make him suspicious.

It was over this puzzling situation that he was pondering at the morning recess, when his attention was taken from it by a singular scene.

The "batas" of the school were flocking and pushing and jolting at the door of the basement which served as stable for the municipal carabao. Elbowing his way to the spot, the Maestro found Isidro at the entrance, gravely taking up an admission of five shells from those who would enter. Business seemed to be brisk; Isidro had already a big bandana handkerchief bulging with the receipts which were now overflowing into a great tao hat, obligingly loaned him by one of his admirers, as one by one, those lucky enough to have the price filed in, feverish curiosity upon their faces.

The Maestro thought that it might be well to go in also, which he did without paying admission. The disappointed gatekeeper followed him. The Maestro found himself before a little pink-and-blue tissue-paper box, frilled with paper rosettes.

"What have you in there?" asked the Maestro.

"My brother," answered Isidro sweetly.

He cast his eyes to the ground and watched his big toe drawing vague figures in the earth, then appealing to the First Assistant who was present by this time, he added in the tone of virtue which will be modest:

"Maestro Pablo does not like it when I do not come to school on account of a funeral, so I brought him (pointing to the little box) with me."

"Well, I'll be…" was the only comment the Maestro found adequate at the moment.

"It is my little baby brother," went on Isidro, becoming alive to the fact that he was a center of interest, "and he died last night of the great sickness."

"The great what?" ejaculated the Maestro, who had caught a few words.

"The great sickness," explained the Assistant. "That is the name by which these ignorant people call the cholera."

For the next two hours the Maestro was very busy.

Firstly he gathered the "batas" who had been rich enough to attend Isidro's little show and locked them up—with the impresario himself—in the little town jail close by. Then, after a vivid exhortation upon the beauties of boiling water and reporting disease, he dismissed the school for an indefinite period. After which, impressing the two town prisoners, now temporarily out of home, he shouldered Isidro's pretty box, tramped to the cemetery and directed the digging of a grave six feet deep. When the earth had been scraped back upon the lonely little object, he returned to town and transferred the awe-stricken playgoers to his own house, where a strenuous performance took place.

Tolio, his boy, built a most tremendous fire outside and set upon it all the pots and pans and caldrons and cans of his kitchen arsenal, filled with water. When these began to gurgle and steam, the Maestro set himself to stripping the horrified bunch in his room; one by one he threw the garments out of the window to Tolio who, catching them, stuffed them into the receptacles, poking down their bulging protest with a big stick. Then the Maestro mixed an awful brew in an old oil-can, and taking the brush which was commonly used to sleek up his little pony, he dipped it generously into the pungent stuff and began an energetic scrubbing of his now absolutely panic-stricken wards. When he had done this to his satisfaction and thoroughly to their discontent, he let them put on their still steaming garments and they slid out of the house, aseptic as hospitals.

Isidro he kept longer. He lingered over him with loving and strenuous care, and after he had him externally clean, proceeded to dose him internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything—the terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his pantaloons—with wonder-eyed serenity.

When all this was finished the Maestro took the urchin into the dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously offered him a fine, dark perfecto.

The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation. For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the little man had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a queer softness had risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little lump in his throat.

"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro quietly. "We're only a child after all; mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to school?"

"Señor Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still perspiring visage, "Señor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school because of the great sickness?"

"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long time."

Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and suddenly throwing himself full-length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within him a long, tremulous wail.

Thus ends the tale of Isidro de los Maestros, the boy who struggled against schooling and triumphed in the end, not only in learning but in winning the heart of his teacher.