The Little Gods: A Masque of the Far East

It would be hard to say whether the porter or I was most bewildered by our meeting, for I, mind you, had made a long journey on the mountain with Fermin Majusay, looking for a certain butterfly you wouldn't be interested in, and had spent a whole night by the fire which Fermin made, while the porter had only to go to the other end of the courtyard of the temple of Tzin Piaôu with his water-jug. Yet we returned from our respective errands at the same moment, and met at the door of my heathen tutor's cell! The porter came within an ace of letting the jug fall, and I dare say I should have done the same thing, if I had had a jug.

The old gentleman looked up at Nang and me, and into us, and through us, with eyes that smiled into vacancy, and at that moment, I think, I first began to entertain some doubts of his complete benevolence.

"Well, Nang," purred the old gentleman from his slab, "what's the matter with you?"

"Holy One," stammered the porter, "not two pipes ago I let this gentleman out to go on a long journey. And here he is. And he has not come back, for I barred the gate behind him."

"Oh, well, Nang, what difference does that make?" purred the Holy One, soothingly. "You may go now."

The porter went away, shaking his head and muttering, and my heathen priest and I were left alone together.

"And have you had," said he, raising himself a little on his hollowed slab, "an easy and a pleasant journey?"

"I did not go for pleasure," I answered sulkily, for I felt that he was mocking me.

"Ah, yes," he answered quickly, "it was for instruction. I forgot. And did you gain instruction from my Little Gods?"

"This time you sent me," I reminded him, "to see some Little Devils."

The spark in his eyes flickered into flame again. "Did I!" he murmured, purringly as a cat. "How I keep forgetting. But after all, it's merely a matter of names. Did you like what you saw?"

"No," I answered bluntly, "I did not. Your Little Gods, or your Little Devils, whatever you choose to call them, seem to me the veriest fiends. And cowardly fiends, at that. They catch men like rats, in traps, and drown them, helpless, as men drown rats."

"My son," purred my old heathen priest, "I wouldn't call them cowards, if I were you. They might not like it."

"Like it or not," said I, hotly, "they are cowards, if what I've seen of them is a fair sample of their ways. Do they never give a man a fair chance, in the open, to fight for his life, and for things dearer to him than life?"

"For life and things dearer than life," echoed my old heathen priest, and yawned, ever so slightly, and stretched his old legs out on his slab. "Dear me, I don't see why they shouldn't. Though of course I know nothing about it. Suppose," he suggested, "you look that up for yourself. I dislike to seem selfish, but really this is an hour which I invariably devote to a nap."

He made a little imperative, dismissing gesture with his hand, and—

"An' this," says big Terry Clancy, reaching over and getting a grip on the little man's collar, "this is our Scuts, the married man."

I never served in a company yet—and I've served in so many, first and last, that I'll never do anything else—I never served in a company yet that didn't have a bully and a fool in it. You can always tell them. No one ever dares to cuss out the bully, and somebody is all the time cussin' out the fool. In the old company the bully was Clancy, relieving me, as Special Orders says. We had some argument about it at first, being about of a size and the biggest men there, but Terry was younger than me, and he relieved me. The fool was a poor little yellow dog that we called Scuts. I don't even remember his name. He was the most helpless, discouraged, weak-eyed little hombre the sun ever dodged behind a cloud to keep from shining on. Worse than that, he had cold feet. All through the China campaign he was so scared he needn't have been afraid at all. A bullet couldn't hit such a little wrinkled, pinched-up thing as he was, even if it wanted to. But of course he got it worse than if he'd been just plain fool. The company don't stand for cold feet.

Even the officers got to jollyin' about him. "The little man," the Captain always called him. "H'm," grunts the Captain, the day we was getting it so bad in front of Tientsin. One of them club-footed Chinese bullets had just bored through his leg, and it looked like he'd bleed to death before the Doctor could fix him up. "H'm. Artery gone, you say? Where's the little man? He's just about the size to crawl in and hang onto it till you're ready to tie it. H'm."

It was the boys telling that to each other, and the Old Man's sending down the line afterwards to know if anybody had the makings of a cigarette, that kept the company from breaking that day, I reckon. We got it hard. If the Old Man had been with us after that, Scuts would sure have had to go. But he being in hospital, the Lieutenant just took the whole outfit with him, the part that could walk, anyway, and Scuts went back to Manila with us, and down to Samar.

"An' this," says Terry, picking Scuts off the bench and shaking him careless, like he was a rag baby, "is the idol of his company, the bold bad soldier lad that won the heart an' tuba-stand of the prettiest little brown girl in Samar. Boys," says he, spinning the little man round with a thumb and finger in the back of his neck, "let me present the husband of the beauteous Marie. Bow to the gentlemen, Scutsy."

"Aw, lemme go, Terry," says Scuts, blushing pink inside of his yellow skin, and grinning like a puppy that's just been kicked. "Aw, you lemme go."

"You set down, Scuts," says Terry, spinning him round again and laying him on the bench. "Set down an' tell us all about it. Give us a tip. We're all wantin' to know how you did it. We might want to get married ourselves some day."

"Aw, you gwan," says Scuts, twistin' round, with that little damp grin of his. "You're joshin' me."

"Man," says Terry, "'tis no josh. Honor bright, we're all envyin' you gettin' a fine pretty little girl like that. Eh, Casey?" he says to me.

"Straight goods," says I. "The little man pulled down a cold hand that deal."

"Hear that, Scutsy?" says Terry. "Come on, now, and tell us about it."

"Aw," says Scuts, throwing a chest as big around as my arm, and twisting a few white hairs on his upper lip, which was his way of wagging his tail, "Aw," he says, "Marie, aw—I kind of helped her keepin' her books, y' know, showin' her how to spell the boys' names an' all that business, an' we got to be pretty good friends. An' one day she says to me, 'Scuts, all the girls but me has got American man, an' they laugh at me,' she says. 'Scuts, I want a 'Merican man myself.' 'All right,' I says, never thinkin' of myself, 'I'll tell the boys.' 'Scuts,' she says, 'I got plenty dinero sellin' tuba to the boys, an' I likes you. You be my man.' Aw," says Scuts, twistin' the hairs, "I looked at her, an' I seen she was pretty fair-lookin', so I says, 'All right, Marie.' An' I ain't ashamed of it, neither," says Scuts, looking round with his big blue eyes, as the crowd begins to laugh. "She's 'bout th' nicest girl in this town, I reckon," Scuts says.

"Scuts, you gobble the pot," says Terry, twisting him off the bench. "You run along to Marie right now, an' tell her to be sure and wrap a blanket round you before she puts you to bed. Wouldn't that beat hell, now," he says to us, watching the little man trot off down-town. "They're all alike," he says. "Give a white one fifty plunks to buy a dog, an' she'll come back with a blear-eyed, knock-kneed pug, and give a brown one a chance at th' company, an' she picks out Scuts. Marie's a good, girl, too. That's th' worst of it. Th' better they are th' less they know," says Terry, "an' by th' time they get all th' sabe they need, nobody'd take th'm for a gift. Who's comin' over in th' grove an' drink a cocoanut?"

This was along before Balangiga, and things were running easy, the Old Man being still in hospital, and the Lieutenant being only a boy. A straight boy he was, but not sure yet how he ought to take us. The country was quiet and the people friendly as bugs, and we got careless. About half the boys was sleepin' out of quarters off and on, and the Top didn't say anything. I don't blame him. Of course me and Terry and a lot of other old-timers didn't go in for that way of doing business, but it's different with a boy. The only home he has while he's in the service is the kind he can make by hanging up his hat and ordering the drinks, and he takes it pretty rough if you don't let him have that in a place like the Philippines. So we went drifting along with only two sentries posted, and the quarters half empty every night, never looking for any trouble.

But one afternoon Scuts came trotting in, looking as yellow as Durham, and had a hablar with the Top, and then they both went across to the Lieutenant's quarters. They didn't come out till just before Assembly went for Retreat, and we smelled something. Sure enough, orders was read to keep magazines loaded, carry two hundred rounds in the belt, and not be absent from quarters between sunset and sunrise. Soon as we were dismissed, we got after Scuts.

"The natives had it fixed to rush us at night," he says. "Marie tipped me off. She told me not to be out of quarters to-night, an' th' Top, he figured out the rest," says Scuts, shortsighting, you might say, out into the underbrush as if he expected to see a gang of bolomen, and holding tight to his rifle.

"An' th' lady, she had another friend," sings out Piggy O'Neil. The crowd laughs, and Scuts turns a dirty pink again.

"Aw," he says, "she wouldn't tell me no lie. She's a good straight girl."

Then we began to debate it, the way we always do in the Army, if it's only a question of how far it is from New York to the moon, and finally everybody called everybody else a liar and we went to sleep.

In the morning everything was quiet and peaceful, so after drill the crowd was beginning to jolly Scuts for fair, when the operator stuck his head out of the window.

"Come up here, some of you, for God's sake," he says, and we didn't stop to ask questions. He was bending over his ticker, white as a sheet. "I'm a fool, all right," he says, "but this is sure gettin' on my nerve. There was a message started to go through from Balangiga ten minutes ago, and all to once— Hear that!" he says. The machine gave a jerky little chatter. "It's like a man sendin' in his sleep," says the operator. "For ten mortal minutes that thing has been stuttering halves of words."

"Who is it?" asks Terry.

"Murphy's sendin'," says the operator.

"Then he's jokin' with ye," says Terry. "Billy always was a great hand for his—"

"Huh?" grunts the operator, bending over, as she begun to stutter again.

"What's he saying?" somebody asked, but the operator didn't seem to hear him. Then all at once he began to talk in a voice that didn't belong to him.

"Balangiga," he read, "seven-ten A.M. Company—attacked by—bolomen—while at—breakfast. Rifles in quarters. Fought with—dishes and—knives and forks—but—no good—"