Chapter XXVII

Through that great block of space and time my mood was often and over the mood of My Fancy. Unhappy enough, I roamed an inner world that was a dark world, with here and there a tarnished gold. But then again I came to the outside and stayed there with the day’s work and at night hard, dead sleep. Or if I could not ignore the inner world, I busily packed it with false shapes. And again there were other moods. In some sort I loved the ship and the sea and, strange to say, the human race, and in some sort I hardened to my trade. I became Bartram.

In Charlestown once I met travellers, a learned German with a book in mind, a gentleman from New England and another from New York. I forget what was the relationship between the three, but the two Americans, having leisure and liking adventure, were engaged in piloting the European down the continent, from snow in June to flowers in January. Massachusetts to Georgia, the colonies had passed or were passing before them. The German had a library of notebooks.

Charlestown is a town of a very polite society. When it read the travellers’ introductory letters they did not lack entertainment. I met them at a supper party in a genteel inn, and I was there because I was in port and Trevannion took me. Trevannion was asked because the German had mentioned that he would like to meet the servant of the Royal African Company, one of his notebooks having a page devoted to that concern. The party was not a large one but was devised to furnish the learned man with the various information for which he hungered and thirsted. Three or four planters, a couple of considerable merchants, a lawyer, a divine, the travellers, Trevannion and myself were all. The lawyer who was host had caught, it seems, at Trevannion’s suggestion that I be included. The traveller to be honored and fed knowledge might obtain something of value from the captain of a big slave ship who was also a decent person, not a bear at table, nor one to disgust with oaths and horrors of the Middle Passage--which last were largely mythical anyway.

I did not err in these respects, but erred, I afterwards found, in keeping silence. I never now discussed the slave trade save in precise and immediate business talk, and Trevannion might have known it. I never philosophized over it in company now, or speculated as to its course and end, or questioned it, or praised, or blamed, or extenuated. Something true in me held me back from that while I sailed the _Janet_. So I sat a listener, or when I answered a direct question answered it shortly, with the bald fact.

Rice, wheat, maize, tobacco and indigo culture, markets and prices--and the German evidently making notes in his brain; the story of South Carolina or of Charlestown, past, present and future; soil, forest, remnant of Indians, back country where the red men still were plentiful; the sea, trade with home, trade with the other colonies, trade with the Indies; buccaneers and pirates, and it is certain we would have a chapter on these; the Government, the Church, the Law; Planting; the gentry and others, plantations and plantation labor--and here we are at slavery and the river through the sea that feeds it from Africa.

And here it was that Trevannion was eloquent and Captain David Scott was not.

They were all eloquent, the planters, the merchants, the lawyer, the clergyman, the agent, the traveller from New York who spoke of the Negro house boy and coachman whom he owned, and the traveller from Massachusetts who had shares in the _Amelia_, Captain Jonathan Bolt of Salem, trading to Old Calabar. I knew the _Amelia_.--Self-interest made them eloquent.

Self-interest!

Seated there, half listening to all that I had heard a hundred times over, the word took hold of me. Self-interest. The King’s in his palace, the Pope’s in Saint Peter, the richest man’s, the poorest man’s. Bartram’s and mine and Colley’s; McNaughton, Olafson, Mr. Godfrey North, Colonel Amory, Williams, Barget, Lace the factor and Rathbone Lace. Black traders, black chiefs, black kings in Africa, black men and women in the villages who betrayed and sold, and who when their turn came around were themselves betrayed and sold. White men who in thousands of ways did the same to white men. Over all the world, black, white, red and yellow--self-interest. It rose from its throne in me, that word, and went up and down in a darkened, vast hall, its face in its hands, as I had wandered at My Fancy. What was interest? What was self?

It was strange. I had been sitting there stolidly, wearily, and they were all as so many wooden figures with parrot tongues.--Something turned, slid, mounted. It was like a dewy morning in the glen at home, in Scotland. Dew and the dawn, hush and tenderness. It was like that, but in the world of the soul or spirit, not of the senses. I felt compassion.

For a breathless second it flooded me--compassion and understanding. Then it went, but it left its echo and its mark, its sign and seal.

I saw Earth a slave ship and the wake it made. I saw that the yoke was of self, but not forever. I felt the god bound in the human self who would one day be free--bound in me, bound in these, bound in those who served the table. The room melted into sea and land, the rolling ball; the minute, like a streamlet, crossed the beach and was in the ocean. I sat there, and they did not notice increase of silence.

The party broke up with the Charlestown debonairness. Every one was courteous to me, even though I had not aided them with an already prepared and rosy light. The German said in parting, “You have a store, I think, sir, but you will not open the door.”

Out under the stars with Trevannion he said, “You’re a big, picturesque figure, Captain Scott, but you didn’t help out with much more than that.”

I said, “Look at the stars!” And indeed the whole sky had to me a strange, new aspect--strange, but not formidable; no, something to be understood.

The next day, waking at dawn, the sense of the moment at the inn breathed more faintly. But it was not gone; it was sunken in me. The business of the day covered it over; by eve I thought that I had forgotten it. That night I had ill dreams and woke in the morning in a bitter mood. That I had ever understood, that I had ever been truly and thoroughly compassionate, was unlikely indeed. Yet--yet--I _had_ been!

In four days the _Janet_ sailed. Charlestown harbor, the pleasant town, the live oaks and the pines, the tower of Saint Michael’s church, we left them all behind. The ship was clean, the ship was fair; we experienced good weather. I could pace, pace, pace my deck in the day or the night; I could take a book that sometimes I opened and sometimes did not; I could talk with Olafson or Lisle or others. Olafson pleased me. Once I asked him what he thought of the stars and he told me of a vision he had had one night in the northern seas. He saw all the stars tied together with moving cords, the color of lightning. “All tied together, sir, and we with them.”

Walk, walk, walk the deck, as though it were the great upper hall at My Fancy. Sit and brood and brood, as though poop deck or cabin were the reef out to which I used to swim. I was unhappy--life frustrated, bitter and weary, and that moment in Charlestown a dream.

When the Bahamas were half a day astern a sail upon the horizon drew our eye. She increased, coming down upon us with power, having the advantage of the wind and being built to sail. She was strange to me, and, “I do not know her,” said Michaelson, who had been to and fro in the Trades for thirty years. We knew well enough the particular danger of these waters and we got the _Janet_ ready and stood to arms. Twice before in my memory we had been chased, but more feebly than this pirate promised. He came nearer and nearer, but I looked at the sky which had been darkening for an hour. It was toward day close also. Up and out went his flag.

“Black, sir!”

“That’s no news. Ready, gunners!”

She was on us now, a fast-sailing bark with pirate written over her as slaver was written over us. She cut across our bows, swung to port and gave us a broadside. We answered. A sea fight began. But the heavens meant their own way this time. There burst with fierceness wind and rain, lightning and thunder. We were driven apart, the pirate’s foremast snapped; we left him with his wild wreckage and were gone, running before a tempest. Night came on; in the middle of it the storm vanished, leaving a heavy sea; in a dawn of piled clouds and purple waters we saw no other ship than ourselves. The _Janet_ had some damage that could be removed. One man was killed; two or three had their hurts. The sea subsided, the wind came back to its steady, sweet blowing.

But that very dawning, looking up to masthead, I had a vision--being a Scot, being liable at times to _see_ things that were symbolic or that were real in another order. What I saw this dawn was that we were flying a black flag. The dawn sent a beaker of light and spilled it against the outflowing web. It was black, it had upon it skull and crossbones. It was there as plain as my hand--the _Janet’s_ flag. I turned cold, I shivered. It streamed there, fastened to our mast, and behind it towered a purple cloud. I saw it--it was gone. And then--the great strangeness--even as I grasped that it was gone and that I had put it there, opened within me so quietly again that clear depth of understanding--of understanding and compassion.

Seemingly it lasted no longer than a lightning flash, as it had done in Charlestown. When it was gone, again I was unhappy, torn. The black flag was not only upon the Guinea slaver--it was everywhere in life.

Days and nights, sun and stars, wind and warmth and the great sea, and we came to Daga.

How many times had I come to Daga? I hardly knew. It seemed of me now, of my flesh. This day that it rose before us was my thirty-seventh birthday.

The _Janet_ hung in harbor a month. I did not drink with Rathbone Lace, or go with him up to Oil Palm village. In the place of that he and I quarrelled.

It was Markham the surgeon of whom I saw most. “Have you had any more visions?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“There are a folk called mystics who have at times--or some of them have--visions. It’s a well-known medical fact--which may or may not mean a fact of Nature. I’ve now and then seen just a flash of that race in you. It was in Bartram too.”

“Yes, it was. Both of us put a stone upon it.”

“For me,” he said, “I’ve a weary vision of Daga going on forever. A world of Dagas. At any moment we see what we are and nothing else, and if all our moments prove the same color----”

“If,” I said.

“There you go!” he answered. “Well, have you got your full number of Negroes?”

In the month I had them and had them aboard--coast folk, hill folk, mountain folk, river valley folk. I sailed from Daga.

That evening there was a great sunset. It flared and flamed, and it cast light across upon Daga, all her whitened masonry. I saw her so, then over all flowed the tropic night, and these eyes saw her no more.

I had aboard docile Negroes and no pest or particular sickness. It was November, the best season for all our affairs. Day after day, day after day, the old routine--week after week.

I woke in the middle of the night, or maybe past the middle. It was as though a hand had been laid upon me, but when I sat up there was no figure, but only Bartram’s cabin, star lighted. But I was awake as I had never been before. I left my bed and sat upon the bench beneath the window. The night was luminous, with a rushing, strong, warm wind, but only my outer man noted that. I sat upon the bench and I was a boy at school.

I will say as shortly as may be what I knew at last. I knew that God is the Whole of us. I found myself and my neighbor there and we were One. I found a greater Self--oh, a greater!--a SELF that left none out.