Chapter I: Part 1

VAIN OBLATIONS

VAIN OBLATIONS

BY

KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1914

_Copyright, 1914, by Charles Scribner’s Sons_

_Published March, 1914_

TO

J. M. F. AND B. M. F.

CONTENTS

PAGE

_Vain Oblations_ 1

_The Mango-Seed_ 43

_The Wine of Violence_ 83

_On the Staircase_ 127

_The Tortoise_ 177

_The Divided Kingdom_ 233

_The Case of Paramore_ 273

VAIN OBLATIONS

As I was with Saxe during the four most desperate weeks of his life, I think I may say that I knew him better than any one else. Those were also the four most articulate weeks, for they were a period of terrible inaction, spent on the decks of ocean steamships. Saxe was not much given to talking, but there was nothing else to do. No book that has ever been written could have held his attention for two minutes. I was with him, for that matter, off and on, until the end. What I have to tell I got partly from my own observation, partly from a good little woman at the Mission, partly from Saxe’s letters, largely from his own lips, and partly from natives. But if I recorded it as it came, unassimilated, unchronologized--one fact often limping into camp six months after its own result--the story would be as unintelligible as the _quipus_ of the Incas. It has taken me three years of steady staring to see the thing whole. I know more about it now--including Saxe--than Saxe ever knew. In point of fact, one of the most significant pieces of evidence did not come in until after his death. (I wish it clearly understood, by the way, that Saxe did not commit suicide.) But, more than that, I have been thinking for three years about Mary Bradford. I could tell you as much about what she suffered--the subtlety and the brutality of her ordeal--as if she were one of my own heroines. God forbid that I should ever think of Mary Bradford as “material”: that I should analyze her, or dramatize her, or look at her with the artist’s squint. If I tell her story, it is because I think it right that we should know what things can be. For the most part, we keep to our own continents: the cruel nations are the insensitive nations, and the squeamish races are kind. But Mary Bradford was the finest flower of New England; ten home-keeping generations only lay between her and the Quest of 1620. It is chronic hyperæsthesia simply to _be_ New English; and the pure-bred New Englander had best stick to the euphemisms, the approximations, the reticences, of his own extraordinary villages. But Mary Bradford encountered all the physical realities of life in their crudest form, alone, in the obscene heart of Africa, with black faces thrust always between her and the sky. Some cynic may put in his belittling word to the effect that the New Englander has always counted physical suffering less than spiritual discomfort. The mental torture was not lacking in Mary Bradford’s case. For over a year, the temptation to suicide must have been like a terrible thirst, death--any death--luring her like a rippling spring. I told Saxe one night in mid-Atlantic, to comfort him, that she would of course have killed herself if she saw no chance of escape.

Saxe laughed dryly. “That’s the most damnable thing about it,” he said. “Mary would think it mortal sin to kill herself. She would stick on as long as God chose to keep the breath in her body.”

“Sin?” I queried rather stupidly.

“Yes, sin,” he answered. “You don’t know anything about it: you were brought up in Europe.”

“But Saxe,” I cried, “rather than--” I did not finish.

“You don’t know anything about New England,” he said. “Damn your books! Missionaries face everything, and there’s more than one kind of martyrdom. I hope she’s dead. I rather think she is.”

His voice was uneven, but with a meaningless unevenness like a boy’s that is changing. There was no emotion in it. A week more of monotonous ploughing of the waves would just have broken him, I think; but he pulled himself together when he touched the soil of Africa. Something in him went out to meet the curse that hung low over the land in the tropic afternoon; and encountering the Antagonist, his eyes grew sane again. But with sanity came the reticence of battle. All that I know of Saxe’s and Mary Bradford’s early lives, I learned in those four weeks. I have made out some things about her, since then, that probably Saxe never knew. As I said, I have been thinking about Mary Bradford for three years, and it is no secret that to contemplate is, in the end, to know. The stigmata received by certain saints are, I take it, irrefutable proof of this. I do not pretend to carry upon me Mary Bradford’s wounds; I do not even canonize her in my heart. But I seriously believe that she had, on the whole, the most bitter single experience ever undergone by woman; and much of the extraordinary horror of the adventure came from the very exquisiteness of the victim. I have often wondered if the Greek and Italian literatures that she knew so well offered her any mitigating memory of a woman more luckless than she. Except Jocasta, I positively cannot think of one; and Jocasta never lived. All of us have dreams of a market where we could sell our old lamps for new. How must not Mary Bradford have longed to change her humanities against mere foothold on the soil of America or Europe! But my preface is too long.

* * * * *

Now and then there is a story where all things work together for evil to the people involved; and these stories have, even for their protagonists, a horrible fascination. The story of Saxe and Mary Bradford is of this nature: a case, as it were, of double chicane. Everything happened precisely wrong. Almost anything happening differently would have given them a chance. If Mary Bradford had been born in Virginia, if her eyes had been blue instead of brown, if Ngawa had come back three hours sooner--Maupassant would have told it all from that point of view. But I am not trying to make literature out of it: it is as history that this story is important to me. Saxe had been engaged to Mary Bradford since her last year in college. Her mother had died when Mary was born, and the Reverend James Bradford had sailed, after his wife’s death, for this little West African mission, leaving his child with a sister. Mary was brought up in America. When she was ten, her father came home for a year and took her back with him; but at twelve she was sent definitely home to be educated. James Bradford could not have conceived of depriving his child of Greek and trigonometry, and from school Mary went to college. She never, at any time, had any inclination to enter upon missionary work, though her religious faith was never at any moment in the smallest degree shaken. From her thirteenth year she had been an active and enthusiastic member of her father’s denomination. She was a bit of a blue-stocking and occasionally somewhat ironic in speech. When I asked Saxe “if she had _no_ faults,” these were all he could think of. When she became engaged to Saxe, she stipulated that she should spend two winters with her father before marrying. The separation had never really parted Mary and her father; they had never lost the habit of each other. You see those sympathies sometimes between father and daughter: inarticulate, usually, like the speech of rock to rock, but absolutely indestructible. There was no question--I wish to emphasize this--about her love for Saxe. I had, for a time, her letters. It was a _grande passion_--to use the unhallowed historic phrase; twenty love stories of old Louisiana could have been melted up into it. Saxe, of course, consented to her going. During the second spring he was to go out, her father was to marry them at the Mission, and they were to return to America after a honeymoon in Italy. There is not one detail that does not, in the end, deepen the irony of it, if you look at it all long enough. Italy! All that romantic shimmer and tinkle against the savage fact that was. She went, and for six months seems to have busied herself happily enough with good little Mrs. Price at the Mission. She picked up a few dialects--she was always remarkably clever at languages. The Mission hangs above a tiny seaport--if you can call it a seaport, for there is a great reef a few miles out, and the infrequent steamships stop outside that and send passengers and letters in by boat. It is not one of the regular ports of call, and its chief significance lies in its position at the mouth of a large-ish river that winds inland for a few hundred miles, finishing no one knows exactly where. The natives for a hundred miles up-stream are fairly friendly and come down sometimes in big boats to trade; beyond that, the country runs into jungle and forest, and grows nastier and nastier. No one knows precisely about that region, and it lies just outside every one’s sphere of influence; but there seems to be a network of unhealthy trails, a constant intertribal warfare, and an occasional raid by the precocious pupil of an Arab slave-trader. It is too far south for the big caravans, of course, but there is undoubtedly slave-stealing--though it is extremely difficult to learn anything definite about the country, as there are a dozen different tribes speaking entirely different languages, and each lying tortuously about all the rest. This is all that Saxe could tell me about that _hinterland_ which he had never expected to be interested in.

In March, after Mary reached the Mission (she sailed in July, immediately after graduation), the chief of a small tribe some hundred miles up-stream descended in pomp to barter ivory for such treasure as oozes from European ships. Having seldom condescended to trade, he was disappointed at receiving so little for his ivory--a scanty lot of female tusks--and sought distraction and consolation within earshot of the Mission piano. He took especially kindly to the Reverend James Bradford, gravely inspected the school, and issued an invitation for Mr. Bradford to come up-stream and Christianize his tribe. The Mission had worked up and down the coast, as it could, but had never worked inland--more rumors than boats came down the waterway, which was not really a highroad and certainly led to nothing good. They lacked money for such an enterprise, and workers; but, being missionaries, never forgot that the river, and all who dwelt on its banks, belonged to God. It did not occur to James Bradford to refuse the call, which he took quite simply, as from brother to brother; it did not occur to Mary Bradford to let him go alone, or to her father to protest against her accompanying him. The patriarchal tinge is still perceptible in the New English conception of the family. Let me say, here, that there is no evidence that Ngawa himself ever broke faith with his white protégés. He was, like them, a victim of circumstances.

They were to go for six months. That would bring them to September. In September, three new workers were to come out to the Mission, and James Bradford hoped that two could then be permanently spared for the new Mission up-stream, which he already foresaw and yearned over. In September, he and Mary would return to the port; in late April, Saxe was coming out to marry Mary. They departed under the escort of Ngawa himself. Mr. Price promised to get a boat up to them in May, or at least a runner with letters.

Such details of the final catastrophe as Saxe was acquainted with were brought to the Mission by a native boy in September, just before the boat was to start up-stream (taking Adams and Jenks, the new recruits) to bring the Bradfords down. All reports had hitherto been favorable, if not astonishingly so. Ngawa had listened, and his heart seemed to incline to Mr. Bradford’s teachings. Mary had started a little school for the babies. But Ngawa had no intention of compelling his people to embrace Christianity: he simply courteously permitted it to exist in his dominion. As talk of war came on, he was preoccupied with the affairs of his thatched state. The populace--they seem to have been a gentle crowd enough--grew apathetic to their apostles and deposited the commanded tribute somewhat listlessly before their huts. The medicine-men, of course, were hostile from the first, and, as the war drums beat in the forest and the men of the village gathered to sharpen their tufted spears, wild talk had undoubtedly not been wanting. The end had really been a bitter accident. Ngawa absented himself for three days to do some last exhorting and recruiting in his other villages. The attack that had not been expected for a week, at least, was made a few hours before his return. It became a raid rather than a battle; the village resisted the siege only a short time, and the invaders did what they would in the monstrous tropic dusk. Many of the native women were stabbed quickly; but the youngest ones, and Mary Bradford, were dragged off as captives. Mr. Bradford was killed in the beginning--not by the enemy, who were busy despatching Ngawa’s subjects, but by Ngawa’s chief medicine-man, who stole out of the shadows, slit his throat twice across, caught the blood in a cup, and then slid back into the darkness. The boy who brought them the story averred that he had seen it all, having been present, though somehow left out of the _mêlée_. The enemy, afraid of Ngawa’s return, did not stop for the half-grown children. The white girl tore away, the boy said, and started back to her father, but the warrior who held her hit her on the head, so that she dropped, and then carried her off. Oh yes, he had seen it all quite well: he had climbed into a tree. The huts were all burning, and it was lighter than day. Ngawa came back that night, and, later, they destroyed utterly the villages of the other tribe, but they got back no captives. These had been killed at once, probably, or sold. Ngawa had gone back to the medicine-men.

Ngawa’s people must have been gentler than most of their color, for the boy answered all the questions of the stricken missionaries before he asked to hear the piano.

This was absolutely all that Saxe knew, when he stumbled into my rooms and asked me to go out to Africa with him. The first cablegrams had simply announced the massacre, and it was only on receipt of letters from the Prices that Saxe learned about Mary and her horrible, shadowy chance of life. The Prices promised to cable any news, but it was unlikely that they would have any more. The boy who had brought them this story drifted down the coast, and for some months few boats came down the stream. Ngawa, they heard vaguely, had died, and his son reigned in his stead, a bitter disciple of unclean rites. Young Adams, in the pity of his heart, had gone the hundred miles to the village, but the people had evidently nothing to tell. The white priest was dead, and the white girl was gone. Their own captives were gone, too, and if they had been able to recover them would they not have done it? Undoubtedly, they were killed, but their enemies had been punished. No: they were faithful to their own gods. What had the white god done for his priest, or for Ngawa, who had listened--and died? Doubtless Adams would have been killed, if they had been defeated in the war, but he profited by the magnanimity of triumph. It was astonishing how little impression, except on Ngawa and one old medicine-man, James Bradford had made. Save that he had achieved martyrdom for himself, he might as well have stayed peacefully at the Mission. It is all, from first to last, a story of vain oblations. The people were inclined to forget that he had ever been there, but they registered their opinion that his white brother had better go back at once. Saxe’s face, as Adams gave him this last news, was tense. He gripped the hand of the one white man who had visited that bitter scene, as if he would never let it go.

If Saxe had been delayed in America, it was only in order to arrange his affairs so that he could stay away indefinitely. He intended to follow Mary Bradford down those dim and bloody trails until at least he should have seen some witness of her death. Saxe was not rich, and his arrangements took him a certain length of time. We sailed from New York in March, and caught the African liner at Plymouth.

I will not enter upon the details of Saxe’s activity during the next months, nor of the results he gained. It was a case where governments were of no use: the jungle that had swallowed up Mary Bradford acknowledged no suzerain across the seas. Saxe visited Ngawa’s village, of course--“I am steel proof,” he said, and I think he believed it. The story of those months is a senseless story of perishing lights and clues of twisted sand. We spent three months in rescuing the yellow widow of a Portuguese pearl-fisher, who had been captured by coast pirates and sold inland. When Saxe stood face to face with the “white woman” he had worked blindly to deliver, he reeled before her. “Tell him that I will marry him,” said the woman with a noble gesture. She was forty, fat, and hideous. I mention the incident--which turned me quite sick, and in which, to this day, I can see nothing humorous--simply to show the maddening nature of our task. Even I had believed that this mysterious white woman was Mary Bradford. In that land of rumor and superstition and ignorance and cunning--above all, of savage indifference--anything might be true, and anything might be false. Three days after we had started off to find the Portuguese hag, a real clue came into the Mission. Our three months had been quite lost, for the Prices could get no word to us on our knight-errant task. Poor Saxe!

In September, Saxe, following this clue, which seemed to bear some real relation to the events of the year before, travelled solemnly, accompanied by a few natives only, into the heart of that _hinterland_ which stood, to all the coast above and below the Mission, for treachery, mystery, and death. In October, he reached the village of the chief in question--a sun-smitten kraal, caught between high blue mountains and the nasty bit of jungle that separated them from one of the big waterways of Africa. Politics are largely a matter of geography, and his position was one of enviable independence, though he was to the neighboring kings on the scale of Andorra to France and Spain. He was a greedy old man, and the sight of several pounds of beads made him very communicative. Half of his information was bound, by African code, to be false, and Saxe had no means of knowing which half; but he owned to having purchased, a few months before, from a wandering trader, a slave woman of white blood. She had come high, he affirmed, cocking his eye at Saxe. But she was not Saxe’s slave--Saxe had put it in that way in order to be remotely intelligible to the savage mind. Oh, no! she was the daughter of a Mandingo woman and an Arab. The trader had told him that: he had known the mother. Oh, no! it could not be Saxe’s slave. However, he was willing, for a really good price, to consider selling her. Saxe refused to be discouraged. The clue had seemed to him trustworthy; and the story about the Mandingo woman might be pure invention--bravado, to raise the price.

He asked to see her. Oh, certainly; before purchasing he should see her. But meanwhile there was the official cheer to taste--_kava_, above all, inimitably mixed--and she should be fetched. Where was she? A young slave girl suggested sardonically that she was probably at her toilet. Since she had heard of the white man’s coming--Saxe had tactfully sent a runner ahead of him--she had been smearing herself meticulously with ochre and other precious pigments. This was said with a sidelong glance at the chief: obviously, he distributed those precious pigments only to his favorites. Saxe said that from that moment his heart misgave him. He had been somehow sure that this woman was Mary. Why his heart should have misgiven him, I do not know; or what devil of stupidity put it into his head that this was the trick of a half-breed slave to make herself irresistible to a white man. It sounded to him, he said, like the inspiration that would naturally occur to the daughter of an Arab by a Mandingo woman. It has never sounded to me in the least like that. He said that he still believed it was Mary; but I fancy he believed it after the fashion of the doubter who shouts his creed a little louder. Of course there was something preposterous in the idea of Mary Bradford’s making herself barbarically _chic_ with ochre to greet the lover who might be coming to rescue her. But was not the whole thing preposterous to the point of incredibility? And Mary Bradford was not an ordinary woman--not the yellow widow of a Portuguese pearl-fisher. It has always seemed to me that poor Saxe ought to have realized that.

Saxe consumed _kava_ until he could consume no more. Then the slave girl announced that the woman had been found. Saxe rose to his feet. He was stifling in the great hut, where all the chief councillors had joined them at their feast, where the reek from greased bodies seemed to mount visibly into the twilight of the great conical roof. His head was reeling, and his heart was beating weakly, crazily, against his ribs--“as if it wanted to come out,” he said. His hands were ice-cold. He had just presence of mind enough to drag the black interpreter out with him, and to leave one of his own men inside to watch the stuff with which he proposed to pay. The chief and most of his councillors remained within.

Outside the hut, her back to the setting sun, stood the woman. Saxe had of course known that Mary would be dressed like a native; but this figure staggered him. She was half naked, after the fashion of the tribe, a long petticoat being her only garment. Undoubtedly her skin had been originally fair, Saxe said; but it was tanned to a deep brown--virtually bronzed. For that matter, there was hardly an inch of her that was not tattooed or painted. Some great design, crudely smeared in with thick strokes of ochre, covered her throat, shoulders, and breast. Over it were hung rows and rows of shells, the longest rows reaching to the top of the petticoat. Her face was oddly marred--uncivilized, you might say--by a large nose-ring, and a metal disk that was set in the lower lip, distending it. Forehead and cheeks were streaked with paint, and her straight black hair was dressed after the tribal fashion: stiffened with grease, braided with shells, puffed out with wooden rolls to enormous size. Her eyelids were painted red. That was not a habit of the tribe, and might point to an Arab tradition. The painted eyelids and the streaks that seemed to elongate the eyes themselves were Saxe’s despair--he had counted on meeting the eyes of Mary Bradford. To his consternation, the woman stood absolutely silent, her eyes bent on the ground, her face in shadow. Even Saxe, who had no psychology, seems to have seen that Mary Bradford would, in that plight--if it _was_ she--wait for him to speak first. But I think he had expected her at least to faint. Saxe looked at her long without speaking. He was trying, he said, to penetrate her detestable disguise, to find some vulnerable point where he could strike at her very heart, and know. In the midst of his bewilderment, he grew cool--cold, even. He gave himself orders (he told me afterward) as a general might send them from the rear. His tongue, his hands, his feet were very far off, but they obeyed punctiliously. My own opinion is that Saxe never, from the moment when he saw the woman, believed it to be Mary.

Her back, as I have said, was against the light. As the purchaser of a slave, he might well wish to see her more fully revealed. He gave the order through the interpreter: “Turn to the light.” As she turned obediently and stood in profile against the scarlet west, he saw that her form was unshapely. On her back were a few scars, long since healed.

That moment was undoubtedly Hell for Saxe, in spite of the doubt upon him. But what must it have been for the impassible creature before him? Saxe saw that he must play the game alone. “Mary,” he said quietly in English, “I have come to take you home.” In the circumstances, it was the stupidest thing he could have said; but the only thing he thought of was speaking in English. If it was Mary, those words, he thought, would reach her, would dispel her shame, or, if she were mad, pierce her madness.

She seemed not to have heard. “Bid her look me in the face,” he said brutally to the interpreter. The order was repeated. She turned, raised her painted eyelids, and looked him straight in the eyes, with the apathetic look of the slave, the world over. “But were they Mary Bradford’s eyes?” I cried to him, when he told me. “I don’t know, damn you!” he said. “Mary had never looked at me like that--as if she didn’t see me, and painted like a devil.”

He seems to have felt--as far as I can define his feeling--that she was not Mary, but that perhaps he could bully her into being Mary. I do not know how else to explain his unconvinced but perfectly dogged insistence on her identity. He had, of course, been greatly shaken by the extraordinary appearance of the woman. Perhaps he was simply afraid it was she because it would be so terrible if it were, and was resolved not to shirk. Saxe, too, was a New Englander. At all events, he shouted his creed a little louder still. “You are treating me very badly, Mary. I am going in to buy you from the chief; and then you will listen to me.”

The woman heard Saxe’s voice and looked at the interpreter. Saxe, stupefied, repeated his speech to the negro, and the latter translated. At this, she threw up her arms and broke into guttural ejaculations. That painted form swayed grotesquely from side to side, Saxe said, and she tore the shells out of her hair, tearing the hair with them. Giving him one glance of devilish hatred, she ran to the chief’s hut. Saxe followed. There was nothing else to do.

Then began, Saxe said, what for him was a horrible pantomime. He heard nothing of what was said, until afterward, for the interpreter could not keep up with the _prestissimo_ of that scene; but one understood it without knowing. The woman grovelled at the chief’s feet; she pointed to Saxe and wrung her hands. She was not Saxe’s slave, and evidently did not wish to be. The other women drew near to listen, being, clearly, personally interested in the outcome. The chief was, as I have said, avaricious. He looked longingly at the shining heaps of beads, the bolts of scarlet cloth, above all, the Remington rifles. Yet it was clear that he had not wholly outgrown his sluggish _penchant_ for the woman who clung to him. It does not often happen, for that matter, that a petty chief in the remote interior can count a white woman--even a half-breed--among his slaves; and the male savage has an instinct for mating above him. The woman saw whither the avaricious eye wandered. She rose from the ground, she stood between him and the treasures, she bent over him and murmured to him, she pointed to her own distorted form.... The little slave girl scowled, and the chief’s eye gleamed. What at first had seemed a possible detriment, now showed as an advantage. “That was true,” he exclaimed. “Before long she would bring him a warrior son or a girl he could sell for many cows. Let the white man wait.” Saxe stamped his foot. Not one day would he wait: the bargain should be completed then. He told me afterward that, after seeing her with the chief, he was absolutely convinced that the woman they were cheapening was the half-breed Arab they said she was; and the general in the rear of the battle wondered dully what he should do with her. But the woman had thrust herself cunningly beneath the chief’s very feet, had twined her arms about his ankles, had welded herself to him like a footstool that he could not shake off. Over the chief’s thick features, in the torch light (for night was falling outside), into his avaricious eyes, crept a swinish gleam. Let the white man wait until to-morrow. Night was falling; it was time to sleep. By the sunlight they could deal better. The woman panted heavily beneath his feet, never loosing her hold. The young slave girl looked down at her with unconcealed malignity. Saxe found himself forced to retire from the royal hut--sleeping-chamber, banqueting-hall, audience-room in one. He said that all he thought of, as he stumbled out, was the idiotic figure he should make at the Mission as the owner of an Arab-Mandingo woman. It was worse than the yellow Portuguese.

He was conducted to his tent. The interpreter confirmed there all that Saxe had divined. Let it be said now that Saxe had one clear inspiration. Before leaving the hut, he had turned and spoken to the woman who was fawning on the wretched negro. “Mary,” he said, “if you ask me to, I will shoot you straight through the heart.” The woman had snarled unintelligibly at the sound of his voice, and had redoubled her caresses. Can you blame Saxe for having doubted? Remember that she had not for one moment given any sign of being Mary Bradford; remember that he had no proof that it was Mary Bradford. “Had you no intuition of her?” asked young Adams, later, at the Mission. “Intuition!” cried Saxe. “There wasn’t a feature of Mary Bradford there: she was a loathsome horror.” Let those who cannot believe in Saxe’s failure to recognize her, reflect for an instant on all that is contained in that literal statement. Have you never failed, after a few years of separation, to recognize some one: some one whose face had not been subjected to barbaric decoration and disfigurement, not even to three years of the African sun; who, living all the while in the same quiet street, had merely passed for a time under the skilful transforming hands of sorrow? I have seen Mary Bradford’s photograph, and was told at the same time that the not very striking face depended for its individuality on the expression of eyes and mouth. But painted eyes ... and a lip-ring? She was undoubtedly, as Saxe said, “a loathsome horror”; and a loathsome horror who gave no sign. I firmly believe that she was not recognizable to the eye. Saxe’s only chance would have lain in divination; in being able to say unerringly of the woman he loved: “Thus, or thus, in given circumstances, would she behave.” Such knowledge of Mary Bradford could never have been easy to any man. In my opinion, no one can blame him for doubting. The magnificence of the performance was almost outside the realm of possibility. I asked Saxe once if Mary Bradford had been good at acting. He had never seen her do but one part: she had done that extremely well. And the part? Beatrice, in _Much Ado_. Beatrice!

The strain of it had told on Saxe, and he slept that night. But it is only fair to say that, before he slept, he had quite made up his mind that he was as far away from Mary Bradford as he had ever been. It is not to be wondered at. Only a man who had grasped Mary Bradford’s idea--it has taken me three years to do that, entirely--could have believed that she would let Saxe go out baffled from the hut in which she deliberately chose to stay with her half-drunk, wholly vile captor. Women who could have done all the rest, would have turned at Saxe’s offer of a kindly shot through the heart. But Mary Bradford was great. She was also infinitely wronged by Fate. It is all wanton, wanton--to the very last: all, that is, except her own part, which was sublimely reasoned.

Saxe slept, I say; and at dawn woke to his problem. The intelligence that works for us while we sleep waked him into the conviction that he must, at any cost, buy the woman. He said that, as he strode over to the chief’s hut, he was thinking only of what price he ought to put on the child that would be such a fantastic mixture of breeds. He did not want the woman, but he felt that the purchase was inevitable. This, I am convinced, was only the New English leaven working him up to martyrdom. It would be unmitigatedly dreadful to have the woman on his hands, and therefore he ought probably to buy her.

The chief greeted him with temper, and soon Saxe learned why. The woman had left the hut before dawn, taking with her her master’s largest knife. She was found later in her own little hovel, dead, with a clean stab to her heart. Suicide is virtually unknown among savages, and the village was astir. Saxe asked to see the body at once, but that, it seems, was not etiquette: he had to wait until it was prepared for burial. For an instant, he said, he thought of bargaining for the body, but forebore. He had a difficult return journey to make, and the point was, after all, to see it. When they permitted him to enter the hut, the face had been piously disfigured beyond recognition. He told me that he lifted the tattooed hand and kissed it: he did not know why. It was clear that if the woman had--preposterously--been Mary, she would not have wished it; and if she were the other, it was almost indecent. But he could not help it. This impulse of his seems to have been his only recognition of Mary Bradford. In life and in death, she suppressed every sign of herself with consummate art.

We were a fevered group that waited for Saxe day after day at the Mission; and he seemed to have been gone an intolerably long time. The broken leg that had kept me from going with him was almost well when he returned. Yet he had taken the shortest way back. It was also the unhealthiest. He said that he had heard war rumors that made him avoid the more frequented trail, but I fancy he rather hoped that the swamps he clung to would give him fever. In that sense--and in that sense only--Saxe could perhaps be said to have committed suicide. He stumbled into the Mission dining-room at noon one day. “And Mary?” we all cried, rising. “Oh, did you expect to see Mary?” he asked politely, but with evident astonishment.

We got him to bed at once. After the days of delirium were over, he told his story quite simply. It was pitifully short. The concrete facts seemed to be perfectly clear in his mind, and he gave them spontaneously; but what he himself had felt during that dramatic hour, I learned only by close questioning. He died suddenly, when he was apparently convalescent. The year he had been through had simply killed resiliency in him and he went down at the last as stupidly as a ninepin. I cannot imagine the source of the rumor that he had killed himself, unless it was some person who thought he ought to have done so. He started, at the end, to speak to me: “If Mary ever--” He never got beyond the three words; they showed sufficiently, however, that he was considering the possibility of Mary Bradford’s being discovered after his death. He may have been wandering a little at the last; but, in my opinion, Saxe had never believed, even after the suicide, that the woman he had seen had been his betrothed.

Some weeks after Saxe’s death, we received incontrovertible proof--if testimony is ever incontrovertible--that it had indeed been she. We had been surrounded for a year by a hideous jungle--blind, hostile, impenetrable. Now out of that jungle stalked a simple fact. One of the native girls who had been taken captive with Mary Bradford returned at length to her own tribe. She had shared Mary’s fortunes, as it happened, almost to the last; then the chief who had bought them both sold her, and by the successive chances of purchase, raid, and battle she had reached her own people. It was hardly more than crawling home to die; but she managed to send word by one of her kinsmen to the white people down the river. Apparently she and Mary had promised each other to report if either should ever reach friends again. Her message was pitifully meagre: Mary had talked little in those wild months; and after she had seen that they were too well watched to escape, she had talked not at all. But the two had evidently clung together--an extraordinary tie, which was the last Mary Bradford was to know of friendship. The burden of the native’s report was that the white girl was the favorite of a chief who gave her much finery. The dying woman seems to have thought it would set Mary Bradford’s friends at rest--her kinsman, I remember, said that he had good news for us. The news was no news to me--I had been thinking; but I was glad that Saxe had died before he could hear it. Even the comfort of knowing that Mary was surely dead would never have made up to him for the ironic memory of the last hour he had spent with her. Besides, Saxe would never have understood.

I should probably never have touched this chapter of history with a public pen, if I had not heard a woman say, a few months since, that she thought Mary Bradford’s conduct indelicate. Had the woman not said it to me directly, I should not have believed, even at my cynical age, that such a thing could be said. I greatly regret, myself, that the facts were ever told: they should have been buried in Africa with Saxe. But the Prices returned to America not long after it all happened, and apparently could not refrain from talking. Even so, I should have let Mary Bradford’s legend alone, forever, had I not learned that she could be misjudged.

Consider dispassionately the elements of her situation; and tell me who has ever been so tortured. Physically unable to escape by flight, morally incapable, as you might say, of escaping by death--for there can be no doubt that, difficult as suicide would have been to a guarded captive, she could have found some poisonous root, courted the bite of some serpent, snatched for one instant some pointed weapon; and that she was deterred, as Saxe said, by the simple belief that to take one’s life was the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost, the Comforter--she could but take what came. As a high-priced chattel, she was probably not, for the most part, ill-treated--save for the tattooing, which was not cruelly intended. The few scars that Saxe noted doubtless bore witness to her protest against the utmost bitterness of slavery, some sudden saint-like frenzy with which she opposed profanation. She may have wondered why God chose so to degrade her: her conduct with Saxe shows beyond a doubt how she rated her degradation. She made not one attempt to dignify or to defend her afflicted body. Her soul despised it: trampled it under foot.

What Mary Bradford suffered before Saxe came we cannot know, but the measure of it lies, I think, in the resolution she took (if we believe the jealous slave girl) when she heard of the white man’s approach. She must have divined Saxe, leagues away, as he was unable to divine her, face to face. Her one intent was to deceive him, to steep herself in unrecognizable savagery. If Mary Bradford had conceived of any rôle possible for herself in her own world, she would not have created her great part. If she had felt herself fit even to care for lepers at Molokai, she would have washed away her paint and fallen at his feet. It is perfectly evident that she considered herself fit for nothing in life--hardly for death. Her hope was clearly that Saxe should not know her. I do not believe that it was pride. If there had been any pride left in Mary Bradford’s heart, she could not have stood quietly (“apathetically,” was his word!) before Saxe in the flare of the dying sun. It was not to save anything of hers that she went through her comedy, but only to save a little merciful blindness for Saxe himself. He undoubtedly made it as hard as possible for her. I am inclined to think that if he had gone away at once, she would be living still--mothering her half-breed child, teaching it secretly the fear of God. When she saw that all Saxe’s bewilderment still left him with the firm determination to buy her--to take her away and study her at his leisure--she conceived her magnificent _chute de rideau_. When she went into the hut, she had decided, for Saxe’s sake, to die. Mary Bradford grovelling at the feet of the drunken chief will always seem to me one of the most remarkable figures in history: I should never have mentioned Jocasta in the same breath with her. Only Christianity can give us tragedy like that. How must she not have longed, at Saxe’s offer of a kindly shot through the heart, to turn, to fling herself at his feet, to cry out his name, once. She “redoubled her caresses,” Saxe said! Has any man ever been so loved, do you think? For the sake of bestowing upon him that healing doubt, she let him go, she put off death, she spent her last night on earth not fifty yards from him, in the hut of a savage, that she might have, before dawn, the means of committing the unpardonable sin. Note that she did not commit suicide until she had made it perfectly plausible--from the point of view of the Arab-Mandingo woman. _She proved to him that it was not she._. She gauged Saxe perfectly. Nothing but some such evidence as later we received--perhaps not even that--would ever have made Saxe believe that Mary Bradford, with him by her side, had clung to that vile savage. Even Mary Bradford--whose soul must have been, by that time, far away from her body, a mere voice in her own ears, a remote counsellor to hands and feet--could not have done that, had she not intended to die. But remember that up to that day she had lived rather than rank herself with the “violenti contro se stessi.” We can simply say that Mary Bradford chose the chance of Hell for the sake of sparing Saxe pain. The fact that you or I--I pass over the lady who thinks her indelicate; does she think, I wonder, that it would have been delicate for Mary Bradford to accompany Saxe back to civilization?--may believe her to be one of the saints, has nothing to do with what she thought. Mary Bradford came of a race that for many generations believed in predestination; but she herself believed in free will. Dreadful as it is to be foredamned, it is worse to have damned yourself. She had not even the cold comfort of Calvinism. I said that I understood Mary Bradford. I am not sure that it would not have taken a Spanish saint of the sixteenth century really to understand her. Sixteenth-century Spain is the only thing I know of that is in the least like New England.

I am not trying to make out a “case” for Mary Bradford; and I sincerely hope that the lady who thinks her indelicate will never read these pages. For most people, the facts will suffice, and I have no desire to interpret them for the others. You have only to meditate for a little on the ironic and tragic reflections of a hundred kinds that must have surged through Mary Bradford’s brain, to be swept away, yourself, on the horrid current. Do I need, for example, to point out the difficulty--to use a word that I think the lady I have cited would approve--of merely meeting the man she adored, face to face? For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement. No, you have only to explore Mary Bradford’s tragedy for yourself. It will take you three years, perhaps, as it has taken me, to penetrate the last recesses. And if you are tempted for a moment to think of her as mad, or _exaltée_, reflect on how completely she understood Saxe. I am only half a New Englander; and I confess that, though I reverence her heroism, I am even more humble before her intelligence. It is no blame to Saxe that he stumbled out of the chief’s hut, completely her dupe. Poor Saxe! But the vivid vision of that scene leaves _Phèdre_ tasteless to me. As I say, I am only half a New Englander....

THE MANGO-SEED

The two young men looked at each other rather helplessly. Then “Marty” Martin drew a few ragged words over his helplessness. “I’m sorry, Peter--really, awfully. I’ll be back in an hour. And do buck up. But you have bucked up, you really have. You look ever so much better than you did when we went to lunch. And I’ll be back. Oh, you can depend on me.” He drifted off through the door. His muscles were tense with haste, but he fingered chairs and tables as he went--as if trying to put clogs of decency on feet indecorously winged. Even so, he was soon out of sight, and Peter Wayne was alone.

“There’s no point in saying it isn’t rum, because it is,” he murmured to himself. “And _here_,” he added, looking about. There was no moral support in those crimson walls, those great pier-glasses, those insignificant writing-tables with red-shaded electric lights, those uncomfortable tapestried armchairs. It wasn’t the setting to help you through a crisis. He was in the quietest corner of the most essentially respectable hotel in New York. There were plenty of them--scores--that were incidentally respectable; but at the St. Justin respectability had been cherished through years for its own sake, as more important than the register, the cuisine, or the unimpeachable location that no metropolitan progress could render inconvenient. As a very young bachelor with virtually no family ties, he was not familiar with the St. Justin. It wasn’t a place where you would expect to get the kind of thing his kind of human being wanted. He couldn’t, for example, have induced Marty to lunch there. They had lunched at Plon’s. It was a hotel where you might be perfectly sure your grandparents had stopped. It was natural that his mother should have selected it for their meeting, as she hadn’t been in America for well over twenty years. But there was less backing than he had expected, somehow.

Sitting uncomfortably in one of the corners by a writing-table (his back to the window so that the familiar streets shouldn’t lure him too much to flight), he took the privilege of the consciously crucial moment. He reviewed his life. It was so very short, after all, that it was easily reviewed. He was only a few months out of the university, and he was just twenty-two. The insoluble was there to the point of being either romantic or absurd, he didn’t know which. He had what so many young people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of himself? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his like had by heart before they could spell? The most that he knew about his parents--except that they were alive and in the tropics--was that they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty Martin’s uncle. Marty Martin’s uncle had picked out Peter’s school and his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had appendicitis. That was as near the parental relation as anything he had known from experience. Lonely? Well, any fellow was lonely when the other fellows all went trooping home for holidays; but loneliness he had always frankly diagnosed as three-quarters pride. The fellows were always glad to get back to school or college, he noticed. In any case, he had stopped thinking about it much--his plight. That saved his dignity. What he sat now vaguely dreading was the immense, the cataclysmic downfall of his dignity. He tried to put the facts to himself so simply that they should be as reassuring as a primer. Ollendorf, he had once complained to a teacher, would take the zest out of a murder, the sense out of a scandal. Tragedy was a verbal matter. Put a crime into any foreign language, and it sounded like a laundry list. He would try, as it were, to find the French for his situation.

“Oh, rot!” he began, taking his own advice quite seriously. “It isn’t so Sudermannish as all that. My father and my mother chose to go to the tropics to live, a year after I was born. They did not take me with them. They have never sent for me; but they have supported me; they have written to me occasionally; they have got Marty Martin’s uncle to keep me out of the hands of the S.P.C.C., and trained me generally to do without them. I’ve never been invited to go to Tahiti. And Tahiti isn’t like London--if you know any one there, you can’t go without an invitation. They can’t have turned against me, when I was eleven months old, on account of my vices. I’ve kept pretty jolly and managed to regularize the situation with my friends. Now my mother has written that she’s coming to America to see me. Indeed, she has actually come. I wasn’t allowed to meet her at a steamer, decently. I have to meet her here--here.” (He looked gloomily around at the conventional walls.) “Yet she doesn’t seem to be staying here. I don’t know whether she will want tea, or where to take her to dinner. I don’t know her when I see her. I don’t know--oh, hang it, I don’t know anything! And if I could funk it, like Marty, I would. But what can you do when a lady takes the trouble to bring you into the world? If it had been my father, now, I wouldn’t--I positively wouldn’t--have consented to meet him. It’s--it’s no way to treat a fellow.”