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The Project Gutenberg eBook of
Va i n o b l a t i o n s
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Title: Vain oblations

Author: Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Release date: May 25, 2024 [eBook #73693]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914

Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAIN OBLATIONS

***
 VAI N O B LAT I O N S

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
 VA I N O B L AT I O N S
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.”
His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down: the mere facts
seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty
Martin that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling;
but, in point of fact, he had never been so uncomfortable in his life as now,
at the prospect of playing the authentic filial rôle. “I’ll make her dine here,”
he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without being actually
disrespectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly down the hall past
the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother would perhaps like to
dine at the St. Justin. “I ought to have cabled to ask what color her shawl
would be,” he began, in a flippant whisper, to himself. The flippant whisper
stopped. He was much too genuinely nervous to be flippant any longer
without an audience. At the same time, he found himself wondering—oh,
insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically wondering—why he had not bought an
etiquette book. There was something—well, to be honest, something like an
extra gland in his throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves
—that kept him from putting the question to himself audibly. “If she cries
—” he reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant
was: “If she makes me so much as sniff.” For your mother was really the
one person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if
you hadn’t the habit of her, you couldn’t count on yourself for reticence.
You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn’t save you. There might
be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the cuticle—all manner of
reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow had your nerves, your
physical equilibrium, at her mercy. Old Stein, prodding at you with
instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a mere joke in comparison.
Even the most deceived, the most docile and voluble student ended
respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt suddenly an immense tenderness
for the decencies, the unrealities of “science.” But to meet your mother in
conditions like these was the real thing: the naked horror of revelation. “It’s
literature,” thought Peter to himself, “and what is literature but just the very
worst life can do?” He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It
was rum.
 The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty
lapse of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might
not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what could
a man in his predicament do, or pretend to do, between luncheon and an
interview like that? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized meal at Plon’s;
but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the stunted box-trees
afterward had been—well, impossible. They had got to the St. Justin
ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter didn’t bear him any
grudge for that; of course it was perfectly proper for Marty to bolt. It would
have been worse, he began to think, to face her first before a witness.
By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin
as the predestined scene of the great encounter; accepted it as, perhaps
divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally, appointed.
These walls had been decorated by dead people to be unsympathetic and
grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne’s embarrassment. To that extent they
belonged to him. The sudden superstition was genuine; so genuine that he
found himself resenting a bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and,
even more, the immediate quick entrance into the writing-room of one of
the chatterers. Why hadn’t his mother given him an appointment in her own
sitting-room, at her own hotel—whatever that might be? He didn’t know; he
knew nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the
appointment; and of course since she was managing the thing that way, he
hadn’t even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually docked
at some unearthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay, too, for her
perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat down rather
aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as much as she did
him. He had owned—or pretended?—to Marty Martin a furtive curiosity as
to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never seen, of whom he hadn’t
so much as a photograph. Now something quite different stirred within him:
the instinct to protect her against anything she would not like. He suddenly
saw her frail and weary and overwrought and quite old—pathetically, not
ironically, like the little old lady who had hobbled past the door—and he
resented any detail that might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra
thorn. He was sure she would hate this other woman’s being there—the
younger woman who had just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly.
This lady obviously intended to stop long enough for their discomfiture,
since—just here he got up and looked at his watch as he did so—it lacked
scarce two minutes of the appointed hour. He looked at the intruder a little
impatiently. She wasn’t writing. Perhaps he could suggest, by some flicker
of expression, some implication of gesture, that he wasn’t there in that
ridiculous galley for nothing, and still less there for casual company. She
was slim and smartly veiled and outrageously made up. That was all he saw
out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough to make him feel that she had
no such rights at the St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn’t
waiting for a parent, he knew; only for some frivolous friend or other. He
was so nervous as to wonder if there were any conceivable way in which
one could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of
them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She was
well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle about the
nature of the current fashion, could, like most men, pounce unerringly on
the unfashionable. Her exuberance wasn’t a matter of gewgaws; it was all in
the meretricious harmonies of her features and complexion. And yet—Peter
caught himself away from staring, as he passed her, but one glance was
enough to show him that—it was a perfectly honest mask; her paint and
powder were as respectable as blue glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He
was glad to recognize it. For at that moment he became so nervous that he
did, without a qualm, the most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at
two and twenty.
His mother was imminent; he knew it in a hundred ways. The
atmosphere was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged
with the actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the
lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked
down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near,
bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag—obviously a
servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the
intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his
mother would be on time: the crispness of her earlier cablegrams promised
it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid—old and “colored” and
manifestly respectable—must move down the hall and sit outside another
door. He went back, and this time walked straight across to the stranger.
“Will you pardon me, madam” (“madam” was a deplorable word, but the
powder somehow demanded an extravagant formality), “if I speak to you,
to ask you something very odd?”
She stared at him through her fantastically patterned veil.
 “I have been put in the position of having to meet an elderly lady—a
near relative—here for a more or less intimate conversation. I don’t think
she realized, in making the appointment, how little privacy you have a right
to in a hotel. It is very long since she has been in a great city. Will you
pardon the—the really unpardonable—liberty of my asking if you are likely
to be here much longer? I mean—ought I to arrange to take her elsewhere
in the hotel when she comes? She will be here in a moment.”
It was a dreadful thing to have had to do, and, if he judged by what the
veil showed of the lady’s face, it couldn’t have been worse done. She
looked dismayed. Peter was angry: so angry that he managed to stop just
where he had stationed himself before her; so angry that he didn’t
deprecate, that he simply set his teeth and waited. There was nothing he
could do now, he felt, to convince her that she hadn’t been insulted.
She lifted her veil ever so little, just freeing her lips, slightly constricted
by its tight-drawn mesh. As she did so, she both rose and spoke.
“Aren’t you Peter Wayne?”
He bowed, relieved. If they had a ground of acquaintance, he could
perhaps cover it all up, make it plausible, get rid of her on some dishonest,
hilarious pretext. “I am.” He waited; there was no use in pretending that he
remembered her.
The veil was lifted farther, then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a
voice sounded in his astonished ears. “Turn to the light, my son, and let me
look at you. I’ve not had a photograph, you remember, since you were a
child.”
Even as he faced the light, he was saying to himself that it was rummer
than ever; but it was rummest when he turned for his legitimate look at her.
She was older than he had assumed the strange lady to be; but she was a
long way from the little old lady in the gray shawl. This was his mother, and
it was over—he felt it as those sinking for the third time may feel. In
another instant he saw his mistake. He had been pulled up out of the surge
into the terrible air—this was his mother, and it had just begun! He
mastered his breath—his breath that under the water had been playing tricks
with him. He looked her over, searching stare for searching stare. Her fair
hair had lost what must once have been a golden lustre, but it was carefully,
elaborately arranged, waved, curled, braided. It was as fashionable as her
clothes. The white mask of powder left clear the contour of the fine, thin
nose but cloaked the subtler modellings of the face. The blue eyes, idle yet
intent, looked at him from behind it; below them it was rent, once, by the
scarlet stab of the mouth. Peter remembered vaguely having heard that the
tropical sun necessitated such protection. It was the northern dimness and
drizzle that turned make-up into a moral question. Even for the grands
boulevards, to be sure, Mrs. Wayne’s make-up would have been overdone.
This was the chief result of his searching stare. She wasn’t like one’s
mother at all, confound it!—not like any one’s mother. He would have been
glad of a little more sophistication than even at wise two-and-twenty he was
conscious of possessing.
“Your maid?” he asked, remembering the figure outside the door.
“Oh, yes; my old Frances. She recalls you as a baby. She’ll want to see
you. You must speak to her before we go.”
“But you’re not going——”
“I find I’d better get off to-night. I’ve learned since landing, that if I do, I
can just get a boat at Vancouver. It’s not as if I had any business to do.
You’ll take me to dinner somewhere—some restaurant. I don’t like hotels.”
“But—you don’t mean you’ve come for only twenty-four hours—across
all that?”
The straight red mouth elongated itself into a smile. “If there weren’t so
much of it to cross, I could, perhaps, stay longer. I came only to say one or
two things.”
She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter
suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his plight. He was glad
if his prayers had succeeded in averting tragedy. At the same time, he didn’t
intend to be turned into farce. He hadn’t let himself in for all this only to be
shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty years. He meant to
know things, hang it! He had been afraid of a scene; afraid of twenty years’
emotion expressed in an hour; of a creation of human ties as violent and
sudden as the growth of the tree from the mango-seed in the fakir’s hands.
“In ten minutes you eat the ripe mango,” a globe-trotting friend had told
him. If he hadn’t the fakir’s miracle to fear, well and good; but neither was
he going to suffer the other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the
experience. After all, she was his mother, hang it! If she wasn’t going to
make him pay—well, he would make her pay. Somebody had to get
something out of so preposterous a situation. He leaned forward.