sugar? The grub on the train was fierce."
Mrs. Egg brought him the tin case of maple sugar. Adam selected a
chunk of the brown stuff and bit a lobe of it. He was silent. Mrs. Egg
marvelled at him. His sisters had hinted that he wasn't clever. She
stood in awe, although her legs ached. Adam finished the lump of maple
sugar and rose. He leaned on the shelves with his narrow waist curved
against them and studied a row of quince-preserve jars. His nose
wrinkled.
He asked, "You been fumigatin'?"
"Fumigatin'! Why, Dammy, there ain't been a disease in the house since
you had whoopin' cough."
"Sulphur," Adam drawled.
"Why, Dammy Egg! I never used sulphur for nothin' in my life!"
He took a jar of preserves and ripped off the paraffin wafer that
covered the top. Then he set the jar aside and sat down on the floor.
Mrs. Egg watched him unlace his shoes.
He commanded, "You sit still, Mamma. Be back in a minute."
"Dammy, don't you go near that heathen!"
"I ain't."
He swung across the kitchen floor in two strides and bumped his head
on the top of the door. Mrs. Egg winced, but all her body seemed to
move after the boy. Shiverings tossed her. She lifted her skirts and
stepped after him. The veranda was empty. Adam had vanished, although
the moon covered the dooryard with silver. The woman stared and shook.
Then something slid down the nearest pillar and dropped like a black
column to the grass. Adam came up the steps and shoved Mrs. Egg back
to the pantry.
He spread some quince preserve on a slab of bread and stated, "He's
sittin' up readin' a lot of old copybooks, kind of. Got oil all over
his head. It's hair remover. Sulphur in it."
"How could you ever smell that far, Dammy?"
"I wonder what's in those books?" Adam pondered. He sat cross-legged
on the ice chest and ate slowly for a time, then remarked, "You didn't
put up these quinces, Mamma."
"No; they're Sadie's. Think of your noticin'!"
"You got to teach Edie cookin'," he said. "She can't cook fit for a
Cuban. Lots of time, though. Now, Mamma, we can't let this goof stay
here all night. I guess he's a thief. I ain't goin' to let the folks
have a laugh on you. Didn't your father always keep a diary?"
"Think of your rememberin' that, Dammy! Yes, always."
"That's what Frisco's readin' up in. He's smart. Used to do im'tations
of actors and cry like a hose pipe. Spotted that. Where's the
strawb'ry jam?"
"Right here, Dammy. Dammy, suppose he killed Papa somewheres off and
stole his diaries!"
"Well," said Adam, beginning strawberry jam, "I thought of that. Mebbe
he did. I'd better find out. Y'oughtn't to kill folks even if they're
no good for nothin'."
"I'll go down to the barn and wake some of the boys up," Mrs. Egg
hissed.
"You won't neither, Mamma. This'd be a joke on you. I ain't goin' to
have folks sayin' you took this guy for your father. Fewer knows it,
the better. This is awful good jam." He grinned and pulled Mrs. Egg
down beside him on the chest. She forgot to be frightened, watching
the marvel eat. She must get larger jars for jam. He reflected: "You
always get enough to eat on a boat, but it ain't satisfyin'. Frisco
prob'ly uses walnut juice to paint his face with. It don't wash off.
Don't talkin' make a person thirsty?"
"Wait till I get you some more cider, Dammy."
Adam thoughtfully drank more pear cider and made a cigarette.
Wonderful ideas must be moving behind the blank brown of his forehead.
His mother adored him and planned a recital of his acts to Egg, who
had accused Adam of being slow witted.
She wanted to justify herself, and muttered: "I just felt he wasn't
Papa all along. He was like one of those awful sorrowful persons in a
movie."
"Sure," said Adam, patting her arm. "I wish Edie'd got as nice a
complexion as you, Mamma."
"Mercy, Dammy!" his mother tittered and blushed.
Adam finished a third mug of cider and got up to examine the shelves.
He scratched the rear of one calf with the other toe, and muscles
cavorted in both legs as he reached for a jar of grapefruit marmalade.
He peered through this at the lamp and put the jar back. Mrs. Egg felt
hurt.
The paragon explained: "Too sour after strawb'ry, Mamma. I'd like some
for breakfast, though. Back in a minute."
He trotted out through the kitchen and vanished on the veranda. She
shivered, being alone.
Adam came back and nodded: "Light's out. Any key to that room?"
"No."
"I can always think better when I'm eatin'," he confessed, and lifted
down the plate of spiced cookies, rejected them as too fresh, and
pounced on a covered dish of apple sauce.
This he absorbed in stillness, wriggling his toes on the oilcloth.
Mrs. Egg felt entirely comfortable and real. She could hear the cook
snoring. Behind her the curtain of the pantry window fluttered. The
cool breeze was pleasant on her neck. Adam licked the spoon and said,
"Back in a minute, Mamma," as he started for the veranda door.
Mrs. Egg reposed on the ice chest thinking about Adam. He was like
Egg, in that nothing fattened him. She puzzled over to-morrow's lunch.
Baked ham and sweet potatoes, sugared; creamed asparagus; hot corn
muffins. Dessert perplexed her. Were there any brandied peaches left?
She feared not. They belonged on the upper shelf nearest the ice
chest. Anxiety chewed her. Mrs. Egg climbed the lid by the aid of the
window sill and reached up an arm to the shelf.
Adam said, "Here y'are, Mamma."
The pantry door shut. Mrs. Egg swung about. Adam stood behind a shape
in blue pajamas, a hand locked on either of its elbows. He grinned at
Mrs. Egg over the mummer's shoulder. As the woman panted sulphur
entered her throat. The lamp threw a glare into the dark face, which
seemed paler.
"Go on, Frisco," said Adam, about the skull, "tell Mamma about her
father."
A sharp voice answered, "Let go my arms. You're killin' me!"
"Quit kiddin'," Adam growled. "Go on!"
"He ran a joint in San Francisco and gave me a job after I got out the
Navy. Died last fall. I kind of nursed him. Told me to burn all these
books--diaries. I read 'em. He called himself Peterson. Left all his
money to a woman. She shut the joint. I looked some like him so I took
a chance. Leggo my arms, Egg!"
"He'd ought to go to jail, Dammy," said Mrs. Egg. "It's just awful! I
bet the police are lookin' for him right now."
"Mamma, if we put him in jail this'll be all over the county and
you'll never hear the end of it."
She stared at the ape with loathing. There was a star tattooed on one
of his naked insteps. He looked no longer frail, but wiry and
snakelike. The pallor behind his dark tan showed the triangles of
black stain in his cheeks and eye sockets.
"He's too smart to leave loose, Dammy."
"It'll be an awful joke on you, Mamma."
"I can't help it, Dammy. He----"
The prisoner figure toppled back against Adam's breast and the mouth
opened hideously. The lean legs bent.
"You squeezed him too tight, Dammy. He's fainted. Lay him down."
Adam let the figure slide to the floor. It rose in a whirl of blue
linen. Mrs. Egg rocked on the chest.
The man thrust something at Adam's middle and said in a rasp, "Get
your arms up!"
Adam's face turned purple beyond the gleaming skull. His hands rose a
little and his fingers crisped. He drawled,
"Fact. I ought have looked under your duds, you----"
"Stick 'em up!" said the man.
Mrs. Egg saw Adam's arms tremble. His lower lip drew down. He wasn't
going to put his arms up. The man would kill him. She could not
breathe. She fell forward from the ice chest and knew nothing.
She roused with a sense of great cold and was sitting against the
shelves. Adam stopped rubbing her face with a lump of ice and grinned
at her.
He cried, "By gee, you did that quick, Mamma! Knocked the wind clear
out of him."
"Where is he, Dammy?"
"Dunno. Took his gun and let him get dressed. He's gone. Say, that was
slick!"
Mrs. Egg blushed and asked for a drink. Adam dropped the ice into a
mug of pear cider and squatted beside her with a shabby notebook.
"Here's somethin' for October 10, 1919." He read: "'Talked to a man
from Ilium to-day in Palace Bar. Myrtle married to John Egg. Four
children. Egg worth a wad. Dairy and cider business. Going to build
new Presbyterian church.' That's it, Mamma. He doped it all out from
the diary."
"The dirty dog!" said Mrs. Egg. She ached terribly and put her head on
Adam's shoulder.
"I'll put all the diaries up in the attic. Kind of good readin.' Say,
it's after two. You better go to bed."
In her dreams Mrs. Egg beheld a bronze menacing skeleton beside her
pillow. It whispered and rattled. She woke, gulping, in bright
sunlight, and the rattle changed to the noise of a motor halting on
the drive. She gave yesterday a fleet review, rubbing her blackened
elbows, but felt charitable toward Frisco Cooley by connotation; she
had once sat down on a collie pup. But her bedroom clock struck ten
times. Mrs. Egg groaned and rolled out of bed, reaching for a wrapper.
What had the cook given Adam for breakfast? She charged along the
upper hall into a smell of coffee, and heard Adam speaking below. His
sisters made some feeble united interjection.
The hero said sharply: "Of course he was a fake! Mamma knew he was,
all along, but she didn't want to let on she did in front of folks.
That ain't dignified. She just flattened him out and he went away
quiet. You girls always talk like Mamma hadn't as much sense as you.
She's kind of used up this morning. Wait till I give her her
breakfast, and I'll come talk to you."
A tray jingled.
Mrs. Egg retreated into her bedroom, awed. Adam carried in her
breakfast and shut the door with a foot.
He complained: "Went in to breakfast at Edie's. Of course she's only
sixteen, but I could make better biscuits myself. Lay down, Mamma."
He began to butter slices of toast, in silence, expertly. Mrs. Egg
drank her coffee in rapture that rose toward ecstasy as Adam made
himself a sandwich of toast and marmalade and sat down at her feet to
consume it.
THE VICTIM OF HIS VISION
By GERALD CHITTENDEN
From _Scribner's_
I
"There's no doubt about it," said the hardware drummer with the
pock-pitted cheeks. He seemed glad that there was no doubt--smacked
his lips over it and went on. "Obeah--that's black magic; and
voodoo--that's snake-worship. The island is rotten with 'em--rotten
with 'em."
He looked sidelong over his empty glass at the Reverend Arthur
Simpson. Many human things were foreign to the clergyman: he was
uneasy about being in the _Arequipa's_ smoke-room at all, for
instance, and especially uneasy about sitting there with the drummer.
"But--human sacrifice!" he protested. "You spoke of human sacrifice."
"And cannibalism. _La chèvre sans cornes_--the goat without
horns--that means an unblemished child less than three years old. It's
frequently done. They string it up by its heels, cut its throat, and
drink the blood. Then they eat it. Regular ceremony--the _mamaloi_
officiates."
"Who officiates?"
"The _mamaloi_--the priestess."
Simpson jerked himself out of his chair and went on deck. Occasionally
his imagination worked loose from control and tormented him as it was
doing now. There was a grizzly vividness in the drummer's description.
It was well toward morning before Simpson grasped again his usual
certainty of purpose and grew able to thank God that he had been born
into a very wicked world. There was much for a missionary to do in
Hayti--he saw that before the night grew thin, and was glad.
Between dawn and daylight the land leaped out of the sea, all clear
blues and purples, incomparably fresh and incomparably 111 wistful in
that one golden hour of the tropic day before the sun has risen very
high--the disembodied spirit of an island. It lay, vague as hope at
first, in a jewel-tinted sea; the ship steamed toward it as through
the mists of creation's third morning, and all good things seemed
possible. Thus had Simpson, reared in an unfriendly land, imagined it,
for beneath the dour Puritanism that had lapped him in its armour
there still stirred the power of wonder and surprise that has so often
through the ages changed Puritans to poets. That glimpse of Hayti
would remain with him, he thought, yet within the hour he was striving
desperately to hold it. For soon the ruffle of the breeze died from
off the sea, and it became gray glass through which the anchor sank
almost without a sound and was lost.
"Sweet place, isn't it, Mr. Simpson?" said Bunsen, the purser, pausing
on his way to the gangway.
"So that," Simpson rejoined slowly--and because it was a port of his
desire his voice shook on the words--"is Port au Prince!"
"That," Bunsen spat into the sea, "is Port au Prince."
He moved away. A dirty little launch full of uniforms was coming
alongside. Until the yellow flag--a polite symbol in that port--should
be hauled down Simpson would be left alone. The uniforms had climbed
to the deck and were chattering in a bastard patois behind him; now
and then the smell of the town struck across the smells of the sea and
the bush like the flick of a snake's tail. Simpson covered his eyes
for a moment, and immediately the vision of the island as he had seen
it at dawn swam in his mind. But he could not keep his eyes forever
shut--there was the necessity of living and of doing his work in the
world to be remembered always. He removed his hand. A bumboat was made
fast below the well of the deck, and a boy with an obscenely twisted
body and a twisted black face was selling pineapples to the sailors.
Simpson watched him for a while, and because his education had been
far too closely specialized he quoted the inevitable:
"Where every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile"
The verse uplifted him unreasonably. He went below to pack his
baggage. He said good-bye to the officers, painfully conscious that
they were grinning behind his back, and was rowed ashore by the
deformed boy.
The boy said something in abominable French. He repeated it--Simpson
guessed at its meaning.
"I shall stay a long time," he answered in the same language. "I am a
minister of the gospel--a missionary."
The cripple, bent revoltingly over his oar, suddenly broke out into
laughter, soulless, without meaning. Simpson, stung sharply in his
stiff-necked pride, sprang up and took one step forward, his fist
raised. The boy dropped the oars and writhed to starboard, his neck
askew at an eldritch angle, his eyes glaring upward. But he did not
raise a hand to ward off the blow that he feared, and that was more
uncanny still.
The blow never fell. Simpson's hand unclinched and shame reddened in
his face.
"Give me the oars," he said. "_Pauvre garçon_--did you think that I
would strike you?"
The boy surrendered the oars and sidled aft like a crab, his eyes
still rolling at his passenger.
"Why should the maimed row the sound?" said Simpson.
He rowed awkwardly. The boy watched him for a moment, then grinned
uncertainly; presently he lolled back in the stern-sheets, personating
dignity. A white man was doing his work--it was splendid, as it should
be, and comic in the extreme. He threw back his head and cackled at
the hot sky.
"Stop that!" Simpson, his nerves raw, spoke in English, but the
laughter jarred to a blunt end. The boy huddled farther away from him,
watching him with unwinking eyes which showed white all around the
pupil. Simpson, labouring with the clumsy oars, tried to forget him.
It was hot--hotter than it had seemed at first; sweat ran into his
eyes and he grew a little dizzy. The quarantine launch with its load
of uniforms, among which the purser's white was conspicuous, passed,
giving them its wake; there was no sound from it, only a blaze of
teeth and eyeballs. Simpson glanced over his shoulder at it. The
purser was standing in the stern, clear of the awning, his head
quizzically on one side and a cigarette in his fingers.
The rowboat came abreast of a worm-eaten jetty.
"_Ici_," said the cripple.
Simpson, inexpert, bumped into it bow on, and sculled the stern
around. The cripple, hideously agile, scrambled out and held the boat;
Simpson gathered up his bag and followed.
A Roman priest, black as the top of a stove, strode down the jetty
toward them.
"You--you!" he shouted to the cripple when he was yet ten strides
away. His voice rose as he approached. "You let the m'sieu' row you
ashore! You----" A square, heavy boot shot out from beneath his
cassock into the boy's stomach. "_Cochon_!" said the priest, turning
to Simpson. His manner became suddenly suave, grandiose. "These
swine!" he said. "One keeps them in their place. I am Father Antoine.
And you?"
"Simpson--Arthur Simpson." He said his own name slowly as thought
there was magic in it, magic that would keep him in touch with his
beginnings.
"Simpson?" The priest gave it the French sound; suspicion struggled
for expression on his black mask; his eyes took in the high-cut
waistcoat, the unmistakable clerical look. "You were sent?"
"By the board of foreign missions."
"I do not know it. Not by the archbishop?"
"There is no archbishop in my Church."
"In your Church?" Father Antoine's eyes sprang wide--wide as they had
been when he kicked the boatman. "In your Church? You are not of the
true faith, then?"
Pride of race, unchastened because he had not till that moment been
conscious that it existed in him, swelled in Simpson.
"Are you?" he asked.
Father Antoine stared at him, not as an angry white man stares, but
with head thrown back and mouth partly open, in the manner of his
race. Then, with the unreasoned impetuousness of a charging bull, he
turned and flung shoreward down the pier. The cripple, groaning still,
crawled to Simpson's feet and sat there.
"_Pauvre garçon_!" repeated Simpson dully. "_Pauvre garçon_!"
Suddenly the boy stopped groaning, swung Simpson's kit-bag on his
shoulder, and sidled up the pier. His right leg bent outward at the
knee, and his left inward; his head, inclined away from his burden,
seemed curiously detached from his body; his gait was a halting sort
of shuffle; yet he got along with unexpected speed. Simpson, still
dazed, followed him into the Grand Rue--a street of smells and piled
filth, where gorged buzzards, reeking of the tomb, flapped upward
under his nose from the garbage and offal of their feast. Simpson
paused for a moment at the market-stalls, where negroes of all shades
looked out at him in a silence that seemed devoid of curiosity. The
cripple beckoned him and he hurried on. On the steps of the cathedral
he saw Father Antoine, but, although the priest must have seen him, he
gave no sign as he passed. He kept to what shade there was. Presently
his guide turned down a narrow alley, opened a dilapidated picket
gate, and stood waiting.
"_Maman_!" he called. "_Oh! Maman_!"
Simpson, his curiosity faintly stirring, accepted the invitation of
the open gate, and stepped into an untidy yard, where three or four
pigs and a dozen chickens rooted and scratched among the bayonets of
yucca that clustered without regularity on both sides of the path. The
house had some pretensions; there were two stories, and, although the
blue and red paint had mostly flaked away, the boarding looked sound.
In the yard there was less fetor than there had been outside.
"_Maman_!" called the boy again.
A pot-lid clashed inside the house, and a tall negress, dressed in a
blue-striped Mother Hubbard, came to the door. She stared at Simpson
and at the boy.
"_Qui_?" was all she said.
The boy sidled nearer her and dropped the bag on the threshold.
"_Qui_?" she said again.
Simpson waited in silence. His affairs had got beyond him somehow, and
he seemed to himself but the tool of circumstance. It did occur to
him, though dimly, that he was being introduced to native life rather
quickly.
The cripple, squatting with his back against the bag, launched into a
stream of patois, of which Simpson could not understand a word.
Gestures explained somewhat; he was reënacting the scenes of the last
half hour. When he had finished, the negress, not so hostile as she
had been but by no means friendly, turned to Simpson and looked at him
a long time without speaking. He had all he could do not to fidget
under her gaze; finally, she stood aside from the door and said,
without enthusiasm:
"_B'en venu. C'est vo' masson_."
Simpson entered automatically. The kitchen, with its hard earth floor
and the sunlight drifting in through the bamboo sides, was not
unclean, and a savoury smell came from the stew-pot on the ramshackle
stove. In one of the bars of sunlight a mango-coloured child of two
years or so was playing with his toes--he was surprisingly clean and
perfectly formed.
"_Aha, mon petit_!" exclaimed Simpson. He loved children. "He is
handsome," he added, addressing the woman.
"Mine!" She turned the baby gently with her foot; he caught at the hem
of her dress, laughing. But she did not laugh. "Neither spot nor
blemish," she said, and then: "He is not yet three years old."
Simpson shuddered, recalling the pock-marked drummer on the
_Arequipa_. That was momentary--a coincidence, he told himself. The
woman was looking down at the child, her eyes softer than they had
been, and the child was lying on its back and playing with her Mother
Hubbard.
The woman lifted the lid from the pot and peered into it through the
sun-shot steam.
"It is ready," she said. She lifted it from the stove and set it on
the earthen floor. The cripple placed a handful of knives and spoons
on the table and three tin plates; he thrust a long fork and a long
spoon into the pot and stood aside.
"Seat yourself," said the woman, without looking at Simpson, "and
eat."
She explored the pot with the fork, and stabbed it firmly--there was a
suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder
again--into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a
callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with
gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed
her example, slobbering the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his
chin. Neither of them paid any attention to Simpson.
He took the remaining plate from the table and stood irresolute with
it in his hand. He was hungry, but his essential Puritan
fastidiousness, combined with that pride of race which he knew to be
un-Christian, rendered him reluctant to dip into the common pot or to
eat on equal terms with these people. Besides, the sun and his amazing
introduction to the island had given him a raging headache: he could
not think clearly nor rid himself of the sinister suggestion of the
town, of the house, of its three occupants in particular.
The child touched a ringer to the hot lip of the pot, burned itself,
and began to cry.
"_Taise_," said the woman. Her voice was low but curt, and she did not
raise her eyes from her plate. The child, its finger in its mouth,
stopped crying at once.
Simpson shook himself; his normal point of view was beginning to
assert itself. He must not--must not hold himself superior to the
people he expected to convert; nothing, he insisted to himself, was to
be gained, and much might be lost by a refusal to meet the people "on
their own ground." Chance--he did not call it chance--had favoured him
incredibly thus far, and if he failed to follow the guidance that had
been vouchsafed him he would prove himself but an unworthy vessel. He
took up the long fork--it chattered against the pot as he seized
it--and, overcoming a momentary and inexplicable nausea, impaled the
first piece of meat that rolled to the surface. There were yams also
and a sort of dumpling made of manioc. When he had filled his plate he
rose and turned suddenly; the woman and the cripple had stopped eating
and were watching him. They did not take their eyes away at once but
gave him stare for stare. He sat down; without a word they began to
eat once again.
The stew was good, and once he had begun Simpson ate heartily of it.
The tacit devilry fell away from his surroundings as his hunger grew
less, and his companions became no more than a middle-aged negress in
a turban, a black boy pitifully deformed, and a beautiful child. He
looked at his watch--he had not thought of the time for hours--and
found that it was a little after noon. It was time that he bestirred
himself and found lodgings.
"Is there a hotel?" he asked cheerfully. He had noticed that the
islanders understood legitimate French, though they could not speak
it.