suddenly dourly communicative. "But I doubt if the _propriétaire_
would find room for m'sieu'."
"Has he so many guests, then?"
"But no. M'sieu' has forgotten the priest."
"The priest? What has he to do with it?"
"My son tells me that m'sieu' offended him, and the _propriétaire_ is
a good Catholic. He will close his house to you."
She shaved a splinter to a point with a table knife and picked her
teeth with it, both elbows on the table and her eyes on Simpson.
"There is nowhere else to stay," she said. "Unless--here."
"I should prefer that," said Simpson--quickly, for reluctance and
distrust were rising in him again. "But have you a room?"
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at a door behind her.
"There," she said. Simpson waited for her to move, saw that she had no
intention of doing so, and opened the door himself.
The room was fairly large, with two windows screened but unglazed; a
canvas cot stood in one corner, a packing-box table and a decrepit
chair in another. Like the kitchen it was surprisingly clean. He
returned to his hostess, who showed no anxiety about his intentions.
"How much by the week?" he asked.
"Eight _gourdes_."
"And you will feed me for how much?"
"Fifteen _gourdes_."
"I will take it." He forced himself to decision again; had he
hesitated he knew he would have gone elsewhere. The price also--less
than four dollars gold--attracted him, and he could doubtless buy some
furniture in the town. Moreover, experienced missionaries who had
talked before the board had always emphasized the value of living
among the natives.
"_B'en_," said the negress. She rose and emptied the remains from her
plate into a tin pail, sponging the plate with a piece of bread.
"I have a trunk on the steamer," said Simpson. "The boy--can he----"
"He will go with you," the negress interrupted.
The cripple slid from his chair, scraped his plate and Simpson's, put
on his battered straw hat, and shambled into the yard. Simpson
followed.
He turned at the gate and looked back. The child had toddled to the
door and was standing there, holding on to the door-post. Inside, the
shadow of the woman flickered across the close bars of bamboo.
II
Bunsen was standing on the jetty when they reached it talking
excitedly with a tall bowed man of fifty or so whose complexion showed
the stippled pallor of long residence in the tropics.
"Here he is now!" Bunsen exclaimed as Simpson approached. "I was just
getting anxious about you. Stopped at the hotel--you hadn't been
there, they said. Port au Prince is a bad place to get lost in.
Oh--this gentleman is our consul. Mr. Witherbee--Mr. Simpson."
Simpson shook hands. Witherbee's face was just a pair of dull eyes
behind a ragged moustache, but there was unusual vigour in his grip.
"I'll see a lot of you, if you stay long," he said. He looked at
Simpson more closely. "At least, I hope so. But where have you been? I
was getting as anxious as Mr. Bunsen--afraid you'd been sacrificed to
the snake or something."
Simpson raised a clerical hand, protesting. His amazing morning swept
before his mind like a moving-picture film; there were so many things
he could not explain even to himself, much less to these two Gentiles.
"I found lodgings," he said.
"Lodgings?" Witherbee and Bunsen chorused the word. "Where, for
heaven's sake?"
"I don't know the name of the street," Simpson admitted. "I don't even
know the name of my hostess. That"--indicating the cripple--"is her
son."
"Good God!" Witherbee exclaimed. "Madame Picard! The _mamaloi_!"
"The--the what?" But Simpson had heard well enough.
"The _mamaloi_--the _mamaloi_--high priestess of voodoo."
"Her house is fairly clean," Simpson said. He was hardly aware of his
own inconsequence. It was his instinct to defend any one who was
attacked on moral grounds, whether they deserved the attack or not.
"Ye-es," Witherbee drawled. "I dare say it is. It's her company that's
unsavoury. Especially for a parson. Eh? What's the matter now?"
Simpson had flared up at his last words. His mouth set and his eyes
burned suddenly. Bunsen, watching him coolly, wondered that he could
kindle so; until that moment he had seemed but half alive. When he
spoke his words came hurriedly--were almost unintelligible; yet there
was some quality in his voice that compelled attention, affecting the
senses more than the mind.
"Unsavoury company? That's best for a parson. 'I come not to bring the
righteous but sinners to repentance.' And who are you to brand the
woman as common or unclean? If she is a heathen priestess, yet she
worships a god of some sort. Do you?" He stopped suddenly; the
humility which men hated in him again blanketed his fanaticism. "It is
my task to give her a better god--the only true God--Christ."
Bunsen, his legs wide apart, kept his eyes on the sea, for he did not
want to let Simpson see him smiling, and he was smiling. Witherbee,
who had no emotions of any sort, pulled his moustache farther down and
looked at the clergyman as though he were under glass--a curiosity.
"So you're going to convert the whole island?" he said.
"I hope to make a beginning in the Lord's vineyard."
"Humph! The devil's game-preserve, you mean," Bunsen suddenly broke
in.
"The devil's game-preserve, then!" Simpson was defiant.
"The ship calls here every other Saturday," was all Bunsen said to
that. "You may need to know. I'll send your trunk ashore."
He stepped into the cripple's boat and started for the ship. Witherbee
did not speak; Simpson, still raging, left him, strode to the end of
the pier, and stood there, leaning on a pile.
His gust of emotion had left him; a not unfamiliar feeling of
exaltation had taken its place. It is often so with the extreme
Puritan type; control relaxed for however brief a moment sends their
slow blood whirling, and leaves them light-headed as those who breathe
thin air. From boyhood Simpson had been practised in control, until
repression had become a prime tenet of his faith. The cheerful and
generally innocent excursions of other men assumed in his mind the
proportions of crime, of sin against the stern disciplining of the
soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never
in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned
certain views of his, saying; "There's more education--soul education,
if you will have it--in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of
sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that--more appalling because
he had tried to contradict it and had been unable to do so. He himself
had been too eager to find his work in life--his pre-ordained
work--ever to discover the deep truths that light-heartedness only can
reveal; even when he heard his call to foreign missions--to Hayti, in
particular--he felt no such felicity as a man should feel who has
climbed to his place in the scheme of things. His was rather the
sombre fury of the Covenanters--an intense conviction that his way was
the only way of grace--a conviction that transcended reason and took
flight into the realm of overmastering emotion--the only overmastering
emotion, by the way, that he had ever experienced.
His choice, therefore, was in itself a loss of control and a dangerous
one, for nothing is more perilous to sanity than the certainty that
most other people in the world are wrong. Such conviction leads to a
Jesuitical contempt of means; in cases where the Puritan shell has
grown to be impregnable from the outside it sets up an internal
ferment which sometimes bursts shell and man and all into disastrous
fragments. Until old age kills them, the passions and emotions never
die in man; suppress them how we will, we can never ignore them; they
rise again to mock us when we think we are done with them forever. And
the man of Simpson's type suffers from them most of all, for he dams
against them all normal channels of expression.
Simpson, standing at the pier-end, was suffering from them now. His
exaltation--a thing of a moment, as his fervour had been--had gone out
of him, leaving him limp, uncertain of his own powers, of his own
calling, even--the prey to the discouragement that precedes action,
which is the deepest discouragement of all. Except for himself and
Witherbee the pier was deserted; behind him the filthy town slept in
its filth. Four buzzards wheeled above it, gorged and slow; the
harbour lay before him like a green mirror, so still that the ship was
reflected in it down to the last rope-yarn. Over all, the sun,
colourless and furnace-hot, burned in a sky of steel. There was
insolence in the scorched slopes that shouldered up from the bay, a
threatening permanence in the saw-edged sky-line. The indifference of
it all, its rock-ribbed impenetrability to human influence, laid a
crushing weight on Simpson's soul, so that he almost sank to his knees
in sheer oppression of spirit.
"Do you know much about Hayti?" asked Witherbee, coming up behind him.
"As much as I could learn from books." Simpson wanted to be angry at
the consul--why he could not tell--but Witherbee's voice was so
carefully courteous that he yielded perforce to its persuasion and
swung around, facing him. Suddenly, because he was measuring himself
against man and not against Nature, his weakness left him, and
confidence in himself and his mission flooded back upon him. "As much
as I could get from books." He paused. "You have lived here long?"
"Long enough," Witherbee answered. "Five years."
"You know the natives, then?"
"Can't help knowing them. There are quite a lot of them, you see, and
there's almost no one else. Do you know negroes at all?"
"Very little."
"You'd better study them a bit before you--before you do anything you
have it in mind to do--the Haytian negro in particular. They're not
like white men, you know."
"Like children, you mean?"
"Like some children. I'd hate to have them for nephews and nieces."
"Why?"
"We-ell"--Witherbee, looking sidelong at Simpson, bit off the end of a
cigar--"a number of reasons. They're superstitious, treacherous,
savage, cruel, and--worst of all--emotional. They've gone back.
They've been going back for a hundred years. The West Coast--I've been
there--is not so bad as Hayti. It's never been anything else than what
it is now, you see, and if it moves at all it must move forward.
There's nothing awful about savagery when people have never known
anything else. Hayti has. You know what the island used to be before
Desalines."
"I've read. But just what do you mean by West Coast savagery--here?"
"Snake-worship. Voodoo." Witherbee lit the cigar "Human sacrifice."
"And the Roman Church does nothing!" There was exultation in Simpson's
voice. His distrust of the Roman Church had been aggravated by his
encounter with the black priest that morning.
"The Roman Church does what it can. It's been unfortunate in its
instruments. Especially unfortunate now."
"Father Antoine?"
"Father Antoine. You met him?"
"This morning. A brute, and nothing more."
"Just that." Witherbee let a mouthful of smoke drift into the
motionless air. "It's curious," he said.
"What is?"
"Father Antoine will make it unpleasant for you. He may try to have
you knifed, or something."
"Impossible!"
"Not at all. Human life is worth nothing here. No wonder--it's not
really worth living. But you're safe enough, and that's the curious
thing."
"Why am I safe?"
"Because your landlady is who she is." Witherbee glanced over his
shoulder, and, although they were the only people on the pier, from
force of habit he dropped his voice. "The _mamaloi_ has more power
than the Church." He straightened and looked out toward the ship.
"Here's her idiot with your trunk. My office is the first house on the
left after you leave the pier. Don't forget that."
He turned quickly and was gone before the cripple's boat had reached
the landing.
III
The town, just stirring out of its siesta as Simpson followed the
cripple through the streets, somehow reassured him. Men like Bunsen
and Witherbee, who smiled at his opinions and remained cold to his
rhapsodies, always oppressed him with a sense of ineffectuality. He
knew them of old--knew them superficially, of course, for, since he
was incapable of talking impersonally about religion, he had never had
the chance to listen to the cool and yet often strangely mystical
opinions which such men hold about it. He knew, in a dim sort of way,
that men not clergymen sometimes speculated about religious matters,
seeking light from each other in long, fragmentary conversations. He
knew that much, and disapproved of it--almost resented it. It seemed
to him wrong to discuss God without becoming angry, and very wrong for
laymen to discuss God at all. When circumstances trapped him into talk
with them about things divine, he felt baffled by their silences and
their reserves, seemed to himself to be scrabbling for entrance to
their souls through some sort of a slippery, impenetrable casing; he
never tried to enter through their minds, where the door stood always
open. The trouble was that he wanted to teach and be listened to;
wherefore he was subtly more at home among the ignorant and in such
streets as he was now traversing than with educated men. He had been
born a few decades too late; here in Hayti he had stepped back a
century or so into the age of credulity. Credulity, he believed, was a
good thing, almost a divine thing, if it were properly used; he did
not carry his processes far enough to realize that credulity could
never become fixed--that it was always open to conviction. A receptive
and not an inquiring mind seemed to him the prerequisite for a
convert. And black people, he had heard, were peculiarly receptive.
The question was, then, where and how to start his work. Hayti
differed from most mission fields, for, so far as he knew, no one had
ever worked in it before him. The first step was to cultivate the
intimacy of the people, and that he found difficult in the extreme. He
had one obvious channel of approach to them; when buying necessary
things for his room, he could enter into conversation with the
shopkeepers and the market-women, but this he found it difficult to
do. They did not want to talk to him, even seemed reluctant to sell
him anything; and when he left their shops or stalls, did not answer
his "Au revoir." He wondered how much the priest had to do with their
attitude. They had little also that he wanted--he shopped for a week
before he found a gaudy pitcher and basin and a strip of matting for
his floor. Chairs, bureaus, bookcases, and tables did not exist. He
said as much to Madame Picard, and gathered from her growled response
that he must find a carpenter. The cripple, his constant companion in
his first days on the island, took him to one--a gray old negro who
wore on a shoe-string about his neck a pouch which Simpson thought at
first to be a scapular, and whom age and his profession had made
approachable. He was garrulous even; he ceased working when at length
he understood what Simpson wanted, sat in his doorway with his head in
the sun and his feet in the shade, and lit a pipe made out of a tiny
cocoanut. Yes--he could build chairs, tables, anything m'sieu' wanted
There was wood also--black palm for drawer-knobs and cedar and
mahogany and rosewood, but especially mahogany. An excellent wood,
pleasant to work in and suave to the touch. Did they use it in the
United States, he wondered?
"A great deal," answered Simpson. "And the San Domingo wood is the
best, I believe."
"San Domingo--but yes," the carpenter said; "the Haytian also--that is
excellent. Look!"
He led Simpson to the yard at the rear of his house and showed him
half a dozen boards, their grain showing where the broad axe had hewed
them smooth. Was it not a beautiful wood? And what furniture did
m'sieu' desire?
Simpson had some little skill with his pencil--a real love for drawing
was one of the instincts which his austere obsessions had crushed out
of him. He revolved several styles in his mind, decided at length on
the simplest, and drew his designs on a ragged scrap of wrapping
paper, while the carpenter, leaning down from his chair by the door,
watched him, smoking, and now and then fingering the leather pouch
about his neck. Simpson, looking up occasionally to see that his
sketch was understood, could not keep his eyes away from the
pouch--whatever it was, it was not a scapular. He did not ask about
it, though he wanted to; curiosity, he had heard, should be repressed
when one is dealing with barbarians. But he knew that that was not his
real reason for not asking.
"But it is easy," said the carpenter, picking up the paper and
examining it. "And the seats of the chairs shall be of white hide, is
it not?"
Simpson assented. He did not leave the shop at once, but remained
seated on the threshold, following his usual policy of picking up
acquaintances where he could.
"M'sieu' is a priest?" the old man asked, squinting at he filled the
cocoanut pipe again and thrust it between his ragged yellow teeth.
"Not a priest. A minister of the gospel."
"_Quoi_?" said the carpenter.
Simpson saw that he must explain. It was difficult. He had on the one
hand to avoid suggesting that the Roman Church was insufficient--that
denunciation he intended to arrive at when he had gained firmer ground
with the people--and on the other to refrain from hinting that Haytian
civilization stood in crying need of uplift. That also could come
later. He wallowed a little in his explanation, and then put the whole
matter on a personal basis.
"I think I have a message--something new to say to you about Christ.
But I have been here a week now and have found none to listen to me."
"Something new?" the carpenter rejoined. "But that is easy if it is
something new. In Hayti we like new things."
"No one will listen to me," Simpson repeated.
The carpenter reflected for a moment, or seemed to be doing so.
"Many men come here about sunset," he said. "We sit and drink a little
rum before dark; it is good against the fever."
"I will come also," said Simpson, rising. "It is every evening?"
"Every evening." The carpenter's right hand rose to the pouch which
was not a scapular and he caressed it.
"Au revoir," said Simpson suddenly.
"'_Voir_," the carpenter replied, still immobile in his chair by the
door.
Up to now a walk through the streets had been a night-mare to Simpson,
for the squalor of them excited to protest every New England nerve in
his body, and the evident hostility of the people constantly
threatened his success with them. He had felt very small and lonely,
like a man who has undertaken to combat a natural force; he did not
like to feel small and lonely, and he did not want to believe in
natural forces. Chosen vessel as he believed himself to be, thus far
the island had successfully defied him, and he had feared more than
once that it would do so to the end. He had compelled himself to
frequent the markets, hoping always that he would find in them the key
to the door that was closed against him; he had not found it, and,
although he recognized that three weeks was but a fractional moment of
eternity, and comforted himself by quoting things about the "mills of
God," he could not approach satisfaction with what he had accomplished
so far.
His interview with the carpenter had changed all that, and on his way
home he trod the Grand Rue more lightly than he had ever done. Even
the cathedral, even the company of half-starved conscripts that
straggled past him in the tail of three generals, dismayed him no
longer, for the cathedral was but the symbol of a frozen Christianity
which he need no longer fear, and the conscripts were his
people--his--or soon would be. All that he had wanted was a start; he
had it now, though he deplored the rum which would be drunk at his
first meeting with the natives. One must begin where one could.
Witherbee, sitting in the window of the consulate, called twice before
Simpson heard him.
"You look pretty cheerful," he said. "Things going well?"
"They've just begun to, I think--I think I've found the way to reach
these people."
"Ah?" The monosyllable was incredulous though polite. "How's that?"
"I've just been ordering some furniture from a carpenter," Simpson
answered. It was the first time since the day of his arrival that he
had seen Witherbee to speak to, and he found it a relief to speak in
his own language and without calculating the result of his words.
"A carpenter? Vieux Michaud, I suppose?"
"That's his name. You know him?"
"Very well." The consul tipped back his chair and tapped his lips with
a pencil. "Very well. He's a clever workman. He'll follow any design
you give him, and the woods, of course, are excellent."
"Yes. He showed me some. But he's more than a carpenter to me. He's
more--receptive--than most of the natives, and it seems that his shop
is a gathering place--a centre. He asked me to come in the evenings."
"And drink rum?" Witherbee could not resist that.
"Ye-es. He said they drank rum. I sha'n't do that, of course, but one
must begin where one can."
"I suppose so," Witherbee answered slowly. The office was darkened to
just above reading-light, and the consul's face was in the shadow.
Evidently he had more to say, but he allowed a long silence to
intervene before he went on. Simpson, imaging wholesale conversions,
sat quietly; he was hardly aware of his surroundings.
"Don't misunderstand what I'm going to say," the consul began at
length. Simpson straightened, on his guard at once. "It may be of use
to you--in your work," he added quickly. "It's this. Somehow--by
chance perhaps, though I don't think so--you've fallen into strange
company--stranger than any white man I've ever known."
"I am not afraid of voodoo," said Simpson rather scornfully.
"It would be better if you were a little afraid of it. I am--and I
know what I'm talking about. Look what's happened to you. There's the
Picard woman--she's the one who had President Simon Sam under her
thumb. Did you know he carried the symbols of voodoo next his heart?
And now Michaud, who's her right hand and has been for years. Looks
like deep water to me."
"I must not fear for my own body."
"That's not what I mean exactly, though I wish you were a little more
afraid for it. It might save me trouble--possibly save our government
trouble--in the end. But the consequences of letting voodoo acquire
any more power than it has may be far-reaching."
"I am not here to give it more power." Simpson, thoroughly angry, rose
to go. "It is my business to defeat it--to root it out."
"Godspeed to you in that"--Witherbee's voice was ironical. "But
remember what I tell you. The Picard woman is subtle, and Michaud is
subtle." Simpson had crossed the threshold, and only half heard the
consul's next remark. "Voodoo is more subtle than both of them
together. Look out for it."
Witherbee's warning did no more than make Simpson angry; he attributed
it to wrong motives--to jealousy perhaps to hostility certainly, and
neither jealousy nor hostility could speak true words. In spite of all
that he had heard he could not believe that voodoo was so powerful in
the island; this was the twentieth century, he insisted, and the most
enlightened country in the world was less than fifteen hundred miles
away; he forgot that opinions and not figures number the centuries,
and refused to see that distance had nothing to do with the case.
These were a people groping through the dark; when they saw the light
they could not help but welcome it, he thought. The idea that they
preferred their own way of life and their own religion, that they
would not embrace civilization till they were forced to do so at the
point of benevolent bayonets, never entered his head. His own way of
life was so obviously superior. He resolved to have nothing more to do
with Witherbee.