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....