relieve an imaginary struggling babe or moaning sleeper. Morning came.
She had dozed. She looked to see the rag-heaps stir; they lay as still
as corpses. The alarm-bells had ceased. She looked to see a new gang
enter the far door. She listened for the gathering buzzing of voices
in the next room, around the auction-block. She waited for the trader.
She waited for the janitor. At nightfall a file of soldiers entered.
They drove her forth, ordering her in the voice, in the tone, of
the negro-trader. That was the only familiar thing in the chaos of
incomprehensibility about her. She hobbled through the auction-room.
Posters, advertisements, papers, lay on the floor, and in the
torch-light glared from the wall. Her Jacob's ladder, her
stepping-stone to her hopes, lay overturned in a corner.
You divine it. The negro-trader's trade was abolished, and he had
vanished in the din and smoke of a war which he had not been entirely
guiltless of producing, leaving little Mammy locked up behind him. Had
he forgotten her? One cannot even hope so. She hobbled out into the
street, leaning on her nine-year-old broomstick (she had grown only
slightly beyond it; could still use it by bending over it), her head
tied in a rag kerchief, a rag for a gown, a rag for an apron.
Free, she was free! But she had not hoped for freedom. The plantation,
the household, the delicate ladies, the teeming children,--broomsticks
they were in comparison to freedom, but,--that was what she had asked,
what she had prayed for. God, she said, had let her drop, just as her
mother had done. More than ever she grieved, as she crept down
the street, that she had never mounted the auctioneer's block. An
ownerless free negro! She knew no one whose duty it was to help her;
no one knew her to help her. In the whole world (it was all she had
asked) there was no white child to call her mammy, no white lackey or
gentleman (it was the extent of her dreams) beholden to her as to a
nurse. And all her innumerable black beneficiaries! Even the janitor,
whom she had tended as the others, had deserted her like his white
prototype.
She tried to find a place for herself, but she had no indorsers, no
recommenders. She dared not mention the name of the negro-trader; it
banished her not only from the households of the whites, but from
those of the genteel of her own color. And everywhere soldiers
sentineled the streets--soldiers whose tone and accent reminded her of
the negro-trader.
Her sufferings, whether imaginary or real, were sufficiently acute to
drive her into the only form of escape which once had been possible to
friendless negroes. She became a runaway. With a bundle tied to the
end of a stick over her shoulder, just as the old prints represent it,
she fled from her homelessness and loneliness, from her ignoble past,
and the heart-disappointing termination of it. Following a railroad
track, journeying afoot, sleeping by the roadside, she lived on until
she came to the one familiar landmark in life to her--a sick woman,
but a white one. And so, progressing from patient to patient (it was a
time when sick white women studded the country like mile-posts), she
arrived at a little town, a kind of a refuge for soldiers' wives and
widows. She never traveled further. She could not. Always, as in the
pen, some emergency of pain and illness held her.
That is all. She is still there. The poor, poor women of that stricken
region say that little Mammy was the only alleviation God left them
after Sheridan passed through; and the richer ones say very much the
same thing--
But one should hear her tell it herself, as has been said, on a cold,
gloomy winter day in the country, the fire glimmering on the hearth;
the overworked husband in the fields; the baby quiet at last; the
mother uneasy, restless, thought-driven; the soft black hand rubbing
backward and forward, rubbing out aches and frets and nervousness.
The eyelids droop; the firelight plays fantasies on the bed-curtains;
the ear drops words, sentences; one gets confused--one sleeps--one
dreams.
"ONE OF US"
At the first glance one might have been inclined to doubt; but at
the second anybody would have recognized her--that is, with a little
mental rehabilitation: the bright little rouge spots in the hollow of
her cheek, the eyebrows well accentuated with paint, the thin lips
rose-tinted, and the dull, straight hair frizzed and curled and
twisted and turned by that consummate rascal and artist, the official
beautifier and rectifier of stage humanity, Robert, the opera
_coiffeur_. Who in the world knows better than he the gulf between
the real and the ideal, the limitations between the natural and the
romantic?
Yes, one could see her, in that time-honored thin silk dress of hers
stiffened into brocade by buckram underneath; the high, low-necked
waist, hiding any evidences of breast, if there were such evidences to
hide, and bringing the long neck into such faulty prominence; and the
sleeves, crisp puffs of tulle divided by bands of red velvet, through
which the poor lean arm runs like a wire, stringing them together like
beads. Yes, it was she, the whilom _dugazon_ of the opera troupe.
Not that she ever was a _dugazon_, but that was what her voice once
aspired to be: a _dugazon manquée_ would better describe her.
What a ghost! But they always appeared like mere evaporations of
real women. For what woman of flesh and blood can seriously maintain
through life the rôle of sham attendant on sham sensations, and play
public celebrant of other women's loves and lovers, singing, or rather
saying, nothing more enlivening than: "Oh, madame!" and "Ah, madame!"
and "_Quelle ivresse!_" or "_Quelle horreur!_" or, in recitative,
detailing whatever dreary platitudes and inanities the librettist and
Heaven connive to put upon the tongues of confidantes and attendants?
[Illustration: "TO POSE IN ABJECT PATIENCE AND AWKWARDNESS."]
Looking at her--how it came over one! The music, the lights, the
scene; the fat soprano confiding to her the fact of the "amour
extrême" she bears for the tenor, to which she, the _dugazon_, does
not even try to listen; her eyes wandering listlessly over the
audience. The calorous secret out, and in her possession, how she
stumbles over her train to the back of the stage, there to pose in
abject patience and awkwardness, while the gallant baritone, touching
his sword, and flinging his cape over his shoulder, defies the world
and the tenor, who is just recovering from his "ut de poitrine" behind
the scenes.
She was talking to me all the time, apologizing for the intrusion,
explaining her mission, which involved a short story of her life, as
women's intrusions and missions usually do. But my thoughts, also as
usual, distracted me from listening, as so often they have distracted
me from following what was perhaps more profitable.
The composer, of course, wastes no music upon her; flinging to her
only an occasional recitative in two notes, but always ending in a
reef of a scale, trill, or roulade, for her to wreck her voice on
before the audience. The _chef d'orchestre_, if he is charitable,
starts her off with a contribution from his own lusty lungs, and then
she--oh, her voice is always thinner and more osseous than her arms,
and her smile no more graceful than her train!
As well think of the simulated trees, water-falls, and chateaux
leaving the stage, as the _dugazon_! One always imagines them singing
on into dimness, dustiness, unsteadiness, and uselessness, until, like
any other piece of stage property, they are at last put aside and
simply left there at the end of some season--there seems to be a
superstition against selling or burning useless and dilapidated stage
property. As it came to me, the idea was not an impossibility.
The last representation of the season is over. She, tired beyond
judgment--haply, beyond feeling--by her tireless rôle, sinks upon her
chair to rest in her dressing-room; sinks, further, to sleep. She has
no maid. The troupe, hurrying away to France on the special train
waiting not half a dozen blocks away, forget her--the insignificant
are so easily forgotten! The porter, more tired, perhaps, than any
one of the beautiful ideal world about him, and savoring already in
advance the good onion-flavored _grillade_ awaiting him at home, locks
up everything fast and tight; the tighter and faster for the good
fortnight's vacation he has promised himself.
No doubt if the old opera-house were ever cleaned out, just such a
heap of stiff, wire-strung bones would be found, in some such hole
as the _dugazon's_ dressing-room, desiccating away in its last
costume--perhaps in that very costume of _Inez_; and if one were
venturesome enough to pass Allhallowe'en there, the spirit of those
bones might be seen availing itself of the privilege of unasperged
corpses to roam. Not singing, not talking--it is an anachronism to say
that ghosts talk: their medium of communication must be pure thought;
and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees
the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of
transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are
chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they
sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former
existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived
and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake up and
find one's self dead, well dead!
I could have continued and put the whole opera troupe in "costume de
ghost," but I think it was the woman's eyes that drew me back to her
face and her story. She had a sensible face, now that I observed her
naturally, as it were; and her hands,--how I have agonized over those
hands on the stage!--all knuckles and exaggerated veins, clutching her
dress as she sang, or, petrified, outstretched to _Leonore's_ "Pourquoi
ces larmes?"--her hands were the hands of an honest, hard-working
woman who buckrams her own skirts, and at need could scrub her own
floor. Her face (my description following my wandering glance)--her
face was careworn, almost to desuetude; not dissipation-worn, as,
alas! the faces of the more gifted ladies of opera troupes too often
are. There was no fattening in it of pastry, truffles, and bonbons;
upon it none of the tracery left by nightly champagne tides and
ripples; and consequently her figure, under her plain dress, had not
that for display which the world has conventioned to call charms.
Where a window-cord would hardly have sufficed to girdle _Leonore_, a
necklace would have served her. She had not beauty enough to fear the
flattering dangers of masculine snares and temptations,--or there may
have been other reasons,--but as a wife--there was something about her
that guaranteed it--she would have blossomed love and children as a
fig-tree does figs.
In truth, she was just talking about children. The first part of her
story had passed: her birthplace, education, situation; and now she
was saying:
"I have always had the temptation, but I have always resisted it.
Now,"--with a blush at her excuse,--"it may be your spring weather,
your birds, your flowers, your sky--and your children in the streets.
The longing came over me yesterday: I thought of it on the stage,
I thought of it afterward--it was better than sleeping; and this
morning"--her eyes moistened, she breathed excitedly--"I was
determined. I gave up, I made inquiry, I was sent to you. Would it be
possible? Would there be any place" ("any rôle," she said first) "in
any of your asylums, in any of your charitable institutions, for me?
I would ask nothing but my clothes and food, and very little of that;
the recompense would be the children--the little girl children," with
a smile--can you imagine the smile of a woman dreaming of children
that might be? "Think! Never to have held a child in my arms more than
a moment, never to have felt a child's arms about my neck! Never to
have known a child! Born on a stage, my mother born on a stage!" Ah,
there were tragic possibilities in that voice and movement! "Pardon,
madam. You see how I repeat. And you must be very wearied hearing
about me. But I could be their nurse and their servant. I would bathe
and dress them, play with them, teach them their prayers; and when
they are sick they would see no difference. They would not know but
what their mother was there!"
Oh, she had her program all prepared; one could see that.
"And I would sing to them--no! no!" with a quick gesture, "nothing
from the stage; little songs and lullabys I have picked up
traveling around, and," hesitating, "little things I have composed
myself--little things that I thought children would like to hear some
day." What did she not unconsciously throw into those last words? "I
dream of it," she pursued, talking with as little regard to me as
on the stage she sang to the prima donna. "Their little arms, their
little faces, their little lips! And in an asylum there would be so
many of them! When they cried and were in trouble I would take them in
my lap, and I would say to them, with all sorts of tenderness--" She
had arranged that in her program, too--all the minutiae of what she
would say to them in their distress. But women are that way. When once
they begin to love, their hearts are magnifying-lenses for them to
feel through. "And my heart hungers to commence right here, now, at
once! It seems to me I cannot wait. Ah, madam, no more stage, no more
opera!" speaking quickly, feverishly. "As I said, it may be your
beautiful spring, your flowers, your birds, and your numbers of
children. I have always loved that place most where there are most
children; and you have more children here than I ever saw anywhere.
Children are so beautiful! It is strange, is it not, when you consider
my life and my rearing?"
Her life, her rearing, how interesting they must have been! What a
pity I had not listened more attentively!
"They say you have much to do with asylums here."
Evidently, when rôles do not exist in life for certain characters, God
has to create them. And thus He had to create a rôle in an asylum for
my friend, for so she became from the instant she spoke of children
as she did. It was the poorest and neediest of asylums; and the poor
little orphaned wretches--but it is better not to speak of them. How
can God ever expect to rear children without their mothers!
But the rôle I craved to create for my friend was far different--some
good, honest bourgeois interior, where lips are coarse and cheeks are
ruddy, and where life is composed of real scenes, set to the real
music of life, the homely successes and failures, and loves and hates,
and embraces and tears, that fill out the orchestra of the heart;
where romance and poetry abound _au naturel_; and where--yes, where
children grow as thick as nature permits: the domestic interior of the
opera porter, for instance, or the clockmaker over the way. But what
a loss the orphan-asylum would have suffered, and the dreary lacking
there would have been in the lives of the children! For there must
have been moments in the lives of the children in that asylum when
they felt, awake, as they felt in their sleep when they dreamed their
mothers were about them.
THE LITTLE CONVENT GIRL
She was coming down on the boat from Cincinnati, the little convent
girl. Two sisters had brought her aboard. They gave her in charge of
the captain, got her a state-room, saw that the new little trunk was
put into it, hung the new little satchel up on the wall, showed her
how to bolt the door at night, shook hands with her for good-by
(good-bys have really no significance for sisters), and left her
there. After a while the bells all rang, and the boat, in the awkward
elephantine fashion of boats, got into midstream. The chambermaid
found her sitting on the chair in the state-room where the sisters
had left her, and showed her how to sit on a chair in the saloon. And
there she sat until the captain came and hunted her up for supper.
She could not do anything of herself; she had to be initiated into
everything by some one else.
She was known on the boat only as "the little convent girl." Her name,
of course, was registered in the clerk's office, but on a steamboat no
one thinks of consulting the clerk's ledger. It is always the little
widow, the fat madam, the tall colonel, the parson, etc. The captain,
who pronounced by the letter, always called her the little _convent_
girl. She was the beau-ideal of the little convent girl. She never
raised her eyes except when spoken to. Of course she never spoke
first, even to the chambermaid, and when she did speak it was in the
wee, shy, furtive voice one might imagine a just-budding violet to
have; and she walked with such soft, easy, carefully calculated steps
that one naturally felt the penalties that must have secured
them--penalties dictated by a black code of deportment.
[Illustration: THE SISTERS BID HER GOOD-BY.]
She was dressed in deep mourning. Her black straw hat was trimmed with
stiff new crape, and her stiff new bombazine dress had crape collar
and cuffs. She wore her hair in two long plaits fastened around her
head tight and fast. Her hair had a strong inclination to curl, but
that had been taken out of it as austerely as the noise out of her
footfalls. Her hair was as black as her dress; her eyes, when one saw
them, seemed blacker than either, on account of the bluishness of the
white surrounding the pupil. Her eyelashes were almost as thick as the
black veil which the sisters had fastened around her hat with an extra
pin the very last thing before leaving. She had a round little face,
and a tiny pointed chin; her mouth was slightly protuberant from the
teeth, over which she tried to keep her lips well shut, the effort
giving them a pathetic little forced expression. Her complexion was
sallow, a pale sallow, the complexion of a brunette bleached in
darkened rooms. The only color about her was a blue taffeta ribbon
from which a large silver medal of the Virgin hung over the place
where a breast pin should have been. She was so little, so little,
although she was eighteen, as the sisters told the captain; otherwise
they would not have permitted her to travel all the way to New Orleans
alone.
Unless the captain or the clerk remembered to fetch her out in front,
she would sit all day in the cabin, in the same place, crocheting
lace, her spool of thread and box of patterns in her lap, on the
handkerchief spread to save her new dress. Never leaning back--oh, no!
always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there
within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding
the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain,
and particularly of the clerk. Every one knows the fund of humor
possessed by a steamboat clerk, and what a field for display the table
at meal-times affords. On Friday she fasted rigidly, and she never
began to eat, or finished, without a little Latin movement of the lips
and a sign of the cross. And always at six o'clock of the evening she
remembered the angelus, although there was no church bell to remind
her of it.
She was in mourning for her father, the sisters told the captain,
and she was going to New Orleans to her mother. She had not seen
her mother since she was an infant, on account of some disagreement
between the parents, in consequence of which the father had brought
her to Cincinnati, and placed her in the convent. There she had been
for twelve years, only going to her father for vacations and holidays.
So long as the father lived he would never let the child have any
communication with her mother. Now that he was dead all that was
changed, and the first thing that the girl herself wanted to do was to
go to her mother.
The mother superior had arranged it all with the mother of the girl,
who was to come personally to the boat in New Orleans, and receive her
child from the captain, presenting a letter from the mother superior,
a facsimile of which the sisters gave the captain.
It is a long voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans, the rivers doing
their best to make it interminable, embroidering themselves _ad
libitum_ all over the country. Every five miles, and sometimes
oftener, the boat would stop to put off or take on freight, if not
both. The little convent girl, sitting in the cabin, had her
terrible frights at first from the hideous noises attendant on these
landings--the whistles, the ringings of the bells, the running to and
fro, the shouting. Every time she thought it was shipwreck, death,
judgment, purgatory; and her sins! her sins! She would drop her
crochet, and clutch her prayer-beads from her pocket, and relax the
constraint over her lips, which would go to rattling off prayers with
the velocity of a relaxed windlass. That was at first, before the
captain took to fetching her out in front to see the boat make a
landing. Then she got to liking it so much that she would stay all day
just where the captain put her, going inside only for her meals. She
forgot herself at times so much that she would draw her chair a little
closer to the railing, and put up her veil, actually, to see better.
No one ever usurped her place, quite in front, or intruded upon her
either with word or look; for every one learned to know her shyness,
and began to feel a personal interest in her, and all wanted the
little convent girl to see everything that she possibly could.
[Illustration: WATCHING A LANDING.]
And it was worth seeing--the balancing and _chasséeing_ and waltzing
of the cumbersome old boat to make a landing. It seemed to be
always attended with the difficulty and the improbability of a new
enterprise; and the relief when it did sidle up anywhere within
rope's-throw of the spot aimed at! And the roustabout throwing the
rope from the perilous end of the dangling gang-plank! And the
dangling roustabouts hanging like drops of water from it--dropping
sometimes twenty feet to the land, and not infrequently into the river
itself. And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks,
and singing of Jim Crow songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black
skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through
red lips, and laughing, and talking and--bewildering! entrancing!
Surely the little convent girl in her convent walls never dreamed of
so much unpunished noise and movement in the world!
The first time she heard the mate--it must have been like the first
time woman ever heard man--curse and swear, she turned pale, and ran
quickly, quickly into the saloon, and--came out again? No, indeed!
not with all the soul she had to save, and all the other sins on her
conscience. She shook her head resolutely, and was not seen in her
chair on deck again until the captain not only reassured her, but
guaranteed his reassurance. And after that, whenever the boat was
about to make a landing, the mate would first glance up to the guards,
and if the little convent girl was sitting there he would change his
invective to sarcasm, and politely request the colored gentlemen not
to hurry themselves--on no account whatever; to take their time about
shoving out the plank; to send the rope ashore by post-office--write
him when it got there; begging them not to strain their backs; calling
them mister, colonel, major, general, prince, and your royal highness,
which was vastly amusing. At night, however, or when the little
convent girl was not there, language flowed in its natural curve, the
mate swearing like a pagan to make up for lost time.
The captain forgot himself one day: it was when the boat ran aground
in the most unexpected manner and place, and he went to work to
express his opinion, as only steamboat captains can, of the pilot,
mate, engineer, crew, boat, river, country, and the world in general,
ringing the bell, first to back, then to head, shouting himself
hoarser than his own whistle--when he chanced to see the little black
figure hurrying through the chaos on the deck; and the captain stuck
as fast aground in midstream as the boat had done.